Jana Threw Out the Episode About an Hour Before We Recorded
Jana Threw Out the Episode About an Hour Before We Recorded
She had a whole thing planned. Talking points, the shape of it, ready to go.
Then she sat down and said we're not doing that.
What she said instead was that she'd had a day, and she couldn't turn it into a lesson, and she wasn't going to try. Her opening line on the recording was stop the planet, I want to get off.
So that's the episode. Her, mid-bad-day, no tidy arc, and me sitting across from her.
I'm writing it up because what happened next is the most useful thing we've published in a while, and none of it was planned.
The day
She found out about the interview that morning. Same day. It's a board seat, fourth round, a room full of people with serious backgrounds.
The cleaners came during her prep window. Vacuum going, and every few minutes somebody asking if she wanted this moved, which meant getting up and moving it, because she's got projects spread across most flat surfaces in this house right now.
Phone kept going. A few things landed that needed answers.
And then it was interview time.
She says she lost a little confidence in there. That's not a thing that happens to her. She practices speaking every day. In the bathroom, in the closet, in the pantry, wherever she is when a line arrives. She writes most of our speeches and then makes me rehearse them, and my contribution to that process is color commentary from the side, which she tolerates.
Her description of our dynamic: she keeps the car on the road and I chase squirrels.
Anyway. She got in there and it wobbled.
The transcript
Here's the part that bothered her most, and I'd never thought about it before.
They're not sending video. They're taking an AI transcript of her interview and distributing it to about a hundred people, who then vote.
No tone. No pacing. No eye contact. None of the energy she brings into a room, which is most of what she is.
And anybody who's read a transcript of themselves knows what that looks like. It's choppy. There are interruptions and half-sentences and places where you started over. A conversation that felt fine reads like a person barely holding it together.
She's spent decades getting good at delivery, and the thing being judged is the part with the delivery removed.
I don't have a fix for that. It's just a real problem and it's going to be more common.
The dance thing
We ballroom dance. One of us knows the full routine and it isn't me.
Here's what happens every time. We finish, people tell us it was great, and the two of us walk off comparing notes on everything we missed. That step, that turn, the timing in the middle section.
Nobody in the room knows the routine. They saw a dance. We saw the gap between what we practiced and what came out.
That's what happened in her interview. She had points she meant to make and didn't. She made other ones instead. The trail still gets to the same place, and she's the only person who knows what the original route looked like.
The gap is real and it's also invisible to everyone but you.
Why we go looking for what's missing
Jana asked this out loud and I didn't have a good answer.
Why is it so much easier to find what you didn't do than what you did.
Best I've got: if you've spent years trying to get better at something, your eyes get trained to find the gap. That's how improvement works. You look for the seam, you fix the seam.
Then the same equipment runs on a day when there's nothing to fix, and it finds seams anyway, because that's what it does. It doesn't have an off switch and it doesn't know the difference between a practice session and a Tuesday afternoon you just need to survive.
So we ran the questions, live
We use four questions at the end of a day. What did I do well, what might I have done differently, what could I do more efficiently next time, how lucky am I.
She'd been ruminating for hours. So we ran them out loud on the recording, on a real thing, while she was still in it.
Living Lucky® Practice
The Four Questions, After a Rough One
Four minutes. Out loud if you've got somebody, on paper if you don't. Do them in order, and do not skip the first one because it feels like it doesn't apply.
01 What did I do well?
Showing up counts. Preparing at all counts. Being decent to somebody counts. Your mind will fight you on this one, which is how you know it's the right place to start.
02 What might I have done differently?
Might, not should. Should is a verdict. Might is information. And check whether the thing you're blaming yourself for was actually available to you at the time.
03 What could I do more efficiently next time?
Usually logistics rather than character. Clear the room. Silence the phone. Close the open loops before the thing starts. Most of what wrecked it was environmental.
04 How lucky am I?
That you got the shot at all. That somebody put your name in. That you were in the room. Zoom out far enough to see the thing you were nervous about is a thing you wanted.
What she got out of it, roughly in order: she showed up, she prepared as much as the morning allowed, she was friendly and the conversation was genuinely personal. She could have prepped earlier except she didn't know until that morning. Next time she clears the house, silences the phone, and closes the open loops before something like that.
And then the fourth one. She's in the fourth round of a process she was nominated for, in a room of people with real careers behind them.
She also had to help the interviewer get Zoom working, which I'd call a data point.
The whole thing took about four minutes and she was noticeably different afterward. Not fixed. Different.
You're allowed to just have the day
The part I'd underline is what she said before any of that.
Not everything has to be a life lesson.
We work in personal development, which means we're both constantly asking what the lesson is, and there are days where the lesson is that it was a bad day and you got through it. You can have the day. You can segment it, write off the morning, and start the afternoon somewhere else.
Get ice cream if you want ice cream.
Then run the questions when you're ready, and not a minute before.
The Living Lucky® Practice
Exercise: next time something goes sideways, run the four questions out loud with somebody. Out loud matters. It's a different process than thinking about it.
Reflection question: what am I judging myself on that nobody else in the room can even see?
Journal prompt: where did my day actually go wrong, and where am I just finding seams out of habit?
Action: give yourself the rest of today. Run the questions tomorrow.
Frequently asked questions
Why do I fixate on small mistakes after something important?
Because getting better at anything trains you to find gaps, and that skill doesn't switch off when you're not practicing. The same attention that makes you good at something will make you miserable about it afterward if you let it run unsupervised.
What are the four reset questions?
What did I do well, what might I have done differently, what could I do more efficiently in the future, and how lucky am I. The order matters. Starting with what went well is the part most people skip, and it's the part that makes the rest usable.
Why start with what went well instead of what went wrong?
Because your mind is already doing what went wrong for free. Nobody needs help with that one. Asking what went well first puts something on the other side of the ledger before you start listing.
Does anybody else notice the mistakes I'm replaying?
Usually not. They don't know what you planned. They only saw what happened, and in most cases what happened was fine. You're comparing reality to a version that only exists in your head.
What if I'm being judged on a transcript or a recording?
It's a real disadvantage if delivery is your strength, and worth naming rather than pretending otherwise. What you can control is being clearer and more concrete in the words themselves, since that's what survives the transfer.
Do I have to find the lesson in every bad day?
No. Some days the honest answer is that it was rough and you got through it. Forcing a lesson while you're still in it usually just adds a second thing to feel bad about.
We went deeper on this on the Living Lucky® Podcast, Season 11, Episode 34.
We Create Our Luck®.
