Episode 69: Sara Wachter-Boettcher - Taking responsibility for how you show up in the workplace

Kristina Halvorson:

Welcome back, friends and neighbors to the Content Strategy Podcast. It's me, Kristina. I'm so delighted to have you here. Once again, thank you so much for tuning into this podcast over and over. The people I talk to, every single one of them I am fascinated by. I respect deeply. Some of them I have known for a really long time. Some of them, it is the very first conversation I'm having with them. So this journey has just been such a delight for me over the years. This is not me saying this is the final podcast episode ever. It's what it sounds like as it's coming out of my mouth, but it's not. I just thought I'd say thank you as we come towards the end of this season.

So as a measure of thanks and to demonstrate my goodwill, I have invited the greatest person on the podcast and I am so super excited to speak with her today and to have her share her experience in wisdom with you. I have known her for lo, these many years, and her name is Sara Wachter-Boettcher. Sara is the CEO of Active Voice, a tiny company on a big mission to create bold leaders and better workplaces in design and tech. Before founding Active Voice, she spent a decade as a content and UX consultant. Now she spends her time coaching, running workshops and group programs and giving in-house training on essential leadership skills. But no matter what she's doing, she'll always be a content person at heart.

Sara, welcome to the Content Strategy Podcast.

Sara Wachter-Boettcher:

Hi, Kristina. Wow, what an intro. Thank you.

Kristina Halvorson:

Well, thank you for being here. I would like to share with our listeners that this is, I think the fourth time, maybe the fifth, that Sara and I have tried to record this episode, but we have persevered through tech difficulties, through a trip to the ER. That was me. Everything was fine. I don't know, late, whatever. But we're finally here and we're finally doing it, and I'm so excited. And to kick things off, Sara, I always ask my guests to start off their time with me by telling me about their career journey through content strategy to where they are today. So go, tell me all about you.

Sara Wachter-Boettcher:

Okay, well, way back many, many years ago now, I started out as a copywriter when I was 22. I was a junior copywriter at an agency doing a lot of real estate. It was not my favorite thing, but it was kind of fun for a while. I wrote a lot of little headlines and that started to get a little boring. And during that time, I had started working on some website projects, some smallish websites. That was interesting enough. And so when I saw this role open up at a different agency for a web writer, I was like, "Hmm, sure, okay." I don't know that I really knew what I was getting into, but I knew that I liked to write. I knew that I wrote well. I knew that a website was something I could handle.

Once I was in that job, what I realized is that they'd never had a web writer before, that they were taking on increasingly complex website development projects and website redesign projects. At the time, websites had been around for some time, but not always well invested in. And a lot of times there were starting to be these organizations where they had a lot of stuff online. I think Kristina, you remember this. We fixed that problem now. It's fine.

But they would have all this stuff online that they hadn't spent a lot of time thinking about, was it up to date and who needed it, and all of these kinds of big strategy questions. And that's really how I discovered content strategy. It was in the aughts, and I found a few people online who were talking about those kinds of topics. Kristina, you were one of them. I think I lured you to come to a meetup in Phoenix where I lived at the time because you were in town for something else. I really sort of embraced this more strategic view of content and got into information architecture and structured content. And that kicked off, I think, a big and really satisfying direction for my career for the next decade or so.

I was consulting for a lot of that, working on projects with lots of organizations. It was during that time where I started getting really interested in questions about who's our content leaving out? Then also that translating into broader design discussions around more inclusive design and ethical questions, and then who could potentially be harmed by the decisions that we're making. So I started speaking and writing about those topics. What happened that I didn't really expect was that in about 2019, I was also working on some side projects, like an event series here in Philly where I live now, and a podcast where we started talking about other feminist leadership topics.

And so I found myself being drawn further and further into exploring that space. At some point I kind of decided that what I really wanted to do was focus a little bit more on how do we show up at work, how do we work together, how do we have hard conversations and how do we kind of get things done so we can create more inclusive, more equitable products? And that got me into creating Active Voice, which I think was in February, 2020. It was great timing to completely pivot my business. In the last few years, I've been really solidifying what it is we do here.

Kristina Halvorson:

And so as of today, what is it that you do there?

Sara Wachter-Boettcher:

So at Active Voice, we do coaching and we do more group programs and we do workshops, but they're all kind of in this space of helping people navigate their work life in sustainable ways. There's this mix of helping people step up, be bolder, take the lead, but then also a huge piece of it is about gaining some distance from their work and maybe disconnecting some of their sense of identity from their work. Because those things can be so wrapped up that it's very easy for people to so fully identify with work that when work doesn't go well, they lose their self-worth as people.

Our whole thing has been how do we do great work in sustainable ways that allow us to take care of ourselves and how do we gain some distance from some of the systems we have to interact with at work that can sometimes feel like they really drag us down? Where people feel oftentimes the environment that they're working in is sort of expecting them to consistently do more with less and advocate for their very existence. And that stuff can really erode people's sense of self and their confidence over time.

And so we're like, "How do we make sense of that and help people where they're at right now and also try to push organizations to do better?"

Kristina Halvorson:

So everything you're saying right now, we could replace they with content people, basically content strategists, content designers. As we were also talking before we started recording, folks who are not necessarily very specifically doing the bright shiny thing like researchers for example, that these are folks whose work tends to be less visible on the front lines, which can make people feel like they're constantly jostling for a place of visibility or that seat at the table that we're all just exhausted from talking about, and yet everybody still is striving for.

With your background in content strategy and the conversation over the last couple of years around content design and how there's just a lot of frustration and all the words that you used, sense of having to struggle to demonstrate value or prove worth in the workplace and how that can erode self-confidence and sense of self. Can you talk to me a little bit more about that? I won't call it a phenomenon because it's pretty regular at this point in content professionals and in that sphere specifically.

Sara Wachter-Boettcher:

Oh yeah, absolutely. And I will say we work with people who are in, broadly speaking, design and tech, a lot of people who are in design, but I would say the biggest groups within that kind of loose design category are content folks and researchers. I think that what's important to say is that this is something that is happening to more than just content people. I think sometimes content folks feel very alone in this experience, but it is something that I hear for design as a whole. And then I also hear it very strongly with research.

I think one of the things that's happening is that design is already an underdog in a lot of organizations, and so there's an underdog issue where they're a newer discipline or a smaller discipline, and so they're being asked to prove that we need more of you or step up in some way to show themselves as being peers to engineering, but there's 10 engineers per designer, so that's a problem that is happening much more broadly.

Then what I see happening in both content and research is almost like the underdog's underdog. So you have a group that's already feeling like they don't have a seat at the table. Design as a whole often feels that way. And then you've got this group that is the smaller and more nascent team within the team that doesn't feel like it has that seat. And so it's the same issues, but they're often exacerbated.

It's things like feeling like your job is to convince people that you should have your job, which I don't think should be anybody's job. I think that if you have hired somebody, then you have decided that you need that person or you need that skill set. And if you don't know what to do with them or you don't know why you hired them, that's a you problem. That's not a them problem.

But I think that's happening a lot. People feel like they're supposed to prove that they deserve to be there, prove that their work is valuable, and then they're also supposed to somehow magically worm their way into processes that they're not invited to or given insight into and convince all of these individual people or all these teams to let them in. I think that's really hard, and I think that that creates a system where people feel naturally pretty exhausted by that kind of constant sense of I have to go in, I have to advocate, I have to sell content again, I have my why content design matters deck that I send to everybody.

The thing is that over time people get really tired of that and I have seen a lot of people in content get pretty cynical and resentful and just start to feel so negatively. That can go two ways, either that goes to their self. So it's like, "I'm a failure because I can't make this organization change and I haven't done enough. I've somehow not done enough to advocate for my discipline because this person or that person or this product partner still doesn't get it, so I must suck." That's one direction it goes.

The other direction that that negativity can go is toward everybody around them, which is, "Well, product management just doesn't care about content and design just thinks we're a nice to have and they didn't invite me." And that can be very much expressing all your negativity outward. The thing I've been really noticing and wanting to highlight here is that both of those things are extraordinarily toxic. They don't create anything generative. They don't get us anywhere better. It's like they don't improve the standing of content within an organization, and then they also make us personally miserable. And that is such a crappy combo that I don't want for anybody.

I think what I've been really trying to help people understand and kind of think through is that the pain that they're feeling is real. Yeah, you are oftentimes being told that you need to advocate for your own existence. In a lot of companies, that is happening. That's real, and that's not okay, and be mad about it, be hurt by that. But also perhaps it's time to pause and say, "Okay, how do I want to show up in this moment? What are the things that are actually in my control? And who do I want to be here?" And really come back to what are the principles that I'm actually going to feel good about sticking with in this time?

If it is lashing out at people and getting pissed and writing salty LinkedIn posts about how disrespected you feel, I don't know, is that really where you want to be? Who's that helping and what's that doing for you?

Kristina Halvorson:

I think that a lot of what we see about those salty posts, for example, is that people are looking for validation. They want to hear, my pain is real. I am being treated, what they perceive as unfairly, and I'm doing my best. I think that that bringing that to a public forum is sort of the quickest way to feeling better. But what I see is that it is a really short-term gain and that it doesn't actually resolve whatever struggle folks are having in the workplace.

Sara Wachter-Boettcher:

Well, and it's a very short-term version of feeling better. It doesn't resolve what's happening in the workplace, but it actually doesn't really resolve what's happening within you either. It's this sort of way of shoving that pain outward, pushing that pain outward onto my angry typing without really reckoning with, okay, what do I need to change here? What is in my control? I feel for people because their pain is real, and I think everybody does deserve to have that pain validated.

Not all of it is really about being a content person. Sometimes I feel like content people often have very strongly identified with the content. I am a content designer, and that's not necessarily a bad thing to have some sense of your identity connected to your work, but what I see is people having a lot of their identity connected to their work where they've so taken on that identity of content designer that when content design is not taken as seriously as they would like or not invested in the ways that they would, that feels like a personal attack on their value as a human being.

So when we're in that place when work and the way that work happens in a hyper-capitalist environment that's making decisions that unlevel so much greater than you as a person, when that's not going well, your sense of identity kind of falls apart and your sense of value falls apart. And people are very reactive to that. And so what I really want to say is I think it's important to validate the pain people are experiencing because your feelings are always real. But I think what we need to get out of is this idea of also validating the way people are responding to that pain, meaning I don't think that we should be taking it out on each other. I don't think we should be throwing other teams under the bus because I don't think that that actually gets us anywhere. I also think fundamentally, no matter how much you think your colleagues don't get it or maybe don't respect you, they're employees too. Mostly they're working in the same kind of screwed up systems that you're working in. They have their own pain points, their own things that they think of, "Gosh, why doesn't anybody listen to me on this? Or Why is this always so hard? Or why am I working so many hours trying to make this thing move forward but it keeps getting stalled?"

They all have problems and pain also. I think kind of projecting this stuff onto our colleagues is, again, it's making everything worse. And so I think one of the things I really try to encourage people to do is one, find a way to talk about that pain and those feelings you're experiencing and validate that, acknowledge that without turning that into that venting and that ranting and that tearing of other people down.

And then I think second, it's really important to get some distance from all of this because I know we care about content. I still love content, I care about it, but sometimes it's important to take a step back and be like, "It's just work. It's just some app, it's just some SaaS software. Is this really what I want to wrap all of myself up in?" Get some of that distance and say, "Okay, who am I outside of this and how do I feel good about who I am and what I bring regardless of whether or not I'm getting the respect that I feel I deserve in the workplace? How do I still have a sense of self?"

Because I think when you can do that, then you can actually approach work with a little bit more pragmatism because there's a little less emotional investment or emotional over investment and get that distance to be like, "Okay, this is the situation. This is where the organization is right now. This is what they've decided to prioritize. I don't have to feel happy about it. I don't have to agree with it, but can I accept that this is what is true and choose how I want to deal with that in a way that's not just beating my head against the wall over and over again and then screaming that it hurts?"

Kristina Halvorson:

I think that's such a huge part of this too, is really some radical acceptance around the fact that you cannot control what other people do or how they're going to react. Some of the posts that I've seen, they come off as like, "Oh, we're rallying behind each other and we all have a tough time and we're all doing the good hard work." But at the heart of the argument, or I'll say, what is coming off as shared validation is because we are oppressed and design needs to change. And that to me is not a rally cry. That to me is very clearly pointing the finger at a force, whether it is a person or a field outside of oneself, making a demand that you have to do things differently and we can't make anybody do anything.

Sara Wachter-Boettcher:

What a hard truth that I think all of us are reckoning with all the time in our lives. You can't. I think that you're right. It's about radical acceptance of just this is what it is, and the only person I can change is myself. That's hard because of course there's stuff that you want to see change. I think that design should change. I think design also has plenty of its own problems where it's getting stuck. I think sometimes content people think design is super powerful, but if you look at the bigger picture in the organization, it is not.

It's not to say that design is off the hook for the ways that it leaves content people out. They're real problems. I would love for design to change and really, really invest in understanding content and really invest in sort of the relationship between the work that traditionally UX or product design does and the work that content does, and to really make that something that they care about. I would love that.

Also if you organize all of your energy around, I need to make design change, you are spending all your time on something that is actually not in your control and you are unlikely to feel a great sense of satisfaction. It is likely going to drain you, and it's going to feel like you're never doing enough because you cannot do enough to make someone else change when that change is always going to be within their control.

And so that feeling of not enoughness, which you may be hearing around you too, you may be told you haven't done enough. That's getting reinforced internally for a lot of people because their goal is to make someone change and they haven't made them change yet that they think, "Well, I must not have done enough." And I think that you have to change the conversation that you're having with yourself and the goals that you're setting for yourself, because if the goal is make someone change, you're setting yourself up to be miserable.

So I think the goal needs to be more like, "What are some of the things that are within my control? Do I feel really good about the way that I showed up in that meeting? When I talk about the way that we work together or what I want to see happen? Am I sharing my ideas clearly? Am I really bringing out not just my gripes about the ways that the content is busted and my laundry list of little fiddly fixes and my frustration at, I don't know, various inconsistencies around punctuation and capitalization? Is that what I'm bringing? Or am I bringing my best ideas? Am I bringing something that feels generative, that sparks ideas for other people? Am I showing up not just as the perpetually aggrieved word nerd, but as an actual design partner?"

I think that is where you have the most control. That is also where you can do the most kind of self-validation, meaning, I know I showed up to this with my best ideas and my best work and with an openness and a curiosity and a desire to partner with others. I don't control whether I receive those things back. I will never control whether I receive those things back, but I know that I brought those things and that's me doing my part. And now it's time to find out will the other party do their part? And if they won't, then it's helpful sometimes to say, "Okay, that's where they're at. It feels like it's about me, but it's probably not really about me. Where else do I want to put my energy so I don't continue to..."

I just think of it as you keep driving your car into the same brick wall over and over again. You're like, "Well, maybe this time it's going to work." And I keep thinking, "Man, maybe you should point that car in literally any other direction."

Kristina Halvorson:

I usually use the analogy of it's going back to a terrible boyfriend over and over again, like, "Well, maybe this time it'll be different."

Sara Wachter-Boettcher:

Exactly.

Kristina Halvorson:

"Maybe this time I can change him." Right?

Sara Wachter-Boettcher:

Right. Well, Kristina, I think that's actually a really good analogy because it turns out people are people everywhere they go. And so yes, romantic relationships are a little different. Human relationships are pretty similar in a lot of different contexts. So oftentimes it is the same kind of internal stuff happening is with the bad boyfriend or the bad partner, which is like, "Oh, I think if I just try harder or maybe there's something deficient in me," or all of these kind of emotional and psychological loops we get into that lead us to just keep repeating the same behavior over and over again and hoping something else will happen.

Kristina Halvorson:

I'm going to share some personal stuff. Now, I've been learning a lot about dialectical behavioral therapy or DBT, and it basically has four or five different modules areas. It's all about learning emotional regulation basically. One of the areas of study is called distress tolerance, and there's this whole set of skills about how to tolerate distress. And essentially if you're in a situation that is causing you discomfort or distress, you have four choices and we've kind of already gone over them.

First, if possible, you can try to solve the problem. Second, you can potentially change how you feel about the problem. Third, you can accept your situation, or four, you can do nothing and stay absolutely miserable. We've kind of talked through those options. But what I have found for myself is that oftentimes if I am facing a distressing situation in the workplace specifically, which I have with other people, I'm still involved in client consultation.

And like you said, we are consulting with people and humans and content, which is you and I have always talked about very emotional, very political. People get very territorial. When I feel like I'm in a situation where I'm feeling threatened or I'm worried about losing the client and being abandoned as it were, or that I feel that I'm being very, very clear and I know that my recommendations are really going to help them advance and they're arguing or not paying attention to me, oftentimes if I'm trying to get to one of these sort of hopefully the first three choices, what I find is that I haven't slowed down to identify first what is my goal. What is my goal here?

If I can identify my goal is to make the other person do a thing, then I know I need to shift how I am approaching and thinking about the situation because that goal is fruitless. We can influence somebody. We can even try to, and this word has a lot of negative connotations, but we're all doing it all the time to each other. We can try to manipulate them into doing what we want in potentially just a way in which we are influencing.

However, stepping back and identifying a goal that is actually within our control, I think can really change the game. So if we slow down and say, "Okay, what is it that I actually want out of this situation?" If what we want is personal validation, that's normal, it's okay, but we can't force the other person to give that to us. Do you have any insights about... And let's talk about specifically in the workplace, how to slow down and some sort of constructive ways in which we can identify and set goals that are going to help us in our work specifically?

Sara Wachter-Boettcher:

Oh my gosh, yes. Okay. And I think you're so right about this need to slow down. And like you said, thinking about is my goal personal validation here, which I think this comes up a lot for content people, that there's a conflation between making the project better or getting to launch or improving something and being personally validated that your work is valuable and your work means something. And those are not the same thing.

The other problem with that sort of seeking validation is that it also doesn't tend to last very long. So even when you get that validation from an external source, somebody's like, "Oh, wow, it's so much better when I work with you." What that tends to do is that tends to then lead us to that gold star seeking, like, "I'm looking for more validation because I have to constantly feed myself additional validation." And instead, I think that's where it's really helpful when you come back to a goal that's within your control. You can also actually work on your own self validation.

I'm not saying that you don't need any external validation. I think it is human to want some level of external validation, but if that's your only food group, you are not getting a well-balanced diet. You need to think about how do I feel good about the work that I do. When you have goals that are within your control about this is what I know good looks like, this is how I want to show up, that's an integrity with myself. This is what it looks like to operate within my values. When you set goals that are around those things, then you can validate yourself because you know that you achieved them. And that really shifts the way you show up because you're no longer showing up trying to get validation, and you can show up trying to solve a problem or move a project forward.

So that's one piece. But your question about how do you do the actual slowing down, I think the first thing I would say is that all of us humans, content people included, but every single human I have ever, we all under stress, anytime we feel threatened, as you said Kristina or potentially we could be abandoned, those are really helpful words. When we feel those stressors, we will most immediately jump into kind of a fight-flight mode, which is I have to defend myself. I have to explain to them once again, why they actually needed to invite me and how dare they? That's that more defensive mode. Or we jump into sort of that freeze and fawn mode, which is more of this lower shutting down, making ourselves small, making ourselves agreeable.

I found that the thing that we need to start doing is just noticing when we have been pushed outside of that zone where we're more reflective or we have some space, just noticing, "Oh yes. Oh, I am having a stress response right now." When you can start to notice that, then you can kind of take a beat and say, ""Okay, I am feeling threatened." This is happening in your head. Maybe it's happening out loud. I don't know your colleagues. But it's in your head's like, "Okay, I'm feeling threatened right now. What do I need to do to kind of bring myself back to center before I jump into action?"

Because in those times where you feel threatened and you feel stressed outside of this zone of tolerance, there's actually a concept that I love that's called the window of tolerance. It's very simple. Window of tolerance means when you're inside that window, you can handle stuff, you can deal with stuff, and you can pause and be reflective. When you're outside of that window, if you're above that window, you're in that fight-flight mode where you're defensive, you're rejecting everything, maybe you're throwing a fit, maybe you're running away or you're below the window, that's that shut down mode where you're just like, "Fine, whatever. It doesn't matter."

When you're outside of that window of tolerance, the first step is realizing it. Second step is getting back into it, and then the third step is actually doing something about the situation. But when you're outside of it, what your brain is going to want to do is react. It's going to want to be very knee-jerk. Learning to notice when you're getting kind of elevated or when you're starting to shut down is how you can actually learn to bring yourself back.

The other thing you mentioned, distress tolerance and DBT. The other thing that I think is really helpful here when you think about this window of tolerance is everybody's window of tolerance is different and it changes in size over the course of your life depending on things that happen to you. So if you have been under chronic stress, if you have a big history of trauma, you may find that your window of tolerance is narrower. I don't know if you've... Kristina, I'm sure you've seen people where they've been operating at the edge for a while, they're really close to some bad burnout, and you notice that every little thing is throwing them off or making them freak out.

Kristina Halvorson:

Look, Sara, you don't know me. You don't know my life.

Sara Wachter-Boettcher:

Personally, I don't have any of these problems.

Kristina Halvorson:

Yeah, I know. Exactly.

Sara Wachter-Boettcher:

But if you've seen people when they're in that place where it's like Kristina, let's say you had a really bad week and there's stuff going on with your kids, and then something bad happened at work and a client was kind of rude to you, whatever. Then you get on that next call, and maybe it's something that on a better day, it would've felt like a little bump in the road, but on that day, it feels like the world is falling. That's like, "Oh yeah, my window of tolerance is a little smaller right now."

When you think about that over time, if you have operated in a really chronically stressful environment, and I think that's what a lot of people are dealing with right now, where it's like they've had layoffs, they've had reorgs there, not sure if they're going to keep their job. In those places, that kind of chronic stress can make us really quick to jump to reactive mode. That's your brain trying to keep you safe. That is your brain trying to be like, "Ah, you're under threat. Do something. Do something now." But that's typically not actually going to help you.

So noticing and then saying, "Okay, am I..." I like the window because you can think of the above and the below. So if I'm above my window, I'm angry typing an email, I'm about to say something spicy. That's a really great time to say, "What do I need to do to calm myself?" So maybe what I need to do is go take a walk and get some of that energy out. Maybe what I need to do is do a body scan, a little mindfulness, calming. Maybe what I need to do is go write out all of those feelings that I want to vent into an email. Go write them out for myself. Take five, read it back.

And then alternately, if I'm finding that I'm getting into that shutdown mode where I'm just sort of, again, it's like I'm trying to keep myself safe, but I'm keeping myself safe by creating this little shell around me, and I'm like, "Oh dude, whatever, doesn't matter." Maybe I'm getting kind of cynical and distant, "Oh, maybe I need to reconnect myself. Do I need to talk to somebody who I love? Do I need to do something physical that feels a little bit more invigorating?"

Sometimes even things like scent, and scented candles will not fix your stress, but scented candles can actually help reawaken the senses if you have been in that shutdown mode. But whatever it is, it's really about learning, when am I outside of that window? What helps me come back? Then taking action from there.

Kristina Halvorson:

So to my dear listeners, I am actually going to share a link to this DBT resource site in the show notes because everything that you're talking about, Sara, there are specific goals or specific skills that help people get to everything that you're talking about. It's so useful, and just the parallels are just blowing my mind. And I will say it has been very helpful for me and it is working for me. I still feel like a wreck a lot of the time. But I've also been living in fight or flight for nine years or whatever, so it'll be fine. Everything's going to be fine.

Sara Wachter-Boettcher:

And that's the thing, Kristina, I'm glad you're even saying that. I've been living in fight or flight for nine years. That's going to chronically impact you, and that's going to make it harder for you to have slowed down intentional responses to things in every situation. That's not because you're a bad person. It's not because you're bad at what you do, it's not because you're not trying or whatever. It's not all of these other things. It's just, oh, chronic stress takes its toll and trauma takes its toll.

One of the things that I want people to hear is that if you are feeling like you are chronically at the edge like that, it is not necessarily anything that you did wrong. It is not your fault. Oftentimes, it's the result of things that have happened to you that were out of your control. That's painful, and that's really hard because what that oftentimes means is that things that were done to you or things that again, that you didn't control, things like reorgs and layoffs, those situations that cause those chronic stress responses, they're not yours. And yet here you are, you're left with the aftermath.

I think it's unfair that this happens, just like I think it is unfair when traumatic things happen to us, and yet this is the life that you have. And I think that the question that you have to ask yourself is, "What do I want my life to look like and who do I want to be? And, okay, I'm going to have to do some work to deal with this, and it's not fair that I have to do this individual work, especially because there's a system problem that got me here, and yet the only thing I can do to fix it is individual work."

But also, do you want to stay stuck? Do you want to stay miserable? Because I don't think people do, not when they really slow down and think about it, I don't think that that's what they want. But I think oftentimes they don't know how to get out of that space, and so they'll kind of really fester.

Kristina Halvorson:

I think that that's kind of what it ultimately comes down to. Whenever we are feeling wrong, whenever we are feeling under chronic stress, whenever we've been laid off or we keep getting ignored by our design counterparts, or we've been transferred under leadership that doesn't really value experience design as a whole or content that isn't marketing content, for example. That it's not our fault that these bad things happen to us and that these stressors happen to us and we are responsible for making change. We are responsible for taking care of and solving those problems, even though it's not our fault that they happen to us.

That is kind of the mind shift I think that can allow people to begin to, in the workplace, from what I have seen and experienced personally, move from feeling like everything that we are talking about here is therapy and soft skills, and why can't we just get past this and talk about the work and do the work to parlaying it into active change management, not just externally within the workplace.

Change management does not mean forcing people to do it, but really beginning to navigate, be the change you want to see in the content or whatever, but also to begin to take responsibility for exactly what you said. Do you want to stay miserable? And if you don't, step back, learn how to observe when you're in distress, and all those really great tools. The one thing that I've been focusing on lately that has helped me enormously is if I find myself, in DBT they call it emotion mind. If I find myself in emotion mind, to just catch myself and think, "If I act or if I do this thing, is it going to make things worse?" And then if I don't make things worse, that's a really big win for me.

Say, I want to move on because we were talking a little bit, you are launching a program in May that you're feeling super excited about with Active Voice, and I wanted to give you the opportunity to talk about that program a little bit.

Sara Wachter-Boettcher:

All of the stuff that we've been talking about is super tied into what we're doing because this is the kind of stuff I see it constantly, and these themes come up over and over again in my one-on-ones. They come up over and over again in the group coaching that we've done and the workshop sessions I do with companies where it's just like you hear these things over and over where, because people feel threatened because they feel like they've been wronged, as you said. I think that's such a good framing of it. People often feel so wronged at work. They can get into that place where they are, they're operating in that fight-flight mode, and they are defensive. They stop being good partners with colleagues.

We are running this program, it's called the Manager's Playbook, and it is mostly for people who are doing some level of people leadership, but it doesn't have to be necessarily a direct manager. I think team leads are a great candidate for it as well. But we're really focusing on how do we have stronger relationships and better communication with the people that we work with? So getting out of that place of they wronged me and I'm going to write that spicy email about why they don't respect content design and whatever, and getting into a place where we're really looking at how do we truly listen to each other?

How do we resolve conflict? How do we have direct conversations about the things that aren't working? How do we show up to conflict conversations in a way that's less about winning and less about a tug of war between two parties and turn those conflicts into things where there is a problem still. It's not that the problem doesn't exist, there's no toxic positivity, but that problem is more of an issue that's in front of both of us as opposed to an issue between us that we're playing tug of war with.

Then it's also going to talk about things like how do we have hard conversations with our teams about things like performance, about setting expectations? How do we get more comfortable coaching one another through challenges? Also, particularly if you've been listening to this and thinking like, "Oh my gosh, I work with people who are so stuck in that mindset of feeling wronged and aggrieved and just getting very negative." How do you help other people start to shift their thinking and see things a little bit differently? So a lot of work on coaching skills.

A lot of what I'm talking about here is stuff we do in coaching. Sharing coaching skills with people who lead people can be just this massive shift in how people see their role as managers. Whole other conversation, but so often managers end up feeling like martyrs because they feel like every time they talk to somebody on their team about a problem, it's now their job to go fix the problem. They have to take on more and more and more. I think one of the underutilized skills is helping coach people through their problems without taking on their burdens. So we're going to be focusing on that too.

So we're going to run that in May. It's our first time turning a bunch of the curricula that we have for these topics into one cohesive thing, so we're really hyped about it.

Kristina Halvorson:

I'm also really hyped about it, and I really want to... I'm listening to it. I'm like, "Do I have time to do this? In between DBT and I don't know, recovery. Recovery from what, you say? The past nine years. It sounds just fantastic. It sounds like, again, I just so deeply appreciate the way that you are able to balance. Yes, your feelings are real, no feelings are bad, and it's up to you to fix the situation that you're in, lovingly, kindly, but also by coming to the table with empowering skills.

Again, not empowering. I am so conscious of wanting to stay away, and I'm sorry to reduce it to this, but I feel like there's so much, "We're in this together and I see you and content designers, content strategists unite." I hear it and I understand it, and I think that we both agree. It just gets into a swirl of short-term validation. The fact that you're putting out this curricula into our community in a way that is going to help drive meaningful change and not just short-term gain, I think it's such a powerful shift, and I just deeply appreciate your work.

Sara Wachter-Boettcher:

Thank you. I sure hope so. I think you're right that it is really about challenging ourselves to take responsibility. That does not mean you are suddenly responsible for every crappy decision about content your organization makes. That's not what we're talking about. But it's taking responsibility for how you show up and how you handle things and what you take on as yours and what you leave behind. I think that is the piece that I really hope people can take away from this, that you do have choices. Sometimes your choices are constrained because the world is hard, and because work is weird. But you do have choices and to embrace the choices that you have and get less invested in the stuff that's out of your control, just that would be a huge win for everybody.

Kristina Halvorson:

Well, I think it makes space for people to rediscover more ease in their day to day, and we all deserve that, to live with a little bit more ease.

Sara Wachter-Boettcher:

Amen.

Kristina Halvorson:

Sara, this has been just outstanding, and I cannot wait to share our conversation with the greater wider world. I know that folks are going to listen to it and relate and hopefully right away go sign up for your May workshop. Can you please tell people where they can do that?

Sara Wachter-Boettcher:

Yeah, you can go to Activevoicehq.com and then you'll head to the Manager's Playbook, which will be on the homepage on our events page. You'll find it. And you can also reach out to me on LinkedIn. That's probably the best place to chat me up.

Kristina Halvorson:

Outstanding. And I do want to say, it took me a solid six months to figure out how to both say and spell Sara Wachter-Boettcher's name. So we'll repeat it a couple of times on the show notes. You can copy paste that right into LinkedIn. It's a beautiful name. It's so powerful and amazing, and I can spell it and that I consider a real win.

Sara Wachter-Boettcher:

I appreciate that. I don't take it too seriously when people get it a little off because it's a doozy.

Kristina Halvorson:

I appreciate that because when I have to tell people, "No, there's no E's, it's V-O-R-S-O-N," I look at them with a little bit of judgment in my eyes. I'm just kidding. Sara, thank you so much for your time today. I appreciate you personally and professionally and can't wait for our paths to cross again soon.

Sara Wachter-Boettcher:

Yeah, same to you, Kristina. Thank you.

Kristina Halvorson:

Thanks so much for joining me for this week’s episode of the Content Strategy Podcast. Our podcast is brought to you by Brain Traffic, a content strategy services and events company. It’s produced by Robert Mills with editing from Bare Value. Our transcripts are from REV.com. You can find all kinds of episodes at contentstrategy.com and you can learn more about Brain Traffic at braintraffic.com. See you soon.