Relaxing into the Unconscious Mind

• You can't learn great leadership from reading a book. You learn it by training your body. Great leadership means learning to navigate instinctively in complex conditions while going against our previously learned tendencies. Training leadership in the body means breaking down complex leadership behaviors into micro-skills you can practice. It means identifying what you're currently unconsciously doing so that you can consciously try something different.
• What is the most valuable thing you can do today? What will you let go undone to make that happen? Early in our career, it's a helpful mindset to think "If I can do it, I should do it". Doing more work leads to increasing scope. But as we get more experienced and capable, we can do lots of things! So to keep expanding our impact, the mindset must shift to "Is this the most valuable thing I could be doing right now?"
• Giving more requirements and context can actually increase autonomy. Giving more constraints and context at the start necessarily means that the team will have less options on what to do. But that actually creates focus as they can quickly dismiss options that are not a fit. And it creates greater autonomy because they can trust that solutions they find within the bounded space they've been given will be accepted, so they can be more innovative within those constraints.
• When things aren't going the way we want, we can stay silent and resentful and hope things will magically change. Or we can speak up and share what we want to be different. Just because somebody is above you in a hierarchy doesn't mean they know better. They certainly don't know everything. You can lead from below by sharing a different perspective, one that is compatible with theirs but shows them information that changes their decisions.

• Why I Left, by Britta Hummel. A woman shares her experience at Meta, from initial skepticism to unexpected delight to disillusionment. What changed? A culture that stopped prioritizing diversity and psychological safety, where keeping the leaders from experiencing challenging feedback became the priority. I appreciated her larger point: "This isn’t just Meta. We are watching a broader societal trend: people who choose power over integrity rise fastest. Ego is rewarded. Dissent is punished. The costs — human, societal, economic, and environmental — accumulate quietly until they explode. This is why I can’t be silent; at some point silence becomes compliance."
• Bridges, by Kent Beck. Beck shares how he learned to build connections with other people, after first over-reaching (pushing too quickly and deeply when meeting somebody new) and under-reaching (waiting for others to connect, which they never did). He uses the metaphor of a bridge, where we can build our half of the bridge, and then patiently wait for them to start building their half: "That moment—when isolation breaks, when the glass disappears, when connection actually happens—is worth all the waiting."
• How My Brother and I Began Talking About Our Political Differences, by Kristin Cobble. Kristin is one of my mentors, and I appreciate the deep vulnerability in sharing this piece about how slowing down and listening to each other allowed her to reconnect with her brother despite their political differences. The essential shift? Getting out of the conscious ego state to become aware of the systemic pattern: "I’ve learned that when we are aware, we can shift the dynamic quickly. Sometimes it just takes a few deep breaths and a commitment to engage in a new way."