Your 3 Selfs

Your journey, just like any entrepreneur’s, any leader, any person’s journey, is filled with obstacles. I love how my friend Susan David captures this in her TED talk. When someone tells her “I just want these bad feelings to go away” she replies “oh, you have dead people’s goals.” Tough emotions, she goes on to say, are part of our contract with life. 

In other words: we as living people can’t get away from obstacles, we can only deal with them – productively – to help us get the lives we want.

One of the pernicious obstacles we have is….wait for it….ourselves! Your negative self tells you horrible lies about your capabilities, your accomplishments, and even the story of your life. 

When that demonic self comes into your head, I like to fight fire with fire and access Your “3 Selfs” which I wrote about for Inc.

Put another way: what if you were your own best friend?

To help support you in befriending yourself, Clarissa Finlay and Kate Furnish are putting on the Brave New Life Summit. When you sign up you’ll get a series of interviews delivered right to your inbox - including one with me! They will give you some great practices and inspiration to help you navigate through challenges and even find your calling during these, shall we say, interesting times.

As another tool, I talked to some wonderful thought leaders on their advice for you for this fall - you can see what they say in my Forbes article here. Create time and space to reflect, they say, and focus on what you can do (rather than can’t do) despite all the constraints we face.

 Oh, and here’s the interview I did last week on the BBC about coaching through Covid. Check it out especially to help you think about structuring your time and networking while many of us are, still, working remotely.

 Let me know what you do to fight the demons in your head, or how you're navigating this time.