On advice and appreciation

Hey everyone! Can you believe how quickly the last three months of the year fly by?! My kids and I realized yesterday morning while making pancakes that Christmas is only six weeks away.

I’ve been playing with AI a lot lately. Not only has the integration of DALL-E 3 into ChatGPT continued to be fun, but Open AI has now unlocked Custom GPTs. A custom GPT is like tuning their base model into a specific purpose. Open AI released several of their own versions to inspire people; there’s Laundry Buddy, a Sous Chef, and a Math Mentor, for example.

I found one created by a user that helped you learn any topic. I asked it for help understanding the nuclear fuel cycle and something I don't understand called 'contango' in oil futures markets. It was really helpful!

I asked the sous chef for what I could do with flap steak on a night I wasn’t feeling particularly inspired. It pointed me to a chimichurri recipe.

I created my own custom GPT that I called Coach. I asked it to:

• Be thorough and detailed in its responses.
• Do some lateral thinking by bringing ideas from other scientific disciplines into our discussion.
• Make book recommendations where appropriate so I could read more deeply on a topic.
• Share some principles from Stoic philosophy if it relates to the discussion.
• Use emojis because, hey, we’re having fun here. 🥳

I promise this isn’t turning into an AI newsletter! This was just on my mind a lot this week.

If you’ve tried any cool Custom GPTs or made your own, please share!

Kevin

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A Quote

“ Consensus, while comforting and harmonious as well as efficient, often leads us to make bad decisions. Dissent, while often annoying, is precisely the challenge that we need to reassess our own views and make better choices. It helps us consider alternatives and generate creative solutions. Dissent is a liberator. — Charlan Nemeth, "In Defense of Troublemakers"

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Three Things

1 - 🥜 Peter Attia Podcast on Immunotherapy for Food Allergies - I was fascinated by this podcast with Kari Nadeau, a specialist in this area. She has experience in treating food allergies, like peanut, and has very high success rates of getting to full cure with these treatments. Other than some rarer sugar-based allergies, there no food allergy that doesn’t respond to this treatment.

2 - 👩‍⚕️ Interesting Highly Personal Clinic - I didn’t know these types of clinics existed before this article. These are a class of medical treatment facilities that are immersive and highly focused on the individual. The current FAQ at the Paracelsus website says it’s $10-20K per week, or about $3K/night on the high end.

3 - 🪦 Over My Dead Body - Since I typically read what would be described as ‘business’ books, this is one of those books that my brain thinks is fiction, but is actually just a not-business non-fiction book. Whatever you call it, I found a lot of interesting facts about the history of death that my family very politely listened to me retell around the dinner table.

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Deeper Dive

Try sharing appreciation and advice with those around you.

Or, as stated in the inverse - avoid negativity and feedback.

Some of this is subtle nuance. I mean, aren’t feedback and advice essentially the same thing? Not quite.

I’ll elaborate on the subtleties throughout today’s email. I’ll also share some insight into why this is so important, how it impacts you and the people around you, and we’ll close with our typical call to action.

When I was coming up through leadership and absorbing from other leaders I saw, including my own bosses, I picked up that critical negative feedback was how you communicated with those around you. You’d do a thing and then your boss would provide their assessment on how you did.

Unfortunately, even when delivered well, feedback by and large doesn’t feel good for the recipient. The ego, as usual, is there to protect us and our identity. Since most people self-identify as effective in the workforce, critical feedback can’t help but trip over the ego, which can cause a range of issues. Most often those issues are a) hurt feelings, and b) not truly hearing the feedback.

Authors Sheila Heen and Douglas Stone, in Thanks for the Feedback have this to say:

There’s certainly a time and place for critical negative feedback delivered well (and I will have a newsletter on delivering feedback well in the future), but there are two important pieces that are needed to fill in the puzzle - appreciation and advice.

Why do we need the elements of appreciation? Well, we’re human. And humans have two competing desires; to be accepted as who we are now (appreciation) and to grow in the future (advice).

Or, as Adam Smith said way back in 1749 in The Theory of Moral Sentiments: “Man naturally desires, not only to be loved, but to be lovely.”

Why do we need appreciation? We need the appreciation to develop connection with each other. We need to honor the part of ourselves that wants to be loved as we are. As Mike Robbins says in Bring Your Whole Self to Work, appreciation is about who we are.

One other principle to note about appreciation comes from The 15 Commitments of Conscious Leadership; it should be unarguable. The example in their quote below is illustrative. Appreciation isn’t about falsehoods - don’t tell someone they did a great job if they didn’t. It’s about looking for and sharing deeper truths.

Now that we’ve decomposed appreciation, let’s do the same for advice.

Whereas feedback is about the past, advice is about the future. Advice, to the recipient, feels like a choice, which helpfully triggers their agency - the recipient has a choice about implementation. Even though this optionality is also true when you get feedback, it doesn’t feel true.

Advice, altogether, feels like co-creation of a future state. The elements of advice feel like the colors in a paint palette; you can pick which ones you use to make the painting of your future.

What is the impact of advice and appreciation on the team? Together they thread the needle on humans’ dual desire. We can appreciate someone for today and still provide some insight into how they can develop in the future. It’s less likely to trigger the ego, and therefore more likely that your advice will be heard. The recipients on your team will feel more connected and a stronger sense of agency over their future.

What is the impact to you? Speaking from experience; prepare to cry.

Appreciation triggers in me a strong sense of joy and gratitude. It’s the principle I shared in the newsletter about how feeling follows action; the act of thinking through and writing appreciation triggers deep feelings of happiness and gratitude. It becomes so clear how thankful I am for the person. It’s not uncommon that when I sit to write appreciations I tear up. I see the other person more clearly, I see all the things I appreciate, and my eyes get watery.

The advice side is admittedly less emotional, but it’s still positive. I think through what impact the person was trying to have and come up with 1-3 things they could implement for next time that would improve their chances of achieving that impact.

I specifically like to frame the advice this way; “To be more impactful next time you should consider trying…”

Depending on the scenario and nature of the advice, I might do it 1-1 to a single person. If the advice is more general and could benefit the whole team, I would share that publicly (as in a Slack message to a team channel).

Now that we know a lot about appreciation and advice, let’s put it into practice this week!

As work and home events transpire this week, see if you can catch yourself going into feedback mode. With that awareness, pause and think of some appreciations instead. Did you love their effort? Their curiosity? Their diligence? Share your appreciations with the person(s) you’re working with. Even a simple, “Hey, I loved the colors you picked for that slide” goes a long way.

Follow up with advice, if applicable. Share 1-3 things you think would help the person achieve greater impact in the future.

As always, I love hearing from you. Let me know if you put this into practice this week and how it went for you!

Good luck and have fun,
Kevin