Self-Compassion and its parallels with the Agile Manifesto

In this profession, I believe there are many people who believe that being “mentally tough” is all about holding yourself accountable and seeing results.

It’s interesting because, I don’t think many people have really read the principles behind the Agile Manifesto and understood what they mean – and that some of the compassion that they give to others can actually be used to further their own abilities.

For example:

Build projects around motivated individuals.

Give them the environment and support they need,

and trust them to get the job done.

I think the key here is “motivated individuals”. You shouldn’t chew your teammate out over a mistake discovered in a retrospective – because very likely, if you were caught on call with the understanding they had – you could all be in that same exact situation. There’s also probably a lot going on that the context of hindsight makes pretty obvious. We should assume that we are all making the best decisions that we can with the conditioning of previous learnings and the data we have in front of ourselves.

So why then, do we chew ourselves out over small mistakes? Well, the problem can often be that we aren’t extending the same compassion inwardly toward ourselves that we extend to the people we interact with.

Getting back to my initial thesis, many engineers will credit this mental toughness as the reason why they have gone so far in their career. Yet – this might actually be the thing holding them back the most.

What would happen if instead of bringing home the point for the fortieth time that you messed up, you instead gave yourself the mental headroom by treating yourself like a good friend who just made a mistake? Maybe you’d bounce back from this mistake a little faster.

It turns out that this voice is a highly reactive piece of feedback, and we too often give it immediate credibility and act on it in the moment. Yet, as we have seen in our retrospectives – that might be actually the worst time to make an assumption and act upon it! This gets at one of the next tenets in the Agile Manifesto:

At regular intervals, the team reflects on how

to become more effective, then tunes and adjusts

its behavior accordingly.

Because the benefit of retrospection is that we learn from our mistakes, and we get to challenge the assumptions we make in the moment – this really benefits teams. The same thing can be applied in our own lives. Inner reflection on our critic is like the kryptonite for this particular cycle. And – it turns out, after listening to Kristin Neff on the most recent Ten Percent Happier podcast, the science tends to agree with this. There are some even better points in here about the conditioning that our society has given us that makes this cattle prod particular prone to biases that don’t serve us well (much like any algorithm made by humans). If you have a few minutes, I’d highly recommend checking out her interview on the podcast.