YouSaid · the spoken record

Donna Lichaw

lines on the record: 87
first: 2024-02-25
most recent: 2024-02-25
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

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“Great questions. As always, the best way to find me is through my website donalishao.com. And that'll be in the show notes as well. And reach out to me for a conversation. One of my superpowers, that's also my kryptonite is accessibility. I'm that author who will always email you about emailing. I hate emailing, always email you back within a day if you send me an email about the book. Same thing about working together. I always make time or even just conversation. I make time for any conversations with interesting people if it is exciting to both of us to make it happen. So find me on my website, donalishao.com. I've also got tons of free stuff there that you can download as well. Everything that we talked about today, a lot of the things that we talk about today are available there to play with as well.”
2024-02-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to discover your superpowers, own your story, and unlock personal growth | Donna Lichaw (author of The Leader’s Journey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Might be yes, and thank you for reminding me because that was originally what I was going to say, which is one of my, I mean, there's so many Dali quotes. And I think all my favorites are in my book, of course. But one of my favorites is find out who you are and do it on purpose. you know, amazing. Another one you don't like the, I guess my two favorites, you don't like the path you're walking on. Pave a new path. I mean, what more in life do you need than that? There's all, yeah, you know, Buddhist and gestalt and mindfulness or whatever, but you could just do what Dolly does and you'll be all good.”
2024-02-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to discover your superpowers, own your story, and unlock personal growth | Donna Lichaw (author of The Leader’s Journey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“20 times in the last hour. Actually, this happened with a client recently. I was there at an executive team meeting. And it's like, you know, someone kept talking over the CEO over and over and over again. And often when that happens, you like bark right back or you get angry or you get quiet or whatever it is. But when you can really fully appreciate, isn't that interesting? My shoulders are really tensing up right now. Wow. You know, whatever's going on, you often have more informed, not often you will always have more informed mindful actions that you can take or not take. And so this is like you can't pay me to meditate or anything or do yoga, but mindfulness, yeah, if you could just think to yourself, isn't that interesting anytime something extreme happens in life, you will be shocked at what you learn.”
2024-02-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to discover your superpowers, own your story, and unlock personal growth | Donna Lichaw (author of The Leader’s Journey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A phrase that I got from one of my mentors, and I teach it to all my clients, which is her catchphrase is, isn't that interesting? And I have it as a sticky note on my, like a physical sticky note on my computer monitor to remind me, which what it reminds me to do is get into what Gestal. Folks call an optimistic stance. And I'm a chronic serious, like acute pessimist. Anyone who knows me, I'm cranky, but I love this reminder to be in this optimistic stance. And it's not like, again, not that Stuart Smalley. Wow, everything's great. Woohoo, but it's a kind of radical appreciation. Not isn't this good or bad? Wow, I just stubbed my toe and it really hurts. Isn't that?”
2024-02-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to discover your superpowers, own your story, and unlock personal growth | Donna Lichaw (author of The Leader’s Journey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Fidgets, all my fidgets. I have so many, many different kinds. They're so much fun. I'm sure I have a better answer somewhere. But yeah, I would say my.”
2024-02-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to discover your superpowers, own your story, and unlock personal growth | Donna Lichaw (author of The Leader’s Journey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Exactly. Or, you know, if you want to add to that, like if you could wave a magic wand, it's the Same kind of thing, what could be possible, yeah”
2024-02-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to discover your superpowers, own your story, and unlock personal growth | Donna Lichaw (author of The Leader’s Journey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“What would you be writing? Like, write the ending. And so I love doing that with clients, just seeing what could be possible that we could create if we work together. Same thing with job candidates, although it's reminding me one of my first jobs I ever got out of college. This is in the early.com days. I remember my then who became my boss, he asked me that question when he was interviewing me like where I saw myself in five years. And I remember at the time my answer was not here and hopefully making documentary films. And this is like a dot-com job. But in hindsight, I can't believe I answered it that way. I was like, yeah, I'm going to be doing something else in five years. And he loved it so much that he hired me like on the spot, on the spot. And we're still friends many decades later. So yeah, that's my favorite interview.”
2024-02-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to discover your superpowers, own your story, and unlock personal growth | Donna Lichaw (author of The Leader’s Journey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The question I always ask when I'm interviewing clients, because if we don't, if I'm not excited about what you're doing, we're not going to work together. And if I. Yeah, I want to know what that is. And so. Imagine it's a few years out Had the best however long, year or three years of your life, what would you be telling me? And I like A twist to that, which is from Benjamin Xander in a book called The Art of Possibility, where he with his students he used to say give yourself an A. If you could give yourself an A at the end of the semester.”
2024-02-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to discover your superpowers, own your story, and unlock personal growth | Donna Lichaw (author of The Leader’s Journey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“A show I've been watching recently, and I feel funny saying this because the fourth season was on recently and it was, I didn't enjoy it as much, but the first few seasons were so much fun was for all mankind on Apple TV. Have you seen it? It was so much fun. It was all like, what if the space industry was like in an alternate reality in the last few decades were different than what they were? So that was very fun. And for work stuff, you could always, a lot of my clients love watching Ted Lasso for all the leadership stuff. It's just a sweet show. But yeah, for all mankind is recent. That's really fun.”
2024-02-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to discover your superpowers, own your story, and unlock personal growth | Donna Lichaw (author of The Leader’s Journey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Here's a funny thing I used to have all these different books for different topics. I'm going to give you the worst answer, but it's true. All these different books for different topics. And similar to when I was working in product, all these different books and whatever. And then eventually I realized I need to write the book that I really want to recommend. And so I did that with my last book, The User's Journey, which is all about product development. This sounds so conceited, but I really believe it. I now recommend my book the most. And it combines all my favorite ideas, philosophies, books out there. And you can check out the bibliography to see all the 30, 50 books that you can read otherwise. But, man, I sound like such a jerk.”
2024-02-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to discover your superpowers, own your story, and unlock personal growth | Donna Lichaw (author of The Leader’s Journey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I remember years ago, 10 years ago, I was like, 10 years from now, I'm definitely not working in tech. Definitely not working in tech. And then here we are. But it's funny how things end up. But what matters is that you're clear on the impact that you want to make and how you make it, who knows what it'll end up being the case. That you're doing it true to yourself.”
2024-02-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to discover your superpowers, own your story, and unlock personal growth | Donna Lichaw (author of The Leader’s Journey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Dream it, see it, and then start taking steps to get there. What you end up creating will very likely be very different than you ever imagined. But this is what's going to fuel you. We're human, we're visual creatures. And so, yeah, this is, and I have the whole mission section of the book, and I have lots of choose your own adventure options for troubleshooting and the pitfalls to look out for. Yeah, that's my long-winded answer. Envision it, then figure out how you might have made it happen and go make it happen.”
2024-02-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to discover your superpowers, own your story, and unlock personal growth | Donna Lichaw (author of The Leader’s Journey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Back to the beginning and then figure out imagine how you got there and just write that journey out and think of it as if you think of it as an experimental roadmap then start thinking all right what's the first thing I want to need to learn to know if this is right work your way towards that and onwards If you do that and you really have no vision, which I remember is what happened in this case, you sit with it for longer. You can't write that journey if you don't have that ending. And so you sit with it for as long as you need until you get it and then You create it. And again, it sounds so. Cheesy in a way, and I'm You know, and I don't, it's not like I'm subscribing to this thing you want in life, you just say it and accomplish it. I know life doesn't exist like that”
2024-02-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to discover your superpowers, own your story, and unlock personal growth | Donna Lichaw (author of The Leader’s Journey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Start with the ending. Come up with how you want things to turn out and then work your way back and start as far out as you want. It could be Decades from now, it could be five years from now, it could be three years from now, it could be a year from now, it could be a quarter from now. You could do all the above and really imagine, close your eyes, imagine you're there, engage all your senses, what do you hear? What do you smell? What do you see? Who do you see? What do you feel emotionally, physically? And what are you doing? What have you accomplished? What's amazing? Then if you've got something exciting”
2024-02-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to discover your superpowers, own your story, and unlock personal growth | Donna Lichaw (author of The Leader’s Journey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, that will tell you something. Or I hear this all the time, or how do you feel? My hands are on fire. Or I was working with one client yesterday, and I think she said something like, that was fine, and her whole face turned bright red. And then after a minute, you know, we were able to say, okay, what's going fine versus your face turned bright red? What happened there? And then she realized, oh, I'm burning up. This is not okay. So yeah, run it through head, heart, hands, life is like product thinking and it's also not. We have to go deeper and more broad with our experiences. And then we'll learn the most and be able to make the most informed, amazing decisions. And so cheesy, but you live a good life and make an impact and be a great leader and do all the things you want to do that way.”
2024-02-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to discover your superpowers, own your story, and unlock personal growth | Donna Lichaw (author of The Leader’s Journey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“This is not my term, but I'll say head, heart, hands is what I like to think of, which is head. Okay, how's this going? What are my thoughts? You know, you might think, yeah, okay, I'm listening. That's fine. Okay, next, emotionally, how is this going in your heart? Wow, I'm terrified. This feels awful, or this isn't so bad, or whatever it is. Or it might be, no, that's fine. I hear that a lot. That was fine. But then how does it feel in your body? Our bodies are ultimately where we store all of our stimuli and then store all of our experiences and our body also tells us what next action we should take. And if you run an experiment and scan your body and it's like, yeah, that felt fine. And then how do you feel in your body? Oh, numb.”
2024-02-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to discover your superpowers, own your story, and unlock personal growth | Donna Lichaw (author of The Leader’s Journey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. And I think the biggest difference that took me a long time for me to learn is that as opposed to product development, you're going to testing things not just how is it working and what are the numbers. Well, even with product, I mean, we're not just looking at numbers all the time, but you're. When you're experimenting with yourself and with people you work with and with your teams and with your companies, you run it through three filters.”
2024-02-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to discover your superpowers, own your story, and unlock personal growth | Donna Lichaw (author of The Leader’s Journey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Let me prototype that. Okay, fine. Five years later, have I done anything with it? No, but I built it. I saw what it's like. It felt good. And then as I got bigger with my experiment of thinking about, hmm, how can I mass produce this? Where would I sell it? What about taxes? Oh God, and you know, not for me. And that's fine. So I give them away as gifts. But whether it's product or you or your business, small experiments, get data, go bigger, adjust, iterate, all of it. You will accomplish incredible things.”
2024-02-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to discover your superpowers, own your story, and unlock personal growth | Donna Lichaw (author of The Leader’s Journey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Superhero stories when superheroes discover what their superpower is actually are, they don't just say, oh, thanks for this gift and then run and save the world. Every superhero has a really hard time accepting, oh, this is my gift. Hell no. Or what do I do with this? And they wreak havoc and they make a mess and it's uncomfortable. And even Superman tries to get rid of his superpowers often because he doesn't like being super. And so it's hard to know what you're really, really great at. But when you can run little experiments that get bigger and bigger over time and really learn how to, whether it's embracing your superpowers or anything, let's say there's something you want to try. Something scary or like look at me with my superhero supply kit. I was like, oh, I really want to build a gift box.”
2024-02-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to discover your superpowers, own your story, and unlock personal growth | Donna Lichaw (author of The Leader’s Journey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We tried a little roleplay of like, all right, what would it be like to just sit here for 30 seconds? And I talked about, I don't know what, and just listen to me, we're having a meeting. What does it feel like for 30 seconds to do that? And we did that. And her answer was that was terrifying. That was god awful. Like, oh my God, I have to do that for a whole hour.”
2024-02-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to discover your superpowers, own your story, and unlock personal growth | Donna Lichaw (author of The Leader’s Journey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“An hour. Just see what it feels like and then see what you make of it, and then we'll figure out what to do about it. But just see what it feels like to listen and be in awe of, wow, I'm really listening. And so that had been like a, you know, sort of get out of the building experiment. But the idea of doing that petrified her because she's like, I can't sit for a whole hour just like being like, yeah, patting myself in the back. I'm a good listener. I'm a good listener. Look at me. Or like, not even good or bad, but wow, I'm really listening. That's all I ever want from people. Just this like radical appreciation, this awe of, wow, I'm doing this. Everything changes when you figure that out. But we decided to run a little experiment because that was just, you know, why waste a whole hour of her life when we could just do something in 30 seconds in the room right now. And so.”
2024-02-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to discover your superpowers, own your story, and unlock personal growth | Donna Lichaw (author of The Leader’s Journey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It and stop beating herself up as much and started realizing, oh, that's a good thing. Why am I so insecure and like, you know, getting so angry at myself for doing this all the time? That's good. So she started to chill out a little bit, but then the idea of her a bigger experiment was in your next meeting later this afternoon, see what it feels like to sit there and just listen.”
2024-02-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to discover your superpowers, own your story, and unlock personal growth | Donna Lichaw (author of The Leader’s Journey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Us back to the example of that one executive from earlier to keep the continuity here who thought she was too quiet and her team was complaining about her. And actually the irony, often when people come to me with things that they're embarrassed by, like on the outside, she was like actually quite loud. Like as a person, she was really loud and brush and all these things. It's just in terms of her team, they didn't like how quiet she was in meetings, especially that dissonance there was confusing to them because she was so loud and boisterous and energetic. But using that as an example, I remember when we first realized that the reason why she was so quiet in meetings is because she was spending a lot of time doing deep listening. She started to chill out a little bit about”
2024-02-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to discover your superpowers, own your story, and unlock personal growth | Donna Lichaw (author of The Leader’s Journey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or you want to do it's a hypothesis until you test it and you go out, get data, and then you can do a bigger version, bigger version, bigger version. So it works with human psychology and all the things we want to create and learn in life just as well as with products.”
2024-02-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to discover your superpowers, own your story, and unlock personal growth | Donna Lichaw (author of The Leader’s Journey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You don't leave a session with me without having tried a little experiment first. So the analogy there is, you know, we would call it an in-the-room experiment versus then get out of the building and do an experiment. And if you subscribe to, I guess I'm going to call it lean methodology, although I feel like these names change all the time. And oh, that's so 10 years ago. And I don't care what anything's called, but the idea of experimenting and getting data and then using what you learn to make informed decisions on how to change things and then how to build things and how to make things even more successful, it works for the digital products that we build. It works for the businesses that we build. And it works for ourselves. And I ideally do it for all the above. And so anything you think is true.”
2024-02-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to discover your superpowers, own your story, and unlock personal growth | Donna Lichaw (author of The Leader’s Journey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You don't just go and change everything or do it all at once. You take one tiny step and run a little experiment to get data. And so the way I work and the way I learn to work, at least through gestalt coaching and gestalt therapy was”
2024-02-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to discover your superpowers, own your story, and unlock personal growth | Donna Lichaw (author of The Leader’s Journey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I trained with gestalt coaches and therapists when I moved into coaching. Gestal psychology and gestalt therapy, the idea is that, well, it's a lot of what I talk about and especially in the book, this idea of when you want to create real lasting, powerful change, you don't do it by forcing change to happen. You instead do it by embracing what is and what's working and then figuring out how to leverage that. And so it works for individual therapy. It works for coaching. It also works more broadly for organizational change and giant transformational development projects or initiatives or any kind of change. But one of the theoretical underpinnings there is When you do understand what's working and you start to get an idea of what's possible or something that you want to go try or do or create or make happen.”
2024-02-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to discover your superpowers, own your story, and unlock personal growth | Donna Lichaw (author of The Leader’s Journey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Oh my God, I know, I know. One of my superpowers that's actually my kryptonite, but if I'm humorous about it, I'll call it superpower, is starting things that I don't finish. And so I have, I think I have a picture of it somewhere on my website, a superhero supply kit that I prototyped a while back that has all these different types of fidgets and chocolate and like all these things to get you through your meetings. And there are like pointy fidgets that give you energy in the morning. And then there are squishy ones for the afternoon. And I've done way too much research. I should send you one at some point. I have a few boxes prototyped and I never ended up doing anything with them. So I just send them to clients sometimes.”
2024-02-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to discover your superpowers, own your story, and unlock personal growth | Donna Lichaw (author of The Leader’s Journey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“We and through our brains, but we're not getting physical stimuli the same, I would be getting if we were in a room together hanging out, even having you just be on the other side of the room and we're chatting, it would be a very different physical experience that would close that circuit tree for me and leave me more satisfied as opposed to on Zoom. I'm all like my brain's like on the lookout for something. And so I and a lot of my clients do this too use fidgets help ground me when I'm on Zoom calls and it's like, okay, great. So there's things that you can manage. But yes, like that Steve Jobs quote, you know, our idea is like if you, God, if you really don't like and are getting energy sucked for most of what you're doing and it's constant, you got to change your situation.”
2024-02-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to discover your superpowers, own your story, and unlock personal growth | Donna Lichaw (author of The Leader’s Journey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I'm in meetings all day long. I love it. I love working with my clients. We can't always, they're all over the world, so we can always travel to be with them. We do sometimes, they can't always travel to be with me. But, you know, the videos and the next best thing, but it also, it can be exhausting. And so, you know, does I mean I'm not just never going to have video calls ever? No, because I love what I do. And so I've discovered little, you know, little hacks for that one, which is like, don't schedule too many meetings a day. Great. Do lots of active stuff in between. Jim walks, whatever, try to get in-person social time, no meeting days, and then. And for during meetings, I've got right here, I've got one of my squishies. There's a neurological thing with Zoom where it, you know, we're just getting stimuli from. Through our eyes, but”
2024-02-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to discover your superpowers, own your story, and unlock personal growth | Donna Lichaw (author of The Leader’s Journey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, I think there, I mean, there's something there. And actually, you know, bring this back to kryptonite, if it's something little, like let's say Zoom fatigue, for example. It's, I know it became definitely a topic when the pandemic hit a bunch of years ago, but I've been working remotely for... God years, years, and even pre-pandemic and”
2024-02-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to discover your superpowers, own your story, and unlock personal growth | Donna Lichaw (author of The Leader’s Journey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think this is what I still bring from product management. I'm ruthless when it comes to prioritizing things prioritization.”
2024-02-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to discover your superpowers, own your story, and unlock personal growth | Donna Lichaw (author of The Leader’s Journey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Well, okay, let me qualify this with just this is why I'm not a career coach, by the way. Like, I don't figure it, navigate, change jobs or leave jobs because I think if you're spending most of your time in your day doing things that are sapping your energy and you hate your things you're doing in your job, maybe you're not in the right job. So I don't know if I was a career coach, I would just tell everyone, yeah, quit your job. I don't know what you're doing there. But there's a lot of truth to that, which is if there are things that you can control energy-wise, great, manage your energy, not your time. If there's really nothing you could do about it, and it's the context and it's the situation, then your next best thing is trying to figure out how to change the context or the situation. So I'm pretty ruthless there.”
2024-02-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to discover your superpowers, own your story, and unlock personal growth | Donna Lichaw (author of The Leader’s Journey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There you go. And I know Matt Mashari works similar to me with a lot of founder CEOs where you have to do that. You have to do that because chances are you're spending, you're exhausted, you're burnt out, you are spending your energy in the wrong places. And so, I mean, it implies to anybody, but especially when you are leveling up in leadership and doing something new and hitting that growth edge, you got to be doing it. It's just, yeah, you'll run yourself into the ground otherwise.”
2024-02-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to discover your superpowers, own your story, and unlock personal growth | Donna Lichaw (author of The Leader’s Journey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There's Yep, because then if you subscribe to, I'm sure your audience is familiar with this idea of managing your energy, not your time, which is great for managers, great for anybody. This will help you do that if you're using your superpowers, you will have more energy if you use them too much, then it's going to detract. But you want to be doing more of that, more of more of what lights you up. more of what you love and figuring out how to manage the rest, whether it's outsourcing or sometimes fixing, but I don't know, we're all grown adult. It probably is a matter of outsourcing or getting help or supplementing. We don't have to fix everything.”
2024-02-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to discover your superpowers, own your story, and unlock personal growth | Donna Lichaw (author of The Leader’s Journey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Problem solving. Like this keen ability to solve problems. I work with a lot of high achieving, especially founder, CEOs who are amazing at solving problems. And that's how they got to where they are. It's usually why you start a company, you're solving some people for the rest of us. You do it because you want to see if you can do it. Otherwise, to solve a problem. You're a super senior executive at some point, you can't be solving problems for everyone. And if you're just in the weed solving problems all day, that's when you're not doing your real job and you're going to be driving your whole team and your whole company nuts. And so you have to figure out, okay, if this like keen ability to solve problems is a superpower, how do you apply it differently?”
2024-02-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to discover your superpowers, own your story, and unlock personal growth | Donna Lichaw (author of The Leader’s Journey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You can look at that in context, what you could see is Could see how it's helped you through life, even if it came from adversity. I'm sure you can also see times when that has not served you. When over indexing, I'm gonna do it just because I can do it has actually done a disservice to you. And so that's how you end up using them, which is you really look at all right from here to where I now want to go, how can I use this? And what do I need to watch out for if I'm going to over index and use this too much? Yeah, another blanket example that I'll give is.”
2024-02-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to discover your superpowers, own your story, and unlock personal growth | Donna Lichaw (author of The Leader’s Journey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, you wanted to do it because you want to see if you could do it, and you thought you could do it. What's so cool when you do this exercise, if we were to do it, we're not going to do it now, it would take a little while. But if you were to unpack enough of those stories, even if you can't go far back to your childhood, because sometimes you don't have those memories, if you could unpack at least three of those scenarios, you would find themes. So for example, it could be that one of your superpowers is Doing things because you can do them. And that's really cool when applied in the right ways. I don't know if you said you did the exercise. I'm curious to know what you came up with.”
2024-02-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to discover your superpowers, own your story, and unlock personal growth | Donna Lichaw (author of The Leader’s Journey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It doesn't have to be happy or sad. It's just you were at your best. It lit you up. And so, for example, I mean, I have a few, but, you know, well, no, let me add enough about me. So other people can hear this in action. What is, when was the time when you were younger or a kid or any time in the past when you were just at your best really, really lit up doing something that just fueled you?”
2024-02-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to discover your superpowers, own your story, and unlock personal growth | Donna Lichaw (author of The Leader’s Journey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Shed that whole great attention to detail thing as she just started embracing that ability to connect and it made her much more effective at her job in the end. So yeah, look to your past and you can pull out key moments and see what your superpowers are.”
2024-02-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to discover your superpowers, own your story, and unlock personal growth | Donna Lichaw (author of The Leader’s Journey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Should be doing strategy and high level stuff. What is happening here? And so, you know, with her when we, you know, she could say, my strength is strategy. And I hear that all the time. I'm a strategist. Like, it's not a, what is that? It doesn't even mean anything. That's not a superpower. May as well say, I don't know. It just, that the means nothing. When we looked at her past and her stories, what we were able to pull out is that She was really great at connecting things together, connecting themes, connecting pieces, trends, and connecting people, connecting ideas together, and then connecting people to ideas. That's when she was happiest, and that's when she was most effective. And so eventually that being a connector, it was a superpower, one of her superpowers. It also became part of her identity. And over time, she was able.”
2024-02-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to discover your superpowers, own your story, and unlock personal growth | Donna Lichaw (author of The Leader’s Journey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Moments in time, and you can kind of lay them on top of one another. What you see at key moments is your superpowers popping through. And they're the things that empower you to make an impact. They are the things that do make an impact. And so an example I'll give you is one of another executive I worked with a while ago. She kept being told in this dreaded 360 reviews at her company, they were obsessed with, this is another big tech company. They were obsessed with superpowers at this company. And so she would get these 360 reviews from her team telling her what her superpowers were. And so they kept saying, attention to detail. And she was like, what on earth? I hate details. Like, that's my kryptonite. I cannot deal with details. Yet they kept telling her, wow, you're so great. You have this attention to detail. And then they kept giving her more detail-oriented stuff to do. And she's like, I want to be.”
2024-02-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to discover your superpowers, own your story, and unlock personal growth | Donna Lichaw (author of The Leader’s Journey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Your peak experiences from life, from work, but especially from life, because even if you want to be a better leader in a work context, the difference between work and life, it's very blurry. So you're better off not separating them. But if you look at your peak experiences from your past, so I would go back to when you were a kid, what's something you did when you were a kid, like a project you worked on or something you were a part of that completely totally totally totally From your more recent past, like what's a project or something you worked on in the last maybe 10 years that just jazzed you up and you were just so excited to do. And then I would also look at just how did you get into your line of work, the thing that you're doing now? What's that meandering path? And when you can look at these three stories,”
2024-02-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to discover your superpowers, own your story, and unlock personal growth | Donna Lichaw (author of The Leader’s Journey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“There are tests out there. I have personally not found them as helpful, but some people love them. And so if you've ever taken a strengths finder test or there's a VIA character strengths test, I think it's called, those are the two most popular and you can just take a multiple choice quiz and it'll tell you what your top five strengths or characteristics are. And I don't find it useful because if I just get a list of things, I will never remember what the list is and also has no context for me. And so what I do and what I find works better for my clients as well is to pull your superpowers out of your stories from your past and your presence and then eventually figure out how to apply them and transpose them to your future. But if you look at”
2024-02-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to discover your superpowers, own your story, and unlock personal growth | Donna Lichaw (author of The Leader’s Journey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I've worked with some amazing CEOs who are just incredible listeners instead. And it's the same thing, which is they embrace what works for them and they don't try to be what they're supposed to be. Well, they have to learn that. And I think of Bob Eiger as an example from Disney. I haven't met him. I know people have met him and I just always hear such a sweet person so nice and such a great listener. So like you can control the world and do it in your way. And so yeah, I see this all the time. Any of your strengths, they operate again on that continuum with Kryptonite. But if you can figure out how to leverage them and really be comfortable with them. Cool things happen. Cool things happen.”
2024-02-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to discover your superpowers, own your story, and unlock personal growth | Donna Lichaw (author of The Leader’s Journey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Gosh, I see this all the time. I especially see this with founder CEOs because there's this very heavy Misconception that when You are again catapulted into some kind of senior leadership position that you're supposed to be a certain way and you're supposed to be loud and opinionated and controlling and tell people what to do.”
2024-02-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to discover your superpowers, own your story, and unlock personal growth | Donna Lichaw (author of The Leader’s Journey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That was fine. That was great because in the end, it was easier for me to write an entire book than to write that email to you. It probably was faster to write my book than it would have been to write the email to you. And in the end, here we are having that first conversation, which is really fun, but it's a way that feels good to both of us. Play to your strengths and good things happen. It's not worth it trying to, like I could get better at writing emails, but you know what? Not worth my time and you could have more meetings and not worth your time either.”
2024-02-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to discover your superpowers, own your story, and unlock personal growth | Donna Lichaw (author of The Leader’s Journey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, there you go. So avoid calls whenever I can. It was very polite, right? But it was like, you know, happy to answer any questions you have. Can you? Shoot me an email. And I think, I don't remember if this was my answer, but you know, my, I think my answer to me was, nope, no emails. I cannot like I can't, I can't give you my questions written. Maybe if I can record them for you, I'll think about it. And I think in the end, the irony is I ended up resurrecting the email list a while later. And now I do send occasional newsletters that I actually like writing and people enjoy. But, you know, I knew, okay, I'm not going to, it'll take me like five hours to write down my questions for you over email. And I knew that was not right for me. You knew, you know, having a meeting was not right for you.”
2024-02-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to discover your superpowers, own your story, and unlock personal growth | Donna Lichaw (author of The Leader’s Journey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Give you an example, and it's funny that we're here talking about this because so a while back, I'm a we first met over email. I was thinking of resurrecting my newsletter and I hate writing. And I've written two books. I hate writing. But more than hating writing, I hate email. Like I hate sending emails, reading emails. I really struggle with it. But yeah, I have this newsletter that people love and people begging me to send more of over the years. And at the time, I was like, maybe I'll, you know, dust it off. And I remember. Emailing you about this and asking if we could have a call because I had questions about newsletters, and your answer was no, no, no, no. No calls. I don't know if it was.”
2024-02-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to discover your superpowers, own your story, and unlock personal growth | Donna Lichaw (author of The Leader’s Journey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“On the one hand, there are so many studies that show that when we play to our strengths, we're much more effective than when we try to fix what's broken. It's a waste of energy to fix what's broken for the most part, but when you can amplify your strengths and figure out how to use them productively so that you can fulfill your purpose, meet your goals, do what you need to do in life and bring others along with you. It's just that you're such a bigger impact that way.”
2024-02-25 · Lenny's Podcast · How to discover your superpowers, own your story, and unlock personal growth | Donna Lichaw (author of The Leader’s Journey) · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source