Letting go of the "should"s

• I took the kids on a weekend camping trip with other families from their school, and the plan was to stay two nights. The baby was miserable the first night, and woke up several times crying, which kept me awake and stressed as I tried to calm her down so others could sleep. I was exhausted the next day, as was the baby, and then she didn't get a good nap because there was too much excitement, so it was likely she would sleep even worse that night. I felt stuck because the older kids were excited to stay and spend more time with their friends. Fortunately, I talked to my wife who reminded me I could just overrule the kids and go home. The kids spent the whole day playing with their friends, and after dinner, I packed them up and we drove home. The baby slept 14 hours straight, and the big kids slept 12 hours straight, and I got a good night of sleep too. Definitely the right call, and yet I almost didn't even consider going home as an option, because I should be willing to suffer because I must keep my commitments and because I must do what my kids want. Obviously, those shoulds and musts are only in my head, but it's so hard to see the arbitrary self-imposed nature of those rules from the inside.
• My coaching business has been slow this year (I'm around half of my desired coaching capacity), and I feel like I should do more sales and marketing to fill the gap. And yet I've been taking time for myself instead of writing LinkedIn posts, starting a more business-oriented newsletter or podcast, advertising the class, doing more outreach to potential clients, etc. And my Inner Critic is going to town, beating me up for being a lazy slacker. But when I step back, I realize that doing those activities just because I should doesn't lead to great results because my heart isn't in it, so I'm both going to be drained and I'm not going to get the outcomes I want. Giving myself time to recharge will both energize me and allow me to show up more authentically excited to help others, so I am learning to trust my inner knowing that I will engage more in outbound marketing activity when I am ready.

• If somebody has to read your mind for them to do what you want, you're the problem. When you notice yourself being frustrated with somebody else not doing what you want, consider how you could communicate your expectations more clearly next time. By saying what you want, maybe you will be more likely to get it.
• I've been less motivated to write on LinkedIn as it seems hard to cut through the noise of AI generated content, and it might be time to explore new marketing channels. I'm curious if you, as a reader of this newsletter, still read LinkedIn, and if not, where do you go for insight?

• I learned of Larissa Conte of wayfinding.io thanks to her appearance on Michael Bungay Stanier's podcast. I particularly appreciated her definition of power as the capacity to conduct energy through systems - it is a concise way of illustrating that there are forms of power beyond hierarchical and positional power. I also liked her distinction between "shadow power" that creates blockage and disconnection (often stemming from unprocessed trauma) and "power that serves the whole" that creates flow and aliveness. When we lean into serving all of us by drawing on our mutual connection, we access a regenerative inclusive form of power. But as she notes on the podcast, the price of increasing your power capacity in that way is "Your comfort, your certainty, the current, precise constellation of your life as you know it." Instead of trying to do the impossible task of forecasting and controlling the complexity and unpredictability of life, this connection power responds with resilience and integrity to whatever happens.
• An illustration of this connection power comes from Carolyn Stanworth, who is the CEO of an employee-owned company, in her Inc. article "Why We Teach All Employees to Lead, No Matter Their Role":

• • As part of that, they realized that communication and feedback was essential for both company and personal growth. So they adopted the phrase "I have a gift for you" before offering feedback as a way to share their perspective with a positive intent. It allows people to be clear and direct while still showing they care.
• On that note, Greg McKeown, author of the great book Essentialism, is on a new mission to improve people's communications to avoid the unfortunate reality illustrated by the George Bernard Shaw quote: "The single biggest problem in communication is the illusion that it has taken place." His newsletter One Minute Wednesdays has had some great frameworks recently (e.g. writing an Intent Statement for meetings in the form of Verb + Person + Message + Outcome), and he did a one hour seminar this week on how to avoid miscommunication where he shared the framework of:
  • Listen (they say what they mean)
  • Reflect (you say what they mean)
  • Speak (you say what you mean)
  • Confirm (they say what you mean)
• Delightfully simple, and yet so many misunderstandings could be prevented if we took the time to check that our communication intent has been received with the steps of Reflect and Confirm.