Issue 019 // Kill It (With Kindness).
A thank you. Thoughts on how empathy and expectations drive performance, art that started with a sunrise and focussed on a war, the power of asking, and newsletter recommendation.
Bom dia, gente
Ignacio here. Happy Monday.
It’s International Women’s Day tomorrow.
I’m feeling deeply thankful for all the wonderful women in my life this week, and I wanted to give them a shout-out. You know who you are.
So many of the biggest opportunities in my life (as a person and professional) have been thanks to bold and brilliant women who took a chance on me, mentored me, or opened doors I didn't even know existed.
Thank you. 💫
On empathy, expectations and performance.
1️⃣ Piece from me:
Kill it with kindness.
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2️⃣ Best of the internet:
Sho Shibuya’s sunrises.
Jack Butcher on just asking for it.
—
1️⃣ Curveball:
Femstreet.
1️⃣
Kill it with kindness.
It’s taken me a while to get around to publishing this piece. I can’t pinpoint the reason - the ideas have been floating around my head for a while, and I’ve been collecting notes on the topic for weeks. There’s always been something that’s held me back.
The core idea is simple: you should be most empathetic with yourself, especially if you have big dreams and expectations.
That simplicity is kind of terrifying - it’s made me question whether it’s worth sharing something that feels so fundamental and basic. There was one thought that got me over the creative fear: how important something is way ahead of its complexity.
And this - balancing empathy with expectation - has been really important to me. I haven’t nailed it yet, but I’m getting there.
That’s made it worth thinking about more deeply, considering it at length, and refining it to the point where it’s worth sharing. So here we go.
High expectations and empathy drive performance.
We’re filled with the ideas that a leader has to be strong, ruthless, tough - even mean - to get the results they need, to drive performance. We see examples highlighted and put on a pedestal throughout history. Steve Jobs is the prime example. He was notoriously mean, but it was justified by his brilliance.
What if those kinds of stories just float to the top because they’re exceptional? What if a deep sense of respect and kindness - empathy - for the folks you interact with actually brings out the best in those people?
In my experience, kindness and empathy win out, every time.
The (neuro)science backs it up.
At a super high level, we do all of our analytical processing in a part of the brain called the prefrontal cortex. When we’re stressed out, chemical signals block it up so a more instinctive (animalistic) part of our brain can take over. We stop thinking logically and
So if you, your team captain or your boss is leading with abrasiveness, you’re going to stress out. You’re going to shut down. And unless you’re trained to go subconsciously and mechanically go through the task at hand, you will underperform.
Not ideal.
Instead, if you focus on creating positive relationships built on empathy and kindness to reduce the burden of stress, you can get the best out of people - including yourself.
But first, your relationships in Orbits of Proximity.
For some framing it’s important to bucket different kinds of relationships in terms of how close you are. I find most relationships are cyclical - you become closer and more distant from people at different times, and different paces.
I find it useful to think of people orbiting around me in 4 ellipses, from closest to furthest:
Family
Here I mean your given and/or chosen family. Tu gente, your ride or die’s, the people that you’re closest to most consistently. This group usually sits in the single digits.Friends
This is one of the widest buckets, and can include some family members. People you care about and have a shared emotional connection.Colleagues
Or team members. Folks where the nature of the relationship is transactional, or oriented around an objective. Little to no emotional connection here.Acquaintances
Anyone you’ve met in passing. A server, a stranger in line at the bank, someone you were briefly introduced to at your friend’s dinner party whose name you can’t remember to save your life.
Each group takes up a different amount of time and energy, and people fall into a spectrum of ellipsis, but more on that another day.
Take the time to figure out how you allocate your empathy.
Where do you spend your energy? Who are you kindest to by default? Who gets the worst side of you?
If I had to map out my default relationship between how kind I am to each group, I think it’d look something like this
I know that I am kindest to my friends and colleagues. I am present in my interactions with them. I am thoughtful in my responses and deliberate in my words. With acquaintances, I make a concerted effort to always be nice enough. To make sure their
There’s this bizarre behavior where you tend to take the people closest to you - your family - for granted. Where you don’t treat them with the same patience and positivity you’d treat a friend. Because we’re hardwired to think that some forms of love are unconditional, you take it to mean that you don’t have to make the same effort to be as present, kind or empathetic with people that love you in those ways.
I know it’s been my default - my family’s patiently borne the brunt of my lack of kindness throughout my life.
And they only get a sliver of what happens in my inner dialogue.
I’ve always had an internal drive to achieve, and a necessity to do things “right,” every time. From as early as I can remember, I was obsessive over perfection with my schoolwork. Even the smallest mistake in form or function would justify scrapping the assignment and starting over again, as many times as it’d take.
This, combined with the skewed idea that stern leadership works best, put me in the depths of unkindness with myself. There was no room for error or underperformance. Anyone else could make a mistake, but not me. It's a record low level of empathy.
And, sadly, I don’t think I’m alone there. Self criticism and self deprecation run pretty rampant. Most of us find it’s easy to be at our worst with ourselves.
‘Defaults’ don’t mean ‘permanent.’
Just because you’ve behaved a certain way so far, doesn’t mean it’s unchangeable. It’s our responsibility to take the basic building blocks of our psyche and reconfigure them into whatever version of ourselves we think is better.
If you want to drive performance, you should optimize for empathy. It reduces stress, increases trust, and opens up better lines of communication.
The closer, the kinder.
Here’s a simple framework to reconfigure those defaults: charity begins at home, and it builds out from there. This is what an ideal empathy graph should look like:
The closer you are to someone, the more deliberate you should be with your kindness, the higher your level of empathy for them.
This means you should be kindest to yourself.
It sounds so simple, but I think it’s much easier said than done. I’ve always found this the most challenging. But I think it’s well worth the effort.
It makes life so much easier.
Once you break out of a mindset of judgement and start accepting your flaws with curiosity, a pressure lifts off your shoulders. It becomes ok to explore, to fail, to move fast. It becomes ok to grow in your own way and at your own pace. Life becomes lighter and easier.It raises your overall level of empathy.
If you’re kinder with yourself, every other relationship will follow that lead. The higher you push that curve earlier on, the bigger the distance between your empathy curve and that ‘Nice Enough’ boundary. Folks who are kinder and more empathetic with themselves are more so with others too.
It takes time, so let’s get tactical.
My therapist gave me a quick exercise that’s helped through some of the deepest, darkest crises, where I just couldn’t give myself a break. Feel free to steal like an artist and take it for a spin.
It’s (again) deceptively simple. When you’re confronted with a tough situation and you’re judging yourself hard, take some time and think of how you’d talk to your best friend if they were going through the same thing.
Even better, write yourself a letter from their point of view.
It sounds pretty out there, but it works. At least it did for me, and I think it’s mostly to do with a certain level of mindfulness and deliberateness:
You tap into what’s usually the highest point of kindness on the empathy graph, and apply it to yourself.
You’re become considerate about your inner monologue - it’s now a conscious exercise, not some self-conscious offshoot of our trauma and insecurities.
By replicating and reversing the dynamic you have with your friends, you tap into the underlying dynamics that make it wholesome and healthy.
It’s ok to go for it and go big, as long as you stay kind.
We’ve gone on a ride, and I’d like to take us back to the thought we started with: high expectations and empathy drive performance.
If you were to draw the same graph for Expectations vs Proximity of relationships, Your graphs should match up to create a way of interacting with yourself and others that’s sustainable and drives results.
If you’re thinking about a partnership, a family, a team - whatever it is - and you want to improve how you’re operating (or “performing”) try corresponding your expectations to the degree of empathy and kindness you show each group. Your graphs for Empathy and Expectations should mirror each other in shape and magnitude.
The kinder you are, the higher the expectations you can place on the relationship. Just make sure you’re careful about both the level and the type of expectation.
You can do this not because you’re entitled to anything (you’re not), but because the fundamental requirements for kindness and empathy are the same building blocks for high performance: being present and deliberate, creating clear and open two-way channels of communication, starting with implicit trust and positive intent.
2️⃣
It started with a sunrise.
Sho Shibuya (@shoshibuya) started painting the sunrise on the daily New York Times throughout the pandemic. The work was stunning. He’s kept going, and it just got better over time.
His latest pieces include a powerful commentary on the ongoing war, and a beautiful stance in solidarity with the people of Ukraine.
Just ask.
In spanish we have a saying: “el que no llora, no mama.”
To save you the confusion Google translating the colloquialism, just look to Jack Butcher’s latest design:
1️⃣
Femstreet, mi gente.
This is one of my favorite newsletters by, for, and about women in tech. It’s been a big inspiration for 121.
The newsletter is written by Sarah Noeckel, and I couldn’t recommend it more highly if you’re into finance, technology, or fintech. Check it out.
Have an idea/question/suggestion for 121? Give me a shout.
Writing is much more fun when it’s interactive and the best content so far has come from questions and conversations with the 121 community.
This week Elliot came in big again with a brainstorm and a nudge on the piece for kindness. Gracias.
You can DM me on Twitter or reach out over email at ignaciosemerene@gmail.com. I’ll answer every message.
Stay curious and keep building.
Abrazo,
Ignacio
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Disfruto y aprendo con tus escritos, un abrazo