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You are listening to Tech Me Seriously with Sarah Esi, CEO of ESI Tech.
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Candid conversations with Driven technology and business professionals who've always got something interesting to say.
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Hi, I'm Sarah Nessi, the host of Tech Me Seriously, and CEO and Founder of 10 Tech an IT services firm headquartered in California.
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Today I'm speaking with Devin c Hughes.
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Devon is a captivating speaker, author, and workplace culture expert.
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He helps leaders at all levels drive growth and engagement by aligning workplace culture with success.
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His unconventional and innovative views on business and leadership have attracted international attention.
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Devin's approach draws from the science of positive psychology, positive organizational research, appreciative inquiry, neuroscience mindset, and mindfulness.
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Welcome, Devin.
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Thank you so much for inviting me.
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I am super excited to be here.
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I am too.
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On this podcast, I've been focusing as much on leadership and kind of workplace culture as on technology over the last few years.
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And, I've Talked about kindness and how to develop a culture in which people thrive.
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And we were gonna talk about kindness, but at the last minute I thought, let's talk about.
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Something else that you often talk about.
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And so our topic today is finding gratitude at work.
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Inoculating your brain against stress and anxiety.
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So what does that mean?
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What are we talking about here?
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Yeah.
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So a couple things that come to mind.
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Number one if you live on earth I think you might suggest there's a lot of heaviness going on.
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And so it's like my beloved mother used to say when I was a child, Sarah, can't control the weather, but you can control how you show up in it.
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And there's a lot of bad weather now,
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Yeah.
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right?
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Just a lot of stuff.
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Heaviness, Gaza, Ukraine, socioeconomic, political, just stuff.
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But the one common denominator, again, the analogous would be how I show up.
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For the people that I care about.
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That's my family, my teams, and my, all of the above.
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Yep.
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said the point of that is if I can get my brain in a better place more days, I can support the people that need it.
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In other words, you cannot pour from an empty cup.
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Right.
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And so inoculate your brain is essentially, I wasn't given the tools and resources when I was a young lad.
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I wasn't, I didn't, you just didn't, weren't given it.
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But the science has caught up outta the last 35 years in attendance of positive psychology that there's a new discipline called human flourishing wellbeing.
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So the subtext of that,
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It feels like no one talked about any of this stuff.
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We're about the same generation and it feels as we move forward year to year, people are finally talking about this stuff.
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I don't know.
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It felt like there was a huge kind of upswing of talking about mindset and mindfulness and workplace culture after COVID.
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I don't know.
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Do you think that it is just changing generationally?
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You know, it's not punch a clock for 30 years, get a gold watch and walk away.
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Yeah, I think it has.
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Every generation changes and I think part of it was a stigma, right?
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If you said that you were exhausted or burnt out or tired, you know what the, we know what, suck it up.
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That's right.
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right.
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Yeah.
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And we use that language, man up.
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Put your big boy pants on.
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And so part of that, I grew up in that era, you didn't have feelings.
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Who cares about your feelings?
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All right.
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Get to work.
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Yeah.
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Yeah.
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part part of it was that, part of it was this tribal norm that you had to pay your dues,
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I.
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I'm totally guilty of the, put your time in.
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We've all been through this.
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Pay your dues.
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Yeah.
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So you go to a law firm, you gotta work 80 hours, you work on Wall Street, you gotta work on 80 hours.
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You work in a startup, you work in a tech company.
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Hey, you know it's gonna be a grind here.
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That's what we do.
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It's gonna be a grind.
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Yeah.
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And, and then we brag about it.
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Oh, Sarah, you work hard.
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Yeah.
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me tell you.
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I don't even take PTO.
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Okay, so I'm glad you said that because I've been socializing the conversation.
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I often will tell people what I'm talking about, you know, on any given week.
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And, um, I was talking to one of our employees about it and I said to him, you know, I'm gonna, I'm gonna be asking Devin about what can employers do to help people inoculate their brain, but also I think this is as much focused on the individual, which is kind of fun.
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One of the things he said to me is, I feel like there's this culture of not.
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Like being expected to be around, be on PTO to take our PTO, which for me is like, the business leader is tough because we have five weeks of PTO.
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We absolutely want people It.
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Right?
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And we, we don't, I don't think we're reminding people enough, like maybe in our monthly all hands we should be saying, Hey, we really want you to take your time off.
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We want you to recharge, we want you to feel good.
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But I feel like we do a bunch of stuff, but it doesn't land for our team.
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And so.
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I'm also kind of excited, and we're gonna get to this a, a little bit later in the podcast, but how can, how can leaders sort of ingrain that in employees?
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Because I feel like we're doing this stuff, but people don't feel that way.
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So the easiest way, and I,
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Yeah.
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you the easiest way I've seen, what leaders talk about is
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Yeah.
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So if you're going on PTO and the VPs are going on PTO and they're sharing pictures and stories.
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It clearly sets the context that that's what we do around here.
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Yeah, we take time off to recharge.
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Yeah.
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We don't, we don't.
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There's nothing to be shameful of.
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I'm excited.
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and PTO could be a home vacation, it could be with staycation, it could be whatever.
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So the easy fix is just a normalized talking about it.
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The other one is you also have to create boundaries.
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Meaning you do take PTO.
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But I'm still checking email and still connected, right?
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We've been there, you, me, and others,
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my god.
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Yeah,
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right?
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just gonna say, I didn't take a vacation without working like legitimately.
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Until maybe eight years ago.
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I'm not even joking.
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Like I would, I would work while my family was asleep, and then I'd hang out with'em.
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It was atrocious.
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I'm over that.
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See that's the thing that we did.
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And I did the same thing.
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So I'd be in this like far away tropical place, getting up at four in the morning before everyone else got up.
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And I, and this is what I normalize, I'm just gonna get on email real quick'cause I don't want my inbox to get too much.
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And I'd crank out a couple hours and then a couple hours and then my family would see me and I don't want to be not present.
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So I close the laptop, sneak back up there maybe kind of throughout the day from the pool and then maybe before dinner.
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And I did that, the dance.
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like,
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Right.
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yes, and you're not alone.
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We all have been there.
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Yeah.
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I guess the point of that is I, it's situational, contextual, but if you can, and if someone's taking PTO, then they're off the grid.
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We will find a back channel.
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We will find a way to fill in, but we normalize it.
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I want, I don't want you half in, I want you all in on the PTO with your family.
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But those are the kind of conversations.
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I think to your point, we need to normalize and be more intentional about it and then let It's okay.
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Yeah.
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It's okay for us to take time away.
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So I wanna, before we're gonna go way more into that, but I wanna, before we get there, I wanna talk about, like more about you.
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Like how did you become, how did this become your focus area?
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Your area of focus, and something that you're super passionate about?
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I, I mean, couple things.
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One you know, I don't know people's backstories, but I think that matters.
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Yeah.
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up with much, My family.
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Neither parent went to college.
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Mm-hmm.
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education was my way out.
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Uh, I played college basketball, and so I was trying to get outta my circumstances.
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So I had a mindset I had to succeed because I just didn't want, I, I didn't wanna stay where I was.
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Yeah.
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forward that, so my dad was in the military and again, so I kind of understood culture and athletics and teams.
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And then intuitively I figured out when I was with my people, uh, and I was in a better place, I performed better.
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Mm-hmm.
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Like I was a better human being.
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Mm-hmm.
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to go, man, it's like a superpower.
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Like when I'm with my people, Sarah, and we're in that foxhole, it was just like a vibe.
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It's like I, I don't know how we're gonna figure it out, but we figure it out.
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And then I was in other cultures and it was like feel right, no trust, right?
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Mm-hmm.
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was like, okay, so I've been in good and bad.
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And so I went out in the workforce.
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I probably had 25 jobs.
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Literally I would just bounce around from job to job.
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'cause you don't know what you don't know.
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Yeah.
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at the time that seemed like a lot, but it gave me a really good sample size on leadership styles.
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Cultures, people, all of the above.
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And then, so I landed on two industries, high tech and biotech,
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Okay.
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which were, which were data-driven, fast growing cultures
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Mm-hmm.
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and bounced around a little bit.
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Startup, big company, et cetera.
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And then my, my last company got, uh, acquired and then I was like in an inflection point, met fast forward I was like, what do I wanna do next?
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And I did a talk at a rotary club.
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I know this is a lot.
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And someone in the back came up to me and said, Hey, you're unbelievable in front of the room.
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Have you ever thought about writing a a book?
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No.
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And boom, it happened like that 15 years ago.
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And so I took the totality of all my experience and said, you know what?
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Workplace culture plus science plus outcomes, and that's how my career started.
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I love it.
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I feel so I've read a couple of your books at this point,'cause I like to do my research and one of the things I feel like, I feel like you're an observer.
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I feel like you are a good observer.
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So it's definitely not by accident that you end up here.
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Yeah.
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I mean, I, you know, no, I don't know if I've, everyone's ever said that, but I do.
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I try to go in spaces as not the expert as a
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Yes.
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I mean, I don't know.
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I picked that up in reading.
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I don't know why.
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Yeah, and I, and I'm just very curious about human behavior.
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Mm-hmm.
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my presumption always with anybody, anybody I meet is that we're all good people,
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Same.
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right?
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And, uh, but we all have different experiences, different life stories, different triggers, different traumas, different stuff.
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And
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Yep.
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spaces, I'm like, okay, wow.
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What can I learn?
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This is interesting.
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How can I connect?
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What do we have in common?
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Just looking and observing and putting that all in context.
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And so, yeah, I mean, I, I think so.
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I'm, I just am fascinated with people.
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So do you think, I mean, I'm, I'm also fascinated with the idea that this is something new that organizations care about and are talking about.
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Do you think you could have had this kind of job, I don't know, 25 years ago?
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I.
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It would've been, I would, yeah, no, probably not.
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It would've been too woo woo.
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Exactly right.
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And what I think is so interesting about this is it was like, you know, I tell this story about how we lived in San Jose for 25 years and I working in high tech, same thing.
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I just had my head down.
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For all these years, and I'm telling you, COVID sort of snapped me out of it because it did, I think, allow a lot of us, and I know like people have been talking about this long before COVID certainly, but it just felt like, I don't know, like I feel like people got refocused on some of the balance.
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And I think that's why it's something that I'm so curious about and that I really want, like the team that I work with to feel like that their work can't be the only thing in their life.
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There's gotta be more,
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Yeah, and so I love that.
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I would also put this in context.
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This is why I'm so passionate about the work.
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We spend more time at work.
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In the aggregate hours
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right?
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than we spend anywhere else.
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Now, you, you might have heard me say this, but you know, again, I spend a lot of time, I, I, I, this is how my mind works.
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You, you look at the mortality tables, most of us have 80 summers.
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Okay?
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Hopefully we have a lot more.
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Summers, that's not that much, and most of us, at least 40 of those are at work.
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Put that in context.
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50% of our existence is at work, so why would I settle and lower the bar and give up 50% of my aggregate hours at a place with people that I can't be seen, heard, and valued?
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Yes.
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That's.
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that's new though, that people have started to draw those boundaries.
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And you know, it's kind of interesting when we talked about this idea that nobody takes PTO and I've worked 24 hours in a row and like those were the badges of like honor at work.
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And now I, I'll like coach my team, like, don't send an email after 6:00 PM.
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Like literally schedule to send.