Stardate S02E03
By: Sean K. Gabriel
Tags: Season 2, Writing, Facilitation, Sales, Conversations

Mood: 💪. Jumping into the foray, trying to stay in the deep.

Sunday snow flurries in London

🌹 What am I grateful for this week?

Glad to be done with my reentry quarantine. When the weather was a bit better than this weekend’s, I was happy to get invited to do a walking 1:1 call first thing in the morning. Crisp air and sunshine can do you a world of good when you’ve been cooped up for a long spell.

I should definitely remember to opt for walking 1:1s more often, both to stretch the legs and encourage my counterpart to do the same. It’s great that nowadays you’re no longer immediately assumed to be crazy if talking to yourself as you walk down the street. 🤙😄

I also felt really fortunate to get a sneak preview of Aleks’ excellent talk on neurodiversity before she shared it with our delivery community later in the week. She did a wonderful job of balancing being informative, building empathy in the audience, and providing practical advice throughout.

🍀 What surprised me this week?

A few of us spent some cycles investigating and ultimately disqualifying a potential project lead that had come in. Despite it not being a great fit, we didn’t want the investigation we’d done to go to waste, so pushed ahead with sending a brief recommendations document back before the deadline. I was surprised and happy to see an appreciative note back for the time we’d spent and felt like there was a genuine desire to stay in touch. Makes me all the more glad that we responded.

🌵 What do I wish could have gone differently?

When it came to the week’s Mission Beyond workshops, I felt like we got a lot more mileage out of the Wednesday session than the Thursday one. In part that came from the decent amount of prep I did to structure the session around creating goal statements and building a roadmap; I was in good form facilitating and mindful of keeping the group moving. However, I took more of a backseat on Thursday as a participant, and with my multi-monitor setup drawing my eyes away from the group discussion, my lack of focus was noticed.

You would think it’d be easier than ever to drop off of a long meeting if you feel you’re not adding much value — in the pre-Covid days, the excuse was always it being awkward to physically leave the room mid-session. Yet with a simple button click as the only obstacle, old habits persist. It’s really the power of social norms at work. Perhaps the facilitation tip here is to create a graceful out when you can; I remember a particular un-conference format that introduces the “law of two feet” i.e. it’s okay and expected to step away from a given discussion if you think you can add more to another one elsewhere.

🔮 What do I still need to take care of?

Sales. Definitely sales.

It’s a team sport, for sure — so this isn’t just for me to take care of. I’m really interested by all the different pockets of activity across our leadership team as we try to converge on a better model. The traditional funnel setup hasn’t scaled terribly well (likely because it’s set up to solve a company/reporting problem, not a customer one) and so we’re taking steps towards measuring the health of our buyer network in terms of authentic relationships rather than strictly based on a linear deal flow.

It’s also highlighted the difficulty of articulating expertise well, what you could do vs. would do, and all this of course while running the ‘BAU’ process and handling live opportunities across the team.

💡 What do I need to remember?

I was going through some of the Ness Labs newsletters in my inbox and came across this great essay from Ankit about loneliness as a means to connect with yourself. There’s a lot in here that resonated for me.

Knowing yourself is hard work, an endeavor you’ll never really finish. But the premise here is that constant connection and stimulation prevents you from being able to do this hard work. In fact, being comfortable enough to be alone with your thoughts is the enabler.

I’d like to think I have a sense from my 20s/early 30s about what I’ve come to value, but still very much figuring out what to do with it next. Being of service doesn’t yet feel like a pointy destination. And is it just going to be dominated by career, or are there other dimensions I need to push in?

It starts to hit you that the past version of you was almost always reacting to the world. Now, you have the capacity for conviction — to decide what you want in your own life.

Ankit also spends some time going into his Tea With Strangers venture, and I love the questions he poses to help forge connection (good answers to these will require you to have done the work above). As David Sedaris has also noted, cool things happen when you break the script:

📚 What did I discover?

Seems like newsletters are at the zenith of their hype cycle nowadays. It’s been bugging me, and I think this critique does a solid job of articulating why. Ultimately I think I fall afoul of the root argument by writing weeknotes on a cadence here — but I’m not claiming to write the next great American novel nor am I trying to harvest your email address 😇. It works for me and I think that’s reason enough to keep at it, the principle has always been to write these for myself first.

By way of Tom’s blog/digital garden, a pitch deck how-to that I’ll definitely want to come back to as we continue revising our sales process. If you’ve got a large library of past pitch decks like we do, you can easily fall into a rinse and repeat trap; seeing a fresh perspective reminds you what matters.

I’m going to miss Rowan a bunch when he leaves us, but I really appreciate what he chose to write about in his outgoing blog. Remembering Sarah’s talk from last year, it’s a topic that I want to keep fresh in my mind.

The State of JS report was making its rounds through our Slack recently, but I didn’t know it had a companion report about CSS. Taking a cursory look and seeing how CSS has continued to evolve, well, it whets the appetite to make something with all those shiny new features!

🏠 AOB

Reporting back on Tiny Habits: my chosen coffee ritual wasn’t sticky enough. Pushups was (I tried BJ’s own recipe here — it’s weird but it works). Verdict is still out on stretching to touch my toes — the habit seems to be in place, but I realize results are going to take longer than a week. I may need to ratchet it up to actually get there in the end.

Also, a quick shout out to Natasha for reconvening her daily writing workshop. It’s one of my favorite exercises she introduced me to: 10 minutes a day, a blank screen, a short prompt, and a partner on the other end to write with. A favorite from this round was the prompt Into The Deep: