Tiki’s Voyage: From Developer to Whiskey Aficionado and Agile Podcaster with Guest - Tiki

Dirty Skittle [00:00:00]:
I'm ready. I went a little heavy on my poor, but.

G-Rex [00:00:07]:
In the grand scheme of things, like who gives a shit? It's a podcast. Like, who's going to know?

Dirty Skittle [00:00:13]:
All right, so your stage name is yes. Okay, cool.

Tiki [00:00:17]:
Cool.

Dirty Skittle [00:00:18]:
G. Rex, do you want to do this intro?

G-Rex [00:00:21]:
Yep. Are you ready?

Dirty Skittle [00:00:23]:
I mean, I'm ready. Is everybody ready?

G-Rex [00:00:25]:
Everybody's ready.

Dirty Skittle [00:00:26]:
Okay, cool.

Tiki [00:00:26]:
Phone ready.

G-Rex [00:00:28]:
All right. Three, two, one. Welcome back to another episode of Shit that goes on in our Heads. Today we have an awesome guest. His name's tiki. And Tiki, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself?

Tiki [00:00:44]:
About myself? Yeah. So I am a husband, a father, also a dog dad. That's what I dedicate most of my time to those things. And then on the side, I am an independent management consultant, also a podcast host. So that's what I do. Yeah.

Dirty Skittle [00:01:28]:
Nice. Don't you have a hobby with whiskey?

Tiki [00:01:31]:
I have a hobby, yes. Whiskey. So every literally, I went down to my bar and I was like, which whiskey do I pick for this one? So I went in and picked a player at all, which I had bought in Scotland when I was in yeah, I traveled the world looking for whiskey, too.

Dirty Skittle [00:01:53]:
Nice. That's another hobby.

Tiki [00:01:55]:
That's cool.

Dirty Skittle [00:01:56]:
I mean, I feel like we're lucky, right, G. Rex? That he's got this whiskey from Scotland. Meanwhile, I have vodka and Mountain Dew.

G-Rex [00:02:06]:
What are you, uh, coffee and muse. You know, what a combination.

Dirty Skittle [00:02:13]:
Nice.

Tiki [00:02:14]:
It'll keep you going, though.

G-Rex [00:02:16]:
It will. I just want this damn cough to go away. It's been like three weeks. I'm over it.

Dirty Skittle [00:02:22]:
Yeah, it's been a while, bud. It's been a while. It's time for it to go. And you have a podcast, right, Tiki?

Tiki [00:02:29]:
Yeah, I have a podcast. My very good friend Daniel Vicante and I, we have a podcast called Drunk Agile, where we drink whiskey right up front, talk about the whiskey we're drinking, and then we run into talking about management concepts, particularly Agile management concepts.

Dirty Skittle [00:02:50]:
What a perfect combination. Yeah, talking about management.

Tiki [00:02:56]:
And the funny thing is we put that our primary audience is on YouTube, so everyone sees us talking, the whiskey and all that stuff. And my dog, Nisha, who's not here right now, she's the real star of the show. She's the one that everyone tunes in to watch.

Dirty Skittle [00:03:12]:
Yeah, that's cool. I love that. So I understand that you know G. Rex from previous careers, right? How long have you guys known each other for?

G-Rex [00:03:24]:
It's got to be over 14 years.

Tiki [00:03:28]:
Yeah, it has to be, because the place where GX and I worked together, I think I started in 2005 and.

G-Rex [00:03:40]:
I started in 2008.

Tiki [00:03:42]:
Yeah. So it has to have been since 2008, 2009, at least.

Dirty Skittle [00:03:46]:
Wow, what a different time it was back then. How long were you guys working together for?

Tiki [00:03:56]:
I think we interacted pretty much because I used to be a developer. So I used to write a whole bunch of stuff that went out and broke for our customers. And that's when Direct would come in.

Dirty Skittle [00:04:10]:
Broke?

Tiki [00:04:11]:
Yeah, that's when Direct or my team wrote it or whatever. And that's where our interactions was. Oh, someone needs to go fix this.

G-Rex [00:04:20]:
Yeah. So it usually be me being like Ping and Tiki. And I'd be like, yo, can you all fix this? Because I got a bunch of customers that are not happy. And he'd be like, yeah, we're going to get right on that. And then I'd be like, silence for a couple of hours and then come back and it'd be like magically fixed. Wow, those were the good old days. Yeah. From what I understand, that doesn't happen so much anymore.

Dirty Skittle [00:04:49]:
Wait, which part?

G-Rex [00:04:52]:
Getting fixed in a couple of hours?

Dirty Skittle [00:04:53]:
I was going to say because very much happens.

Tiki [00:04:58]:
Well, if you build something, it will break. At some point, you got to accept that.

G-Rex [00:05:04]:
So if you build something, they will come.

Tiki [00:05:07]:
If you build something, it will break.

G-Rex [00:05:09]:
It will break.

Tiki [00:05:10]:
If you build something, be ready to fix it as quickly as possible.

Dirty Skittle [00:05:14]:
Yeah, man. So you guys went from working together. How long were you there for? You were there for a while, right?

Tiki [00:05:20]:
I was there for 16 years, 1617 years, something like that.

Dirty Skittle [00:05:27]:
That's a long time. I can't imagine, like, I've been at my last place for what, like seven years, I think. Yeah, I can't imagine doubling that. That's a long time to be invested into something.

Tiki [00:05:41]:
It was a place where I think most of us felt like we would want to be invested in. We wanted to stay invested in. And eventually, as everything things evolve, things change. And there was a point where I think a lot people started deciding it was no longer a place we wanted to be invested in.

G-Rex [00:06:04]:
And for me, I just got the opportunity to retire early. Age played in my favor this time.

Dirty Skittle [00:06:14]:
Yeah. If you don't mind me asking, so what do you think made it a place worth investing your time in?

Tiki [00:06:23]:
Oh, yeah, that time, effort, blood and sweat. Yeah. It was a lot. I attributed to at least two things, which end up being one thing, the leadership that we had who inspired us day to day, and the people I worked with on a daily basis, my team, which, again, as I said, those two things are the one thing, which is the people. The people that were around us, around me. I wanted to show up for them every day. I wanted to show up and do my best to help them do their best.

Dirty Skittle [00:06:58]:
Yeah, man, that must have been I mean, it's a big change, right, to walk away from that many years of commitment. And I would imagine as a developer, it's not always the easiest of jobs and it could get stressful.

Tiki [00:07:14]:
But that's what makes it as I shifted into management. As I started reading more and more upon management theory, it ended up changing my perspective on this to it's really the fact that you're working on a team or a group of people who are committed towards the same thing, that makes it so much easier. Rather than feeling like you, by yourself, are trying to pull this whole thing forward.

Dirty Skittle [00:07:43]:
Yeah, we had somebody on our podcast, Crazy Eight, and I remember him saying that if the group of you have the same goal right, like that that's very important. And so I feel like that's what you're saying and I can relate to that as well. As stressful as it is, it's the.

G-Rex [00:07:59]:
People that keep you mean that's what kept me there for so long too, is the know. One day I was working at what I would call Disneyland, and then the next it was not so much Disneyland anymore, but it was the people and those relationships that I built and nurtured for years and years and years. Once I retired, it was really hard to walk away from that because you miss those daily interactions, you miss the camaraderie. But fortunately for me, I kept up with everybody. I have a Zoom account so I would reach out to people once every couple of weeks and check on and see everybody's doing and dirty skittles. I call you every day. Well, almost every day. There are some days I still kind of sleep in and then when I do call you, you're busy so I'm like catch up with you via text.

Dirty Skittle [00:09:02]:
I'm still working that nine to. I mean, I'm curious how that transition went for you tiki like working somewhere for that long, being in that group of people, working towards one goal and then transitioning out of that to where you are now with this podcast. I mean, it kind of sounds like it could be related, but what happened in between? How did you get there?

Tiki [00:09:30]:
When I first left that job where I was 16 years, I actually went to a different company that was looking for someone who had done pretty much exactly what I had done and it fit the bill. That's where I was for a year. And then I eventually got to this point. I had learned so much in all those years that I felt like I did not want to stay restricted to just one place to work with just one set of people. I wanted to have a broader influence, have the ability to work with people across the world, across different industries. And that's how I went into being an independent consultant. And it's been great because of the same thing. You get to work with a lot of people with a lot of different backgrounds who themselves are looking for that same thing that we had, which is how do we get people to be in a safe environment where they are all moving in the same direction?

Dirty Skittle [00:10:36]:
Man and your interests into, I guess, that philosophy and that world. Did it start with the previous employer or were you always kind of drawn to that bit of knowledge?

Tiki [00:10:50]:
It absolutely started with the previous employer. I graduated as a developer. I spent a good amount of time writing code and solving problems. But as I was doing that, I realized the thing I really enjoyed was sitting in a room with four people and kind of us figuring out this thing together and high fiving when we figured it out. That was the part that I really enjoyed. Ever since I was a little, I played sports, and even now, every Sunday I go play Frickin with my team. And I love the fact that you are all in a space where you come together to get things done. And that is a realization I had much later. Because when you're a developer, all your colleagues, everyone trains you to put the blinders on and just look at the screen and code away. And over time I discovered that that's not the part I enjoyed as much I enjoyed we all come together to solve a problem part a lot more.

Dirty Skittle [00:11:57]:
Wow. I'm curious if I'm just very curious. So, like, all the developers I know, no offense to developers, and my husband Bizzle is probably going to be like, what are you saying? But they are very to themselves focus. And I guess if that's the training right. I guess it makes sense that that takes on into your personal life. But I'm curious why it was so different for you, right? Like, if you were there in that environment, learning from what you're seeing and being so impassioned by it, that you continue kind of on that path, that's cool. But also I'm like, Dang, how did that happen? Because Bizzle is upstairs still keeping how do I slide him into that world?

Tiki [00:12:49]:
I'm trying to roll back 20 years to remember how it happened, which is really hard after all the whiskey I've consumed. But it's one of those things where I think, yeah, you do get trained to you get praised for this is the thing. You get praised for being the brilliant developer that can solve all the problems. And it's a self fulfilling prophecy. At that point, you don't want anyone else to solve the problem. You want to solve the problem because that's what's rewarding. And at some point you realize that you can't do it all by yourself. And when you deal with other folks who only want to do it by themselves, it's even harder. Maybe it's the fact that I've played sports all my life and I've always dependent on people around me for us to work together. But yeah.

G-Rex [00:13:53]:
I think that collaboration makes the dream work, right? Because you can't just be so siloed that you don't want to look elsewhere for help. Right. It's like peeling the onion. You can only peel it so far by yourself. But if you have somebody else that can come in and be like in 2 seconds, tell you exactly what the problem is, I would much rather work in a collaborative environment than in a siloed environment with my blinders on. I don't think I could do that because I'm too much of a people know I was the one in class, the teacher would be yelling at me to be quiet. Well, I can't be quiet because now that I found my voice, apparently I can't shut up. So it's all good.

Dirty Skittle [00:14:41]:
Yeah. That's one thing I think early in my career I learned from you, G. Rex, was resources and working with other teams and not being so dead set focused on what we were doing and realizing, I guess the bigger picture, that there are many teams to get us to our goal. Thanks. G rex.

G-Rex [00:15:02]:
I try, I think a lot like what Tiki's saying, it takes a team, right? And if you have a team that's not willing to come to the table and help you solve the problem, it makes it a lot harder. But if you have a team that is willing to come to the table and sit with you and kind of analyze what's going on and shoot out ideas and make you kind of think about the other possibilities because if you know me, it's like, hey, let's just give this a shot. If it doesn't work, fuck it. At least we tried, but at least giving it a shot without just shooting it down right away. And that's kind of how I work. I'm going to try something once. If it doesn't work, fuck it. At least I tried it's on the.

Tiki [00:15:55]:
Flip side of it. The flip side of it, right? You want people to come in and help. But I think what's harder for a lot of people who have been praised for individual brilliance is to ask for help. Because I think that's where we were talking about developers earlier and as a recovering developer, I can say this, it's very hard for a lot of developers to just take that step back and say, hey, I don't know how to do this. I'm out of my depth here, can I get help? So having that safety and that vulnerability to do that too, that's what leads to the teamwork, I think.

Dirty Skittle [00:16:38]:
Yeah, it took a while for me to learn that because that was one thing and I guess necessarily know where it came from. But it was very hard to stop and say, I don't have it all figured out and I need help. And maybe it was just that it's vulnerability, right? Like you're shedding your skin there and saying, hey guys, help me out.

Tiki [00:17:00]:
Was there any well, I was going to add one more thing. There's a great book by an author called Daniel Coyle. It's called The Culture Code and he worked with a lot of different organizations and kind of figured out, what are the three things required for high performing teams? And his conclusion was, you need safety, vulnerability, and direction. You have those three things. A team can become a high performing team. You need at least those three things.

Dirty Skittle [00:17:35]:
Man, that's good. Yeah. Because without safety, you're not going to be comfortable, to be vulnerable. And without direction, I mean, where do you go? Right? Yeah, man, I feel like we need that on a T shirt. I need to write that down, frame it, keep it next to my computer screen so that I can refer back to it.

G-Rex [00:17:58]:
Yeah, you need to go back to that, like, 14 times a day. But it also kind of plays into your mental health, too. Right. Because in order to be sound with your mental health, you need to have safety. Right. You need to be able to feel comfortable being who you are and being able to discuss kind of what's going on within you. Right. Because a lot of people out there suffer from mental health issues, and they're too afraid to come forward because they've all been trained or raised to keep it close to the heart, put a big happy smile on it, and just come back to work. But if you're depressed or going through your own kind of shit, it's hard to do that. Right. It's hard to break out of your own headspace, and if you don't feel safe talking about it, that's kind of sad. But I think that organizations more and more now are normalizing, how we talk about mental health and making sure that their team members have the resources that they need, because that also leads to a huge amount of burnout.

Tiki [00:19:12]:
Yeah. Just to double down on that. Coming from a culture I come from a culture where we value hard work, we value determinism, and we value just pushing through things, but we don't value mental health. We don't value taking a step back and going, oh, I need help. It took me, at least personally, at least 15 years of being in the industry to be, okay, I do need help. I give my wife a lot of credit for this because she's the one who talked to me a lot about this stuff. You seem like you just keep pushing through stuff. You don't even talk about it. Like, yeah, what else are you supposed to do? Why would I tell anyone how I'm feeling? I just need to figure out what the problem, what the solution is, and that's it. That's all I need to do. And as you were saying, I think that leads to a lot of anxiety because you're taking it all on yourself rather than looking for help.

Dirty Skittle [00:20:21]:
Yeah. I've learned with therapy, like, my signs, because I think I kind of can relate to what you're saying, where I think my normal way before of handling things was just power through, like, doesn't matter what it is, I can do it, I can get through it. I'll move past it, it's going to be fine. DA DA DA. And then learning to be vulnerable and saying, okay, I'm feeling anxious. Even just that identifying what types of physical triggers right. I could notice like, oh my gosh, I'm anxious about this and I don't have to do it all by myself. That was huge to learn. So I'm happy to hear that your wife was able to talk you into discovering that part of yourself. That's cool.

Tiki [00:21:09]:
If you add to that things, like, most people start off work, and when you're young, you're really ambitious and you really want to do these big things you start in and it's like, okay, what do I need to do to get promoted? What are these things I need to do? Because once I get to get promoted, I won't have to do all this stuff. I won't have to grind so hard. And then you get promoted and you're like, oh my God, this is worse, and I have to take care of people. Okay? And then you go, oh, wait, but if I get to the next step, it's going to be different. I won't have to do this anymore. And you get to the next step and you're like, oh my God, this is even worse. Now I have to play high level politics and grind and take care of people. And that anxiety keeps building. You think that moving up the ladder will help you get rid of the anxiety, but no, it only adds compound because now you're doing things you never did before.

Dirty Skittle [00:22:09]:
I know. And it's like, how do you do you have any, I don't know, tricks for handling stress or things that maybe you use to ground yourself? During during all of that, I think.

Tiki [00:22:20]:
We'Ve talked a lot about one of the things for me, which was, how do I reach out to my peers and kind of have those conversations? Because, um, that that was the beginning of it for me. It was like, okay, how do I talk to people who are in the same situation? And that kind of thing led to the whole podcast thing too. How do I talk to people who are in the same situation? And we bounce ideas off of each other. The other thing that as I became a manager, I realized and even when I was an individual contributor, I realized that it's going to sound really weird. It's not about the people. It's about the system that the people live in. You don't want to focus on making the people better. You want to focus on making the system better so that people can do their best work in it. Once you get to that point, that's when you start going, oh, I've been focusing on all the wrong things. And that's what's been causing my anxiety. I've been trying to make people better. I cannot make anyone better. What I can do is I can give you the environment in which you can best express yourself.

Dirty Skittle [00:23:27]:
Yeah.

G-Rex [00:23:30]:
Those environmental factors play so much into just your day to day life that eight to five grind or being on call twenty four, seven, that environment makes all the difference. And once you see that environment change, that's when that anxiety kicks in.

Tiki [00:23:55]:
Yeah. I think we have been trained traditionally to look for individual brilliance, to point out people who are really brilliant and trying to make an example of them. But I like to call this baseball management, because when you're in baseball, a really good pitcher and one or two really good hitters can win you the game. But most of the games we play are not baseball, they're basketball. They're where you need basketball management, where everyone needs to work together to get open and to pass the ball. And there's a lot more coordination. If you keep promoting individual brilliance in a basketball environment, you get some pretty bad results because people are just competing with each other rather than coordinating with each.

G-Rex [00:24:46]:
Tiki. How were you, um, were you raised here in the States or were you raised out of the country?

Tiki [00:24:55]:
Yeah, I grew up in India. I was in India all through high school. Then I moved here for college. I went to boarding school since I was twelve, so I've spent very little time at home since I was twelve. And I had middle class parents who were very hardworking folks. And my dad is probably the smartest person I know. And I saw him do essentially two things almost on a daily basis work really hard and then come home and spend time with us, which is me and my brother, to make sure we were getting the things done that we needed to get done. That was the upbringing of kind of nose to the ground, work hard, do the best you can, day in and day out, man.

Dirty Skittle [00:25:55]:
So no rest. He was no rest.

Tiki [00:25:57]:
Yeah, well, as I said, I played a lot of sports, so that was kind of rest. But even there, it was competition. Go compete and be as good as you can be.

Dirty Skittle [00:26:07]:
Yeah.

G-Rex [00:26:09]:
So what did they think when you moved out on your own, became an independent consultant?

Tiki [00:26:15]:
It's interesting because you grew up in this environment. My dad was a government employee pretty much his entire life. He spent one year as an engineer, but then he was a government employee till he retired. And there's certain safety in being a government employee because you get a salary regardless, you get a pension regardless. There's also the same safety when you have an employer that you get a salary, you get your benefits and all that stuff when you go independent. Well, that's a risk now. It's a huge risk. And my parents were very supportive of it. Definitely they were. But they did recognize the risk of, like, wow, seems like almost the first person in our family to kind of take this risk. So it's been a risk. It has its own anxiety with it because you're sitting back as an employee, you're doing things, and there's a paycheck coming. Doesn't matter what you do every couple of weeks with this, you have the anxiety of, hey, where does the next paycheck come from? I'm good for the next month or two. What happens after?

Dirty Skittle [00:27:27]:
Oh, yeah, that's stressful. I can only imagine. That's crazy. Oh, go ahead.

Tiki [00:27:36]:
Sorry, I thought GX was going to say something. I think we were all, like, half open. We're like, we're all going to say something.

Dirty Skittle [00:27:44]:
I know.

G-Rex [00:27:50]:
You broke me. Cough broke me. Let me go on mute.

Tiki [00:27:57]:
This is a safe, vulnerable environment where we are all giving each other the opportunity, and then we're making G rex cough all over the place.

Dirty Skittle [00:28:05]:
I mean, she's got to loosen it up, you know what I mean? All right, let me stop. Otherwise she's not going to be able to breathe here.

G-Rex [00:28:13]:
You both suck. But I'm good now. We're good.

Dirty Skittle [00:28:19]:
I was going to ask, how do you stay up to date with stuff like, are you constantly reading? What do you do to learn?

Tiki [00:28:26]:
I'm definitely constantly reading. I should have probably done this from the bar downstairs that I have so you could see the whole thing. I have a bar, and then I have two bookcases which keep getting which I have a really bad habit. I buy books faster than I read them.

Dirty Skittle [00:28:46]:
Do you rotate out books? Do you get rid of them? Do you donate them or no, I don't.

Tiki [00:28:52]:
Every time we move, I end up donating because we move every five or six years, I end up donating. Some of the older books, like, for example, a bunch of my programming books, a bunch of my developer books, I don't necessarily read them anymore, but there are kids who can definitely benefit from reading them. So I'll donate those. But a bunch of my business books and all my fiction stuff, I keep those because those are reference.

Dirty Skittle [00:29:16]:
Do you go back to them and read them again?

Tiki [00:29:18]:
Absolutely. It's one of those things of I think this is going to sound a little philosophical, but I think books change without changing because you yourself move into a different place in life. You have learned so much, and you go back to a book that you read five years ago and you go, oh, wow, this hits completely differently now. This is a totally different book at this point.

Dirty Skittle [00:29:48]:
I never thought of it that way, but you're absolutely right, because whoever you are in that moment that you're reading it and digesting it and whatever is happening inside of your head at that moment in time will humans.

G-Rex [00:30:02]:
Yeah. So, like, the book I'm reading right now is called The Advantage by patrick Laconi. Yeah. What a great book. Yeah, it really hit home. And so I have bookmarked a few pages in here and then the other book I've been reading is Emotional Intelligence 2.0 just being in the Moment. Because for me, I'm a true empath, so I really have to watch my boundaries. Know what? If it smells like drama now, it doesn't get to come in the box anymore. Before I had my breakdown, I would take on the world's problems, but now I'm more focused on taking care of me and my mental health and dirty skills. And I were talking and I was out of work for about four months doing my little sabbatical. And in those four months I healed a lot and I was really fortunate to be able to have that time to reevaluate what's important to me. So the things that are important to me are like my podcast, my family, my health, my mental well being. My mental well being is probably the highest of all those. But like, getting to do this every weekend, I love this. I love meeting new people. I love your story. I love talking about dirty skittles. It's our therapy.

Dirty Skittle [00:31:37]:
Yeah, we're selfishly just learning from you.

Tiki [00:31:41]:
It's so funny because we were talking about this. I think we were talking about this before we started recording the five minutes we were on it's. Healthy and happy people create healthy and happy systems which end up in healthy and happy products and services. It starts with those healthy and happy systems. Healthier, happy people creating those systems.

Dirty Skittle [00:32:04]:
One of my questions that I was going to ask that might be a little hard, maybe not. Who knows? If you were to build the quote, unquote, perfect environment or that ecosystem for a group of employees, are there any things that you would say, I have to have this or this cannot be a part of it at all. Any thoughts there?

Tiki [00:32:26]:
For me, what has to be important is that everyone is invested in creating a healthy system. There are different ways to measure what a healthy system is. I am a data geek. I'm a nerd that way. I believe in things like statistical process control and all that stuff. So I want everyone involved to be able to look at a system and go, are we in a healthy place? Is this system healthy? Is this system stable? And I don't want just the managers to do it. I want everyone on the team to be able to look at it and go, are we in a healthy place? If we are not okay, what are we going to do? What are we all going to come together and do to get us to a healthier place? That skin in the game, that investment of we are all in this together and we're going to figure out how to make the system healthy. That would be my baseline. That would be my basic. Thing.

Dirty Skittle [00:33:31]:
Is there anything that you're like? Absolutely not. This cannot be a part of it.

Tiki [00:33:39]:
Having your egos be so big that you feel that they're bigger than the team. For some reason, my head always goes to sports teams and it's when you have egos that are that big that they drive the rest of the team crazy. Sure, you might win a few games, but it's not a place people want to be. It's not going to be sustainable again. I live in South Florida, so Miami Heat, when we got the three big names in a while ago, we had Dwayne Wade, LeBron James and Chris Posh all in, and first year was a bit of a debacle. We should have won everything. We didn't. It's when the three of them figured out that, oh, we need to actually work together. When Chris Posh was like, I'll do more of the defensive stuff, dwayne Wade was like, okay, I am no longer the main guy. I'm going to pass the ball to LeBron James. That's when we started winning championships.

Dirty Skittle [00:34:46]:
Yeah, I thought were going to say the Dolphins. I'm just kidding.

Tiki [00:34:53]:
There's a football team around here. I had no idea.

G-Rex [00:34:57]:
Are you sure? They haven't shown up in years. Just kidding. Yeah, but go ahead.

Dirty Skittle [00:35:06]:
No, I was just going to say like that. I mean, just listening to how you answered that for me, it's resonating really deeply. I didn't mean it as a joke when I said that I'm selfishly learning from you because these are things that I'm going to take back and really think about for my everyday work life.

G-Rex [00:35:26]:
So, Kiki, now that you're out on your own, what are you doing daily for self love and self care? Are you making sure you're taking care of yourself?

Tiki [00:35:36]:
Yeah. My wife always looks at me weird when I do this, but I talk to my dog quite a bit. My German shepherd is my therapist. So, frankly, the thing that helps me the most is spending time with my family. And it sounds cheesy, but it really does. It's one of those things where all three of us, my daughter, my wife and I, we all work from home. So throughout the day there are at least like five to six different moments when we're all free at the same time and we'll do something little and then we all have dinner at the same time and all that. So it's definitely something that we have learned to prioritize, all three of us, because my wife comes from the same tradition, like nose to the ground, let's keep going. When she was working, where we all worked together, 1213, 14 hours, days were regular for her. But I think we've all gotten to a point that we're like, okay, you know what? What gives us peace is us spending time as a family. So we've definitely prioritized that. We've made a conscious effort to prioritize that and then, yeah, talking to my dog, which is sending out family.

Dirty Skittle [00:37:00]:
That is definitely I love that. I can understand that, because for me, with my little nugget, it doesn't matter how stressful the day was, it's almost like a release. Like I don't have to worry about anything that happened, because now I get to do whatever we're going to do together and kind of just let it go. So I get it. I get it, for sure.

G-Rex [00:37:23]:
So, Tiki, how can people find your podcast? How can they find your consultant services? I want to make sure that people know how to find you because I'm sure we have listeners out there that maybe need some insight from an independent consultant.

Tiki [00:37:43]:
Yeah, absolutely. So the podcast, you'll find it on YouTube. That's the easiest place to find it. If you just go and search drunk, Agile, you'll find us. That's literally the name of the podcast. As I said earlier, I'm a data geek, so we spend a good amount of time talking about numbers, but all those numbers are essentially aimed at building healthy systems to reach out to me directly. LinkedIn is probably the best place. You'll find me on LinkedIn. Should I give away my non stage name? Is that how it works?

Dirty Skittle [00:38:23]:
If you want it's, totally.

G-Rex [00:38:26]:
Yeah. You can give.

Tiki [00:38:30]:
I just didn't want to break the rules. Or maybe I did. My name is Pratik Singh. You'll find me I broke you again, didn't I?

G-Rex [00:38:41]:
You broke me again.

Tiki [00:38:42]:
So my name is Pratik Singh. You'll find me on LinkedIn. My photo has me with long hair, you'll see?

Dirty Skittle [00:38:52]:
I want to see you with long hair.

Tiki [00:38:54]:
Well, it gets a little longer than this. Not a lot longer than this, but, yeah, Pradeep Singh on LinkedIn, that's the easiest way to get to me. And, yeah, if you're looking for someone to come help your teams build healthy systems that are predictable, efficient and effective, that's what I do.

Dirty Skittle [00:39:21]:
You it's okay to be not okay. Just make sure you're talking to someone.