Managing your attention in a meme culture

• How do you measure progress for yourself? Another coach asked me how I know whether my coaching is impactful. Obviously, I think it is, but I hadn't asked myself what makes me think that. I had to invert the question to ask myself when things aren't working, which revealed that my coaching is effective when the conversations change each session as the client is paying attention to different things. As their attention shifts, they start to think differently, and then their behavior changes by trying new actions they hadn't previously considered.

• Look for a third option beyond the binary choice. It's easy to feel stuck when we see only two options, both of which seem bad. It's hard to break out of that binary thinking without help - it's much easier to see faulty thinking or these false binary choices in other people than it is in ourselves. So ask for perspective from somebody else. If that's not possible, ask what advice you'd give to a friend in your situation - I bet it will be easy to come up with more options for your "friend".

• Effective leadership gets people to follow. I had this misconception early in my career that people listened to leaders because of their titles, and that someday I would be given that title and then people would listen to me. But that's not how it works. What I learned later in my career is that those who can influence others to take action without hierarchical power are the most effective at using that power to get things done. Leaders create followers by offering them a vision of a future where the leader and the follower create success together.

• I was on the Dan Barrett Show to discuss being happy, agentic and effective. It was a great conversation which revealed a thread in my career that I hadn't even been aware of, that when I don't understand something, I dive in to figure out what I'm missing. Check it out on Spotify: Part 1 and Part 2.
• I had a nice surprise when I opened up Lenny Rachitsky's newsletter about burnout and my book was mentioned! They had interviewed people resistant to burnout on what worked for them, and somebody wrote: “I read this book called You Have a Choice by Eric Nehrlich. One of the big unlocks for me was ‘You don’t have to do anything you don’t want to . . . as long as you’re okay with the consequences.’”
• I ran a hour-long in-person workshop for 100 people at a Google offsite to apply the principles of my book, You Have a Choice, to career navigation. It was well-received and I'd love to do it again. If your company is looking for an offsite speaker, please check out my speaking page for talks I offer, or just email me.
• I facilitated a leadership team offsite to help the team find better ways to work together. Coming into the workshop, they had each rated their team's performance with scores ranging from 6 to 8 on a 10 point scale. We worked together to identify how a 10/10 team would operate, and how they would commit to act differently to move towards that ideal. I'd love to do more such facilitation work if that feels like something your team could benefit from.

• The Who Cares Era, by Dan Sinker, which starts with the utterly ridiculousness that the Chicago Sun-Times published a summer reading list in their print edition that included books that were complete hallucinations from the AI that wrote it. Sinker writes: "It's so emblematic of the moment we're in, the Who Cares Era, where completely disposable things are shoddily produced for people to mostly ignore." While he finds these behaviors disheartening, he uses it as a call to action: "In the Who Cares Era, the most radical thing you can do is care. In a moment where machines churn out mediocrity, make something yourself. Make it imperfect. Make it rough. Just make it. ... Be yourself. Be imperfect. Be human. Care."
• Garrett Bucks cares about the United States, and shares his thinking about why he's staying here in his heartfelt essay. He had been visiting his wife's family in Sweden, and they asked "Why don't you move here?" Even his kids were wondering that. He responded that "we are staying not just to fight but because there are people here who care about us and for whom we care." But he goes on to ask a far more interesting question, which is "what will you decide to do while you’re here?" I saved his essay because his question "If “here” is reasonably safe for you, how are you making it safer for others?" is antimemetic for me - I can see it's important and my mind keeps sliding off it. So I share the question here so that I can keep returning to it and asking myself what will I do to make "here" better?
• I Founded Girls Who Code. Now I’m Worried About Boys, by Reshma Saujani. The last few decades have been focused on gender equality, which is a continuing struggle (millenia of patriarchy aren't reversed in a few years), but that has led to boys becoming antimemes, important but not getting attention. Saujani writes "And while we’ve been distracted, our boys have been searching for connection and finding it in the worst places. ... We failed to offer them belonging, so they’re grappling for control." Her answer is not to try to compete with the "manosphere", but to connect deeply and emotionally with our boys, to be there with them even if we don't have answers so they feel they are seen and they are heard and they are cared for. In other words, pay attention to them and don't let them antimemetically slide out of our focus.