Ep #8: Empathy + Noticing Your Assumptions with Garrett Ledbetter

GUEST: Garrett Ledbetter

Garrett Ledbetter believes in a world where everyone deserves a great first boss. Coming out of college, Garrett, had the experience of understanding how his blind spots kept him from being the leader he wanted to be. Because of this experience, Garrett now works with leaders on developing the interpersonal skills they need to become the most successful version of themselves.


Empathy is the practice of trying on thoughts that are different from our own to explore how we’d be feeling and acting if we thought that way.

The emotion of empathy is usually generated when we’re able to use that skill on a thought someone else is having, and get a brief sense of connection to their current experience.

We’re at our strongest when we’re able to recognize that all thoughts are perfectly valid ones. The thoughts we’re having, the thoughts the other person is having, they are all valid. The self-coaching model teaches us that circumstances, the world around us, are neutral and that we get to choose any thought we want about them. None of those thoughts is more right or wrong than the others.

We decide which thoughts we want based on what results we want to produce and which thoughts will help us get them.

Empathy is one of the emotions that acknowledges other people may have chosen a different thought than we did, and that’s just fine.

Listen in as I talk with guest Garrett Ledbetter, founder and leadership coach at The Leadership Effect, and General Manager at Old Navy about empathy, trying on new thoughts, and noticing your assumptions.

IN THIS EPISODE YOU’LL LEARN

  • Why being a leader means NOT being the expert
  • Why silence is critical to leading your team well
  • How to really listen instead of planning what you’re going to say next
  • Why empathy and curiosity are so valuable for performance management
  • How to shift from impatience to empathy with a coworker
  • Which beliefs about your co-workers are serving you, and which aren’t

TAKE ACTION

  • Notice the thoughts you have about other people and the results they create in your life.

Download this week’s Podcast Guide for printable pages for this week’s exercise, deeper explanations of this episode’s main takeaways, my Manager Notes tips from my conversation with Garrett, and printable quote cards to help you remember key lessons.

RESOURCES

LISTEN NOW

Empathy + Noticing Your Assumptions with Garrett Ledbetter

Choosing our thoughts intentionally lets us choose how we experience our life. It lets us create any results we want. And it lets us choose how we’re going to feel. For most of us, empathy is our first experience with intentionally trying on new thoughts, by seeing a situation through the perspective of another person.

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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, amazing leaders. Over the last few episodes we’ve talked about the only three steps you need in order to achieve big wins at work: Create a clear vision, stop distracting yourself, and plan and take massive action. Last week, I introduced you to the self coaching model. Today we’re going to talk about one specific aspect of it: that we get to CHOOSE whatever thoughts we want. This is so important, because as you know from the last two episodes, our thoughts create our feelings, and our feelings prompt all of our actions, and of course our actions are what create all of our results in life.

I’m going to say that again because this is one of the most powerful and useful things I can offer you: Choosing the thoughts we want lets us choose how we experience our life.

It lets us create any results we want and it lets us choose how we’re going to feel. Frustrated, busy, overwhelmed, curious, confident. It all comes from our thoughts.

Today, I’m going to be talking with Garrett Ledbetter. He’s the founder and leadership coach for The Leader Effect and a general manager at Old Navy. We’re talking about empathy.

I love talking about empathy because it’s the practice of trying on someone else’s model and seeing how we would feel and act if we believed what they believe. I know some of you think that you don’t have any control over your thoughts and I know that some of you don’t quite buy that circumstances are neutral and it’s your thoughts about them that create your feelings. But I know that you’ve experienced empathy before and you can use that experience as your first proof that it’s possible to think different ways about the same thing.

While you’re listening, I want you to be thinking about the places at work where you’re not open to alternate explanations. This might be where someone isn’t performing the way you want them to and you’re not being very effective at helping them improve that performance. It might be where a peer makes decisions you don’t agree with and you’re frustrated because you don’t understand why they’re pursuing that path. And it might be someone who said no to a request you’re making of them as part of your project or who disagrees with the solution you’re proposing. I want you to ask yourself, how can you use empathy to find thoughts that would work better for you than your current default thoughts are? How can you put into action at work the idea that everything everyone else does is neutral and you get to choose to think about those actions any way you want?

Begin Guest Segment

Emily
Good evening. I’m so excited to be here with Garrett Ledbetter. Garrett, tell us a little bit about you and who you are.

Garrett
Thank you Emily. So happy to be here tonight. I’m Garrett Ledbetter from South Bend, Indiana. I’ve just started a company called The Leader Effect, where my mission is to really help develop great bosses, especially bosses that are now bosses for the first time. When I have some free time, I’m also a general manager for Old Navy.

Emily
Awesome. And could you give us a quick sense, what do you love about leading and managing?

Garrett
For me, I was really fortunate to have a, a great boss right out of college and that was a moment that really made me who I am. So in turn I have a lot of associates at Old Navy that are in high school and college age and I think it’s just such an impressionable time in their life and I try to impact them in such a great way to help create the future that they really want.

Emily
So you’ve got your own coaching business as well, which is awesome. And I loved your phrasing, which is to make sure everyone has a great first manager. Could you tell us a little bit more about that?

Garrett
Yeah, I think it’s such a foundational thing, especially as you’re aging through high school and college. They’re such formative years in your life and you know, a lot of time we can’t depend on the situation that they’re coming from. And a first boss, a great one, can really make an impact that changes a kid’s life. And that’s really what I try to do. Um, you know, there’s so many managers out there that just really haven’t been exposed to a different way of thinking. You know, a lot of it’s just that very authoritarian way of looking at things and, you know, there’s a better way to do it.

Emily
Yeah. And I loved the observation you made there. So for so many of us, the people who we’re managing and leading are professionals, younger professionals, older professionals. But so many of the folks that you work with are really still in the context of their family and their house. And so we tend to think a lot as leaders, as helping people become better employees. But I love the way you kind of think and talk about it as helping them become better adults as well.

Garrett
Yeah. Really, I think it goes hand in hand. You know, the way I teach it, you really have to lead yourself before you can even lead others. So eventually I want all the people that work for me to go off and become leaders of others. But there’s a lot of steps along the way that they can get there by leading themselves first and becoming aware of all these different things going on in their lives, the emotions and kind of just life in general. So I think it’s such an important part of what I do.

Emily
They’re really lucky to have a manager who wants to invest in every single one of them as leaders. I know that’s not always the most common experience for folks who are working in a retail setting.

Garrett
Yeah, yeah. Unfortunately, retail does get that bad rap of just bad bosses. You know, the word boss just has a negative connotation with it and unfortunately that’s very alive in the service industries like retail and restaurants. But I think there’s a lot more that we can invest, especially in those first-time leaders and managers so that they can really, one, drive great results from leading and correct way, but really, two, impact a lot of lives in the process.

Emily
Yes. So I think the emotion we’re talking about is such a great fit for this work, which is empathy. Let’s start off with just, what’s your quick pitch? Why should folks want to experience empathy at work?

Garrett
For me, it’s something that it never came naturally for me. I’ve lived most of my life really thinking about me first and when I got my first leadership role, at Macy’s at the time, I really wanted to tackle everything and show everybody that was all about me and you know I was what mattered. But slowly, over time and with helpful guidance from my first boss, I realized that it’s not about me. So utilizing empathy is all about seeing things from other perspectives. For me, I’m somebody that has a very analytical approach to life and I was able to really adopt that and think about, okay, how many different perspectives could I see through here and really understand and be a part of the situation that somebody is dealing with. I find when you do that, it just really strengthens that relationship you have with them and then you can really take a lot of stuff to the next level, especially through the coaching that you do with them.

Emily
And I think that makes this such a fantastic conversation for us, because you had to work to develop empathy and the ability to think thoughts that led you to feeling that way. What were some of the exercises that really worked well?

Garrett
I think for me it’s just all about slowing down–slowing down and becoming aware. I had a very quick trigger on just that natural negative thought that comes with people. You know, seeing them NOT being able to accomplish the goal and just, you know, thinking like, well, I could do it. Why can’t they do it? So it’s slowing down, recognizing that emotion and then really going towards a perspective that’s more helpful. Like really understanding, okay, even though I can do this, what’s keeping them from being able to do this? Diving in deeper, exploring that dynamic, then helping them problem solve so that they can overcome, you know, what’s holding them back?

Emily
How did you do that exploration?

Garrett
It’s all through curious questions! Really asking the right questions and truly listening, which I think for a lot of people, listening is kind of formulating your next question as you’re listening to them, but for me just asking great questions so that they can understand why they understand what they do. I think it’s really important to dive in and try to understand somebody’s perspective. And a lot of times people are unaware of why they had that perspective. So you might ask a great question that kind of shifts how they think about things and they might come across a self-discovery around like, wow, you know, that maybe that was a self limiting belief for me and I’m actually able to achieve something like this.

Emily
Yeah. And I’ve got to ask, because I love helping my audience find quick tips that actually help them get through to the things that they want to be doing and haven’t figured out how. So if you’re listening and you’re not planning your next question, how are you figuring out what to say next in the conversation?

Garrett
That was something I struggled with quite a bit. You know, I was always kinda jumped to like, what’s the best question to ask somebody? But really it’s listening to them fully, taking a moment to really soak in what you just heard, and then planning your next route. It’s kind of like if you’re going on vacation and maybe you didn’t plan out the vacation beforehand and you’re looking at all these things to do–you absorb them all, you wait a minute and then you make your decision about what you’re going to do next. I think it’s really important just to slow down and take some time and really understand or try to understand what you’re hearing.

Emily
Yeah. I love how you’re touching on one of my favorite things that I think we don’t do enough as leaders, which is be willing to have there be silence.

Garrett
Mmm, yeah.

Emily
I think for a lot of us that comes from the belief that we’re supposed to solve someone else’s problem and if we don’t have an immediate answer or there’s something wrong with us and someone’s going to come find us out and take this job away cause we definitely don’t belong.

Garrett
Yeah. You know, there’s such a [culture of], you’re a leader because you’re an expert. I think you see this in so many fields. Especially in retail. Like, most people become a leader because they excelled at an individual role, not because they were great at leading other people. You know, maybe it has some good influence over them, but most people are thrown into a leadership role and you know, they really spend a lot of time trying to figure stuff out and trying to figure out what works. And you know, some people are a little bit more introspective about it, some aren’t. I think that’s where you get the good boss, bad boss mentality. But just taking that time to slow down and really understand–I think that comes from a lot of people being the expert and then growing into a leadership role because they were the expert of what they formally did, and their version of leadership is telling everybody what to do because they are the smartest person in the room.

And for me, I’ve completely flipped it upside down. It’s not about what do I know, but it’s really about showing people that the answers are actually already with them. They just haven’t seen it yet. I think that’s really important, especially if you think about buy-in and things like that, that they have to be able to understand how the problem in order to solve their way out of it and come up with their own solutions because they’re gonna be so much more bought into that solution because they created it. But you’re right, silence is awkward and that’s something that everybody wants to be quick to give advice. And sometimes when you’re asking those questions, it takes a little bit of time for them to develop their own device and you just have to let them think. And that’s what silence is to me. It’s just allowing time to think.

Emily
I had a great conversation my dad a few years ago about leadership and management. He was stepping out of a role of the president of his company and his company was having trouble kind of letting him go. And he talked about, you know, with so many of the less experienced folks on his team, so many of the people even who were just a few years behind him, they’d want to stop and talk and pitch him ideas and ask for his advice. And he was talking about the idea that so much of his job had nothing to do with giving them the answers. It just had to do with sitting there and validating that it was worth them asking the question and they’d ask themselves a question and they’d give an answer and his only role in the conversation was just to, you know, sometimes validate that the answer made sense and help them bootstrap to something quicker than they would have gotten that confidence on their own. But so much of it was just validating that the question itself was worth asking and it was worth that employee’s 15 minutes to think about it. Cause if it was worth the president’s 15 minutes to think about it, it was definitely worth their time.

Garrett
Yeah. Yeah. That makes a big impact. I think that’s something that, you know, we struggle a lot with, especially in coaching is really helping people understand how they think about things. It’s not that we’re training in the do skills, sometimes it’s really that we’re training them how to think about something. And something I spend a lot of time my time thinking about is how do we develop sustainable results? Cause the biggest legacy that we live as a leader is really about what happens after we’re gone. If we’re promoted or leave the company or whatever it was, you know, did we build up a house of cards or as soon as we leave it just all falls down? Or did we take the time to really help people develop the way they’d think about things, and we built a strong foundation, so that stands the test of time.

Emily
Yeah. And I love that as a lead-in to thinking about empathy because for me, empathy is about trying on thoughts that are different from the default thoughts that we’re having when we think about something and trying to understand what we would be feeling and how we would be acting if we were thinking a different thought. And the coaching tools that I teach are that we get to choose that for ourselves. We get to choose our thoughts so we get to choose our feelings, our actions and results. For so many people that feels like a big jump. And I love using empathy as an introduction to it because it’s something most of us have already spent time working: How do we take someone else’s thought and try it on?

Garrett
Yeah, it’s something I deal with a lot, especially having a lot of high school and college kids that I manage and lead because, you know, high school and college, it’s a very emotional time and there’s a lot of different things that happen, you know, good, bad and different. And I really have to apply the mindset of, even though their situation might just sound crazy, I have to remember that it might be irrational to me, but it’s still very rational thought to them and that’s what truly matters. So it’s really getting on their level, trying to understand why they’re thinking the way that they do and why they think their life is going to be over because their boyfriend just broke up with them and really just meeting them where they’re at so they can see that I’m right there with them, whether it be something in the store or with their personal life. Now I spent a lot of time trying to help my kids–students, is pretty much what I refer to them as–through life.

Emily
What are some of the situations that have been most challenging for you?

Garrett
Quite a few. I think one of the biggest challenges I had right away was working with somebody that was on my management team that had been–she hadn’t been given the feedback that she needed over time, and that really led to her kind of having an inflated sense of what she brought to the company. I think the thing that made it really challenging is that, for me, it was very easy to become frustrated with what got accomplished, what didn’t get accomplished. And I think one of the most challenging things was setting boundaries with them and focusing on how do I create accountability and also promote their own self-discovery within the process. I had to operate from the assumption that they had never been really fully trained on what they were supposed to do. I had to operate on an assumption that, you know, they’re always trying their best each and every day. And for me that was really hard because it was going to be an easy assumption for me to draw that that was not the case, that they were just coming in and not really doing the work.

Emily
What made it challenging to feel empathy in that situation?

Garrett
Yeah, in that situation, it was gonna be pretty easy for me to draw conclusions and really make some assumptions on my own about what I believed about the work ethic that they were bringing to the business each and every day. So it was really challenging to remind myself that they are trying the best that they can. That’s something that I really did not believe for a very long time. And when I first read that in Brene Brown’s Dare to Lead book, I read that and I was like, no, no way. That’s impossible. Not everybody’s trying the best that they can. But then you remember that everybody’s been raised differently, everybody comes from different backgrounds and not everything is created equal in terms of how you grow up. And I think that’s really important to remember that. And just because I came from a very privileged background doesn’t mean somebody else did.

And when I was able to come to my truth with that, then I was able to really understand that everybody IS trying the best that they can under their circumstances. So really trying to take a minute to slow down with them and think about, what were the gaps? Were they not trained correctly on things? Did they not know exactly what to do? So we had to ask a lot of questions and really do it in a way that didn’t invite the defensive response back to me. So it was very challenging just from a interpersonal relationships perspective. I spent a lot of time really thinking about what I was going to say and how that was going to land for them and what their response would be back to me, so it was really a ton of preparation–all signified by just slowing down and just really thinking through all my possible options and trying to put myself in their mindset so I can understand how to help them the best that I could.

Emily
Nice. How did you leverage empathy as part of that process?

Garrett
I think just really trying to understand why they’re doing what they’re doing, and really utilizing different perspectives and trying to, you know, maybe it was something where our priorities were a certain thing for that one day and the priorities that they chose were completely different. So really thinking through, okay, why did they choose to do those priorities and not the priorities that we had laid out earlier in the week? And just really think through every possible scenario. You know, especially in retail every single day, you really don’t know what you’re going to get and you have to really go with the flow and sometimes that makes your priorities change on a daily basis. So it was really all about utilizing multiple perspectives and really thinking about all the “why’s” behind everything and not jump to that conclusion, but ask good questions to really understand the true meaning behind something. And really get to a point where there’s some vulnerability there, because if you don’t have that vulnerability, a lot of the why’s that you’re looking for aren’t necessarily going to be the why that they really want to communicate to you, because they don’t feel like they can.

Emily
What are some of your favorite questions for helping someone communicate that why and helping you empathize with it?

Garrett
Yeah, I like digging deeper into things. Cause I do believe that a lot of the beliefs that we hold aren’t beliefs that we’ve spent a lot of time thinking about. And if you ask questions that go in deeper, I think it provides people with another expanded perspective on why they think about things the way they do. So one of my favorite questions is: how so? And just really, not necessarily challenging the way that they think about it, but getting clarity on the way that they think about it. Because if it makes sense to me in how they think about it, then we’re going to be able to problem solve collectively a lot better.

Emily
Yeah. So on the software side, when we’re thinking about building a product for our user, we have to actually figure out what the user’s problem is first. This is where so many companies build things that don’t actually work well for their target audience, because they don’t really understand their target audience’s problem. I love that you’re using that same perspective of I can’t come alongside this person and help them show up the way I want them to until I actually understand where they are. I can’t align myself with them until I know where they’re standing. How did choosing empathy help you produce better results with that employee?

Garrett
I think for that situation, choosing empathy really allowed me to understand what they needed from me–and what ended up being the case is that they really never got the training that they needed to be successful for that position. So operating under that circumstance, that we found out, it was a lot easier for me to help them close the gap and really spend a lot more time focusing on some of the fundamentals that really drive success in their role and how we can create those long-term results for them. So it really helped me mind the gap and really understand because–you don’t know what you don’t know. And empathy allowed me to understand what they didn’t know and once I did understand, then we can come up with solutions that help eliminate that gap so that they can be the most successful version of themselves.

Emily
How did you shift from assumptions to empathy?

Garrett
When I saw that I wasn’t getting the results that we needed from them so that we could move the whole business forward, I really had to think about a different approach I could take because I really believe that as a leader, 99% of my problems can be solved by the person that I see in the mirror. So I took that approach and just tried a bunch of different ways with her and really taking a more caring and humanistic approach and really valuing them as a human first. So going back and reinvesting in that relationship and making sure the relationship was solid before I could even think about moving on to giving feedback or holding somebody accountable. Cause I wanted them to know, at the end of the day, that I valued them as a person. Way before we valued any kind of results that came from their benefit.

Emily
Yeah. What’s been a moment where you found yourself resisting empathy? Just not wanting to feel it.

Garrett
I think for me it’s been easy to want to resist it. When you’re working with somebody and you’re definitely in it for the long game and you’re working on, maybe it’s a particular skill, and they’re showing that they understand it but there’s no progress in terms of behavior change. Cause it’s, again, it’s that gap between what we know and what we do and when progress, which can only be slow and steady is slow and steady. Sometimes it’s easy to want to draw back to those assumptions rather than choosing the empathetic route.

Emily
Yeah. I think the coaching approach to working with our team members is all about giving them the space to learn and figure it out themselves and do it at their speed. As you said, it’s the only approach to learning that really works. We can’t grow someone else. We can just help them grow themselves, but when we are that expert, or not expert, who thinks they already see the end goal and our employee just isn’t quite seeing it yet, it’s so easy to be impatient. How do you shift from impatience back to empathy?

Garrett
That’s something I really have to make sure I’m very cognizant about. Because I’ve struggled with it so much over time and it’s natural for me to choose the assumptive route. I really–when you take that step back and slow down–I have to remember who I was when I was their age or even earlier on my career when, you know, if somebody had gone that assumptive route on me and not taken the longer game with the patience, it would have changed who I am at this point. So I had to remember that I always have to send that elevator back down because it’s been sent up for me.

Emily
I love that phrasing.

Garrett
I think that’s a House of Cards reference there. I think it’s Episode One.

Emily
What do you find are the negative impacts of avoiding empathy when you’re at work?

Garrett
I always think of relationships as checking accounts. And this is something my first boss like really instilled in me. And every good interaction you have with somebody, you’re making a deposit into that account. Every bad interaction with somebody, you’re making a BIG withdrawal. And usually it’s a lot bigger than one deposit can do for you. When I choose not to be empathetic, I am massively withdrawing money from that account. There’s only so many withdrawals that I can do before that account’s empty and I’ve burned that relationship. So in order to build a very sustainable organization, I always have to choose an empathetic route, so that I’m depositing into that account, because those deposits are really what’s going to create sustainable longterm behavior change.

Emily
So what are your favorite sentences for dropping yourself into empathy in a moment where it’s really hard for you to create it naturally? What are the touch points or the keywords or the sentences you remind yourself of?

Garrett
I think it constantly thinks back to the two phrases of: you don’t know what you don’t know. And, everybody is doing the best that they can. And for me those two are huge pillars of my leadership style and that really influences everything I do throughout the day. And those have been pretty powerful for how I lead my teams.

Emily
Yeah. So the tool that I’m teaching listeners on this episode is all about the idea that everything that happens in the world around us and everything that everyone else says or does is completely neutral and that it’s our thoughts that create feelings for ourselves about it. So I’d love it if you’re willing to just do a little bit of an experiment. What’s a place where you and someone that you work with saw the same situation really, really differently?

Garrett
This happens a lot! And I think a lot of times that we’re not even conscious of it, which makes it really difficult. I think a great example was an article that I read the other day. The article was all about how as a leader you really undermine yourself when you go defensive, when you’re getting feedback or other guidance or advice. And for me, I was just reading that and my whole thought process the whole time was, yeah, this is great AND I think it’s really important as a leader that you’re really leveraging that relationship and that you know that person well enough that you know how to speak to them in a way that doesn’t elicit a defensive response.

Emily
Yes. So your take on that is that it’s our job as managers to make sure that when we’re giving someone feedback, we make it easy for them to not be defensive. So, as you were trying the other viewpoint on for size, what did you find yourself having to think or feel when you looked at the world through those other eyes?

Garrett
I think for me, because I’ve worked so hard to know craft interpersonal communication in a way that doesn’t offend somebody, I guess it kind of went against the grain of who I wanted to become as a leader and then I realized that I was being defensive, about a defensive article. And that really helped me shape my perspective a little bit more, because I think even your best intentioned person, when they receive feedback, I think there’s always going to be that kind of emotional hijack that happens. And it just depends on what kind of scale it is. A lot of people, you know, especially if you’ve got “practice this” are just gonna allow that to happen in their mind, they’re not going to voice anything from it. So thinking back through it and that way, I think it made a lot more sense to how both of those ideas can live together, because the brain’s a very natural and fickle thing and we really can’t control it. It just does its own thing. We just control the reaction that we have to it.

Emily
This relates so well to one of the tools I taught a few weeks ago on this podcast, which is the idea of separating out the Default Thoughts that our brain has and the emotions that those bring up from the thoughts that we choose and the feelings that we choose for ourselves. I love the example that you gave of noticing you were feeling defensive, and using that as a trigger to stop and intentionally choose a different thought. But one of the things that I think makes it such a great example for the tool of allowing emotions, is that you didn’t then stop and beat up on yourself for being defensive and you said, Oh, this is funny, and let that thought and feeling rest. They happened. There’s nothing wrong with them, but you moved forward to the one that was going to serve you better.

Garrett
Yeah. That’s something–I’ve picked up meditation recently and it’s been super useful, especially for a circumstance like this, where you’re not trying to NOT HAVE the thought. It’s really just about how you react to that thought. And so to notice and gain the awareness that you’re having negative thoughts and just simply letting them be and brushing them aside and creating a more positive thought from that situation.

Emily
Absolutely. It’s such a powerful set of tools to learn for exactly that reason. So as we’re wrapping up, what advice do you want to leave our listeners and leaders with about empathy and feeling their emotions better?

Garrett
I think the biggest thing that I can lend to you is really to understand your own meaning of everyone is doing the best that they can. For me, that was incredibly transformative in how I lead people. And we have to remember that empathy is really about choosing the long game, because it’s way too easy to take shortcuts and still get results, but that’s building your house of cards. It’s not going to last in the long-term. And I think we need more leaders that are thinking about things for the long-term so that we can build more sustainability, not just within our companies, but in the way that we think about things. I think it’s such a healthier mindset to adopt, so it goes way beyond what you do at work.

Emily
Agreed. Absolutely. Thank you so much, Garrett. It’s been an absolute pleasure to talk today. I look forward to seeing you soon.

Garrett
Thank you for having me on Emily. It was a pleasure.

End Guest Segment

Emily
Thank you, Garrett, for a great conversation. I have the privilege to be part of a mastermind group with Garrett, led by Dave Stachowiak of Coaching for Leaders. I love his vision of making sure every employee has a great first manager. It’s a goal close to my own heart and one I think will make the world a much happier place. And I’m so lucky to have him help me think through my own management challenges during our mastermind sessions.

And now to wrap up today’s episode, I want to share this week’s tool. This week, I want you to get in the habit of noticing the assumptions you have about why other people do what they do and what their actions mean about them as a person.

If you’re new to the podcast, I want you to grab your phone, open your work calendar, and put a recurring 10 minute calendar event on it every day–on my calendar, I call the event “Growth”.

It doesn’t matter when in the day, and it can be different each day if needed, but make sure it’s on there. You’re going to use this slot every week to put that week’s podcast skill into practice. So if you’re new to the podcast, or if you’re not new, but you haven’t added your calendar event yet–I’m looking at you–pause this episode and set that up right now. This is important because learning information isn’t the same thing as really using it and getting good at it and goals require action to get there.

So, this week, during your growth time, I want you to write down the names of three people you interacted with during the last 24 hours. Then under each of their names, I want you to write three things you believe about them. Don’t think too hard, just write the first things that come to mind when you think about that person.

Now take a moment to notice that these are JUST YOUR THOUGHTS. And, even better, they’re just the thoughts you’re choosing to think right now. They’re not necessarily true and you don’t have to keep them. You get to decide if you like these thoughts or not, if they serve you or not. Because the best way to decide if a thought serves you or not is to see what it’s creating in your life, for the last step of the exercise, I want you to choose one of those nine thoughts and complete a model on it. If you haven’t listened to Episode 5, you won’t know what the model is yet, but never fear, I included a refresher on the model in this week’s Podcast Guide just for you. You can find a link to the podcast guide in the show notes.

Want a simple way to put this exercise into action? Of course I made a printout for you with these questions and a space for each day this week. It’s that same Podcast Guide I was just mentioning, so just click the link in the show notes or text the word ASSUMPTIONS to 44222 and we’ll send it straight to your inbox.

And that’s it for this week. Make sure you’re taking the time to be aware of what you’re feeling and the thoughts creating those feelings. Drop me a note hello@exceptional.vision with your observations. I’ll see you 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. See you there!