Your biggest opportunities are in your day to day. It's easy to imagine that opportunity is going to hit us in the face. We'll know exactly what it looks like. We'll be able to seize it. We'll be ready for it when it comes. But I want you to evaluate your current state. If an opportunity were to hit your desk today, how would you know it? My name is Jonathan Cutrella and you're listening to Developer Team. My goal on the show is to help driven developers like you find clarity, perspective, and purpose in their careers. Opportunity is sitting in front of you every day. And this is not just a cliche. In today's episode, we're going to talk about the specific way that you are missing opportunity that's sitting in front of you. Today, like most work days, you're going to have some kind of interaction with your coworkers, whether that's directly or indirectly. Directly, you may have meetings. You may have a stand up this morning. You may get a chance to talk with each other. You may get a chance to talk with each other in Slack. Indirectly, you might do some code review or some documentation updating. Whatever it is, most of work is involving some kind of interpersonal contact. Some kind of social atmosphere exists in your workplace. Even, and perhaps even more, in a remote company. The granularity, the surface area, the amount of information that exists at the social layer is, generally speaking, vastly more, vastly more detailed than the amount of information that exists at the company level. What does this mean? It means that people bring their histories. They bring their experiences, their former work experiences, their knowledge. They bring their experiences, their former work experiences, their knowledge. To work. They bring their feelings, which are complex. They bring all of their connections. People that you have never met, or maybe they have connections that you have, and you don't even know it. People bring the people side to work every day. And the people side is vastly more complex than any of the business that you do. This presents a major opportunity because people bring their feelings, which are complex. It is very easy. It's very easy to misunderstand this complex landscape, this social layer of our work. And specifically today, we're going to talk about your influence. Specifically, we're going to hone in on this misconception. This kind of thwarted view of ourselves in that social layer. Specifically, we're going to hone in on this social layer. And this happens beyond work, by the way. This happens in all parts of our life. We imagine that we are observers. We imagine that our impact on the people around us is little to none. That people around us are going to behave however they're going to behave, and we are there to watch it. That our interactions, even our observation itself, has no impact on their behavior. But this couldn't be further from the truth. This is the opportunity that's in front of you. Your basic interactions are, in fact, shaping the actions of the people around you. We're going to talk more about how that happens and what you can do to take advantage of this opportunity. Thank you. And we'll talk about today's sponsor. This episode of Developer Tea is brought to you by Split, the feature management and experimentation platform. What if a release felt exactly like that? A release, a moment of relief, an escape from your slow, painful deployments that hold back product engineers. You've been a part of one of those, I'm sure, where you have to double and triple check that you're launching it to the right people. You have to click the various buttons to make sure that you don't launch the wrong thing. Well, Split's going to help you with this. Split allows you to free your teams and your features by attaching insightful data to feature flags. This allows you to quickly deploy, measure, and learn the impact of every feature you release, which means you can turn up what works, turn off what doesn't, and give software innovation the room to run wild. Now, you can safely deliver features up to 50 times faster and finally take a breath. Split feature management and experimentation. What a release. See what they did there? Reimagine software delivery and start your free trial and create your first feature flag at split.io slash developer tea. That's split.io slash developer tea. Thanks again to Split for sponsoring today's episode. We'll see you next time. Now, the simple reality is they are. Research shows that this is the case regardless of your power dynamics, your position. People are not ignoring you. They are, in fact, responding to you in some way. It's essentially hardwired into our social. Remember, this is the social layer into our social interactions with other people. It's hardwired for us to respond to those people. It's hardwired for us to respond to those people. But here's the thing. We don't always report to other people that they have had an impact on us. In fact, we tend to shy away from this. We tend to shy away from being noticed observing. It's worthwhile to kind of turn the camera around and look at how you are influenced by other people. Now, simple examples of this might be you change the way you talk when you're discussing a particular product problem. Maybe when you're talking to your product manager, you talk about things that they find to be interesting or problematic with the product. Whereas when you're talking with another engineer, you might focus on their recent contributions in code. Regardless, these are changing your behavior. It's usually in small, subtle ways to enable communication, but sometimes in much larger ways. For example, if you were to have a discussion about an idea that you have with your manager, let's say. Your manager may affirm your idea and you walk away believing in your idea more. This is a result of a single person's affirmation. Now, this is not good or bad. It's just an effect that they have on you. But interestingly, nothing about the idea itself has changed. Your kind of relationship with your own idea has changed. And this is because of a social influence. Now, play the same script, but imagine that your manager has disapproved of the idea. What happens to it? Or let's say that your manager is despondent to it. What happens to it then? A simple reality is in these kinds of conversations that seem maybe off the cuff, you are influenced and you are influencing. In today's episode, I'm not going to go into the details of how you can take advantage of this in its fullest. Instead, I want to give you one simple instruction to shift the way you think about these interactions. And that is to shift from seeing yourself as an observer of a given state, and instead, after important interactions and before important interactions, reaffirm to yourself that something is likely to change. Something will change as a result of this discussion, of this interaction, of this Slack message, this addition to the documentation, this review in this PR. Something will change. It might be small or it might be pretty significant. You may change someone's mind. You may change somebody's perspective, their values. But you are not a passive observer. You cannot be a passive observer. Once you become mindful of this inevitable participation that you have with the other people in your work life, and also, you know, more generally, then you can start finding the opportunity in each of those moments. Thanks so much for listening to today's episode of DeveloperTea. Thank you again to today's sponsor, Split. Head over today to split.io slash developertea. That's split.io slash developertea. You can get started for free today. That's split.io slash developertea. Thanks so much for listening. And until next time, enjoy your tea.