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Imposter syndrome, perfectionism and people pleasing are just some of the pervasive norms weve come to acceptand even expectfrom high-achievers. And when we hear advice about how we can mitigate this internal strife, we hear phrases like fake it to you make it. All too often, the self-criticism, insecurity, and harsh self-judgement remains. Take for example Sara, a high-achieving marketing director who recently had a major campaign launch falter. When reality fell significantly short of projected targets, she immediately blamed herself. I spiraled into harsh self-criticism, working excessive hours, and neglecting my wellbeing to try and make up for what wed lost. I knew I was being too hard on myselfbut I thought if I could just push through, Id be able to salvage some success. If this sounds familiar, youre not alone. Many leaders struggle to show themselves compassion, in part due to the archaic belief that we have to push ourselves harder and harder to achieve results. As a result, we end up tying so much of our self-worth to our outputs, which is a dangerous territory. But research shows that we can achieve incredible results by cultivating self-compassion and fiercely holding ourselves accountable while being kind to ourselves along the way. Self-compassion is not weakness According to leading researcher and editor of the Handbook of Self-Compassion Amy Finlay-Jones, self-compassion is treating yourself with the same kindness you would offer a dear friend. And as Finlay-Jones explained to us, an increasing body of research shows that its crucial for effective leadership. Dont confuse self-compassion with self-indulgence or self-care. As Finlay-Jones framed it, self-compassion isnt just about being nice to ourselves. Instead, its similar to replacing self-criticism with self-understanding and acknowledging our humanity. She emphasized, Its not about letting ourselves off the hook, but about approaching challenges with a more balanced perspective, which fosters both self-kindness and a commitment to growth. Resilience through self-compassion Studies show that leaders who are self-compassionate are better equipped to handle stress, navigate setbacks. They also create a more supportive team environment. Thats because self-compassionate leaders have increased emotional regulation which reduces the likelihood of burnout and fosters work environments that are positive and nurturing. Leaders who cultivate self-compassion are also better equipped to handle setbacks and support their teams through adversity because they possess a stronger ability to take accountability for their behavior, for their lives, Finlay-Jones explained. Leaders who are highly self-critical, on the other hand, are more likely to project blame elsewhere out of insecurity and fear or failure. Reap the benefits of self-compassion When leaders show themselves a lack of compassion, like Sara did, it often leads to counterproductive behaviors and undesirable outcomes for themselves and their teams. In contrast, self-compassion can lead to the following benefits, which extends beyond the individual: Better emotional regulation: Self-compassion improves emotional regulation, which is crucial for leaders facing stressful situations. Finlay-Jones emphasized the importance of being aware of how were feeling during times of difficulty and really being curious about our emotions and our experiences. This allows leaders to manage their emotional responses more effectively, which prevents impulsive decisions. Reduced burnout and increased resilience: The relentless demands of leadership often lead to burnout. However, self-compassion acts as a buffer against this. By treating themselves with kindness and understanding, leaders can prevent the downward spiral of self-criticism and exhaustion. This allows for a more compassionate response to setbacks. Improved decision-making: Interestingly, when faced with difficult decisions, self-compassionate leaders are less likely to succumb to emotional biases and more likely to consider multiple perspectives. Stronger team dynamics and increased collaboration: By modeling self-compassionate behaviors, leaders encourage open communication, mutual respect, and a shared sense of purpose. Finlay-Jones shares that self-compassion can contribute to a leaders ability to create a culture of psychological safety where team members feel safe to make mistakes and learn from them. Enhanced ethical leadership: Self-compassion promotes ethical leadership by encouraging leaders to prioritize the individual wellbeing of their teams and make decisions based on empathy and fairness. Leaders who practice self-compassion are better at recognizing and addressing issues of injustice and inequality. 4 ways to improve your self-compassion If youre looking for ways to bolster your self-compassion and improve your leadership, you might want to consider the following practices: Cultivate mindfulness: This involves developing the ability to observe your thoughts and emotions without judgment. Recognize them as transient experiences rather than fixed realities. Says Finlay-Jones, Its about being aware of how were feeling during times of difficulty, and really being curious about our emotions and our experiences. Embrace shared humanity: An important component of self-compassion is understanding that were not alone in our struggles. On the contrary, even for leaders, setbacks and difficult emotions are a universal part of the human experience. This perspective shifts the focus from flagellating yourself with blame, judgement and even shame, to a more compassionate understanding of what youre going through. Practice self-kindness: Imagine your dearest friend, a child or another loved one. Now imagine extending the same empathy, understanding, and compassion to yourself that would extend to that person. What would that look and feel like? What language or gestures would you use to demonstrate your empathy, understanding and compassion towards that person? How might it feel to direct that language and those gestures of kindness towads yourself? Establish healthy boundaries: Many people struggle to extend kindness to themselves. The yin and yang of self-compassion, as Finlay Jones noted, recognises the need for both tender self-care and assertive boundary-setting. This requires the courage to say no to unreasonable demands. Cultivating self-compassion is not a once off, but an ongoing process that requires regular practice and self-reflection. High achievers might find it uncomfortable, but leaders who embrace self-compassion stand to enhance their wellbeing and create a more positive, supportive, and successful work environment.
Category:
E-Commerce
Susan Kare, designer of the original Apple icons, is back with a new 32-icon collection, one that you can buy in the form of silver or gold vermeil mechanical keys and pendants. Called Esc Keys, the new icons perfectly capture the everlasting magic of her 1-bit legendary past work, always mesmerizing in their extreme minimalism and at the same time as satisfying as triple-chocolate cake. Kare obviously had lots of fun creating them. Her new designsfrom an alien head to a light bulb to love birds to puppies, plus a Panic! key that we all really need right nowinspire the same joy she was gleaming with when I spoke to her from New Yorkwhere she was visiting for the Esc Keys U.S. launch (and to celebrate her participation in the group exhibition Pirouette: Turning Points in Design at MoMA). We spoke about this collections genesis and about the attraction and everlasting power of pixel art as a universal language. A code that has seemingly crossed generations, beyond the people who originally experienced it first hand, when her original digital creations saw the world for the first time in 1984, when Steve Jobs presented the Macintosh in San Francisco, California. I sent the first photos of the Alien icon pendant to my own three sons and I remember they all immediately wrote back: Sick! she says. I took that as a good sign. “There’s hidden meaning on each one” Kare tells me that she was asked to create the collection by Alastair Walker, the founder and creative director of Asprey Studiothe Mayfair, London, art gallery that sprang up about two years ago from Asprey, a designer, manufacturer and retailer of jewelry, silverware, and all things luxury founded in London in 1781 (The former Queen always bought gifts there! Kare tells me with her charming laughter). Walker says he thought Kare was the perfect person to design his idea of the “escape keys”: Meaningful symbols that would represent things people might want to do away from their keyboards, physical reminders of the joys of physical life. There’s hidden meaning on each one, Walker says, and the whole idea is that they’re literally in front of you on the keyboard or on your chest. It’s a reminder not to be a keyboard warrior. So its kind of almost antithetical itself. It’s a little ironic, but it resonated with me and I loved the idea, Kare says. Walker initially asked if she would be interested in designing roughly 10 icons that would be on keyboard keys or mechanical keyboards with universal attachments. The 10 designs quickly grew to a collection of 60 to 70 concepts. She started doing some icons and then she showed me like a whole bunch of them, Walker says. And then we were like, ‘Oh, well, we can’t get rid of this one, you know. Or this one.’ So then we thought, you know what, just do them all. He was fascinated by the process himself, he tells me. She’s insanely methodical. You speak to her and shes moving a pixel here and then shes like, no, lets move it there. [Photo: Asprey Studio] Stop, observe, reflect The escape keys were a good metaphor of that process too, the idea to stop, observe, reflect, to slow life. There are so many options now, we get sucked into a vortex of choice that make things lose their true meaning and intention. And theres so much meaning and intention in Kares designs. It’s just so funny when there’s 50 layers of undo now. You forget how amazing it was just to iterate undo and back again, Kare tells me. Andy Hertzfeld [one of the core Apple employees who made the Macintosh] wrote an icon editor as soon as I got to Apple. I did some drawings on graph paper to take to my job interviews, but using that icon editor was amazing. It was so nice to get to do it on the machine. In the end, Kare and Walker managed to curate the Esc Keys down to 32 final pieces, although additional icons will appear later for some charity events they have planned later in the year, Walker says. Each icon is a limited edition, from 30 to 120 pieces depending on the icon, with prices ranging from $650 to $2,000 depending on the type of object: You can buy the computer key in enameled silver for $650 or in gold vermeil (a 19th-century technique in which you apply a thicker layer of gold to sterling silver, resulting in a finish that is five-times thicker and more durable than gold plating) for $1,010. The necklace pendant in silver goes for $1,390 while the gold vermeil version is $2,020. We carefully handcraft everything in the studio, Walker says. Things like the enameling is super sharp. You usually get blotches with enamel, but this is beautifully flushed, hand filed to get these sharp edges on the pixels. Each icon is also paired with a digital counterpart on the blockchain. [Photo: Asprey Studio] Shes an icon But more than their material value, these icons carry something that to me is far more precious: Kare’s unique ability to distill complex ideas into minimal, universal symbols that speak directly to our emotions. There’s somethin intrinsically appealing about the minimalist expression of Kares 1-bit icons, a striking contrast to this age of high-definition graphics, photorealistic interfaces, and artificial intelligence. Her iconic imagery, which created the modern graphical computing language after it’s protoform was developed at Xerox PARC, is the progenitor of much graphic language we still see today. Her work has an endearing quality that made it ideal for the collection, Walker says. It celebrates Susan. I’ve been looking at digital arts history in general and shes the pioneer. Indeed, Kare is the GOAT and everyone should say that more often. She should be recognized universally for her founding contribution to the modern era of both computing and design, and not just in those industries. What Kare does may look simple, but the way she distills and synthesizes reality into its purest form, the pure soul of everyday things and ideas in a 16 x 16 or 32 x 32 grid, is nothing but pure art. The pixel aesthetic she pioneered has transcended its technological origins to become something deeply emotional and universally understood, which is the key to these keys. Some may say that this is just nostalgia speaking, but it goes way beyond being a GenXer reminiscing about the golden years of computing and the Pirates of Silicon Valley. And it goes beyond the faux nostalgia of the generations that grew up on touchscreens too. I suspect they crave these essential pixelated representations of reality, plastering their Tik Toks and playing retro games, not because they are artifacts of the past but because there is an intrinsic appeal in Kares work. Because the simplicity of things, the abstraction process, makes all of us put more of ourselves into those graphics. And thats why I believe pixel art transcends generations and is universal. [Photo: Asprey Studio] The beauty of simple forms There’s science to back this up. Shaped by millions of years of life evolution, our brains love to fill in the blanks. And, in that process, we project our emotions into these visual objects, something that is extremely satisfying at a subconscious level. It’s like the original Lego minifig, where there was only one smile and two eyes. It didnt matter it was smiling: I remember putting my emotions in those ‘blank’ faces. A minigif could be happy or it could be sad. It could be angry or in love because of the simplicity of it. It makes us put our brain and soul into it. It creates a connection. At this point in our conversation, Kate reminded me of American cartoonist Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics. He has a couple illustrations where he showed a few drawings, like a very detailed pen sketch of a person, and then less and less detail, getting down to just a circle with a slight smile and two eyes, she says. McClouds said that, the less detail, the more universal and the more anybody can look at that and feel as if it represents them. I always used to think that the pencil icon can look to anybody like a writing implement. If you draw a chrome pen with highlight and shininess, it becomes so specific that it’s not the writing implement you imagine, she says. Even though most people don’t work in 72 DPI anymore or monochrome, I hope in some of these escape keys there’s that beauty, Kare says. Indeed, thats exactly the beauty of all her work. A beauty that is endearing and, well, cute. “I’ve been accused of being someone who likes things that are cute,” she says. “And yes, I really do think that a tablespoon of cute is good.” But cute may be interpreted as something done on purpose, frivolous and superficial. There’s nothing superficial about her approach to synthesis, however. The cute factor is a side effect of that process and the process of our brain projecting our ideas and feelings into simple forms, which makes them instantly endearing and memorable. The objects in Esc Keys are a convergence of art, technology, and fine craftsmanship but, more importantly, they demonstrate in a physical and most definitive way how Kare’s visual language, born in the constraints of early computer displays, has evolved into something timeless. These aren’t just escape keys. They are escape pods into humanitys core, in a time where so many people feel divorced from it.
Category:
E-Commerce
If your company is losing Gen Z talent, chances are, the problem isnt themits you. The phrase “quiet quitting” has become a catch-all for blaming Gen Z workers for workplace disengagement. Older generations stereotype them as unmotivated, unwilling to go the extra mile, and too demanding. But heres the reality: Gen Z isnt disengagedtheyre just done tolerating bad leadership. My research, including surveys, interviews, and case studies across industries, shows that what many have labelled “quitting” is actually a rational response to workplaces that lack fairness, structure, and alignment with employee values. Instead of writing off an entire generation, leaders should be asking: What are we doing wrong? The real problem: Leadership that hasnt kept up Gen Z grew up amid economic uncertainty, social justice movements, and an increasing focus on mental health. They dont just want jobs; they want workplaces that prioritize psychological safety, transparency, and fairness. And yet, many companies still cling to outdated management stylesrigid hierarchies, inconsistent expectations, and vague career paths. If leadership is unclear, unresponsive, or inequitable, Gen Z isnt going to stick around and suffer in silence. Thats not “quitting”thats self-respect. Why traditional leadership fails Gen Z Leadership models that worked for previous generations often fall flat today. Take transformational leadershipwhich focuses on vision and motivation. It sounds great, but often lacks the psychological safety Gen Z craves. Servant leadership, which emphasizes employee well-being, is a step in the right direction but can also fail if it lacks structure and clarity. Gen Z doesnt just want a charismatic leader who inspires them; they want fairness, clear expectations, and leaders who actually listen. When those elements are missing, disengagement is inevitable. This is where the model I developed, Engaged Empathy Leadership Model (EELM), offers a solution. A better leadership model: kindness, fairness, structure Through my research, I developed the EELMa leadership framework designed to retain and engage Gen Z talent by focusing on three essential elements: Kindness: Leaders who genuinely care and empathize build trust and psychological safety. Employees are more engaged when they feel valued as individuals, not just as workers. Fairness: Gen Z expects equitable treatment in promotions, pay, and opportunities. If they sense any sort of favoritism or lack of transparency, they disengage. Structure: Gen Z demands clarity in expectations, consistent feedback, and transparent decision-making eliminate the ambiguity that leads to frustration. Remember, structure isnt about rigidityits about alignment. Real-world success: Companies doing it right Forward-thinking companies are already proving that when leadership evolves, Gen Z thrives. Ive seen it work in several instances. One tutoring company increased retention by replacing traditional performance reviews with casual one-on-one check-inssometimes over coffee or even during a round of golf. Employees didnt stay because they had to, they stayed because they felt heard. Then theres the production company in the manufacturing and retail space that shifted bonus structures from individual seniority-based rewards to team-based outcomes. This resulted in less resentment, better collaboration, and a more engaged workforce. The last example Ill mention is a restaurant that implemented structured weekly feedback sessions. This provided a format for open conversations where employees could ask questions, voice concerns, and get clear guidance. These town halls werent just for top-down critique; they allowed employees to critique leadership in a respectful way and engage in honest discussions. The result? A dramatic boost in engagement and retention. Debunking the ‘bad attitude’ myth One of the most persistent myths about Gen Z is that they have “bad attitudes.” In reality, they simply communicate differently and expect clarity. Workplace conflicts often stem from misaligned expectationslike a Gen Z employee thinking a text message is fine for calling in sick, while an older manager expects a phone call. And lets be clear: no generation is inherently more or less hardworking. Employeesof any agego the extra mile when they trust leadership and see a future for themselves in an organization. The end of the ‘quiet quitting’ myth Gen Z isnt quietly quittingtheyre actively deciding where to invest their energy. If leaders fail to evolve, disengagement isnt a mystery, its a predictable outcome. But for companies that embrace kindness, fairness, and structure, Gen Z wont just staytheyll excel. The question isnt whether Gen Z is willing to work hard. The real question is: Are leaders willing to evolve?
Category:
E-Commerce
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