Exploring Gender At Work And "Work Life Conflict" With Dr. David Smith

**Morra Aarons-Mele** (0:02)
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With his collaborator, Brad Johnson, my guest today, David Smith, PhD, has been the leader, someone I respect so deeply, for his very candid call to action that men need to step up as allies for women in the workplace. I'm Morra Aarons-Mele and this is The Anxious Achiever, the show that looks at the intersection of mental health and leadership and asks, how can we do it all better? Smith has written with Brad Johnson, Athena Rising, Good Guys. He has been helping leaders at companies think about gender inclusion in a smart, practical way, away from all the swirl and insanity frankly, of our current gender discourse in these past few years. Because Smith and Johnson know what's true.
When men and women are happy and thriving at work everybody wins. And Smith knows this because he has been studying the family unit at work for decades, ever since he was in the Navy. We talk about his background as a Navy pilot, as a member of a dual career Naval couple, and his recent work. His new book is called Fair Share, and I can't wait to read it. Making work more equitable, fair, enjoyable for everyone. My conversation with David Smith.
David Smith, welcome.

**David Smith** (3:30)
Great to be here with you, Morra. Thanks for having me.

**Morra Aarons-Mele** (3:32)
Oh my gosh. I'm such a fan.
I want to just dive in a little bit into your past, how you got here. You were a Navy pilot. You went to the Naval Academy. You were a Navy pilot before you became a sociologist. And I have to ask, because I ask everybody about their relationship with anxiety, what was your relationship with anxiety like as someone sitting in a cockpit?

**David Smith** (3:58)
Great question. And I think, you know, one of the things, I don't know that I spent a lot of time thinking about it in the moment when I was going through flight training, for example, and then I think where you, I think you first start to experience some of that anxiety of, wow, I'm up here and I don't think it really hit me until, I think, the first time I soloed in an aircraft. In my first solo flight, I remember being up there and how quiet it was, and I was like all by myself, and it's like, there's nobody here to save me. There's no safety net, right, in the, in with me in the aircraft. But then, but I also recognized the things that my instructors had taught me all along, that they had prepared me for this. They had given me the confidence that I knew that I could handle anything that was thrown at me, or at least I thought I could.
They give you that self-confidence and hopefully not too much overconfidence in there as well, to be able to handle everything that comes at you. And so to me, in many ways, that we learn to deal with anxiety is often through repetition, through exposure, through titration, right, all these different ways that, and flight training is no different. It's kind of the medical model to some extent, right? It's like we're gonna talk about it, we're gonna see it, we're gonna watch him do one, her do one of those, and then I'm gonna do one with help, and then I'm gonna do it all by myself, and then we're gonna teach it, right? We're gonna teach somebody eventually how to do that ourselves, and so that really helps to build that confidence and it really help us to get over some of that anxiety that we might feel.