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Stop Being Trampled by Your Commitments
Saying yes to too many things? Here’s a framework for better discernment. (4 min read)
Photo by Africafreak.
You’re standing on the savannah, the morning sun rising over the horizon. A morning wind lifts your hair. A bird caws from a nearby Baobab tree. All is calm and beautiful. In the distance are tiny specks, so far away they look like ants. You’re enthralled by them, and are told — by some disembodied voice — that they’re a herd of animals. And even better: you get to ride all the animals you want, just as soon as they’re close enough. You jump at the chance. Why not?! It all sounds so fun! And you’re so excited by all these opportunities! You say yes to all of them. As the sun climbs higher in the sky, the tiny specks grow bigger as they approach you. Then they’re almost upon you. Too late, across the mirage of shimmering sunshine, you realise that each tiny speck is a 7-ton elephant. And you’re about to get trampled under hundreds of colossal feet.
A (terrible) spoof horror safari movie?
Well, maybe.
It’s also exactly how many entrepreneurs and leaders treat their commitments.
Meet my favourite term when it comes to the art of discernment: distant elephants.
It’s easy to say yes to an opportunity when it’s a tiny speck on the horizon. Something far away that you can think about closer to the time. Something you’ll figure out when you get there.
The problem is, of course, that distance is deceiving.
When you say yes today to an event happening six months’ from now — and then an invitation in four months’ time, a presentation a couple of weeks’ later, a personal project that will be a multi-week commitment, and then yes to a stream of neverending life admin — you get trampled underfoot.
This isn’t the way it has to be.
When you’re being trampled, you’re not riding any of the elephants. In other words, you’re not fulfilling any of your commitments well. Even if you’re the type to double down under stress and just … push … harder, and knock it out of the park, you pay some kind of price. Your health, your sleep, your peace of mind, your sanity. You might end up backing out of commitments at the last minute, and damaging your reputation. If this pattern continues, you may burn out.
So how do you avoid being trampled on?
Ask yourself these four questions:
1) “Where are my biggest elephant herds today?”
Take a minute and jot down the main areas of your life which generate commitments (either ones you choose to take on, or ones that are just part of life — like taxes).
Working in your business (clients, sales, operations, finances, etc)
Working on your business (strategy, planning, leadership development)
Social life
Family
Personal projects
Life admin
Volunteers
Health, leisure and wellbeing
This helps simplify the vast horde of elephants into categories that you can start to get objective about.
2) “Of these, which 1-2 herds feel most overwhelming?”
For me, I tend to say yes to too many things that help me work on my business. I love strategy, planning, creativity, and research, so it’s easy for me to bite off more than I can chew, and then stall all my projects because I’m doing too much. I also say yes to personal projects, like planning someone’s party or creating an art piece, which tend to experience ‘scope creep’.
(Side note: many of us underestimate life admin: life insurance, holiday planning, passport applications, recycling printer cartridges, weeding, etc. These don’t tend to be distant elephants — they’re probably all gazelles — but it makes the savannah busier, so we don’t have as much space to ride the elephants. We need to remind myself of their presence so I can better judge how much time and energy I’ll have.)
Now you know which herds are most troublesome, you know where to focus for future discernment.
Moving forwards, whenever you’re presented with a tempting opportunity, ask yourself:
3) “What would I do to create this opportunity if it weren’t already here?’
This comes from Greg McKeown’s brilliant book, Essentialism.
McKeown argues — rightly — that successful people often become victims of their own success. You’re known to be competent, so more opportunities come your way. And in an attempt to keep leveraging your success and building on your foundation, you yes say to too much. Just because someone’s offering you something doesn’t mean it’s right for you right now.
4) “What trade-off am I willing to make?”
Again, back to Greg McKeown: there are always trade-offs in every decision (we just pretend that’s not true). We’re kidding ourselves if we think we can ride a hundred elephants at the same time.
Every YES is also a NO.
What are you willing to say no to? What are you willing to deprioritise in order to take this on? In other words: what trade off is worth making?
5) “What are my HECK YES parameters?”
One option, when about to be trampled, is to start an urgent NO diet. But if we just focus on saying NO, we miss what a heartfelt, gut-level, full body YES might feel like.
When I was a new coach, I said yes to any professional project that came my way. I was hungry for experience and learning, and dove in head-first. This opportunism served me well. I grew my network quickly, honed my craft, and built confidence. But five years in, I can’t operate like this anymore. I’d just get trampled.
Here are my current HECK YES parameters for new professional projects:
it must be aligned with my mission to help climate startups scale their impact. This means it needs to be linked to climate, entrepreneurship, and/or leadership development — ideally all three at once. If it only serves two of these three, I need to see how it will equip me to fulfil my mission in a different way.
It requires me to play in my Zone of Genius (coaching, facilitating, teaching, writing, creating, relationship-building) at least 80% of the time
I have the time, emotional and intellectual energy to fully commit to it
It compensates me in a way that feels satisfying. This isn’t always financial. I’m an active volunteer and offer limited pro bono coaching. But these opportunities pay me in other ways: wider impact, feeling better from having helped a cause I believe in, personal growth, deeper relationships, etc.
Once you have yours — a first draft is fine — evaluate new opportunities against this framework.
Discerning what your distant elephants are will mean you’re far more effective on the savannah, and you enjoy the elephants you do choose — with clear-eyed vision — to ride.
Something to chew on: Where do you feel least willing to follow your HECK YES parameters? And who would you need to become in order to do so? If you’d like support to help you break this down, reach out for an initial call.
This post was written in 12 minutes, followed by a few simple edits for grammar and clarity. It’s an active practice to transcend perfectionism and paralysis when it comes to my creative work.
Trusting the Process When You’re Not Seeing Results
How do you keep going (and stay sane) when you’re not getting the traction you wanted? (3 min read)
Photo by Sara Kurfeß on Unsplash.
It's goal time! Your target is clear. A new level of revenue, an exciting launch, a new product, a creative dream. You’re bright eyed and bushy tailed, full of motivation. You hustle. You invest money, time, attention, energy. You expect equivalent results, and you expect them SOON. And then … it takes so. much. longer than you expected. Success doesn’t feel linear. It feels messy. It even feels like you’re going backwards.
You start to question whether you can really achieve what you want. Are you cut out for this? Can you make it? Should you just keep plugging away, or is it time to throw in the towel?
Making slow (or seemingly circular) progress can be enormously frustrating. And it can be especially so for high-achieving, driven, creative entrepreneurs who want to make a true impact.
So how do we trust the process … and not lose our minds?
These four practices can help keep your sanity:
(1) Play the long game.
I read this week that most things worth creating in life — a family, a business, a healthy romantic partnership, a better relationship with our bodies or work — take about five years.
Five years.
But most of us expect results within six months (ok, maybe within 30 days).
So, get honest with yourself. What are your expectations (explicit and implicit) for results within a certain timeframe?
And — critically — what are you making it mean about yourself if you’re not seeing these yet?
We wrap our ego into our results all the time, without realising that this is exactly what gets in the way of playing the long game.
If you were taking action today with a five-year time horizon, how would you approach this challenge differently?
(2) Beware the lie of linear progress
When we’re in the thick of our messy middle, it’s natural to look at others’ stories and compare our own to them.
“How come they’re succeeding so quickly?”
“It looks so easy for her.”
“It’s not fair he had an overnight success!”
“What am I doing wrong?!”
The thing is, other people’s stories look linear because that’s how storytelling works. And it’s not manipulative.
After all, we can only make sense of our lives, and the world, by looking backwards. When we’re moving forwards, all we see is the chaos of (not-yet-connected) dots.
“Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”
— SOREN KIERKEGAARD
All those people you admire? It really wasn’t linear for them at the time, and it still isn’t.
They explored avenues that ended up being dead-ends, too. They were also ghosted by potential clients. They also had days they woke up and wondered whether it was worth continuing. They also scrolled through LinkedIn and compared themselves to their peers. (They still do.)
Remember: you’re still in the middle of your story, not the end.
And that means….
(3) This is your video montage
My husband said something brilliant to me recently. I’d been feeling demoralised at the lag between action and results in an area of my business.
He said to me: “Megan, this is your video montage.”
In other words: this is the part of the movie where the Director splices together all different shots of you busily reading, writing, doing, talking … and then knits them together over an upbeat three-minute song, so it feels fun and energizing.
The montage = the struggle. It’s an essential part of the story arc.
And it always takes longer than the movies show. In fact, that’s the whole point … if they showed how long it really took, none of us would stick around until the end of the movie.
4. Keep doing your reps.
Don’t quit on yourself.
Think creatively about what you might do differently, if you need. Don’t keep banging your head against the wall.
But keep showing up. Be consistent in whatever you’re trying to achieve. If you want to develop thought leadership, write a new blog post and publish it, even if you think it’s not your best work. If you want to build your strength, go out for that run today even if it’s raining. If you want to build a better relationship, ask your partner how they are, and really listen.
If you’re not getting results yet, focus on the next micro-step in front of you. Keep taking tiny actions. And don’t get distracted by your longer-term goal.
After all: anyone can have a goal. What differentiates people who succeed is their commitment to the process in front of them.
The process can be messy and humbling, and it can be hugely lonely.
But it’s part of anything worth doing well. The process is the way, even when it’s hard.
Something to chew on: What actions would you take now if you knew you didn’t need to produce results in the next six months?
This post was written in 12 minutes, followed by a few simple edits for grammar and clarity. It’s an active practice to transcend perfectionism and paralysis when it comes to my creative work.
Transforming FOMO into Wholeheartedness
How can we access what’s really going on beneath our FOMO, and transform it? (2 min read)
Photo by Jen Theodore on Unsplash.
How fraught is your experience of decision-making? How much do you feel pulled between two good options? How difficult is it for you to say no to one of them? How much energy do you then spend revisiting that decision and agonising over whether you made the right one? And how much FOMO - the Fear of Missing Out - do you tend to feel?
If this rings true, then decision-making is likely exhausting for you. I’ve been thinking a lot about it recently because I’ve been needing to make choices myself. Big life choices, between two options that both feel necessary and important, but that I need to choose between.
And I’ve noticed myself experiencing FOMO in a big way.
When I think of what I’ve said no, my body gets tight, I feel constricted in my chest and pit of my stomach, and my gut starts to churn. When I check in with my emotions, I’m feeling scared, resentful, angry, under threat, and betrayed. There’s a lot there.
So – what if you could learn to turn the FOMO into an empowered yes?
And how might you do that?
Here’s a series of four questions to ask yourself, in this order:
1. What are you really afraid of here?
Many times, what we humans perceive as threat targets one of three core drivers: security, approval, or control. Which is under threat for you right now?
When I checked in with myself, I noticed that for me the biggest driver was security.
2. What’s the story you’re telling yourself?
There’s always a narrative beneath bodily sensations. What is it that you’re believing is true?
For me, I noticed a few things. I was telling myself that :
Choosing this option — the one I’d chosen to say no to — was the only way that I could feel safe and secure
I needed to keep up with the Joneses or I’d fall behind
I wasn’t complete or whole without this option
It was now or never. If I didn’t take this choice, I would NEVER be able to do something like this again.
Wow. A ton of pressure! No wonder I was feeling so conflicted.
3. Can you accept yourself for feeling exactly this way?
We can’t shift what we can’t accept. As long as we’re wanting things to be other than how they are, we’re unable to work with them.
So, in this moment, are you able to simply be with your fear, your threat response, your ego, your paranoia — all the ugliness that might be surfacing — and let it be without needing to change it?
4. What would you need to believe for this to be an empowered YES to something else, not just a NO to this?
Author Parker Palmer has a beautiful analogy. So often we’re standing at a closed door, banging it in desperation for it to open… when all we need to do is turn around and take in the expansiveness and abundance of the world that’s right behind us. So, if you’re agonising over your NO, what do you need to turn around and say YES to, instead?
For me, here’s some of what came up:
“I would need to believe that there’s always more where that comes from.”
“I’d need to believe that I can make good decisions, and trust myself.
“I’d need to believe that if I want to be fully committed to something I’m saying YES to, it makes sense to wait until the time is right.”
“I’d need to believe that I’m already whole and complete, just as I am.”
Right away, I began to feel my body become less tight.
Leadership expert Michael Hyatt talks a lot about an abundance vs scarcity mindset. An abundance mindset is characterized by trust in being provided for. A scarcity mindset is consumed with there being not enough. Many of us default to a scarcity mindset, which is often accompanied by binary thinking:
“It’s now or never.”
“If I don’t do this thing right this very minute, I’ll never succeed.”
“There’s only one way to do this.”
“It’s either me OR them. We can’t both make it.”
“I’m either right or they are.”
When we’re stuck in this scarcity mindset, we aren’t able to access our creativity and resourcefulness. And we don’t tend to make good decisions because we’re being driven around by our threat response.
Something to chew on: What do you learn about yourself when you walk through the above questions? And what lifelong pattern might this reveal?
This post was written in 12 minutes, followed by a few simple edits for grammar and clarity. It’s an active practice to transcend perfectionism and paralysis when it comes to my creative work.
Sacrificing Joy on the Altar of Impact
Sometimes our relationship with impact means we don’t make space for joy. (7 min read)
Photo by Eduardo Flores on Unsplash.
For leaders in climate, work is often so much more than work. It’s making a better world for our children. It’s influencing systems change. It’s about safeguarding the future. For my clients, this is often hugely meaningful. The problem is that the pursuit of impact can also become all-consuming.
When do we get to just be? Sometimes, climate action is even a way to avoid feeling what we’re really feeling. We’re scared that if we really allow ourselves to slow down and be with whatever’s coming up for us — grief, rage, helplessness, despair — we’ll be swallowed up. And so we put our heads down and power through, doubling down to make a change, afraid to say no to opportunities to keep doing more because there’s already so little time. Climate action, originally a way to do something useful for our pain, becomes one more way to distract ourselves from our pain.
For a good chunk of 2021/2, this was me.
In 2021 I became so desperate to play my part that I drove myself into the ground. I worked until 11pm most nights, catching up so I could go out and do more impactful stuff during the day. I deprioritized my rest because there was so much to be done ‘out there’. I told myself I was hustling to make the world a better place for my son. This was the price to pay for changing the world, right? Sure, I was burning out, but it was in service of love.
It wasn’t just my sleep that suffered, though. It was my joy. When I marvelled at autumn colours, my throat clenched with foreboding at the beauty we might lose. When I breathed in the smell of my sleeping toddler, I felt a stab of guilt for the parents losing children to famine and violence. My joy was radiant, but it felt unfair or frivolous to bask in its light. It felt safer to acknowledge its shadows instead.
Perhaps predictably, I ended 2021 burnt out, dispirited, and deeply disconnected. And as 2022 unfolded, this feeling of emptiness and grief stayed with me.
I watched children die in foreign countries and read reports of impending catastrophe. I watched powerful people – mostly, older white men – stand back and consistently choose self-interest over the lives of other humans and other beings. Stories of tragedy, war and loss stalked my dreams. For a week in February, I became incapacitated by grief.
As I said to a friend: I felt like an open wound walking the streets, bleeding everywhere.
My story isn’t unique.
I work with people who share my drive to heal and repair the climate emergency. People who are mobilised to act in the face of great crisis. My clients often identify with their careers more than any other part of their lives. They’re great at what they do, are driven by their mission, and see opportunities to create change everywhere. There is always something bigger, calling them forwards.
It’s easy for my clients to sacrifice joy at the altar of impact.
They know full well: there is still so much to be done. Do they really have time to celebrate? Do they have the right to say no to important tasks – tasks that nobody else is doing – if they don’t feel right at a gut level? Do they get to ‘waste time’ on wonder?
The answer to all these questions must always be yes, yes, and yes.
Here’s what I’ve been learning so far:
1. Holding the ‘both/and’ is a spiritual practice.
It’s easy to collapse into despair and feel like everything else is irrelevant. It’s also natural to numb ourselves to pain and lose ourselves in pleasure. Holding both – without diminishing either – is a discipline.
For me, this looks like marvelling at our garden daffodils even as I know that bulbs are coming up earlier this year. It looks like allowing myself to fully feel my delight in my son even as the radio has just told me about children dying abroad, and my heart is breaking. It looks like celebrating a birthday meal with family even as I feel a lump in my throat about the future.
Holding the ‘both/and’ isn’t turning away from others’ suffering.
It doesn’t mean we’re less empathetic or connected with the world.
Instead, it’s a way of honouring all that is true in this miracle of being alive.
It’s a way of protecting our capacity to be awake and engaged.
In some ways, it’s even a mysterious stand for leadership; for not permitting Goodness to be swallowed up. It’s like we’re Gandalf, standing in front of the Balrog and thundering: ‘you shall not pass!’ This goodness that lies behind us, we declare, is sacred land. Darkness and destruction: you have already taken so much. You shall not take this, too.
We refuse to let our capacity for joy atrophy.
Credit: New Line Cinema
2. Each of us is called to take 100% responsibility for how we show up.
One way of seeing the world is that in every given moment, we’re either above the line, or below it. Above the line, we’re living from trust, openness, and a commitment to learning. Below it, we’re living from threat, fear, and a commitment to being right. As leaders, our job is to notice where we are at any given moment, without making ourselves wrong. Then if needed, our job is to do what it takes to move back above the line.
This is a simple and brilliant model. There is much that we cannot control about our world. What we can control, however, is how we choose to be in the midst of it. Who we be is a far more fundamental choice than what we do, because it radiates out into all our actions. When we look back at this time in our lives …
Who will we be proud of having been in the midst of it?
What stories do we want to be telling ourselves and others?
What are we willing to give up in pursuit of our goals?
What we are unwilling to give up?
What do we want to fuel us so we can contribute at our highest level?
From that place, we can observe the lives we are creating, and whether we are out of alignment.
As leaders, our highest responsibility is to ‘protect the asset’: ourselves. Each of us is responsible for cultivating the energy that we need in order to contribute at our highest level. That might mean making hard choices. It might be doing less in order to do more.
A personal example:
Last year, I felt like I wasn’t engaged enough as a citizen and voter. And so I jumped head-first into climate advocacy. I trained with Al Gore’s Climate Reality Leadership Corps, joined a climate-concerned group coaching programme, and became involved with a parent climate network. There was no end to the ways I could volunteer. I saw gaps everywhere that I could step into. And this was alongside my paid work with Climate Change Coaches, Climate-KIC, nature-based accelerators, and three leadership programmes.
It was tough to step back and acknowledge that I couldn’t do it all. But in saying yes to everything — even though all of it was good, impactful, needed work — I was becoming scattered, overworked, and exhausted. My anxiety and grief weren’t being helped; they were being exacerbated. And I wasn’t bringing joy or creativity to these opportunities. I was bringing anxiety, distraction, and resentment. It was also threatening to impact my coaching. I was having to fight hard to maintain the key quality my clients pay me for: my presence.
I realised I needed to create a filter. Moving forwards, I’d only say yes to opportunities where (a) I could operate in my zone of genius, (b) have a climate impact, and (c) align with my personal and career priorities for 2022.
For me, my zone of genius intersects at coaching, teaching, creating, and connecting. I’m good at organising, planning, and creating systems, and it’s often where I’m asked to step in. But it’s not where I find flow.
In line with that commitment, I said no to eight offers of work so in the first half of 2022. Many were tempting. But they didn’t pass the filter test. By taking on less, and doing it better, I’m making a far more valuable contribution. I’m also allowing others to step into leadership roles that they’ll enjoy far more than I will.
3. Each of us defaults to a particular (justified) sacrifice.
In the face of climate change (and many other huge systemic crises), it’s easy to offer up all kinds of things at the altar of impact. Some sacrifices make sense. Our money, our convenience, and our time are sometimes obvious choices. They’re in line with who we want to become. They’re also a way of resisting the machine that keeps unjust systems going.
But some sacrifices are the very quality of our lives, and we never really intend to give them up. Our joy. Our playfulness. Our health and energy. Our family time.
Sometimes we make these choices consciously, for a limited period of time.
Our challenge is to be ruthlessly honest about ongoing behaviour that we dress up as noble, but is actually undermining us (or hurting others). Workaholism disguised as ‘a passion for justice’ is still workaholism.
When I worked more than I intended, deprioritised leisure, and turned to work as a way to numb my own anxiety, my own health took the brunt.
When I made my life all about my impact, I missed out on the ordinary joys that I needed to fill me up and keep me on the pitch.
And so the energy I brought to the very cause fuelling my drive was diluted.
4. We aren’t meant to do this alone.
When I did my annual review of 2021, I was struck by how one of the best investments of my money and energy had been in finding professional support. My coaches, my counsellor, and group work had all helped me to make sense of my grief and despair, to give myself permission to rest, and to hold the paradox of the both/and.
The climate crisis isn’t going away any time soon. The world will likely continue to be ravaged by war and drought and violence. So, how do we develop the resilience to stay engaged and awake without collapsing into despair, or numbing ourselves into distraction through work? A vital part of the answer is connection.
I’ve found a great counsellor through the Climate Psychology Alliance. I’m in a group I found through The Work that Reconnects Network. I have a coach who gets the emotional complexity of working in climate. And I’m in ongoing conversation with a small circle of friends (What’s App audios, while on dog walks, are a whole new thing for me.)
It might take some trial and error to find the right support for each of us. But it’s essential.
Perhaps, like me and many of my clients, you sometimes think you need to be some kind of tank of productivity and purpose, powering through life making change left, right and centre.
The good news is that sometimes acknowledging our humanity and our limits might be just what’s needed to start healing ourselves, as well as our world.
Honouring the both/and as a spiritual practice. Taking full responsibility for our energy and our contribution. Compassionate and ruthless honesty about what we tend to justify in ourselves. And not doing this alone.
Something to chew on: What here do you most recognize in your own relationship to impact? If you’d like support to work with one (or more) of these behaviours in yourself, contact me today.
Announcing 18 Possibility Sessions
No cost. Pure possibility. (1 min read)
Image by Robert Katzki on UnSplash.
The word possibility has been on my mind a lot this year. As a new(ish) mum, I’ve been thinking about the kind of world I want to hand onto my child. And as a coach, I know that a great way to help create that kind of world is to support the people who are leading change for good. This autumn (2021), I’ve decided to do something about this, so that I support more people than I’m currently able to in my ongoing practice.
I’ve set myself an 18 Possibility Session Challenge.
I’m offering 18 one-hour conversations – one for each month of my son’s life – to purpose-led founders, entrepreneurs, and leaders who are struggling to close the gap between their vision and their reality.
Starting next week, I’ve set aside 4 hours each week, on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays, to offer no-cost, no-strings coaching that – I promise – will be illuminating and energizing.
We’ll work on your vision for the world and what might be calling you forward … how you might be holding yourself back … and what might become available – for you, for your family, for the world -- if your best possibility became real.
In all my time coaching, I’ve never done anything like this. Challenging myself to have an impact in 60 minutes, with anyone who steps up to the plate, feels edgy. But I feel called to do this from a deeper place than my resistance. If you’re feeling the itch to step up to something bigger – and help me complete my challenge while I’m at it! – I encourage you to claim a spot. They’re first come, first served.
Update (November 2021): I enjoyed this challenge so much that I’m planning on doing it again. Watch this space!
Launch At Last? What I Learned from a Huge Flop
I created a perfect product that nobody wanted. (3 min read)
This was the title image to my landing page: Launch at Last. Sadly, I no longer have the credits for it, but I fell in love with this picture.
It was January 2018, and I was part of a group mentoring programme for new coaches. Our leader challenged each of us to create a coaching package for our ideal client. We were meant to talk to real people, find out what they were struggling with, and create something that met their needs. So, not knowing quite who my ideal client was, I began to reach out to strangers and have conversations with them. Based (somewhat) on what I found out, I created a package designed to help them. And the rest is history! My coaching business was born.
Well….. Not quite.
Fast forward to October of the same year.
It had been almost a year since my interviews, and I was … still …. working on the landing page for my package.
But let me tell you: this landing page would have won awards.
Every image had been painstakingly chosen to convey the perfect balance of imagination, possibility, and credibility. Its copy would make professional writers weep with pride and envy. It was a perfect showcase of all that a coaching package could be: the pinnacle of transformation.
The coaching package was called Launch At Last, and the irony of the title wasn’t lost on me.
I’d created this package for people who wanted to launch something they cared passionately about, but who felt paralyzed by procrastination and perfectionism. They were going around in circles, chasing their tails, desperate to get out of their heads.
I hadn’t realised that this description would end up exactly fitting my own experience.
Normally, I loved the process of creating something new. It had come to me naturally since I was knee-high. But this time, it felt like pulling teeth. Each stage of this process required a Herculean effort. All my fears around self-employment, and whether I would be taken seriously as a coach, became wrapped up in this venture.
No wonder I had so much resistance and fear around it.
By November 2018, with lots of support from my coach, I’d done enough of the work to press ‘publish’ on my website, and – the really scary part – to share on LinkedIn. It was live! I felt sick.
The hours ticked past. While I received a lot of kind comments, I didn’t get any enquiries. And as the days crawled by, though I refreshed my email obsessively, my inbox remained empty.
Not a single person ever signed up.
A year or so later, I quietly took down the page.
There are two ways to look back on this experience: tactically (“what did I learn about entrepreneurship through this?”), and developmentally (“what did I learn about myself through this?”)
What did I learn tactically?
I made all kinds of mistakes; mistakes that would be spelled out to me later through ThePowerMBA and its Lean Startup Module.
For example:
Research Interviews
In my call for interviewees, I described myself wanting to speak with ‘people who feel stuck’. This was very vague, because I really didn’t know who I was wanting to work with. As a result, I got a huge amount of variation in how people described and experienced ‘stuckness’, which led to a lot of murkiness in who I was creating this package for.
Content
I created my beautiful landing page in total solitude. Again: this landing page took me ten months. Ten months, people. Looking at it now, I’m still immensely proud of it. I might still do something with it. But the time to create something this polished and time-consuming was not at the beginning of my process; it was at the end.
Timeframe and messaging
I posted one message about my programme on LinkedIn. Just one message. I didn’t want to bother anyone by going on and on about it. And so if someone missed that message, or didn’t go to my website, they had no idea that my programme even existed.
I didn’t have any intake timeframe. Launch at Last was open indefinitely and people could contact me if they wanted to join. As a result, there was no incentive for anyone to join.
In sum, I spent a lot of time polishing my product behind the scenes, making it beautiful, and not a lot of time actually talking to people about their problems, finding out what they’d truly see as a solution, and testing a beta version of it to get their feedback.
These are all cornerstones of The Lean Startup approach, and ThePowerMBA spends a lot of time on them for a reason.
Entrepreneurs are also humans, and we humans like to minimise our exposure to risk. It feels less risky to perfect an idea before we present it to anyone. In actual fact, talking to the people we want to serve sooner rather than later means that we’ll be in with a much higher chance of actually helping them solve a problem.
What did I learn developmentally?
In a nutshell: this was a home run.
With the benefit of hindsight, I see this as a grueling success story (if there is such a thing). Why? Because I spent ten months in the throes of aggressive imposter syndrome and pressed ‘publish’ anyway. Because I still felt like a fraud, but decided to take action regardless. Because I was courageous, and courage is critical to the kind of life I want to live.
So many of us waste months or even years sitting on the sidelines, waiting until we feel ready before we take action. And because we’re researching and preparing and polishing while we do so, we get to tell ourselves that we are investing in our dreams. We’ll simply take action – talk to the client, create the programme, launch the product – when we’re ready.
It’s a lie.
And it’s a lie that keeps a lot of us trapped.
If we’re serious about living a certain kind of life, and leaving a particular kind of impact, we owe it to ourselves to do courageous things.
In truth, I’m actually glad that Launch at Last went nowhere. It taught me that – even if my worst fears materialize – I can survive. (In fact, it was this very experience that gave me the guts to raise the stakes and do it again two years later – this time, with 100 x more visibility.)
It also made me a better coach. Launch at Last gave me much more insight into perfectionism and procrastination: the very challenges I was aiming to address in my clients. These weren’t new struggles for me, but until now the consequences had been much more private. My own story now supports me to serve my clients with more integrity, playfulness, challenge, and depth… and to take more risks in my creative work. It got very ugly at times … but it was worth it.
Something to chew on: How have your biggest failures been your biggest teachers?
Finding Meaning in Loss
Losing a friend has taught me a lot about meaning and legacy. (4 min read)
Photo by Cosmin Gurau on Unsplash.
At the end of 2021, I sat down to write the eulogy I’d want at my funeral in three years’ time. It was a confronting experience. If I died at 38, I wouldn’t see our son grow up. I’d leave my husband a single father. I’d never do all the things I dreamed of, or make the impact I wanted to have.
After I finished the exercise, I checked my phone. A friend had texted me. “Have you heard the news about Pete?” One of our friends had just died. I’d met him just three years beforehand. He’d been 37.
The eulogy exercise, from Stephen Covey’s 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, is effective because it focuses our thoughts on who we want to have been to the people around us. How do we want to be remembered? What did we stand for? How did we make people feel? From that perspective, we can reflect on whether our lives are currently reflecting those values, and make tweaks as needed.
There’s a beauty to contemplating the eulogy of my elderly self’s funeral. It gives me the comfort of many more decades in which to become the person I want to be: a long life in which to create and contribute all the things of which I dream.
Of course, this is a false comfort. None of us knows when we might only, in fact, have three years left. Or three months. Or even three minutes. Pete’s death shook me because it reminded me of this truth we so easily forget. My eulogy exercise suddenly felt very close to home.
Pete’s absence has felt especially poignant this summer, because I’ve been coaching again at the Journey — where we first met.
The Journey is the world’s biggest climate innovation summer school for graduates and young professionals. It’s run by Climate-KIC, part of the EU.
For the last decade, it’s been a full-time, month-long residential programme across different European locations. In each Journey, two coaches lead a group of forty young people from around the world, helping them to think creatively about combatting climate change through innovation.
In 2018, Pete and I headed up ‘Journey 2’: a group of forty passionate, fun-loving, razor-sharp, deeply caring participants. Over the course of three weeks, we became like family.
We became known as Uncle Pete and Aunt Megan. Together, we were the ‘dream team’ I’d longed for in my career, but had never thought I’d be lucky enough to get.
Back in summer 2018, in Cyprus and Bulgaria, Pete and I spent long evenings planning the next days’ sessions over dinner and wine; celebrating with participants after hours; and creating a structure during the day that supported them to thrive and be stretched. The days were long, intense, challenging, and full of fun.
To me, Pete was a magician.
He’d coached The Journey three times already, and could have done it backwards and blindfolded. He was playful, effervescent, creative, ridiculously goofy, and brilliantly intelligent. He won our participants’ love as well as their respect.
Pete remains the most skilled facilitator I’ve ever had the chance to work alongside, and one of the biggest inspirations in my career. The Journey was everything he stood for: education, possibility, creativity, leadership, entrepreneurship, climate change, multiculturalism, fun, rigour. I think he was the secret godfather of the programme.
Losing Pete three weeks before The Journey made it impossible for me to run from my grief. His presence was inseparable from the programme.
Most days, I longed to message him: ‘hey — remember when we did this?!’ We had so many in-jokes I wanted to revisit, that nobody else would get. I listened to all of our What’s App audio messages on repeat so that I could keep hearing his voice. And so The Journey this year was in part about working to remedy climate change and inspire future leaders. And in part, it was a deeply personal pilgrimage of sadness.
Pete’s death has led me to reflect a lot:
To be alive is truly wondrous.
After this blog post, I’m going to leave my house and go for a run, and I’m going to feel the ache in my legs and the breath in my lungs and know, without a doubt, that I am here. I’ll get to hug my toddler close before bed and read him stories. I get to use my talents in ways that feel meaningful. I get to look at the beauty of the vast skies and drink it in. Life is a gift. Savouring our own experience honours those we’ve lost.
There is great comfort in grieving in community.
A couple of weeks after Pete died, a friend and I held an online memorial for him, together with students we’d coached together. We lit candles, read poems and sang, and regaled each other with our favourite memories of him. We laughed a lot. It was deeply healing.
Grief (like all emotions) can’t be compartmentalised.
After the memorial, I wanted closure on my grief. I tried to separate out my personal grieving self, and my professional coach self that was prepping for The Journey and wanted to be all efficient and productive. I wasn’t able to do this. They remained intertwined, and it felt messy and unpredictable, and inconvenient. The more that I fought this, the harder it was.
Our hearts know what we need, if we quiet down enough to listen to them.
I was expecting myself to power through The Journey like some kind of coaching tank. “After all, I’m a professional! I’ve got a job to do!” In reality, I was depleted and sad and enraged at the injustice, and struggling with my lack of motivation. I realised that I needed to give myself permission to both give this programme my all and for that ‘all’ to feel different than normal. For a driven, excellence-oriented human, this permission was a game-changer.
Sharing vulnerability deepens our leadership.
At the end of The Journey 2021, I shared Pete’s story, and my grief, with our current students. Far from alienating us, it built trust. In fact, I wasn’t the only one going through something personal. Students were also grieving relatives and relationships, struggling with personal situations, and mental health. It normalised our struggles and brought us together.
But perhaps most importantly: it’s reminded me not to underestimate what we can create with our lives.
I can only imagine what Pete would have done had he lived many more years. And yet he made huge ripples in just four decades on earth. Most of our legacy is not in what we do, but in we who are. As Maya Angelou reminds us:
'I've learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.’
Pete inspired people all over the world to see more possibilities than they began with. He injected serious playfulness into weighty subjects like climate change, precisely in order to liberate ideas and leadership. His energy, wonder, and playfulness created containers for magic to be created — magic that’s still casting spells today. He sparkled.
Who knows whether Pete had the chance to think about the legacy he’d leave at forty? And yet a legacy it truly is. What a gift to those of us he touched. As I return to my own eulogy for 2024, it’s a reminder that we can still leave great ripples in the world — even if we don’t end up having as long as we’d hoped.
Something to chew on: How do you tend to relate to grief? What is grief asking of you?
The Superpower of Purpose-Led Brands
This is a gamechanger for purpose-led ideas, organizations, and movements. (5 min read)
Image courtesy of ThePowerMBA and TwentyFirstCenturyBrand.com.
When it comes to maximising impact and influence, there’s a superpower that many purpose-led brands aren’t tapping into. This is despite the fact that –in the sea of businesses, social enterprises, and movements out there – it’s the purpose-led ones who are best positioned to leverage it. So why are they leaving it on the table? According to ThePowerMBA, it’s because most people misunderstand this superpower – so they don’t leverage it properly.
Branding.
In a recent module in ThePowerMBA, we’ve been taking a look at branding in a way that radically reframes how most of us tend to think about it.
Branding isn’t brand identity: the distinctive signs such as your logo, images, colours, and sounds.
Branding isn’t brand awareness: how well you’re known among your target audience.
Branding isn’t brand equity: the value of the brand, influenced by brand love and brand awareness.
Branding is far more all-encompassing than each of these things.
As ThePowerMBA puts it: Branding is the story that people are telling each other about your organisation. The heart of branding is deciding to take ownership of that story.
Seen through this lens, you start to recognise that every touchpoint you have with anyone – customers, investors, team members, suppliers – contributes to telling that overarching story. Becoming clear on the story you want to tell will help everything else fall into place.
The branding module is taught partly by Jonathan Mildenhall, who previously led the marketing team at Coca-Cola, before becoming Chief Marketing Officer of Air BnB. He’s now co-founder of TwentyFirstCentury Brand, which works with the likes of Pinterest, Thrive Global, and LinkedIn.
It’s safe to say he knows a thing or two about the field.
According to Jonathan, four pillars characterise the most successful 21st century brands:
Purpose-Led
The brand’s greater WHY, transcending the business plan, that inspires the team, stakeholders, customers, and investors. (Obviously, purpose-led organisations have the edge here; they don’t have to look hard for their why. However, they do have to communicate this powerfully.)
Community-Driven
The brand’s community engages with the brand, and feels enabled and equipped by the brand. As a result, this community carries the weight of the marketing.
Tech-Enabled
The brand doesn’t need to be a tech company. Instead, technology is used to make customers’ interaction with the brand easier, even in simple ways.
Narrative-Based
The brand tells a bigger story in everything it does, not just advertising.
Scoring highly on these pillars helps brands have more impact, engage or sell more, attract top talent, investors and partners, and stand out in a crowded market. But more: these pillars help real humans connect with what you stand for, and want to tell others about you. It’s not disingenuous to rely on them; on the contrary, it’s exactly what can help you make the biggest impact possible. People want to find, and partner, with brands that stand for shared values and tell stories that energize them.
Now, a side effect of being a PowerMBA student is that you start to see examples of the lessons everywhere. And so I’ve been on the lookout for sustainable, purpose-led brands that exemplify these pillars, to see if they do indeed make them stand out from the crowd.
The answer? I think they do. Let’s dive in.
1. Oatly
Oatly is a Swedish oat milk manufacturer that’s been around for years, but has relatively recently amassed a cult following. During the pandemic alone, its sales growth grew by 295%. Supermarket shelves were stripped of Oatly, alongside toilet paper and hand sanitizer, meaning boxes of the stuff sold for $200 on Amazon. Honestly, it’s true.
I’m a very loyal Oatly customer, not just because its products are delicious but because of what it stands for. Despite its fun and accessible voice, its commitment to sustainability is unwavering and provocative. As an example: it publishes its carbon footprint on its products, and demands that its competitors do the same. It’s also created a landing page called ‘Are You Stupid? The Milk Lobby Thinks You Are’, which drives customers to petition against plant-based censorship.
Image shared courtesy of Oatley.
Oatly aims to rewrite the narrative around plant-based milk, so that traditionalists are persuaded to try it out, too. Earlier this year the brand launched a high-profile online campaign called ‘Help Dad’, aimed at helping Oatly drinkers convert the middle-aged men in their lives – statistically the least likely to be interested in plant milk – to the product.
As a side note, Oatly’s an interesting example of being community-driven, because part of its initial market capture was to partner with hipster artisan coffee shops rather than spend big on digital ads. As a result, the Oatly brand quickly became legimitzed among serious coffee drinkers (there’s even an Oatfinder map, to hook you up with your nearest Oat-foamed latte).
Image shared courtesy of Oatly. Taken from: https://help-dad.com/: A Guide to Help Dads Quit Dairy.
2. Bravissimo
From plant milk to body image: this is one of my favourite (and award-winning) brands. Bravissimo creates lingerie and swimwear for women with bigger bra sizes: women who seldom have a lot of choice when it comes to high street options, and can feel frumpy or uncatered for as a result. Their self-proclaimed mission is to be ‘the cheerleader for big-boobed women’.
Bravissimo backs up this mission in every element of their branding.
Its catalogues, social media, and website are filled with photos of real customers – of all shapes, sizes and ages – who send in selfies in their bras and swimsuits, together with testimonials of how confident they finally feel. None of these images are ever retouched.
Image shared courtesy of Bravissimo.
It takes a lot to make ordinary women confident enough to take a selfie in their underwear and have it shared with the world. But Bravissimo makes their customers feel like they’ve found their tribe. They feel celebrated for who they are, not for who they’re not. Currently, 170,000 women are in their online community: testament to what this brand does for them.
During Covid, Bravissimo has pivoted to start offering virtual bra fittings. It also offers bra recycling so that customers can responsibly dispose of textiles. Everything about this brand is about positivity, empowerment, and celebration of the women it supports.
3. Global Optimism
However, these branding pillars aren’t just relevant in business. They’re also used to great effect by the climate movement Global Optimism. Founded by Christiana Figueres and Tom Rivett-Carnac, who led negotiations for the UN during the 2015 Paris Agreement, Global Optimism’s WHY is to change the narrative around climate change.
In its own words:
“We believe it is essential to change narratives and build resilient mindsets if we’re going to stay the course in transforming our world….we aim to change the story about climate change, from one of doom to one of opportunity, building understanding that in tackling the climate crisis, we can build a bustling, more equal and healthier future.”
Image shared courtesy of Global Optimism.
Changing the stories we tell ourselves about climate change is something I’ve shaped my career around. We don’t take action if we don’t believe that action is worthwhile.
This is exactly what Global Optimism does – and it does it, literally, through storytelling.
Its book, The Future We Choose, opens by vividly painting a picture of two futures. The first is the future in which we do nothing to halt global warming. This future is terrifying beyond words (I couldn’t sleep after reading it).
The second is the future in which we’ve decided to act. We’ve successfully halved our emissions every decade. We’ve decided it’s worthwhile to do everything we can – and we’ve saved ourselves. We’re working together. This second future is one of flourishing. “Humanity was only ever as doomed as it believed itself to be. Vanquishing that belief was our true legacy.”
Global Optimism enrols its readers in building this second future, by calling them to commit to personal action towards it. Its campaign, Count Us In, enables people to pledge to make a change in one of 16 areas, including eating seasonally, voting strategically, and talking to friends about climate change.
As with Oatly and Bravissimo, part of the movement’s power is in capturing a sense of belonging and shared purpose, so that its adherents are genuinely excited to spread the word to others.
Using these pillars in branding isn’t simply a strategic way to grow your audience. It’s the best way to reach your people and start a movement. This is exactly how your people will connect with you and feel loyal towards what you stand for. People want causes that they can get behind. As a result, purpose-led organisations, movements, and entrepreneurs that don’t include these pillars are missing a trick.
Branding is far more than your logo, style guide, or visual appeal. It’s the story that you tell to your customers and your team about WHY you’re doing this. It’s having your customers spread the word about you through their delight in what you stand for. It’s using technology to smooth out their experience and build relationships. And it’s being very deliberate about the story that you’re choosing to tell about who you are.
If you do this, the possibilities for impact are endless.
Something to chew on: What’s the story you want your organisation to be known for? And which of these pillars could you strengthen to help you do that?
