In today's episode, I hope to give you an opportunity to build your confidence. Whether you are a junior engineer or a seasoned manager or another kind of engineering leader, there are plenty of reasons that you can be confident in your work. And this applies to everyone, regardless of your actual experience or your personal accomplishments, because what we're talking about in today's episode is your confidence as it relates to your interactions with other people. My name is Jonathan Cutrelli, listening to Developer Tea. My goal on the show is to help driven developers. Like you find clarity, perspective and purpose in their careers. Perspective is what this entire episode is about. Perspective. In the book, You Have More Influence Than You Think, Vanessa Bonds highlights a series of studies at the beginning of the book, talking about the spotlight effect and the reverse spotlight effect. The basic idea is that we tend to misjudge how much other people are paying attention to us. And this happens in two ways. First, we overestimate how much people are paying attention to us when we are self-aware or self-conscious of something that we think is negative. But on the flip side, when we're not paying attention, when we are not feeling self-conscious, people tend to notice us more than we estimate that they do. And so this outlines an important reality that we are misjudging how much other people are taking notice of us. But in two ways. The first is in overestimating how much they may be seeing our mistakes. This kind of translates to the kind of thing that we might worry about in our work. We might think that people are looking at our code and finding a particular flaw. Or maybe you just ended a presentation and you felt like you rushed through it. Because you feel that way, you imagine that other people are feeling the same way. We transfer what we think about ourselves. We transfer what we think about ourselves in that moment to other people. Now the interesting thing is most of the time we're not really thinking much about ourselves. We're not really paying attention to the things that we do, for example, habitually. And once again, we transfer this inattention to other people. And so the things that we do habitually may actually be making an impact that we're not recognizing. We're not taking advantage of. Here's what I want you to take away from this finding. From this spotlight. And anti-spotlight effect. It makes more sense for us to focus on the things that we do consistently. We have more influence over people and we have more leverage over ourselves when we focus on those things. Here's the important thing to take away. When you find yourself in a situation where you did just end that meeting and you rushed through the presentation. Or you did have a bad code review or a moment where you felt vulnerable. Realize one very important truth. What you do next is just as important to everyone around you as that moment was. People are observing you in essentially the same manner. I'll even stretch it and say what you do next is even more important than whatever you did before. Most people do not have the energy or the capacity to focus on whatever it is that you did yesterday or the day before. They're noticing what's happening now. How are you doing? How are you doing? How are you doing? How are you doing? How are you doing? How are you doing? How are you interacting with them? How are you performing? What are the things that you're saying and doing in the present situation? Focus on looking at now and future. And don't overweight any one given mistake. We all make mistakes. And people are looking less at your mistakes and more at your day-to-day than you think they are. Thank you for listening to Developer Tea. If you enjoyed this episode, if you don't want to miss out on future episodes like this one, click here to click here to click here to click here to click here to click here to click here to click here to click here to click here to click here to click here to click here to click here to click here to click here to click here to click here to click here to click here to click here to click here to click here to click here to click here to click here to click here to click here to click here to click here to click here to click here to click here to click here to click here to click here to click here to click here to click here to click here to click here to click here to click here to click here to click here to click here to click here to click here to click here to click here to click here to click here to click here to click here to click here to click here to click here to click here to click here to click here to click here to click here to click here to click here to click here to click here to click here to click here to click here to click here to click here to click here to click here to click here Thanks so much for listening, and until next time, enjoy your tea.