What is your body telling you?

1. I observe my child do something.
2. The action is not what I have asked them to do, so I feel angry.
3. The anger kicks off the hormonal release of adrenaline and cortisol that amplifies the anger.

1. My body is fighting the cold by flooding my system with hormones to amplify my immune system.
2. I interpret the hormones as anger due to the fight-or-flight response.
3. My mind makes up a story about my children's behavior to justify the feeling of anger.

• I am delighted to have been nominated as a Top Executive & Leadership Coach in the Momentum Awards, managed by Angie Callen of The Modern Coach. If you have appreciated my content here or my coaching, please vote for me at https://themoderncoach.co/eric-nehrlich/
• I have a few coaching slots to fill, and I get my best clients from referrals. If you know somebody who is ready to take the next step in their leadership, please encourage them to sign up for a free coaching conversation with no obligation.

• What are the leadership skills you can practice as an individual contributor? Somebody recently asked this on a leadership Slack, and my answer was that when you are a leader, the job shifts from doing the work yourself to creating the conditions for others to do the work through skills like influence and alignment, building relationships, giving constructive feedback, and setting clear expectations. Somebody suggested storytelling as such a skill in the comments - what would you add?
• If it's really important to you, commit to show up. For years (decades!), I said I wanted to do more strength training. And I didn't do it. I knew the benefits, I knew it made me feel good, and I just never made the time because I was always thinking I would fit it in after everything else. This year, I've put my gym time on my calendar first and scheduled my other commitments around it, and it makes a difference (see the photo below). Showing up consistently is how we make progress.
• Develop your ability to recognize exceptional work and personalize it for others.
  If you can see what others don't and customize solutions for others, that will differentiate your work from the work of generative AI that is trained on the average or generic. Let's practice what makes us unique as humans rather than duplicate what machines do better than us.
• Other people are just people; you are the one who puts them on pedestals above you. I had an interesting experience last week where I talked to a coach a few years ahead of me and a few years behind me back-to-back. In the first conversation, I felt anxious and desperate to impress. In the second, I was bewildered that the other coach was treating me as if he were unworthy of my time. In both cases, I was projecting my own internal state onto the other person, rather than just treating them as a fellow human on their own journey.

• What Game Are We Playing? by danah boyd. "there’s not just one game at play right now. Different actors in this melange are playing at different games. There are divergent ideas of what the “win” state is." boyd identifies a few frames she's been finding helpful to make sense of what's happening: jenga politics (pulling out pieces until everything falls down), dismantling the state, arson (burn it all down!), or treating this all as a game (ignoring the consequences to people). None of these are _the_ answer, but they provide some insights into what other people might be thinking.
• Corporate "DEI" is an imperfect vehicle for deeply meaningful ideals by Charity Majors. One thing I like about Majors's perspective is that she is extremely practical as a startup founder: "It’s a reality that when you’re a startup, your resources are scarce, your time horizons are short. You have to make smart decisions about where to invest them." But that means she's not idealistic in the sense that she believes that good will inevitably triumph: "If you want your values and ideals to spread throughout the industry, the most impactful thing you can possibly do is win." Her belief is that top talent wants to work at ethical companies where they can bring their whole selves to work. That's what will help values like inclusion and equity win, not the DEI industrial complex.
• A Flytrap round table on Neil Gaiman, and more generally abusive men who position themselves as feminist allies. This line hit home for me as somebody who aspires to allyship: "We are living through an era where feminism or feminist allyship can be used as a marketing tool, particularly by abusive men. Liberal politics are used as shields which are an obstacle to actual liberation.” It's easier than ever to say the "right" thing (even if anti-woke folks object to even that). What's hard is dismantling all of the structures that support patriarchy and colonialism and create ever-greater-inequity.
• Celeste Davis asks why there has never been a matriarchy where women dominate men. Davis looks at the historical record, and building on Riane Eisler's work, she says "we don’t have evidence of matriarchies because in the civilizations where women were in power, women shared power and resources with men. Making those societies egalitarian, not matriarchical. Those civilizations were characterized by a partnership model of rule instead of a dominator model of rule." In other words, the opposite of patriarchy is not putting women in charge and making men inferior, it's a civilization based on care and connection and sharing, rather than power and domination.