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Leaving Comfort Zones
Dear HBR: answers your questions with the help of Brandeis management professor Andy Molinsky.
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How do you feel when you have to do something new or difficult? In this episode of HBR’s advice podcast, Dear HBR:, cohosts Alison Beard and Dan McGinn answer your questions with the help of Andy Molinsky, a professor at Brandeis International Business School and the author of Reach: A New Strategy to Help You Step Outside Your Comfort Zone, Rise to the Challenge, and Build Confidence. They talk through what to do when you’re terrified of giving presentations, big changes at work make you uneasy about the future, or your voice quakes when you deal with conflict.
Listen to more episodes and find out how to subscribe on the Dear HBR: page. Email your questions about your workplace dilemmas to Dan and Alison at dearhbr@hbr.org.
From Alison and Dan’s reading list for this episode:
HBR: If You’re Not Outside Your Comfort Zone, You Won’t Learn Anything by Andy Molinsky — “Start with small steps. Instead of jumping right into speaking at an industry event, sign up for a public speaking class. Instead of speaking up in the boardroom, in front of your most senior colleagues, start by speaking up in smaller meetings with peers to see how it feels. And while you’re at it, see if you can recruit a close friend or colleague to offer advice and encouragement in advance of a challenging situation.”
Book: Psyched Up: How the Science of Mental Preparation Can Help You Succeed by Dan McGinn — “There’s a reasonable body of evidence that doing a routinized set of pre-performance activities—ritualized, superstitious, or not—really can help someone perform better.”
HBR: When Was the Last Time You Took On a New Challenge? by Karen Firestone — “Other research has shown that learning something hard can help expand our creativity. And although it seems unlikely that swimming an open water race or learning to paint would help in one’s job of writing software or managing employees, the broader benefits of pushing ourselves may be positive for colleague relationships, productivity, and task comprehension. Plus, acquiring new skills is enjoyable..”
HBR: How to Handle Stress in the Moment by Rebecca Knight — “You hear a lot of advice about how to reduce stress at work. But most of it is about what to do over the long term — take up yoga, eat a healthy diet, keep a journal, or get more sleep. But what do you do when you’re overcome with stress in the moment — at your desk, say, or in a meeting? Perhaps you’ve heard bad news from a client or were assigned yet another project. How can you regain control?”
DAN MCGINN: Welcome to Dear HBR: from Harvard Business Review. I’m Dan McGinn.
ALISON BEARD: And I’m Alison Beard. Work can be frustrating, but it doesn’t have to be. We don’t need to let the conflicts get us down.
DAN MCGINN: That’s where Dear HBR: comes in. We take your questions, look at the research, talk to the experts and help you move forward. Today we’re about breaking out of your comfort zone with Andy Molinsky. Andy’s a professor at Brandeis University’s International Business School and the author of Reach. Andy, thanks for coming on the show.
ANDY MOLINSKY: Thanks for having me.
DAN MCGINN: So, we tend to think of people as ambitious and sort of wanting that next challenge. How often do people need a push? They don’t want to change what they’re doing.
ANDY MOLINSKY: Well, not everyone’s ambitious. But for those who are, often people do I think, get stuck. They might want the next challenge, which might cause them anxiety and fear, so much so that they might avoid it.
ALISON BEARD: Has there ever been a time that you’ve pushed yourself out of your comfort zone and either failed or succeeded?
ANDY MOLINSKY: Constantly. [LAUGHTER] That’s why I got so interested in this. I mean I was the kid in college who would be in the back of the class, thinking about something to say, my heart would feel like it’s beating out of my chest. My cheeks would get flushed and I might raise my hand, I might not, but even if I raised my hand it would be very slight and I’ve always struggled with this. But I don’t know, I think I’ve also thought a lot about it, and I think I’m really attuned to what the roadblocks are that people face.
DAN MCGINN: And people do get better at this over time?
ANDY MOLINSKY: Yeah. Absolutely. I think what’s empowering is having some simple, but powerful strategies that are grounded in research with the right support and the right insight, absolutely.
ALISON BEARD: Dear HBR: I’m a corporate lawyer in a manufacturing industry in Nigeria. I work as a legal manager and I have a thirst to lead. But there’s something that always holds me back: the inability to express myself publicly. I know that if I don’t come out of my comfort zone in this area, it could cost me my career. So, I feel like I need to make a drastic move. The legal department is about to facilitate a week-long ethics and compliance training. I volunteered to lead the two hour morning session. I’m worried. I’m trying to calm myself down. I know the punishment for performance isn’t death, but I really want the presentation to be a success. How do I get over this fear of public speaking?
ANDY MOLINSKY: I think a lot of people struggle with public speaking.
ALISON BEARD: All of us.
DAN MCGINN: Yep.
ALISON BEARD: Dan, yep. I have.
ANDY MOLINSKY: Yeah, I have too. It’s one of the notoriously most difficult challenges that people face and stepping outside their comfort zone. What I would say is one of the things that really jumped out at me when hearing this letter was the person writing the letter has a thirst to lead. That’s really important. Whenever you’re stepping outside your comfort zone, and there’s going to be barriers. You might feel anxious that you’re not good at public speaking. You might feel embarrassed that you might not do it well. You might inauthentic standing up in front of so many people, but if you have that thirst to lead, that can be the wind at your back that can at least nudge you to try.
ALISON BEARD: And she has this willingness to make a drastic move and volunteer. Do you all think that that was a good idea?
DAN MCGINN: Well, I agree with Andy that she has a strong motivation. I actually worry, she said that if, she feels like she needs to make a drastic move or else it could cost her, her career. I thought that was maybe a little bit too high stakes. It’s not clear to me that if she stayed a little bit on the introverted side that the penalties would be quite as high. I think she might be building this up in her mind to be a little bit more high stakes than it is. I think if you’re going to pick an initial forum in which to public speak, doing it at an internal company event on ethics and compliance where nobody’s paying to be there, they’re all probably expecting to be fairly bored. [LAUGHTER] So, if you can just get over the fairly low bar, you’re going to have an early win.
ANDY MOLINSKY: Yeah, I really like the idea that she’s gone for a low stakes environment. It’s almost like if you’re going to go from, I think they call it like couch to 5K, or couch to 10K. I’ve never done that. I’m not much of a runner, but I can’t imagine you like literally get off the couch and run the 5K, or 10K, right? You set yourself up. Maybe you run around the block. Maybe you run a couple of times around the block and I think she’s chosen sort of a challenge, a doable challenge where, so she can sort of build those confidence muscles. So, I think that was a smart thing just in terms of the absolute level of anxiety she’ll experience right now, as opposed to going a TED Talk or something like that.
ALISON BEARD: This reminds me of a piece you actually edited Dan, by Chris Anderson who’s the founder of TED. And he was writing about how to do well at TED Talks. This is a much lower-stakes environment that we’re talking about. But he emphasized how important memorization is and I do think that when you’re getting used to public speaking for the first time, you are not going to be a natural off the cuff, eloquent speaker. And so, it’s important to plan to know exactly what you’re going to say. You don’t want to sound like a robot. But it is OK to look down at your notes.
ANDY MOLINSKY: Yeah, especially for a novice public speaker. One of my best pieces of advice would be, not to watch a TED Talk. I think it sets a very sort of unrealistic standard. It can do more harm than good to watch those because those TED Talks are the result of a tremendous amount of rehearsal, coaching, deep expertise and experience and if you see that and you assume that’s your standard, I think that can intimidate rather than help someone. Especially when stepping outside their comfort zone is the real issue.
DAN MCGINN: One of the things that Chris Anderson said in that piece was, it’s OK somewhere early in the speech to say to the crowd, forgive me I’m a little bit nervous today. Or, to acknowledge that you’re feeling a little bit of discomfort. And one of the things that can do is make the audience kind of root for you.
ALISON BEARD: I was recently doing a live event and there was one man in the front row who I did not know at all, who just nodded throughout my entire introduction. And it was so unbelievably helpful. So, I hope that she has one of those people. If she doesn’t, maybe she can imagine it, but I think you’re absolutely right Dan. To know that, whether they’re nodding or not, no one in that audience is waiting for you to fail, or waiting for you to stumble. They really on are your side.
ANDY MOLINSKY: And she can also, not only have people root for her, but she might feel more authentic herself. Because she’s not having to put on a mask. And she’s being herself.
ALISON BEARD: Dan, I’m going to cite even more of your work today. Talking about her nerves and how she gets ready, you wrote a book on getting psyched up and getting ready for these sorts of situations that you’re nervous about. So, are there any tips you would give her about just as she walks in?
DAN MCGINN: Yeah. The book really concentrated on what to do when the last 10 minutes before you go into something that feels very nervous making and is high stakes. And generally what you want to do is you want to try to find ways to crank up your level of confidence and to tamp down your level of anxiety. Imagine if she were an athlete and ESPN showed a highlight reel of her best moments on the field. Well, we’re not athletes, but in our work lives, we have moments when we’ve been sort of spectacular. So, if she can sort of play a mental highlight reel of her most articulate, most competent feeling moments, that can sort of give her a little bit of a boost. Some people find rituals to be helpful. Some people find listening to certain kinds of music before they go into a situation like this can get their emotions tuned to the right thing. So, there’s lots of different kinds of things people can do in the moments before they go into this nervous making scenario.
ANDY MOLINSKY: Eminem, “Lose Yourself.” [LAUGHTER]
DAN MCGINN: That’s a good one.
ALISON BEARD: My son can actually do that. So, I probably could too. [SINGING – There’s a moment you own it, you better never let it go].
ANDY MOLINSKY: The greatest psych up song ever.
ALISON BEARD: It really is. OK, so let’s say that she gets through this, maybe it’s not perfect, but it’s also not terrible. What should her next step be to learn from the experience and then take on the next challenge?
ANDY MOLINSKY: Well, what I would say is it’s important for her to sort of build on this by trying to find another opportunity that’s not too far off in the future. You might start to build some courage, some confidence, maybe even some skills, but those could atrophy if you have to wait another two years to speak in public. So, I think having another opportunity and actually actively scheduling another opportunity would be a great suggestion. I think also feedback would be really nice and how do you get feedback in a situation like this? I think the idea of some friendly faces in the audience, some colleagues, some close colleagues that maybe she could ask ahead of time to give her a little bit of feedback about what she did particularly well, where she could improve, how she could improve and so on. I think that’s important as well.
DAN MCGINN: So, Alison, what’s our advice to this listener?
ALISON BEARD: So, first we want her to know that everyone struggles with public speaking including us. So, we’d really like her to take the pressure off of herself. Being an amazing public speaker is probably not necessary to succeed in her career, and also this session that she’s signed herself up for does not need to be a TED Talk. She shouldn’t set unrealistic expectations for herself. We really applaud her decision to take this opportunity and practice in a lower-stakes environment. We really think it’s a doable challenge. We want her to prepare, make those slides, practice them, rehearse, even memorize. We want her to psych herself up a little bit before she goes in. Think about times when she’s done well before. And then after she gets through it, she should ask for feedback from people she trusts and then make sure to take on another challenge as quickly as she can.
DAN MCGINN: Dear HBR: I work in a multinational professional service firm that’s undergoing significant change. The business is digitizing and streamlining. This has created lots of opportunities. But as with any restructure there’s been politics, land grabs and poor communication. So, the transition has been difficult. Some teams, not my own, will see redundancies while others will see new reporting lines and stakeholders to manage. The worst part is the number of departures. It seems like every day someone gets fed up with the process and resigns. This has affected the morale of the whole team. On a personal level, a number of close colleagues who I consider friends have left. These were the people I turned to for a laugh, advice, or a time jut to vent and let off steam. So, I’m worried I’ll be left with no one and my work life won’t be the same. What can I do to try to address this? I’m considering whether I too should move on. Maybe it’s better to start somewhere else. Find new friends and make a fresh start than it is to build a new network in my current organization, given what’s going on. I’ve been engaged in my role at times and it’s a good job. But with all this change I wonder if I need to look at my options and avoid getting stuck in the fallout at this restructure. With so much going on, how can I develop? Without an obvious career path to leadership, and with my friends dwindling, and work demands increasing as a result, it’s a lot to think about.
ANDY MOLINSKY: That’s a bummer. I feel bad for her. That’s a tough one. I think that she’s, I think she’s experiencing a real loss, a real legitimate loss. She worries it won’t be the same and I think she’s right. It won’t be the same.
ALISON BEARD: I think it’s important to tease apart the emotion that’s happening from things that are going on in the business. So, yes, it’s very, very sad that she’s lost these cohorts. If Dan every quit I would be devastated.
DAN MCGINN: I would feel the same way.
ALISON BEARD: But I think what’s going on in the business now doesn’t seem all that bad for her. Her team isn’t experiencing any redundancies. She’s worried about career progression, but actually, in times of flux, that’s when people can really jumpstart their career and they can get ahead by taking on the hard jobs and the new challenges and building those new networks in the restructured organization. So, I do think that she needs to set aside the emotional bit of it and understand whether she wants to play a role in this new company.
DAN MCGINN: Yeah, I agree. The way I think about that is if she puts up with the discomfort of what’s going on, is the company eventually going to thrive? A lot of times when you see redundancies and restructuring it’s just sort of a downward spiral and nothing goods going to come out of it. If that’s the case, if she thinks the company’s sort of on a slow path towards oblivion, get out. Right.
ALISON BEARD: Andy, do you agree?
ANDY MOLINSKY: I think that’s not an either-or situation. I think she can sort of become a bit of an anthropologist. Watch what’s happening in the company. Watch how they’re treating people as they’re leaving. See what the opportunities are. Assess what’s going on, but at the same time maybe use it as an opportunity to have a parallel experience of doing a career check-in for herself.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah. I do think it’s a red flag that people are leaving voluntarily, not because they have to. And I think when you see red flags like that in any organization, it’s worth it to you to explore what else is out there. It would certainly be worth her while to explore the options and then step back as we’re all saying, not think emotionally and make a rational decision about what will be the next best step for her career.
ANDY MOLINSKY: I would say though that it’s tricky. The emotion parts tricky because there’s information in emotions too. Like if you feel really crappy about the way people are treated, that’s a feeling and that’s important information. Do you know what I mean? I wouldn’t be unnecessarily swayed by your emotions, but I would also sort of keep an eye on your emotions and be thoughtful about your emotions because that’s important, I guess data, in a sense, about your own sense-making about this organization going forward. The other thing that I would say is that when there’s a change like this, it’s like, it can be really blurry in terms of your understanding of what’s really happening in this organization. It’s almost like a picture. It’s very, very blurry. And then at some point, it will come into a bit clearer focus. And I get the sense that from her letter, we’re in the blurry stage. That she’s not quite sure what’s happening. She’s also, she’s certainly experiencing loss. She’s experiencing anxiety. She’s concerned about her career and about her future possibilities. But not everything’s come into focus. And so, I think that it’s probably not a time to make rash decisions. But it’s certainly the time to consider potential alternatives and really keep a close eye on what’s happening and how things evolve.
DAN MCGINN: I wonder if she would benefit if she were able to open a better dialogue with her boss about some of these issues. Number one, just letting the boss know hey, a lot of my closest friends here have left. I’m feeling a little bit adrift. It’s not like the boss can fix that, just making the boss aware of some of those emotions could be useful. Number two, this blurriness Andy that you were talking about, the boss has the ability to clarify some of that. The boss might be able to affirm what it is about her skills and her performance that make them want her to continue on the team.
ANDY MOLINSKY: I keep thinking as we’re talking about this image and maybe it’s because I like the show Deadliest Catch on TV, of a boat sort of swaying in a storm and in some ways maybe that’s how she’s feeling and what she really needs is some sort of anchor. And what you were just talking about might be that kind of anchor to enable her to sort of start to have a bit more of a perspective, to start to make sense of possibilities in a slightly more reasoned way. It’s going to be emotional, but a slightly more reasoned way that can sort of maybe help her feel more at ease in her discomfort, and more at ease in the transition.
DAN MCGINN: Yeah, we get a lot of letters that remind us of how hard it is to be a good manager, even if in the best of times. And one of the things this letter reminds me of is that when a company’s going through this kind of change, the premium on somebody who’s able to provide some comfort and reassurance to their direct reports is really invaluable. And that that’s a skill of direct report management that we probably don’t teach enough and it’s a different kind of management skill to sort of manage an organization when people are getting laid off and when everybody’s scared.
ALISON BEARD: So, Dan what are we telling her?
DAN MCGINN: Well, we empathize with her. It’s normal to feel sad and feel a sense of loss as your friends leave the organization. It’s normal to feel a sense of anxiety about all the changes that are happening. We don’t think she should make a rash decision here. We think that she should pull the lens back and take this as an opportunity to do sort of a broader career check-in. Think about whether this is still the organization she wants to be at. Maybe explore whatever kinds of opportunities are out there. She should listen to her emotions. If she’s really feeling crappy and depressed about going to this job every day, that’s information that’s useful as she thinks about whether this is the place she should be or not. She might want to try to think optimistically about the opportunities for career development that this naturally presents. As people leave, their responsibilities are up for grabs and she may be able to inherit or grab some of them. We also think she should open up a line of communication with her boss to try to get some affirmation, get some clarity and to talk proactively about what opportunities these changes might present for her. If she’s going to succeed and thrive in this organization she’s going to need to shift her mindset and to be a little bit more focused, not on the past and what she’s lost, but on the future and the opportunities that lie ahead.
ALISON BEARD: Dear HBR: I work at a small tech startup. I love the company and the product. I have a great relationship with my boss and our CEO. The team I work on consists of eight men and myself. I’m the only account manager and the only woman in the company. Over the past few months, I’ve repeatedly found myself blindsided by a coworker. He engages in an open conflict with me in front of our teammates. Every time I think I have it handled, I let my guard down and it happens again. I’m never prepared to react in the moment. Instead, I become flustered and my voice gets shaky as I try to deescalate the situation. The most recent example was by far the most frustrating. I’d been in back to back meetings and was about to jump on a client call. I was updating my team on a last-minute change that I’d just been made aware of. My coworker was upset that I hadn’t prepared him for these changes sooner. He told me that I needed someone to help me do my job. The rest of the team was in the room. I told him that the way he was handling his frustration was not professional and that we had to call our client. I barely recognized my own voice. Keeping my composure through the call was extremely challenging. I waited a few hours to calm down and pulled him aside and addressed the situation. I told him that we had to set the right example for working relationships at our company. I told him that if he needed more from me in order to be successful at his job he should tell me in the right setting. I believe it will happen again. This whole issue has made me aware of how uncomfortable I am with conflict. I’m nervous that if I don’t deal with it better, it will hurt my reputation as a leader. I’ve talked to my boss about it. He says he’s equally frustrated with this individual, but he does not manage him. He told me to let him know if it continues. But I don’t want to have to run to him every time I’m faced with conflict. At the same time I know I have a habit of getting into my own head once my confidence is shaken. What can I do to be less emotional? How should I respond in the future?
ANDY MOLINSKY: My reaction is that this guy’s a total jerk and that she actually handled it pretty well. She took time to cool down. She thought about what she wanted to say. She seemed to be assertive and purposeful. I mean I think at the end of the day this question is about conflict. And conflict can be useful in an organization setting, especially if it’s a conflict about ideas. But conflict can also be dysfunctional and this seems to be dysfunctional in demeaning frankly. I don’t think it’s her responsibility to have to deal with this on a recurring basis.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah. I think especially because he’s a repeat offender. And it does seem to be a personal conflict, not one that is related to something involving the business. She has handled it well. She’s been very firm with him. I think it’s important that she has been firm with him in front of the team too. She called it out. She said you’re not behaving professionally. We need to focus on the task. She then did it and then she went back to him after the fact and said look, here’s how I want it to work from now on. But he keeps persisting and so I do think it’s time she goes to her boss and says, this is a personality conflict. He is not behaving in the way that he should if we’re all going to collaborate in the way that I think you want us to, so I would like you to speak to him.
ANDY MOLINSKY: So, maybe in a sense she’s had a successful difficult conversation with this employee and now she needs to have a difficult conversation with her boss.
ALISON BEARD: Yes. Right, exactly.
DAN MCGINN: It seems like part of the problem is even though the three of us all sit here and look at the situation and say, she handled it perfectly, she’s not convinced of that. She says I have a habit of getting into my own head. My confidence is shaken. It sounds like she’s being very self-critical and it sounds like in particular the fact that we’ve all seen people get that kind of quaky voice and it sounds like that’s what happened to her. And she’s probably making more of it than she should.
ALISON BEARD: But I think she’s also recognized that she does have this discomfort with conflicts. So, even if he handles it correctly, she doesn’t feel comfortable handling it correctly. She doesn’t walk away from that feeling good about herself at all. And so, I think that is what we should turn to Andy Molinsky for advice on about how she gets comfortable with behaving the way that she did. Because we all believe she did the right thing.
ANDY MOLINSKY: I wonder actually in this situation whether I would be very curious about what her other relationships are on this team and in this organization. And she said the piece of information that we heard was that they’re eight men and herself. That’s hard for one thing to be the one single woman in this situation where she’s also being berated in front of the team. What are her relationships with other people? Can other people, does she have allies? How do other people sort of see this situation, see that person’s behavior? Those would be questions that I’d be curious about. But in terms of being comfortable, this seems like an eminently uncomfortable situation. She’s certainly outside her comfort zone, but for good reason. Of course, this is outside our comfort zone.
ALISON BEARD: I am so glad that you brought up gender here. Because the letter writer does use the word emotional. She’s worried about how her voice sounds and I have been known myself, although I think I’m a very strong and assertive person, to get more emotional. And I think when I do that in front of men, they assume that it means I’m about to fall into a puddle. And it doesn’t. It means that I feel strongly about something and that’s how my body reacts to it. And so, I think that if she can stop beating herself up for having that reaction and understand that she doesn’t need to act like a man would in that situation, and maybe the key is there are eight men on her team and she’s the only woman. Are there other women in the organization that she can talk to in the way that you’re describing Andy, to figure out, this is a startup. It’s tech. It is probably a bit of a boys club. So, does she have to develop that hard veneer, or can she retain some of her emotion and her natural reactions to things, and still progress and be respected.
ANDY MOLINSKY: That also really resonates with me in terms of when she said that she barely recognized her own voice. It feels to me like she’s sort of developing that voice. And so, she’s in the stage where it was outside her comfort zone to act assertively as she did, and I actually think she did a great job. At least the way she describes it. But she didn’t, maybe she didn’t feel authentic doing it. That’s how it sounds. And I think that as she starts to kind of own that voice and hopefully with the support of allies, and colleagues, I think that it’s going to be an opportunity for her to build strength.
DAN MCGINN: The more I read this letter, it says, she never feels prepared to act in the moment. Instead, I’ve become flustered. My voice gets shaky as I try to deescalate. If this voice piece of it is really a big part of it, I wonder whether some actually, some technical coaching in terms of breathing, almost like a vocal performance kind of coaching might help her to just be able to control that one mechanism or mannerism that seems like it rattles her. The same way a singer or a public speaker could.
ALISON BEARD: Yeah. And I think just the attitude that I’m going to keep this short. That was totally unprofessional. I don’t expect you to do it again, it will help her not get emotional because it’s just short and simple. I’ve warned you before, I’m not going to warn you again, stop.
DAN MCGINN: Your voice isn’t quaking. [LAUGHTER] Alison, what’s our advice?
ALISON BEARD: So, first of all, we think that she handled the situation really well. So, we congratulate her on that. She addressed him immediately. She took the time to calm down and then she revisited with him and explained that his behavior was not acceptable. We do think that gender is probably at play in this situation. But we don’t think that she should be ashamed of being emotional. We don’t think that she has to act like her male colleague. We think that she can be assertive and be herself. Part of what might help that is getting some coaching, even some vocal training so that she’s prepared for the next encounter. She might even develop some set phrases and she keeps it short and simple, and direct. Most importantly though we really do think that she needs to go again to her boss and explain that this guy is a repeat offender and he really needs some reprimanding from someone more senior than her. So that his behavior changes and that will benefit not just her, but the entire team.
DAN MCGINN: Great. Andy thanks for coming on the show.
ANDY MOLINSKY: Thanks for having me. This is fun.
DAN MCGINN: That’s Andy Molinsky. He’s a professor at Brandeis University, International Business School and the author of Reach: A New Strategy to Help You Step Outside Your Comfort Zone, Rise to the Challenge and Build Confidence.
DAN MCGINN: Thanks to the listeners who wrote us with their questions. Now we want to know your questions. Send us an email with your workplace challenge and how we can help. The email address is DearHBR@HBR.org.
ALISON BEARD: We also want to thank Louis Weeks and Nick DePrey for composing our theme music.
DAN MCGINN: We hope you liked today’s episode and if you want to get the next one automatically, please go to your podcast app and hit subscribe.
ALISON BEARD: And if you liked the show, please give us a five-star review.
DAN MCGINN: I’m Dan McGinn.
ALISON BEARD: And I’m Alison Beard. Thanks for listening to Dear HBR:.