Confidence Comes From Resilience
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This is the Too Many Trees newsletter, where I (Eric Nehrlich) share what I’ve been writing and reading in the realm of leadership and personal development. My executive coaching practice helps leaders amplify their impact by focusing their time and energy on what matters most, while uncovering and reshaping the unconscious patterns that may be holding them back. If you know somebody that could benefit from my perspective, please forward this to them or have them set up a free intro chat with me.
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I've been reflecting on a principle that is showing up in a number of different ways, which is that confidence and mastery come from being able to recover from falling off the path.
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I mentioned in the last newsletter that I have been using Henry Shukman's app The Way to get back into meditation. And in the first 20 sessions, he constantly reminds the listener that getting lost in thoughts or getting distracted from the meditation is normal. It's expected. It's how the brain works. The point of meditation is to build the skill of noticing when our mind wanders, and bringing it back to our intended focus.
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The framing here was really valuable for me - I always felt like a failure when my mind wandered during meditation because I believed "good" meditators never get distracted. And then I would get discouraged, and I give up because I'd question whether I was meant to meditate. But if the point is to practice falling off the path and getting back on, then every distraction is also an opportunity to improve.
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This perspective reminded me of Wendy Palmer's book Leadership Embodiment, which I summarize here. My main takeaway from her book was that while we aspire to be Centered in our body, the way to get there is not to rigidly hold ourselves in a Centered position, but instead to notice when we fall out of Center and quickly recover. The similarity to meditation is unsurprising since Palmer is a master of aikido, which is effectively a form of physical meditation.
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This more dynamic perspective where perfection is not expected and each setback is an opportunity to practice recovery feels more attainable to me. And it's a mindset that applies across other domains as well.
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One of my mentors was once asked about his confidence, and how he knew he was doing the right thing. He laughed. He shared that he's made lots of mistakes, and his confidence came from knowing that he'd recovered from them. That confidence freed him to take bigger chances in his career, because he trusted his ability to recover if something went wrong.
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This growth mindset is challenging for me. I'm used to thinking of capabilities as being static - I'm smart, I'm good at this or that. So when I can't do something, it becomes part of my identity - "I'm just not good at that" aka fixed mindset. I'm trying to adopt this more dynamic resilient mindset where I trust my ability to learn new skills, and recover from mistakes as I do. And to remind myself that each recovery is a chance for learning how to do better next time. To modify the earlier statement, "I'm not good at that ... yet!"
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Confidence comes from resilience, from bouncing back when things go off track. Rather than stay frozen in anxiety for fear something will go wrong, developing confidence is practicing the skill of trusting that you will figure out what to do when that happens.
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P.S. While writing this, I was reminded of my post that expertise is exception handling: "the difference between the intermediate player and the expert is that the expert can handle a wider variety of rare situations. The intermediate may be almost as good as the expert the majority of the time, but in unusual situations, the greater experience of the expert allows them to do something when the intermediate is frozen by uncertainty."
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In other words, expertise (confidence) is not because you get everything right all the time, but because you can recover quickly when things aren't right. Same message from a post I wrote in 2014, and yet I'm still learning it. Personal development is a flat circle.
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Scale Your Leadership with the Executive Mindset: I resurrected my Maven group coaching class to run a cohort in January. As a reminder, the executive mindset is the career inflection point where you evolve from being the expert problem solver who delivers the work, to becoming the executive who sets up the teams and processes to deliver the work. This class is a distillation of what I've learned from coaching over a hundred rising executives through this transition as they learned to let go of what had previously brought them success.
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One student's testimonial:
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"Eric is incredibly approachable, intelligent, creative, and supportive. He meets you right where you are, and somehow distills hundreds of research papers and methods into 2-3 practical tactics and suggestions to help with whatever hurdle you're facing. Most meaningful to me: I felt he was advocating for us - truly rooting for each of us to make a change in our lives. THANK YOU Eric for making an impact on my mindset that IS changing my life."
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Maven is running a promotion this week, starting Monday, Nov. 17th, where you can get 25% off any participating class using the code FAST25. Sign up via this link to get the discount.
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And now for the normal personal development content…
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- I had a deep conversation with Alyssa Nolte on her podcast, Taking Back Monday. I talked about my own journey from burnout to setting boundaries and saying no, which resonated with her. She shared her own "what am I doing?!" moment when she told her toddler it was time to go to bed, and her daughter responded "Mommy, I am in a meeting and you need to be quiet."
- I wrote a book review of The Compass Within, by Robert Glazer. Subtitled “A Little Story About the Values That Guide Us”, this is a short parable of a young professional at a career crossroads who discovers his core values through a mentor guiding him through the process. By aligning his work and community with his values, he becomes more energized and impactful. I really liked the values exercise that Glazer describes, and used it to identify my core values as:
- Respect: Support and appreciate others (and myself!)
- Impact: Progress with conscious intention (You Have A Choice!)
- Integrity: Radical Candor (say what I mean and mean what I say)
LinkedIn: These are ideas that have helped my clients (or myself), and that I share via LinkedIn to help a wider audience, and archive here.
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- Your industry is your destiny. Your CEO is your culture. These two maxims from a fireside chat with Patrick Pichette (CFO of Google at the time) are a formula to identify where you can have the most impact. Find a company where the industry is growing, and where the CEO/company’s values align with yours. It’s hard to find that combination, but pays off exponentially when you do.
- Your “intuition” is just your past. “Intuition” is really just your nervous system getting trained on a pattern until it no longer feels surprising - it just feels right. If you stay in your normal routines, your brain will keep reinforcing the belief that the world works only one way. If you want to create a different future, you have to get uncomfortable and go somewhere unfamiliar.
- Confidence doesn’t come from knowing you’ll get it right. The best leaders I know don’t get it right all the time. They’ve learned to see mistakes as feedback, not failure. Their confidence comes from pushing their limits, getting it wrong, and learning how to recover. But if you’re so afraid of things going wrong that you never try anything risky, you’re slowing your own growth.
- I offered my thoughts on Jerry Colonna's "Guide for Would-Be Coaches". There are many people who call themselves coaches who never explore their own presence, nor seek to deepen their inquiry into their own patterns. And you can tell - they rush to share techniques or frameworks or answers, when the power of coaching comes in sitting in the unknowing with a person to consider a "well-asked, open and honest question" without judgment. True presence arises from having the confidence to know one's own value without answers, to trust the miracle of life and awareness that is embodied in each of us. Jerry has been a role model for me as a coach in demonstrating that presence.
Here are a few articles that have caught my attention recently:
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- Turn the Volume Up, by Anil Dash, who extracts insights on how leaders can drive change from Zohran Mamdani's mayoral campaign. A few examples:
- You have to start with the principle.
- They have to be able to talk about us without us.
- What we're joyfully running toward, not what we're fearfully running from.
- Everything can start from one voice.
- Personal Agency Hyperinflation, by Joan Westenberg, who makes the point that using apps to do more doesn't actually expand our capabilities - it outsources them. We lose our skills because we aren't practicing them. Some of this is convenient (e.g. not having to remember phone numbers), but "The tool - initially leverage - becomes a dependency." Those who rely too much on apps and tools become "capable in theory, brittle in practice". If you want to still be confident in your own skills, ask yourself: "Can you still function when the tool is gone? If yes, the tool serves you. If no, you serve it."
- 21 Facts About Throwing Good Parties, by Angela Chen. One of my themes has been connection so I appreciated this perspective that "Parties are a public service, you’re doing people a favor by throwing them." Some great principles here as well: "Prioritize your ease of being over any other consideration: parties are like babies, if you’re stressed while holding them they’ll get stressed too." Plus I liked the reminder that if connection is the point, "prioritize introducing people to each other".
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Thanks for reading, and see you in a couple weeks!
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