Hey, friend!

Man. November. What a month this has been.

Elon making us fear Twitter's downfall. Trump back on Twitter. Layoffs all around the world but especially strong in the tech industry. Elections. Cold. Violence against the LGBTQ community.

It's been a tough November for me. Days where I've been extraordinarily grateful I have a therapist and close friends who've helped me, when everything feels so complicated and confused and conflated, separate out each piece of life into their own little buckets.

My anxiety brain makes it hard to understand nuance. If one part of my life is bad, anxiety brain says my entire life is ruined. If someone says something critical and also speaks a truth, I assume the entirety of what they've said must be true. If I make one mistake I assume everything I've done is a mistake.

What's helped me the most is how I've learned to step back from each situation and ask: what's true here and what's not? What's fact and what's speculation? In what ways are my thoughts or someone else's criticisms extending a small bad thing to be a big bad thing, and how can I separate the reality from the exaggeration?

And, because anxiety is present, there's always the everpresent question I'm so glad to have learned from my therapist: What's the worst case scenario, and what would you do if that happened?

If you find yourself being captured and captivated by the overwhelming, un-nuanced takes of your anxiety brain or your external critics, take a look at these tools I've listed above, these questions we can ask ourselves to help separate out reality from anxiety. Give yourself space and grace for one thing to be hard but not all things, to make one mistake and still not be a mistake, to see the good as much or more than we focus on the bad.

What Else?

Tighten Blog

• Meetings Don’t Have To Suck
• Why Mentoring Matters with Shawn Jones

Tighten YouTube

• Jeanne Henry & Molly Fisher: Meetings Don't Have To Suck
• Shawn Jones: Why Mentoring Matters

Matt Stauffer YouTube

• Cultural Intelligence, with Karl Ostroski

Links

• Chris Arter on Twitter: “Alrighty, looks like I'm just about to ready to ship this 🚢 Dream is a package to implement common AI / ML tools into your Laravel app with zero setup / boilerplate. It supports AWS Comprehend, and I'm working on an Azure Cog
• Laravel Model Flags Package | Laravel News
• Assert DOM Elements in Laravel Tests
• Tim MacDonald on Twitter: “🍃 YAGNI feature flags”

Things Worth Learning

• Cultural Intelligence, with Karl Ostroski

Popular Tweets

• .@laravelphp peeps, did you know that Artisan is an executable file? I feel like we've all been running "php artisan" for so long, but yesterday I was playing around and realized Artisan is, itself, executable. That means you can just run "./artisan". (Tweet) (image)
• New profile pic--for now! Generated by @dannypostmaa's http://profilepicture.ai. I cropped this in the profile pic, but. CHECK OUT THESE FINGERS!!!! #aifingers (Tweet) (image)
• Is there a name for the fallacy that because someone has done something successful before they will be successful in future ventures? Probably obvious who I’m talking about here but I’m legitimately curious: is this a known/named concept? (Tweet)
• “The world will be better off without twitter” is a very interesting take. I know it tracks for many when it comes to their ideas about twitter as distraction. But what about twitter as communal space? As tool for freedom work in oppressive spaces? As fast & democratic news? (Tweet) (Quote Retweet)

That's it for now!

Until next time...

Your friend,
Matt Stauffer