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.
Oops, I did it again, where I started writing an update for this newsletter, and it expanded into a full blog post.
A couple teaser paragraphs to get you to click through to the post:
After this past pandemic year, I suspect that many people are experiencing spiritual debt, where they have been surviving through short-term hacks that are not sustainable spiritually and emotionally. This could include working past the point of burnout, accommodating a toxic coworker or boss, or just never giving themselves a chance to recover.
Americans often glorify “hustle” culture, which is focused on working hard and staying busy. But that assumes that we have the mental and physical resources to “hustle”, which seems like a broken assumption in light of the past year unless one had tremendous privilege. I hope that writing about spiritual debt might give people permission to allocate their resources towards rebuilding their reserves and paying back their spiritual debt by investing in their own emotional well-being.
I go on to talk about my own challenges with overcommitting myself and how I am trying to reset my own expectations for myself to be more realistic. Let me know what you think!
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.
What are you afraid to hear? If you want something, it’s not logical to be afraid to ask for it. If they say no, you haven’t lost anything because you already didn’t have it. And yet when we are afraid to hear a confirmation that we aren’t “worthy”, we never make the ask and miss out on potential opportunities.
The compounding returns on daily deposits - You can get rich by getting lucky and winning the lottery, or by consistently saving and being patient. Similarly, you can become a leader by getting lucky and being in the right place at the right time, or by consistently making daily deposits in building your leadership skills.
HALT (Hungry Angry Lonely Tired) is a valuable checklist to use when you feel like you’re not functioning well. You might feel that you’re broken or that it’s hopeless, and you might be astonished to realize those feelings go away after eating or a good night’s sleep.
Making difficult decisions in the face of uncertainty is an essential skill to learn if you want to become a senior leader. As you move up in an org, the easy decisions are made by more junior folks, so the only decisions left for you are ones that involve difficult tradeoffs or no clear analytical answer.
Articles and resources I’ve found interesting:
Twitter thread on Berkson’s paradox - I hadn’t heard of this “paradox” where “two positive traits are (spuriously) negatively correlated, in a population *selected on these traits*.” The first example given is “handsome men are jerks”, because we exclude ugly men who are jerks, so we are left with handsome men that are jerks, or nice guys that aren’t handsome (or, more rarely, handsome nice guys).
Twitter thread on company culture from somebody who worked for both Amazon and Facebook, including insights like “Culture is maintained through rituals” and “The key to a strong culture is consistency from the top” (aka What You Do is Who You Are).
Building on “What are you afraid to hear?” above, Julie Zhuo’s Twitter thread on asking for help is inspiring: “When someone helps you, it makes you want to help others. This is why you shouldn't hesitate to ask for help if you need it. Counter-intuitively, asking for favors creates more generosity in the world.”
Emi Nietfeld’s heartbreaking essay “After Working at Google, I’ll Never Let Myself Love a Job Again” gave me all the feels. I never loved Google in that way, but I really appreciated my time there. However, as a white-passing male, it was much easier for me, and this essay was yet another reminder of how Google was built by and for people who look like me.
Thanks for reading! See you in a couple weeks.