Aligning with your body, plus my leadership class starts this Thursday
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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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It's been two months since I last wrote an edition of the newsletter. I'd say I've been busy with the demands of parenting, but, as always, I must remind myself that I have a choice in that I didn't prioritize the newsletter enough to make it happen over the other demands on my time. I had planned to write a review of Charles Duhigg's book Supercommunicators, and then to do my typical year in review post, and neither of those happened before or during our holiday travels (traveling with three young kids is a non-stop endeavor!).
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But I am making a renewed commitment to writing this year. I enjoy the process of trying to share what I think, to coherently lay out the thoughts floating around my mind. And to give myself space to write, I will need to cut back on other commitments, because I can't do it all. This may mean being less responsive to my kids at times, or asking others to help me with home or business tasks, or just letting things go undone. And I want to remind myself that while it often feels hard to start writing (especially compared to the effortless distractions on my phone), the satisfaction of getting something out into the world is proportional to that effort.
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While we may think we are rational and cognitive beings, we are embodied animals in reality. We might think we need to study and read and think to learn to do something new, but what we really need is to deliberately and consistently practice the new behavior we want to embed it in the nervous system of our body.
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This obviously applies to physical skills like swinging a rope or strength training at the gym. But I believe it also applies to more subtle skills like meditation, energy awareness, and trauma processing. It's all the same neural circuitry - if we can find a way to give ourselves positive feedback when we do something correctly, we can learn to do it more consistently.
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An example I didn't use in the post is toilet training. How would you describe the muscle you use to control your excretory functions? It's impossible to put into words, and yet all of us learn to do it because there's concrete feedback. I am starting to believe that much of what I used to derisively label as "woo-woo" is actually just spiritual equivalents of training our nervous system to do things that feel similarly impossible to those who haven't experienced them.
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But as I have worked with coaches who give me feedback, and on whom my nervous system can imprint and mirror, I am expanding my belief in what's possible. I used to believe many things about myself that were limiting ("this is just the way I am") that are no longer true thanks to the coaching and personal development work I am doing. While I fall back into previous patterns of anger or dissociation when I am stressed or tired, that just points to the importance of self-care and setting boundaries.
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The next cohort of my Maven group coaching class starts this Thursday, January 15th. It is designed specifically for rising tech leaders to help them break through the patterns blocking them from the executive level.
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Previous students have rated the course 4.8/5 with comments including:
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“This course is a leadership powerhouse — sharp, practical, and transformative.”
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“Eric drives home insights, rituals, and behavior changes that accelerate your trajectory toward executive roles.”
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“THANK YOU Eric for making an impact on my mindset that IS changing my life.”
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As a thank you for being a newsletter subscriber, you can get 25% off the course by using the code GRATITUDE. Sign up via this link to get the discount.
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Coaching scholarships available:
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I have joined with 14 other coaches to offer 18 full coaching scholarships to leaders from underrepresented groups in technology.
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If you are a leader from an underrepresented group in technology and are seeking to overcome challenges, boost your impact and advance your career, this could be just what you need.
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And now for the normal personal development content…
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- I lowered the price of the paperback version of my book to $9.99 for the holidays to make it easier for gift giving. If you've been waiting to get a physical copy of the book, now is the time!
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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- How does your team stay focused on what's most important when you're not in the room? You create a clear compelling message that helps everybody in the company align to a common set of values, so that they make the same tradeoffs you would make if you were involved. That's how you move beyond micromanagement where you supervise every decision and/or do the work yourself, to creating an organization that thinks and acts in an aligned way.
- You might think that applying more pressure gets more done. It was counterintuitive to me that slowing down is the way to go faster. But top performers know that staying relaxed is the only way to get into the flow. So when you feel the pressure to go faster or to push harder, pause to step back, slow down, and ask yourself the question "What's next?" Just do that, and trust the rest to take care of itself.
- It feels unfair when relationships aren't reciprocal. Why should I spend extra effort helping others when they aren't doing the same for me? And that's why it's powerful. It feels like an additional burden to make things easier for others when our own jobs are already so demanding. And yet if you can make that extra effort to help others towards their goals, you activate their reciprocity instinct. They will match your efforts to work together because they don't want to be seen as unfair.
- Leadership starts by taking control of your own time and choosing what you will do. Doing everything your manager and other leaders ask of you isn't leadership - that is being an excellent follower. Leadership is deciding for yourself what is important. Leadership is convincing others what to do, rather than deferring to their judgment. Leadership is choosing the direction, not following the map of others. You can't lead others effectively until you choose to lead yourself.
Here are a few things that have caught my attention recently:
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- How will the miracle happen today? by Kevin Kelly. He draws on his experience of hitchhiking and traveling through Asia to make a larger point - we can't experience kindness unless we open ourselves up to the miracle of being helped. "I believe the generous gifts of strangers are actually summoned by a deliberate willingness to be helped. You start by surrendering to your human need for help. That we cannot be helped until we embrace our need for help is another law of the universe. ... When the miracle flows, it flows both ways. When an offered gift is accepted, then the threads of love are knotted, snaring both the stranger who is kind, and the stranger who is kinded." Tying into my blog post above, I wonder how I can practice letting my body be more open to kindness, rather than my typical counterdependent resistance to needing any help.
- Are we too impatient to be intelligent? by Rory Sutherland. Sutherland makes the claim that in our desire to quantify and optimize everything, we forget that sometimes what we are optimizing for is not what matters most. Do we want the cheapest thing? Or the shortest path if it will make us miserable? "there are things in life that you want to telescope and compress and accelerate and streamline and make more efficient. And there are things where the value is precisely in the inefficiency, in the time spent, in the pain endured, in the effort you have to invest." Faster isn't always better: "We need to understand when we need to go slow."
- Behind the Briliance, a "long-form interview podcast for the intellectually curious and relentlessly ambitious" by Lisa Nicole Bell. I'll be a guest on an upcoming episode, but I have been appreciating Bell's variety of interesting guests (including Kevin Kelly) and her perspective on navigating ambition from healthy wholeness rather than from scarcity and trauma.
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Thanks for reading, and see you in a couple weeks!
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One of the parenting things I won't give up is skiing with my kids. Look at that stunning view from Crystal Ridge at Diamond Peak!
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