Understanding AQ and the Changing World
Melina Palmer: Welcome to episode 591 of The Brainy Business: Understanding the Psychology of Why People Buy. In today’s episode, I’m excited to introduce you to Liz Tran, author of AQ. Ready?
Melina Palmer: Let’s get started.
Announcer: You are listening to The Brainy Business Podcast where we dig into the psychology of why people buy and help you incorporate behavioral economics into your business, making it more brain friendly. Now, here’s your host, Melina Palmer.
Melina Palmer: Hello. Hello, everyone.
Melina Palmer: My name is Melina Palmer and I want to welcome you to The Brainy Business Podcast.
Melina Palmer: You’ve definitely heard of IQ and you’ve probably heard of EQ, but have you ever heard of AQ?
Melina Palmer: My guest today is Liz Tran, author of the new book AQ: A New Kind of Intelligence for a World That’s Always Changing. Liz is the founder of Inner Genius and a leadership coach to CEOs and founders of some of the world’s fastest growing companies. She’s worked with companies like Facebook, Instagram, Outdoor Voices, and the Ford Foundation. And her transformative work has been featured by The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Today Show, Bloomberg, Entrepreneur, Fast Company, and more. Today she brings engaging and interactive workshops to startups and Fortune 500 companies, speaking to employees about how to avoid burnout, build unshakable confidence, and unleash their inner genius. An expert in unlocking employee potential in the modern workplace, Liz is redefining what it means to be an exceptional leader. And of course, that includes having a high AQ. I’m going to let her share all about what it is and how it works in our conversation today, but I’m guessing you can agree that our world is always changing and if you want to be better at changing with it or hire people who are more likely to be responsive to change or just generally be more thoughtful about change, something has been missing in identifying what’s underlying all that, and Liz is going to show you what it is really quickly. Before we get into the conversation, I want to be sure you know that there are links in the show notes for my top related past episodes and books, ways to get in touch, and more. It’s all waiting for you in the app you’re listening to and at thebrainybusiness.com/591.
Now let’s jump right in. Liz Tran, welcome to The Brainy Business Podcast.
Liz Tran: Thank you for having me, Melina.
Melina Palmer: Yes.
Melina Palmer: I’m so excited to have you here today. As I mentioned, I saw the topic of the work in the book and was like, yes, yes, yes, a million times. And I can’t wait to dig into that. But before we do, for everyone who doesn’t yet know you, can you share a little bit about yourself and the work that you do?
Liz Tran: Absolutely. I am an executive coach, so I coach CEOs and founders of fast-growing tech companies. In my prior life before that, I worked at a venture capital firm. So I was an executive, not on the investing side, but concerned with how to get the greatest performance from all the leaders and founders in our portfolio. And now I’m also an author, so I wrote a book called The Karma of Success, which is about the intersection of business and Eastern spirituality. And then my newest book that we’re talking about today is called AQ. And it’s about a new third intelligence that matters more in this modern world than IQ or EQ.
Melina Palmer: Yes.
Melina Palmer: And all the yes to all of that. I think most people listening have probably heard of… Well, you know, if we do 80/20s, right? Like pretty much everybody’s heard of the IQ piece and maybe know some of what it stands for, how it came about, EQ a few less, and then, you know, AQ being brand new. Can you give a little bit of that definition and background just to help it be fresh in everyone’s mind and how you kind of deduced that something like AQ was necessary to layer in and be that third space?
Liz Tran: Yeah, absolutely. And maybe just to even go back in time a little bit: 130 years ago, that was when IQ was born. And most people don’t know that. I think they think it kind of is a given that it’s existed for far longer. But it emerged from France when kids were mandated to go to school, and suddenly the French government needed a way to sort, rank them, and then put them into the right classrooms regardless of age. So they needed a cognitive horsepower assessment. And that became the Stanford-Binet IQ test, which has been sort of the go-to in the US for the past hundred-plus years. And it happened to coincide with a time when we were moving from an agrarian to an industrial society. So more governing bodies, big bodies of people, needed to use this. So the military is one—they suddenly were like, “Okay, we can use this as part of our entrance exam,” and the government for civil service. So IQ sort of became the de facto understanding of intelligence. And we didn’t always think of it that way; it’s relatively new and kind of ushered in on the backs of industrialization.
Then 35 years ago is when EQ happened. 1990 was when the term was first coined, and then it was popularized in 1995 with Daniel Goleman’s book. But it wasn’t until that moment that we really needed EQ, because the world was moving into knowledge work. So suddenly it wasn’t just about the work that you did, but also how you helped others to collaborate to do their work. And we were also moving into the era of globalization. So, could you work with someone who lived in a different country, with a totally different culture? So those values or those tenets of EQ—of communication, interpersonal skills—those only really became important where we needed a term to describe that intelligence in the 1990s.
And now here we are. It’s a very different time period from 1899 or 1990, and we’re in an era of a new technology revolution that I think all of us are feeling or thinking about in some way. And on top of that, we’re experiencing unprecedented levels of change all across the board. The Federal Reserve has this metric that they release every month to describe how uncertain global trade is. And for the past 10 years, it’s hovered around 85. And then this past year, it jumped up to 900. So that’s a 10x increase in just a year of a number that’s been relatively stiff. Exactly. Oh, no. So I think we all feel that change is no longer linear, it’s exponential. So I wanted to write a book that captured that. AQ stands for your agility quotient. And just very briefly, it’s your capacity to handle change, uncertainty, and disappointment without losing your footing.
Melina Palmer: Mm. Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, everybody… You know, we’ve all heard where it’s like “the only constant is change” sort of aspect of things, but knowing that change is layering to where… So actually, in my second book, What Your Employees Need and Can’t Tell You, I make the argument essentially that every conversation and interaction is one of change. As you’re working with your teams and saying, there are so many ripples to it, right? So you’re either in the wake of a change that’s already happened, and it’s communication, you’re presently having a conversation about a change that’s happening, or you’re in the wake of change yet to come, and it’s like all those. Or like you’re setting off the ripple of that change that’s coming next. So, like, you have to be able to navigate all these different aspects, and know that they’re intersecting in a way that they just are layering. And as things are more complex, there’s just so much. And humans are really… While in some ways we’re, you know, wired to be adaptable, we’re also really rooted in our status quo and familiarity bias and all of those things. And so, you know, where we can’t like, click and evolve immediately, understanding those agility quotients, and like where we’re starting from and some steps to take is really helpful for people, for sure.
Melina Palmer: Yeah.
Liz Tran: And I think you nailed it, where everything is change management these days. And I think it’s not even about burnout anymore—what employees are experiencing is change fatigue because it requires so much mental work to grasp and process a change. And we can do it. Obviously, like, we’re very skilled at it. I think humans are naturally born very agile, but we’re just getting inundated with it now.
And I love that that’s what you wrote about because that is something that it’s really important for employers and leaders to put themselves in the shoes of employees who haven’t had time to think about the change as much as you have. I always joke around that if you’re getting broken up with, it’s always more shocking for you because the person who’s doing the breaking up with has thought about it for months and they’ve processed it. Maybe you’re aligned with them, but they’ve just had more time. And same thing with the leadership team that is making the change. They’ve been running scenarios and risk models and debating it, and by the time they announce it, they’re kind of over that. But remembering the employees are not—they’re just hearing it for the first time.
Melina Palmer: Well, and people forget how they felt when they first thought about it, right? It’s so easy. And that, when you’ve been in the boardroom and like you said, talking about it for sometimes six months or more, like really debating and all the conversation you’ve had and all the water cooler fears or whatever you’ve had with the coworkers in that C-suite or wherever else in management, like, we just like, gloss over by the time you’re ready to present it. And like, “Why isn’t everybody on board?” Like, you should just… I said it once and like, they shall follow. And like, that’s just not how humans work by any means. So as we think about change… I know so we’ve got a couple of really amazing layers and aspects to what you share in the book and kind of the framework, methodology, approach—like things to think about here.
Navigating Disruptions with the CHURN Framework
Melina Palmer: If we can, before we get to the types, I think because we’re talking about like the nature of change, if we were to talk a little bit about CHURN, like a way to think about changes as they come, and then we can talk about like how different types might react to it, if that works for you to kind of jump in so we can start to kind of classify and understand like how change can kind of work.
Liz Tran: Absolutely. I came up with an acronym called CHURN because I wanted people to be able to create some distance between these events that really knock us over. So CHURN, broadly, is anything that sort of gets us off of our daily path, right? It interrupts our status quo way of doing things, and oftentimes it feels very hard to deal with. Not always—it’s more of a neutral thing, but that’s our association with it. And the reason why I wanted to break it down into different component pieces is because I think we tend to have the same reaction: we can often get into fight or flight, whether or not we are actually at risk of dying or not, right? Fight or flight was originally an evolutionary reflex because we were being chased by a saber-toothed tiger. But it’s hard for us to differentiate now between what is actually putting us, in our physical physicality, at risk versus something that just feels really scary.
So the C in CHURN stands for change—anything that’s a shift from one thing to another. Again, not inherently bad, but when taken in too much volume, you get that change fatigue that can lead to burnout-like exhaustion, inability to see the world objectively, even a lack of confidence in yourself—like losing sort of that sense of self-possession, losing a sense of excitement for the work that you’re doing. So very similar to burnout symptoms.
H stands for hiccups. So these are the small things in life, like the internet goes out, or your Uber cancels, or you have a weird conversation with a friend. And again, none of these are a big deal. But for instance, if you’re experiencing lots and lots of change, you can be very activated, and so suddenly just a little hiccup happens, but it’s like that on top of already a mountain. It’s the cherry on top and can really tip you over sometimes.
Then U stands for uncertainty. This rattles some people more than others, depending on, as you said, what archetype you are and what is your need for certainty.
R stands for rupture, like a tire rupturing on the highway. These are really big experiences that come out of nowhere. I was catching up with a very healthy young friend on Monday, and he was hit by a car while he was riding his bike, and that was a rupture. But then he went to the hospital, they did a scan to see if he had internal bleeding, and they said, “You actually have lymphoma,” which really was two ruptures back-to-back. But it’s kind of those things that you never anticipate them coming; there’s no way to even guess that either of those things would happen.
And then finally, the last thing is newness, which is honestly my favorite pillar of CHURN. And again, when we have a lot of C, H, U, R, any sort of newness can also feel traumatizing, stressful—we don’t want it. But it’s not inherently bad; it’s just about what amount we’re getting. And I create this acronym so that we can sort of distance ourselves a little bit, intellectualize things that are happening to us, and put them in these T-shirt sizes of small, medium, large so that we know that the brain can take over—the prefrontal cortex versus that more reptile part of our brain that’s just like, “Ah, all of this is scary, crazy!” We can say, “Okay, actually why don’t I call on my ability to think through this and actually size this correctly and then give it the appropriate emotional response?”
Melina Palmer: Absolutely. And it’s so helpful to see in that aspect of those layers of CHURN, right, to know that like change is not the same as a rupture, which is not necessarily like a hiccup. All of them are kind of around all the time and we’re like living in all these sort of aspects. Maybe not in the… But we want to be like able to navigate the uncertainty so that if there’s a rupture we’re prepared, but we’re not like dwelling and totally secluding ourselves so that we never get anything done, and helping teams too to make sure we don’t overload them. Like, you know, there’s so many projects and priorities and things and whatever.
Melina Palmer: And like, I’ll tell people it’s like being in a change-ready organization doesn’t mean that like we never know what’s going to happen, and we’re constantly layering changes on top of each other. Actually having some structure and like some stability and knowing like, let’s not throw in the hiccups when there’s a rupture. Like, we’ll wait for those, you know, to use some of your language there. Being thoughtful to what people already have on their plate within a team and also with your own self, right? Like maybe I don’t need to try to like change up my whole like diet and exercise plan while I’ve got this big uncertainty at work. And like maybe you do—maybe it’s actually going to help you get through it. But being able to be thoughtful to how those things can align or might be derailing and like understanding your priorities, that’s there. I like having those sort of… It’s not even like buckets, it’s like lenses or angles and where you can also say if something feels really overwhelming, but you can say, you know, actually though, this is really just a hiccup. And so maybe I’m not going to give it as much attention. It’s kind of annoying, but I’m going to just like move along because I can easily adapt or change or it can be undone if I need to. I can always like buy the other thing that’s $5 instead of this one or, you know, whatever it is.
Melina Palmer: Right?
Liz Tran: Yeah, absolutely. When I was on book tour for AQ, you know, I was between 36 and 39 weeks pregnant, and I actually decided I was not going to let hiccups bother me because I already had so much change going on and I really needed to reserve. And also a lot of uncertainty that I couldn’t control. And so I kind of said to myself, “I’m not going to let myself be bothered by newness or hiccups because I guarantee you, being in your late third trimester and getting on planes, there’s going to be a rupture at some point.” Hopefully it’s not your water—it’s like another rupture. And I just thought, “You know, crazy things are going to happen; I’m putting myself in that situation. So I am high-canny.” If I’m like, “That’s a hiccup, that’s newness—fine, we’ll put that in its compartment, we’ll let it go.” And I agree with you, the same thing is true at work. Let’s say you have an entire new leadership team: why not just hold off on introducing a new process or system? Just give people a little time.
Melina Palmer: Right? Yeah. And especially if you didn’t plan it all together and message around it in that way, right? It’s one thing to say like, “We’re doing this, it’s a package of stuff,” and because we want the leadership to be able to… And like for you to have an influence on the system, we’re going to roll them out together because… And you can present it as a package of stuff. If it’s like, “Here’s a new leadership,” and then like a week later, “And like, just kidding! Now we have this other thing you have to deal with,” like, that’s no good.
Liz Tran: Yes, yes.
Melina Palmer: And I think from what you were saying too, like knowing that like one person’s hiccup could be your rupture, and that’s like okay too, right? So it’s what it is for you. I bet there were people listening that are like, “Oh my gosh, like traveling when I’m 39 weeks pregnant, that’s a very… That’s too stressful, and like that’s not hiccup territory for me.” I know we were kind of bonding over… I was six months pregnant with my son when What Your Customer Wants and Can’t Tell You came out, and so we’re like very, you know, similar, but you were, you know, further along for sure with that. But yeah, just being like kind of ready for the waves of change.
Liz Tran: For sure. Yes. The person I think about when you said that is the Free Solo guy, Alex Honnold—the guy who climbed that 101-story building in Taipei without any rope or any support. A hiccup to him is probably a giant… Like even the thing that he just does normally, he’s not even sweating! All of us are watching, and people are like, “I can’t even watch this!” And he’s like… I just see this guy.
Melina Palmer: Yeah, for that is a really great example.
Melina Palmer: Like…
Melina Palmer: And I never ever want to be at the point… Like, all praise to Free Solo guy—I forget, I think I know you just said his name, but I just say Free Solo, right? But like I remember watching… My husband wanted to watch that documentary, and I was like, “I don’t think I can even watch this because it’s so stressful for me to just see it.” So I know I’ll never be to that point where any of those things are just a hiccup for me, and I can accept that and have my own things that I’ll work on being hiccups. And I bet there are things that would feel really stressful for him that are not necessarily for other people, right? So that perspective is important.
The Four Archetypes of AQ
Melina Palmer: How do we know what type of people we are? Are there categories? Of course, you know, I know from reading the book, but, you know, I’m setting you up.
Liz Tran: Yes, yes, absolutely. I love this. There are four archetypes: there’s the Astronaut, the Neurosurgeon, the Firefighter, and the Novelist. And they all handle CHURN in different ways, and they all have unique talents for dealing with that CHURN and helping others in their lives deal with it, too. So you can kind of think of them as flavors of your superpower. And also, you know, just as we all do, there’s the flip side where we have a little bit of deficiencies as well attached to our strengths.
So we’ll start with my favorite—it’s not my type, but what I hope to be reincarnated as in my next life—the Astronaut, which is prototypically what we think of when we think of high AQ. So think of an astronaut floating off in space: they are at the edge of the known world, you know, they’re innovators, they have a vision for the way that they see the world and for their mission. And astronauts, the archetype, are the same way: they love change. In fact, they’re so used to change and taking risk that they might not even clock it, or other people will say like, “How did you do that?” I have a friend who’s an Astronaut, and people always say, “How do you get the courage to wear such bold clothing?”
Melina Palmer: And…
Liz Tran: And she’s like, “This is… I don’t even recognize that as risk, I’m just being myself.” And they care about passion and authenticity. And so in a corporate setting or at work, they tend to be really good at moonshots, innovation, and anything that requires sort of a leap of faith. And they also make great managers because they help their teams understand the bigger picture and vision. And the downside is that they may not be as in the details; they also might be so ahead of everyone else and not willing to slow down that people can get lost. So I say, as an Astronaut, just try to keep your visions within kind of one standard deviation of what everyone else is thinking. Slow down so that they can catch up with you, because when you can do that and learn to explain your vision in bite-sized pieces, you become your greatest potential, which is this really inspiring, inspirational leader.
The opposite of the Astronaut also can be incredibly high AQ, but less associated. You know, people generally think of the Neurosurgeon as slow. They’re very detailed, they care about excellence, they’re perfectionists. And they are slow because they generally push themselves to a higher standard than other people do. But where the Neurosurgeon becomes extremely high AQ is that when they finally do decide that they want something, they will never give up. They’re resilient, they’re gritty, and most of the other types would have moved on, but they really stick it through, and in and of itself that can be the highest form of agility. And I think of them as… The metaphor is picture a giant cruise ship, you know, one of those ships that has 15,000 people on it. To turn it requires so much force and so much time, but great power. And that’s what the Neurosurgeon does: they can create these amazing, massive, meaningful changes in this world because they are the ones with the patience to see it through.
Then the next type is my type—I’m the Novelist. Just as a novelist sits at their desk and plots out exactly what happens, the Novelist wants to predict their own life. I get very upset if I don’t have a plan. I love sitting down and knowing exactly what my next few months is going to look like. Like I always make a calendar that’s color-coded, and I do a lot of research—I want all the data. And when things do not go according to plan though, it’s infuriating, it’s frustrating, I get very overwhelmed. So I used to just be in pieces if a flight would get canceled, especially if there was like a pretty tight agenda. And conversely, nothing is more satisfying than when I have a very detailed agenda and everything goes exactly to plan. So it’s tough in this world because I think we’re experiencing more and more hiccups, and Novelists need to learn to befriend hiccups—that’s kind of their growth area.
The opposite and the last archetype is called the Firefighter. So just as the Novelist is horrible at unexpected, spontaneous hiccups, that’s where the Firefighter excels. They’re great in emergency situations, they thrive in chaos, and they’re very good at out-of-the-box problem-solving. But unlike the Novelist, they’re not so good about being planful, researched, intentional, because they have these skills that are ad hoc. They think, “Oh, why should I make a plan when everything is going to change anyway?” So you can see how each of the four types really excels in specific areas, and how if you know the type that your colleagues are or your family members are, you can learn how to lean on each other when a different skillset is required.
Melina Palmer: Absolutely.
Melina Palmer: I love hearing about them. And of course, you know, there’s so much more information about each of the types and how they interact and respond to CHURN and how to like lean into being more agile, having a higher AQ. If it’s not… Because everybody kind of… Humans naturally, we’re wired for that status quo, right? Like we like to have some novelty, of course, and be doing something, but in kind of these different ways. And so then being able to identify what you are so you can understand how you might naturally respond to some of the CHURN and where you might have issues, so then you have some tactics to move forward. For everybody who’s listening, I’m guessing it’s like, “Ooh, I love those aspects, I want to be that, but I’m kind of this too, but like that resonated with me.” What’s the best way as someone’s going to figure out, like, “Am I an Astronaut or a Novelist?” You know, how can you help them as they figure out what type they are?
Liz Tran: There is a quiz you can take in the book and you can also take it online at aqquiz.com. And what I will say is that many people do feel that they are two types, and the reason why is that it shows up contextually. We often are different at home than we are at work, or maybe in a different group of friends, like with your family of origin or with your community. And also, unlike a lot of personality inventories that are stagnant—for instance, according to Myers-Briggs, you cannot change over time—the AQ archetypes account for this. You know, people are always changing. And what I have noticed that’s interesting is that when I work with people through the archetypes, I hear a lot of people say, “I used to be X, but now I’m a Firefighter.” And I think it’s because the world really demands that skill right now, when, you know, maybe 50 years ago, being a Neurosurgeon would have been better rewarded. And so it’s interesting to see how even sometimes people will feel like, at their core, growing up, they were always a certain default type, but then the way that their life has shaped out has just required them to change that.
Melina Palmer: Absolutely. Well, we’ll definitely have a link so that people can take that quiz, and of course, links to the book and all those things.
Melina Palmer: Before we close out the conversation, though, there’s these additional dynamic things to be thinking about of like: How do we get out of some of those changes? So like we said, we’ve got the types that are aligned with that great visual of saying like, “Oh, I’m an Astronaut,” which I know I mentioned I believe I would be an Astronaut. But like, I think there’s interesting aspects in so many…
Liz Tran: I think you’re 100% an Astronaut. Yay!
Melina Palmer: I know we were chatting a bit before, but I feel… and very fitting that The Brainy Business logo’s a rocket, right? It’s kind of meant to be.
Liz Tran: And when I was describing that specific aspect of the Astronaut where a lot of other people would consider what you do risky, but the Astronaut’s like, “Wait, no, this is just what I would do”—like if there’s not even that calculation. And so even I think, you know, the podcast itself and the speed at which you write, I think has this sort of Astronaut quality of like not doubting yourself. That’s actually what’s cool about the Astronauts: they’re so fast. And so if anyone listening is wondering if they are an Astronaut, if people around you say, “Wow, that was really fast,” or “Can you please slow down?”, you’re probably an Astronaut. Ooh.
Melina Palmer: All right, good. Good tip there as we figured that out. So, I love that. And so we’ve got our types in those great visuals that we can say, like, I know what a Neurosurgeon is, so do I identify with that versus a Firefighter, right? That’s great. And then we’ve got our CHURN acronym, but we’ve also got some ABCDs. Can you give us that little piece as we go to… Big piece, but that insight as we close out the conversation?
Raising Your AQ with the ABCD Method
Liz Tran: Absolutely. A stands for Anchors. And this is a little counterintuitive because it’s all about stability. But to be agile, you actually have to have stability. And what I mean by that is that anchors are the people—your friends, your family; the places—like your home or third space; and then the routines that ground you. And we really, really, really need this. It’s what you were saying before, where in the workplace, if you’ve heaped a lot of change on your team, maybe give them a little bit of stability to balance it out. And it’s the same thing for ourselves where if work feels very uncertain, then we should actually try to create more stability for ourselves at home, and vice versa.
This is especially important because I think all of us naturally have anchors in our lives, but we tend to toss them out the window when we are in periods of overwhelm and CHURN. So remembering that these practices or these people, they’re not frivolous, they’re not a waste of time—they’re so important to our growth and to our resilience in times of CHURN, and we need to prioritize them. So, you know, when it gets busy, it’s hard to say, “Oh yeah, I’m going to make time to see my friends, or meet up with my mentor, or to make that cup of tea in the afternoon and read a book.” But this is your encouragement to double down on those anchors when you are really in the middle of it.
Melina Palmer: And so the anchors, sorry, they can be people, they can be like kind of those rituals, processes, sort of like a mental tradition. Like you said, it’s that “I go for a walk at 2 o’clock every day,” or “This is when I have my cup of tea,” or that kind of experience, which could be with yourself or with someone else, right? But like the thing that you do there. And then also maybe it’s like a stability in a role or a piece of your identity that’s outside of that—like any of those things could be anchors, and probably want a mix of those things in your life so that you have that space to be more agile when you know you have those roots and anchors.
Liz Tran: Exactly. And also places—so, your home. You know, I work with a lot of founders who are in their 20s and they came up from coding or from product and now they’re running early-stage startups. And when things are crazy, they feel really overwhelmed. I’m like, “What is your apartment like?”
And they’re like, “Oh, I sleep on a mattress on the floor. I don’t even have a dresser, I’m in the office half the time.”
And I just say, “No, you’ve got to get it together, because there has to be a base somewhere.” So even if your home doesn’t allow for that: a park, yoga studio, cafe—something that has a physical presence to it that is sturdy and steady.
Melina Palmer: Love it. Perfect. All right, so as we’re approaching… We’re working on that agility quotient, right? So the first thing we need to consider are the anchors—what’s balance?
Liz Tran: B stands for Bets. A bet is any action you take without knowing the outcome. So gambling, right? Like placing a bet at a roulette table, you don’t know if it’s going to be red or black, but you make a guess anyway. And that’s what a bet means: it’s to move forward even if you don’t know what’s going to happen. And bets and anchors go hand in hand because the more anchored you are, the more bets you can take. And we need to be betting all the time to be high-AQ people. In fact, betting is the number one way to raise your AQ.
And that can be a small bet, like listening to a new podcast you haven’t listened to before or trying out a new coffee shop, to a bigger bet, like reaching out to a friend you haven’t spoken to in 10 years, or even the biggest bet: moving to a new country where you don’t know anyone and don’t know the language, a career pivot, whatever it is. And so bets of all sizes count, but what they do is they actually widen the scope of your known universe. And that’s what we want to do in this world where we’re required to be agile: we need to be pushing our comfort zone constantly. So what I always say is that you’ve got to bet a lot, you’ve got to bet before you’re ready. So when people say, “When’s the right time to take a bet?”, I’m like, “Well, if you wait until you’re ready, you’re never going to take that bet, so you’re already too late.”
Melina Palmer: And it’s not really a bet if you know that you’re ready for it, right?
Liz Tran: Exactly, exactly! And then the last thing is you have to… It’s really a quantity game, so bet a lot and don’t worry about failure. In fact, if you’re focused on how many bets you’re taking, you’re not really thinking about the outcome. Don’t over-optimize for the outcome or success rate; you want to optimize for the number of shots you put on goal.
Melina Palmer: Love it. All right, so we’ve got our anchors, we’ve got bets. Let me roll into C and D.
Liz Tran: C is Classroom, and it’s the idea that everything that happens to you exists to teach you something. My favorite story about this mindset—this classroom mindset—is when Satya Nadella took over as CEO of Microsoft in 2014. There were many decisions he had to make and different strategies that he had to decide on, like are they going to sell off chunks of the business? Are they going to continue to not invest in mobile and social? But what he did first was to change the culture, because Microsoft employees were really stuck in their ways. And this change—he styled this as the switch from everyone being a “know-it-all,” an expert, to everyone becoming a “learn-it-all.” He wanted everyone to let go of this idea that they had to be the best, they had to have the right answer, and instead to make them curious, open, and to adopt a beginner’s mindset, even if they had been at the company for 10 years.
And I think that this is what we all need to be doing, especially the more senior you are, the longer you’ve been in your field: the more we will benefit when we put ourselves in the shoes of the student once again. And I love this one because I always ask myself if I’m taking the route to the greatest learning. Sometimes that’s not the fastest way or the easiest way, and oftentimes it’s not the most enjoyable way. But you want to set that as your reason for being—is to learn, not necessarily to succeed. And by way of learning, you will actually succeed. Look at Microsoft: since he took over and switched everyone to the learn-it-all mindset, its stock price has gone up dramatically, it became a leader in AI, and it really wasn’t innovating at all for a decade before he joined.
Melina Palmer: Well, we know that the listeners here on The Brainy Business are all about learning, and I am all about being a curious questioner and just being more thoughtful. There’s a reason we end every episode with “be thoughtful,” right? So we’re fans.
Liz Tran: Yes.
Melina Palmer: Perfect. Well, we’ve got our classroom layered in, and so let me go with the last one. What’s D?
Liz Tran: The last one is the one that most people dislike the most, and it’s D stands for Discomfort, because no one likes to feel bad or uncomfortable. But I think it’s actually the most important, and it is a reframing of discomfort to be something that’s good, to be something that we crave because it’s an indicator that you’re growing your AQ. Just as when we go for a workout or for a run, if you’re really feeling the burn in your muscles, you think, “Oh wow, I’m really growing stronger by the day.” And so is the same with your emotional state: if you’re really feeling that tension, that friction, it’s actually a really good sign and you need to celebrate yourself and go, “Woohoo, I’m growing my AQ! This is exciting!” Give yourself a treat, right? Celebrate that pain, celebrate that discomfort, because none of us ever got to where we’re going by keeping things completely comfortable.
And I think this one is very different from how society has oriented ourselves even the past five years. We spend 97% of our day in temperature-controlled environments. You can get anything you want on your phone in 15 minutes: you can get directions, you can find out any information. There has been so much less friction. And so a way that I describe exercising this pillar of discomfort is to “friction max”—create more friction in your life, or when you feel that friction, then to actually lean into it, because it is an indicator that you are becoming more and more agile and therefore more and more adept at life every single day.
And so I try to think about this in ways big and small. It was really cold outside this morning and I was waiting in a long line, and I just thought, “You know what? I’m growing my AQ, I’m working on my AQ.” You fail at a project and you think, “Great, I’m just growing my AQ. What can I learn from here?” And the big piece is that when you do experience disappointment, you actually reward yourself by how much time it takes to recover, so you’re optimizing for a shorter recovery time. This is the acceptance that we’re all going to experience ups and downs and disappointments, but where we can show our true character and where we can feel proud of ourselves is if we just let it go and move on.
Melina Palmer: Absolutely. I like to say “Elsa it,” you know, in the frozen land.
Liz Tran: “Elsa it.” I love that! A, B, C, D, E—Elsa it! Elsa it, yay!
Melina Palmer: Stuff’s always going to be happening and things don’t work out quite perfectly, but whether it’s that silver lining… You don’t have to be a rainbow-unicorn crazy person, right, to be in this sort of state, but what did we learn from that and how’s it going to help us? And I love leaning back into CHURN on some of that, too, right? So it’s like you’re never going to have more things that you can say are hiccups unless you experience them enough. It’s that exposure therapy, right, of being able to have enough of the changes to where they feel not fully mundane, right, but there’s a little bit of a, “Like, that was kind of a nuisance,” but you can celebrate that something can feel more like a hiccup that would have been a change or even a rupture in a previous version of yourself. And like helping to try to have more things that feel like hiccups, I guess, could be an approach, too, right?
Liz Tran: I love that! I have never thought about that before, but that’s exactly right. You can map your progress by your changing definition of each of the skills of CHURN. I love that.
Melina Palmer: Oh yeah! And I think… So you talk about, too, that you have the calendaring or the journal, right, that you do the five-year journal, and you can see where you were five years from now. So it could be interesting for people if, when they read the book and they’re adopting some of this or whatever, if you were to note like, “This thing happened today and it felt like a rupture,” or “This felt like a change,” and you could see if you go back and say, “Hey, does that thing, if that happened to me again today, would that still feel like a rupture, or does it feel more like a change or a hiccup?” And you could use that point of reflection to see how far you’ve come.
Liz Tran: I totally feel this in my five-year journal, especially around parenting, where I was rereading a journal entry from two years ago when my oldest daughter was really small, and I was just so overwhelmed by her having back-to-back poop blowouts. For anyone who knows what that is who’s not a parent, it just means that they have pooped so much that it’s all over their clothes and they have to change their clothes—it’s blown out of pants, everything, your hair, maybe in your mouth, it’s scary. It means it’s blown out of the diaper. And I remember being like, “Oh my goodness, this blowout!” Today, I’m just doing blowouts one by one, no big deal!
Melina Palmer: Oh, here we go! Well, hopefully, you know, our life doesn’t feel like a bunch of diaper blowouts, whether they’ve become hiccups or otherwise, but, you know, agility quotients abound—we’re ready for it, for sure. Thank you so much for joining me on the show. Like I said, I knew I was going to just absolutely love this, and I loved the book even more than I expected, if that’s possible.
Melina Palmer: I love chatting with you even more than that, if that is possible. So, for everyone who is so excited now to get their copy of AQ, and of course we talked a little bit about the quiz and everything, and they want to follow you and learn more, all the things, you know… We’ll have links in the show notes, but where should they go to do that?
Liz Tran: I am on Instagram at @liztranwrites. You can find the quiz at aqquiz.com, and again, the book is AQ, and it’s everywhere that books can be purchased or rented at the library.
Melina Palmer: Oh yes, very important, for sure.
Liz Tran: Yes.
Melina Palmer: Amazing. Well, thank you again, Liz, for joining me on the show. It was really delightful to chat with you today.
Liz Tran: Thank you, Melina.
Final Reflections on Building Your AQ
Melina Palmer: Thank you again to Liz Tran for joining me on the show today. What got your brain buzzing in today’s conversation? For me, it’s almost impossible to choose a favorite insight or moment from this book and conversation. So I think in that way I can say that I love the thoughtful breakdown into simple frameworks and acronyms that shift a complex problem into its key parts so you can actually work on one thing at a time. It’s one thing to say “be more agile,” but what does that really mean in practice? For most people, that’s going to get you stuck—you’re not actually going to go do anything. But knowing what type you are naturally, be that an Astronaut or a Neurosurgeon, a Novelist or a Firefighter, is a great place to start. And once you know that, you can understand how you approach change and problems and the status quo.
You can also understand CHURN, which allows you to categorize the disruptions around you and know that there will always be disruptions so you can size them correctly and respond more thoughtfully, a little bit more on that conscious level rather than in that subconscious fight-or-flight initial response. You can say like, “Hey, is this really a rupture? Or is it more of a hiccup?” Things like that.
And as you get the hang of that, you can look at your ABCD categories so you can work on raising your own AQ. Do you have the right anchors in place? Where can you be making more bets even when you don’t feel ready? If you look at everything as a lesson, where’s the classroom element in whatever’s going on now? How does that make it easier to handle? And how can you push yourself to feel some discomfort? How can you start to covet and seek that out? Yes, I know the inclination may be to shy away from that discomfort, but there’s so much opportunity there.
In my opinion, reframing discomfort as a positive thing is so powerful. And if you do choose to journal like Liz does, if you have a notebook that lets you look back on this day for the last five years, you can take an opportunity to reflect when you see you had something that felt like a rupture, say, three years ago, and then say, “Hey, yeah, that was really uncomfortable, but I learned from it. And that same thing happened three months ago and I barely noticed it.” How cool is that? And those lessons, as you reflect on yourself, can help you to see even more opportunity in that agility quotient, right, of being able to shift and change and lean into it. And I think that is one of my favorite things about AQ is that you do have so much opportunity to grow in any place that you might want to do so. None of it’s fixed because, you know, kind of misses the point! A little focus and intentional thought can go a long way here, and of course, Liz’s book is a treasure trove that will help you to do just that.
So what about you? Which of the models or frameworks or insights stood out most to you? Is there something you’re going to apply right away? Whatever it is, come share it with me on social media. You’re going to find me as @TheBrainyBiz pretty much everywhere and as Melina Palmer on LinkedIn. There are links in the show notes to make it easy, as well as links to my top related past episodes and books, including AQ, ways to get in touch, and more. It’s all waiting for you in the app you’re listening to and at thebrainybusiness.com/591. And thank you again to Liz Tran for joining me on the show today. It was a delight to chat with and learn from you. Join me next time for another brainy episode of The Brainy Business Podcast.
Melina Palmer: It’s going to be a lot of fun.
Melina Palmer: You don’t want to miss it. Until then, thanks again for listening and learning with me, and remember to be thoughtful.
Announcer: Thank you for listening to The Brainy Business Podcast. Melina offers virtual strategy sessions, workshops, and other services to help businesses be more brain friendly. For more free resources, visit thebrainybusiness.com.
