THE LEAFLET
January 16 2025
trigger and increase your EI, critique your boss, shape culture with “always” and “never” rules
HOW TO TRIGGER (AND INCREASE) YOUR EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE
You may find yourself frowning at a memory of doing something in a meeting or conversation that felt rash and misaligned with your values. The way I acted then is not the way I’d hope to act in the future. This sequence of thoughts is a good example of self-awareness.
A critical next step in emotional intelligence is self-regulation. Not just knowing you have a tendency, but taking steps to address or adjust it in the moment.
My recommended trick is: before entering a situation where you have struggled in the past, imagine your future self looking back on this moment telling your present self what to do. Then do what your future self recommends. Sometimes that recommendation can take the form of a mantra - if so, great. Use that mantra in your preparation.
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Some say that you can accomplish this with regular meditation, that that practice slows your response to stimuli and affords you the chance to change or choose the response once you have it.
I’m not an experienced meditator, so I can’t speak to the effectiveness of that particular approach. But I know lots of people who helpfully bring their future selves into the present when they pause, voice a centering mantra, and deliberately choose that future self.
-ben
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CRITIQUE YOUR BOSS (LIKE YOU’RE POLITICALLY NAIVE)
Premise: You see something your boss could be doing differently or better. Maybe this is an individual tic of theirs that shows up small scale, in informal meetings; maybe it’s a decision or pattern that impacts the culture or strategy of the whole team. Either way, I tend to see three approaches to this fact pattern:
You tell your boss. Give them the feedback.
You talk to a peer about it. (When I’m feeling my oats, I just call this “gossip”).
You stifle it. Let it go.
Rationale & Context: Feedback that is good (ie useful) and good-hearted (ie generous to the recipient) can get scarcer and scarcer as you move up in an organization. Your job becomes more and more about helping other people (and teams) to do their jobs better, through the provision of clarity, capital, or feedback. Those same people rarely see their jobs as helping you get better at yours. At the same time, you have fewer people above you who do see their jobs that way. Those few people, it turns out, are likely among the busiest at the organization and they (hopefully, correctly) assume you’ve gotten where you are because you can figure things out and author your own improvements. Your growth might not be their priority.
Your boss might be in this exact pickle. If they are, your feedback - the thing you noticed and had the guts and care to bring to their attention - can be the best sign that a) you take the right things seriously (you get it) and b) you have their back.
-eric
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SHAPE YOUR CULTURE WITH “ALWAYS” AND “NEVER” RULES
Fun exercise alert. Coming up with core values or operating principles or other cultural guides can spin you off into some pretty esoteric philosophical places. You can find yourself writing a lot of bs that will rightly be seen as such by your people - especially the second and subsequent waves of people who weren’t cooking up This Organization with you in a founder’s test kitchen.
One way to avoid lyrical but useless culture stuff: write a list of observable “always” and “never” rules. These are the things we always (or never) do and say around here. The observability criterion is an important part of this particular exercise. You’re looking here for propulsive actions not pure souls. (Mindsets and philosophy matter, of course, they’re just not what this exercise targets).
Give yourself permission to get really specific with some of these rules. “We never use sans serif typefaces” or “we never waste time thinking about typefaces” or “we always pick the typeface that best matches the needs of the audience” are all legitimate, depending on what kind of place you’re trying to be.
You may find that some of your rules have a similar spirit and point at a common desideratum. If there’s a word or phrase that captures the shared spirit and goal of that set of rules, that word or phrase is probably one of your starting core values.
-eric
Read the rest here.
COMPELLING QUOTES
Blogger Nabeel S. Qureshi on nostalgia:
Later, you’ll be nostalgic for right now.
Novelist Alexander Chee on the weirdness of the world:
Waiting tables was not just a good living, but also a good education in people. I saw things I never would have imagined, an education in life out past the limits of my own social class. Your imagination needs to be broken in, I think, to become anywhere near as weird as the world.
Poet David Whyte on work:
Work is a constant conversation. It is the back-and-forth between what I think is me and what I think is not me; it is the edge between what the world needs of me and what I need of the world.
Keep going, keep growing,
Ben & Eric