In today's episode, we're continuing our discussion on self-coaching. I want to be very clear. I do not believe that you can totally replace or that the advice that I'm giving in these episodes should lead you to think that you can totally replace the voice of an external coach. Now, an external coach doesn't necessarily have to be someone who calls themselves a coach. So maybe the better way to think about this is that this episode is not proposing that you can guide yourself for your entire career. Without any external observation, any external feedback, I don't think that that is a likely path to success. This is not intending to be your way of canceling your coaching membership. That is not what we're talking about doing here. Instead, you should think about this as another voice, an additional perspective. You're providing yourself the opportunity. You're providing yourself the opportunity to learn how to shift your own perspective into a different mindset. And so that's what these coaching personas are. In the last episode, we talked about the available manager. And the idea here was instead of going into your next one-on-one and trying to work out what you think your manager can help you with or having them try to work it out, going in with an ambiguous goal. And. You know, talking through that problem and hopefully eventually getting to, okay, here's my ask of you. Try to do that work ahead of time. Try to do that for yourself. Imagine that you are your manager and you want to know how can I help this person within my boundaries of access and agency? What can I do for them? You know, if you do the pre-work here and you identify what your manager can do for you. What are their boundaries? What are their levels of agency? Where can they operate on your behalf? If you do that in advance, then you can have a much more productive conversation with your manager. Instead of spending, you know, 20, 25 minutes just working out your thoughts and feelings about the subject, which may be useful. The perhaps more useful or more tactically useful approach might be to come with a more direct ask. And providing the ask up front and then diving into the details with your manager if it's appropriate to do so. Why is this useful? Why is this persona useful for you? Because there's very likely more conversations, more constructive conversations that you could have with your manager. And if you take the time to eliminate the back and forth, if you take the time to kind of pre-process some of this stuff. Then your manager. Will have the opportunity to move into potentially more valuable discussions. This is the first step, by the way, if you've ever wondered, how do I ever get to the managing up part of my job? This is the first step towards that. Okay, because managing up takes space. It takes time. And if you have this one-on-one time with your manager and you spend most of it talking about your own issues, then you don't have the opportunity to discuss your manager's issues. And ways that they might be interacting with your other teammates or in skip levels with your own reports, for example. So in today's episode, we're going to talk about another one of these personas. The over-optimizer. Now, this might sound like a negative thing, but remember, there is no negative when it comes to these personas, right? This isn't real. It is a thought experiment. This coaching persona that you're adopting is not actually you. It's you playing. A role. We talked about Damona's hats in the last episode. If you missed that, I encourage you to go back and listen to it. That is kind of the, at least the application model that we're using for these personas. You're not actually going to act this way. You're going to play this role in order to explore a subject, right? So the prompt you might give yourself when you're sitting down to journal, or if you're going to think through this on a walk, the prompt you would give yourself is if I was X, what would I be? What would I be? What would I be? What would I be? What would I be? What would I be? What would I be? What would I do? Right? So if I was my own manager and I had all the time in the world, what would I do? That was covered in the last episode. In this episode, we're covering the over optimizer. The question you're going to ask is if I was optimizing only for X, what would I do? As it turns out, this is a very valuable question to be able to explore both for yourself and in understanding the motivation. At the end of the day, you may find yourself bringing yourijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijij for example, limited control, this messy output. But what if I told you that's not how website builders work today? Specifically, you could have a node-based builder that lets you add full stack JavaScript code to any site. With Wix Studio, you can spend your time on the things that matter, spend less time on fiddly UI coding, hosting, and security, and more on the things that matter to your business or your client's business, like the custom logic and the functionality that you build. Develop in your preferred coding environment using VS Code as an online IDE, or you can develop locally like you always have through a GitHub integration. Either way, with Wix Studio, you're deploying in a click. Extend and replace hundreds of powerful business solutions and custom-built features with APIs and integrations. And when you need to speed things up, Wix Studio's AI assistant is on hand to generate tailored code snippets, troubleshoot bugs, and retrieve product answers in seconds. All of that is neatly wrapped up in an automatically maintained infrastructure for total peace of mind. Work in a developer-first ecosystem. Head over to wixstudio.com. That's W-I-X studio.com. Thanks again to Wix for sponsoring today's episode of Developer Team. What would I do if I was optimizing only, only for X? This is the key question for the persona that we're talking about today. What would I do if I was optimizing only for X? Now, I want you to think about this. How do we understand the importance of optimizing only for X? How do we understand our behaviors? How do we understand even our own behaviors? In most cases, behaviors are essentially described, and this is just basic behavior science, right? They are essentially described as incentives and disincentives, or they're described by the incentives and the disincentives. In other words, we need a reason. We need a reason for doing what we do. Now, there are multiple incentives and disincentives. There are multiple incentives and disincentives in any given situation, and those incentives, they tend to interact. And so our decision in a given moment is a balance across many different things. Usually, we're not just thinking in a single, kind of singular way about a single incentive. This persona, however, will allow you to think in that single incentive. So, for example, let's imagine that your primary incentive is you want a promotion. That is the only thing you're optimizing for. It's your whole goal. It's your whole purpose in life. Okay. So you would do anything that it takes to get that promotion. Perhaps you would even lie to get the promotion, right? Now this, again, understand that this is a thought experiment. We're not suggesting that you go out and lie in order to get a promotion, but understand that you're optimizing for X. So, for example, let's imagine that you're optimizing for Y. So, for example, let's imagine that you're optimizing for Y. So, for example, let's imagine that the incentive to be truthful is not present in this thought experiment, right? The incentive to be honest is not here. And so if you wanted to get the promotion, you would lie in order to get the promotion because you don't have an incentive to tell the truth. And you might be thinking, okay, well, I'm not going to do that. I'm not going to, you know, set aside all of my values. For example, I have an incentive to maintain my values because it gives me a sense of identity and it gives me a sense of purpose in life. Remember, the goal of this podcast is to help you find clarity, perspective, and purpose in your career. So certainly I'm not telling you to set those things aside at all. Instead, try to imagine why the incentive that you're optimizing for, why would you be led to lie? Or perhaps more tactically, what would you lie about? Perhaps there are certain numbers that you are trying to prove you right? You want to have certain performance numbers or, you know, some kind of a metric that you care about that, you know, your boss cares about. It may be the very first time that you've ever realized that those metrics being at a certain place would give you an upper hand in trying to seek a promotion. Think about this for a second. If you're optimizing for the promotion, you might lie in order to get the promotion. What are you going to lie about? Well, you're going to lie about your performance metrics. Why do you need to lie? Now, this is the interesting part, okay? As you begin to understand this kind of perspective of how you can optimize for something, you can start to uncover gaps that may have otherwise gone unnoticed. You may need to lie about your performance information because you're not performing up to the degree that your boss would require in order for you to get the promotion. So now you can revert back to the previous persona that we've talked about, the manager who has plenty of time, to talk about that gap. Okay, what is it that's causing that gap? Maybe you're in too many meetings. Maybe you feel like the work that's getting assigned to you, you don't really have the skill set that you need in order to complete that work. And so your real ask for your boss might be, can we consolidate some of the meetings so that I have the time to meet the performance expectations that you want me to meet? Or your ask might be, I really need to level up in these particular areas or perhaps shift my focus to tasks that are in a different area that I do have expertise in. Which one of those do you think would be better? Now, if you notice, this is a conclusion that you've come to by way of two different tasks. So you're going to have to different personas interacting. Okay, the first persona is, what are you optimizing for? And ruthlessly optimizing for that. Going against your personal values even. And then backing out of that and wondering, okay, if I needed to do that in order to get that thing, then what is the version of that that retains my personal values that I'm willing to actually take a step towards? In this case, we said, you're going to lie about some performance metrics. Well, instead of lying about those, why not try to improve those performance metrics? Then you don't have to lie, but you're also meeting the gap that you need to, to both optimize for that outcome and retain your integrity. Once you've identified the gap, then you can revert back to, okay, now what do you need from me in order to make this happen? Your manager may have the agency, for example, to get you the training that you need. Or to talk to the relevant stakeholders to shift the meeting schedule around. They may have more sway than you do on that particular topic. But that may be the thing that's holding you back from achieving the thing that you care about. Now, we mentioned that this could be an insightful persona to adopt to understand other people. And it's for basically the same reasons. Essentially, when you observe a behavior in a person, you may ask, why is that person doing that? Let's say, if you're a person who's doing something that you're not doing, then you're not doing that. You yourself are a manager and you're trying to understand, why is this engineer that's on my team who previously was engaged, why are they disengaging? What's happening? So you're going to participate in a variant of this optimizing, the over-optimizer or the ruthless optimizer. In this case, you're putting on the hat of the person that you're trying to understand their behavior. And you're using their behavior as the basis for this optimization. So I'm engaging in this behavior, this specific behavior, in order to optimize for X. Now, notice this is very similar to what we remember, balancing equations in algebra. Previously, we were looking at, okay, I want to optimize for X, therefore I need to do what? So I want to optimize for some outcome, like a promotion. So I need to do X. In this case, we're looking at, I'm doing X, right? In this specific example, we're saying that you're withdrawing or you're not participating as often in order to optimize for something. Optimize for, you know, insert variable here. Now, I would caution you to remember what we said about the idea that incentives can mix. You can have multiple incentives in any given situation, just because you have one idea for why this is happening. So you're going to optimize for X, for why this person might be optimizing, or what this person might be optimizing for. Doesn't mean they don't have multiple things going into that discussion, you know, multiple, like inputs, incentives, inputs. But in the vast majority of cases, if you were able to come up with, let's say, three or four different reasons why this person may be behaving this way, a lot of the time, we have a primary motivation in our behavior. In other words, even though we may have some competing incentives, usually there is one that is overriding the rest. So let's say, for example, in this case, you come to the conclusion that perhaps this person who is withdrawing and not engaging with the team as often, maybe they are trying to express a frustration, but they're also afraid of expressing it explicitly. So maybe they are withdrawing from participating with the team out of, frustration or disgust or some other emotion, and they want to respond because they disagree with the direction of the team they're withdrawing in order to send some kind of signal, right? A social signal that they disapprove of what's going on. So this might be a possible hypothesis that you use to understand another person's behavior. But you may also have a hypothesis that this person is just burnt out. They're tired. They have nothing particularly a disagreement with what's going on with the team. They're burnt out because they've been working too many nights and weekends. So the important thing to understand here is try to understand the context that you're evaluating this stuff under. The truth is, most of the time, there's going to be too many options for you to nail down unequivocally why somebody might be acting this way. This is one tool. One tool, that you can use to build your own empathy. Trying to understand the reasoning, trying to understand where this person is coming from. Doing this without judgment, right? Don't come into this with a presupposition of what you think this person is doing this thing for, what their incentive is, trying to prove that your incentive is right. Instead, try to view this through the lens of an objective observer, right? You're trying to understand their behavior, and the incentive that is leading them to that behavior, or the disincentive that's leading them to that behavior. Of course, this particular kind of persona that you're adopting, this is mostly for your own coaching. Remember, we're not talking about you trying to figure out the political landscape at your company necessarily. Instead, we're talking about you trying to coach yourself so you know how to approach these conversations with your co-workers in the future. In almost every case, though, if you're sitting back and doing this silently over in the corner, you are much more likely to get better information by just talking to the people that you're trying to evaluate, right? Trying to psychoanalyze somebody. Nobody is going to be particularly great at that. If you try to understand what people's behaviors are, and you talk to them, you're likely to get a much better picture of reality. If you only talk to them, and you take everything they say at face value, you're likely to get a much better picture of reality. That is one kind of distorted reality. And if you only trust your intuition, or you only trust your kind of armchair psychoanalysis that we're talking about doing here, then that's another kind of distortion of reality, right? The more angles you can get on the situation, the more accuracy you can build in understanding that person's motivations, understanding their incentives. Now, you're probably asking, like, why do I need to know what other people's incentives are? Why do I care about that? This seems a little bit invasive. And the truth is, understanding other people is a fundamental building block of a good career. Whether you are managing that person and trying to get out ahead of, for example, burnout, maybe they don't even realize that they are burnt out, and you have to recognize the signs of burnout yourself. Or if you're just trying to collaborate with another person better, and you want to understand, okay, what is this person trying to get out of this situation, right? How can I collaborate best with them so that I can make it a mutually beneficial situation? These are the reasons why you would want to understand other people's incentives so you can figure out how you can align with them in meaningful ways that are productive for both of you. Ultimately, this persona, the over-optimizer persona, allows you to simplify things into very gross models that have a lot of assumptions, you know, kind of, rough edges to start to approximate a picture of reality. That is the goal of adopting this hat. I'm very interested to hear about your experience as you start using these different techniques and adopting these coaching personas in your personal reflection. If you want to share your stories, please consider joining the DeveloperTea Discord community. It is 100% free, and we've committed to making it always free. That's developertea.com slash discord. Thanks again to today's sponsor, Wix. Your old bad memories of website builders, those are a thing of the past. Wix Studio's developer-first ecosystem allows you to spend less time on tedious tasks and more on the functionality that matters the most to you and your clients. You can develop online in a VS Code-based IDE, or you can use your normal tool set that you're used to developing locally using GitHub. Extend and replace a suite of powerful business solutions and ship faster with Wix Studio's AI Code Assistant. All of that's wrapped up into an automatically maintained infra for total peace of mind. Work in a developer-first ecosystem at wixstudio.com. That's W-I-X, W-I-X, studio.com, wixstudio.com. Thanks again to Wix for sponsoring today's episode of Developer Tea. Thanks so much for listening, and until next time, enjoy your tea.