Shaping Design Careers, featuring Jason Mesut

Speaker A: Love this podcast. Support this show through the ACAST supporter feature. It's up to you how much you give and there's no regular commitment. Just click the link in the show description to support now. UX Cake is all about developing the layers you need to be more effective in your work and to be happy and fulfilled in your career. I'm your host, Leigh Allen Arredondo, and I'm a UX leader and leadership coach. Hello and thank you so much for joining me on UX Cake. Today we are talking about shaping, uh, our careers and our teams in a more holistic way. Today I'm joined by my friend and colleague Jason Massoud, who is a design strategist and coach and excitingly the author of the upcoming book Shaping Design. You, you may have read Jason's work in Medium and LinkedIn and. Or you may have seen him talk at conferences around the world. So I'm very excited about our conversation today. Jason, thank you so much for joining me.

Speaker B: It's amazing to be here. I'm really looking forward to it.

Speaker A: Um, you actually have a fairly large body of work out in the world that people can find. You included for me a video of a talk that you did, which I hadn't seen before. I'm really glad that, that you sent that. A talk that you. At a conference, I think, 2019, that sort of gives a little bit about the origin story of how you came to this more holistic view, the importance of. A more holistic view of, of our own careers for leaders of teams, a more holistic view of the people on their team. And so I wanted to talk just a little bit about kind of your origin story, the importance of aligning what you're doing in your work with what is actually most important to you as a person and your whole self and your whole life. And I think that this happens for a lot of people at some point in their career. Although I will say I've been noticing. I feel like I've been noticing this desire for people to, uh, connect more meaning to their work across industries actually since the pandemic. I, and I don't know if there is, uh, an actual correlation certainly.

Speaker B: And I was, I was noticing it even before I, I think it was maybe rising generally prior to that. But that just shook things up for people. And I think maybe there's aspects of trauma that we've been going through that just then shine lights on other things that weren't quite right for us. So I've been quite a bit of that and it's I think it's exacerbated at the moment when I felt. Feel like. I feel like there was a. There was. People felt a little bit more empowered that they were able to maybe have some more agency over their. Their new Directions. And then just more recently with layoffs and AI stuff and other things like that. I think that that's been crushed Little people m. Are feeling less. Less so. So yeah, it's interesting that that's happening and I think we're going through a different wave of that.

Speaker A: Yeah, I. It's interesting that you mention trauma. There has been more discussion about work trauma and that is actually what I felt like I went through in 2019 and it sounds like that was part of the ins instigation for your deeper work that has led to this shaping conversation. I'm curious if you want to maybe expand on that at all.

Speaker B: Well, yeah, so I m mean, it's a story I've told a few times, but I mean in some ways I feel like it's a bit petty. But what, what kind of happened is I uh, was having a pretty good relationship with it, with a client that I had and they were under some scrutiny through an external management consultancy that was auditing them and checking things out and I wanted to help them. And I was coming to the end of my. My contract with. With them and I was put into a really difficult situation and a kind of quite aggressive meeting situation and they shortened my time and everything else. And so the tone of that meeting changed for me and I felt like I had to deliver things in such a way that would like super clear and crisp and a little bit less Jason, a little bit less human than maybe what was before. And I felt afterwards I felt right, okay, they put me in an awful situation. I told them where it was at and it wasn't really clear whether they were going to extend or not. They were playing silly mind games with me. Well, my immediate client was. And, and then the next day I was at a, uh, conference and I was checking my emails every so often and I. And I was just watching one of the talks at Leading Design Conference actually and checked my emails. I got this whole email from one of my clients and it just listed out a whole bunch of things that just. Whoa. Is that what you got from this negative? Yeah. Yeah, but you're unprofessional. You were really unclear and all these things. I was like, this is like the opposite of what I thought I was in that situation. What's going on here? It's like a Mismatch. And it was very much hit straight into my value system.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Someone thought that that was like the opposite of the way I wanted to be seen or be experienced. And this email really hit me in my value system and challenged some things which I thought people understood about me around my care and attention to things and trying. Trying to be clear. I'm not always clear up front but I'd spent a lot of time kind of crafting this thing. Shared it in the thoughts, everything and yeah, I uh, I was just. This one email just throw me into pieces and it was just silly. I thought it was silly. And then later that night I was chatting with some fellow kind and they were just like no, you can't work with this person. And I was like wait, what? I've never quit a client before. That's.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker B: What you. What are you telling me? Like that. That relationship shot or he's an abusive relationship. And I was like I know I cried that night. I was in really bad trauma around it and it triggered a. It triggered a breakdown for me and because I. Everything that I thought I'd been building up for the past 20 years had suddenly been shattered and what I felt was. And it was silly. It was silly little things and internalize it and thought well what does this mean for me? And um. Yeah, it triggered a lot of self discovery work and me getting a coach myself. In fact Julia Whitney who was the talk that I was watching just before I got that email because I was like right, I need help, help me. And that triggered my uh, ultimate kind of coaching journey myself and becoming a coach. And was sort of around the time when I was uh, starting to run these workshops around my other work as well. So it was like this weird kind of connection of all these events. But it's, it's. I feel like I'm still recovering from that in many ways. M. What happened there. I was. I was never able to kind of reconcile it with him. He just didn't respond to me afterwards to do it. But I essentially I went in after the. The weekend and said I have to, we have to. I have to end this. This contract. And got walked out of the building. Everything. It was wow. Um, and all these great people that I built relationships were like what. What happened there? I couldn't tell them.

Speaker A: Yeah, I think that story will definitely resonate with a lot of people. It resonates a lot with me and the situation I had in a almost toxically misaligned role that I had that I should have left had I been more keyed into my own values. I think it uh, it wouldn't have lasted as long as it had and it would have ended differently because when you're in a situation like that, you're reacting out of emotion. And that interesting also led to my own coaching journey. I hired a coach and became a coach. So there's a lot of resonance there. Coming back around to this idea of how do we define ourselves in our career. The, the idea of how do I describe myself, how do I think of myself, how do I define me as a unique designer, let's say my skills, my skill set, both hard and soft, my, my leadership skills. And I think there's a typical approach to how we define ourselves. I may entry level designer, mid level designer, senior designer, principal designer, uh, design manager, design director. So there's these roles that are in a career ladder let's say then there might be some skills matrices or wheel alignment where we're as a team leader, as an individual you might identify where you have, are high in certain skills and where you have room for growth. And those tools are, are helpful. Those are actually necessary, but they're not enough. Right. And I think that is a lot of what you're talking about. So I'd love to hear you talk about this idea of an approach to how an individual or team leader can frame their, their career or themselves in a more holistic way.

Speaker B: Yeah, okay. No, brilliant. Uh, and, and thanks for sharing that your experience. I feel closer to you now. We were synchronized on the time and everything I guess, I guess one way to look at it is so know what it was but like maybe back and just a little bit of origin story on, on the work related to it is I think maybe it was about 2005, I was, I was in a meetup and someone had said, asked a question as going who are our heroes? Who do we look up to? And at the time there, there wasn't as many kind of thought leaders in our space and the particular people that were very prominent, they weren't appealing to me as people to look up to in certain UX space as opposed to maybe wider industrial design space where I originally studied. And I was curious around that. I was like going to go what makes a good user experience person. So I did some research around that with various people and I got a whole bunch of different skills from and qualities of different individuals and most of them were these softer sides, these interrelational sides of things of people. And so I developed a poster around this and took it to a conference and uh, kind of shared it with people. And people were fascinated by like this way of unpicking these different aspects of who we were as designers I suppose rather than fully holistically ourselves. But in our roles, designers be the technical skills and practices and disciplines or fields that we're. Many of which we consider under this umbrella of UX or whatever we call it these days. There was all these other things that kind of were part of who we are and we all know all the people that I got to be assessed and assessed by others were just very different across these. No one was the same. And I was like curious about that. So.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker B: That was just. I just got a little bit interested in mapping these different, different types of skills, different types of capabilities, different types of qualities of, of self as a designer just to think about well how are we different? And so a lot of the time we did, even back then we did have these kind of. These frameworks, these kind of essentially a matrix. Mhm. These things were hard to grok and hard to process especially as a predominantly visual designer mindset. And so I just kind of like was just trying to just try to distill it and put these into these what I called imperfect visual frameworks. Like taxonomy wasn't perfect but it's just like enough to. To prompt things and people just really gravitated towards these, these pictures of these slides and these different shapes and stuff. And so I started running them with, with people at conferences and then in corporate organizations and, and then, and then started writing about them. But essentially I would just take people through a kind of like a pretty much a set process of using different kind of visual frameworks to, to look at yourself it through lots of different lenses. So whether what your career history was in an almost like what you call a career timeline.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Uh, which is more of a like a kind of I guess a customer journey map of your life.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: In some ways. Right. And curiously I've come up with this thing. I thought I was smart and clever and actually Julia had given it to me when I had this breakdown. I was like oh, this is serendipitous. This is a real thing. And another one she gave me which is a wheel of life which is common in coaching, coactive coaching specifically where you have. You missed out different areas of life and how happy you are. But I had things around the specific fields of practice, these kind of softer skills, debatable terminology I know. But like qualities and values and lots of different things and just trying to give a Whole bunch of like a, a mix of different lenses to start looking at yourself through. And what was just super interesting because we would get people to do them by themselves and put them up. Um, looking at these different shapes, no one was ever the same.

Speaker A: Mhm. Right, sure.

Speaker B: And of course, like you're human, you're different and. But it sounds simple and obvious, but like it is a truth. And yet we treat each other as if we're, you know, almost cookie cutters in different ways.

Speaker A: Interchangeable.

Speaker B: Exactly.

Speaker A: Resources. Yeah.

Speaker B: And I have a massive problem with this, like on a whole other level around design process and how we may have dehumanized it a bit too far by assuming that we just put the same type of person, same class of person, the same junior designer or mid designer, staff designer, whatever, just get another one, put them on the same thing with the same process, same time limit and um, output, same. I mean that's just not how it works at all, unfortunately. Maybe how we might sell it to other people just to give confidence and certainty. But that's not how design works in my experience. And I'll challenge it.

Speaker A: But there's a certain amount of labeling that has to happen. Right. Just to. So people will understand. Because what we do is already fairly misunderstood.

Speaker B: You're absolutely right. I mean there's a, there's a tension there. Right. Because in some ways it's helpful to some extent to have a handle on what type of thing. Are you more of a researcher or are you a uh, product designer or service designer or UI or UX designer? But what then, then when you start digging into those things, like what, what do you really mean by those? And, and yes, they might be sort of good archetypes and handles for someone who's more this way than that way. But ultimately you could get someone who's a, a service designer with a similar profile, similar to someone who's a ui, UX designer. What's that all about?

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker B: And the roles and the capability maps we might. Well, capability descriptions or job descriptions we might have for someone. List all these things as bullet points is almost at the same level of hierarchy. Oh, uh, no. Surely this thing is m more important for this role than this one. And we don't present that. So uh, yeah, I was just curious. So really the workshops were an opportunity for people to start looking at themselves through these different lenses and then to use that as a basis to start projecting directions of where they might. When you do it with a, with a team situation, you can start to analyze the gaps and the differences m all self reflection. You can like gap, gap and analyze it all. But also a lot of people come to me to run these workshops as like a team building thing. How can we understand each other better? And it's a level of maybe decoding some of the complexity that we've built up around ourselves and maybe just through these different lenses. And again this is similar to my strategy works sometimes, sometimes I'm applying like a framework or model just to help me see the problem differently and just to highlight a particular thing. And it's essentially doing that holding different type of mirrors up or lenses, whatever the metaphor is appropriate and that. Yeah. So I believe it helps to start to turn the cogs in people's minds around who they are and the broad ranges of what that might mean.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker B: And ultimately that might encourage them to think about how they want to change that view of themselves in the future if they do want to.

Speaker A: Yeah. It's a. I uh, think it's a fantastic approach and it gives it a container for. A lot of folks have difficulty identifying where they want to grow or what they want to learn because it's. There's so many things. And um, I work with people a lot on identifying use using certain sort of tools to identify what would be most impactful now and what are more long term kind of goals for growth, personal growth and development and career growth and development. But, but I think the things that you're talking about, they're super helpful in a team environment. But, but from an individual perspective as well, identifying m not only where you want to grow and develop, but what kind of company you want to work for, what environment you want to work within, what kind of people you want to work with and what kind of change do you want to make. I'm curious. So you, you do a lot of coaching and um, you've mentioned that you, you work with, you do these processes with folks that you, that you coach. Are, are people coming to you? What are sort of uh, the primary problems presented? Like why are they going through this work?

Speaker B: Yeah, it, it's interesting and has. There's an interesting tension for me. I think I've shared it with you separately. But in my coaching practice I don't use the tools as much. It's. It's like I have a less of a set process. So I, when I first started out I might start with. I used to start with the career timeline and a wheel of life because that's what Julia did to me.

Speaker A: And uh. Right.

Speaker B: And it was helpful for me so that's like. It was comfort, comforting to get a good read on someone. But I stopped doing it because. Because. Yeah, because people came with different problems or different presentations. Right?

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: So, yeah, they're probably the COVID me. Sometimes they are like, I want to get a job. I want to get a new job, or I want to leave this one. Or I'm struggling with what kind of leader I want to be, or I've. I've lost the love I once had for this and I want to see if I can rekindle it. M. And.

Speaker A: Or something different. I get that a lot too. Like.

Speaker B: Yeah, exactly.

Speaker A: Should I be considering something else?

Speaker B: Yeah, they don't know. And it's. Or I just absolutely have to leave. Or I had someone. Right. I have to leave this work and get a new job with lots of more money and with lots more power and lots of these different things. And like, whoa, okay. And just straight after, he got his employer to pay for it. And I was like, whoa, okay. That was early on in my coaching experience. How do I handle this? And interestingly, that narrative completely changed with that person. But so the interesting thing about what you asked was around. Yeah. What did they present with? M. Because what they present with is not necessarily the thing.

Speaker A: That's right.

Speaker B: And so this is when the coaching work often is about deepening and understanding the stuff behind that.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And that's where me running one of these workshops won't necessarily achieve that. It might start to uncover. But these people won't necessarily share, especially in a kind of team environment. Different. And I think the difficulty with the work is presented. And lots of people have taken my tools from these medium articles I've written and then just done them. Some of these tools will not work for some people. Some of them. People have different reactions to the different tools in the set. So I do a whole bunch. Way too many probably some of the time. But then people often read the tools as well. You just do the tool and you just fill out the boxes and that's it. No, not at all. All it is is a prop. All it is is like a prop for discussion. It's a probe.

Speaker A: If.

Speaker B: If I do this career timeline, it's like this or this wheel of life or one of the other tools that I. I have developed. The interesting stuff comes when you go. You ask questions around it. Reflective questions. What does this mean? How accurate is it? What do other people think of me? What does this mean to me? Like, where would I want to change this? What happened here? What. What made me this way all these different questions that the bigger work is more reflective practice so people might pick up the tools, see the media article, go cool. I think that's a shape and it looks cool. Do it for team or whatever. And, and some people uh, are smart enough that they will just have really good conversations about what this might mean and a lot of people will be like, so what does I just did this. It's just a shape and it's, it's not very accurate because I did it by myself and all these kind of things I go yeah, totally. It's, don't treat it that way. You shouldn't be promoted or not as a result of filling out some charts.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker B: But what did it, what did it illuminate for you is the start of an inquiry around how you might develop or, or be reassured or think differently about your future.

Speaker A: Mhm. Yeah. I wonder if it's, this might be a good time to talk about the importance of self reflection and examining looking at your whole self. Like you mentioned in a workshop setting it's, it's different. In the leadership workshops that I do, we always start with clarifying your values and what's most important for you. What's your purpose? What gives us meaning? Right. What is your why? Why is being this kind of leader like what kind of leader do you want to be? Why is that important? What is it you're hoping to do or change or affect? Right. And those are, those are just really important starting like foundational questions and exploration to, to happen.

Speaker B: Really hard questions though was that they're really hard questions to have a confident view on though. So I mean I totally agree but it's an interesting, I imagine it, the value would be iterative processes of asking those questions again and again and again

Speaker A: because it is iterative. You're right. And, and actually I'll, I will add that is why I like having multi week courses while you and I are talking about yes, it's important to do this reflective work and someone can read your medium articles and soon someone can purchase your book and use these tools themselves. I, I, every person in the world has best intentions sometimes and then without any kind of a container for that like a course or a coach, um, or a workshop. Right. It doesn't, we somehow don't get around to it or we started and it doesn't, we don't incorporate it into our practice. Actually I think it's um, practice is maybe something worth talking about. How to incorporate what you learn into a practice.

Speaker B: Yes, I think that's a really good point. The container I think is valuable. It sometimes creates accountability, it creates the space because people struggle to shape that space for themselves. And so knowing that they're going to attend the course where they're going to have some time, usually the value more than anything else. People, uh, obviously they value the content and stuff but most of the time. But people go, oh, this has been so great to spend this much time on myself because you just, people just don't. And they don't, they don't recognize that it's important work for the benefit of others, not just you. And so yeah, the coach creates accountability because you want to make sure you do stuff in between and you're having that dialogue in session. A workshop, you paid for it or someone's paid for it and you're there and there's other people there and there's a lot of. Bit of. I think the pressure of. It's just. It is quite hard for some people. Some people will maybe be really good at getting into practice and just doing these different exercises themselves. I, uh, I haven't been. I mean occasionally when I've kind of really, really needed to. I've created something myself and spent the time but it's really, really quite difficult. And yeah, even I tried to do the, the year compass thing at the end of the year. It's quite an involved activity and it's,

Speaker A: it is, it takes. I uh, think I did something. I don't know if we did the same one. It was called the yearly Compass. I loved it, but it took two days. I was, I think I did it when I was quote unquote on vacation. Like I work for myself so I don't know what that means. I was just taking time off and I feel like it took a couple of days around the holidays of just um, doing that. Yeah, yeah.

Speaker B: It's time consuming and I think it's interesting. I've just been signing up for ah, a monthly reflection thing. It's just an hour container. It's really good because just getting it.

Speaker A: More practice incorporating self reflection and yeah, like you said, utilizing these tools. How often do you use them? I find myself doing the same thing. There are certain tools that I love to use to identify what's most important right now. For example, and when I remember to do it. Like I actually, I've given workshops on this and yeah, I don't always remember to do it myself. And then after several days of feeling like I'm spinning my wheels, like the light bulb goes off. Oh, right.

Speaker B: Yeah. And I mean, I guess there's. So some people are really good at creating the habits around it like a gratitude practice or like a daily or week reflection or certainly kind of from a. What is it called when people journaling and logging and uh, those sorts of things can be really, really valuable. And yeah, about the only thing I've managed to keep up is there's my Friday thanks that you'll be aware of. But that partly because I, I just made it public and that created a level of accountability for me to, to do it and I felt pressure to do it but like I'm, I'm the sort of person that needs to have something there to push me to do it. But you write the triggers, otherwise you're just going to forget. So I'm signed up to this monthly reflection thing and that's a bit easier an hour. Uh, but yeah, I think that usually unfortunately what happens is that people start to do these things when, when they really, really need it. And it's almost like it's not too late, but it's all. It's often when they've hit a kind of traumatic experience, they've lost a job and they have to do this reflection or they're really unhappy or something's happened in a feedback process or we're often addressing these things when we're having some form of existential crisis rather than just becoming more and more aware of ourselves and more conscious.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And so I mentioned before like how I've been recovering in some ways, uh, what I've been doing is becoming more and more aware of myself and more self aware and I think that self awareness is talked about a lot in terms of emotional intelligence. Right. But I think sometimes it's hard to do that. Sometimes it's hard. And I, and I think that these tools are just examples, little prompts of your own kind of self sense making. It just, just gives you nudges and different categories of things to think about. And related to the practice thing, I think if you consider it like a canvas, we know you've got the, the headings and the business model canvas or whatever or the different things you've got to think about in a customer journey map is just that they're prompts. You go, oh right, I need to think about that. I need to think about that. But the work really happens when you internalize and really think about it and ferment m and have it in the back of your mind. I think it's just. And that stuff starts to grow and you become more Subtly more aware and conscious. Self conscious. And you start to feel your anger building up or something. Or something feeling wrong in you more acutely over time when before it was just like everything. You were maybe dull to yourself. So this is. That's my journey at the moment. I'm still working on that.

Speaker A: Um.

Speaker B: That makes sense. Does that?

Speaker A: It does, yeah, it does make sense. I want to make sure that we give time for some practical advice we could give listeners. I know you and you have a lot of resources already available which we will absolutely put in links. I have some resources of similar things actually that uh. It's so funny that you do that. Career timeline I have a career journey map process that is actually up on my website. Anyone can download it but I also give workshops for free on it because I think it's so. So incredibly helpful as a starting off point. It's a great starting off point and your book will have just immense value. So I'm. I'm curious though if there are any tools that. A couple of the most valuable things that you. That you think might be helpful for someone who wants to identify a more holistic shape of themselves in their career.

Speaker B: Definitely the career timeline you mentioned and career journey map. Definitely you should look at those things and especially ask the question around. Well, why was I unhappy or happy at these different points? So you're.

Speaker A: You're just to describe it. It's like you are identify you are on a timeline writing out your jobs. I also ask people to. So you're saying identify your emotions.

Speaker B: Yes.

Speaker A: And I think you could also layer in there, you might identify what were the strengths that you were using, what was valuable to you in that role, what was not.

Speaker B: Mhm.

Speaker A: What was out of alignment.

Speaker B: Yeah, there's some good questions. So yeah, I think that's a good one because it's an often looking back to where you are right now and you could do it for your whole career. You could do it for last year or last quarter, last week if you wanted. I guess you could change the time horizons and the Wheel of Life is a bit more of a holistic one and it's not one of mine, but it is very common because it just gets you to look at all aspects of your life and work and stuff. But I think um. Because my tools are what I think one of the key. The key aspects of my tools and where other people try to do things which I don't have a problem with. I think making the kind of compound one that's a more holistic for a particular role in an organization where you might mix some of the softer stuff with the harder technical ones. I deliberately chosen not to do that just to separate those things out because it becomes clear in terms of taxonomy and then you can build your own afterwards once you've worked out what's relevant.

Speaker A: But the ones that just to. Again sorry to interrupt but just to describe it. Are you talking about like a two by two matrix or a wheel?

Speaker B: Yeah. So I mean people. I guess people always assume that there's a uh. There's lots of these radial charts. So like I have a few radial charts that are more profile oriented I would say like in terms of more technical and observable skills and, and stuff. But some are uh, like a values one. I have a set of example values words or qualities words and people would like select some or write some more but use them as a prompt and then highlight and then attribute values too. So there's basically lots of different types of visuals. I've created a whole kind of visual framework with my, my publisher and friends Evolotta and stuff. So we've got a kind of family of different visuals and some are more positioning related like as in between two poles or between multiple poles or uh. There's a one on using the double diamond for like where you're spending most of your time or whether you think you're spending time. So they're just like little visual kind of references that you can, you can make a mark on that you can reflect on. But one. One specific tool might be interesting to talk about is one I call the leadership functions one.

Speaker A: Okay.

Speaker B: And the reason even though I, I created it with Martina Hodges shell around leaders.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker B: Design leaders responsible for managing others. I think it's applicable to almost anyone in the design team and the basically you have in a similar way you can see it's a radial chart but if you think about multiple axes going around I think they're eight octagonal or something. Um and there's things like you know, vision and strategy. So these are the functional roles what you expected to do possibly in a leadership capacity. There's stuff around engaging external community, possibly the internal design community. There's your team and growing supporting team. Encouraging quality of the design work or practice like developing the toolkits like the operations side of things, methods, techniques. Mhm or collaboration with the wider uh organization and other stakeholders or even building like design style capabilities across the Org if you're doing like design thinking workshops or other things and like advocacy. So kind of like selling the team and selling design and other things. So imagining those kind of like around a wheel with different spokes, I, I get people to first just loosely, just relatively map like where they think they spend the most time with the like loads of time on the outer parts of this, this map and no time at all like right in the center and they just draw a shape like where they, they spend the time. And then, and then it's really interesting to then ask the question in a different color line. What do you enjoy doing?

Speaker A: M. Mhm.

Speaker B: And you could do it ask a third like, where do you feel confident in your capabilities doing? And just seeing particularly the what you enjoy versus where you spending the time is so illuminating. It's like going, what if it's in sync? Great. If it's not, usually not.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: What's going on there? And especially if you see like peers and you see, oh, someone enjoys the thing that I hate and they're not doing it and I'm spending all my time doing this thing and you look across them and you can go, well, what kind of person do I want to be in support of others? Like, where should I be spending this time?

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker B: And there's usually a correlation between your confidence and competence and what you enjoy, but not, not always. So that can be an interesting other dimension. So just with these maps, rather than just kind of like scoring your own competence, which I know is risky and it's not necessarily an objective science. It's more about, okay, where do I think I'm spending time, what do I enjoy, how good do I think I am? And then trying to see where the deltas are between that. It's so interesting. And so I've known people take this to job interviews and go, this is what, tell me where you think this role I talk about.

Speaker A: Oh, interesting. Yeah.

Speaker B: And it's, it usually stumps people, by the way. I did it in interview. I. I don't know. And I'm like, maybe you should right. Think about like where you think the emphasis should be in this role. Because I can't do everything.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: Want me to do everything. I'm gonna need to kind of balance that time.

Speaker A: Yeah. Yeah. That is a super uh, interesting use of that. I can also see something like that. I use something similar when I'm working with someone to identify where they want to put their effort towards growth. And, and I think another maybe takeaway from something from an exercise like that might be if you, where you see misalignment would be an area to, to think about why and how to change it. Don't just, you can't just accept that this is uh, this is what you can do about it, how it's going to be. So I'm going to have to leave my job.

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker A: It's not always the answer. There's lot more that we can do. People get so caught up in feeling like they don't have the agency. I, I think part of it is, comes from just impatience. Like it takes time to create change.

Speaker B: I mean, I was going to pick up on that earlier. You were talking about those toxic environments and this is, you have to be, I have to be careful with this. But you know, I mentioned this person who I was coaching. He ended up staying where he was. Even though, uh, his original thing was I want to leave and all those. I'm like. It in some ways, it, it doesn't feel like it at the time, but it should be easier to stay and work through it than to just leave and start a whole new job where you have no idea really what it's really like. And it'll be, is it the same, same challenges that you've had in a different place or some different challenges which you are way worse or I don't know, who knows, grass is green and all that. So when I, when I look back about my traumatic thing and I don't know, you in this toxic environment too. Right. Even though like people were telling me not to leave, I still feel like I probably could have reacted in a different way. And it's still what the question I could ask is, is what can I do about it?

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker B: What can I change? And so yeah, people think, oh, uh, my role is this and this and all these things, therefore I need to go and get a job that's more fitting with what I love. That is an answer maybe.

Speaker A: Right.

Speaker B: But like you're saying like how can you have a discussion, go look boss or peers. Like this is where I think I, I enjoy doing and you're over here and what could we spread the load a bit? Like maybe we can think about who might want to do this and want to grow and develop and spend time on these things. It's like, that's why I say for the wider ic, uh, community, usually there's an aspect of leadership in any role and level. Right. You don't have to have the title. You can do stuff that helps the team, you can do stuff that helps advocacy, you can do stuff that's collaboration, it's serving others. And therefore in my book is leadership. And so like these, these people are Often hungry for that. And the leaders and managers who you and me coach and help in lots of different ways are like overloaded with trying to do everything.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: They can't do the things where they, their heart and soul is where they can give a value. And so they're doing things which they're not enjoying, not spending the right amount of time and hurting others potentially.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker B: And themselves.

Speaker A: So yeah, I mean Hindsight is, is 2020, but I absolutely wish that I had had that kind of wisdom years ago. I can think of jobs that I loved until something happened.

Speaker B: Right.

Speaker A: And then it seemed like it was, I couldn't stay. And um. It doesn't have to. It's not that black and white. No. Always some. Sometimes you, it is. Sometimes you do need to figure out, you need to leave. That's always a possibility. But yeah, it's not always the answer. I have a tendency to be a little impatient, so I don't know, I

Speaker B: don't want to relate it too heavily to kind of like more personal, intimate relationships. But the same probably be applied. People like, they go and do a silly thing or they, they just suddenly go, right, that's it, it's over. Uh, without ever having opportunities. Probably discuss it, go into therapy together, whatever, because they don't want to address the uncomfortable conversation. And uh, the conversation might actually not be that uncomfortable, but we don't know unless we try. The fear of that uncomfortable conversation is, is, is greater than the fear of jumping ship and trying something new and potentially moving to another country or whatever it is. And it's just like it's these silly little things that kind of get in our way and we create catastrophize, especially if we're creative. All these things that are going, I'm really good at that. I'm really good at thinking about all the possible things that are going to be awful. And the reality is that they might not happen. And someone go, oh, thank God you said that.

Speaker A: Yeah. Right. Yeah. Lots of fantastic conversation, lots of wisdom. Thank you so much, Jason. This has been fun. I feel we have another conversation out there with, with, okay, so I've done all this work. What do I do with it? What's the next step? So that'll be our, our next conversation.

Speaker B: That's a, that's, that's some of the feedback on my book at the moment, which I'm trying to reckon with. They're like going, yeah, cool, I've done this. Now what? I'm like, ah, uh. And people often give me that feedback after workshops. And the truth is it's such a personal and individual answer.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker B: And yes, my one of my go to answers is talk to someone about it.

Speaker A: Yeah.

Speaker B: And. And that doesn't have to be a coach or a mentor or partner or your manager, but talking it through and verbalizing and externalizing in ways that other people hear.

Speaker A: Mhm.

Speaker B: Is a big part of it. What does this mean and what am I going to do about it? Uh, yeah, that's. But there's many more answers around that for sure.

Speaker A: Yeah, we'll come up with some and we'll record our our answers.

Speaker B: Oh, excellent.

Speaker A: Thank you so much Jason. Thanks for joining me on UX Cake.

Speaker B: Thanks Lee.

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