Tuesday, Feb 8, 2022 • 16min
Two Shifts to Change Our Working Mindset from Static to Dynamic
Play Episode
The world around us isn't static, but our brain processes as if it is.
In this episode we talk about subtle shifts to help break that mold for the most important interactions we have in the world.
Read more
Talking about
Speakers
(1)
Jonathan Cutrell
Transcript
Verified
Jonathan Cutrell
00:00
It's easy to create in our minds a false stability, a fact that remains static forever. And the truth is that most things are changing, most things are in flux, they're at balance. Very few things are absolute and reliable. Now, this isn't just a philosophical discussion, a philosophical debate. This is something that can have practical impact on how you go about your day to day, how you make decisions, how you treat other people.
Share
00:45
In today's episode, I want to discuss two specific ways, specific mindset shifts that you can make to make you more mindful and aware of the dynamic nature of your coworkers and of the goals that you're setting.
Share
01:03
My name is Jonathan Cottrell, you're listening to Developer Tea. My goal on this show is to help driven developers like you find clarity, perspective and purpose in their
careers
.Share
01:13
I'm gonna talk about these two mindset shifts. There's subtle things to help you recognize that your goals and your coworkers are not simple. That we live in a complex world and, while some aspects of it might be simple, you can zoom in on something and understand the kind of defining factors and principles that are guiding that particular specific thing.
Share
01:41
When you're looking at big pictures, like setting goals, especially big goals for your life, or when you're looking at the whole picture of who another human being is, these are very complex subjects. More importantly, they are as dynamic as as they can possibly be. But our brain doesn't really process dynamic truth very easily.
Share
02:07
In other words, when we imagine a person in our minds, you've probably done this before, you recall a few key facts about that person. You might recall your first interaction with him or maybe your most recent interaction with themm or you might recall a very memorable specific interaction with that person.
Share
02:30
Specifically, if you are recalling something that was, you know, a really intense emotional experience with this person or your most recent experience, that kind of recall is called the peak-end theory, the idea that these are the memories that stick out. But it's not just memories that we're trying to bring up. We're trying to understand who this person is, but we substitute who this person is with some specific keystone points that we know about them.
Share
03:02
So this is the first subtle shift that I want you to make. I want you to think about your memories with a person as just exactly what it is: your memories with that person. And think about who that person is in terms of their values, and in in these more abstract ways of thinking. How do they interact with the world?
Share
03:28
And the reason for this is because we can get stuck in kind of over evaluating or over indexing on a specific memory about a person and allow that to represent who they are as a human being indefinitely for us. This is obviously not an accurate picture of the dynamic reality of who they are as a person.
Share
03:53
Now, hopefully you're hearing this and you're saying, well we can't really rely on anything about a person in that case, because people's values change people's interests change, they're kind of abstract things, those can also change. And that's true, we should be paying attention to that reality just as much as any other. But we're not trying to be perfectly accurate in our representation of understanding who a person is, we're trying to be able to have a good relationship with that person.
Share
04:24
And so the shift isn't just a redefining moment for you to recognize all of the realities about a person. Instead, it's a different way of thinking about other people rather than thinking about them in terms of what you remember about them, you begin to accept that those people are changing. That in fact to know them, you have to go with them.
Share
04:52
You have to understand them through inquiry, through curiosity, through interaction. This helps us understand how a relationship can actually develop. It helps us understand the necessity, the importance of connecting with people on a regular basis.
Share
05:11
And it may also help us let go of a sense of control and focus on a factor of growth for the relationship. Let's say you're a manager, a factor of growth for someone who is a report of yours. For example, you may have known them since they were a junior engineer, and now they're growing, they're changing. Maybe they have become a senior engineer, or maybe they want to become a manager themselves.
Share
05:38
Or maybe they don't want to be an engineer anymore at all. Maybe they want to move to a totally different career, a career path, maybe they want to become a product manager, for example. Your interactions with this report or with uh you know, any other co-worker - and your interactions with any people at all for that matter, anybody that you maintain a relationship with.
Share
06:02
Are going to be much more enriching both for you and for that person if you set aside this lens, the static definition of who you believe they are based on previous experiences and instead open up to that curious mindset. Open up to the idea that maybe they're a little bit different than the last time you talked to them.
Share
06:25
Now, that doesn't mean that you dispose of all of your memories and act like that stuff never happened. Even if I was trying to tell you to do that, it wouldn't be possible. But instead of allowing those memories to be your entire picture of what you think or what you believe about a person, you adjust that you use your memories as context, and you use this curiosity as a future focused lens with that context in mind.
Share
06:55
The difficult thing to process in all of this is that some things about people don't change as often as others, but we're really bad at keeping track of which of those things are static and which things will actually change. So the probably better heuristic for you to adopt is that people are always growing.
Share
07:17
We're gonna take a quick break and then we're gonna come back and talk about one other mindset shift that you can adopt to accept and affirm this idea that the world around you is simply not static.
Share
Break
Jonathan Cutrell
08:54
The world around you is not static, even though it would be nice for our brains if it was. And in fact, you can think about it kind of like this: our brains are operating in sort of a cashing mechanism. We experience something and we update our definition of that thing during those experiences, but then it's really hard to keep those definitions updated.
Share
09:20
For some of the same reasons why caches exist, it's a really high load to try to evaluate everything all the time. And so instead we're evaluating the things that are closest to us. We're evaluating the experiences that are closest to us. Now, it would be debilitating for me to ask you to stop doing this. Of course we need this kind of performance optimization, for lack of a better word, in order to operate in our day to day.
Share
09:51
Otherwise, we'd constantly be analyzing the world and trying to keep everything up to date perfectly. We don't really have a good reason to do that. But if we understand it, then we can find ways of - for lack of a better term - busting that cash. You can figure out a way to more manually, specifically evaluate something.
Share
10:15
Now this kind of applies in our next subtle shift that I want to help you understand in terms of the world not being static, and that is in setting our goals. Specifically around the idea that our lives are one long journey up the hill of improvement, that we have, every kind of step that we take in our career is an improvement from the last place that we were as a human being. That everything that we're doing is intended to be making things better.
Share
10:49
Now, the problem with this perception is that there's a single kind of pathway towards improvement that when we're young, we're kind of walking that pathway upwards and that we want to end at some point, you know, some arbitrary point on that path at the best version of ourselves. and then we're done.
Share
11:10
And when we set our goals, we imagine that we are somehow purely incremental on that improvement, and everything that we've done so far, we kind of retain. And this mindset can cause a sense of anxiety that we're always climbing a ladder, that we always need to be improving and that if we don't feel the drive to improve, that there's something somehow wrong.
Share
11:41
The truth is that virtually every change we make in our lives, every goal we set is just that: a goal, a change. And that improvement is contextual. Improvement is essentially up to you. Yes, there are some things that we all share in common. No one wants to be without shelter or food, for example, and the goal of this episode is not to try to parse out which things are shared in common, that we can kind of improved for humankind versus the individual goals that we set.
Share
12:21
But most of the goals, most of the things that we are doing in our
careers
are about choosing and what I want you to get a hold of for this subtle shift in thinking is that with every choice you make, you are choosing against something as well.Share
12:42
I want you to start asking yourself: what am I losing? What am I giving up? What is the downside to this decision? And sometimes the downside is small. Sometimes the adjustment is simple. But for big goals for things that are significant changes in our lives, we often are trying to avoid thinking about the downside.
Share
13:11
This is a kind of an exercise in acceptance that with every major improvement that we make, there might be something that we're giving up, that we're losing. Being aware of these decisions, being able to accept them, helps us avoid the magical thinking that there's one right path for us, that all of our decisions should be carrying us on that path, that we have to improve with every decision we make.
Share
13:44
Instead, we can start to adopt the mindset that our decisions are experiments. That our decisions are going to change our lives in one way or another. And if you imagine a series of dials, were kind of turning those dials, we turn one up, and we turned a different one down.
Share
14:06
The important thing is to not try to focus on finding universally accepted improvements in our lives, but instead to be really clear about why we're making decisions, why we're going a certain path. What we're really optimizing for, what is it that we're shooting for? What do we want?
Share
14:28
By setting our goals this way, we're asking ourselves not only what do I want - out of my life, out of my career, out of my relationships; but also, what do I not want? What do I want less of? What do I want to give up? What am I willing to not have so that I can have something else?
Share
14:49
This way of thinking will give you not only a sense of calm, a sense of peace when you make a decision and you decide that perhaps you should have made a different one for what you care about in your life. But it will also give you a better perspective on why other people are making the decisions that they're making.
Share
15:07
Rather than trying to proselytize and make everybody kind of conform to what you're doing to improve, you can be more permissive and understanding and once again, going back to the first point that we made in this episode, adopt a mindset of curiosity. Ultimately, most improvements that you make in your life most of that
self-improvement
journey that you're on it's contextual to you.Share
15:34
Thanks so much for listening to today's episode of Developer Tea. Thank you again to today's sponsor, Cord.
Share
Break
Jonathan Cutrell
16:11
Thanks so much for listening to today's episode. If you enjoyed this discussion and you'd like to talk about more subtle shifts in your mindset and your
awareness
of the dynamic world around you, then I'd love to talk with you about it in our Developer Tea Discord
Community. You can join that by heading over to developertea. com/discord
. That's 100% free and always will be for the listeners of the show. Thanks so much for listening and until next time, enjoy your tea.Share
Add podcast
🇮🇹 Made with love & passion in Italy. 🌎 Enjoyed everywhere
Build n. 1.38.1
Jonathan Cutrell