JACOB: Hello and welcome to Episode 192, Greater Than Code. I’m Jacob Stoebel and I’m here with John Sawers.

JOHN: Thanks, Jacob and I’m excited to be here. First, I’m with Jerome Hardaway!

JEROME: Hey everybody, it’s Jay here. So we're here with our special guest, Siobhán Cronin. Now she's an engineering leader with a passion for platform engineering, machine learning, and building strong communities. She began her career researching how humans learn at Harvard’s Lab for Developmental Studies, and now stewards human-computer ecosystems solving problems that matter i.e. she's like a billion times smarter than me. She is currently the Engineering Manager at Landed, where she leads a team of engineers helping support the financial well-being of essential professionals. Wow, that's very important.

Siobhán has published research in Brain & Cognition, Neuroreport, and Model View Culture, and presented at the Conference on Complex Systems, Conference on Cognitive Neuroscience, AlterConf, PyLadies, Metis, and Temple University. She is the lead developer of SwarmOpt, an open-source swarm intelligence algorithm library—I have no idea what that is, you’ve got to send me some links—a guest researcher at Slow Research Lab, and an engineering mentor at Hackbright Academy—I understood that reference. 

Siobhán enjoys powerful conversations, championing women/NB changemakers, dancing, laughing, enjoying delicious food, reading poetry, supporting friends through life transitions, and building strong communities.

Here are some things on Siobhán’s mind these days such as managing change during COVID, which is what’s on everybody's minds. The pros and cons of bringing our full selves to work—I'm really excited to talk to you about that. Building intentional hiring partnerships and communities we serve. Oh, [inaudible] on that, I’m going to be so excited. Balancing full-stack learning on a team of specialization and sparking the joy of learning after periods of being underwater. This whole podcast is going to be a vibe, I'm going to love it. 

So I guess our first question—I read your mini autobiography, I was blown away—what is your superpower that is not posted on here?

SIOBHÁN: I love it. Thanks for having me here and reading through that because it's like oh gosh, I like to squeeze all of my things into one little paragraph. 

My superpower. So I have a funny story about this. I've often said that my superpower is believing in people and I like to say that and post it in places and it feels very true and I can share why. But this last weekend, I had a cousin. I said that to him and he said, “I'm sure you do more than just believe in people. Once you believe in them, you probably advocate and champion them,” and I was like, “Oh right. It just sounds like the first part of what I really need to say.”

So I stepped back and I thought well, what I really need to say as a superpower is that I like to align with people inside their own meaning-making systems, inside their passions, their desires, get to know them really intimately, their own passions and then really hold them as though they were my own and collaborate with others to find what the edge of growth would be. The pithy way of saying that is my superpower is catalyzing personal and community change and that's where I am right now. 

JOHN: Wow, that's incredibly powerful. 

JEROME: That is big. It's awesome. So let's start going down this list and let's do some crazy, let's just tap on some shit. First, I want to apologize in advance. I am a combat veteran, US Air Force so I speak in F bombs and acronyms so if you're that anti-swearing, I will try to keep it down for the sake of this podcast.

SIOBHÁN: No, I'm secretly a sailor, so that's great.

JEROME: Exactly. You just got to roll the punches, man.

So, all right. Let's talk about managing change during COVID. Let's start with that subject because I'm sure we are all going through that on some level. Personally, I'm having this weird kind of lifestyle. Professionally, I am firing all cylinders, but outside is closed because of COVID, Aunty Rona. Outdoors is not open to me and I'm making real cool lifestyle creative decisions and this is the most popular and biggest wave I’ve rode as I've been on since starting my nonprofit and being in software engineering, but people are dying so it’s weird to be excited. I can't be happy with oh, my country is burning to the ground at the same time. So what are your feelings on that? 

SIOBHÁN: Jerome, that is to me, so foundational for why this time is so unique and challenging is that the variance across experiences being so vast, like what you're describing. Some businesses, great to be at Zoom, perhaps. Everyone's realizing they have to work at home and big for business and then other companies failing just even in the tech space and then on the personal, it's the same. Individuals that wow, it's like this extended staycation with my family and I'm cloistered in my beautiful privilege and then others that are completely on the frontline dying. 

And so, holding that much community variance, to me, is one of the biggest challenges not even as a worker bee at the company, but just being a human right now and I think maybe extra bolstered by we're at home and we're digesting more social media. We're actually more tethered to the media outlets. So I think there's even more a sense of, wow, there's people really with a wide range of experiences right now.

I think for me, at the core level, I hear what you're saying, too. How do you even experience maybe joy or pride in your work right now, if it's going well like how do you feel that if you're also holding space for grieving in your community? And I think for me, one of the bravest things I can sort of track in people around me and in myself is the bravery to feel range of feelings even in the midst of crisis; to feel joy, to feel pride, to feel excitement even if that morning something horrible happened. 

Because what's happened across the history of our species is there's always been something quite atrocious happening in the planet, to the humans that are on it and it's been convenient that we've selected to look at that or not look at it depending on the community-making systems we hold. So I think this is a real chance to explore that for oneself like, how do you want to make your day?

JACOB: Yeah. Someone at work said something that I thought was really smart. He's himself an MD, he’s working for a healthcare company and he said, “If you are in a very privileged position to have the option of basically not having a story during this period” –basically, which is you're someone who is relatively healthy, you work at home, you don’t stand to be impacted in any major way, if you're in that privileged position, “you better go get that story.” And if that story is like, you're going to help your neighbors pick up their groceries or anything, really, you don't want to look back on this and say, “Nothing happened to me and I didn't do anything of any importance.” A story I’m thinking like, it's probably good that we're all – what I'm hearing you say is it's a good thing to feel affected by this. 

SIOBHÁN: It shows that you feel. That you have the capacity to have feelings.

JACOB: Yeah. The reason I bring this up is that I think this goes back to the topic that was in your bio and I think we’ve discussed this theme on our show is bringing your whole self to work. And I think that is a boundary that is being stretched like never before where I'm working and there's a 3-year-old in the background half the time when I'm on meetings, like that is a completely new thing for most people. It’s certainly for me.

JEROME: Oh yeah. My dogs, they like to just “you know what, you’ve been on the computer too long so I’m going to bother you.” I have dogs of variant heights. Or even with the kids. One kid decided that he needed a hug and he didn’t care like, “I'm going to stand up right now” like what is that to me? I don’t know, I don’t care. I was like, “Oh, all right.” So there are six living things in my house that don’t give a damn about my Zoom meetings and my podcast and they’re like, “No, give me attention now.” So it's a wild ride right now. 

SIOBHÁN: That makes me excited, though that there's human care and a hug in your day and a standup. I think that definitely boosts standup in my eyes if there's more hugging involved. But I think it's true, that's something that I've always had hope for, for more remote working situations and more interweaving of our lives. Being able to cook, being able to care for others, being able to lie down—that was a big deal. When I started looking at offices that I could work for, like companies to work for, I was really just looking for where can I be more like a human being? Where can I sit on the floor? Where can I lie down? Where can I kind of cook food and if those things were more and more absent, I was like, “So what are you expecting me to do here? Become this cyborg that I'm not? I actually have material physical reality.”

I typically want a nap after lunch for like 10 minutes and I think a lot of people I know, once they eat a lot of food, maybe they want to sit down for a second and if there's nowhere in your space, I would hide in the phone booth and curl on the floor and it was like, “Okay, I made it work.” But now I look at well, how can we set up more spaces for people to be more in their bodies? 

I came from this weird background early in my career where I was a contemporary dancer and worked in the art world for a long time and if you hang around with dancers, we’re obsessed with being in our bodies and our big contribution to the world is to say, “We forgot that we exist in these embodied forms,” and so, if you just think you're a floating head, you're wrong. Your ideation, your cognition, your desires, your dreams, they actually are networked through this entire body and so, if you're sitting in a crappy chair, you're not thinking the best thoughts. If you didn't eat something delicious, you're kind of distracted. So I think there's still part of me that's on that rampage of humane. Like you said that early, Jerome like humane, like being more humane here and that involves the full human, like what is the human?

JOHN: Yeah, that’s one of the things about working at home, you've got that ability to make that space exactly what you need; you can accommodate all the things that you need. That's one of those not really trumpeted benefits of working from home, but I think one of those great, especially for people with any kind of disability or any kind of issue with being out in the world. You can take care of all that stuff that you need to take care of. You can take into account the fact that you need to have that nap after lunch and not have it impact anything because it wouldn't, but you've got the space for it. So that's one of those things that I think a lot of people are realizing it once they get that chance to work from home.

SIOBHÁN: And Jerome, I hear you because there's also, like you said, folks with different needs. This is a funny story just to throw into the room. So I'm a late blooming trans woman and so, it's so funny to be in this process, already to be at work and meeting all these people and investors and it's probably times I would have been like, “I'd rather like just to like go into like to the moon and transition and come back when it's all done.” But life doesn't work that way; we have to make money and do things and so, then we have COVID winter and then everyone's on this thing called Zoom literally zooming into my face all day long for hours and hours and hours and hours and it's like, wow, this is like a psychological stress I didn't expect. 

I'm actually a very resilient trans person. I feel like I just kind of roll with the punches, but all of a sudden, I was like, “Wow, this is actually, for a lot of folks, boosting interpersonal tensions and anxieties that weren’t there before.” That where they could hide in the back of the room during standup or whatever. 

So I think, I guess what I hear too, like John is just like there's a range of experiences, once again. Some folks are really dialing it in right now and some folks are really feeling further and further left behind and it's like, that's what's in the room with us.

JEROME: Absolutely. You had me at the napping part. I was like, “Yo, that is my favorite song.” Being able to nap after you do something, I'm one of those. My energy levels are super high, if you can’t tell by how I just bring the ruckus. Halfway through the day, I'm like, “All right, it's time for a nap. I’m out [inaudible].” By 3:00 PM, I need a 20-minute recharge sessions so I can do this until 10:00 PM and people are like, “That's abnormal, grownups don't nap.” I’m like, “Why? Napping is amazing.” So I'm with you a hundred percent on the whole napping thing.

SIOBHÁN: The napping revolution. 

JEROME: Yes. Let's start it! 

[laughter]

SIOBHÁN: But yeah, I think this idea of pros and cons of full self at work, maybe just to get into that a little bit because actually, I wanted to talk about. This is something I'd love your thoughts on is that I think what we shared before. I work at a company called Landed and we help essential professionals, build financial wellness in the communities they serve, and it calls all the cool kids to the yard. People that want to work at Landed come from planning, one of our cofounders is on the Obama campaign; folks that are really here to make a difference and so, we all show up. We're like, “Yeah, we're jazzed, we’re ready.” 

Furthermore, two cofounders met at Stanford Business School and at Stanford Business School, they take this class called T-group where you log all these hours in a room with people getting real about who you are and how you perceive one another. It's emotional intelligence bootcamp and you really have to get really real with yourself and really real with others and it's amazing training. T-groups have been around, I think, since the 70s. 

So they brought this culture that they learned there to our company. They said, “Hey, we can get real with each other. We can be ourselves. We can be really authentic and not only that just as a provocation, we can also train in that.” We actually do these trainings. We actually practice it over and over again and I was so jazzed because my whole life, I wanted to be more human in my work and human with others in systems. 

But then I found something that I didn't anticipate, which was we build a lot of affinity and care, just like you would in a tribe or in a family. You start to really care for these people. We always have our work partners and our work family. We say that kind of casually, but if you really emphasize it and you really go for it, it can get really thick and really strong.
 
So COVID shows up and we have to do a reduction in force. It's financially motivated and we have to actually lay off some of our friends, some of our family members and watching what that did to our human system and watch us not fully be prepared for navigating that change, was a real eyeopener for me. My eyes are still open. I'm still trying to navigate. What does that mean for us? If we're on this collective campaign to bring ourselves more fully to work, how does that interface with capitalism? How does that interface with actually bring yourself, be yourself, be very vulnerable and then oh, because of necessity, we have to let you go? You've actually have lost your care network, perhaps; you feel like you can't go to that same Slack channel where you might have been weathering COVID because now you're out of the company. 

So these are on my mind right now and it's not making me want to say, “Okay, stop the presses. Let's go back to being turtles at work and just put up our shell and just pretend we're something else.” I have questions. So I'm curious to know how this is being observed in your world. Have you found the cons of being your full self at work like, maybe feeling too exposed? 

JEROME: No, I have not found any cons of being my full self at work as of yet. I definitely understand what you're saying. I just think it’s going to – hear me out. I am weirdly excited about the changes that the world is going through because of COVID because of things just like you said. We’re bringing a full self to work, we're also dealing with more compassion and also, the mourning of losing coworkers and things like that because you spend 8 hours with these people. 

So I am thinking that as this continues to grow, we're going to have more compassion starting to get baked into our government—well, hopefully—baked into our workplaces, things like that. I am very excited and I know that there's a lot of places like, “Oh, shut up and color, just do the work,” and stuff like that and I've never been a fan of those places. It's so much energy goes into just bringing a piece like, holding most of yourselves back and only bringing the essential pieces of who you are into the workforce or into the workplace that you don't even get to bring your best work in because you're concentrating on pattern matching and what they desire you to be when you're at work. 

So I see the consequences of it and I think we needed the consequences because that's the only way you get better, right? It's humans. You need the consequences, like it needs to hurt because now you need to have those protections baked in because it hurts and you need to find ways to communicate with people and become a part of your community beyond work and be able to beyond work style community because it hurts to lose those people. There's difference between financial decisions and “I really love hanging out with these people.” So you have to think of it like that with everything. 

Like I said, I'm excited. I think just some of the things you said are going to spur, especially most of us are on this call right now, we're at the cusp of becoming leaders in our industry. I am an old guy or whatever, I don't know. I'm 33 right now and I [inaudible] calling the shots and doing things and I'm excited to be able to implement the changes that I want to see in the world. So I'm listening to this, I'm experiencing this and I want to be able to bring a lot of these things to the table and in a new world that we're building right now on our new normal, so to speak. 

SIOBHÁN: That was so beautiful. Please just keep saying that over and over and I will just listen to it when I'm going to sleep every night. I really believe in that as well. I am on board and I think you're saying the painpoints are the learning, too. It's just a growth point and it's true. Some of the responses when we realized that okay, we have these alum, they’re now in the market and it's scary. So let's make sure we huddle around them closer than we've ever huddled. Let's make sure we see them to their next position and we did, we have a committee doing that. I was on that. It was really real. Not everyone, it was like oh, rebound and ready to send resumes out. Some had to grieve for several weeks and we worked through that as well and I loved it because I was like, “This is the promise of being human in all systems; at home, at work and the streets.” It’s like you stay on, you don't turn off.

JEROME: It's like getting to that next level. I'm a big anime fan and I don't know if anybody has ever watched the show Dragon Ball Z and people totally miss this because I guess, dudes are just idiots. We're trash. So all the guys would see this as the Saiyans getting Super Saiyans and stuff like, “Oh, they're getting stronger and stuff,” but it's not really, they’re getting stronger, it's they get more into their emotions. It was the loss of Goku’s best friend that spurred him to be a Super Saiyan. It was the pain of feeling like he would never live up to his father or his [inaudible] or be able to be a true vision for his people that he lost and that spurred Vegeta. 

Then the kids because they were half-human, they already had this human emotional feelings baked into their psyche and mostly because their moms making sure their dads aren’t jackasses or I don’t know and they were able to turn into Super Saiyan at 3 and 4 and [inaudible] and Vegeta, they're giving Super Saiyan out like crackerjacks boxes now, what's going on. 

But that's how humans reach the next level is through our empathy and our being able to feel emotions, being in tune with it or at least that's the lesson I got from the cartoon that I got [inaudible] to that next level, I'm going to have to get rid of that shell, only being one part and let everything in and out. So that’s how we get as the human race, it's time to drop all the old stuff and break down those shells and as I like to say, let's get it. 

SIOBHÁN: It’s very motivating. Yeah, love that. 

JACOB: I have a completely opposite experience. I worked in a job several years ago where there was a culture of bringing your full self to work and unfortunately, what that meant is we were basically just replicating the dynamics of a family but it was a dysfunctional family. So the head of the department—I worked at a college—was basically the matriarch who worked out insecurities and conflicts toxically, in a toxic way and all that meant is that all kinds of personal feelings were brought into the room when arguments were being had and you were expected to [inaudible], for lack of a better word, shit. I guess, sort of my takeaway from that is super important to be able to bring your full self to work but that alone has to be mitigated with the understanding that there still maybe be boundaries.

JEROME: I mean, boundaries come with being a part of bringing yourself to work, right?

JACOB: Yeah.

JEROME: Like Siobhán, I did not know that Siobhán was trans, it didn't matter to me. She decided that she was going to disclose that to me at her own decision based upon a comfort level that she had. However, it is my job as part of the boundary is to treat Siobhán as she chose to present herself and not ask questions or pry in and try to figure out, getting deep into the nitty gritty of things. That's where the boundary stops. I treat you as you choose to be treated until you let me know otherwise and that's where boundaries, consent, all that stuff comes out.

So boundaries, that's a part of being a human, right? I can be like, “Oh girl, this shit is lit,” but that doesn't mean we're super close or whatever. I know where our boundaries are regardless every level of [inaudible] conversation. The boundaries that are in language when it comes to saying something taboo, like the N word. Black people use it as a term of endearment but somebody who's not Black like white people from Carolina says that, you know he's not saying it from a place of endearment and brotherhood or sisterhood. So that's the science of boundaries and we have to learn how to respect those boundaries while, not saying that it makes us less human or it tampers the human experience because boundaries is part of it, it adds flavor to it. I guess, that’s my two cents on it.

SIOBHÁN: Yeah. I like what we're talking about here because it sounds like the handbook of life; things that humans should know upon moving out into the world and living and then the petri dish of our employment as a place to explore those things. 

I learned so much from our CEO, he's a really inspiring guy and some of the things that I've learned from him just so trickled out beyond talking about my reports. Almost every frustration I'll bring of like, “I'm stuck on this.” “I think this person wants to do x, y, or z,” and he's always like, “Is that true? Have you validated those assumptions? Can you go verify that story?” and it’s like what you're saying with like there's so much to grow into when we bring curiosity to the other, including knowing that we'll never fully know one another. 

That's something I love about being with humans is that you are this becoming system that's forever unfurling and so even when I think I might've scoped or sketched you, you change and so that means I have to bring a fresh perspective every moment to our encounters, which does kind of tamper me a bit or it’s almost like is its natural boundary, which is I can't make assumptions about you. Even if you said, “I'm always this way.” Next time I see you, I'm like, “Are you still always that way because it might've changed,” and to me, that allows for a lot of these conversations with how do we build these inclusive communities and inclusive workspaces. 

It’s like start with the premise that you don't know anybody; you really don't know them fully, but you're excited to. You're curious and you want to understand them on their terms and you want to do that not just once, like take a workshop. You want to do that forever like, over and over and over again as a way of living.

JEROME: Yes, because the person I was 10 years ago was nowhere who I am today and the person who I was 2 years before that was nowhere – if I went back and that version of Jerome who was into combat sports, just getting out of the military, was 50 pounds lighter, if I met this version of me, you would be shocked. You would be like, “Yo, you're out here helping people with pixels and shit, what's going on here?” So that's how the idea of acceptance and being human is. We have to not only get to the idea of accepting people, but also accepting the people have the capacity to grow and evolve. Like you said, getting to know them over and over again; it's a new person in front of you every time. I'm excited about that.

SIOBHÁN: And I'm also curious, how do we care for each other back to that point? Like Jacob, I was thinking, how did you heal from that really crappy environment? Did you go through a period where you're like, “Okay, I'm just not going to bring myself now,” like I'm burnt or I don't know, how did that go?

JACOB: No, that's the thing of when there's a traumatic – well, I don’t know if I want to say traumatic but [inaudible] negative experience. [crosstalk]

JEROME: It’s traumatic, it’s traumatic.

JACOB: I don't want to minimize real trauma. [crosstalk]

JEROME: It’s not minimizing. That's the thing about trauma; just because your trauma isn't the same as other person's trauma doesn't mean it’s not traumatic. A trauma is in relation to the person – it's like racism. It’s relation to the person and not to what one person thinks; it's not a blanket thing. It's very nuanced. So if it was traumatic for you, it's traumatic for you, right? 

JACOB: Well, thank you. I mean, end of the day, it ended in a getting laid off, so. But I think when something traumatic happens, you tell yourself a story about why that happened and then you sort of say, “That thing that I did, I must never do that again.” 

JEROME: Take the most extreme response.

JACOB: Yeah, and you sort of apply it to every context even though the context is completely changed. Like this is three jobs later for me and so, it's a hard experience especially being in COVID ;and with a 3-year-old of trying to not “bring too much of myself,” but also knowing that my coworkers need to know what my personal shit is going on because there's a 3-year-old that wants my attention and he can’t go to daycare right now. That just validates me.

JEROME: I will start with this. Right now, you are not working from home remotely. You're working home remotely during a pandemic. So it's not a trying to separate home from work, this is an unmitigated, unusual response. Like, I was in the military. Being in the military state side is that totally different idea of being in the military while in Iraq and Afghanistan. There's difference between “Oh, I'm in the military and I'm at Tyndall Air Force Base just doing my security forces duty” where “Oh, I'm in Camp Bucca, Iraq where shit's real. I don't care about this.”

So remember, look at it through that scope and they have no choice, but to accept you as you are because this is an unprecedented time. Like I said, outside’s trying to kill you. Like what the fuck, right? So [inaudible] out there. 

So you have to think of it from that scope and not feel too guilty because I think people feel guilty of this idea of trying to control kids and dogs and pets and parrots and shit all at once like what we're doing now, like don't feel guilty. You're not working from home; it's not normal working from home. It's like yo, some shit has gone down so don't feel bad about it. This is very unusual environment that you're in. I've never been in the same situation before; I have zero ideas of an advice because this happened like a hundred years ago the last time. So I don't know. I'm reading history, but he's trying to figure out how they did it and they were just as affected back then and who they are now like same shit, different day. 

So you have to accept that part. This is a nightmare scenario and you're doing the best you can with what you have, right? It's okay to bring your whole self to this environment like, fuck that. You have to take a Zoom call and do a planning meeting with a 3-year-old in the room on your lap playing with cars, then you just have to do that because 3-year-olds – is it a 3-year-old boy or girl? 

JACOB: It’s a boy.

JEROME: Oh yeah. So you’ve got to watch him all the times, right? When a 3-year-old gets quiet, you know that some shit is going down that you [inaudible] of. 

JACOB: True.

JEROME: I know y'all saw it, but I have a Tasmanian devil, a little terrier in my house. I have to keep an eye on him. So no, bring your whole self.

JACOB: Yeah, bring it on. Thank you.

SIOBHÁN: I loved hearing that because Jerome, you're modeling how to extend grace and care to Jacob and literally, this is how people can talk at their jobs and then I just want to highlight meta. It's that simple. You just went to your core, you're a dad, you see another person, you can share from that space, and you just did and Jacob, how did that land to hear that?

JACOB: That was a hundred percent couldn’t have hoped for better. That was great, thank you. 

JEROME: My superpower is I come from one side of the fence of being super cool and being what people think is alpha male, but as I've grown and done everything that I can become to a better human being over the course of the last 10, 12 years, I am nowhere near that guy anymore. But I have all this stuff that people consider is cool in an alpha male in my background and history. So I get to walk with that power of if I say it, then you're not going to challenge it and then that's part of my privilege and I get to use it. Who's going to check me, boo? Nobody, right? So that's where I'm at in life. 

I spent my 20s doing [inaudible] shit for my country, now I'm this super empathetic guy and I do that intentionally because like I said, if I say it, even the most alpha conservative person out there isn't going to challenge it because I've done more gangster shit than them. So like I said, I wear it proudly and intentionally to make sure – like I say, I took an oath to protect people from my all threats foreign and domestic and sometimes, the biggest threats are our own thoughts and behaviors. I’m out here in these streets trying to do the best work I can.

SIOBHÁN: Solid.

JOHN: I think we've touched on an interesting topic here where we're talking about bringing our whole selves to work, but because we're humans, those selves are flawed and then they can be flawed in ways that are actually toxic because of the people that we're working with. So I think one of the things that's implicit, but not really talked about in this whole idea of bringing yourself to work is that people have the responsibility for themselves that you’ve got to do the work on yourself to be part of that community and not just spew toxicity into that environment and make it worse for everybody.

SIOBHÁN: Yeah.

JOHN: But that's not something that ever gets talked about in these contexts and I don't really know. It sounds like Siobhán, your environment and the leaders that have created an environment there where you are able to do a lot of that process work, you are able to hold people responsible and there's a very open communication about impacts and community structure and all that sorts of things. I think it's great that you have that. It seems like a lot of organizations haven't gotten quite that far and I'm wondering how we can help advance the conversation about this into developing those sorts of skills.

SIOBHÁN: One of my favorite phrases to offer the type A student who wants to get all the high marks and all the gold stars, when I see them starting to get stretched and afraid and they have to drop some balls and they start freaking out that they can't please everybody—the people pleasers—is to say, “You're not categorically a good person. You're not slammed down hundred percent all the time good. You're also not categorically bad.” In fact, categorical thinking is a bit dubious. 

I'm a Bayesian probability thinker. I believe that we have these varying degrees. It's like this hydraulic system and they’re ever-changing. I find that’s one of the pre-recs for a growth mindset is to start looking at yourself, honestly. Let me actually calibrate. Where am I showing up? How am I showing? You might need data asking. I said that to you, “How did that land? How do I impact you? Maybe anonymous, you can tell me privately, all these things. But I think if you haven't done that first step of knocking yourself off the horse and believing you're a good person, you will forever defend that little ego, that little castle and you'll die on that hill and you'll learn nothing about the world. You will not advance. 

So I think to me, it’s that critical. Check yourself at that first fundamental of, are you trying to maintain a story and all the data you're getting from the world that invalidates that story is just like completely erased, then we got to start there. We have to go to that fundamental first before we try to add on cultures of feedback, which is [inaudible] the spiritual journey.

JOHN: That's hard work, for sure. 

[laughter]

SIOBHÁN: I mean, how have you seen that show? It's true. Like how do we get people into that first door?

JOHN: I think probably a prerequisite is psychological safety; just feeling like there is that ability to have that open communication and the ability to say, “I'm having a terrible day, let's change how we operate for a little while” or whatever that is. The next steps are all – I mean, I feel like probably it needs some leadership, like I was saying with your environment where you've got leaders who are really modeling this and really promulgating it out into the group so that the whole community can form around those norms as far as taking them a more standard corporate environment and trying to shift it in that direction. At this point, I don't have a good plan for that. Wish I did.

JACOB: I think part of it is not having an environment where anyone is like the one person who blank. So for example, what Jerome just said and you just said about being a parent and relating to me about being a parent. If I was the only parent at a tech startup where everyone else is a 25-year-old dude, then yeah, I probably wouldn't want to bring my whole self to work or my identity as a parent because it's like, who would I bring it to? That is a key dependency in building trust, too is are there people that I can relate to?

JOHN: Yeah.

JEROME: I mean, but this is one of the reasons why we still bring ourselves to work. That's a great example. Yeah, they may be all 25-year-old dudes with no kids, but you don't know who has a rough childhood, their parents were kind of absent and they had to do most of the heavy lifting or raising her brothers and sisters. I’m a parent, but I also had a childhood where I had to do a lot of the heavy lifting with my little sister and little brother when I became a teenager because my parents worked all the time. 

So these are the stories that you don't know and that's why that's a motivator of bringing your whole self to work because you don't know what you don't know and you don't know how it might relate. I always thought like a parent, even when I was a person that didn't have kids, because that was part of my responsibilities is making sure people got up on time and were fed breakfast and got on the right school bus and did their homework when they came home and made sure they had their snack and made sure they did their chores and were showered and ready to chill for the rest of the day before my parents came home. Parents came home [inaudible] shift change happened. 

So those are the things that you have to keep in mind that the less of yourself that you bring to work with you, the less you're going to learn about other people around you. 

JOHN: Yeah!

JEROME: So that's why that's that motivating part about bringing your whole self to work because you don't know who's going to empathize with you because you don't know their experiences. You can't read minds. So assume that because you can't read minds, they can't either. I love just trying to see the good in people before write them off as they might be assholes. Even though when I think of 25-year-olds, I automatically think of a jackass. Like oh, 25, I’m like, “Oh, idiot, aren’t they?” [inaudible]. 33-year-old Jay cannot hang out with 25-year-old Jay. [crosstalk]

JACOB: Oh no, that was a rough time. [laughs]

JOHN: But I think you've identified an interesting point there, which is that if you are the only one of whatever—you're the only woman, you’re the only person of color, or you're the only parent—it puts a bigger burden on the team to develop that empathy where they don't have something in common where they can still relate to you and understand the parts of it, like how your life is affected by that element of yourself. 

I think Jerome, you're right about that; you have to start with bringing that to give them the chance to develop that. I know I certainly understand a lot more about a lot of my coworkers’ lives now that I can see the children crawling over them in the meetings because that's just the way life is these days and knowing just that that's the environment they're working in, just helps me understand them as people better.

JEROME: Saying well, my last job, I was there and I was one of three Black guys in the room, we were in the South and everybody's either staunchly conservative or independent, which is where they want to say they're conservative, but you're Black and they don't want you to think that they're a Trump supporter. I would bring my whole self to work just to ensure that they knew this is how it affects my community when you do things like this or where you vote this way,

I know you're all doing from this point of view, but this is why people are angry at you. Like, no, this is why women are angry, this is why Black people think you’re monsters if you vote for this guy. It has absolutely nothing to do with what your thought process is. All the other things you're ignoring, these are the things that you’re just telling me the things you do value, but you’re also telling is that the parts that you don’t value are all the parts that are [inaudible] to me. I'm not seeing any report of a bunch of cops jumping up and whistleblowing people. You can see that with doctors, like doctors will whistle blow on a shitty doctor in a New York minute, but you do not see cops whistle blowing on shitty cops. 

That’s where that whole ideal of being able to see things from other people's point of view. No, shit’s wild so you bring your whole self to work just so you can change, put a dent in the universe as I like to say. You’ve got to be able to do that. You never know who you're going to affect positively and who you’re going to touch and that's the risk you take or somebody might double down on their jackassery and that’s the risk you also take. But at least try.

SIOBHÁN: I really resonate with that. Some of the storytelling I've been able to do at work, I've really enjoyed, which is have we recently had this pride panel at work. We got to talk about how our different journeys from different LGBTQIA+ folks got to, where they are in their careers. 

I was able to share how growing up in the 80s and 90s in America, the only paths for trans women that were just depicted in the news or anywhere was in entertainment or sex work. That was like the places where we saw ourselves and one of the effects of seeing that as a child is you start to believe it, you start to say, “I guess, that's all I can do,” and there is another layer on top of that, which was basically you probably not going to live past 30 because of the murder rate of your population. So growing your psyche as a child is like okay, I've got to like be prepared for murder and I have to do that within one of these two professions and so always loved science, always loved math, but realized the only way I could be myself, was to move to New York and be an artist and so I did that. 

When I started to see some cultural shifts that you track since you're a child, some little subtleties of a messaging that maybe the violence is abating just slightly, maybe there's a little window, a little door. I ran through that door and I said, “At the risk of maybe putting myself more further out in front to be the first to be killed.” I was like, “I'd rather die and try to live my life than not.”

So it's been so great to be able to share at work that that was one of the layers of story in my world, which is once you've sort of stared death down and made a little pact to say, “I'm not going to perform fear for you. I'm not going to like take this pervasive general fear of trans women and this violence and perform it on my own body as shame or self-violence. I'm just going to take it and just put it to the side,” a lot of other things become available.

For me, it was a lot of cognitive capacity. I started learning and growing at a really exponential rate because I didn't have this little fear machine sitting on my shoulder and it wasn't because of just like magic. I had some incredible therapy. I used EMDR. Folks that have gone through a lot of stuff can find a lot of advancement through these therapies. 

But just to say that sharing even that story at work sometimes, I'm so pleased because there might be others in the community and maybe not even there at work, but more beyond who don't even know how much they’re dimming their own light by living in fear or having chronic anxiety maybe for a similar reason. Maybe because they have something about themselves that if they were ever proclaimed maybe sent away from their families and that terrifies them and so just modeling some of the path through the woods. 

Sometimes I've actually felt that might be one of my biggest roles in my career even is just to model some of that story over and above like some of my design decisions are code, but yeah, I think we're just tracking here to some of the ripple effects of what else happens when you're really fully embodied and really here.

JOHN: That's a great wrap-up. 

JEROME: That is inspiring.

JOHN: So we're kind of part of the show where we do reflections, which is basically just the ideas or the thoughts or the takeaways that each of us has gotten out of this conversation and certainly for me, there's two things, really and then they're both around bringing your whole self to work. 

The first is, like we were talking before, how can we inculcate more of that caring into corporate environments where you can build the sorts of deep communities that you've been talking about, Siobhán. 

And then the second part is as you were talking about the difficulty and the emotional toll of what happens when the team make up changes whether you're adding new people to it and you've got to get them used to it all or you have to lose someone either for positive or negative reasons. The community itself has to react to that and it strikes me that there's probably a deep tradition in communities going back thousands of years of how to handle processes like that. But because this is sort of a new environment, it's corporate, it's tech; you don't tend to think of it as having a lineage going back that far but humans have been doing this sort of things in community forever and there's probably things we can learn from how that's been done in cultures old and new that can teach us how to process that as a group better. 

JEROME: My reflection on this is a little bit in-depth. It's we can be the change that we want to see and it’s really motivating to be on with people like Siobhán who are also willing to do their work, but especially the idea of fearlessness or acknowledging the fear and consequences of the decisions you're making, but not allowing them to stop you or hinder you. It’s just like [inaudible] that we should all focus on doubling down on that; being more fearless or acknowledging the consequences will not let it stop us especially if we know we're doing the right thing, right?

JACOB: Yeah, to transition for that, I really felt positively challenged by Jerome to I think try to be more visible about how the pandemic is affecting. It’s sort of is in my life and it's sort of watching over my shoulder as I'm working because yeah, that's the only way my coworkers are going to know. They don’t know what they don't know. So I'm going to challenge myself to sort of try to be a little bit more visible in the hopes of being an agent for change and maybe start moving the needle in terms of visibility appearance at my company.

SIOBHÁN: My takeaways relate to the actual practice of the call itself. We've been here. I joined not really knowing what we're going to do or how it might unfold and you each put me at ease to say that was going to be this meandering walk through the woods together. The way I saw is building on each other's ideas and circling back and modeling care and even nodding and smiling and even hearing the Skype sort of virtual video world. I saw this actually experimenting with this idea of showing up in real-time. We were showing up to each other and when we were showing each other that it's powerful and that it has the ability to maybe elicit new ideas or spin ideas out further and we saw that happen. 

So just to go like meta meta, I feel like my takeaway is it's possible in any direction. It happened today, so where else can I bring this level of bravery to show up to the moment and maybe it'll all surprise me where it happens today, but I will definitely take away this reminded of that it's valuable and we do.

JACOB: Thank you so much for showing up and then helping us out with this conversation. 

SIOBHÁN: My pleasure. This was great.