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.
I feel a little diffident sending out this newsletter while the Russian invasion of Ukraine is happening. What value is there in my musings on leadership and personal development when a war between global powers is escalating?
And yet, there is always an emergency happening somewhere in the world. Black men and women are still being shot by the police in the US. The planet is still getting warmer, and humanity has shown no evidence we will change even in the face of climate events like rampant wildfires and powerful hurricanes. A majority of the world’s population remains unable to access Covid vaccines. Plus there are countless more tragedies and calamities that I’m not even aware of.
If I waited to post until there was nothing happening, then I’d never post, and that doesn’t serve me or you. So I am keeping to my (mostly) biweekly schedule, because shipping matters and I don’t want to give in to what Steven Pressfield calls the Resistance.
Rather than spend all day scrolling the news, I recommend that you do something, anything, to remind yourself of your own agency. The news is designed to make us feel helpless, to reinforce a passive mindset where events happen to us, in part because that makes us better capitalist consumers that buy ourselves comfort. But we can fight that designed intent if we take action. A few options that I find helpful:
Start with self-care: sleep, good food, exercise, nature. If our mind and body are not resourced, it’s hard to do anything else.
Connect with and help others: get out of your own head and connect with another human by deeply listening to their experience, or doing something to make their life easier.
Create something: cook, draw, write, play. Creation is active, and reminds us we don’t have to settle for what’s convenient or easy. Practice the hard thing.
Taking action in this way will not do anything to help people in the Ukraine. But biasing ourselves towards action may help us to build the skills we need to change our local environment. When we see something that is not right, we can learn to take action to improve it, rather than passively accept “that’s just the way it is” (a toxic myth of capitalism). So what will you do?
P.S. I saw this list of charities in another forum if you want to contribute to a nonprofit engaged in relief and recovery efforts in the Ukraine region.
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.
When is it time to move on? When you are facing a difficult situation, there's always more you could do to make it work, so when do you decide you've done "enough"? Check out other people’s perspectives in the comments.
Offer direct feedback. I had a few instances recently where a client told me about a situation with another person, and what they are concerned might happen if things don't change. After a minute, I stopped them and say "You need to tell that to them, not me - I can't do anything to change that situation".
Going to the leadership gym. Even in a difficult situation, you can try things as a way to invest in your own skills. By practicing in difficult situations, it’s like lifting weights in the gym, making you stronger and more capable.
Who else should know about this? One lesson I liked from the Donella Meadows book, Thinking in Systems, is to "Honor, Respect and Distribute Information”. In other words, systems work better when relevant information is delivered accurately and promptly to the people within the system.
Articles and resources I’ve found interesting
Leading and Living from a Whole Body Yes - I’ve started following the Conscious Leadership Group, and love this concept of the Whole Body Yes, which I learned from Diana Chapman describing it on the Tim Ferriss Show. She describes it as “A Whole Body Yes happens when you are fully aligned with your whole body (head, heart and gut) and there is a bodily sense of well being as you consider a choice.” I’m starting to experiment with a Whole Body Yes to raise the bar for myself before making a new commitment.
Ezra Klein interviews Annie Murphy Paul about her book The Extended Mind. I deeply believe her premise that our body is processing a ton of information for us and that “people who are more attuned to those internal signals and cues are better able to draw on that wealth of information that we know but we don’t know. We possess it, but we don’t know it explicitly or consciously.”
Story Driven, by Bernadette Jiwa - I read this book after a Seth Godin recommendation, and appreciated her questions to elicit one’s own backstory, values, purpose, vision and strategy. “It’s hard to figure out how to be great at what you do, in the way only you can do it, by focusing on what everyone else is doing.” "Differentiation happens when you authentically amplify the best of you—discovering how to be more of who you are, rather than finding ways to be a version of the competition.” (note that “more of who you are” ties in nicely to “Whole Body Yes” above).
Thanks for reading! See you in a couple weeks.