Episode 317 - Losing a job or having a terrible job can pull you straight into survival mode. In this conversation with Jon Rosemberg, we unpack how to move from white-knuckle coping to a more intentional, agentic way of designing your next chapter.

Jon Rosemberg (00:00)
The best way to go from survival mode to thriving is practicing agency. And I define agency as the capacity to make intentional choices supported by the belief, you have to believe this, that your choices matter and actually have an impact on the world. That’s the definition of agency. So the question that I often get after that is like, okay, great, love agency, great definition, I understand that. How do I do agency? you know, what, how?

How do you serve agency for dinner?

As the moment I found out about agency, went really deep into the research and tried to understand what are some common threats? What are some through lines of ideas that help us develop our agency? And there were three things that kept coming up over and over again. And I summarize them in an acronym AIR, as in the AIR with brief. And AIR stands for A for awareness, I for inquiry, and R for reframing. if we practice AIR,

we develop our agency. And if we develop our agency, the more we develop it, the more we can go from survival mode to thriving.

Renata Bernarde (01:22)
When did your success stop feeling like success? What happened? When did you start focusing on everything that is wrong at work and in your career? I asked John Rosenberg how professionals can spot survival mode at work and shift into thriving. With an MBA from Cornell and a Master of Applied Positive Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania,

Coupled with an inspiring personal journey forged by immigration, loss, career reinvention, John has this special capacity to blend hard-worn business insight with cutting-edge research to guide others towards greater meaning. In this conversation, we discuss the concept of agency as a crucial element for transitioning from survival mode to a thriving state.

John is also the co-founder of Anther and the author of a brand new book, A Guide to Thriving, which will be available for purchase on November 25th. We start off by reflecting on this journey from corporate to personal fulfillment, which I am sure you will find very inspiring. Before we begin, I wanted to also let you know that this week on November 20th, 2025 at 10am Melbourne time,

that’s November 19th, if you are in the US and Canada or Europe. I am facilitating a workshop in collaboration with job search platform, callings.ai on how to job search during the holiday season. You will find a link to register in all the different time zones in the show notes and also in…

all of my social media activity on LinkedIn and Instagram, wherever you follow me. So please register and I would love to see you there. And even if you can’t come, I can send you the link to the recording. I want to make sure that you have all the knowledge you need to make the most out of the next couple of months if job hunting is important and crucial for you right now and you need a job soon. Okay, let’s go.

to the conversation with Jon Rosenberg.

Renata Bernarde (03:38)
sometimes I bring in guests for the sake of my audience, of course. I know it’s a topic that they need to hear. In your case, yes, it is for my audience, but it’s mainly for me. Like, I’m so interested in your topic. And yeah, for personal reasons, for…

Jon Rosemberg (03:56)
I love it.

Renata Bernarde (03:59)
scholarly reasons, mean, it would be a dream for me to do the masters that you’ve done. I love that university and the academics day and the research that comes out of the University of Pennsylvania. So I’m really interested to know everything about what led you to start there.

you will be my mentor, Jon. It’s decided. I’ve decided. Okay. Cool. Cool. One of the things that I love about both of our experiences is that we went through this corporate experience, you know, and achieved C level roles. And then we walked away.

Jon Rosemberg (04:23)
Count on it. I’d be happy to. I’d be happy to.

Renata Bernarde (04:43)
I want to know more about why you walked away from a COO role.

Jon Rosemberg (04:48)
Renata, I spent two and a half decades climbing the corporate ladder, right? And I chased the next title, the next promotion, the next race. Like these were the things that matter to me.

And then I landed on this job at a startup, really fast growing startup. We were growing about double digits every month and we did a series B race of $150 million and everything was going swiftly. It was my dream job. We were fully funded, ready to grow. I traveled to LA and then I came back to Toronto and I got COVID. I was exhausted. I got COVID.

and I was on a call with the technical team. And as I’m on a call with the team, it starts getting more heated and more heated and more heated. So at one point I’m like, okay, I’m done with this. So I just shut off my laptop, turn off my phone, and I heard my two kids who at the time were nine and six playing in the basement. So I went downstairs and they were playing Legos. So I sat on the floor and started playing Legos with ⁓ Jacques and Charlie for about an hour. And as I was playing with them,

I had what I’d like to call a glimmer of agency, and we can talk a little bit more in a minute about what that means. But I realized that although I was present and they could see me at breakfast or at dinner and I was around the house, I was physically present, but I wasn’t actually present. I was missing this important moments of connections with my children. So later that evening, I’m sitting in my favorite chair and Adriana walks into the room and Adriana is my wife.

And she says, Jon, are you okay? And, you know, I was covering my face with my hands and I looked at her and I said, I think I’m done. And within two weeks I had left the company. And then I decided to start my own business. Eventually went back to school and studied the masters of applied positive psychology and ended up writing this book. Little did I know at that time that this is where that journey would take me.

Renata Bernarde (06:55)
That’s amazing. ⁓ Jon, to people that are listening and are done as well, I mean, it’s a privilege to walk away, right? So, and not feel that you need to earn money, you know, straight away and allow yourself the, again, the privilege of taking time off to work on your business, to go and study.

Did you have finance to back you up or did you go really cold turkey on this?

Jon Rosemberg (07:29)
That is a beautiful question. And the first thing that I want to say is that a lot of times we feel like we don’t have a choice when we’re in survival mode. And survival mode is this state, this 911 state where we feel like everything is urgent and our focus is really narrow and we get tense and it’s hard to sleep and we overthink and it’s hard to deal with our emotions. That’s survival mode. Survival mode can be very helpful when our physical safety is

at risk. That, in those cases, survival mode is a highly adaptive way to navigate the world. And I know this because I grew up in Venezuela. The year I left the country, there were 52,000 violent murders, by some estimates. So survival mode was really helpful navigating that world. ⁓ In most of the Western world, and there are people who still live in survival mode because they’re in war zones or in difficult places, and it makes sense, but in most of the Western world,

Our physical health is rarely a threat. So it is our psychological, ⁓ our psychological wellbeing that is at risk, but we perceive it as though if we were going to die. So going back to your question, in that moment, it wasn’t like I said, ⁓ I can do this. I have money in the bank and I’ll be fine and I don’t have to pay my mortgage. And no, I was scared. I was extremely scared. And by the way,

For the longest time, I would say for decades, I thought, if I leave this job, I will be living under a bridge in two weeks. I will not be able to feed my family. I will not be able to pay my mortgage. So that was a very real fear to me. ⁓ Now, was it factually accurate? Was it actually a reflection of my state of life? And I hear this a lot with my coaching clients that they said, well, but I like my lifestyle. I don’t want to give any of this up.

Well, you’re giving something up by staying in the job, right? You’re giving something up by staying and you’re giving something up by living, leaving the job. There’s an opportunity cost. So the short answer is I did not have a plan. Was I financially okay? Yes, I think for a little while, but I needed to have a mortgage like most of us do, right? Like I had a lot of responsibilities. So

It was a very scary decision and it was like taking a step into the abyss. That’s exactly what it felt like.

Renata Bernarde (10:00)
I’m glad that you share that because I feel like some people that I work with, because I work with people that have been laid off or, know, hated their jobs and resigned or really couldn’t cope anymore like you were completely burnt out and want to do something different, but they really feel paralyzed by their inability to put one step in front of the other in order to get to a different path for their careers because

Once you do that, you also lose a lot of status quo and you lose a lot of your reputation. You had a reputation for being a COO. You have no reputation for being whatever it is that you want to be next. And it’s a real challenge, it? Pitching and finding clients and not, and especially for you because you were so eager to get out of survival mode and into thriving mode.

Jon Rosemberg (10:42)
Mm-hmm.

Renata Bernarde (10:56)
I’m really interested to know how you manage that. Were you in surviving mode when you were setting up your business?

Jon Rosemberg (11:03)
Yes, I would say we are, most of us, sometimes through the day, through the week, through the month, through the year, we fluctuate between the two states, right? And sometimes it’s really useful to be in survival mode and sometimes it isn’t because our world narrows and we see a lot less choices.

I think you hit on a very important point, Renata, and I just want to bring this up. Thriving and success are not the same thing. So success is often defined by money, status, and power, two of which you just mentioned, right? And our system is built for us to be, quote unquote, successful, whatever that means to you, but it’s usually money, power, and status. That’s how success is defined.

Thriving, on the other hand, the way I define it is defined by agency, meaning, and social connection, which are three intrinsically motivated elements of our life that we can pursue, as opposed to the other ones which are extrinsically motivated, right? So if you think about it,

Power is something that we have over other people. Status is the way other people perceive us and money is something that we have in our bank account or wealth, whatever we want to call it. But agency is a skill that we can develop ourselves. Social connection is something that we can develop ourselves. And meaning is something that we can work on to try and find and understand better and make meaning out of our lives. So I want to make that distinction because if it was…

I could have called the book a guide to success, but it is not. It is a guide to thriving. So if the interest is to make more money or get that promotion, that’s not what this book is for. The intent of this book is to help people practice the skill of agency. It’s to lead more agentic lives. And one of the things that happened to me when I was shopping around the manuscript for publishers is that I kept getting told your manuscript is too

descriptive, we want something more prescriptive. What is the recipe? What do I need to do in order to thrive? And I think that’s a very personal question and that it will be different for every person. So that’s why the book is written with ideas and research and information and lots of questions for you to figure out how to thrive yourself. That’s agentic thriving.

Renata Bernarde (13:34)
I love that. I really want to talk to you about agency in a moment, but just sticking with the survival mode ⁓ and also for the sake of the listeners, when you are laid off, when you lose your job or decide to leave your job, usually you go into survival mode. If you are having troubles with your boss or difficulties meeting your KPIs or you are in some sort of performance management situation, you will naturally

Jon Rosemberg (13:51)
Mm-hmm.

Renata Bernarde (14:03)
going to survival mode. ⁓ One of the most important things that I think people need to do when they are looking for jobs, when they are applying for jobs and going through the job search journey is moving to thriving mode. And that’s really hard to do, but it’s necessary. Yeah, it’s necessary because even if it means taking a break and sometimes I tell my clients and my listeners here,

Jon Rosemberg (14:24)
It is really hard.

Renata Bernarde (14:34)
take a break, you know, to rest your reign so that you can reach that point in time where you will let go of some of the grief and some of the anger towards what happened to you or how you’re feeling and move towards thriving because you need to be at your best when you are talking to people about what you want to do and, you know, and letting them know that you are going to be a great match for that job that they are.

⁓ advertising. I’d love to hear your views about that if you have any tips or ideas to share.

Jon Rosemberg (15:11)
The first thing is that I want to say is that if you’ve recently lost your job, that’s really tough. It sucks. It really sucks. I have been there and it’s incredibly hard to be in this place where you were so productive for so many years.

and you’ve accomplished so many things and now it’s like the ground has been taken from underneath you and that is very challenging. I also want to say that for most of us, not for all of us, but for most of us, especially in the Western world,

We’ll find a way through it. There are ways through it. One of the big inspirations for my book was Victor Frankel, who wrote Man’s Search for Meaning. He’s a Holocaust survivor who went through incredible hardship, and he found a way through. So by all empirical measures, Renata, humanity right now, we are in the golden age of humanity.

Renata Bernarde (15:50)
Mm.

Jon Rosemberg (16:17)
And I know we don’t think that because of what we see in our feed and what we see in different places. But if you look at our access to food, access to water, access to education, access to health, as a matter of fact, a hundred years ago, life expectancy was 32 years old. Today is more than double that. Humans have never lived longer or better than we have today. That’s true. There’s evidence to suggest that. And at the same time,

we know that rates of depression and anxiety are rising and that there’s mental health challenges in the world. So this is all very contextual and I’m going around the long way to give you an answer. What I’m going to suggest is that in order to go from survival mode to thriving, especially after you’ve lost your job and you’re going through this suffering and this difficulty trying to figure out what your new identity is, and we can talk about identity, let’s table that.

The best way to go from survival mode to thriving is practicing agency. And I define agency as the capacity to make intentional choices supported by the belief, you have to believe this, that your choices matter and actually have an impact on the world. That’s the definition of agency. So the question that I often get after that is like, okay, great, love agency, great definition, I understand that. How do I do agency? you know, what, how?

How do you serve agency for dinner? ⁓

As the moment I found out about agency, went really deep into the research and tried to understand what are some common threats? What are some through lines of ideas that help us develop our agency? And there were three things that kept coming up over and over again. And I summarize them in an acronym AIR, as in the AIR with brief. And AIR stands for A for awareness, I for inquiry, and R for reframing. So if we practice AIR,

we develop our agency. And if we develop our agency, the more we develop it, the more we can go from survival mode to thriving.

Renata Bernarde (18:24)
I love that. You mentioned that we are in this amazing era and I think we are in the era of agency as well. Not because everybody has agency these days, but there is the potential for a lot of people to have agency. And especially when I’m thinking of this from a career perspective, ⁓ you can have your own voice, you can showcase your thought leadership, you can present yourself.

on a sub stack newsletter or on LinkedIn, you know, with your posts or write a book and self publish. Like there’s just so many ways that you can have agency today versus 10, 20 years ago. but in contrast to that, I find that people are dreaming smaller and smaller. I don’t know about you. Maybe it’s just, you know, my environment here. I’d love to, because this is all anecdotal.

But people are feeling very conservative when they’re making choices, I find. ⁓ And maybe this openness of social apps and, when I tell people you have to be more on LinkedIn, there’s a real ⁓ barrier there from most of my clients to be vulnerable and present themselves and have agency. Do you find that that’s the case also where you are in Canada?

Jon Rosemberg (19:44)
⁓

You are pointing out a really interesting paradox here, Renata, which I think it’s important to bring into light. It’s this idea that the more in survival mode we are, the more we want to protect ourselves. We want to build this harder and harder harder shell so we don’t get hurt again.

And what the research is telling us is that we’re meant to do the opposite. We’re meant to create more social connections. We’re meant to resource ourselves better. if there was a pill or a medicine that would increase your wellbeing, improve your immune response, decrease your depression, ⁓ reduce your risk of stroke or of a cardiovascular event,

Increase your survival by 50%. Would you take this drug? Most people would say, yes, I would. That drug is social connection, meaningful social connection. So when we suffer and when we go through hardship, ⁓ so one of the main stories in the book that I tell about myself is that my best friend called me on January 4th of ⁓ 2023. ⁓

from a hospital in Caracas, Venezuela. He was in Caracas, I’m in Toronto. This is like a brother to me. ⁓ And he called me and he said, I was just told I have stage four liver cancer.

And he doesn’t look good. He died four months later to the day. And from the moment he got the diagnosis to the moment he died, I saw him shrinking, not only physically, because he lost weight and the impact that this very difficult experience he was going through, horrible, but it was also harder to reach him and harder to connect with him. His name was Nathan, by the way.

And so I think of Nathan and I think of his last few months and by the way, he was one of the most joyful, kindest, most given people I have ever met in my life. And I saw how much his personality and his way of navigating the world change as a result of being very justifiably so in survival.

There are other folks who face the same challenge, the same health challenge in their books and information and research about this, who approach it differently. And they do so because they have the social connection, because they have the resources, and because of many different elements, like many different variables. But what I’m suggesting is that we have a choice, despite the hardship that we confront, we have a choice, however small, to decide how we confront.

our hardship.

Renata Bernarde (22:37)
Yes, you’re right. ⁓ that choice can be learned. you know, if people are listening and thinking, you know, if you’re designed a certain way and you have traits in a certain way, you can learn those things. And that’s what your book’s trying to portray in Showcase.

Jon Rosemberg (22:57)
There’s overwhelming evidence to suggest that we can learn. Overwhelming evidence. And it may not be the case for everybody. I’m sure there are people who have gone to unimaginable hardship who might be very hard for them to get out of survival mode. It’s possible. Again, it’s not prescriptive. It doesn’t work for everybody. And I believe that for most of us, this is a muscle that we can exercise. And the more we exercise it, there’s this thing called neuroplasticity.

Renata Bernarde (23:01)
Thank

Jon Rosemberg (23:26)
Our brain has the capacity to change. Our bodies have the capacity to change. And if we exercise that enough, it starts to become a different way of going through life. Listen, Renata, I was one of the most cynical people you would ever meet. And, you know, I used to diffuse my discomfort with humor and rarely be vulnerable or connecting with people. And it was as a result of the hardship and the learning and the studying that I…

came back to this realization that I have agency and that I can develop this agency and I can use it to lead a better life for me. And now here’s the most powerful part of this whole thing. When we develop our agency, it not only impacts us, but it impacts the people around us, our friends, our families, our communities, our cities, our countries, and the rest of it. There’s a ripple effect that extends far, far beyond ourselves.

Renata Bernarde (24:21)
want to test a hypothesis with you here about agency that I have been communicating this for quite some time. So gosh, if you disagree with me, I’m in trouble. A few years ago, I read a book called Shop Class as Soulcraft. This book by Matthew Crawford opened my eye to something that I want to share with you now.

Jon Rosemberg (24:25)
Let’s do it. Let’s do it.

Yeah

Renata Bernarde (24:46)
It’s not exactly ⁓ what he said in his essay, but it’s what I understood from it, that is what I’m trying to say. Corporate professionals feel like they have less agency than other professionals. Professionals that are, for example, actors and athletes or plumbers or piano teachers, they need to have more agency in order to get gigs and jobs.

they need to get out of their comfort zone time and time and time again in order to get a client, to get a new student. And I find that really interesting that because we finish university and we go into a graduate program and if we feel like we’re safe for at least a decade, if we get into a nice consulting firm or whatever.

Jon Rosemberg (25:15)
Hmm.

Renata Bernarde (25:43)
we sort of, that muscle doesn’t get used.

Jon Rosemberg (25:48)
That’s interesting. I’m ⁓ curious. I think that would be a really interesting hypothesis to test. I’m ⁓ not sure. What I would say is that the corporate environment in general is created in order to extract as much productivity from the folks who work in the corporate environment as you possibly can.

Renata Bernarde (25:50)
Yeah.

Jon Rosemberg (26:13)
And I know it because I helped design it in some of the companies that I work with. ⁓ Of course, we didn’t describe it in the way that I’m describing it right now, but the intention was how can we maximize productivity, right? So we would attach the value of employees to their productivity, which I think, number one, is very narrow minded. ⁓ And number two, it misses a big part. What may…

Many thousands of years ago when homo sapiens and Neanderthals were inhabiting the earth, Neanderthals were bigger than us and more powerful. So why did homo sapiens, why were we able to survive while Neanderthals didn’t? And one of the theories that has a lot of consensus is that it’s because we could work in much larger groups. So I would argue that in the corporate environment, there are two types of value.

that you’re creating at any given point. The productive value, which is how good are you at running a project plan or doing a data analysis or creating a strategy deck or whatever it is that your job is. That’s productive value. Most of us focus a lot on that. But there’s another portion of this, which is relational value, which is how well do you connect with all of the different parts of the organization in a way that you can bring them together, which by the way, it’s

kind of the idea of leadership, right? In a way that you can bring them together to accomplish great things as a group. And I think that’s what makes organizations great. to take this point just one step further, last year there was a research from Oxford University that basically was trying to understand the correlation between the wellbeing of employees and a firm’s ⁓ market value.

And what they found is that the top hundred firms, I want to say they were about 1200 firms that they, ⁓ that they research the top hundred firms on wellbeing outperformed the SMP by 11%. So there’s a business case for wellbeing that I think we’re ignoring. There’s a business case for relational value that I think we’re ignoring. And there’s a business case for offering

Renata Bernarde (28:25)
Wow.

Jon Rosemberg (28:35)
and giving employees agency in the workplace and allowing them to thrive in the workplace to find meaning, to create social connections and to have agency in the workplace. There’s a business case that I think we’re ignoring because we continue to see people as renewable resources. know, so and so gets fired and I just hired somebody else. So and so gets fired. I just hired somebody else. And that’s such a reductionist view to see the human potential.

So I think there’s a cultural shift that needs to occur. And I think it’s happening in many places, but we know that a lot of workplaces have not experienced this yet. And that’s when we create all these toxic cultures that we’re also familiar with.

Renata Bernarde (29:17)
Yes, yes. You tackled it from a different perspective than what I was thinking of, but I love that. And I think you’re right. think that, you know, I mean, we, know, my background and what I studied is ⁓ commerce and business. And we see those wonderful business cases when we’re studying marketing and finance and of companies that do well because they’ve given their employees agency to take care of customers, to resolve issues on the ground.

We don’t actually see that when we actually start working in organizations. So there’s this discrepancy between best practices and what we experience as people that go into the workforce straight away. But what I was thinking of more was agency of your career. So taking care of your career and doing professional development alongside the job that you do and developing your own personal reputation alongside

Jon Rosemberg (30:03)
Mmm.

Renata Bernarde (30:15)
the position that you have in an organization. I don’t know about you, but I remember once leaving one of my jobs where I kind of became quite well known and I had lots of these perks and, you know, people would, you know, give me free things. As soon as I left that job that all disappeared and I’m like, it wasn’t about me. It was about the position that I had. Right. So I didn’t sort of nurture those relationships in a way.

where I learned a lesson after that, it never happened again. I became much better at having my own network that belonged to me and not to the position that I was holding at the time. And when I see people coming out of roles after being in an organization for 15, 20, 25 years, I see that they all of a sudden don’t have a sense of self as a professional.

Mm.

Jon Rosemberg (31:13)
Yeah, so let’s talk about identity for a moment, right? Because identity is an important part of how we navigate the world, right? So let’s define identity first. I think identity is a bundle of beliefs.

So it’s a bunch of beliefs that we have about ourselves. When we pull them all together, that creates an identity. Now, the interesting thing is that beliefs get challenged. We can choose to challenge them ourselves, which would be highly agentic, I might suggest. Or the environment will challenge it. If we say, ⁓ I’m at the top of my game. I am the best analyst that has ever existed in this company and they cannot survive without me.

And then two years later, here come the LLMs and all the AI, and suddenly they can do the analysis much better, much more accurately for a fraction of the cost in a fraction of the time. Poof, there goes the identity. So does that mean that you no longer have any value to provide? So the first belief that we need to challenge is that our value is tied to our productivity. And I think a lot of us believe this.

very, it’s like a deeply, deeply ingrained belief. I am only valuable when I’m productive. You know, I have lots of, I work with clients as a coach and these are all, most of them are very senior people who are at the top of their game, they’re top of their careers. And one question that I like to ask is, if you had to stop producing tomorrow, what would be your value?

and most people are stumped. They do not know how to answer this question. It is a very difficult question to answer. Well, I could always do X or Y. No, no, no, no, that’s not what I’m saying. What is your fundamental value as a human being? And this is a very deeply engraved belief. if we take this belief and we

Renata Bernarde (33:13)
Yeah.

Jon Rosemberg (33:23)
take it out from the shadows and we put it in front and center and we start to challenge it, we know, right, there are people in the world who cannot produce for whatever reason. Maybe it’s a disability, it’s their conditions, whatever that is. Would you argue that that person is worth less than another person? Probably not, probably not, right?

So this idea that we can measure the value of a human through their productive value, ⁓ I think it’s time to challenge it. And I think, by the way, I think this is deeply ingrained in our system, right? Our system was created for productivity. so we have to challenge the idea and we have to challenge the system that comes with that idea and start trying to understand what is the fundamental value of a person.

what I might say, and it may sound Pollyanna, is that the fact that we are alive, you know? So the Earth is one planet amongst, I don’t know, how many billion in our galaxy? And then there’s about two trillion galaxies in the universe. And by the way, it keeps expanding. The universe continues to expand. So the fact that, Renata, that you and I are having this conversation here today is a miracle.

The fact that we have life is a miracle. maybe there is evidence, the evidence to suggest that our life has value is just the fact that we exist, that we are just here.

Renata Bernarde (34:43)
Mm.

Yeah. I love that. This is one of the most challenging situations when you’re job hunting, when you are between jobs, is that you are not being productive in the sense that you don’t have a nine to five job anymore. And that transition into looking for work may sometimes my clients will say, okay, what do I do next? You know, I have an interview in a week’s time. What should I do? And I’m like, nothing.

Jon Rosemberg (35:07)
That’s him,

Renata Bernarde (35:25)
between now and then.

Jon Rosemberg (35:27)
How do they react when

you say nothing?

Renata Bernarde (35:30)
Usually when, look, I’m gonna give away some of my IP here, but I find it hilarious. People book consultations with me because they want to prep for interviews. And I say, okay, when is your interview? Let’s say today is Monday, the interview is Friday. And I’m like, well, you’d have to make sure that as much as you can, that you sleep well. Are you a runner? Yes, go for a run. Every day if possible. Let’s sweat out all that survival mode, fight and flight situation. ⁓

How do you eat? Tell me about your foods. Do you drink coffee? Okay, let’s do a coffee schedule for you. What time is the interview? ⁓ here in Australia, sometimes we have interviews at 11 p.m. at night, depending on, you know, because of the situation. Well, then between now and then, every day, you’re going to drink coffee at 10.30 p.m. at night. I can’t do that. No, you have to. You’re going to drink a coffee at 10.30 p.m.

Jon Rosemberg (36:12)
Yeah.

Renata Bernarde (36:25)
and then you’re gonna practice for your interview at 11 p.m. at night every day. and we’re not even talking about behavioral questions or star questions, know, situation that, and they’re getting really anxious because it’s a one hour consultation they paid for. And they’re thinking, okay, this woman is crazy. But it works, it works every time.

Jon Rosemberg (36:36)
Yeah.

Yeah, but you know it’s in

It’s interesting because having interviewed hundreds, if not thousands of people throughout my career, think decisions get made, mean, Renata, can correct me here, but decisions often get made really early in the process, right? You meet a candidate and your biases kick in and all of these things, already have, the interviewer is going through their own thing, maybe they had a bad morning, who knows what’s going on through their heads.

Renata Bernarde (36:53)
Yeah.

Jon Rosemberg (37:19)
And I think the most powerful way to show up in an interview is authentically. And that’s a really hard thing to do. It’s a really hard thing to do to say,

Renata Bernarde (37:26)
Yes. Yeah.

being present, being ⁓ intentional. I know you like that word about what you’re to say and hopefully even though yes, you are going to have some stress hormones fluctuating in your system in the beginning, hopefully try to get rid of them within 10, 15 minutes. Usually men ⁓ do it faster than women and within 10 minutes they might sort of get overcome.

Jon Rosemberg (37:37)
I love that word.

Hmm, that’s interesting.

Renata Bernarde (38:00)
Because it makes you jittery, it makes you forgetful. You know how it is to speak a second language, I’m assuming from what I read in a book. Many times, Joan, I’ve opened my mouth in interviews and the first thing I say is something in Portuguese because my brain is just so wired for fight and flight that it bypasses all the creative thinking that’s necessary to speak a second language. And I’m like, and then I have to sort of correct it very quickly.

Jon Rosemberg (38:08)
I do.

Renata Bernarde (38:30)
So ideally you want to practice it ⁓ with somebody like me. And I like to make my ⁓ consultations as awkward and difficult as possible for my clients. Because I want them to use all of that energy.

Jon Rosemberg (38:51)
So can I offer a suggestion here, Renata? And maybe

you’ll let me know, because you’re the expert, but I would love to hear your thoughts on this. ⁓ So in the book, I present this idea of the AIR method, which stands for awareness inquiry and reframing. In an interview case study, what would that look like? So let me first ⁓ kind of describe what the AIR method is for the listeners.

Renata Bernarde (39:00)
Mm-hmm.

Uh-huh, let’s go through it.

Jon Rosemberg (39:21)
⁓ You know, earlier this summer, my son broke his arm three days before going to summer camp. And he had a big cast all the way up to his shoulder. So while his friends were jumping in the lake, he was playing with a Rubik’s Cube. And I have a Rubik’s Cube right here for the people who are listening. I will explain this as well as I can. ⁓ So.

When we’re going through a difficult situation like jumping on an interview, right? A stressful situation, a situation where we get into that fight or flight or freeze mode or we’re in survival mode, right? What happens is suddenly the Rubik’s cube is like it’s right next to our eye, right? It would be very difficult to solve the Rubik’s cube if it’s right next to your eye, right? So all you can see is one little square, right? And that may be the red square or the blue square, whatever color, but that’s all you can see. If you apply air,

The A is awareness. It’s just noticing. And that means creating a little bit of distance between you and the situation. And that can be done through breathing. It can be done through mindfulness. It can be done through just sensing your bodily state and noticing, my jaw is tight, my shoulders, I have a shallow breath. So you’re now turning from being subject, the subject of your experience, to turning it into an object that you can actually look at. So that’s awareness.

Then it’s the eye, which is inquiry, and it’s just getting really curious. So you say, OK, so this is a Rubik’s Cube. It’s got, instead of just one square with one color, each side has nine squares with nine different colors. And there are six sides to it. So now you’re seeing the situation differently. In an interview, you could say, well, if this person is not engaging with me, might not be because of me.

Maybe they just had a bad day or maybe they’re connection socks or maybe they have somebody waiting outside their office or you know, maybe they’re just tired and they want to go to the bathroom. It’s like, you know, there’s a million ways in which we can slice that. So that would be inquiry. And then we can start getting really curious and playing around with the Rubik’s cube, right? And, and seeing all this moves one way or the other way. And you know, we can switch it around, we can play with it. And the reframing is finding a combination that works for us.

So in the case of the interview, it could be, you know, I can’t control how my interviewer is going to behave. I can’t control that the connection is not working. I can’t control that the questions this person is asking me have nothing to do with the questions that I have prepped for for the past month and a half. What I can control is my presence and how I show up and how I listen and how I engage with an interviewer. And that’s agency.

That’s agency saying, here’s the choice that I can make to engage in this conversation. Maybe a reframing that worked for me really well while I was interviewing for jobs, which I did for many, many years, is seeing them as practice. I would go into an interview and say, this is just practice. It doesn’t matter if I get the job. It will help me get the next one. Right? So that’s a potential reframing that may work really well when you’re going for an interview.

Renata Bernarde (42:25)
Yes.

I love that. I haven’t used those words, but I think because we come from similar backgrounds in what we’ve studied, I hope that I’ve been doing justice to all that positive psychology research that I’ve done as a student as well. So yes, I like that. One thing that…

that I love about what you’ve just said, when you are questioning, when you are paying attention, when you have enough insight to pay attention to what’s happening in an interview situation, you can adjust and do the reframing. You can find the patterns, the situations or the answers or the ways that you have engaged that brought a sparkle in someone’s eye that,

Jon Rosemberg (43:19)
Mm-hmm.

Renata Bernarde (43:30)
caught their attention, that they looked at you or that they wrote something down when you were, like you want to pay attention to those things to give you clues and how to engage with that new audience for you. So ⁓ I love that. And the other thing too is ⁓ coming out of that situation, you know, if people are listening to this and getting ready for interviews,

And instead of thinking, I’m gonna get some beer and relax, it’s all done. Ideally, what you want to do is sit down and do that continuous improvement that will tap into what you just said. This is an experience and I’m gonna learn from this and get better at it and do better at the next interview.

Remember to write things down because one of the things I’ve noticed working as a coach that mostly helps people get jobs is that when they come to my session, maybe two weeks after an interview, they forgot everything. We have the, is it part of the fight and flight? We basically just forget, we forget the questions that were asked, what we said. You know, I think people just zone out. They just completely, you know, I’m not saying that everybody.

Jon Rosemberg (44:38)
Hmm.

Yeah, especially if we’re overwhelmed,

our memory tends not to record as well. You know, I ⁓ was talking to a friend of mine who’s from Germany and I’m descendant of Holocaust survivors and she lives in Dachau where there was one of the biggest concentration camps and gas chambers. And I was talking to her and I said, I would love to come and visit you one day and actually see the

Renata Bernarde (44:58)
Yeah.

Jon Rosemberg (45:21)
concentration camp because I’ve never been to one and my grandparents were survivors. A couple of weeks later, I was having dinner with a really good friend of mine. We backpacked together through Europe and I was telling him about this conversation and I said, you know, we should have gone to a concentration camp and we should have seen it. And he looked at me and he said, Jon, we went to Dachau and I said, what? I said, no, we didn’t. And he said, yes, we did.

And as he started telling me about the day, the images started flooding me and I started remembering the gravel on the floor and being inside one of the gas chambers. so my body deemed the experience too much in the moment. And I basically erased it from memory for the better part of 20 something years. And it was this

Renata Bernarde (45:51)
⁓ you food go a lot.

Jon Rosemberg (46:20)
kind of weird chain of events that kind of brought it back to me. And I realized, my goodness, is memory ever a fickle thing? It is a fickle thing.

Renata Bernarde (46:33)
Yes it is, I am emotional about this. This is crazy that you were able to put that aside and shelf it into your brain and forget that you’ve been there. ⁓ That’s impressive. Our brain is just such a curious thing. Amazing.

Jon Rosemberg (46:50)
Yes. And I think you

hit Danelle in the head, Renata. Getting curious is the key here. We often treat our thoughts as if they were the ultimate arbiters of truth. I’m a firm believer, and this is a belief, that there is no such thing as an absolute truth. Things can be challenged. These are beliefs that we can challenge. Our memory is things that we can challenge. So we hold on to these ideas so tightly.

Renata Bernarde (47:07)
Mm-hmm.

Jon Rosemberg (47:19)
and we make them a part of our identity and we suffer because of it. And learning to let that go, even just creating a little bit of slack, right? We’re not talking about giving up your identity or giving up your beliefs. We’re just talking about holding them a little bit lighter, just so you can see other angles, just so you can allow yourself to reframe difficult situations. That is a really powerful thing.

Renata Bernarde (47:44)
Yes, yes. I would love to ask you more, and I haven’t reached that part in your book yet, but I want to know more about emotional agency. What does it mean to have emotional agency? And maybe how can people ⁓ use that as part of their careers and their…

Jon Rosemberg (47:56)
Mmm.

Renata Bernarde (48:08)
the way that they present themselves, their executive presence. One thing that I ⁓ tell people to do, and it has worked so far, so I’m hoping I’m doing the right thing, is whenever they are writing a Kovaletta, whenever they are pitching, that they use the art of persuasion from Aristotle’s. And I love it because it’s 2,000 years old. In fact, that’s how Chet Tooby-Tee writes things because somebody taught…

you know, chat to be to write in that way, which is you have to be brief. You have to start with your ethos, you know, tell people what you do in case of a professional pitch. Then you show all the receipts, you know, all the rational reasons, the logic reasons why you have that experience, all the jobs you had, and you can do some name dropping. That’s all fine. But then you tap into pathos and then you tap into emotions.

You know, tell them what you’re passionate about, you know, show them that vulnerability that will make people want to connect with you, right? Share some examples. That is the art of persuasion. It’s so simple. But most times I get Kova letters from people or I hear people talking about themselves when they book consultations with me and it’s just logic, right? It’s never emotional. Or they will start off

Jon Rosemberg (49:08)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah.

Renata Bernarde (49:29)
You know, and sometimes I go to people’s LinkedIn profiles to do a LinkedIn audit and they start off really passionate. I am passionate about this and that right at the beginning. And that doesn’t connect immediately because that sounds a little bit cringe. ⁓ Finding your balance is hard.

Jon Rosemberg (49:43)
Yes, I get that.

Yes. So there’s so much to unpack on what you just shared, Renata. So let’s start maybe with emotional agency. So for the longest time, we believed emotions were hardwired. This is like a Darwinian notion that, you know, happy, you smile, you show that happiness, and that happiness is the same across cultures and around the world.

know, emotions are all the same for everybody, right? Now we know what research is telling us is that they’re not, they’re constructed. There’s sensations that we feel in the body, but our brain makes sense of those sensations and interpret them. Let’s go back to the interview example, right? When you’re about to go into an interview, Renata, do you like roller coasters?

Renata Bernarde (50:35)
Mm-hmm.

No, I hate them. I’ve never been to them.

Jon Rosemberg (50:42)
Okay,

then you’re not going to like this example. I’ll use it because I’m a huge fan of roller coasters. ⁓ And when I started first going on this podcast and talking to people about my book, I was getting really nervous. And the reframe for me was I said, instead of feeling like the world is about to end before I walk into an interview,

Renata Bernarde (50:52)
Are you?

Jon Rosemberg (51:09)
I’m going to say that it’s just like a roller coaster. When it’s starting to go up and it sounds, you hear the sound of the roller coaster going up that moment before the first drop, which is, I actually really like that moment in the roller coaster ride. That is something that I enjoy thoroughly. So I’ve been reframing the same emotion or the same sensations in my body, which is the sweaty palms and the throat closing and the tight chest and the tight shoulders.

I’ve been reframing it as, well, this is the climb towards the right, which I actually thoroughly enjoy. because emotions are constructed and they are, well, the evidence is suggesting that emotions are constructed. ⁓ We have agency in how we interpret it and how we worked with our emotions. But before we do any of that, we need to learn to recognize them and to tame them.

To name them, sorry, not to tame them, to name them. Well, name them to tame them. Let’s put it that way. So, for men, for example, for me, for the better part of my life, it was very hard. Every time I got sad, I would just get angry. I just start yelling and get all red. Because I wasn’t allowed to feel sadness as a man. If I’m not acknowledging my sadness, how can I have any agency to work with that emotion? If I actually say,

⁓ this is not really anger. What I’m feeling right now is sadness. And I recognize that and I acknowledge it, I can say, hey, sadness, what are you trying to tell me? What’s the message here for me? So that in turn leads us to work more agentically towards using those emotions, leveraging those emotions, partnering with those emotions to navigate the world in a way that’s more meaningful to us. And that leads us to thriving.

Renata Bernarde (53:06)
Got it. Wow. Yes. ⁓ There’s so much to unpack. And I think you mentioned, you know, that gender difference between men and women as well. And we’re seeing good and bad things being written this week. don’t know if you’re following this about women transforming the workplace and being responsible for cancel culture because they’re too emotional. And I will put some of the links about those articles that have.

Jon Rosemberg (53:15)
the same.

Renata Bernarde (53:34)
come up this week in the episode show notes. ⁓ yeah, that emotional agency, I think is really important and making that a part of your ⁓ identity, right? Including that as part of the identity which you spoke about.

Jon Rosemberg (53:48)
Mm-hmm.

Yeah,

acknowledging that as a human, feel a wide array of emotions and that these emotions come, they’re messengers. They come with a lot of really useful information and that feeling the, listen, we, by some estimates, we’re exposed to between 10 million and a hundred million bits of information every second.

only about 10 to 50 of those 10 million to 100 million bits of information come into conscious awareness. The rest of them either we completely ignore or they may manifest itself through emotions. They may manifest itself through other types of expressions. So for us to have this somatic and cognitive awareness about how we are in the moment,

is a really, really powerful way. That awareness, it’s what unlocks what opens the door to the inquiry and the curiosity. And finally the reframing. But we can’t get to reframing without first going to awareness and inquiry, right? First, we have to actually understand what we’re experiencing. So, and what ends up happening a lot of times is somebody will come to you and say, Hey, just next time you’re in an interview, just think like you’re in a roller coaster. If you like roller coasters, like I just said, it’s a nice reframe, right?

But I had to do the work for that reframe to work for me, right? And you have to like roller coasters, but that’s a whole different situation. But you have to do work before the reframing works for you. The reframing is the last part of the process. So you need foster awareness, get really curious, and then the reframe. And it’s powerful because it turns setbacks into stepping stones.

You’re walking through this muddy world and every time somebody pushes you, instead of just falling and sitting on your bum and just being like, my God, I’m done, right? Completely helpless and hopeless. You can say, I can use this setback as a stepping stone, put it in the mud and get ready for my next one. And here’s the thing for folks who are looking for jobs right now and struggling with it. In this moment, the moment you’re listening to the podcast is the closest moment.

you’ve ever been to your next job. This is the closest moment you’ve ever been to your next job. Because he will come, right? For most of us, he will come.

Renata Bernarde (56:23)
Yeah.

Absolutely. Jon, that’s such an inspirational way to sort of tie up this conversation. As you can tell, I could talk to you forever. I don’t think I’ve even tapped into the questions I sent you prior to the interview. So apologies for that. But I was really excited to meet you and get to know you. I hope we can stay in touch. I hope that you have…

Jon Rosemberg (56:47)
Absolutely.

Renata Bernarde (56:49)
another reason to come on the show. You are now a friend of the podcast. So if you write another book or you have another idea that you want to share with us, you are more than welcome to come on board. Your book is coming out later this month. This podcast is going out in November. The book’s coming out ⁓ late November. We will have a link to people that want to pre-purchase or buy it. ⁓

a link to your website and whatever other social platforms that you are part of, will have a link in the show notes.

Jon Rosemberg (57:25)
thank you for the questions. And I love the framing ⁓ of job loss because there are so many people experiencing this right now. I think these are really important conversations that need to be have, we need to be having them more in the open and more people need to have access to this information. So thank you for the work that you’re doing and thank you for opening the space for me. It means a lot.

Renata Bernarde (57:42)
Of course.