Explore antiracism with me
March 12, 2022
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.
tl;dr I’m starting a discussion group to meet monthly to talk about racism, and what actions we can take to become better allies and start to dismantle the systems and structures that empower racism. If you’re even a tiny bit interested or intrigued, please reach out and let’s talk.
Why am I doing this? The universe feels like it is nudging me to take this on:
For Black History Month, I read Ijeoma Oluo’s book So You Want to Talk About Race (you can read my summary here), and appreciated her challenge: “White people - talk about race with other white people. Stop pretending that you are exempt from the day-to-day realities of race. Take some of the burden of racism off of people of color. Bring it into your life so that you can dismantle racism in the white spaces of your life that people of color can’t even reach.”
The Reboot.io team just published How to be an Anti-Racist Leader (subtitled “Confronting and Healing Amidst Whiteness and White Supremacy”) with a number of powerful resources on how to confront whiteness and do our part to create systemic change.
I started a leadership coaching class, where Steve March challenged each of us to create and lead our own group as a “leadership lab” to practice the principles of leadership we would be learning in the class. He invited us to “reflect on what’s happening in the world that calls for your leadership. What
do you care about and value that enables you to hear this call?”
For the class, I could have done something easy like form a group around building leadership skills, bringing current and former clients together to share what is working or not working for them. But I feel I will benefit more by using it to push myself through my doubt and uncertainty around antiracism, where I know I can do more and have been afraid to step up.
Let me be clear that I don’t know what I’m doing, and I’m not an expert in antiracism or social justice by any means. My intention here is to convene a group of people to learn together and support each other in that learning. If you feel even a tiny spark of interest, please email me at eric (at) toomanytrees.com or reach out, and let’s figure out what we can do together.
And now for the normal personal development content:
LinkedIn: These are ideas that have helped my clients (or myself), and that I share via LinkedIn to help a wider audience. In assembling these, I realized the first two apply to why I’m starting the antiracism group: get active, and start practicing.
Stop reading the news. Rather than doomscrolling about Ukraine, I recommend breaking out of passivity to do something active instead. Taking action in this way will not do anything to help the Ukrainian people, of course. But practicing breaking our passivity may help us to change our local environment.
Practice doesn’t make perfect; practice makes permanent. This aphorism from my violin teacher felt apropos for describing why we can’t consistently act from a new mindset. We need to rewire our brain’s neural pathways by consistently and consciously practicing the new action.
Count to 5 before speaking. Rather than feeling like you “have to” speak up and fill silence in a meeting, practice being with the feeling of anxiety. This will help you build the skill of responding from your conscious intent, rather than reacting quickly to make the anxiety go away e.g. saying “Yes” to a task without fully considering whether you have the capacity to do it.
Articles and resources I’ve found interesting:
I love the work Lolita Taub is doing to expand access to VC funding and knowledge to historically excluded communities. She just launched her first solo venture fund, and shares her amazing story here.
I’m biased as Lolita was an early client of mine, and I’ve been cheering her on ever since, so I was excited to invest in her fund. If you’re an accredited investor, you can become an investor here.
Karla Starr’s rant about productivity gurus was pretty epic, where she points out that the reason Adam Grant can focus two days on deeply researching a paper is that his wife literally supports his every non-work need, leading to her point: “It’s insanely elitist and fragile to claim that Very Important Work requires a particular ecosystem”.
I was reminded of her rant when I read the Farnam Street article on first principles thinking, where they say “First-principles thinking is a competitive advantage because almost no one does it” because “it’s easier on your brain to reason by analogy”. Building on Starr’s perspective, I might observe that the reason almost no one does it is because most people don’t have the privilege to dedicate brainpower to first-principles reasoning - they have too much stuff to do each day just to survive!
The mess we’ve made of means testing with the subtitle “We give subsidies to people who don’t need them, and order the poor to find money they don’t have when they get in trouble with the law”. The more equitable idea they propose is to assess fines that are proportional to income: “If the federal government can tax incomes based on ability to pay, then local government could apply the same principle to the fees it charges for misdemeanor offenses.”
Thanks for reading! See you in a couple weeks.
