Hey there! I hope you’re enjoying this mid-late summer!

Before we get into my thoughts for this month’s newsletter, I wanted to announce that I’m launching a public 10-week leadership development program, based on the book, Multipliers!

It will be a mixed group, capped at 8 people. I typically deliver this program to leaders within a specific company but want to provide a chance for leaders from any industry to connect and grow together! If you or someone you know might be interested, please reach out and I’ll send all the details

So this past weekend I thought a lot about doing hard things. I was with a group that included my nephew, backpacking from the Mineral Lake trailhead to Chikamin Lake, where we would set up camp in the Alpine Lakes Wilderness. It was roughly 9 miles of hiking at 4k+ feet of elevation with a 35-lb pack. In other words, it was hard!

I’ve known this backpacking trip had been coming up for weeks, even months. I’ve hiked with these friends before and know that the friend that usually plans our routes is known for taking us to beautiful places that are difficult to get to. We’ve hiked or explored places that I wouldn’t normally seek out or know about, and sometimes make me a little nervous because of how remote they are. But, I know that he’s always looking out for our safety and sharing something amazing.

In our professional lives, we stare down (or mentally anguish over) hard things all the time.

Projects we have no experience delivering, presentations to Boards or leaders that we’re not familiar with, or even conversations with people on our teams that we are absolutely not looking forward to. They might invoke fear, invite judgement, or expose us as someone who doesn’t know everything.

When we’ve worked to build safety within our teams and peer groups, understand people and where they’re coming from, and take interest in the difficulty, doing hard things gives us momentum to grow. That growth brings us more we can share and shows us (and others) that doing hard things is worth it!

Here are a few related resources that I’ve appreciated:

• Difficult conversations come loaded with different perceptions and assumptions, and they can be the thing that we know is needed most but dread doing. This 8-page summary of the book, “Difficult Conversations” by Doug Stone & Sheila Heen (who also wrote “Thanks for the Feedback”) has 6 tools that help us prep for those chats. (10 min read)

• Discomfort, from a place of care, is one of the biggest gifts you can give. (<5 min read)

• Listening is difficult because it can reveal things we’ve been avoiding. (2 min read)

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