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I do talk about careers in this talk, but really I'm discussing a much broader framework for making choices in your life that can be applied to careers. So who am I?
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I am that crazy lady who shows up to tech conferences in thigh-high boots and talks about her feelings. You can tell I'm going to talk about my feelings because I have a little barrette here that says 'feelings.' I am also the VP of Engineering at ConvertKit, a creative marketing platform. Yes, I am hiring, so if you like hearing about my feelings, come talk to me about the jobs I have available. I've been a software engineer since 1999 and a Rubyist since 2007. I have bipolar disorder and too many boots.
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So, why do I talk about my feelings so much? It’s in part because I can’t get permission from anyone else to talk about their feelings on stage. It is not beneficial for me as a woman engineering leader to talk a lot about my feelings because it sure doesn’t help my career. It makes people think that I’m either not technical enough or not businessy enough, both of which are false.
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I talk about my feelings because I like to live in reality, and feelings are some of the best information we can get about our present reality. Software engineers don’t always understand this. We call our bodies meat sacks; we think we are brains with bodies attached. Some of us might even think that someday we could upload ourselves into the cloud and live forever. This is a profound misunderstanding of the nature of the human experience. Our bodies are not meat sacks. Everything about the way we work as people, how we think, and how we move through the world is deeply connected to the fact that we have bodies.
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We are embodied, and we can’t separate our consciousness from our bodies. In fact, humans are complex open distributed systems. We are obviously very complex; we have a lot of things going on all over our bodies that interact with one another. There’s not really a centralized thing. We’re open because we’re interacting with the world around us and responding to the people around us. We have mirror neurons, so we’re all in this larger system together.
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Why do we know about complex distributed open systems? I’m sure most of us here have to work with such software systems every day. They are really hard to reason about, difficult to debug, and they constantly change. What went right or wrong last week may tell you very little about what goes right or wrong this week or next week. And because they are open systems, we don’t control everything that happens in them; they are always impacted by and interacting with all the other systems around them.
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So how do we work with such systems? We increase their observability. If we need to fix things or make changes in the system, we have to understand that we can’t prevent all bad things from happening, and we can’t predict the impact of the changes we might make. You may have information about the past, but you need information about the present.
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We need to get better at asking questions about the present state of the system and making choices based on that present state. Then we rinse and repeat as we guide those systems where we need them to go in the future. There’s this funny word, somatics, in my talk title—it's a way to increase the observability of the complex distributed system that is ourselves.
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Here’s some other definitions: somatics is the field that studies the soma, the body as perceived from within. This comes from Thomas Hannah, who coined the term in the 1970s. His idea was that our lived experience internally, which no one else has access to, is just as valid a source of facts as external experience, and it's a really important way of understanding ourselves in the world.
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Here's another definition: feeling our livingness—this is Richard Strazi Heckler, who does coaching with somatics. I love this one because it is so intuitive. It's about what it means to be alive as a human. You could also call it embodied self-awareness. So how do we sense our present reality? There’s exteroception, which is what’s going on outside of me; that’s the classic senses. There’s interoception, which is what’s going on inside me; and then there’s proprioception, which is where I am in the world and how I am moving.
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I’m going to focus mostly on interoception here because it's the thing you’re probably least familiar with. I’m going to use the term interchangeably with feelings, although some aspects of interoception you might not consider to be feelings, like nausea or exhaustion.
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Okay, we’re going to do some things to learn about interoception in action. First, we’re going to imagine a coin flip. Think of a choice you have to make—not something super hard, like should I marry this person? And not something easy, like what should I have for a snack—something kind of in between. Then we’re going to flip a coin. Assign choices to heads or tails, as one does.
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When I go to the next slide, you're going to see whether it's heads or tails. I want you to pay attention to how you feel in that moment. Y'all with me? Yes? All right, I’m seeing some nods. It’s tails. When I switched to this slide, did you have a feeling about the choice the coin made for you? Yes? I’m seeing some nods. You had a feeling about the choice the coin made because the coin concentrated and turned up the volume on your interoception into one tiny moment so that you could potentially hear quite loudly if you felt relief, annoyance, or if you were like, 'No, I don’t want that!'
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People tend to use coin flips this way: well, maybe I don’t do the thing the coin tells me, but then I have a better sense of what I want. That is interoception. The coin flip increases the observability of your soma in that moment.
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Okay heartbeat. I want you to close your eyes, and we’re going to take like five seconds to see if we can feel our hearts beating or the blood moving through our veins in a rhythmic fashion—not with your hands, just inside. We’re starting now.
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Okay, raise your hand if you could feel your heart beating. Okay, so most of you can, actually. A lot of the time in research studies, not everyone can, and some people will be like, 'Obviously I can do that,' and others will be like, 'Are you crazy? That doesn’t make any sense to me at all.' That is because people have differing levels of ability to sense their internal state.
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Next, I want you to close your eyes and focus on your big right toe. If for some reason you don’t have a big right toe, or you can’t feel it, just pick another part of your body that you don’t usually pay that much attention to. I want you to think about how it feels: is it warm? Is it cold? Is it tingly or numb? My big right toe is frequently arthritic because I'm getting to that age.
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This is also interoception. We like to think that feelings are the opposite of facts, but feelings are actually our best access to the facts about ourselves in the present moment. They are facts; they’re not the only facts—there are a lot of other facts out there in the world—but when we’re making choices for ourselves, our feelings are some of the most important facts.
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Our sensations and feelings drive our actions, whether we notice them or not. If we are cold, we put on a sweater; if we’re bored, we look at our phones. In fact, if all you do is tell yourself to pay attention to something you’re doing, you will act on that information. There is no sensing without moving—it’s one system; it’s the sensory-motor system.
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When I asked you to feel your big toe, your brain sent a lot of signals to the muscles around your big toe to get them to relax so that you could focus on feeling your big toe. So even just asking you to pay attention caused you to move, and you can’t help but make changes based on observations of your current state.
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This is why even without any coaching or reading about it, if you are doing a skill every day and you're paying attention to how you’re doing it, you’re going to get better. You can’t pay attention to what you’re doing without adjusting to get better at it.
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This is another great book about somatics: 'Your Body is Your Brain.' All these are in my references, and there’s a website to go to at the end. Anatomically speaking, your capacity to feel your sensations is inseparable from your ability to choose a wise course of action. In order to make good decisions, you must be able to sense your preferences.
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Observability, embodied self-awareness—the better we can observe the system, the better choices we can make about how it needs to change. Weirdly, we don’t have to know why we're making a choice in order to rely on our somatic intelligence. In fact, research shows we know things in our bodies long before we have cognitive access to the information.
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I swear I'm citing an actual scientific study; I did not read this on Goop. This research is discussed in another book called 'The Extended Mind.' If you put a person in front of like four card decks, and you say you need to win by pulling the highest cards, but some of those decks are 'unlucky' decks, they will start avoiding the bad decks without even noticing it.
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It’s much later in their process that they might be able to say, 'Oh yeah, these decks are bad,' but before that, if you measure their skin conductance when they start reaching toward the bad deck, they get really stressed out. They feel anxiety, and then they move away from the anxiety, leading them to pull from the good decks.
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Sometimes you don’t know; your consciousness does not yet know what your body knows. Research also shows though that the better we can sense our internal state, name it, and at the same time see what’s going on around us, the better choices we can make.
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People who are really good at responding to stressful situations are very aware of their internal state as well as what’s going on outside. They adjust their internal state to meet the external conditions while recognizing that their internal state knows some things that they don’t yet know in their consciousness.
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There’s also a whole study about Wall Street traders, where the better ones have much better interoception. So how do we get better at paying attention to what is going on inside us in the present moment? We practice.
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In the body scan meditation, you go through your entire body, piece by piece, like we did with the big toe. You’d probably start with the big toe, and you bring focused attention to that part of your body and note what you’re feeling. There’s an example narrated by Jon Kabat-Zinn; again, online references, but you can also just Google 'body scan meditation.'
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This next slide makes me sad because it kind of sucks. Because of the way we work with our interoception, everything we do that limits our access to our feelings reduces our ability to choose wisely. And I say that as someone who just took an anti-anxiety med like an hour ago. Technically, that has caused me to lose some access to my feelings.
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I’m not here to judge you or me for all the things we do to take the edge off and tolerate our lives. I do a lot of things that reduce my access to my feelings because I have extremely large feelings due to my mental illness, and sometimes I really just need to do that. Nevertheless, it is a truly relevant and unpleasant fact that when we do that, we reduce our observability of everything about ourselves.
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This isn’t just about the thing we’re trying to tolerate or avoid; we are making poorer choices. I’m going to talk about some things that could go wrong with your somatic intelligence and your interoception. You might not be able to feel your body. This could be because you just need to practice or it could stem from good reasons in your life where you really don’t want to feel your body.
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You might not like what your body is telling you, and so that might be some stuff you have to work through. You might, like me, sometimes have a body or feelings that tell you things that don’t seem related to what's outward. So you may have to triangulate with external sources of information to figure out what’s going on.
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You could also find that you’re getting too much information from your body, and it’s hard to tolerate, or you might discover that when you let your body lead, it's making choices that you don't like. All of these problems are real, and I can't really address them here. Many of them relate to learned patterns from our past and the things that have happened to us, and that is therapist territory—I’m not a therapist.
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But a therapist who grounds their practice in mindfulness or bodywork could certainly help. I do want to broaden our perspective for just a second and recognize that these issues with our interoception and our ability to sense ourselves are not just individual problems. They often result from things that have happened to us: oppression and the challenges and trauma we've faced in our lives.
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So here’s Richard Strazi Heckler again. If we do not live in our bodies, then we do not have to feel the pain of internal and external oppression. Living with reality is hard because it’s full of pain, suffering, and oppression. But if we can’t live with reality and really feel it in the present moment, just like with the observability of software systems, if we can’t see what’s going on, we cannot effectively change it.
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If this topic sounds interesting to you and you want to explore more, I actually learned about somatics from an amazing book by activist Adrienne Marie Brown called 'Emergent Strategy.' She discusses a lot about activism, somatics, and systems thinking as forms of strategic change.
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All of that is included in the references. All right, I’m 20 minutes in, and now I’m getting to how you can apply this to making career choices. One of the things you can do at any time is ask yourself not what you need to do five years from now, but rather what is the next thing you can do.
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Here’s Adrienne Marie Brown stating: What is the next most elegant step you can take given the current state of the system? Here’s Anne Lamott, who identifies it as ‘the next circle of light into which I might step,’ which I think is also a beautiful way to think about it.
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Here are some practical questions: do you feel bored? Then what would feel interesting? If you’re feeling suffocated, how do you get some air? Are you joyless? What would be fun? I recently bought roller skates and started learning to skate with my children because my psychopharmacologist asked me what I was doing for fun.
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If you feel excited, then what is causing that, and how can you get more of it in your life? If you're having trouble figuring these things out, you can use some tricks to access your feelings: coin flips, tarot cards, or other oracles if you’re into that. Journaling, movement, poetry, or other kinds of art can help.
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Connect with your felt sense of yearning and your felt sense of caring. Those are both feelings you feel in your body. You yearn for something in your body; what is it that you want? You don’t have to be able to answer this question in words, and just like those people who started avoiding the unlucky card decks but couldn't say why, you may not even be able to answer it in words.
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But you can answer in choices. It’s not an intellectual exercise; it’s an embodied experience. So just do what feels right. I can share a couple of examples from my personal career journey. There was a moment—I forget what year it was—when I was an engineering manager.
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I reported to a director who reported to the VP. The VP was leaving, and I had a one-on-one with the director. I asked if he was going to try to get promoted to VP, and he said yes. In that moment, I had a powerful feeling and said, ‘Well, I would like to be director.’ I didn’t know before that moment that was something I really wanted, but in that moment, it was the next most elegant step for my current job.
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At ConvertKit, I was not looking for a role at all at the time. I had just sent out an email because I was using the product for a creative project, and that day, I received a recruiting email looking for a VP of engineering. It was a Rails shop at a good size, and I liked the mission. I started talking to them, thinking, 'Well, I’ll just have one call,' and I just kept enjoying our conversations.
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I kept liking what I was hearing, and now I have a job, and it’s delightful! It was certainly the right choice, but there was never a moment where I made a checklist or weighed pros and cons. I just thought, 'All right, I guess this is what I want now.'
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So if you like where you’re going, even if you can’t say why you decided to walk that way, your body’s leading you, and it’s doing a pretty good job. Congrats! Another way to put this—Mary Oliver is a poet, and this is from a lovely poem called 'Wild Geese': you only have to let the soft animal of your body love what it loves.
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Why do I emphasize choosing over planning? They are very different things. We make a plan with just our minds, and we choose with our bodies. We choose with our bodies every single moment; that’s the only time we can make a choice—right now. All the plans in the world will do nothing for you if the choices you’re making with your body every day aren’t in accord with those plans. You will not get where you plan to go if you keep choosing something else.
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We’re also really bad at predicting what we want in the future, and we’re especially bad at it if we ignore the best source of information we have about how we’ll feel in the future is how we feel right now. So if you want to make a plan, think about how you want to feel in five years, what makes you feel that way now, and what choices you think you can make right now that lead you in that direction.
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All right, let's wrap this up. I'm proud of my time; I think I'm doing okay. This is Richard Strazi Heckler again: there's a certain warmth and joy that emerges as we become in touch with the somatic reality of our lived experience. Our bodies now appear as encyclopedias of information about how we’re dealing with our present transitions.
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We might not always like this information. I don’t always like what my body tells me. I don’t want to feel the arthritis in my toe; it interferes with my dance plans. But even that gives me amazing access to information about what’s going on inside me at any moment, and that’s really incredible.
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Now I’m going to read you a quote from Audre Lorde, who was an incredible activist poet: 'Poetry is not a luxury.' Sometimes we drug ourselves with dreams of new ideas, thinking the head will save us—that the brain alone will set us free.
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But there are no new ideas still waiting in the wings to save us as women, as humans. There are only old and forgotten ones, new combinations, extrapolations, and recognitions from within ourselves, along with renewed courage to try them out. We don't just make plans; we make choices. We make choices with our bodies, and when we get better at listening to our bodies, we make better choices.
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Thank you! Thank you! I have like three minutes. I don't know that we’re set up for questions, but someone could shout out. I will repeat it if anyone has a question; otherwise, I can just end.
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Yes. How do I talk about my feelings at work? Different ways with different people, right? I can give you one example. I took a mental health day not long ago, and I did it because I realized I had gotten into a panicked state about some things happening.
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The panic was causing me to behave in ways that I didn’t think were helpful, especially as a leader. So I posted in the engineering Slack channel, saying, 'Hey y’all, I’m taking a mental health day and here’s why: it’s because of this situation, and that’s bad for everybody. I need to go deal with that and take care of myself in order to be effective as a leader and not make things worse.'