This is a week of experimentation––an exploration at the launch point. Rather than sharing a story, I’m sharing a few quotes that I’ve encountered recently and the thoughts they prompted in me.
I look forward to your feedback!
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“Realizing what you aren’t good at can be liberating, even empowering.” –– Steve Arntz, CEO of Campfire, and this week’s podcast guest.
One of the seven accelerants of growth is “play to your strengths.” Steve Arntz helped me realize that sometimes we can better discover our strengths and/or give ourselves permission to play to them when we have the contrast of knowing what we don’t do well.
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“Even a wounded world is feeding us. Even a wounded world holds us, giving us moments of wonder and joy. I choose joy over despair. Not because I have my head in the sand, but because joy is what the earth gives me daily, and I must return the gift.” Robin Wall Kimmerer, Potawatomi botanist and author of Braiding Sweetgrass.
I loved her book and its reminder of the importance of not just taking but giving back to and nourishing the ecosystem around us in a way that helps others grow. It also reminds me of the growth accelerant “examine expectations.” It’s a choice of how we approach obstacles and challenges in life and relationships. Like Kimmerer, I want to “choose joy over despair.”
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If you want to accelerate the growth of your team, you’ll need to play to the strengths of both individuals and the collective, but first, you need to identify those strengths. An effective way to do that is to write notes of appreciation.
You may want to try this exercise my company’s co-founder, Amy Humble, and I outlined in this week’s HBR article.
P.S. I’ve written a sort of note of appreciation in this week’s LinkedIn newsletter. It covers all sorts of things I’m grateful for, including air-traffic controllers. There are so many good and useful things in our lives.
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“The law of gratitude is that action and reaction are always equal and in opposite directions (like physics). If your gratitude is strong and constant, the reaction is strong and continuous. The movement of the things you want will always be toward you. You cannot exercise much power without gratitude because it is gratitude that keeps you connected to power. But the value does not consist solely of being more blessed with what you want in the future. Without gratitude, you cannot keep from being dissatisfied with things as they are. Because as you focus on what you don’t like, what you aren’t grateful for, more of that comes to you too.” –– Wallace D. Wattles, 19th-century writer
There are many quotes I love about gratitude, and many of these derive from my faith. What I like about this quote is that it is grounded in neuroscience. Wattles captured a truth about the human condition before neuroscientists. It is that what we pay attention to, we get more of. Focus on the good with gratitude and watch the good amplify in your life. Put your magnifying lens on the negative and… well, I’m sure you get the point.
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What are your thoughts?
I’d love to hear!
All the best,
Whitney
P.S. Wondering how to recruit, hire and retain women and BIPOC professionals. Come listen to LinkedIn Learning’s most popular instructor Stacey Gordon talk about unconscious bias and what to do about it! Tuesday, November 29 at noon on LinkedIn Live.
P.P.S. If you are in the U.S.––Happy Thanksgiving!
