Turns out hard stuff and personal stuff resonate

I’m celebrating one year of writing A People Person, and one year of getting really lovely messages from dear readers! From said messages, here’s what I’ve learned about what resonates:?

1. Honest reflections on the hard stuff. I think this is because while we are all struggling, there’s pressure to present only our wins to the world. “I’m humbled, honored, flattered to be crushing it, etc. etc.” But it turns out we gravitate more to the messy. Learning about other people’s struggles (and by that I mean mine) is both comforting and informative. Like any masochistic fitness instructor says, “no pain, no gain.”

Not to recap my low-lights, but here are the “this is me failing” newsletters that got the most responses:

• Me getting kicked in the face (metaphorically) as a founder
• Turning a frustrating experience with gendered feedback into Ethena
• What getting (initially!) rejected by investor Hunter Walk taught me about resilience. “He’ll be sorry,” I said to myself…
• Me getting kicked in the face (physically) in the Army?

2. Work-life imbalance. It’s funny because I’m a CEO and this newsletter lives on the most professional of social media sites. But even so, when I write about being a person, and particularly a parent, it hits a nerve. It turns out we’re all people who (mercifully) live for more than just work.

• What potty training my son (a journey I’m still on) taught me about micromanagement
• Vacations gone awry?
• Attempting to separate “working mom” from “guilt”

So here’s to another year of parenting blunders dressed up as management lessons!

But today?

For today, I have a newsletter that’s basically a combination of these two buckets. Y’all, I am wiped out! Not in some sort of existential, burnout kind of way. But more in the, I’m staring at a blank Google doc and coming to terms with the fact that I will not have anything profound to say in the next six hours.

Why?

Well, let me give you an honest reflection on the hard stuff combined with an update from the home front!

Work-wise, things have been *super* busy. Ethena is a startup, so things are always busy. But this quarter, we shipped 3 new products – a Learning Management System, employee surveys, and an anonymous reporting tool.?

It turns out that both our customers and prospects are very interested (the LMS and anonymous reporting tool, in particular). And while this sounds like a humble brag, in practice what all of this new stuff has meant for me as CEO is that I’m doing two things:

1. Internally, I’m telling the same story over and over. “Here’s why we built them, here’s how it’s all connected,” rinse, repeat. I once heard a great analogy that leaders are driving a bus (Jeep, whatever) and everyone else is smooshed inside, often with a foggy view. It’s the leader's role to explain to everyone where they’re all headed because the leader has the best seat and needs to relay that info to whoever is stuck in the middle seat.
2. Externally, I’m solving problems in real-time because startups, when done right, are about seeing what the market is interested in and only then, building out systems and processes. So I’m doing a lot of problem-solving two minutes after I learn something is a problem.

Good problems are still problems!

And then on the home front, my son is a few months shy of being three years old. He experiences twelve intense emotions in a two-minute period. And literally this very moment, I can hear him stomping around in his room over an hour after bedtime because time is but a social construct to him.

Every so often, he’ll poke his head out and either ask if it’s time to get up, or declare that he needs to use his potty (potty training is still very much a WIP).?

I know I’m supposed to cherish every moment because it all goes so fast. But also, in all honesty, right now I’d like to be cherishing some Netflix.?

I hope your week is filled with interesting professional challenges (“growth opportunities!”, yells the Peloton instructor inside of me). And if you have kiddos, I hope they are sleeping when they are supposed to.

Some great webinars!

How to create manager training your managers will actually like – TBH the title says it all. Come because it’s run by the incredible Melanie Naranjo and leveling up managers is basically the key to everything at work.?

How to get ahead in your HR Career – On July 25, Melanie Naranjo will be joined by Mita Mallick , head of DEI at Carta for a discussion about insights, strategies, and real-life lessons for growing a career in the HR/ People field.