On Being Positive - "I'm going to be fired"
When the going gets tough.
That's it — I'm going to be fired, I think to myself, right as I answer the phone.
It’s a C-level executive, responsible for the company's engineering structure, who's calling me. He’s on holiday and he’s using his personal number.
He starts the call by appreciating my work but then drops a bombshell — huge business cuts are happening and all managers will be affected.
I can hear my voice quivering. I had to let people go earlier this year, so I tell him that I understand this is a difficult conversation to go through. I ask him about the future of my teams, and what the next steps are, but he says it is still too early and that we'll get to it in a few weeks. The call is over after four minutes; I ask him about the weather over there in sunny Italy before we hang up.
It’s difficult to hear and I have a lot of emotions to process, but my calm response in that moment was typical of how I operate.
In this article, I'll share my strategies to remain calm when the going gets tough.
On Optimists
Psychologist and Nobel Prize winner Daniel Kahneman has some excellent advice on the most important skill that you should want for your kids:
"If you are allowed one wish for your child, seriously consider wishing him or her optimism. Optimists are normally cheerful and happy, and therefore popular; they are resilient in adapting to failures and hardships, their chances of clinical depression are reduced, their immune system is stronger, they take better care of their health, they feel healthier than others and are in fact likely to live longer.
— Daniel Kahneman, “Thinking Fast and Slow”
I couldn't agree more — being optimistic helps. It's a skill and it can be practised.
I'm not that optimistic; I'm rather realistic, but I understand that focusing on positive things can have huge potential for reframing how we see the world.
The Worst Case Scenario
We tend to focus on perspectives we already have.
I write this newsletter because taking on different perspectives is an antidote to our struggles. Being positive or negative towards things that happen to us, shapes how we perceive them.
Things happen — some we can control, and some we cannot. But what we are in control of is how we react to them and reframe our perception.
Imagine the worst things that could happen. Chances are, the current situation will unfold far better than any of the bad scenarios you have imagined.
During the first round of layoffs in 2023, which didn’t affect me directly, I tried to imagine what it would be like if I had been fired. That's when I came up with the idea of having a gap year.
Get Perspective
While this exercise of imagining helped me prepare for receiving the shocking news, it did not help me prepare for the process of letting people go.
We had professional training sessions for managers. These sessions were helpful. However, what mattered most to me was “the perspective training” I did by watching one specific movie.
I watched Up in the Air, starring George Clooney. The protagonist travels around the US, firing people because their bosses are too afraid to do it themselves. It’s not a masterpiece, but it shows the worst-case perspective. In the movie, all the people losing their life roles are devastated, broken by the process, and have nowhere to go. I knew it would be different for me — we were letting good people go who would soon find good roles elsewhere.
The only thing that helped keep me calm during the layoffs was the perspective that we are in IT and that most of these people will find new positions sooner or later. Looking back, all of them did find new jobs.
Positive Corners
Whenever I join meetings where I can shape them, I propose to start with quick updates in the form of positive corners.
During positive corners:
One by one everyone shares one good thing that happened to them
No questions asked, just listening
It sounds simple, but it has an influence. It reframes how we start the meeting by forcing us to mention one positive thing, so we can see that it's not all grey and negative.
Summary
Being able to remain calm and optimistic in difficult moments when you would rather disappear is a superpower.
It's impossible to force yourself to be more optimistic with a snap of your fingers, but we can influence it, even if it's just a question about one good thing.
My difficult conversations were calm because I had considered the worst-case scenarios and explored different perspectives.
Thanks for reading,
— Michał
Post Notes
Optimistic individuals play a disproportionate role in shaping our lives. Their decisions make a difference; they are the inventors, the entrepreneurs, the political and military leaders – not average people. They got to where they are by seeking challenges and taking risks. They are talented and they have been lucky, almost certainly luckier than they acknowledge... the people who have the greatest influence on the lives of others are likely to be optimistic and overconfident, and to take more risks than they realize."
— Daniel Kahneman, “Thinking Fast and Slow”
What a great article, Michał!
Focusing on the things I can control, helps me a lot.
Ultimately, as Stoics say: "amor fati".
The Worst Case Scenario - This is my go-to method.
Every time I get into a scenario that might turn out bad, I automatically think to myself "What's the worst thing that could happen?"
99.99% of the time, I find ways to mitigate the worst thing or find ways to overcome it.
Then I calm down and continue.
For example, sometimes I get stressed about the fact that I didn't make any money yet and I might "waste" all my savings.
Then I think: "I can go back to work and get things done on weekends".
As I think about that, I already think of a solution to what if this doesn't work.
Fantastic article Michał