Professional & Personal Self-Care With George Miranda

George talks about how we’re going through an astonishing moment of civilizational grief and disorientation. And, this grief is different because the things we’re losing feel very ambiguous because they have no closure.

Myth About Self-Care

The biggest myth about self-care is that it’s not entirely about you. It starts with you; you have to help yourself before you help others. You should make sure that you are your own top priority, but those priorities need to be balanced.

Why This Topic Now

George talks about how he’s going through the worst emotional period of his adult life. He describes that we all are experiencing incidents in our own lives, and it’s our instinct to try and resolve them. One way we do this, at least temporarily, is to compartmentalize our incidents to give us time to deal with other things before addressing the problems. But, at some point, we run out of compartments.

Lessons That Apply Both Personally and Professionally

Everyone is struggling to cope with these ambiguous losses. We have all experienced loss of many things that kept us going. And that grief is hard to deal with because there is no end in sight. “Everyone, and I mean everyone, is going though this. Live is hard right now no matter how you slice it.”

George talks about how we’ve been at this for a little over six months now and are now hitting a wall where we are all running at diminished capacities. And he recommends we need to walk with empathy for our fellow humans.

How To Not Trigger Personal Incidents

I think we need to have each others backs–which isn’t all that different than dealing with things professionally. We need to be gentle with each others psychological safety. We need to be gentle with each other

We need to go above and beyond when we communicate with those we call friends. That’s how we build and maintain trust.

Mindful of Professional Self-Care

We have to be ruthless about prioritizing what we’re going to work on. If we’re lucky, we have really only about 3-4 good focus hours in a day. Then you have to decide where is it going to be okay to under deliver? Things are going to fall.

It falls on the leadership to set the pace, but it also falls the the team to return in kind.

Handling Incidents From Perspective of Self-Care

Scott and George talk about how the number of incidents appears to be increasing during the COVID era. Scott shares that PagerDuty has seen the volume of incidents handled by its customers remained fairly flat for several leading up to March 2020. Since that time incident volume has steadily increased by 7% each month.

George refers to a Honeycomb meta-incident writeup about a couple of back-to-back incidents Honeycomb experienced recently.

Additional Resources

• PagerDuty Home Page
• Honeycomb meta-incident writeup
• Pauline Boss, Navigating Loss Without Closure
• Blameless Culture
• Folks can ping George via Twitter. If they’d like to talk, He’d like to listen - @gmiranda23
• Episode transcribed by Rev

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