This was the year of two metrics and it is interesting how it panned out. I’m grateful for the greater focus this year, it helped me to see progress in a way I have not seen as clearly before. Let’s take a moment to reflect back on the metrics I tracked and then some of the things I learned.
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The year of 2023 was my year to focus on living a healthy life. At the beginning of 2023 I decided a healthy life consisted of several buckets. Alongside each bucket, I documented my intention. Below you will find my buckets, intentions, and learnings/reflections.
Not documented in my post last year were the measurements that I was using to track my progress on these buckets. About halfway through the year I stopped tracking my progress. This happened for two reasons.
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This year my oldest daughter is in 6th grade and if you have had a sixth grader before you know students in sixth grade have the opportunity to experiment with band or orchestra.
We talked it through with my daughter and she thought the violin would be a fun instrument. For the first two weeks of school, they learned about the instrument and plucked at the strings. This week she came home and with some excitement shared she got to try out the bow for the first time on the violin. She laughed saying that she’s learned how to squeak on the violin but eventually she will be able to make music.
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Bob Sutton has been a considerable influence on me on how I think about scaling. Recently he taught me about three intertwined scaling challenges.
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If you have followed my posts for any amount of time you know I’m a visual learner and I like patterns. There is a pattern for growth that I’m working through that has felt durable and I’d love your thoughts and reactions.
The patterns looks like this:
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Seth Godin has attributed his success to the fact that he has failed more than anyone he knows. If you don’t know Seth Godin, he has been writing daily on his blog since 2002 and is one of the leading thinkers of our time.
When I heard him share this idea in a podcast I listened to, it made me think of something that wasn’t immediately obvious to me.
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Awhile back I wrote about boundary conditions and how when we expand our boundary conditions, we can find greater growth.
I am one that does not like to show too much emotion. All my life I have been steady, not too hot and not too cold. This has served me well in many things, but it has meant that I have a narrow range of emotions and it is limiting to me and impacts the way I connect with others.
In a recent class with leaders at Microsoft I pushed against my boundary conditions.
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Building and strengthening your own leadership and the leadership of others is not an easy task. It requires focus, intentionality, and most often a mindset shift.
The beginning of this mindset shift for me happened right after college. I was working for a serial entrepreneur who taught me about Don Clifton and the early days of positive psychology. He had the following research question after finding there were mountains of research studies about how to “fix” psychological challenges we all face in life.
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At Microsoft we have implemented a habit called the “check in”. This habit consists of two primary questions “what am I feeling?” and “what might be distracting me?”
Often, we include a third question, but it always changes depending on the context and owner of the meeting.
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Personal and organizational growth is difficult. Hundreds, if not thousands, of books have been written on the topic and we have yet to crack the code. I do not pretend to have cracked the code, but I found a pattern that is worth exploring.
Physical, emotional, and mental growth all follow the same pattern.
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I teach and invite people to act. Proud husband, father and amateur pizzaiolo