If we are forever in survival mode, unlocking and unleashing our full potential would be impossible. Jon Rosemberg, Co-Founder of Anther, reveals what it takes to achieve your thriving mode.

He joins J.R. Lowry to talk about his newest book A Guide To Thriving, as well as what it takes to feel a greater sense of control over the things happening in your life.

Jon delves into the idea of giving yourself agency to make the most of your human experience and experience profound self-transformation. Find out how to escape the constant struggle of survival mode and get into thriving mode that leads to fulfillment.

Check out the full series of “Career Sessions, Career Lessons” podcasts here or visit pathwise.io/podcast/. A full written transcript of this episode is also available at https://pathwise.io/podcasts/jon-rosemberg

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How To Go From Surviving To Thriving, With Jon Rosemberg

Co-Founder Of Anther And Author Of A Guide To Thriving

There’s a big difference between surviving and thriving. Many of us still feel like we’re in survival mode, struggling in one way or another to get through the day. What if you could change that and what would that take? With me to discuss that is Jon Rosemberg, author of the new book, A Guide to Thriving and the founding partner of Anther, a professional development firm focused on helping leaders and organizations transform on certainly into possibility and to discover what it means to thrive. Let’s get going with Jon.

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Jon, welcome. Thank you very much for being on the show with me.

Thank you, J.R. It’s a pleasure to be here with you and with your audience.

How Jon Got Into The World Of Thriving

We look forward to hearing everything you have to say about your book and the topic of thriving and your career journey more broadly. Before we dive into your book and other things, give us a background on you.

I was born in Caracas, Venezuela and I was raised there. For folks who are familiar with the politics of Venezuela, it has been a rough couple of two and a half decades. Many years ago, my business partner was in an armed robbery and he was killed. My wife and I decided it was time, so we emigrated to Canada. We are now in Toronto. I spend a large part of my life in the corporate world. A few years ago, I decided to leave all that behind. I went through that journey and ended up founding my own consulting firm. I’m going back to school, getting a Master’s in applied Positive Psychology, and that’s what landed me here in your show.

Talk a little bit more about that transition that you made, Jon. How did it lead into the consulting practice and to your book, A Guide to Thriving?

As I mentioned, I was in the corporate world climbing the corporate ladder as fast as I could, and as furiously as I could. I feel very lucky that I got to work with some amazing organizations and my value system seemed to be focused on extrinsic motivators like money, power and status. I was very narrowly focused on that. I have come to realize now that I had to do a lot with being in survival mode. We can talk a little bit more about what that means or what that means to me and how I describe it in the book.

In early 2021, I joined a startup. A very fast growing startup with double digits every month. We raced a series B round of $150 million. A few months later, I was in Los Angeles buying some facilities for our expansion. When I came back, I was exhausted then I landed with COVID. I was on a technical call with a team and the call heated up quickly. It’s one of those team calls which I’m sure many of your readers are familiar with. Your chest feels very tight and you get tense. You feel a rush of heat coming to your face. I ended up closing my laptop and shutting off my phone.

I was just in this difficult moment. I was in my home office and I heard my kids playing in the basement. I went downstairs and Charlie and Jackie were playing with what they call it 10 and 6. They were with Legos. I just sat on the floor and started playing Legos with them. We played together for about an hour. As I was doing that, I realized how much I was missing. I was around the house. I would have breakfast, lunch and dinner with them sometimes. They could see me, but I wasn’t present. I was missing them growing up.

I was sitting in my favorite chair in the living room and Adriana, my wife, approached me. She said, “Are you okay?” I said, “I’m done.” Within two weeks, I had left the organization that I was with. I did not have a plan at the time. I had some stock options that never vested and ended up just starting my own consulting firm. As I was going through that journey, I said, “That moment that experience that I had in the basement and that I have had before in my life. What is that all about? We’re calm, connected, creative and we get to engage with people in a meaningful way. We’re present for others and others are present for us.”

I ended up finding out that it was thriving. That sent me back to graduate school. I did my Master’s in Applied Positive Psychology and ended up doing a lot of research about it. Once I had that lens on, I got to look back at my life and see what were all the moments and all the different things that would leave me to thrive in. That’s how I’m here and in this conversation.

Go back to that moment where you said to your wife, “I’m done.” I don’t know how much I’m going to put on the spot a little bit, Jon. I don’t know how much conversation you might have had with your wife, Adriana before that. A lot of people probably in their heads have this fantasy about being able to tap out of the corporate world and go in a different direction.

Probably more now than maybe ever before because a corporate world has become difficult and challenging for many people. When you have that conversation with a loved one, a spouse or otherwise. The financial reality starts to creep into your thoughts. How did those conversations go that got you comfortable that you could cross that chasm into going back to school and starting your own business?

I’m very lucky that Adriana has been incredibly supportive and we have a trusting relationship. The real blocker for me to do something like that earlier was myself. In many cases, that’s the case. You’re talking about the financial reality. J.R, let’s be on us. There are a lot of people struggling. We know that the economy is suffering across the world and there are people who need to pay checks or for other reasons need to stay in their jobs. Let’s acknowledge that first.

In my case, when I thought about leaving my job, my mind almost always went directly to me being under a bridge with my family homeless. I didn’t see any of the steps that would have to happen between me leaving my job, getting fired or quitting and me being under a bridge. What I realized which is eventually something that I go deep into in my book is this idea of agency. The way I define agency is the capacity to make intentional choices supported by the belief that those choices matter and have an impact in the world.

Now, let’s break that down because it’s a bit theoretical. A lot of times when we’re in a job, we stay because we feel we don’t have a choice. If you say to yourself or to others, “I would love to leave, but I don’t have a choice.” That’s probably a good sign that you are not leaning into your agency. Agency starts when we start analyzing a situation and seeing other options. Being more agentic in terms of leaving a job could be, “I can stay or I can go.”

Now instead of just one choice, which is to stay. You have two. You can say I can stay or I can go. Once you start dissecting your situation, I use a method that I call AIR, which stands for awareness, inquiry and reframing in the book. We can go into that into a bit more detail. Once you start analyzing the situation, one of the things I realized is that it’s not only two choices.

I can stay and change my job, transfer to a different division, get a different boss and craft my job to be different, or figure out different ways in which I can engage with my job. Maybe I can go to a different job or I can start my own company. I can take a break or go back to school. We have all of these options available to us at any given moment and a lot of times we don’t see that. As I was exploring this, agency was the word that kept coming up.

A lot of people fall into this trap of playing the victim and almost taking comfort in the fact that they don’t have control over their lives. I was talking to somebody for another episode of the show, and we’re talking about bad bosses in particular. I was talking about people I know who would say, “I hate my boss.” “How long do you work for your boss?” “Ten years?” You spend ten years working for somebody you don’t like to work for. How can somebody be in that situation?

That’s just one example of not feeling the sense of agency as you’re describing it. A lot of people fall back on not giving themselves agency because it’s easier. It’s easier to make excuses, blame the system, blame their broader environment, and blame even the people around them who they don’t think will be supportive of what they need to do. That’s how people get themselves into this mental trap of not taking ownership. At the end of the day, you cannot take ownership. You’re going to be stuck in the situation you’re in. It’s probably not going to change much. What good does that to you?

I would say it’s a big misconception in my opinion and based on what I’ve seen on the research. It’s a big misconception that it’s easier to stay where we are. It might be a discomfort that we’re more accustomed to but it’s just as uncomfortable as the discomfort of change. I don’t know how we’re going to measure discomfort, but what I’m trying to suggest is that at some point the discomfort of staying the same is higher than the discomfort of change. That’s when a lot of people may change. What I’m suggesting is that we can do that even early.

I imagine somebody who’s been working for a horrible boss for ten years. That’s probably not a very good life. It probably has a tremendous impact on their mental health. It’s probably incredibly challenging not only at work, but with their relationships with their families or anything else that they do. What I’m suggesting is that there is discomforting life whether we like it or not. No matter how much we want to appear or how much we see in social media the appearance of people looking happy and traveling and my-life-is-perfect kind of thing. We all go through difficult moments.

The moment we acknowledge that, we can start being a little bit more selective around which difficult moments we want to go through. If we know that we’re all going to go through some pain, we might as well be agentic in terms of which pain we’re trying to choose. It’s a different angle from looking at that same situation. I’m curious to hear what you think.

There is a mindset thing here. For me reading Carol Dweck’s Mindset, which I read some time ago. It was a bit of an eye-opener. It’s a very simple thing of like, people are fixed and people can grow. That’s the book in a nutshell at least in my simplified framework for it. If you start thinking about the idea that I can change and others can change, the situation can change. The way things exist today isn’t the way that they always have to exist. It gives you a sense of control, hope, resilience, or whatever word you want to use that a lot of people are lacking.

This is where they get stuck for one reason or another. Now, that’s not to take away that there are some legitimate traumas and very difficult health situations that people go through. Those require their own form of brit, but you can’t generalize and say, “I don’t have control over any aspect of my life.” That’s a completely unhealthy place to be.

I would propose that you will change. We all change in life. We grow up, grow beards, we shave, cut our hairs, or cut our nails. We have different friendships. People pass. People move. Change will occur whether we like it or not. I’m proposing that we can lean into our agency to choose as much of that change as we can possibly choose. It’s not a huge idea. Philosophers and religions have been talking about this for thousands of years. We’ve forgotten a little bit, especially in the Western world and now it’s spread globally. We have this notion of what success is, and if we achieve success then we are worthwhile then we matter.

Thriving: Change will occur whether we like it or not. We can lean on our agency to choose as much of that change as we can possibly choose.

I want to make a distinction. The book is called A Guide to Thriving, not a guide to success because striving and success are two different things. The way I would describe thriving is small moments like the moment I had with my kids playing Legos in the basement or at some point in my career, I started trying to leave work early on Fridays. It doesn’t happen every Friday, but I tried to do it. I came home and I opened the fridge and saw what’s there. I start cooking a meal and we usually have guests visiting us. We sat around the table.

Cooking for me is a way to enter a state of flow, which is a form of thriving. Sitting around the table with people that I love or with friends or with whoever it is and having an intellectually stimulating conversation is another form of thriving. We’ve idealized what thriving looks like. Thriving can be found in small moments in small ways. If we can start doing that, it starts building. There’s a cumulative effect that has.

The more moments of thriving we build, the more thriving we are in life. Instead of chasing that promotion or getting that beautiful car that you’ve wanted for long or getting a bigger house or flying first class. You end up thriving in small moments. That doesn’t mean that I don’t like fancy things, nice meals and great wine or whatever that is. What I’m suggesting is that there can be a little bit more balance there.

Difference Between Thriving And Succeeding

There is a difference between thriving and success. You talked earlier about external extrinsic motivators like pay and status that differ. I know this from all of your work and graduate school about positive psychology. There’s a difference between those extrinsic motivators and the things intrinsically that motivate us like challenge and purpose. We’ve always had people who have been more focused on building the extrinsic indicators of success, rather than the internal indicators of thriving or happiness or whatever word that you want to use.

It’s gotten way worse in this era of social media. You see many people trying to present this as moonbeams and rainbows and all of that stuff and view of themselves in the world that they live in, but they are suffering and struggling just like everybody else. The problem is they can’t even admit it to themselves often. Let alone to the people around them. They have to keep up these errors of appearance and that’s an unfortunate outcome of social media. It’s something that was perhaps intended to bring people closer together or ends up making people feel more isolated. There is a very big difference between the internal and the external here. That’s the crux of what your book tries to delve into.

What we see when we see people who are unable to have that awareness of their own pain or suffering or emotions or the way in which we connect. This is usually a highly adaptive response or a coping mechanism. It’s for a reason. It’s there to protect us. What I suggest in the book is, when we do that we are often in something that I like to describe as survival mode. What is survival mode? It’s that hyper-focused, that narrow mindset, where we’re not engaging our proof frontal cortex. Our body floats with cortisol and all of these different chemicals and adrenaline rushes. Survival mode is very helpful if you are in a survival situation.

Think a few thousand years back. If you were in Savannah and you heard a rustle in the bushes. You wanted to go into survival mode. You wanted to be prime to fight or flight. You want it to be ready to protect your life. Now, researchers call it an evolutionary mismatch where we feel like we’re in survival mode when survival mode is not warranted. This can happen because your boss sent you an email or because like my meeting that I described at the beginning of the conversation. At that moment, when tensions rise, we enter into this survival mode.

As I said, it can be useful. If you’re in a war zone, you want to be in survival mode. When I was growing up in Venezuela, survival mode was very helpful. It kept me alive. However, for most of us who already have a home, a roof over our heads, we have food on our table and we have many of our basic needs met already. The survival response may not be warranted. It becomes even more harmful to our wellbeing when we get stuck in the loop of survival mode. Now, we’re talking from a cute survival mode like a tiger chasing me to chronic survival mode. Which is, I’ve been feeling this way for years and I am stuck in this mode.

Those are the people that I wrote this book for. The people who’ve been stuck in survival mode for years because I was. I would say for the first 40 years of my life, I was stuck. Suddenly, over the past two and a half decades, there’s been much research and much science around how to step from survival mode into thriving. I thought if I would have had this book years ago, my life would have been very different. By the way, I still go to survival mode quite often. I’ve been having to go back to my book and be like, “I like this,” but it’s part of the experience.

This is a reason why the movement of positive psychology has become popular because if you think about the classic psychology. It gave us some mental frameworks for explaining the way that our brains worked and the way that we interact with other people. It was also externalizing a lot of the factors. The classic Freudian, “tell me about your mother” joke showed that everybody makes because it’s all based on some childhood trauma in terms of the way that you are.

The element of positive psychology that’s different is it comes back to this form of giving you a sense of agency in your own happiness. That gives people much more of a sense of control than classic psychology did, which gave them an excuse maybe, or at least an explanation without necessarily giving them a whole lot of hope or power to change things in their own minds. To me, that is what a lot of people resonate with the principles of positive psychology and all of the work that’s come from the key proponents of it.

It’s funny because when you go back to it, there isn’t a huge secret. We know social connections, being in nature or sunlight. All of these basic things that we’ve heard for many years. The world is changing rapidly. It’s getting increasingly more complex. I was at the University of Pennsylvania and we had a summit that we have every year for the Masters of Positive Psychology. Martin Seligman, who is the pioneer and the founder of the field. He was sharing that by all measures, whichever measure we take, whether it’s infant mortality, access to food or education and all of these different things. We are living in the golden era of humanity. We are.

I know this is hard for some people to hear because you look at the news and you see everything that’s happening and the worse. In comparison to the rest of our history, we are in the golden era of humanity, except for one factor that has probably stayed flat or even decreased, which is depression and anxiety. There’s something happening here that is very unique. I would propose that he has a lot to do with how complex the world has become and how typical this conversation is that we’re having with people.

They say, “How are you?” “I’m very busy.” It seems like there’s a lot of motion with very little momentum. We are just moving and keeping up all the time with the notifications, the emails and everything else that’s coming through. We have very little time to be present in the moment, which by the way, is nice having this conversation with you. It gives us a chance for both of us to be present with one another, which is in itself already a great way to thrive.

You talk about the complexity. The pace is probably the hardest thing, even though mean things are happening fast. I’m not stating anything other than the obvious, but you go back 100 years and we had the mail. We had the telephone 100 years ago. Go back to 200 years and we had the mail before we had the telegraph. Before we had any ability to do any form of immediate communication over a distance that went beyond sight lines. Things happened more slowly. Now it’s like bam, bam, bam, and as you say notifications and all the different ways you can get messages and the pace at which things are changing.

It’s hard for people because people do struggle to adapt, it’s especially pronounced now. They’re having a hard time keeping up with the sheer force of what’s going on every day. To your point, we are in any objective measure. Poverty is always the one that is about. At the beginning of the 20th century, 95% of the population, the world had become poverty.

We’re way less than that now, and getting steadily better year by year. Complain about anything you want in the current world environment, but in this scheme of things, by many objective measures, as you said the world is arguably in a better place than it ever has been. At the same time, it’s become a harder world for people. Maybe we’re just all spoiled. We’ve gotten used to the creature comforts of things, but it does feel hard for a lot of people and that’s unfortunate.

How To Find Agency In The Most Difficult Moments

Here’s one that always gets me. A hundred years ago, you and I would probably not be having this conversation. I’m going to take a wild guess and say that you’re over 32. I know I am too. That was the life expectancy 100 years ago. Now, it’s more than double. Let me introduce this idea of AIR and what it means. AIR stands for awareness, inquiry, and reframing. This is a way to find agency even in the difficult moments.

By the way, it’s practice. It’s not a recipe. It doesn’t work for everybody, but it works for a lot of folks. He takes practice. We start and you build through it. The first thing is awareness. Awareness is noticing non-judgmentally. Some people call it mindfulness too. There’s a lot of overlap between awareness and mindfulness. For the folks that are reading and can’t see the video, I’ll try to describe this as I do it.

I have this Rubik’s Cube. My youngest one Jack broke his arm earlier in the summer right before going to summer camp. He went to summer camp with a cast that went from his wrist all the way up to almost his shoulder. While his friends were jumping in the lake, one of the things that he got to do was play with a Rubik’s Cube. The way I describe awareness is that when we’re in survival mode, when we’re in this state, this is either a chronic or acute state of survival mode.

We can’t see things. It’s like the Rubik’s Cube is right next to your eye. You may be able to see one square of color, but that’s all you see about the situation. As you pull the Rubik’s Cube away, that’s awareness. Being aware that it’s not a blue square or a red square in the Rubik’s Cube but it is. It’s a Rubik’s Cube. You get to see this object.

The inquiry is starting to get curious about that object. What is this? You start looking around and seeing all the sides of it. Instead of being this red or blue that you were seeing right next to your eye. Now, you can see all the sides. You realize that you can move it around, you can shift it. You get a little bit more information. This could be a situation, a challenge, emotion, thought or anything that you’re going through that feels difficult. That would be awareness. Acknowledging that this is a Rubik’s Cube. Inquiry, understanding how it works, all the colors that it has, the different sides and how you can move it around.

Reframing is playing with it until you find the combination that works for you. I was tempted to say until you solve it, but sometimes you don’t get to solve it. You find a combination that’s closest to what you need. That process of AIR can be very powerful. It’s deceptively simple. What I mean by deceptively simple is that it’s just three letters and three words, but it requires a tremendous amount of practice. I know I’ve spent years practicing it and I still have to bring myself back to think about it.

What you just described is a very internally oriented mental process, but there’s a social component to this, too. I want to make sure that you bring that in terms of the balance between the inner work you do but also how you engage others in the process around you.

This is a great point that you’re making. The spaces in which we move have a profound impact on our ability to thrive. Some of the systems that we’re in were not designed for all humans to thrive. This is a reality of the spaces. It is the best ones that we know and the best ones that we’ve experienced in the history of humanity. Still, they’re not meant for everybody to thrive. Whether it’s governments or economic systems or an organization that has a toxic culture or a household. I was in Philly. I was visiting a friend who just opened a business in a neighborhood of Philly that is now starting to get more investment, but it hasn’t been invested in. It was deeply impacted by the crack epidemic.

She was telling me this is a food desert. We got talking about food deserts and what that means. There’s little agency you have when the system is constraining you in a way that you can’t do it. What I argue in the book and this is inspired by Viktor Frankl’s teachings in Man’s Search for Meaning. By the way, Victor Frankl is a holocaust survivor.

He tells his story of being in the concentration camps and how he found meaning even in what I would suggest, it’s probably the most challenging, painful and difficult experience that any human being can experience. In his teachings, this is what he suggests. For most of us, the situation is not as dire and we have an opportunity to find that moment of agency between stimulus and response.

Thriving: We have an opportunity to find the moment of agency between stimulus and response.

Either the environment you’re in is certainly very important. I think about some of the research that was done on people who are overweight tend to be married to people who are overweight because you’re in that environment of overeating that leads to obesity. That’s one bit of research I can think of, Jon, off the top of my head. It’s important as you say and obviously, Viktor Frankl and the people who are similar are going through horrible things around the world. Don’t have the ability to change their environment, but most people do have some degree to change it.

It goes back to what we were talking about not accepting that your environment is what it is and that you have no ability to change it. You’ve got to put yourself rather than digging too deeply. You talk in the book about the dangers of hyper-independence where you dig in and say, “I’m going to bulldoze my way through this on my own and ignore everybody else.” That doesn’t work. You’ve got to get other people around you who are engaged and committed to your success. In the way that you described it your wife was when you decided that you are going to make a change in careers.

A lot of these coping mechanisms like hyper-independence evolved from a need to engage with the world in a different way. If you were a kid and your parents didn’t pay attention to you and you struggled to get your needs met. Being hyper-independent made a lot of sense as a kid. You learn this hyper-independence but it becomes a pattern. Maybe later in your life, once you are married and you have a family or you have a group of friends or live in a community. Whatever that looks like. Instead of being adaptive, which means helpful and useful to you, that hyper-independence becomes maladaptive. It limits your ability to connect with other people and to thrive.

What I’m suggesting in the book is that we can look at some of these patterns, question them and challenge them and see the pattern that most would fit my wellbeing in this moment and how I change that pattern. In bringing awareness to it, getting curious about it and then changing it, that exploration is the most important work that we can do for ourselves and for our communities.

One of the interesting things about this work is that once we start to thrive, people around us start to thrive more. We know this. There’s plenty of research that suggests that in happy communities, there are happy people and the happier the people, the happier the community. There’s a cycle here that occurs. When we do this work, we not only help ourselves but we help everybody else around us.

Daily Practices To Help You Get Into Thriving Mode

What are some of the day-to-day practices, Jon, that somebody can adapt to put themselves more into thriving mode as opposed to survival mode?

First, the caveat. It depends here. It’s important that whatever activity folks are choosing is an activity that works for them. We hear a lot of prescriptive ideas in the media like, “If you only drink eight glasses of water a day then you’ll be fine. If you only go to bed before 9:00 PM and you don’t have screens for two hours, you’ll be fine.” That may work for some people, but I would argue there are no magical cures and no magical tools here.

I will say that for me social connection has worked well like being in community, reaching out to people, asking for help when I need it, and trying to make those connections as deep as possible. By deep I mean you have the transactional connection that we all do. You send an email and you’re like, “Can you get me this by such and such time?” For example, I start my email saying, “I hope you’re having a good day or how was your day going or how are you really?” Asking a question and trying to see the person behind the transaction can be powerful.

For me, meditation has worked well. I meditate while walking. People picture meditation sitting on a pillow. I’ve tried it and it did not work for me. We have a cemetery close to my house. By the way, this is an interesting part of my journey. I have very profound death anxiety. I did some work with psychedelics a few years ago and my death anxiety now has settled to the point I wrote my master research on psychedelics. We can go down that rabbit hole if you want.

For me, now I do my walking meditation in a cemetery 3 or 4 times a week, which is something that I would have never pictured. Talk about people changing. We all have the capacity to change. That’s very important. Finding whatever activity it is that works for you in order to be present, to down regulate your nervous system and for you to be able to connect with other people. If you go from saying, “I have no choice,” to, “Maybe there is a choice here. Maybe there is something I’m not seeing here.” If you start getting curious you know it’s working. That’s a good way to tell that it’s working.

Be Willing To The Hard Work To Thrive

Back to your point to the very beginning about magic cures. I’m not a fan of the idea of life hacks because I don’t think with one TikTok video or maybe three TikTok videos you’re going to solve all of the problems in your life or in the world. Some things are just more difficult than that. We’ve almost created this expectation that you can find a quick how-to video on anything and solve your way out of any situation in 60 seconds or less. Life does not work that way and to your point, it requires deeper work and deeper reflection than you are going to get in one of those short how-to constructs.

Whatever it is for you. For some people it’s being in nature or meditation or faith or spending time with family, but you have to find the things. Ultimately, it comes back to energy. What gives you energy and what takes away energy. You have to work that energy equation. Bring more things into your life that bring you energy and get rid of the things that are taking energy away from you.

The more that you can do that, the more that you start to tilt the balance, the scales in your favor but it takes work. You’ve got to actively work at the things that bring you energy and surround yourself with more of them. Put more time into them and you’ve got to actively get rid of the things that are taking away from it. Again, it comes back to what you want to do.

The more that you build that toolbox or whatever we want to call it, of things that give you energy or allow you to be present or allow you to slightly reduce that state of survival mode. The more that you start creating those tools, the more tools you’ll find. I describe it in the book as a spiral. The more you do, the more you get. This is inspired in Barbara Fredrickson’s work on Broaden-and-Build Theory, which is, a positive emotion baguettes positive emotion. That’s the case. That doesn’t mean that everything is going to be fine, you’re going to be happy and it’s all going to be sunshine. Things will happen.

Life will come at you as hard as it can come because it does for all of us. When that happens, you’ll have this big toolbox. I do a lot of coaching work with senior leaders and executives. Often, what I hear most is, “I don’t have time for this, or I don’t have time for the other thing.” Especially when things are going well, “I don’t need this now.” We learn when we are thriving. When we are in survival mode, it is very difficult to learn.

If you are in a crisis, there’s lots of research on this, it is very difficult to engage the part of the brain that learns. In the moments when you’re doing better, those are the moments where you lean in and you start building that toolbox. You start figuring out what are the things that will help you thrive when life throws curveballs at you.

To wrap up, I want to ask you what you want people to take away from the book, A Guide to Thriving and then we’re getting into a conversation about psychedelics. The audience would kill me if I didn’t follow up on that. Let’s spend some time on that.

If you’re in survival mode or if you feel like you’re often in survival mode, there is a way for you to go into thriving. That requires agency, the capacity to make intentional choices. If agency is a skill, you can develop. It’s a capacity, but it’s also a skill. It’s something that you can learn and work on. The best way to develop your agency that I have found for me, and I’m hopeful that this will be the case for other people. It’s based on a lot of research. It’s to lean into this idea of AIR, which is awareness, inquiry and reframing. That in a nutshell is the big idea in the book. The rest is just a lot of stories and a lot of research.

Elevating Yourself Through Psychedelic Therapy

Let’s talk a little bit about your graduate research. How did you pick that topic? What have you learned from the experience?

My best friend, Nathan, on January 4th of 2023, called me. He says, “I’m in the parking lot of the hospital.” He was in Caracas, and I’m in Toronto. He said, “The doctor just diagnosed me with stage 4 liver cancer and he doesn’t think I’m going to make it.” That was a very difficult moment for me and for him. For the next months, I saw as he was slowly deteriorating but also going into a cocoon. Where it’s harder and harder to reach him. For folks, who’ve had people that have either died of cancer or experienced cancer, it can be very painful.

Nathan died on May 4th, four months to the day of that call. When I saw this, he called to me, “There must be something else that can be done for folks who are at the end of life.” I decided to go deep into the research on psychedelic assisted therapy. I was lucky enough to work with David Yaden who’s at Johns Hopkins, as my research advisor. It’s a literary review of the research for the past twenty years because there’s been this Renaissance and you see in the media all the time.

I also attempted to create a hypothesis about the psychological mechanisms because we know a lot about how it works, physiologically but we don’t understand what the psychological mechanisms are. Part of the idea of AIR is inspired by some of the experiences of folks who do therapy with psychedelics, the experiences that they have and how they find relief from this.

I don’t think it necessarily has to be psychedelics. Let’s make a big caveat here that they’re not for everybody. There are a lot of risks attached to using psychedelics. They’re not a panacea. There’s a lot of hype. There’s a big hype bubble out there. They can be incredibly powerful for people to shift their beliefs, which are the lenses that we use to look at the world. They can be very helpful for that.

Did you try them in the course of doing your research on them?

I had tried them before in my twenties. I’ve had a few journeys with psilocybin and 5 MLB, which is the Sonoran toad venom that they call. It’s been powerful for me to experience. First of all, a lot of folks think that it’s all about the journey. Finding somebody who can get you the medicine. I’m going to refer to it as medicine because this is within the context of healing. Not within the context of recreation. People who can get you medicine and you take psilocybin. You’re under for 4 or 5 hours and then you come out and you’re like, “My life is solved. I am happy now. I figured it out and I’m enlightened.” I would argue that’s not the way it works based on the research.

Most of the studies that are done, include a very stringent protocol of therapy. Which means that you are preparing for the experience for months sometimes and you are integrating the experience for months. There’s a huge therapeutic component that it’s attached to. When Maps put in the application for MDMA to get approved by the FDA, which by the way got denied. They put in a protocol. I think it was the first time that any “drop company” put in a protocol not a substance for approval.

By a protocol, what I mean is you have to do X number of sessions with two therapists for X number of months then you go through the journey, and you have to do X number of sessions with therapists. There’s a container in which the psychedelic experience occurs in order for a lot of the positive effects to show. That’s an important takeaway from the research that I did.

It’s completely the opposite of the way it was portrayed in Nine o Perfect Strangers. It did not end well for anybody who hasn’t seen it.

There’s a lot of portrayals about psychedelics in the media. I’m not suggesting that you can’t take some mushrooms and go run in the woods and have a great experience. Maybe it will be beneficial to your wellbeing. What I’m suggesting is that it is meant to be an amplifier of the work that you’re doing to try and improve your wellbeing. It’s not like a Tylenol that you take in your head and it goes away. There’s that misconception out there.

It’s important to dispel that myth and acknowledge that these are powerful substances. They should be treated with extreme care. You have to be in a place where you have the right support. Do you remember we were talking about that toolbox? That toolbox has to be there. There are people who have very challenging experiences with the use of psychedelics. It can be harmful in the wrong context.

Helping People Make The Most Of The Human Experience

Your points about doing it under supervision and a cautious process make a lot of sense in that context. Before we break, Jon, talk a little bit about your work in Anther and the types of clients that work with and the types of situations that you’re helping them with.

I’m very lucky to have an amazing business partner, Lara Merriken. She’s the Founder of LÄRABAR. Lara and I decided to start another month ago. What we wanted to do was bring a combination of our experience as business people. entrepreneurs and our business acumen. We didn’t want to just do consulting. We wanted to pair that with coaching, with helping, learning and development. We wanted to help people, the leaders, and the organizations that we work with find ways to thrive that are truly sustainable.

By the way, there was a study out of Oxford that showed a correlation between wellbeing and stock price or enterprise value. The effect size was about 37%. The company’s wellbeing is higher or has a 37% higher stock price or enterprise value. There’s a strong business case for this. Often, wellbeing or wellness is seen as an employee perk. We’re nice. We treat our employees great, but then you walk into an organization and you see a lot of toxicity and not a lot of care for the employee.

Lara and I want to work and we are working with organizations who want to make a change in that and want to make a profound cultural shift. What we found is that the clients that we’re working with are seeing a tremendous amount of value. I’m talking measurable on the P&L. I’m not just talking about the value of great relationships, which is even more important I would argue. You can see it on the P&L. You can see the impact that this work has on leaders, their teams, their clients and any stakeholder that engages with the organization.

It must be incredibly meaningful to be doing that work with leaders and other organizations.

Meaningful is such a great work. There’s a crisis of meaning in-work. I think there was a study by Gallup. I want to say it was Gallop that said that about two-thirds of the day, people are spending it on doing work, about work. Setting up meetings or going to a meeting about the meeting that’s going to lead to the next meeting. There’s a lot of these happening and there’s a crisis of meaning at work but we are not finding that. Meaning is an important part of the human experience. How we make sense of our time on earth is incredibly important to us, our well-being and the people around us. What we’re trying to do is to bring a little bit more meaning, a little bit more wellbeing and a lot more agency to organizations.

Keep Going Even If Life Gets Hard

If you could go back and give your younger self three insights, whether from your book or otherwise. What would they be?

The first thing I would say is stick it out. Keep going because he gets hard a lot of times. It gets very hard. Having the courage to wake up another day and do it again is no small feat to me. That’s a very important thing. The second is to get curious. Go out there, read, learn, watch videos, or whatever it is that you need to do. Get very curious ideally in a long form content way because otherwise, it gets shredded, the new ones and the complexity.

The third one would be to read the book because I wrote it for me many years ago. That’s who I wrote it for. If I could have access to it, I would say read your book. By the way, I still tell that to myself every day. In the interest of being very transparent, as I’ve gone from writing the book and editing it, and all of that process. Which was fascinating, fantastic, difficult and challenging. I move to this promotional stage of putting the book out into the world.

It’s going in shows and writing up and all this type of work. I have had to go back to my book because it’s semi-deep into survival mode. It’s a very different skillset and a very different approach. It’s been fascinating for me to find myself saying, “Remember. Remember what you’ve learned. Lean back into it.” It’s hard. Anyway, I wanted to share that little story.

Certainly, getting a book out into the world is a very difficult thing. I’m in the middle of going through that process now. We’re in the editing stage and trying to figure out which direction we’re going publishing-wise. You realize we have at least a year or more of this. It’s a crazy long process for anybody who hasn’t gone through it. That’s from the point of having a finished manuscript probably a few months ago. It takes a very long time to get a book out. It’s an exhausting process. Congratulations for having made it through and now, getting to talk about it with the book behind you on the shelf.

Thank you, J.R. Congratulations to you for going through the very courageous process of putting out into the world.

It’s a marathon, Jon, and I’m in the middle miles now.

I don’t run marathons, but I have friends who do. They say that there’s that point where you feel like you’re about to die. The moment you go through that point then, suddenly, it becomes much easier. This is what I’ve heard.

I always tell people there will come a point where you just want to walk. Walk. Who cares? You’re still going to finish. You’re not going to win. You were never going to win, unless you’re a world-class athlete. You set out to finish the race. Go finish it. You just may not be as fast as you thought, but you still finished.

There’s much wisdom in that. Walk. Walk to the end. I’ll take that with me, J.R. By the way, as I’m heading into the last part of the promotional process of this book. I’ll take that word from you. Thank you.

Fair enough. Good luck with everything, Jon. It was great to get to talk to you and learn a little bit more about you, your business and your journey to getting this book into the world. Thank you, again.

Thank you, J.R. I appreciate it.

Take care.

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Episode Wrap-up And Closing Words

Thanks to Jon. It was an interesting conversation about his book, A Guide to Thriving and about the ideas that are in positive psychology more broadly and this idea of agency. Once you start giving yourself agency, you can start to feel a greater sense of control over the things that are happening to you and your life. As a reminder, this episode is brought to you by PathWise.io. If you’re ready to take control of your career, have some agency, join the PathWise Community. You can also sign up on our website for our newsletter. Follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. Thanks.

Important Links

• Jon Soremberg
• Jon Rosemberg on LinkedIn
• Anther
• A Guide to Thriving
• Mindset
• Martin Seligman
• Man’s Search for Meaning
• David Yaden
• LÄRABAR
• PathWise on LinkedIn
• PathWise on Facebook
• PathWise on YouTube
• PathWise on Instagram
• PathWise on TikTok

About Jon Rosemberg

With over two decades coaching Fortune 500 executives and global teams through deep transformations, Jon Rosemberg has learned firsthand that growth begins when we courageously reclaim our agency. His personal journey, forged by immigration, loss, and career reinvention, inspires him to blend hard-won business insight with cutting-edge research to guide others toward greater meaning.

Driven by his belief in human potential, Jon co-founded Anther, a firm dedicated to transforming uncertainty into possibility. He previously led high-impact initiatives at Walmart, Procter & Gamble, Indigo, and GoBolt. Jon holds an MBA from Cornell University and a Master of Applied Positive Psychology from the University of Pennsylvania, where he serves as an assistant instructor. Originally from Caracas, Venezuela, he now lives in Toronto with his wife, Adriana, and their two sons.