Notice your assumptions

• Clara Ma featured my take on Defining Your Role As Chief of Staff in her newsletter, Ask A Chief of Staff. If you want more of my Chief of Staff content, you can read my original reflections on the role here, and see two presentations I've given to CoS audiences: Finding Your Way and Creating Organizational Alignment.
• Matt Heinz invited me to come talk about my book at the CMO Coffee Talk that he hosts. It was a great conversation, with people sharing vulnerable reflections and asking difficult questions. It wasn't recorded, but you can read some of the comments on LinkedIn here.
• Please consider writing an Amazon review for the book if you haven't already. I had the pleasant experience that I just got the first two Amazon reviews from people I don't know, and I think each review opens the door to more people benefiting.

• Being matters more than doing. Rather than try to force an agenda on a situation, what happens if you are able to be with it as it is. If you can address your own anxiety or agitation, perhaps your resulting calm will create different possibilities.
• Share your struggles to help address imposter syndrome. This was inspired by a discussion at the CMO Coffee Talk where most people felt imposter syndrome, but thought they were the only ones who felt that way. By sharing our stories, none of us have to feel as alone.
• How you initially show up sets expectations going forward. When you enter a new situation, think about what expectations you are setting for others and whether you will want to keep acting that way in a year. If not, consider doing something different and/or making it clear that this is temporary.
• Giving difficult feedback can be an act of caring. When somebody is struggling, it can feel like we should step back and just let them figure it out. But then they might wonder if anybody even notices or cares. Instead, let them know you see they are not delivering to their usual standards; perhaps you will discover what they're facing, and can offer them help.

• American Parenting vs. European Parenting. A couple with both a European parent and an American parent observed several differences in parenting styles, mostly along the theme that American parents assume that kids can't handle life, and European parents assume their kids can do more e.g. play by themselves, help with chores, eat a variety of foods. Those assumptions become reality!

• How to be More Agentic, by Cate Hall. Taking responsibility to run one's own life can be painful: "radical agency is about finding real edges: things you are willing to do that others aren’t, often because they’re annoying or unpleasant." Hall lays out several strategies to increase one's agency, including court rejection, seek real feedback, assume everything is learnable, learn to love the moat of low status, and, surprisingly, don't work too hard.
• The Laughing Heart, a poem by Charles Bukowski.