Turns out there is an ‘I’ in ‘team.’ Effective product leaders know the importance of giving credit to their teams for a job well done. But too often, we forget to accept some of the praise for ourselves. The risk we run in overlooking our own contributions can actually be detrimental to the team in the long run, says Jocelyn Miller.

In this episode of the Product Momentum Podcast, Sean and Paul catch up with Jocelyn Miller, who converted her product management experience at Google and Amazon to help professionals in product, tech, and UX create their dream careers.

“If you leave the ‘I’ out of ‘we,’” she says, “that’s when product managers are more likely to get burned out…when even the most effective leaders can become resentful. One of the things so many of us forget is that the more we are recognized and rewarded, the more we can bestow that recognition upon our teams, and the more we can elevate others,” Jocelyn adds.

As we learn what it is to be a product manager, she adds, we’re learning that it’s okay to think about ourselves in the team and to accept that it’s okay to think about ourselves outside the team, in our own lives.

Catch the entire episode to learn more from Jocelyn Miller, especially –

• How to balance team advocacy with self-advocacy
• Why leading a team requires confidence in both the vision and the path
• Modeling the behaviors you want to see in your team
• If the culture you’re in isn’t fun, it isn’t sustainable

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Paul [00:00:19] Hello and welcome to Project Momentum, where we hope to entertain, educate, and celebrate the amazing product people who are helping to shape our community’s way ahead. My name is Paul Gebel and I’m the Director of Product Innovation at ITX. Along with my co-host, Sean Flaherty, and our amazing production team and occasional guest host, we record and release a conversation with a product thought leader, writer, speaker, or maker who has something to share with the community every two weeks.

Paul [00:00:43] Hello. Today, Sean and I have the pleasure of chatting with Jocelyn Miller. She’s got a great approach to staying human in the product space. For much of our work, we get wrapped up in new processes or techniques and the scale can be huge. What I learned from our conversation is that sometimes when you’re stuck, what’s needed isn’t grand overhauls, it’s just to be present. And sometimes even the smallest change can have a disproportionate effect on how things feel. So here’s our conversation with Jocelyn Miller.

Paul [00:01:09] Hey, folks and welcome to the pod. Today we’re excited to be joined by Jocelyn Miller. Jocelyn helps professionals in product, tech, and UX to create their dream careers. She uses her background as a leader at Amazon and Google to help her clients make substantial increases in compensation, increase their impact as leaders, and do this with work-life balance. Jocelyn, welcome to the show.

Jocelyn [00:01:27] Thank you so much. I’m so excited to join both of you here, Paul and Sean, and really excited about our conversation today.

Paul [00:01:35] Absolutely. So jumping right in. We were just chatting about a story that you shared with a client of yours. And it sounds like this individual is trying hard to be a servant leader, trying hard to boost his team, promote their success, and be an advocate for all the good work that they do. And there’s this interesting paradox of the more we encourage that kind of behavior, which is good in product managers, the more we kind of forget to take our own credit. I was wondering if you could begin just by sharing this recent experience of how do you grow yourself as a leader without being a jerk?

Jocelyn [00:02:08] Absolutely. Yeah, it was great because one of the beautiful souls who I’m working with as a product leader, he was bringing this to me. Like, he basically wants to expand what he does. He’s capable of doing really high-level, great strategy work. He’s got this awesome plan for the organization, bringing it into a new area innovation-wise. But he was trying to figure out, “how do I sort of pitch this stuff without being like, ‘I’m the king of the hill, I do all the things, this is all just me here.'”.

Jocelyn [00:02:40] And it was really interesting because what we came to learn together was that he almost set himself up to not succeed. So, like, with all the best intent, but he sort of had this role. It’s like, “well, if anything goes wrong, I take the blame, and if everything goes right, it’s the team.” And that can be a beautiful thing. The sentiment is really wonderful and I understand that he’s trying to ensure that he can protect his team as that true leader, inspire them and really credit them for everything that they’re doing.

Jocelyn [00:03:17] And what we realized together was that he was losing sight of him in this equation, that he wasn’t even elevating himself to be equals with the other members of his team. So what we were really exploring is, how can we look at taking the appropriate level of credit? Not the like, “oh yes, I did what this hundred people did and it’s all me and just ignore them,” but rather, you know, “yes, they’re amazing, it has been wonderful, and, senior leadership, you know, these are the parts that I played and I want to continue to grow and expand and get promoted and recognized.” And, you know, p.s., right, one of the things that so many leaders forget is the more that you are recognized and rewarded, the more you can kind of bestow that upon your team, the more you can share that, the more you can elevate others.

Paul [00:04:12] Yeah. This actually reminds me of a bit of a sea story. I don’t share too much of these from my days in the Navy. But one of the stories that my first executive officer on my ship told, and he actually gave me a petrified dung beetle as a parting gift, is to exemplify dung beetle leadership. Basically, stuff rolls downhill unless you do something to stop it. And it sounds like this leader of this team is doing something similar where you’re stopping all of the negativity or taking all of the blame, but not necessarily looking out for your own. I think there is something to that that’s a worthwhile consideration, especially for this moment that the product community is in.

Jocelyn [00:04:46] Yeah.

Sean [00:04:47] Yeah. I’m a big fan of Peter Drucker, if you’ve read any of his books.

Jocelyn [00:04:51] Of course.

Sean [00:04:52] In the opening paragraph in one of his famous leadership books, he says, “the best leaders speak and think in terms of we.” And I think what you’re saying is it’s important to not leave yourself out of that we equation, like it’s important that we all get appropriate credit for the things that we’re doing. And that’s good. That’s that’s an important life lesson.

Jocelyn [00:05:10] Exactly. That’s 100% the case. And the thing beyond that and just thinking about this client in so many situations is, just as you said, Sean, when you leave the I out of that we, well, then you’re more likely to get burnt out. Then you’re more likely to get resentful. Then you’re more likely to start questioning, “well, why am I not the director or the senior director?” “Why am I not being rewarded and recognized at a certain point?” And the unfortunate reality of that is that it’s often because you forgot to put you in the we. It’s because, you know, that senior leadership, if you’re not telling them, if you’re not advocating for all of you, yourself included, well, they’re not going to really know which part you played. Like, they’re not going to just discern from the mess of goodness, “oh, wait, you’re actually the starter of this, you’re the one who’s really pushing this forward in so many ways.” And so it’s like you’re doing a disservice to the we, to the team, to not claim the appropriate spot. Again, not the, “it’s all me and forget them,” but, “I’m among all of us.”

Sean [00:06:20] Yeah. You know, pulling on this thread a little bit, I have this belief system about great product leaders. You know, we’re building things that don’t exist yet. So there’s like a lot of unknowns. If you’re going to step into that space and produce something that you don’t know whether or not it’s going to work until you actually put it in the wild and see it working, it requires a significant amount of confidence. It requires, like, the ability not only to see what’s there and what’s possible, but to get other people to step into that possibility to create this thing. And sometimes even architecturally, like, we don’t know how we’re going to do that. So we have to figure out how to get creative, how to get outside of our comfort zone, to try new things, and experiment with new technologies and experiment with new ways of doing things. And that’s exciting work, but it requires confidence. There’s no way around that. And we’ve talked about this in the past, Paul and I significantly, the Dunning Kruger effect. Like, we all have an unconscious bias about how competent we actually are. And I think what great leaders do is, to some extent, they recognize that sort of gap between how competent we actually are and how competent we need to be to produce this thing in the world.

Jocelyn [00:07:23] Yeah, I mean, I love what you bring up about that confidence that’s needed. Because whether you’re looking to expand your level of leadership, bring more people into a team, or even switch positions, in a sense, what I always say to people is, “if you’re not confident in this, well, how in the heck are you going to get anyone else on board?” Right? If the leader is like “I don’t know, maybe it’ll be good, maybe it’ll be horrible, let’s just throw the dice.” Then that’s not really going to get everyone moving forward. Versus if you’re like, “Hey, I know that we can do this; I know that this is at least worthwhile.” Even in a sense, going with your point of, you know, we’re building things that we don’t know yet. There’s so many unknowns. Is it desirable? Is it feasible? Is it viable? But even being that leader who’s like, “look, even in if our initial thing we find a flaw, we find there’s something not quite feasible, great; we’re going to learn that and then we’re going to shift it so that we’re still going to win.” So really leading is like that confidence not only in the outcome, but also in, “look, we’re going to go in this direction; I believe in us and where we’re going, and if something shifts along the way, we’ll adapt together and we’ll still win.”

Paul [00:08:39] Amazing. I think one of the things that this is reminding me of is an article that you co-wrote recently with Barry O’Reilly, and it talks about this model within teams and getting into a flow state and solving problems. And not just solving the problems and creating things that don’t exist, but helping those teams to gel and helping to shift the strategic vision concepts that we know and love and bumper sticker on our walls and love to infuse into our products, but there is a because or a why comment that’s missing in a lot of our metrics and our goals. So I wondered if you could unpack just a bit about not just how that model works for framing questions differently and being more agile as organizations, but also, what are those attributes of teams that are doing the thing that you were just alluding to?

Jocelyn [00:09:22] To even go to the underpinning there of really starting with why and the motivation. You know, to put it in a different way, I’ve never seen someone look at a goal, even a very large goal, like we’re going to increase this by 50%, 200%, 300%, I personally haven’t found that that’s quite enough to get people consistently excited. Like that, really, you know, understanding the even deeper, okay, “well, what does this mean? Does this mean we’re going to dominate a market? Does it mean we’re going to serve people at a deeper level than they’ve ever had before?”.

Jocelyn [00:10:00] And for many people, what’s really going to get them going, like, for example, so much great tech and, you know, machine learning and data science is happening in the health space. So, you know, you can look at it as we’ve got a 97.8% accuracy rate of detecting images. Blah, blah, blah. Or, and again, great stuff, but for like that motivation, that why, what really I see tends to drive people is really understanding that full implication of, “look, when we’re looking at a cancer screening, like, we’re able to save this many more lives because we are detecting these things so much sooner and like moms and dads are returned home to their family based on the work that we do.” And when you’re at that level of why and you look at every percentage point and you’re like, “Oh my God, that’s like more people that now get to live and thrive.”

Paul [00:10:58] Great, love it. I think that’s a metric that we look at in time-saving, you know, for building a platform as a service. If we’re getting folks home, it might not be that dramatic as a cancer patient living longer or seeing their family, it might be at your kid’s soccer game that you might not otherwise have been able to. So I think big and small, that vision correlation with the why is really going to connect the team with that success outcome. I think that’s really powerful.

Sean [00:11:22] Yeah. And in the pre-call, you had mentioned the term target fixation, right? You get target fixation on those hard metrics. And they’re important, like, they’re important metrics to know that we’re actually adding value. But really, the motivating pieces lie in the narrative.

Jocelyn [00:11:35] Mm-hmm.

Sean [00:11:36] …About, you know, what it is we’re here to do, and we’re here to make people’s lives better with our products and services. I love that.

Jocelyn [00:11:42] Yeah, 100%. And I do want to say I totally appreciate not everything is the immediate life or death. And at the same time, it’s like, “but what was the purpose of all the life?” Right. Is it to just, you know, click buttons? I mean, I remember years ago when I was working on an application when Google bought DoubleClick, which was a video ads platform that was the top in its day. And at that particular point, it was very advanced in the business, but the tech like only worked on Internet Explorer, you couldn’t press the back button, it was just like, so many hours were spent, you know, just based on these like subtle but like quite problematic technical limitations.

Jocelyn [00:12:21] So it’s like, where do we want human creativity and time spent? Is it on the PTSD experience of, “Oh my God, never press the back button. It could really ruin this whole thing,” or, you know, do we want them spending the time where it’s like, look, get these ads in the system, get these things flowing, you know, get people connected with things that they’re interested in so that they can be more creative, so that they can be, whatever it is, more entertaining. Getting back to the soccer games and the life that you wanted to lead, or even getting outside, like, going back to that initial leader, I mean, part of his path is not just him becoming part of the we, but it’s even just getting outside every day, right? Seeing his wife and kids. Like, you know, just those moments will totally shift your perspective.

Paul [00:13:09] Yeah. Go touch grass once a day.

Jocelyn [00:13:11] 100%.

Paul [00:13:12] I think there’s a need for product managers to think about themselves in the team, but there’s also a need for product managers to think about themselves in their lives, which I think is where you’re going. And, you know, there’s a career cycle that’s started to, I think, formalize in the community recently over the past decade or so. But not a lot has been really well written or researched into how this virtuous cycle of a career can feed back into our goals. And I was talking to somebody recently about how your product manager goals are allowed to be building in the life you want for your family. You don’t have to be on 24-7. You don’t have to be product obsessed all the time. You’re allowed to have this career in order to enable sort of a backwards looking, an inward-looking facet of your career. And I was wondering if you could expand a bit on some of the thoughts that you’ve started to put to paper about how you exchange this impact with the life that you want to lead.

Jocelyn [00:14:02] Yeah, I mean, it’s funny and I know we discussed this a bit and part of me is like, if people are like, “Hey, I want a book on this, feel free to write it because I do think it’s kind of overdue,” and I’ve been thinking about it for a while. But one of the things that I find really interesting… So just to disclose some things personally, I’ve been using OKRs personally for quite some time. And really some of this virtuous cycle comes back to, especially for product people, there are so many great methodologies that we have in product that are completely applicable to life. So it’s like, what if I product managed my career and my life, even? And like some people get to the product managing of the career, seeing that they’re going to need to sort of set the vision, take ownership, understand the outcomes, like in that realm.

Jocelyn [00:14:50] But then there’s this beautiful expansion of that to your overall life. Like, what is this vision that you have for yourself, your family, your experience? Like, not even everyone is going to want to have a family. Maybe they just want to travel the world, like, check off all that bucket list, want to experience so many different things. And that too is really necessary. Because to your point, what I often say, you know, this whole idea of, you can’t be 100 percent all the time, like on-call or product obsessed all the time. It’s like, we’re not assembly line workers and even those should have been treated better. But that’s not what we’re doing here, right? We’re looking to improve other people’s lives. And in a sense, I almost want to go to a Gandhi, like, “be the change you want to see.” I mean, it’s like, do you want your clients and your users to be just 100% grinding or do you want to be helping them live expansively? Then start with you.

Sean [00:15:46] First of all, I love the concept of taking these product management principles and applying them to our own lives. There’s a lot to do there. But having worked at Amazon and Google, do you have examples of how you would tactically pull that into your team environment? Like that sort of balance and making sure that people are paying attention? Because I think the best leaders do have rich, full lives and they do balance well. And I think those that are overfocused on any one thing in their lives, you know, you tend to have all sorts of distortions that fall out of that.

Jocelyn [00:16:15] Mm-hmm.

Sean [00:16:16] So do you have any tactics you could recommend from your experience for product leaders?

Jocelyn [00:16:20] Yes, so many, Sean. So I love that. So it’s really interesting. I mean, there’s really so many, but a few that come to mind are really looking at, what is the culture that you want to have for your team, and then are you modeling it? Are you living it? Because, like, one particular way that leaders will often go wrong is they’ll be like, “Oh yes, I want to have work-life balance.” And then they’re like replying to emails over the weekends and at night and like all of the time and they’re texting you and, you know, all these things. “Oh, just one quick thing while you’re away, we realized we didn’t have this thing.” And meanwhile, your report is on vacation and it’s like, what are you doing? Or even if you don’t do it with your reports, but you do it yourself, right? You’re like checking in, “oh, I’m in Hawaii, but let me just dial into this one meeting.” Really understand. And it’s funny, now that I have kids and I have so many clients with kids, I’m like, really understand, what they’re looking at is not what you say, it’s what you do. And so what is the model you are setting? So that to me is like step one. There are other parts to this, but I want to pause first so I can see if you have any comments or questions on that.

Sean [00:17:32] I captured a quote that I wrote down: “be the product leader you want to see in the world.”

Jocelyn [00:17:37] Yeah.

Paul [00:17:38] Yeah. I think one of the things that you’re getting at, though, is endemic of a lot of the burnout that we’re seeing in the product community at large there is, I think, a trend of this omnifocus, omnipresence, always-on mindset, and people in the product community are passionate people. It’s not that they’re being forced to, we’re willing to do this. We want to see our product succeed. We want to see our team succeed. And that is, paradoxically, some of the things that are going to hinder the team if we don’t restrain ourselves and model that culture. So I think there’s a really powerful statement in there, for sure.

Sean [00:18:09] Yeah.

Jocelyn [00:18:10] And it’s funny. I want to like love and honor that ambition and drive and the polymath that tends to be a product person. And it’s funny, just hearing you describe that it reminds me of when I was a director at Zazzle. And with my team, I, you know, not shockingly, given that I’m a coach now, I have a coaching-type management style. So I would, you know, of course, go over with them the technical things that we needed to do for the product and manage our cross-functional teams and partner appropriately in all of this. But one strong thread that I always had with every direct report was, “Where do you want to grow and expand? What do you see as your next level or what do you want to experience in your life?” Because I know at the end of the day if you’re struggling to have your family or see your kids or whatever the case is, we’re not going to be doing this for very long. Right? Like, that’s going to burn you out. This isn’t going to work out.

Jocelyn [00:19:10] So I remember one of my reports who’s just lovely and I had brought her in to grow as a leader. One of the things she wanted to work on at a particular point was increasing her voice and her presence and the ability to go in and present to our executive staff and things of that nature. And so we went through and it’s like, well, you know, she was supposed to present and she’s saying she doesn’t feel prepared. And I’m like, “Okay, let’s go through that, you know, how much have you practiced?: And she’s like, “What?” And I’m like, “All right, you feel unprepared because you are not, you know, so let’s talk through how you do a practice.” And it was funny. A lot of it, though, was even just literally the ability to vocalize from her.

Jocelyn [00:19:51] And so at a certain point, she had this idea or somehow we came up with it together, I think, where she wanted to take literal voice lessons, like singing lessons. Which had this impact of like, you know, ability to speak up more easily at work, but also had this personal expansion component, this fun component. And I want to invite all the managers, and we’re talking about the team environment, like what can be fun? What can be something that, you know, maybe it’s got an element of, yes, growth in the workplace and has that tie, but also is just freaking cool? Like it’s something that’s going to break up the monotony, break of the day or, not that it’s super monotonous. Product management is sort of the opposite in a way.

Jocelyn [00:20:35] And I will say, I always think of her as like a major success story, because when I left, I said to her and another leader who I had brought on who was more junior at that point, I said, “Look, I’m creating a vacuum by leaving, you guys can come up and fill it, so I invite you to do so.” And each of them, the last I checked, which was not that long ago, they were still there five years later, having risen. And that is in large part because they have that base. They have the ability to live and expand and grow in the ways that they want while also being that leader for the team.

Sean [00:21:11] I love that. That reminds me of something I read that I took notes on from some of your writing in the past that great teams recognize that the real framework that they’re operating under is a framework of rapid learning and course correction. And one of the traits that you see in a lot of great teams and great leaders is they know when to break the rules. They know the rules and they know when to break them. And that’s a process that’s based upon learning and continuous growth. So I think that fits into this framework of, we got to keep growing our people. Sometimes, you know, know if you know enough about what you’re trying to do in the world, having good, solid guardrails is important, but knowing when and where it’s possible to stretch and break the rules a little bit is also valuable.

Jocelyn [00:21:49] Well, I mean, I have to admit, I’m a bit of a rule breaker myself… Um, no, but I mean, with that in mind, but I love the way you said it and it really is the way that I think about it. Like, know the rules. This is probably what leads me to be somewhat of a rule breaker. I’m like, I don’t even view it as breaking the rules. I view it as, “well, what are we trying to accomplish?” You know? And it wasn’t like we were not disclosing what we were doing or anything like that. It’s just, what are we trying to accomplish and what can get us there…

Jocelyn [00:22:17] I mean, I will say one of the things that I tend to look at for culture personally is fun. Like, I think if it’s not fun, it’s just not friggin sustainable. Like you’re not going to keep these people for three, five, maybe even more years if there isn’t something fun or fulfilling or something deeper than just checking the box. And so to me, and look, I’ve done Toastmasters, too. It’s great, right? Well, someone might say, “well, Toastmasters seems more fitting for, you know, public speaking improvements, and that’s more fitting for a corporate environment,” something along those lines. I’m like, look, let’s not be robotic. Like, let’s find ways that are really satisfying, are really expanding in multiple dimensions because that’s where the spice of life comes in. That’s where like memory even comes in. Like it’s much more memorable to be like, “Oh, now I can sing a song and I can speak clearly in our exec teams,” and not just, “Oh, I can do PowerPoint slides really well.”

Paul [00:23:17] Amazing. I think one of the things that I’m picking up in this whole thread for the past couple of minutes is that it’s ironic that in product circles, in product teams, as product leaders, it’s the humanity that’s often the first thing that gets lost. The irony is that it’s the humans that we’re building these products for. It’s these humans that we’re so passionate about improving the lives of and in the process, we often forget to think about the humans on the team and the humans that are ourselves at times. So I think there’s a really powerful thread in there. I really enjoyed this conversation so far and I think there’s a ton of stuff that I’d love to continue unpacking. But Sean, I hope there’s a nugget in here that you might be able to draw out for us. We’ve covered a lot of ground. Did you have anything that you captured that you wanted to sum up here?

Sean [00:24:00] I captured quite a few nuggets, eight to be precise. So here they are. Thanks for asking, Paul. First is that leaders should make sure to celebrate together with their teams and not leave themselves out. Number two is teams that celebrate together remain more adaptable. I can totally see that. Like, if you don’t celebrate together with your team, you might lose that sense of, “Why am I doing this?” And that’s really, I think that’s a really important nugget for product leaders to take away. Number three was that OKRs are awesome and useful, but they can lead to target fixation and these hard metrics aren’t as motivating as the story itself. So make sure not to lose the narrative and understand we’re doing this, to Paul’s point earlier, for people. And the people that we’re doing it for are important and that’s what’s going to get people up in the morning.

Sean [00:24:45] Number four, I love the concept of using things like OKRs and all of our product leadership tools around vision and things like that in your own personal life. Look at your own life and figure out, how can these tools be applicable to you? I think that’s a really interesting life lesson for product leaders. Number five, I love it when anybody pulls Gandhi into any conversation, so the whole concept of modeling, we know this is important and I do think we get so bogged down in our work as product leaders that we tend to forget that people are watching our own behaviors. And if we want to see great product leadership behaviors in the world, the first place to start is by modeling them ourselves.

Sean [00:25:21] Number six, love and honor the ambition and drive that comes with passionate product leaders. What you phrased as polymaths because most great product leaders are polymaths. I love that. But not at the expense of their own personal satisfaction, life, and happiness. And that goes back to the modeling piece. Number seven, grow your people. This is something we’ve talked about in a lot of different pods, and we believe this to be a critical part of intrinsic motivation. And self-determination theory from Ed Deci and Richard Ryan talks about this a lot. Like, if you lose focus on how your people are growing, not necessarily just in their role as a product leader, but in their lives, it’s a failure of leadership to not understand how people are growing. And lastly, don’t be afraid to stretch the rules a little bit. Make sure it’s fun. Because it’s really the stretching of the rules, the stretching of the boundaries, that enables rapid learning and might lead to that transformation that really sets your team apart from all the other teams. So that’s my summary. Thank you, Paul, for asking.

Paul [00:26:15] So Jocelyn, before we let you go, we have a couple of last questions. First, how would you define innovation? It’s something we ask of all our guests and I’m curious what that definition means to you specifically.

Jocelyn [00:26:26] So it’s interesting. I find that innovation has almost two flavors to it, and I want to kind of highlight that for a second. So some people view innovation as like straight up, net new, nothing like this has ever been seen before. And you can think of like in Elon, we’re going to Mars. Like God knows what that’s going to take, or even when we went to the moon, right? Things that were so far beyond what humanity thought was possible. So I feel like there’s that kind of definition of innovation. And sometimes that will overshadow what I think is an equally important either whether you want to call it definition or aspect of innovation, which is the continuous evolution. So, you know, things where it’s like you’re improving features, improving efficiency, expanding on different things that existed.

Jocelyn [00:27:29] And in a sense, you can kind of devolve either into the other, like, with a certain way of looking at the genesis of things and like nothing new under the sun but also like fire was a big thing for humanity. Right, like these different kinds of things that get introduced over time. But I really want to highlight those two things because I think sometimes, especially product people will get fixated on one and lose sight of the other. And that’s something that I always find really important to include both of those things. And I almost want to further say, every like a major crazy leap, like something that we’ve never even imagined, I want to invite everyone to notice that that is built on so much that came before, that really everything is truly continuous evolution and sometimes we just have a step change at a certain point with enough momentum or enough, like in biology, it’s often talked about as like an emergent property where so much comes together and then boom, like another level shows up. But both are essential to being amazing humans and expanding humanity.

Sean [00:28:44] I love that answer. Thank you for that. Last question, what are you reading these days?

Jocelyn [00:28:49] Oh, good question. I’m like, let me pull up my Audible because I will say I am an Audible junkie. And it’s funny, actually, because of the work that I do in personal development… Well, one thing I want to just like highlight a little which a little bit connects back to some things we talked about before. While we can take all these products, principles, and tools and apply them personally, I also find the reverse to be especially helpful, meaning there are so many tools in personal development and expansion that can absolutely apply back to the teams. So even your first two points in your synopsis, Sean, with the celebrating together. It’s like celebration is something that is essential in self-development and personal growth communities, but can often get missed in a corporate context. So there’s that virtuous cycle that can come between each side.

Jocelyn [00:29:51] And so with that in mind, some of the things that I’m looking at recently are Michael Singer, The Surrender Experiment. So a lot of that is really about, how do you have, you know, life happening? Or something that I’ll often talk about is wobbles. Like things that, “oh, that didn’t go the way that I was hoping.” Right, and like, you know, “the launch, the data, whatever, the customer is not happy.” “Oh, okay, now we’re at a wobble.” And how do you surrender to that? How do you have the emotions related to that and continue to grow and expand, you know, and really see all of that? And similarly, Byron Katie, Your Inner Awakening.

Jocelyn [00:30:30] So those are two that I’m looking at right in this moment, which are very similar to that theme. Because I will say, as an entrepreneur who coaches so many product people and having done product for so long, we tend to be so like invested in our work. There’s a lot of, you know, feelings that you go through on this sometimes roller coaster of, “it’s amazing… Oh God, that didn’t go well at all.” Like all of these, you know, ups and downs that you’ll experience. And so much of life, expansion, growth, even innovation is going to hinge upon you being able to allow the emotions to pass through, celebrate the ones that are great, allow for everything to just be an experience, and stay in the, great, “how do we use this? How can we better serve? How can we continue to grow and evolve from here?”

Paul [00:31:26] Wonderful. That’s amazing.

Sean [00:31:28] Great recommendations. I’m going to read them both.

Paul [00:31:30] Absolutely. Jocelyn, it’s been a pleasure talking to you today. Thank you so much for taking the time. It’s been a blast.

Jocelyn [00:31:36] Thank you so much for having me here. I’ve been so thrilled to talk with both of you. And I love that you got eight nuggets.

Sean [00:31:44] I got nine now. I captured life wobbles. Life wobbles, I think that whole concept, that struck me. So I can’t wait to read that book.

Jocelyn [00:31:53] Love it. Well, this has been totally fabulous and I really benefited so much from our conversation as well.

Paul [00:31:58] Thanks so much, Jocelyn.

Sean [00:31:59] Thanks, Jocelyn.

Paul [00:32:00] Cheers.

Paul [00:32:03] Well, that’s it for today. In line with our goals of transparency and listening, we really want to hear from you. Sean and I are committed to reading every piece of feedback that we get, so please leave a comment or a rating wherever you’re listening to this podcast. Not only does it help us continue to improve, but it also helps the show climb up the rankings so that we can help other listeners move, touch, and inspire the world, just like you’re doing. Thanks, everyone. We’ll see you next episode.