At Work, Mindset Is Everything with Dr. Carolyn Pritchett, PhD

In this episode, Laura, Michael, and Tessa sit down with workplace science expert Dr. Carolyn Pritchett to discuss her fascinating career journey from studying rats to coaching humans. 

Carolyn shares key learnings from her research on stress mindsets and how our perceptions impact our physiology. 

Listeners will walk away with practical strategies for regulating stress responses and reframing challenges, whether at an individual or organizational level. 

To stay connected and continue the conversation, be sure to follow us on LinkedIn.

And don't forget to check out our previous episodes for more tips and strategies to boost your workplace happiness. You can find them on your favorite podcast platform or on our website.

If you have any questions, comments, or topic suggestions for future episodes, please reach out to us. We'd love to hear from you!

Stay inspired, stay motivated, and stay happy at work!

Transcript

Laura Hamill: 0:06

Welcome back for another episode of the happy at work podcast with Laura, Tessa and Michael.

Tessa Misiaszek: 0:14

Each week we have thoughtful conversations with the leaders, founders and authors about happiness at work.

Michael McCarthy: 0:22

Tune in each Thursday for a new conversation. Enjoy the show

Laura Hamill: 0:37

Welcome, everybody to the happy at work Podcast. Today, we are so excited to have Dr. Carolyn Pritchett with us. She's the director of workplace science at groove. And with full transparency, I get to work with Carolyn. So I've got some inside stories and questions that I'm going to ask her about. But Carolyn, welcome. We're so glad you're with us.

Carolyn Pritchett: 1:01

It's really nice to be here. Thank you.

Laura Hamill: 1:03

Absolutely. Thanks for coming. So we usually like to start with hearing about our guests career journey, like where you've been, and what you're doing. And I would love for you to do that. And I'd love for you to make sure you talk about rat allergies when you do that.

Carolyn Pritchett: 1:21

Allergies. It's a huge factor in my story, unfortunately or fortunately. Yeah. So I knew I wanted to be a psychology major, really early in my life and pursued that. So I started my freshman year at Stanford as a psych major, always really fascinated by human behavior. And while I couldn't have articulated it at the time, I realized now looking back particularly motivated behavior, of which stress is a really important part. So I think I always had this fascination with stress, even before I could say it and verbalize it. So I was also really fascinated with biology, human biology, and thought I might actually pursue a degree in the field of medicine. And along the way, I started working in a research lab and felt absolutely head over heels in love with behavioral neuroscience. So the very first thing I did actually in lab was a stress study. My first day walking in as an undergraduate researcher, my advisor had me stressed some rats, which is a little traumatizing for all of us. But it was it was a really great experience. And it definitely launched my long term career in studying stress. So I went on to pursue first a master's degree at University of Missouri after I graduated from Stanford, and received a master's degree in cognitive psychology and neuroscience, they're also studying to some degree stress, but mostly feeding behaviors, again, that motivated behavior component, really looking at the role of areas of addiction, like the nucleus accumbens, and the basal lateral amygdala and how these interacted and work together. Then I pursued my PhD at the University of Penn State University College of Medicine in Hershey. So I was studying obesity and diabetes in the land of Hershey's chocolate. So no irony there at all, of course, and also had a big kind of stress played a role in that research as well. But very peripherally. I did a postdoc very briefly at UPenn. And that's when the rat allergies really took hold. So I unfortunately, was very sick for most of my postdoc, and it ended early. So I went on to teach and had a really wonderful time at the University of West Florida. I switch from rats out of necessity to humans. And that's when my interest in positive psychology and stress and particularly stress mindset, all of these things kind of started to weave together at that point. So I spent quite a bit of time five years, little over five years at University of West Florida, and as an assistant professor before, having the opportunity to move to New Zealand, which is where I am now. So it's beautiful, bright, nice fall day, autumn, as they would say, here in New Zealand. And I had the opportunity at that point to say, you know, do I want to go back to teaching or don't want to try something different. I'd spent my entire life in academia, and I loved it. But I was also really curious to be totally honest, I'm extremely curious person. So I thought it might be kind of fun to see what's on the other side of the fence. And then COVID happened. So we moved here right before COVID. And probably my favorite part of teaching was the student interactions. So seeing them face to face being in the classroom with them, having them ask me questions and having that rapport and after, you know in the hall kind of chats afterwards and being in the lab together. So I thought I really love these one on one interactions. So I started to pursue coaching during COVID and receive some certifications including in a branch of coaching called Positive Intelligence, which has very strong roots in positive psychology. So my journey was kind of meandering from for quite a while with the red thread kind of being this motivated behavior and understanding human behavior and understanding, to some degree, what stress and our mindsets play in all of this. And I love the concepts of uncovering kind of the subconscious reasons why we do things. And I love the fact that mindsets provide this kind of bridge between the two between what we're doing our outward behavior, what we're thinking, and then the subconscious reasons and motivations behind those things. So all of this came together quite nicely. And I did a bit of coaching for a while here in New Zealand before having the opportunity to come work for groov. And it was a bit of a dream of mine, actually to work for cert for John Corwin. So JK, who is a famous figure here in New Zealand, and Australia and the UK as rugby legend, and I really admired what he was doing, particularly with children, he has a really great program where he goes in and works with teachers here in New Zealand and helps him understand mental health better. And so I have a tremendous amount of respect for him in the work he's done in the mental health space. So now I have the opportunity to work for his company. And we are we go into organizations and helping them figure out what's going to improve their performance cares metrics. And so things that are going to balance both performance and productivity as well as care and well being. So that's why I have the opportunity, the beautiful opportunity to work with Laura. So yeah, that's kind of my my background briefly.

Tessa Misiaszek: 6:43

That's fantastic. Thank you, Carolyn. And I want to pull on one particular thread that you talked a bit about, which is behavioral neuroscience and your work in cognitive science. And I'm just curious as to how that's been now integrated into the work you do today, and really thinking about creating great places to work and what is the role of neuroscience? Because again, I think, you know, think there's always this these kinds of schools of thought around organizational psychology versus neuroscience. And obviously, I think the integration of the two is really important, but I would be curious to get your perspective on on that as well, given your work.

Carolyn Pritchett: 7:19

Well, organizations are made up of people. And people have these things called brains, which dictate pretty much everything that we do. So they are so inextricably linked, it's it's a fascinating concept to try and separate them. Because how we engage in our workplace is very much driven by our brains and how we function and in the world, that's just, you know, our cognitive abilities dictate what we're going to do, how we're going to do it, maybe even to some degrees, when we're going to do these things. And so if we understand more about just basic human behavior and basic cognitive motivations, then that helps us a lot in understanding why people might, you know, engage in the particular behaviors, they are engaging in and do the particular things that they're doing. And so there's a very strong interplay between the two, obviously,

Unknown: 8:11

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Michael McCarthy: 8:11

I wanted to dive a little bit into some of your work on stress management, could you tell us a little bit about it as well, some of your discoveries, and maybe some things that people who are listening to the show could actually take out from this episode and operationalize in their organization?

Carolyn Pritchett: 8:27

Yeah. So within the concept of stress management, one of the things that I find to be really, really important is the role of mindset. So one of the things whenever I made the transition from animals to humans, I had to start to kind of understand, okay, I know how to work in the world of animal behavior. And I understood a lot about human behavior, because obviously, we're trying to replicate human behavior to the degree that we possibly can and then understand, for example, the neural mechanisms behind those behaviors. So I started exploring mindset science as a result and kind of ended up really pursuing a lot of research in my early work there at UW F on stress mindset. So there was research coming out of Stanford from Dr. Aaliyah crumbs lab. She's had some really, really amazing research. And the research that she was putting out at the time was showing that there's this fascinating concept that the mindset that we have about stress influences both our behavior and our physiology. So that's a really important component because a lot of people will separate the two. And she's done a lot of really great work. For example, she has a really famous study on the milkshake study, where if you give an individual a milkshake and they think it's going to be high fat, high sugar, very indulgent, they will have a greater release of satiety hormones and if they think it's a diet milkshake, which we won't, we won't get into that. But the concept is, you can't really decouple our brain influences are hormones. Therefore, if we have a certain mindset about something that's going to potentially influence our physiology. So one of the things that I thought was really interesting was that interplay, like I said, that's the bridge between the conscious and the subconscious mind is our mindset. If we bring awareness to our mindset, whether it's taking an understanding the mindset that we have, which was one of the things that she found, or actually manipulating the mindset to some degree, so providing, in her case, she was providing accurate information about the potentially healthy benefits of stress. And what she found was that individuals responded differently to stressful experiences, if they believed that stress could be motivating if they thought that stress is something that could actually help them do their best work versus something that was debilitating. So, to me, that has huge implications that all you have to do is in the sounds right, I'm oversimplifying all you have to do. But if you bring awareness to what your underlying beliefs and assumptions are about something, then you have the ability to potentially change both your mental, emotional and physiological outcomes. And this has been shown in other areas too. So for example, she did another really famous study with hotel housekeepers. They just explained to them that in their daily work, the things that they were doing on a day to day basis and their jobs, they were actually meeting the Surgeon General's requirements for getting enough activity in their day. As a result, these individuals not only felt better mentally, and were more satisfied with their jobs to some degree, but they actually had physiological responses. So improvements in heart rate and blood pressure, and all of the things that we see whenever you start exercising, and they weren't changing their behavior, they literally just changed their mindset. So to me, this is a really fascinating thing, if you start to bring awareness to something again, then you have the ability to change it. And there's a quote that's attributed to Dr. Viktor Frankl, although I found out very recently, it's not exactly his quote, and it goes back to the concepts of conditioning. So classical and operant conditioning, there's a stimulus and a response. So you can think of the stressful experience as the stimulus. And then you have a response, both one that you're aware of, like, I'm going to choose to say this thing or do this thing, and then we have the physiological responses that we believe are more out of our control. So this might be like autonomic nervous system arousal, your sympathetic nervous system lights up and your fight or flight goes. And in the quote, it goes between stimulus and response lies the space, and it's in that space. That is where our growth and our happiness and our freedom lives. And I really appreciate that quote, and like I said, it's attributed to Viktor Frankl though, according to the his official website, that may or may not be his exact quote, it's the concept of this really important, which is the power of the pause, if we take a moment to put a pause between the stimulus and the response, we can make better decisions. And ultimately, that is where our ability to manage stress lies.

Michael McCarthy: 13:04

So let me give you a specific example, if I may, this, there's an organization that I've been hired to help. And they have been given a sales quota that is, literally it's impossible. And the gossip around it is, this is their pre excuse to not give a bonus this year. So their pre response is, why bother because I can't hit this goal. And I'm curious, because my job is to get them to be motivated. And one of my thoughts was to have them look at that goal as let's say, the moon, but to set a a mindset of always shoot for the stars, and you're going to you're going to go for the moon. When I spoke to my professor, the father of positive psychology, Martin Seligman about this. He said, Well, the research says if you have more well being at work, you'll be more productive. So focus on that what you're focusing on is the prize. And I thought, okay, so I'm curious, Carolyn, what what would you do? And what do you think? Wow,

Carolyn Pritchett: 14:12

Wow, that's kind of fascinating. But I, this is where I think reframing is really helpful. So an impossible task sometimes simply means that they maybe they believe that they could actually achieve those targets. And if they said, that impossible task, maybe someone will achieve those or get really close to those impossible targets. And it's not a matter of, oh, they're setting us up to fail. Which by the way, that is the mindset that leads to failure, believing that well, if they're setting us up to fail, then it kind of becomes a self fulfilling prophecy and I believe self fulfilling prophecies. That concept is rooted in mindsets. So I'll give an example with Carol dorks research. She went into schools and if a teacher believed that a student could perform above average they did. In a nutshell, if a teacher believed that the student was incapable of performing at or average or above, typically, they also met that standard. And there's a whole nuanced kind of set of behaviors, things that we go about doing in our day to day lives, that influence our behaviors, little tiny choices that stack up over time. And all these little choices, because mindsets are cognitive shortcut, they allow us to navigate the world, hopefully more quickly and more efficiently by having expectations and making attributions to things. And so if we're working in this space, where we believe we're going to fail, we're making all these little tiny decisions along the way that probably are going to lead us to that outcome more likely than not. So it's a probabilities game, it's not all or none. So it's really about reframing and seeing what are the targets, you know, maybe the baby steps along the way that are achievable, that we can hit, and that goes back to your comment, shoot for the stars, and maybe you'll hit the moon, that's reframing it in a positive way versus well, they're setting us up to fail. So have something in there is helpful, although well being is extremely important, as well for the longevity of the behavior and that motivated behavior to keep going. If you if you don't have well being the motivated behavior, no matter what, your mindset becomes a little bit more difficult.

Tessa Misiaszek: 16:20

So one of the questions I have, and of course, I feel like we're all down, just using us using you as our personal personal coach. Because I had a bad day at work today, needless to say, but of what it made me reflect a reactive response, I cried at work today. So that's never a good thing. And of course, you don't want to cry at work. And the the beauty of zoom is that you can turn your camera off, right. So you don't have to like sit there in front of your boss crying, but you can actually turn your camera off, although I'm pretty sure everyone knew I was in the meeting. But it just made me reflect on kind of these the the accountability, so much of it is placed on the individual employee, right? And what is it? What stage and I would hope that it's an early stage that we are saying to organizations, like we can talk mindsets all day long. But is there a limit to the ability for someone to have the most positive mindset to be practicing mindfulness and taking those positives if the organization is created an infrastructure support system or lack of support system incentives, that don't actually line up to what is the desired expectation out of the employee? Like, I just think sometimes, a lot of this just placed so much of the accountability and responsibility on the employee, and the organization is able to kind of get away with not providing the environment for them to thrive. So just would be curious as to what would you say to the organization? You know, if they're like, Well, my entire sales team just had the wrong mindset. Did they? Did they? You know, so what are your thoughts on that? Oh,

Carolyn Pritchett: 18:01

Oh, good one. So a couple of pieces there. And you may all be familiar, you're probably all familiar with the Pygmalion effect. So Robert Rosenthal found going back to the rats, if you labeled rats, and this is kind of where some of Carriageworks research came from, if you label them as smart or dumb, as capable or incapable, they will, to some degree, achieve those effects. So one of the things about mindsets that I like to think about is they're integrative, so they don't exist in a vacuum by themselves. We have social interactions, the social interactions definitely impact us. We are social creatures, as human beings, we get a lot from the social interactions that we have with other people. And those social interactions impact us. And so what an organization does, how they emphasize certain things, how they speak to certain people, the resources that they give them, absolutely are going to impact the potential outcomes. Because again, in mind sets are integrative. So they exist within the individual. They exist within, there's a team mindset, there's an organization mindset, and all of these come together to create the outcome. So the short answer is, one person's individual mindset doesn't exist in a vacuum is being influenced by all of these other outside things. And so the organization has to really be thoughtful and aware, just like a human would, as an entity. They also want to be thoughtful and aware about, you know, the expectations that they're setting the ways that they're treating people and whether or not they're setting people up for success or for failure.

Laura Hamill: 19:38

It just want to build on that Carolyn, because I think that's so cool. And you can think about the culture of the organization as the shared mindset, right? Like that's, by definition. It's like what we sort of agree to around how we do things here, right, how this stuff goes down. And it's fascinating to me how you could think about, you know, at the individual level, how we want to have some thing like a stress mindset, right? How we think about stress and how we handle stress? Well, at the organizational level, we can think about those things too, right? Like, how does the organization handle stress? Or how does the organization deal with change or deal with hard situations? So there's so much of what you're saying, I'm like, Ah, that ability to handle that and have the pause in between, right? Like, there's so many things that really could apply at the organizational level to, which is really fascinating. The part that you were bringing up, and this just continues to blow my mind is the connection between what we think and how that shows up in our bodies. And so I'm curious, when you think about the application to work, you know, what we do every day at work? What are some of your tips around? How we can regulate that? And, or how we can test was just talking about having a hard day, right? Like, what are some things that you think, really can work? In that kind of connection between what's happening in our heads and what's happening in our bodies?

Carolyn Pritchett: 21:08

I love this question. Because our brains are taking in information, it's a two way street, they're taking in information from our bodies, and there are definitely times and this is really important within the stress mindset literature, there are definitely times where you might start to feel your heart race, right, and you start to feel a little emotional about something. And then you This is where that pause comes into play, you have the opportunity to pause and figure out how you want to interpret that. So most of us run on automatic, and we go, we've been taught that that's bad. I personally think, you know, sometimes crying work is necessary, it gets the emotion out, that's not necessarily a bad thing. The cultural implications of it are what they are, right? But for the actual individual, that might be exactly what's needed to get that emotion out and move on to the next.

Tessa Misiaszek: 21:56

Thank you saying that just because I think that every woman who has cried at work, just heard you say that and feels like, okay, because the whole time I cried at work today, I was thinking to myself, I can't believe I'm crying at work. Like I can't believe I can't get hold of this. Like why can? I do. It's like involuntary. And so I think what you just said is so important for people to hear, because sometimes it is just that involuntary reaction likely built up over time, but you just haven't recognized it was building over time.

Carolyn Pritchett: 22:29

That's such a good point. Because we, we often discount our bodies and our bodies will start to tell us and leading up to it, I had a panic attack in the middle of teaching sensation and perception on your worst day of work in my entire life. All the signs were there leading up to it, that I was having a rough not just day or week, but probably more like a rough semester. All the signs were there. And I was ignoring my body. And so if we pause and say, Okay, this is what's going on, what do I need to do about it? My heart is racing, I've got all of the physiological symptoms of stress, regardless of what's going on in my mind. What is going on? What do I am I sleep deprived? Am I not taking care of myself? Is it literally just all of the stress and pressure from life all packed piling in on me at that particular moment? And sure, there's definitely some things that we can try and do to the best of our ability. One of the things I like to do is, whenever it's a small thing, like your heart starts to race and you know, your Sunday like, oh, maybe I'm a little nervous reframe that and be like, am I nervous? Or am I excited, which I love that term, nerves sided, blending the two together, because I think a lot of people walk around feeling nervous sighted about things because they care about them. When you really care about something, you don't want to fail. You want to do a good job. So you may actually experience things that feel like nervousness, and then your brain is interpreting that because you've been taught that when your heart starts to race, or you start to you know, sweat or whatever, that you must be nervous. Stress is bad. That's not a good thing. That's a rabbit hole that you can start to spiral down. Or you can reframe and say, Yeah, I actually sure I'm stressed about this a little bit, but it's because I care about it, and I want to do a good job. And you can try and harness that physiological sensation. I love the concept that Shirzad Charmaine puts out in Positive Intelligence, using it as like your Jedi teacher, using your body as a way to say, Okay, here's what I'm feeling and potentially thinking about this particular thing that I'm going to do or where I am at this particular moment. What does that mean to me? How do I want to choose to interpret it, so you can kind of harness that and then choose your reaction appropriately as a result, so hopefully, something in there is helpful.

Unknown: 24:43

purlins

Michael McCarthy: 24:44

Carolyn this is great. I'm curious now as we finish up on the podcast, what are your thoughts on using job crafting to deal with challenging jobs with an organization where at the top, they don't really support the employee, but they kind of do the greenwashing like, oh, we love your well being but the rubber doesn't really hit the road. What are your thoughts on job crafting as a coping mechanism?

Carolyn Pritchett: 25:07

Could you defined job crafting specifically for me?

Michael McCarthy: 25:09

Sure. So job crafting was a lot of work that was done by Jane Dutton at University of Michigan, the Center for Leadership. And it's basically recognizing that that nothing at work will change. But your attitude and your mindset and one of the more famous studies on it was Jr, hospital janitors in Michigan, most of them were nine to five, push the broom didn't like it. A handful were super engaged, came in early work late. And they said, Why do you work so hard? And they said, Well, we feel like we're part of the healthcare team. We know we're not the surgeon or the nurse. But we do feel that a clean room a good environment can help the healing process. So we feel that we're doing something important. And they worked better, because they had a different perspective. And I'm curious if you feel that could be something for people that just are not getting support at work, and are not going to get support at work.

Carolyn Pritchett: 26:03

Oh, wow, I love that study. I'm so glad that you brought that up. That's a I hadn't thought about that one in a while. But yeah, it's bringing meaning and purpose to the job, regardless of what that job is. And there's so much research that shows that job satisfaction is so linked to finding meaning and purpose in the job. And actually, one of the things I was reading very recently is that places that consistently are ranked as places that people love to work the best places to work in the world. One of the things they do is allow space for people to pursue their passions and find and bring meaning and purpose into their jobs in ways that work for them. And so, you know, there's an authenticity piece there allowing people to be their authentic selves and to pursue their passions and to find ways that really light them up in their own jobs. And in terms of whether or not there's organist so that's, that's an example of where there is good organizational support. Obviously, there's not always the case, that's not always the case. And I've worked with some people that similar to the hospital janitor study where their jobs are fairly thankless. But they are able to find something within it that gives them meaning and drive. And I would say if you're in a job that you're absolutely, there's no love and no passion. See what you can do what what are your passions outside of work? And how might those actually be brought into your workplace, even if you don't tell anybody, if it's just your experience, what are some ways that you can bring your own passions and your own loves into your workday that do potentially improve your work, it certainly will improve your satisfaction at work, but it might actually have a benefit on what you're doing in your day to day job. And so this is where I find getting creative is really fun. So thinking outside the box, and really starting to explore, I love experimentation and exploring and seeing what the possibilities are. This is also where coaches come in really handy. So having a mentor or coach, whether it's in your workplace or outside of your workplace, and they can kind of give you some outside perspective, because sometimes we get stuck, we're in the job, we're doing the thing. And we have a hard time seeing outside the box, because we're so in that experience. And so talking to other people about things, writing things down journaling, sometimes really bring stuff to the surface is kind of floating around in the right brain behind our awareness, our conscious awareness, but can make a really positive impact. So I will stop there, I won't go down the rabbit hole of left brain right brain, which I do love to do. So I'll behave myself.

Laura Hamill: 28:35

Carolyn, this has been so good. I love hearing your perspective. And that's why I think it's so important when we're thinking about something as hard as how do we make work better to have the different perspectives right to have the neuroscience perspective, I think is such an important one. And it adds so much value because there's so much we have to understand about what's going on in our minds, right. And so just so grateful for you to spend this time with us today. Thank you so much so many cool ideas. And so I love those the studies that you have brought up...

Tessa Misiaszek: 29:08

It was just jam packed, Carolyn. And thank you for the personal coaching that you gave to Michael and I during the course of this podcast.

Michael McCarthy: 29:20

bill Send the bill! took

Carolyn Pritchett: 29:24

their time, because one of the answers that I didn't learn I would have loved to have gone down the rabbit hole with the stress management side of things and neuroplasticity. And you're gonna

Unknown: 29:33

get more into that because specifically on that piece because I do think stress management and you know, the whole neuroscience of stress management is it's such a burgeoning field right now. And it's, I think, not really being tapped into in the way it could buy a lot of companies and organizations, especially really traditional organized organizations, so we'd love to have you back lately.

Carolyn Pritchett: 29:55

Yes. Lovely. Thank you so much, Carolyn. Thank you all.

Michael McCarthy: 30:03

We hope you've enjoyed this episode. If you'd like to hear future episodes, be sure to subscribe to the happy at work podcast. And leave us a review with your thoughts.

Tessa Misiaszek: 30:14

Are you interested in speaking on a future episode or want to collaborate with us? Let us know. You can send us an email at admin at happy at work podcast.com And

Laura Hamill: 30:26

lastly, follow us on LinkedIn or Twitter for even more happiness. See you soon