This is the Too Many Trees newsletter, where I share what I’ve been writing and reading in the realm of leadership and personal development. My coaching practice is centered around the idea that we are more effective in moving towards our goals when we become more conscious and intentional in focusing our time and attention, and learn how our unconscious patterns are holding us back. If you know somebody that could benefit from my perspective, please forward this to them or let them know they can set up a free intro chat with me.
I started writing thoughts here about deprogramming myself from capitalism, and the books that helped me see alternative perspectives, but the thoughts got too long and ended up in a blog post instead.
A teaser paragraph to get you to click through to the post:
Reflecting on my own situation, it made no sense within the reductionist capitalist framework for me to walk away from a prestigious highly paid job at Google for self-employment, because my compensation would go down, and that is the only number that determines capitalist “success”. Once my coach and friends helped me realize that I could choose a different set of “success” criteria (breaking out of myth #3), I realized that spending my time on more fulfilling coaching work, and having more time for myself and for my family, was worth more to me than the Google compensation. Admittedly, I was privileged to have the financial security to support myself and my family while I built my coaching business. But two years later, I am very happy with my decision – I don’t regret the “lost” income at all, as I am feeling more fulfilled through the mastery, autonomy and purpose I get through coaching.
And now for the normal personal development content:
LinkedIn: These are ideas or questions that help my clients (or myself), and that I share via LinkedIn to help a wider audience.
How are you spending your time? The one thing we theoretically control is our time and attention. If we notice when we let our calendar and time be driven by others, rather than by our values, we can take actions such as delegation or prioritization to bring ourselves back into alignment.
Influence is presenting information in a way people will receive it. I suggested this framing to a client who was told to improve their influence, which gave him ideas of what skills he could practice to increase influence, including understanding their perspective and incentives, and tailoring his communications accordingly.
What are your principles for making decisions? I use Patrick Pichette’s questions from his time as CFO of Google to illustrate the value of creating a framework for decisions to enable others to model one’s thinking. Consistent principles create leverage for leaders so they can focus on higher impact activities.
The difference between your truth and autopilot reactions, where your truth comes from a quiet place inside, and our acculturated reactions tend to be absolute rules or unconscious biases or loud internal voices that drive conformist behaviors.
One of my standard interview questions from Google was “Tell me about a time when you changed somebody's mind who held power over you” - I share some themes I saw in people’s answers.
Sleep is my keystone self-care habit. I share some observations from my own behavior during a week of poor sleep, and how it diminishes my effectiveness in everything that I do.
Articles and resources I’ve liked recently:
Building on the LinkedIn post above about spending your time in accordance with your values, I am sharing a few articles around building the skill of saying No.
Saying “No” - this article (seen in James Clear’s newsletter) shares one woman’s journey from being the “Queen of Yes” to the “Duchess of No”. I particularly loved this insight: “the first part of learning to say NO is learning to accept that offers and opportunities are merely an indication that you’re on the right path- not that you’ve arrived at a final destination you can never find again.”
The CEO of No - an interview with entrepreneur Andrew Wilkinson, who shares great perspectives on how he runs his business in a few hours each day e.g. “One of the mistakes that a lot of entrepreneurs make is they include themselves on the team. I think you're a coach and you should be standing on the sidelines — cheering on the team, moving the right people in and out, and changing strategy as you need to.”
Saying No is a gift - one of my LinkedIn posts from last newsletter
Thanks for reading. See you in a couple weeks.