Mindset: You vs Your AI

Hello, everyone. Brilliant to be here. Hope you're all having an awesome day. And yeah, super excited to be able to talk to you today about mindset, or you versus your AI. And it's a topic that I don't think we manage to talk enough about in the software development industry.

But first of all, again, just a little bit about me, why I'm here. I've been in software development for over 24 years, and I've worked at all different levels. I transitioned to be a mindset coach for software developers and software development leaders, because I don't think anyone else seems to be doing that. And we definitely need a bit more support in this area. And to make my purpose well-being as a whole, I trained to become a personal trainer and an online fitness coach.

Now, I've estimated the time of this talk probably about as well as I estimate software projects, so I better crack on. I want you all to imagine that, as you go about your daily lives, you have a little AI assistant watching and analysing everything that you do. It's constantly giving you little suggestions about how it thinks you should think in any given situation. Now, sometimes, it works perfectly. And we don't even know it's happening. But other times, it's not so helpful. So to try and understand why that happens, we're going to look at this AI assistant and we're going to inspect a high-level system design about how this AI assistant might be operating. So this AI assistant has an API so that we can communicate with it. It can ingest data. We can send it requests. And we can get responses back. Simple enough.

Now, the data for your AI assistant, how that is being trained is getting the data from your conscious mind. So that is anything and everything that you are giving your attention to. And that has been streamed directly to your AI assistant. And it has been for your entire life. So there's a hell of a lot of data there. That data is saved. And then we have some background algorithms. They try and make sense of this data.

They try and work out what's important and what isn't. And they try and optimise it. And index it. And they create links between all kinds of concepts, ideas, people, places, situations. And your AI will use this data to constantly tell you how it thinks you should think in any given situation.

You can imagine your mind is constantly sending your AI assistant requests over and over and over again. And there's something like, how should I think about this? How should I think about this? How should I think about this? And this, of course, is the context of your current situation. Now, your AI assistant has got a hell of a lot of data to come up with an answer and a suggestion of how you should be thinking. And we need these responses to be pretty snappy. We can't just be standing and pausing all the time.

So your AI assistant employs a cache. It's the job of one of those background algorithms to be sifting through that data, working out what's important, working out what is being most frequently accessed. And it will put that into the cache for you. What that means for your AI assistant is it will check your cache first instead of checking that vast amount of data. And it will say, is there anything in here that suits this current situation? Now, the kinds of things that this algorithm is going to find are things like our beliefs, our attitudes, our morals, and our values, in a very simplistic way. And so there's a very high likelihood it's going to find something that's relevant to your current situation.

So it will lean on that to give us a response. And that's great for performance, but it's not so great when some of the data in that cache actually has gone stale. So we've got some strongly held beliefs that might have occurred during childhood, for example. And those beliefs might not be relevant to our current context. And yet our cache is using them to suggest how we should be thinking. And so the whole system looks like this. Your conscious mind is constantly training your AI assistant. It's not a one-time operation. It's constantly getting that data. We've got background algorithms that are sifting through that data and trying to optimize it. We've got a cache that your AI assistant is using to give us these responses. And we've got your mind that is constantly pulling your AI assistant to get these suggestions of how we should be thinking. And it's generating a vast amount of thoughts. And then there is a face-off, or at least the potential for a face-off.

And that is happening in your mind. And on one side we have your AI assistant and the vast number of thoughts that it's producing. And on the other side we have our conscious mind, the thing that we're in control of. And our conscious mind can also produce thoughts.

Now, I say a face-off. But for most of us, this face-off is actually a bit of a non-event. And what happens is we get a combination of these thoughts coming in from the AI, we get the thoughts coming in from the conscious mind, and they funnel down to create an experience. But we're missing an important part of the puzzle.

And that is the role of our conscious mind. Because our conscious mind can be the gatekeeper to our thoughts. If it determines particular thoughts are unhelpful, negative, harmful even, it has the power to veto or override those thoughts. And that has a big impact on our experience. Unfortunately, for many of us, our gatekeeper is asleep on the job. And what that means is that our AI assistant has a disproportionately large impact on our experience. Even when it's producing potentially negative, unhelpful, or harmful thoughts.

And so we get to the experience. We have the resulting thoughts of this face-off, or lack-of, with these thoughts that are being gatekept or not, and they funnel down into our well-being processor. And the reason why we need to pay extra attention and gatekeep some of these thoughts is because these thoughts will actually drive how we feel. And just let that sink in. How you're thinking in a given situation is driving how you're feeling. And you can try this for yourself. Just very, very quickly. If you think of a really sad time in your life. Don't stay there too long. If you think of a really sad time, you start to sense a change in how you feel. For me, I can put that into words, I just start to feel a little heavier. A bit low. And it's instant. It's subtle, but it's instant. But again, don't stay there too long.

Go the other way. Think about a really happy time in your life. Just something that just makes you really happy. For me, again, it's the little smile on my 18-month-old daughter's face. And putting that change of feeling into words, I start to feel lighter. And I almost feel like I've got more energy. And again, it's an instant change, but it's subtle.

But it doesn't stop there, because those thoughts are driving those feelings. Those feelings are heavily influencing your actions. What you do or what you don't do. We all know that when we're feeling great, when we're feeling good, we're far more likely to tackle those difficult tasks. And when we're feeling a bit rubbish, we're more likely to procrastinate or find ourselves sitting on the sofa, watching Netflix or YouTube.

And again, this is so important, because the combination of all of this stuff is going to lead to some kind of result. And you can think about that result being the result of a person's the result of a situation almost based on the thought you're having in that moment. But you can also think about the accumulation of these results, building up towards something bigger. And we, of course, think about our results. And we think about our results helpfully or unhelpfully, positively or negatively. And we go round and round and round. And this is happening every second of every day.

So what's your point? I hear you asked. Because we don't actually have a little AI assistant in our heads, which is, of course, true. What we have is something far more powerful. And it's called your subconscious mind. And you can think about your subconscious mind as operating in a very similar way to how I've described our AI assistant. So my point, whether it's an AI assistant or whether it's our subconscious mind, my point's the same. We need to take responsibility for the data that we're training our subconscious mind with. And of course, we need to take responsibility for the data that we're training our subconscious mind with. And of course, we all know this. If we put garbage in, we're going to get garbage out.

Now, I just want to leave you with a couple of suggestions of how you can improve the quality of the data that you're training your subconscious mind with.

So I like to journal three wins each day. And they can be huge things or they can be tiny things. But they're things that I see as a win. And what I'm doing there is I'm nudging my subconscious to look for more of these things and to nudge me about when it finds things that I might consider a win.

The same thing happens. I like to journal three things that I'm grateful for. Again, my subconscious mind starts to nudge me. Maybe you could be grateful for this. Maybe you could be grateful for this. Maybe you could be grateful for this.

And then, of course, something we could all probably do a better job with. And that is just being mindful of the media that we consume. Because so many of us do it almost mindlessly. We're giving it our attention but we're not. And we're not taking into account how important or the impact that that data can actually have for us down the line. And that's you versus your AI.

Thank you. Whoa. Any tips for helping raise spirits and mental health in a team setting?

Yeah. I think one of the biggest challenges that we all have, both individually and our software development teams, is that... I mean it's slightly strange that we know that what we measure we tend to improve. And I don't know of very many software development teams that are trying to measure the well-being of their team, whether that's individually or as a whole. And that well-being obviously filters into their mental health. So I think just being able to find a way of measuring your team's well-being, whether that's ratings, questionnaires, working with them, making the concept of well-being and mental health just easier to talk about.

So if we can do these things periodically so it's not out of the blue and it becomes a normal conversation, it's that awareness that is such a huge problem and people just don't want to talk about it. So if we can make mental health and well-being easier to talk about, that's a huge way to improve the mental health of software development teams for sure.

Yeah. Thank you. I'm just checking more. I would ask you...

Ah, I see another question. So fast. Yeah, thanks for writing this, Richard. How can we recover from a negative thought cycle? I see this question, this one. You see on the top? Yeah. How can we recover from a negative thought cycle? It's an interesting one. It's that combination of the fact that we have our conscious mind that we have control of and we're battling against almost the latency of the subconscious mind. So we're trying to feed it the kind of data to bring through the thoughts that we want, the more helpful, the more constructive ones. But that's going to take time.

In the meantime, we need to stand guard, be aware, look out for those kinds of thoughts that we don't want and just once we're aware of them, we can do that through self-reflection and even just mindfulness or meditation. But once we see them, we can interrupt those thoughts with your conscious mind. You can stand there, you can yell, stop, in your head and it causes an interrupt to prevent that negative thought from spiraling into something bigger and bigger. And then once we've interrupted that thought, you want to have a little bit of a nice big deep breath.

Because when we start with these negative thoughts, there are physiological changes that generally accompany them. We start to breathe more shallow and we maybe start to sweat. By having a few deep breaths, we start to reverse that physiology. And then the best way we probably have of directing our mind is through questions. And so we need to deliberately then ask ourselves, how do I want to think about this situation? I can see that I'm having this negative thought, how do I want to think about it? And then if we look at the well-being processor, and we recognize these thoughts that drive feelings, what kind of thoughts do I need to have about this situation that drive away feeling that I want to have, not the feeling that I have from the negative thoughts? So, yeah, just deep breath, stop, ask yourself, how do you want to think about it?

So, any suggestion about how to help a team member take care of his mental state? Yeah, absolutely. So, again, one of the biggest things with mental health is having supportive relationships and just being there as someone who listens. And not everyone wants to talk, but trying to create that environment where they can feel like they can actually open up and they can actually feel listened to. That's a big step.

On top of that, there are various things that we can do around doing little things with self-care. And they can be the smallest things, but just taking 10 minutes in a day to do something that you actually enjoy, no matter how stressful the day is, if that's getting your Kindle out and reading a few pages, we need to start to prioritize the things that improve our mental health. And one of the biggest things about this is that mental health is different for everyone. So one of the things we need to do as individuals is to work out what mental health means to us. Because if we don't do that, then it's harder to identify the kind of things we can do to improve it. So, again, awareness is super important in this situation.

So, again, awareness is super important in this situation. But the self-care thing, doing things you enjoy, trying to get some physical activity in, encourage people to do physical activity. And people set the bar way too high for that. But a simple walk at lunchtime, every day, it can be 5 minutes, it can be 10 minutes, it goes a hell of a long way to improving mental health.

And do you think that advising someone to go to psychologists or to coaches is good advice? It's always helpful to have a coach, assuming you can build that relationship, you can relate to them. Which is obviously why I do this for software developers. As a software developer myself, I'd be skeptical of this kind of thing, if I'm honest. But knowing how much it's helped me, I hope my background actually bridges that gap for a lot of people. Because I definitely think we can do a lot more help in this space.

How can we be more mindful while consuming media? Any tips on how not to get stuck in the loop? Yeah, I mean it's one of those things where we need to build awareness, we need to decide. We need to decide that we're going to take responsibility for what we consume. We need to acknowledge the potential impact that that data can have on us. Not just in the moment, but down the line. And once we start to see that, that comes out, not just in our thinking, but how we're feeling. And effectively in our experience. Then we can decide to do those things. There are plenty of approaches around turning off notifications and locking yourself out of apps. One of mine, I was getting far too many emails and I just turned off all my notifications a couple of months ago. And I just pop in when I want to. But it's similar for social media. We're all jumping every time we get that notification. The app's open, we're there, and then suddenly we're scrolling and we're scrolling. We have to take responsibility for that. And I think for a lot of us, maybe we don't recognize the impact of those actions. And the more that we do, then maybe we can make those conscious decisions to actually do something about it. And it's a form of self-care. And it's a form of self-respect. It's like, what do I want out of life? Do I want to feel a certain way? And if I do, what am I going to do about it? Am I going to look after myself? Am I going to exercise? Am I going to eat well? Do I want to consume? It falls into the same category. Am I going to spend all my time scrolling? It's a choice we need to make. Thanks.

Maybe a last, fast question. Do you see fitness as something that plays a big role in mental health? I think it also could be something else, not only sport.

Fitness is absolutely massive with mental health. When we do physical exercise, we release endorphins. It reduces stress, anxiety, depression. It obviously helps our physical health as well. And when we're physically fit, we're not constantly worrying about whether we're going to break down or that kind of thing. And I think we underestimate how much mental energy that can take when someone is concerned about their own physical health.

But fitness, particularly for me, has been an absolute lifesaver. Thank you very much, Richard. Thanks for your answers. Let's applaud Richard. Thank you all.