Shaping Design Careers, with Jason Mesut
Do you want your career to be sustainable and aligned with what truly matters to you? Designing a holistic career that embraces every part of who we are can be a complex and meaningful challenge.
This week Leigh and guest Jason Mesut have a captivating discussion about the significance of aligning personal values with work and finding meaning in one's career. Jason is an experienced design strategist and leader, who conducts workshops on and has written extensively about shaping one’s future in design.
Jason sheds light on the limitations of traditional career labels and role descriptions, advocating for a more holistic approach. He shares his own path of creating visual frameworks and facilitating workshops that empower individuals and teams to delve into their unique qualities, values, and skills.
Join Leigh and Jason in this episode as they discuss the common challenges that people bring to coaching sessions, from navigating the job market to making critical decisions about leadership roles, reigniting passions, or even contemplating a career change. Tune in to discover practical tools and strategies that can propel you toward shaping a more aligned career.
🎤About Our Guest:
Jason Mesut helps people and organizations navigate their uncertain futures. He does this through executive coaching, community leadership, strategic consulting, futures design and shaping workshops.
📚Additional Resources
Jason’s DesignOps 2019 talk “Shaping Design, Designers and Teams”
Jason’s Medium article series on Shaping Designers and Design Teams
---
Connect with Jason
Website | LinkedIn | Linktr.ee
Connect with UX Cake!
uxcake.co | Instagram | Linked In | YouTube
Connect with Leigh
Strategic UX Leader Coaching and Workshops
FULL TRANSCRIPT
Leigh Arredondo 00:02
UX Cake is all about developing the layers you need to be more effective in your work and to be happy and fulfilled in your career. I'm your host, Lee Allen-Arredondo. And I'm a UX leader and leadership coach. Hello, and thank you so much for joining me on UX cake. Today, we are talking about shaping our careers and our teams in a more holistic way. Today, I'm joined by my friend and colleague, Jason Mesut who is a design strategist and coach and excitingly the author of the upcoming book shaping design, you may have read Jason's work in medium and LinkedIn, and or you may have seen him talk at conferences around the world. So I'm very excited about our conversation today. Jason, thank you so much for joining me,
Jason Mesut 00:59
It's amazing to be here, I'm really looking forward to it
Leigh Arredondo 01:03
You actually have a fairly large body of work out in the world that people can find that you included, for me a video of a talk that you did, which I hadn't seen before, I'm really glad that that you sent that talk that you did at a conference, I think 2019 that sort of gives a little bit about the origin story of how you came to this more holistic view the importance of a more holistic view of of our own careers for leaders of teams, a more holistic view of the people on their team. And so I wanted to talk to us a little bit about kind of your origin story, the importance of aligning what you're doing in your work with what is actually most important to you as a person and your whole self and your whole life. And I think that this happens for a lot of people at some point in their career, although I will say I've been noticing, I feel like I've been noticing this desire for people to connect more meaning to their work across industries, actually, since the pandemic. I don't know if there is an actual correlation,
Jason Mesut 02:11
Certainly. And I was I was noticing it even before, I think it was maybe rising generally prior to that. But that just shook things up. And I think maybe there's aspects of trauma that we've been going through that just then shine lights and other things that weren't quite right for us. So quite a bit of that. And it's I think it's exacerbated at the moment when I felt feel like I feel like there was a there was people felt a little bit more empowered, that they were able to maybe have some more agency over their new directions. And then just more recently, with layoffs and AI stuff and other things like that. I think that that's been crushed a little people are feeling less, less so. So yeah, it's interesting that that's happening. And I think we're going for a different wave of that.
Leigh Arredondo 02:53
Yeah, It's interesting that you mentioned trauma, there has been more discussion about work trauma. And that is actually what I felt like I went through in 2019. And it sounds like that was part of the instigation for your deeper work that has led to this shaping conversation. I'm curious if you want to maybe expand on that just a little.
Jason Mesut 03:18
Oh, yeah. So I mean, it's a story I've told a few times. But I mean, in some ways, I feel like it's a bit petty, but what can happen is I was having a pretty good relationship with with a client that I had, and they were under some scrutiny through an external management consultancy that was auditing them and checking things out. And I wanted to help them and I was coming to the end of my contract with with them and I was put into a really difficult situation. And I've kind of quite aggressive meetings situation, and they shorten my time and everything else. And so the tone of that meeting changed for me and I felt like I had to deliver things in such a way that we'd like to be clear and crisp and a bit less Jason, a bit less human than maybe what was before and I felt afterwards, I felt like okay, they put me in an awful situation. I told them where it was at and it wasn't really clear whether they were going to extend or not. They were they were playing silly mind games with me, but my immediate client was and and then the next day I was at a conference and I was checking my emails every so often. I was just watching one of the talks at leading design conference actually, and checked my emails, I got an email from one of my clients and it just listed out a whole bunch of things that just, "Whoa, is that what you got from this?" Yeah, but you're unprofessional you were really unclear and all these things and I was like, this is like the opposite of what I thought I was in that situation. What's going on here, it's like a mismatch and and it was very much hit straight into my value system. Someone thought that that was like the opposite of the way I wanted to be seen or be experienced. And this email really hit me in my value system and challenged some things which I thought people understood about me around my care and attention to things and trying to be clear, I'm not always clear upfront, but it's been a lot of time kind of crafting this thing, shared it in advance everything. And yeah, I was just this one email just came into pieces. And it was just silly. I thought it was silly. And then later that night, I was chatting with some fellow kind of design leaders, and they were just like, "No, you can't work with this person". And I was like, "wait, what?" I've never quit a client before this. What are you telling me you're like, oh, that that relationship shop or he's just an abusive relationship. And I was like, I cried that night, I was in really bad trauma around it. And it triggered a breakdown for me. And because I everything that I thought I'd been building up for the past 20 years and suddenly being shattered and bought, or what I felt was in it was silly little things, and internalize it and thought, well, what does this mean for me? And, yeah, it, it triggered a lot of self discovery work. And me getting a coach myself. In fact, Julia Whitney, who was the talk that I was watching, just before I got that email, as I was like, right, I need help - help me. And that and that triggered my ultimate kind of coaching journey myself and becoming a coach. And was sort of around the time when I was starting to run these workshops around my other work as well. So it was like this weird kind of connection of all these events. But it's, I feel like I'm still recovering from that, in many ways. What happened there I was, I was never able to kind of reconcile it with him. He just didn't respond to me afterwards to do it. But essentially, I went in after the weekend and said, I have to end this contract and got walked out of the building everything it was all these great people that I built relationships with.
Leigh Arredondo 06:44
Yeah, I think that story will definitely resonate with a lot of people that resonates a lot with me and the situation I had in a almost toxically misaligned role that I had, that I should have left, had I've been more keyed into my own values, I think it wouldn't have lasted as long as it had. And it would have ended differently. Because when you're in a situation like that, you're reacting out of emotion. And that interesting - also led to my own coaching journey, I hired a coach and became a coach. So there's a lot of resonance there. Coming back around to this idea of how do we define ourselves in our career? The the idea of how do I describe myself? How do I think of myself? How do I define me as a unique designer, let's say, my skills, my skill set, both hard and soft, my leadership skills, and I think there's a typical approach to how we define ourselves. I'm a entry level designer, mid level designer, senior designer, principal designer, design manager, design director. So there's these roles that are in a career ladder, let's say, then there might be some skills matrices or wheel alignment, where we're, as a team leader, as an individual, you might identify where you are high in certain skills and where you have room for growth. And those tools are, are helpful, those are actually necessary. But they're not enough. Right. And I think that is a lot of what you're talking about. So I'd love to hear you talk about this idea of an approach to how an individual or team leader can frame their their career or themselves in a more holistic way.
Jason Mesut 08:53
Yeah. Okay. No problem. And thanks for sharing that - your experience. I feel closer to you now. We were synchronized on the time and everything. I guess, I guess one way to look at it is so know what it was, but like, maybe back in just a little bit of origin story on the work related to it is I think, maybe it's about 2005. I was I was in a meet up and someone had said, Ask, the question is going, who are our heroes? Who do we look up to? And at the time there, there wasn't as many kind of thought leaders in our space. And the particular people that were very prominent, they weren't appealing to me as people to look up to, in UX space, as opposed to maybe wider industrial design space where I originally studied. And I was curious about that as like getting go what makes a good user experience person so I did some research around that with various people. And I got a whole bunch of different skills from qualities of different individuals, and most of them were these softer sides, these inter relational sides of things with people. And so I developed a poster around this and took it to a conference and I shared it with people and people were fascinated by like, this way of uncut, unpicking these different aspects of who we were as designers, I suppose, rather than fully, holistically ourselves. But in our role as designers be the technical skills and practices, and disciplines or fields that were, many of which we consider under this umbrella of UX, or whatever we call it these days, there was always other things that kind of were part of who we are. And we will know all the people that I got to be assessed and assessed by others were just very different, no one was the same. I was like, curious about that. So that was just, I just got a little bit interested in mapping these different different types of skills, different types of capabilities, different types of qualities of, of self, as a designer, just to think about, well, how are we different. And so a lot of the time we even back then we did have these kind of these frameworks, these kind of essentially a matrix. These things were hard to grok and hard to process, especially as a predominantly visual designer mindset. And so I just kind of, I was just trying to just try to distill it and put these into these, what I called imperfect visual frameworks, like the taxonomy wasn't perfect, but just like enough to, to prompt things, and people just really gravitated towards these, these pictures of the slides of these different shapes and stuff. And so I started running them with, with people at conferences, and then in corporate organizations, and, and then and then started writing about them. But essentially, I would just take people through a kind of a pretty much a set process of using different kinds of visual frameworks to look at yourself through lots of different lenses. So wherever your career history was, in an almost life, we call it career timeline, which is more of a like a kind of, I guess, a customer journey map of your life.
Leigh Arredondo 11:43
Right.
Jason Mesut 11:44
Right. And, and curiously, I've come up with this thing, I thought I was smart and clever. And actually, Julian had given it to me as when I had this breakdown. I was like, Oh, this is serendipitous. This is a real thing. And another one she gave me, which is a wheel of life, which is common in coaching, corrective coaching, specifically, where you have you missed out different areas of life and how happy you are. But I had things around specific fields of practice, these kind of softer skills, debatable terminology, I know, like qualities and values and lots of different things, and just trying to give a whole bunch of like a mix of different lenses to start looking at yourself through and what was just super interesting, because we would get people to do them by themselves and put them up - looking at these different shapes, no one was ever the same.
Leigh Arredondo 12:30
Right, sure.
Jason Mesut 12:31
And, of course, like, you're human, you're different. And but it sounds simple and obvious, but like, it is a truth. And yet we treat each other as if we're, you know, almost cookie cutters in different ways.
Leigh Arredondo 12:45
Interchangeable.
Jason Mesut 12:46
Exactly.
Leigh Arredondo 12:47
Resources.
Jason Mesut 12:48
Yeah. And I have a massive problem with this, like, you know, on a whole another level around design process and how we may have dehumanized it a bit too far. Assuming that we just put the same type of person, same class, a person, the same Junior design or mid design, staff, designer, whatever, just get another one, put them on the same thing with the same process, same time, and output, same. I mean, that's just not how it works at all, unfortunately, maybe how we might sell it to other people just to give confidence and certainty. But that's not how design works. In my experience,
Leigh Arredondo 13:20
There's a certain amount of labeling that has to happen, right? Just to so people will understand. Because what we do is already fairly misunderstood.
Jason Mesut 13:30
You're absolutely right. I mean, there's there's a tension there, right? Because in some ways, it's helpful to some extent to have a handle on what type of thing you are, you're more of a researcher, are you a product designer or service designer? Or a UI or UX designer? But what then then when you start digging into those things like what, what do you really mean by those? And yes, they might be sort of good archetypes for handles for someone who's more this way than that way. But ultimately, you could get someone who's a service designer with a similar profile, similar to someone who is a UI UX designer go - What's that all about? And the roles and the capability maps, we might well capability descriptions or job descriptions we might have for someone, they store these things as bullet points is almost at the same level of heirarchy. No, surely this thing is more important for this role than this one. And then that. So yeah, I was just curious. So it really the workshops were an opportunity for people to start looking at themselves through these different lenses. And then to use that as a basis to start projecting directions where they might when you do it with a with a team situation, you can start to analyze the gaps and the differences and all self reflection. You can like gap, gap analysis, analyze it all. But also, a lot of people come to me to run these workshops as like a team building thing, how can we understand each other better? And it's a level of maybe decoding some of the complexity that we've built up around ourselves and maybe just through these different lenses and again, this is similar to my strategy work sometimes sometimes I'm applying like a framework or model just to help me see the problem differently and just to highlight a particular thing, and it's essentially doing that, holding different type of mirrors up for lenses, whatever, whatever the metaphor is appropriate. And that, yeah, so I believe it, it helps to start to turn the cogs in people's minds around who they who they are, and the the broad ranges of what that might mean. And ultimately, that might in encourage them to think about how they want to change that view of themselves in the future. If they do want to.
Leigh Arredondo 15:29
Yeah, it's, I think it's a fantastic approach. And it gives it a container for a lot of folks have difficulty identifying where they want to grow, or what they want to learn. Because it's, there's so many things, and I work with people a lot on identifying us using certain sorts of tools to identify what would be most impactful now? And what are more long term kind of goals for growth, personal growth, and development and career growth and development. But I think the things that you're talking about, they're super helpful in a team environment, but from an individual perspective, as well identifying not only where you want to grow and develop, but what kind of company you want to work for, what environment you want to work within, what kind of people you want to work with, and what kind of change do you want to make? I'm curious, so you, you do a lot of coaching. And you've mentioned that you, you work with, you do these processes with folks that you that you coach, are, are people coming to you? What are sort of the primary problems presented? Like why are they going through this work?
Jason Mesut 17:02
Yeah, it's interesting and has an interesting tension. For me. I think I've shared it with you separately, but in my coaching practice, I don't use the tools as much. It's it's like, I have a less of a set process. So when I first started out, I might start with, I used to start with the career timeline and a wheel of life, because that's what Julia did to me. And it was helpful for me. So that's like, it was comfort, comforting to get a good read on someone. But I stopped doing it. Because, because yeah, because people came with different problems or different presenting ones. Right? Yeah. So yeah, the probably the come to me sometimes they are like, I want to get a job, I want to get a new job, or I want to leave this one I'm struggling with what kind of leader I want to be. Or, I've, I've lost the love I once had for this, and I want to see if we can learn. And,
Leigh Arredondo 17:51
Or something different. I get that a lot - should I be considering something else?
Jason Mesut 17:58
Yeah, they don't know. And it's just absolutely have to leave or had someone who's right. I have to leave this work and get a new job. We have lots of more money. And we have lots of more power and lots of these different things and like oh, okay, and just straight off the got his employer to pay for it. And that was early on in my coaching experience. How do I handle this? And interestingly that, that that narrative completely changed with that person. But so the interesting thing about what you asked was around yeah, what did they present where because what they present where it's not necessarily the thing.
Leigh Arredondo 18:28
That's right. And so this is when the coaching work often is about deepening and understanding the stuff behind that. And that's where me, me running one of these workshops won't necessarily achieve that. It might it might start to uncover but these people not won't necessarily share especially in a kind of team environment. Different and and I think the difficulty with with the work is presented in lots of people have taken my tools from these medium articles I've written and then just done them. And so and if like, literally, some of these tools will not work for some people, like some of them, people have different reactions to the different tools in the set. So I do a whole bunch, like way too many problems on some of the time. But then people often read the tools as well. You just do the tool and you just fill out the boxes. And that's it. No, no, that's all it is a prop. All it is is like a prop for discussion. And it's a probe. If I do this career timeline, it's like this or this wheel of life or one of the other tools that I have developed. The interesting stuff comes when you go you ask questions around it reflective questions, what does this mean? How accurate is it? What do other people think of me? What does this mean to me? Like, why would I want to change this? What happened here? What what made me this way? All these different questions that are the bigger work is more reflective practice. So people might pick up the tool so that when you ask a call, I'd say shaping that let's call do have a team or whatever. And and some people are smart enough that they will just have really good conversations about what this might mean. And a lot of people will be like, so what I just did this it's just a shape and it's it's not very accurate because I did it by myself and all these kinds of things that go Yeah, totally. Don't treat it that way you shouldn't be promoted or not as a result of filling out some charts. But what did it? What did it illuminate for you? Is a sort of an inquiry around how you might develop or, or be reassured or think differently about your future? Yeah, I wonder if it's, this might be a good time to talk about the importance of self reflection and examining, looking at your whole self. Like you mentioned in a workshop setting. It's it's different. In the leadership workshops that I do we always start with clarifying your values, and what's most important for you. What's your purpose? What gives us meaning? What is your why in being this kind of leader? Like, what kind of leader do you want to be? Why is that important? What is it you're hoping to do? Or change or affect? Right? And those are, those are just really important starting, like foundational questions and exploration to happen.
Jason Mesut 21:16
Hard questions, though. They're really hard questions to have a confident view on those. So I mean, I totally agree. And but it's an interesting, I imagine it, the value would be iterative processes of questions. Again, again, again, because
Leigh Arredondo 21:32
It is interative. You're right. And and actually, I will add, that is why I like having multi week courses. While you and I are talking about, yes, it's important to do this reflective work, and someone can read your medium articles. And soon someone can purchase your book, and use these tools themselves, every person in the world has best intentions sometimes. And then without any kind of container for that, like a course or a coach or workshop, right? It doesn't we somehow don't get around to it. Or we started and it doesn't, we don't incorporate it into our practice. Actually, I think a practice is maybe something worth talking about how to incorporate what you learn into a practice.
Jason Mesut 22:30
Yes. I mean, that's a really good point, that container I think is valuable, sometimes creates accountability creates the space, because people struggle for to shape that space for themselves. And so knowing that they're going to attend the course, where they're going to have some time, usually the value more than anything else, people. Obviously, they value the content and stuff, most of the time, but some people go, "Oh, this has been so great to spend this much time on myself." Because you just people just don't and they don't. They don't recognize that it's important work for the benefit of others, not just you. And so yeah, the coach creates self accountability, because you want to make sure you do stuff in between and you're having that dialogue in session, or workshop, you paid for it, or someone's paid for it. And you're there and there's other people there. And there's a little bit of I think the pressure of it's just it is quite hard for some people, some people will maybe be really good at getting into practice and just doing these different exercises themselves. I haven't been I mean, occasionally when I've kind of really, really needed to I've created something myself and spent the time but it's really, really quite difficult. And yeah, even I tried to do the the year compass thing at the end of the year. It's quite an involved activity.
Leigh Arredondo 23:42
Is is - it takes it I think I did something. I don't know if we did the same one. It was called the yearly compass. I loved it. But it took two days I was I think I did it when I was, quote, unquote, on vacation, like I worked for myself. So I don't know what that means. I was just taking time off. And I feel like it took a couple of days around the holidays of just doing that. Yeah, it's time consuming.
Jason Mesut 24:16
And I think it's interesting. I've just been signing up for a monthly reflection thing. It's just an hour container. It's really good because it's just getting more
Leigh Arredondo 24:24
Practice incorporating self reflection. And yeah, like you said, utilizing these tools, how often do you use them I find myself doing the same thing. There are certain tools that I love to use to identify what's most important right now, for example, and when I remember to do it, like I actually I've given workshops on this. And yeah, I don't always remember to do it myself. And then after several days of feeling like I'm spinning my wheels, like the light bulb goes off. Oh right.
Jason Mesut 24:59
Yeah, I mean, I guess there's some people are really good at creating the habits around it like a gratitude practice or like a daily or weekly selection or certainly from a, what is it called when people are journaling and logging and those sorts of things can be really, really valuable. And the only thing I've managed to keep up is there's my Friday thanks that you will be aware of that, partly because I just made it public. And that created a level of accountability for me to do it. And I felt pressure to do it. But like, I'm, I'm the sort of person that needs to have something there to push me to do it. The right the triggers, otherwise, you're just going to forget. So um, sign up to this monthly reflection thing. And that's a bit easy. an hour. But yeah, I think that usually, unfortunately, what happens is that people start to do these things when when they really, really need it. And it's almost like it's not too late. But it's all it's often when they've hit a kind of traumatic experience, they've lost a job, and they have to do this reflection, or they're really unhappy, or something's happened in a feedback process, or they're, we're often addressing these things where we're having some form of existential crisis, rather than just becoming more and more aware of ourselves and more conscious. Yeah. And so I mentioned before, like, how I've been recovering in some ways, what I've been doing is becoming more and more aware of myself and more self aware. And I think that self awareness is talked about a lot in terms of emotional intelligence, right. But I think sometimes it's hard to do that. Or sometimes it's hard. And I think that these tools are just examples, little prompts of your own kind of self sensemaking. Like just just give you nudges and different categories of things to think about. And related to the practice thing. I think, if you consider it like a canvas, we know you've got the headings of the business model canvas or whatever or the different things you've got to think about in a customer journey map. It's just that they're prompts you go oh, right, I need to think about that. I need to think about that. But the work really happens when you internalize and really think about it and ferment and have it in the back of your mind, I think is just that stuff starts to grow and become more subtly more aware and conscious self conscious, and you start to feel your anger building up or something or something feeling wrong in you more acutely over time. When before it was just like everything you were maybe dulled yourself. So this is that's my journey. And I'm still working on that. That makes sense does that?
Leigh Arredondo 27:21
It does. Yeah, it does make sense. I want to make sure that we give time for some practical advice we could give listeners, I know you and you have a lot of resources already available, which we will absolutely put in links, I have some resources of similar things actually, that it's so funny that you do that career timeline, I have a career journey map process. And that is actually up on my website. Anyone can download it. But I also give workshops for free on it, because I think it's so so incredibly helpful just as a starting off point. It's a great starting point. And your book will have just immense value. So I'm curious, though, if there are any tools that are a couple of the most valuable things that you that you think it might be helpful for someone who wants to identify a more holistic shape of themselves in their career.
Jason Mesut 28:26
But definitely the the career timeline you mentioned and career journey map, definitely you should look at those things and especially ask the question around, why was I unhappy or happy at these different points?
Leigh Arredondo 28:37
So you're, you're just to describe it, it's like you are identified, you are on a timeline writing out your jobs. I also ask people to so you're saying identify your emotions? Yes. And I think you could also layer in there, you might identify what were the strengths that you were using? What was valuable to you in that role? What was not? What was out of alignment?
Jason Mesut 29:09
Hmm, yeah, there's some good questions, I think. So yeah, I think that's a good one. Because it's an often that they're looking back to where you are right now. And you could do it for your whole career. You could do it for last year, or last quarter last week, if you wanted, I guess you could change the time horizons. And the Wheel of Life is a bit more of a holistic one. And is not one of mine. But it is very common, because it just gets you to look at all aspects of your life and work and stuff. But I think because my tools are what I think one of the key actually the key aspects of my tools and where other people try to do things. I don't have a problem with I think making the kind of compound one. There's a more holistic for a particular role in an organization where you might make some of the softer stuff with the harder technical ones. I deliberately chosen not to do that just to separate those things out because you becomes clearer in terms of taxonomy and then you can build your own afterwards. Once you've worked out what's relevant.
Leigh Arredondo 30:01
But the ones that just to again, sorry to interrupt but just to describe it, are you talking about like a two by two matrix or a wheel?
Jason Mesut 30:12
Yeah, so I mean, people, I guess people always assume as there's lots of these radial charts so like, I have a few regular charts that are more profile oriented, I would say like in terms of more technical and observable skills and, and stuff, but some are that like a values one, I have a set of example, values, words are qualities words, and people would like select some or write some more, but use them as a prompt and then highlight then attribute values to So there's basically lots of different types of visuals, I've created a whole kind of visual framework with my publisher and friends, Evalotta and stuff. So we've got a kind of family of different visuals and some are more positioning related, like as in between two poles, or between multiple poles, or there's a one on using the double diamond for like, where you spending most of your time or whether you think spending time, so they're just like little visual kind of references that you can, you can make a mark on that you can reflect on but one specific tool might be interesting to talk about is one I called the leadership functions one.
Leigh Arredondo 31:17
Okay.
Jason Mesut 31:18
And though I created it with Martina Hodges-Schell around design leaders responsible for managing others, I think it's applicable to almost anyone and design team. And the basically, you have in a similar way, you can see it's a radial chart. But if you think about multiple axes going round, I think they're eight octagon or something. And there's things like the vision and strategy. So these are the functional roles, what you're expected to do possibly in a leadership capacity. There's stuff around engaging external community, you possibly the internal design community, there's your team and growing supporting team, encouraging quality of the design work, or practice, like developing the toolkits, like the operations side of things, methods, techniques, or collaboration with the wider organization and other stakeholders, or even building like design style capabilities across yours if you're doing like Design Thinking workshops, or other things. And like advocacy, so kind of like selling the team and selling design and other things. So imagining those kind of like around a wheel with different spokes, I get people to first just loosely just relatively map like where they think they spend the most time with the like loads of time on the outer parts of this, this map, and no time at all, like right in the center. And they just draw a shape, like where they spend the time. And then and then it's really interesting to then ask the question in a different color line. What do you enjoy doing? And you could do it ask a third, like, where do you feel confident in your capabilities doing? And just see, particularly what do you enjoy? Versus Where are you spending your time is so illuminating? It's like game? What if it's in sync? Great. If it's not - usually not
Leigh Arredondo 33:09
Yeah What what's going on there? And especially if you see, like peers, and you see, oh, someone enjoys the thing that I hate, and they're not doing it, and I'm spending all my time doing this thing. And you look across them, you can go well, what kind of person? Do I want to be in support of others? Like, where should I be spending his time? And there's usually a correlation between your confidence and competence and what you enjoy, but not not always. So that can be an interesting other dimension. So just with these maps, so rather than just kind of like scoring your own competence, which I know is risky, and it's not necessarily an objective science. It's more about okay, where do I think I'm spending time? What do I enjoy? How good do I think I am? And try it to see where the deltas are between that and it's so interesting. And so I've known people take this to job interviews and go this is what I tell me where you think this role I'm talking about? Oh, interesting
Jason Mesut 34:03
yeah. And it's usually stumps people, by the way, I did an interview. I don't know. And I'm like, maybe you should, right, you think about, like when emphasis should be in this role? Because I can't do everything. Yeah, you want me to do everything? I'm going to need to kind of balance that time.
Leigh Arredondo 34:19
Yeah, yeah, that is the super interesting use of that. I can also see something like that I use something similar when I'm working with someone to identify where they want to put their effort towards growth. And and I think another maybe takeaway from something from an exercise like that might be if where you see misalignment would be an area to, to think about why and how to change it. Don't just, you can't just accept that this is this is how its gonna be be so I'm gonna have to leave my job. Yeah. If it's not always the answer, there's a lot more that we can do people get so caught up in feeling like they don't have the agency. I think part of it is comes from just impatience, like, it takes time to create change.
Jason Mesut 35:21
I mean, I was gonna pick up on that earlier, you were talking about those toxic environments. And this is gonna have to be after careful with this. But you know, I mentioned this person hires coaching, he ended up staying where we was, even though his original thing was I wanted to leave and all those I'm like in some ways, it it doesn't feel like it at the time, but it should be easier to stay and work through it than to just leave and start a whole new job where you have no idea really what it's really like, is it the same same challenges that you've had in a different place? Or some different challenges? Which you were you weren't us? Or I don't know, who knows grass is greener on all that. So when I when I look back about my traumatic thing, and I didn't know, and I know, you were in this toxic environment, too, right? Even though like people were telling me not to leave, I still feel like I probably could have reacted in a different way. What can I change? And so yeah, people think, Oh, my role is this and this and all these things. Therefore, I need to go and get a job that's more fitting with what I love. That is an answer. Maybe, right? But like you're saying, like, how can you have a discussion, go look, boss, or peers like, this is where I think I, I enjoy doing and you're over here and what it could we spread the load a bit, like maybe we can think about who might want to do this and want to grow and develop and spend time on these things is like, there's why I say for the wider IC community, usually, there's an aspect of leadership in in any role and a level, right, you don't have to have the title, you can do stuff that helps the team, you can do stuff that helps advocacy, you can do stuff that's collaboration, it's all serving others, and therefore my book is leadership. And so like, these, these people are often hungry for that. And the leaders and managers who you and me coach and help in lots different ways are like overloaded with trying to do everything.
Leigh Arredondo 37:17
Yeah.
Jason Mesut 37:18
They can't do the things where their heart and soul is where they can deliver value. And so they're doing things are not enjoying not spending the right amount of time and hurting others potentially, and themselves.
Leigh Arredondo 37:30
So yeah, I mean, hindsight is is 2020. But I absolutely wish that I had had that kind of wisdom years ago, I can think of jobs that I loved until something happened, right? And then it seemed like it was I couldn't stay. And it doesn't have to, it's not that black and white. Don't always some sometimes it is sometimes you do need to figure out, you need to leave. That's always a possibility. But yeah, that's not always the answer. I have, it's like, I seem to be a little impatient.
Jason Mesut 38:10
So I don't know, I don't want to relate it too heavily to kind of like more personal intimate relationships, but but the same probably be applied people like they go and do a silly thing, or they they just suddenly go right - thats it - its over without ever having an opportunity to probably discuss her go into therapy together, whatever, because they don't want to address the kind of uncomfortable conversation. The conversation might actually not be that uncomfortable. But we don't know, unless we try. The fear of that uncomfortable conversation is is greater than the fear of jumping ship and trying something new and potentially moving to another country or whatever it is. And it's just, it's these silly little things that kind of get in our way. And we create catastrophies, especially if we're creative, about all these things that could happen really good at that are really good at thinking about all the possible things that are going to be awful. And the reality is that they might not happen and sometimes you said that. Yeah, right.
Leigh Arredondo 39:07
Yeah. Lots of fantastic conversation. Lots of wisdom. Thank you so much, Jason. This has been fun. Yeah, we have another conversation out there with with "Okay, so I've done all this work. What do I do with it? What's the next step?" That'll be our our next conversation.
Jason Mesut 39:36
That's that's some of the feedback on my book at the moment, which I'm trying to recommend. They're like going Yeah, cool. I've done this. Now what I'm like, Ah, and people often give me that feedback after workshops. And the truth is, it's such a personal and individual answer. And yes, my one of my go to answers is talk to someone about it. Yeah. And and that doesn't have to be a coach or a mentor or partner or your manager or whatever, but talking it through and verbalizing and externalizing in ways other people hear is a big part of it. What does this mean? And what am I gonna do about it? Yeah, that's but there's many more answers around that for sure. Yeah.
Leigh Arredondo 40:17
We'll come up with some. And we'll record our our answers.
Leigh Arredondo 40:26
Thank you so much, Jason. Thanks for joining me on UX cake.
Jason Mesut 40:30
Thanks, Leigh.
Leigh Arredondo 40:34
Hey, if you enjoy this slice of UX cake, please share this episode with a friend or a few. You can share it on social media even. It really helps us spread the word and get this free content to more people. You can follow you XK on LinkedIn, Twitter and Instagram, and get all the episodes and show notes at UX kake.co. Thank you so much for listening, and for sharing the UX cake