One of the things we hope for in a good manager is someone who can help coach us in our career, someone who can help us grow, who can help us achieve our goals. They can help us move from one position in the company to the next, or maybe prepare us for a transition to another company altogether. And so often, this is what we imagine our managers, you know, kind of their main role is. And this is flawed, unfortunately. And we actually discussed some of the reasons why this kind of thinking is flawed on a recent episode with Brian Pulliam. Brian is... A career coach. In fact, I would call him my career coach. And the short version is that your manager, they are incentivized. They are incentivized to keep you at the company. They are not primarily incentivized to encourage your career growth. Instead, they are primarily incentivized to get certain results. In a well-managed company, those results are clearly understood. The outcomes are clear. They are clearly understood. And you set goals that help you kind of walk that pathway and keep you accountable to goals that the company cares about you hitting. But those goals don't always necessarily mean career growth or career success for you. They don't mean that you are walking the pathway towards what you ultimately want in your career. So I believe that having multiple sources of coaching is a useful... Kind of a... Useful approach. So what do I mean by that? Well, it's useful to have an external career coach for the reasons that we've talked about. Specifically that they have, you know, their primary incentive is to help you. It's also useful to develop that relationship with your manager. Not necessarily because you're going to get the, you know, best, most stellar coaching from your manager. But instead because that develops a professional relationship with your manager. Uh, where they are... More likely to help you. Right? They're more likely to help you if you are actively engaging in conversations about growth. Actively engaging in conversations about, you know, what your goals are. What your personal aspirations are. Versus just waiting on them. Right? If you're just waiting on your manager to show up one day and start that conversation. You're probably going to be, unfortunately, disappointed. But there's this aspect of coaching or the coaching mindset. That I believe is helpful for all engineers to learn. Now, am I saying that you need to learn how to coach other people? Maybe along the way you accidentally do pick up that skill. That will be useful in your more senior roles. It might be useful if you transition into an engineering manager role. But instead, what I'm really wanting you to focus on is how you can adopt some of the same practices that a coach might adopt. For yourself. For your self-reflection. For preparation. For identifying, you know, how can you interact with a given situation in a more effective manner. That's what we're talking about in this episode. And probably in a couple of upcoming episodes of the show. This idea that you can adopt some of the practices of coaching and apply them back to yourself. Now, why would you want to do this? But we kind of already said in the beginning of the episode. The reason that you might care to do this is because your manager. Is probably not going to be. A available and be incentivized. To help you work through all of the, you know, the topics that you might work through. Using some of these kind of coaching techniques that we're going to talk about. The second important factor here is that. You don't necessarily have to just engage in coaching. That this kind of self-coaching habit that we're going to be talking about. You don't have to engage in that. Only in order to. Solve a tactical problem that can't be solved some other way. This kind of thinking. Can be useful in your day-to-day normal. You know, kind of everyday situations. Stepping into. And we're going to talk a little bit more about this in this episode. But stepping into this role. And using it as kind of a thinking mode. Can be useful for gaining perspective in any situation. Not necessarily just the really hard ones where you wish you could tap a coach in. To help you. Help you out. So what does it mean to to engage in self-coaching? We're going to talk about that right after we talk about the day's sponsor. If you're like me when you hear website builder, you probably have little mini nightmares of using Dreamweaver forever ago. But these things have changed. Right? And no longer does website builder necessarily mean limited control. What about a node-based builder that allows you to add full stack JavaScript to any site that you're working on? With Wix Studio, you spend less time on coding your UI, hosting and security. 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Well, I'm going to compare this to something that we've talked about on the show before. It's Debono's. Six thinking hats. And the idea that Debono had was to intentionally adopt a mindset or a specific kind of frame or point of view. And his specific frames and points of view, he represents them with six different colors. And there's a seventh hat. We'll talk about that in a second. The six colors are the white hat, which is neutral objectivity. Think about it like a blank sheet of paper. Neutral and objective. Concern with data, facts, figures, and information. We're actually going to use this, something very similar to the white hat in our self-coaching. The other ones, and I'll go through these quickly. There's the red hat, which represents emotion. The yellow hat, which represents benefit or optimism. The green hat, which represents ideas. You can imagine this being kind of the innovative thinker or the creative thinker. The green hat, which represents ideas. The blue hat is planning or process control. And then the black hat is judgment or logical narrative, right? Or not logical, negative rather. And all of these have some potential benefit of using them. And the basic idea of Debono's six hats is that when we are acting as ourselves, we get our ego wrapped up into the equation. And I'm going to use the same basis, the same argument. For our self-coaching investments. So, you know, if you are given the opportunity or the license to wear one of these hats, your job has now changed. Instead of being, you know, your ego, your typical way of operating, maybe your identity is to be a creative person, right? Or maybe your identity is to be the optimist. Or maybe you have the identity of being the one who... Who is very strategically minded. And you are quick to find, you know, flaws or issues in a plan. Well, if you are given a hat that is different from your ego, then you have this kind of mental switch, right? This mental switch. And I don't really have any research to back this, but this is at least the concept that Debono suggests. The idea is that you are adopting this. And you're trying to play your part well now, right? The pride, you know, the psychological side of our pride has now changed to instead of being myself and portraying my ego and identity, you know, perfectly well. I instead want to do this task that's been given to me. I want to wear this hat that's been given to me and do that very well. So the person who is typically creative may easily... Or at least more easily slip into the logical negative, you know, seat. And someone who may be highly creative or ideas driven may slip into the objective seat. And these are very different functional roles than we might naturally play. And the seventh hat we mentioned, by the way, is the invested owner, right? This is the person who wants the best outcome. They are, you know, seeking objectivity. But they're doing... And so through a subjective lens. A slightly different kind of hat and not necessarily, you know, part of the original Debono's six hats. But this hat can be useful because it's kind of the executive hat. And in our kind of, you know, metaphorical model that we're using that's a shadow of this, we're going to assume that the owner is kind of you. It's your original ego. You're the one that's invested in the outcomes of your own self-coaching. Okay. So the basic kind of format here is that you'll have some perspective that you are intentionally adopting that is different than your own kind of natural perspective. Now, there's no way that we can ever fully, you know, set aside our own perspectives. But this is in similar manner to Debono's hats. You are stepping outside of what you would normally do. And we've talked about things like this on the show before where you adopt a different perspective. Or you adopt, you use kind of these mental tricks to adopt an outsider's perspective, for example, to help you see things more clearly. And for the sake of this series or at least this episode and likely more episodes about this subject, we're going to call these personas. These are kind of self-coaching personas. So the first persona we're going to talk about today is the available manager. The available manager. I fought myself over calling this your manager's better half. So if you want to use that phrasing for your notes so it's easier to remember, then use that. But the available manager. So what is this particular kind of coaching persona? Well, the opposite of this is the busy manager. The busy manager. What does a busy manager want you to do? A busy manager wants you to come prepared. Come with specific requirements. Specific requests. You're not working through your thoughts with a busy manager. Or at least you're not doing that in a way that is effective if you're engaging with this persona. Your manager is probably busy. This is just kind of a fact of life for the average manager. Now, it may be the case that you have a good coaching manager. But if you are like most people. Especially if you yourself. Are a manager. And your manager is somebody like a director or a higher level executive. They likely have a lot more going on. And their engagement with you is going to be most effective if you can come with as specific of requests and recommendations as you possibly can. So in this case, this persona, we're going to point it at you're trying to work through a difficult issue. Okay. That is what this persona is. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. And what you want to know, you start with a couple of questions. And these are questions that we are kind of borrowing from the book, The Coaching Habit. Go and look that book up if you want to learn a little bit more about coaching more generally. The Coaching Habit has seven questions. We're going to focus in on only a couple of those questions. Okay. The first is what's on your mind. All right. So imagine, you know, kind of evaluating what is it that is really sticking out to me? What is actually something that I'm concerned about? What do I really want to talk to my manager about? Okay. So you're kind of having this back and forth conversation with yourself. So what is on your mind? You can do this in kind of a written format if it's helpful. But, you know, answer this question, what's on your mind? And then move forward with, and what else? Okay. This is another question from The Coaching Habit. And what else? And usually the things that are on your mind, top of mind, are more tactical. All right. They're more immediately present or things that are happening today. And then the things that you answer with, and what else, are the deeper problems. Okay. And it's up to you. Which one of these do you care about, you know, focusing in on? Usually, you know, very good coaches will focus in on the second ones because they're more long-term, more impactful. But it's totally up to you in this case. You may have a really tactical problem that you want to get some kind of resolution. Or help from your manager on. So answer this question, you know, what else is on your mind? And then I want you to ask the question, what can I do for you? What can I do for you? And in this case, you are imagining that you have the power, the position, the sway, that you are essentially your own, whoever your actual manager is. What can I do for you? Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. to capture from this particular persona is the idea that sometimes we go to our managers with requests or complaints that they themselves don't have much agency to change. And so they have to figure out, okay, what is it about this that I can affect? If you do a little bit of work in advance to try to figure out, okay, what can my manager do for me? Not just what do I want them to do for me, but what can they do for me? Right? So that is the persona that you want to adopt. What can I do for you? And then answer that question thoughtfully. What can my manager actually do in this scenario to help me? Sometimes the answer turns out to be nothing. And sometimes then what we're actually looking for is commiseration to share our thoughts and feelings and to express something more like frustration rather than a request. So then perhaps the better thing to do instead of sharing a frustration that your manager doesn't really have the agency to fix is to consider what routes would help your frustration and determine whether your manager can actually affect those routes. So maybe you're burnt out and you're burnt out because this project has, relentless deadlines. And maybe your manager can't change those deadlines. That's very possible and very common. But what you really need is a little bit of a break. Maybe you need someone else to come in and shoulder some of the delivery for this deadline. Or maybe all you really need is an extended weekend to shift some of your hours around. Try to determine what it is that you can ask your manager to do for you that they can do for you. And then maybe you can ask your manager to do for you that they can do for you. And then maybe you can ask your manager to do for you that they can turn around and actually affect change for you. What this will allow you to do, or kind of the mindset shift that I'm trying to encourage when you adopt this persona, is to recognize that your manager doesn't fix all of your problems. They can't even possibly fix all of your problems. And often we imagine that our managers have all of the keys to our career potential. They have the keys to our promotion, to our pay. Maybe they have the keys to all of our workload. They are the representative of our company to us. But the truth is so much different than that. Anyone who is a manager knows this is the case. And so by adopting the hat of being your manager, adopting the perception that you have the limitations they have, perhaps you can develop a more fully faceted strategy that your manager is one of the many possible ways to fix your problems. And so I think that's one of the most important things that we can do. And I think that's one of the most important things that we can do. And I think that's one of the most important things that we can do. And I think that's one of the most important things that we can do. That you can affect the change that you're trying to affect. Thank you so much for listening to today's episode of Developer T. Thank you again to today's sponsor, Wix. When you hear website builder, I want you to think new. They are no longer the antiquated tools that we remember just in our nightmares. Instead, Wix Studios developer first ecosystem allows you to spend less time on tedious tasks and more on functionality and business logic. That matters the most to you or your clients. Develop online in a VS code base IDE, or you can develop with your existing tool set locally using a GitHub integration. Extend and replace a suite of powerful business solutions and ship faster with Wix's Studios AI code assistant. All of that is wrapped up into auto maintained infrastructure for total peace of mind. Working to develop our first ecosystem at Wixstudio.com. That's W-I-X studio.com. Thanks so much for listening to this episode and until next time, enjoy your tea.