Episode 150: How to Truly Flourish Through Life’s Highs and Lows with Dr. Michelle McQuaid

Ashish Kothari:

Michelle, it's so lovely to have you here. Thank you for joining us all the way from Australia.

Dr. Michelle McQuaid:

It's such a pleasure to be with you.

Ashish Kothari:

I want to go all the way to the beginning. You are a veteran in this field. You've been doing this work around flourishing and helping organizations and leaders flourish for over 15 years. But that's not your roots. That's not where you started.

I want to trace back to you going from leading brand strategy at PwC. How did you go from there into positive psychology and flourishing? What was the turning point that got you curious and made you dedicate a big chunk of your life over the last 15 years to this field?

Dr. Michelle McQuaid:

 I've always been interested in how we bring out the best in ourselves and each other. I trained in public relations, communication, and marketing—trying to find ways to connect people. I think that was what I was doing all those years.

I wound up at PricewaterhouseCoopers leading brand work for them out of London. I was responsible for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa, helping our people live our brand values because in a consultancy firm, your people are the product. We wanted clients to have great experiences with them.

But every country was very different, and often our leaders were put into leadership roles because they had great technical expertise but knew nothing about how to lead people and bring out the best in them.

As our clients grew more global, that became a real problem for us. We started projects around living our brand values—bringing our brand to life. Then we had a lot of competitive shifts in the marketplace to the point where PwC was going to launch its own consulting division. I was going with the consultants, so we had to create new brand values.

What was this organization going to stand for? How did we get 60 different countries, with 60 different leadership teams and thousands of employees, to live those values? I had an amazing period where I was in and out of a different country every week, working with different leadership teams, getting to see what worked and what didn’t. It was the ultimate experiment design.

I was working with people responsible for change management for our clients, and all I could see was that it wasn’t working. We got compliance while leaders were focused on these things, but the moment their attention moved to the next priority, people went back to doing what they always did.

I got really curious—what do we actually know about changing human behavior? I stumbled into the science of Positive Psychology. The Master’s of Positive Psychology program that Martin Seligman was running at the University of Pennsylvania was about three years old at that time. I thought, “I have to go study this and figure out how to do this.”

I was fortunate that PwC was very supportive of that and said, “Go experiment on our people and see if any of this stuff works.” That was the transition point for me.

Ashish Kothari:

 Amazing. As you finished the program and started implementing it in the context of consulting and audit—this kind of work where people are the product—it reminds me of my 17 years at McKinsey. It’s one thing for a company like Barry-Wehmiller, which makes capital equipment, to say, “We build product.”

But Bob Chapman from Everybody Matters says, “We build people. We don’t build products. It’s our people who do that, and we measure success by the impact we have on their lives.”

It’s one thing for them to say that, but for consulting firms and accounting firms—the people are it. There is no other “it.”

So, as you implemented the changes and applied what you learned, what were some of the learnings that emerged in that context? Because in professions like consulting or law, burnout is at an all-time high. Stress is at an all-time high. I know so many consulting firms where people are just super stressed. They’re not flourishing.

Dr. Michelle McQuaid:

 No, not at all.

Ashish Kothari:

Tell me a little bit about what you learned. If someone listening is a consulting firm partner or leader, what should they do?

Dr. Michelle McQuaid:

My most important learning from that time would be true for many leaders across industries: often, leaders believe that the value they add is being the expert, having the answers, knowing how to get something done. That puts a lot of pressure on us.

Many leaders today are leading from a place of fear and anxiety—fear that it’s about to be figured out that they don’t have all the answers. None of us do. Leaders generally haven’t been taught how people’s brains or nervous systems work, or how to bring out the best in people—the very resource companies entrust them with and pay a fortune for.

I found that these leaders were very protective of the way they were already leading. They didn’t want to hear that they weren’t doing an awesome job, or that they might need additional tools. Their identity was often very attached to being the expert in the room—being right, being in control.

That meant looking for all the things that weren’t working, pointing out faults, and finding ways to fix them. It created climates of anxiety in many workplaces.

The biggest learning I took from that time was figuring out how to help leaders feel safe enough to get curious—to want to learn and experiment with the things I was offering them.

That started with, first, recognizing how hard they were working; second, absolutely respecting the value they were trying to bring every day; and third, offering these tools as an expansion of their toolkit.

They had amazing technical expertise. I would say, “You know way more about that than I do. But I know a lot about how people’s brains and nervous systems work to bring out their best. Can I give you a few more tool options? You can choose whether you use them or not at the end of the session, but let’s just play and experiment and see where they take you.”

The moment I could help them feel safe enough with me to be curious, all sorts of things became possible. They did amazing things—things I never believed they’d take so far. But getting them there was the key.

Ashish Kothari:

Making them feel safe, reflecting back the value in what they were good at, and then giving them options—saying, “Here’s a bunch of tools. I’m not asking you to use them. I’m asking you to experiment with them at your own time.” See what works and what doesn’t. It’s not a one-size-fits-all solution. You must do this and that will make a difference.

Dr. Michelle McQuaid:

 The first thing I do every time I’m running workshops or coaching is say, “Here’s what we’re going to do today. I’m going to share some of the latest science on what helps people to thrive. Hopefully, that’s going to accelerate our knowledge. I’ll also share some really practical, evidence-based tools, and hopefully, they’ll inspire some ideas and practices you can walk away and use.”

Then I say, “Please pull it apart and figure out what works best for you—in your context, for your people, and for the outcomes you want.” I think in honoring that, it creates some safety for all of us because, as you and I know, and your listeners appreciate, it’s not a one-size-fits-all solution for these things.

We want to honor people’s lived experience and their wisdom to know their context far better than any of us when we bring tools into their situations.

Ashish Kothari:

I love that. What are some of the no-regret, easy tools that you offer, Michelle—science-proven tools that people can think about, play with, and see results from? Which are your go-tos that you’ve found consistently seem to work?

Dr. Michelle McQuaid:

We’ve found two parts to this journey. One is often giving people a framework because it’s not one-size-fits-all. It’s not one tool that’s going to fit everybody. Offering an evidence-based framework gives them a bigger picture.

When it comes to caring for wellbeing, Dr. Martin Seligman’s PERMA framework works really well. We’re doing a lot of work at the moment around change, and from all of my years of research on navigating change, we’ve been playing with a framework we call HEART.

What we’re trying to find are evidence-based frameworks that are easy to remember and that you can plug different tools underneath. That way, people walk away with a flexible toolbox.

We often start with PERMA as one example. It’s really well known, and we’ve taught it all over the world. We find people can hang onto it—even though it’s a made-up word. Once they understand it, they realize wellbeing isn’t just one thing. It’s not just physical health or relationships—it’s different dimensions, and all of them matter.

A couple of my favorite tools within PERMA that really help people:

One is around positive emotions, particularly self-compassion. We’ve measured wellbeing across tens of thousands of people in thousands of workplaces, and the one thing we find most consistently helps people have higher levels of wellbeing is whether they have healthy levels of self-compassion.

That makes sense across all the PERMA factors because if I’m busy beating myself up every time my wellbeing isn’t going the way I want, it’s going to be hard to keep showing up with the energy to look after it.

Whereas if I can be that wise and kind friend that Dr. Kristin Neff talks about in her research, then when things aren’t going to plan, I can bring curiosity and compassion. I can ask, “What is working about this? What isn’t? What should I try next?”

So we often teach self-compassion as one of our favorite tools.

I also love a good somatic tool, not just a cognitive one, which we call an oxytocin shot. If your listeners want to try it, they can take one hand and place it over their opposite wrist—skin on skin if possible, not over clothes or jewelry. Gently wrap the fingers around the wrist on the side of the pulse point, and breathe gently for seven seconds. It doesn’t need to be deep, just reassuring.

I like to think of it as, “I’ve got this. It’s okay. I’ve got you.” Studies suggest about seven seconds is enough to induce a bit of oxytocin—our calming hormone—into the bloodstream and lower cortisol, one of our stress hormones.

When I take my oxytocin shot, I remind myself like a wise and kind friend would: “It’s okay. We’ll figure this out. You are perfectly imperfect, just like everyone else.” And we’ll sort this through, “What’s ours to learn? What do we need to take accountability for? What will we try next?” That’s one of my favorites—the oxytocin shot.

Another one I love under Engagement, one of the PERMA factors, actually came from Dr. Barbara Fredrickson. She taught me how to turn a to-do into a ta-da.

The way Barb taught me to do this was to look at my to-do list each day and choose one of the tasks I’m procrastinating on—something I’m not looking forward to—and ask myself, “How can I align one of my strengths, the things I’m good at and enjoy, to that task?”

That way, a to-do becomes a ta-da because it becomes more engaging and energizing.

My third favorite is in the Accomplishment factor. This is where people often struggle with wellbeing in workplaces because we can be so outcome-focused. It comes from Dr. Carol Dweck’s work on growth mindset, and it’s called Be a Not a Yeti.

“Be a Yeti” is what I say when I’m not achieving what I want to achieve yet—it’s not going the way I hoped. Instead of firing up that inner critic, I remind myself, “I’m just not there yet.” And that’s how we be Yetis.

Ashish Kothari:

I love those three—so powerful. I love Kristin Neff’s work. I think self-compassion is crucial because our brains don’t allow us to treat ourselves the way we treat others.

Dr. Michelle McQuaid:

 No.

Ashish Kothari:

Oftentimes, we speak to ourselves much harsher than we would ever speak to anybody else. If we spoke to others even one-tenth as harshly as we speak to ourselves, we’d be very lonely. Nobody would want to be with us.

It starts there. It’s really so important. I love that one. I also love the to-do-to-ta-da—especially using strengths and starting with knowing what your strengths are.

Shell, it’s crazy to me—in a lot of the work I do with teams, I ask, “Do you know each other’s strengths?” Everyone looks around blankly. I tell them, “There’s a tool for that. You can have a conversation about it—whether it’s Reflected Best Self, StrengthsFinder, or even just simply asking each other, ‘Tell me what lights you up when you’re working.’”

You’ll learn a lot. But most people don’t know it, and they don’t harness each other’s strengths.

Dr. Michelle McQuaid:

We really love teaching leaders how to ask their teams once a week: “What lit you up last week? What are you looking forward to this week?”

Those two very simple questions are great ways to see how people’s strengths are being applied to their roles. They’re also a great way to know whether your team is prioritizing the same things you want them to prioritize for the week ahead. And if they’re not, you can ask, “How do I help you align some of those tasks to your strengths?”—especially if they’re still learning how to do that for themselves.

Ashish Kothari:

At Happiness Squad, one of the practices we lead with is opening every standup with an energizer.

Often, one of the big ones is: “What’s a big win from yesterday, and what’s the one thing you want to nail today—the one thing you’ll put a big chunk of your time into?”

Because in a startup, there are always seven things to do. But what’s the one that you really want to focus on and say, “I want to actually get this done”?

I often find when we complete something, that sense of accomplishment—no matter how small, even if it’s just sending an email or finishing a campaign—makes you feel good.

So many people otherwise end the week thinking, “I don’t know what I achieved.” That’s such a de-energizing feeling.

Dr. Michelle McQuaid:

 One of the tools we’ve developed over the years—with input from Carol, from Kristin, and from Amy Edmondson on her psychological safety work—has really been a tool for leaders, and we call it the Safety Check Chat.

Here in Australia, we now have legislation that says workplaces, and leaders in particular, need to be supporting psychosocial safety—so emotional and social safety in their teams—which has put a really interesting lens on the importance of wellbeing.

We also have international standards for all countries that suggest we need to be teaching leaders to do it.

The Safety Check Chat, to your point, is four very simple questions. It starts with What’s working well? so we can take the victory lap and celebrate the strengths. Then, where are we struggling?

One of the things that always stuck with me came from an early conversation I had with Carol Dweck. She said, “Michelle, I love the focus on strengths. Can I also encourage you to not be scared about talking about the struggle?”

The more we normalize the ability to talk about the struggle, the more we help people see that struggle is just an invitation to learning and growth. We start to take the shame and the isolation out of it.

She said, “I love that you start with strengths because that’s going to help calm people’s brains. We need to know what those strengths are so we can build on them. But can you please always follow it up and also ask about the struggle so that we’re normalizing that?”

Her point was the third question—actually the most important—is What are we learning from both of those things? She pointed out that, particularly in workplaces, we are so outcome-focused that often we miss the learning along the way. We think the outcome is all that matters.

She would say, “Think back even six months to all the things you were working so hard on. I’ll take a safe bet you can’t even remember half of them. But what you did get to take forward—whether you got the outcome or not—was the learning from those opportunities.” Then we go to the fourth question, which is What do you want to do now? What comes next?

I love these four. They’re super simple. We teach them to leaders all the time as a way to create more of that psychological safety and to have open and honest conversations about hard things: What’s worked well? Where did we struggle? What are we learning? What will we do next?

Sometimes leaders will say, “What if nothing’s working?” I’ll say, “The fact you’re even having the conversation is something that’s working. If we’re still here to talk about things, something is working. Otherwise, we’d all be at home in bed, not here in the organization.”

We don’t want to lose those strengths in hard moments just because it might feel like the struggle is bigger right now. I love this as a way to teach leaders how to have these conversations with people.

Ashish Kothari:

How often do you invite leaders to do this?

Dr. Michelle McQuaid:

We encourage them to find what feels right for them and their team. Some leaders will add it as a weekly standing item on their agenda: “Let’s just run a Safety Check Chat, team—what’s working well, where are we struggling?” Others will use it more in one-on-one conversations.

Some will use it almost every check-in; others will save it for when there are issues. Sometimes it’s used at the end of project periods for a wrap-up of what’s gone on. Others will wait until there’s clearly an issue—nobody’s being honest or really talking about it—and use this as a safe way to open up a space to dig into it.

I love that it can be more organic or planned; it can be more regular or in the moment. It works so well to create the psychological, neurological, and social spaces we need to have more of those open and honest conversations in our workplace.

Ashish Kothari:

What I’m taking away from this—as I’m thinking about our own team—is that this is something I want to implement in one-on-one conversations every week with each one of the teams.

Dr. Michelle McQuaid:

 Yeah.

Ashish Kothari:

Because they’re all driving their workstream. Even just asking, “What’s working? Where are we struggling? What are we learning, and what do we want to do differently?” would be good. Then making it a part of our once-a-month cadence—we do three-week sprints as a team.

Dr. Michelle McQuaid:

 Nice.

Ashish Kothari:

As part of the sprint, before we kick off the next one: What did we learn from the last? What worked well? What did we struggle with? Incorporating that can be beautiful collective sense-making and individual sense-making to find our way through. That’s probably how I would do it over time.

Dr. Michelle McQuaid:

Over time, it’s building that culture of psychological safety. It’s building that growth mindset and that strengths orientation. It’s encouraging self-compassion.

I remember in my early days with this work when I was leading a team still at PwC and I was first learning about growth mindset. I put on our team agenda each week Screw-Up of the Week, and they thought this was a management trick to get them to admit all the things they were doing wrong. For the first three weeks, it was just my Screw-Up of the Week that was being shared.

What we learned almost a month later was that I was still there to tell the tales—I hadn’t been fired yet—but many of our best conversations and learning during that month had come because of the screw-ups I shared.

They started to become more comfortable sharing theirs as well. It really showed me the importance of how, as leaders, we make it safe enough for people to have more open and honest conversations with us. I think Amy’s research on the benefits of psychological safety for wellbeing and performance is too good to ignore and just roll past.

Ashish Kothari:

What I found most interesting about her work—the origins of her work—was this notion of high-performing teams having the highest error rates.

Dr. Michelle McQuaid:

 Yes.

Ashish Kothari:

It wasn’t that they had higher error rates than others, but they talked about them so they could learn from it.

Dr. Michelle McQuaid:

 Yes.

Ashish Kothari:

It wasn’t something to be hid, which is what most organizational cultures are like. They don’t want to talk about stuff that didn’t work.

They also don’t want to do stuff outside their comfort zone if they feel there is a risk of failure. On both ends, it keeps you stuck—not learning and not experimenting enough to grow.

Dr. Michelle McQuaid:

 Right. I’ll often say, “If you haven’t failed recently, then you’re not stretching far enough outside your comfort zone to discover—to keep figuring out—what you are capable of doing and what’s possible for you.”

It’s only in that stretch that we get the learning and growth for the next thing and the next thing. I think this is so important—that we are not just comfortable.

One of the things that underlies that is this mistaken idea that somehow everybody else has got it figured out except for us, and that we’re going to be found out at any moment. The other piece

I always lead with when I’m teaching in workplaces and with leaders around this is: We are all perfectly imperfect, and nature wired us that way so we could learn and grow and adapt as the world around us—and within us—keeps changing.

The moment we can all start to accept that and see the reality that this is how our brains are wired to perform at their best, not only does it take the pressure off, but it also opens up so much possibility and opportunity for us to get in and play. It makes self-compassion, growth mindsets, and psychological safety so much easier for us all to reach for.

Ashish Kothari:

Isn’t it interesting? I’d written a LinkedIn post on this a while back. We were walking in London, and I’d seen this tree in a garden that was completely crooked, floating up. The thought that went through my head was, “How beautiful that is.”

But that’s not how we look at people. When we look at nature, we find beauty. Nature rarely is symmetrical; there are always things off. We make sense of that. But when it comes to people, we very quickly go to what’s not right with this person.

Dr. Michelle McQuaid:

 Yeah.

Ashish Kothari:

 And what’s not right with me. We are always swimming in that, but also with what’s not right. It’s something we have to consciously recognize as a bias in how we look at the world and choose to do something different.

Dr. Michelle McQuaid:

Yeah.  When I work with leaders, I find it helps to get them to understand that our brain is wired to attack any source of threat—whether that’s somebody else or ourselves, to your point about self-criticism. The brain’s job is to keep us alive, and it does that by constantly scanning the world around us asking, safe enough? Not safe enough? Safe enough? Not safe enough?

When it’s safe enough, all the blood and oxygen keep flowing up to our prefrontal cortex—the thinking part of our brain—where we can be curious, creative, compassionate, courageous, and confident. That’s when we’re at our best. But when we perceive “not safe enough,” it flows out into our arms and legs, ready to trigger our stress responses—fight, flight, freeze, fawn, or flop.

It’s hard to do your best work when you’re in those states, unless your life is actually on the line, which is when those responses are needed. For many leaders, just helping them understand in simple terms how people’s brains and bodies work in order to show up and do the job is a big missing piece of the puzzle.

I do find that leaders right now are more curious about this than I’ve ever seen. Often, this helps move what’s considered a “soft skill” into something that feels much more real, tangible, and gets their attention.

Ashish Kothari:

That’s very true. So let’s talk a little bit about that. The Center for Positive Organizations, Marty, and the whole positive psychology movement that evolved into the Happiness Movement—there are so many coaches now.

The amount of spending on wellness and wellbeing is close to $200 billion and continues growing, and yet only 20% of people are thriving. Twenty-two percent are burnt out, and 60% are stressed. What’s going wrong? Why are we not making progress?

Dr. Michelle McQuaid:

 I don’t know if we’re not making progress—let’s play with that for a second. I think context matters. The context over the last 20 years—the period during which the fields of positive psychology and positive organizational scholarship have been doing their work—has shifted dramatically.

Context matters, and context keeps changing along this journey, so it’s going to challenge us in new ways.

The second piece to that is: What does success look like here? What are we playing for? Is it increased levels of thriving? Increased levels of happiness?

For me personally, when I went to do the Master’s in Positive Psychology, I had a professional interest—how do I help people thrive as they work and navigate change? But I also had a very personal interest. From the time I was a little girl, when adults would ask, “What do you want to be when you grow up?” I would say, “Happy.”

They’d look at me like I didn’t understand the question. “No, what are you going to do? Are you going to be a teacher or a firefighter?” And I’d say, “I want to do things that will make me happy.” They thought something was wrong with me—it seemed so simple.

As a kid, it felt like the easiest thing in the world. I went about life trying to tick all the boxes we’re told will make us happy: good career, financial security, physical health, people to love. On paper, by the time I was 35, life looked great—but I was exhausted trying to keep up with that life, and it wasn’t making me happy.

When I came across positive psychology, I thought, Okay, there’s a science to happiness. I’ll go to school, figure this out, and then I’ll know what it is. But what I realized about halfway through my master’s is that perhaps there was something more valuable than happiness that I was playing for.

I started to understand that for all of us, life naturally has ebbs and flows—highs and lows. We’ll have moments of happiness and moments of despair. Moments when we’re lost, when we feel like it’s all falling apart and we don’t know if we’ll ever get back up again.

The master’s really taught me how to navigate the highs and the lows. How to have the confidence that in the moments when things were great, I could savor and enjoy them without worrying about the bottom falling out. And in the moments when I was on my knees, unsure if I’d ever get up again, I knew I had the knowledge, tools, and support to find my way through that learning and back out the other side.

So, I agree—if we’re measuring thriving purely as “I’m feeling on top of the world” or happiness as a constant state, it looks like we’re making no progress in moving that population curve. But if we think of the goal as building people’s confidence—so they have the knowledge, tools, and support to navigate life’s highs and lows and back themselves through it—then I’d actually say we are making progress.

The kind of conversations and the level of interest we’re seeing now is unlike anything I’ve seen in the last 15 years. I see incremental improvements.

One last thing that had a big impact on me was a conversation with Dr. Barbara Fredrickson a few years ago. It was not long after my dad had passed away from melanoma cancer. She asked, “Hey Shell, how are you doing right now?”

I said, “Well, right now, Barb, I’m just focused on functioning. I’m trying to get out of bed every morning, do some exercise, eat some food, and see if I can get a decent night’s sleep. If I can tick those things off, I’m doing okay.”

She said, “Michelle, that sounds exactly like you’re flourishing in this moment—not just functioning—because you’ve thought about your context and you’re showing up in a way that is healthy and appropriate for the moment you’re in.”

So what does thriving look like? What does happiness really mean? Is it just being on top of the world, or is it our ability to navigate the highs and lows that this super cycle of change will require from all of us in a way we’ve never seen before over this next decade?

Ashish Kothari:

I love that. I think when I talk about thriving and happiness, I always say that in our work, we want to help people cultivate a state of joyfulness rather than joy. Because I can be joyful even in suffering.

In fact, sometimes when I’m lifting weights and it’s painful, and afterward I’m sore, I’m joyful. I’m in pain—but I’m doing it because I know I’m growing through it.

Dr. Michelle McQuaid:

 There’s the bittersweet element to it—it’s bitter and sweet.

Ashish Kothari:

Exactly. I always think about it that way. And I also look at this field—I’ve been in it now for about 10 years—and I see all the research that’s caught up and all the conversations, like the ones you’re leading.

Dr. Michelle McQuaid:

 Yeah.

Ashish Kothari:

There are more and more people talking about mental health and stress, but when we look at the 20% thriving point—not in terms of feeling on top of the world, but the four key elements.

We did this research at McKinsey where only 15% of people find meaning at work, especially on the frontline, on something that you’re spending the majority of your waking hours on. Then it is creating a level of suffering. People aren’t thriving because they don’t have meaning. It’s one of the core elements of PERMA.

When people aren’t growing, they feel stuck, stagnant, unseen. They’re not satisfied with their work. Satisfaction levels are at an all-time low.

When you have 60% of people experiencing stress because of workloads, work pressure, time pressure, feeling like they can’t break away and can’t separate work and life—because again, they don’t find meaning—work and life are too distinct.

For me, they’re the same. I don’t think about them differently. But for many, leaders haven’t done the work to infuse meaning in what people are doing. It’s a constant battle.

I think about this a lot because I see these measures. We were looking at this when I was at the firm; I’ve been looking at it now, and all of these indicators are actually lower. At least in the U.S., the whole origin of “Thank God it’s Friday” is real. “I’m glad it’s Friday. I’m not glad it’s Monday.” The highest number of heart attacks are on Mondays.

I think about how we get more leaders to do that journey from the head to the heart. All the research exists on why we need to do it—for performance and to alleviate human suffering.

We know the research. We have all the tools—20 plus years between Michigan and UPenn and all the other great individuals who’ve been doing this research. We have the tools and the knowledge, but I don’t see people practicing it and embedding it in organizations.

My other reflection is: we are in a period of unprecedented change, this polycrisis. But if we step back, nobody is doing this to us.

Dr. Michelle McQuaid:

No.

Ashish Kothari:

We are creating it. That was the thesis behind my book Hardwired for Happiness. The original title of the book was actually From Fear to Freedom: A Journey from Within to Live Your Best Life.

What I hold is, one, the environment is constantly pushing us more toward fear—where we operate in a scarce, closed, focus-on-self, here-and-now mode. But also, when we’ve created a situation where the place we spend the majority of our time leaves us stressed and in suffering, we are not in a place to create anything different for others.

I go back to climate change. The science is clear—in 30 years it’s going to be irreversible—and yet we’re not moving fast enough. In the U.S., we are reversing 20 plus years of progress. I grew up reading The Lexus and the Olive Tree, and we are literally reversing globalization—after Brexit in Europe as well.

I feel the origin of this is individual. Yes, the environment is shaping us, but we are also creating it because we are operating out of fear and stress circuits—below the line most of the time—versus in a state of flourishing and above the line.

Dr. Michelle McQuaid:

My experience—a sample of one over the last 15 years, being deeply immersed in this work—is that I see more awareness and practice in a percentage of people than I’ve ever seen before.

If I think about where it was 15 years ago to where it is now, I do see a shift happening. Not fast enough, not wide enough, not consistently enough—absolutely. But I do see shifts. I think about contagion effects and tipping points—how far do we go?

For me personally, what motivated me coming out of my master’s was: how do I put the science of all of this into as many hands as possible, in the most affordable and effective ways I can? I truly believed 15 years ago that the future of the world depended on this—on me, on you, on all of us listening—being out in the world doing that, because I could see what was coming, environmentally and otherwise, at least in some regard.

When these moments of change come, will we navigate them from places of fear and scarcity, or from places of community and supporting each other the best we can? The die is still to be cast as to how we’re doing. Like you, I’m cautious and nervous and a little anxious about what I see in this moment of change, particularly in places like America and Europe.

I’m fortunate here in Australia. We have our share of challenges, but we also recently had an election where two leaders both talked about kindness and treating each other with respect and integrity.

Again, we are not perfect by any means, but there was a pulling towards community rather than away from each other. That gave me some hope. But there’s no good living in a bubble in a global world—the bubble will burst sooner or later as we all interact.

I see signs of hope. Whether the contagion and the tipping point come fast enough for what’s ahead—the jury is still out. All I can do every day is show up and keep planting those seeds wherever someone is willing to listen—just as you are on the podcast—wherever a leader or a workplace is willing to have that conversation.

The good news is we see many more of us, so much research, so many books, so many beautiful podcasts talking about similar things. Each morning I get out of bed with hope that maybe today will make a bit more difference. That’s all we can do in the midst of it.

I do think people are scared. People numb pain. We often lack confidence that we are resilient—that nature wired us for learning, growth, and adaptation. Instead of stepping into learning and growth, we numb it or avoid it, or expect somebody else to come and fix it. Then we elect dictators.

There is a piece here about trusting ourselves to stop abandoning ourselves over and over, to trust that we are perfectly imperfect—nature wired us for learning and growth. We can figure this out with each other, but we have to keep choosing to do the work and not opt out. Otherwise, the pain will be much greater on the other side of all of this.

Ashish Kothari:

 I love that. That’s why I jumped into this field. After 17 years at McKinsey—10 years as a partner—I had a choice. To your point, I had designed the perfect mousetrap for me. In my last five years at the firm, I worked 36 hours a week. I traveled one night a week. I was working on the field I cared about.

I came to a point where I thought, I can do this for another seven or eight years, but the level of change I’d get to drive from there—given our economic model and priorities—would be like scratching the surface versus what was needed.

As I reflected on my son, who was 12 at that point (he’s 15 now), and I reflected on legacy and the future we all want our children to have—to flourish and do well—I felt that adding more to the bank account and living a comfortable life was worse than jumping into the fray and taking my learnings from driving at-scale, sustainable transformations in operations, and figuring out a way to bring that into this.

Figuring out a way to use the language and business thinking I’d learned, combined with this, to see if we can move the needle, accelerate it, and get more people to adopt. Very similar to you, Michelle—that became my rallying cry.

And yet, when I see those numbers and stats and the slow progress, it makes me even more passionate and brings a sense of urgency and conviction: if we don’t do this, if we don’t figure it out—this is the best we can do. If we solve this—flourishing is the point—then we will disentangle all the other crises we’ve created. The origin of all of those is the human—which state are we operating from? In the end, that’s going to decide what we create.

Dr. Michelle McQuaid:

 I agree. I think part of this is learning to value something more than money. And I say that as someone who grew up in poverty—I understand how big that fear can be when you don’t have enough of it.

I also think it keeps us trapped in patterns, jobs, and behaviors of fear. We only get our freedom back when we decide there is something more important than money to be played for. That doesn’t mean money doesn’t matter, but that I’m going to value something higher than just money alone in how I live my life and prioritize things. I think that’s a big piece of this.

Ashish Kothari:

So Shell, I have a question for you. As I think about your change experience—you’re a really experienced change leader, you’re a systemic thinker, and you’re deeply in the field of flourishing.

There are a lot of leaders who will listen to this and—even if they say, “Yeah, this makes sense”—they’re afraid to take it forward and actually do something with it. In your client work, how have you built the business case, but more importantly, the conviction of leaders to actually do something at an organizational level to make this a reality for their people?

Dr. Michelle McQuaid:

Typically, I try to find the issues in the business that I can hook onto, because then I don’t have to make the business case—they already know there’s a need or a pain point. Then, I look at how to integrate the solution we all work toward every day into that fit.

Before the global pandemic, especially in Australian workplaces, there was a growing focus on wellbeing. It was often framed as being an employer of choice. If you wanted to attract great people, you needed to be clear about what you were doing for wellbeing. There was a bit of concern around burnout at that time, but it was more about saying, “Hey, we are a great workplace. Come join us. We invest in people’s wellbeing.”

At that time, when I went in to make the business case, it was around helping them attract and retain great talent. We helped organizations teach wellbeing, measure it, and train leaders to lead it. That was the hook.

During the global pandemic, wellbeing became critical—especially as people were working from home. The main topic we taught during that time was rest and recovery, because people were struggling so greatly.

Coming out of the pandemic, here in Australia we’ve had new laws introduced where workplaces and leaders can actually be fined, and even jailed in extreme cases, if they are not doing everything reasonably practicable to minimize the risk of emotional and social hazards—things like unachievable job demands, poor workplace relationships, or poor change management.

Now that there’s a legal requirement, we’ve hooked onto that piece to say: how do you prepare leaders to do this? “Hey CEOs, you are personally on the hook. Boards, you are on the hook. Do you know what this is and what you need to do?”

We found that one in two employees said, “I’m quietly cracking right now.” When we asked what that meant, they said, “On the outside, I’m working so hard to hold it all together, but I’m hiding the fact that on the inside, I’m falling apart.” We discovered that this was a precursor to burnout. If you were quietly cracking, you were six times more likely to end up burned out.

So again, right now, we’re in that change piece. I’m always trying to understand: what’s the current challenge in organizations, and how do I support it? It’s always the same solution in the background, but how do I meet the moment and hook what I can offer to the real business need, rather than fabricating one that’s not actually on the leadership agenda?

Ashish Kothari:

Well, Shell, I love those. Thank you.

Dr. Michelle McQuaid:

You’re welcome.

Ashish Kothari:

 We’ll wrap up with one question—and one hope for me. My hope is to figure out a way to come see you in person or meet somewhere. I wish you weren’t all the way across the globe, because I would reach through the screen and give you a hug. Your energy, positivity, optimism, hope, and passion are infectious. I’d love to figure out how we can collaborate together.

But my question starts from there: what are your personal non-negotiable practices? Despite 15 years of doing this work—when you started, this wasn’t even part of common language—and even now, it’s still hard. Change is hard and slow. I know you’d want it to be faster, and I would too.

What are some practices that help you fill your cup, renew, recharge, and just be this positive beacon of light—your heliotropic self, to borrow a word from Kim?

Dr. Michelle McQuaid:

 Absolutely. I’m very fortunate here in Australia—the beach is about a five-minute walk from the end of my street, where I’m headed right after this with the dog. I try every morning, around sunrise, to be down on that beach. I walk, and at the end of it, I draw a circle in the sand. I think of it as my circle of love, but it also reminds me that I’m part of this big, beautiful, mad world.

I step inside it, sit down, and put my hands into the sand. Here in Australia, our First Nations people—our Aboriginal people—have a beautiful wellbeing practice around connection to the country. This grounding practice of hands in the sand reminds us of that connection to country, to Mother Earth, to the living energy we’re all part of.

That’s how each day starts. It’s also where I try to be at sunset—to do my safety check chat: what went well today? Where did I struggle? What did I learn? What will I take forward? I give gratitude and thanks and take a moment of savoring as I connect back to the country.

It’s a great way to remember how tiny I really am in the scheme of things, but also that we’re all just stardust here—doing the best we can each day—and that I get another shot at it tomorrow.

Ashish Kothari:

Wow. Beautiful. Thank you, my friend. It’s been such a joy to be with you, to hear you, and I’m setting an intention to figure out a way to find you and meet you in the next 12 months.

Dr. Michelle McQuaid:

 Awesome. I look forward to helping make that intention a reality—and giving you a proper hug.

Ashish Kothari:

Thank you for all the important work you’re doing and have been doing for so long. Be well.

Dr. Michelle McQuaid:

Thank you. You too.