Tag: work

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The Hard Work of Being Human

In “Is People Pleasing Your Leadership Blind Spot?” by Eric Kaufmann in Real Leaders Magazine, a 2022 YouGov poll found that 49% of adults see themselves as people pleasers, and 92% say they act in people-pleasing ways.

When I read about common people-pleasing habits, these stood out to me:

  • Avoiding conflict at all costs
  • Softening strong messages to make them easier to hear
  • Feeling responsible for other people’s emotions
  • Struggling to set boundaries
  • Not knowing how I really feel about something

These habits have been a challenge for me and often kept me from being true to myself. It was only after facing big family conflicts and discovering the Art of Accomplishment courses that I started to see my patterns and work on them.

Now, as an interim team lead at Automattic, I have another chance to face these challenges and practice showing up as my authentic self.

It’s a journey that never really ends, but every step counts.

As Simon Sinek said:

Cats don’t have to work very hard to be good at being a cat, but it turns out that people have to work pretty hard to be good at being human.

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Insights from a Conversation with Jerry Colonna

I just have to share how grateful I am for what Automattic did! They set up a video call with Jerry Colonna, CEO and co-founder of Reboot and a coach highly praised by Matt Mullenweg.

Let me tell you, it was packed with wisdom!

How have I been complicit in creating the conditions I say I don’t want?

Matt’s favorite question by Jerry

Next, here are some powerful questions:

What am I not saying that needs to be said?

What am I saying that’s not being heard?

What’s being said that I’m not hearing?

What is it I don’t want to know that I need to know?

Now, [if you] hold those questions in mind and then flip over to the question [that Matt was talking about,] how have I been complicit in creating the conditions I say I don’t want?

Jerry unpacks that in this passage:

[…] when you start to do what I refer to as radical self-inquiry, one of the most logical defense mechanisms that pops up is guilt. Guilt and shame. And so what people often mistake that question for is how am I responsible for the miserable conditions of my life?

The question is complicity. And the best way to understand that is the word accomplice, right? The accomplice drives the getaway card, doesn’t stick up the bank teller. So what’s really important here is that this is a question designed to unlock curiosity about our own emotional state, our own challenges, our own struggles in this march towards adulthood. You know, P.S., I’m 60. I’m still marching towards adulthood.

It’s really important to separate out complicity from responsibility. There may be times when you’re responsible, but more often than not, the impulse to feel responsible is, as I was saying before, a kind of defense mechanism.

The second half of the question is that I say I don’t want. It is not how have I been complicit in creating the conditions I don’t want. For example, I say I don’t want to be busy. But this morning I woke up with this cold, and as a result, I canceled a trip to Nashville tonight. And I told my wife that I wasn’t going. And she said, so how do we stop you from working tomorrow? See, part of the structure of me is I say I don’t want to be busy. But boy, am I uncomfortable when I don’t have something to do. This is why it’s radical. Because it is not common for us to ask ourselves these questions. It’s much more common for us to simply complain.

Here are a few more quotes on self-inquiry, needs/benefits, and transformation:

The second level question is what benefit do I get out of the condition in my life I say I don’t want?

Carl Jung once said that until you make the unconscious conscious, it will direct your life and you will call it fate. Personal transformation, a.k.a. growth, a.k.a. growing up, can feel overwhelmingly difficult and challenging. It’s one of the reasons why most people don’t do it.

Behaviors persist because they meet some sort of intrinsic need, either at the individual level, the organizational level, or at the global level, at the community level.

When I am trying to understand why is it that I find myself in the exact same situations again and again, there’s that fate part of Carl Jung’s quote. So this entire process falls under that rubric of radical self-inquiry.

But most importantly, this is actually the path of transformation. See, just noting that there’s a problem doesn’t create transformation, but noting that there’s a problem and moving into this other realm of saying,

How does it serve me?
How does it benefit me?
What would I have to give up that I really enjoy about my life?

Because I enjoy feeling the adoration of being busy from the minute I wake up to the minute I go to sleep. You see the little mind trick I do on myself?

It’s really important to understand that cognitive awareness alone does not create transformation. If it did, none of us would be overweight. None of us would have addictive behaviors. Everybody would be perfect. The thing that creates transformation is repetition.

Here is another Q&A gem:

Q: I don’t have time to stop and reflect and do radical self-inquiry? What would your response be to that?
A: Just ask yourself a simple question as I just sort of tossed off how does it make me feel when I suddenly have two meetings canceled in the middle of the day. I’m too busy allowing life to happen to me than to put myself in the driver’s seat and say, how do I want my life to be?

The more power one has, the greater the responsibility to do the internal work so that we don’t knock over the lamp and hurt somebody over here and just roll over and, you know, create suffering needlessly. And this is true of parents. This is true of both partners in a relationship.

There’s that corollary responsibility to do that radical self-inquiry so that you are less likely to hurt somebody.

The call wrapped up with several wise reminders:

You cannot work at 110% every minute of every day. Sometimes you’re just going to go for a walk in the woods. Sometimes you’re going to treat yourself with grace.

You be kind to yourself. Take it in small steps, in small increments. Just be gentle with yourself. You know, it’s a kind of reparenting of oneself. You got a lifetime of growing up to do.

Thanks to Automattic’s thoughtful gesture, we all could order both of Jerry’s books — Reboot and Reunion — free of charge. The company cares so much about its people.

Now I have two more books to look forward to reading. I’m excited!

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Navigating Vulnerability: Bits from “Daring Greatly” by Brené Brown

My workplace recently rolled out a new perk—a premium subscription to Blinkist, a platform offering key insights from nonfiction books in bite-sized formats via 15-minute audio and text.

The first book I explored through Blinkist was “Daring Greatly” by Brené Brown. The main topic of the book is vulnerability—something I’ve been navigating lately. I highlighted several quotes I wanted to preserve:

When we’re resilient to shame, in situations where we’d normally feel shame we can instead feel the empathy of others. Since we feel shame only when we fear others’ opinions of us, we can become resilient to it by reaching out and verbalizing it. In doing so, others can then understand our fears and emotions, leading them to empathize with us, and we can then replace any feelings of shame with those of received empathy.

The following ones are great to return to as a parent:

Firstly, we must consider that children experience shame as trauma. Shameful incidents early on in children’s lives can influence not only childhood, but the rest of their lives too. Just think about times when you felt shame in your own childhood. Are they still vivid to you? On the other hand, if children don’t experience shame, they feel worthy because they are loved unconditionally and sense that they belong.

Put simply, if parents want to teach their children that they’re worthy, they must first accept their own worthiness. No child can inherit a quality from a parent that the parent does not actually possess.

These insights serve as gentle reminders of the transformative power of vulnerability and the importance of fostering an environment of love and acceptance.

How do you view vulnerability in your own life?

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The Dance of Emotions in Decision Making

The initial week of the Great Decisions Course overflowed with content and lively interactions through video calls. I had lots of homework—listen to podcast episodes and review material for 1:1 partner session and small group session. What truly caught my attention were the quotes from the podcast episodes.

Before diving into those, I’d like to acknowledge a personal revelation: doing the intellectual part (reading, listening, and watching the material) comes much easier to me than doing the emotional part (noticing my emotions in the moment, allowing them to take space and time rather than avoiding some feelings). Yet, I feel I’m in a better position than one year ago.

And while typing the above, I realized I don’t know the difference between emotions and feelings, so I looked it up.

Despite the words being used interchangeably, emotions and feelings are actually two different but connected phenomena. Emotions originate as sensations in the body. Feelings are influenced by our emotions but are generated from our mental thoughts.
[…]
Emotions are the raw data, a reaction to the present reality, whereas feelings can be diluted by stories we’ve created in our head based on events of the past or fears of the future—not necessarily the truth of the situation. Listening to our bodily emotions, informed by our sense perception, helps us connect to the reality of our present experience rather than to stories made of potentially inaccurate beliefs.

The Important Difference Between Emotions and Feelings | Psychology Today

Now, returning to the podcast quotes that resonated deeply with my intellect.

We make emotional decisions. We do not make intellectual decisions. What we are doing is we are using the intellect to help us try to understand how we will feel at the end of the decision.

How Can I Make Better Decisions?

Clarity in decision making comes from being willing, able and welcoming all emotional experiences. What we know about neuroscience is we are more likely to make a decision or act as a way to avoid something bad than to feel something good.

A lot of the time what that means is that our decision making, the intellect, is weighing the avoidance of something bad over the potential of feeling something good.

If you are happy to feel any emotion, good or bad, if you welcome any of these emotions, your decision making becomes very clear.

How Can I Make Better Decisions?

If you think you are making a decision, you are in fear. Period.
[…]
If you are in a thing where a choice has become a decision and all of a sudden there is a lot of thought put into it and you are really putting some energy, that in itself is fear. Already you are operating in some fear.
[…]
The short fix on that that a lot of people will use, and I will share here is that you just do the next most obvious thing.
[…]
What’s the fear not being addressed here? What’s the next most obvious step?
[…]
All of a sudden these big decision points evaporate and they just become the next most obvious thing. It is because you are addressing the fear directly.

How Can I Make Better Decisions?

Oftentimes what we are doing is we are deciding something to either avoid a consequence, which are emotional feelings, or hope for a consequence, which again is a feeling.

Making Great Emotional Decisions

We invite the thing we are avoiding in the exact way that we are avoiding it.

Golden algorithm by Joe Hudson

A simple example of this would be my daughter and I are sitting there, and she had a big project, which she went to some bureaucracy, like fish and game bureaucracy, and some secretary there chided her for trying to do something bigger than her britches, so to speak. I asked my daughter what happened, and she said it sucked. I asked her what she was trying not to feel. She said she didn’t want to feel like a failure. I asked her what she did to not feel like a failure, and she said I stopped trying. What did not trying create? It created her feeling like a failure. That’s how it works.

Making Great Emotional Decisions

Every single problem that you face you can go to and ask yourself what emotion you are avoiding and how the way I am avoiding is actually creating the problem.
[…]
You can say you can never make your wife happy. It might be that you try to fix her problems, which of course makes her feel like she is less than and not good enough, and that will constantly make her feel disappointed because she is not happy with herself.

Making Great Emotional Decisions

And from the vulnerability exercise in the course:

Know that if you are being judged, it is because the listener does not love this aspect of themselves. It is not about you.

Know that if you are judging, it is because you don’t love that aspect of yourself.

As a closing note, a work-related situation during the week became a pivotal moment. I was falling behind with one of the tasks due to a new project I am leading and I immediately responded by beating myself up for that.

The very next moment, I saw what I was doing and stopped. I realized no one was watching or penalizing me for the delay.

This new awareness, a gift from my participation in the Art of Accomplishment offerings—the Connection Course and the Master Class—allowed me to take the time and complete the task without unnecessary stress.

I am surprised and deeply grateful for this unexpected transformation.