Ep #7: Validation + Everything You Want with Jill Wetzler

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! It has been so much fun to watch the first feedback on the podcast roll in. I’m so pleased that you all find how to embrace and use the full range of emotions at work to be as valuable a topic as I do!

Today I want to share with you a really important sentence. Everything we want, we want because of how we think we’ll get to feel if it happens.

And, similarly, everything we want to not happen is because of what we’re afraid we’ll make ourselves feel if it happens.

So how does that fit into the context of the self-coaching model we talked about last time? The one that tells us that the only place our feelings can come from is our thoughts – never from the events in the world around us or what other people say or do? Well, it basically gives us a shortcut to accomplishing all those desires!

So today we’re going to start noticing what we want, and why we want it. Then we’re going to practice feeling the emotion we’re hoping that event will produce WITHOUT waiting for that event to happen. This skill is amazing. It breaks your dependency on the whims of the world around you for you to be able to feel happy, confident, accomplished, motivated, and joyous.

And speaking of embracing the full range of emotions, I have to say that Validation is one that’s really fascinating.

Similar to many of the positive emotions we’re talking about in these episodes, Validation is one that we resist a LOT. But what’s interesting about it is that I think most of us wouldn’t recognize that we’re resisting it. Instead, we think we’re hungry for it and constantly seeking it.

In fact, when I ask most people when they resist validation and resist feeling it, they talk to me about all the times they tell themselves not to seek validation so much from other people.  They’re letting go of the feeling of validation because they don’t want to be constantly seeking it. They want to create their lives on their own terms. And have their own sense of accomplishment.

Well, my leaders, you can create the validation for yourself. It’s totally allowable.

We just believe our brain’s argument that the only way to feel validated is because of someone else’s actions. But if you listened to last week’s episode, you’ll remember that when we look at the world through the lens of the self-coaching model we realize that we’re the only person who can create our feelings. This means that we’re the only person who can EVER create the feeling of validation for ourselves. Validation never comes from what someone else said or did. It comes from how we choose to think about those words or actions.

The cool thing is, those thoughts are available to us no matter what. We don’t need to wait for someone else.

And sometimes we resist Validation even when the other person does exactly what we want them to! I’ve been doing this a lot recently. If you remember Episode 2, about Discomfort, you’ll remember that our brains would really rather we never did anything new. Well, guess what’s something new for me recently? Producing a podcast! I’ve been telling lots of people about what I’ve been working on. And basically all of them have responded positively. Y’all are excited about talking about emotions at work! In fact, I’ve had folks interested in signing up as a coaching client with me just because they hear this is a topic I’m paying attention to, and they don’t know anything else about me as a coach or a leader. Clearly, this is a topic people care about. And yet, I’m noticing that I continue to feel anxious and uncertain. Will listeners like it? This is a great example of resisting Validation. I’ve received SO much positive feedback from folks I trust a LOT, and yet I’m effectively choosing to shut down the feeling of Validated and stick with Uncertainty. Our brains do this sort of thing all the time!

And then I take it even further, and resist feeling Validation a SECOND way. In the first example, I heard positive feedback from other people and then I dismissed it. But the other thing I do is that I don’t even seek all the positive feedback I could. There are folks at work and in my personal life who wanted an early preview as soon as I had something ready to show. But I emailed under a quarter of them. A quarter would be generous. I didn’t email my parents, who both are super supportive and have great feedback for me. Of course, it was easy to blame that on being busy. I wanted to focus on creating the episodes, not focus on what other people would think of them! But really, the amount of time I spent worrying that maybe I was creating something hard to understand or not valuable belied that excuse. My brain just wasn’t comfortable feeling amazing more than a small portion of the time, so it shifted me back towards the emotions of busy and occupied, which it’s MUCH more comfortable with.

I’m pairing today’s conversation about everything we want ACTUALLY being an emotion we want to feel that we think we’ll be able to get once that thing happens with the emotion Validation because so often one of the things that we want is for other people to act in a specific way because we think that if they do or say exactly the right thing we’ll be allowed to feel Validation. Or we want them to not do something because we think that if they do it we WON’T be allowed to feel Validation.

Well, if you’ve been listening so far to this episode, and I assume very few of you just skip to the middle and go for it, so most of you probably have–you’ve probably realized that neither of those things is true. We get to feel Validation anytime we want, just like any other emotion. It doesn’t matter what anyone else says or does. And this is the third and most common way that we avoid feeling Validation. It’s when we buy into that lie that we need someone else’s actions or words to TRIGGER that feeling of Validation for us, or when we buy into the lie that someone else’s words or actions can mean that we’re no longer ALLOWED to feel Validation.

So I hope you enjoy my conversation with the fantastic Jill Wetzler, Head of Engineering at Pilot. We’re going to chat about what makes it easy or difficult for her to feel Validation. During our conversation, pay attention to what resonates with you. How do you want others to behave so that you can feel Validated? What would change about your experience at work if you chose to create Validation for yourself 24/7 no matter what anyone else said or did?

Begin Guest Segment

Emily
Good evening, Jill. It’s great to see you! Tell our audience a little bit: who are you?

Jill
Yeah, thanks for having me! My name is Jill Wetzler. I am the Head of Engineering at Pilot. We’re a startup that does bookkeeping and tax services for companies, mostly small businesses. My teams build the software that allows our internal operators to do books for companies at scale. Previously I was Director of Engineering at Lyft. I worked there for about four years and built up the infrastructure engineering org basically from the ground up. And the last year that I was there I created a role for myself that was focused on developing managers with a specific focus on first line managers and maybe second line managers as well.

Emily
Awesome. What do you love about leading and managing?

Jill
Yeah, managing kind of became my calling. I think when I was, you know, just a baby engineer, I started to really pay attention to what my manager’s job was and found it very intriguing and started to create opportunities for myself to help develop and guide some of my teammates. And I find that extremely rewarding. So for me, I really want to build high performing diverse teams where people have equal opportunities and can really see their careers take off. And that is sort of what keeps me coming into work every day.

Emily
Awesome. So we’re talking about validation today. What’s your quick pitch? Why is validation such an important emotion at work?

Jill
So for me, validation is really the thing that makes or breaks somebody’s experience in the workplace. Speaking from personal experience, when I feel invalidated at a job, I feel incredibly disengaged. It can make me start to question myself, question my sanity. It certainly doesn’t make me feel loyal to a company. On the flip side, when I feel validated, I feel elated. I feel engaged, committed, loyal. I feel like somebody sees my work. I feel like somebody takes my concerns seriously. And it just makes it easier for me to come into a job and want to recruit for a company and to be authentic. Even if people have the best of intentions and I’m witnessing something that feels like sexism and it truly isn’t, my feelings are still valid and I think that’s really important for managers to acknowledge those feelings in their directs and also for us to acknowledge those feelings in ourselves.

Emily
So I’d love to dig into the difference between “my experience is valid just because I had it and it’s what I thought and what I believed” and the notion of feeling validated by somebody else. How do you think about the difference between those two things?

Jill
So I think it’s really important for us to be able to validate ourselves. And this is something that I work with constantly with my own therapist and executive coach. And at the same time, in order for us, we all say we want to be able to bring our whole selves to work or we want our teammates to be able to bring their whole selves to work. And it’s really hard to do that if you’re not seen. And if you’re not validated by the people around you, because then you start to question, well, who do I have to be at work? And if my feelings aren’t valid, then what feelings am I supposed to have? And I think that really hinders us from allowing people to come to work and really be themselves.

Emily
I think part of our brain that’s always looking for danger–it’s looking for danger from being hit by a car, but it’s such an old part of our brain that it really deeply believes that social isolation could kill us!

Jill
Absolutely.

Emily
And feeling not part of the group is something it considers to be deeply threatening.

Jill
Yes. We’re all seeking acceptance into a group, for sure.

Emily
So what’s a point for you where being able to feel validated and it really embraced that emotion made a huge difference for you?

Jill
Yeah, I think I have a number of examples about that, but one that really comes to mind is an experience that I had with executives actually. And there was one executive in particular who, for whatever reason, I did not enjoy interacting with him. I didn’t really like the way that he talked to me. I didn’t feel like he thought I had the best of intentions. I didn’t really feel like he was listening to me. And when I expressed that concern to peers, a lot of the response I got back was like, Yeah. That’s just how he is and you shouldn’t take it personally. And that’s fine, right? And we learn work around people of all sorts of different personality types. And at the same time that was actually making it difficult for me to do my job. I was actually avoiding conversations with this person.

Emily
I think there’s such an interesting difference there, hearing you talk about it. Sure–everybody has their own communication style and we don’t get to choose how our coworkers…I mean we get to choose to not be coworkers with people whose style we don’t like, but we don’t get to kind of set the nuances of how they behave. But there’s a huge difference between somebody saying they act this way and it’s not a problem, they act this way and it is a problem and you have to deal with it, and they don’t act that way and I don’t know what you’re seeing.

Jill
Right, right. Exactly. And so, yeah, on the one hand it was comforting just to hear that, Oh yeah, I have this problem with him too. That’s just how he is. Like, now I’m part of the group.

Emily
Right, your observation has been validated. But the idea that it’s a problem hasn’t been.

Jill
Right because I’m just supposed to work around this and, you know, let execs be execs, and just deal with it. And this was one of the first conversations that I had to have with my boss where I was really expressing some unhappiness at that time. And I was honestly afraid to have that conversation because I don’t want to look like a complainer and don’t want to look like I can’t handle my own problems. I don’t want to look like people have to adapt their communication style to me. And so I had this conversation with my boss at the time and I was shocked honestly when they said, Oh, he’s not supposed to be talking to you like that, let me give him some feedback. And that was pretty incredible! I think we take it for granted. Like, we don’t always expect our bosses to like help us solve our problems. A lot of times we go into coaching mode and it’s like, okay, here, let me help you figure out how to solve your own problem. And so knowing that my boss really did validate that, no, this is a problem and I actually have the relationship and the capital that I can use on your behalf. So that was…I mean, I walked into the meeting scared and I walked out elated. And I think that’s pretty unusual for us.

Emily
So I love the idea that all of our emotions come from a sentence that we’re thinking. What was the sentence that you walked in with and what was the sentence you walked out with?

Jill
Hmm, that’s a good question. I would say that I walked in saying to myself, this probably isn’t going to make a difference. And I walked out thinking, wow, my boss actually has my back. That’s a big transformation in half an hour.

Emily
Yeah! You were talking a little bit about walking that line between not wanting to complain, but also knowing that we have managers for a reason and it’s not just to hold us accountable for goals. They’re also supposed to be there to support us, right? How did you walk through that thought process in your head?

Jill
I mean, a lot of it was just pulling on past experience and thinking about like, well, what happened the last time that I complained about an exec? Or what happened the last time I complained to one of my bosses? And of course, every experience has been different. And I think there’s also this internal monologue that I have of, now that I’m in this role that, you know, I’m the head of a department and I really should be able to handle my own issues for the most part. I shouldn’t necessarily be so bothered by something that’s so minor, because in actuality it was kind of a minor situation. But at the same time I think… I keep losing it.

Emily
How did you think about how, let me see, how did you think about how you wanted to show up in order to, well, no, that’s not quite,

How did you get your brain to a really clean place so that you could walk in and talk about it as a challenge you were facing that you wanted your manager’s help with, as opposed to walk in and bitch about a coworker and blame other people?

Jill
I mean, that’s a good, that’s a good way of framing it because I definitely didn’t walk in to that conversation asking for help even or at least asking for them to do something on my behalf. I did want some advice on how to deal with this person. Knowing that everybody had validated me in that, like, yeah, that’s just how he is, I thought it would be helpful to get some sort of opinion or guidance on how to make that relationship more effective and to be honest with you, that’s I expected. And I expected some amount of like, you know, Oh, don’t worry about it, just let this roll roll off of you and if you need to engage with him in the future, do it through email instead of through Slack or, or something like that. But it wasn’t that at all.

Emily
It sounds like you walked in and basically looking for new thoughts to think and you thought you were going to get thoughts you kind of liked and instead you got my manager has my back, which you really liked.

Jill
Exactly.

Emily
You thought your manager was going to offer you a sentence and you could just take that sentence, and instead kind of you walked out creating a new way of seeing it in your own head.

Jill
Absolutely.

Emily
I think it’s fascinating to watch our experiences and how we create so much of them ourselves. Because one thing you did there was put yourself in a situation where you could create that sense of validation for yourself. It would have been so easy to not bring it up with your peers. It would’ve been so easy to not bring it up with your manager and to stay sitting in that place of, this bothers me, but a good head of an organization wouldn’t even notice it. She wouldn’t feel the need to talk about it.

Jill
I mean, you’ve given me a lot of credit for that, so I appreciate that.

Emily
But I think along those lines, the concept of invalidated and invalidation comes back into the picture. In my head, I don’t know about for you, I see those as kind of two separate scales. I can feel very validated or I could feel very invalidated or I could feel very strongly that both were happening or very strongly neither was happening. Interesting. They’re kind of like an X and a Y axis [in my head]. I don’t know if that’s how you think about it.

Jill
Not exactly. I would say that it may be just comes down to like whether I feel valued or not, whether I feel like my opinions are valued or not. If I can, I’d like to give an example that actually is not my own feelings of invalidation, but somebody else who used to work for me at a prior company. There was a person on one of my teams who reported to a manager who worked for me and she was not having a good time on her team. And she said, she gave some feedback to her manager and she said, I don’t know what it is, I don’t know if it’s because I’m black, if it’s because I’m a woman, if it’s because I haven’t been here that long, I don’t have the same level of experience that other people have. I’m not sure what it is.

And almost immediately this manager who I think is otherwise very, very thoughtful, said, Oh, it can’t be the racism or the sexism thing. I was able to have a conversation with her manager, and we were able to sort of work out why she was feeling invalidated and why he was so scared by that feedback. And what does that mean for him? If somebody is coming to me and telling me that, I’m not happy on your team because there is an element of sexism or racism in it, what does that say about me as a manager? It means I’ve created an environment where sexism and racism can exists. And you know, the unfortunate reality is that we live in a society where sexism and racism exists. And as much as we try to build organizations that are not influenced in these ways, we can’t really prevent it. And it’s not unreasonable for us to have the reactions that we have, it’s just we have to consciously pull ourselves out of our own defense modes and to really recognize that if somebody has a concern, it is valid for them to have that feeling. It doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s THE valid explanation, but it’s valid for them to have that feeling and just acknowledging that discomfort can go a long way, especially for people who regularly have their concerns dismissed.

Emily
Yeah, and I think there’s such an interesting aspect of that.

So in this case, my guess is that the woman who brought up her concern initially felt really invalidated by her manager’s response and probably interpreted that as, you’re wrong, your thinking is wrong, your perception of the world is wrong, but all the manager was trying to convey is, you told me something really scary, I think I’m the manager bad and wrong, now that I’ve maybe let these things happen on my team and I don’t know how to deal with that and I don’t know how to come to terms with that. So the manager’s response of, it can’t be that, was coming from fear, not from lack of belief.

Jill
A hundred percent.

Emily
Or not from thinking his report was a person who has reasonable opinion and reasonable observations.

Jill
A hundred percent.

Emily
But for her, that was hard to see in that moment, because it was instead of–when we’re in her shoes, we’re not looking and saying, Oh, my manager’s afraid, this is an identity threat, of course they don’t want to hear what I’m saying. They’re saying, Oh, they think I’m wrong. they don’t trust me. So the idea of creating validation for ourselves, how do you do that?

Jill
Whew. Well let’s, let’s ask my therapist. One thing that really, really helped…I had an executive coach who sort of took me on this personal fulfillment journey. And we spent a lot of time talking about what are the things that I am uniquely qualified to do in an organization. And actually that work is what led to the creation of this role that I had for a year at Lyft. And I talked a little bit about that on my blog and have a description of the job posting or the job description that I created. And if you look at that job description, I would like to think that there are very few people other than Jill who can do that job. And that really helped me find my place, I think, in the world and in the industry.

Like knowing that I don’t have to follow the path of some of these executives that I work under. I don’t have to follow the path of some of my peers, you know? I work with men who have, for whatever reason, whether it’s sexism or not, have advanced faster, who have been given more surface area, who have been given more money. And a lot of that can be pretty invalidating. But at the same time, I know what my worth is to an organization. I believe at this point that I have found a place that recognizes my worth. And when I was job hunting, I talked to a lot of organizations, looking at similar roles and realizing that every single company I talked to was asking for different things. And Pilot was the place that was asking for a Head of Engineering to do the things that I was good at and that I thought were important.

And so some of this comes down, I think to values alignment and being in an organization that values the same things that you value can definitely be a way of creating more validation for yourself. I don’t have to expend a ton of energy arguing with people or defining terms that I think everybody should know. Like, we have the same values and so when we have disagreements, it’s much easier to work through those disagreements.

Emily
I love the idea of creating an environment where it’s easy for us to think thoughts that make us feel the feelings we want to feel.

Jill
Yes. There were parts of my brain when I came here that freed up for me to actually work on other parts of my craft that I think were neglected previously. Coming to Pilot, being in a completely different environment, different coworkers, much, much smaller company. And then, especially having that values alignment and the fact that I did that work while I was job hunting to make sure that the next place I go to is going to have that strong values alignment from the beginning I think really went a long way towards just placing myself in an environment where I could get better at some of the things that I wanted to get better at but you know in the past have just been so distracted by everything else is happening around me.

Emily
I think when we want to feel a feeling, we get two options. One is that we can choose new thoughts that create it for us and practice them and get really good at thinking them. And the other is we can notice what makes it easy for us to think thoughts that create that feeling. And we can surround ourselves with more of it intentionally.

Jill
I’m snapping! [In agreement].

Emily
One of the things we always teach as coaches is your feelings come from your thoughts, not your circumstances, you can’t change your circumstances. But so much of that idea is like, you can’t change how your boss shows up. And so trying to get someone else to change their behavior is a totally losing battle. You should probably change how you think about it and what you make it mean. But when you’re job hunting, choose the company that makes it easy to think the way you want to think!

Jill
Exactly. Exactly.

Emily
So as we’re wrapping up, what are your tips for listeners about how to use the feeling of validation and being willing to feel validated ourselves to be a better manager and leader?

Jill
I think this is the most important one, is just remembering that everybody is entitled to their feelings. Feelings are not right, they’re not wrong, they’re just ours. And we have our feelings because of whatever kind of baggage we have from, you know, where we grew up and what our family’s situation is and what our prior experiences were at previous jobs. And that is so important for us to just be allowed to feel those feelings. And then to have somebody that we can talk through those with. One thing that has become really clear to me over the last couple of years is that it really makes no difference if there’s a real issue in my org or if everybody just thinks there is.

Emily
The reality is what people are thinking, regardless of if it’s what you intended to create or not.

Jill
Exactly.

Emily
Anything you want to share before we wrap up?

Jill
I think we’re all in this push right now to build more diverse teams to bring more underrepresented people into our orgs and it’s going to fail if we don’t know how to handle the complications that that creates. I think in all of the studies around diverse teams, yes, diverse teams ultimately perform better, but they have a lot more bumps along the way. And in certain makeups of teams, homogenous teams actually perform a lot better because there’s less conflict, less weird feelings to deal with.

Emily
Well you were talking about alignment. When we all use the same vocabulary, it can be faster to communicate.

Jill
Exactly. And so we have to be willing to accept the discomfort that comes with adding diversity to our teams. And my friend Cate Huston has this tweet that I talk about all the time where she says inclusion is not about making everybody comfortable. It’s about redistributing the discomfort across the team. And if you can imagine that like underrepresented people who come into your org, especially if they’re the only one with that identity and they’re experiencing feelings of isolation, they’re uncomfortable a lot of the time while the rest of your team is just sitting around like feeling like they fit in and you know, and they get to focus on getting work done. And when it comes to actually making a team that’s psychologically safe and inclusive, we’re going to have to confront feelings that we wish didn’t exist on our teams. And that’s something that as managers, we just have to get comfortable with hearing scary feedback and acknowledging feelings even if we don’t think that they’re true, we have to acknowledge that they’re valid.

Emily
Yes. Very well said. Thank you so much. This has been really fun!

Jill
Thank you! This was really fun. Thank you for having me.

End Guest Segment

Emily
Thanks Jill for a fun conversation! I’m always inspired by how much attention and care you put into creating really healthy culture on your teams.

Jill also mentioned a number of great resources and articles. You can find them in the episode page. It’s linked from the shownotes.

For this week’s exercise, I want you to explore what you want and how you think you’ll get to feel if it happens.

Make sure you’ve got 10 minutes on your work calendar every day labelled Growth. We talk about that part basically every week, so I assume you have it. But if you’re new, make sure you go set that up.

This week, each day in those 10 minutes, I want you to write down three things you wanted to happen during the next day so you can feel validated. Then write down three things you want not to happen, so that you can feel validated. Then, because practicing models every day is a great habit to be in, choose one of those six wants or un-wants and put it happening in the circumstance line of a model, validation in the feeling line, and fill in the rest. If you’re not sure what the self-coaching model is yet, go check out Episode 5 after you finish listening to this episode. Finally, you’re going to list five reasons you can think the thought from your model even if the event you’re wishing for doesn’t happen, or the one you’re hoping against does.

Let’s try a quick version right now.

What’s that one thing you really hope will happen today, so that you can feel Validation? By the way, doing this exercise is going to help you get a great sense of all of the ways you’re seeking out Validation from your environment all day in just these small tiny ways and all the ways you rely on certain events for it, even if it’s not conscious.

So what’s that one thing that you hope will happen today so you can feel Validation?

Now, what thought would be creating the feeling of Validated for you?

Alright, so now we’ve got the first three lines of our model filled out. Circumstance. Thought. Feeling.

Next let’s continue down the model and fill in the Action line. When you anticipate feeling Validated, because you’re thinking that thought, how are you anticipating you’ll act?

And finally, if you acted that way, what result would it create in your life? Remember, your result can only include you. It’s never something you’re creating for someone else, it’s something you’re creating for yourself.

Now, what’s one reason you can think that thought anyway? Regardless of whether the event you put in the circumstance line happens or not.

The goal here is to do two things. The first is to start being aware of all the little wants and un-wants in your day. These are the tiny nudges that guide our actions all day long. They’re the instincts that can drive us toward distraction or prevent us from taking planned actions. Last week when I imagined writing a peer manager an email proposing a joint project and them writing back with 5 different questions I hadn’t thought about yet, I anticipated feeling embarrassed. And then I didn’t send the email that afternoon, and I didn’t push my project forward. Where are some places you’re doing that?

The second is to separate out what you want to feel from what you think could happen in the world around you that would make it easy for you to feel that feeling. When you start getting good at recognizing what you REALLY want, the emotion, it’s much easier to let go of trying to control every little thing in your day. You will notice this as a theme in almost all of the leaders that I talk to. And in some cases, it’s in even more conversations than you think, it’s just such a big part of our conversations that I’ve pulled it out for later bonus material.

Letting go of trying to control everything around us at work and everything everyone else does is CRITICAL for managers. It’s also an important part of general mental health!

Make sure you grab the Podcast Guide, which includes a written version of this week’s exercise, including models with that Validation already partially filled in and all the step-by-step questions I just asked you. 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 VALIDATION to 44222.

Have an amazing week! Make time to notice how everything you want in life, from the little things to the big things, is because of how you think you’ll allow yourself to feel if it happens. 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.