Ep #5: Confidence + The Model with Patricia Perozo

Emily
Welcome to Emotional Leadership, the podcast for high achieving leaders. Because healthier emotional lives means stronger leadership, thriving teams and much bigger results.

Hello! This is an episode I’ve really been looking forward to. Today I’m going to teach you the core tool that has completely changed my life over the last four years. It’s called The Self-Coaching Model, and it was developed by my teacher Brooke Castillo. Much of it is going to feel familiar and obvious because it just describes the world as it is. But you know that feeling when someone puts knowledge you already have into super clear words, so you can start talking about it with other people and rolling it around in your head, and finally USING that knowledge? That’s what learning the Model is like.

It’s taught me to stop waiting for confidence, waiting for motivation, waiting to not be afraid. I’m getting so much better at just getting up and doing things, even if I don’t quite feel like it in the moment. This feels like a superpower. I used to waste SO much time avoiding doing simple things like emptying the dishwasher or calling my parents. In my head they were categorized as “hard”. They’re not hard. I think we both know that. My parents are amazing. They’re in my top 5 favorite people in the whole world. And every time I talk to them I love it. And yet…I wasn’t doing it. And I love it when my kitchen is clean. I love the satisfaction of having everything tidy and gleaming. It doesn’t take more than three minutes to empty the dishwasher and re-load it. But I wasn’t doing that either. I mean, I’d sit on the couch and just AGONIZE over the fact that I should probably go do the dishes but I didn’t FEEL like it right now. And I couldn’t for the life of me figure out where that reluctance was coming from.

I still do waste some time on that spinning. But so, so much less than I used to. And it’s decreasing every day.

The model has also taught me that I create my own experience in the world. And I have the power to make it exactly what I want it to be. And of course, it’s also taught me to shift the leverage points I use to control my experience. Trying to change the people around me – my manager, my boyfriend – wasn’t working. Did it work for you? Yeah, probably not.

Owning that I was creating my own negative experiences as well as my own positive ones was transformative. It’s not always easy. But when I’m stuck spinning in drama, I’ve got my game plan for pulling out of it and creating the life I DO want.

If you know me, you know I love frameworks. And the model is the base framework that underlies a huge portion of what I teach. It’s like an axiomatic rule I can derive everything else from. Half of my management philosophy. How to have a much better relationship with my partner. How to break the cycles of beating up on myself and self-doubt.

When you apply this mental framework to the world around you it becomes much easier to follow step 2 of the Big Results formula and Stop Distracting Yourself from your goals. Because when you know where your emotions come from they’re less scary, and it gets much easier to not run away from them.

And the self-coaching model also makes it much easier to follow step 3 of the Big Results formula: Plan and Take Massive Action. When you stop waiting around for the right mood to strike, and learn how to choose exactly which actions and results you want to create for yourself, you can reliably take big action any time you want.

I really toyed with teaching this in episode one. But I think it’s a much more useful lesson, and a much more powerful one, when you’re already playing around with awareness of your emotions and allowing discomfort and the rest of the ones we don’t love as much.

And I’m pairing this tool with today’s emotion of Confidence, because I think confidence is one of those emotions we tend to wait for. And I want you to know that you don’t have to wait for it. And in fact, that you can’t wait for it. Because the only place confidence is ever going to come from is within you. And it doesn’t have a timer. It just shows up whenever you choose to let it.

That idea is really powerful for me right now, because I’ve been having some issues recently with resisting feeling confident in a number of places in my life. I know! It’s such a great feeling! Why would we ever resist it? Well, it turns out for me that one reason I deny myself the lovely and beautiful feeling of confidence is when I can see ways that I could do something I’m good at even better. Silly, right? I am good at it. I know it. So why would I deny myself confidence?

This podcast is actually one great example. I think I’ve got some pretty helpful ideas to share, and a pretty good ability to explain them. But I’m afraid that if I feel confidence, it’ll set me up for feeling terrible later when people laugh at me and tell me the ideas were terrible and my way of presenting them was worse. Of course, no one has said that. In fact, I get really positive feedback when I give talks based on these ideas at conferences. But I’m afraid that putting myself out there will result in someone telling me I’m horribly mistaken and misled. And I want so much to avoid that hypothetical negative feeling of annoyance, or embarrassment, or uncertainty that I deny myself the great feeling of confidence right now.

And did you see that I even did it right there? Pretty helpful. Pretty good. Sure, I used a humorously self-deprecating tone that made it clear I thought they were better than pretty good. But why not just use the words “amazing” and “life changing”? Because that’s what I actually believe in my heart. The answer, apparently, is that if I let myself enjoy the confidence too much, something bad might happen. Our brains are full of really intriguing thought errors like that one!

So, I’m going to share with you my conversation on Confidence with Patricia Perozo from Pinterest. And while you’re listening I want you to notice all the ways that we choose to limit our own confidence, and which ones resonate with you.

Begin Guest Segment

Emily
Good morning!

Patricia
Good morning!

Emily
I am so excited to have you here today. Patricia and I worked together at Brigade for several years. She joined us at Pinterest and is part of the Trust and Safety team there. I was so excited to bring her in as part of this podcast episode because she has such a great way of thinking about how she’s thinking and how she’s feeling and putting that into words. And in the episode where we talked about vulnerability, we talk a lot about how important it is to let ourselves see what we’re thinking and feeling. And we also talk about the value of letting other people see that. And just working with Patricia, she embodies that so well. It just makes it so easy to have conversations about her experience and I think you’ll really enjoy it too. Patricia, could you tell us about you? Give the audience a flavor of who you are?

Patricia
Sure! So I was born in Caracas, Venezuela. We moved to the US when I was a year old, so pretty much grew up here in Virginia, Chicago. I definitely rep Chicago pretty hard. I moved out to California for college. I knew I wanted to be a CS major because I always just loved problem solving. I think computer science is some of the most pure problem-solving and I just really wanted to do that. I think for me, the part where I got a little discouraged was in college. Everyone seemed to want to work at Google or Facebook and trust me, I did that. I was an intern at Facebook if we’re doing the resume points. And that just didn’t bring me a lot of joy. And so I learned pretty quickly that what I wanted to be doing was as close to social justice work with a computer science degree that I could get. And so I interned at Brigade, joined Brigade out of college and really just wanted to focus on building tools to help constituents access their government better. I work at Pinterest now, I work on the Trust and Safety team, which I just sort of think of as like protecting people who are trying to go out out about their normal business online. And that’s fascinating! I mean there’s just so much to talk about there, but it’s not what we’re here to talk about.

Emily
But what is your quick pitch? Why does that excite you?

Patricia
Oh man. Yeah. Okay. So I think I’ve gotten to a weird place where a lot of people in Trust and Safety are, is that you kind of have respect for your adversaries. Like some of them are just really smart–some of them are not and we make fun of them–but some of them are really smart and you just have to respect the intellect of the problem solving and the fact that you’re sort of playing chess in this constantly moving system where we control the system and they’re trying to get around it. There’s just–you just have to respect the creativity. Obviously a lot of them are doing really terrible things and I don’t respect that and I don’t condone the illegal and elicit online activities, but the problem solving, it’s entertaining.

Emily
So you’ve mentioned problem solving a couple of times and I also had the great joy to be Patricia’s manager for a few years.

Patricia
Yes.

Emily
And so one of the things that I always loved about working with you is the way that you take that problem solving approach to everything. Two of the terms that I use a lot in my coaching, and I use a lot with folks that I’m teaching are “emotional adulthood”–emotional adulthood is basically where we actually take responsibility that all of our feelings come from our own thoughts and we don’t give our environment credit for how we feel.

Patricia
Mmm, yep.

Emily
And I love the way you take that problem solving mentality and you use that to say, okay, well this is how I’m feeling. I don’t like it. What am I going to do about it? Not how am I going to try to change and coordinate everything around me so that I never, no one ever makes me feel this way again.

Patricia
Oh yeah, yeah.

Emily
Math is the facts. This person said these words in this meeting and then all the drama is about what we made that mean. I love who you kind of have this natural ability to sort those two out.

Patricia
Mmmhmm.

Emily
And that makes it so interesting to talk with you about the emotions that are negative and challenging because you do have such an ability to be like, but I know it’s coming from me.

Patricia
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I think I will just give a lot of credit to you here. I think a lot of what we did in our one-on-ones was coaching!

Emily
So I’m really excited today to talk about the flip side of that, which is positive emotions that we also don’t always do a great job of jumping in and creating for ourselves.

Patricia
Yeah.

Emily
The emotion we’re talking about today is confidence. What’s exciting about confidence for you?

Patricia
Yeah. I wanted to talk about this because you asked me what emotion do you AVOID feeling and this was not my first answer. My first answer was anxiety. But then I had a couple of days to think about it and for me, I really think anxiety and confidence are two sides of the same coin. For me, those are sort of the two emotions that play off each other the most and are sort of opposite ends of the spectrum. At first I thought that the emotion I avoided the most was anxiety. And after just a couple of days of work and life, I realized like, wait a second, that’s not true. I actually shockingly have started to gravitate towards that feeling of anxiety a little bit and feel more comfortable in that sometimes. Then confidence in very specific elements of my life. And I think I wanted to talk about confidence because I think if you know me, I can be described as a fairly confident person.

I definitely know what I’m about in terms of my life and my values and who I am and what I want to do and who I want to be. And so I think I can come off as someone who doesn’t have a ton of anxiety and who is fairly confident in what I’m doing. And I think that there are specific skillsets of mine that I’m very confident in and always know to pull those out of my back pocket. One of those is public speaking! I’m happy to go in front of a crowd and talk or in front of a mic. But when it comes to the day-to-day work of being an engineer and writing code, I am a very anxious person. I think the number of times where I just sit at my desk and sort of spiral before making a decision or before continuing something–I think I am someone who feels sort of the two extremes of being like hyper confident in myself and my values and who I am as a person and at the same time so anxious about some of the ways in which I show up and I use that skillset.

Emily
Yeah. One of the things we wanted to talk about today is, when do you avoid confidence?

Patricia
I think one of the places where I avoid confidence is genuinely in tactical decision making. I think that there are a number of places where I can come up with multiple decisions, I can come up with pros and cons, and I just don’t feel confident in myself or the decision or any ability to make a decision. And I will pull other people in at that point to help me make that decision–which obviously we should all be doing, right? Collaboration is definitely one of the keys to problem solving. I’m working as a team–and yet I think that there are places where I go to get other people’s opinion where frankly, I don’t need to. There are a number of places where I know what my right answer is and still don’t feel confident in it.

And that has been changing. It was happening more around this time last year, a year ago, nine months ago. It has gotten better as I felt more confident in the code base that I’m working in. But I think there are places where honestly, also laziness leads to just being like, well, I’m a little anxious about putting this up for review, but I’m just done with it. Or I’m a little anxious about deploying it, but I’m just done with it. Just screw it, let’s do it. And one of the things that I realized while we were prepping for this was actually that when I have that feeling I need to just stop and say, no, you know how to do a super thorough job at this. You know exactly what it takes to make you feel confident about a piece of code you’re putting up for review.

So sit down, take the time, do it. I guess I didn’t put laziness into the mental equation earlier, but…I don’t want to call it laziness, but there is a certain just frustration and a feeling of, ah, screw it, I’m done, that leads to a little bit more like, I feel anxious about this, but I want this anxiety to stop and I don’t feel confident about it, but I don’t want to do the work to feel confident about it, so I’m just done, getting it out there. I think part of that, to just continue the stream of consciousness, is that one of the ways in which I have spiraled on my anxiety is sometimes I will just have a commit that’s ready to go and I just can’t force myself to put it up for review. Because I don’t know what I don’t know. And I don’t know what comments are going to come my way.

And I think sometimes when you pick a certain approach and you code the entire thing up, it’s really hard to, once you’ve taken that path, take a step back and see where were the forks in the road that I made a decision, after the fact. I think as you’re making the decisions, it’s easier to stop and say, I’m making a decision here. But once you’ve done the whole trail, it’s a little harder. And then I hit the end and I’m like, well crap, where were the decisions where I could’ve made something different? Where are people going to ask me to do something different in code review and then I spiral. And so the way that I’ve stopped that is just saying, screw it, put it up for review. They will tell me what their problems are with it. Which is a fine approach except for the fact that there’s a point in time where I just have to be able to make those decisions for myself. I’d have to be more cognizant of the places where I’m making decisions.

Emily
Yeah, so I love where you’re touching on having access to this emotion of confidence is really important to me, even though I’ve worked around it for now. This is what I think so many of us encounter when we look at the emotions that we’re not good at yet, is we find all this scaffolding for how we’ve worked ourselves around it. The more I’ve been thinking this year about what is mentoring, what is coaching? What is the purpose of these activities? Why do senior engineers mentor junior engineers? Why do people work with coaches? So much of it I think most people think is because the person who’s being coached or the person who’s being mentored couldn’t get there on their own. I think that’s totally false. I believe that everyone can get anywhere they want in their lives, however weird and out of the way and absurd it might sound for them, they can absolutely get there on their own if they’re willing to put in the work. And I also think that we can get there a lot faster when we can take all of the windy, twisty paths in our head and all the ways that we’ve built these very carefully propped up scaffoldings and we can create straight lines of knowledge and clear ways of describing things and cleaner ways of thinking about things and firmer foundations in just how we do what we do. So I love this example that you gave right here, which is I’ve learned how to do without this emotion in this moment. And it works. It’s good enough. So what would be better if you had confidence in that moment instead?

Patricia
Oh yeah. I think it’s one of those things that is like I think I have kind of hit the point where it’s not good enough to me. I think, I think the difference is that I have decided it’s not good enough. This is unrelated, but until a few weeks ago I had sort of always thought that I was going to transition out of being a software engineer and be, I don’t know, a product manager or something else and that I would sort of use my problem solving skills and other ways. And a few weeks ago I finally was like, wait, actually no, I really want to be a software engineer. I do think part of that decision has forced me to be like, so this is my job now. Yes, it’s been the job I’ve had for the past two and a half years.

And yes, I went and got a four year degree to come do this job. This is my job. And with that, I want to be good at it! I want to be proud of the work I’m doing. I want to feel confident in my decisions and I want to be better than I am today. And one of the ways to be better is to be able to work faster. I think one of the ways that my lack of confidence hurts in this industry is that it takes me longer to make decisions. It takes me longer to write code because code is making decisions every fricking second your typing almost. Some of them are really small decisions like variable names and some of them are much bigger decisions and those are the ones that you talk about in big groups and you run through other people and think of all the downsides. But writing code is decision making. And if I’m not confident in my decisions, it means every decision takes that much longer. And I like to be productive at my job and my chosen career–now six and a half years in. It has sort of come to a crux of me deciding that this needs to change.

Emily
Okay. So I have to ask, because you just talked about deciding six and a half years that actually maybe computer science and software engineering is really going to be your career. And we’re in the middle of a conversation about confidence and about how maybe we make decisions faster when we’re willing to embrace having confidence. Are these things related?

Patricia
Yeah, it’s a very fair question. Probably. I think, again, speaking to the sort of dichotomy of confidence that lives within me, I once said to our coworker, Teddy, that I was never going to be a senior engineer and I meant that I was never going to be a senior engineer because I was going to transition out and I was going to go do other things. And he took it as, I didn’t think I was confident enough to be a senior engineer. And he was like, no, no, no, no. You’re going to be a senior engineer. We’re going to get you there. And I was like, hahaha, no you’re not. I didn’t say that, but I thought it.

And I do wonder if part of my decision to sort of think of this as temporary was related to the lack of confidence that I could do that. Was that related to the lack of confidence that I could become a senior engineer? I think one of the things that we as an industry have decided is that, you have to want to write code all the time, you have to want to do side projects, you have to want to keep up to date with all the newest technology. Just to say that like I definitely didn’t see myself in any of the stereotypical characteristics of a senior engineer and I didn’t see any of my values or motivations reflected by any of the senior engineers that I saw. I think like one of the things I’ve been super cautious of in Silicon Valley, and this is completely unrelated to confidence, but I’m here, I’m explaining my thought process and here we go, is I think that there is a lot of greed.

I think there is a lot of greed to capitalize, right? Literally to capitalize on a moment on a technology and to make money off of things and I am very wary of that to be completely honest with you. I see the inequality and the disparities in San Francisco. And it makes me really just sad and demoralized for our society and I’ve always sort of been cautious to take advice from people who have similar value systems to mine. I think that when you have a mentor or someone you’re looking to for advice, it’s really important to know what they value so that you can tell where their decision making is coming from. And so I’ve always wanted to have people, to surround myself by people who had similar values so that I would never sort of go off on this path of just greed and moneymaking.

Emily
So there was a piece that I wanted to jump off on. You said maybe one of the reasons that it was hard to find the confidence to see yourself as like, Hey, I could be that senior engineer, I could get there, was because you looked at what you saw is the generic archetype of a senior engineer and it didn’t match with what you saw as you. And I think this is so much fun because both of those are collections of random thoughts. Like you made both of them up in your head and then you made up this meaning. That because they don’t match means that might not be for me. And I think that’s fun, but I also think it’s a great way to kind of call out one of the things that, because we know that our thoughts produce our emotions, and so confidence comes from how we’re thinking and we know that we get to choose any thought that we want. But that’s sometimes it’s nice if it’s maybe easier to think that way.

We can do the work to get to how we want to think. But also there’s ways that we just think more by default right now. We can shift that over time, but there is how we think easily by default right now. And I love that example that you gave, which was one of the ways that would be easy to have confidence is if you looked at people and you said, Oh well that looks like me, I can super easily see myself reflected in this. And I love that example because it just speaks to, it’s easy to feel confident in one circumstance. It takes more effort from you to feel it in the other, but it doesn’t mean you can’t.

Patricia
Totally.

Emily
And kind of the same idea, right, sometimes I like to talk about like what puts our foot on the gas and makes it easy to do something. But also great to talk about what puts our foot on the brake and makes it hard to do something. You also brought up a great example of that brake, which was, I don’t want to be that person. Like when I look around this industry, there’s so many people who are acting in ways that just don’t line up with, we could talk about it as morals, we could talk about it as all sorts of other kind of labels, but it’s really you see people and, to be blunt, the judgments you apply to them don’t line up with how you want to see yourself and you don’t ever want to judge yourself that way.

Patricia
Yeah, I think that’s totally fair. I don’t think that’s that blunt!

Emily
But I think what this does is it holds us back from becoming the thing, because we’re afraid that if we become a senior engineer, we’re all of a sudden going to be the person who isn’t thinking about everyone else who’s in our city or who is doing these other behaviors. And it makes us not want to identify that way, which makes it so much harder to feel confidence that we could be that person when we don’t even really want to be that person.

Patricia
Yeah, I think that’s really fair. The only thing I would caveat that with is, I think that, at least for me, one of the things I think about is that, number one, it’s not just about the end goal and that if I believe that things are not about the end goal, that the path is important, then I also think that the path can sort of change you. And I think for me the fear about the [path of] staying in the industry, becoming a senior engineer, being a person I don’t want to be, is that I am worried, not necessarily that being a senior engineer would turn me into a bad person, but that the pathway would be these series of small jumps that change who I am fundamentally. I think that’s for me the bigger fear. It doesn’t need to be that way. And I think I’ve done enough research on the ways in which I want to use my skillset that I feel more confident now in continuing along this path. I also think like in the realization a few weeks ago that I actually want to be a software engineer, it was at a similar time where I felt ready to consider applying to what I consider to be one of my dream jobs. I’m not going to do it yet, I think that there is a lot more that I can learn, but it was sort of like I saw it. Before then, the pathway to that dream job was just completely nebulous and now I can see a pathway. And the ability to see that pathway was enough to make me go, okay, I can do this, I can get there. And that is confidence, right? Without confidence that you can get yourself somewhere, you just don’t think that you’re ever going to see the pathway there.

Emily
Yeah. So you’re highlighting this awesome chicken and egg and I think this is such like a great place for us to talk about, because this is the problem with feeling confidence for so many folks. One of the other reasons we don’t feel confidence is we think we have to know how we’re going to get there. We tell ourselves, well, I can’t be certain if I’m going to get there because I don’t know how, but also we never really know how we got somewhere until we got there. I believe we have to feel the confidence upfront in order to stay to start down that path and continue down the path to the end goal. What are some of the specific thoughts or sentences that you notice create confidence for you?

Patricia
The first thing I think of is when I feel pride in my work. I feel confidence. Like if I’m proud of what I’ve done, I can also feel confident.

Emily
Why?

Patricia
I don’t know. I think like one of the things that leads to confidence for me is doing the due diligence, being really thorough and going above and beyond.

Emily
I think that one’s fun, because when you’re talking about like, I can feel confident if I’ve done my due diligence, it sounds like a variant of “I can feel confident if I’m sure nothing will go wrong.” I’m trying to arrange the world just right so that like I can’t have messed anything up.

Patricia
Yeah, a hundred percent a hundred percent.

Emily
So the question is why?

Patricia
I don’t want break things. I don’t want to cause problems for other people.

Emily
I think that can also put us in this place of trying to control the outcome, instead of just deciding that we get to feel the way that we want to feel and that it’s not dependent on being able to produce THIS specific outcome that we envisioned.

Patricia
Yeah, I’m going to be honest, I don’t know if I agree with that but that’s just because I’ve never had that thought before. There’s never been the concept that you just get to feel confidence.

Emily
So let’s play with that one! You walk back into work and you honestly believe, you just get to feel confidence whenever you want to and somehow you’ve figured out the magic of doing so. What changes about work when you can just wave your magic wand and be confident anytime you want?

Patricia
I think I would spend more thinking about our systems as a whole and the ways that I can contribute to that, than the smaller projects and things that I’m pushing forwards. Yeah. I think I would think a little bigger cause I think right now I can–well, one, I have to do my specific projects and tasks, but two I am confident enough that I can achieve those smaller projects and tasks, and less confident that I can achieve some of the like broader system wide changes. I also think the things that interest me aren’t necessarily on specifically the team I’m on, they’re on sort of sister teams and having more confidence would mean I would interact with them and those projects a little bit more in ways that I currently avoid.

Emily
Yeah. That’s that chicken and egg of I want to know what’s going to work out the way I think it’ll work before I start.

Patricia
Totally totally. No, that’s 100% it.

Emily
To wrap up, we talked a little bit about if you could wave a magic wand and have more confidence at work every day, what would be different? So what will be different THIS week? If you intentionally create more confidence?

Patricia
Yeah. It’s interesting, I actually feel like I did some of that on Friday. There are a couple of bigger decisions I need to make in sort of the next steps of this project I’m working on. And I had kind of this freak out on Thursday and was just spiraling, [feeling like] there’s no way to move forward right now. And so I just was like, that’s okay, I’m going to go do another thing cause there are other things I can accomplish. On Friday I spent some time looking at the code that I was worried was going to be problematic and just got back into it and was reading it and getting more comfortable with what was going to need to happen there. And so I think one of the things that’s going to happen on Tuesday when I come into work, is just set up some of what needs to happen for this week and I think I’ll probably write some things down. One thing that I need to figure out, and this I probably will just ask a teammate about, is that I need to run a daily job to start doing something. And I haven’t written a daily job at Pinterest. And so, to me at Brigade that was like, Oh well you’ll just do it with a Cron job. And so like I looked up some of our Cron job infrastructure at Pinterest. And this is a place where like not having a ton of confidence in this decision is actually a good thing. Right? Because I will now go ask some of the more senior engineers on the team, Hey, I know this bit of our infrastructure exists, this is what given my past experience I would use, if there’s something else I don’t know about that I should be using. And that’s a place where not having confidence in being able to call out my like lack of confidence about what else exists there. Having like done the due diligence on what does exist based on my past experience, I feel more ready to take on the next steps of the decision making that has to happen.

Emily
So where are the portions of that that you do need to create more confidence for yourself?

Patricia
I think for me because the places where I’m not super confident are actually the smaller decisions, it’s just in the habits. I think we’ve talked a lot about how when you change environments, you do lose the triggers that were triggering you into good habits and I have better habits, but I think continuing to work towards what are the questions I should be asking myself every time I put in a piece of code? Like, what are the places where I do genuinely know better and could be doing things faster because I already have learned about lesson.

Emily
Yeah. So, so much of that approach is around how can I make sure I dot all the I’s and cross all the T’s so I can feel confident. Where are the places that would benefit from just generating that emotion straight up?

Patricia
I think right now I’m not super competent that if I were to propose big projects or problems I see in our systems that any of that work would be scheduled or that I’d be allowed to work on any of that, and so I just don’t do it.

Emily
Yeah. So what would be different if you did propose that work?

Patricia
Yeah, I think what would be different is that I have a different relationship with my PM and with my manager and I think I used to do a lot more of that than I do now. And I would honestly go back to feeling happier about my work.

Emily
What would you need to think in order to feel confident when you think about bigger picture projects?

Patricia
I think that there is actually, talking through this now, that I do value sitting and doing that work regardless. And so I think I just need to be okay with the concept that I like doing that work. It makes me happy to do that work and that even if it doesn’t happen, that has to be okay. Like even if that project doesn’t happen and even if they don’t take my advice on that, that’s okay.

Emily
That’s awesome. What are your tips for listeners around how to just jump off the deep end and feel confident even if you haven’t put all the I’s and T’s in order that make it easy to feel that way?

Patricia
I do think there’s a certain element of having trust in yourself and feeling security in the fact that the world isn’t going to end regardless of whatever decision you make and whatever context makes it easier to feel confidence.

Emily
And I think that’s where a lot of the magic comes in. When we can take all the, I know it’s going to be fine because, and we can literally just turn into one of my favorite things from my teacher which: I know I’m going to be fine because the worst thing in life that can ever happen is an emotion. My emotions all come from how I make myself feel when I think about the things in the world and I can handle any emotion and if I can handle any emotion, it literally doesn’t matter what happens in the world around me because that is the worst that will ever happen and I can handle it.

Patricia
Oh I really like that.

Emily
That creates such a different sense of self confidence. It’s really fun.

Patricia
I think this is unrelated to professional things, but part of just dating is feeling confident that you can create a life that you love and that you’re happy in regardless of whether that person stays with you or not. I think part of being happy about being single is that…so I spent a year and a half single and by the time I met my current boyfriend, I just had this lovely and vibrant, wonderful life and community around me and now I’m in this relationship where it’s I love him. He’s great. But also, if for some reason he leaves me, well, he leaves me and I have lovely and wonderful and vibrant life that makes me happy. And I think that that type of confidence is…I think security honestly drives a lot of problems.

Emily
Now. What would happen in your professional life if you felt like that, about every single commit?

Patricia
Wow. I don’t, I don’t know.

Emily
Right. And I think that’s what makes it really interesting because so many of these emotions, we’re really great at feeling them in one place and we’re not great at filling them in the other and we just think that’s how life is.

Patricia
But I think that that is kind of the beauty of life, is learning to apply things that you’ve figured out in one arena to another.

Emily
Exactly.

Patricia
Yeah. I’ll eventually get there, even if I’m not there right now!

Emily
Thank you so much for such a lovely conversation. This is so much fun.

Patricia
This was great!

End Guest Segment

Emily
Thanks again to Patricia!

And now I want to teach you the Self-Coaching Model, the tool I mentioned at the beginning of the episode.

The Self-Coaching Model divides everything in the world into one of 5 buckets.

Circumstances trigger Thoughts about them. Our Thoughts create all of our Feelings. Our Feelings drive our Actions. And our Actions create our Results.

So we’ve got five buckets: Circumstances, Thoughts, Feelings, Actions, and Results.

Let’s look at each of those five buckets in a little more detail.

The first bucket is Circumstances. Circumstances are everything that happens in the world around us. They are anything everyone else says or does. They are the weather, they are world events. They are also anything that has happened in the past, even if it’s something we did just a millisecond ago–it’s still in the past. Circumstances are things we have no control over. Remember my comment earlier about not being able to control other people’s actions? Yeah. What other people say and do? No control. It’s a circumstance. Circumstances are also factual and neutral. There is nothing inherently good or bad about them. It’s just what happens to be in the world.

The second bucket is Thoughts. Everything in the world is neutral, until we think a thought about it that gives it meaning. The fun part about thoughts is that they’re totally random strings of words that we just get to make up in our brains. Or, sometimes, it feels like that our brains make up for us.

Here’s a quick example. I’m hiring for the software team I manage. At my previous company, I developed some beliefs and techniques around hiring that I was really proud of, and I still am. I hired very talented and collaborative engineers. I got reviews from candidates that they loved our process and felt respected in a way that they hadn’t with any other company they’d interviewed with. Most people hate interviews, and I get feedback from candidates that they would come back and do this day over because they had so much fun talking with my team. Yeah, they would voluntarily take an on-site interview. I knew this process allowed bootcamp candidates and senior engineers many years out of college to shine in a way that the traditional toy problem interviews didn’t. I was super confident.

And then at my new company, a ways into the interview process, over the course of a few days, two different partners that I work with during the hiring process joined my interview discussions. And they weren’t familiar with how I was doing them. And to them it just looked different. This is a company that also prides itself on interviewing well. That’s worked really hard to reduce bias, and to do a great job of hiring a diverse engineering team. And they’re succeeding! So of course these two partners expressed a lot of concerns that I was doing things differently than the company’s usual approach. And all of a sudden I found myself feeling the opposite of confidence. I was scared. I was questioning myself. I was worried that maybe everything I’d developed and prided myself on was full of one of the things I try so hard to avoid – bias.

So now let’s put this into the first two parts of the self-coaching model.

My Circumstance is that co-workers asked me questions about why I do certain things in the interviews and debriefs I run. My Thought was that maybe all of my previous learnings were wrong and I couldn’t trust my instincts.

See how quickly separating out the story that I was creating from the facts of what actually happened made that sound a lot more neutral? And a lot more manageable?

There are three more parts of the self-coaching model. The next part, part three, is feelings. You knew they were coming up in this explanation right? Well, our Thoughts create our Feelings.

I think this is even more powerful when we make that observation in the opposite direction.

Our feelings are created by our thoughts, and only by our thoughts. We think a sentence, and it triggers a response in our muscles and chemicals.

But what’s most powerful about that observation is what it means ISN’T true. The world around us never creates our feelings. Other people never create our feelings. We only have a feeling about a topic once we think about it and ascribe some meaning to it by the story we tell.

I know that many of your Thoughts and Feelings probably feel entirely out of your control. The amazing news is that they’re not. We’re going to spend lots of time on that in the next few episodes.

So, if we go back, we have this model that we are creating. My Circumstance: Co-workers asked me questions about why I do certain things in the interviews and debriefs I run. My Thought: Maybe all of my previous learnings were wrong. My Feeling was fear. And doubt. So we always only want to choose one feeling for our model. So in this case, when I think “maybe all of my previous learnings were wrong,” doubt is the one of those two that fits most closely with it, so let’s stick with doubt.

The last two parts of the self-coaching model are Actions and Results. Your feelings drive every action you take, as well as all of your inaction. And those actions you take are what create your results, in your life and in your work.

So in this case, when I felt doubt, the actions I was taking were questioning “was I doing this right?” and “why did I do it?” instead of giving really crisp clear answers and helping my hiring partners understand why I liked this. My result was that I was treating all my previous learnings as wrong, without even taking the time to really understand and re-investigate them myself and decide what I liked or didn’t or offer them as options to my new partners. I had a process that I was really proud of and I was just backing down from it and that wasn’t the result that I wanted at all.

One important thing to know about the Result bucket is that only YOUR results go there. You can’t put “team member felt validated” or even “team member said they felt heard”. That’s something else someone else says, does, or feels, so the only place it can go in YOUR model is the Circumstance bucket. That first bucket of neutral facts that includes everything that happens in the world outside of you.

The second thing is to notice that your result always matches your thought in some way. You can use this to check that you haven’t mixed up your models partway through. I’m going to do another episode in a few weeks on Un-mixing Your Models. In this case my thought was that my approaches might be wrong. And in my result I was showing up as if they were definitely wrong.

And now let’s talk about how to use this yourself this week. What I want you to do this week in your Growth time, that 10 minutes a day you’ve set aside on your work calendar, is to practice using the self-coaching model. And because today we’re focusing on not resisting Confidence, we’re going to practice using it to identify thoughts that create confidence for us.

So, what I’d suggest is that you grab the podcast guide for this one. I’m going to have a sheet in there that will have a pre-written model. I’m going to try to describe it out loud to you right now, because I never want to you HAVE to download that, but this one’s a little bit of a visual description, so feel free to just go grab that if my instructions don’t make sense. So what you’ll do is grab a piece of paper and down the left-hand side of it write the letters C, T, F, A and R in order. Those stand for Circumstance, Thought, Feeling, Actions, and Result.

One thing if you’re particularly observant you’ll notice: the only thing that was plural out of those five words was Actions. Everything else we are just focusing on one thing at a time. One thought, one phrase, one emotion word, one result, one circumstance or situation–one very specific one.

So what you’ll do with that outlined skeleton of a model C T F A R, next to the letter F write the word confident. We will not always start with the Feeling, you can start from anywhere you want, but because today we’re focusing on Confidence, we’re going to start with that Feeling line.

Now, next to the C, you’re going to write a situation in the last 24h where you felt confident. Remember, this is our circumstance, so we want to be as neutral and factual as possible. This is NOT where our story goes. It might look like tying my shoes. Suggesting tacos for lunch. Sitting at the conference table in my manager’s staff meeting. Asking for a raise. Feel free to choose something big, feel free to choose something small. Whatever you know you felt confidence about. I love that my teacher uses the example of pouring a glass of water. At some point, we were a toddler and we were terrible at transferring liquids from one vessel to another. In fact, I still am most of the time! And yet I feel pretty confident when I go to get started on that. Use that as a great example for why we don’t have to be perfect at something in order to feel confidence. So don’t overthink this! Just choose a situation where you feel confidence.

Then next to the T, write your one sentence phrase or thought. You’ll notice I use the words “thought” or “phrase” interchangeably. It’s because if you’re anything like me, you’ll say “one sentence? I can make that about a paragraph and a half!” I can! Somehow, I can make my sentences LONGER than paragraphs, even though they should be a subset. So. One phrase–really simple. Think like three to eight words. Alright. And you’re going to use those words to answer the question: hy do you feel confident in this situation?

Then next to the A write all the actions you take when you’re in this situation and you’re feeling confident.

And then next to the R, write the results you create in your life when you act that way. Then I want you to send it over to me–you can grab my email from the bottom of the podcast guide, or you can email me at hello@exceptional.vision. I’ll help you with any trouble spots and send you some ideas back. I really want to help you learn how to use this and the best way to learn how to use this tool is in conversation with someone who understands it really well.

Taking the time to learn to use the self-coaching model and to use it well is one of the best investments you can make in yourself and your work.

Okay, so that was a LOT of information. This is one of those episodes that you’re really going to want to grab the Podcast Guide for. Because I took all of that information on the Self-Coaching Model, what each of the five components are, and exactly how to use it, added a few more tips and tricks and a template for how to write a model down on paper, and put it all into one awesome PDF for you.

If there is only one tool you take away from this entire podcast, this entire series of episodes, it should probably be this one. So make sure you grab the Podcast Guide, and that you use it to practice models all week. It’s linked from the shownotes OR you can get it in your email really easily right now from your phone, by texting the phrase THEMODEL to 44222.

You’re going to start thinking about the world through this framework more and more. And it’s going to give you the superpowers it’s given me.

Have an amazing week. Take the time to notice the story you create with your thoughts, and to separate it out from the facts of your circumstances. And I’ll see you back next week!

If you loved this episode and want to dive deeper into improving your own emotional health so you can feel better and have bigger results at work, you have to join me for a one-on-one call. We’ll talk about where you are, where you want to be, and create a solid plan to get from here to there. Just visit go.exceptional.vision/call.