My Prescription for a Good Life
Photo by Paul Hanaoka on Unsplash
I am in a strange and unfamiliar place. It is a place of curious contentment, where everything seems to be going well. When I’ve been here in the past, I’ve always been waiting for the other shoe to drop, for some bad thing to happen. This time instead of searching for a problem that doesn’t exist, I’m going to embrace the fulfillment and capture my prescription for a good life.
1. White space
I need white space in my life. It is the space to let the unknown unfold and to embrace the discomfort of a blank canvas. It is the space that can only occur with having hours of unscheduled time in my calendar.
White space is solitude. It’s being alone and lost within my thoughts. Eventually it leads to inspiration. It allows me to be contemplative, whether it’s getting lost in a work of fiction or creating something new.
White space is surfing. This white space is bobbing up and down in the ocean, waiting for the next wave while watching pelicans soar and whales breach in the distance. It lets me connect to the rhythms of the ocean and get lost in the vastness. Research has shown that water can be this source of happiness for us.
White space is rest. It’s getting 8–9 hours of sleep and the blissful feeling after a vigorous exercise session. I need the sleep. I crave the savasana and meditative relaxation that’s easiest for me to achieve after a yoga flow.
2. Adrenaline & Adventure
I’ve always had a drive that pushes me to do more and be more. It shows up in my work as a fierce desire to excel. It also shows up in activities that make my heart pump uncontrollably. I get it by snowboarding down a hill faster and faster until I am on the edge of being out of control. Sometimes I make it all the way down the run. More often, I catch an edge and tumble through the snow. I thrive on the fear of being held down by a wave and fighting up to take a mighty breath on the water’s surface.
I also get the adrenaline from dancing, either at a club completely immersed in the music, or dancing with a partner and perfectly executing the moves and improvisation of lindy hop.
The exploration of new places speaks more to adventure than adrenaline. I am exhilarated to explore an unknown new city or country. I still remember the feeling of sitting alone in a city bus at midnight, heading from the airport into Cairo, traveling alone and without a place to stay. The adventure is the anticipation and the slight trepidation of the unknown.
3. Meaningful Connection
I live my days to experience meaningful connection with other people. I spend less time now thinking about work vs life. Connections happen with all the people around me, both in work and non-work situations. Increasingly, it’s harder to distinguish between the two.
Meaningful connection is the joy I get from living with my 9 and 11 year old daughters. Being able to see the world from their eyes as well as experiencing the emotional roller coaster of tween-dom.
Meaningful connection is when I make 1–1 connections with people and support them to realize their dreams though my leadership coaching practice.
Finally, it’s also through the co-creation of something bigger. Building something together, whether it’s a product, a process, or a team. It’s both the connections with the people I’m building something with, and the sense of a collective creativity to make something bigger than our individual efforts.
From my 3 prescriptions for a good life, it’s important for me to identify the emotions and find more places to honor those emotions in my life.
“I can summarize my research here in three words: emotions create habits.” ― B.J. Fogg
White space is being serene, centered, and refreshed
Adrenaline & adventure is exhilaration and adventure.
Meaningful connection is curiosity, intensity, and joy.
These are my 3 prescriptions for a good life. What are yours?
The Four Facets of Work Fulfillment
Photo by Eric Ward on Unsplash
We are entering the season of gratitude, celebration, reflection, and change. I support many clients who are in the midst of career transitions, whether that’s feeling stuck, starting to dream about what they want, or actively interviewing. However, for many people, it may not be the right time to switch jobs. This could be due to any number of reasons—financial constraints, golden handcuffs, health concerns, energy, or simply not the right time to embrace a job change. Whichever state you’re in, as we approach 2020, consider the following four facets of work fulfillment.
1. Autonomy
How much autonomy do you have in your work? Perhaps you have more control than you think. Some people have the privilege of flexible hours and projects but that comes with the pressure to be always-on and accessible. Consider what active choices you can make throughout your work day.
Hours and schedule. Workers in the gig economy often cite this flexibility as the main reason to work for Lyft or Postmates. If you have a more traditional job, what autonomy might you choose over your hours? What is the formal requirement of the job, and what are the assumptions or additional burdens that you’re taking upon yourself? When I worked in tech, we had the freedom of unlimited vacation and the ability to set your own hours. It can be a double-edged sword when this expanse of autonomy made many of us feel like you have to be always-on and respond within 5 minutes to texts and messenger pings. And sometimes unlimited vacation translates to no vacation at all. Could there be a team discussion to establish cultural norms about work hours? Is there more that you can do to establish personal boundaries & communicate it to your team?
What work you do. Autonomy over your work is the ability to choose the work you want to do. You may not have this choice and be assigned your work. If you do have the luxury of choice, consider what projects you’re drawn to and why. Is it because they’re high profile? Because you can collaborate with a stellar team? Because it will give you the chance to grow? Consider how these projects map to your goals & dreams over the next 3–6 months.
Execution of your work. Even if you are assigned projects, you will have some choice in how you execute on them. Do you tend to be tidy or sloppy? Do you plan out each item task-by-task or do you procrastinate and do it all at the end? You have a default approach for how you do work. How might it feel to mix it up with small experiments? What if you picked an intention for your work such as playful or thorough or as-fast-as-possible? How could you experiment with different ways of work execution? Keep what you like and discard the others in the quest for more control over work choices.
2. Flow
How often in a work week do you feel that you’re in a state of flow? This is a state where you’re doing what you do best, taking advantage of your innate skills, and working through a challenge. The challenge could be a gnarly problem, a creative exploration or even rote scheduling.The common theme is that you are joyful, the activity makes you feel that you’re at 100%, and time flies by quickly.
The desire for flow regularly shows up every 6 months in Facebook’s Pulse survey. At Facebook, similar to many corporations, every person completes a Pulse survey of employee satisfaction. One of the most complicated answers to diagnose is when low scores appear on two related questions:
How often do you have the opportunities to do what you do best?
What percentage of time do you spend doing the work that you enjoy?
These questions refer to a flow state. The reason they’re hard to solve org-wide is that the answer can both be deeply personal and also dependent on roles & context. For example, product designers would often want more time to do broad overarching blue sky concept work rather than the perceived grind of growth work where iteration through 20 different variations of a design detail is needed.
For yourself, start with some days or weeks of observation:
What tasks or meetings do you enjoy the most in a work day?
What activities give you the most energy?
What meeting size do you feel most comfortable & strongest in?
Who do you enjoy being around?
What do you dread doing?
When you have a sense of what triggers your flow, try to optimize your days around those activities. One example from Facebook is that many product designers feel like their day is chunked into 30 minute meetings with wasted down-time in between. They are unable to get into a flow state to produce the design work they do best. One solution is to block out 2–3 hour chunks of time on the calendar to protect focused creation time.
3. Meaning
Why do you do the work you do? Meaning can be broken down to mission and values, both on a company and personal level. Why do you work at a certain company? People want to believe in something bigger than themselves. Having a common mission-based cause helps provide meaning around work. For customer-centric organizations, meaning is providing better experiences for people or significantly improving their lives. While reading a recent Verge article on the travel company Away, I was struck by how long the employees could stand a toxic environment because of the company mission:
“Away promised a lifestyle of inclusion and nice vacations. It was also founded by two women (one a person of color) who sought to run a globally minded business. “In my mind, it’s a trivial product but the brand is more than just luggage,” Avery says. “It’s about travel.”
We choose to spend our time at work places where we believe in the mission, in something greater than ourselves. How might you remind yourself of your company’s mission? One of the easiest ways is to get closer to customers, as a proxy to the mission. This could be done with a stint in the customer service org or by observing research sessions. Research sessions can be listening to people using your product and giving direct feedback in a usability lab, or getting the privilege to go on a research trip to the customer’s workplace or home.
Work fulfillment is also amplified when our personal values get honored at a company. I have a strong value for directness and transparency. While working at a design studio, it was challenging for me to support a South Korean electronics client with a culture of indirect feedback and strong adherence to hierarchy in that the boss’ opinion is always right. Consider your personal values, and try to optimize for a company, or at the very least a manager who can help you honor those values.
4. Community
Finally, the last facet of work fulfillment is the community of people around you. Community exists on both the team and personal level. On the team level, what is the vibe and culture? Is it a group that likes to eat lunch together or do activities outside of work? How does that map to your values? You may love the joint activities that provide a built-in social circle, or you may resent having to join team-building activities and off-sites that interfere with other priorities.
Is there some part of the community that you can experiment with?
Do you have a genuine friend at work? Someone with whom to share small wins, to vent with, and to tackle any work issues together.
Could you build stronger 1–1 relationships by asking different colleagues out to coffee?
If you have a colleague who you frequently clash with, how might you challenge yourself to find something you have in common to agree ?
If the team vibe or culture doesn’t feel inclusive, how might you change it? For example, if you feel like an isolated introvert inside team culture of drinking or physical activity, could you try establishing a book club?
Experimenting with the Four Facets: Autonomy, Flow, Meaning, and Community
If you look at the four facets and how each of them can be considered within your individual context as well as your company’s work context, which one feels the strongest for you? Which one feels the most out-of-whack? Consider if there’s one small thing in one facet you want to experiment with to drive more work fulfillment. Try it for a week or two and notice if you start to feel happier at work.
The Secret Trait of All Successful Product Designers
Photo by Marc-Olivier Jodoin on Unsplash
The secret is self-awareness. (and it’s also helpful if you’re not a product designer)
I’ve managed and mentored hundreds of designers in design firms, startups, large companies, and most recently at Facebook. There are hard skills that successful product designers have—product thinking, craft/visual design, interaction design, plus the equally-important soft skills around intentionality, communication, and collaboration. Yet, across the board, every successful designer has self-awareness. And when young, talented designers lack self-awareness, I see their careers stagnate over time.
Self-awareness is a conscious knowledge of one’s own character, feelings, motives, and desires.
Let’s break it down into actionable parts.
1. What You Want
Do you know what you want and why it really matters to you? When you’re in school, there are easy externalities to want— good grades, loyal friends, social status, to get into a good college. As we start to adult, we may get trapped into wanting the conventional path that we see modeled around us— a corporate job, a promotion, a partner, a house, kids, that dream vacation.
What do you really want as a product designer? And how will you feel once you’ve gotten that thing? Will there be a moment of celebration and enjoyment, or is it simply another checkbox to be ticked off? I’ve commonly heard these work desires from designers:
Master a skill (e.g. prototyping, writing)
Become a mentor/ team lead / manager
Be externally recognized for my contributions (e.g. bonus, raise, promotion)
Go back to school (e.g. MBA or another field entirely)
Start a side-hustle or my own business
Some of are bigger and some are smaller. Think about it in terms of corresponding to time. What do you want in 3–6 months? What do you want in a year? 5 years? 10 years? The most important thing is to understand why you want it. That individual knowledge, and being able to make the day-to-day nitty gritty of the dream tangible will start to give you self-awareness. The reason YOU want something is completely different from someone else’s reason.
2. Self Assessment
If you work at a corporation, figure out if there is a rating system of required skills at each performance level. If not, take a look at industry examples. (e.g. component skills for product designers, 12 competencies of UX design, product design competency matrix)
How would you assess yourself on each skill? Are there any differences between your self-assessment and how your manager or peers would assess you?
Strengths. What do you do particularly well? What activities get you into a flow state? If you had to pick one thing, what is your design superpower? What do others come to you for advice on?
Growth areas. What are you working on? What do you continually get feedback about? What don’t you like about your design skills? What is hard for you to do?
The most successful designers keep working on their strengths and growing what they’re good at. Everyone has continual and familiar growth areas— perhaps they’re terrible at organization, can be prickly communicators, or hate sharing their accomplishments. Often these growth areas are a shadow side of a superpower. Each of these can be mitigated to reach a minimum level needed to match the job expectations. Self-awareness means amplifying what you’re good at and getting to good-enough for the things you don’t enjoy.
3. Feedback is a Gift
We can identify our dreams and self-assess all we want, yet we don’t exist in a solo hermit world. As we work with others, there is continual feedback, whether part of a formal review, or informally as we share work and collaborate with a team. As a creator, feedback is excruciating. We’ve spent a lot of time making a thing. We’re proud of our thing and hope that others will like it too. And perhaps it’s even worst when the feedback isn’t about something we made, but quite personally about us.
Consider that feedback is a gift. Someone else has spent the effort to share the gift. The only polite response to a gift is “thank you.” Afterwards, you can consider how you feel about it and what action you choose to take.
The gift might be something you’ve always wanted. You will happily use it in your daily life.
The gift might be unexpected. Something you’ve never thought was needed. You might need to sit with it for a while and see if you want to try it on, or use it in some fashion.
The gift might be terrible. You’re definitely going to return it, re-gift it, or donate it to charity. You never want to think about it again.
Taking action on the feedback is your choice. Even if it’s feedback from your manager, you still have choice on how you want to creatively incorporate the feedback into your day-to-day work.
Finally, you may be in a culture where giving feedback is prolific and colleagues feel that feedback is welcome in this open & trusting atmosphere. However, if you’re not, consider actively asking for feedback from the people you work with frequently, and from people who you may have more conflict with. Don’t forget to say “thank you!”
4. Impact on Others
You’re pretty self-aware. You know what you want. You have a good sense of where you stand. You try to respond to feedback. Yet the master level of self-awareness is being continually aware of your impact on others.
Casual interactions. How do you show up each day when you interact with others? You may be light and chatty. You may be busy & distracted re-hashing that fight with your mom. When you pass someone in the hall with a casual catch-up, what’s your impact on them?
Meetings. How are you in a more formal situation? What if the vibe changes through the course of a meeting? How do you present? How do you ask or answer questions? How do you react to feedback? What shows on your face & body language? Are you defensive? If you tend to have RBF like I do, then it’s probably good to let new colleagues know that you’re not actually mad at them.
Over time. As you work with colleagues over months and years, you build trust and accumulate debt based on each interaction. What is the impact of how you show up and interact with people over time? What impact do you want to have over time? How might you intentionally choose to change behavior when someone has a pre-existing notion of you?
Learnings & Take-away
How self-aware do you think you are across the 4 dimensions? What’s one thing that you will do differently going forward?
Do you have any feedback for this article? Please comment or get in touch.
Emigrant vs Immigrant: Looking Backwards to Look Forward
Photo by Toimetaja tõlkebüroo on Unsplash
“Mama, you’re an immigrant” said my eight year old. We had just watched Hamilton on stage after listening to the soundtrack on repeat for many months. It had never occurred to me to describe myself as an immigrant before. The famous lyrics
“Immigrants (We Get the Job Done)”
mainly remind me of current US political fighting and families pulled apart at borders. Other people. Not me.
I was curious about the etymology of emigrant vs immigrant and figured that it was likely due to differences in British vs Americanisms. I was wrong and learned that they mean the same thing, but vary depending on whether you’re talking about the country you came from or the one you’re going to. Immigrant looks forward to the country you’re going to and emigrant looks back at the country you came from. For example:
Alexander Hamilton immigrated to the United States
Alexander Hamilton emigrated from the Caribbean island of Nevis
Thinking back to my childhood moving to a new country every 3–4 years and then to the US for college and my working life, I realized that I mostly look forward. I make my plans for our next vacation, think about my personal goals, create my business plan, and have hopes & dreams for my children. Often, I forget to look back to see where I’ve come from and see how it has inexplicably affected my view on the world.
Looking Back on Design
In product design, we always start with a look back to the visual styles, existing patterns, typical user understanding, and the product decisions that have led us to the system we have today.
“Good artists copy, great artists steal” — Steve Jobs (or Pablo Picasso?)
Designers are aware of the current aesthetic of the past few years. They seek to emulate it, perhaps to make sure that their apps play well with Apple’s former skeuomorphic style or feel more modern with card-based interfaces and material design’s newer inspiration from the physical world. If we’re looking even further backwards, digital metaphors often arise from the physical world. The physical world gave us icons of gears (settings), envelopes (email), and bells (notifications).
Working on innovation teams within Facebook product design, we urged the designers on our teams to internalize the Facebook style guide and be familiar with existing patterns on the app. If 80% of the pattern will fit the new use case you were designing for, then strongly consider using the existing pattern to minimize new mental load on the user and to ship it faster using pre-built components. However, always keep exploring and knowing what inspiration can be taken from the strengths and limitations of the existing pattern to solve new use cases or simply to explore a nifty new pattern that’s just cool. Know the past, know what exists and use it as as a springboard to create new and more innovative designs.
Questions to help understand a product’s past:
Why did the product team at the time make those decisions? What were the trade-offs?
What was happening in that time period, either culturally, economically or with competitors, to serve as context for the launch?
With the benefit of hindsight, what worked well and what went terribly wrong?
Regardless of success or failure, what was new and innovative about the design?
What parts of the design have successfully stood the test of time to become classic elements?
Immigrant / Emigrant in my Life
Today, I’m writing this from Bangkok. My trips home this year have been to mourn and also to celebrate with family. I’ve realized that I come from a family of immigrants with grandparents on both sides coming to Thailand from China and Hong Kong.
I’ve realized more that my past is part of who I am. It informs how exist in the world and make decisions. Parts of my personality that I’d singularly claimed, have mainly been learned from examples through my youth.
Ask for forgiveness not permission
You would assume that Asian cultures foster an atmosphere of asking for permission. That’s certainly been the case for me with my family as well as parts of my schooling. However, I have a fierce rebel streak that could be born from seeing examples through childhood of family breaking the rules, with perhaps an entitlement of being beyond the rules. Perhaps it’s from a non-understanding (as an immigrant) or a non-caring because the new situation’s rules feel arbitrary.Adventure & Entrepreneurship
My dad was a lifelong employee of Thai Airways. He took that job as an avenue for him to see the world. My parents met when my mom was employed by Air France, also as a pathway to adventure. At Thai Airways, my dad was their “growth guy” who would be the founding station manager in a new country to see if it would be a viable route for the airline. Growing up, we moved to a different country every 3–4 years. They were always able to figure it out and make things work everywhere we moved.Communal Generosity (over food)
My family eats together. We plan the next meal while we are consuming the current one. The most intense debates occur over the quality of the food and where to go to find the best xiao long bao or rich chocolate cake. There are no boundaries over whose plate is whose–any food on the table is considered to be communal. And similarly, there is no splitting of bills. Someone always pays in the spirit of generosity, as thankfulness that we have shared this experience together.Service-oriented
Our family is Buddhist. Despite any pettiness and complaints about each other, service to the family comes first. Family is there to celebrate together, and to mourn together, each person playing a crucial role in the ceremonies. My grandfather was a doctor. He was a medic in China in WWII and when coming back to Bangkok had his own private practice serving many that were less fortunate. Service can be direct or non-direct, but ultimately that desire to help others near and far is the root of most activity.
Questions to help understand your own past:
What unique truths do you hold that originated with your culture or family?
Why have you chosen your past jobs and how has that led you to today?
What prompted you to choose what to study?
What are you proudest of?
What stories are part of your family lore of shared history?
What are your peak experiences from childhood or student days, either positive or negative? How do they affect your decision-making today?
Today, I am more mindful of what has come before. Of what family lore and generational trauma as immigrants has crept into my relationship with foundational concepts like financial stability and security. Of what product questions have been considered before that will inform the new experiences we are building. Becoming closer to what has come before provides a richer tapestry and foundation for the future.
Stretching Your Authentic Leadership with Range
Photo by Zoltan Tasi on Unsplash
Part of the frustration, complexity and deep fulfillment of life is working with oxymorons. How do you both step into your leadership, owning who you are with your unique values and strengths AND also work on developing yourself to be more?
I spent this weekend in a finalization of formal coaching training, the Synergy workshop that integrates all the coaching skills and celebrates how we use them in our individual brands. This is how each of us shows up as a leader and as a coach. Part of the workshop, similar to design, is dealing with oxymorons. The number one rule is “everybody/nobody/everything/nothing gets to be wrong and/or right.” It reminds me of being a designer and always answering a direct question with, “it depends.” The answer depends on who you’re designing for, the principles, the timeline, the constraints and a million other things. The answer is typically X and Y and Z. And sometimes none of them at the same time.
There’s an oxymoron around how you can be your authentic leader AND also play with range. We can play with “fixing” your weaknesses, your opportunity areas, that doing all the things “aren’t me.”
We are connective beings. Nothing is ever new. We learn and steal ways of being by interactions with the people around us. We look at someone who inspires us and can pick a value of generosity because we see it role-modeled in Michelle Obama. We see an action a coworker has chosen to take, think it’s a fabulous idea, and also choose to take a public speaking class. We are constantly in motion and change.
It is possible for you to have a set of authentic values that defines who you are AND to choose range. Range is choosing to experiment with your authentic self by trying on different ways of doing things and different ways of being. We adopt and practice range through our daily interactions with organizations and people.
You
Each of us has a leader within. We have a strongest, surest part of ourselves that chooses, reflects, learns, and knows that there is something good within us. This inner leader may not show up all the time. She may be buried beneath layers of doubt, imposter syndrome, and self-judgement. Yet she’s there, and she’s available as a memory from the peak moments and highlights of life. She was there when you celebrated milestones — graduation, a milestone birthday, a vacation, a new job, or getting into college. She was there when you were on your last emotional high — pride at a child’s accomplishment, your best friend’s wedding, the delicious sweetness of saving a bite of dessert, the last sunset you saw, or that moment of endorphin when you broke through the tiredness and became alive in a spin class, run, or strength workout.
For me, there are certain things that are a core part of who I am. Direct & transparent. Resilient. Bold. Driven. I have big emotions. I like to get sh!t done. More on my values and big emotions.
Range: You + Organizational Context
While I’ve been coaching through my 20+ year career leading creatives and product teams, I’ve chosen to formalize my training through learning from one organization — the Coactive Institute (CTI). Three core attributes of coaching from CTI are:
“Fierce Courage: the quality of boldly standing for the big agenda of the client, risking not being liked, audacity, bravery, and truth from the heart. The heart is fiery.”
“Aliveness: the quality of full vitality. You can feel your heartbeat, the desire for movement and action is activated, the energy of aliveness is palpable.”
“Connection: the quality of a trusted, empowered relationship. The heart is open. There is room for all of who you are. There is acceptance and compassion.”
This weekend, as part of expanding my range, I chose to work on Connection. I felt pretty good at exhibiting boldness and also dancing with a range of emotions. I wanted to work on holding a safe space of security and trust, with zero judgement for every type of client, not simply the ones who are like me.
Through every interaction, I kept Connection in mind and focused hard on expanding my range by holding it as an intention and reminding myself how to hold safety both for myself as well as for others.
You have your own values & leadership strengths. And there are organizations and associations that you have chosen to work within. It might be the company that employs you, the non-profit you volunteer at, or the school your kids go to. Each organization has its own principles and values, its culture where exhibiting those traits gets individuals rewarded. When you think of the organizations surrounding you, do you know their values? How might you stretch your own range by embodying the values of the organization?
Range: You + Other People
Have you noticed that you can be quite different depending on who you’re around? When you sit around the Thanksgiving table with your parents and siblings, does it put you back in a certain childhood context? There might be an old story you tell yourself about being the youngest child, the creative one, the unloved one, the comic, or the one most like your dad. How do you show up differently with your college friends, coworkers, or people you meet at a cocktail party versus a networking event?
You already have range. You stretch the pieces of you depending on who you are around. For example, I show up differently for each person I coach. This depends on the topic we’re talking about and who the person is. There are people who are quieter and I am aware of that energy. If I raise my voice to make a point or to jolt them into action, I am aware of what level to raise my voice to. What is speaking loudly to one person may be yelling to another. If I am working with a technologist who can be cerebral and come off outwardly as deep & emotionally-flat, I can play with range in my tone of voice to evoke different actions. I can play with pacing to be slow and deep, to mirror the deliberateness. Or I can play with tones to be perky, playful, whiny, angry… all the while taking cues from my conversation partner. Together we are synergistically creating a moment in time. I feed off their calm or sadness or joy; and vice versa.
Range: You + Experiments
You are an authentic leader right now. And right now is one single step on your leadership journey where you continue to evolve, to change, and to react to what’s happening around you.
Yet rather than simply reacting, you can choose to play with range and to try experiments. It’s like trying on a different shirt or jacket or dress to see if this one stretches your style just a little bit. And if it does, if you like who you are within it, then maybe it’ll become a part of your future leadership.
One of my front-of-the-room leaders this weekend, Sharna Fey, pushed us:
“Do more of what makes your heart beat faster.”
Both she and her co-leader, Anne Grete Mazzionta, embodied their own fierce, sweet leadership and showed us how to play with our range. Notice what makes your heart beat faster. It’s likely something uncomfortable that doesn’t fall into your “natural” leadership style. Find that feeling, lean into it, and try the action on for size. You never know, you might like it.
Stop Dreading Performance Reviews and Set Powerful Goals
Work performance reviews, school grades, Lyft ratings, and test scores are a source of some dread. These externalities where other people assess how well you’re doing all matter. Performance reviews are data points around how others view you and how good you are at your job. Often they also correlate to financial success. Your performance rating will affect the promotion, the size of your bonus, or the number of new customers who try you out. Your high school grades and SAT scores directly affect which college you get into.
Yet what happens when your self-accomplishment doesn’t map to the performance review you’ve received? What matters more, the internal sense of satisfaction or someone else’s validation that you are doing well in their system? They both matter, yet many of us fall into the trap of passively awaiting our grade with a sense of dread. I’m sharing a different perspective, where you as the heroine of your professional accomplishments can work through 5 points and set powerful goals in service of your own accomplishments.
Do the work that you love and the rewards will follow
Understand the company’s context
Know your context
Common fallacies
What matters most for you
Do the work you love and the rewards will follow
I worked at Facebook for over four years. I’ve written countless performance reviews, and had even more conversations with individuals wanting to know how to be successful at the company. I helped to run a process of product design calibrations where each half, all the managers would assess each designer’s accomplishments to determine what is a fair rating for each person, especially compared against how their peers are doing.
The consistent piece of true advice that’s often considered a trope is “Do the work you love and the rewards will follow.” What this is intended to do is to have the designer focus less on the grade she might receive and focus instead on the work itself — the people and the products, plus the craft of the work that she’s creating. If you do this well, you will get your positive rating. If you do this well over a period of time, you will get your promotion. Yet often this advice feels trite and a brush-off. It requires a longer term patience and investment in your career, and it also requires trust with your manager and the company that you’re working at. I’ve been at multiple ends of the performance review spectrum of delight & disappointment—I’ve had halves where I thought I excelled and received a Meets Most. I’ve also had halves where I had so much going on personally that when I got a promotion and a Greatly Exceeds, I realized how little it meant to me in the overall balance of life. Most importantly, my various coaches and mentors have taught me that valuing my own sense of powerful goals and being able to reflect on my learnings matters more than an external rating. If I am able to do the work I love, serving the designers I care about, then I am successful. (Brief overview of Facebook’s performance review process).
Understand the company’s context
To understand your performance review, first understand the rubric by which the company values success. Hopefully you have access to a written guideline for expectations and skills in your role. If not, it’s something you should co-design this understanding with your manager. For Facebook product design, there are 7 core skills covering hard design skills as well as collaboration and leadership skills that each level of product designer should exhibit. For assessment in each half, managers write a brief outlining what each designer has done in the last 6 months. This is split into 1. individual impact on the team’s product goals, 2. strategy impact which may include visioning design work for the future, and 3. leadership/culture impact on the product team or elsewhere within Facebook. For more Facebook-specific measurement, see what it takes to be a designer at Facebook and how Facebook hires designers.
While a written rubric is a good starting point, it’s a guideline, which means that it’s open to interpretation and individualization. The most important conversation is the one between you and your manager around shared understanding of the success guideline and how it applies to you individually. This conversation and shared understanding will ideally be based on a mutual relationship of trust and respect. I’ll dive more into how to create that ideal relationship in a future blog post.
Know Your Context
What matters to you professionally or at your work over the next six months or year? What would you like to do personally to help your team achieve their product goals? What new skills do you want to develop? What would you like to learn? What relationships do you want to nurture?
For example, a designer who wants to work on building his prototyping skills may focus on 1. learning framer, 2. setting up a base prototype to match his product structure, and 3. committing to showing every single design in a prototype, and 4. sharing his learnings with others via a post or a lunch & learn talk. Another designer who wants to improve relationships with her product manager and key engineers chooses to 1. invest time in informal coffee meetings & 1–1s, 2. organize team events to build a sense of team culture, and 3. deliberately schedule whiteboard sessions to co-create requirements with her PM.
Your goals should be self-driven and personal. You may also choose to work on feedback received from others, either about your passions & strengths, or areas of growth. Ultimately, they should be personal and powerful, mapping to what matters to you in your life, not simply driven by what your work needs from you.
Also be aware of what else is happening with your life in this period. Are you dealing with health issues? Do your immediate friends and family need extra support from you? How much of yourself are you able to bring in to work? There is no shame in choosing to hang on at work for a period of time and not have big stretch goals. Your whole self has to look at work and non-work together.
If you have a draft of your powerful goals and what success means to you for the upcoming period, bring them as a conversation point to your manager. She can provide additional company context and help map these goals back to what the company needs. She can provide feedback for you, and the two of you can co-create these personal success metrics together. You can check in over the period to see how you’re doing, and then at the end of the period, you will have a a sense of accomplishment or learnings about your powerful goals.
Common Fallacies
If I work more hours, then I will be more successful.
I grew up in a school system that equated hours of rote practice with achievement. If I spend 5 hours reviewing biology terms on flashcards, then I will do better in the test. If I put in 3 all-nighters in service of this project or client, then I will be more successful at work. This is a fallacy. Hours do not equal success. First, identify what impact means for your company and for you personally, then work on those items. For people in a creative field, the gestation time away from the continual grind allows for ideas and inspiration to blossom.Once I get that promotion, rating, etc. then I will be happy.
We are a culture of achievers, and can live in a mindset of scarcity. Right now I don’t have X, so I am unhappy. X can be a stand-in for a raise, a promotion, a rating, a grade, or closing a certain number of clients. Have you ever strived so hard for X, then managed to achieve it, and felt a sense of hollowness or emptiness because simply achieving it wasn’t enough? Did you immediately move to create a new Y that was an even bigger goal?Instead, celebrate the powerful goals that you’ve set that you’re moving towards. Savor the feeling of achieving X and congratulate yourself for the learnings.
What matters most for you
Each year of your life is different. You will have different energy and a different balance of personal/professional life. There will be years where professional achievement is the #1 thing — you want to devote the time to climbing the ladder, getting that rating, achieving that title and promotion. If you’re in that state, also consider some other questions:
How much fun am I having?
What relationship do I want to cultivate with coworkers?
How much energy do I have at the end of each day?
What am I intentionally saying “no” to in order to say “yes” to work?
There will also be years where life comes first. Yes, you will show up fully at work and do a more-than-competent job with your responsibilities. Yet you are also choosing to spend more time with your kids, your side hustle, or supporting your community outside of work. If you are choosing “yes” to these options, be gentle to yourself about your performance review and know that’s the important choice you are making with your time and energy.
Finally, in an atmosphere of continual learning, perhaps the most useful question you can ask yourself at the end of each period of assessment is:
What learning can I take away from this?
That question will generate the most powerful goals to sustain energy and provide long-term fulfillment.
Thanks to Toben for reading early drafts of this post.
How to Keep Your Fire Burning Strong
Photo by Kyle Peyton on Unsplash
I was in Yosemite this past weekend. As I was camping without my kids, I had the luxury of time. I didn’t have to cook or officially watch children, so I took on the chore of making the camp fire. I built a lot of fires this past weekend. It brought back memories of the different fires I’ve built over the years. And it reinforced the primitive yearning to keep our fires collectively glowing & continuously lit through the years. Similarly, fire can be a handy metaphor for our lives and community.
The fire triangle
There are 3 simple ingredients to a fire — heat, fuel and oxygen — making up the fire triangle.
One of my strengths is being bold and direct. The same applies to when I build fires — I focused on the heat and fuel. Apply more heat and fuel and the fire will get bigger. Throw on more lighter fluid. Add the bacon grease from the morning’s breakfast. Yet this focus on heat and fuel can lead to a bright intense flame that peaks brilliantly and then burns out, exhausting itself with the effort.
My father passed away last April. I got the call from my sister late on a Saturday night, the last time I was camping in Yosemite. The next morning when I awoke, I built a fire. I must have spent over an hour crouching by the wood, covered in smoke and charcoal. I tried my usual method of heat and fuel. I could light the fire, but nothing I did could sustain the flames. I ripped off countless pages from a magazine and went through books of matches. My daughter, seeing my grief & desolation and desperate to help, went to fetch little twigs and pinecones to serve as kindling. I sat in the smokiness, blowing on the fire and thinking of my dad. My hands were busy and it allowed my mind to free-roam, alternating between anger, sorrow, regret, satisfaction, and happiness that he had found relief from a body that he was no longer in complete control of. Eventually someone else took over the fire-making, and I spent the rest of the morning watching the flames dance and letting my mind be free. I had failed to build a fire, and I was strangely OK with the unfamiliar feeling of accepting help from someone else. Sitting around the fire together with friends felt like a community brought collectively closer with flame and empathy for my grief.
Fast forward to this weekend where I learned the power of oxygen. I learned to teepee the kindling and wood into a structure with a chimney so that oxygen can rush through it. I learned to carefully prepare paper balls to start the combustion, followed by a layer of twigs and kindling, followed by a small dry piece of firewood, all arranged around a chimney or teepee. Once the initial match lights the paper, you can wander away but will need to check back every five minutes or so. Because the carefully built twigs and firewood could collapse upon that teepee structure, depriving the flame of oxygen and suffocating it. I learned to wait, to check back in, and to blow air through the coals with powerful lungs. It’s a thing of beauty to see the flame reignite after a powerful puff to the embers. More instructions on how to start a campfire.
Metaphors are powerful. They help you to learn. And a full-body metaphor—building fire — helps lock in the learning.
The fire triangle of heat, fuel, and oxygen can be translated to a personal fire triangle that keeps us truly vibrant, living a fiery purposeful life. Our personal fire triangle is drive, energy, and emotion.
Heat is the Drive for a fire. It’s the fierce ambition or yearning within each of us. Our drive is the part of ourselves that moves us forward, continuing to live and work and experience our lives to the fullest. It can also be a negative self-critical aspect that pushes for more and drives us to keep going. It is our motivation, and the sense of what we do each day.
Fuel is the Energy we need to sustain ourselves. It can literally be our food choices, made up of a colorful balanced plate of fruit and vegetables or an equally vivid pack of red hot flaming Cheetos or rainbow Lucky Charms. It includes our physical energy management of exercise and meditation. And it also includes the relationships around us — the boss who builds up our confidence, the best friend who holds our secrets, the office gossip whose tidbits can connect or destroy, and also the rival who drives us to be better.
Oxygen is the Emotion and the way we exist or be in our days. (being vs doing) It is the ability to stop and patiently wait for something to unfold. It is the comfort in the not knowing, and being willing to wait, because the answer will unveil itself at some point in time. It is the ability to give up control, to see how the pieces we have put into place will move on their own and grow into something different, and then we can choose to react to this new thing. We can breathe and be. And eventually something different will grow. Some new ember, or flame, or way of being will move us forward.
Creating fires creates community
Gathering around a warm fire is the heart of community. It’s the relaxation of making smores, sharing ghost stories, listening to the gentle strum of a guitar while basking in the warmth on half your body. I was glad to be able to contribute to our camp’s community and warmth this past weekend. Imagine if you were able to keep your personal flame burning strong through the Drive of doing, the Emotion of being, and sustaining your Energy over time. How might your flame be of service to the community around you?
Our campsite was still quite chilly especially as the sun started to fade in the mid-afternoon. We ducked into Curry Village and found the giant fireplaces lit and supplied with wood. One of the fireplaces was smoldering with red hot embers, but the flame was dying. I moved the giant grate and crouched close by the fire. I’d learned that oxygen was needed, so I started to blow. I crouched there for 10 or 15 minutes, stoking the fire with a poker, blowing hard, and re-arranging the logs for optimum air flow. And still it wouldn’t light. Finally, a man working nearby on his laptop walked over with a pile of scribbled-upon notes and offered up his papers. Accepting the help, I balled up the papers and tucked them under my carefully constructed logs. I noticed that I’m getting more used to accepting help. With a whoosh of ignition, the whole fireplace erupted into flames.
If you’d like more practical tips for how to start a campfire, read more from Wilderness Redefined.
Thanks to Amara for reading drafts of this post.
Devastation and Beauty on the Periphery of the California Fires
Sunday night as I tucked my 8 year old into bed, she told me
“Mama, I don’t think that I’m a very grateful person.”
We’d been watching the striking red sunrises together. And I told her about the fires that came again. She felt guilty to admire the beauty of the skies when so many people were evacuating their homes.
I am one of the luckies. I live in San Francisco. My home has never been razed to the ground. I have never been forced to evacuate, with 5 minutes to grab the cat, the hamster, the kids’ stuffies, important documents, and invaluable non-digitized family photographs. The most inconvenience I’ve had is PG&E’s power outages and bad air quality. Each day, I wake up to the glory of stark apocalyptic blood red skies, and it reminds me to cherish what is in my life.
Our physical surroundings are a choice once-made a long time ago. We may have chosen to live in a certain apartment in a certain city because of a job, a lover, or a school. That choice was made years ago and has already faded into the background, replaced by the ordinariness and regularity of routine. In San Francisco, we don’t dwell on living in an earthquake zone, other than when we get a reminder of a small tremor every some months or years. It is challenging to live in prospective terror every day of our lives.
Each day, we wake up, do our morning rituals, and then transition to work and school. Often the routes and days blur into each other, the ease of the commute making them automatic and residing in the bottom of our subconscious. The very ordinariness makes it routine and easy. Forgettable. Nondescript. Years of our lives can go by like this.
In Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, we have our basic physiological & safety needs—food, water, a warm bed to sleep in, and a refuge of a home. My family has our psychological needs met—friends, our family unit, and accomplishment through work and school. This foundation enables us to achieve our full potential, including tapping into our creativity.
Through this week, we have been waking up to a glorious red sunrise of beauty. On Monday, we woke up to the smell of smoke and knew that fires were getting worse. We could feel for the thousands of Sonoma residents evacuating their homes and even more Californians subjected to forced blackouts by PG&E. It’s a reminder, a trigger for a change in perspective.
Change is hard, change is good
I’ve repeated this mantra to myself as I’ve gone through major life changes over the past years. Yet perhaps change doesn’t need to be devastating to evoke a shift. Perhaps such a small change as being in the periphery of fire could evoke something new. Perhaps we could be in safety and security and have a physical change help us more easily reach trigger us to more easily reach self actualization.
What’s the perspective if you want to choose today? If you’re on the periphery of the Kincade fire, do you want to choose aggravation at the PG&E blackout and poor air quality? Or do you want to embrace the change in physical environment, and choose something else that may be possible.
Embracing a new perspective right now may not be possible. If you have been directly affected, like people I know who have lost their homes in last year’s Carr fire, everything can still be bleak. Without being in a place where basic and psychological needs are met, it’s challenging to have the luxury of choosing a perspective. There still needs to be time spent in grief and being with emotions.
Returning to my 8 year old’s perspective the other night: “Mama, I don’t think that I’m a very grateful person.” Her guilty insight led to us discussing the things she’s grateful for:
Her stuffie, Jelly Bunny
Unlimited food and water
A cosy bed
Just the basics. The physical surroundings of a fire was simple enough to jolt an 8 year old into gratitude. Afterwards, she slept better than she had in days.
If you’d like to directly help people affected by the Kincade fires, the San Francisco Chronicle recommends volunteering and donating.
Thank you to Margaret and Amara for reviewing early drafts of this post.
How to Be Present with Emotions in a World of Getting Sh!t Done
Photo by Mark Daynes on Unsplash
This past weekend was the first time in my life where I got a glimmer that being present with emotions is more valuable than getting shit done. It was transformational.
I’m good at getting shit done. Give me a good crisis, gnarly problem, or something to tackle and I am in my element. I’ll figure out what needs to happen, break it down into smaller milestones, and kick it off with a team. I keep myself and everyone else inspired and motivated to stay on task. Over the years, I’ve learned a bit— I’ve evolved my process enough to figure out how to build in room for experiments, failure, learning, and celebration.
As part of my coach training at CTI, the co-active model talks about the different types of partnership. One form is the relationship between Being and Doing. As humans, we exist in a balance beam that is often more tipped towards one side than the other.
Which side do you lean towards?
As a human being, think of all the ways that you are being with your emotions right now. Perhaps you are:
Jittery from the 2 cups of coffee pounded this morning to get up and going
Tired from going to sleep too late after binging on Stranger Things
Cold, and maybe a bit resentful of how hard it is to adjust the heating system
Sated from that snack of pistachios and a banana
Grateful that it’s a beautiful October day in San Francisco. Sunny and with a tiny nip of fall.
Anticipatory of the meeting with your boss this afternoon. She wants to talk about something important. You’re a little scared, excited, and feeling some butterflies in your stomach. Can we just get it over with already?
All of these complex feelings and emotions exist within us at every point in time, often flitting and combining with each other in a dance that’s entirely human. We are human be-ings and emotions are part of us.
How much time do we spend in our days Doing— creating to do lists, checking off each task with satisfaction, and moving onto the next item? Or sometimes doing multiple things at a time because multi-tasking feels so much more efficient? If an emotion comes up, it’s squished to the side. I’ll feel this disappointment later, I can’t cry at work right now. Compare this Doing time to the time that we let ourselves feel and experience a range of emotions. It’s more rare for me to let myself relish how serene and content I currently am. Or to let myself sit in what’s perceived as a negative emotion such as rage or jealousy. Emotions simply are. They aren’t positive or negative. They are a part of our experience, and that makes the emotion right. And until that emotion is fully experienced and allowed to flourish, it’s impossible to let it go.
This world of Doing is familiar to me. Working in fast-paced tech startups and large companies is about how much impact you can make on the world and how many things you can get done in a limited amount of time. At Facebook, we talk about ruthless prioritization, about what we are going to ship in the limited time we have in a 6 month period. It’s about what we do and how we measure that impact.
I spent this past weekend in a world of Being. As part of my coach training, we spent three days learning how to be with emotions and to trust the process of witnessing and seeing another person’s experience. I approached it with trepidation and skepticism. The coaching skills I’d been embracing to-date felt somewhat familiar and akin to what I’d been practicing as a design leader for years— envisioning a dream future, encouraging viewing an issue from multiple perspectives, lovingly challenging people to be their best selves, and creating structures so they can keep themselves accountable. I wasn’t sure of the value of this being present thing. I already do a 2-minute daily meditation, have an evening gratitude practice, and occasionally go to yoga class. I was present enough in this life, thank you very much. And yeah, I suppose it makes sense to have a balance of Being and Doing, but Doing is clearly much more valuable in this world we live in.
“Those who are the most resistant, fall the hardest.”
One of my previous teachers had shared that beautiful quote about his journey into coaching. It resonated with me as a lifelong skeptic. This is how I fell hard for being with emotions:
1. Connect with Metaphor
Thai mango and sticky rice. If I had to pick only one favorite, this is it.
Metaphor is magical. Metaphor evokes the safety and knowledge of something familiar. The familiarity helps provide a doorway into a new concept which then helps with the click of understanding. One of my front-of-the-room leaders, Susan Carlisle, offered up the metaphor of decadently relishing your favorite dessert. That being with emotions is the dessert of life.
I love dessert. With groups of people, I’ve been known to order “One of every dessert, please!” My superpower is appreciating and relishing every single sweet, crunchy, bitter, subtle bite of glorious dessert I’m digging into. Susan’s metaphor gave me permission to regard being as something delicious & special, rather than an inconvenient skill to practice and master.
2. Embrace Powerful Emotions
I am a person of big emotions. I would regularly receive performance feedback that I can come off as being too intense, sometimes too emotional, which can have a negative impact on others. Years of that feedback had led me to control and lessen my emotions as a way of playing with range and what’s appropriate for different leadership situations. Outside of work, my friends & family know that I can be ridiculously childlike in my enthusiasm for things like splashing through puddles or spontaneously breaking into dance moves.
Big emotions are familiar to me. Yet I’d always embraced the so-called “positive” emotions — joy, compassion, hope, playfulness, curiosity while suppressing and closing off the “negative” emotions — frustration, depression, powerlessness, hurt, jealousy. Through multiple coached sessions spending time being with all my emotions, I learned that all emotions are valid and valuable. There is no “good” or “bad” emotion. Emotions exist and are a reflection of what you feel right now.
A concrete example. The “difficult” emotion I am most uncomfortable with is apathy. I get frustrated when I exist in a state of uncertainty, of not having an opinion, and not immediately knowing what to do. In multiple sessions, I was coached to experience and feel apathy. To imagine & visualize a House of Tutti and to see what it would feel like to walk down a hallway and approach the door to apathy. Parts of this experience were unsettling — I was angry that this ugly door and bland room existed in my beautiful house. And after sitting with anger for a little while, curiosity emerged. Rather than being frustrated, I became curious about why this door existed and excited & anticipatory about what was behind the door. When I walked through the door, I was able to connect with a space of possibility— a playground or blank canvas where I gave myself permission to be messy & patient, to not know what happens next.
I’ve started on a path of honoring emotions, allowing them to be, seeing where they show up in my body, and using visualizations to explore them further… all of these are ways of being with emotions. Humans are naturally creative and resourceful enough to handle the range of powerful emotions.
3. Be Curious about Feelings
In being with apathy, curiosity was my best friend. Once I had given myself permission to embrace a powerful emotion, then I could be curious about it. Why am I so triggered by uncertainty? What does it feel like in my body? What areas tense up? Are there hidden memories that emerge? How could I use my senses to explore the color or smell or taste of apathy. What type of room is it? What’s inside the room and what materials are on the walls?
And eventually… after the exploration and being with, something shifts and a new emotion emerges. A new journey of curiosity begins.
4. Build on What You Know
As I immersed in emotions and we talked about love as the secret to good coaching, I thought about falling in love. I thought back to my value of Family. Of being able to hold my chosen family—children, friends, designers, clients and support them with unconditional love.
As a designer, I first start with people problems. Who am I designing this product for and what problems am I solving for them? Through user research, there is a deep well of empathy to understand who the user is, what emotions they’re struggling with, what their problems are, and how the day-to-day of their lives unfold. The best designers I know will deeply & empathetically understand their users. You could call it being in love with our users.
Another design story. One of the skills we look at when evaluating current and prospective Facebook designers is the skill of Intentionality.
What is the purpose and intention behind the design solution, and did the solution meet that purpose? How deliberate was the designer in selecting the solution? Did it land? In addition to the main definition, I’m intrigued by the philosophy behind the definition of intentionality. It acknowledges that intentionality is grounded in mental states, or emotions. That a design becomes intentional when it honors the designer or the user’s emotions.
And with a final click of building upon what I know, I realized that being with emotions is something that I’ve known how to do all along. When emotions in users are honored, a design becomes intentional. Being with emotions is a familiar concept to design, and a familiar concept to me.
“Those who are the most resistant, fall the hardest.”
And yes, I’ve fallen hard and I’ve fallen fast. I’ve fallen in love with my big emotions and to being with the emotions of my clients.
Ready to take a small action?
So if you’ve read all the way to the end, you might be wondering,
“But how do I do this? How do I be present with my emotions?”
My suggestion is to try an experiment. Pick one of the following two small actions and notice what happens after you do it:
Path 1: Doing. Think about how you want to show up in your next important meeting. Perhaps you want to be curious, or brave, or confident, or welcoming? Before you enter the meeting room, set that intention. Write it down on a sticky note or in your notebook. Check back in after the meeting.
Path 2: Being. Each morning when you wake up, notice what emotion you’re feeling and write it down. Each evening before you go to bed, notice what emotion you’re feeling and write it down. How does this feel after a couple of days?
Because we might not be as familiar with the language of emotion, in the appendix below, I’ve provided a list of different emotions, courtesy of CTI.
If you take an action, I’d love to hear what happened for you. Feel free to reach out directly or comment on all the social mechanisms.
Thank you to Leland and Amara for graciously reading drafts of this post.
Appendix of Links & References
I am pursuing coaching certification through the Co-active Training Institute which uses the Co-Active Model
Listing of emotions, courtesy of the CTI Process workshop
How I left the Corporate World and Embraced Freedom
In summer 2019, I chose to leave my high status, impactful, and financially lucrative job as a design leader at Facebook. I was on a search for something more meaningful, more fulfilling, and that quest eventually led me to leadership coaching. This is the story of how I designed my life to be successful for me.
I loved my job at Facebook. I gained deep satisfaction from supporting the immediate designers on my team as well as providing inspiration, creative North Stars, and engaging collaboration with my partners in engineering, product, and content partnerships. Working on the innovation side of video products, I deeply believed in the mission, that we were seeking to add more meaning in people’s lives by enabling connections with friends & family over a shared love of shows or bonding with strangers over entertainment topics that friends can’t relate to. If you’re looking for some fantastic and free shows, scroll down for recommendations in the appendix.
Yet it wasn’t enough.
Many people think that working for Facebook is a dream job. And it was my dream job when I first joined. I had followed the traditional path of success. My tiger mom helped form my path from valedictorian to a Stanford B.S. degree, and I forged my own way through 20+ years of design jobs in startups, design agencies, and large companies. I was lucky to have this wealth of experience in so many industries and to work with some of the smartest people in the world. I had also worked hard — 50–70 hours each week in corporations for other people for over 20 years. At Facebook, I was able to build completely new video products and create shows filled with diverse voices and new forms of interactivity. Each day I was exhilarated. And at the same time I was tired. I was running at 110%, jumping from crucial meeting to crucial meeting, making important decisions, engaging in fierce conversations to build the best products, and always multi-tasking, being always-on, all the time. The to-do list had to be painfully prioritized because it would never get done. At the same time, I was holding the mental weight of leading a team. I needed to believe, so that I could help hold the inspiration and belief that the work we do matters. My energy was lagging. My time was lagging. And everything was compounded with a daily 3-hour commute. It was never enough. I was never enough. Work was conflicting with my values, with what I held to be most important in life. It felt like I was giving up the best hours of my days in service to something else, to someone else’s vision and purpose.
Something had to change. So I quit.
I left the security of Facebook. The company makes it hard to leave — you are surrounded by ridiculously smart people, you make products that impact 2.3 billion people all around the world, you are cocooned in an idyllic place where growth & learning is emphasized, and the food is seriously delicious. When your work with one team is coming to a close, you are encouraged to find another team within the broad world of Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp, or Oculus. When I was ready to leave Video after three years, I couldn’t bring the energy/passion/leadership to join another team and be truly excited and inspirational to a new cohort of product designers. So I left Facebook.
Saying “Yes” to leadership coaching.
I have been coaching designers on my team for 10+ years and Facebook gave me the training and skills to coach female technologists throughout the company. After I left Facebook, I took my first coaching workshop through the Co-active Training Institute. I figured that it would help me be a better leader, a better listener and that it would help me in my next design leadership job. That wasn’t the message that the universe had for me. Even though I fought it, kicking and screaming (more to come in a future blog post), four weeks and three workshops later, I decided to take a career swerve and establish my own business as a leadership coach.
After receiving extensive coaching on what I really wanted, this is what I learned:
1. Permission to dream
Unlike mentoring or therapy, coaching is the process of forward-looking individual self-growth where a coach helps her client to dream big about what she really wants. Coaching gave me permission to dream, to design the life that I want right now. This life is a balance of having enough time for family and a deep focus on 1–1 relationships & support via coaching.
When I say “Yes” to leadership coaching, I continue to be a designer. My 20+ years in product design had already equipped me in helping product teams dream the future of automotive, of mobile devices, of television, of interactive entertainment. I simply needed help to give myself the permission to dream.
Similar to design, once a dream has been identified, coaching helps provide the operational execution and structures to help a client get from a place of now, where she may be stuck with self-doubt or hesitations, to a new and powerful place of experiencing the dream.
2. Honor My Values
I’d always considered myself to be values-driven. Through the coaching workshops, I honed my values as well as the impact I wanted to make with my life. I also realized that I hadn’t been completely honoring some values in my career choices.
Adventure. I grew up moving to a different country every 3–4 years. I adore change, taking risks, and experiencing new things. This has been a core value for me ever since I was a little girl.
Challenge. This is closely related to change and experiencing new things. Change is often challenging, bringing you out of a comfort zone. I like hard things. I am competitive and driven. I continually challenge myself to be better.
Transparency. I strongly value being direct, honest, and open. Transparency honors the way I see another person and when done with caring intention builds trust and mutual benefit. Feedback is a gift.
Family. Being a mom is the hardest and most rewarding job that I had ever done. I carry over this mama bear protectiveness to people within my circle — my design team, my friends, my clients. Family means a sense of shared responsibility, of being autonomous and also better together. I aspire to provide my family with unconditional love and support.
Dance in the Moment. Co-active coaching felt like home when I saw Dance in the Moment as a core foundation of the Co-Active Model. As a life long type-A planner, I’m good at strategizing the future and creating operational structures to meet these goals. Yet simply engaging in a model of planning & to-do lists left me missing a sense of fulfillment and satisfaction. I’m far less skilled at being present, savoring the moment, being funny, being messy, making mistakes and forgiving myself, and surrendering in to the freedom of dancing in the moment. Yet it’s those moments of Being between the Doing that give me contentment.
Truly honing into the values that matter to me made me realize that while my corporate career let me honor Adventure, Challenge, and Transparency; some aspects of Facebook, including the daily 3-hour commute was at the expense of Family. It was also challenging to honor Dance in the Moment while working for high impact tech companies and startups where how fast & well you build products are the main metrics of success. Clarifying my values was a giant step to help me embrace leadership coaching.
3. Measure Energy & Authenticity
Measuring success and impact in the corporate world is often about metrics. How much Watch Time are videos receiving? How many comments or likes do videos receive as a signal of community? What is the sentiment of creators on the platform? Through coaching and honoring my value of Dance in the Moment, I learned to measure two other very important metrics.
How authentic am I? How am I honoring my values?
How much energy or joy am I getting from what I do each day?
I realized that while I was both exhilarated and drained after leading design sprints or leadership workshops, after conducting 1–1 coaching sessions, I was buzzing with energy and resonance from the conversations. My clients were gaining new insights and realizations about what they truly wanted and how to claim that life for themselves. It felt truly magical and special. And I was being authentically myself — being lovingly challenging and transparent while unconditionally supporting my client.
Damn, it feels good. And I was hooked.
4. Trust the Process
I have a skeptical rebel within me. This is the part of me that challenges and pokes at anything that seems too “woo woo” about the inner work of coaching. The part of me that says, “Really? Does everyone need a life purpose and does it need to have those beautiful sayings around being the light to shine the way for others?” It’s the part of me that’s scared and uses skepticism to mask my fears. It’s the part of me that’s not brave enough to treat it as a learning experiment, to just try it and see what happens.
I’ve learned enough through years of designing products that Trust the Process always works. There is a familiar rhythm with going deep into research to understand what people problems you’re solving for. There is a rhythm to sketching out a wide variety of ideas & solutions. To brainstorm widely to get ideas (diverge) and then to select a few (converge) that will be experimented upon. This is a typical design process that the Stanford d.school shares. And I also know that it feels shitty in the middle. It feels hard and unfamiliar and that you’ll never come up with the beautiful conceptual North Star. And I always know and tell my teams that it’s a simple replicable design process. Trust the Process and you will get to the right design.
In coaching, I tell myself the same thing. Try the new tools, try the new imaginings and looking within for different Allies and Leaders and Sabotoers. Play games. Embrace the “woo woo.” It’s about allowing myself to marinate in the fear and discomfort. Fear is part of the process. And fear is the pre-cursor to trying to change and to be brave. Trust the Process.
Thank you for reading to the end and taking this journey with me. Thank you to Leland and Amara for graciously reading drafts of this post. Also published on Medium.
Appendix of Links & References
Highly recommended Facebook Watch shows. Sorry for Your Loss starring Elizabeth Olsen dealing with grief around her husband’s early death and Nala Cat the most adorable Siamese and her friends.
I am pursuing coaching certification through the Co-active Training Institute which uses the Co-Active Model