OG Tuesday Issue #214

💡 Do not forget to put on your virtual intelligence before your next Zoom interview.

🌍 Must orgs go ‘global’ to stay competitive in the future?

🚫 Why working women need to stop…hurting other working women.

🤖 This new AI capability has the potential to make day-to-day life a whole lot easier.

Never heard of it?

Even if you don’t know the label, you probably know the suboptimal workplace reality it refers to all too well: When members of a team possess potentially beneficial knowledge or information that never reaches the rest of the team.

This is a problem. It exacerbates other chronic, slightly broader workplace headaches, such as working in silos and communication flows that do no flowing whatsoever.

On the up side, some cases of unintentional quiet constraint can be spotted and resolved in a snap when/if…

A) Someone asks questions until the constrained information is released.

B) A clear and apparent consequence emerges to force out the constrained information, as modeled in this brief text exchange:

Person 1: Where r u?
Person 2: Lost 🤔
Person 1: How’d u get lost?
Person 2: Never sent me ur address
…
Person 1: Ohh, sry. Guess u need that huh? 😅

C) The constraint is really more ‘loud’ than ‘quiet.’ (And maybe also toxic!)

Constraint causes the most damage when its loud, obviously intentional, and obviously intended to demean or cause harm. Sometimes painfully so—as modeled in this slightly altered text exchange:

Person 1: Where r u?
Person 2: Lost 🤔
Person 1: Omfg  😡
Person 2: Never sent me ur address
Person 1: I shouldn’t have 2 spoonfeed u
Person 1’s closing text may seem a little justified, but it’s apparent intent to sting is also unignorable.

So yeah. This is a very tricky problem that can also be completely invisible.

• You don’t always see it happening. It’s challenging to even notice when a colleague might be constraining. There may be a few people out there who store their knowledge analog style—on paper and locked away in an actual vault, but for the most part, you can never see or know for certain if A) someone is truly constraining something and B) what on earth that something could possibly be.
• You don’t always think to look inward and see it happening in yourself. Even you, yourself, and you may have a hard time noticing and flagging your own constraining.
• The potential reasons behind inadvertent constraining are too numerous to process. Here are just a few examples that demonstrate why quiet constraint can be so hard to recognize and so easy to forget:
  • You never had a good opportunity to share the information.
  • You had the perfect opportunity to share the information, but then you completely forgot to do it.
  • You are aware of having the information, of course, but sharing it simply never crossed your mind.

Get more intel on confronting this tricky problem: WTF is quiet constraint? (Worklife)

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One TA reader is having a hard time leaving work…at work: My biggest challenge is thinking about work when I’m not at work.

This is definitely giving us one of those deja vu moments. This particular challenge is and may always be among the top issues plaguing workers.

Most of us accept that we have to work in order to live. Not all of us want to live to work but nevertheless have a hard time not doing that.

This biggest challenge is timeless, really.

Here are two timeless and totally doable tips from former TA issues around being more present in your life rather than your work:

Reframe your view of presence as an opportunity worth seizing.

This is TEDx Youth speaker Sammie Fries’s golden rule about being and staying present: “Remember that right now is an opportunity that you need to grasp.”

Sammie acknowledges that dwelling in the past or planning for the future is a practically universal tendency. However, being constantly tugged away from the present also makes people unhappy.

She urges listeners to accept the tendency in their thought patterns but also to take responsibility for disrupting them.

So the next time you’re talking to someone special and finding yourself making plans about what you’ll make for dinner and when you’ll squeeze in a trip to the grocery store, stop. Take a minute. Then leverage the enthusiasm you felt about planning, toward the simple pleasure of focusing on what you’re doing, right now.

For real, do quick daily exercises to strengthen the mental muscles that help you direct and fix your attention on life and not your to-do list.

Exercise: Take 5 to do absolutely nothing

• Dedicate just five minutes a day to doing absolutely nothing.
• Close your eyes and sit, stand, or lay in silence. Observe your thoughts, your breath, and your surroundings just for observation’s sake and not to change or influence anything.
• If your phone buzzes or your computer dings, remember that few things, practically no things, legitimately cannot wait for you to finish your 5 minutes of presence.

Exercise: Tap into joy you may not realize you experienced

• End each day by taking a few minutes to write about one experience or event from your day that brought you joy, satisfaction, fulfillment, insight, or really any positive association.
• Busyness may at times allow those moments to go unnoticed and unappreciated, which is why this exercise is so helpful for people already spread too thin: Instead of trying to find more time to enjoy life, it focuses on enhancing the satisfaction you get from enjoyable moments already built into your life.

Let’s talk about mind mapping—a strategy we all think sounds simple until we actually sit down to organize our thoughts. Suddenly, we realize our brains are a bit messier than we’d like to admit.

Here’s where mind mapping swoops in like a hero for the overworked and overwhelmed. The concept is easy: you start with one central idea and branch out into related concepts. But the magic? It allows you to visualize how those ideas connect, making even the most complex problems seem manageable.

So, what’s the big deal?

Mind mapping is a game-changer for teams looking to streamline brainstorming, organize tasks, and problem-solve faster. By laying everything out in a single space, you and your team can easily spot gaps, prioritize tasks, and break down big projects into bite-sized actions.

But it’s not just about structure—mind mapping also supercharges creativity. Instead of being stuck in linear thinking, it helps you expand in multiple directions, ensuring you don’t miss out on new, innovative solutions.

Our tool of choice: We swear by Miro’s Collaborative Mind Mapping Tool, which gives us the freedom to build out ideas, brainstorm in real-time, and add in visuals or notes on the fly.

So next time you’re staring at a blank page, give mind mapping a shot—you might be surprised at how much clearer things become.

“Experience is key, whether that be volunteer experience, interning or actual work experience—all of this helps you grow as a contributing member of the workforce.

Very early on just after graduating many moons ago, it was tough to find a job in my field, I faxed (yes faxed!) 20+ resumes to businesses asking for an opportunity to volunteer at their firm.

I not only secured a volunteer opportunity that was invaluable to my career, but was offered a job about 1-month in at this firm. I am now at a Director level in my career and still look for volunteer opportunities just because.”

— Lisa C. (Director, People & Culture).

📊 Pipedrive is a lightweight CRM we can get behind.

🎯 Psst…TikTok’s giving you $100 in ad credit when you spend $100 (perfect time to test some campaigns!).

📖 Buy Back Your Time by Dan Martell is your guide to taking back control and building the life you want.

🍬 Stock up on your Halloween candy stash (trust us, you’ll want extras).

🚨 Job Ops: Visit our job board here.