Parenting and Leadership Advice: Chill out!

1. You set the tone. Your family (or your team) will take their emotional cues from you.

2. Chill out! You don’t matter as much as you think you do, and you don't have nearly as much control of what happens as you imagine.

3. They can do more than you think they can. If you believe that your child (or your report) can’t do something, then you won’t give them the chance to do it. The only way to grow their capabilities is to step back and let them try things beyond what you think they can handle.

4. Admit that you can't do it all. It’s better to plan to “drop the ball” on certain things than to try to hold yourself to an unrealistic standard of doing it all which leads to doing everything poorly and letting things slip unintentionally.

• If you want to understand how executives think, you have to understand the money. That statement from Alan Morley during my master's program in Technology Management changed the course of my career. I pivoted from engineering and product to business as a result, which led to my Chief of Staff role, which led to what I do now as an executive coach. My career trajectory accelerated significantly because I took that one idea about understanding the money seriously.
  
• What motivates this person in front of me? Many of us make the mistake of assuming that other people think and feel the way we do about a situation. But different people are motivated by different things, and are looking at different parts of the situation than we are. Developing influence depends on understanding what the other person cares about.
• Name the core emotion, and address it directly. Rather than react to our emotions without thinking, it helps to name the emotion and dig into its concerns. Our emotions are a signal from our unconscious processing, so it can be a game changer to condense the feeling into a specific problem to be addressed so you can do something about it. But if you react unconsciously to the feeling without reflection, you will never make progress on the underlying problem.
• Accountability matters. It's not enough to ask somebody to do something, and expect them to do it. Each of us is overwhelmed with endless tasks and requests and none of us can get through them all. And yet, many of us don't hold the people around us accountable. We let things go. We don't want to make a scene. And then other people learn to not take our asks seriously, because they won't be held accountable.
• What's stopping you isn't a lack of information - it's the emotional intelligence to take the actions you know are necessary. In many situations, we are blocked by an emotional reaction that hijacks our nervous system and prevents us from taking our intended action. To change the outcome, we need to recognize the reaction as it's happening, appreciate its good intent, and then let go of the emotion so that we can take the conscious action we intend.
• How do you find that magical moment when you "click" with somebody? The best answer I have is to keep putting myself out there and hope that other people connect with what I share. Somebody has to open up first, and I try to be that person. I think being in-person also helps to build a connection, so I'm trying to attend more in-person events. Let me know if you'd be interested in attending a get-together in Mountain View, CA if I organize one.

• I gave a 30 minute webinar on the topic of Growing Your Executive Influence to Get Things Done. You can watch the recording here.
• I asked Google's NotebookLM to do an audio summary of the book, and the 15 minute podcast it generated was surprisingly good, both in terms of covering the content and sounding like a realistic conversation between two "hosts". Check out the MP3 here!

• Productive at Work, Paralyzed at Home: What to Do When You’re in a Functional Freeze, by Anne-Laure Le Cunff, really hit home for me. She describes the functional freeze as "The paradox of high-functioning exhaustion. ... On one hand, you’re capable of meeting or even exceeding expectations at work. On the other, you’re completely depleted when it comes to self-directed activities that can support your wellbeing and personal growth." and explains that this occurs because "The workplace provides external scaffolding that supports productivity even when our internal motivation might be waning. However, this performance often comes at a cost: ego depletion, where the mental energy required for self-control becomes temporarily exhausted." This described my last few weeks where I did what I "had to" do, but was completely unable to summon the focus to do anything self-directed beyond that due to the exhaustion of sleep deprivation and being slowed down by the cold.
• The Most Valuable Commodity in the World is Friction, by Kyla Scanlon (hat tip to Anne Helen Petersen for sharing this link). In our pursuit of ease and comfort, companies have designed systems to make our lives frictionless. But the friction is where the growth and learning happens, and it's still there, just hidden:

• Maximize Slope, by Avni Patel Thompson. In an uncertain world that is changing fast, how does one make career decisions? Thompson recommends asking "which option is going to give me the most learning and growth? ... Maximizing slope at every point also has the added bonus that you’ll be able to get yourself to the unique space where you and you alone occupy in the world. Where your unique set of talents exist to do something that no one (I’d argue even AI) is able to." "A warning though: maximizing slope also means maximizing discomfort. Because it will often mean changing many things at the same time or jumping into a completely unknown areas." I particularly love her advice at the end to "Start small" and "start today" - leaning into learning and discomfort can be practiced in every small decision, even choosing to travel a different way than your usual.