There's so much more to say about Michelle Obama, and we're not going to have time to get into much more detail. I want to focus your attention on three, just like with the others, with the many skills and practices that her life illustrates and that she developed over time, just like all of our exemplars in this course. From the South Side of Chicago to the White House, it's a story of continuity, of values, of a moral compass that directs her even in the face of pretty intense pressure. The initiative she took up reflect those core values, responsibility and caring. The barriers she broke are in inspiration to so many people around the world. And her insistence on creating a life that worked for her and her family and for our country by creating boundaries between the different parts of her life. Devoting time to her family and ensuring that the President did as well, for example. These are all aspects of her story that I want to direct your attention to now. As she illustrates the three skills of aligning actions with values, of managing boundaries intelligently, and embracing change courageously. To align actions with values means to make choices that match what you care about, which is what Michelle Obama has been doing her whole life. Her actions flow very clearly from her values, and gives her passion and the will to persevere in the face of pressure. She knows when to say no to certain opportunities or demands because they don't fit with her values, and she learnt that at home as a young child. Thinking through your choices in light of what you know matter to you despite social pressure, wherever that social pressure might come from, this is a hard thing to do. It's hard for all of us. And her story illustrates well how you learn how to do that. In her senior thesis, she wrote about what it was like to have to learn how to do that. And that of course helped her and helped others. And it hasn't stopped since then. And nor does it for any of us. This is a continual struggle as new opportunities emerge. As new pressures emerge, how do you stay true? How do you act in alignment with your values? What can you do now to strengthen those muscles to enable you to do that? Well, one thing you can do, there are many things, but here's one exercise that we know can be very effective to find the larger meaning. So here, what you do, in this exercise, is to think expansively about something that you all ready do, a responsibility that you already have. And the trick here is to look beyond the day-to-day and the immediate impact. And to think more broadly about the ultimate consequences of your actions. And do they fit with what you say is important to you? You could start a little list. What are the things that you do that affect others? That's what imbues our work and our various activities with meaning. At least, that's a big part of it, the impact or significance on other people. How is what you do in your work, for example, how does that affect other people? Maybe it's the people immediately around you, or the people who are served by the product or service, or decisions that you make. Or people further down the line in rippling out from what you do. Maybe you work in isolation but the ultimate impact of what you do affects other people in some way. Maybe it's the chores you do in your family that help your family to function well. If you're in a service occupation, it's probably a lot easier to see the direct impact that you're having through your work. But it's remarkable how some people forget that. I once worked with a marketing executive in a pharmaceutical company who had kind of lost sight of the fact of what he did everyday, and what his team did everyday, had an impact on the health of other people. It's a pharmaceutical company. It may seem like, how could that possibly happen, but it did. Because it's easy to lose sight of the impact that you're having on other people. Even just doing the dishes and having the kitchen be clean in the morning for when everybody else comes down there is a way to create value for other people. So that's a really small of thinking about it. But it does change your orientation, even if slightly, to think about the impact that you're having. And we know, research that supports this, that tasks become more motivating, for most people, if they are filled with meaning, n terms of the impact they have on other people. Even if indirectly through these ripple effects, and your well-being improves. So by taking few minutes to simply think through, what is the larger meaning to some of the things that I do? Just try doing that with a few of the things, whether it's at work, at home or with your friends, wherever. And think through, what's the impact? And now what does that tell me about importance of what I'm doing? And it might even get you to think about some things that you're doing that perhaps you shouldn't be spending so much time on. The second of the skills that I want to draw your attention to in the Michelle Obama story is managing boundaries intelligently. And this means being able to create boundaries between the different parts of life your work, you're home, your community, your private self. To create boundaries that help you to achieve the goals that matter to you and the people that matter to you. Now sometimes that means blending or merging the different parts of your life. And other times it means separating them. So to manage boundaries intelligently doesn't necessarily mean to shut out everything. Although it often does mean the need to just focus on one thing, one person one project at a time. But another way of managing boundaries intelligently is to bring the different parts together. Maybe you have your family involved in some thing that you're doing at work, for example. Or we're letting them know about what it is that you do at work, or vice versa, in a way that both your family and your work would benefit from. So, the idea is to become more conscious of how you manage those boundaries, and then to take action to adjust. Either to make them more permeable or more firmly separate. In Obama's story, you see someone who was really good at this. The instances on having family dinners, even in the White House. Living with her community on the south shore, and not downtown with all the other young lawyers at Sidley Austin. That was privacy boundary that she wanted to maintain. But still, she was flexible as in eventually dating the co-worker who was to become her husband and our president. She adjusted to White House life, but brought her mother. So that was a way of bringing her family of origin into that world in a way that was useful for everyone. She found a way to create time for herself in exercising in the morning. And that was a boundary that separated her family from herself. Taking care of her mind, body, spirit. And it also had the benefit of making Barrack Obama help in a way that he hadn't, which influenced his thinking, his attitude, about working families which I heard him speak about at a forum at the White House that I attended on workplace flexibility. And another way in which she is able to really focus on one thing at a time when needed was, at that forum, we're at a reception, and it was really clear that each person that she spoke to, one at a time, got her full attention. And then she moved to the next and gave them their full attention. And this is this is a skill for, that many people have to work on to develop, keeping the attention on the people who are hoping and expecting for it when you can and must provide it, and then being able to move. I call that the art of interruptability, which requires some practice. Here's an exercise that I call segment and merge that you can try to increase your skill in managing boundaries intelligently. In our frenzied digital world, which most of us didn't grow up in, I certainly didn't, but here we are. It is a distracted and distracting world, and it's harder and harder to focus our attention on any one person or thing when we are deluged constantly by the flow of digital information that comes through our smart phones that are on our persons all the time. So, how you manage the psychological boundaries of paying attention, perhaps your most precious asset as a leader. How you keep focus on one thing at a time is a greater challenge today than it has ever been. And yet, it's essential for productivity and for thriving. We know that multitasking isn't a thing. [LAUGH] It's not real. You can't do two things at once. Your mind is moving very, very rapidly between the two or three things that you're doing all at once when you're doing them all at once. You're Shifting very quickly. And yet, when you move one task to the other, there is what's called a cognitive residue. Your mind is still in that other task as you're moving one to the other. And that takes up energy. It takes up your attention. It takes up space in your brain. Well, how do you counteract? So we're going to talk here about segmenting, creating a firm boundary. Here's something that I recommend you try. Pick an activity, something that you do regularly, maybe daily. Maybe it's exercising. And try one day doing that activity while you are doing something else, or two other things. Maybe you are reading or listening to music or something while you're exercising. Pay attention to what it's like when you're doing that with respect to the quality of the exercise, and the results of that exercise on your well being, your health, how you feel. And then try the same thing on the next day, or the next time you are doing that activity, when you are not multi-tasking, when you're uni-tasking, when you're just doing nothing but exercise or stretching or going for a walk or whatever it is. One thing. Pay attention to what happens then. What do you notice? What do other people say? Notice what the costs and the benefits are of one versus the other approach. You will become more conscious, more deliberate, about what it means to create meaningful, useful boundaries just through that simple exercise. So you might want to try that. Another example that takes that further is to do what I call a digital detox. I actually have my students do this in my total leadership class where they have to, in the course of a week, find six waking hours during which there will be no digital devices available to them. Can you imagine doing that? You wouldn't be able to do this course if you were doing that because you wouldn't be able to watch me talk to you through this medium. So, it would have to be at some other time. Six straight hours of no digital. I've been doing this for a number of years now, and what typically happens is that in the first hour or so people have the delirium tremors. Like addicts, they shake. Like what I'm going to do without my device. But they find a way through that because they're doing this assignment from my class. And then what happens is there's a change. They start to pay attention to other people in ways that they hadn't. They start to see aspects of nature or the cityscape that they haven't seen before. And they also start to notice how other people use their digital devices as a way to remove themselves from social situations that might be a little bit uncomfortable, because they're new. All kinds of insights like that emerge and help people to realize I should do something like this more often, perhaps, so that I can be more focused and attentive, and managing the boundaries between the different parts of my life. So you may want to try that as well. Finally, to embrace change courageously. That's the be innovative skill that I want to tell you about, how Michelle Obama illustrates it. To embrace change courageously is to see something new as an opportunity. And to overcome whatever danger or fear might also attend whatever it is that is new. And Michelle Obama has learned over time to become more comfortable with embracing change, and to do so with courage. And I use the word courage very consciously because it does take courage to act in the face of fear, which almost any meaningful change Evokes some anxiety. Because there's uncertainty. What if things don't work out? What if things go bad? Life's twists and turns are often fraught with risk. When she was younger just going to that Whitney Young school and having to take this long commute, that was scary for the young Michelle Obama, Michelle Robinson then. But she saw it as worthwhile to expand her horizons. It took some courage, same thing about Princeton and finding her place there, and reaching out beyond her comfort zone. It was a shocking transition for her, but over time she learned. She grew in her confidence through taking those risks. Not a natural risk taker though. But she saw the value of education, one of the core values that she learned in her family. That she took with her and keeps with her, and saw that, okay if I'm going to expand in my capacity to contribute and to learn, I'm going to, I'm going to have to move. And she says her husband helped her to do that, to loosen up, and to be more comfortable trying, trying new things. But because she was able to express her concerns about the new thing that was coming next, like moving to the White House. She was able to, thereby, get support and to build structure around her, including having her mother there, for example. That would help her to make the transition to something new. So if embracing change courageously is something that you want to develop as a skill or strengthen as a skill, there are so many things that you can try. But one that we know from research, and that has been the basis for a whole field of psychology is called challenging your beliefs. New things are scary, and to fortify your courage, one of the things that you can do is to challenge your beliefs. You're thinking about what the new event, new opportunity, new circumstance might mean for you. So in this exercise what you do to help overcome the inhibitions to leading the life you want to lead, is to challenge your beliefs, because your apprehensions that you might feel are linked to what you believe about what might happen. So this involves, challenging your beliefs involves writing down your thinking. What do you believe might happen? If you take this next step, this move, this transition, this new opportunity, this new place in your life, however big or small it might be. What you do is simply write down, what are your thoughts about what might occur, good and bad? And for the parts that inhibit you from acting, because they raise anxiety, or that they're frightening, you ask yourself and perhaps ask others, is this accurate? Does this seem realistic? Do research to find out if your fear is indeed warranted. Are you not seeing the full picture, or are you ignorant of the full range of possibilities? Are you biased and only seeing the negative? Get as realistic picture as you can of what you think about what might happen, and then try to systematically address whatever those concerns are. What most people discover when they do something like that, if they're not accustomed to doing something like that, and perhaps that's you, is that they have more control over the fear factor than they think. Sometimes that's not the case, and some people are just born highly anxious. And there are lots of different ways beyond challenging your beliefs that can be helpful. Like psychotherapy, for example, or medication, to help manage anxiety. The important thing is to realize that anxiety in the face of change is extremely common, and the leaders in us find ways to proceed, to get help so that we can proceed and embrace change courageously. Michelle Obama learned that the public doesn't always value transparency, being authentic, being yourself. But with her, it is what you see is what you get. At the same time, she's not immutable or rigid in her thinking. And her self exploration, thinking about what she cares about and making choices that are aligned with what she learned growing up, and what she continues to have as a foundation for her choices in life, but allows her to adjust. And to act increasingly in accord with her values as a woman, as a citizen, as a mother, as a friend. Keeping her family close and connecting with real people, listening to the people around her and to the citizens of this country as First Lady. It makes her very effective at finding solutions that work for real people. As First Lady, she helped children to be healthier and to value higher education. And she served veterans and their families. She's a role model for many people, for some controversial, but for most around the world, someone who is a strong, caring mother who achieved significant change in the world by serving others beyond herself, beyond her family. She's admired, because she is someone who is real, whole, and innovative, and has become more so over time, as an advocate for other people. And she's funny, and humble about who she is and where she has come from. All these things contribute to her having left the White House as a very popular public figure. We're going to move on to two figures from sports and entertainment. Julie Foudy, the great soccer champion, an advocate for women's rights and parity in sports. And Bruce Springsteen, who needs no further introduction.
