"Between Sessions"
​Blog

If a person ranked the importance of their relationships, likely partner, family and friends would be at the top. However, when taking a weighted ranking based on time spent with a person, a work boss will likely take the #1 or 2 spots. 
It is not uncommon for someone to spend more hours per week with their boss over their own partner.

People undervalue the importance of having a great boss when choosing a new job. Compensation, company reputation and scope of role take precedence. The quote, “People don’t leave jobs, please leave bosses,” tends to hold true. Unfortunately, companies do not adequately train people to be great bosses. 

Companies tend to focus trainings on workplace harassment, inclusion and unconscious biases. These are important, but actual training on how to be a manager people want to work for, is lacking.

Often, a company wanting to promote a high performing individual can only do so by making them a manager. But being a proficient individual contributor does not translate to rock star manager. Many learn to be a manager on the go, sometimes at the expense of their employees.

But why should you care?
Unlike the other relationships in our lives, a manager-employee relationship is a lopsided hierarchical relationship. The manager controls his/her employees’ compensation and career. 

Your patient may find themselves agonizing over how their boss perceives them, constantly crafting their words in their boss’s presence. 

Praises such as “great job at that presentation” will light up an employees day, while a “That didn’t go as well I hoped” can completely bring it down.

As a result of the lopsided power structure of this relationship, many feel the need to always be “on call” for emails or messages from their boss. To drop everything that they are doing (including pausing events with family/friends that people claim are the most important relationships in their lives) and maintain a perception of dependability and competency.

Your patient may have the perfect family and lifestyle, but their 9-5pm can completely consume their mental health. A toxic relationship with a boss usually seeps in to the home life, where pent up anger and stress can boil over at home.

Advice to consider during sessions.

1. Remind them of the benefit of investing time on improving a relationship with a boss. Ignoring the situation and just labeling their boss as difficult and crazy is not wise given the number of hours they spend with this person per week. 
2. Remind your patient to focus on the holistic relationship with their boss, instead of referencing the most recent event as the barometer of their performance. For example, if someone received great marks on their annual review, a recent mishap is just a recent mishap. 
3. Many bosses crave feedback and honesty from their employees. Sometimes they aren’t comfortable with the power they have over employees and worry whether their team is happy. Start with light, genuine praise such as, ”That time when you gave me feedback about speaking too fast at presentations. Thanks!. I’ve been working on it and have already received positive feedback.”
4. Have them be comfortable with their peers that report to the same boss. Avoiding gossip as much as possible, peers can offer great tips on a boss’s working style, especially veteran employees.
   
5. Take it as a learning experience. The patient will one day manage people and can learn from this experience while being in the shoes of a boss's report today.
   
6. Avoid a 100% transactional relationship. They should establish a more personable relationship by asking about their boss’s kids/hobbies or even allowing them to vent to your patient. Building trust will get the employee comfortable and less likely be in situations where they have to guess how their boss thinks about them.
   
7. Remind them to not be afraid to ask for help when stuck. The key to this is to propose all the work/research they’ve done so far and remaining open questions. Your boss will appreciate the collaboration and may have information/context that they may have never had unless they asked.
   
8. Advise them to improve skills on managing up. A boss/employee relationship is 2-way. Both parties need to make an effort for success. Seeking mentors at the workplace can help here.

In a previous newsletter, we discussed the “Great Resignation and Great Reshuffle,” with employees jumping ship to new companies. In this newsletter, we want to discuss that shift into the new company, specifically the first 90 days of a job, “The Dreadful 90.” Many hiring managers create 90-day work plans for new employees to create a focused onboarding. Work plans include a list of people to meet, expected deliverables to be completed, recommended training courses, etc.
 
For the employee, this is an anxious 3 months. They were once the smartest person in the room with established work relationships and process. Now they are nobody. 


A steep learning curve is ahead of them, where they will need to adapt to a new culture and domain knowledge. They will need to recreate their credibility. Anxiety levels are similar to a teenager starting a new school in the middle of a semester with a midterm exam in 7 days.

But why should you care?
The dreadful 90 is a stressful period for your patient. They will worry about setting the right first impression and desperately seek opportunities to add value to the company. It’s also a time they are cultivating new relationships with busy individuals that are most likely all remote. Your patient will feel lonely by not having a go-to person to chat with in these early months. They will have insecurities about their manager’s opinions of them. They will feel pressure to succeed in these first 90 days, starting from zero. Imposter syndrome will immediately kick-in.

Advice to consider during sessions.

1. Your patient may have feelings of uselessness in the beginning. Remind them of the skills and experience that helped them obtain this job. Have them reflect on the big wins they had from the last job and the seemingly insurmountable obstacles they endured.
2. Remind them that as a new hire, they aren’t on a pedestal where every single person is tracking their progress. People are too busy thinking about themselves and their work than thinking about a new hire. That’s a good thing and should feel less pressure.
3. Remind them that after the 90 day hump, it’ll start feeling like their old job. The initial learning curve is stressful, but that’s usually a sign of growth and acclimation.
4. Remind them to be in listening mode. Before conveying strong opinions and driving change, your patient should actively listen in meetings and coffee chats. Attempting change before establishing respect and credibility will make it difficult onboarding. Your patient also doesn’t have the full picture of company plans and projects yet. So it would be wise to learn as much as possible first before driving change.
5. Quick, low hanging fruits also help mitigate the 90 day anxiety. By going after smaller, ignored projects, your patient can achieve quick wins to improve their self-esteem and establish credibility early. Their manager will perceive them as being driven and dependable.

Inflation is a complicated topic and misunderstood even by economists. We’ll do our best to explain it at a high level. 

In summary, inflation occurs when there’s more money chasing fewer goods and every dollar becomes less valuable. This occurs for multiple reasons including government printing more money (e.g., Stimulus checks), consumer demand of goods outpacing supply of goods, employee wage increases, etc. Inflation isn’t necessarily bad. In fact, the government has intentionally attempted to achieve 1-2% inflation every year in the last decades.

How do they measure inflation? 

One method is the Consumer Price Index. Think of this as the price you pay for the “basket” of your personal needs (transportation, food, medical care, etc.), tracked every month. So as the price of milk goes up, this “basket” price will be impacted.

What’s been causing the recent inflation?

In the last 2 years, inflation has been growing 6-7%. First reason is the stimulus checks. With more money in people’s hands, there is more demand for goods. Unfortunately production supply has not kept up. With more demand and fewer products, prices will go up (If you’ve shopped around for a car lately, you likely observed price increases due to the lack of supply).

2nd reason, production is still catching up to pre-pandemic levels. With labor shortages across the world, factories have not been able to catch up with the recent demand.

3rd reason, as the service industry (tourism, restaurants, etc.) shut down in the early pandemic and partially shut down today, consumer spending has shifted from travel and experiences to material goods. This adds further strain to supply chain and production.

But why should you care?


Inflation makes people nervous. You patients will likely be considering where to invest their money or whether to sell their stocks in anticipation of a market cash. They will also be hearing stock advice from friends and colleagues that will drive FOMO or panic. For example, while it is expected that interest rates will rise to combat inflation, many might feel the need to purchase a home immediately even at the risk of actually affording one. They will also likely perceive inflation through a political lens, blaming the new or old administration, further amplifying their anger.

Advice to consider during sessions.

1. As a therapist, you shouldn’t attempt to offer financial advice nor predictions. However as noted in prior recessions/depressions, the ones who tend to come out with less regret are the ones that do not panic. If they have a monthly investment transfer from their bank account to their investment fund, they should maintain it.
   
2. Remind them to stop checking their 401K. It is expected that in a timespan of 30-50 years, an upward trending curve is not a straight line, but an up and down choppy line trending upwards.
   
3. Remind them that a vast number of Americans are living paycheck to paycheck. They should feel grateful to have the luxury of an investment portfolio. 
   
4. Advise them to take economic metrics with a grain of salt. Inflation, unemployment rate, GDP growth are important signals of the wellbeing of our country, but do not capture the full picture. Have your patient focus on controllable, personal metrics such savings and career goals. 

Biohacking is self-experimentation on your body to fight aging and disease, increase performance, lose weight etc. Experiments can range in risk levels, from intermittent fasting to DNA injections.  

Many of these biohacking ideas originate from Silicon Valley, where people treat the body as a technical engineering problem. In other words, any problem is solvable, including death. A related and growing movement is transhumanism, where some believe that human beings can and should use technology to augment and evolve our species.

Some of these biohackers are PhDs, applying published scientific studies in unique ways. Others are amateurs that use wearable tracking devices to report on their results (e.g., tracking sleep quality). With the rise of Instagram and other social media platforms, more people now have access to these biohacks.

But why should you care?

Everyone should have the right to experiment. In fact, biohacking can lead to great discoveries that can eventually be fully tested in clinical trials. However, many of these biohackers are notable influencers (e.g., Jack Dorsey, CEO of Twitter). They publish results to millions of followers who then perform similar experiments. As a result, your patient will encounter these experiments when conducting basic web searches such as “how to lose weight.”

Rather than seeking a nutritionist or doctor, they will likely succumb to charismatic influencers and experiment out of ease and desperation. Again, many of these are harmless. But a person can easily get lost in the rabbit hole of the biohacking world and no longer question things. They will also likely increase their risk tolerance.

In addition, majority of these experiments will lead to subtle to no-results. This can deflate your patient’s confidence and motivation. The fact they were proactive to research is great! It’s unfortunate to channel that energy to a non-proven solution, resulting in your patient thinking that change is just not possible for them.

Advice to consider during sessions.
 

1. While many biohacking experiments have positive results, consider this: A fully funded clinical trial were run with 1000 participants, without controlling any of the variables then only reporting out the results from 1 of the 1000 participants. That is not too different to biohacking results.
   
2. There are some great biohackers to follow. However, have your patient consider how much of the biohacking experimentation is really to sell products. Not to say that monetizing is a bad thing, but it can alter incentives.
   
3. There is no silver bullet to fight aging, gain muscle or increase intelligence. At the end of the day, lifestyle changes and hard work are required. 

Last week we saw company stock prices tumble, rise and tumble again (e.g., Facebook, Paypal, Amazon). Many of these tech companies employ your patients who have a compensation package heavily based on company stock. 

Why should you care?

Well, think about a client of yours that works at Netflix or Facebook whose stock price dropped +20% overnight. For those employees whose majority of compensation is stock, this is not an easy event to stomach. Many of these employees use tools such as Mint or Wealthfront to track their net worth. Equating financial net worth to self worth is not all too uncommon. And so seeing that drop overnight is devastating.

Given how much of these tech stocks have risen in the last 4-5 years, many of these tech employees accepted a 4-year package for let’s say 200K a year, with 25% of the promised stocks released annually. With the stock price rise, they are now seeing their 4th year income rise as much as 400-500k. THIS IS THEIR NEWLY PERCEIVED NET WORTH. Anything below this is inferior.

Salary is relative to many of them.

Something else to consider is that many of these tech employees are on the anonymous social network known as Blind. Here people post salaries, interview questions, company advice, and complaints. Your client could be earning $500K annually, but when they see posts by 25-year-olds who are making more, depression and self-doubt grow.

Advice to consider during sessions.

​Remind them of other means of perceiving self-value and success. For example, managers take pride in promoting their people and contributing to their career trajectory.

1. Remind them of the big wins they had at work such as launching a new feature and how customers’ reacted to it.
2. Remind them of the tribe and community they have at work. The alliances, partnerships, debates etc. This last point is much more difficult lately to practice given the remote working arrangements.
3. Finally, ask them to consider what really changes in their life when a net worth number fluctuates. Do their kids become less healthy, their cars stop working or roof starts leaking? Nothing changes.