Hi, everyone. I hope your day is going well and welcome to the darn good leadership podcast. This show was all about being a strong and effective leader. One that creates positive impacts on your teams and communities. You're going to get ideas, inspiration, and practical advice. You can take action on to be a darn good leader. I'm your host, Emily holding. And in the spirit of Valentine's day, which is happening this week, we are talking about one of the best ways to show some love for your teams and for yourself. And that is by demonstrating team care and self care. But this self care does not include eating chocolates or having a bubble bath or taking a half day from work. This self care is taking specific care of future you and your future team. So there's current you, as you exist today. And there's your current teams as they exist today. And then there's future you and your future teams. By intentionally thinking about future you or your future team and a quarter and a month from now and a week from now, or even a couple of hours from now at the end of the day. The goal here is to help you and your teams make better decisions in the here and now. In this episode, we will be showering our future selves with love and care by reflecting on our habits. Uh, discussing future SPECT is for your teams and learning a daily practice you can implement today to help improve and shape the lives of your future teams and self. But first a story. So there was a recent study done where undergrad students were asked to commit their time to helping tutor other students who were struggling. And to do this during midterms week, which if you don't know what midterms is, it's a very stressful time for all students, because they've got a lot of exams. In the study, one of the group of students was asked to commit their time to help the people who were struggling during the upcoming midterms happening that week. So this was going to impact their current selves. And also in the study, there was a second group who was asked to commit their time to tutoring during the next midterm period. So this was something that would impact their future self. The study found a significant difference between those committing to the current versus future state and to no surprise. Those who were asked to help in the current midterms committed to just 27 minutes on average. While those asked to help the following midterm period, committed to 86 minutes on average. So almost three times as much. No doubt, you've all done something similar to this. So if someone asks you to do something today versus next week, or next month, you're more inclined to offer up your future self to do the work. The typical assumption is that your future self has more capacity and more motivation than your present self. But that is rarely the case. So the future you tomorrow and the future you next week or a month likely has the same capacity and motivation as your current self. For example, I was in my car last night and my gas light went on. It was already pretty late and I wanted to get a home and it was cold, not really cold, California cold would feel cool to me. But I also knew that I had to be somewhere super early in the morning and my morning was already jam packed. My future morning self is not going to have more motivation or capacity to go get gas in the car. But my current knee was trying to make the case for that to be true. So how can we not prioritize our current mood over the consequence of our lack of action for our future selves? In other words, how can we get ourselves to get the gas now? So our tank is full in the morning. Because humans have this bias. And we're always assuming that our future selves will have more time, more motivation, more desire to do things. A way to mitigate around this is to think about your future self in the shorter term. So again, when I was in my car and thinking about my future self in the morning, That's not that far out. It's not like a year from now. I'm going to need to get in my car. I knew it was going to have to get in the car in the morning. So that made me go, all right. And I stopped and I filled up the gas tank. So when you think about yourself on the shorter term, you're more inclined to take action. I want you to only think of your future self and your future team three months from now to several hours from now as you and your teams are much more likely to take action. When thinking about your more immediate future self. First let's talk about habits and practices. The goal here is envision what your future team and future self will look like. If you continue with your current habits and practices that you have today. So let's start with our team habits. You could do this as a part of a retrospective or just as a part of a activity that you have in one of your team meetings. You could even do this asynchronously, like if you've got a mural board or a confluence space or some other place for your team to come together. And work collectively to think about what our current habits as a team. So list them out again, synchronously or asynchronously. And then I want you to go through each of those habits that are listed out, but you have as a team. And decide which ones have a positive impact? And which ones have a negative impact on our future team? Our future selves a couple of months from now three months, two months, one month, a week out. For example, let's just say that one of the habits is we do a daily standup. We'd probably mark that as a positive impact on our teams and our future self, because we're staying aligned. We're saying together we're seeing informed it's good hygiene. Let's say another habit though, is that your daily stand-ups are taking 30 minutes instead of 15. So we're going to mark this one as a negative impact because now this additional time is eating into your focus heads down, working time and space. Let's say another habit that your team list is having everyone work on their own area of expertise. There's not a lot of cross teaming on any sort of stories or work. I'm going to mark this one as a negative impact because you're creating a whole bunch of single points of failure across the team. If somebody wants to go out on vacation or they ended up getting sick. Then there's going to be a huge burden place on that future team. The fourth habit that I'll mention. Let's just say that. They call out team accolades in their slack channel. So we're going to mark that as a positive impact for your future team. Cause it's building comradery, it's building team spirit and it's making people have gratitude for each other and their team members. The ones that you've listed as negative, then you'd want to go through and identify what are the biggest two items that have the most negative impact. And then from there, brainstorm ideas and take action on how you can reduce those, improve those, or eliminate them altogether. All right. Now that you've given your team some loving care thinking about their team habits. It's time to do some self-reflection. So now I want you to think about your daily habits and these are your professional daily habits or your habits that have an impact on your professional life. You're going to list out your major habits that you have. And after you have that list, you're going to mark again, which ones have a positive impact on your future self and which ones have a negative impact on your future self? So let's go through a couple examples. Let's say that you have a daily habit of hitting the snooze button several, several times. We're going to mark that one as a negative impact because now you're starting everyday chaotically, you feel like you're always behind. It's just a bad way to start your morning. Second example is you always put together clear agendas for any of the meetings that you have. And we're going to mark that one as a positive impact because people who come to your meetings now know what to expect. Your meetings are more concise and effective and efficient. So good job there. A third example might be that you never check your emails before you've made your top three lists for the day. We're going to mark that one as very positive impact on your future self, because you're making sure that you're doing a gut check on what you've got to get done before all these distractions come in looking at emails. The fourth example I'll give you, is that. You find yourself consistently working extremely long hours. So maybe you start at 6:00 AM and you find yourself ending at 7:00 PM on most days. That we're going to mark as native because it's not sustainable and it's not good work-life balance and you're going to burn yourself out. So again, you'll want to look at your lists and identify out of all the negatives. What are the one to two that are the most negative and try to reduce, remove, eliminate, improve it. Make it better for yourself. And if you can take your way through all the negative ones. Great. But at least start with the top two. One thing I'll say about habits and practices, if you're trying to figure out, I don't know if this one's a negative thing or if it's a positive thing. A big guiding principle to ask yourself and to ask your teams, is this. Does this habit or a practice have a benefit to future you or your future team? If it doesn't have a benefit to the future, you or future team stopped doing it or reduce it significantly or deprioritize it significantly. As it's likely not worth your time and energy. So, if you can't quickly describe how this thing is actually benefiting the future, you or your future team, it's probably not worth taking action on. All right. So that wraps up our habits section. Now let's talk about future. SPECT is. So if you've never heard the term future spective, well, hello. It's one of my, it's one of my favorite things to do. It's like the cousin to retrospectives. But instead of reflecting on the past and identifying areas to improve you have the teams ideate on their future? Future SPECT is our team working sessions and which team members collaboratively think through their future challenges, future opportunities and goals that they may face. So when you're looking ahead, future spec does give teams a space to discuss what's worrying them. What's what's exciting to them and what they want to achieve. And to work through those things in advance of them actually happening. So, this is great to get your team talking, connecting, visualizing how they can effectively work together as a unit. And I have two future spectrums that are a favorite of mine that I'm going to talk you through. The first future spective is what I lovingly refer to as headlines. Headlines is great for when you have a new project, a new initiative, or a new OKR that your team is getting ready to kick off. So prior to kickoff, you essentially want to gather everyone together. Who's on that team. And they're going to envision a future state where this project, this initiative, or this OKR has been met. And the measures of success have been realized. And in this future state, after these things have been realized someone has written a news article. So everyone's going to brainstorm around. What is the title of this news article? What would it be? And then what are the associated pictures or images that, that would show in this article? And then what would they write about the one to two things that we did as a team to overcome our challenges? How does the article talk about how the team behaved and work together to meet such success? And finally, what does the article credit for the success of the project initiative or OKR? This is just a really good way to get people talking and thinking through and articulating that future state together. The second future spective is what I call all cylinders firing. Now this one does not need to be tied to any project initiative. Oh, Kara, this is just great. When you want your team to start thinking through an improved ideal state for themselves. Set the target date for a month or three months from now? No further. As I said, we're not going to go further out than three months. Have the team imagine that we are now three months out from now, I'm going to use the example of three months for this. So we are three months out from now and we are firing on all cylinders, which means there wasn't a fairy godmother. There wasn't some genie or divine intervention. So these are all realistic things that could happen. But the team has a meeting at our max efficiency and effectiveness in our day to day for three months. So now that we are three months firing on all cylinders, write down what are the want to practices or behaviors that helped us. What were the one to two things we stopped doing as a team? And what were our biggest wins or what do we deliver or achieve? So the practices that helped us, the things that we stopped doing and our biggest wins. So there, you have it to future specters headlines, which is really great for projects and initiatives and OTRs, or all cylinders firing for thinking through just an improved state for your team. Now let's move from our teams to talking about ourselves. And more specifically our future self. And not our future self in three months or a month or week, but I want you to think about your future self at the end of the day. Okay. this is the most easy future self to think through. At the beginning of every Workday. I want you to picture your professional self completely satisfied and happy with where you landed at the end of that work day. What things have you accomplished? What energy and mood and attitude did you bring into each of your meetings and sessions? And what time are you done with work at the end of that day? Now that you have that visual, I want you to think through what are the one to three things you could do to make your future you at the end of that day, completely satisfied and happy and realized. Your professional decisions in the moment will determine your professional realities for your future self. If I choose to waste a lot of time instead of being productive, or even if I do nothing more than just completing my tasks at the bare minimum. I'm never going to build the skills or the reputation or the satisfaction or the happiness in my career to move it to a good place. Nor if I keep saying yes, the things that don't matter and doing habits that don't help me with future me, I'm going to be overworked and burnout. Doing things now. So future you at the end of the day, isn't stressed, isn't overworked, isn't overwhelmed. Isn't unhappy. Isn't worse off is really what we're aiming for here. So let's recap. In honor of Valentine's day, we are showing self care and team care by focusing on our more immediate future selves and future teams. We discussed listing out our daily habits and practices and removing or improving any items that do not benefit our future selves. We discussed two future perspectives. You can run with your teams. One called headlines that you can use to kick off any project initiative or OKR and one call to firing on all cylinders that you can use at any time to help envision an improved state for your teams. We then talked about a self hack where at the beginning of every Workday, we picture our future professional self at the end of that day. And we envision what would make ourselves feel completely satisfied and happy, and then begin working on those tasks that we are going to do to help make that a realization. One way to reframe your perception is to think about your future self and your future teams. And not as in five years, one year, six months from now, but future you in three months, a week, or even a future, you at the end of the day. future me and my future team motivates me to make better choices and my day to day, and it motivates me to knock out those things that need to get done. So I can have future me, say to pass me. Wow. She was a rockstar. I hope you enjoy today's show and it gave you some ideas on how you can help better set your Uh, future self and future teams up for success. If you like, what you heard, please share the show. Be bold, be bright, be a leader who fills up their gas tank the day before. So future you has a full tank in the morning. Cheers.