Radical responsibility is a powerful concept. But as with anything, we can take it too far.
You are not all powerful. You cannot hold yourself responsible for everything that goes wrong.
Go easy on yourself.
Self-serving bias leads us to attribute others’ success to luck, and our own successes to our inherent gifts.
You are brilliant, but you don’t operate in a vacuum. You’ve been shaped and guided by lots of influences.
Give credit to collaborators and teachers.
And also?
Give yourself more credit. I bet your inner Regina George is a whole lot louder than your inner cheerleader.
So, give yourself credit where it’s due, and maybe even where you don’t think it is, to compensate and balance out that critic’s bias.
What I’m reading
How to talk to kids (in so many ways, it’s the opposite of how we talk to adults?)
I mean, this is not a bad benchmark for a lotta things - are the men doing this? (Also a question relevant to something else, likely controversial, I’ve been sitting on/brewing for a while… one day!)
When anxiety strikes, choose the role you want to play
Finally, I keep thinking about this essay on meetings, calling out the links between anti-meeting rhetoric and hustle culture, and to shift personal development away from technical skills toward skills like facilitation and collaborative decision making.
Yes, meetings often are the devil - bloated, unfocused. AND they can also be the most efficient and beautiful collaborations and exchanges. As with anything - it’s how you use the tool.
“PLEASE stop saying that meetings aren’t work. That’s toxic productivity culture speaking. That’s the dominant power structure trying to preserve a split between thinkers and doers. It’s a perspective that rejects the dignity of knowledge work and of your colleagues as knowers. If we want to do justice to ourselves and our fellow thinkers, if we want fulfil the promise of knowledge work as creating and not merely extracting value, we can start by honoring our meeting spaces.
And on the podcast: been thinking about congruence and channeling
I think most of struggle with giving credit to ourselves. I know I do. Even when I do something well my first instinct is to think about what I could do better. It’s still very much a work on for me! My inner Regina George definitely gets in first most of the time.