You can replicate my tips because it’s not about tooling or models. It’s about knowing how to collaborate with AI.

In the Thriving Challenge, what started as a commitment to move from surviving to thriving has become something even more powerful. What we learned can be used as a foundation for the future of leadership with AI.

“We can’t be in survival mode. We have to be in growth mode.” — Jeff Bezos

The leaders we’ve grown through this challenge inspire and motivate, make resilient and thoughtful decisions, spark innovation, nurture strong team culture, accelerate growth, and leave lasting legacies. Those exact strengths matter even more now when you’re not just leading humans but leading teams that include AI agents.

This is what I learned while trying to adopt AI from my previous team and from the new one.

What is AI Collaboration?

AI Collaboration is a new type of partnership where we work alongside AI as our thinking partner. You can collaborate with AI in different ways:

1. Personal companion and assistant for daily productivity. Where you ask for targeted tasks and expect quick solutions.

2. Team colleague for complex problem-solving. Where you collaborate through multiple tasks, humans and agents in your project.

3. Coach and mentor for skill development. Where you ask for help and your agent helps and supports you.

In all of these roles, AI is supporting and collaborating with us, and we get the same collaboration benefits we’ve been practicing throughout our Thriving Challenge, but amplified!

But, Is AI Collaboration Only for Tech People?

Absolutely not! While the user experience is still evolving, you don’t need a technical background. The foundation is composing workflows through prompts, context, and agents with clear guardrails. The market is focused on technical solutions, but you can use them for your own use cases. And in this post I will help you.

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What’s the Cost When Collaborating with AI?

Besides the high energy cost, just like in our daily work, interruptions and distractions have a cost. Therefore, you must choose your battles wisely when solving problems with AI. Be responsible with its usage, consider the energy it requires, and the time it gets you to do it manually.

The 20-Minute Threshold: If a task takes me less than 20 minutes, I don´t do it with AI. Setting up AI, providing context, and reviewing output takes time, and our brain needs about 20 minutes to refocus of switching context.

Pick the right moments to leverage AI collaboration for maximum impact. Read more in 4 Tools To Become a More Productive Leader.

Your AI Thriving Toolkit

Just as we used specific tools during our challenge, here’s your transition toolkit for AI collaboration:

1. The WonderLead AI Framework

Structure your AI collaboration to stay aligned with your values:

1. Planning: Align AI agent goals with your prioritized values and objectives, as we practiced with personal goal alignment in <link>.

2. Daily Check-ins: 15-minute daily check-ins to review and plan the day with AI companions. Check in with both human team members and AI agents.

3. Weekly Reviews: Assess your team’s progress and collaboration effectiveness. Assess if your team (humans + AI) is surviving or thriving.

4. Journaling: Reflect on human-AI interactions and continuously improve.

5. Gratitude and Celebration: Appreciate both human contributions and be transparent on the AI capabilities used.

6. Self-Care: Maintain human well-being while managing AI-augmented workloads.

7. Discover with Community Support: Join others navigating the human-AI leadership transition. Create AI learning sessions or recommend WonderLead.tech. In the next post, I will share how I am driving AI learning sessions at Amazon in Berlin between organizations.

   

2. Emotional Intelligence in AI Era

Apply each EQ pillar to AI collaboration:

Self-Awareness Tools:

• Monitor your comfort level when using AI.

• Identify when you’re avoiding vs. over-relying on AI assistance.

• Recognize emotional triggers about AI from yourself or colleagues. AI is causing FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out).

Example: When I joined my new team at AWS, I decided to experiment with AI for onboarding. With self-awareness I identified that I over-relied on AI, I didn’t have setup all the tools that I needed, and many times it was taking me more time.

Self-Management Tools:

• Set boundaries for AI usage that align with your values. Enforcing responsible AI practices is essential for organizations to build trust, ensure positive impact, and comply with evolving regulations.

• Practice decision-making frameworks that incorporate both AI insights and human judgment. Human input is what makes AI output outstanding.

• Maintain work-life balance when AI enables 24/7 productivity potential. Set background systems, but with balance. Not every tool will give you the same impact and the time invested might block your progress.

Example: After recognizing my AI execution mistakes, I identified gaps in my tooling and created clear guidelines for my team on when and how to collaborate with AI. Tasks requiring empathy, cultural context, or strategic judgement are better when led by humans, while others need only reviews and small changes. For instance, communicating with customers vs development of AI features.

Social Awareness Tools:

• Observe team reactions to AI integration.

• Monitor whether AI is enhancing or hindering human connection.

• Sense when to emphasize human collaboration over AI efficiency.

• Capture feedback from your team on how they need to learn or use AI.

Example: In my team, I discovered that some members resisted AI because they didn’t succeed in their first tests. But AI tools have evolved a lot in the last year. Adding a mechanism for the team to share their wins made the AI skeptics change their minds. The key wasn’t forcing adoption. It was creating social proof from trusted colleagues.

Relationship Management Tools:

• Facilitate transparent communication about AI decision-making.

• Create psychological safety for questioning AI.

• Build bridges between AI-enthusiastic and AI-cautious team members.

• Bring Collaboration - Your Trust Framework Evolved:

  • Building Trust with Humans: Be transparent about AI usage. Share your learnings and tools.

  • Building Trust with AI: By understanding AI capabilities, limitations, how, and when to use it.

Example: My organization had a very low AI adoption rate. To help, I launched weekly AI Learning Sessions led by Individual Contributors, not Managers. It’s a safe space where we run workshops and learn from each other about AI. Two months later, team members are actively sharing their custom agents and have created more efficient team workflows.

3. My AI Collaboration Workflow

Every week and day, I plan my tasks for myself, team, and AI collaboration. I create the agents that I need, define their roles, and plan together with the AI. Then I open the sessions for each agent, and they start or continue the execution of their tasks. During the day, I check with AI if there are changes in priorities or if there are agents blocked. I unblock them and continue with my tasks. At the end of the day, I review the progress and update notes for the next day’s execution. This is my 5-10x multiplier.

Individually, this is the workflow that each agent runs:

It is very similar to how you would collaborate with your team or colleague, right?

How to Create an AI Collaboration Workflow

Ask to create an agentic workflow for your AI tool and import it in the next execution.

Let me know if you want to learn more in the comments.

AI Tools for Workflows Automation

I tried creating workflows with different free AI tools (Claude, Gemini, GPT), but the message limitations and lack of context were frustrating. Those tools’ free tiers work well for AI as companion or assistant with small defined tasks, but not for bigger and more complex projects. I needed something with flexibility that allows me to focus on human productivity and team interaction.

Claude Skills is an improvement. We need AI tools less focused on tech users that help everyone to be more productive. , a follower from WonderLead is another example, focused on a human-first solution.

Connecting AI Execution to Your North Star

Remember, the discipline of building your career gives you the freedom to become the leader you want to be. These new AI execution tools must always serve your roadmap. Use the insights from your Weekly Reviews and Journaling to ensure your AI agents, together with your actions, are continuously aligned with your prioritized values and goals. Now that we are equipped to thrive, it is time to continue with our discovery journey and define our career next steps in this AI era.

We must use AI to achieve our long-term vision, not just to move faster without direction!

The Future Is Human-AI Collaboration

The organizations that thrive in the next decade won’t be those that replace humans with AI or those that ignore AI entirely. They’ll be led by individuals who’ve mastered the emotional intelligence skills we’ve been practicing and learned to apply them in human-AI collaborative environments.

✅ What We’ve Learned (Thriving Challenge):

• Thriving leaders inspire and motivate others.

• Emotional intelligence drives better decision-making.

• Community support accelerates growth.

• Daily practice creates lasting change.

• Self-awareness is the foundation of all leadership.

🌟 What This Means for AI Collaboration:

• Inspiring humans while optimizing AI performance.

• Making EQ-informed decisions about when to use AI insights.

• Building communities that include AI as thinking partners.

• Daily practice with AI will multiply your impact.

• Self-awareness about your unique human value is your advantage in an AI era.

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Let’s Learn Together

I want to hear from you, Wonder Leader!

💭 Share one way you used AI this week. What worked? What didn’t?
The best learning happens when we share our breakthrough stories. Your failure might save someone else hours of frustration.
Ready to continue this journey? Comment below with your AI collaboration story!

Self-Awareness Thriving🌟Challenge Practice

Ask for feedback about your AI collaboration from your team (humans+agents)

Now that you are collaborating with AI, you need 1) human feedback to ensure your new workflow is truly building trust, not hindering connection, and 2) AI feedback to ensure your workflows are successful.

3 Activities:

1. Ask a human peer or report for feedback on your AI collaboration:
   Am I over-relying on the AI? Is my use of this tool making communication easier or harder? Is my code easy to review or lows the bar?

2. Ask AI for feedback on your tasks and how the workflow can be improved:
   Review the workflow you executed and propose changes so that the issue you faced doesn´t happen again.

3. Reflect on the feedback. Use it for continuously improving your performance and detecting blind spots in your new AI adoption. Getting feedback is a gift.

This post concludes our WonderLead Thriving Challenge. It was a pleasure to practice it with you. Let me know what path you want to take next in our journey. I am also considering opening paid subscriptions to give you more value and ensure consistency.

Support this Newsletter

Did you read all the breakthrough stories of the challenge? You can find them here:

💡 How to identify and break down common collaboration barriers
💡 Practical strategies for fostering cross-team communication
💡 Steps to become an agent of positive change

In today's fast-paced, ever-evolving IT business, the ability to collaborate effectively has become a critical skill for leaders.

Recently, in my team at AWS, leadership suddenly changed our vision, and multiple projects that were in progress had to stop overnight. The uncertainty and unexpected change impacted the motivation of almost everyone in all the teams. However, what could have been a crisis became an opportunity for growth. Our leadership suggested doing multiple hack weeks while reshuffling the roadmap and increasing 1:1s to rebuild trust. The collaboration fostered by the hack weeks raised motivation, innovation, and performance. Within a few weeks, people started to smile back.

Benefits on Collaboration in Leadership

Thriving leaders cultivate an environment of mutual understanding, psychological safety, and a shared sense of purpose and empower their people to collaborate together.

Open collaboration creates space for exploration, diverse perspectives, and creative risk-taking. It brings the best decision-making, problem-solving, conflict resolution, innovation, motivation, performance, and stronger relationships.

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The Collaboration Barriers & How to Break Them

1. Misaligned Objectives

During the first months of any year, the company’s objectives are communicated top-down with a high-level strategy full of buzzwords to achieve them. Projects are allocated, and the staff’s year objectives are cascaded down, losing granularity and real meaning by the time they reach the IT engineer. At the higher level, the outcomes of the projects are translated by fulfilling or delivering a specific well-identifiable set of objectives.

However, the reality sometimes looks like a stand-up comedy sketch. Imagine being in a meeting and being instructed to find ways to be more cost-efficient for an entire IT department. In practice, this means we need to decrease the budget somewhere while maintaining the same output, or we need to find ways to reduce headcount without impacting key projects. While in the same meeting, I was told to onboard a new project related to infrastructure migration, whose outcome will increase the run costs by 20-30%. To make everything even more wonderful, this needs to happen without assigning specific investment budget lines for each application (aimed at hiding the true cost of the investment by diluting it across the same cost centers as day-to-day activities). Situations like these are a bad joke but, unfortunately, occur openly in any large organization.

This is due to feedback not being passed through higher management and not being aware of how some details are dealt with, also the fact higher management is a difficult silo to reach a lot of times. However, these silos can have multiple forms. One of the most popular is having the sales team closing contracts with clients based on features that product teams are not even aware of. Let alone the IT department have started development on those features.

How to address this?

It starts from the top!

Cascading objectives is not a straightforward operation. In the same way the C-Level management defines objectives for the coming years, (1) these objectives need to be aligned with each department in the organization, and (2) the plan needs to be coherent between the strategy and objectives.

Based on the example given above, if the directive is to reduce costs for the IT department, how will the approved projects contribute to the different kinds of objectives? How to tackle a project whose outcome will make some problems even worse for a specific period?

2. Us / They Mentality

Not all problems are to be fixed by the C-Level management. Some of the Silo mentality happens at the very base: The Us & They kind of conversation. Sometimes the “They” are the team seated nearby at the office, and barely there is any communication between them. And when a communication happens, it is typically to make some last-minute request due to an unforeseen dependency.

Once I worked in an office where some Team Leaders were openly forbidding interaction with colleagues from other teams. Like they were professors teaching kids from kindergarten to avoid those bad boys from the hood impacting their day. A way these enlightened leadership folk found to control communication, was by assigning Single Points of Contact (SPOC) that became bottlenecks for everything important.

These kinds of leadership will result in weak teams and fragile workflows. True Leaders should avoid the “Us/They” language at all costs.

How to address this?

Cultivate synergies between dependent teams. The easiest way to cultivate synergies is to organize a workshop for people to present themselves (Boring, I know! I did this almost 10 times in a week once).

In the teams presentation workshop, start by breaking the ice and letting people organically talk with each other, with the clear goal of letting information flow and cultivating collaboration in the form of help, technical insights, and allowing learned experiences to be shared among peers.

3. Insufficient Feedback Loops

Once I was tasked to define a set of tools to be used for the Project Management Office (PMO) scope of the company. I was “invited” to a demo of a Project Management tool that is very popular in the internet realm. However, my testing showed the tool was missing some key features someone would expect from a Project Management software, like automatic scheduling based on task durations and ways to understand if a team member was over-allocated on projects or tasks (basic resource management).

During the meeting, the salesperson was having difficulties understanding my feedback and complaints about the tool. I was trying so hard to hide my surprise (moreover, shock), since the features I was referencing are standard for Microsoft Project or even Open-Source Project Management software.

Once the meeting was over, I didn’t believe the tool didn’t have the most basic features, so I went to Mr. Google and figure this one out for myself. The vendor has a very interesting community forum to which I was granted access. While I investigated the forum further, I couldn’t believe what I found and I was even more shocked. It was clear they were having multiple people giving the same feedback as I and their support engineers were having the same challenges understanding the problem. Nobody at that entire company had a look at Microsoft Project and its basic features. No benchmarking study, no feedback loops between Support, Sales, and Product Teams, nothing! Each department is a silo.

How to address this?

Organize workshops to share feedback about pain points and common complaints between different departments.

⋆｡°✩ Become an Agent of Change ✩°｡⋆

Breaking these silos is a responsibility of each of us. The most important aspect of breaking a silo is for every one of us to become what I call an “Agent of Change”. It starts by talking with a colleague of a nearby team and sharing challenges and solutions. Understand what every team’s goal is and the people that might help unblock a future issue. Also, take the initiative to organize small conversations or forums to get insight from different colleagues.

An Agent of Change is someone who starts to understand the landscape and sets in motion a set of actions for promoting positive change.

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Special thanks to for sharing his collaboration tips in this 4th milestone of the Thriving Challenge. Follow him in .

To increase collaboration in your teams, follow Artur’s tips.

Key Takeaways

1. Align objectives across All Levels.
   Company goals are communicated top-down, often losing clarity and becoming contradictory when they reach the IT engineers. Aligning these objectives at the higher level with solid team feedback is the first step.

2. Break down silo mentalities through regular interaction.
   Sometimes we don’t know whose team is seated next to us in the office. Workshops, fostering dependencies and connections between teams, allow letting the communication flow.

3. Create robust feedback loops between departments.
   With feedback mechanisms, departments will share information, understand the competition, and strategize together on ways to build a better product.

4. Take personal initiative to become an agent of change.
   Increase your social awareness of your organization and company to thrive.

My Recommendations

Tasks for the Week

☑️ The 5 minutes Favor: Each day, identify a small action you can take that will add value to someone you work with. This could be something as small as sharing an article, making an introduction, or recognizing someone for a job well done.
☑️ The 15 minutes 1:1: Choose someone you didn’t talk to in a 1:1 for a long time. Send them a message or meme, ask for a coffee or lunch, or go to their table and ask what they are working on this week.

Books

1. Drive: The Surprising Truth About What Motivates Us — Daniel H. Pink

2. Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together & Others Don't — Simon Sinek

3. Overcoming the Five Dysfunctions of a Team — Patrick Lencioni

Self Awareness Side Thriving🌟Challenge Practice

Ask for Feedback and Reflect

We have blind spots, the people who we think we are might not be the people others see. What you say or you ask others, might not be aligned with your actions. We need feedback to uncover what we don't see and increase our self-awareness.

3 Activities:

1. Ask for feedback from a peer, direct report and/or supervisor. Start with vulnerability. Reflect on it. Use it for continuously improving on performance and detect blind spots. Getting feedback is a gift.

2. Take the Insight Quizz to identify how self-aware you really are. Tells us the amazing results!

3. Keep taking note of how you feel and enumerate 5 things you are grateful for.

2 Resources:

1. Read The Power of Self-Awareness in Tech Leadership with

2. Watch The Power of Self-Awareness which illustrates the transformative potential of giving and receiving feedback.

Get in Touch

You can find me on LinkedIn and X.

If you wish to make a request on a particular topic you would like to read, you can reply or send me an email to patri@develagora.com.

💡 Ways to lead with empathy and compassion
💡 Practical strategies for creating psychological safety
💡 How to build trust across language barriers

Language was the first barrier I found when I moved to AWS in Berlin.

I still remember my exhaustion after 5 hours of interviews. I started to mix Spanish words in the very last hour. To my surprise, I got hired. But during my probation, the senior engineer told me I needed to improve my English skills. He gave me some tips to follow, and after the probation period, the company paid me for English lessons. How did I improve? Controlling my emotions by not feeling discouraged. I studied and practiced more with my English teacher, who helped me land AWS, my dream job.

What is Empathy and Compassion

Empathy is caring about our coworkers, feeling with them, and wanting to help them. We are open to change our perspective while being focus in the purpose and not where to go or battle to win. It allows us to connect. However, it may cloud our judgment, encourage bias, and make us less effective at making wise decisions.

Compassion occurs when we take a step away from the problem and ask ourselves how we can really help. Then we act to overcome the challenges.

How To Master Leading With Compassion

1. Notice: Slow down. Observe team dynamics. Stay aware of communication challenges and watch for signs of frustration or hesitation. When focused on something, don’t lose awareness of everything else. Noticing can prevent you from making careless mistakes and enable you to become a present and engaged leader.

2. Understand: Seek the perspective of others by asking direct questions to understand them. Thank them for answering. Sometimes answering questions that allow us to understand them requires vulnerability, so create safe spaces.

3. Act: Look for ways to help to overcome the pains or challenges of your team. These compassionate acts might bring a smile or prevent burnout, even your own. Remember that some problems just need to be heard and acknowledged. Just listening or coaching can help them to find their own solution and grow.

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This is what from applied successfully with Peter. He helped Peter to overcome his language challenges through psychological safety. He normalized mistakes and fostered learning from each other. With psychological safety, Peter felt valued, and his team was encouraged to address language problems, take risks, and help others. Read his story below.

Adler, over to you:

As a foreigner living in Japan, the language barrier is always a challenge for me. The working environment here is usually a mix of Japanese and English, and neither is my first language.

Since I deal with it every day, I never expected language learning to be a tool for building trust as a leader. But one of my team members, Peter (not his real name), gave me that opportunity. It was unexpected, but it worked out better than I imagined.

Let me share how language learning can be surprisingly useful for leaders.

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Language Barriers and Conflicts

Peter was my team member, and he didn’t have a great relationship with others. There were constant conflicts.

When I took over the team as the Engineering Manager, I quickly realized that the team didn't like Peter. The biggest complaint I heard was that he could come hostile out of nowhere. This has been bothering the team for a while.

The first thing I did was try to understand the root cause. After talking to him and other members, I found a mix of factors:

• He treated people differently depending on whether he saw them as "friends."

• He was overly insistent on certain design principles and coding styles.

It seems like there are a lot of issues to work on. But luckily, I found one easy entry point that allowed me to build trust with him.

Both of us are non-native English speakers, and I noticed that he struggled to express himself accurately. His words often sound blunt or rude, but it was mostly because he couldn't find the right expressions. As someone who has also learned English as a second language, I understand how frustrating that can be.

Empathy is a choice. And it’s a vulnerable choice, because if I were to choose to connect with you through empathy, I would have to connect with something in myself that knows that feeling. — Brené Brown

For example, once someone asked him a question: “Hey, Peter. Has that feature X been deployed?”

He replied: “Yes. Do you have a problem with that?”

That sounds rude. However, what Peter wanted to say was: “Yes. Is there any issue with feature X that I can help with?”

His colleague misunderstood and thought Peter was being hostile again, leading to another conflict.

I asked Peter about his struggles with English and whether he found it difficult to express himself. I also offered to help correct any unclear or misleading phrasing when I noticed it. He was happy to accept, and from then on, we worked on this every week in our 1-on-1s.

He still had conflicts with others from time to time, but it became easier for him to listen when I stepped in. Since we had already built trust, discussions about improvements were smoother.

Creating a Language-Friendly Workspace

That experience with Peter helped me develop a few more strategies. Most of them are aligned with core leadership principles. The following is how managers can help create a language-friendly team environment:

Normalize Language Mistakes

Language learners make mistakes all the time.

You probably have run into the following situation: a foreigner tried to explain something in your native language, they struggled, and you started to lose your patience.

The same thing happens in the workplace. Everyone’s busy, and slow communication can kill productivity.

But this is where your leadership skill comes in. Leaders should create an environment where people are free to make mistakes. Language is a skill, just like coding. Working with language learners is like working with junior engineers. When they make mistakes, you help them learn, and you encourage everyone to do the same. It creates a healthy and positive environment.

And for those who don’t want to make the effort? You can include it in the feedback. Everyone should contribute to building a healthy team environment, including the language learners themselves.

Speak Their Language

If you live in a foreign country like I do, learning the local language helps not just in daily life but also in the workplace.

People give you more respect when you try to speak their language, even if you're not very good at it yet.

Speaking a foreign language in team meetings can be intimidating, and using it in casual conversations could be awkward too. In my experience, 1-on-1 meetings are the easiest place to start.

Here’s how I usually approach it:

I ask if they’re okay with me trying to speak their language. I also let them know I’d like to try it once or twice as an experiment. This gives both of us a way to adjust or stop if it doesn’t work.

When I speak, I try to use the easiest words and grammar. This minimize the risk of misunderstanding.

When listening, I clarify anything that I don't understand. And I skip the parts that don't seem important, because there's no way I'll understand everything.

And yes, sometimes conversations get stuck. When that happens, I switch back to English, write down what did't work, and study it later.

Trust me. You will earn a ton of respect, and you will see your own improvement quickly.

Encourage Learning

Depending on the language setup in the workplace, language learning can be a powerful tool for building trust. Leaders should encourage team members to learn the main communication language if they are still in the process.

Mastering a language takes time, but demonstrating a willingness to learn is a great help. The following section will explore how to demonstrate a positive learning attitude as a language learner.

Building Trust as a Language Learner

It’s much more challenging for language learners like Peter who struggle to express themselves.

As someone who has gone through the same process, I've found the following actions helpful in building trust early on:

Be Clear about the Learning Process

At an early stage, communicate the idea that you're still learning the language. This helps set the context that some mistakes may simply be due to the language barrier.

Learning Through Actions

Show a learning attitude and actively learn. For example, during one-on-one meetings, write down points you struggled to understand or express. At the end of the meeting, take a moment to ask your manager or team member about those points. This reinforces that you're actively learning, while also giving them an opportunity to support you. Through these interactions, it becomes easier to build trust and integrate language learning into the team dynamics.

Be Consistent

Avoid merely stating that you're learning without taking concrete actions. It's easy to forget language learning when work demands increase. However, if you don't actively work on it, people may forget, and they might not factor the language barrier into consideration during potential conflicts.

Final Thoughts: Language as a Leadership Skill

As a leader, it’s important to remember you don’t need to be good at everything, including languages. You don’t need to be fluent in all the languages your team speaks.

Instead, leadership is about enabling others, so language is a tool to build trust and understand the team better. You can create an environment where people feel safe making mistakes, and encourage everyone else to help. These helps build a culture with diversity, empathy, and compassion.

Have you ever worked in a foreign country and had to learn the language? I’d love to hear about your experience in the comments. — Adler Hsieh

Leave a comment

Special thanks to for sharing his building trust story in this 3rd milestone of the Thriving Challenge. Follow him in . In the 4th milestone, we will talk about Collaboration with and wonder leaders.

My Recommendations

Tools

1. WonderLead Building Trust Bundle for free for Wonder Leaders.
   Assess your team’s psychological safety and use the sheets as tools or to track progress on building trust.

Books

1. Unleashing the Power of Emotional Intelligence Paperback — Daniel Goleman

2. The Fearless Organization — Amy C. Edmondson

3. Against Empathy: The Case for Rational Compassion — Paul Bloom

4. Crucial Conversations: Tools for Talking When Stakes are High — Joseph Grenny

Self Awareness Side Thriving🌟Challenge Practice

Stop Cognitive Distortions with Blue Dolphins

If we believe that our thoughts and feelings are true, it risks our self-motivation and self-esteem. Instead of turning off negative self-talk (White Bears), get mindful and make thoughts and emotions work for you with “Go-to” positive thoughts you find inspiring (Blue Dolphins).

There are 10 types of White Bears (Cognitive Distorsions): 1) All or Nothing Thinking, 2) Overgeneralization, 3) Mental Filter, 4) Discounting the Positive, 5) Jumping to conclusions, 6) Magnification, 7) Emotional Reasoning, 8) “Should” Statements, 9) Labeling, and 10) Personalization and Blame.

Create blue dolphins 🐬 to conquer your white bears 🐻‍❄️!!

1. If you identify a cognitive distortion, defuse it by naming your feeling:
   “I’m noticing I’m having the thought that [thought] that makes me feel [feeling].”

2. Reframe by 1) reinterpreting (they might have unmet needs), 2) reordering (will you care in 1 day/month/year?), 3) repositioning (how can this make me a better leader?), or 4) normalizing (it’s ok to feel anxious/overwhelmed..)

3. Dive deep and keep a log in your journal 1) the thought you had (white bear), 2) its new reframed version (blue dolphin), and 3) the why and reframing technique used.

Get in Touch

You can find me on LinkedIn and X.

If you wish to make a request on a particular topic you would like to read, you can reply or send me an email to patri@develagora.com.

💡 What is building trust, why it is important, and how to apply it daily.
💡 Difference between “sympathy,” “empathy,” and “compassion” when leading.
💡 How to build trust as an Individual Contributor, Manager, and Director from Gabriele.

Tasks for the Week:

☑️ Apply one of the tips for your job role/level. Apply another tip next week.
☑️ Practice the self-awareness activity on the bottom of this post with your team.
☑️ Practice one of the productivity tools from the previous post in your job.

Building Trust at the Workplace

Building trust is hard. It includes bringing our emotions and unique experiences through vulnerability to the workplace. But it creates safe environments that allow us and our teams to be our full selves at work. By building trust, we deepen engagement, help our team manage change, and inspire creativity and growth.

We build trust by being curious, empathizing, and consistently seeking and actively supporting the overall well-being and needs of others.

It’s not enough with being nice or connecting with empathy.
You need to lead with compassion which is the active intention to help others.

Gabriele, over to you.

Early in my career, I was eager to find a place to learn and grow with others, feeling comfortable enough to admit my mistakes and weaknesses. Instead, I crowded my mind with a handful of: "I hope they won't find out I don't know how git rebase works.", "Ugh, I don't know half the acronyms everyone uses.", "What was a left join again? I need to look this up quickly!", and so on. I second-guessed every move and was anxious to admit when I didn’t know something. At the time, I didn’t realize I didn’t trust the team enough and would rather keep all these questions for myself. These daily thoughts were not a sustainable way to start a career. They were trapping me in a cycle of self-doubt and isolation, hindering my growth.

Building Trust As an IC

My impostor syndrome held me back, brushing away any chance to be part of a community. I felt the constant struggle of having to do it all by myself. Then, with a glimpse of mental clarity, I drove back down memory lane. I remembered that I had been the one building communities before, but not in a professional setting. It all came back. Building this environment requires deliberate work; it doesn't just "happen" over time.

I went through ups and downs when I worked at startups or smaller companies. Poor leadership often caused a lack of trust between peers. You would try to outshine your teammates and hoard knowledge to sound brighter. Not only did this make me feel lonelier than before, it eventually fostered unhealthy competition.

Collaboration was a second-class citizen. It created uncomfortable dynamics because you wanted to take credit for the work done. It was hard to make good, lasting decisions; everyone wanted to push for their idea even when it was not the best. Only one could win and get the trophy! (Spoiler alert: there was no trophy.) I didn't know how to change this, and I didn't feel empowered to try.

Looking back, I should have taken the initiative and talked to my manager. I was blown away by how people could run a company or manage a team at such a young age. I was sure they had it all figured out. How come they couldn't fix it? There was no way someone like me could help, right? It turns out they were also figuring it out. They didn't intend to create this environment and could have used someone to call it out.

At this point in my career, I thought I could gain trust only by delivering excellent work. I was uncertain about many things but was confident in my creative problem-solving. I doubled down on that and was eventually offered to be a leader at the company. Since I found myself trusting people who were either delivering or were trying hard to do so, I figured that’s how I should behave to gain the team’s trust.

My tips for building trust as an IC:

☑️ Deliver excellent work.
☑️ Go out of your way to help others.
☑️ Communicate openly and frequently with your manager.

Building Trust As a Manager or Senior IC

As I advanced to managerial and director roles, I've been committed to creating a safe space. If I didn't feel empowered to lead those changes before, others likely felt the same. I knew it was a leadership problem then, so I wanted to be part of the solution this time. It all began with establishing a simple yet effective group chat for the team to focus on collaboration. It allows for exchanging ideas, asking for help, calculated risk-taking, and cultivating good rapport and trust.

I led the effort by showing my weaknesses and knowledge gaps. Doing so gave the team a clear signal: not everyone needs to know everything. I promoted the idea that, as a team, we need to support each other in overcoming our individual limitations. This approach helped foster conversations as equals where every member not only shared their ideas freely but also discovered how to serve the team more effectively, thereby building lasting trust.

At this stage in your career, you have the power to make a difference. Don’t hesitate to try different approaches. Observe how your team handles each change and adapt accordingly. Most importantly, collect feedback!

My tips for building trust as a Manager and also beneficial for Senior ICs:

☑️ Show up when your team needs it.
☑️ Listen openly and act quickly to resolve issues and blockers.
☑️ Ask for feedback frequently.
☑️ Create a safe space for the team.

“A Safe Space” means any place where:
🌟Anyone can openly challenge ideas without fearing repercussions.
🌟They feel comfortable disagreeing with one another.
🌟Anyone can admit when they make a mistake and know the team will be there to help.

Building Trust As a Director or Staff IC

As a director, the challenge of building trust extends beyond your teams. It goes across the entire engineering organization, which inevitably carries a different weight. In a way, this feels less natural. You must actively keep the trust level high, or project collaborations will fall apart quickly. You might lack day-to-day interactions, so you must plan how trust can be managed consistently.

Not too long ago, we needed to collaborate with a team in a different time zone. We both intended to make the relationship work, but we had to overcome the difficulties of having only a few overlapping working hours. There was a lot of transparency in surfacing concerns and challenges each team faced, which made the conversation simpler and more focused. I was eager to learn from them what an ideal collaboration looked like. This helped build trust and align us on goals. We eventually documented our strategy, which served as a reference for the future. We also settled for recurring check-ins, which helped maintain trust.

My top tips and habits for Directors and Staff ICs that I served my teams well:

☑️ Ask for feedback, listen openly, act on it, and follow up. Communication channels should be open, especially for skip-level 1:1s.
☑️ Encourage cross-team collaborations. This can take the form of a roundtable, a happy hour, or anything that helps avoid silos.
☑️ Help and support your managers so they can iterate on trust-building within their teams.
☑️ Be transparent by letting the team understand how decisions are made, the priorities, and what obstacles stand in the way of success.

Conclusion

Key strategies for building trust and collaboration include creating a safe space for team growth, clarifying alignment and challenges, and promoting open and transparent communication. As one's role grows within an organization, the scale of trust-building changes, significantly impacting the business and team's success. I hope it’s clear that you can make a change for the better, no matter where you are in your career.

A team with individuals who trust each other will outperform a team that doesn’t.

Special thanks to for sharing his leadership insights. Follow his journey on LinkedIn and also on .

Self Awareness Side Thriving🌟Challenge Practice

Ask for Feedback

We have blind spots; the people who we think we are might not be the people others see. What you say or you ask others might not be aligned with your actions. We need feedback to uncover what we don't see and increase our self-awareness and growth.

1. Take the Insight Quiz to identify how self-aware you really are. It includes an assessment from someone who knows you well. — Dr. Tasha Eurich.

2. Ask for feedback from a peer, direct report, and supervisor. Use it for continuously improving performance and detecting blind spots. Getting feedback is a gift.

3. Enumerate 5 things you are grateful for and keep taking notes of how you feel.

4. Watch The Power of Self-Awareness illustrates the transformative potential of giving and receiving feedback. — William L. Sparks

My Recommendations

Books

• Radical Candor — Kim Scott

• Thanks for the Feedback — Douglas Stone & Sheila Heen

• Leaders Eat Last — Simon Sinek

• The Five Dysfunctions of a Team — Patrick Lencioni

Videos

• Simon Sinek Videos

• Why Building Trust Is Important - Simon Sinek

• How Can All Contribute to a Safe Environment - Amy Edmondson

Get In Touch

You can find me on LinkedIn and X.

If you wish to make a request on a particular topic you would like to read, you can reply or send me an email to patri@develagora.com.

💡 How to overcome productivity roadblocks and maintain work-life balance.
💡 Ways to lead by example while delegating effectively.
💡 4 practical tools to boost your productivity while managing energy.

From A Break to Productive

In my team at Amazon, we used to say: “The most stressful periods of the year are October to November and February to March”. In October-November due to reInvent and in February-March due to planning/scoping work. You can correlate those months with my publication dates. In the last 3 weeks, I had to prepare the review of a 5 Customer Questions Working Backwards document with senior leaders in an onsite, and an internal AWS conference presentation. But there was something else: 2 children in Daycare + Winter Flu. We have been rotating the flu at home over the last 2 months.

The result? At work great, but I slowed down and got delayed in our 30 Days Thriving Challenge. Publishing daily in the chat and 2 weekly posts, together with the stress at work and sickness at home, was too much. I needed to rest. I needed to take breaks. Taking breaks helps us to refresh our minds and to refocus later. To be resilient. But we need to get up, and productivity tools can help us to get back on track.

Today, I share with you the 4 productivity tools that I promised you in my last post. Next, and will publish guest posts on Earn Trust.

Productivity vs Motivation

Productivity isn't just about getting things done. It's about effectiveness (doing the right things, the appropriate goals, and quality of work) and efficiency (doing things right and quantity of work).

While motivation drives our intensity and persistence, being motivated makes us 17% more productive. However, we often fall into productivity traps.

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Common Productivity Roadblocks

1. Firefighting: Spending time on urgent issues that need resolution, rather than progress on more important and impactful goals. Example: Solving all oncall tickets instead of planning, executing, and tracking by severity.

2. Lack of Clarity: Ambiguity about how to move a project forward or what to work on. Lack of deadlines, importance unawareness, or what needs to get done. Example: Early this year my team was blocked by high level leadership decisions. It impacted the productivity of the team.

3. Cherry picking: Choosing what to do to make quick accomplishments and feel productive instead of focusing on what’s important. Example: Talking with stakeholders without an intentional plan.

4. Lack of Planning: Spending a disproportionate amount of time on activities and projects that are not important nor add value. Example: Working on projects that are not aligned with your leadership.

5. Distractions: External and internal interruptions that keep you from giving something your full attention. Example: Opening new browser tabs while switching to a different, slightly related topic.

6. Lack of Focus: Diminished concentration that slows down your progress and makes a task bigger in time. Example: Rereading a document or email.

To avoid getting trapped, we need to be aware of the productivity roadblocks and find a balance.

Avoiding Productivity Roadblocks as Leaders

As leaders, we need to lead by example as well as delegate while avoiding the productivity roadblocks. When something is urgent but not important to you, that usually means it is urgent and important to somebody else. But as we work in collaborative settings, sometimes we need to complete tasks that are sand instead of big rocks (unimportant tasks). Not collaborating enough can impact your ability to Build Trust and not working on your important projects can impact your ability to Deliver Results. We need a balance.

Great leaders are self-aware and adaptable. Here’s how to lead with balance:

1. Know Your Why: Before stepping into a task or delegating, ask yourself; Why am I choosing this approach? Acting with intention ensures your actions align with your goals, values, and avoids you from firefighting, lacking clarity, or cherry-picking by default.

2. Plan Your Tasks and Energy: Once you know your why, block time in your calendar for planning or addressing the task considering your energy and scheduled breaks. Calendarizing allows you to focus on the right things and avoid distractions, because during the autopilot while executing, we will be able to do the right things planned efficiently.

3. Communicate Clearly: Authentic leaders bring their team along on the journey. If you’re leading by example, explain why it’s necessary. When delegating, articulate your trust and expectations clearly. By communicating clearly, you bring clarity and focus to the team.

4. Adapt to the Situation: Leadership isn’t one-size-fits-all. During high-pressure moments, lead by example to inspire. In everyday operations, delegate to empower. Flexibility is key. Through daily, weekly, and monthly reviews, you will get more self-aware and be able to identify a lack of focus or planning.

5. Show Gratitude: Practicing gratitude helps team members feel valued and appreciated, increasing their job satisfaction and productivity. Additionally, it will boost your positivity and motivation.

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4 Tools for Productive Leadership

As leaders, we can make things happen that weren’t going to happen without us. We create a vision and strategy through goals. These tips will help achieve them productively:

1. Manage Your Energy for Optimal Achievement

Understanding and managing your energy levels is crucial for peak performance. Here's how:

1. Identify your Chronotype: Take this quizz and determine whether you're a Lark (morning person), Third Bird (in-between), or Owl (evening person) to understand your energy peaks.

2. Estimate your tasks based on your energy: Assess your energy level and focus relative to the task. Estimate task duration based on your current energy state.

3. Organize tasks based on your energy stages: Divide your day into peak, trough, and recovery stages, and plan tasks accordingly.

"I do my high-IQ meetings before lunch. Like anything that's going to be really mentally challenging, that's a 10 o'clock meeting. By 5pm, I'm like, I can't think about that today. Let's try this again tomorrow at 10 am." — Jeff Bezos

The 3 Energy Stages

1. Peak: Highly vigilant, in the best mood, and with the most energy.

2. Trough: Major drop in mood and performance.

3. Recovery: Rise in mood but no great vigilance.

Night Owls, experience a reverse pattern and are in Recovery in the morning, Trough in the early-to-mid-afternoon, and Peak in the late afternoon and into the evening.

Use your peak period to focus on deep, important work and analytic, cognitively-demanding tasks. Avoid administrative work, like processing emails, and time-wasters like reading online news, at peak hours or recovery stages of the day. When you’re in your recovery period, switch to insight, creativity-driven tasks because you will be less vigilant but in a good mood.

Example: As a leader at Amazon I sometimes have to wear many hats. With the experience I identified that at my Trough stage I feel better doing TPM work than tech designs. Because I don’t need to put a lot of energy and my brain doesn’t try to avoid it. When I tried to be creative or write a tech design in the afternoon (my trough), it resulted in me wasting time and working extra hours that day.

2. Refocus by Slowing Down and Resting

Make real breaks that allow you to refresh your mind, detach from work, and help you to refocus later.

2.1. Mental Rest: Take strategic breaks of up to 20min every 90min of work to take advantage of the daily ultradian rhythm. The ultradian rhythm is the wake-rest-activity cycle that repeats through the 24h day. It alternates periods of high-frequency brain activity (roughly 90 minutes) followed by lower-frequency brain activity (approximately 20 minutes).

2.2. Physical Rest: Keep a consistent sleep schedule that aligns with your circadian rhythm. The circadian rhythm controls when you are most alert and when you are most tired. It is your brain’s sleep-wake cycle in a 24-hour period that determines your natural wake up time and bedtime. The average sleep is 90 minutes long of 4-5 full sleep cycles, or 6-7.5 hours. Plus 20-40 minutes to fall asleep. Starting at your wake time, work back 7.5 hours to find your bedtime.

2.3. Sensory Rest: Unplug from electronics at the end of the day to reduce their sense of overwhelming. Or close your eyes for 1 minute in the middle of the day.

2.4. Creative Rest: Take in the beauty of the outdoors or enjoy arts to reawaken the awe and wonder inside to improve in problem solving.

2.5. Emotional Rest: Be authentic. Take the time and space to freely express your feelings and cut back on people pleasing.

2.6. Social Rest: Surrounding yourself with positive and supportive people will allow you to differentiate between those relationships that exhaust you.

2.7. Spiritual Rest: Engage in something greater than yourself and add prayer, meditation, or community involvement to your daily routine. It will give you a deep sense of belonging, love, acceptance, and purpose.

My current sleep time is 6 hours split in half due to the baby. That negatively impacts my concentration, energy, and mood level during the day. The community from Substack gives me some rest too. Thanks to and for all your support.

3. Calendarize and Adapt

Keep your calendar up to date and also incorporate time for addressing your projects while being adaptable through the day with reviews. Read this tip in the chat:

4. Time Management Apps

Additionally, here you have 3 apps that will help you to focus through the day:

1. Stayfocusd: Control the websites you visit at the time you want to stay focused.

2. Marinara: Pomodoro: Light way Pomodoro browser tool.

3. Break Timer: Plan your breaks. You can also use it with Pomodoro technique.

4. Automated WonderLead Framework in an Obsidian preconfigured Vault.

5. Digital WonderLead Planner for those who prefer a more printed sheets.

"Good intentions never work, you need good mechanisms to make anything happen." — Jeff Bezos

Self-Awareness Side Practice

Pause, Breathe, and Recharge

Being self-aware is not easy. After asking for feedback or in another situation your emotions might been triggered. Then our defense mechanism arise.

Pause and Listen to your emotions.

Listening to our emotions is hard at triggered moments. Tens of different emotions might hit us at the same time.

Breathe and Accept they are there.

Ask yourself what is causing them? Keep diving deep until you identify the root cause.

Then ask yourself, what do I want to do about it?

Take note of: (1) what you were doing, (2) emotional reaction rate, (3) triggering thoughts, (4) feelings (in body too), (5) with/about who, (6) assumptions, 1 negative thing or many data?, (8) next steps.

Now Recharge.

Try recharging by listening to music, dancing, drawing, or walking in nature. All of them will release dopamine (the brain's reward chemical), while reducing cortisol (the stress hormone).

Share in the comments the music that helps you to focus or recharge. Or the drawing this post inspired you.

Get In Touch

You can find me on LinkedIn and X.

If you wish to make a request on a particular topic you would like to read, you can send me an email to patri@develagora.com.

Hi! 🙋🏻‍♀️ Welcome to WonderLead.Tech!
In the last 2 weeks, we doubled the size of subscribers, and I feel very grateful to have you here.
I believe we can build together a great community of wonder leaders in tech!

What You'll Learn:

💡 Transform from being overwhelm to strategic achiever.
💡 Align your goals with personal and team values.
💡 Combine self-awareness with self-management to keep focus.

From Overwhelm to Achievement

I used to own too much and became a bottleneck for my team.

Juggling too many high-priority tasks led to missed deadlines and compromised quality. I wasn't choosing the right battles because, for some of them, it wasn't the right time. I also couldn't meet delivery dates because I had too many big rocks in the jar. Through practice and mentorship, I learned a system that helps me thrive. And combined with self-awareness, I can self-correct and align my goals with my values and vision.

This week in the Thriving Challenge, we are going to start diving deep in thriving through self-management of our emotions and challenges. We will address challenges with curiosity, positivity, and focus. This will allow us to learn from failure, innovate, and adapt with success. I will share with you 4 tips during the week. After practicing self-awareness, we are ready to set habits and tools that will make us thrive. At the bottom of each challenge post, you will find self-awareness tips. Self-awareness is an ongoing process that we have to keep practicing to become great leaders!

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The Foundation of Right Achievement is Self-Management

Self-management in Emotional Intelligence helps us to regulate our behaviors, thoughts, and emotions in a productive way. So that we can excel for the benefit of ourselves and our team. It includes the competencies Emotional Self-Control, Adaptability, Achievement Orientation, and Positive Outlook.

Achievement Orientated Balanced Leaders

As wonder leaders and in our lives, we strive for excellence. We look for ways to do things better and set challenging goals with calculated risks. However, staying in this overdrive all the time may make us toxic leaders or unhappy in our lives. To avoid it, we need a balance with the rest of Emotional Intelligence competencies.

How To Achieve Your Goals With Balance

For achieving my goals I use productivity technics (Big Rocks, GTD, and Pomodoro) together with self-awareness. You may already have your own system that works and that makes you an achiever. Then, I suggest you to incorporate in it self-awareness and align your goals and tasks with your core values, while following your purpose or vision. For details on assessing your values, you can read the post below.

1. Adopt Time Management Methodologies

There are several ways to self-manage ourselves; The Big Rocks methodology is about fitting in our time or resources (Jar) high priority projects (Big Rocks) while eliminating, delegating, or de-prioritizing less important projects and tasks (little rocks and sand). It creates time for our highest priorities and still having space for other less important things.

Benefits: It allows to grow in our role, impacts our customer significantly, and contributes to our team or organization. Because they maximize our resource allocation, enhance focus and clarity, boost morale and productivity, reduce stress by prioritizing overwhelming workloads, and deliver superior results by achieving more important tasks.

2. Plan Goals Aligned With Values

2.1. Define Your Aligned Goals

1. Identify your high priority projects (Big Rocks) from the plan of the year, strategic documents, level guidelines, or customer metrics.

2. Choose 3-5 Big Rocks for the quarter that:

   1. Drive significant team/customer impact.

   2. Align with organizational goals.

   3. Support personal/professional growth.

   4. Connect to your values and purpose. 🚀

3. Define them with the SMART🌟 framework. Relevant should have your purpose.

Why: Not aligning your goals with your values can lead to burnout despite external success, decreased job satisfaction, internal conflict and stress, reduced long-term motivation, and potential damage to relationships or well-being.

2.2. Your Success Roadmap

1. Plan your Big Rocks by breaking the projects into manageable tasks.

2. Track and Prioritize your plan and tasks weekly. This way, you make progress and boost your focus. Otherwise, some tasks might linger for weeks in your list before you consider them while you Keep The Lights On or firefight urgent issues.

My Example: Last week I worked on a 5 Customer Questions (Little Rock) document for a new technical product (Big Rock). While at the same time supported the team with reviews and writing a COE. What I did was break the doc down into the following tasks which allowed me to make progress on the project: (1) Initial section notes, (2) PM/SDM alignment, (3) UXD visuals planning, (4-6) write draft of section 1-3, (7) refine draft and add visuals, and (8) do the first review. This week finalizing the doc is urgent because I want to review it with the Leader PM of the org.

Tip: What was important may become also urgent, which is a state you must avoid.
Under urgent situations, our brain is in reactive mode and doesn’t do its best.

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3. Plan and Execute Your Roadmap Daily

3.1. Mindfully Review and Plan every task

Our work is never just Big Rocks, so we need to account for smaller rocks. With a daily plan you will know what to tackle, instead of prioritizing instant gratification or getting tunnel vision, our brain’s default choices. Tunnel vision might neglect smaller important tasks and miss opportunities.

3.2. Maintain Daily Focus

1. Try first a small, slightly related task or tasks previously done to boost your motivation. For instance, clean up your inbox before writing an important email, or sync with a stakeholder about your doc before writing a specific section.

2. Block in your calendar the high priority tasks of the day or from yesterday.

3. Keep a single backlog for the tasks you want to do and focus on today.

4. Skip not important and conflicting meetings by following up asynchronously.

3.2. Adaptive and Positive Mindset with Self Awareness

By combining self-management with self-awareness we can thrive. Do the following:

1. Delegate and Collaborate. Your little rocks might be the big rocks for someone else. You can use the Eisenhower Matrix or GTD to identify what to delegate/drop. Also remember that you don’t need to do actively all important and urgent tasks always.

2. Think in the positive customer and team impact to keep a positive mindset.

3. Balance tasks with values and purpose. In your reviews, ask yourself if the new task (1) process and (2) outcome align with your Values and Purpose by asking “Why am I doing this?” and “What do I want to achieve?”. If the goal task is not aligned, think of a way to tackle it so that in the long term you will have a positive outcome out of it.

4. Balance urgent needs with important priorities. Values, culture, leadership development of your people, and building and maintaining strong team relationships all fall into the important and not urgent category. Being able to maintain these important functions when the demands are pulling towards the urgent tells your teams that when a crisis hits, you care about them and you are maintaining a wide perspective.

“Putting first things first means organizing and executing around your most important priorities. It is living and being driven by the principles you value most, not by the agendas and forces surrounding you”. — Franklin Convey

Thriving Challenge Action Plan

Step 1: Define Your Goals (Today)

☑️ Write down your top 3 Big Rocks for this month.
☑️ Align each goal to specific core values and your purpose.
☑️ Use this template:

Goal: [Your SMART Goal]
Value(s): [Your Value(s)]
Impact: [Team/Customer/Personal Growth]
First Action Step or Detailed Plan: [Specific Task]

Step 2: Set Up Your System

☑️ Schedule focused work blocks in your calendar.
☑️ Prepare your inbox.
☑️ Practice delegating and saying no.
☑️ Do daily and weekly reviews with values checks.

Step 3: Join the Thriving🌟Challenge and Get Accountable

Put these principles into practice with other wonder leaders right now!
☑️ Share your most important goal for this month in the comments or chat.
☑️ Share your core values aligned with your goal.
☑️ Ask Us Anything. Experienced leaders such as , , and joined the challenge and can be found in our Chat or Discord. Feel free to connect or ask us for help!
☑️ Get Accountable by filling out this Accountability Sheet!

Leave a comment

Self-Awareness Side Practice

Pre Step 1: Define your Values and Strengths

To align your goals with your values and strengths as part of your weekly reviews, you need to define your values first. Your values and goals will become the compass of your actions. 🚀 One tip: You likely admire the people who exhibit those values in their day to day lives. Join the chat and share your values with Marion with Animalsofa, Artur Henriques, and me.

1. Define your core values and strengths. Share them in a comment or chat.

2. Read Self-Assessment: Knowing Your Why Leads to Your Dream Job

Pre Step 2 - Mindfully Identify Your Purpose

As leaders, we need to be intentional. To be able to thrive, we need a sense of fulfillment, and for achieving it, some of our goals and actions should be aligned with our purpose and mission. Today, mindfully identify your mission, passion, vocation and profession in your life and career through an Ikigai exercise.

1. Find your Ikigai, the intersection between 1) What You’re Good/Skilled at, 2) What Others Need, 3) What You Get Value From, and 4) What You Love. Reflect, and share your ikigai in the chat or comments. Is your job and life aligned with it?

My Recommendations

Thriving Books

• The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People — Stephen R. Covey

• Getting Things Done — David Allen

• Thinking, Fast and Slow — Daniel Kahneman

Thriving Tools

• WonderLead Obsidian Vault Automated Planner — Patricia Juarez Muñoz

• WonderLead Digital Planner — Patricia Juarez Muñoz

Thriving Related Publications

• How TOP engineers structure their day to maximize their productivity without burnout — Strategize Your Career

• Don’t Snack Too Much At Work — The Proactive Engineer

Get In Touch

You can find me on LinkedIn and X.

If you wish to make a request on a particular topic you would like to read, you can send me an email to patri@develagora.com.

💡 The importance of self-awareness for companies and teams.
💡 Self-awareness from the lenses of a people manager.
💡 Practical tools for improving the self-awareness of your team and yourself.

Tasks for the Week:

☑️ Practice self-awareness activities from the Thriving Challenge with your team.
☑️ Send the below self-awareness quiz to your team, where you can rate each other.
☑️ In your next 1:1 ask 1) what they value in you and 2) what actions you take that annoy them.

Self-Awareness at the Workplace

Companies with more self-aware employees, from IC to top-level executives, significantly outperform — revealed a research by Korn/Ferry Instititude. As tech leaders, we have to be aware to succeed. Yet while 90% of people believe they're self-aware, only 10-15% actually are. We can change and become aware leaders. It’s a journey that I am still following.

This week in the Thriving Challenge, we are practicing self-awareness. Self-awareness allows us to understand our emotions and thoughts. It is the first step to own the actions that will make us thrive in our goals! With self-awareness we can improve our performance and overall job satisfaction of ourselves and teams.

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from , is a Senior Engineering Manager at Salesforce and believes in the advantages of self-awareness, for himself and his team. He embraces self-awareness daily and influences changes in his team that make people succeed. Want to know how? Read on, he is sharing his learnings next. Suresh, over to you.

Self-Awareness as a People Manager

As an Engineering Manager, you manage three things: yourself, your team, and the work. But the first thing you need to manage is yourself.

One morning, I got pulled into a meeting about a production issue. The on-call engineer, visibly annoyed, walked us through the root cause. It turned out to be a change another team member had made. He muttered in a frustrated tone:

“This was so obvious, right?”

He raised his eyebrows and then shook his head in disapproval. He was clearly blaming the other team member.

That triggered me. My first instinct was to snap back.

“What if you had made the change? Would you like being blamed like that? Can we act more like a team instead of pointing fingers? Shouldn’t we focus on understanding why this was missed?”

If I hadn’t been self-aware, I would have said all that aloud. And the meeting would have gone downhill from there. It would have turned into a yelling match because emotions were high on both sides.

Your Leadership Debugger

That's why Self-Awareness is such an important skill to have as a manager. Without self-awareness, you’re flying blind. It’s like trying to debug code without logs or a stack trace. You can’t fix what you don’t understand. You can’t manage others if you can’t manage yourself.

Self-awareness helps you recognize:

• What triggers you and why.

• What communication is working (and what isn’t).

• How your behavior affects your team and vice versa.

That day instead of reacting, I caught myself. I paused. I looked away, opened my notes app and started writing my thoughts. This allowed me to process those thoughts better. With my emotions in check, I could now think clearly: How do I get the outcome I want without escalating this further?

So I asked about the next steps and moved on. In my next 1:1, I gave the engineer direct and constructive feedback. He took it well.

If I had yelled that day in the meeting, this behavior change wouldn’t have happened.

How to Master Self-Awareness

For me, self-awareness has become the foundation for empathy, better decision-making, and effective leadership. It has helped me catch my blind spots and make meaningful improvements.

It’s not easy, but it’s a skill you can develop:

• Notice your emotions and pause before reacting.

• Reflect on conversations that didn’t go well. What made you angry or sad? How could you have handled it differently?

• Seek feedback to know what others observe about your behavior.

When you show self-awareness, it also encourages your team to do the same.

You can also take the coaching approach to make team members think about their behaviors and emotions.

“How does that make you feel?”

“Why is it important to you?”

Next time around, they will mentally ask these questions themselves first, making it easier to take the right action.

The idea of self-awareness is to observe, process, and respond with intent.
This is how you manage yourself first. This is how you thrive when working with other people!

Special thanks to Suresh for sharing his leadership insights. Follow his journey on LinkedIn and also on his newsletter.

Self-Awareness Week in the Thriving🌟Challenge

Connect with other leaders practicing self-awareness this week in our Substack chat. Share your experiences, get daily exercises, and practice them within the challenge. The week is not over yet! You can still join and start practicing to become an aware, thriving leader.

Challenge Recommendations

Day 1 - Define your Values and Strengths

During this month you will align your goals with your values and strengths. They will become the compass of your actions. 🚀 One tip: You likely admire the people who exhibit those values in their day to day lives. Join the chat and share your values with , , and myself.

1. Define your core values and strengths. Share them in a comment or chat.

2. Read Self-Assessment: Knowing Your Why Leads to Your Dream Job

Day 2 - Start Practicing Self-Awareness

With self-awareness we will be able to control our thoughts influenced by our values and emotions. This control will increase the likelihood of success towards our goal for the next 30 days! After the activities, don't forget to share how you felt in the process.

1. Reflect on how you feel today and what the triggers were. Take notes.

2. Journaling: At the moment you feel an emotion, dive into what situations or thoughts triggered those feelings from the present or past.

3. How do you live your values today? Write down 1-3 real examples. (e.g. one of my values is kindness, and I am running this challenge to share what I know)

4. Read "Self-Awareness: First Step to Your Career Plan and Thriving as a Leader?"

5. Watch "Increase your self-awareness with one simple fix" with Tasha Eurich.

Leave a comment

Day 3 - Mindfully Identify Your Purpose

As leaders, we need to be intentional. To be able to thrive, we need a sense of fulfillment, and for achieving it, some of our goals and actions should be aligned with our purpose and mission. Today you will mindfully identify your mission, passion, vocation and profession in your life and career through an Ikigai exercise.

1. Keep reflecting on your day.

2. Find 2 moments to breath for 2-3 minutes each. Breathe before reacting to a triggering moment, before starting a meeting, or through a guided meditation.

3. Find your Ikigai, the intersection between 1) What You’re Good/Skilled at, 2) What Others Need, 3) What You Get Value From, and 4) What You Love. Reflect, and share your ikigai in the chat or comments. Is your job and life aligned with it?

Day 4 - Ask for Feedback

We have blind spots; the people who we think we are might not be the people others see. What you say or you ask others might not be aligned with your actions. We need feedback to uncover what we don't see and increase our self-awareness and growth.

1. Take the Insight Quiz to identify how self-aware you really are. It includes an assessment from someone who knows you well. — Dr. Tasha Eurich.

2. Ask for feedback from a peer, direct report, and supervisor. Use it for continuously improving performance and detecting blind spots. Getting feedback is a gift.

3. Enumerate 5 things you are grateful for and keep taking notes of how you feel.

4. Watch The Power of Self-Awareness illustrates the transformative potential of giving and receiving feedback. — William L. Sparks

💡 The difference between surviving and thriving in leadership.
💡 Four key areas for thriving as a leader.
💡 Practical tools for maintaining Emotional Intelligence and goal alignment.
💡 About our free 30-day thriving challenge to boost your leadership skills.

Tasks for the Week:

☑️ Assess whether you or your team are in survival or thriving mode.
☑️ Prioritize your values and ensure basic and psychological needs are met.
☑️ Commit and practice daily the tools that will help you thrive.
☑️ Join the 30 Days WonderLead Thriving Challenge & Course.

From Surviving to Thriving

After 7 years working at AWS, I thought I had mastered Amazon’s culture. But when I returned from maternity leave, I realized that I had temporarily forgotten some of my high-performance habits and skills. This made me feel less confident and like an impostor. Later, I was assigned to lead a crucial launch for my organization at reInvent - AWS's most important annual event where teams present their biggest updates - while adjusting to my life with my new baby. Sleep deprivation, stress, and lack of free time were pushing me towards survival mode.

Being in survival mode made me get stuck in the day to day high priority tasks with tunnel vision. It wasn’t only me. The team also got so focused on the delivery that we skipped retrospectives and worked more hours. We were doing an amazing job, but at what cost? At the moment I defended the team needs, it was when I started to thrive and feel myself back.

When I learned about Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs, everything became clearer. Understanding the needs required for thriving, combined with a system to support it, allows my team and me to completely succeed today.

"We can't be in survival mode. We have to be in growth mode." ― Jeff Bezos

What is Surviving vs Thriving?

Surviving is doing what is necessary to exist, while thriving is reaching for continual growth and success. We all exist on a spectrum somewhere between surviving and thriving. And we all constantly shift between the two states depending on our situation. What’s critical is that we can identify where we and others are on that spectrum and then move towards thriving!

It’s not enough knowing our values and be self-aware. Before being able to thrive, we need to know the priority of our values and satisfy our basic and psychological needs. And if our environment doesn’t support us, we can apply self-management tools to stay in thriving mode.

Why is it Important to Thrive as a Leader?

When leaders thrive, it benefits the leader, the team, and the entire organization. It creates an environment where everyone can excel!

Thriving leaders inspire and motivate, are resilient and good decision-makers, foster innovation, enhance the work culture, accelerate their personal growth, improve their work-life balance and retention in their team, increase organization success, and build a legacy that lasts and has a positive impact.

How can I Thrive as a Leader?

To thrive as a leader, commit to improving the following 4 areas. They align with the Emotional Intelligence 4 Pillars that I introduced in Your Journey to Become a WonderLead post.

1. Self Awareness: Knowing ourselves allows to make the best decisions and act on them.

2. Self Management: Drive your actions towards your goals with motivation. Manage challenging situations and your emotional triggers through Self-Management. It allows to build resilience and use adversity to grow.

3. Build Trust with Social-Awareness: Empathize and support the well-being and needs of those around. It allows to deepen engagement. It helps your team manage change, prevents burnout, and inspires growth.

4. Master Collaboration Social Skill: Through relationship management, create a psychologically safe environment that fosters inclusion and innovation. It allow to resolve conflicts, influence, and develop the best in others.

Let’s break down an example:

• Situation and Task:
  My team has just encountered a major technical issue that threatens to potentially delay for 6 months a reInvent launch.

• Possible Survival Mode Actions:
  1) Panic and work longer hours, 2) Blame team members or other departments, and/or 3) Cut corners to meet the deadline at any cost.

• Recommended Thriving Mode Actions: 1) Self-Awareness: Recognize your stress and anxiety about the setback. 2) Own Your Actions: Take a step back and assess the situation objectively. 3) Build Trust with Social-Awareness: Communicate transparently with your team and stakeholders. Empathize with team members who might be feeling pressured. 4) Master Collaboration: Bring the team together to brainstorm solutions. Delegate tasks based on individual strengths. Negotiate a realistic timeline or solution with stakeholders.

• Result: Immediate problem addressed but also strengthen team cohesion, build trust with stakeholders, and creates a team process for handling future challenges.

The actions were generated by my 🎁 AI Thriving tool. You can get access when joining to the WonderLead Thriving Challenge by filling this Substack survey.

What Tools can I use to Thrive?

To be an intentional leader and thrive, I try to apply the following consistently:

1. Cultivate Self-Awareness by understanding your emotions, meditating, and rethinking what you will do before doing it.

2. Focus and Take Action with the WonderLead Framework to thrive daily by:

   1. Planning to avoid losing your North Star. Align your actions with your prioritized values and goals. Choose 1 goal at a time in a dedicated timeframe.

   2. Taking Care of Yourself by walking and mindfully breathing to reduce stress and increase optimism.

   3. Practicing Gratitude to boost your resilience and happiness.

   4. Journaling to reframe things that you are labeling as bad. Identify what actions for turning the bad into a good thing to celebrate someday in the future.

   5. Regularly Reviewing to reaffirm your values and check if you/your team are surviving or thriving (quiz). Get some additional perspective by asking others how they see your values manifested in your actions. And ask yourself, what could you have done differently to stay aligned with your values?

3. Practice Thriving Consistently. To ensure your success, I created the 30 Days WonderLead Thriving Challenge & Course! Together we’ll practice daily the 4 areas that are required for thriving. Participants will get an AI app that will help them assess survival mode and will receive guidance for shifting to thriving. Top achievers will get 6 months of the future WonderLead paid subscription and access to productivity tools. Join me for the first cohort for free here! 🎁

Remember that it is expected that we move to survival mode when there are life-inevitable issues. I also thought I had already learned the reInvent rushing lesson, but I made the mistake of stopping my own system because of lack of time and moved to survival mode. There are still days when I feel overwhelmed or unsure. But with each roadblock, we can grow, recover faster, and spend more time thriving with ongoing awareness, acknowledgement and practice.

"Do not judge me by my successes, judge me by how many times I fell down and got back up again." ― Nelson Mandela

30 Days WonderLead Thriving Challenge

To help you put these tools into practice, I'm excited to announce the launch of the 30 Days WonderLead Thriving Challenge & Course! This free program is designed to help you focus on thriving through daily reminders, mini-posts, and support.

You just need to subscribe here and adjust your schedule for 20 daily minutes! It will be free in exchange for your feedback during and at the end of the program. Participants will get an AI app that will help them assess survival mode and will receive guidance for shifting to thriving. Top achievers will get 6 months of the future WonderLead paid subscription and access to productivity tools.

Start to Thrive. Join before Jan 26!

Whether you're returning from vacation or leave, aiming for a promotion or goal, dealing with survival mode or impostor syndrome, or simply you are curious to learn with like-minded individuals, this challenge is for you! You will be more prepared to handle stressful situations and life’s inevitable issues. 🎁 Join for Free! (See details).

My Recommendations

Thriving Books

• Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence — Daniel Goleman.

• A Theory of Human Motivation — Abraham H. Maslow.

• Think Again —

Thriving Tools

• 👉🏻 WonderLead Thriving Challenge

• Pomodoro Physical Timer

Thriving Related Substacks

• How to make meaningful progress this year without burning out -

• How I'm advancing my career without neglecting my life. "New year's resolutions" done right. -

This post opinions are my own, and may not reflect the opinions of the company I work for.