You Have a Choice, page 17
9 Mike Daisey (2002) has a great example of this in his book 21 Dog Years: A Cube Dweller's Tale, in which he describes his experience working as a customer support representative for Amazon. Once he figured out that he was rewarded for spending less time on calls, he started hanging up immediately on every fourth customer, and won an award because his average call time was the lowest in the department.
10 Fernando Flores (2012, 29) describes the fundamental unit of work to be a “conversation for action,” where one person makes a request of another and they negotiate the terms of the work until the other person agrees to the work. The other person does the work, declares it complete, and then brings it back to the first person for approval; if the work is not approved, they start the cycle over with a new request and negotiation.
11 I’ve heard this called the “bring me a rock” game. The manager says, “Bring me a rock!” The employee brings them a rock. “Not that rock, I wanted a rock that is X [adding a new requirement]!” The employee brings another rock that has X. “Not that rock, it needs to have Y!” Repeat until everybody is frustrated.
12 This discomfort with receiving a no may be cultural, as described in the article “’Askers’ vs. ‘Guessers’” (Eichler 2010). East Asian cultures are “Guesser” cultures that use hints and context to guide guests on acceptable behavior, as it is considered rude in those cultures to directly refuse a guest’s request. In other more direct “Asker” cultures, people can ask for whatever they want, and the other person is expected to say yes or no. Either culture is self-consistent, but interactions between different cultures can lead to both sides being confused and frustrated. This section will help you to make clear requests as expected in American Asker culture.
CHAPTER 5
1 Derek Sivers shares a story in his book Anything You Want (2021) in the chapter “Delegate or die: the self-employed trap” about how he escaped being the bottleneck when he was running his company. Every time somebody asked him a question, he stopped work and gathered everybody together. He repeated the situation and the question for everyone. Then he answered the question and explained the thought process and philosophy behind his answer. When he finished his explanation, he asked them questions to check their understanding, and had somebody write up the process and answer. Because he chose to prioritize information and context sharing over completing a specific task, his team quickly learned how to handle things themselves, and he was able to move away and let the team handle the company.
2 This experiment is inspired by Matt Mochary’s “Mochary Method Curriculum” for CEOs (2022), in which he recommends onboarding every new hire through this shadow and reverse-shadow process.
3 I’m inspired here by the books Us: Getting Past You and Me by Terrence Real (2022) and The New Psychology of Leadership (Haslam, Reicher, and Platow 2020).
4 Note that this is particularly valuable at the executive level, where discussions of engineering vs. product vs. sales vs. finance are not as productive as asking, “How do we grow the company together?” Patrick Lencioni calls this the First Team mindset (Gibson 2011): your peers are your most important team, not the team that reports to you.
5 I did complete the Death Ride in 2015 and it wasn’t even hard once I trained for it.
6 You may recognize this as the language of a growth mindset as described by psychologist Carol Dweck (2016). Dweck also describes a fixed mindset as one that assumes our lack of talents is inborn or genetic. She asserts that a growth mindset leads to more ability to learn new skills because we believe we can grow and change.
CHAPTER 6
1 Kegan and Lahey’s book Immunity to Change (2009) hypothesizes that our resistance to change is so high that we have a psychological immune system to fight against it.
2 Daniel Kahneman and Amos Tversky (Kahneman 2011) uncovered this loss aversion bias through experiments showing that people feel roughly twice as negative about a loss as they feel positively about an equivalent gain.
3 A mentor coach once told me that there’s only two reasons people change: desperation, because the current situation is no longer manageable, or inspiration, because the new possibility is so enticing.
4 BJ Fogg shares the importance of celebration for habit formation in his book Tiny Habits (2019). He recommends “ABC” to build habits: Anchor yourself on a prompt, do the Behavior, then instantly Celebrate.
5 James Clear, in his book Atomic Habits (2018), suggests two steps for changing your identity:
1. Decide the type of person you want to be.
2. Prove it to yourself with small wins.
6 Fortunately, after I spent a year training for all-day endurance bike races, I used the fitness from that training to run a marathon that fall, and checked that achievement off my list.
7 The motto of the Leadville races is “You can do more than you think you can.” Since finishing the race in 2015, I regularly use that motto to motivate myself when starting something hard, reminding myself that if I could do Leadville, I can handle whatever I’m facing.
8 To use Cal Newport’s (2012) framing from his book So Good They Can’t Ignore You.
9 Josh Waitzkin (2008) shares some additional principles of skill acquisition in his book The Art of Learning, as he generalizes from his experience of becoming a world-class master in chess, a world champion in the martial art of tai chi chuan, and other areas.
CHAPTER 7
1 Please refer to chapters 2 and 3 if you need refresher tips on how to accept your current self.
2 Celebration is the key to rewiring the nervous system, according to Stanford habit researcher BJ Fogg (2019).
3 I’m inspired here by David Cain’s writings on meditation (2019b), as I first attempted meditation via his online class.
4 Patrick Lencioni calls this the First Team mindset (Gibson 2011).
5 I love the First Round article “The Best Leaders Are Feedback Magnets—Here’s How to Become One” (Berry 2021) for practical advice on gathering feedback.
6 I was surprised at how helpful it was to read Jennie Nash’s Blueprint for a Nonfiction Book (2022) when I started writing this book. She broke down the book-writing process into clear, simple exercises that helped me quickly improve the structure of this book, in a great example of how consulting a coach can help when learning a new skill such as writing books.
7 Continuing my book writing example, Rob Fitzpatrick’s Write Useful Books (2021) gave me a structured process for gathering feedback from beta readers to increase the value of this book.
8 As explained in chapter 3.
9 Deb Dana is known in coaching circles for popularizing polyvagal theory, which is the understanding of how our nervous system operates in different modes and how we can manage our own nervous systems if we understand those modes. You can learn more at https://www.rhythmofregulation.com/.
10 I am using the “to me” language from the Conscious Leadership Group’s “4 Ways of Leading” exercise (n.d.) in which “to me” is victim mindset, where I have no control over my circumstances, and “by me” is agency mindset, where I control my actions, aka "You Have a Choice."
11 Jim Dethmer of the Conscious Leadership Group shared these questions on The Knowledge Project podcast with Shane Parrish: https://fs.blog/knowledge-project-podcast/jim-dethmer/
12 By resourced, I mean having whatever you need to be the best version of yourself. This includes taking care of your physical needs (such as getting enough sleep, having enough food, staying hydrated) and emotional needs (such as social connection and support) so that you have all the resources you need to focus your attention and energy where you intend.
CHAPTER 8
1 I love the subtitle of Nilofer Merchant’s (2017) book The Power of Onlyness: “Make Your Wild Ideas Mighty Enough to Dent the World.” This chapter is about finding those wild ideas that will put a dent in the world.
2 I am reminded here of Layla Saad’s exhortation in Me and White Supremacy (2020, 167): “You will be called out/in as you do antiracism work. Making mistakes is how you learn and do better going forward. Being called out/in is not a deterrent to the work. It is part of the work. And there is no safety in this work. There has been no safety for BIPOC under white supremacy.”
3 Murthy (2020) and Hari (2018) summarize this research. I also like the expression of this idea in Viktor Frankl’s book Man’s Search for Meaning (1946), where he shares how he created meaning in the suffering he experienced in the Nazi concentration camps by reminding himself of his love for his wife and the meaning he found in his psychological research.
4 In his book Together, Dr. Vivek Murthy says “So many of the problems we face as a society—from addiction and violence to disengagement among workers and students to political polarization—are worsened by loneliness and disconnection. Building a more connected world holds the key to solving these and many more of the personal and societal problems confronting us today” (2020, xix).
In his book Lost Connections, Johann Hari says “When we talk about home today, we mean just our four walls and (if we’re lucky) our nuclear family. But that’s never been what home has meant to any humans before us. To them, it meant a community—a dense web of people all around us, a tribe. But that is largely gone. Our sense of home has shriveled so far and so fast it no longer meets our need for a sense of belonging. So, we are homesick even when we are at home” (2018, 98).
5 I’m inspired here by Jeff Bezos, who once commented, “I almost never get the question: ‘What’s not going to change in the next 10 years?’…When you have something that you know is true, even over the long term, you can afford to put a lot of energy into it.” (Haden, 2017) In the case of Amazon, he trusted that customers will always want lower prices and faster delivery, so he could invest vast resources into those areas without worrying he would regret that decision. Similarly, a cause or community that you have cared about for years is one to which you can make a long-term aspirational commitment.
6 I love Katie Hendricks’s definition of integrity as “energetic wholeness” (2022) When you live from integrity, you are not losing energy to doubt and anxiety or wasting energy on unspoken resentments, unkept agreements, or unfelt feelings, and thus are able to show up with your full self in each moment.
Eric Nehrlich, You Have a Choice
