Sara Wachter-Boettcher
Finding and Using Your Active Voice
In this episode of Brave UX, Sara Wachter-Boettcher inspires us through her actions 💪, reminds us why it’s important to see shades of grey 🙈, and helps us to design the careers we actually want 💭.
Highlights include:
- Is it career limiting to enforce a work/life boundary?
- Do we have to accept that companies exist to serve shareholders?
- Should we ever sacrifice our wellbeing to solve important problems?
- Who or what inspired you to become a feminist leader?
- Why are some people uncomfortable with life’s shades of grey?
Who is Sara Wachter-Boettcher?
Sara is the CEO of Active Voice, a leadership development company that’s on a mission to make work culture better for everyone - in particular those of us working in design and tech 🧑💻.
Through Active Voice, Sara helps organisations - like LinkedIn, Etsy, and Mastercard - to build radical and courageous leadership practices, the kind needed for today’s world 🌍. She does this through 1-on-1 coaching, workshops and the facilitation of strategy sessions.
Before starting Active Voice in 2020, Sara was the Principal of Rare Union, a content strategy and user experience consultancy. Sara also ran a feminist leadership community and event series called Collective Strength, and hosted a podcast for feminists called Strong Feelings 🎙️.
She is the author of three influential books 📚, Content Everywhere: Strategy and Structure for Future-Ready Content, Design for Real Life, and Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech.
Transcript
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Hello, and welcome to another episode of Brave UX. I'm Brendan Jarvis, managing founder of The Space InBetween, the behavior-based UX research partner for enterprise leaders who need an independent perspective to align hearts and minds, and also the home of New Zealand's first and only world-class human-centered research and innovation lab. If that sounds interesting, you can find out a little bit more about what we do at thespaceinbetween.co.nz.
- Here on Brave UX though, it's my job to help you to keep on top of the latest thinking and important issues affecting the fields of UX research, product management, and design. I do that by unpacking the stories, learnings, and expert advice of a diverse range of world-class leaders in those fields.
- My guest today is Sara Wachter-Boettcher. Sara is the CEO of Active Voice, a leadership development company that's on a mission to make work culture better for everyone.
- In particular, those of us working in design and tech through active voice, Sara helps organizations like LinkedIn, Etsy, and MasterCard to build radical and courageous leadership practices, the kind needed for today's world. She does this through one-on-one coaching workshops and the facilitation of strategy sessions.
- Before starting Active Voice in 2020. Sara was the principal of Rare Union, a content strategy and user experience consultancy that worked with Fortune 100 companies, startups, and universities on their content strategy, content design, and UX writing.
- Some of Sara's other career highlights include working as the product in UX strategy lead for the Covid tracking project as an expert consultant for Rosenfeld Media and as the editor and chief of A List Apart.
- Sara also previously ran a feminist leadership community and event series called Collective Strength and a podcast for feminists at work with over 100 episodes called Strong Feelings.
- She is the author of three influential books, Content Everywhere: Strategy and Structure for Future Ready Content, Designed for Real Life, and Technically Wrong: Sexist Apps, Biased Algorithms, and Other Threats of Toxic Tech.
- Sara's critical thinking and contributions have seen her grace stages all over the world, including at Northern UX, Beyond Tellerand, UX Copenhagen, Delight Conference and talks at Google.
- And now, after a lot of patience with us having to rerecord several segments of that intro, Sara is here with me for this conversation on Brave UX. Sara, hello and a very warm welcome to the show.
- Sara Wachter-Boettcher:
- Hi, Brendan. Thank you so much for having me.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It's great to have you here, and I was really stoked that we were able to bring it forward because I know we were scheduled for some time in the distant future, but it's so good to have you here and I really enjoyed preparing for today's conversation. Now you run a company called Active Voice, which strikes me as a very intentional name, and I recently heard you relate the name, the purpose of that name of having an active voice to your own life. And you said, and I'll quote you now, I also am familiar with having an active voice. It's one of the things that was always on my report cards growing up sometimes, sometimes con. So tell me about the pros of having an active voice growing up. When do you first remember using that voice, your active voice and it having a positive effect?
- Sara Wachter-Boettcher:
- Well, I think that when I was growing up, one of the things that was really difficult for me was trying to navigate being sort of academically ahead, but socially not necessarily so, and trying to figure out how to advocate for myself because I found myself really bored at school a lot because I needed a more advanced reading class. I needed to have more challenging assignments, things like that. But then I would get thrown into these situations where suddenly you're a first grader and they're like, okay, well now you're going to go into the second grader, third grade classroom for reading or for math. And the problem was, of course, I was still a first grader. And so I think one of the things that was really useful for me early on was trying to figure out how to advocate for myself and my needs in school without just ending up back in this classroom that wasn't serving me.
- So trying to figure out how do I speak up about, Hey, I could actually use something more challenging, or I read that book a couple of years ago, is there a different book that I could read? And also being able to then speak up and say something about not always wanting to necessarily just get bumped into the next class because that had its own downsides with it. And I think that's one of the first times that I think about how I started speaking up. But honestly, I think a lot of my experience speaking up growing up wasn't necessarily, didn't necessarily feel positive at the time. Sometimes it was very really hard. And I think that I can see the positives of it now, but I think one of the things that I'm doing with Active Voice is also just thinking about how do we create spaces where it's safer for people to speak up, where it's safer for people to use that bold voice or to self-advocate or talk about their needs, because I think that that's actually a big part of the problem as well. It's not just how do people speak up, it's also, and what happens when they do.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You spoke about it sometimes being difficult for you growing up at school, having that active voice of sort of backing yourself, fighting your own corner. What was the response from the people that were in positions of power? And I'm assuming it's the school administrators, the teachers, the institution itself. How did they respond and did you navigate that as a child? Did you have advocates or what did that look like?
- Sara Wachter-Boettcher:
- I had a pretty messy childhood where, to be honest, I think a lot of my experiences were I was left to handle a lot of stuff relatively independently, relatively young. And so I think one of the things that was really hard for me, and one of the things that I had to work on as an adult was that I didn't have a ton of sense of support or safety. And that left me in a place of constant hypervigilance. So constantly needing to be monitoring, paying attention, figuring out how to navigate, figuring things out on my own in a way that made me really good at some stuff, but also made me more likely to show up on conversations as an adult already on defense already ready for things to not go well. So some of those things that really came up later that at the time it's like survival mechanisms, it's ways that you get by if you are a kid who's not necessarily getting a ton of active support. And then those things become later on stuff that can actually hold you back.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It seems like there's a direct line between what you experienced growing up and potentially as a young adult and the mission that you're on through Active Voice.
- Sara Wachter-Boettcher:
- Well, I think it's a lot of different things, but truly I think that all of us are running around either reenacting or learning how to not reenact the patterns and behaviors that we learn young. And one of the things that I have taken on is a personal responsibility is that latter part of not reenacting them. And I think one of the things I'm interested in as a company is looking at how do we help people understand that and how do we help people build some of those tools specifically to the workplace? There's a lot of that that goes into some deep therapy territory, which I don't do, but I mean, I personally go to therapy, but I don't do that as part of active voice. And in the workplace though, we're still the same people. We bring all that stuff with us. And so I think that all of us in some ways are trying to make sense of patterns, habits, behaviors that have become ingrained in us. And so I'm just trying to do a lot more of that out in the open and to really talk about the ways that those things do show up in our workplaces and our workplace dynamics. Because fundamentally work is just a series of relationships and we enact some of the same stuff there that we do anywhere else.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You've lent your active voice quite powerfully in your career to feminism, to women in the workplace, and I mentioned in your introduction, your podcast Strong Feelings, which has over a hundred episodes, and I know just how much energy and effort and intention goes into creating that many episodes. This is something that's clearly a passion of yours. What was it or who was it that inspired you to become a leader, a feminist leader?
- Sara Wachter-Boettcher:
- Yeah, I don't know that that's something that I was conscious of when it happened. I think it's a thing that it was with me long enough that it just felt normal and natural. But I will say that I think the first time that I got really kind of formally involved in Feminist Cause was when I was working at a rape crisis center when I was in college and I worked in the education program there. So I gave presentations to middle schoolers on sexual abuse, sexual assault, and we did a lot of workshops. We talked to kids about consent, we talked to them about assertiveness, we talked to 'em about boundaries. We also talked to them about what happens when people have been abused and sort of some of the things around shame and blame that happened. So anyway, in that experience, that was a really powerful time where I was surrounded by feminist leaders in this organization.
- That's, those are the people I was with, and I learned a lot from them. I learned a lot about different ways of leading too. I'm really grateful that that was one of my early experiences. I'd had jobs before that. I had many jobs and some of the just jobs you get in high school jobs you get in college where I've worked in childcare and I've cleaned locker rooms and I've been at the front desk and all of these other places, but having this experience at the Rape Crisis Center in the middle of all of this other stuff, it gave me a really different perspective on what a workplace can be like, what a manager might be like, what a boss could be. And I think that was really helpful because I knew after I was there, I knew that there were leaders out there who led in ways that were really focused on inclusion and safety, where they were really thinking carefully about the impact of their words and actions, the consistency of their message and their behavior.
- And it's not that they always got it right. And it's not that there wasn't difficult moments there because I mean, it's an underfunded rape crisis center. There was also a lot of stress and there were people who were trying to deal with that stress. But I definitely saw non-traditional versions of leadership early on. And when I went out into the workplace after college, I for a little while felt like I kind of set that aside. Not that I set aside my beliefs or values, but I went and I was like, I need a job and I need money to live off of. And so I prioritized building a career in a very practical way where didn't, there's probably a couple years in there where I wasn't really thinking so much about the politics of my work, or at least those weren't things I was necessarily talking about.
- I was trying to get by, get my foot in the door, get a run up the ladder, et cetera, et cetera. But after a couple of years of doing that, I really did start to notice when I would see things like inequity show up in the workplace. And it definitely brought me right back to some of those earlier realizations. And it became a thing where I was like, I find it really challenging not to speak up about harm or inequity or oppression that I see. And also, I don't know that I want to train myself to be the kind of person who stays quiet. I don't know that that's a skill that I actually want to build just in order to make myself more palatable to a status quo company. And I think I started to make some active choices not to do that. And mostly I feel really good about that, even though at times that was hard.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You talked about the early entry into the career, the real job to get money to live off putting those political or fundamental beliefs that you held about how we should be in the world aside, it almost sounded like you suppressed purposefully, and I dunno if I'm projecting this here or if this is what actually happened for you, but did you feel like you had to purposefully suppress that because you were afraid that if you were open, especially earlier in your career, that you would pay a price for flying that flag?
- Sara Wachter-Boettcher:
- I mean, yeah, I think that it was very obvious. It wasn't always safe. The first career job I had, I was a junior copywriter at an advertising agency. That's actually how I then got into doing more like web writing and then content design, content strategy work. But when I was a junior copywriter at this agency, I mean, this place was all kinds of problematic. And we had a C E O who would come down and scream at people every time she felt like it. And we had a creative director who was sexually harassing people on the accounts team. And it's just like all of this stuff. I mean, I could make a laundry list about it, but we don't actually want to hear all about this, all this petty garbage from this company. But there was a lot of bad behavior and a lot of things that looking back, I'm like, not okay.
- Red flag, red flag, red flag. And at the time, it's not like I didn't see those things, but I very much knew that I worked in a place where I felt lucky to get that job at all. I was 22 and didn't have any connections and et cetera. And I knew that the c e O could be very mercurial. He just never knew I had seen her fire people randomly. And I knew that I did not have a lot of power or clout in that company. And so there's very real risks. And I think one of the things that I'm very aware of as we start talking about what happens in tech and design organizations now and when and how, and if people speak up about things is that power dynamics play a massive role. And when I was in those positions of less power, it was a much bigger risk for me to try to do or say something.
- And so there were some times where I took those risks anyway, and there were some times when I didn't. And I think it's an imperfect system, but I do think it's really important when we talk about how people speak up against things like injustice or inequity, that we also talk about how it's not an on off switch. It's actually a whole spectrum. And you have to orient yourself on that spectrum according to your risk tolerance in that particular moment and constantly be reassessing that, which I think is a really helpful skill to start to learn that. I don't think I knew that at the time. I couldn't have said any of those things then. But I definitely thought about the risks that I would take if I spoke up. And I was definitely more careful than I would be today, which today I would be immediately like, excuse me, no. But at the time that felt impossible.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You ran rare Union for I think near on a decade, and that was your UX and content strategy and design practice. And during that time, you wrote technically wrong. And so you are an, you're an inde independent in this perspective. And I was curious about, because technically wrong is a very provocative pull, no punches, criticism of tech, and there's a definite power as symmetry in the relationship that, for example, even though you're in a independent in Reunion has with the industry, yet you felt compelled and strong or brave enough to put that out there and to try and take an important issue to the people that are in power and make more people aware of what some of the problems are in the tech that we've been designing. How much of that action that you took, how much of it do you feel you can attribute to your decision to be an independent, to not work within a larger structure?
- Sara Wachter-Boettcher:
- This is such a tough one. Cause it's sort of like, which is what's the source and what's the result? Because I think it's a little bit of chicken and egg where I think the more outspoken that I was in my career, and there was a lot of becoming more and more outspoken that led up to writing that book, but the more outspoken I became, I think also the less desirable I became for big companies anyway. So I think that for me, I decided that one of the things I wanted to do was to think about my career on my own terms as much as possible and to say, instead of saying, I can't be this voice, I can't write something this critical, no one will hire me for projects because that's the other thing. It's like you work for yourself, but that doesn't mean independent doesn't mean independently wealthy.
- I need to make money. I don't have any rich uncles, I don't think unless you're out there, in which case get in touch, but I don't. I do need to have somebody pay me for my work, just not necessarily within a traditional job structure. So I did have fear about that, but I think I really had to come at it from a place that wasn't like, I can't do this because no one will hire me if I do. And instead say, what does it look like to build a career in which both things are possible? What does it look like to insist on keeping my integrity and keeping my voice and also trying to package up some of what I do in ways that maybe are palatable enough to enough organizations. And that doesn't mean everybody. That's not for everyone, and that's okay. I don't have to be, and doesn't mean I always like it.
- Nobody likes to feel rejected. But I do know that when an organization thinks of me as too political or too divisive or too much against the grain of the status quo, that's actually okay because if nobody thought that about me, then I don't think I'd feel very good about what I'm doing. And even as my work has changed a lot away from more of the consulting work on products and projects and toward more working with people, it's really the same thing. There are people who are going to want capital D to capital L, design leadership, little TM mark training, and they're going to want to bring people in who are going to show you, here's how you go from manager to director to VP in a big company and follow along this little path. And that's not for me. I would never, first off, I would never do that because I don't have that experience.
- So I'm the wrong person to train people on how to do that. Also, I don't want that and I don't want to be that person. And I'm much more interested in where are there messier and thorny or conversations about the places where our values, our sense of integrity and the work that we're trying to do end up colliding, and how do we navigate those and how do we navigate those in ways that don't completely burn us in the process? And there's enough people, my sense is there's enough people who are interested in that. My job is more to put out that real message, talk honestly about it, and make sure that the people who want that know that that's who I am. And if I water it down and try to make it really comfortable for everybody, that might make me more palatable to people who are a bad fit and more invisible to people who are a good fit. And I just think that that's not actually serving anything, even though it can feel safer,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well, let's talk about a messy situation. Let's get even more real and more honest. Great. About the same time. Yeah. Great. We'll see if, we'll, great. At the end of the question, about the same time that you started Active Voice, you took on the role as the product and UX strategy lead for the Covid tracking project, where in part the goal was to highlight the massive disparity between people of color and white people in terms of the health outcomes of Covid 19. Now about this role, you said, I felt so responsible for the outcome. I felt so responsible for getting this quality product out the door. Cause time was of the essence. And so what I found is I started making some really knee jerk decisions. So take your cast your mind back to that time, to those knee-jerk decisions. What's an example of one of those knee-jerk decisions that doesn't sit well with you?
- Sara Wachter-Boettcher:
- Yeah, I think one of the things that I did, I mean I was pushing, right? I was like, we have made promises to partners, we have to get this done, et cetera, et cetera. And I remember there was this one day I was working with a designer who was wonderful and who had said, I think, I'm trying to remember exactly how they framed this. They said something along the lines of, I think that we should think about what order we're displaying information. We were displaying a whole lot of data. The Covid tracking project was displaying all of this data about covid tests and cases in the US in the early stage of the pandemic, which at the time the US was doing a truly terrible job of providing information and there was no source for complete consistent information. That data was just an absolute, absolute disaster.
- And so we knew there was all this racial disparity, so meaning we knew, for example, that black Americans were contracting covid at higher rates and also dying of Covid at much higher rates we're losing a lot of lives. And so we were building out this dashboard lots and lots of data. And the question was sort of like, how are we displaying racial information? And the default was the US census. Well, the US census, while the default and sort of standard approach to displaying race and ethnicity data in the US also defaults to putting white people first and it defaults to putting white people first, probably mostly because it always has, because it used to have two categories like white and non-white. There's a lot of history baked in there, and that history's not pretty. And so this designer had said something along the lines of, I think we should reorganize and basically put most affected groups first.
- And my knee-jerk response to that was like, we can't just do that. We need a good reason. Don't why I thought that we didn't wasn't already a good reason. I don't know. And I think more than anything, what I was concerned about was making decisions that would slow us down on getting this thing out the door, having to explain ourselves, et cetera. I was going down this path in my head that was very focused on trying to launch this thing that I knew was important and that I was under some pressure to launch. And looking back, I was like, oh, no, it's not the biggest choice in the world. There were many larger design choices we made, but it's one that I felt really not proud of and not proud of. Also, the way that I responded to that person where I think I really shut them down.
- And going back to what we talked about at the very beginning, I mean, that was a moment that I've reflected on a lot. As an example of times when some of the things that I learned growing up to cope with situations I was in and to sort of survive the world ended up biting me because they kept me from actually being in alignment with my own values and the things that I care about. And one of the things that I'm a huge, huge proponent of is being able to acknowledge and admit that and hold myself accountable for that. Because the reality is we're all doing that kind of stuff. We're all messing up all the time, and yours are going to be different than mine, but none of us is perfect. And particularly as a white person in the United States, I'm going to screw up a bunch of things, and the best thing I can do is be able to learn to see that and see it sooner, get to the place where I can see it earlier and earlier and hopefully more often before it happens.
- And then also be able to admit it and then be able to say, yeah, that sucked. That was n not the right decision. And the power that I had in that scenario was a power that ended up being used sort of over to override somebody else. And that's not how I want to be or where I want to be. And so yeah, I think about that a lot. And I look at it as like, well, worst thing I could do out of that is deny it because I think then it protects me from criticism maybe, but it doesn't help me learn, and it doesn't also help other people own up to their stuff. And I would like to see more people be willing to say, oh yeah, that decision I made, like, oh, that was biased. And I think that if I can say that, I hope that that makes it at least a little easier for more people to do it.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Now, not to make excuses on your behalf, but I just want to give people some context of where you were in space and time at this moment that you made
- Sara Wachter-Boettcher:
- That it's locked in my house, the worst of the pandemic.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- You just rough started with active voice, right? You're navigating this transition between what you would you'd done with rear Union in terms of consulting with project. Oh, I was terrified. The product, yeah.
- Sara Wachter-Boettcher:
- I mean, this is why one of the things I talk about a lot is stress. Because stress and the impact of chronic stress, which we've all been through particularly, I mean particularly the last few years, but I was really in a place where I like a lot of people, I wanted something that felt like it was within my control and so much fell out of control at that point. I had made this huge shift to my business, and I didn't know it was going to happen. I was locked in my house with a pandemic that was a nothing but question marks at that point. And on down the line, there's all these things I could point to. And it's okay that I wanted something that felt like it was within my control, but what didn't work is is that I picked the wrong thing. I think I picked that.
- I think I tried to run with that project and own it because I'm really good at getting things done on time and making stuff happen. And that's true. That's a skill I have. You want something to launch, I'm going to get done. But in that moment, I over relied on that capacity and didn't hold myself accountable enough to the impact of operating in that way to what the harm could be of operating in that way. Doesn't mean it's a bad skill, it just means it's a skill that I was using in an inappropriate way in an appropriate moment.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- And not long after you left the project, you learned about a social worker called Laura Van Dannu Lipsky, and she'd spent many years at the front lines of trauma work. She worked at Hurricane Katrina. I think in terms of the recovery for that, she'd worked in er, er sort of situations at hospitals really on the front lines. What is it about Laura's story that you found about her story that you could relate to in your own experience?
- Sara Wachter-Boettcher:
- Well, so when I found her work, and I was reading her book on tra, it's called Trauma Stewardship. I found it, I think I saw her quoted in an Atlantic article or something during the pandemic. And what she said struck me, and I went and followed it and I read this book and then I started thinking a lot about what does it look like to hold other people's stress and trauma? And she's talking about it from a clinical perspective. She was doing social work, and that's not what I do. But I think that when you're thinking about the experience, particularly I would say that first year of the pandemic, everybody was under such chronic stress and it was a really traumatic period for pretty much everybody on earth. Probably some people were acknowledging that and some people were denying it, but I think was everybody was feeling the impact of that stress.
- What really resonated with me about her work is she talks about what do you need to do to steward people through those experiences, which obviously as a clinician, as a particular type of role, if you're doing therapy or if you're providing direct service in a crisis, in a crisis kind of way, but also if you're a manager of other humans or a colleague to other humans or just a human out there talking to people in the world, you are ending up being influenced by and carrying around bits of other people's stress and trauma, particularly during that time. And what I realized was that a lot of us were not attending to our own direct experiences and the pain of them, but also not really dealing with the aftermath of trying to support teams through that time. What does it actually cost you as the person listening, if everybody on your team is coming to you about their stress and their anxiety and their fear and how this thing is happening in their family.
- And this crisis is happening over here because you get so focused on, I'm trying to be helpful to other people. We sometimes don't do enough of the work to be like, okay, but what is the impact this has on me and what do I need to do to attend to that? And so I started getting really interested in, well, what does it look like to show up for the people around us and also take care of ourselves in the process and to be able to deal with that aftermath? And so that trauma stewardship book I thought was really useful for thinking about ways of acknowledging and really coming to terms with all those feelings and experiences and then figuring out what you need to do to process them to not be stuck in this place of just chronic overwhelm and to really be able to talk it through and come out the other end with a little bit more lightness, a little bit of a sense of relief or a little bit of a sense of closure from that.
- And at times, from new, with new insights, new learnings, I think that there's a big thing in there that's around how did this experience change you? How did going through the pandemic change you and the things you care about and the way you see the world? And that's where I think growth comes in. And we don't get there though. We never get to that growth part. It's the part people want to skip to, but we don't get there until we do the messy part of how did this hurt you and where were you having needs that were unmet and what drained you? And all of those pieces have to be attended to first, otherwise we try to jump to the growth and we actually don't get growth.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well, let's take a thread from what you've been saying there, and I want to quote you again. You've said, for a lot of us, it's very hard to be non-judgmental and compassionate with ourselves because we immediately go to a place of comparison. And then you went on to suggestion, I'm paraphrasing now that we set up a binary, an unhealthy binary where we can either be privileged or struggling, but we feel that we can't be both. So why are we, at least it seems to me so afraid of embracing shades of gray like this?
- Sara Wachter-Boettcher:
- Oh my gosh, this comes up so much in so many conversations. There's a perception of safety being in a binary because see if it's right, wrong, I'm right, you're wrong. I don't have to think beyond that, right? I'm right, you're wrong. Now we're set up to be in an argument. We're setting ourselves up to fight about it, which I don't actually want to do, but I feel like I don't have to do any work of interrogating my position. I don't have to be curious about yours. I'm done. Right, wrong. And I think that that happens a lot. I think the other part of it is that binaries are really common, and we're often been trained to see things as a binary. We do get trained to see things from an early age. It's like good, bad heroes, villains, wrong, male, female. There's a lot of stuff that we've been trained to put into two categories.
- It's simple and it's clean and it's tidy, and it's very rarely reflective of reality, which is much, much, much messier and more gray than that. And so getting to a place where you're willing to hold your perspective and say, my perspective is real and it's valid, and there are other ones, or I have it good. This came up so much during the pandemic, I hear people say, I have it good, right? I'm safe. I'm comfortable. I have a cushy tech job. I work from home. I have it good. Therefore I shouldn't talk about feeling bad. Other people have it worse than me. And I think that that's really dangerous because yes, I'm sure other people have it worse than you. Many people had it worse than me, 100%. But what that does is it makes us so we push down our feelings, pretend they don't exist because you are, in fact, you are struggling, right?
- It's still hard even if other people have it worse. And so you push down your feelings because you feel like you're not supposed to feel that way. And it creates this layer of shame, which is very toxic because if I feel like I'm struggling and I'm overwhelmed, but I feel like I'm not supposed to be, and I'm hiding it from you, I'm afraid you'll see it. Because if you see it, I'm ashamed of having this feeling I don't think I'm supposed to have. So that layer of shame around our experiences, it puts us on defense and it makes us kind of close off. We kind of close ranks because I have to protect it. I can't let you see how I'm really doing, and I can't let you see how ashamed I feel for feeling that way. So now I can't connect with you. I can't be present with you because I'm spending all my time creating a wall and protecting and defending that wall. And I think that makes any difficult time that we're through so much harder because now you're going through it really alone, and now you're unable to ask for help from people or find out that other people are having similar experiences or all of these other things that are possible once that wall comes down. And so that's why I think that binary can really hurt us in so many different ways. I can name 20 other ways, but maybe we'll get to them later.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well, maybe I'll come to another way now, or at least what I understand is another way we do this, and you've described that we often use opaque or obfuscated language when describing how we feel, that we really get into the depths of what the emotion is and how that might be driving out behaviors. Now, I've heard you before recommend that people consider using a feeling wheel, which is literally a sound. I love
- Sara Wachter-Boettcher:
- That. I use one today.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah. So what is it about feeling wheels and what they enable? Why use one? Why sort of, for example, if we're talking about stress and we are feeling stressed, why is it a good thing to then pull out a feeling wheel and have a go at getting a little deeper into that?
- Sara Wachter-Boettcher:
- Yeah. Well, so here's why. Okay. I think that stress is real and a useful concept. But when we talk about stress, oftentimes what we're doing is we're kind of a lighting. Where is that coming from or what is that really? And when we go beneath the surface, we'll say stress because that stress is an acceptable feeling to talk about at work. But the real feeling underneath of it might be something like fear, which is much less acceptable. I'm afraid that if this project doesn't launch on time, I'm going to get in trouble in some way. That's more of what the fear is actually, but we'll call it stress because that's sort of considered a work appropriate or acceptable way to talk about it. Another one that we hide often is particularly women, and particularly women of color, anger, because there's a lot of bias that you might experience for acknowledging anger and being angry.
- And you can think, I mean, there's a lot of racist stereotypes out there. For example, like an angry black woman, common racist stereotype. I know many black women have told me that they go to great lengths to make sure that nobody could ever label them that. And that's a real self-protective measure that people might have to take. And that I think women generally often feel pressured to take because women's anger is often judged much more sharply than men's. But when we do that, there is a cost to it. And I think at an individual level, it's really worth exploring what is it costing me to pretend I'm not angry? And sometimes it's not even about whether you tell people or express it, but even just acknowledging it to yourself is really important. And I think sometimes when we feel like it's not an acceptable emotion, we don't even let ourselves feel it.
- We don't give ourselves space to say, I am mad. And that cuts off our ability to process. It can lead us into this cycles of more self blame, shame and cynicism and resentment. And those things are, I think are really big flags for burnout too, constantly suppressing those things to get by. But I think that there's also the societal component of it, so it's at the individual level. You got to find a way to process those feelings, even if those feelings are not acceptable in your workplace at a societal level, obviously there's a big problem, which is the fact that some emotions are okay for some people to have and some emotions are not okay for other people to have. The reality about emotions is like, that's not how feelings work. You have feelings, you're having some right now, I have feelings. I'm having many of them at any given time, and they exist, whether we accept them or not, whether we talk about them or not, whether we can name them or not, they're still there, but lacking sort of an emotional vocabulary and lacking safes places to talk about them, they can end up, they all come out, they all get leaked out somewhere.
- And so when we're bad at doing the work of making space for them to come out in healthy ways, people let them come out in less healthy ways, and they oftentimes will come out along power lines. So people in positions of power will take out their stuff on people with less power than them. And so this is one of the reasons I think it's really important for organizations and people in power on organizations to think about how safe is it for people to talk about how they actually feel, and what is the risk of people being labeled in biased ways if they take on emotions that we're uncomfortable with.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- One of the ways that you've suggested that individuals before they get to a group setting can interrogate those feelings aside from the use of a feeling wheel, is the use of a three questions, three key questions here, and they are, what has work felt like for me lately? What's draining me the most right now? And what do I need more of right now? So what is it about those questions that you feel are useful in helping people to be more mindful or be more productive or whatever it is to do something rather than just suppress those things that they're feeling? Yeah.
- Sara Wachter-Boettcher:
- Well, I think first up, I'll back up and say for me, reflective questions are incredibly powerful, and there's a lot of them that I use for different circumstances. Those questions are really optimized around dealing with times of uncertainty and crisis and high stress, which I mean turns out to be perennially valuable right now, it seems like. But that in those moments, it's a chance to check in with yourself and to really give yourself some non-judgmental prompts to understand where you're at. So what's work felt like for me lately is very neutral. As a question, it's, it's a very open question. It's not giving me any leanings one way or the other about how I'm supposed to answer it, and it's not demanding that I justify myself, which often happens if we ask a y question. I know UX people love y questions. I love y questions too, but actually, when we ask a why question about people's personal experiences or their feelings, oftentimes it leads to people feeling really judged.
- Why do you feel that way is actually a thing where somebody's internal monologue will kind of go like, oh, maybe I'm not supposed to feel that way, or This person is questioning whether I deserve to feel that way. And so oftentimes, and same with when we do it to ourselves, so if you want to get a why answer, it's actually oftentimes helpful to not ask a why question and what question can actually get you there in a much more interesting way, because it kind of refocuses it from, it's about something that's wrong with me or about me to more what are the things, right? So what's work felt like for me lately is a really helpful way to get it. Oh gosh, what has it felt like? Have I checked in on that? And it's like, okay, it's felt tiring, or it's felt confusing, and there's no judgment of me associated with that.
- Then looking at things like, what's draining me lately? I mean, that one's obviously leading people in a direction, but when you say draining, people almost always have a really immediate response to that. It connects with something kind of visceral for them. They're like, oh, they feel that sense of something being sucked from them, and they almost always will respond. When I ask people this, they'll almost always respond with really specific answers. And I find that for myself too. When I ask What's draining me right now? I know that for me, I'll tell you, one of the things that has drained me in my work lately has been operating at a lot of different altitudes and across multiple different kind of topical areas, and the context shifting not just one way, but both ways has been draining, and I recognize that I really value being able to do that, and there's aspects of that that are important to the business I want to run, and also I got to manage how much of that happens on a day-to-day basis, or it's really tough. And then,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, we were speaking about this, right? Yeah. When you first jumped on before we hit record, you thought you had an hour before we jumped into this in-depth conversation and you only had half an hour. So having to switch out of coming a workshop and then 30 minutes later meeting someone new me for the first time and then jumping into relatively intense discussion. Yeah, that's a good example of that.
- Sara Wachter-Boettcher:
- Absolutely. Yeah. And that's one where I think what I said to you was like, so I was running a workshop, it was a virtual workshop, but we had 20 people on Zoom for two and a half hours. We were talking about having difficult conversations and communicating through conflict, which is a topic that I love, but it's also hard, and being in a workshop facilitator mode is a certain kind of energy. It's an kind of energy that I like, but it's a particular type of energy and it requires a lot of presence. Being interviewed is a different kind of energy and also requires a lot of presence. And so in between those activities, what I'd planned to do was my normal, take a break, stretch, go to the bathroom, get a snack, whatever. But also, as I said, it stare off into the middle distance for 20 minutes, and that was the time that got crunched, and I'm rolling with it and it's fine, but I also know that there's a cost there that takes a toll.
- When I finish this, it'll be 5:30 PM here in Philly, and I will be exhausted. A friend texted me earlier and was like, oh, do you want to come to this thing tonight? And my answer was like, Nope. I absolutely, I know myself, and I know that I will need to stare into the middle distance in a dimly lit room for a bit, and that's okay. But I think recognizing that different kinds of work takes different kinds of energy, and then being able to figure out how do you give yourself space for that? Yeah. So I ask those questions of myself a lot and try to be, I try to honor my answers to them when I can, and then in times when it doesn't quite work out as planned, recognizing, okay, well, that just means that that's come back to you later.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Well, speaking about work taking its toll, some of the problems that the people listening to this podcast will be working on, dark, deep, big, expansive, messy problems, the kind that aren't necessarily easy to solve, and they're going to take a lot of energy from a lot of people to work on. I'm talking about things like ableism, racism and dark patterns, so these aren't nicely discreet, mathematically able to be solved problems anytime soon, right? Yeah. Now you've suggested, and I'm going to paraphrase here, that we should never devalue our own health and wellbeing to solve problems like that. The problems we're trying to solve, whatever they are, doesn't great change though the solving of really messy problems that require great sacrifice. And if we are not prepared to do it, then who,
- Sara Wachter-Boettcher:
- Yeah, I dunno that I would say that we should never sacrifice our wellbeing for that, but I do think that you have to look at that as it's a very temporary solution. It doesn't last very long. And I mean, really, if you're putting your wellbeing on the line in order to make a change in your organization, you are going to wear out relatively quickly, and I think it's really important to think about what is going to be sustainable for you. I think sometimes we'll use that though as a way to stay comfortable, and I think that's not what I mean by that. When I say what's sustainable for you, I mean, what does it look like for you to take some of your social capital, some of the privileges you might have, some of the relative safety you might have compared to other groups, and put some of that on the line in the service of your values.
- And also recognizing that you are are a strong, powerful person and a fragile old baby, and at the same time, and you do have to think about how much of that you can actually take on right now, I think one of the things that happens is that, oh, there's a few things. If you put too much of your wellbeing on the line in the service of your values, you'll burn out and give up. It's a really common answer. You see it a lot. I think we're seeing it right now with white people in the United States. The peak of racial justice protests in 2020 after George Floyd's murder has turned into a pretty lackluster kind of ongoing effort in a lot of places and with a lot of people, and there's oftentimes exhaustion from it, and a lot of that exhaustion is from coming in too hot and then not being able to keep it up.
- Some of that is you have to think of it as a little bit like a muscle. How do you continue to train for that work and work your way up to it? And I think the other thing is I talked about before, it's like when you try to show up to really important work that is anti-oppressive or work that is or that is really organized around societal change and you're not taking care of yourself, it is very, very possible. And in fact, I think it would be likely that you will end up doing things that harm people and can be harmful to the very people you're trying to help in the process. And so you have, I think, not just hashtag self-care, but I think you actually have a responsibility to be attending to your own wellbeing so that you can be a responsible member of whatever change movement you're part of.
- I don't think that that means always being comfortable. I think those are different. I think it's also saying it is uncomfortable to show up in new spaces, to maybe listen to people that you haven't listened to in the past to reckon with your own internalized racism or misogyny. Those are uncomfortable things. They should feel uncomfortable, and you should do them even if they're uncomfortable. But also that discomfort might mean that you need a little space afterwards where you're a little tender with yourself doing the hard thing. It's okay to say, that was a hard thing for me, and now I need a little something to take care of myself afterwards. That's actually how you learn that it's safe to do hard things, and if you don't give yourself that, then what your body learns is just the stress part, and it doesn't learn that you can do the stressful thing and it's okay afterwards, and it's safe to do that, and that's actually what you need in order to make any long-term changes.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It's a really important and nuanced clarification. The thing that came to mind for me as you were talking about that is running the car at red line's, okay, for a short period of time, but it's actually as the driver, it's your duty of care to the car to make sure that you don't do that all the time so that you can continue to keep driving that car. Otherwise you're going to run into some pretty serious problems.
- Sara Wachter-Boettcher:
- Yeah. Yeah.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Sara, you touched on the fairly lackluster space that America finds itself in now with regards to the civil rights reckoning. And you mentioned George Floyd in there.
- Sara Wachter-Boettcher:
- Lackluster is a kind way to put it, but yeah. Yeah,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- I would say this is a PG show, but it's not. So if we want to use more strong language, it's totally fine. And you've suggested that companies are being more performative than true in their desire to address issues of equity and inclusion and that they're very quick to sacrifice those things that they say they believe in when it comes down to a choice between an existing roadmap or an established strategy. And now specifically about this, you've said, and I'll quote you again, as much as corporations talk about these things, it's not really what they're designed for. And this is a moment for me when I was prepping, I was thinking about this and why I was thinking about this so much is because that's actually a fundamental truth about the design of business. And then I started going down another rabbit hole here in my head, and the question I came to was, aren't we in design then just fiddling around the margins? Do we have to come to terms with and accept the Friedman doctrine that the primary responsibility of a corporation is to maximize its profits for its shareholders?
- Sara Wachter-Boettcher:
- So I think that's a great question, and I think the answer is yes, and meaning yes, we have to accept that that is the primary directive of a company. I mean, most companies there are differences, and some of them are really based off of how a company is structured. But if you're talking about what we traditionally think of as a corporation, so a company that's publicly traded or that would like to become publicly traded someday, and particularly companies that are in the United States, which is what I know the most about, or that are modeled after United States companies, which a lot of tech companies not based in the US have taken a playbook from US tech companies, which has played a role in how they're formed. But all those companies structurally like the organization is designed to create profit for shareholders, period. If it doesn't, that organization is in trouble.
- And those shareholders have expectations. And when those expectations aren't met, I mean, this is how CEOs get ousted, right? They rarely get ousted because of they were, I don't know, mean to employees. They get ousted because they are not performing. And when they're not performing, it's typically around a financial thing. Yes, there, I'm sure there are examples at the edges, but for the most part, we're really talking about what is the purpose of a company? And in the current moment, the current legal structure that is what is actually enshrined. Anything else the company decides it wants to do. The people in that organization who made that decision might firmly believe in it, but structurally, the organization is oriented in one direction. So that changes when there are things like regulations that say, oh, yes, as an organization, you are obviously oriented in this direction, and this is what we're going to put some boundaries around that we're going to say we understand that's where you are oriented, so we're going to prevent you from doing it in ways that are harmful.
- Right? In the absence of that, then you have things like public pressure. You have things like bad pr. You have things like customers leaving your company because they don't like the way that you like the kind of positions that you take or where you put money or products and you have employees revolting. And all of those things are, let's say, they hold less sway than the fundamental direction of the company. But that doesn't mean that they're powerless. It just means that you have to work on them. And so I think what we have to think about in design is like, yes, at some level there is a lot of work that's just fiddling around at the edges and kind of smoothing out the rough bits of an experience so that it feels friendlier, but isn't necessarily more humane. And on the other hand, I think that we have a big obligation to think about where can we improve the actual outcomes humans are experiencing even if we don't have control over the macro picture.
- And I think that when we do that, and when we speak up for those things, we create a system in which it's more acceptable to speak up to those things. There are more people who are talking about difficult subjects, and there are more people who are finding one another, and that's how you get things like connection and solidarity amongst workers, and that's where you start getting collective power. None of those things is a quick fix. None of those things changes the way that corporate entities are structured or the fundamental priorities that they have. But it will, it can help put some of that power into check. And I think that it's okay to acknowledge the reality of the situation. And my opinion is that if you can't acknowledge that big reality, it's going to be real hard to make any change where it's possible because you are kind of living in a fantasy land.
- But if you can acknowledge the reality and be like, yep, that is what a corporation is designed to do. I don't care how many black squares they put on Instagram, I don't care how many PR releases they have or what the CEO says, this is what they're designed to do, that's what they're going to do. Then you say, well, okay, I don't have to pretend like they're going to be something other than what they are. I can look at that in the eye and say, okay, what is possible for me to do from the place that I'm at? What's possible within this company? What's possible in my life outside of this company? And those questions I think are ultimately much more meaningful.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- So if we think about what's possible and we accept that changing the fundamental priority of the corporation from profit to something else is not going to happen, and instead we think about the influence that we can have, as you've talked about on the things that we can affect change on in particular perhaps the design of the organization or the way that it frames its operations in the world. You've talked about something that I feel is relevant here, and I'll quote you again. You've said different people have different needs and they always have had, we just pretend that everyone had the same needs and could go to work in the same way. I think this is a moment when organizations can really say, how do we accept that and design for that for the long haul? And that made a lot of sense to me, and I think it's a really great reflective question to be asking and for designers to be thinking about.
- But do you ever get the feeling that those of us in design, we have plenty of these really useful insights, yet we spend too much time speaking to other people within our own domain and too little time speaking with or trying to connect with or trying to share those insights with people that actually have the real power to make decisions that can affect the status quo in a meaningful way. And I'm talking about people here like the c e O. Do you feel that we spend too much time in our own echo chamber? And I know this is an ironic question to be asking on a design podcast, but do we need to get outside our building a little here?
- Sara Wachter-Boettcher:
- I'm actually really interested because that question makes me think that that's what your position is. And I'm actually really curious about that. I mean, what do you think? Because it sounds like that's something that you want to see designers do.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It would be fair to say that that is not a completely open question and
- It does scratch an itch for me, and it's something that I've heard murmured around the edges of the design universe that I have had the privilege operating within. So I don't know if this is a deeper vein of gold that might exist here, but I do get the sense, I do get the sense, and sometimes I'm having these conversations and I really enjoy them, but sometimes I get the sense that what we are thinking of and what we have to say is actually really valuable, yet it's falling on deaf ears because we're only talking to ourselves. So you're right, it is a position that I'm starting to form. Yeah.
- Sara Wachter-Boettcher:
- Yeah. And I, I have some opinions on this. I think one of them is that I think that can be true. And at the same time, I also think that there are a lot of people out there who are framing this as all designers' fault, that it's designers don't know, business designers aren't interested in having conversations outside of other designers. Designers are all into naval gazing. And there's a lot of stuff that makes that like and a designer's problem when sure, some of that comes up. But I also think it is, it's a question of who's interested in hearing us. You can yell all day at people who aren't interested in hearing you and they're not going to get a damn thing from that. And I think there is an aspect that's both like, yes, look for opportunities to have conversations with people outside of your bubble and also know that you are only one part of that equation and you are not going to change the hearts of and minds of somebody who is invested in ignoring you and is invested in not hearing what you're actually saying.
- And so I think it's important to try that out, experiment, see what works. But I also think we do designers a disservice when we tell them that their job is to spend their entire freaking life building influence, managing up, advocating constantly, constantly socializing their ideas. It's very draining because, not because those things aren't valuable, but because the way that it's often positioned is very one-sided and it makes it seem as if you are not getting success, getting the leadership in your organization at the executive level to give a shit about something, it's because you're not doing a good enough job. And what that doesn't take into account is what are the incentives the other person has in that? And if the person in power has a lot of incentives to ignore you, then they're going to ignore you and that's not your personal failing. And I think that that's important because I think it's very draining to keep hearing if you just did it better, if you just did it better.
- I mean, look like I have spent years trying to set boundaries with some people in my life, and guess what? I've worked on it and I've tried to do it so well and I've gotten so much better at it and not all of them know how to respect boundaries and I don't control that part. And I think that this is a similar thing where it's like if I looked at that as my personal failing, if a family member continues to violate a boundary, no, no, no, that's their choice. All I can do is decide what I want to do with that in my personal life. It's like, do I continue having a relationship with them? What kind of relationship? What are the limits on the relationship I will have with them in your professional life? It's the same thing. Can I live with this? And if I'm going to live with this, what is that costing me and how do I take care of myself in the process? Am I okay with it? And I think that that's a big piece that you have to come to terms with. Otherwise it is so demoralizing to feel like you are endlessly repeating the same thing and not getting the result that you want and that it's somehow your fault. And if you were just better, you wouldn't have that problem.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- That also is a really important clarification and added perspective to that conversation, particularly the part around other people's incentives. And I know I spoke with, it was Jesse James Garrett late last year, and we were talking about the role that incentives play in the motivations and the way that other people outside of design behave and that actually understanding those, and to your point, understanding which ones you can influence and which ones you can't. And therefore what you have control of and what you don't is actually a really healthy space to arrive at and you can become more okay with what the status quo is and your efforts to try and change that. You spoke very briefly about boundaries, and I wanted to come to this and I know we're about to bring the show down to a close, so we won't spend necessarily as much time as I would've liked on this. Oh my gosh,
- Sara Wachter-Boettcher:
- I could talk about boundaries all day.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- We've kind of been skirting around this subject and I do want to give it some air time. I've got one particular question about bound boundaries here, and that is, given that the predominant business culture, and I'm talking about the American business culture, that many of us in the west have inherited or imitated for whatever reason, one of
- Sara Wachter-Boettcher:
- Our very successful exports. Yes,
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It's a very successful west export, which is, I've kind of phrased this as it's do more, get further in terms of the way that as individual, individual actors within these organizations, there's often an emphasis on hard work. You know, just need to work harder. If you do more, you'll get up that ladder faster, you'll have more status, you'll get more money. This is a very binary framing of that. But if you establish boundaries at work, we've seen many people through the pandemic do, and many organizations talk about needing their people to need to do this now for healthy work cultures. Do you have to accept that if you are going to maintain those boundaries, that you are going to sacrifice a bit of status and a bit of income for your immediate need to protect those boundaries that you're actually trading off future income and future status with your current state.
- Sara Wachter-Boettcher:
- So I don't know that you have to accept that because I don't think that's always true, but I think it's sometimes true. I think what is always true is that you are always making trade offs. We're making trade offs constantly. I mean, it's life, right? I have to make a trade off between spending my time. I don't know, am I going to go to dinner with my husband or am I going to read a book or whatever? Everything is a trade off of time and time, resources, et cetera. And so what you want to think about is what are my trade-offs here? And oftentimes when we talk about boundaries, people go right to that binary thinking it's right, I can't do this. And it's a yes no, right? Can I say set a boundary or not? And it's very easy to always default to no, because there is some kind of risk.
- Now what we have to think about is what is the risk in that particular scenario? Oftentimes I work with people on boundaries and they will tell me that they're so scared to set them and they're like, they've built up this kind of catastrophizing situation in their head that's very cognitive distortion town where you are. If I say no to this thing, this person will think that I don't care. And then when my review comes around this, it's like we create this cascading effect of things that's often not true. And it's really helpful to start to notice when you're going into places catastrophization, so you can pull yourself back and say, what is the actual risk here? What's the real risk? And one of the first ways to do that I think, is to get to a place where it's saying, what is it? So what is the boundary that I'd like to set?
- What might it cost me to set that boundary? What are some of the potential risks? And then to investigate how likely are those things? Why do I think they're likely, where does that come from? What assumptions are baked into that? What is based on evidence and past experience? What is just my fear talking? And then on the other side, what is it going to cost me to not set this boundary? And I think oftentimes we spend way more time on what is the risk of setting the boundary than we spend on what is it costing me not to set it? And when we are honest with ourselves with the risk of not setting the boundary, those risks are really high. I've worked with a lot of people who are in, who've been in, let's say relatively senior roles in big companies like Design Directors and Upward who have realized too late the cost of not setting those boundaries, meaning they've come to me when they have been burnt out and feeling really broken because they spent so much time telling themselves, this is what I have to do to move up.
- This is what I have to do to get by. I often work with women and oftentimes it happens when women have pushed so hard to get promoted within a system that often devalues them and then get out the other end of that, and they're like, wait a second, I don't even want to be here and I don't like who I've become. Now in my mind, that's a really, really high price to pay and that it's probably would've been a better price to pay to set a boundary earlier on and to get some guardrails in place because turns out you didn't even want what you got. You got the thing you worked so hard for and then you were miserable there. So what I always think about is just can you bring yourself back to what is the risk, what of not setting it, what kinds of trade offs are the right mix for me right now?
- And that's going to change over time too. There might be times when if you are in a period of real economic instability, let's say, right? You're like, I might not be able to make rent next month. That is going to give you a different set of parameters. Then somebody who's like, I have been saving really well for a long time. I'm very stable and I have my fuck you money, and that person has a lot easier time setting a particular boundary. I just think it's always important to think about what your particular situation is. What is your risk tolerance in this moment and what are the risks on both sides? But your brain is going to have already spent a lot of time on one side of those risks, so it's more work to then investigate the other side.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Just very briefly, coming back to those conversations with those female leaders that have gotten more than halfway up that ladder only to realize that it's not really the thing that they wanted. I suspect some of that comes down to social conditioning and the things that we are taught to value and potentially not enough critical thinking along the way, which is definitely something that I feel that you give people, you give them a lens through the questions you ask to think critically about their behavior and how they've arrived at their current destination, and then what they might do to change that. Now reminded me what you were saying about an episode of a TV show called Station 11 that I was recently watching, and there was a quote in that episode and the quote was, I don't want to live the wrong life and die. So what do you tell these women when you're having these very personal conversations about the fact that I've now realized that their life they're living is not the life they want? What is it that you say to them?
- Sara Wachter-Boettcher:
- I think the first thing is to acknowledge how hard it is to come to terms with that reality. That's a painful thing to realize, and I think it's important to acknowledge that pain and also to acknowledge that there's a lot of grief there because you put a lot of yourself into something and it doesn't mean that none of that matters too. That's the other thing, when you realize that you've made decisions that aren't right for you, for a lot of people, they start to feel like, well, I've wasted all my time and I've wasted all this energy, and I think it's a really healthy thing to acknowledge a lot of that pain and that grief and that fear and that sense of really questioning and having this sense of regret. And then also holding space for the idea of these are the choices we made.
- Can't when we can't change the past, how do we take what we can take from it and acknowledge the rest of it and allow ourselves the grace to move on from it, which is a big, long process. But I think the biggest thing is the first part, just anything else stressful and hard is you got to feel your feelings about it. And so if you feel that grief and that sense of loss and that sense of fear to be able to just have that exist first because it's only once you can work through that, that we have space to really allow ourselves to embrace what's next and to also be able to say, you know what? That might not have been the right path for me. There might have been things about that that don't work for me. And also I learned a lot there.
- I have skills that I'm bringing with me, I take with me all of those experiences. What about those experiences? Do I want to pull with me to my next version of myself or the next place I'm focusing? And I think that that then allows us to not feel like we're necessarily starting over or to feel like all of it was a waste or to kick ourselves as much, but to instead get into what I like to think of as the reality acceptance business. We're just accepting what is already true. You're just acknowledging to yourself that this is not what you want, but you've not wanted it for a while. And while it's painful to go through, the part of acknowledging it is through that acknowledgement and through that processing that you will actually get out to what's better on the other end.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- It's almost as if people say that breakups happen a lot earlier on than the day that you decide to tell the other person that it's not working, and it's just that confronting moment being able to process that. Yes,
- Sara Wachter-Boettcher:
- Yes.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Sara, as we bring the show down to a close, I've got one last time that I'd like to quote you now something that you said, which was, let humans be human. People go through things. People need time to process things. People have feelings. If you can accept that, that's what humans are like, and stop expecting them to always follow your idea of how things should be, the world actually gets a lot easier once you can truly accept that that's the case, you can stop trying to force fit everyone else into your perspective as an individual or as a company. So you seem to be cautioning us there that holding onto something too tightly can actually crush it.
- Sara Wachter-Boettcher:
- Yeah, I think we often hold really tightly to things that we believe or ways of seeing the world that are important to us, almost as if we don't trust ourselves enough. Because I think part of this is really saying, if this is how I see it and what matters to me, that's real and that's enough. And I don't have to force that perspective onto everyone else in order for it to be true. For me, being able to see that allows us to be able to see multiple truths. Doesn't mean you don't disagree with people, it doesn't mean that you don't have values. It doesn't it not any of that. It's not like everybody's opinions are equal. It's saying there is space for me to let other people be other people and to let them need different things than me because I am confident that my perspective is valid simply because I am valid, and I don't have to justify it by making it something everybody else has to be as well.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Sara, what a great conversation. I really have really appreciated the depth that we've gone to today. We've had plenty of important things. We've put out plenty of important things for people to think about. I'm sure people that have been listening along have gotten a lot from this conversation. Thank you for sharing your stories and your insights with me today. Yeah,
- Sara Wachter-Boettcher:
- Thank you so much, Brendan. This has been fun.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Yeah, definitely my pleasure. And Sara, if people want to keep up with what you are doing with Active Voice, what's the best way for them to do that?
- Sara Wachter-Boettcher:
- Yeah, go to ActiveVoiceHQ.com and get on our newsletter list because we do announcements of workshops and stuff. We also do a lot of writing. I write a lot of essays that go out that way, and I'd love for you to be there.
- Brendan Jarvis:
- Great. Thanks Sara. And to everyone that's listened, it's been great having you here as well. Everything we've covered will be in the show notes, including detailed chapters of all the conversation that we've had today, all the good questions and answers that have been asked and responded to.
- And if you want to catch up with me, you want to hear more great conversations like this with world class leaders on UX research, product management and design, the best way to do that is actually to subscribe to the podcast. It'll turn up every two weeks.
- If you've enjoyed the conversation and you want to hear more like this, then give it a review. Those are really helpful as well for helping people to understand what it's like to be a listener to these conversations and tell someone else about the show if you feel that they would get value from the types of conversations that we have here.
- If you want to reach out to me specifically, you can find me on LinkedIn, just search for Brendan Jarvis, or there's a link to my profile at the bottom of the show notes. Another way you can find me is to visit my website, which is thespaceinbetween.co.nz. That's thespaceinbetween.co.nz. And until next time, keep being brave.