Hey everyone and welcome to today's episode of Developer Team. My name is Jonathan Cottrell and my goal on this show is to help driven developers like you find clarity, perspective, and purpose in their careers. We've been doing this for over a decade, over 10 years we've been doing this, helping engineering leaders, engineering managers, mid-level engineers who want to become senior engineers. That is what this show is about. And in today's episode, we have a very special episode today, a first in a series of episodes. This series we're going to call the Career Growth Accelerator, the Career Growth Accelerator series. And this series is focused specifically on you in your mid-to-mid-20s. To senior level career especially, and certainly there are things that if you are a younger engineer, younger in your career, you can learn from, but we're going to focus on the kinds of hurdles that a senior engineer or a manager or even moving into the director and VP levels, what kinds of hurdles you're going to face in growing to the next spot in your career, right? And this may even apply to those of you who are thinking about becoming managers. You've thought about kind of jumping tracks, moving from the senior or principal manager, maybe you're recognizing or your manager is helping you realize that you have an opportunity to be a people leader. This series is for you, the Career Growth Accelerator series. We're going to focus on those problem areas, the hard questions, the things that are not obvious, the things that you're not going to get by just following the status quo. We're going to focus on tackling those hard problems in a way that is coherent, right? We're going to have coherent actions. We're going to actually have, you know, clarity on how to tackle those hard problems through specific actions. This is going to be a very practical series with exercises and things that you can, you know, sit down with your notebook, sit down with a trusted advisor and walk through some of these exercises. I hope you will stick around for this and I hope that if you have not yet, subscribed or maybe you have subscribed, but you haven't been listening regularly, that you'll listen through all of these episodes because I think this is some of the most, you know, powerfully packed content that I've created for this show in a long time. So I'm really excited to get into it. So this is the first episode of the Career Growth Accelerator. We're going to kind of treat this as an episode zero because what we're going to be doing today is setting up a prerequisite. We're going to talk about, the key kind of fundamental thing that you have to do in order to succeed in any of the rest of the Career Growth Accelerator, you know, exercises and, you know, problem solutions that we're going to talk about in upcoming episodes. In this episode, we're going to focus on something that's a little bit more introspective. If you've listened to this show before, you know that we're going to start with some kind of human aspect to this problem because most of our problems start, there, right? Most of our problems in our career start inside, start somewhere in our minds, somewhere deep inside in our psyche or, you know, something about ourselves is connected to the problems that we're facing. And so, especially for those of you who are trying to grow beyond some kind of failure or some kind of stagnation, right? That's who I'm really focused on. Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Some people are coming to this and you've been laid off or you've been on a job search for a long time. Maybe your current job has stagnated. Maybe you know that it's going to stagnate soon. And that stagnation is not just a result of, you know, happenstance. Right? That's the group that I really want to zone in on. in this episode because I think that that is kind of the perfect juncture for a lesson that all of us can learn, right? And this lesson is something that we have to learn over and over and over. And that is that we often get in our own way. We often get in our own way. And I want to demonstrate this to you through some kind of thought experiments, right? When I say we get in our own way, what I really mean is that our ego gets in the way. Our sense of self, our sense of pride, our sense of value and worth. We have a hard time thinking about our careers without attaching all of that personal baggage on top of it. And that's why I want to demonstrate this to you. And so we create meaning and we create connections that we trip over. Think about it like this. When you think about your career from a problem solving standpoint, it's very difficult for us to see the problem clearly if we are also attaching to that same problem a sense of our self-worth. In other words, let's say you got laid off. And a very hard question that you should be asking yourself right now is why? Why did I, of all the people that they could have laid off, why did they choose to lay me off? Now, for many people, the answer will probably have something to do with an organizational restructure. Very possibly that could be the case. In almost every circumstance that I've witnessed, that I've been a part of, there is another factor as to why those people were chosen and not another group of people. Not always. And sometimes it is genuinely a restructure. You know, somebody is being made redundant somehow, an entire department is being cut, and that person is not necessarily, you know, directly impacted. impacted because of something about their performance. But in many cases, not all, but in many cases, there is another underlying reason. There's another lesson to learn. Now, the difficulty is that if you were to only stick with the first narrative, if you only stuck with the narrative that this wasn't really about me, the reason that I was let go was not really about me. It was the restructure. It was a strategy. It was a budget that I didn't have control over. It was a crazy boss. It was somebody who didn't have their head on straight. All of these maneuvers, these reasons, all of them are pointing away from ourselves. Why? Why do we do this? At At At At At At At At Main reason that I've been able to identify in experiences that I've had with others is that when you start to dig into this question, people begin to protect their own worth. They protect their own value. They create justifications for how qualified they are at the job and how unqualified the other people are. Or they may go out of their way to explain all of the things that they did that were unseen at the company. But the truth is, all of that is unfortunately unhelpful. It may be descriptive and it may help the person feel a little bit better, but all it really serves to do is protect your ego. Protecting your ego is, as it turns out, one of the... The most dangerous ways to control your career. If you're thinking about your own self-worth and you're conflating the signal of reason I got laid off with my value as a human being, right? If you conflate those two things together, then you're very likely going to discount many of the valid reasons that you might have been laid off. And... And you're also very unlikely to grow from this circumstance. You're more likely to burn a bridge, for example, right? You're more likely to not have any meaningful skill acquisition coming out of this circumstance. Because the narrative that you are feeding yourself and when you talk to other friends or colleagues in the industry, the narrative that you're responding to them with... Is that actually, I'm very good. I'm really good at my job. Actually, I have a lot of skills. And these things may not necessarily be untrue, but they're not helpful in diagnosing your circumstance and becoming better out of it. And the whole point of this series is the career growth accelerator. Career growth accelerator. Not to recognize all of your accomplishments. On its own. But instead to help you move past the things that will trip you up. Right? This connection between your ego, between your self-worth, between your self-image, your esteem. All of these things that are connected to the way you see yourself in life. Versus problem solving in your career. And in your abilities. And your ability to move to the next step. So the fundamental break that you have to be able to make. And I'm going to give you a kind of mental thought experiment to help you break through this. Is disconnecting. Disconnecting your self-worth from your career aspirations. Disconnecting your self-worth from your career aspirations. Recognizing that the position that you hold. In your career. Is simply a fact. Okay. It's simply a fact. It has no bearing. On whether you're a valuable human. It has little bearing on reflecting your work ethic. It has little bearing on reflecting your morality. Your ability to succeed. More generally. Your kind of innate worth. And your innate capacity. Right? All of these things. If you can disconnect them from your career. You're going to be able to diagnose your career. And hopefully you can be more honest with yourself. Right? You can identify the places where you may have changes to make. Right? So that is ultimately where you want to end up. You want to end up in a place where you can comfortably identify adjustments that you need to make. Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? Right? this, right? And the phenomenon is, if you were to look at this situation from some distance, right? Let's say it was a friend or even an acquaintance, somebody that you have no real deep connection with, and they brought to you the same story, right? All the facts and details of the story, they're all the same, but it's just not you, right? You're only presented with this list of facts from a kind of an external perspective, right? And this goes back to one of the things that we do on this podcast, is finding clarity and perspective. If you were to look at this external situation and try to identify some kind of diagnostic approach, right? If you were to identify a root cause, if you were to kind of walk through, okay, what happened exactly, and why you versus the person, your peer, if you were able to walk through that as if it was someone else, then you don't have the opportunity to bring ego into the equation. This changes the way that we think. And even in this thought experiment version, the shift, the distancing, even if it's artificial, is meaningful. And we've talked about this on the show before, this ability to give yourself advice as if you were another person. And famously, one of the people that did this to great effect was Andy Gould. At Intel. If you want to learn more about that story, I'd encourage you to go look it up. It's been told in a handful of books. The short version is, he asked one of his colleagues what advice they would give to themselves if they were someone else. And the advice was very clear. Unfortunately, they were so attached originally to this other business unit that they couldn't see that advice for themselves until they took on this external persona, right? So someone giving them advice from the outside looking in who doesn't necessarily have all of the same attachments. This is the critical insight for you before you step through any of the rest of this series, right? The critical insight is that a lot of the insights that you might gain through any kind of coaching, a very significant number of them are likely available because that person is actively disregarding the ego, right? They don't necessarily need to make you feel better. They don't need to make you feel, you know, any more successful than you are. You're coming to them for career advice, right? So walk through this exercise, write down your recommendations, right? Another useful version of this is to discuss these problems with a colleague, right? Somebody else who's a trusted advisor to you and tell them what you're trying to do. Tell them that you're trying to avoid anything that you're not doing. You're not doing the right thing. You're not doing the right thing. At the same time, you may want to write down yourijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijijij It doesn't just have to be like a postmortem, what happened and why diagnostic of a past event. It can also be a diagnostic of what is holding you back from the next thing. Because our ego often gets in the way there as well. I know I'm good enough for this promotion, right? I know that I've put in the hard work for this. It may have nothing to do with your skill. And so you're pushing and pushing and pushing, trying to build your skills. But really the path to growth has nothing to do with that. But because your ego has gotten in the way, you believe that as long as I can become worthy of this promotion, then I will get it. As long as I become worthy of this growth path, then I will get it. But that may have absolutely nothing to do with why you haven't gotten that promotion. And so stepping outside of yourself and recognizing, hey, it's not that next book. It's not that. It's not that next tutorial. It's not that next project lead role. It's not the next status meeting update that you give. None of those things are really the thing that's going to move the needle. The biggest thing is fill in the blank, right? Some strategic move that the company needs to make, right? That may have a totally different path of growth for you if you're not focused on your ego, but instead you're focused on the real problem at hand. Thank you so much. Thanks for listening to this episode. I hope you enjoyed this first episode in our career growth accelerator series. If you enjoyed this, please do me a couple of favors here that I'm asking for at the end of the year. One, share this with somebody that you think needs it, right? Not just somebody that you think will like it, but somebody that you think will be improved by this advice. Someone that struggles with trying to find a way forward in their career. Maybe part of the reason is because they can't seem to get past it. They can't seem to get past the ego aspect of this. If you're listening to this right now and your friend sent this to you, maybe your friend is a good person to do that exercise with, right? They're trying to help you in your career as well. So that's the first request is to share this with somebody that you think needs it or that will need the upcoming career growth accelerator episodes that we're going to put out. The next thing I'm going to ask you to do is turn on your notifications and your downloads of Developer Tea. Why? There's a couple of reasons. One, this helps iTunes recognize that we still have listeners of the show when the episode first drops. This is important for iTunes algorithms. It's important so that other people can find the show. It's important that we continue to have this kind of automatic delivery because we do deliver a lot of episodes, at least one a week. We're probably going to pick up the pace a little bit on that. And move back to like a two week schedule. Still not totally decided on that. So having those automatic updates, if you have the space on your phone, if you don't have the notifications enabled on your phone for that. And then finally, reviews and ratings in iTunes are hugely helpful, of course. And now we are on YouTube as well. Go and subscribe if you'd like to see this in a video format. You can put it on YouTube and listen to it on your computer in the background or whatever you want to do. We have both the audio only version as well as the video version in YouTube. Thank you so much for listening. And until next time, enjoy your tea.