We’re having a little fun over here in Sunday Scaries land.
If you scrolled down and thought, “Angie sent us her newsletter instead of the Sunday Seven,” well…not quite! After nearly 250 editions of giving you seven things on Sundays, I’m breaking my own rules today.
There will not be seven things.
😱 I KNOW.
But there will still be great lessons!
I spent part of this week talking to a room full of humans about curiosity, attention, and nerve, and there’s a bigger idea in there that doesn’t really want to be chopped into seven tidy parts.
So, we’re going with it.
What was the room, you ask?
It was the 38th floor of the Grand Hyatt in Denver, with blue skies, mountain views in every direction, and the feeling that you’re much more important than you probably are. 😂
I was there with the Tailscale sales team to talk about the art of being human in sales.
What a concept, right? I loved the talk I gave, but I think I like that phrase even more.
There’s an art to being human.
Science is part of almost everything we do (spoken like a true former engineer, eh? 😏)
In sales, there are pitches, processes, account plans, and performance metrics. Leadership has frameworks, assessments, and operating models. Marketing has funnels, data, segmentation, and strategy. Coaching has competencies, models, and methodologies.
🤖 And of course now AI is weaving its way into all of the above…and more.
We’re really good at ‘building’ science, and we should be. We love structure; processes help us learn faster, make things repeatable, and keep us from reinventing the wheel every time we do something hard.
And then there’s the art: the human stuff that’s a whole lot messier, more unpredictable, and harder to put into a spreadsheet.
For the sales team, we talked about that art through three things: curiosity, attention, and nerve. Be interested enough to ask better questions, pay attention to actually hear the answer, and have enough nerve to do something with what you learned.
😉 Nothing earth-shattering (which is exactly why I like it), but very effective in building human relationships, whether it be on the sales floor or at the dinner table.
At one point, I asked everyone to pair up with someone they hadn't met and spend 90 seconds talking about anything except work. That's it. No networking objective, no clever prompt, no desired outcome other than getting curious about another person.
The room got loud fast as they learned things about each other, paid attention, and asked thoughtful questions to create even stronger human connection.
Turns out, the art was already in the room.
That may have been what I liked most about the Tailscale crew.
I was there to talk about being human in sales, but over the course of the afternoon, I got to watch a group of people who are already pretty darn good at being human with each other.
They shared what they knew instead of hoarding it.
They asked questions and actually listened to the answers.
They encouraged each other, laughed, and seemed genuinely happy when someone else had something to contribute.
And there was ambition in that room — a LOT of it — without the feeling that someone else had to lose for you to win. Considering how common cutthroat cultures can be, that was refreshing.
👉 Quick Sunday Scaries gut check: When someone around you wins, is your first instinct to celebrate, compare, or compete?
No judgment. We’re human. But the answer probably tells you something about the environment you’re in (and maybe something about the environment you’re helping create…)
Now, before this starts sounding like I spent an afternoon drinking the corporate Kool-Aid, remember: I was the lady with the microphone. 😆 I saw one team, at one event, for a relatively short amount of time.
But I can also tell when an environment feels real and intentional, and nothing about this one felt accidental.
And that’s the part worth lingering on.
Whether you’re building a team, planning a dinner, keeping a twenty-year friendship alive, or trying to get your family together for something other than a funeral, good experiences need someone to care enough to create them.
And then everyone else has a choice about how they show up and engage.
👉 Maybe that’s reminder #2: Good human experiences require participation.
You can get invited to the dinner and stare at your phone.
You can join a great team and never share what you know.
You can sit across from someone you love and only half-listen because you're thinking about the twelve other things you need to do.
Or you can participate.
That’s where the science and art meet.
We can create the conditions for people to connect. We can build the team, plan the dinner, organize the event, start the tradition, or put the date on the calendar.
But we can’t engineer everything to death, even though some of us might like to try. 😏
The humans still have to human.
We have to ask the question, share what we know, put the phone down, notice who hasn’t said much, invite someone in, remember what someone told us last time, and perhaps most importantly, actually care.
Because that’s the part I don’t think any framework, process, technology, or AI tool can manufacture for us.
Maybe that's why I'm getting so interested in “the art.”
This week it was the art of being human in sales. But there's an art to being human in leadership, marketing, coaching, friendship, marriage, your neighborhood, and whatever weird interaction you're having with the person next to you at the airport.
We have more tools than ever to help us with the mechanics of all of those things, and hey, I'm here for that!
Give me the data, the systems, the automations, and the AI assistant that saves me three hours of painful manual, transactional work.
But none of those things can create genuine interest, attention, or connection between two people.
That’s the art.
And apparently, I like being around people who practice it because my part of the Tailscale event ended Wednesday afternoon…and I went back for breakfast Thursday morning anyway.
No reason I needed to be there. I just liked the humans and had time before heading home. 😊
👉 And that brings us to reminder #3: Use all the tools you want. Just don’t outsource the part that requires you to care for the humans in your world.
We’ll keep getting better at the science. We’ll have better tools, smarter systems, faster ways of doing things, and AI that can handle more of the mechanics for us.
Awesome. Let it. That gives us even more room to practice the art of being human…in life.
Your Friend and Coach,
Angie
P.S. Look at us already putting your survey feedback to work. Seven tips, what?! 😜
