Cracking the Self Fulfilment Code with Maja Djikic

Transcript

Des Dearlove:

Hello, I’m Des Dearlove, co-founder of Thinkers50. Welcome to the last of our weekly LinkedIn Live sessions, celebrating the brightest new voices and ideas in the world of management thinking.

Back in January, we announced the Thinkers50 Radar Class for 2024 in partnership with Deloitte. The Radar Class consists of 30 thinkers from around the world whose ideas have the potential to shape the future of organisations. Over the last few months, we’ve heard from many of them, and today is our final session. Artificial intelligence and all things digital have been on the minds of our Radar thinkers this year, as has sustainability. Another key theme has been making workplaces more inclusive and healthy for everyone, but nothing good happens without good leaders and the best leaders always want to get better. How they can do that is our topic for our final session today. We like to make these sessions as interactive as possible, so please do let us know where you’re joining us from and put your questions in the chat box.

Our guest today is Dr. Maja Djikic. Maja is a personality psychologist specialising in adult development. She’s an Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior and HR Management at the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto. Her research has been featured in over 50 media outlets, including The New York Times, Salon, Slate, and Scientific American Mind in 15 different countries. Her first book, The Possible Self: A Leader’s Guide to Personal Development was published in March 2024. Maja, welcome and congratulations on making the Thinkers50 Radar List and even more on the book.

Maja Djikic:

Thank you so much. It’s such a privilege to be here.

Des Dearlove:

Well, we’re very, very privileged to have you with us. Before we talk about the book, which obviously we’re going to get our teeth into, our intellectual teeth into I hope, tell us a little bit about your journey, how you arrived at this place in your career and also what a personality psychologist actually does.

Maja Djikic:

Well, I am a very bad person to ask about what personality psychology does because I could be the only personality psychologist out there who doesn’t believe in personality, and that’s perhaps a bit of a longer conversation we can have. But my journey in this area is, basically, coming from studying. Oddly enough, I started with my Master’s studying self-deception and how it is that people develop narratives about themselves and others that are very destructive. I studied collective self-deception.

I come from Bosnia and Herzegovina and we had a genocide there due to which I left the country, about a year into the war in that war. What really got me on is to understand how people behave towards each other. After a couple of years of studying self-deception, individual and collective, you would be surprised how one gets very, very down if you’re analysing genocides in various different parts of the world across history. I really got interested about, how is it that people ever get out of it? How do we grow? Yes, I see how people get stuck, but how do we get out of stuckness, and that started a long growth towards understanding how adults, who are just going about their way, what keeps them stagnant and what helps them grow?

Des Dearlove:

That’s absolutely fascinating. I had no idea you were going to say any of that. Self deception, I mean that’s a whole webinar in itself.

Maja Djikic:

It is.

Des Dearlove:

I mean, we may have to have you back for another, but I really want to talk about the book.

Maja Djikic:

For sure.

Des Dearlove:

The Possible Self, it’s a great title. What does it mean? Where did you get the title from?

Maja Djikic:

Well, The Possible Self is this idea that most people, professionals, they tend to think of themselves in terms of personality types. When you said, “What is it that personality psychologists do?”, oftentimes, what they do, and not all but a lot of time, they think of people in terms of what type of personality a person has and how that develops and what does that mean for their growth or what kind of leader they are. Instead, the idea of Possible Self came out of a realisation that a lot of assumptions that we have about personality are not true. That personality really, unlike temperament, is not genetic.

The way that I define personality trait is an early skill in dealing with your temperament in a particular environment. Basically, you’re given a particular physiological temperament and then you are in a particular family, in a particular culture, and you figure out simply how to get along. Maybe you get along by being nice, and then suddenly you end up as an agreeable personality type, or maybe you get along by being very, very assertive and then you have an assertive personality type.

If the person is a very nice personality type, when they come often as a leader and they get stuck and say, “Well, I just belong. This is how I lead, this is my strength,” I often tell them, “It’s just an early skill. You can develop yourself on the opposite pole of that skill and that would really round out and restart your development as a leader because suddenly you’ll be able to do so many more things rather than limit yourself in some ways to only something that you have developed early and internalises your identity.” The Possible Self, really, is meant to evoke the selves that we left behind. We simply didn’t develop those parts of ourselves, and so much so that we now think of it that, “Well, that’s not ourselves. We know who ourselves are.”

Even that, this idea of a kind of identity and that we know who we are, I find very problematic because we, just like all other living beings like plants and animals, we’re continually changing and growing, so anything that lives has a developmental potential. To try to say, “This is what I am,” is antithetical to how life really is, how we grow, how we continually change. To me, that statement I am, it can become very destructive to what could be and what are these other ways that we haven’t grown in yet that we could develop and continue to grow all the way until the very end of our lives.

Des Dearlove:

I mean, what I’m hearing from you is that it’s a much more organic thing, and I’m fascinated by the idea that personality in particular is sort of contextual in the sense that we adapt because of our culture, our circumstance, our situation. I mean, you might develop a different way, almost like a coping mechanism, so that’s really fascinating.

Maja Djikic:

One more thing I might want to add. Often, I hear people, I’m not sure, they always say, “But wait a minute, I have two kids that are toddlers and they’re very different,” and I tell them not to mistake personality for potential. Two kids, one of them really likes to draw and do art and the other one likes to pull things apart and see the mechanisms. It’s not that they have different personalities, they have different potential, which is reflected in different interests. We need to know that difference.

Des Dearlove:

Let’s start to unpack the book a little bit. I think it’s tempting to think that when we want to change, if we get stuck, I mean that’s what I’m hearing the language from you, that we address our behaviours, but I think one of the big messages of the book is that actually pulling on the behaviour lever is hard, and in the long run, likely to be unsuccessful.

Maja Djikic:

That’s correct. When it’s successful, it’s not to our benefit, and I’ll tell you how. We can decide that we’re going to, from now on, we’re going to get up at 5:00 AM because you just decided that 5:00 AM, other leaders get up at 5:00 AM and it’s one of those things that you want to say, “I tried this.” Every morning you use up that very limited willpower that you have and really, you get in there, although maybe you’re not a morning person. People say, “Well, it becomes successful. You just give it a little bit of time and you do 1% at a time,” and you eventually do this, you change your whole life to be starting at 5:00 AM. You build that habit. The problem is that you have now just made something very stable that is perhaps not developmentally beneficial to you.

What is developmentally beneficial to us? Changes over time. You basically take just one part of yourself and you are bending it through sheer will, which people feel like these days a glamorous thing to do. It’s like, “I have so much willpower, I can bend myself. I’ll wrap myself into a pretzel by having so much willpower,” and then you end up in a situation where you have made your life into something and now you’re reinforcing it with these habits and you think that’s a good thing to do. What we need is habits. Well, you end up in a static stagnant state in which you are bending and limiting your development because you think this is a great idea. You think this is how to lead a best, or healthier, fulfilling life.

Des Dearlove:

If we’re not just going to act through changing behaviour and adopting habits. Of course, the nature of habits is, as you say, they become fixed, they become fixed points, and then we become that early morning person who gets up at 5:00 every morning. That may not be helpful in a different context or even in a different job or a different relationship, all sorts of situations. If it’s not just behaviours, what are the other parts of us that we need to work with?

Maja Djikic:

As I mentioned in the book, basically, we have five parts, or rather there’s many parts of the self. I chose five, the ones that were most significant in our development. In addition to behaviour, motivation, emotion, your mind and your body, which I think of it not in terms of measurements or exercise or food, but in terms of carrying all of your history in neural pathways. The body is really a neural history of all of your learnings from the past. These are the five parts.

And so, I often say what you do when you try to pull behaviour one way and everything else is moving the other way, you’re basically just breaking and self fragmenting. The insight I had about how to change when you’re stuck came from understanding what it means to actually move and develop naturally and spontaneously, and that turns out not to require any real power. What you need to think about, what happens when all five parts move together at the same time, is basically you just need to watch children growing or when you develop a hobby you’re very excited about, all parts of yourself.

Let’s say you’re developing a hobby, whatever it is, you’ve taken up something like tennis or something like this. Well, what would happen is that you would suddenly notice that not only will you actually go and try to play tennis, but you’re going to think about the tennis or anything you watch, your interest is going to be moved, you’re going to have emotions about it. The whole wheel is moving naturally, and importantly, without willpower. Another detail of it is that it actually gives you willpower to do it. When we do intrinsically motivated things, if the cup of willpower gets empty, it actually pours back into the cup.

Then the question became… when people are stuck to know that they are stuck and to ask the question, “Well, why am I stuck?” Because the natural movement is to move in this way. If I’m not moving in this way, if I need to use willpower so hard, and if the willpower is at the centre of my life in some domain of my life, not at the periphery, not just getting yourself to this, but really at the core there’s something, well, then the question becomes what is it, basically it’s like throwing a wrench into this wheel of self that’s moving and removing it.

And so, what five parts of the self is you basically find out, by working on all five parts, how to remove the wrench from the wheel to then have it move and roll smoothly and naturally. The way you would know that you are done is that you wouldn’t need habits to maintain. You wouldn’t need to control your behaviour. You would just start growing naturally. Basically, what happens is that you just simply forget about self-work because you’re growing and interacting and being yourself and feeling fulfilled.

Des Dearlove:

I mean, you mentioned your model, which is the wheel of self, which I found really interesting in the book. You see, at one level, it sounds as though,  if we can pull the wrench out the way, this wheel is going to roll beautifully and spontaneously.

Maja Djikic:

Restart.

Des Dearlove:

We’re going to be in the moment and not have to impose this discipline of willpower on ourselves. But it also seems to me that this is quite internally focused work. This is hard work, this isn’t-

Maja Djikic:

It’s hard.

Des Dearlove:

You make it sound almost like it’s easy to pull that wrench out the way and we’re away.

Maja Djikic:

I always have to be optimistic because it’s actually hard work and not always the most pleasant. But I always tell people it’s not more unpleasant than how it feels for you to live your life with the wrench in the wheel. Even though it’s difficult, it’s not more difficult than trying to live all the time pushing yourself and not getting the outcomes you want. It’s hard internal psychological work.

One misconception people have, they think of it a little bit like in this long term, “Well, it’s just time. It’ll take a long time.” I’ll tell them, “If you know what you’re doing, it doesn’t need to. It can if you want it to go that route.” But for some reason, I really love more rapid change approaches. One thing that neuroscience tells us is that, basically, our brains become more plastic when they’re slightly dysregulated, and so this is why we get traumatised so quickly. Those neuro pathways get written down very quickly if you’re being traumatised.

And so, the question is, can we do the opposite? Can we do the healing, which would be rapidly riding down neural pathways in a different direction? It can be done, and if you know what you’re doing, it can be done rapidly, within weeks. Psychology, it’s the only place where that whole idea that, I don’t know whether it’s a cliche, that time heals all wounds doesn’t really happen. You can be a 95-year-old person and you can remember the way that Mrs. Smith looked at you in your second grade when you didn’t get the answer correctly. You will still have that vivid feeling of embarrassment unless you do something to change that.

Des Dearlove:

I mean, it’s interesting, isn’t it? If you observe children, particularly very young children, they have a spontaneity and a playfulness and a natural… It’s like they haven’t settled into these rigid shapes.

Maja Djikic:

That’s right.

Des Dearlove:

The pretzel, whatever shape it is, that life hasn’t formed them into, and they just seem like they can just roll.

Maja Djikic:

Yes.

Des Dearlove:

What you’re saying, I think, is that the experiences that we have, if we don’t revisit them or process them or find a way to get them out of our system, we just live with these wrenches stuck in our…

Maja Djikic:

That’s right, and that’s the thing I really want people to notice. People think, “Oh, well, I just need a different strategy.” Let’s say if I’m a leader, but I’m uncomfortable talking in front of large groups, “Oh, I just need a strategy. I need to know how to hold my hands,” but those are strategies. Or somebody, let’s say, and I know this is a very simple example, somebody who is trying to not yell at their kids as much. They say, “Well, every time I want to yell at them, I count to 10.” I tell them, “You can do that or you can work on yourself in a way that makes you not want to yell at them.” One thing is not to do it, another is not to want to do it. If you can get that motivation, the want, if you can change the want, well, your whole life changes.

I think we have some misconceptions about how change happens. It is long. It is habit based. It’s willpower-strong. I will always be this person, so therefore, people tell me I’ve always been shy, and that means that ever since I remember, so this could never change for me. Well, it turns out most people who are shy have had very early experience of rejection in social settings such that left a bit of a deep wound that they never got to heal. The first obstacle to change is for people to realise that all these ways that they think of themselves as these boxes, stable boxes, “Well, this is just who I am,” is radical acceptance, which I have nothing against, of course.

All I ask people is to say, “This is who I am now. I accept and love who I am now, and I appreciate everything now,” because you might want tomorrow to not have that pain and not to work so hard to feel comfortable speaking in front of others, to not have those little voices of imposter syndrome talking in the background and bothering you while you’re trying to have some very good ideas and share them with your team or with your board, depending on your position.

Des Dearlove:

We carry this baggage, but how can we, I mean, because we’re going all the way back to the beginning, people’s self-deception piece. We deceive ourselves. We tell ourselves, silently, we repress ourselves. We say, “I’m an introvert. I can’t stand up in front of people and talk to people.” I’m sure you’re right. Something happened somewhere, way back in the mists of time, that made us conscious or self-conscious so we don’t want to have that pain again. I mean, on a very practical level, I mean obviously read the book, the book’s fantastic, but how can people begin to look inside in a way that they can see more clearly?

Maja Djikic:

You go back to the mists of time. There’s a writer, Alice Walker, and I’m sure I’m going to misremember her quote. She says, “To heal the wound, you have to go back to its origin. You have to find the place where it was made.” And so, what you do, what the wheel helps you do is you identify the core thing. If you don’t mind, I’ll just give you an example. Maybe that’s easier.

Des Dearlove:

Yeah, go ahead.

Maja Djikic:

Let’s say that you are a leader, you’re very successful, but you’re having voices at the back of your mind that when you want to give an idea, it’s like, “Oh, well maybe that’s not correct, or maybe I shouldn’t say it, or what will they think?” You think, “Okay, well I just need to shut down those voices or use my willpower,” but you decide, “Okay, you know what? Let me check this book out. Let me try to work on myself.”

I’ll tell you what the book will ask you to do. The book will ask you to, first, find this very thing that is the thing, it’s almost like you’re anchor. What is this thing that you want to pull out? You can say, “Okay, well, I want to have a sense of value. I am a valued person that I don’t need to rely so much on other people to tell me. I want to have a sense that I’m intelligent, that I am a valuable smart person who can do big things in the world.” That’s on the motivation side.

Then I ask people to stop doing whatever it is that they have been doing to try to change. I know it’s a very funny step. You go from the motivation piece of why, to you go to the behaviour, and the behaviour is mostly just don’t, don’t do anything. Stop getting up at 5:00. Stop trying to sound assertive. Stop doing power poses in the bathroom before the meeting. Just stop. Because what I want people to do is learn how to refill the cup of willpower. Why? Because the other three pieces of self that need to be moved require a lot of it.

I have people gather back the strength. When you do this, because it’s relatively short burst of inner work, I ask people try to do it when you’re not in your busy time at work, you have a little bit more reflection time, at least a long weekend or around the holidays so that you can refill a little bit because it’s going to be intense.

And then, we move on to emotion, mind and neural pathways in the body. For the emotion, we figure out what are our activating situations? Let’s say your activating situation is when I’m in a board meeting and there are 70% of people who are higher, or have achieved more than I have, I start sweating, I start having thoughts. Those are activating situations and saturating triggers.

Des Dearlove:

Bit like what you might call triggers. Yeah, okay.

Maja Djikic:

Triggers. Triggers, and what I ask people is to identify the emotion that they get. I ask, “Is it shame? Is it fear?” I direct people to understand how it is that all of these emotions are telling you something, you are under threat. There’s an obstacle that’s insurmountable for you. If you get what the emotion is, you’re getting closer, you need to define, find where the wrench was put in.

Once you have an emotion, I ask people, once you have an emotion, write down when you’re in that active state of emotion, what are the thoughts that come to your mind? Now, we’re moving on to the mind part. So, what is it? You’re stupid. You’re never going to make it. You’re writing down what I called closed constructs, which is beliefs about yourself. It can be about others or about the world. Belief about others. Something like. You can never trust anybody or you will always fail or you will never make it or you will never be happy with another person, whatever that construct is. I have people find what these are. Think about what this is. Think of it as a set of neural pathways, that there is no more openness to that. Constructs, think of it as, the reason I don’t use the word beliefs is because I want people to understand they are constructed and they can be reconstructed.

I jokingly tell them it’s like a little bit of a bowl. When a bowl is nice and open, all information can go in. Every time you interact with somebody, there’s more information that goes in. Closed construct is maybe this hypothetical person I’m talking about finds out that in third grade their teacher made fun of them, and then that locked, put the lid on the construct of ‘I’m not smart.’ Now, they’re going with this lid for the rest of their lives and acting on it without even knowing that they have this in them.

Once you identify the lid and where it’s snapped on, there is a final technique that is perhaps the most intensive and unpleasant in which you pop back open the lid through self dysregulation, within the very safe confines of an exercise, like a writing exercise. You pop open the lid, and what you do is basically you bring up those old pathways and you overwrite them with a new experience and you only need to do that for maybe 20 minutes for three days.

This particular technique is a combination of multiple techniques that I’ve seen. There’s a great writer on trauma, van der Kolk, who I’m sure you know his book, The Body Keeps the Score. He said, “Listen, we don’t know why some things don’t work and some things work, but here’s a set of things that work.” What I’ve done is that I basically put together a technique made of the things that do work into a basic three-day, 20-minute-a-day technique that can overwrite new experiences on top of the ones that you’ve had before. Which in my book I think of it, I don’t use this word a lot when I’m in a business setting, but I’m going to use it right now anyway, I think of it as healing. It’s going back to experiences that you had and adding in another experience you kind of needed to keep that construct open, to not put down the lid.

And then, with that new implicit belief, which is sometimes I don’t have the right answer, and that’s okay, it doesn’t make me a bad person. Or you see, once you open the lid, once the new information goes in, you have now reopened yourself. Now, you have a different belief about the self with which you enter the world. Suddenly, things that used to trigger you, don’t trigger you anymore. You walk into a room and you don’t feel like they’re going to all judge you or you’re going to say something. Even if you do say something, they all laugh at you and say, “Wow, that’s interesting.” It’s tough luck. Well, I’ll try better next time and let’s see where that takes us.

The way that I think of it is that I’ve simply put together what’s out there that works, but in a way that gets all the parts of the self moving rather than just one.

Des Dearlove:

No, it is fascinating. It’s really interesting stuff. You mentioned healing. We were doing a webinar yesterday evening. We’ve been doing a series of webinars to draw attention to mental health awareness month, and obviously the subject of burnout has come out a lot. We’re constantly being told we have an epidemic of burnout, and I think that’s probably true, whatever language you want to use.

You also mentioned this notion of a cup and being able to replenish. I’ve heard you talk about burnout and I found it really quite helpful, the metaphor you were using. Can you speak to that? Then I will grab some questions and we’ll put some of the people who are tuning in, some of the questions to you.

Maja Djikic:

For sure. The metaphor of a cup simply is that you wake up and you have this much willpower, and every time you do something in the day that you don’t like to do, don’t want to do, that you’re forcing yourself to do, you pour a little bit out. And so, when you wake up at 5:00, you pour out if you don’t want to wake up at 5:00. Then you have to herd your children for daycare, you pour a little bit out because it’s stressful. Then you take the transit or you are in a jam, you pour out. You go to work and you’re dealing with meetings. The point is that you’re pouring out, pouring out, pouring out until the very end.

Now, burnout happens when you keep pouring out more than you pour in. To me, we’re partially in the pandemic of burnout because, again, we have assumptions about this and the assumption is that you’re pouring in at home, but you’re pouring out at work. Immediately, that basically gives eight or 10 hours of our day of pouring out. We basically assume we’re supposed to just pour out at work and do things we don’t want to do. This is a classic stagnating mindset.

Basically, and people sometimes tell me, “Well, Maja, we live in an adult real life, which is who likes their work? Come on, who enjoys their work?” You’re laughing. I can tell you’re enjoying your work. The problem is that if you’re pouring out for eight or 10 hours and then you get home, and guess what? Maybe you have a situation at home, maybe you have kids to take care of, that it’s not always all sunshine and flowers or you have an elderly parent you need to take care of, which can be demanding. Well, basically, you’re pouring way out more than you can ever pour in. If you keep doing that, your body, this cup gets broken and now you’re pouring in, but there’s a crack at the bottom and you can never get enough.

I think what we need is to stop and to understand for ourselves and for others, “Okay, what are the things that I do that pour out of my cup in a day and what do I do to pour in?” If I’m a team leader, I need to sit my whole team down and tell them, “Okay, team, tell me at work, what pours most out of your cup?” They’ll tell you, “Oh, meetings that are too long. Meetings that have no agenda. Talking to people who are negative.” I mean, there’s a whole list. And then, my job and our job together is, how can we minimise these drainers and how can we figure out the things that pour in for most?

People say things like, “Oh, it pours in when I talk to my colleagues.” It turns out that things that pour out for everybody at work tend to be common to everybody, but things that restore them are very unique. Some people, it restores them to have lunch alone. For some people, it restores them to have lunch with others. For leaders, it’s a lot about, first, reduce as much as you can common drainers and then give people flexibility to restore themselves uniquely in the way that works for them.

This is why also it really works well to give people flexibility about where they’re working from. I mean, some people say, “Well, just the whole process of getting there is exhausting and I already have half a cup by the time I get to work, so can I please just if at all possible work at home for two days out of the week or something so that I can not be so drained?”, and so on and so forth.

Des Dearlove:

I used to think in terms of energy vampires, but that’s perhaps unfair because that puts it onto people and it’s not just people that drain your energy, sometimes it’s certain tasks and it’s certain situations and sometimes we’re our own worst enemies.

Maja Djikic:

Processes.

Des Dearlove:

But to understand which, I think we can all perhaps just pause sometimes and think, you do recognize them. If you put your attention on these things, you think, “That person, every time they walk in the room, it’s always the wrong time, so there’s something going on with that energy that that person is bringing us is sapping my energy or my attention.”

Maja Djikic:

Here’s what, you come to me and say, “You know what? When that person walks into the room, I just feel drained.” There’s two things that I would probably say. First, how are your boundaries? Can you push that? If they’re trying to talk to you or they’re not reading cues and they’re overstaying their welcome, do you know how to tell them, “I would really love to talk but not right now,” or, “We can make an appointment then,” or, “Now is the time to leave.” One is the boundary thing.

The second thing is that because often it’s basically, if the energy gets drained as soon as they walk into the room, it means that you’re porous energetically, basically they’re getting you, and how they get you, they get you through the mind. In your mind, you’re thinking, “Oh my god, now I have to listen to them complain for all of this time,” when you really don’t. You really don’t have to listen to them complain. You can say, “You know what? Sounds like you’re not having a great day. Why don’t I leave you to rest and restore in the way you want to while I go and do something else?” I know it sounds a bit cold, but this really helps us not to be drained by people.

Des Dearlove:

We have to protect ourselves. If we don’t look after ourselves, then we’re not much good to other people.

Maja Djikic:

That’s right.

Des Dearlove:

Listen, I’m going to jump you around a little bit because we’ve got a couple of questions.

Maja Djikic:

Please.

Des Dearlove:

One is sort of a clarification point. Alison says Maja believes in temperaments but not personality types. I think that’s what you said at the beginning.

Maja Djikic:

Yes.

Des Dearlove:

And personalities are a contextual result of temperaments.

Maja Djikic:

Basically, temperament is physiological. Maybe you have a kid who is a little bit more irritable because their tummy hurts a little bit and they develop a different dynamic with a parent because they keep the parent up at night and so on. It looks to a parent like, “Oh, it’s a cranky kid.” It’s not a cranky kid, they’re having a physiological change.

And so, you can have sensitivity to light or sound, but depending on which family a kid ends up, let’s say a kid, exactly same kid, very sensitive to sound, ends up either in a family of musicians where they really appreciate it and get them to engage with it and share that with others, or in a different family where their sensitivity is seen as really annoying and people are forcing the loudness on them and then the person just withdraws, becomes very shy, introverted. You see how a person with the same temperament ends up with two different personalities.

Des Dearlove:

Oh, very interesting. Elizabeth asks, how do we change this on a larger scale, i.e. in organisations where multiple, often conflicting motivations, wants, needs and behavioural strategies are all interconnected at once and also perhaps at odds with the set company mission and vision? We’ve been talking about it very much at the individual unit of analysis. How does this stuff play out? How can leaders use the wheel to change things around them?

Maja Djikic:

Think of each part of the wheel as having an organisational extension. The motivational part of the wheel has an organisational extension, which is organisational goals. And so, what you want is to make the two as congruent and aligned as possible. To do that, of course, you have to be transparent about the goals of an organisation, ask people about their own goals in relation to organisation, and try to activate not their strengths but their interests to keep them engaged, and then discuss very openly and honestly, motivational conflict. Why? Because even inside of our own selves, we are conflicted.

How is it that we expect that we’re not going to have conflicts with organisational goals? For example, you can have a parent who needs to pick up their kid from daycare at 3:00. Now, if you have an organisation that doesn’t ask the right kind of questions, what you’re going to have is that person slipping away from all the technology at a particular time of the day and then coming back on all the while really feeling bad and stressed versus saying, “Hey, I’m having this conflict. Can we do something? Can I work an extra hour or two in the evening or can we figure it out to have somebody cover me at this time and then I will cover them for some.

It’s basically talking about either overlap, alignment or conflict between organisational goals to come up with some adult solutions. And so, you can take each section of the wheel and then do an organisational extension for behaviour, personal burnout. What can we do as an organisation to reduce burnout in a team? On the emotion side, I think of extension of emotion into organisation as culture. What happens when there’s a problem in the organisation? Do we have ways to process it as an organisation?

The same thing, just like there’s an individual mind, there’s a collective mind. Just as there is individual trauma, there’s collective trauma. Perhaps it’s another book, I imagine, to explicitly… but I find a lot of leaders, once they learn about what it feels like for each person, they can do this natural extension into organisational space.

Des Dearlove:

Interesting. I think you mentioned engagement, and I think that’s another, obviously, we’ve got an epidemic of disengagement. Very few people seem to be engaged. If I heard you correctly, the difference between strengths versus interests. How can we re-engage people who are just… The trouble is, they might be really good at what they do.

Maja Djikic:

That is the trouble. The trouble is that being very good at what we do and only being asked to do what we’re to do inevitably is going to lead to disengagement, because engagement comes not from being able to do stuff, but comes from not being able to grow in that direction. What I usually tell people is, “Listen, I know you want people to do what they’re good at, which is their strengths. However, if you don’t have them follow their interests, which is where they want to grow, they’re not going to be engaged. They’re going to be bored and stagnating.”

The strength-based has some benefits as in everybody’s very good at what they do. Interest-based, everybody’s pouring back in their cup, being excited, they want to do more of it. What I find interesting is how it is that people try to increase engagement, organisations that try to increase engagement by giving people basically more money, more promotions. It’s basically, you are increasing their sense of safety that has nothing to do with engagement. It belongs to a different motivational system. Being safe and being exploratory and passionate are simply completely two different motivational systems.

If you want them to engage, you have to ask them about their interests, not outside necessarily work, but even inside of work, what are their most exciting projects they’ve had? What is the area they would like to read more about? When they read about work, what are they reading? By aligning them with potential projects, you’re going to get a very engaged crowd.

Des Dearlove:

You’re almost back to the play, children trying things.

Maja Djikic:

Yes, yes.

Des Dearlove:

I know you’re an advocate of adults playing and trying different things.

Maja Djikic:

Yeah, that’s exactly right. I mean, when you’re fully engaged with your work, and I’m sure that maybe you can even share, it becomes like you’re exploring in the sense as being even when it’s difficult and when you’re having conflict and obstacles and a little bit of anger and frustration that you can’t get somewhere, what you have is deep sense of fulfilment and joy. Basically, that sense of fulfilment is a sign we are growing. Part of it, if we can follow that fulfilment and say, “Okay, I’m growing from this. I’m exploring, I’m trying, I’m engaged in this,” and that’s how you know you’re growing.

Des Dearlove:

Okay, that’s good. Couple more concepts. We’re going to run out of time, but I just want to talk to you about envy may not be a bad thing if we know what it signifies, and this notion, which I think is very, very present, the sense of being behind schedule. Why do we do that to ourselves? Sorry, two things for you there!

Maja Djikic:

First, I love envy. Isn’t it such a fast way to be able to catch which part of the self is underdeveloped? Let’s say that I don’t have very good friendships and then I witness, I don’t know, I turn on the television and I, “Oh God, I wish I had friends that,” okay, well, I suddenly have identified where I’m underdeveloped. As long as you know how to say, “Oh yeah, this is what I want. How do I find what prevents me from very naturally and organically developing?” Let me take the wrench out from how I think of friendships. Or, “I love how this person speaks publicly.” Oh, okay, what is the block that’s preventing that? Envy can be such a quick, fast way to have us understand, “Okay, I have to get the wheels moving here.”

Des Dearlove:

Again, as long as we turn it internal and we don’t-

Maja Djikic:

That’s it.

Des Dearlove:

We don’t blame people.

Maja Djikic:

No.

Des Dearlove:

We realise that it’s something that we covet and that we have the power to do something about.

Maja Djikic:

That’s right. If you persist in envy, that means basically you’re not doing your work because your attention should be back to you, just like a moment of envy and then back to you. But if you keep envy, it means basically you’re not doing your work, but you envy other people for being able to grow in their way. It’s about click! and then turning back inside.

The second thing is this experience of being behind schedule. The idea there is that, and I find that people of all different generations have it, it doesn’t even matter how old you are or how successful you are, it’s basically the experience of not being fulfilled that translates, that looks for a cause. It’s a lack of fulfilment that is looking for a cause, and where it finds it is in other people’s LinkedIn profiles and says, “Oh yeah, this person got this and then they got that this time and then I was supposed to.”

Basically, we believe we’re unfulfilled because we didn’t have particular achievements or successes by a particular date, when really we’re not fulfilled. All fulfilment is in the moment so it has nothing to do with the stretch of time. If you’re fulfilled in the moment, this thought will never enter your mind. The past, the future, the schedule, whatever imaginary schedule you think there is, there is no schedule. Either you’re fulfilled, in a thin slice of time, one after the other, or not. If you’re not fulfilled, you look for where it is that you are stuck.

Des Dearlove:

This is going to be the final question of the Class of 2024 Radar webinars, so I’ll try to make it a good question. I think we just have time for it. What is the difference between happiness and joy and what can we do? What can people do to get a bit more joy into their lives?

Maja Djikic:

Fantastic question. Happiness is when you set any goal, you can set any goal, and achieve it. I can set a goal to become an accountant and achieve it, but it’s nothing with my developmental potential. Joy is when you are moving towards the direction of your development. You know what it feels like. Happiness feels like a hit and it goes away very quickly. It’s like a hit of dopamine that then very quickly drops off. Joy is you’re in the middle of an activity you love. You don’t want to be on the other side. You just want to stay in it and keep exploring. That joy, it’s basically an emotional signal that you’re in the middle of development.

If you’re feeling just happiness but no joy, turn your eyes towards where you’re stuck and start moving that wheel again. You will feel fulfilled even when frustrated and upset and sad. All of these, there is going to be an underlying joy of being fully growing in the direction you need to be.

Des Dearlove:

Presumably, if you like, that is the antidote to feeling behind schedule as well. Because if we feel that we’re moving forward, everything is as it should be.

Maja Djikic:

That’s the feeling.

Des Dearlove:

We have joy in our lives, so we take the temporal concerns out because we know that we are where we should be and we’re moving forward.

Maja Djikic:

Joy is a sign to you that you are on your path to a purpose and it feels perfect. There’s no future, no past. You’re just in the now and it feels just right.

Des Dearlove:

Do you know what? I think that’s a perfect place to finish because we are just over time. Huge thank you to Maja. The Possible Self: A Leader’s Guide to Personal Development. It was published in March. It’s published by Berrett-Koehler and I thoroughly recommend it. Thank you, Maja.

Now, as I said, this is the last in our Radar 2024 series, but we will be back with more great ideas and thinkers in the coming months. Please do check out The Thinkers50 website. Even better, sign up for our free newsletter to hear about what we’re up to, and we will look forward to seeing you next time. Maja, it’s been an absolute pleasure.

Maja Djikic:

My pleasure. Thank you.