Self-promotion to have greater impact
April 9, 2023
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.
I skipped sending the newsletter a couple weeks ago in part because I was on a spring vacation with my family, and also because I was putting my time into other areas to help grow my brand.
I feel a bit icky about self-promotion, as there’s a part of me that feels that my work should speak for itself. I don’t want to be a poser who is talking myself up without actually delivering anything of value.
At the same time, anybody subscribed to this newsletter has indicated they want to hear about my thinking and writing. And my ideas will not have impact unless people read my writing, and do something different in their lives as a result. One of the things I most love about being a coach is having somebody share that they had a conversation with me years ago that they still remember and think about; it shows that my ideas can have long lasting impact if delivered at the right time to the right person.
But I don’t want to just hope that serendipity (or the vaunted “algorithm”) gets my ideas to where they need to be. It’s up to me to share my thinking with a wider audience, rather than sit back and hope that people find their way to me on their own. I am doing fine with my LinkedIn posts and my blog, but my 2023 mantra of Connect with courage and vulnerability means going outside of my comfort zone and finding more ways to reach people who could benefit from my work. That is how I will have a greater impact, and that is more important to me than staying comfortable.
So below I share three ways in which I am doing that. Or you can skip ahead to the LinkedIn posts, and my brief summaries of the books I read on vacation.
I have finished a first draft of the book I am writing, tentatively titled “You Have A Choice”. It’s still very rough, but if you’re interested in taking an early look in exchange for feedback on how I can make it clearer and more useful, I’m sharing it with beta readers here.
Metagrove VC asked me to write a guest piece on effective leadership for their newsletter, where I share what I think leadership is and how one develops it:
A shy entry-level worker that inspires their coworkers to make something happen is acting as a leader. It also means that leadership is observable; you aren’t showing leadership if people don’t follow your lead. … In other words, you aren’t a leader just because you have a big title or have a lot of people reporting to you. We can see effective leadership in action by what a person does to mobilize others and how others respond. This turns leadership from being an undefinable innate quality into a set of skills that can be studied and practiced.
I'm excited to be a featured panelist on the topics of Leadership and Coaching at CriyaCon '23, an invite-only conference of product and tech leaders. It will be an excellent opportunity to be inspired to take a bold step in influencing organization-wide changes and developing your own leadership goals. You can learn more and request an invite at criya.co/criyacon - you can get an early bird pass if you apply before April 15th, and I’d love to meet up if you come.
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.
Inclusion matters. It's not just to be “nice” or “diverse”. When people feel comfortable and safe in a workplace, you get healthier whole people, who have better ideas and contribute more. I believe that leadership should play a role in creating an environment where everybody on the team can show up as their whole selves and contribute in that way. On this topic, I also recommend:
Lily Zheng’s post describing a conversation with a DEI skeptic
Dr. Carey Yazeed’s post on why Brene’s Brown advice to be courageous and vulnerable doesn’t work for Black women: “America has shown us over and over again it refuses to create safe spaces for Black women where we are not judged, hence prohibiting us from being vulnerable and limiting our ability to show up authentically.”
Sleep makes a huge difference. I've been clearly seeing this over the last couple months, as my toddler has been intermittent in sleep, a few nights sleeping through the night, then a few nights waking up 2 to 4 times through the night. And I share the stark differences in how I show up when I’m well rested or not.
Book summaries of what I read on vacation:
Scaling People, by Claire Hughes Johnson, is a valuable reference guide to the operations and processes and mindsets necessary to effectively grow a company and its people, drawing on Johnson’s experience as a Google VP and as Stripe's COO. When running a startup, one is constantly encountering new-to-you situations where you might want somebody to tell you a good enough way to deal with it. That's what this book does. Is it revolutionary? No. Is it mostly common sense? Yes. But having templates to follow, and common pitfalls laid out for you, has a ton of value, and that's what Johnson delivers.
I was fortunate to work with Claire for several months at Google back in 2012, when she was brought in to try to turnaround a struggling business unit (Google Offers, a Groupon competitor). Even though that business ultimately failed, I loved working with her, and still tell people about her clarity and focus as a leader. I am delighted with her continued success.
A Thousand Brains, by Jeff Hawkins. I appreciated Hawkins’s first book, On Intelligence, which I summarize here, as a drastically different way of describing how our brain works. This book goes into more detail on how that model of the brain is actually implemented via cortical columns and reference frames. The brain consists of thousands of separate mini prediction machines, which are constantly scanning the environment for what "should" come next when we act or move in a certain way, and updating its model or map of reality when what happens isn't what's expected. Everything is done relative to either a model we have of the object or the model of our own body, which is where the reference framework comes in. I would have loved more details on how this might work to explain abstract thinking, and I didn’t need the second half of the book where he pontificates on machine intelligence and existential human risks since he has no special insights there. But I appreciated that the book got me thinking about cognition again, and I am noodling on a blog post connecting cognition to leadership.
You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train, by Howard Zinn. As a long-time activist who participated in the civil rights movement, and was regularly imprisoned for his anti-Vietnam protests, Zinn shares his perspective that “small acts of resistance to authority, if persisted in, may lead to large social movements. That ordinary people are capable of extraordinary acts of courage. That those in power who confidently say “never” to the possibility of change may live to be embarrassed by those words”. I appreciated his courage in his own activism, and his conviction that each of us is capable of those small acts of resistance that lead to change.
Thanks for reading! See you in a couple weeks!
