Give it a try
December 3, 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 executive 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.
Things are rarely as hard as you imagine. If you read through a couple articles online or watch a couple YouTube videos, you can generally figure out the first steps.
I’ve been in a learning mood this fall, and building new skills:
A couple years behind everybody else, I started making bread from scratch. It was surprisingly easy, and after a few iterations, quite delicious (picture).
Earlier this fall, I tried making yogurt in the Instant Pot. It took a few trials and experiments, but a couple months later, we have yogurt whenever we want.
For Thanksgiving, I brined and roasted a turkey, made the gravy, made pie dough, and baked three pies (picture).
In none of these cases was the actual task the hard part. Once I decided “I want to learn how to do this”, it took minutes to learn how to do it. The hard part was to actually try it, rather than dismiss it as a possibility, because I had to change my identity to believe “I am the kind of person who makes my own bread or yogurt”.
So what’s something you’ve been curious about but never tried? Take 5 minutes to look up a YouTube video or online lesson and try to follow along. Once you try it once and have a clear first step, you might decide that it’s more accessible than you thought.
Book in progress: How we limit our possibilities through our unconscious beliefs about ourselves is, uncoincidentally, the draft book chapter that I’ve been working on this week. I’d love any feedback you have on the draft if you’re willing to share (or just comment directly in the Google doc).
Thanks to all of you who have contributed comments and feedback on the drafts of the book intro and first chapter - I read and appreciate each bit of feedback and they are helping me to refine my ideas and increase my clarity as a writer.
Let me know if you want to be a beta reader, and continue getting draft chapters as I write them in exchange for providing feedback and comments. I don’t want to continue making every newsletter edition about writing the book, so I’m looking for a few people who opt-in to get notified about my ongoing writing.
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.
Create, Connect and Appreciate. Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday because we create food we love for people we care about, and appreciate what we have. This is at odds with how most of us spend our time Consuming, Producing, and Coveting, activities designed by our capitalistic culture to keep us unhappy and therefore buying more stuff to theoretically help us feel better. I want to stay more in Create, Connect and Appreciate mode even when it’s not Thanksgiving.
Give yourself permission to prioritize. I made a clear decision heading into Thanksgiving week to prioritize family time, even if it came at the cost of productivity. I was glad I did so, as it meant I didn’t have lingering guilt over all the things I “should” be doing, and could enjoy the wonderful times I did have.
When does it serve you to act as a player, or to act as a coach? At the highest levels of sports, we rarely see top players become top coaches because the skill sets are diametrically opposed - players dive into the action to take control, coaches step back and invest in player development. Yet in business, we expect people to make the transition from player to coach as they move from individual contributor to manager to executive. Being aware of the different skills needed in different situations can make it easier to switch your mindset.
Articles and resources I’ve found interesting:
What would a beloved economy look like? I loved reading Anne Helen Petersen’s interview with Jess Remington and Joanna L. Cea, the authors of Beloved Economies. This paragraph particularly inspired me as a leadership coach:
“when teams of people intentionally reimagine and re-make how we work together, that doing so is a powerful force for change. It creates precedent and examples that shift practice in sectors, in geographies, and can even change what gets on the table as potential policy and then enacted as policy. We are not saying: forget policy advocacy or the political process or labor organizing or other forms of community organizing. To the contrary. We are saying: all of these levers are vital. And there is a lever that is under-recognized, and underutilized: the lever of teams intentionally reimagining and re-building how they work.”
How to Push For Policy Changes at Your Company. This Women at Work HBR podcast interview with Lily Zheng and Ashley Lewis was inspiring in sharing specific tactics to drive such change without being a leader. They identify different types of power that one can wield from wherever you are in the organization to advance the causes you care about.
3 common mistakes teams make when using data. Julie Zhuo, former design manager at Facebook, shares how teams mis-use date, including:
Rejecting data that doesn’t match your beliefs: “Instead of trying to prove one’s opinions, we should aim to broaden our view of reality to incorporate all the data.”
Selecting ineffective methods of measurement: “There’s no right answer here; the only way forward is to keep iterating on the best proxies for reality as it relates to our purpose.”
Failing to turn disagreements into learnings: “What evidence would convince you that your belief is wrong? Then, listen closely to what the person says and propose a way to collect that evidence.”
Thanks for reading! See you in a couple weeks!
