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.
Despite making a commitment earlier this year that shipping matters in consistently delivering my LinkedIn posts and newsletter, I haven’t sent this newsletter out in six weeks. I have good reasons which I don’t feel like sharing in this public forum, but I decided it was time to start back up.
Once stopped, it’s easy to find excuses why it’s not time to start again; for instance, this past week was consumed by prepping for my talk at the Chief of Staff Summit on Thursday. That’s why the internal commitment of shipping is critical, because I could easily let this newsletter continue to slip for weeks, if not months.
It reminds me of the difficulty of sticking with any habit or routine. The challenge is not in getting started, as my initial enthusiasm will carry me through the first several days. It’s when I inevitably slip and miss a day, and then think to myself “That’s okay”. And then it’s “Well I missed yesterday so does it really matter if I do it today?” And then the new habit is gone, as if it never existed.
I’ve experienced this pattern with exercise, with meditation, with writing, with so many things in my life. Again, there are always good excuses e.g. I’m a parent of a baby and a toddler, neither of whom have been sleeping well for the past month.
What I try to remind myself is that the true test is what you do when you falter. Do you give up? Or do you pick yourself up and try again? One of the slogans I repeat to my toddler as he rides his balance bike is “When you fall, you get back up!” It is adorable when he falls, pauses, says to himself “Get back up!” and keeps going (and if he doesn’t get back up, I know he needs attention).
This is an attitude echoed in Wendy Palmer’s book Leadership Embodiment (which I summarize here). The authors observe that it is not realistic to aspire to always be centered, and offer that the way to “spend more time in a centered state of being” is to “increase your capacity to recover your balance”. In other words, you’re always going to fail; the question is how quickly will you notice, and then recover.
This is also the principle behind BJ Fogg’s Tiny Habits methodology (summarized here). There are some days when you won’t be able to do your normal routine, and Fogg gives you an out on those days to do the tiniest version of your habit to remind yourself “I’m the type of person that does this every day” (as James Clear would put it). In retrospect, I wish I would have sent the minimum newsletter the last few weeks (as I did with a newsletter earlier this year), but that’s in the past, so I can’t change it.
What helped me start back up today was setting up time with a friend for both of us to commit an hour to focus on our writing. In that hour, I was able to write this newsletter. Yet another reminder of the Power of Accountability Partners.
What tips do you have for restarting a habit that is important to you? Please share in the comments on the newsletter or via email.
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. I kept posting there despite the newsletter hiatus, so there are a lot of posts to share in this edition.
What can you deliberately practice that won't change? Riffing on Jeff Bezos’s idea to build a business around things that won’t change, I invite you to think about practicing skills that won’t change as those are the basis of a long career.
You are not in control. And yet when our expectations are not met, we often get frustrated or angry that the world has not done what we wanted. Can you accept the reality of what is, and plan accordingly?
Gratitude or greed? It’s easy to believe cultural myths like "More is better" or "There is never enough!" But if we step aside and practice gratitude, we can learn to decide for ourselves what is enough, and accept what we have.
This idea was reinforced a couple weeks later by Modern life is fragile, where I share the experience of a long power outage near Lake Tahoe as temperatures descended towards freezing.
Impact over intent. When we focus solely on our intent, while denying the consequences of our actions, we privilege our experience over the experience of those who are impacted. We are telling them to deny what they felt, how they were affected, to preserve our peace of mind.
“You are perfect just the way you are. And there’s room for improvement!” This quote from Shunryu Suzuki, one of the first Zen teachers in the US, is one that continues to befuddle me, but my therapist offered that this might be another manifestation of my confusion between being and doing. I can _be_ perfect, while not _doing_ everything perfectly.
How are you communicating expectations? If your coworker has to read your mind to do what you want, you're doing it wrong. Before you berate others for not getting something done, review whether you clearly communicated what you wanted to them, and whether they agreed to deliver, which I covered in the next post How do you get commitments from others?
"Sometimes magic is just someone spending more time on something than anyone else might reasonably expect.” I use this quote from Teller (of the magicians Penn and Teller) to share the story of a former director who consistently wowed people with his presentations, by putting a full two weeks of work into preparing and practicing them. There was no secret. Just work.
This led to the next post "You have to do the work. But you don't have to show your work." which is advice I got from my Columbia mentor on how to prepare a presentation. Great presentations require a lot of work, but the best presenters don’t show that work (magic!).
Another example of what we learn in school that can mislead us is that You don’t get extra credit for doing it alone. Good students often learn to do things alone because they don’t want to risk being accused of cheating. And yet in the real world, we get things done better and faster when we ask others for help.
Given the excessive number of LinkedIn posts in this edition due to the newsletter hiatus, I’ll skip linking to other articles this week, and instead share this quote from Jorge Luis Borges:
“A writer—and, I believe, generally all persons—must think that whatever happens to him or her is a resource. All things have been given to us for a purpose, and an artist must feel this more intensely. All that happens to us, including our humiliations, our misfortunes, our embarrassments, all is given to us as raw material, as clay, so that we may shape our art.”
Thanks for reading! See you in a couple weeks.