John Mark Nickels: preference

Transcript context

…I want to take us to a recurring segment on the podcast that I call Contrarian Corner. I feel like you're going to have a good answer here. What's something that you believe that most other people don't believe? One is back to being aware of your internal state and allowing emotions and thoughts is... Emotions in the workplace, a lot of people have the thing of like, "Well, there's no need for emotion in the workplace. We're going to be logical. We're going to be data-driven. Keep your feelings at home. Just show up and presentation J.M. Mode." And I guess in my experience, there's this thing around whole body intelligence and whole body, yes, which is yes, there is signal from the head and logic and data and left brain reasoning are amazing and it could be great, but there's also heart and gut. And to me, what is an emotion? It's just energy moving on the body. Often it's correlated with a thought too as well. I might have a thought that creates fear and so forth. But to me there's wisdom in emotion and I can start to access noticing them more. Like where do I feel sadness in the body? I notice I feel fear in the kind of center of my chest, and then sadness is like a sinking feeling in my stomach. And I notice when I'm angry, my jaw gets tight and my eyes furrow a little bit. And so those are common ones, but you may have your own little signatures of you pick up where is joy, where is creative energy? Where is fear or sadness, anger? And then noticing those in a meeting or in a conversation or review. And actually if you're willing, even just voice it to other people, that's like the next step. But start with just acknowledging it to yourself. And so for me, the wisdom of emotions is fear is something wants to be paid attention to. There can be the saber-toothed tiger is not really Dara disapproving of me, whatever. I shouldn't be afraid of that. But there are times where fear is applicable. There might be fear around, let's say back at Waymo, you want to be really intentional about safety and you want to be super... That's one of the things I love about Waymo is they're very committed to having a super strong safety record. And so there might be fear around did we really consider all the edge cases of what might happen if a dog runs in the street or a ball or child or whatever, and you might see wow, fear. It's great. The wisdom of that is something wants to be paid attention to and listened to. Okay, great. Sadness for me is something wants to be let go of. There's a mourning, there's a letting go of I had an idea or vision for the future that will no longer be because whatever, something happened, other people don't want to do it, this or that. But it could be a vision of a relationship, it could be a vision of what you thought your life would look like, whatever. We all go through those sorts of things. And there might be micro-moments of sadness of like, wow, that feature didn't work. It's like I really wanted it to be successful. I just let go of that, welcome the sadness. Anger to me is something is not of service to me or my people or my mission or whatever I'm up to. dn't work. It's like I really wanted it to be successful. I just let go of that, welcome the sadness. Anger to me is something is not of service to me or my people or my mission or whatever I'm up to. And so again, that can be a great signal to like, okay, I pay attention to that. I want to change something. And then joy is something that wants to be celebrated. We had a great win. We nailed the OKR, we had a great product launch. A lot of times we spend too much time moving back into the next, okay, let's set another goal. It's like, it's okay to stop and celebrate. And then creative energy is something wants to be born into the world. It's like it's almost like I'm going to birth an idea or a vision or some new product thing and then just tuning into that. So yeah, I would say welcome emotions, maybe even talk about them, god forbid, in the workplace. Imagine that instead of having a OKR review where you're behind target and everyone's blaming other people, and you could tell when it's kind of fearful, if someone was just like, "Wow, I noticed that I just feel fear around this." Everyone was like, "Wow, I feel fear too." That would just totally change the tone of the conversation.…

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