2 The Courage to Live Your Values

In the first chapter, you went through a process to discover your values. To live your values on a daily basis, you have to develop some momentum. Set yourself up for success, and learn how to get the courage to set and defend your boundaries.

The Cost of Living Your Values

You learned in the previous chapter that your self-esteem shrinks whenever you don’t live according to your values. Unfortunately, living according to your values is not always easy. Let me give you a hypothetical example.

Imagine you live in a relationship, where you two deeply care for each other. Suppose your significant other is about to develop an allergic reaction to a medicine, and you need calcium urgently to calm down this reaction. You are supposed to show up in the office by 9AM every day, so you call the office that you would arrive late because of an emergency. You sprint to the pharmacy and secure the calcium you need. Once the emergency is over, you arrive at work twenty minutes late.

Seemingly, everyone is settled. A few minutes later, your boss asks you to go with him to a meeting room. He went on a rant: “There are certain rules in this company. And these rules must be respected by everyone, without exceptions.” He told me that I violated these rules and he is verbally warning me that this is the last time he accepts that.

At the end of this paragraph, stop reading this book for a moment, and start thinking about your reaction. How would you respond? Either write down your response in your journal, or record your sound with your phone.

I am not kidding. Do this exercise, you will benefit from this.

Welcome back and congratulations for doing this exercise. I will reveal my thoughts at the end of this chapter, just before the reading list.

Let’s jump ahead a few weeks. Imagine you played by the rules and came in a bit before 9. Around 10:30, the head of HR asks you where your boss is. There is a candidate waiting for him to start an interview. You tell the head of HR, that you have no idea where your boss is. He appears half an hour later. You approach him and tell him, “HR was looking for you, she said it was urgent. Where were you?”

Your boss becomes speechless for a few seconds, then he mumbles, “I had an errand”. He tries to establish connection with the candidate again, but fails. After some silent swearing, he continues work. You get a sense that he was caught off-guard, and he completely forgot about the interview.

All of a sudden, two sentences come to your mind. “There are certain rules in this company. And these rules must be respected by everyone, without exceptions.”

What would you do? Write down your actions.

Fast forward another few weeks. Your boss is getting some heat. If you quit, he knows his project will fail, and that would have major consequences on his reputation. You are expecting guests who came to your city for the first time. According to your calculations, you could pick them up, escort them to your place, and come back to work by taking a lunch break of 1.5 hours. The rules set by your boss state that the lunch break is up to 1 hour long.

The day before the event, you inform your boss in writing ccing HR that your lunch break may take half an hour longer than usual, so you’ll come in half an hour earlier that day. He does not respond.

Just before you were about to leave for your break, your boss comes out of the blue and asks you to come back in an hour, because he wants to assemble a meeting with your team. What would you do in this situation? Write your answers down.

How do you feel about your decisions you took in these three scenarios?

If you are satisfied, chances are, you took some conflicts. Some of you might have resigned on the spot right after the first scenario. Actually, I respect you for your decision if it comes out of your values and beliefs and not due to ego problems.

Of course there are some situations where you have no other choice but to obey. In a war in the 19th Century, you did not have the luxury of defying orders, unless you wanted to face death penalty.

Therefore, in your situation, your answers might be different than my answers. In the short run, you may be forced to enter into compromises. In the long run, it is your responsibility to find colleagues or clients who enable you to work on your terms.

Remember, conflicts are sometimes inevitable. To successfully navigate around these conflicts, you need confidence.

Hacking True Self-Confidence in Your Career

A cornerstone in our career plan is self-confidence. The ability to feel that we are enough. The ability to feel that we are worthy of achieving any goals we want.

Confidence is a complex topic. Developing true self-confidence is a lifelong journey. In this section, you will just take one step. You will feel confidence in your abilities by discovering your character strengths.

You see, most people lack confidence, because they don’t live according to their values.

I can still recall one of my interviews as a fresh graduate. I had many options, but most of these options didn’t want to pay above a junior developer salary range. There were a few exceptions: consulting companies and some smaller companies that paid half of the salary in cash, without paying taxes and social security on the amount in cash.

This money trick bothered me a lot back then. I found taxes just a constant factor in the profits of a business. I reasoned, if a business is growing exponentially, it is their best interest to pay their developers legally. Some companies even invented a weird term for paying half the salary in cash. It was the “moving” part of the salary, as it moved undercover in an envelope.

I continued searching for options, but no-one wanted to bid for me in the range I wanted to be in. So I gave a company with the “moving” salary another chance. I went in the office, and started talking to employees there, discovering what projects they were working on.

I can still recall a demotivated employee telling me about the work he was doing, using a lot of hardcore terminology and abbreviations I didn’t understand. As I looked around, none of the developers wanted to change the world in there. I just couldn’t imagine myself spending my next years in a dark office lit by neon lights, surrounded by demotivated people.

Eventually, I turned down the offer at an expense of settling for less money.

In hindsight, I found out that other fresh graduates were more successful than me in convincing their employers to pay them more. Whenever it came to the salary situation, I clearly felt uncomfortable. I wanted more money, but I felt I didn’t deserve it. So people didn’t place trust in my abilities.

In the job market, your grades do not matter. You have to convince your potential employers that they make a great deal by hiring you.

I studied and got good grades, because my mother conditioned this habit into me. I literally lived the life of a zombie who had no clue what his life should be about.

You may ask, what got me out of this miserable situation.

Sometimes I got into a deeply immersive experience Mihály Csíkszentmihályi¹ calls flow. Flow is a state when you are deeply immersed in an activity to the extent that you lose track of time. You stop being self-conscious. You just take action without considering how you are perceived and how other people judge you. In a flow state, you are naturally charismatic.

Flow experiences help you demonstrate your values to the fullest. When you are in flow, you have everything you need to learn from this book or any course on charisma. Charisma is in you, as you are, without any changes. It is you.

You don’t have to feel in a certain way or act in a certain way. You don’t need to learn anything to be charismatic. There are situations in life when anyone can be charismatic. Flow states help you experience this.

When you are in flow, you are naturally confident. You are unstoppable.

Flow experiences helped me break through some of my limitations and give meaning to my life. I started enjoying some activities, and started controlling my focus.

Once I got control over my focus and values, I was more in alignment with what I wanted in my life.

You can experience the same effects on a daily basis. In the rest of this book, you will learn how to express your values better through seeking experiences that cause you flow. As an added bonus, you will enjoy these experiences more than your regular activities at work.

Exercises

Most of us spend some time in depressive states, feeling frustration, anger, resentment, or grief. Remember, focus is power. By shifting focus, you can empower yourself.

1. Name a few things you really enjoyed and loved doing before the event happened that made you lose confidence in your own abilities.
2. Describe these events in the next ten minutes. Go on a rant of how great life was before this event happened. Give yourself permission, don’t hold yourself back. If you are in a place where you are alone, you are not self-conscious, and no-one listens to you, talk out loud. If not, you can just write in your journal, and do the talking afterwards.
3. Find one activity you could really enjoy even if you are lacking confidence right now. If you can’t find any, you will surely find something you can get deeply immersed in. This can be jogging, studying, a captivating movie, or even meditation. Anything that helps you experience some flow.
4. Notice how confident are you while doing that activity.

Confidence, Ego, and Narcissism

As I got stronger, I started asserting more space. People started listening to me more. As I started thinking of myself as an important person, my self-esteem got higher, and I got confident.

Being narcissistic does not have much to do with being confident. Narcissism is a personality disorder, where you see a distorted image of yourself, and you want to be like your image. In the mean time, you live the path of self-destruction, as this false life slowly poisons your everyday life.

Asserting yourself means that you give yourself permission to pursue what you want from your life and your career. Asserting yourself means that you don’t have to live your life according to the expectations of others.

You have your own character strengths, so the expectations of other people may not apply to you.

Once you stop pleasing other people at the expense of your own needs and desires, your life will be free.

This is why we will continue with your values in the next section.

Exercises

1. Do you feel shame around being confident? Describe this shame in detail.
2. Are your negative feelings about being confident true, or they are just nonsense you poison yourself with? Support or deny your feelings about being confident.

The Courage to be Vulnerable

Now you know that narcissism is not a sign of true self-confidence.

Confidence is not about behaving like a jerk. Confidence is rather the side-effect of a healthy self-esteem.

When you don’t work on your challenges and you don’t live according to your values, you stop respecting yourself, and therefore, your self-esteem shrinks. This is an unconscious process.

Imagine your self-esteem as the immune system of your mind. If you don’t respect yourself, you will poison your mind with negative self-talk.

Working on our problems is often hard, because life is far too comfortable even when we make absolutely no effort. Survival in today’s world is not a challenging task at all. Most people choose the path of lower resistance. This is why today’s society suffers from low self-esteem.

It may happen that you work on your problems on a regular basis. Yet, the results are not there yet.

Hard work is often not enough. The harder you work, the more likely it is that you don’t want to come across as weak. As you start hiding your weaknesses and insecurities, you sabotage your own progress. This is why vulnerability helps you. You will not only get allies in the form of others helping you. Your biggest ally is yourself. By being vulnerable and by not caring about how you are perceived, you raise your self-esteem, and you focus on solving your problems instead of hiding them.

Many software developers tend to just nod and listen even when they have no clue what the other person is talking about. After all, we don’t want to be judged for not knowing something, right?

The vulnerable solution is, you confess that you ask for clarification even at the expense of the other person figuring out that there is a fundamental flaw in your understanding.

No-one knows everything. Therefore, others will understand you when you are vulnerable. They may even support you.

When I was really down due to a personal issue, I called out my lead and told him, listen, I am facing a life crisis right now. I will do my best at work, but don’t expect miracles until I resolve my issues. I thanked him for his understanding, and got maximum flexibility from him to resolve my issues.

Had I attempted to fake confidence, my boss would have discovered that something was temporarily wrong with my focus.

During my exams and job interviews, I always admitted when I didn’t know something, and asked the cooperation of my interviewer. I put in my thoughts, my interviewer put in some hints about what he wanted to hear, and the result was an enjoyable conversation. Vulnerability made me relatable, because no-one knows everything.

It takes a lot of courage to be vulnerable. Most people choose faking confidence instead.

Exercises

1. Recall three situations in your life when your insecurities made you fake confidence, and you got caught.
2. Recall three situations in your life when the act of being vulnerable resulted in other people supporting you.

Integrity

You live your life with integrity if you live according to your values. You develop a moral code, describing how life works for you.

For instance, if leadership is an important skill for you, you will not wait for others to act when you can act too. You will also develop your leadership abilities even when no-one is watching.

Once it was Friday late afternoon. I was about to leave the office, when the managing director approached me with an urgent problem. As I was the only one around, I had to be the one who would fix the error in the system of another team.

My MD told me, it is all right to just kill the process that is currently running to avoid exposure to a security vulnerability.

I could have simply shut down the process and go home in ten minutes. Something was fishy in this story though, so I chose to explore it.

It turned out that the security vulnerability my MD had described simply didn’t exist in the system. Once I got this suspicion, I could have just emailed the MD that the threat was not there, and my reasoning would have been defendable.

I chose to go on and prove the assumption instead. This took me another half an hour. Eventually, it was crystal clear to me that the security vulnerability was a false alarm. I informed my MD, and went home.

My MD didn’t read the proof. I worked on the proof because it was the right thing to do given the severity of the problem.

If you think of yourself as an engineer, a professional, you do your best even on Friday evening, and even near the end of the last day of your contract. Even when no-one is watching.

Exercises

1. Identify three areas in your life, where you need more discipline to commit to a decision. You may combat your addiction to social media, or lack of sports, or lack of being social.
2. Think about some situations when you had a chance to experience an invisible victory, but you didn’t. Write down how you felt afterwards.
3. Set yourself up for success. Schedule three situations for each day in the upcoming three weeks, when you will do something that would result in an invisible victory. We are designing a new habit here, so you will need the commitment to follow through. Three times 21 small victories over the next three weeks. Write down how you feel each day.
4. After these three weeks, reflect on the changes in your life. Did these invisible victories make you a more charismatic person?

Exercising Your Boundaries

Values and integrity are great in theory. Unfortunately, we have no tools yet to put theory into practice. Therefore, it’s time to learn about personal boundaries.

To exercise your boundaries, you have to believe that your opinion is important. Once you truly believe this, you will not chicken out from entering into conflicts when someone tries to violate your boundaries.

What are examples for boundary violations at the workplace?

1. Your boss expects you to show up at his private party.
2. Your CEO orders you to vote for a political party.
3. Your product manager expects you to commit to a deadline without agreeing to the scope of the project, then he extends the scope after you agreed to the deadline, and keeps telling everyone that you committed to the deadline.
4. Your colleague never double checks his work, and expects you to take care of his flaws.
5. Your boss expects you to lie to management about the status of your project.
6. Your colleague sets you up for failure, then spreads lies about your performance to management so that he gets the promotion instead of you.

These boundary violations have one thing in common: people expect you to take responsibility for their own actions.

Remember as long as you live: it takes two people for a boundary violation to succeed.

For instance, if you value honesty, you will not lie to management even if your boss orders you to. If you get fired, so be it. Software developers are still in high demand, you will find a job, where you don’t have to lie.

You may say: “Jim, I understand you have reasons to blur the truth. At the same time, honesty is an important value in my life. Therefore, I am not in a position to cooperate with you. Please leave me out from the meeting.”

This hypothetical answer defends your boundaries by asserting yourself in a vulnerable way. Vulnerability entails some form of a self-disclosure. You don’t explain yourself. You just show your values, and let the other person deal with his emotions. After all, your boss is responsible for his emotions, not you.

A brief side-note about bullying. I have more than ten years of experience in this field, unfortunately from the receiving end. Count me an expert. It always takes two to tango. It took me more than ten years to learn that I cannot let other people violate my boundaries. Once I started defending my boundaries, the same people who had been bullying me for years, stopped.

Defending your boundaries is the most important habit in this chapter. Spend a lot of time on identifying how your boundaries are violated, and how you react.

Exercises

1. Identify events in your life when you allowed other people to violate your boundaries. Make sure at least two of these events are related to your profession.
2. Formulate a constructive message for each event and practise it in front of the mirror until you strongly believe what you say.
3. Start small and plan in some small victories in your life when you defend against boundary violations in situations that don’t matter to you. One example is when someone jumps in the queue in front of you. Or you don’t pay a tip when you are not satisfied with a service. It is important that you experiment in a low risk environment.
4. Think of situations where you could have violated the boundaries of other people. Examine what you said and did and change your behavior.

We will stop here with exercises on boundary violations. I cannot guarantee that after reading these two chapters, you will learn how to disagree with your boss when defending your boundaries.

For instance, if you are in debt right now, and you live in a small city where employment opportunities are scarce, disagreeing with your boss might not be the best choice for you.

There is an important negotiation concept called BATNA: Best Alternative To a Negotiated Agreement. Your BATNA is your best option when your boss fires you for disagreeing with him.

If your BATNA is unemployment, me advising you to defend your boundaries from your boss is dangerous advice. If your job is in real danger, I can only tell you to increase your BATNA before proceeding.

Be aware that after years of boundary violations, initially, you may come across as highly uncalibrated in your effort to defend your boundaries. Proceed with caution when risks are high, and seize every opportunity to grow when risks are low or your BATNA gives you a solid backup plan.

Living Your Values - My Solution

You had three scenarios at the beginning of this chapter. I asked you to write down your choice in your journal, but I haven’t told you about what I think. This is unfair, isn’t it?

First of all, let me add that this hypothetical boss was a horrible leader, and you deserve better working conditions just based on human rights. As soon as you find out that anyone in your company is treated like that, your first reaction should be to find a new workplace. There are more opportunities out there than you’d think. For some inspiration, check out my article on this topic.

Let me enumerate what I would have done in these situations.

If you hadn’t realized in these three scenarios, your boss most likely wanted to exert his dominance on you and wanted to make your life miserable. The reasons do not matter. Most likely he wanted to fire you, but near the end, you found out that he temporarily needed you to complete a project. These situations are hostile from the perspective of your career. You have to treat them accordingly.

Scenario 1: an emergency is an emergency. My values dictate that I would even save a stranger had he asked for help on the streets. By the way, if you had first aid training, you would learn, this is your duty as a citizen even if you don’t feel that way. My point of view on this matter is unshakeable, so I would tell my boss that life threats are considered as vis major events, and I am ready to get fired if he thinks that his rules are stronger.

Depending on your BATNA, you can do multiple things.

If you need your job badly, you may end the discussion there and start focusing on building your BATNA before fighting your boss. If you just go back to work and do nothing, your self-esteem will shrink.

If you know that your boss cannot fire you, because he depends on you, you may override the dominance hierarchy by reminding him of his position and telling him that he has violated your boundaries and this will be reported to HR. You may also tell him that in case you got any negative consequences, he would face a lawsuit.

If you can get a similar job at any time, your BATNA is high, so you have nothing to lose. You may just choose to resign right there and let your boss deal with the trouble he caused himself.

Scenario 2: I personally value integrity and taking responsibility. If I expect others to respect rules, I follow the same rules. I have no professional respect for people who preach one thing and do something else. On top of that, I strongly believe that if you make a mistake, you should admit it. My values are in clear conflict with what my boss represents in this scenario. Therefore, it is evident that I will enter into conflict at the right time.

If your BATNA is low, you may just stay silent and double down on increasing your BATNA. You cannot lose anything by documenting this event and submit the description of both scenarios to HR once your BATNA is high. Possibly with your conditional resignation in the form of either you or him.

Scenario 3: If this scenario was in a vacuum, my personal values would not dictate a defined choice. Depending on the circumstances, I could choose to skip welcoming my friends and telling them that we would meet later, or I could choose to stick to my request. The history of events clearly indicate to me though that submissive behavior at this stage would open an endless vortex of boundary violations from the end of my boss.

By the time you reach this point, your BATNA should be high enough to risk immediate resignation. If not, notice that you most likely win time, because your boss needs you temporarily. You may chose to tell him that he violated your boundaries by delaying his answers by a full day. If he responds that he misunderstood you, or he didn’t open your email, you may respond that it is not your problem. Or, if there are rules in the company on expected response time, you may tell him that he is expected to respect those rules too.

Note that you may face a dark triad (i.e. narcissistic, machiavellinistic psychopath), and in this case, you have to proceed with extreme caution with what you say, because he may choose an irrational lose-lose situation and fire you on the spot.

If you did an acceptable job with your BATNA, you should already have a saved template conditional resignation with a detailed description on what happened during Scenarios 1 and 2, and you tell HR that unless your boss is fired for abusing his power, you do not wish to work for an organization tolerating this behavior. If not, you just inform your friends that they have to wait fifteen minutes and you construct an accurate resignation letter. It takes you one minute to submit your resignation, you leave for your 1.5 hour lunch break, and you let your boss worry and face the consequences.

This hypothetical boss was not charismatic in these scenarios at all. Let’s conclude this lesson with a small lesson on charisma:

Reading List

If you need more help with your professional code of conduct, assertive communication, nonviolent communication, and negotiation, I can recommend a few books for you.

Your best course of action is to read them all in the next half a year, and practice.

1. Rober C. Martin: The Clean Coder. This book gives you clear examples on how to set your boundaries at the workplace and how to keep your professional code of conduct.
2. Manuel J. Smith: When I Say No, I Feel Guilty. The best book I have ever read on assertive communication and setting boundaries. There are countless examples in the book for defending your psychological boundaries, while the other person does every dirty trick possible to violate your boundaries.
3. Dale Carnegie: How to Win Friends and Influence People. A classic book that helps you with communication in general. This book teaches you that there are only losers in an argument. You can reach what you want by listening to the needs of the other person and putting your ego aside.
4. Marshall Rosenberg: Nonviolent Communication. This book helps you defend your boundaries without leaving any room for a heated debate or argument.
5. Chris Voss: Never Split the Difference: Negotiate as if Your Life Depended on It. If you need some advice on negotiation, read this book.
6. Marshall Goldsmith: What Got You Here Won’t Get You There. This book is relevant for work once you are promoted to heights where tech skills don’t matter anymore. Everyone is good enough. Your soft-skills determine your success. This book gives you actionable advice on how to communicate at the workplace.

I can also recommend my book, The Developer’s Edge, where we go through most of the principles outlined in the above books in the context of software developers. Regardless of whether you own my book, you will thank yourself later for scheduling in the above six books on improving your communication skills.

I know, this is a lot of material. I just gave you the best ones according to my own opinion. Think about it. You may have lived twenty, thirty, or even more years letting other people violate your boundaries on a regular basis. Don’t expect to read fifteen pages and experience a change overnight.

Read, learn your lessons, and put things into practice in low-risk environments. For instance, you can go to an interview even if you don’t want to change your job. A tech interview is free communication practice. I can already see hiring managers hate my guts for this advice. I can only tell them that this is a way for them to give back to the developer community.

If you don’t like reading, you can also listen to the audiobook version on Audible or Scribd. In both platforms, the first month is free.