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How to discover your superpowers, own your story, and unlock personal growth | Donna Lichaw

Donna Lichaw is an internationally sought-after executive coach, keynote speaker, and best-selling author. She helps visionary founders, CEOs, and executive teams level up their leadership and scale their impact while staying true to their mission, purpose, and themselves. Donna works with leaders at companies like Google, Disney, Twitter, Microsoft, Mailchimp, and Adobe, as well as a plethora of mission-driven startups and nonprofits. In our conversation, we discuss: • How our personal narratives influence our success and failure • Why identifying your superpowers (and kryptonite) is so important, and how to do it • The value of doubling down on your strengths rather than trying to fix weaknesses • How to acknowledge and reframe feelings of impostor syndrome • The Double Diamond framework for personal growth and goal-setting • The power of visualization and how it can fuel motivation and creativity — Brought to you by: • OneSchema—Import CSV data 10x faster: https://oneschema.co/lenny • Sendbird—The (all-in-one) communications API platform for mobile apps: https://sendbird.com/lenny • Sprig—Build a product people love: https://sprig.com/getstarted?utm_source=lenny&utm_medium=podcast Find the transcript and references at: https://www.lennyspodcast.com/how-to-discover-your-superpowers-own-your-story-and-unlock-personal-growth-donna-lichaw-author/ Where to find Donna Lichaw: • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/dlichaw/ • Website: https://www.donnalichaw.com/ Where to find Lenny: • Newsletter: https://www.lennysnewsletter.com • X: https://twitter.com/lennysan • LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lennyrachitsky/ In this episode, we cover: (00:00) Donna’s background (04:25) Donna’s origin story and transition to coaching (08:38) The power of storytelling in leadership (11:36) Becoming the hero of your own story (14:49) Changing your story (21:19) Understanding and shifting others’ stories (25:41) Imposter syndrome (31:28) Exploring different types of kryptonite (36:41) Identifying and leveraging strengths (43:53) Identifying superpowers (56:39) Running experiments (01:01:52) Using product frameworks for personal growth (01:12:41) Identifying subconscious goals (01:15:27) Envisioning impact (01:16:44) Lightning round Production and marketing by https://penname.co/. For inquiries about sponsoring the podcast, email podcast@lennyrachitsky.com. Lenny may be an investor in the companies discussed.

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when superheroes discover what their superpowers actually are they wreak havoc and they make a mess and it's uncomfortable and even Superman tries to get rid of his superpowers it's hard to know what you're really great at how does somebody identify their superpowers their strengths pull your superpowers out of your stories from your past your present and then eventually figure out how to apply them and transpose them to your future the person story this is Central to becoming a better leader th
e most effective stories are the ones that we tell ourselves they may or may not be true our brain doesn't know the difference once you can really understand that you may as well leverage it to be that hero today my guest is Donna Lisha Donna is an executive coach speaker and best-selling author she helps Founders CEOs and executive teams level up their leadership skills and scale their impact while staying true to their mission their purpose and themselves Donna has worked with leaders at compa
nies like Google Disney Twitter Microsoft and Adobe and she's also the author of the book The Leader Journey which is what we spend our time on in our conversation we talk about why the story that we tell ourselves has so much impact on our success and failure why knowing your superpowers and also your Kryptonite is so important to your career and how to identify these two things how to reframe your feelings of impostor syndrome and actually use it as an advantage how to identify your life goals
even if you have no idea what they might be plus a ton of examples from her coaching practice of people unlocking their career using her Frameworks and how they went about doing this and so much more if you enjoy this podcast don't forget to subscribe and follow this podcast in your favorite podcasting app or YouTube it's the best way to avoid missing future episodes and it helps the podcast tremendously with that I bring you Donna Lisha after a short word from our sponsors today's episode is b
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munic medication experience to the next level start today with send Bird's free plan and as a listener of Lenny's podcast you'll get an additional 2 months of unlimited usage and access to all premium features including creating your very own generative AI chatbot visit send bird.com Lenny to begin your free Journey that's s bird.com Lenny Donna thank you so much for being here welcome to the podcast thank thanks Lenny it's exciting to be here so we connected through a former colleague of mine w
ho could not stop raving about how much value she got from working with you also you have a new Bookout right here that I have the leader journey and so I thought it would be awesome to bring you on and share your wisdom with a wider audience love the podcast my clients love your your stuff and newsletter everything so very excited to be here amazing and congrats on the book by the way thank you you actually were a product manager in a previous life you're also a designer in a previous life thes
e days You're an executive coach just briefly I'm curious what pulled you from product management design and the things you did before this life into Executive coaching and maybe another way to ask this question is what's what's your origin story and this is a little foreshadowing to the stuff we're going to be talking about later actually it's funny like all origin stories there were actually multiple episodes multiple moments that that led me to an epiphany but the the biggest aha moment was w
hen I was working several years ago almost almost a decade ago at this point with an executive team in Silicon Valley and we were at a a Leadership Retreat and we were supposed to at the time I was facilitating a program on effective product leadership how to be a great product leader product executive and the biggest thing that companies wanted at the time and teams wanted was their teams to be better storytellers and it's still something we hear today which is you know to be a great product le
ader or leader in general in any industry is you got to be a great Storyteller and so at the time I was teaching and facilitating storytelling workshops and exploring that with with teams and it was a few people on this team specifically who I so appreciate their their honesty in cander here which is what this giant tech company is known for very blunt people working there and they pulled me aside halfway through the the offsite and they were just like honestly story telling is not going to fix
our problems this is silly and what they were able to tell me is that their their leaders wanted them to be more effective by having greater influence and you know these are terms that we throw around all the time be more influential and and be a better leader whatever that means and what was happening on the ground with these Executives was that they were all fighting so you know I'd hear oh the head of engineering is such a jerk or this person won't listen to me or my team is demotivated and I
get it but they need to step up and work more and there's just a lot of conflict going on here and there that storytelling wouldn't fix like when that happens and I talk about this in the book about a bunch no one wants to hear your stories you have to actually be able to connect with people and to work with people and and feel good as a leader in order to really step up and Lead You know I didn't have an answer for this team at the time and I I left this offsite just honestly feeling terrible
and not knowing what to do about it except telling them I think you got to go work with a coach because this is this is beyond my pay grade but when I left that day I just couldn't stop thinking about this team because I I had hunched that stories were still a part of something but not what they needed telling stories was was not the answer and so I ended up spending what now is the next decade figuring out all right how do you become an effective leader and of course because I I can't do anythi
ng lightly once I went down that path I ended up switching up my entire business and and now that's all I do is help people be better more effective confident leaders who really make the impact that they want to make so along those same lines what's interesting is you actually found that this idea of Storytelling was actually much more effective in your coaching practice instead of helping them figure out the story of the product it's the story of the person and so kind of transitioning into the
meat of your approach to coaching I think you call it uh story driven leadership essentially your finding is that uh story and the person's story is extremely important and Powerful in helping them level up as a leader and also seeing them as as the hero of their story so I guess just with that Foundation you just talk about why that is so powerful the idea of figuring out your own story and why you need to be the hero of your own story and just what all this means we all as humans want to be t
he the hero of Our Own Story it's how we live our lives it's how we make choices it's how we understand the world around us and it's how we communicate to to the back to the world with leadership it's it's much the same which is we have a mission that we want to accomplish no matter how big or small it's something we're driven to do something if you're a leader you want to be a leader you have to be taking yourself and you have to be taking people somewhere we also have obstacles so that's a par
t of any great story there are challenges it shouldn't be easy it shouldn't be so hard that's that you fail that's a tragedy but there are challenges and it makes life more exciting you don't do it alone so it's rare that a story just has a single individual it happens but that's not most of life and there are other elements that I ended up uncovering when I look deeper into what makes the most effective leaders effective and the biggest thing is stories that we tell people it's like the tip of
the iceberg and and if anything it even doesn't matter I've worked with a lot of folks who their teams say stop it with the storytelling stop talking at us they don't want any of that but the most effective stories are the ones that we experience as we live life and that we tell ourselves as well because we have the ability by saying things like oh I'll never succeed or or oh she'll never go for it or he's such a jerk or whatever the stories are these are all stories and they may or may not be t
rue they're usually not true but our brain doesn't know the difference where our brain it's like the most powerful ability our brain has is to understand and see stories everywhere and so once you can really understand that you may as well leverage it to to be that that hero in in your life and even as I say it out loud it sounds so cheesy but true this is neuroscience and psychology like we just want to be the heroes and that's what our focus is so I want to delve deeper into that in that idea
there so people listening to this might feel like okay cool let me think about the story of my life this sounds like a fun thing I could do yeah but I think your point is this is Central to becoming a better leader figuring out the story of you and kind of that changing your perspective on yourself and giving you more like unblocking you I think is is is a big part of it you just talk about more just like the power and why this is so important because it not just like cool I'll sit around and th
ink about oh here's my story I was born here I did this thing why why is this so important to do it's and it's a little antithetical in a way because it sort of um it goes against what a lot of us believe especially if we have I'll say product backgrounds or just business backgrounds or or Tech backgrounds or anything where we've built things for people for years we've had this idea that we build companies in a user centered way where all right build for the customer first and all else will foll
ow and there's some truth to that on the one hand and I used to think leadership was the same which is well it's not about you as a leader it's about who are you bringing Along on your journey and how do they need to be heroes so how do you enable everyone you work with and everyone you want to follow you to join you and feel amazing with it that's the kind of user centered approach where it's not about you it's about who you're bringing with you and the impact you want to make but what I learne
d is that it's actually it doesn't work that way and you need to flip that which is when you start with you first at the center of the equation and then I'm going to do um uh you know everything for me is a diagram so I'm thinking of concentric circles you start with you and this isn't also uh Ken Blanchard has a a great model for this where you start with you it's the inner Inner Circle then you are able to lead yourself then you can lead others it extends to one-on-one relationships then once
you've got that you're able to lead groups teams and then outward towards the business business when you figure that out and you come from the inside out it's much much more powerful because it's not selfish like I would have thought years ago but it's purposeful you as human we we all are are driven by a mission by purpose by a reason for what we do and when we're able to have that power us it then empowers us to connect with others so that we can bring it to life and especially in a business c
ontext but this is the case in in anything uh communities and family but especially in business so it has to start with you you gota you need fuel from somewhere and it then it if it comes from without it's like a an eggshell that's just ready to crack it's it's not sustainable if it comes from outside can you give an example of someone you worked with that changed their story and what impact it had on their career to make this even more real I can think of a CEO I worked with a few years ago wh
o on the outside was so put together he was the CEO of a billion dooll company successful raised money like no one's business was able to get people excited about what he was building join him and when we started working together he had recently hired an ex ex cutive team members of an executive team that were just superstars from Silicon Valley and just incredible and they were so excited to work with him he was so excited to work with them as well but on the inside the story he kept telling hi
mself was he's too nice nobody listens to him was another story people don't take me seriously was was another story and then there were what I call horror stories this is not a scientific term by any means but horror stories that he told himself were things like we're never going to make it or they're never going to listen to me or I'll never learn to be a real CEO and the problem with stories like that is they end up taking over your identity they Shadow and Cloud your every day and and action
s you take and interactions you have with people and when you focus on them so much they very well will become true so that's that's um one example I could tell you a little more more about that what what we did about it so yeah that's exactly what I was gonna ask and then I'd love to and then yeah so if you could share what you did to help shift his story and then also just how do people do this for themselves perfect so in um in this case and this is this is like everyone I work with and this
is absolutely something that everyone listening and and and everyone in the audience can absolutely do is take a datadriven approach to the stories that you tell yourself so for example you know the story I I'm too nice you know it could be true it could not be true how did we get down to the bottom of that in this case what we did is I went out there and talked to his team and this is something you can do for yourself as well if you're extremely busy you can have someone else do it for you and
I found out how people actually experienced him and his leadership and I didn't hear he's too nice I heard he is so heartfelt and so caring and that's a really cool thing I mean how rare is is that for you know to hear about a CEO especially a Founder oftentimes you hear the opposite which is is not really true usually when founders are not nice people they're insecurities at play but in this case yeah he people were like we you know we love him he's wonderful that's why he recruited us and so g
reat all right um validated and a little debunked really nice but not too nice that was not a problem for anyone so then we hear things like okay you know one story he told himself was like people don't take me seriously they don't listen to me what's what's going on I I need to command respect and and they need to just do what I say and I hear this all the time so I'm using this one example but this could be anyone I've worked with and what we heard from people instead was it's not that they we
ren't listening to him but but when you're hiring super senior whip smart Executives to work for you they don't want to be told what to do they want to have a Grand Vision that they're excited about they want maybe some goals to latch on to and and help possibly with a strategy to get there although probably they they can they got the strategy all on their own and they want to then show you how they can help you in the business meet your goals and align towards that Vision so you can build the c
ompany that you want to build so that story no one listens to me it was the wrong story to be telling what the actual story was is that people wanted him out of their business and wanted to feel empowered doing their seed level and ex super senior executive level work but we don't want him to be absent because when he does that it doesn't work and it's very frustrating in when he just disappears for two weeks so we need him involved but want him to give us problems to solve give us a vision give
us problems to solve them let us do it for you and so they were able to write a better ending of that story together he you know it's exactly like user research of any kind or customer discovery which is you find out what could be possible from your customers and then you can you ideally you co-create a better together if you're Building Products or Services that's how you do it if you're a leader you do it by showing up and helping others do what they need to do in a way that feels good for yo
u and that aligns with how you want to be doing things and so this is one example but I find using real research and data and actually talking to people is most effective there are other ways to take best guesses and I'll use the product metaphor again which is you know you can try things in experiment and then see how it it works and not talk to your users but you should probably talk to your customers in other words your colleagues and everyone who works for you and really find out what is the
true story and what is possible there's all these stories that people believe about themselves and to your point many of them are not true when you actually look at the data you talk to your customer AKA your colleagues I imagine many are actually true or there are feedback you get that is like you are not clear enough about stuff like there's things that you actually hear from other people does this approach help there as well or is there a different tactic for something's actually okay you ar
e actually too nice it's not just a story in your head absolutely there are times when the stories that we tell ourselves are true and when we go out and find out what's possible it is something that we're doing that needs to change or isn't working and so one example is and this comes up sometimes as well one executive who I worked with Once kept getting this feedback that she was too quiet and when we went out and got feedback it was true people were like she needs to speak up more and this is
becoming a problem because she was so quiet that her team thought she was not interested in them and she would just sit back in meetings not say anything and they were like God she sucks like this is the you know worst boss ever I don't even want to be at this meeting and why is she here why am I here and it really was detrimental to them all working together and then she was was frustrated cuz she was always wondering well why are they not performing they're not stepping up and so it was frust
rating all along and it was true she as far as they saw it her not speaking up was the problem but when we got down to the bottom of what was really going on for her and not speaking up at these meetings is she was just listening her processing style was she had to listen and then maybe a few hours later she she have thoughts and so even though the team said we we do want her to participate what they really needed to know was it didn't have to do with speaking or not speaking what they really ne
eded from her was to know that she was listening to them and that she actually heard them and was gonna do something about it and that she wasn't she was quiet in his meeting she was not checked out and so simple solution for that you know she could start trying to yell more and talk over people and be obnoxious but nobody wants that either and so she just started communicating with them more about hey this is this is my style I'm a little a little slower I often need you know a couple hours to
really process things I'm here and I want you to know that and the irony of establishing those lines of communication with your team when they're not getting what they need is that you often end up doing the thing that you've been trying to do but failing to do anyway because she end up talking more with her team just in communicating with them about her style and then they started communicating their styles with her and with each other and this is something that it's not in the book but um you
might have heard of this idea of like a personal OS that a lot of us like to have which is hey these are my work Styles this is how I process this is how I do things these are great ways to work with me and here's how I'd love to work with you and they end up doing a lot of that and worked it worked out really well well but but it was true she was not speaking up and it was it was having a detrimental effect but the answer was not talking more it actually was listening more and just having a bet
ter relationship with people that's an awesome example by the way on the work the personal W another term for that I've heard is read me like your own personal read me file oh I like that too yeah is that great so it sounds like there's kind of these two buckets it's probably more buckets but one is a story of yourself that is not true that you can disprove by looking at data talking to people and then there's like some almost a story people have about you that they don't quite get what's going
on and then you could change their Story by communicating here's what I'm really doing I'm actually just listening and I'm actually really deeply paying attention if we pick an example say impostor syndrome which comes up a lot on this podcast where people feel like I am an imposter in this role nobody knows how bad I like I have no idea what I'm doing it's all going to crumble if I mess up so say someone has that in their head like like I everyone can tell I am an imposter and it all crumble ho
w would you recommend someone vet this this is real or not to understand is this a story in my head or is this real and what do people actually think like do you go talk to people how do you recommend people go about that certain Stories We Tell ourselves are actually quite functional and do not necessarily need to be Rewritten so impostor syndrome for an example if you're going around saying I feel like I'm an an impostor I can't believe I'm doing this you can try to fake it till you make it yo
u can try to I always think of Stu I'm totally dating myself here but Stuart SMY in in uh Saturday Night Live in the 80s and 90s he would look in a mirror and do these affirmations and say you know I'm smart and I'm whatever like I'm good enough I'm strong enough and gosh darn it people like like me or love me there you go so it's like you you could do that and it's kind of all very mechanical and these are there are ways to sort of prop yourself up but what if you took a counterintuitive approa
ch and looked at that story I'm an impostor and instead asked okay that's a good good story how is that serving you because when we default to these behaviors imposter syndrome is something everyone has at one point or another when we default to these behaviors of oh God I'm an imposter okay over and over and over again I know it doesn't feel good but we default to that because it's it's serving Us in in one way otherwise it wouldn't become a habit and you know I always think of habits as a um a
n itch so if you have an itch you scratch it you feel better so there's a reason why we scratch itches it feels better if you do it too much it hurts and something like that telling detrimental stories have that impact but when you can intercept them just the right time and say okay what if that is true how does it serve me to constantly say I'm an imposter whenever anything gets hard well there are so you know one co-founder I worked with a while back she did this whenever she things got too ha
rd and then she was convinced and and Founders have this a lot I who am I to be running this company and what am I doing here and oh my God I can't be doing this but when we looked at how that habit of calling herself an impostor served her what she realized is that every time it kicked in she worked harder and it just meant she was hitting some kind of a growth Edge so when she would jump into action she would learn something new she would read 20 books she would go out take a class she would l
isten to podcasts and and on and on and and she would get better at this new thing it was fun for her and then she would feel less like an impostor over time so it was a very functional thing for her the problem is when she did that too much and this is the case I work with a lot of women who this is the case for she often did way too much work and so she took on emotional labor for other people she did 10 times as much work as she needed to do like actual work as you know in her role she was pl
aying coo and CFO and C you know EO and it's just like she didn't need to be doing all of that and so on a spectrum of it's actually helpful give yourself a pad on the back for jumping into impostor uh Zone every time things get hard to the other side of the Spectrum which is okay but when it's too much you burn out you're doing way too much work for other people you're falling into these unfortunate conventional gender roles that doing extra work you don't need to so you want to find a happy me
dium but I think the the the trick is to with imposter syndrome to not deny it to embrace it as much as you can but not embrace it so much that it ends up holding you back so yes functional even things that we think are bad for us are actually good I love that advice it's so much easier to just like okay yep it's true maybe I am an imposter but here's how he can maybe help me while I feel this and it this actually reminds me of another coach who did a guest post in my newsletter a long time ago
and her advice is like yeah you probably are an imposter you were in a role you've never done before and that's pretty normal and that's okay and here's how you should approach it yeah especially in Tech where half of the roles we have are all made up you're probably the first person ever to have your role anyway whether you founded the company or you're you're doing something else at your company so yeah it's a great thing embrace it so the takeaway advice there is essentially ask yourself Okay
this may be how I feel how is it helping me and don't try to push it down and convince yourself that you're not necessarily an imposter but how is this feeling helping you how is it serving you it's what um I have a whole chapter on Kryptonite in in the book which is it's it's what I call Kryptonite and I use superhero metaphors pretty pretty heavily in in the book because I'm I guess a grown child and I Like Comics and superhero stories but and so are my clients so I think because I work in Te
ch I get to do get to do this but I it's um I lik in it to Kryptonite which is what the things that we think harm us actually when we look at how they serve us they can serve a function like Kryptonite for Superman it's how um uh people are able to operate on him they use a little Kryptonite so they could get in there and do some surgery and then get out so it it serves a function but it's um you know when it's too much that can be detrimental so yeah how does it serve you that's it's a question
that it's so important and so so powerful what are some examples of other types of cryptonite that you find leaders have and how do you find that it ends up maybe serving them and being useful they're the kinds that you should avoid and can avoid so for example um scheduling things is My Kryptonite but I do meetings for a living and I love being in meetings strangely and so a SK not scheduling is not an option but there are ways around it so I automate everything and some people hire assistants
and there are ways to do it so that's the kind that you're better off avoiding there's nothing there's nothing that serves me about having the schedule of things or my inability to schedule things properly how is that serving me you know what I don't care doesn't matter so just the kind that you need to avoid or you know you could say um toxic people or people who just don't add anything to your life you know there kinds are just like all right done moving on but then there are the kinds that i
t's usually on the inner cryptonite side where you can look at okay well how does how does this serve me and so sort of wide swath of people EX example is dyslexia so I work with a lot of Founders CEOs and and Senior Executives who are dyslexic very very very common especially for CEOs you could say well that's Kryptonite you know having to read things or do things with text and and and it can feel like that to a lot of people yet when you look at the science of something like dyslexia it's not
so much an impairment it just means that your brain is operating at a different level in a different way than most people same thing with ADHD and and you could extend it to autism and and ton of other things as well but when you're dyslexic you're thinking spatially you're thinking big you're thinking visually you're not you know so yes you mix up letters or you're struggling with Big Blocks of text that's fine if you're like founding a company you know you're not in documents all day long anyw
ay probably so that ability to think big and spatially and Visually is probably how you created your company in the first place or how you know if you work at a large corporation how you you catapulted into executive leadership that way because you're a Visionary and you do all these things so I think Kryptonite the inner kind of Crypton tonight that's how I like to think of it which is you think it makes you weak but when you can look at how you it serves you it's often not the case so it could
be something that is you know often classified as a disorder like dyslexia ADHD and it could be quirks like the one earlier I'm I'm too quiet um well no she was just a really good listener she just didn't realized that she had a poker face on when she was listening and no one knew she was listening so everything it just just look at how it serves you so it's the kind you need to avoid the kind of kryptonite that you need to really look at and embrace and once you embrace it just like with the s
uperheroes it becomes ideally something that's useful in small doses like Superman or it could be something more like Hulk which is you know you could say his Kryptonite is his anger but that's also his superpower and he can't get rid of it or if he does he becomes Mark ruffle being really boring uh like in the latest Avenger movies and he's all meditating yeah I don't know what the point of that is so yeah that's how I see Kryptonite it's actually a really really amazing amazing tool that we ca
n all Leverage The Flip Side of kryptonite is superpower and I definitely want to spend time here so I'm a big believer in this you are too of just how important it is to lean into your strengths and identify what you're better at than most people and use that as your way of getting ahead versus trying to say just remove these Kryptonite uh Slash things you're not good at for me it was really a big deal I actually worked with a coach while I was working and this wasn't the biggest uh step change
s for me is just realizing I will never be amazing at XYZ but I turns out I'm really good at these things and so let me just use those things to achieve the things I'm trying to do as one example I'm never going to be an amazing public speaker I hate that stuff even though I do this podcast it's not my strength and it turns out I much prefer writing and sitting there and thinking and that's what led to this newsletter I started doing the thing that was pulling me and was easier for me and ends u
p being really successful because that's another way of achieving the same thing turns up so here's the question why is it so important to think about your superpowers how do you identify your superpowers and just how do you think about this area you know on the one hand there's so many studies that show that when we play to our strengths we're much more effective than when we try to fix what's broken it's a waste of energy to fix what's broken for the most part but when you can amplify your str
engths and figure out how to use them productively so that you can fulfill your purpose meet your goals do what you need to do in life and bring others along with you it's just that it's your you're you have such a bigger impact that way I'm going to um give you an example and it's funny that we're we're here talking about this because so a while back I remember we first met over email I was thinking of resurrecting my newsletter and I hate writing and I've written two books I hate writing but m
ore than hating writing I hate email like I hate sending emails reading emails I really struggle with it and but yeah I have this newsletter that people love and um people were begging me to send more of over the years and at the time I was like oh maybe I'll you know dust it off and I remember emailing you about this and asking if we could have a call because I had questions about newsletters and your answer was no no no no no I no no calls it was I don't know if it was that I don't know someth
ing like this it's just like I prefer I prefer to avoid calls whenever I can yes there you go so I prefer to avoid calls whenever I can it was very polite right but it was like you know um happy to answer any questions you have can you shoot me an email and I think I don't remember if this was my answer but you know my I think my answer to me was no no emails I cannot sh like I can't I can't give you my questions written uh maybe if I can record them for you I'll think about it and um and I thin
k in the end uh the irony is I ended up resurrecting the email uh while email list a while later and and now I do send occasional newsletters that that I actually like writing and people enjoy but you know I knew okay I'm not gonna it'll take me like five hours to write down my questions for you over email and I knew that was not right for me you knew you know having a meeting was not right for you that was fine that was great because in the end it was easier for me to write an entire book than
to write that email to you it probably was faster to write my book than it would have been to write the email to you and in the end here we were having having that first conversation which is really fun but it's in a way that feels good to both of us play to your strength and and good things happen it's not worth it trying to like I I could get better at writing emails but you know what not worth my time and you could have more meetings and not worth your time either let me tell you about a prod
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nny to learn more and get 10% off that's sp.com Lenny is there an example you can think of of someone that you work with where identifying their strength and then leading into that made a big impact on them gosh I see this all the time I especially see this with founder CEOs because there's this very heavy misconception that when you are again catapulted into some kind of senior leadership position that you're supposed to be a certain way and you're supposed to be loud and opinionated and contro
lling and and tell people what to do but I've worked with some amazing CEOs who are just incredible listeners instead and it's the same thing which is they Embrace what works for them and they don't try to be what they're supposed to be well they have to learn that and um you know I think of Bob Iger as an example from from Disney he's um I haven't met him I know people have met him and I just always hear such a sweet person so nice and such a great listener so like you can control the world and
do it in in your way and so yeah I see this all the time any any of your strengths they operate again on that Continuum with Kryptonite but if you can figure out how to leverage them and really be comfortable with them cool things happen cool things happen the big unlock for me was realizing that you can achieve all the same things using different strengths like you can be an amazing Co being very loud charismatic Visionary you could also be great SEO being very quiet and thoughtful and deliber
ative and working in small teams versus like hey everyone wel listen to what I have to say exactly okay so how does somebody identify their superpowers their strengths I know there's some tests they could take very tactically what do you recommend people do what do you send them to to figure out here's what I'm really good at there there are tests out there I have personally not found them as helpful but some people love them and so if you've ever taken a strengths finder test or there's a um VI
character strengths test I think it's called those are the two most popular and you can you know just take a multiple choice quiz and it'll tell you what your top five strengths or characteristics are and um I don't find it useful because if I just get a list of things I will never remember what the list is and it also has no no context for me and so what I do and what I find works better for my clients as well is to pull your superpowers out of your stories from your your past and your presenc
e and then eventually figure out how to apply them and transpose them to your future but if you look at your Peak experiences from from life from work but especially from from life because even if you're you want to be a better leader in a work context there a difference between work and life it's it's very blurry so it's better you're better off not not separating them but if you look at your your Peak experien is from your past so I would go back to when you were a kid what something you did w
hen you were a kid like a project you worked on or something you were a part of that completely totally lit you up and that you were so excited about and I would then look at something from your more recent past like what's the project or something you worked on in the last maybe 10 years that you just jazzed you up and you're were just so excited to do and then I would also look at just how did you get into your line of work the thing that you're doing now what's that mandering path and when yo
u can look at these three stories as moments in time and you can kind of lay them on on top of one another what you see at Key moments is your superpowers popping through and they're the things that Empower you to make an impact they are the things that that do make an impact and so an example I'll give you is one of uh got another executive I worked with a while ago she kept being told uh in this dreaded 360 reviews at her company they were obsessed with is another big big tech company they wer
e obsessed with superpowers at this company and so she would get these 360 reviews from her team telling her what her super Powers were and so they kept saying attention to detail and she was like what on Earth I hate details like that's my cryptonite I cannot deal with details yet they kept telling her wow you're so great you have this attention to detail and then they kept giving her more detail oriented stuff to do and she's like I'm I want to be I should be doing strategy and high Lev stuff
what is happening here and so you know with with her when we you know she could say my strength is strategy and I hear that all the time I'm a strategist like that's not a what is that it doesn't even mean anything it's not a superpower like may as well say I don't know it just that that it means nothing but when we looked at her past and her stories what we were able to pull out is that she was really great at connecting connecting things together connecting themes connecting pieces Trends and
connecting people connecting ideas together and then connecting people to ideas that's when she was happiest and that's when she was most effective and So eventually that being a a connector it was her superpower one of her superpowers it also became part of her identity and over time she was able to shed that whole the you know great attention to detail thing as she just started embracing that ability to connect and it made her much more effective at her job in the end so yeah look to your past
and you can pull out key moments and see what your superpowers are we'll link to these tests they recommended just for people to explore I took a couple of them and they were actually really useful to me so I think it's if nothing else it's a good little context to have while you do this other exercise and I don't know if I got this right but one is think about Peak experiences in your life including like childhood or like mostly adult life do you recommend yeah I would go back as far as you ca
n definitely childhood childhood like like amazing like happy experiences is that what she look for it doesn't have to be happy or sad it's just it you were at your best it it lit you up and so um for example like one I mean I have a few but you know well let no let me ask enough about me so other people can hear hear this in action what is um when was the time when you were younger or a kid or anytime in the past when you were just at your best really really lit up doing something that just fue
led you to me I guess I think of not necessarily an ex specific example but just like accomplishing things always gets me energized like I did this I did this hard thing like selling my startup that was a peak experience every there's one selling selling your startup yeah okay and starting the startup and starting starting the startup what what compelled you to start the startup I always had this goal of I want to start a company which is a terrible reason to start a company but I had a goal I w
anted to start a company so I had set this goal in two years I'm going to leave this job and start a company and two years later it's exactly what I did what was it about starting a company that made that something that you were so interested in doing I wanted to prove to myself that I could do it I think is the core of it like I just want to I keep reading about start UPS all these people are doing interesting things I want to just see if I can pull this off okay so you wanted to just see if yo
u could pull it off yeah and I also felt like I had the skills to do this compared to other folks that were starting companies and trying to their hand at a startup so you wanted to do it because you wanted to see if you could do it and you thought you you thought you could do it what's so cool when you do this exercise if we were to do it we were not going to do it now it take a little while but if you were to unpack enough of those stories even if you can't go far back to your childhood becaus
e sometimes uh sometimes not it's you don't have those memories if you could impact at least three of those scenarios you would find themes so for example it could be that one of your superpowers is is doing things because you can do them and that's really cool when applied in in the right ways um I don't know if you if uh you said you did the exercise I'm curious to know what you what you came up with what what I'm thinking about as you talk about this is I was very shy my entire childhood and
I think people didn't expect me to achieve big things because I was always just like this nerdy shy guy so I think there's always this like chip on my shoulder of like I'm gonna show I'm going to show people what I could do I want to show that I'm capable of more so I think there's a lot of that there when you can look at that in context what you could see is you could see how it's helped you through life even if it came from adversity I'm sure you can also see times when that has not served you
and when over indexing on I'm gonna do it just because I can do it has actually done a disservice to you yeah and so that's that's how you end up us using them which is you really look at all right from here to where I now want to go how can I use this and what do I need to watch out for if I'm going to over index and and use this too much um yeah another blanket example that I'll I'll I'll give is um problem solving like this this Keen ability to solve problems I work with a lot of high achiev
ing especially founder CEOs who are amazing at solving problems and that's how they got to where they are it's usually why you start a company you're solving some well for the rest of us um you do it because you want to see if you can do it otherwise it's to solve a problem but when you're a super senior executive at some point you can't be solving problems for everyone and if you're just in the weed solving problems all day that's when you're you're not doing your real job and you're going to b
e driving your whole team and your whole company nuts and so you have to figure out okay if this like Keen ability to solve problems is a superpower how do you apply it differently that super resonates a lot of times you just you're interested in the problem you just want to it's like a puzzle and pulls you in yeah and that gets you in trouble so to answer your question what these tests told me my number one strength was was adaptability that I could just adapt to situations which has pros and c
ons but I super res resonates I find that I could just fit into things and and adapt that's and that's a perfect example and as you see it has has its pros pros and cons so again just for people to think about because I I really think this is such an important topic and it makes me want to write a newsletter post about this just like how powerful it is to identify here's the things I'm very strong at and why it's important to double down on those versus think about solving your weaknesses so you
r advice here is maybe take these quiz that'll give you a sense of maybe your superpowers and then think about your Peak life experiences when you're the most yourself I think is how you describe it when you're uh at your best at your best at best yep and and there's an element of also when you're energized which came up a few times on this podcast like look for things that give you energy because there's something there yeah because then if you subscribe to um I'm sure uh your audience is famil
iar with this idea of managing your energy not your your time and um which is great for managers great for anybody this will help you do that if you're using your superpowers you will have more energy if you use them too much then it's going to detract but you want to be doing more of that more of more of what lights you up more of what you love and figuring out how to manage the rest whether it's Outsourcing or sometimes fixing but I don't know we're all grown adults it probably is a matter of
Outsourcing or getting help or supplementing we don't have to fix everything there's a this guide that we'll link to in the show notes by another executive coach Matt Masari who we had on the podcast who is is just like a walkthrough of how to do an energy audit on your day so that you can identify what gives you energy and this is actually exactly what led me to this path when I left my job I specifically paid close attention to what gives me energy after meeting I had after a call after things
I did in the day and what saps me of energy and I just decided I will do more of the things that are giving me energy and that ended up being this news letter in eventually this podcast so it really works there you go and I know Matt mashari works um similar to me to me with a lot of founder CEOs where you have to do that you have to do that because chances are you're spending you're exhausted you're burnt out you are spending your energy in the wrong places and so I me to anybody but especiall
y when you are leveling up in leadership and doing something new and hitting that growth Edge you gotta be doing it it's just yeah you'll run yourself into the ground otherwise I imagine many people listening to this are feeling like like I wish I could not be in these dumb meetings that I'm in all the time and these stupid reviews and like there's a lot of stuff you have no control over that also are very energy sapping what advice would you give to people thinking that well okay let me qualify
this with just this is why I'm not a career coach by the way like I don't he people figure navigate um how to change jobs or leave jobs because I think if you're spending most of your time in your day doing things that are sapping your energy and you hate your things you're doing in your job maybe you're not in the right in the right job so um I don't know if I was a career coach I would just tell everyone oh yeah quit your job I don't know what you're doing there but um but there's there's a l
ot of Truth to that which is if there are things that you can control energy wise great manage your energy not your time if there's really nothing you could do about it and it's the context and it's the situation you then your next best thing is trying to figure out how to change the context or the situation so I'm pretty ruthless there I think this is what I I still bring from product management I'm ruthless it comes to you know prioritizing things I love it prioritization yeah there you go tha
t this reminds me of a Steve Jobs quote that I love of his advice is just if you wake up every morning and you're feeling dread for the thing you're doing it's okay to wake up sometimes and feeling that and feel like ah what I'm not excited about this day but if it keeps happening over and over and over and over that's a sign that maybe you should make a change yeah I I think there I mean there's something there's something there and um actually I me to you know bring this back to Kryptonite if
it's something little like let's say Zoom fatigue for example it's I know it became um definitely a topic when the pandemic hit a bunch of years ago but I've been working remotely for God years years and um even pre pandemic and I I'm in meetings all day long I love it I love working with my clients I we can't always they're all over the world so we can't always travel to to be with them we do sometimes they can't always travel to be with me but you know the video is the next best thing but it a
lso it can be exhausting and so you know does that mean I'm not just never going to have video calls ever know because I love what I what I do and so I've discovered little you know little hacks for that one which is like don't schedule too many meetings a day great um do lots of active stuff in between uh gym walks whatever try to get inperson Social time no meeting days and then um and for during meetings I've got right here I've got one of my my squishies there's a neurological thing with zoo
m where it um you know we're just getting s stimuli from through our eyes but we um and through our our brains but we're not getting like physical stimuli the same I I would be getting if we were in a room together hanging out even having you just be on the other side of the room and we're chatting it would be a very different physical experience that would close that circuit tree for me and leave me more satisfied as opposed to on Zoom I'm all like my brain's like on the lookout for something a
nd so I and a lot of my clients do this too use fidgets help ground me when uh I'm on Zoom call and it's like okay great so there's things you can manage but yes like that Steve Jobs quote you know idea it's like if you God if you really don't like and and are getting energy sucked from most of what you're doing and it's constant you got to change your situation I really like that tip that's very practical buy something that you can play with with your hands I use this pen actually is what I'm p
laying with usually with these podcasts I need something squishy maybe uh if there's anything you recommend let's to it in the show Nots oh my God I know I know I um one of my superpowers that's actually my kryptonite but if um if I'm humorous about it I'll call ITP superpower is um starting things that I don't finish and so I have um I think I have a picture of it somewhere on my website a Superhero Supply kit that I prototyped a while back that has um all these different types of fidgets and c
hocolate and like all these things to get you through your your meat meetings and there are um like pointy fidgets that give you energy in the morning and then there are squishy ones for the afternoon and I've done way too much research I should send you one at some point I have um a few boxes prototyped and um I never ended up doing anything with them so I just send them to clients sometimes I'll take it good I'll put that on my list of things I need to do which is aw my kryptonite okay so ther
e's just a couple more things I want to touch on and then I'll let you go one is you have this interesting approach of using product Frameworks that people know in their day-to-day Building Product to translate that to personal growth advice and so in your book you use this like that design thinking Double Diamond framework for helping people think about their own life and career is there a couple you could share of that people can maybe think about and use of just like here's something you don'
t product here's how you can actually use this in your life in your career I trained with gestal coaches and therapists when um I moved into coaching gestal psychology and gestal therapy the idea is that well it's a lot of what what I talk about and especially in the book this idea of the when you want to create real lasting powerful change you don't do it by forcing change to happen you instead doing do it by embracing what is and what's working and then figuring out how to leverage that and so
it works for individual therapy it works for for coaching and also works more broadly for organizational change and and giant transformational development projects um or initiatives or any any kind of change but one of the theoretical underpinnings there is when you do understand what's working and you start to get an idea of what's possible or something that you want to go try or do or create or make happen you don't just go and change everything or do it all at once you take one tiny step and
run a little experiment to get data and so the way I work and the way I I learn to work at least through gal coaching and gestal therapy was you don't leave a session with me without having tried a little experiment first so the analogy there is um you know we would call it an in the room experiment versus then get out of the building and do an experiments and if um you subscribe to I guess I'm going to call it lean methodology although I feel like these names change all the time and oh that's
so 10 years ago and I don't care what anything's called but the idea of experimenting and getting data and then using what you learn to make informed decisions on how to change things and then how to build things and how to make things even more successful it works for the digital products that we build it works for the businesses that we build and it works for ourselves and ideally do it for all the above and so anything you think is true or you want to do it's a hypothesis until you test it an
d you go out get data and then you can do a bigger version bigger version bigger version so it works with human psychology and all the things we want to create and learn in life just as well as with products is there an example of one of those little experiments you R in a session bring us back to the example of that one executive from earlier to keep the continuity here who thought she was too quiet and her team was complaining about her and actually the irony often when people come to me with
things that they're um embarrassed by like on the outside she was like actually quite loud like as a as a person she was really loud and Brash and all these things it's just that in terms of her team they didn't like how quiet she was in in meetings especially that dissonance there was confusing to them because she was so loud and boisterous and energetic but using uh that as an example I remember when we first realized that the reason why she was so quiet in meetings is because she was spending
a lot of time doing deep listening she started to chill out a little bit about it and and stop beating herself up as much and and started realizing oh that's a that's a good thing why am I so insecure and like you know getting so angry at myself for doing this all the time that's good so she started to chill out a little bit but then the idea of her a bigger experiment was in the your next meeting later this afternoon see what it feels like to sit there and just listen for an hour just see what
it feels like and then see what you make of it and then we'll figure out what to do about it but just see what it feels like to listen and be in awe of wow I'm really listening and so that would been like a you know sort of get out of the building experiment but the idea of doing that petrified her because she's like I can't sit for a whole hour just like being like yeah patting myself in the back I'm a good listen I'm a good listener look at me or like not even good or bad but wow I'm really l
istening that's all I ever want from people just this like radical appreciation this awe of wow I'm doing this everything changes when you figure that out but we decided to run a little experiment because that was just you know why waste a whole hour of her life when we could just do something in 30 seconds in in in the room right right now and so we tried a little little role play of like all right what would it be like to just sit here for 30 seconds and I I talked about I don't know what and
just listen to me we're having a meeting what does it feel like for 30 seconds to do that and we did that and her answer was that was terrifying you know like that was got awful like oh my God I have to do that for a whole hour and eventually over time it got it got easier it was very uncomfortable I mean this is where I'll bring up the whole superhero analogy again in superhero stories when when superheroes discover what their superpowers actually are they don't just say oh thanks for this gift
and then run and save the world they are every superhero has a really hard time except in oh this is my gift hell no or wait what do I do with this and they wreak havoc and they make a mess and it's uncomfortable and even Superman tries to get rid of his superpowers often and because he doesn't like being super and so it's hard to know what you're really really great at but when you can run little experiments that get bigger and bigger over time and really learn how to whether it's embracing yo
ur superpowers or anything let's say there's something you want to try something scary or like look at me with my Superhero Supply kit I was like oh I really want to build a gift box let me prototype that okay fine five years later have I done anything with it no but I built it I saw what it's like it felt good and then as I got bigger with my experiment of thinking about H how can I Mass produce this where would I sell it hm what about taxes oh God and you know not for me and that's fine so I g
ive them away as gifts but um whether it's product or you or your business small experiments get data go bigger adjust iterate all of it you will accomplish incredible things and I think they'll a lot of the power there is you feel like wow there's something new here I didn't expect and this is like a new interesting learning um let me see where else this can go yes and I think the biggest difference that was took me a long time for me to learn is that as a opposed to product development you're
going you're you're testing things not just how are how is it working and what are the numbers well even with product I mean we're not just looking at you know not just looking at numbers all the time but you're when you're experimenting with yourself and with people you work with and with your teams and with your companies it's um you run it through three filters so and this is not my term but I'll say head heart hands is what I like to think of which is head okay how's this going what are my t
houghts you know you might think yeah okay I'm try listening that's fine okay next emotionally how is this going in your heart wow I'm terrified this feels awful or this isn't so bad or whatever it is and or might be no that's fine I hear that a lot that's that was fine but then how does it feel in your body our bodies are ultimately where we store all of our where we take in our stimuli and and then store all of our experiences and our body also tells us what next action we should take and if y
ou run an experiment and scan your body and it's like yeah that felt fine and then how do you feel in your body oh numb well that will tell you something or I hear this all the time or how do you feel um my hands are on fire um or I was working with one one client yesterday and I think she said something like that that was fine and her whole face turned bright red and and then after a minute you know we were able to say like okay what's going fine versus your face turned bright red what happened
there and then she realized oh I'm burning up this is not okay so um yeah run it through head heart hands life is like product thinking and it's also not we have to go deeper and and more broad with our experiences and then we'll learn the most and be able to make the most informed amazing decisions and um so cheesy but you you live a live a good life and make an impact and be a great leader and do all the things you want to do that way beautiful the um point you just made about how much of our
thinking is driven by our body we just had a whole episode on this a few episodes ago with Johnny Miller where we talk about the nervous system and how most of our neurons go up to our brain versus down from the brain and our body is telling our brain what we're feeling so there's a lot if you want to explore that as a listener that's a great episode we'll link to it in the show notes okay good good okay let me ask you a question that my colleague suggested she gave me a few suggestions to ask
you and I imagine this is what worked for her in you two working together so question she had is how's how as an executive coach do you help identify slash bring out goals or wishes that people have in their subconscious but are unable to realize or articulate start with the ending come up with how you want things to turn out and then work your work your way back and start as far out as you want it could be you know decades from now it could be five years from now it could be three years from no
w it could be a year from now it could be a quarter from now could do all the above and really imagine close your eyes imagine you're there engage all your senses what do you hear what do you smell what do you who what do you see who do you see what do you feel emotionally physically and what are you doing what have you accomplished what's amazing and then if you've got something exciting go back to the beginning and then figure out imagine how you got there and just write that Journey out and t
hink of it as if you think of it as an experimental roadmap then start thinking all right what's the first thing I want to need to learn to know if this is right work your way towards that and onwards if you do that and you really you're like I have no vision which I remember is what happened in this case you sit with it for longer you can't write that Journey if you don't have that ending and so you sit with it for as long as you need until you get it and then you create it and again it sounds
so cheesy in a way and I'm you know and I don't it's not like I'm subscribing to this like anything you want in life you just say it and accomplish it I know life doesn't exist like that but dream it see it and then start taking steps to get there what you end up creating will very likely be very different than you ever imagin but this is what's going to fuel you we're H human we're visual creatures and so yeah that this is and I have the whole mission section of the book and I have lots of uh C
H Choose Your Own Adventure options for troubleshooting and and the pitfalls to look out for but um yeah that's that's my long-winded answer envisionment then figure out how you might have made it happen and go make it happen I was going to say this is a great tease for uh a part of your book we didn't get to too much so a good reason to go buy the book um something I was going to say as you're were talking is I with this coach I worked with once we did this exercise and I was like okay in five
years or maybe 10 years I'm not working anymore here's what I'm doing I'm living here family she's like everyone in Tech is like in five years they're not working anymore they just like done there re tired everybody's in that that's their future which is not obviously realistic but it's hilarious yeah I remember you years ago 10 years ago I was like 10 years from now I'm definitely not working in Tech definitely not working in Tech and then here we are but it's funny how things end up but what m
atters is that you're clear on the impact that you want to make and how you make it who knows what'll end up being the case but and that you're doing it true to yourself and impact is another chapter in your book which we didn't get to so there's a lot of so many teasers yes go by the book many teasers Donna is there anything you wanted to share or leave listeners with before we get to our very exciting lightning r no no this has been so it's been so delightful chatting with you no nothing else
well with that we've reached our very exciting lightning round are you ready I'm ready first question what are two or three books that you've recommended most to other people here's a funny thing is I used to have all these different books for different topic I'm going to give you the worst answer but it's true all these different books for different topics and similar to when I was working in product all these different books and whatever and then eventually I realized I need to write the book
that I really want to recommend and so I did that with my last book The users Journey which is all about product development and I sound so conceited but I really believe it I now recommend my book the most and it combines all my favorite ideas philosophies books out there and uh you can check out the bibliography to see all the 30 50 books that you can read otherwise but um man I sound like such a jerk no I get this because this is what my newsletter was originally is like I will just do my bes
t to Define an answer to this question I get often and put it together and make it really good so that I could send people here's my best answer answer to this question but every time I do that they're like oh brother just like sending your own blog post to me like just tell me what an answer like but I've written the best version of it here I this is gonna answer everything you're looking for so I go through the same the same pain okay next question do you have a favorite recent movie or TV sho
w that you really enjoyed a show I've been watching recently and I feel funny saying this because the the fourth season was on recently and it was I didn't enjoy it as much but the first few seasons were so much fun was um For All Mankind on Apple TV have you seen it the yeah um it was so much fun it was all like what if the um the space industry was like an alternate reality and the last few decades were different than what they were so that was very fun and uh if um you know for work stuff you
could always a lot of my clients love watching Ted lasso for um you know all the leadership stuff and it's just such a sweet show but um yeah For All Mankind is recent that's really fun next question do you have a favorite interview question that you like to ask usually this is meant for people interviewing candidates but is there anything that comes to mind when I ask this question the question I always ask when I'm interviewing clients because if if we don't if I'm not excited about what you'
re you're doing we're not going to work together and and um if I yeah I want to know what that is and so imagine it's a few years out and you've had the best however long year or three years of of your life what would you be telling me and I like to add a Twist to that which is from uh Benjamin Xander in a book called The Art of possibility where he with his students he used to say say give yourself an a if you could give yourself an a at the end of the semester what what would you be writing li
ke write the ending and so I love doing that with clients just seeing what could be what could be possible that we could create if we if we work together same thing with job candidates although it's reminding me the one of my first jobs I ever got out of college this is in the early.com days I remember my then who became my boss asked me that question when uh he was interviewing me like where I saw myself in five years and I remember at the time my answer was not here and hopefully making docume
ntary films and this is like a.com job uh but like in hindsight I can't believe I answered it that way I was like yeah I'm gonna be doing something else in five years and he loved it so much that he hired me like on the SP on the spot and we're still we're still friends many decades later so um yeah that's my favorite interview question all around it's similar to question people often use in product they just what is the ideal experience that what's the perfect version of what we're building and
let's work backwards from that or what's like the 10x version exactly or um you know if you want to add to that like if you could wave of magic wand it's the same same kind of thing what could be possible yeah I love the leveraging of product think always to coaching I love it next question do you have a favorite product that you recently discovered that you love maybe you already mentioned the squishy thing maybe something else comes to mind my fidgets all my fidgets I have so many many differ
ent kinds they're so much fun I'm sure I have a better answer somewhere but yeah I would say my if you can if you can point us your favorites in length that would be awesome I'm sure people are curious what You' discovered I curate them I will definitely do that they all have yep and there's also the long one the sticky monkey noodle so many so many amazing do you have a favorite life motto that you often find yourself coming back to sharing with friends or family either in work or in life it's
a phrase that I got from my one of my mentors and I I teach it to all my clients which is her catchphrase is isn't that interesting and I have it as a sticky sticky note on my like a physical sticky note on my my computer monitor to remind me which what it reminds me to do is get into what Gall folks call an optimistic stance and I'm a chronic serious like acute pessimist anyone who knows me I'm cranky but I love this reminder to be in this optimistic stance and it's not like again not that steu
art SMY wow everything's great woohooo but it's a kind of radical appreciation not isn't this good or bad but wow I just stub my toe and it really hurts isn't that interesting let me feel that throbbing toe or wow someone just my uh someone on my team just talked over me in a meeting 20 times in the last hour actually this happened with a client recently I was I was there at an executive team meeting and it's like you know someone kept talking over the CEO over and over and over again and you kn
ow often when that happens you like bark right back or you get angry or you get quiet or whatever it is but when you can really fully appreciate isn't that interesting my shoulders are really tensing up right now wow you know whatever is going on you you often have more informed not often you you will always have more informed mindful actions that you can take or or not take and so this is like you can't pay me to meditate or anything or do yoga but mindfulness yeah if you could just think to yo
urself isn't that interesting anytime something extreme happens in life you will be shocked at what you learn and that what you what you do accordingly very Buddhist non-judgmental awareness exact exactly deciding it's good or bad yep final question I'm surprised you haven't used any Dolly Parton quotes in this conversation Lally in your book you're a big fan I'm curious what what is what a wisdom or quote that comes to mind that always that you think of from Dolly Parton that might be yes and t
hank you for reminding me because that was originally what I was what I was goingon to say which is one of my I mean there's so many Dolly quotes and I think all my favorites are are in my book of course but um one of my favorites is find out who you are and do it on Purp purpose that's um you know amazing another one you don't like the I guess my two favorites you don't like the path you're walking on pave A New Path it's I mean what more in life do you need than that there's all yeah you know
Buddhist and Gall and mindfulness or whatever but you could just do what Dolly does and you'll be all good Donna thank you so much for being here two final questions where can folks find you if they want to reach out maybe work with you and how can listeners be useful to you great questions as always the best way to find me is through my website Donal low.com and that'll be in the show notes as well and reach out to me for a conversation I one of my superpowers that's also my kryptonite is acces
sibility I'm that author who will always email you back even though I I hate emailing always email you back within a day if you send me an email about the book same thing about working together I always make time or even just conversation I make time for any conversations with interesting people if it is exciting to both of us to make it happen so find me on my website Donal low.com we also got tons of free stuff there that you can download as well everything that we talked about today a lot of
things that we talked about today are available there to play with as well amazing I think we're going to create a lot more superheroes with origin stories superpowers Kryptonite missions impact all the things we written about in your book Donna thank you so much for being here thank you Lenny this was a treat bye everyone thank you so much for listening if you found this valuable you can subscribe to the show on Apple podcast Spotify or your favorite podcast app also please consider giving us a
rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast you can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at Lenny podcast.com see you in the next episode

Comments

@techronin_

I don’t know what you do, but it’s like you’re reading my mind. Every drop, is a show that solves a problem that I’ve been grappling with.

@ecodelearn

Always teaching us something new. Thank you Lenny and Donna.

@Thilosophocl3s

It's not the people who are following you, it's the you that people follow. Folks don't quit their jobs, they quit their bosses.

@abhishekparmar4983

Wonderful content man.

@diegovalero92

And the link to the fidgets?

@andrewsorenson5492

This was an amazing interview. Thanks for sharing this with the public!

@heshamfm

Nice! It’s been sometime since I listened to some sense. Well done.

@Lossengwath

Absolutely loved every minute of this episode. Loved even more that there is another book also named The Leader's Journey which is one I'd never ever buy. So, now I'm hoping they get lots of hits but no conversions :-) edit: typo