Melody Wilding: We’ve been sold a story that success is linear. You get the degree, you climb the corporate ladder, you follow the 10 year plan. But what if that is all wrong? What if the most fulfilling careers actually come from embracing uncertainty and treating life more like a laboratory for experimentation. I am so excited to welcome Anne-Laure Le Cunff to the show.

She is a neuroscientist, entrepreneur. She is the founder of Ness Labs, where her insights on psychology and productivity reach over a hundred thousand readers. every single week. And what really drew me to Anne-Laure’s work is her very fresh perspective on how we navigate our careers and lives. She has a new book coming out.

Actually, our new books come out on the same date, March 4th, so make sure you pre order. And her book, Tiny Experiments, she challenges Everything we think we know about setting goals, making decisions, navigating your career. She is someone who has made a lot of bold moves herself. We’re going to talk about that from leaving Google to pursue her PhD in neuroscience.

So she knows firsthand how an experimental mindset can really transform how you approach uncertainty. From something that is scary and daunting, and to totally be avoided. To something that can be exciting. So welcome Anne-Laure, I’m so glad to have you here.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff: I am so, excited to be with you today.

Melody Wilding: yes. let’s get into it. I was mentioning just a second ago that you were working at Google when you up and decided to go back and get your PhD. And most people would think, Google, you’ve reached the top of the professional food chain. Why would you ever leave? So take us back to that moment in time.

What led you to that decision? And how did you make that?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff: Yeah, you’re right that wasn’t a very easy decision in the sense that I had an amazing team. People were really smart, were creative, were driven, and there were lots of reasons to stay in that kind of job where there was a very clear way for me to grow. But I had realized that I had become a little bit bored, to be honest, a little bit Psychologists call this being bored out, so it’s the opposite of being burned out.

Being bored out is when you know exactly what’s going to happen. You have a plan that is so clear that you start losing interest.

And so I started asking myself, do I want to stay in this situation where I can just keep on going to work and having this very clear path in front of me where I know exactly what success looks like, or do I want to try something different?

The answer for me was that it felt a little bit too early in my career to have this clear path and that I wanted to expand my horizons. So I went back to the drawing board and I asked myself, What is something I’m curious about? What is something I would like to explore? That I would love to learn about?

Even if success was completely out of the equation. And in my case, it was neuroscience. I had always been fascinated with how the brain works, why we think the way we think, and feel the way we feel. after a little bit of a meandering path of trying different things, this is where I ended up going.

Just going back to university in my late twenties to study neuroscience.

Melody Wilding: Amazing. I have so many follow up questions and I’m taking notes here. And so one thing I wanted to come back to was this idea of being bored out because there’s so much talk about burnout. But, uh, in, in the research I’ve looked at there’s, yes, there’s what we think of as overload burnout, doing too much, working too hard, all of that, but to your point, there’s under challenge burnout where we’re not being challenged enough. Every day feels so routine. It feels like we don’t have something on the horizon to look forward to. And we’ll probably get into this, but that really speaks to the fact is fact as humans, yes, we value predictability. We want stability. We want a good paycheck. But at the same time, we also have this drive for self actualization, like we, we want to reach our potential.

We need to have something that we feel like we’re, we’re growing towards, we’re striving towards. And that was. Missing for you, which is really, uh, I think that’s such an important, um, drive to follow because most people don’t listen to that. they push it aside and they say, I have a good job.

What, who am I to feel like, oh, you should want more. So I want to get your opinion on that. And then also we may get into this and other questions, but I wrote down curiosity, not passion. And. We can come back to this, but, uh, I think that’s really important because at least in my work, I see so many people get stuck when they’re trying to make these big transitions or make, take experiments because they get really locked in on I need to find the one thing I need to find my life’s purpose. Rather than like you were saying, curiosity, you were interested enough that you could follow it. So we can loop that to that point back to that point. But I do want to talk about, um, the idea of giving yourself permission to follow that urge you had when, all the messaging is, you have a good job.

Shouldn’t you be happy enough?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff: Yeah, this is so interesting. And I think it ties back to the concept of the arrival fallacy. It’s the idea that if we get to a certain point, if we achieve a certain milestone, then we’ll be happy. And very often what happens is that we get there. And we realized that happiness was not hiding just behind that milestone.

We’re still the same person. We still feel like we have a lot to learn. We still feel like we need to grow and evolve. And the reaction, the response we have quite often Is that we feel like, but is that because I’m an eternally unsatisfied person, shouldn’t I be happy to be here? I have achieved so much, as you said, I have this job that is secure with colleagues who are smart and interesting and I’m working on pretty fun projects.

Shouldn’t that be enough? The reality is that as long as you’re alive, you will want to grow, you will want to explore. We’re not really designed to be static, to always repeat exactly the same things and to have the same routines. So it’s perfectly natural that you want to keep on exploring. So to answer that first part of your question, I think it’s really more about embracing that it is part of human nature to want to grow and to learn and to explore.

And it’s perfectly okay if you find yourself in a job where a lot of people externally are telling you, you should be happy, but you feel like, oh, I want more. Actually, that’s okay. Your definition of more can be different from the definition of someone else. And as long as you still have this, and that ties back to what you mentioned, you still have that curiosity, this drive to learn, you should absolutely follow it.

And to connect to that second part, which I think is also very important, I agree, is that when I found myself in this situation, I felt bored out. I felt like that wasn’t enough. I wanted to learn and to grow more. It also would have been very easy to fall prey to one of the most insidious scripts that we have in our careers, which is that whatever you do, it needs to be big.

It needs to be impactful. It needs to be aligned with your passion. It needs to give you a sense of purpose. Because of that, we close many doors to ourselves that we could explore because it doesn’t feel like big or significant enough. And instead, that’s why I advocate in the book, I encourage people to follow their curiosity instead of their passion.

Melody Wilding: Yeah. And that brings us, let’s like formally define what you mean by an experimental mindset, because that’s really the cornerstone of the book, right? It’s called Tiny Experiments. And so define for us, what, does it mean to have an experimental mindset as compared to the type of mindset we may be in right now?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff: Yeah, so in the book, I talk about the four different mindsets that we can have when we approach uncertainty. So the first one, very common, is cynicism. And this is when you let go of both your curiosity and your ambition. You say, huh, it’s not even worth trying. The world is so uncertain. It’s so unpredictable.

Might as well not even try. And we all know people, we’ve been that person also. It’s very important to understand that these are not fixed personality traits. They are protections that we design for ourselves. Um, and we’re going to talk a little bit more about how we’re going to use those protection mechanisms that we have so we can respond to uncertainty in a way that makes us feel safe.

So cynicism is one of these responses, one of these mindsets. The other one I talk about is escapism. In that case, we are curious, we’re open minded, we’re happy to explore, but ambition is low. We don’t want to work too hard. We also feel like it’s not worth it. So in those cases, those might be the responses where we might want to read a lot of novels, travel, um, or maybe shopping, online shopping can be a form of escapism, for example.

And in those cases we explore, we do learn things, we do connect with other people, but we don’t feel like we need to have any kind of ambition in our work.

The third one is perfectionism. In that case, and you can think of it as the opposite of escapism. Ambition is very high. We have our eye on the prize, we want to succeed, we want to do very well at work, but because of that we feel like curiosity is a waste of time and energy.

So we only explore things that are aligned with our ambitions at work. And that might drive a lot of our decisions, the books that we’re reading, the online courses that we’re taking, and even the conversations we’re having. Because we want these to be productive. So those are the three mindsets that are the most common responses that we have in the face of uncertainty.

Cynicism, escapism, and perfectionism. And in contrast, what I recommend people developing is an experimental mindset. And an experimental mindset is when both curiosity, and ambition are high.

Melody Wilding: I’m laughing to myself because I, see myself in all of these, probably, unfortunately, the least I see myself in is experimentation. Uh, but it’s interesting because as you were talking through those, I almost, I think I flip flop. Between definitely between perfectionism and cynicism, because when my perfectionism has me really rigidly locked down on something, and then it’s not working out like I hope it will, or as I, on the timeline I expect it to, and then I become cynical and then I escape.

And then I get bored of escaping or realize, it’s not productive. And then I go back to perfection and the cycle goes round and round. And so is it, possible to see yourself in all of them at different times.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff: Oh, absolutely. So they’re really shields that we raise in front of us to protect ourselves in different situations of uncertainty. So that’s why I said those are not fixed personality traits and it’s very common for someone to be cynical in a certain situation and then switch to perfectionism and escapism.

So these are the three automatic responses that we might have. And having an experimental mindset is rarely automatic. So that’s a response that you have to learn and you have to unlearn these other responses. You have to notice them when they happen and instead ask yourself, okay, what would that look like if my response was a little bit more experimental?

Melody Wilding: Yeah. And let’s, I love this cause you are a scientist, right? Experimentation is how the frame at which you come from the world. And in the book, you talk about three mindset shifts that we need to make to learn, and that’s an important word to learn the experimental mindset. And as I was reading the book and all of your other work, what I love about that is like you were saying, this is an aptitude you can develop because I think a lot of us, we’re, much more,

we have the childlike curiosity when we’re younger, and then life starts to happen and you lose that willingness or even that ability to dream or to even know what you want. And that’s a big thing I see with clients is that they have spent so much time reacting and responding to what other people want, following the prescribed path that they can’t even generate ideas for experimentation. So talk to us about those mindset shifts. How do you even start, cultivating this, relearning this skill.

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Anne-Laure Le Cunff: Absolutely. I write about, I use a metaphor in the book that I think is very helpful in order to understand what shifts you want to see. What I describe is. I asked the person, the reader, to imagine themselves on a plane. So imagine you’re on a plane, you’re going somewhere, you’re flying, right? And you can have two different responses when you find yourself in this situation.

The first one is a response of fear and anxiety. Because, let’s face it, you’re flying in this tin can where you have zero control over what might happen. And because of that, your response might be to maybe drink a lot of alcohol, or take some sleeping pills, or maybe, try to, um, just close your eyes and, um, and close your fists and just hope that it’s going to be okay, right?

So that’s one response, response one.

The second response is one where you feel like, actually, this is super, I’m super lucky to be here, right? I’m going to have those few hours without Wi Fi, without anybody bothering me. I might read a book that I’ve been thinking of reading. I might watch one of these movies that’s a bit more like a guilty pleasure.

I might not watch it at another time, but nobody’s watching, I can do this on my own. I might take a little nap, I might journal. And this moment of uncertainty, becomes a moment of opportunity for you and flights are a quintessential metaphor for what is called liminal spaces. A liminal space is a space that is in between two points.

It’s a space of transition. What’s amazing about these spaces is that they can be very generative, but We’re not used to them. They can be very scary. Those are spaces where we don’t have a lot of control, where the rules are not very clear. And because of that, our instinctive reaction usually is to try to cross them as quickly as possible.

Let’s go to the other side. Let’s go back to that space of certainty that feels more comfortable. So that’s the big mindset shift that I recommend people have is embracing those liminal spaces. Seeing those spaces where you’re in the unknown, where you’re uncertain, as a space for self discovery and opportunities to grow and learn.

Melody Wilding: Ooh, it makes me uncomfortable. even thinking about it. You, you and I were talking before we started recording that we’re both in a liminal space right now. You have Tiny Experiments as your first book and, Managing Up as my second book. They both come out on the same day and we’re in this

liminal space of, we don’t, we’re doing a lot of, we’re both doing a lot of things. We’re putting ourselves out there. We’re doing a lot of podcasts and speaking engagements and all of this. And we don’t know what’s going to pay off. And there’s just this uncertainty we’re having to live with, which is. So uncomfortable. So uncomfortable. Um, and so let’s talk about uh, the people who are listening to this show, very career professional oriented, and some of them may be in liminal spaces in their jobs, in their, uh, careers overall, talk to us about some of the common liminal spaces you find professionals fall into. And then we can talk about Yeah.

Just some strategies for maybe navigating some of those or running your own tiny experiments.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff: Yeah, absolutely. There are so many in our professional lives. Uh, one of them might be, for example, when you’re applying for a promotion. That’s a lot of uncertainty, lots of factors that you might not be able to control also. And, uh, this can be quite long. In some companies, it can be month where you’re going through this process and waiting to hear back whether you got the promotion or not.

Um, another one might just be a project, a product launch, for example. You just mentioned our two books, like this is a really good example, but it could be launching a new feature, launching a new project and same. You might use research, you might do a lot of things in terms of trying to de risk that launch and really understand how your users might respond to it, but the reality is there is always going to be a bit of uncertainty around it, and you will only know after the launch whether it went well or not.

So this can also be a liminal space. And another one might be not in your current job, but maybe you’re starting to think about what’s next. Maybe you’re thinking about getting another job, whether it’s within the same organization. You might want to work on another product, or as part of another department, or maybe you’re thinking about completely changing jobs and careers and working at another company, or becoming a freelancer.

So that’s another liminal space where you might think about how do I want to cross that space? How do I want to explore it? And how do I want to do it in a way that is generative and that fosters self discovery rather than anxiety?

Melody Wilding: Let’s take that example of being in a liminal space overall. Do I want to stay? Do I want to go? I was talking with a client earlier today who felt like she is between a safe path of going to another role. That’s what she’s, done for many years or a more, the quote unquote, risky path that would be, uh, starting her own venture.

And how do you run Tiny Experiments when you’re in that type of little liminal space, especially when, um, there’s no one right answer. You could do the list of pros and cons and still the path is not clear.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff: Yeah, tiny experiments are actually perfect for situations where there’s no right answer, because that’s exactly what an experiment is for. When you think about a scientist designing an experiment, if they knew the answer already, they would not have to run the experiment, right? So this is perfect for those moments where you don’t really know what is the right path? And you’re trying to figure out what is the right path for you with the current conditions, your current context, which is completely unique, right? You can’t just copy paste what other people have been doing.

So in terms of running tiny experiments, the first step is observation.

And I know, especially for professionals who are doers and let’s get things done type of mindset. It might be really tempting to just want to go and run the experiment straight away. It’s very, important to pause a little bit and just observe, the current situation. An exercise that I recommend people try, which is actually really fun to do, is for 24 hours to pretend that you’re an anthropologist who is observing this weird culture they have just discovered.

And this weird culture is your life. So pretend you know nothing about your life. And for 24 hours, you can do that with your notes on your phone or with a notebook. You just write down your observations. That can be things like, this gives me energy every time I talk to this person, or every time I leave this weekly meeting.

I have a lot of energy. This drains my energy. Every time I think about this other project, every time I worry about this idea, this thing I haven’t progressed on, it really drains my energy. Um, it can be about your skills, skills that you’ve noticed that you don’t have and you might like to have, skills that you have where maybe someone compliments you and says, I really love that memo that you wrote, it was so clear, just write down all of these observations and you will see actually that there are so many data points that can inform the design of an experiment that you might have not noticed before because you’re not paying attention, you’re so busy doing things that you’re not taking the time to observe.

Okay. So 24 hours of pure observation, and then you sit down with your notes, and again, just like a scientist, based on those notes, you formulate a hypothesis. If you noticed, for example, that you, keep getting compliments around your writing, is there an experiment that you can conduct here, where you say, okay, every week for a month, I’m actually going to write a Substack newsletter, and I’m going to publish it.

And at the end of the month, we’ll see what happens. If you notice that giving presentations, teaching others, gives you energy, what about every two weeks for the next quarter, I’m going to put together a little presentation and I’m going to teach something to my team. Something I learned about that I think might be helpful to them.

Melody Wilding: So you design your little experiment and you run it. And this is when you collect fresh data for you to know what you want to do next. This is how you inform your decisions in a way where you’re not looking for a perfect answer. You’re just looking for data so you can make better decisions. Yeah. And if I could point out a few things, because I would imagine there’s a difference between helpful experiments and unhelpful experiments, I would love your opinion on this, but a few things I heard is that it was, in, the examples you shared, they were very tactical and tangible. I’m, going to do this two times a week and they weren’t just open ended.

It, there was a period where you were going to assess the results. So like at the end of two months, I’m going to see, is this working or not? And go from there rather than committing to something for the rest of your life and not having a period where you reevaluate it. Is there anything else that makes for a constructive or a good experiment versus one that could steer you the wrong way.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff: first, I want to thank you for pointing out the very important factor in the design of a tiny experiment, that it is contained. And that’s the big difference between a habit and an experiment. A habit, you just say, this is good, I’m going to try and do this for the rest of my life, whether it’s like running three times a week or drinking more water, et cetera.

An experiment is just a hypothesis. You don’t know. And it might be that at the end of the month, or the quarter, or the three month, or whatever, you actually notice based on the data that this is not for me at all. People keep on complimenting me about this, and maybe my writing is good, but every time I had to sit down and write this, I hated it.

So that’s not the path. Let’s try another experiment. So very, important, just like a scientist, you have a fixed number of trials, and then you analyze the data. And the other important factor. This is why I called my book Tiny Experiments, is that especially when you tend to be quite ambitious, you might also be a little bit too ambitious with the experiment that you design.

And I call this the maximalist brain. We tend to always want to go with the bigger, more exciting version of something. I would encourage you to go with the smaller, more manageable, more achievable version of an experiment. The reason why is, again, because you need to collect all of the data in order to be able to know whether this is for you or not.

Just like a scientist who doesn’t stop in the middle of an experiment saying, huh, actually, I’m not sure I like it. You have to finish the experiment, and then you decide. You withhold judgment until the end. And for you to be able to do this, it’s a lot more practical if you go with something that is a little bit more manageable in terms of how long the duration of the experiment.

Melody Wilding: Are there any other, um, career or job related tiny experiments that you have run, or you’ve heard from your community? Because I think people get inspired by examples again, because it’s sometimes hard when you’re in the thick of things to generate possibilities of what this could look like for you.

So what, have you enjoyed or seen from your experience or your audience?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff: I’m going to give you an example of an experiment that didn’t work for me because I think it’s also very important to talk about these. Um, I was inspired by a lot of people around me to start a YouTube channel because in my field, when you’re an online educator, Teaching through YouTube is considered an amazing platform to have and to build.

I designed an experiment where I said, for the next six months, I’m going to publish one weekly video on YouTube about any topic that I find interesting, low pressure, just show up, record the video, publish it every week, and at the end of the six months, I’ll decide whether this is for me or not. And, at the end of the six months, so I completed the experiment, And in terms of external metrics of success, you could say this was a success.

I got to about 10, 000 subscribers, uh, people said they liked the videos, um, I actually got more traffic to my newsletter, I grew my community. So in terms of those numbers, it looked pretty good. But it’s also very important to look at your internal metrics of success. Which is really, how does it feel to do this work?

And for me, sitting in front of a camera, without having someone else in front of me and seeing their reaction, and having this human connection, felt horrible. I was dreading sitting in front of the camera every week when I had to. I was procrastinating so much, finding excuses to not get started. I was spending hours writing the script just so I could avoid actually filming the video.

And because of that, at the end of the experiment, I decided that, you know what, I learned a lot, but that’s not for me. I’m not a YouTuber. I’m more of a writer. I’m an educator, yes. And I’m very happy to do live workshops and to have those kinds of conversations on podcasts, but I need to have a conversation with people.

It needs to be a two way relationship. So that’s an experiment, which, you would say, oh, it wasn’t successful. But when you experiment, you completely redefine your definition of success. There’s no binary sense of failure and success as in the traditional sense of it. Instead, as long as you learn something new, the experiment was successful.

Melody Wilding: what’s that phrase? You, uh, you either win or you learn. And that’s.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff: like that.

Melody Wilding: Yeah, that’s such an important mindset to approach it with because it would be easy. Not every experiment is going to work. That’s the nature of this. And you set yourself up for failure and self judgment. if you think that way, you have to go into it knowing a large amount of these are going to fail and that’s good because each step gets me closer to an answer or to the next.

The path reveals itself. Um, okay. So, Anne-Laure, last question. There was really interesting topic in your book around procrastination and you say procrastination is not the enemy and you say we can actually mine it for insights. So talk to us quickly about that because I think that, um, can blow a lot of people’s minds cause they think of procrastination, bad avoid at all costs.

Anne-Laure Le Cunff: Yeah, absolutely. If you look up online how to deal with procrastination, most of the articles that come up will tell you how to beat procrastination, right? How to get rid of procrastination. It’s pretty violent when you think about it. When in reality, procrastination is just a signal from your brain telling you that something needs to change.

And so instead of trying to squash it, to beat it, you can listen to the signals, learn from it, and use it as information to then decide how to approach the challenge that you have in front of you. And in the book, I share a very simple tool that I call the Triple Check that you can use. And it’s basically asking, where’s the procrastination coming from?

Is it coming from the head? Is it coming from the heart? Or is it coming from the hand? If it’s coming from the head, it means that at a rational level, you might not be convinced that this is the right task to work on. And so you can go back to the strategy, whether on your own or with your team, and say, hey, I’m not quite sure this is the right approach.

Should we revise this together and figure out a better way? If the problem is coming from the heart, it means that, sure, at a rational level, you’re convinced this is the right thing to do. But at an emotional level, maybe the task doesn’t look like fun. Maybe it doesn’t look like it’s exciting.

And in that case, same. This guides you to a solution. You can decide to maybe do a bit of co working with a friend or go to your favorite coffee shop, pair it with something else that makes it more enjoyable, and then you can start working instead of procrastinating. Finally, if the problem is coming from the hand, it means that even though at a rational level you’re convinced, at an emotional level that looks like fun, at a practical level you feel like you don’t have the tools or the resources or the support that you need in order to complete the task.

Again, as you see, that’s the great thing about listening to the signals that procrastination is giving you is that the solution is embedded in that answer. You just need maybe to watch some tutorials, to ask for some coaching, mentoring, reach out to a manager who might be able to help you work on it with a colleague who has more knowledge about the problem.

And that’s it. Instead of being paralyzed because of procrastination, you can listen to the signals and use them to design the correct solution to the problem.

Melody Wilding: it is information. It is information just not, uh, don’t use it against yourself. And I love that head, heart, hand. So smart. Such a good diagnostic tool. So Anne-Laure, this is amazing. I think it’s going to open up a lot of things for many different people who are listening. So where can they get the book?

How can they connect with you? What’s the best place to send them?

Anne-Laure Le Cunff: To get the book, you just look up Tiny Experiments, anywhere books are sold. And if you want to read my newsletter, which I send every Thursday on these topics that we just discussed, just go to <a href=”https://nesslabs.com/” target=”_blank” rel=”noopener”>nesslabs.com</a>.

Melody Wilding: Yes. And we’ll make sure all of those are in the show notes and please everyone, make sure, you pre order the books for us authors. Pre-orders matter a great deal for multiple reasons. So make sure you get your hands on Anne-Laure’s book and just thank you so much for taking time. I know you’re, uh, in New York city and on a big book tour, doing lots of stuff.

So I appreciate you joining us.

Thank you so much for having me.

Thanks for tuning in to today’s episode of psychology at work. If you enjoyed the show, I’d be so grateful if you could take just a minute to rate and review wherever you are listening. It’s how we reach more professionals just like you. And if you’d like to see even more content on how to feel more self assured, grounded, and in control of your emotions and reactions at work, follow me on LinkedIn or head to the links in the show notes.