Live Career Coaching - How to Own Your Career

hello everyone good evening i have very unusual lighting tonight it's because it's a sunny day see if i open the curtains i get all washed out but Doesn't matter.

um tonight we have our special guest i'll switch over you've all met her many times unless you're brand new here this is kristin one day i'm gonna screw up and say her last name because it's in my head and i'm not supposed to say it so you'll eventually that that's a risk you accept with the coaching is one day I'll screw that up Kristen Smith Kristen Smith from Des Moines Iowa Kristen Smith

yes it's still light over there yes it will be light for a long time it will still be bright light coming in this window when the show ends let alone when it starts because this window faces west which means if you think about it i've

perfected the the feng shui of my desk because it faces south so maybe not perfectly i need a river and some crystals so if anybody wants to send me crystals rather than whiskey like all of my guests do i like the whiskey though it's a good trend all right so um for those who don't know We'll pop up our guest info in the chat. Kristen is one of the moderators of the channel, but she became a moderator by first volunteering to come on about a year ago.

and have me coach her live in front of an audience. And we go through her career. And in that time, hey, it's been great. She was an individual contributor when I met her and now she manages two teams. Kristen, I don't know if you caught the tweet or the title of things I sent out, but I said based on your agenda tonight, For the things you'd like me to coach you on, you seem to be attempting to implement every piece of advice I give on this channel in parallel all at once.

Which is certainly a bold thing. Not surprising. It's certainly a bold thing to attempt. Be careful, kids. I don't advise doing this at home. Some of you should ease into it with one small career improvement at a time. But Kristen can be a role model and show you how to just run the tables. Read the books, talk to your boss, talk to your employees, have a coach, have somebody. Find an Amazon VP to coach you. Yeah, you know, just run the tables, right? Just run the tables. Go for it all. Why not?

yeah well i know hey there's 400 or so amazon vps that means 399 of them are available you just have to get after them so you know it's totally possible out there And yes, I'm sure chat will say 400. Oh my God. How can that be true? 400. What's going on? it's a big company folks it's like a million people so you do the math like each vp does it still has like a whole company worth of people working for them um all right how many directors oh my god

So there's a difference between directors little d and directors big d. Directors big d are like people on the board who are officially legally directors of the company. I don't know, that's a small number. And then directors little d would be like 2,000.

something like that but again that means the average one has 500 employees it's a pretty pretty big set of people anyway we're off in the weeds um so uh early ad just in case we do have a really interesting show coming up next tuesday in the middle of the day at one o'clock i'm taking the day off because my daughter is here she's a refugee from ohio said i should mention that she normally lives in ohio during the school year

Refugee. Well, she's a refugee in the sense that you have the COVID outbreak rising rapidly. But some of us are stuck in Ohio. Is that what you're saying? I'm saying that being out while Governor DeWine gets it under control is not the worst thing that could happen to her. But honestly, the whole world, to be very fair, cases in Washington are unfortunately rising also.

Just none of us is a dumpster fire like Texas or Florida or Arizona. So anyway, yeah, come visit Washington. There you go. Awesome. Come on out. So anyway, Kristen sent a whole list of things she'd like to follow up on. And we do have this guest at 1 p.m. next Tuesday. I got distracted mid-sentence. Olympic silver medalist John Coyle.

And so I'll talk about this again at the end of the show. But this guy is really interesting to me. I'm just going to show his website real quick. He medaled in speed skating. um and he's way more handsome like this this is one of those guys who can get away with shaving his head the piercing blue eyes make it work plus the athletic build um but anyway uh he's pivoted to being a he was a consultant for a long time and now he's a speaker um he's a public speaker he's got his own book um

He does two really interesting things. Frankly, he tells the story of what he learned in both winning and losing medals and what he wished he'd known when he was coming out of school. Because basically... He didn't learn his lesson until it cost him more Olympic medals and sort of in hindsight. So he could have medaled more, I think, if he'd learned the lessons earlier and he's going to teach you.

And, oh, I have actually, there are pictures of me. Maybe I'll share them. I did once have my head completely shaved in order to see what the hell it looks like. Unfortunately, I did this after a bunch of tequila shots with my boss at his New Year's Eve party. And my boss, who has a shaved head.

really wanted to shave my head and i thought sure why not what could go wrong but having a boss who's drunk a lot of tequila shave my head at a new year's eve party turns out he's really good at it and I did not get cut at all but the problem is shaving your head at New Year's Eve is it's cold and now you have no hair and you didn't bring a hat because you did have hair so

I don't know. You learn things. You learn things you did not expect. The law of unintended consequences. It sounds like common sense, but I'm surprised, Ethan. You know, I do have a party. I do have an occasional. I do have an occasional, you know, spontaneous streak. I try to keep it under control, chained in the closet away from doing harm, but I had let it out on New Year's Eve.

So since we're telling stories and you people like stories, before we go to Kristen's many questions, anyway, John will come one o'clock on Tuesday and share a bunch of valuable lessons. I'll leave it at that and talk about it more later. Let me come back to me and Kristen. There we go. So the rest of the story is... My boss was a crazy guy. No, I'm not talking about Bezos, though he also shaves his head. It was the guy between me and Bezos. His wife is very responsible.

And she had a breathalyzer at the party so that you could tell if any guest was inebriated and needed a taxi or an Uber. Well, I'll give chat 10 seconds to respond. What happens when you have a breathalyzer at a party? Kristen, do you know? No. I don't know. I feel like... Everybody has a big sleepover. I don't know. What are you going to do? How do you get that many people? PMA Dota nailed it right away. He said, you try to get a high score. Yeah, it becomes a competition.

Um, so, so actually having a breathalyzer at a party, like if you do don't let on until the end when you're checking people on the way out the door, because. It totally became a high score competition. Now we'll ask the second question. Who is most equipped to quickly get smashed? Assuming you're all doing drinks together. So. And yeah, it's a set of competitive high performers. Now, NVA Hitch says him. Ethan, the owner. The lightweight is close, awesome.

Who tends to have the lightest person? Oh, PMA Dota, you're an expert at this. You clearly understand the game. So without revealing names, because some of them still work with me at Amazon. the various ladies at the party quickly won the competition because two shots of tequila for me and my equally six foot two boss or three or four were feeling nice

Four shots for them, they are in the bag. Yeah, that sounds awful. And they were definitely winning. They were definitely winning very, very quickly. Luckily, I think most of them had enough. The thing I'll give them credit is they knew when to say, okay, I was in the lead and now I'll relinquish my crown rather than push it further.

you know so they knew when to stop mostly did you ever play wizard no drinking game no what's that yeah you it's probably a good thing because you're so freaking tall so in wizards you drink until Every time you finish a beer, you tape them together. And then you have to build yourself a staff. And you're not allowed to use it until it's as tall as you. And as soon as your staff gets as tall as you, you can just go around and beat the shit out of anybody else that hasn't done it yet.

So me and my friend, we were going to play Wizards with a bunch of friends, and we're very slow drinkers, and we knew we would never win, but, you know, whatever, we were hanging out. They let us combine our camps, and we still lost, like, by far. and like the guys that won were definitely taller than us of course they didn't actually hit us because they were nice and not drunk enough to actually do that but yeah that's a terrible game

Don't play that at home. We have an honored guest, Anil in chat, one of my good friends from Twitch. I don't know if he's ever dropped in and spoken up, but he apparently likes to hear me talk about drinking games. Hey, Anil. It's good to see you. I hope you're doing well in COVID times. I haven't been able to see... All my Twitch buddies, I can't get down to see them in...

San Francisco I mean I guess I could road trip it Which I will have to do eventually because I haven't seen so many of my twitch compatriots But we'll end with one more drinking game story then i have never played this but one day i will one of the things we did at twitch a couple years ago is we revived bob ross and do you know bob ross kristen so Oh, yeah. He's on Netflix, too. You can binge watch.

Bob Ross. Well, and that's what we did. When we revived Bob Ross, because unfortunately he's passed away, we played every single episode of Bob Ross back-to-back as a marathon stream, and it took over a week. But there are a bunch of variations if you Google them for the Bob Ross drinking game. And if you know the show, basically every time he says happy little trees, you have to drink. And you can imagine how badly that can go.

And every time he says, it's your world, you can do what you want, you have to finish your drink. Those are the two main roles I remember. Oh, that's funny. And you can definitely see how that would go badly. Yeah. I feel like maybe I heard something about that.

time he has a baby deer or like a baby squirrel like he feeds a baby squirrel like because that happens often yeah there's an unlimited in the middle there's an unlimited number of bob ross rules uh but um someday maybe I wonder I probably uh hey Neil is that stream available can I like host it when it's on because it still plays every Monday so I could do a Monday stream

you know with a Bob Ross we could do a Bob Ross like watch party kind of where I co-stream it I think it probably is anyway I'll stop bothering a Neil he's got real work to do So with all this said, Kristen, you sent me an agenda. Do you just want to take it from the top or do you have something burning on your mind? Where would you like to start using our time? I don't. It doesn't matter to me. I'll let you pick.

I kind of did it in chronological order. Last time I did assign you homework. You were reticent to pursue getting a mentor. And you, you propose this very anemic step. Like, I think you said, well, by the next time we talk, I'll think about, I think you said, you would have asked him. And I said, step it up. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And all of chat said that that was weak and that I needed to do more. And then everyone said to go for it. And because you guys made me feel so confident, I just did.

went for it great tell us more how did it go Yeah. So first I emailed my boss because I, after we talked, I felt like it was really great advice from you to put out there what I'm specifically looking for and what I need help with as a mentor.

my boss as a vp could consider who do i think would maybe be a good fit for that specific need um so he sent me over three additional names to check out so then i reached out to somebody else that i know in the organization that i'm close with um and she met lots of people and i thought hey do you know any of these people you know me really well do you think any of these people would be a good fit i'm also considering this initial person that's a vp that was recommended

And so she was like, well, I know one of those people. I think that both of those, the initial and this person would both be good fits for you for a different reason. So I was like, okay, I'm going to go with the initial person. That's the VP. Because the other people were still in leadership roles, but they were in the clinician space. So like, you know, nursing director for a hospital.

or something like that. Like they were high up on the clinician side. And I decided to go with the marketing VP because one, I've already met her. Two, I work a little bit more closely with the marketing department. And so I thought that that could be good too. And then three, I don't really have a desire to necessarily grow into the clinician space.

So I kind of felt like having a mentor, it could be cool because it'd be a very different perspective. But I opted to go with this other person. So I. i had i went back and listened to some of our our talk because you're so good with this VP speak that I was like okay I loved the way Ethan phrased some of this so I like listened to it and jotted it down and kind of rephrased it into my language and I sent her the note and I just said you know

I said I'm looking for a mentor and my boss recommended you. Here's specifically what I'm looking for. Let me give you a little more color. Looking for someone who can help me with my confidence. someone who can help me because I'm often feeling out of my depth. I'm not having the time to master these things that are coming at me and I'm just constantly learning. And I shared a little bit more. I kept it fairly succinct, but I wanted to give her enough.

detail that she could make a good decision on whether or not she wanted to entertain this as an idea. And then just told her, you know, we can meet a couple times and if we feel good about it, we can continue. And if not, if it doesn't, it's not a good fit for you, which I said for her because I felt like that.

would be the more appropriate thing to say. If it's not a good fit for you, that's no problem. I'll just enjoy getting to know you better and left it at that. So then she emailed me back like fairly quickly. um and minutes hours days like like a day like a day and was just like hey i would love to do this i've been wondering how things have been going for you since you've moved into management um

And just would love to hear how things have been. And this would be really fun. So I was like, awesome. This is exciting. She wants to do this. This is great. So then she reached out to her assistant to schedule something with me and she was going to be going on vacation early July. So she wanted to try to fit in our first session before she went.

Which I thought was cool, too, because she easily could have just put it off and been like, oh, we'll meet in a month. And so that kind of told me she was interested, just the way that she had prioritized it. Made me feel valued. So I had my meeting with her and it was very casual and I was very candid. It went really well, I thought. She asked me some really good questions.

she gave me some great advice and she kind of level set at the beginning just kind of was like you know you would think as a vp maybe i've like got things figured out she's like but these are some things i'm working on that i've gotten feedback on and um I know how to lead a large group of people, but this is what I'm working towards. And it's hard for me to admit it, but I don't have all those skills completely honed yet. And so these are the things I'm working on. You're just very transparent.

which set the tone really nicely for me to be able to do the same. Afterwards, I was like, oh man, I would never have like just talked to one of our VCs like that. Like how I just put myself out there. but like that's what mentorship's about like she can't help me if she doesn't know where i'm struggling and and whatnot so um i just thanked her for allowing me to approach this with such raw conversation and she replied back she's like it was perfect

And so I just felt like it was a good connection. And so she gave me homework. And she asked me, how often do I want to meet? I'm like... you're a VP I don't know when do you want to meet how much time do you have um I told her I was like well maybe you've seen a good cadence with other mentees or something before and she's like well how about we try to meet once every three weeks uh for right now and if we want to meet more than that we can so i thought that was very gracious yeah um so uh

So I'm waiting to get the schedule from her for our next session. But in the meantime, she sent over a bunch of articles that she thought were really helpful for her from some sort of subgroup in our organization. and to read. So I read through all of those and then she gave me the homework. And so my homework was to elicit feedback because she said it sounded like I wasn't sure.

what it was I wanted to work on specifically like I didn't really have that figured out yet um and so she thought maybe if I asked like certain people for feedback and i got an array of responses that that might um maybe will bring up a theme or it will bring to light some sort of an idea of something i want to focus on uh as part of my you know my

personal development plans. So I was like, Oh God, I don't know if I really, do I actually want feedback? Like I started thinking about it and I was like, who could I ask? And I'm thinking of all the people I could ask that would tell me what I want to hear. And that wouldn't be helpful. So hold that thought. Do you mind for a minute? Because we'll jump into your feedback. i i have like 10 things queued up in my head i want to share with everyone else who's listening because

I joked when I sent out both the Discord message and the tweet for this stream. I said, Kristen is trying to implement everything we teach in this channel at once. She did a bunch of things here that I want to call out in case you want to do what she's done first In the beginning when we coached her last time, if you go back and roll the tape, so to speak, she didn't want to approach a VP mentor because she thought she might be wasting the VP's time.

Kristen's relatively new at the company, has only been there a couple years, not even, right? It's full-time like 18 months. Yeah, not even. Full-time, I got one year in April as a full-timer. yeah so 15 months is a full-timer so here here she is approaching a vice president in the company that's one thing she did so she she aimed high because the worst they can do is say no

Second, she made a clear ask. Here's what I would like and here's where I think you can help me. Third, something we coach on is she made an ask that made it easy for the VP to say yes. As you heard, she framed it as...

i want to see if you'd be willing to mentor me but we don't know each other yet so could you commit to just a couple of meetings and see how it goes and so she made an ask that was easy for the person to say yes to she also gave the context that the vp had been recommended to her which puts the vp

This is fair tactics in a situation where they know if they say no, they're not only disappointing Kristen, maybe, but they're also sort of denying a request or a recommendation from a peer. And that peer recommendation validates that.

investing in kristin is a corporate priority and worth the time and so there's all these things that got done right kristin enlisted her boss she wrote a letter that covered what she wanted she gave the person a request that's easy to get out of she gave them con or you know to say yes to and to get out of if they need to she gave them

context on what she would like to learn and that they were recommended um and then you know she showed up and was genuine in the first meeting uh all of it and she made the ask the number one thing about getting a mentor is ask there's a lot of people i know are like well i haven't found a mentor and i'm like who have you asked you're like well i can't think of anybody sure but it's not that hard and so um

Kristen is every woman. She's meaning. She works in middle America in a great job, but one that is very similar to what many of you either have or will have one day. And she accomplished all this since the last time we met, which I can be a little slack about scheduling follow-ups, but it was probably six weeks, something like that. Yeah, because we had joked about it happening by around July 4th.

Yeah, so five, six weeks. So what sector? Healthcare. Kristen works in healthcare. And it should be an open. If you use exclamation point guest, you should get.

any any time on any stream assuming i've remembered to update it you should get all about who our guest is um so uh kristen did a ton of stuff right you can do that stuff right so good job you completed the homework now the other thing i have to observe that's funny you completed my homework yes the other thing i have to observe that's really funny if you haven't noticed a pattern i'm a vp i gave homework

She talked to a VP. That VP gave homework. For all of you who are in school and think, oh, when I graduate, I'll never have to do homework again. Get over it. Get over it. It's a double homework. It's like, yeah, it's a little bit inception going on, but. So do you want to talk for a minute then about, go ahead and frame what her homework was and the feedback part. So I just wanted to call out that you say it's easy. And in hindsight, it was easy. But getting the courage to actually do it.

was like it wasn't necessarily scary it was just like for me this is different i'm sure for everybody for me i just really felt um like who am i to be asking somebody to invest in me like this It's a humbling thing for somebody to say yes. And I'm really grateful for you and for chat because I've been putting this off for a while.

uh just feeling inadequate and um and so with your guys's encouragement i just was like i gotta i just gotta do it i know i'm gonna do it at some point i just gotta do it And I finally did. And it was like way less painful than I expected it to be. And even if she would have said no, like I had three other names. that I could have contacted and it wouldn't have been, you know, any big deal. So just encouraging. Yeah, I just want to encourage people that it does feel like a big step.

um to ask someone to invest in you but the thing is like people do want to help and if you're willing to ask for it then they're even more like yes because they're probably already keeping tabs on who could i

Who can I help? Who's rising to the top of where I can help? Yeah, well, for most of them. I'll give you all a window. This does not apply to me because of what I do here, but I am an outlier in this one way. Most... managers and vps have this vague guilt that they know they're supposed to be mentoring more but they don't know who to mentor because They can't just mentor their own staff. They already work with them. So the mentor, the mentee has to be somebody else.

And they don't just want to pick randomly and say, hey, do you want me as a mentor? They fear rejection just as much. And they don't want to go recruit someone who actually doesn't give a crap and doesn't want to be harassed. So they're kind of like the people leaning against the walls in a dance. They're hoping someone will ask them that they can say yes to. So really, that isn't going to be true of all, but just remember.

you have this fear but they actually have a need so yeah all right yeah so so her homework was to get feedback from different people and she kind of she recommended That I get it from my peers, that I get it from somebody else above me, not my boss. You know, and so one VP telling me.

To ask people above me, that's not my boss means it's going to be directors or VPs. So I ended up reaching out for both. And I probably wouldn't have done that, except that the homework was from another VP. I didn't even tell them that.

when I asked for the feedback because I didn't feel like I needed to. But it just gave me the confidence to go ahead and do it. So what I did was I kind of thought through what are the different layers and who could i ask and who do i think will be will actually give me something valuable that i can use or leverage um and so i thought through that and picked my my

specific people and then I kind of crafted a message and then I just tweaked it a little bit to personalize it to each one. And the way I presented it to them was, first of all, I created a quick survey using Microsoft Form. because we have that access um i just made it two questions because i wanted to be really simple so that i could actually get people to do it so um i was very specific in the language that i use

So the first question was, from what you've seen, what is a strength of mind you appreciate that you'd like to see me leverage more often? And then on the negative side, I asked, what can I do better or stop doing? um and then the way that i crafted my message was i kind of just said you know hey so and so um i'm i'm looking for some honest feedback i'm wondering if you can help me out with a two question survey

I made sure to call out that it was just two questions so that they didn't just flag it in the email and not come back to it. Smart. See, smart. Make it easy. You're learning something. This is a master's class, sorry. This is a master's class Kristen's putting on, on how to work with executives. It's really how to work with anyone. Make it easy for them to help you. Please go on.

Well, and I was sending one of these to an executive too. And I did tweak hers just a little bit to give her a little more of an out because I didn't want, I didn't have the same like familiarity with her as much as some of the others. But I basically just said, can you help me out with this two-question survey? And then I made sure to call out why I picked you. What I said was...

I'm only sending this to a few folks that I know have valuable opinions to share because I wanted them to know I'm not just blasting this out to everybody. picked you specifically without having to go in and be too detailed about why you but just enough to let them know that i put thought into it so that they would feel more motivated to respond to it, knowing that there was less people responding.

So and then, of course, I had the link obviously was tied in. So I had hyperlinked it. And so, yeah, I got.

feedback like the the vp that i asked for feedback submitted it the first thing i sent it at like 11 o'clock at night on sunday and i got it monday morning like 8 8 a.m so she was on it and then i've kind of gotten more feedback trickled in um up to this afternoon so um so yeah so i have this and you can pull it up whenever you want um but i'm happy to share with you guys the feedback that i got and this is what i'll be discussing

with the VP of Marketing. So my boss is the VP of Engineering and my mentor is the VP of Marketing. And then I got feedback from another VP in our healthcare infosystem. I rolled this up on screen. This is the first three. The first three are showings. The VP of IS, the architect and manager. I can scroll up or down. so this is really uh and i'll say and i'll take an aside chat ones i could easily bring one of my old mentees on um but i could probably someday as a stream also bring

My second ever boss on. My second ever boss. Who would tell you all about. What a nightmare it was as a young manager. That would be really fun. We should interview him. We should let chat interview him. Well, first it would be interview her. unusually I worked for a woman in technology in the early 90s who was a manager and that if you think they're rare now they were unheard of uh in the early 90s um so anyway yes i had uh i had uh she she would though she's very she likes me a lot but uh boy

She could tell stories that would curl your hair, I bet. I would guess they are proud now. But, you know. okay so um let's talk for a minute here though about some of your feedback so i would say unless you want to do it differently we could just go I've highlighted the first positive piece or the first, you know, strength. We could just go strength, opportunity, strength, opportunity. Yeah. It will take a long time to go through them all.

because you did have other topics we should talk about tonight. What would you most like to get from looking at the feedback? What's success for you? here tonight? Honestly, I just wanted to kind of share it with chat because I feel like it's good for you guys to see what feedback can look like. It was intimidating to ask for it.

Because you don't always want to hear that stuff, even though you tell yourself stories of what you think they're going to say. And some of them might be true. But it was actually very empowering to have people just... give give me feedback and um I don't know it felt really good and so I wanted to show it because

i think that it's not always the easiest thing to do and i just wanted to have that transparency as a part of that's like what i bring to chat every time we do this right it's just transparency and so in all my candidness like this is the feedback i've gotten Well, then I'll make sure to show it all. Yeah, go ahead. So what I think I would love is commentary on what are my themes? Like, I need to bring back a theme. And I'll talk about this with, you know, my mentor.

You guys are helping me process my initial processing of this since I haven't really dug into it yet. And so we can take it wherever you want. Well, for those of you on PC, I'll scroll through it and you can see what themes you pull out. I do think theming is really important. So let me go ahead. There's only five things. So you've got the first three above the fold.

i'll move down these are the other two obviously one person wrote a lot um i'll say uh i scrolled back up for a second one thing that's really interesting to me is uh someone here says honest feedback here what this tells you is you're uncomfortable everyone is uncomfortable asking for feedback

But one thing that can make you... They're uncomfortable giving it. Because what they're worried about, you're afraid of what bad thing you might hear. They're afraid... that even though you've asked for it if they tell you the truth they might offend you or or wound you

and it was funny i've told this story before that i had a woman ask me for feedback and then when i gave it to her immediately began to argue with me and say i was wrong um at least she wasn't offended though she simply disagreed But, you know, it's a risk. It's a risk to ask and it's a risk to receive. But there's so much value. There's so much value. And that person has now said, well, because I talked with him after and I just thanked him for it.

And I apologize. You guys will see. Basically, I told them, I'm going to be looking for more feedback from you on how I'm improving, because that's my goal, is to improve this. So I guess that might play into one of my themes. And, you know, I just told him that I didn't know how I was going to respond to getting feedback, but I knew he would give me like real feedback. And he works with me the closest out of any of these people.

And so I was just really grateful. Like I thought when I would read something like this, that it would make me just feel like guarded or defensive. But instead, I actually just felt so thankful that I work with someone who's willing to tell me this. And I was a little bit surprised at my own reaction. So I told him that because I wanted him to know that I had, you know, that it felt good and that all it did was make me feel grateful that I get to work with him.

And and then he said that, you know, he appreciates it. he wants to do something similar. And I'm like, oh crap, now I have to give candid feedback. But you're right, there's like a fear of asking, but it is almost harder to have to give it. Yeah, it can be, it can be. So maybe we'll talk about how to give feedback well another time.

So, Chad, you've had a chance to look at these. I'm sure many of you are looking at the what can you do better. But if you look at the what have you seen, to me, one person clearly doesn't know Kristen as well. right he or she opens this with i do not work with kristen daily with kristen again do not work daily with her so this is a person who's distancing things and giving short answers but if you look at the other four i would argue all four of the of the strings are the same

So if anybody in chat wants to call out a theme, we'll see if you agree. You have to get started typing before I say what I see. But what I see, the messages I'm sure will show up in a minute. Ability to connect well comes from extremely good at asking open-ended questions. Biggest strength is your empathy and your sincerity. And then the next person says empathy.

These are all really the same thing they're variations and angles on it and different emphasis but everyone is clearly talking about your ability to knit with your team show care for them uh give them air cover um and uh represent your team and and that comes out as a strength across all of these i would argue and it might be more rationalization that part of this watching or pull concept and ideas together may or may not be the same which is fine so that

that director i have never worked with on like project work um but she is the one of the sponsors for our diversity and inclusion council and i'm on that and so i've just stepped in and i started like there's a bunch of people that want to do something and not a lot of people that feel like naturally capable of leading and so it ends up with wasted time because we're meeting and not doing anything and I I just can't do that so I I just

step in and start throwing stuff at them like hey what about this hey what about this hey could you guys but i don't want to lead it because i don't have time to lead it i'm like trying to get other people to lead it and so that's kind of where her um observations have come from So it is a different, kind of a different observation experience, I guess. Yep. So I'll note someone in chat, PMA, who's been really on top of it tonight. and generally, but really on top of it tonight in particular.

observes that you can tell something by what is not in your strengths, which is that you lead tech teams, but no one has mentioned anything about technical skills. That's right. Yeah, and I'm not surprised. Yeah, one of the things Kristen struggles with is she never claimed to be technical. She got asked to lead in a technical space and in fact does not. personally have a technical background and that's a challenge and so interestingly i do think you could take away potentially some need

Not for a growth area that says, well, you need to be technical. But for one that says you may want to, over time, become technically conversant enough. that it gets called out as notable or maybe not your greatest strength but at least it's listed like oh and she gets it because you don't want it to one day show up as oh she just doesn't get it um and

I don't think that's a top priority because PMA and others who have observed this, while it's not mentioned as a strength, it's also not mentioned anywhere as an opportunity. It's not mentioned as something she needs to do. So I think on this, you already knew your strength, Kristen, and this just confirms it. You told me you were a people person. You told me you cared more about people than where you work or projects. And that clearly shows here.

so then let's look at that but you know that's you got confirmation yay most people know their strengths it's very rare that you get told a strength you're like that's not a strength um So now we look at the feedback, the what can I do better or stop. So here is a little of this, right? Learn areas you do not know as well. that could be taken this is really talking about relationships and and going horizontal but i think you could read some of that as

you're not from the healthcare industry, as long as you're going to work in it, you're going to need to be knowledgeable. And that makes sense too. This VP has a lot of directors and a really large group of people reporting to her. And she oversees a lot of the clinical stuff. So she's the one leading our daily, you know, 8 a.m. calls where we hear all the updates on what's going on with COVID and, you know.

are we prepared and what needs to change and how can we make sure we're ready wow that's got to be respect to that person for that job right now I know. And the fact that she literally responded to me before our 8 a.m. meeting is impressive. Yeah. And she's seen me in action as an individual contributor. Good. That's where she initially met me. We would have demos as a product owner. I would speak quite a bit in those.

So I've been involved with some of the work that her teams have done, where we started to collaborate in ways we never had before. So yeah, so it makes sense that that's what she would kind of say, because she's right. The department I'm in, previously under our old leadership, we really weren't integrated with the rest of the IT world for our company. We were very secluded and kind of did our own thing.

And that's changed a lot since my boss came in. So we're integrating with her team a lot more now. So it totally makes sense that she would call that out. It's been a gap. That's been known from our department to the rest of IS. So there's a question in chat I'm going to aside for real quick where St. Outlaw asked, do you think it's worth reaching out to potential mentors during this COVID outbreak?

Obviously, Kristen did, and she works in a place that's under more COVID pressure than the average workplace. And she works in healthcare. She works in the healthcare industry. And so she was able to find a great mentor in the middle of a pandemic working in one of the hardest hit so-called frontline first responder industries. So if she can do it, you can do it. We all can do it.

Yeah, and I would say, too, Ethan, your point of people wanting to find those opportunities. Right now, there's this feeling of helplessness. Like, I can't fix... the world's problems coming to me but i have someone coming to me who's taking action which shows me that they're committed you know to ask for help and assistance and that's one thing i can do yep so it's kind of like right it's almost more motivation um than anything else i think right now and by the way um

we talked briefly in the stream about black lives matter uh not this stream but other streams and minorities and the burdens the challenges of being a female employee a person of color or otherwise uh this disadvantage Frankly, if you fall into any of those categories, you're never going to have a better chance to ask for a mentor because I'll give you two reasons, one of them good, one of them bad.

The good one is lots of people are more sensitive right now, want to help. And they're like, I have no idea how to fix racism or sexism. I don't know. But now I have a woman or a Latino coming to me asking for help. I can do that. That's a good reason. The bad reason is there will be a few of them who are like, and oh. when the howling, when the baying wolves that I'm not doing enough come looking, I'll point them to my black and Latino mentees and be like, see, I'm totally woke.

I'm not, you take whatever motive you want. Everyone has a blend of motives. Just recognize if you're in those buckets, this is a golden chance to get help. And if you're not in those buckets, it's as good a time as any. Potentially, as Kristen said, better because people are still thinking, how can I do more human contact things?

okay so uh i don't want to you know you have some other good stuff we should talk about but let me talk a little bit more about some of this feedback um this box number three gets a little bit in what we call the magic loop. You will have great success if you augment your engaging questions of leadership by showcasing suggestions on how some of the challenges can be solved.

by applying problem-solving skills. Tell me, Kristen, what are they saying here? Paraphrase this back to me in the language of our channel. I think what's happening here, and I'll have to talk with him to confirm, but... This is a relatively new position in our department and he is very, very smart, wicked smart. So he's an architect. He's also, he manages two people and he's kind of leading the architecture group, which has maybe like 10 people in it right now. And it's a pretty big list.

What he's good at and what he does is he looks very laterally and kind of takes everything in and assesses, do we need to buy it? Do we need to make it ourselves? Like, you know, where should we do this to architect it? So he thinks in solutions and he can knock things out very, very smart, right? And I have the total opposite approach to things. And so what happens a lot of times is in our meetings, in our leadership meetings.

I will ask questions or I'll start like getting a thought, but I don't know what words to put with it. I don't know what the actual solution is. I don't know the technical piece. So maybe this was actually another. This was kind of speaking to what we were talking about earlier, potentially, with learning a little bit more from a technical standpoint. Because...

I'm looking to the others to kind of fill in those gaps. And I'm just kind of spurring on that conversation and trying to get the group connected and talking and communicating because that's what I'm good at. So I think what he's saying here is that I'm asking good questions. question and bringing up good topics, but he thinks I could contribute more by also bringing potential solutions.

wait so if I may interject I think you got to the meat of it I was going to say I can shorten your answer a lot you got to the me potentially you got to the meat of it right at the end which is we've talked about With anyone you interact with, are you bringing them, everyone has a certain number of bags of poop on their desk. Are you bringing them a bag of poop or are you coming in and picking one up and saying, I'll take this and get rid of it for you?

People appreciate more those who remove poop than those who add. And as a manager, people come and add poop to my desk sometimes, but I also have some people who take it away. And I like it when people come in and say, hey, can I help you with that? Or, hey, I noticed this bag of poop. See, I have it, but I'm not going to set it down. I'm telling you what I'm going to do with it, you know, to get rid of it.

I think in the simplest terms, he's asking for more poop removal and less poop creation. He's saying you ask a lot of questions and they're pretty smart, but you end up leaving them with me to solve. Yeah, potentially. That might be what's happening. Well, at least think about it. Situations always have nuance. I tend to try and simplify things to really simple rules, like be a poop remover, not a poop remover.

giver but uh think about that a little bit you gave a much more nuanced explanation of he's looking for you to contribute ideas not only facilitate Which is also possibly true. But I'm tying this together. Why I'm doing this theory is I'm going to scroll down. Both of the other two things. Talk about getting people to solve their own problems, not taking them on.

when there is specific feedback then I would always encourage us to ask individuals if they worked with the specific individual first or worked with the team to discuss or brought up concerns I've observed moments where instantly escalated rather than allowing individuals or teams to self-organize um he's basically saying you know uh try to push people to solve their own things so try to push people

handle your own poop don't bring it to others and similarly with the director of is even though she doesn't know you as well she's saying i think she may need to be more director specific with who is doing what by when and not owning all the follow-ups and again that's about get other people to handle their own poop so yeah I know that one yeah go ahead

Well, that one is harder for me to understand, too, because I've I have actually I've intentionally tried to not be the person that's like, OK, you're doing this. here's what you're, I'm expecting you to do. And this is when, because I'm not in charge of that group. And so, and I don't want to take on this stuff. So I've purposely like pulled back from doing that just because I know that

I don't want to come across as if I'm trying to be one of the coaches because I'm not. And so I'm trying to be careful because like when people don't step up to lead, I just kind of jump in. But I'm not one of the, I'm not actually one of the leaders. And so I'm trying to figure out that balance. I think maybe what she's saying here, if I see the need, just do it. But I don't know. So.

And the product owner, so this was one of, she was once here when I was an individual contributor. We were on the same team. And so now, you know, I thought she'd be a good person to ask because she knew me both then.

I knew she would give me some honest feedback. So I think what I'm reading in from her is more figuring out that balance between what do we ask our teams to do and figure out versus... um you know coming in and like what problems are we giving them i guess to solve and this is coming actually from a lot of other issues that we're dealing with um with those teams right now

So it's a little bit harder to speak to, and it would probably take a lot longer. It would take a whole other session for us to talk through some of the stuff that she's bringing out there. But I'm curious to hear, so then how are you tying?

that back to... Well, I tie several things together just essentially saying you're really good at facilitating maybe you're not yet as strong at causing problems to get solved that you're better at identifying things and surfacing them then leading to their resolution so another you know if i look at the positive side i do not work daily with kristen however i enjoy watching her ability to pull concepts and ideas together and help move the topic forward

which is how you describe what you do with the architect that you pull things together and move the topic forward and my point is it's extremely valuable to be able to point tease out what is the problem and get people's consensus on the problem and it seems like you're getting a lot of feedback that you do that really well

you're also getting some maybe feedback that taking things to the next step and getting the scrum team to okay effing do it or yeah with a date you're getting a little bit of feedback of you know a plus identifying the problem and getting consensus maybe c on now get somebody to deal with it Now, I know you're very interested in this other piece of feedback, which you and I have talked about before.

from your manager. And by the way, of all the people who give you feedback, your manager is definitely the most important because in the end they have the most influence on your career. Wait, the manager, when I say manager here, this is my co-manager. Co-manager, okay. This is not my boss. This is my peer. He and I lead the engineering team. Good to know. Thank you for clarifying. In any case, you and I have talked about this, right? I am verbose and I know it. You are also verbose.

And I think you know it. Yeah. I wasn't surprised. I knew that. I had a feeling this is what he was going to say. And it's, you know. This is why, do you remember almost a year ago when we started this, my first thing I did was started tracking like when I didn't speak up. That was your first homework. Yeah. So here we are a year later, and I'm still working on it. And probably you will be your whole life.

We have traits and we get better at them, but expectations also rise because as you climb in your career and you do more and more. The expectations of you being crisp and concise and speaking at the right time and giving air to others and not wandering in what you say will become higher and higher. And I certainly see this at Amazon all the time where we teach people actually we're relatively stern about it. We teach people if you're asked a yes or no question.

You can give context to the yes or no, but begin the answer with yes or no. Like... If the question is yes or no, say yes or no. Because people are like, is the project on time? What people want to say is, well, you see, we had this problem and that problem. And you just need to say no. However, we have a plan to make it on time. We hit this setback and that setback, but just straight up, no. Or, yes, we were behind schedule, but we did blah, blah, blah to get back on schedule.

similarly if the answer is a number you know what was our profit last month 12 million dollars not blah blah blah we're very pleased answer the question right so That goes back to, is it, maybe it's decisive or I can't remember which book talks about not generalizing. And like, you guys, if you're going to give a number, you got to give it like.

don't generalize it give the number and it comes back to the idea of giving real data and I have been working on that because I am definitely a generalizer. And I guess my question here, and this is probably something I've talked with my mentor about, but I'm a verbal processor. We've had this on, so I'm going to put you back on. Go ahead. So I'm a verbal processor, which is part of why I'm sober, but I'm figuring things out as I'm talking. That's what I have to do to figure it out.

And so it can be difficult for me to be concise because I have to get through that process to arrive at a conclusion. And I don't know how much of that I can change. what I can do to practice ways to do that without like what I'm doing right now, which is verbally processing as I'm talking to you about verbal processing. Whoa, self-referential much. Inception playing now. Well, what you can do there then is you can learn an adaptive tool.

that adaptive tool is to say bear with me while I talk this through or I need to crystallize my thoughts could i talk this through with you for a minute in other words set people up for the ramble give them an idea of like it's not random You know you'll, and I do this, my wife will be the first, second, third, and 17th person to tell you that I share this trait. I'm a verbal processor.

And that oftentimes I will answer my own question to her if only she sits silent while I get there. Yep. That's totally me. Yeah. So that's who we are. But you can at least... My wife knew that when she married me, but the other people aren't married to you. And so... uh they they didn't pick me they just got stuck with me right and so they could maybe use a warning and some guide posts um and if they say you know actually i don't have time for that right now

say either great i'll then i don't have an answer for you or okay i'll have to go through and you know can we talk in a yeah some but take it offline take it offline but the great thing is if you If you sort of ask for that social permission, people can tolerate like in the most bald way, not that you would ever do this. But if someone came into my office and said, Ethan, can I just ramble at you randomly for five minutes? I really need it.

i'd be like i guess so sure and you know then i'd sit there kind of no matter what they said right because i had opted in and plus i'd be curious as hell like what was on their mind at that point so there's a lot of ways to do this But what I'd like to do, just to make sure we don't stay up too late on your end, because I know you're East Coast time. Maybe we talked, you had this question, prepping for mentorship meetings.

and parenthetically you said what have you seen successful how to make the most of it what can i do differently than i do for these sessions well first this is a uh would it be okay if we moved to that Sure. Okay. So on a mentorship point, this is mentorship, that's mentorship. So at some level, you should use those sessions like you use these, except

There you have people who have domain specificity. They both know the domain and the company you're in, so they have context I don't. And they've seen your actual work, which I never do.

and so the main indifference I have an advantage over them and that I can give you feedback without needing to be burdened by Your company culture or any of the personalities or who I might offend if I say this or that because I don't know any of them So I have independence What they have that I don't have is they have context And so that context can be super valuable because they have that great context. And so both are very valuable. So I think I would.

Try to slant my questions or my use of the time to the things that require workplace context because I will never have that for you. And you can't get that from an external mentor who hasn't worked at your workplace. Now, what have I seen be most successful? Well, short term. successful there's a short term and two long term short term it's be focused bring an agenda you know understand that

The worst type of mentee for me is the person who comes to me and says, you know, they say, will you be my mentor? And I say, sure. And then they come to me and they sit down and they say, OK, I'd like to grow. Tell me like they're putting. one percent energy and which is to show up and expecting me to deposit with no preamble sort of this godlike wisdom on them um you know and this is just uh This is a very. It's not very inspiring and it's hard to do because I don't.

You know, so you have to make it a give and take. Try and meet them 60 percent of the way. And so because remember, more than likely.

they're not spending any time thinking about you between meetings. Maybe they are. Maybe occasionally. But mostly, they're going from meeting to meeting on their calendar. And the first time they know they're meeting with you is when they... finish with their last meeting and they have two seconds they're like oh kristin huh i wonder what's gone on the last three weeks like they've got usually about 60 seconds of prep time um so you need to try and

you have much more frankly even with a good mentor you have much more motive to make value from the meeting than they do And so just realize, and it's not because they're bad people, it's because it's your life. For them, you're an opportunity to invest in a task. For you, this is your life and career. So the motive is way different. So lean into that a little bit. Now the two long-term things are actually polar opposites. On the one hand, you want a mentorship to turn into a sponsorship.

So you want the mentor to go from advising you to helping you You're winning quote-unquote in a mentorship when the mentor stops talking stops just answering questions, and starts connecting you to opportunities and recommending you to people. So you're hoping to turn your mentor into someone who's actually going to be an advocate.

now you have to earn that you have to earn that by being competent by being attentive by being all these things but ideally this is a person and eventually you want to ask for that when you feel the relationship is strong enough you actually three months in six months in you want to say hey i think this is going really well i think you have a good insight into me um i don't know how you if you've already done this

But I'd love to ask you, when you see opportunities that would benefit me, could you put me forward for them? And, you know... They may say yes, they may say no. If they don't say a strong, clear yes, you can say, you know, I sense that you may not be comfortable with that. I don't want to overstep, but what would you need to be comfortable?

because they may have a blocker where well blah blah blah and you'll learn from that too so one thing is try and turn them into an advocate and certainly a lot of my past mentors are advocates for me

The other thing, though, you want is mentorships tend to die at about the six-month point. And the reason they die at the six-month point... is the boss type person has run out of magic wisdom to drop into your lap and you may have run out of super obvious burning questions and so the other thing you want to do is realize that you need to evaluate, should I end this mentorship?

before it gets stale before if you find yourself both kind of showing up to the meeting and just making small talk you know that you're no longer getting value you can transition things very smoothly to say you know i feel like you've given me a lot of value and we've come down to where we're mostly just chatting um is there more we should focus on in a mentorship relationship or should we transition this to more of a sponsorship where you'll keep

I'll keep you up to date on my career and ask you any questions I have, but I won't take up your time regularly. And what I'd love for you is if you see an opportunity for me, you'd reach out. And that's a way to end it gracefully. and to transition it to what you want and i think uh the stream just died or i lost zoom because kristen froze so let's see it says my lighting is different

Interesting. Stream is good. Okay. So stream is good, but Kristen froze. Are you still there in chat? Because Kristen was watching chat. So something died for her. She'll respond in chat. Corona got her. Oh, that's terrible. I hope not. So chat, what do we want to ask Kristen? If anything, you can just tell me in chat what else you'd like to see us cover. We have one more surprise topic. If she comes back. And she's gone. Zoom died too. We'll see if she comes back here in a minute.

But obviously, yeah, it's close up. That's my other camera. So one camera here for Zoom, one camera there for the stream. Computer got the virus. what's this stream about and this channel okay everybody else tell rzb 125 what we're all about please it's good to see you rzb welcome in Five head. Here she is. She's back. Waiting room. I figured I'd admit she'll be here in a second. All right.

All right. Can you hear me now? Yes. You went boom. Kicked me out. I don't know. Anyway, welcome back, Kristen. So the other thing I was going to say is... At the six-month point and thereafter, you have to drive it because it will become chit-chat sessions. Basically, you need to know when to end it. These two things are almost contradictory.

Because on the one hand, you want sponsorship, which requires a relationship. But on the other hand, you need to know when to kill something that's run its useful course. Remember, you're going to get the most nuggets of wisdom and the most fresh perspective from someone in the first six months. So what you really want to do, broadly speaking, is have a mentor for a while then transition them to a coffee friend and a sponsor and get a new mentor who's going to give you different perspective

and i made a mistake with someone who sometimes watches here where i mentored him for 10 years and i knew this rule but i kept not doing it and partly i kept pressing myself to do better mentoring but uh you know i probably was lower and lower value to that individual over those 10 years and wasted a lot of time having friendly chats which i enjoyed and so i did eventually end that

very early in the stream someone said uh someone asked me how many mentees that i had at once and i had about 10 all at the same time which is a lot and that's what led me to fire them all and go streaming instead um because and then pick up someone like me to have to mentor instead well but you're you're uh

We're helping each other, which is another good thing in a mentor relationship, right? Is can the mentee contribute in some way? So you contribute to my mission. I contribute to yours. That's a great relationship. Okay. A question in chat that I can answer. So how do I come up with the appropriate questions to ask a mentor and how do I determine the type of mentorship I expect or want?

from whoever i approach well first of all I figured out how to approach my mentor by talking with my other mentor, which is Ethan, by just talking it out and listening and then taking advice.

But how do I figure out my topics? I mean, it's the same thing that I do when I'm prepping with Ethan. And usually I don't pull together the agenda until right before because whatever's burning on my mind is going to be... the most valuable probably to talk about and have the most meat to it um and i basically stop and i kind of think through like um what's important to me what do i think asin can add value

Where do I think he could challenge me or give me insight or advice or the things I'm doing? What would I like to know what he's experienced to help shed light on something I don't have yet, which is the experience. and so that's kind of the questions that i go through when i'm trying to pick what i want to ask about and a lot of times i pick things that are kind of related but sometimes they're you know they span a bunch of things if you've watched

these conversations, you'll notice that. But usually there's some sort of a trend of, you know, whatever the topic is. But that's how I pick. So I don't know if that answers the question. Hopefully it does. So let's go to our last super fun topic, which is between our last sessions, I reached out to Kristen and asked her to jump in for a favor. And what's fun. is i asked kristen would she be willing to mentor someone and what i felt was one of her areas of strength

Which, by the way, if we flip back over here, let's see. We all saw earlier, but some of you have joined and left. This is her feedback. And her feedback was all about... empathy and caring for people and ability to ask questions, all things that are emotional intelligence. You're extremely good at asking open-ended questions. This is feedback from her co-workers and managers above her.

biggest strength is your empathy and sincerity etc so um i had someone come to me who wanted to grow his emotional intelligence and was asking me how to find a mentor who could help with emotional intelligence and i racked my brain and thought who do i know is really good at that and of course i landed on kristen And so the funny thing is here in chat, we have awesome.

awesome p in chat who would ask me how can he find and get a mentor in this and i thought of kristen who's another one of our channel vips and moderators and i connected them so the fun thing we have going on here is yes i am a grand mentor in this sense um and i like that i have many grand mentees now um But tell us a little bit, where have you and awesome ended up and how is that? Yeah. Awesome. You're welcome to.

speak up and chat because your opinion is equally if not more valuable than my opinion and perspective on this experience. so we we met once just once we had a video chat on zoom um because video is important to me and i asked if he would be up for it he was so um we got to meet and

Honestly, we spent like, I don't remember how long it was, maybe like an hour and 45 minutes or something chatting. And I spent most of the time just asking him a bunch of questions, trying to figure out what his needs are. And I asked. him pretty specifically like what are your expectations what do you need out of this what are you hoping to get out of this um just to get a better sense of you know how i should where i should take it

So I really enjoyed getting to know him. And I kind of repeated and rephrased a lot of things he said back to him to try to like... figure him out and he would correct me if I was a little bit off course and he would confirm things and so it helped me kind of understand what his needs are and then I followed up with him a few days later with some homework. for him because that's just the best way to do this that's so funny

So I gave him homework and one thing was simple. Oh, they're both pretty simple, I think. I don't know. You're welcome to disagree on them. But, you know, one was just an opinion that I was asking that really I wanted him to get. down to the meat of his motivation for making this change because that will impact the way that I can help him. And the second was I asked him to basically collect some data.

um and tracks and stuff so you know i've never done this before i i do this i guess with my team but like you said it's different when it's not your team uh and you don't have all the context and stuff so But yeah, I mean, I thought it was really good. He gave me great feedback afterwards. He kind of told me that he observed a bunch of things that I did in the meeting to help like break the ice and get him comfortable.

to be able to share and talk. I don't know what all those things were, and you're welcome to share them if you want awesome. You know, those were all things that he picked up on. And I called a few of them out while we were chatting as I was doing it because I know that that's what he's looking for. So I was trying to give him some, like, by the way, this is why I just did that. Or this is why I started with this.

um and um you know left the meeting i really enjoyed meeting him but i kind of felt like well i don't know if that was valuable or not for him to be honest like he might have just felt like he just hung out with this you know a 33 year old stranger for an hour and a half um with you know nothing to come out from it but i don't know um i'll let him speak to it

So yeah, so we're going to meet up again and maybe at this point, it's probably in like three weeks or so, we're going to schedule a follow-up because I wanted him to have a minimum of two weeks to track the data. Because what I was asking him to track, I think, could take a little bit longer to actually get that data. So we agreed on a month. And what did you ask him to track exactly? Just say again.

uh are you cool with me sharing it awesome i don't want to like oh he's i'm voting for him he's in he's good i mean unless you ask him like so yeah he says okay so i'll just uh pull it up because I can't remember the specifics on how I asked him. Okay, so I asked him Go ahead. Oh, for those who don't know, Awesome is a new graduate in finance. And so asking a finance guy to track data, I feel like is a soft ask, but we're going to see what the data is. Yeah.

It is a soft ask. It is soft. That's okay. He's new to being mentored, so it's okay to start off using it. Well, and I'm new to mentoring. So anyway, I need some of this basic data in order to figure out where we can go from here. So I asked him, the first thing I asked him about his motivation. I wanted to know if it was leaning more towards the professional dynamic.

and getting, you know, to be successful or if the motivation actually stems from a more personal experience or relationship that he wanted to be working towards. And then the homework assignment. with for him to answer that and then i want him to track the number of times he feels uncomfortable or that he can't be himself in a conversation and whenever possible i want him to jot down who is the person what was the circumstance and how did you respond

So what I want to gather from that is I want to know, like, what are the triggers? And what when you just go into your what are your natural instincts? And I want us to figure out underneath that layer, like, why is that your natural instinct? What's motivating that? What's happening in your process, you know, that's causing you to react that way and then try to separate.

the perspective to get down into like how he can see the red flag before it happens and make a more intentional decision on how he's going to approach the situation. that's good and i just i just verbally processed all of that with you and actually hadn't thought it completely through why exactly i was asking him to do this but there it is yeah well what i like about it

What I very much like about it is it's, so I do feel like you're cribbing my playbook here. It's right off of my original homework for you, which is track your conversational data, which is great, totally fair, but it's funny. What I like about it, though, is just like I did for you, the first way to change a behavior is to be aware of it.

So I'm sure chat will catch me on this a lot. I end many statements with a rising right. It's like my trademark speech mannerism because... i make an i make an assertion and then i turn it into a question by like right but the way i say it means yeah it's right um uh and i'm like telling myself see it's right anyway So I try to cut that down. Well, being made aware that I do that has helped me cut it down some. You making him aware of his situation, once you...

Many people can change their behavior, but only once they can pop out of the frame of being in that behavior to step back and see themselves behaving that way. To say, oh, I'm feeling nervous now.

uncomfortable is there any real reason for that what am I trying to accomplish here if I remain nervous can I accomplishment or or do I need to do something even though I feel uncomfortable So I think that's good first homework because it will probably not only get you data and get awesome some data, it will also...

give him some context, give him some awareness to pop out of that frame. Yeah, definitely. Because also part of what he's looking to do is to remain... himself and be genuine while working on this and

Because, you know, you could look and read a bunch of stuff about how to be more empathetic and you can go and try to implement it. But if it doesn't jive with who you are as a person, it's not going to it's just not going to ever come across genuine. It's not going to produce the results you want. And so the goal is to say.

Except that it's okay that you are built differently and wired differently than me. And there's so many strengths that you have that I don't. And that's okay. And there's nothing wrong with that. But what you need to do is be able to recognize the perception and then address it through communicating effectively. So what I want is for him to be able to stop, see your point, notice.

when he's starting to feel like either he has to be nice in a situation because he wants to be empathetic, but he really is feeling like, yeah, you're an idiot, and this is why. I want him to be able to recognize those moments and start to figure out more of that balance so he can remain genuine while he's trying to practice and implement some of these things. All right. So now I want to come back to you.

How did it feel to act as a mentor? It was really fun and a little bit of pressure because I'm like, oh, like... this person's looking to me to somehow help them in some way and um i i just but i just i mean i think it was okay it was the first time we met and i kind of set expectations and said hey

I just need to like get to know you a little bit to understand how I can help you. Now, if that continues on, then he's probably going to be like, yeah, like you're not helpful at all. So, you know, there's. And my style will remain the same because that's who I am. But, you know, the value I provide should change. So I felt pretty good about this first round.

You know, Austin's like super respectful and kind and, you know, good at communicating and explaining what he's thinking. So it was a good conversation. Good. yeah i i mean i had fun i'm i'm looking forward to chatting some more and hearing where he goes i already feel invested it doesn't take much for me i'm already in i'm all in

And that's why you're the perfect person and a high EQ, all in, invested in people is the right. If it doesn't work out, I imagine one day awesome will end up telling you or me. Kristen is so great in trying and she's so alien to who I am. I need someone more like me. But I don't think that will happen. But it is a big golf. You're such different people, personality-wise. He's quoting me in chat. So I've told him...

That at some point, like you can't logic your way out of everything. And I understand that that's probably how you want to do this. But you're going to hit things like you are working with people who are complex, unpredictable, sometimes.

stupid but like you know you just you can't always logic your way out of sometimes feelings have to be taken into account yes very good well what i like about um this and i want to close with this in a way i said at the beginning of this dream kristen is attempting to do everything we preach in this stream everything we teach all at once so she's talking to her boss about how to do better and how she can improve and talking to other people about it as well.

We covered all the things she's doing in the work and mentor front as a mentee. But then I threw in go learn how to be a mentor. And it's one more skill to be able to. aid someone who doesn't work for you to be able to aid someone in a very different field and the more you build that ability to communicate across fields the more it will serve you so um

Super valuable. So with that. Actually, you're the one that's causing me to not pace myself because you're the one throwing me the suggestion to go and just go ahead and ask that VP to mentor you. Here, try mentoring yourself. And you're also the person that told me I needed to pace myself. Fair. That's fair.

But I love it. I'll take it. Well, I have trouble with pacing. Like, you know, physician heal thyself. That is awesome. So this is going to be a really interesting... yeah well I probably I mean this channel frankly probably attracts people who have problems regulating how much they do because if you really If you really, and you know, DT Twitch Talk, who's another overachiever, he's got an internship with my team right now. The people who come and hang out on this channel are achievers.

and yeah I recently had I have I see a counselor not all the time but I've been talking to a counselor an actual therapist about issues And I was explaining to her recently that my life would probably be better if I only tried to achieve three things a day. If I only set myself three activities or goals a day and she's like three, that's a huge number. I'm like, you need to understand that my run rate is like 10.

Right. I have like 10 things I'm going to do every day. Dialing it down to three is a 70 percent drop. Not not like, you know, she's like. Therapists never say you're effed in the head, but you could definitely tell. She's like, well, that's interesting. You know, which meant. That's funny. So. Yeah. Yep. That's funny. Yeah, I have a therapist too. And I was talking to her and she was, she always calls me out when I start judging myself for things.

And I'll be giving her a response about something that happened at work or whatever. And she's like, yeah. And I'm like, okay, I just heard it. I said it. She doesn't even have to say anything. She just looks at me. And I'm like, okay. I get it. That was just me putting pressure on myself to do more than I'm supposed to. She told me that part of my reaction to things is because I have

such high standards for myself and such a high bar that in some ways it might just be like not feasible. And yet I'm still setting that as my own bar. So again, probably something applicable to a lot of people in this. Yeah, it's it's the perfect. This is actually you'll be great. This is a place where you can relate to awesome. He's a perfectionist. And so he knows this. I'm not telling him anything. He doesn't know. He produces slides.

for some of the shows i do including some i'll do soon he's produced slide decks hundred percent of the time he tells me i'll get you a slide deck on this date and then misses it And then when I get the slide deck, it's late. And he says, oh, I feel bad about it. I don't think it's good enough. So we talked about this.

you know it's his perfectionism biting him twice because his perfectionism causes him to not be willing to send it on time because he has to keep working on it and then still to be unhappy with it and this is this is so many people We've done a show on perfectionism and the high standards are good. Crazy standards are damaging. And so all of us here.

who are high standards oh i call all sorts of people out on stream i call myself out though i hope um like i have the same problem i i want things to be really good um my wife just gave me a copy of the book the fine art or whatever of not giving a and i need to read it because you know um it would be good like that's i will always

again if i turn my perfectionism down from 10 to 8 probably no one else will notice and i'll be way more sane so yeah uh yeah the art so is that your homework is that your homework even Probably. I have so much homework. So Andy, if that was your latest read, how was it? How many stars would you give it? Amazon, as you know, rates books from one star to five stars with half star increments. So give us your star rating for the book.

And with that, I think we're good, right, Kristen? We've covered everything pretty well? Yeah, I think so. I feel good just being able to let everyone know I followed through. I felt a lot of pressure because it wasn't just you, Ethan. It was a whole bunch of people. The good news is I don't think we have to give you new homework this time because first, you just scolded me and I'll take it of giving you too much pressure.

And second, I think following up on the new mentorship relationship you have plus following up as a mentor is plenty. Those will both grow you.

And so we do need to pace things just a little. And those will be good. All right. All right. So what did... what did he say a bit sensational but the core teachings are good a good four and a half if you can parse through the fluff well a lot of books have that like one of the books i've recommended to a million people and a lot of you will know it is tim ferris and the four hour work week

It's got some fluff in it for sure. It's an amazing book. It's like a six star book watered down to four stars by the two star cheesiness in it and the randomness. So you got to just extract. five-star value by ignoring some of the two-star that's blended in um all right So yeah, the Tim Ferriss part of the book. That's exactly right, NVA Hitch. That is so true. If you could just get the Tim Ferriss out of the Tim Ferriss book, it would be incredible.

Anyway, I will let you go back to your kids and your evening. I hope to see you. And I'm going to talk. I hope to see you at the Olympic stream. I know it's in the middle of your workday. So if you can't get it, catch it on. catch it on VOD sometime or replay. And I'm going to talk about that for everybody else, but I will let you go and we'll wrap up here. All right. Have a good night. A pleasure as always. See you guys.

All right, end meeting for all. Okay, so what are we going to talk about real quick? I have to turn these off. See the little green light? I never do it, and then the battery's dead. But I did it this time. So, yeah, give a claps in chat. I'm sure Kristen's still watching. She's awesome. She's very transparent. She shares a lot. At 1 p.m. on Tuesday, assuming it holds up, I think he's very reliable, but we'll find out.

I have John K. Coyle. This is his website. He's an Olympic speed skater, silver medalist. But he's done these incredible things. Awesome connected me. with um john john's given some ted talks uh and is now a full-time public speaker but he was and he's written this book uh designed for strengths and he's all about using your strengths to maximize your performance and then he also has this stuff about the art of really living which is a time manifesto so i find um uh i find

I had a chance to talk to John for about half an hour. He agreed to come on the show. I can't wait to have him on and really talk to him. This is him speed skating for Team USA. And so I can't wait to have John on the show and have him really talk about. um how he earned the medal and what he learned on the way and then if we have time we'll get into some of his time management but this guy lives kind of my dream life in a way he travels all over the world as a public speaker

He makes tons of money doing it. As you can see, he's in Armenia. He's in Georgia. And this is not the state. It's the country of Georgia. So one day I will do this as well. But he's amazing. And look, someone last time, I don't think he's here right now, and I want to call him out, kind of made fun of like, oh, only a silver medal. Well, holy crap. I wish I could medal in anything. I have participation trophies.

very humiliating one of my hockey teams gave me most improved player which as you know what that means is man did you suck when you started uh so uh yeah my trophy shelf not that impressive so anyway um he'll be great so with that um we'll have him on next tuesday at one o'clock And I've really enjoyed having all of you here. I hope you've had a good night. I really enjoy all of your company. And look.

This was fun. Kristen's amazing. Awesome is very transparent to both hook us up with guests and to let us talk about him being a grand mentee. So, and Taron Fear, you are welcome, son, by all means. So with that, I finished the drink. I bid you good evening. Go forth and live well. Conquer all. Cheers.