Author: alearningaday

Professional maturity is realizing you’re on your own.

It’s tempting to believe a mentor, a manager, or someone wiser will step in with the answer.

But no one is coming to “save” you.

The hard truth is that mentors and wise friends can guide you, but they can’t walk the path for you.

Ultimately, you will have to build your own conviction, push through uncertainty, make the call, and own the consequences.

We’ve been taught to think about “Reduce, Reuse, and Recycle” as if they’re all equally responsible choices.

But the truth is that recycling plastic does virtually nothing. At most, 10% of plastic is recycled. The rest makes its way into our food chains in various ways and causes disease. And plastic pollution is continuing to get worse.

It will take a drastic global intervention to change course – and if history is any guide, our track record of solving long-term problems is dismal.

Perhaps the first step is simply to bring to light the uncomfortable fact – recycling isn’t a solution, it’s a distraction.

Real change begins with reducing and reusing… and rethinking our relationship with plastic altogether.

The amount of openness in any community or culture isn’t determined by the degree to which people in the “in” group exclude others. Instead, it is determined by the amount of effort that goes into including those who are on the “out.”

And it almost always shows up in the small things in conversation – in translating humor, picking common topics, showing curiosity.

Those small things are the big things.

The biggest challenge with a commitment to seeking the truth is that you will often not like what you find.

That’s because truth often goes against our biases and our identities and makes us uncomfortable in the process.

But it is in that discomfort that we find growth.

Showing someone the way doesn’t mean they’ll take it.

Sometimes, it even has the opposite effect.

That’s because people often need to arrive at the path forward themselves – in their own time, on their own terms.

The art of coaching isn’t in showing the way, but in creating conditions where the discovery of the path forward feels like theirs.

One of our kids’ teachers has been sharing this maxim in class – practice makes progress.

She’s replaced the old practice makes perfect with something more powerful — because the goal isn’t perfection, it’s progress.

Perfection is static and can get us stuck. Progress is alive and keeps us moving.

It’s a beautiful articulation of a growth mindset.

It resonated.

Very few stimuli are worthy of an immediate and urgent reaction – the kind that gets the fight or flight system going.

Breathe.

Then take the time you need to respond.

I was on a flight the other day and paused as the Captain’s briefing began with humor that made me look up.

It turns out the Captain had come to the passenger side to talk to us. Over the next 3 minutes, he humorously told us about his son’s Little League defeat, the rooster on his farm, and cracked jokes at the expense of the airport we were going to.

He ended with a lovely thank you for trusting him, his crew, and the airline with our safety. He believed the trust was well placed as he’d been doing it a long time but he never took it for granted.

When he finished, we all clapped.

I’ve been fortunate to take many flights over the years. This was the first time I experienced this reaction after the Captain’s briefing.

As I reflected on it, it was all just an illustration of the combined power of humor and gratitude that transformed something mundane to something unique and memorable.

Any effort that goes into creating the perception of competence almost always takes away from effort required to become more competent.

A simple test for effective leadership – the ability to act before something becomes a problem.

It requires the difficult work of thinking a few steps ahead and taking opinionated stances that prove to be right, recognizing and rewarding people who find ways to deliver exceptional value to customers, and not tolerating any signs of the bar being lowered.

All of this is hard to do. It’s much easier to choose the easier path.

But it is also the difference between relevance and irrelevance.