Fierce Encouragement

Compassion in the Code

• Mark Walker • Season 2 • Episode 55

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We trace a rough week of illness into a clear practice for staying human in fast, high-pressure tech. Breath, intention, and one small courageous act become a repeatable way to widen the gap between stimulus and response and lead with heart.

• gratitude for health and the fragility of normal breath
• keynote anxiety reframed as a search for heart in tech
• questions for leading with courage amid uncertainty
• burnout in startups and the cost of constant doing
• reconnecting features and roadmaps to human outcomes
• the contrast between doing and being
• a micro reboot: five breaths, one word, one act
• expanding the gap between trigger and response
• bringing compassion into teams, families, and everyday moments


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SPEAKER_00:

Hey everybody. This is Mark. I hope this finds you well, and this is the podcast called Fierce Encouragement. Honestly, it's uh been a difficult past week. Uh I've been barely able to breathe. Um I got back from my seven days of meditation retreat in Seattle, and honestly, just having a fever, having a pounding head, um, and finally getting on some antibiotics is just uh, well, it's helped me a lot, but that sinus pressure was kind of like a sledgehammer between my eyes, just not able to sleep. Um, and uh have been hesitating to get a new episode out there. So I'm just letting this one rip. And if it sounds a little bit off uh the cuff or shooting from the hip, I'm gonna let it run. I think it's funny, though, how we lose uh gratitude or how fast that gratitude and that appreciation for our body disappears when um our health kind of turns against us. I know in the middle of my illness, we can start praying for that feeling of normalcy again, for maybe uh an unencumbered breath, or even just for a quiet night of sleep. So that kind of got me thinking. Obviously, I'm feeling better, and I hope you all are doing well out there. I'm really appreciative for the doctors and the people that have helped me kind of get back to health here. Uh I'm on a few days of antibiotics, so I have a lot to be thankful for. But this got me thinking as I came into this episode that, oh crap, I got a keynote uh presentation that's coming up at the University of Wisconsin that I was hired for. Now it's for some IT leaders and a lot of people that uh do a lot of heavy lifting for the medical side of IT. And the leaders, gosh bless them, they've reached out this week as I kind of still am on my healing journey, but they reached out and asked me, hey, what's your topic? We wanted to get some materials out there. And then I realized, oh crap, I don't know. But maybe that's kind of the deeper point here, and that's what I felt today as I unpack this, as I kind of wrote about it a little bit. So I want to ask you, maybe in your work, but how do you bring heart and compassion into your tech work? How do you bring that into your work? How do you stay more human when the machine or the work machine or the culture that kind of subsumes us when it kind of keeps speeding up? You know, we can feel that with the onset of AI. Everybody's talking about it, but it feels like, you know, the economic machine or the gears that were kind of grinded, Mikshween, it feels like we can kind of just be lost in that. Maybe I could just ask you, how do you lead from a place of courage when everything feels uncertain? So whether you might be leading a tech team or leading and managing people in your own department, or even raising kids, or working on your code, or working on yourself and your own mind states and your mindset, I think it's the same. I think the question kind of comes back again and again. How do we stay awake in the middle of all this noise? When our health is failing us, or when we feel overwhelmed by work in life. How do we stay awake in the middle of all that noise? And it's a hard question. It's not something we're going to answer. There is no right or wrong answer, but practicing it, getting clear on it, and asking ourselves that with journaling or just meditating and sitting with it. So I was really lucky enough this week, even though I'm on my healing journey. I had uh a wonderful virtual coffee chat with a tech coach. Now he's spent over 10 years in startups, uh, doing everything from accounting all the way up to product ownership and management. But it was wonderful to connect with him. He spoke about the burnout and the drain uh that can come from being in tech and kind of being in that startup mentality all the time. Everybody's willing to burn both ends of the candle, um, but kind of miss the deeper point of managing our energy and managing our lives in a really bigger way. And I guess that's where we discussed how so often modern technical startups or even IT departments can have that drive towards releases and getting new features in or creating um new products that solve amazing problems that people are having. But we start to disassociate or disconnect from the heart or the compassion or the results that it brings into people's lives. I have another amazing client in my practice, and I have a lot of amazing clients, but there's something that really resonates here for me, and it's this, well, it's this idea of how we crave results or outcomes in our life. We want the money, we want the status or the role. Maybe we want the healthy outcome, right? Like myself, but we do everything that goes counter to it, it runs counter to it. We avoid working on an inner stillness. We avoid those breathing practices, the slowing down practices, maybe unplugging at a certain time of the day so we can be 100% fully present with our family. So many high achievers and kick-ass leaders that I've worked with crave those big results. They want leadership coaching in that way. But inside, they're still a mess because they almost avoid their inner energy and their inner work from that standpoint of stillness and presence and being. You know, there's this big contrast between doing and being, if you kind of pause and consider that for a moment. You know, who we are, and we've been trained from birth on this, is to do, to achieve, to go, go, go. We even say to our kids, you know, what are you doing right now? What did you get done today? What did you achieve at school? But rarely, or very not as often do we ask, who are you being while you do it? Who where's your energy at as you enter that room? How can you create a literal energetic heart space for your kids or your employees or your team? Taking that breath before responding. And I kind of laughed today during the session with my client. We've been taught to do do, but rarely to be. We've been taught to crap all over ourselves and do crap, do do, but rarely just to be present. And yet I think that's the biggest place where it takes real inner courage. When we practice being, that's where the strength comes from and the courage needs to come forth. So this is the work. This is the deeper, the biggest part of our work that we kind of just rush past. We want more hacks and activities and you know, structure and journaling techniques, uh, whatever, you know. We got we can find a whole library full of books on business productivity and all those things that we crave. But if we kind of look below that, look uh a surface or a level two below that, it's just activity, it's more doo-doo. So in your next moment of doubt, I just ask this pause. Feel that breath move through you. And notice what is alive in your body in this moment. Maybe it's that heart and that heat in your chest. Maybe it's that uh clogged nasal passage. Maybe it's a uh maybe it's a tightening or some tingling in your throat. And really, none of this is failure. It really isn't. It's just where we're at right now. It's kind of like a little feedback loop. And this is really the system, our nervous system, and we're asking ourselves, can I just be a little more present and stay a little more present today or in this moment? That is the work. It's a simple practice, it's profound, and it doesn't seem like it should do anything, but it will change your life. And this is really like a micro reboot practice. Five of these breaths, one word of intention, like I got this, I'm gonna get through this. And just one simple act of courage. Maybe it's reaching out to that uh new client, maybe it's getting that one email sent, maybe it's that one task you'd like to get off your list. So, yeah, we can practice that. Five breaths, just notice where you're at. Have that one word ready that anchors you. Maybe it's something like steady. And then do that one act. Something small, something real, maybe something really kind, even to yourself or those around you. So I really appreciate you uh dealing with my uh foghorn nose today. I'm not sure how this is coming across. I'll probably laugh at it when I listen back to it. But just to kind of close this up and just to stay fierce and warm on all this, it is really about training for those big storms in those smallest moments. And what I mean by that is we can train for those big events, those illnesses, those moments of loss in our lives, when we face those smallest moments, that uh kind of space between the event and our response, or as Victor Frankel talks about it, between stimulus and response, there is a little gap. And that's where the real work happens for us. And there's a lot of people that don't even know this, so that the fact that you're sitting here listening to this, and maybe you're confused by it, but just re-listen to this. Find that stimulus, that trigger, that activation point, and then feel that emotional response in your nervous system. It might seem like they're fused together, but there is a gap in there. And the more we can expand that gap, the more our growth and our spiritual growth or our esoteric growth and our freedom comes online. It really isn't in spreadsheets or goals or deadlines. It's not in, you know, our forecasting or even in AI. It's in that pause that we give ourselves. I just want to end with this. You are great. You are amazing. You are practicing something that a lot of the population just doesn't even take the time to look at. And you can practice this even right now, maybe you have been, so I applaud that. But don't take your health and don't take your breath or your heart, uh, your heart space for granted. It's easy to, or taught to, just to tune out. I just want to encourage you to be courageous, to fiercely encourage yourself, maybe enough to be disliked at your job or with your kids, just to slow down, just to listen with a little more presence, to listen a little better. And this is how we can bring compassion into our tech worlds as I go into uh structuring my talk, but even to our families, even into the car, a car ride as we uh ride back from the sports game with our kids, or even in the grocery line. This is how we can stay human in this big machine that we kind of find ourselves in. So, this is Mark Walker. Thank you, thank you for listening today. This has been Fierce Encouragement, and I appreciate you sharing your time with me. Have a great day and a great week. Talk soon. Bye bye.