 So, the way that this whole talk and schedule came together this week is kind of ironic because it's made the whole thing seem utterly more dramatic because it looks like a write-in at the last minute and lots of swapping going on and everything. If you came to this talk expecting to see live WP drama or for me to say something horribly controversial, you will be sadly disappointed. The only potential WP drama that will happen here today is if I pace and fall off the stage, which is a possibility. So the four agreements and WP drama and WordPress community, this is a version of a talk that I've given before to professional services and to consultants, but this time with an orientation toward the community. Human behavior is complex and over-determined. What I mean by that is the individual reasons why any given person does a thing have multiple conflicting overlapping interests behind them. It's actually very difficult to figure out why somebody does something. You may encounter this yourself as you look back over your career and you try to figure out why you made certain decisions. When you add people together into communities and shift from sort of psychology into sociology, things get even weirder and more complex and more over-layered. In an open-source community, sometimes the result is WP drama, which feels like constantly ramming your head over and over again against a wooden wall like this person is doing in the helmet testing image. So over my years as a consultant over the last 20 years, one of the things that I've discovered as a way of helping me understand my relationship to various communities and how I work with people in those communities is this book called The Four Agreements. It's about 20 years ago, came out in 1997, Don Miguel Ruiz. It is squarely in the kind of New Age self-help era of mid-90s Oprah Winfrey show. He was a favorite guest of Oprah's. If you are a person for whom a phrase like spiritual warrior gives you the hives, there are aspects of this book you will not like. I would recommend you skip the first chapter. That's true whether that's because you're a traditionally religious person who finds New Age unsettling or a non-religious person like myself who finds it equally unsettling from the opposite side. That said, if you look at the very top, it's called a practical guide to personal freedom. There is a wonderful wealth of very concisely put value in this book for everyone. The first agreement, I'm going to go over all four. Be impeccable with your word. I have used the phrases here directly from the book because I think it's actually a marvel of kind of concision and preciseness. Speak with integrity, say only what you mean. Often when it comes to engaging with a community, the most important thing you can do with your word is be silent. When gossip is floating around, when controversy is happening that you don't actually know anything about, sometimes the best thing you can do is shut up. In other cases, recognizing the power of your word, recognizing the way that we tell stories about ourselves and about each other shapes our perception of the world in very meaningful and fundamental ways. In a lot of ways, your brain doesn't know the difference between a story you tell it that is fictional and a story you tell it that is real in terms of how it affects your physiology and your psychology. Recognizing that means avoid using the word to speak against yourself or to gossip about others. Many of us have that kind of internal dialogue, that internal voice that says you're a failure, you're a loser, you're an imposter. Ultimately, they're going to figure out you don't know what you're doing and they've given you this job by accident and all of that kind of self-negativity. The more that you can change that script and make your story about what you have succeeded at, the better. The same is true when you talk about other people in the community. If you grew up in an English speaking or English as a first language community, you may know sticks and stones may break my bones but words will never hurt me. The reality is it's not true. Words are very hurtful and they have a strong impact. We should take very seriously the power of communication in a community setting and what it means to do so. Second agreement is don't take anything personally. When it comes to not taking anything personally, you have to be a bit careful. What we mean by don't take anything personally is recognizing that when you're engaging with others in the community, you're responsible for your side of the conversation and they are responsible for their side. So a lot of times the energy that they're bringing, whether it's negativity or criticism or anger or jealousy or whatever, says as much about the person who is talking to you, says more about the person who is talking to you than it does about you. The way he puts it is what others say and do is a projection of their reality. I always talk about this as when you're having that conversation with someone, they are bringing and presenting you a gift. Sometimes that gift is praise, sometimes that gift is criticism, sometimes that gift is anger but it's your choice whether to accept it and internalize it or brush it off and move on. This doesn't mean there are two ways in which this goes wrong. This does not mean we have to tolerate abusive behavior. It doesn't mean that people in the community who are subject to certain kinds of harassment should just toughen up and get over it. That is not what I'm saying. I want to be very clear about that. It also doesn't mean that you should ignore feedback that you get from your peers, your friends and your colleagues, especially if it's consistent over time. If you have five different people in the course of a year tell you that you were doing something that isn't appropriate, you are. Third, don't make assumptions. There's a great saying about assumptions and what happens when you make them to you and me, which I won't repeat. This is one that is incredibly difficult to actually operationalize. Most of the time when there is WP drama, it's because people are making assumptions about motivations, about why someone has done something. They're filling in gaps in things that they don't understand and it's that disconnect between sort of what has actually happened and the assumptions that they've made about it, that becomes the problem. I'm going wicked fast. All right, so I will try to slow down a bit. When I see this happen with consultants making assumptions, there's a couple of different versions that happen here. One is that imposter syndrome version. And there's a great series of videos that Jimmy Kimmel Show does where they go to Coachella and they ask people outside Coachella about bands. But the thing is they're making up all the band names. They're not real bands. They don't exist. And yet, people are so afraid to say, oh, I've never heard of them, that they will go on for 10 minutes about I saw them at Lollipalooza and I heard they're really good and I'm really looking forward to that show and one of my friends went and saw them and they'll make up whole elaborate tales. Consultants will do the same thing. A client says in a meeting, I need to make sure that our DFP is properly configured and you have no idea what DFP is. You say, yes, absolutely, we need to make sure that DFP is properly configured, right? Or some framework that you've never heard of or some JavaScript language or something else that's happening that you don't know. And instead of saying, excuse me, could we stop for a minute? I have no idea what you're talking about. We just nod and smile and go on about our day and it makes us feel stupid. I have even seen this happen where then it turns out later that the client was actually using the wrong term and now you're in this weird situation where you didn't correct them because you didn't actually know but now you're not actually sure what they were actually talking about because they also didn't really know what they were talking about. Talk about drama, that's a very clear way to have this happen. When Reece says with just this one agreement, you can completely transform your life. I think this is absolutely true. In my practice when I'm engaged with clients, when I'm engaged with employees, when I'm engaged with my family, when I'm engaged with my community, anytime I find myself getting hot under the collar, getting stressed out, feeling my blood pressure rising, seeing a conversation going in a bad direction, I stop and think, what are the assumptions I'm making about the situation? It's hard, it's something you have to practice and learn to do but the more that you can do it, the more that it will fundamentally change your life. The fourth agreement, always do your best. I love, first of all, that there's a picture of a sad stormtrooper sitting at a table and second of all that somebody came up with that tagline, those were the droids that we're looking for. My only wish is that they had put were in italics because I think that would really make it stronger. Those were the droids that we're looking for. Always do your best is about avoiding regret. Always do your best is about making sure and being authentic to yourself, going back to being impeccable with your word, about when you really were doing your best and when you really weren't. This picture on the right actually comes from, it's my photo, a Fortune 10 company, let's say, at which I used to spend significant time on site as a consultant and in the break room on the floor where IT was, there was this sign next to a toaster, a microwave and a coffee machine. Please do not use all three appliances at the same time. This will overload the circuit and shut off power to this location. We never quite figured out whether this location just meant like that kitchen or the entire building or the whole city or like what exactly this would mean. But it became our sort of shorthand for when you're running too fast and when you're gonna burn out, right? If you've plugged in all three appliances at the same time, you're gonna shut down. It's kind of like burning the candle at both ends but it's a modern version. And it's literally only five years later when I was preparing this deck that I noticed that it says thanks, facilites, right? Facilites, I guess maybe, right? Now, probably some ESL or whatever, I mean, I don't wanna mock the person who wrote the sign but it's just sort of, you're so focused on one thing, you actually ignore everything else and I never even noticed that until I did that. The thing in our community that I always do your best comes down to is again a tricky balance. So just like when you're talking about don't take anything personally, you have to worry about, don't take anything personally means don't internalize that criticism, don't take on energy that doesn't belong to you. But it also can't mean ignore the feedback you're getting from the community and it's all right to just be a jerk because you don't have to take anything personally and you can do whatever the hell you want. Always do your best has an interesting also dichotomy. It does mean you are supposed to really lean in and do your best. And I think all of us as consultants, anytime I've had this conversation with an employee and some kind of challenges happen with a client and they've said, well, I did my best and I say, really? Did you really think you did your best to try to check your assumptions? Do you really think you handled that the most effective way you were capable of? We all know when that's not true, right? There's a kind of internal dialogue that says, actually, what I probably could have done a lot more. Balanced against if you are constantly running 80 hours a week, if you are constantly using all three appliances at the same time, you will shut down. So do the best that you are capable of at that moment is what it means. The order of these is important, right? This is the kind of thing that I have gifted, given as required reading, assigned, discussed, handed out to teams. Once you understand these four and how they relate to each other, it can really have a huge impact on how you think about your relationship to the community. Starting with be impeccable with your word comes down to owning your part in the conversation, right? As my mother, the social worker used to say, you can't control how other people act. You can only control how you react to them. So the be impeccable with your word is the part that you play, right? And for us, that means the things you retweet, the things you like, the things, the comment threads that you engage in, the things that you subtweet, right? All of those things are part of using your word and thinking about what do you promote when you are retweeting somebody? Who are you calling attention to and who are you ignoring? And how are you playing a role in perpetuating that drama is all part of that. That don't take anything personally is then about how you're reacting with those folks around you. That don't make assumptions as often as that's the problem is you're making assumptions about the people you're interacting with so it sort of starts to edge out from you to the community. And then they always do your best means, also always do your best at obeying the three above it, right? So it's kind of like Asamo's Laws of Robotics or something, they're in an order for a purpose. There's a reason for that. So lastly, a couple of bonus agreements. So the first one, be skeptical but learn to listen is actually from a later book put out by Don Aries' son called The Fifth Agreement because any super successful book has to have a sequel. I'm expecting The Sixth Agreement at any point probably as a Hollywood movie. But I think it's great, right? Be skeptical but learn to listen. Think about how impactful that could have been in this election year. Really learning to listen. And a good sort of caveat there is listening in order to actually understand versus listening so that you know when you can cut in with your reply because they've finally stopped talking, right? There's a huge difference between those two that sometimes we miss. Second is one of my favorites, don't take anything especially yourself too seriously. Humor as an antidote to drama is a hugely valuable thing, right? And having a sense of humor about your own world as well as the world around you is important. Third is from Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, one of my favorite four book trilogies, Don't Panic, which is my first advice. Every time somebody reaches me by phone or by Slack or whatever and I can sense the panic in their voice, my first words are always don't panic. Has anyone been injured? Have the policeman called? Will this be in the newspaper tomorrow? If they answered all three of those questions is no, calm down, right? You are not alone, it's more fun with other people. There are a bunch of other great talks at WordCamp about this, you know, human contact is important where social animals, if you're a remote worker, find ways to do it online, find ways to connect with people. And don't feed the trolls, it's just kind of classic internet wisdom. Sometimes the most important key on your keyboard is the delete key, right? And that doesn't excuse other people's behavior, but it does mean it's sometimes your simplest answer. Thanks, I've been John Eichmann, I'm the CEO at TenUp and I'm very happy to be here. Thank you.