Recharge the batteries | Laura Kightlinger

[Laura] (0:00 - 0:21)

I'm looking at Google Maps because we want to go here and not, well, I've just sort of picked it up unconsciously. And I think for me, the most important thing is that I have dedicated time with other human beings where I'm very present. And that for me is what recharges me the most so that when I get back to doing something, I'm motivated, I'm fresh.

[Dillon] (0:31 - 0:47)

What's up lifers. And welcome to the daily standup with lifetime value, where we're giving you fresh new customer success ideas every single day. I got my man JP with us.

JP, do you want to say hi? Hey, what's going on? And we have Rob with us.

Rob, can you say hi?

[Rob] (0:48 - 0:56)

For the second time today. Bom dia. Our second guest stayed in Portugal.

We had two on Portuguese.

[Dillon] (0:56 - 1:01)

Oh, you're in Portugal? And we have Laura with us. Laura, can you say hi, please?

[Laura] (1:01 - 1:03)

Well, it's hard. It's the afternoon here.

[Dillon] (1:04 - 1:11)

Whoa. What did you call me? And I'm your host.

My name is Dillon Young. Laura, thank you so much for being here. Can you please introduce yourself?

[Laura] (1:12 - 1:34)

Absolutely. Thanks for having me. Laura Keitlinger.

I am a 10 year long CS leader, grew a couple of teams in London across Europe and Asia the last decade, and now have ventured out on my own to do some advising in the CS space while I play with some passion projects on the side, outside of CS, see what I can spin up.

[Dillon] (1:35 - 1:37)

And you're in Portugal. Is that correct?

[Laura] (1:37 - 1:48)

I am based in Lisbon, although I am originally from the U.S. I can tell. Well, I've tried really hard to get rid of that accent.

[Dillon] (1:49 - 2:01)

Yeah. Yeah. Laura, you know what we do here?

We ask every single guest one simple question, and that is what is on your mind when it comes to customer success. So can you please tell us what that is for you?

[Laura] (2:01 - 2:37)

For me right now, it's the word focus. I think in CS where we've always been generalists, pressures just keep getting higher with revenue pressures in so many businesses. And now we're being asked to figure out how to have AI take away things that we're doing.

And we are spread thin. And I feel this in life too. I don't think it's just a CS thing, but we can keep it focused on CS today.

So I'm kind of trying to figure out how, how do I personally, but also how would I coach others to actually truly focus in this world of constant context switching?

[Dillon] (2:38 - 3:53)

I love this because for anybody who follows along with this show, we did not talk about AI to begin with. And then it became all AI all the time. But this is the first time we have talked about this.

And Laura, I've already sort of forgotten the exact phrasing, but the mandate being use AI to be more efficient effectively. So for a while, we kind of danced around it. And we were like, Oh, nobody's using AI.

We're all just magically more effective. And we all are conveniently using em dashes all of a sudden. And make really crappy analogies.

JP's bad. So this is the first time, this feels like a turning point for you to say that of like, now we're just admitting everybody's using AI. Everybody's got chat GPT on their second screen and they're using it for everything.

And often copying the commentary chat GPT adds to its outputs directly into their emails, which I've seen on multiple occasions personally haven't done it myself. Anyway. So like, I think that's really interesting.

I want to hear more about this, but maybe Rob, if you have a specific question you want to ask, why don't you jump in here?

[Rob] (3:54 - 4:14)

So I'm thinking I'm keying in more on actually something else, Laura, that you and I have talked about the focus part of what you said, because a big part of what, when you mentioned the side projects, I recall our conversation last time being about doing some mental performance in sports coaching, right? Is there a, do you see, is there a connection there?

[Laura] (4:14 - 6:19)

There is. And I think actually one of the reasons that I decided to take a break from full-time work was because I felt like I'm just pulled in all these different directions. I can't control it.

I want to control my time and where I'm putting my efforts. And then I got into consulting and I put a lot of pressure on myself to earn a certain amount of money. And suddenly I'm seeing the exact same patterns come up of, Oh, I'm trying to do multiple different things.

I haven't kind of carved out like this day is my focus for myself on my side projects. These other days are clients and I'm timeboxing my clients. I haven't done that.

And I find I'm right back in the brain space of I jumped from one thing to the next. I checked three different email accounts and two different Slack accounts and then teams, and I'm not as effective or efficient and I'm not ever in or rarely in flow. And this is, I think, consistent in the life of a lot of professionals, but I think especially CSMs, because again, it's widespread the type of work that we need to do in almost every role in an organization.

So it is definitely not robbed to your point, what any mental performance coach would say is the best way to work. But I think it's really hard not to work that way. And you can read all the books about time block and just turn off your notifications.

But as I live in Portugal, a few weeks ago, we became completely disconnected from the world with a power outage in which we had no electricity and no data services, no phone service at all. And that day I watched my brain jump from thing to thing when I didn't have, I couldn't physically jump from thing to thing. And it was so revealing to me of, Oh, this is actually like trained in my mind.

And if I follow those threads and I do it a lot unconsciously, just like I'll be working on something and think, Oh, I forgot to look that up. And I don't park that thought. I either, even if I just go write it down, I have context switched and it was really interesting to watch that because I know that it makes me much less effective and actually a lot less happy.

[Rob] (6:20 - 6:55)

I relate so strongly to that just because like the same as you, Laura, and same as all the CSMs listening to this show, like context switching between clients is exhausting. It's so exhausting. One of the things I'm actually doing, see this thing right here, this is a timer that my friend got me that I use.

So you can set it to different for those who can't see it's a little timer that you can use to just set timestamps on things. And it helps me just like focus for like just five minutes at a time or often 25 minutes with like a classic Pomodoro technique is like the canonical thing to do, but yeah.

[JP] (6:55 - 6:56)

Rob's Italian.

[Dillon] (7:00 - 7:23)

Your Rabiata technique will be next. So I actually, I'm really interested to hear what you have to say about this JP, because I think you've spent a lot of time meditating and I'm willing to bet that is in part to try and strengthen this muscle around focus and patience and calming your thoughts. So I'd love to hear your thoughts about all this.

-: 11:15

Yeah. Yeah. It's the, um, it's the lumps in the Nutella, you know, the lumps in the Nutella.

What is it? What is in, what is in the Nutella? Well, you know, we talked about spreading yourself too thin earlier, right?

Like they don't make chunky Nutella. Well, exactly. What's in there?

It's ads. We live in the most marketed to age of all. I think we're seeing at least 5,000 ads a day, something crazy like that.

And so the simple task of going to get some Nutella and spread it on where you would talk about being spread thin. It's like, what's even in there, right? What's, what's even in this like simple task, right?

Laura, you talked about having this day where the stimulus was all removed and all that was left was the, the pattern, the compulsion even. And I think that the thing about being marketed to is that marketing is all has to do one thing first, and that is grab your attention. It has to grab your attention.

So if we're being marketed to, it means that we're used to having our attention be yanked in different directions. So that's going to extend to work, everything else even down to going to get your, your bread and spread some Nutella was spread too thin, right? Well, what's in there.

And I think that this, it's a, it's partially a symptom of the age that we live in. And so we have to sort of make more of a concerted effort to unplug from the really like the lifestyle of it all. So meditating, you know, helps a lot in terms of settling the mind, getting some intentionality back, realizing that focus is one of the most precious resources we have in today's world, because we are so used to being torn apart by endless marketing.

Everything is listening to what you say. Now we're going to pump, pump, pump. We're going to pump that out.

Like, you know, I can, the amount we spend on, on a, not we, I guess, but they spend on ads is mind boggling and it's only going up. We're talking about, you know, billions and billions of dollars. And so when, when it comes to the, the whole CSM, the customer success of it all, I think that it's, it's partially a symptom of this time.

So if you can use AI, like where it's in a way we're sort of turning, we're sort of taking something of the time to help us be more, to take back more of our focus in this. In other words, like I resisted AI for a long time as something as another sort of lump in the Nutella, if you will, something that was like, you know, ah, I was just saying, what is it? But now I'm like, well, if there's this thing, how can I use this to help me reclaim some focus?

Right. How can I use this to write an email? And then maybe I'm only spending, you know, 30 seconds to make sure that the email I send to Dillon doesn't have any dashes in it.

So that it doesn't, doesn't think that it's AI. Right. So like there is a way that I think we can, we don't have to go live in a cabin in the woods.

You know, we don't have to pull a Thoreau or anything like that, but we, or was it Emerson? I don't know. One of them dudes, I think they both did.

But what we can do is, yeah, it's something about a pond. I don't know. But what we can do is I think instead of sort of getting woe is me say like, okay, why, instead of being afraid of AI, let's think about this and how can I use this to become more human?

How can I use this technology to actually become more human? And in other words, take back more of my time, my focus and do what I want to do.

[Dillon] (: 11:16

Laura, can I ask a question?

[JP] (: 11:17

Absolutely.

[Dillon] (: 11:18

I love this idea of slowing down and, and trying to like, I keep calling it strengthening this, this muscle around focus or like maybe just quieting the noise in our heads and that compulsion to constantly be pulled in a different direction. And so I'll do this. Like I'll sit down and watch a movie or I'll read a book and it feels great until I realize all the work I have to do.

So how, what's like your best tactic for fighting against that urge so that you can still feel satisfied while you're slowing down?

[Laura] (: 11:57

It's a good question. I don't know that I have figured that out for myself. I know I did pretty much completely disconnect last week.

I was traveling with a friend last weekend, traveling with a friend. And I do find if I give myself that space for longer periods of time, it is more effective. And then when I came back, I had two super busy days and I did have a lot of context switching, but I could actually focus, like keep myself for the hour that I was on this call.

I was on it because I was truly rested after a weekend of very little device time or very purposeful device time. Like I'm looking at Google maps because we want to go here and not, well, I've just sort of picked it up unconsciously. And I think for me, the most important thing is that I have dedicated time with other human beings where I'm very present.

And that for me is what recharges me the most so that when I get back to doing something, I'm motivated, I'm fresh. And like I do naturally find some of my focus comes back in the urge to jump from one thing to the next or check all the notifications is lower, but that's perhaps the personal thing. I don't know.

[Dillon] (: 13:05

No, I think I come back to the word balance. And I think that that's, that's a part of it. Laura, I love this.

I would love to hear more about some of these side projects you're doing, but you've got to come back because we're out of time. And until that time you've got to say goodbye.

[Laura] (: 13:21

Thanks so much for having me. Great discussion.

[VO] (: 13:29

You've been listening to the daily standup by lifetime value. Please note that the views expressed in these conversations are attributed only to those individuals on this recording and do not necessarily reflect the views and opinions of their respective employers. For all general inquiries, please reach out via email to hello at lifetime value, media.com.

To learn more about advertising on the daily standup and the lifetime value media network, please reach out via email to advertising at lifetime value, media.com. Find us on YouTube at lifetime value and find us on the socials at lifetime value media until next time.