Episode Transcript
[00:00:02] Speaker A: Hey everyone. Welcome to the episode. So Ask a RAM flips the script one step beyond Podcast Guests and listeners submit their questions and ask a RAM anything. Questions can be music, life stories, business, leadership advice, how to make the best vegan omelette. You name it, a RAM will unpack your questions and leave you with info you can apply. Before we get to it, please rate, review and subscribe. I feel aligned with the leadership on our goals, but unaligned on how we're going to get there. I worry that if we stay in our silos and approach our unified goals independently, we're not going to get the results we want. How can I unify our approach?
[00:00:45] Speaker B: Think about business strategy dovetailing into leadership strategy, which is a bit of what I hear in your question. A lot of businesses have really well articulated business goals based on business strategy. Where the challenge comes in is how people and teams come together to make that happen. And that's the leadership strategy portion of it. And I encourage you to think of it in four ways. First is how are we going to work together? So that's going to be your working alliance. Everyone who is a stakeholder of getting something to a destination should be a part of that conversation. How we're working together. The second is what's our mission? The mission isn't like a company mission. Company missions are intended to be kind of like Evergreen and speak to external audiences. This is why are we coming together as a group of people? What's the point of this? What's our purpose? Then you want to come up with two year vision. So what are we going to get done in two years? And then what's our four year vision? What are we going to get done in the next four years? It might be hard to understand the difference between the mission and the vision. And let me break it down for you, a team mission. So the purpose of a mission usually lasts between three to five years. The idea is why are we bringing a group of people together? What's the point of them coming together? What's the greater thing we're doing? That's the leadership strategy. You're saying, okay, we know what our business strategy is. We as a group of people, what's our mission in regards to that? What are we trying to achieve in this bigger picture? The two year vision is based on that mission and it's the okay, well how are we going to do it? What are the practical things here that we're going to do? And you set that up. The four year vision is the moonshot you imagine what becomes possible that's not possible today once we hit that two year vision. So it really is. The mission is three to five years. That's the why. Then the two year vision is the what and the four year vision is the what's possible once we hit that. All of that is about saying you can have company strategy, but company strategy is basically like this useless little cog that's floating around unless you connect it to leadership strategy. And those two things work together. And most companies have the first, but very few companies have the second. If you're interested in learning more, we have a whole philosophy on how we do this called leading with purpose. And it's something you should hit us up about.
[00:03:14] Speaker A: In Ontario, the government has passed right to disconnect laws. What do you think about this and do you think corporate America is ready for it?
[00:03:23] Speaker B: I like it. And I think corporate America is ready for it and is doing it in many ways to make sure we're on the right starting space. In Ontario, this is a requirement that employers that have more than or 25 or more employees have a policy in place that clearly identifies, like, here are the parameters about when we will and can reach out to talk to you when you have your own time off. I think it's great. Like, I think it's fantastic because Covid really created this.
No working hours. Like everything is a working hour. And it's not just that employers did that. People did that. So like, you're locked in your house, you're anxious, you're feeling a bit cagey. What if a lot of people, do they soothe their anxiety through working, through firing off emails, having phone calls. And this was already kind of a thing before COVID but Covid really made this a big thing where people were really, in a lot of ways kind of medicating their anxiety through work, especially work at like late at night, you can't sleep. So I might as well hit all those emails. And a lot of unhealthy patterns were formed and a lot of workplaces either intentionally or unintentionally took advantage of that were like, hey, people are Suddenly working at 10 more hours. Let's make that a norm. And it's just become this kind of like pattern that people fell into. And again, just as I said earlier, I want to acknowledge that this was a thing previously. Some companies really expect people to just be able to respond to things near 24 hours. Others had better practices about it. But this has become a thing and Covid's made it a lot worse. So, yeah, I totally celebrate this. For anyone who might be having a negative reaction, like, oh, no. Like, I don't want to feel like penned in by this. Just go to like, kind of best practices.
Most bosses should, if they haven't already had, have clear conversation with people of saying, hey, in your time off, let's set a mutual expectation of what that looks like. If I reach out or if someone on the team needs to reach out. This is like, in a totally digitally connected world, you should have that. It should be a best practice. And it isn't that anyone should ever be expected. Like, you need to be available all the time. Now, as I say this, I know some employers do that and it's kind of like a, you know, behind the scenes, like, wink, wink, nudge, nudge. And if someone's saying that to you, I really encourage you to A, start a dialogue around that because that's like unhealthy and totally impractical. And then B, you might have to make some decisions about whether or not if your employer is not reacting the right way to those conversations, what you need to do just to make sure you're healthy. But going back to it, leaders should totally have that conversation and team members should have that conversation and there should be open negotiation about it. As an example, at my company, I always tell people, I don't want you working on the weekends, I don't want you working at night and don't want you working on the holidays. And there will be times when where I will reach out on a weekend. And it's simply because in some cases I'm just trying to clear out my inbox, as a lot of people do on the weekend. I'm just trying to get to some emails I haven't gotten to or something pops into my head. And I make it very clear to people that if I send you an email on the weekend, I don't have any expectation. Or at night or on a holiday, I don't have any expectation for you to respond to it unless I say that in the email. If it's something that's urgent, I'm not going to email. I'm going to text and call. But I set that in advance with people. That means if I send emails on the weekend, very often I send somewhere between 10 to 20 emails on a weekend. No problem. Like easily. When I send off those emails, I'm not even thinking about getting a response until Monday.
And I've already had that conversation with people. If people start responding to me on the weekend, I'll usually text Them and say, hey, don't respond like, I don't need you to do this. Do you got to have that negotiation? Also, if you have teams that are international, it's also really important to think about this because there's going to be different policies and different laws in different countries. A if you're in a company that's big enough to have, like, international teams, then you should be talking to your legal team and the HR group about that in advance. But I also encourage you to have a norming conversation with people on the team. Like, hey, what do you usually do?
How have you traditionally do it, how do you done it, and how do you want to do it going forward? Finally, if we're thinking about international teams, you have to take into consideration culture. Different cultures interact with work hours in different ways. It's really important to understand what the culture is if you're working with a team that's international. So while it seems like there's a lot of complexity to all of this, it's like the simplest thing. People have a right to their time off. They should feel that their employer recognizes that. And on the flip side, there are times where employers just need something to get done due to an opportunity or an emergency. The simplest thing is just have the conversation with people and make sure that it's a conversation where you best recognize what power dynamics might be at play. So people aren't just agreeing to something to either appease you or just get through the conversation. It's all about talking, setting real expectations and sticking to them.
[00:08:29] Speaker A: I keep hearing advice about building a brand at work, but I'm not sure I understand the point. I'm just a person doing my job. Shouldn't my work speak for itself? As an employee, is it necessary to have a personal brand?
[00:08:42] Speaker B: Necessary for you to develop it? No.
A good idea to know what it is and what you want it to be? Yes. So branding is this kind of thing that I think due to the Internet and, I don't know, social media and all this, it's got this kind of icky idea to it. Just pull it all the way back. People form a perception about other people all the time. And we do that because human beings get a ton of information at any given moment. So as an example, if you look up at the sky and you look at clouds kind of naturally for most of us, we start forming patterns out of those clouds. Like, what do they look like? It's the same with, like, most things in life. We are always trying to put things into buckets just for simplification of how we process data and interact with things in the world. And branding actually falls into that. You know, people very often are looking at the people around them, the people they work with, and not just the people they work with very closely, but the people they work with once in a while or one time, and they're kind of putting them into buckets just so, again, just for future reference of how to work with people and how to work in situations, sometimes those buckets are dead on, and sometimes they're, like, totally off. So from a branding perspective, what I really encourage people to know is that most people just in general have an established brand. And that brand could be pretty accurate, or it could be wildly inaccurate. And it could also be based on, like, really, like, bad, like discriminatory, discriminatory things or like prejudices or any of those things. But I really encourage people to think, what do I believe my brand is today? What's my value proposition? Like, where do I come from as a person in the work world? And not only that, but also, what do you want it to be in the future? So what do you aspire to be? And here's a simple way of doing that. If you think about your brand, think of it as three sentences. And those three sentences should be 22 words or less. The reason it's 22 words or less is business writing. And business communication is intended to be very concise. So it's unlike entertainment writing or academic writing. Academic writing, the sentences are typically longer, more complex sentence structure. Same with entertainment writing. Think of sentences in the work world that you're saying. Or writing should be really short, really clear, and really direct. So think of your brand, three sentences. Your brand should be identified by the behaviors that you demonstrate. So when people think about branding, they usually use words that I call marquee words like integrity or transparency or things like that. It's not that those things are bad, but what do they actually mean? I really want you to think, if you're going to have a behavior, what are the data points? And the data points should be. So if I'm going to say I'm this, how would my audience know that? How would they recognize that? How would they be able to track that that's actually how I behave, and that I behave that way enough that it should be a part of my brand.
So the easiest way to do that is write out your brand, three sentences. This is who I believe I am as a professional today. There's going to be a bunch of behaviors in there. Then I Want you to think, what are the data points to that? Like, how would someone see that in practice? So they would know this is true about me. And the easiest way to do that is figure out what are the skills that are associated with those behaviors. If you're wondering what the difference is between a behavior and a skill, a behavior is something that people can see that you're expressing, like people can be like, that's how this person behaves. Skills are the things that allow you to execute on that behavior. So to demonstrate that behavior. So you need a bunch of skills to do to demonstrate any behavior, especially if it's a behavior that you're trying to do consistently. Because most of us know that almost anyone can demonstrate a behavior for a short period of time if they feel they need to. But for it to be consistent, it actually has to have skills that they've really adopted, they've learned, they've honed. So write out three sentences that you believe show who you are as a professional, what are the behaviors in there? And then write down what the skills are and just make sure that it passes the pressure test. Do people have enough data to say, this is who I am as a professional? That's step one. And trust me, this is like a super, super hard exercise. Step number two, I want you to write your aspirational brand. And your aspirational brand is like, what do I aspire to be within three to five years? Three to five years is like a pretty practical timeline. If you're aspiring to become something and write out a different brand. And that brand should be what you actually want to be perceived in the future. Recognizing that you're not that today, write that out. What are the behaviors, what are the associated skills? Then you figure out that gap. And then you're going to figure out, well, what are the skills I have to acquire, how do I develop them, and who could help? It totally matters because most people who are going to be watching this care about progressing not just in their careers, but in their lives. And who you are as a person, that's your brand. And it does matter, because no matter what your brand, whether you intentionally or unintentionally develop it, it's there. I encourage people to be like, really honest, like, what's my brand today and what do I want it to be in the future? And start working on it.
[00:13:44] Speaker A: I just got feedback from a 360 review, and it highlighted a gap between how I see myself and how others see me. Some people describe me as aloof or distant, but I Want to be viewed as supportive and approachable. What steps can I take to shift this perception? Also, since I'm naturally more quiet and reserved, is this just something that comes with my personality or can I still make meaningful changes?
[00:14:10] Speaker B: It's important to tease out what you should change because there's going to be an upswing, what you could leave alone because there's not going to be an upswing from it. And also what's just perception versus reality.
So whenever I get a 360, one of the things that I encourage people to think about is things that are accurate versus inaccurate versus neutral. And when people get 360s, they very often feel like they can't push back against any of the feedback because it would say something bad about them. It's like, no. Like, all feedback is subjective and contextual. You could interview 10 people one month and have a certain set of data, and then interview people the next month and have not necessarily radically different data, but the data could be. Could represent different things. It's really important to know that when I say data or like, feedback is subjective and contextual has a lot to do with, like, what's going on with a business, who's. Who's kind of the opinion maker at the time, how much pressure people are under, how much people like working with someone. There's a lot of things that go into that. So feedback. When I say it's accurate for someone to view feedback as being accurate, they themselves should actually have noticed this about themselves before or have gotten that feedback consistently enough throughout their career where they're like, pretty sure it's accurate. So if you get feedback and you're like, I don't think that's true. I've never seen that in my own process, nor have I ever been told that before. It doesn't mean it's totally inaccurate, but I would put that more in the neutral category, where essentially when I say something's neutral is that you've never noticed it in your own process before and you've really never heard that about yourself. Neutral just simply means you're undecided. I don't know if it's accurate or inaccurate. I need to learn more. And learn more is like talking to your manager, asking feedback from your colleagues. Start paying attention to how you show up on things, start tracking things. You shouldn't just go out the door and start executing on feedback. You should really think, well, do I think this is accurate or inaccurate? And if you don't have an answer for either one, then it's neutral. Neutral Requires you do some more research, you pay more attention. You actually disagree with this. You think the opposite of it. You're like, no, I just don't think that's true. And again, people sometimes think, oh my gosh, can I actually say something's not true? Of course you can. You totally can. Just because someone gives you feedback doesn't mean it's good. It could be totally crappy feedback. So the good thing about that is that if you believe something's inaccurate, it's one of two things. Either you have a blind spot. It's good to have a. It's good when you take a position, and then it's proven wrong to you because that means you have a blind spot. Everybody has blind spots in their life, just in general and in their career. So if you think something's really not true, you should inquire about that. Like, I really disagree with that. And if you got a 360 and you're. And if you're working with a coach, that's a great conversation now because you can explore it more. You can get feedback from them. You can deep dive into it. If you're not working with a coach, you've really got to, like, focus on it and like, kind of do some more research. But saying something's inaccurate is okay as long as you're willing to do the work that will tell you either you're right and it is inaccurate, or you actually have a blind spot. But let's go to the other thing. So first, it could be they have a blind spot. The second could just be that it's a perception that's been formed around you that either at one point was true but is no longer true. That happens all the time. People change in their careers, they change in their lives, they learn, they grow. And sometimes a story that's been built around someone is because, yeah, that's how they were, but they're not like that anymore. And just the perception hasn't caught up with the change. In that case, steady as you go, stay the same, and eventually perception will come up. The other thing that could have happened is maybe it was true at one point. So sometimes people have like an unfortunate misstep in their career, and it could be in whatever situation where it could be for a short period of time or just even one time, but it's kind of like a mountaintop moment where people say or do something where perception is attached to them and they can't shake it again in that case, and it turns out to be that steady as you go over time, it should dissipate, especially if you stay steady and consistent. But the last is with inaccurate things is sometimes people try to make people look certain ways, look like villains, look like they're dishonest, they're inaccurate, make people seem smaller than they are, make people seem like they're not courageous or they're not resilient. I see this in the workplace all the time where people have an agenda and it could just be personality based, it could be because people want a position. All of that is to say that all feedback isn't the truth about you or anyone else. It's subjective, it's contextual. And either you're going to think it's accurate, if you think it's accurate, you create a plan on it. If there's an upswing on it, I'll talk about that in a second. But if it's neutral, you got to go out, you got to do some research, you got to like really like pay attention so that you can put it in either into an accurate or an inaccurate bucket. And if it's inaccurate, again, you do have to do some research to either discover whether or not you have a blind spot or if it's a perception based thing. And you got to figure out what you want to do with it. But let's go to whether or not you think it's accurate. You only put work on things that are going to have a return. So for example, being told you're aloof, well, is it a problem if you know you're not aloof? Like you're not this cold and negative person, you're not pushing people off. If you know that about you yourself and it's not intentional. Is there really like an upside of putting a lot of work into it? If the answer is no, well, there's not really an upside. It's not actually affecting my career and I'm not intending to do it in a negative way. I don't think you need to put work into it. But if you're like, you know what, there is an upside.
I don't like getting that feedback and I'd like to do better. That's enough of an upside. But also, let's say it might improve your ability to work with others, it might open up your network, it might make you feel better, then yeah, you should put some work into it. And I'll get into that work in a second. But only really if you feel it's something I want to do. And there's a great upside to it. If you don't feel that it's okay to not to not do it around the work that you could do. So some people are just as you'd said in your question, some people are just a little bit more naturally reserved. Some people don't share about their personal life. Those are okay things. What I'd encourage you to do is to think about tone setting. So tone setting is about how we engage in a conversation. There's always someone setting the tone in any conversation. Whether it's just two people speaking or three people speaking or 300 people speaking, someone is always setting the tone. And tone can be set by one person or tone can be set by multiple people. And that's called co creating. If you're someone who's been gotten the feedback that you're a bit more reserved, the easiest thing to do is show up at the beginning of conversations by tone setting from an open perspective. Tone setting from an open perspective means that you usually like, you know, like making a point of saying hello to people, like shaking their hand or giving them a fist bump, or in certain work situations, giving people a little hug. Whatever's appropriate in your workspace and you're comfortable with. It also has a lot to do with smiling and activating your eyes. So smiling doesn't have to be like, you're like got some huge ridiculous grin the whole time, but just like a dedicated smile with a little bit softer eyes to demonstrate to people that you're there. It could also just be asking people questions about themselves at the beginning of the conversation. Tone is established within the first three to five minutes of any interaction, whether it's people on stage speaking to hundreds of people or just one to one conversation. It just means that if you've gotten a little bit of that feedback that you can be a bit withdrawn or a little bit cold. Use that first three to five minutes to establish that tone differently. Have open body language and maintain good eye contact. And again, that's not looking at someone the entire time because that's creepy. But just have good, good eye contact around 65% of the time. Use that other amount of time to think, look away and those types of things being viewed as being a little bit distant or a little, little bit cold is ultra common feedback. You just need to decide with A, is this accurate, inaccurate or neutral? And then B, if you want to do something with it, make sure there's an upside and don't like totally go over, over the top with it. Just do small stuff and think about tone setting in that first three to five Minutes of any conversation.
[00:22:33] Speaker A: How do I restore trust with the team that I manage and build back a positive team culture. For context, we've gone through some recent turnover of high level positions and the landscape of our work is changing. So it's been hard. I feel like my team does not have faith in me as a leader and morale is low. Personally, I'm struggling with constant negative feedback, being expected to have every answer and also be the cheerleader. What are some steps I can take to rebuild positive team culture and have my personal boundaries respected?
[00:23:06] Speaker B: At the same time, I would encourage having a team alignment session. So when teams become misaligned, it really gets really, really chaotic. Even if they're slightly misaligned. Because like even slight, like kind of like imagine just like a grain of sand in your eye, like how uncomfortable that is and just like how much it bothers you. But realistically it's this teeny little thing, but it's affecting the whole thing. It can affect both your eyes. You can't stop thinking about it. That's what misalignment is like. So have a team alignment session. And this is what I mean by that. For a team to be aligned, there needs to be four things in place. You need to have a working alliance, a mission, a two year vision and a four year vision and all of those things like a leader being expected to answer. You've got to have all the answers and you have to cheerlead us and you have to have a hard conversations and do it just the right way. Like all of these like really heightened expectations of a leader, they're too much, they're unrealistic. And not only does it make people not trust their leader, it makes the treater, the leader not trust themselves and also trust the team. Got to get back into alignment. So this is what a working alignment is. A social contract is an unspoken set of agreements that people have. So for example, if I invite someone over to my house, I don't stop people at the door before they come in and say hey, before you enter my house, you've got to agree to not spit on my floor and like kick my dog. I just assume people aren't going to do that. That's a social contract. Social contracts hold up a lot of really, really good things in society, but it can also hold up really negative things like racism, sexism, ableism, like why one person on a team can say some like totally insane thing, like totally uncomfortable, really weird thing or make types of jokes while other people would never think about doing that. Social contracts Have a lot of really good stuff, but they also hold up a lot of negative stuff and also like weird expectations of leaders, like all the things that were in that question. Instead of a social contract, we should have a working alliance. A working alliance is not a set of rules. A Working alliance is one sentence, 22 words or less about how we agree to work together. And I'll get into how you do that in a little bit. A working alliance should also not be vague in like marquee words like transparent, you know, ethical. Like, yeah, those are cool words. I think we all want to work on a team that's transparent and ethical. But what does that actually mean? What does it mean in practical terms? So it is a clear agreement of how we are going to work together that everyone on the team is involved in crafting. The second thing is you got to have a mission. There's a difference on a team's function. So what a team does and a team mission. I want you to think of a lawnmower. The most basic function of a lawnmower is to cut the grass. If it doesn't cut the grass, it's effectively not a lawnmower. It's just something you have. The most basic function of a lawnmower is to cut the grass. But there are a lot of different kinds of lawnmowers. So some people might want to have a hand push lawnmower, but if they have a hand push lawnmower, they have it for specific reasons. There's a purpose of why they have that. Some people have these, like, you know, like super, like luxury, like really nice, like high tech, like riding lawnmowers that like do all the stuff, you know, they collect the grass, they mulch the grass, all that well. There's a reason they have that. If we can agree. The most basic function of a lawnmower is to cut the grass. And that's the function. But the purpose of why a certain lawnmower at a certain time has a lot to do with the person and their lawn, like how they interact with their lawn. So what's the mission of a team? If the basic function of your team, whatever the basic function is, is like, this is the basic function. Like this is cutting the grass for our team. These are the things that we do.
Then why this group of people at this time? What is the thing that you're trying to accomplish together? So what's the purpose behind your team? The purpose behind a team usually switches every three to five years. And so you just say, like, why this team now that's the question you should be answering. And a mission should be something that you can track your progress in so that at some point you say mission accomplished. And that means the team either goes on to its next mission or it kind of changes the pieces of the puzzle. So like who's on the team and why they're on the team. So again, thinking of a lawnmower perspective, it's like, you know, maybe I got a bigger lawn or a small, smaller lawn. Maybe I want more exercise, maybe I want to be outside less. Whatever it is, how do you formulate the team? So you got to figure out what your mission is. The two and four year vision, this is the what you're trying to accomplish. And the two year vision is based on what the, what your mission is like. So if we think that's our mission, what do we need to get accomplished within the next two years? And then the four year vision is aspirational. If we're successful with the two year vision, what becomes possible? That's not possible today?
Alignment sessions are long, they're a full day session. And I encourage people to split people up into groups. And so you should always have three different flip charts going at any given time. And you should get through each one of those things through an iterative process. Each one of them, the working alliance, the mission, the two year vision, the four year vision, they're each 22 words or less and it requires an iterative process. So one team comes up with like, here's our idea of the mission. The next team comes up with what their idea of the mission is. The next team comes up with what their idea of the mission is. You take that, you put it up on the wall, you switch spaces and then each team looks at each other's mission and then they create a better version and a better version of it and you distill it down. It's a full day process. But by the end of it, you will have had the conversations you need to have, like real open, honest conversations, like, well, how do we agree to work together? You will have understand the mission like, well, what is our function? But actually why us? What are we trying to accomplish? Why have we been brought together? You'll understand that the two year vision, okay, what is it that we need to do in the next two years? And you'll understand what's possible in the future. I've taken a very complex topic and split it down to just like, I think around four minutes of dialogue. If you have questions about it, look up on our website. Leading with purpose. And if you have more questions about it, how to actually do this on a deeper level, just hit us up and we can help out.
[00:29:10] Speaker A: I'm doing well in my position, but I'm worried about my work all the time. How can I become more confident in myself and trust my work?
[00:29:18] Speaker B: I encourage you to consider that you might be becoming hypervigilant or avoidant or a combination of both due to the pressure that you're experiencing. So human beings have this thing called the long term stress response. And it's our response to stress for long term periods. And stress doesn't have to be like terrible, like really like on you pressure, but it could just feel like that sense of like steadily increasing pressure over long periods of time. And what I'd encourage you to consider is these types of responses usually kick in if something ultra dramatic has happened, like something super high pressure that you instantly are like, oh, this is going to be a long term push. Or if you've been under steadily, steadily increasing pressure for six weeks or more. So a feature of the long term stress response is how people start changing their approach to things. So when people are under stress for long periods of time, usually I refer what I refer to as the three P's get impacted. The first P is patterns. It's patterns of self care. It's just like how people take care of themselves and we have a lot of material on that around the legs of the chair of how to maintain your patterns of self care. So you can refer back to that in the podcast. The second one is performance. The next P is performance. And then the third one is personality. Personality is like the person who's showing up, like their personality starts to shift. So someone who's more gregarious might become more reserved or might become much more gregarious. Someone who's more reserved might become way more reserved and almost like a ghost in the workplace. Or they might become more reactive. But let's go to the second one, performance. When people are under long term stress, their reserves start to change. It impacts their sleep. Especially if their patent self care start going off. They start worrying about the future a lot. They start hyper analyzing the past. And it can cause people to become either hyper vigilant, so hyper vigilant being. It's that like you get an email, boom, you're on it, you are doing as much if not even more work. You're like churning work out. So essentially you're trying to work your way through the stress and the pressure. But in doing so, your quality starts to dip. And even if you're doing it really well for a while, the more, the longer you stay in a hyper vigilant state, you can't help it. You're just going to start having less accuracy, less precision in your work, but you'll be churning out the same amount of work because you're anxious about it. So you're trying to do as much, you don't want to dip it all, you might even do more, but the results are getting worse and worse and worse and worse. But the flip side is someone who could be becoming avoidant. And from an avoidance space, people are getting so concerned about their work that they start becoming a little bit paralyzed and it's taking them longer to do things and they're doing things at like less depth, less precision because they're just like, it's too much for them. And in some cases people can become a mix of hyper vigilant, so they're trying to do a ton of stuff, but also avoidant, where they're doing a ton of stuff, but to reduce the pressure they just stop doing other parts of their job or start doing it in kind of a half assed way.
This P that we're talking about the performance space. When I find people are in a place in their career where they're really like, they're trying to go and they're trying to like make a make, you know, make things happen for themselves, it's really easy to become hyper vigilant or avoidant or a mix of the both. And what I really encourage people to do is pace back back. The past and the future start rising into too much prominence when we're in an anxious or a depressive space. And hypervigilance and avoidance bring in anxiety and depression, which are kind of hallmarks of the performance issue. Pacing back and being in the now, what can you really actually accomplish right now and how that practically links to next steps. And I also really encourage you to be thinking about work life balance. I know that sounds kind of trite, like, oh, work life balance. But now like work life balance is actually like a thing that you can really meaningfully impact if you pay attention to it. So in that space, if you're really pushing on your career and trying to make things happen, you have to make a trade off of like, well, where am I putting my energy right now and for how long? And knowing when you're taking breaks, how do you draw that energy back and redirect it? You only have 100% of energy and if you commit a ton of energy to a big push in your career, which is totally cool. A lot of people do that. How do you draw that energy back and how do you redistribute it across the important parts of your life? Listen, it sounds like you're in a cool part of your career, like, exciting. I've been there in many ways, I'm still there. And I get anxious, I get nervous, I get avoidant, I get hyper vigilant. The difference maker here is being aware when you're doing those things and taking the right steps to address them. So it doesn't impact your work, but it also doesn't impact who you are and just like your heart, your soul, like your, like, feeling of just being the person that you want to be. We all experience work pressure, but it's about being aware and taking the right steps.
[00:34:17] Speaker A: We want to hear from you, our audience. To submit your questions, send us a message, drop us a DM or comment on our social channels.
