💌 The real tea on how to influence and persuade people. Eric Yuan's thoughts on work life balance.

I always contemplate whether or not I should include my normal intro message in this section because most newsletters don't, but including it here especially because today is World Mental Health Day 🧠 Please make sure to take care of yourselves and put yourself first, check in on your loved ones, and invest in the rituals and practices that fill you up. 💞

🔍 Today at a glance:

Length: 7 min | Readability: Grade 11-12

• How to persuade and influence people at work. The best career and mental health advice I've received in a while. Dealing with incompetent colleagues. Sharing because I don't gate-keep.

• Quick advice from Eric Yuan (CEO of Zoom) about work life balance.

• Weekly roundup of articles and advice this week - Practical career advice; Constance Wu's attempted suicide, how to choose dependable friends, how to identify rest debt / burnout, and more.

🧠 Influence and persuade people so you can do less & be stressed less.

You normally have to pay for this type of career/mental health advice from an executive coach! I got this for free, so I'm sharing.

Do you ever find yourself dealing with a group member, family member, or colleague that simply isn't pulling their weight? Or they make a mistake that ends up impacting you? 🙋🏻‍♀️ How do you persuade and influence people in your life to do the things that you need them to do?

In every environment (e.g. school, work, personal, etc.), this type of situation exists everywhere.

I've found myself in more of these situations as life goes on — and I realized I didn't have a tactic to deal with it. I have found myself genuinely stressed whenever I found that a colleague, family member, or anyone was just not meeting the quality bar for what I expected them to do. Over time, these small frustrations can compound, impacting your mental and physical health.

I generally get snappy, irritated, or abrasive - my nice filter goes off during these moments.

I finally spoke with a mentor about this, and she got this advice from her executive coach.

Here are the gems 💎 of her advice:

• When you want to drive a resolution. If you want to drive a resolution or outcome (and you're not the one directly responsible for it - otherwise, you'd have already done it), you can message the individual responsible on the side: "Can you drive this to completion?" Or if you're in a group meeting state in the call: "A decision [X/Y/Z] needs to be made by this timeframe, who is on point to make this happen?" Or state "It sounds like we needed to get to [X] decision, what’s the next step?" Be comfortable with awkward silences. If no one volunteers, you can start name-calling and volunteer people's names.

• Be aware of your emotions. Whenever you encounter a situation that is frustrating, take a deep breath and be aware of your emotions. Acknowledge those emotions and how you feel in that moment. Are you feeling heightened emotions? If so, try not to jump on a call for at least 2-4 hours until you start to feel calmer about the situation.

• Relationships trump everything. Your reputation will follow you, so think about the end goal in mind and ask yourself how reacting with your emotions will help you.

• When someone screws up. Don't give feedback in that moment when everyone's heated. You can do two options: You can set up a retro meeting (example here, another one here) where the team figures out the root cause of what happened so everyone can learn from it moving forward. It's very tech-biased, but I have found that it is effective in my personal life as well if you just do it verbally. Another option is to set up a 1:1 with that individual and use the following template to frame the discussion: "So [describe X, Y, Z event] happened. It should have occurred like this [describe desired, ideal outcome]. How did we arrive to this conclusion? How could we have arrived to this conclusion another way?" In other words, it frames the discussion from "This person made a big mistake" to "What went wrong? And more importantly, how can we learn from this without making people feel bad?"

• Find buddies with influence. Become friends with the people whom you need to influence and learn how they operate. Set up 1:1s (or if they're family members, set up hangouts/brunches) with them and ask how you can help make their jobs or lives easier. Align expectations with them about what you expect out of them so that you don't get frustrated.

• When people suck at their job. No one likes to be told they aren't doing their job. Understand people's capabilities, the level of detail that they can handle, what their manager's expectations of them are, and most importantly, the political system that you are a part of (and exists in nearly every dynamic wherever there are humans involved). You might hold yourself and your colleagues to a high standard, but if their manager doesn’t hold them to a high standard, then you won’t win.

• Life is not fair. Sometimes you’re dealt with sh*tty people and they suck. What can you do about it? It's not productive to stew in anger or frustration. You can channel that energy into something positive and deal with the cards that you've been dealt with + turn it into a winning hand.

♟ Tactical Exercise

How do you create influence across organizations? Whether it's organizing a family reunion or navigating politics within a company, do this exercise:

1. Who has influence in the areas that you work in?

2. What is your score of influence (i.e. closeness of relationship) with them?

3. What is one thing that you can start doing to increase your influence with that person?

Learning this from my mentor has been incredibly powerful for me, because I realized that so much of this can be applied to everyone's day-to-day life.

Mental fitness, resilience, emotion management, leadership - it can be called many different things depending on the context, but at the end of the day, it's crucial to be able to be aware of and manage your emotions.

It's easy to have a good mood and attitude when things are going well. But what happens when you hit a rough patch? It's these toughest moments that reveal who you truly are and ultimately what makes you. Learn to manage your emotions and you will unlock so much more beyond leadership, inner peace, emotional stability - what you unlock is the power to not let anyone else control your mental state.

No one else can control your emotions except you.

I'm not perfect at this (maybe because I just learned it last week), but now that I have these set of insights, I'm actively working to improve these skills.

A few related finds:

Raheem Sterling on how you respond to pressure during challenging times is what truly defines you as an athlete.

Tips on how to be direct but still be easy to work with. I wish we didn't have to learn this, but I didn't create the rules (and sometimes I also don't follow the rules), but if you want to play the game (and play it well), here are some tips.

🤓 Advice from Eric Yuan about WLB

I spent my World Mental Health Day listening to Eric Yuan talk in person at an event. I won't go into this in too much depth, but when asked with the question of: "How do you have work life balance" as someone who was trying to build something great that impacted the world while also managing his family... this was his response.

I'll leave you with that to marinate on 😉

👀 Weekly Finds:

• ✨ Five pieces of career advice, shaped by economics, psychology, and a little bit of existential math. You might be hearing a lot of different advice right now on the internet around careers. Most of it isn't helpful. Telling young adults or new college grads that a satisfying career is hopeless until we dismantle capitalism is about as helpful as telling somebody asking for directions to the bathroom that no true relief will visit humankind until death. Derek Thompson has a pragmatic, realistic, yet also inspiring approach to some of the career advice that is worth a read.

• 😕 Constance Wu shares details about her attempted suicide. After 3 years of being away from the spotlight, Actor Constance Wu opened up about her suicide attempt in a tearful conversation on Jada Pinkett Smith’s show “Red Table Talk,” divulging what led to the incident. You can view the entire Red Table talk here.

• 👯‍♀️ How to choose dependable friends, from a therapist. Who you surround yourself with is crucial to personal growth and healing. Find friends who can be vulnerable, listen to your needs, and hold you accountable when needed.

• 👀 Do you have "rest" debt? Do you know what that is? Last week, we mentioned that you need several types of rest in order to prevent burnout. How do you identify that you even have "rest" debt or are burnt out in the first place? Use this post to identify which areas of rest you may be lacking in, and take accurate steps to recover.⁠

• 🤓 Why you shouldn't wait for inspiration to come: In other words, the inspiration lie we've all been told. And for my creatives out there, do you find that you ask a lot of people for feedback or thoughts? He argues that getting others’ opinion can be valuable, until it’s not - you need to choose carefully when and how you get it. And that ultimately, YOU are the expert. He applies it to art and design, but I think it's applicable to life in general as well.

• 👩🏻‍⚕️ It might be World Mental Health Day today, but don't forget that it's also Breast Cancer Awareness Month! Here's how to do a self exam at home!

💌 Hope this newsletter provided some value! Please reply to this email or submit here if you have any feedback! And please share with anyone whom you think might be able to gain value from this.

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That’s it for today! See you next week!