The Hope And Resilience Issue
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Welcome back to the [ALIGNED] newsletter.
It's been a while. I took a pause on writing through August as I took most of the month off to vacation with my family. We had an incredible time canoeing in Killarney Provincial Park, (safe) cottaging with friends, and farm visits with in-laws (remember when it was easy and much less risky to visit people in the sunshine of summer?).
Then school started and my energy and time have been focused on ensuring our children had the best start possible to this new, chaotic school year.
My eldest daughter (who is 12 and starting middle school) has had a hard time with the transition. For my wife and me, it's been a lesson in helping our daughter develop resilience - a quality whose importance I always recognized but now feel is critical for managing the decades ahead.
And with that, I wanted to focus on resilience with this email and introduce you to my new newsletter approach.
A New Approach
I've decided to take a slightly different approach to the newsletter.
I'm still going to send it out weekly on Tuesdays, but instead of just pointing you to the latest of my articles on the [Aligned] blog I'm going to be taking more of a curation approach by sharing some of the interesting recent stuff I'm discovering to help me on my own journey toward greater alignment in life:
Wise approaches to entrepreneurship (especially those that counter the dominant narrative around scale scale scale)
Resources around building a self-managing company that can run smoothly without you
Developing a resilient and sage approach to life
Finding and nurturing fulfilling relationships
And other stuff that I think is useful to entrepreneurs seeking an aligned and fulfilling life
I'll still share some of my own writing with you, but frankly... I don't want to hold myself to a weekly schedule anymore. It's hard developing good long-form content week after week; I want to focus on quality over quantity and don't want to put something out there just for the sake of publishing if I'm not feeling the muse, and I'm not about to start doing cheesy 200-word 'Top 5 Ways to ___' posts.
I hope you enjoy this new curated approach and would love to hear your feedback!
Without further ado, here are some of my favourite recent resources around resilience and hope.
The Value of Resilience
Looking back at my life, I have a deep sense of gratitude for its most difficult periods.
These times were when I experienced my deepest growth and, in hindsight, look and feel like a call to another stage of my growth. I've written publicly about my battle with depression back in 2004-2006 and much of my recent writing is about the struggles I went through with my previous business.
Both of these episodes, while deeply painful at the time, led me to a much better place in life and they helped me develop a sense of resilience - a sense that I can handle challenges thrown at me and come out stronger.
In this wonderful Ted talk, Lucy Hone shares the 3 secrets of resilient people. The tips echo my own experiences and thoughts around resilience. I encourage you to devote 15 minutes of your day to it - or flag it for later viewing.
Tending To The Fires Of Hope
From Arthur Brook's 'How to Build a Life' column in The Atlantic (one of my favourite publications these days), comes this short little treatise on maintaining hope in the face of an uncertain and difficult future.
By using two easy techniques outlined by the author, one can change the mindset with which one faces difficult and uncertain futures. Check them out.
This Is Your Brain On Uncertainty
With so much disruption and change, we were already forced to live with a high level of uncertainty about the future before March. Then COVID hit and uncertainty went exponential.
As entrepreneurs, we are used to dealing with uncertainty; to a large extent we are comfortable with it or we would be taking a steady paycheque. But the current pandemic, coupled with a high level of uncertainty around the USA's political situation, threatens to overwhelm even the most steadfast of us.
This short article, by Axios' Alison Snyder, goes into the neuroscience of fear, anxiety and the unknown. NOTE: it doesn't have a lot of advice around strategies for handling uncertainty, but it does help you understand how your brain handles it.
(p.s. if you're not familiar with Axios, check it out now. Some of the best journalism available today.)
Planning For An Uncertain Future
If you're like me, you're probably wondering or have wondered how to approach business planning for your company in the face of massive uncertainty. When will COVID pass? When will international travel resume? When will lockdowns end? What will the world look like post-COVID? So many questions have no answers at this point, so how do we plan?
Strategic foresight is one approach. This article on the Future Proof blog gives a brief outline of the process (hint: plan for multiple futures), while this article goes deeper into a method called the Futures Triangle.
Spending some time predicting plausible futures and how your business might respond will, I promise, lower your level of anxiety about the uncertain future, at least how it relates to your business.
That's it for this first issue of my new, curated Aligned newsletter. I'd love to know what you think, and if you find it useful please share it with a friend.
Yours,
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