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 learning 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.
A coaching friend of mine, Sarah DeWitt, offered a three-week self-paced workshop in January to “Design Your 2021”, using the ideas from the Designing Your Life books by Bill Burnett and Dave Evans. It consisted of three email prompts each week, to design, prototype and reflect, with each week having a different focus of Body & Behavior, Relationships, and Supportive Structures.
I found it to be a helpful way to start the year, as it prompted me to imagine what I want my life to look like in five years, and to identify how my habits, relationships, and support structures are enabling or blocking my path towards that vision of life. Reflecting for 20-30 minutes three times a week illuminated ways in which the structures composing my current life are at odds with the future vision I say I want for myself. And as is the magic of coaching, just starting to pay attention to those discrepancies allows me to see opportunities that I had previously been ignoring to change things.
To move it from the abstract to the practical, I realized in reviewing my current life that I am missing friends and connection and community. I love my family, and I love my coaching clients, and yet I have defined roles to play in those interactions of being a good husband, father, and coach. Being a friend or a community member allows me to just be “me” without worrying about living up to my standards of playing a role. Once I realized that I was missing that, I started seeing opportunities to reach out and say hi to acquaintances and friends, even small things like saying hi after seeing a LinkedIn or Facebook post. It seems obvious, but it’s easy to get stuck in our routines and not even notice what we are missing until it becomes an urgent lack.
So what are you missing in your current life that would be part of your ideal life? What can you do today to get more of that? Hint: if you, like me, want more connection, get in touch for a chat!
And now for the normal personal development content:
Blog: I didn’t manage to write a book summary in the past two weeks, but did manage to edit and finally publish the first post in a series about alignment. In this post, I explore how aligning our parts can lead to greater impact in multiple realms from the physical to the mental to the organizational, and how alignment differs from the zero-sum power game.
LinkedIn: These are ideas or questions that help my clients (or myself), and that I share via LinkedIn to help a wider audience.
“constructive, nonviolent tension is necessary for growth” For MLK Day, I re-read Letter from a Birmingham Jail, and was struck by that quote. Acknowledging “the hidden tension that is already alive” and turning it into constructive tension for growth is how we make progress.
How do you handle strong emotions? The male default in America is to hide emotion by holding it in, which creates tension and stress. I am learning to feel the emotion and let it go.
How do you escape an emotional loop? Our brains tend to reinforce existing perceptions, as we interpret new actions in light of what we already think. This can lead to runaway loops of escalation, so I offer ideas on how to interrupt the loop and start over.
Articles and resources I’ve liked recently:
The GameStop story is ongoing and hilarious. This Vice article is a decent summary but I’ve been really appreciating Matt Levine’s daily Money Stuff column this week (I get it via email), as he analyzes everything happening around this story.
On Deck is a company that assembles cohorts of like-minded people to take the next major step in their careers, including founding a company, scaling a company, etc. Last week, I gave a talk to the On Deck First 50 cohort, which is for people who want to transition from big tech to a startup, and was excited by the energy in the Zoom.
The Michael Scott Theory of Social Class: I never watched The Office, but this was a brilliant analysis of how the “educated gentry” (aka me) divorce themselves from straight talk by focusing more on posturing for each other and others than on reality (building in part on the ideas from Bobos in Paradise). I saw this in the free version of Anne Helen Petersen’s newsletter.
Thanks for reading. See you in a couple weeks.