Ep #3: Vulnerability + Awareness with Jessica Mink

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

Welcome to episode three this week. We’re talking vulnerability and awareness. Awareness just means recognizing what we’re feeling, but most of us aren’t very good at that. By default, we try to pretend we don’t have emotions at work. We try to ignore how they feel in our bodies because that’s uncomfortable or we label them with a few go-to words like frustrated, happy, annoyed or tired, and lose the power that comes from understanding the nuance of how we’re feeling.

This week I’m so excited to be talking to Jessica Mink, Director of Engineering at Auth0, about vulnerability. It’s the perfect partner to awareness and I think you’re going to love her observations and ideas. I love having vulnerability as our focus emotion while we talk about awareness because being really aware of what we’re feeling requires us to feel vulnerable within ourselves. To give you a quick taste of why, I’m going to pause for a moment and I want you to list five emotions you think you shouldn’t feel. Here are some of mine. I don’t want to feel shame because it means I did something wrong and I don’t like having to admit that. And I don’t want to feel ambitious because I think it will make people like me less. What about you?

When we have emotions that we think we’re bad for feeling or think means something has gone wrong, it’s not at all surprising when we have trouble admitting to ourselves when we’re feeling them. As you listen to Jess and my conversation, pay attention to how you’re reacting to our stories and ideas. What emotions come up for you? Which are easy to feel and which are hard? And then after our conversation, I’ll wrap up the episode by sharing more details with you on awareness, one of the fundamental tools of emotional health. Five easy minutes a day are going to change your life. Promise.

Begin Guest Segment

Emily
Good evening. I am here with Jess and I’m so excited. Jess tell us a little bit about yourself.

Jess
Hey Em. Thanks for having me on. My name is Jessica Mink. I’m the Senior Director of Engineering at Auth0, which is an online security company. I’ve had a pretty traditional tech background. I’ve mostly worked for software companies. I took a side trip into product for a while, but I’m back in engineering now. Outside of work I do search and rescue with a lot of my time.

Emily
Awesome. And what do you love about managing and leading?

Jess
I really like the opportunity to build organizations where a wide range of people can be successful and where people can rise to their potential.

Often, and we think about engineering leadership being about getting a project done and that’s part of it. But the people you build, and the skills you build in the people, last a lot longer than the code base usually.

Emily
Yeah, I love that way of thinking about it. I, I think I feel very similarly.

Jess
Fundamentally, management is helping the people around you be their best selves. And how can you ask for a better job than that?

Emily
Yes. Yes. And this job is so much fun.

So today we’re talking about vulnerability and let’s hear your quick pitch. Why is vulnerability critical at work?

Jess
Vulnerability lets you get to the heart of the situation. It lets people know what you’re actually thinking and it gives them a space to show up authentically. One of the places I see this come up a lot is when you ask people what their longterm career goals are. Often, especially past a certain seniority level, someone’s longterm career goals cannot be accomplished at your company. If you keep the kind of normal professional framing, people come up with an answer that’s maybe not real, but it’s something that can be accomplished at your company. If you have that vulnerability back and forth, people can tell you that they want to go be a goat herd or they want to switch careers or they want to go to 80% time, or really they want to found a company. And then you can make their day to day work relevant to that right, and set them up for their longterm success.

Emily
I think it’s Radical Candor that has an example of someone’s direct report who wanted to be, I think it’s a spirulina farmer. And their comment was she’s still with the company like half a decade later.

Jess
Yup.

Emily
Because they framed so much of her work around what appeals to her about that and building skills that it’s just stayed so enjoyable and so relevant.

Jess
Yeah. I literally had a direct report who wanted to go start a goat farm and so I talked about, “Oh let’s talk to the business people about running a business. And let’s think about this in terms of a startup. What skills are you going to need? Are you going to need to manage? How are you going to need to project plan?” And he had a great time with it.

Emily
That’s awesome. So of course we’re talking about emotions in the context of ones we try to avoid sometimes. Why do you find vulnerability uncomfortable?

Jess
I mean vulnerability is showing the things that are fragile. Right, they’re the things that someone could judge you for. They’re the things that people could hurt you if they say the wrong things. Right? So that’s uncomfortable. And also as a leader there’s things to be vulnerable about. And there’s a line you need to not cross. Cause you don’t want to be vulnerable in a way that puts the emotional burden for taking care of you on your direct reports. That’s inappropriate. That line can be really hard to find. And usually what I think about is what’s my intention behind it. Is my intention to give people context to know why I’m showing up that way that day? Is my goal to help give people a broader perspective that not everyone on their team is like them? Or is my goal to elicit sympathy or to try and get people to take care of me? Cause if that’s it, that’s not appropriate.

Emily
How do you tell what your goal is?

Jess
That can be a hard one telling what your goal is. I usually stop and think for a second. I find when you sit with yourself slowly, you can tease it out. If you ask yourself, “Oh, what is this emotion? Let’s try and name it.” Uh, sometimes the first name you give it isn’t actually the name. You might be like, this is anger and the emotion is like nah. And you try again. You’re like, this is fear. It’s like, yep. It’s like, Oh, that’s interesting. What is this fear of? And you can try a few different things until one lands. So you can do the same thing with like, why do I want to express this? Is this because I want other people to feel this thing? Well maybe that’s not appropriate. Or is it, I know other people in the company are feeling this thing and I want to make sure that these leaders I’m working with can show up in an appropriate way for these other people. Well that’s quite appropriate.

Emily
So you mentioned something that’s super relevant to awareness, which is the tool that I’m teaching listeners this week. Around sometimes when you name an emotion, the first name isn’t actually the right one. How do you notice when you’ve gotten the name wrong for an emotion?

Jess
So when I get the right name for an emotion, I can feel something relax inside of me usually, if I’m paying attention. But when I give it the wrong name, it just kind of slides off and doesn’t make a difference.

Emily
Where does that relaxation come from?

Jess
I think it’s understanding yourself. I think a lot of internal stress comes from cognitive dissonance, which is when part of your brain is trying to think one thing and the reality is different and that difference between the two causes a continuous, um, causes a continuous set of stress. Once you have brought your perceptions of reality in line with what reality actually is, that cognitive dissonance dissipates, which puts you in the right position to move forward. And I think that’s why vulnerability is so important. We were talking about people you manage and what their longterm career goals are. You can’t actually help them until you know what they actually are. Sometimes you have to be really honest with people and talk about, cool, so the company is pitching this long-term direction due to this reason and yeah, it’s tied to this reason. It’s also tied to this other reason that’s a little bit more hidden and here is how those tie together and here’s why they’re good for the company in the long term. And, if you try and hide the other one, people are going to sense something’s off. They’re going to sense something’s fishy. So I think it’s a lot better to come up and say like the companies at this stage of growth, that means this is the pressure from the board. That means this is the situation the executive team is in. So it means you’re going to be seeing this type of theme of things people are asking for and these are the emotions different people are in. And not in a politic-y way. Right. In a just like, “This is the reality of the company. This is the stage of growth and what this looks like and what the impact is for you as an engineer.”

Emily
That reminds me just so starkly of a conversation I had with some of my direct reports about a year and a quarter ago now. We pulled them all in for an All Hands one Friday and told them that the company was shutting down.

And then we broke out from the full company into engineering and non-engineering. And then we broke out by management groups. And the first thing I remember telling the folks who reported to me, once it was just the like 12 or so of us was you’re going to hear a lot of people talking about a soft landing. I need you to know that you don’t need one. You are totally capable professionals. You do not need our help finding a new job. You don’t owe us anything. Don’t need to take this acquisition we’ve negotiated for the engineering team. Every time you hear a leader here talking about a soft landing, I need you to realize that they are feeling guilt or something along those lines. And they’re just trying to make sure that they don’t judge themselves as having failed you.

Jess
Yup.

Emily
And I need you to be able to sort out the difference. And you’re going to hear it from me too. And I need you to know that it has nothing to do with how capable I think you are.

Jess
Yeah. And that’s a great example or vulnerability from a senior leader. Um, I was in a company that went through a bunch of layoffs and we had a similar thing. People were really invested in the company, and part of vulnerability sometimes is making space for the other person’s emotions, right? Being willing to sit there and have them be upset at you because that’s what’s going to happen in that moment. And then being ready to show up for them again once they’ve gotten through that.

Emily
Yes. So you were talking a minute ago about that piece of you that relaxes when you’ve named an emotion correctly. One of my Master Coach instructors mentioned that the thing we all want most in the world is to be seen for exactly who we are and to have that be okay.

Jess
Yeah.

Emily
Have that person be okay. And I think we’re doing that for ourselves when we’re willing to see how we’re feeling.

Jess
I completely agree. And it’s a com, it’s a super important skill as a leader, as a manager, to be able to see yourself clearly and be able to see the people around you clearly. Um, I’m a big believer in continuous feedback and what I mean by that isn’t, “This presentation could have been stronger this way.” I mean for sure do that. But also just regularly talking to people candidly about “You have grown so much in this spot.” Right? “Imagine where you were six months ago, how you would’ve reacted to the situation. Look at this growth you’ve had!” As well as, “Hey, I think this is one of those things that six months from now you’re going to look back and be amazed at your growth. Like, there’s a lot of opportunity and here’s what we might want to aim for in a few months and what that might look like.”

And once you’ve done that, you can have conversations with people where you just lay out very bluntly, right like, these are your strengths, these are your weaknesses. And they’re like, well yeah, of course we’ve been talking about this. And that level of candor is vulnerability, right? And the next layer of that is you can actually take your whole team together and have them give each other peer feedback live in front of each other. This is one of my favorite exercises. I’ll have an entire team sit together and I work remotely. Um, I’m a remote manager, but this is something I like to do in person for the first time. And then it can move remotely. But have each person take care of giving each other something they admire and a challenge. So admire: What do you most admire about this person? And the challenge: If you were going to change one behavior, what’s the thing that’s going to have the biggest impact on your career?

And I think it’s useful to have everyone else hearing those things about all their team members. Cause maybe there’s that person who gets on your nerves on the team and you’re hearing all these things about what everyone else on the team admires about them. Or maybe there’s that tech lead that you feel like walks on water and when you get to hear everyone else challenging them about what to work on, you’re like, “Oh they’re human and growing too.” And also if you know what each other are working on, it’s easy to make space in the team for each other’s growth. Like of course this person needs to get this project. It’s totally in line with how they’re growing and yeah of course I need this one, right? And everyone makes those space, that space because there’s that level of transparency cause they were all willing to be vulnerable in front of each other.

Emily
I love that exercise as well. And there’s a fourth thing that my team members have told me that they got out of it that I thought was fantastic. The less experienced team members learned what kind of feedback more experienced folks give and receive. And how they’re judged and evaluated and how they’re encouraged to grow by me, by their peers, by other people they mentor. And I’ve gotten kind of comments that folks walked out, not just with a better sense of what each other are working on, but with a better sense of where they could grow.

Jess
I love that.

Emily
Yeah.

Jess
And to cite the tools, cause I don’t like just stealing tools. Uh, that one’s inspired by Five Dysfunctions of a Team, which is an excellent book. If you hadn’t read, haven’t read it. There’s even a manga version that takes like an hour or two to read.

Emily
Oh, I did not know that. I should just stock up. That’s getting given as gifts this year.

Jess
Yup.

Emily
I remember reading The Five Dysfunctions of a Team years and years ago when I was first really interested in leadership and kind of working my way through leadership literature as quickly as I could and finding it interesting. And coming back to it maybe a year and a half ago and finding that first team’s part to be just so profound in a way that I really didn’t understand when I was an individual contributor.

Jess
Right, because your first team is your team. There’s no question when you’re an IC. One thing I’m really proud about that I’ve done at Auth0 is I, I manage group of managers cause I’m a director and so those managers are first team. And the first thing I did with them is to talk to them about being a first team. And they have a private channel without me. They meet once a week without me in addition to our staff meetings. And it’s amazing because they will talk to each other about deeply vulnerable things because they have that relationship to support each other. I can point people at each other, I can say, who do you think on the team is really strong in the skill that you’re working on? And they’re like, Oh yeah, I’ll go ask them for their perspective as well. And they’ll even work through problems and they come to me with a solution that’s like across the entire org. It’s, it’s really, it allows the entire org to be a lot more effective and makes the culture more contiguous so that when people switch teams, it’s not a culture shock. And I think it makes it a lot less lonely to be a manager in that org, or at least I hope it does.

Emily
And it means that you’re following through on what we spend so much time teaching frontline managers, which is to not solve their team’s problems for them and to not be the one source of truth. I know engineering managers, especially folks who move from tech lead to manager, are used to being the centralized place for advice and opinions. And I think that instinct can come back to us when we start managing managers.

Jess
Yeah. And I think that behavior of wanting to be the source of answers is really born in insecurity. It’s really vulnerable to say, I’m not the one with the best answer here. I’m not the one who was hired for my technical prowess. Like let’s talk to the Tech Lead. Let’s talk to the engineer who’s worked in this piece of the code the most. Let’s have a design discussion. Let’s bring in a senior engineer from another team who might have a useful perspective. Right? I tell my managers over and over again, I was not given a technical interview to be a director. I can write code, I can write architecture, but you don’t want me to. Like, that’s not what I was hired for. We have principal engineers who are hired for those skills, so let’s make the space for the technical people to really shine and there to really be a senior technical path. But doing that scary cause it requires moving out of that comfort zone, especially as a line manager, right? You what got you there isn’t going to keep getting you there and you have to accept that you’re at stage one of a whole new career that requires a whole different set of skills. All of a sudden you’re being paid for emotional labor, not for ability to code.

Emily
Yes. You really called out one of the places I end up feeling most vulnerable at work. I have a fantastic tech lead and a fantastic technical team and I don’t always know exactly how we interface with all the systems around us. And so when I’m in a one on one with another manager or they set up a one on one with me because they want my feedback on a technical system, I feel like I’m talking to another manager and I have to tell them, well, you know, but I don’t. And that’s always a moment I feel this little like up swelling in the bottom of every page of like someone’s going to find me out, they’re going to tell me I’m not good enough.

Jess
For sure. And I think the way that shows up at the director level is project management. Can you talk about the status of every project? Um, do you know what percentage complete everything is? Do you know all the details of? And I don’t need to know all the details, right. That’s if I’m spending my time project managing at that level of detail, I’m micromanaging. It means I’m not trusting my managers. It means I’m not trusting my product managers. Sure. I need to set up things to get that status, to be able to communicate that to the rest of the org when we need it. But I don’t have to be down in the details for everything. I can be spending that time to debug the organization, to build stronger ties across departments, to give people the tools they need to be unblocked. And that’s a much better use of my time.

Emily
So what are the thoughts or beliefs that you use to help yourself get out of the details?

Jess
Well I’m blessed or cursed that I cannot remember the details to save my life.

Emily
Well, that helps.

Jess
Yeah.

Emily
Or it hurts. So it could mean that you just spend all day trying to refresher on them.

Jess
Ah, that’s true. That’s true. So there’s a couple of things I do. I figure out what type of visibility the people around me need to be successful. And I try and set up systems where that visibility happens automatically.

Is the data in JIRA, do we need to have it linked to epics that actually describe what this project is about? So anyone in the company can go find it out, not just people who have enough gumption to ask me. Uh, do you need to know what a team did every week? Okay, let’s go to the sprint demos or the Kanban demos and maybe ask them to write a little paragraph about the coolest things and post it in engineering for everyone to see. How do you make that status visible to everyone in a way that’s consumable by everyone? Because if you’re the bottleneck and people have to go ask you personally, there’s probably a lot of people who need that information who aren’t getting it.

Emily
Yes. And why does that require vulnerability?

Jess
It requires vulnerability cause there’s a lot of saying “I don’t know”. You’re going to be in meetings with your boss and with peers where everyone else can rattle off the status of every single project. And you’re having to be digging in in the background, trying to piece it together. Cause you’ve been reading it, you’ve been paying attention, but you haven’t been micromanaging the teams so it’s not in your head. And sometimes it even requires standing up and saying this thing you all think I should have, and I’m feeling like maybe I should have in this moment because that’s what the peer pressure is, that’s a thing I don’t think I should know.

And that feels really scary. Especially because maybe you’re wrong sometimes. Maybe you should have been in the details more, right? Especially if something’s going off the rails. Right?

I read a really interesting article a couple of years ago that I share with almost everyone I manage. Where a manager went to someone, uh, a director went to a manager and asked what’s going off the rails? The manager was like, Oh my gosh, nothing I hope. Nothing I know of. And the director was like, then you’re micromanaging your team. Next time we talk I want to know what’s going off the rails that you’ve caught and you’re working on getting back on. Cause if you are micromanaging such that nothing ever goes off the rails, how is your team learning?

Jess
Which,

Emily
Yes.

Jess
So vulnerable.

Emily
I remember a conversation a few years ago that I end up using a lot. The company was working on a big rollout and two members of my team were really strong project leaders and had the opinion, independently, that one of the tactics that was going to be tried might not work out very well. In fact, in one case it was, there’s no chance this works. Why are we doing this?

Jess
Whoa.

Emily
Right. And I remember having to sit with each of these people and it was like two one-on-ones in the same week. I remember. I remember having to sit with each of them and one of them just looks at me and was like, so you want me to let this be a dumpster fire? I was like, yeah. Now that you have a really well developed skill in this area, you need to let other people around you develop that skill. I don’t care if this person outranks you one or two up the company. They’re learning this skill and they need to be able to learn from their own mistakes. So now that you’re ahead of them and learning your job is to notice the trashcan fires or probably not even notice the trashcan fires, right, in the spirit of not micromanaging. But your job is to notice the dumpster fires and to make sure that when it becomes an alley fire it never becomes a neighborhood fire.

Jess
Yeah. Yeah. You want to see when things are going off the rails, you want to set up the systems so they, once they’re off the rails, you know you’re going to know. And then you can coax them back on. Cause you know when someone learns that way with that small mistake, but real where they were actually able to make this mistake, they’re never going to forget it.

Emily
Our greens learned so much faster from failure than success.

Jess
Yup. When my very first engineering job, one of my coworkers kept telling me good engineers are expensive. And I didn’t get it. I was like, yeah, we’re paid a lot, uh huh. And that’s not what he meant at all. What he meant at all is to be come a good engineer, you have to break some stuff.

Emily
Yes! Okay. I had a similar one. Remember that like the like urban legend of you make a big mistake and you go to your manager and they say, why would we fire you? We just paid $10 million to educate you. And I liked it in theory. And then one day I realized it’s like we all have 10 big mistakes we’re going to make. I mean big mistakes. And if I’d made one, the company knows I only have nine left. If they hire someone random, they might have all 10 left. Who knows?

Jess
Yeah. So and I, and as a leader, I’m not saying just like give people a bunch of rope and let them hang themselves. You want to notice when people go off the rails. But yeah, like show up for people. There’s a phrase my dad actually taught me called self critiquing failures so that when someone does something and it goes off the rails and they notice it, you don’t have to come in all heavy. You can come in and being like, “Well that was self critiquing, huh?” And then the other person’s going to probably be like, Oh thank God. Cause they’re worried they’re going to be yelled at. And if you take that out then you have space to be honest with each other. Like cool. So that was a failure. That’s fine. What are we going to learn about from that? How would you approach that differently now? How are you going to help teach the rest of the org about this lesson? How can we celebrate the learning here? Which is wildly uncomfortable and wildly vulnerable, but the whole org is so much stronger than if you sweep it under the rug or you come down in a punitive way such that people hide.

Emily
Yeah. And the vulnerability, not just for the person who made the mistake, but the vulnerability for you as a manager. Being willing to have a tolerance for mistakes on your team and be comfortable with that.

Jess
Especially cause it generally means standing up to other people in the org who might be like, “This person did this thing. Why are they still here?” You’re like, “They’ll never do it again. They learned.” Um, but you have to, you have to convince the other and other people in New York sometimes to trust that person again. Which kind of crosses into the concept of sponsorship, right? I truly believe you can’t be a good senior leader unless you’re willing to show up every day being willing to be fired. Cause you have to be sponsoring almost everyone in your org. The only people you’re not sponsoring need to be people who are willing to manage out.

Emily
I love that concept. For our listeners, can you define sponsorship?

Jess
Sure. So when I think about sponsorship, I think it’s useful to define it in relation to a couple other words. So people talk about mentoring a lot. Which is showing up and giving advice and asking questions. And mentoring is kind of like coaching but with your own experience layered on top of it. Because pure coaching is just asking questions. Not interjecting your own experience and not interjecting your own feelings. And you can tell if it’s good coaching if someone can build a little model of you in their head and take it with them. And apply it to other problems and be like, the little Jess in my head asked me this question and now I know I should do this. Right? That’s coaching. Mentoring is that with your advice layered on top. And then sponsorship can be either of those, but the real difference is that you’re also advocating for the person in places they’re not. Behind closed doors or when an opportunity comes up. You’re like, no, this person can do this. I have faith in this person. This person can do this thing that you don’t think they can do. Give them this chance. This person’s really excellent in these ways. And when you do that for the people in the org, they get the opportunities to continue growing. But it puts your career at risk because you’re stepping up and saying, I am staking my reputation on this person being good in this way. So it’s risky, but it’s what you have to do.

Emily
And it’s so critical to be willing to.

So we’ve talked a lot about why vulnerability is important and some great examples of how to feel it and how to demonstrate it. What are some moments where you notice yourself shying away from vulnerability? Not wanting to feel it.

Jess
Yeah. I find myself moving away from vulnerability when I’m emotionally stretched, when I’m tired and have personal things on my mind and don’t have the emotional bandwidth to show up fully for the team in front of me. Um, and don’t have the emotional bandwidth to necessarily deal with their return vulnerability in that moment. And I think that’s okay. I think an important thing about being a senior leader is understanding your limitations and knowing what way you can show up in what moment. And sometimes the right thing to do is go take your dog for a walk, right? Or go get a cup of tea. Because if you go into that one on one or you go into that meeting right that minute, you’re not going to show up in a way that’s helpful. And damage control is a ton of work and takes a long time.

Emily
Yeah. I think that difference between in theory, and in practice right now what am I actually capable of is so critical for us.

Jess
Yeah. I also think it’s okay to show up and occasionally be like, Hey, I’m really distracted by the Coronavirus or whatever it is, right? If it’s something that’s easy to communicate. So I’m not on my best at my best right now. I know we were talking about maybe diving into this really meaty, vulnerable topic. Would you be okay if we dealt with these slightly more tactical things today and I can schedule us another one on one later in the week to deal with that, that other needy or topic.

Emily
That is an amazing script.

Jess
Thanks.

Emily
And when do you find that you or managers you’ve worked with avoid vulnerability and it’s a problem?

Jess
I think a lot of managers feel a need to show up as kind of an all-knowing, competent person, right? And that vulnerability is showing the cracks in the armor. Is showing that you don’t have it all figured out. That you’re just operating in a particular level of abstraction, and they’re operating at a different level of abstraction and you actually need each other. And sometimes the people who report to you might even be stronger in a particular skills than you are. It can feel like failure sometimes to tell people that. So there’s a lot of people who don’t do that, whose management style is very buttoned up. And the result of that is that the decisions aren’t as good. You’re not leaning on people’s strengths.You’re not asking for help where people can help you. So, people are confused. There’s bad answers. And eventually you get lack of trust and lack of growth. Which causes people to be disengaged, and leave or for small finically conversations to explode into big discussions because it’s not actually about that. It’s about something much deeper, but no one has the built up trust to be able to address the deeper issue.

Emily
I think that comes back to that idea that vulnerability is so important because, I guess we can think about it as building a muscle. Building a muscle of something goes potentially wrong and I’m fine and safe and potentially wrong and I’m fine and safe. And it’s like doing pushups before we go, I don’t know, move houses and carry a lot of boxes.

Jess
Yeah. Vulnerability is the act of extending trust and having that be honored over and over again.

Emily
So as we’re wrapping up, what tips do you have for other leaders and managers for using vulnerability to be better and happier at their jobs?

Jess
Yeah, I think a critical thing about vulnerability is being honest with yourself about your own needs. Most managers I know need someone to talk to, whether it’s therapy, whether it’s a coach, whether it’s going to pottery or a friendly discussion group or decompression time with their spouse. This is emotional labor. And if you’re not taking good care of yourself and you’re not helping yourself be in the right emotional spot, you cannot show up for your team. So don’t be afraid about prioritizing that time for yourself in whatever form it needs to take.

Emily
Yes, exactly. I think that is an aspect that a lot of us overlook. We’re so busy trying to keep all the plates in the air and make sure we don’t disappoint anyone. We always hear that analogy to an oxygen mask and I found one a few years ago that I like a lot more. You can’t pour love from an empty pitcher.

Jess
That’s awesome. Yeah. The thing that brought it home for me is my whole job is to help take care of people and help them grow, right. Help support people. And I realized I’m a person too. And I’m a person where I can show up for myself way more completely than I can for other people. So maybe I should invest in myself at least as much as I’m willing to invest in the other people around me.

Emily
I love that way of thinking about it. I think that is something most of us could do a little better than we do.

Jess
Yeah, I’m definitely not always perfect about it.

Emily
You’re one of my favorite people to talk to both in general about management philosophy and just have like a great hour on the couch chatting on a Wednesday night about why we love our jobs and how they work, but also about specific challenges that I’m facing. And one of the reasons for that is that you do a great job balancing the people and the company and you do it with such love and such care for both. We’ve been talking a lot about the people aspect of it. Can you talk a little bit about how all this ties into making companies successful?

Jess
Absolutely. So companies fundamentally exist to make people’s lives better. That’s what creating value is for your customer. It’s making their life better. So you can think about all of this in terms of the people, but obviously the people on your individual team can’t be successful unless the whole team is successful because they’re just going to be frustrated and feel ineffective unless that team is successful. And your individual team can’t be successful unless the wider company is successful. Because when the wider company is successful, you feel that momentum, there’s more resources, you’re making more impact. So you often have to make a little bit of a sacrifice at the individual level or the team level to optimize through the larger company and the impact that larger company can have.

Emily
What are some examples of that?

Jess
Yeah, I think a really obvious example is how much do you standardize the process across different teams. Maybe you have all but one of your teams using scrum and that one last team, like they really just work better with Kanban. Or asking everyone to use JIRA so that the work is all visible in one place. That’s a great example. Because each individual team would probably do better if they could just use Trello. But at the whole company level, like sales needs visibility and marketing needs visibility so they can plan their departments. And if you ask everyone to put things in JIRA, then all those other departments can be successful. Even though engineering maybe is slightly grumpier.

Emily
I love that. And I think that hits on two things that are so vulnerable for most managers and most teams. Which is on the part of managers, my team might not love me as much as they did yesterday.

Jess
Yes.

Emily
We’re terrified of that.

Jess
It’s not my job to be like, it’s not my job to be liked and sometimes people are going to hate me. But that’s what they need. That’s what the team needs, that’s what the company needs. And I try and focus more on that’s what the company needs and the team needs. Because when you get too much into like that’s what the individual needs, you can get paternalistic real fast.

Emily
Yes, yes you can. And we never really know what someone else wants or needs.

Jess
Nope.

Emily
We’re all individuals.

Jess
Yep.

Emily
Thank you so much. This has been so much fun.

Jess
I’ve really enjoyed it too. Thanks for having me on Em. Take care.

End Guest Segment

Emily
Thanks again to Jess for joining me. She’s one of my favorite people who coaches me in my life, partially because I find it really safe to feel vulnerable when I’m talking with her. And in addition to feeling vulnerable with the people around us, we also have to be willing to feel vulnerable within ourselves.

This week we’re talking about one of the fundamental tools of emotional health awareness, and it definitely requires that vulnerability with ourselves. It just means knowing what you’re feeling. It’s so simple. But so, so important. So why does awareness require vulnerability? Because in order to know what emotions we’re feeling, we have to be willing to do two uncomfortable things. We have to be willing to feel a little bit of the emotion instead of just shoving it away, because we can’t recognize it if we’re trying to shut the door on it and run away as fast as we can. And we need to be willing to admit to ourselves that we’re feeling that way.

Remember what we talked about at the beginning of the episode. Sometimes we don’t want to know that we’re feeling this way. Everyone has a few emotions they think they shouldn’t feel. But guess what? You definitely do experience that emotion sometimes. So you need to be willing to be vulnerable and admit to yourself when you’re feeling that way. And why do vulnerability and awareness relate to achieving our big results? Well, if we want to stop distracting ourselves, the best way to do that is to get a good look at what we’re distracting ourselves from. And what we’re always distracting ourselves from is an emotion we don’t want to feel right now or don’t want to risk feeling in the future.

So here’s what I want you to do this week. I want you to pull out your calendar right now and put five minutes on it every day.

If you’ve already got your 10 minutes a day Growth time set up from last episode, that’s perfect. If you don’t pause your podcast and set up those calendar events right now. You just need five minutes each day this week, but most weeks we’ll use 10 so you might want to set it up that way right now.

Back. Did you schedule five minutes for every single day? I promise you it’s worth it.

In those five minutes, what you’re going to do is take a sheet of paper and write down every single emotion you felt over the last 24 hours. Don’t judge them. Don’t try to fix any of them or change how you’re feeling. Just write them all down. You’re practicing being aware that you had a feeling and naming what it was. For some of you, this is going to be familiar and easy. Do it anyway. You’re still going to learn a ton about yourself and what your daily experience is really like.

For others of you, just noticing what you’re feeling might be new and uncomfortable. In the show notes, I’ve included a link to a feelings wheel and it’s also in the back of the podcast guide along with a feelings list. This is a great tool you can use if you’re having trouble finding the right name for an emotion. You can also look at it for help in generating your list. Did I experience disgust today? What about joy? Curiosity? Elation? Anger? It’s a great way to ensure you’re making a list that’s as complete as possible.

One caution I’m going to give you. Once you see what’s on your list, you are going to really want to make it better. Did you hear the air quotes there? Yeah. You’re going to want to try to fix your days or fix your thinking so that you have fewer negative emotions and more positive ones. We’re gonna talk about this in a few episodes from now in more detail. For now, I just want you to know that trying to fix your emotions is going to make you less happy and less effective and more stressed. So just practice being aware of what you’re feeling, but don’t judge it and make sure you do.

Grab this week’s podcast guide from the link in the show notes, or by texting the word vulnerability to 44222.

Alright. Have an amazing week. Make sure you’re taking the time to be aware of what you’re feeling and 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.