Six Lessons From Twelve Episodes of Unleashing Your Great Work | UYGW12

I'm such an old person. I like to talk about

the weather and discuss how unbelievable it is that time

passes so quickly. So let's do a little bit of that together,

shall we? This week, I'm creating the 12th episode of

unleashing your great work. A dozen episodes are out there in

the world, entertaining dozens of people. Actually, according

to my statistics, I have 400 listeners, that's not nothing. I

have to tell you. Overall, having a podcast has been a

really fun experience. And I've become somewhat of an

evangelist, to all my blogger friends out there who don't want

to do video, podcasting is a truly great middle ground, it

gives people a chance to really know you without having to do

your makeup, which is when when, and maybe most importantly, over

the past 12 episodes, I've learned some things about great

work. When I put the podcast together, I already had a lot of

ideas about what great work is, how it works, what it looks like

and how it feels. But I've been excited by how much I've learned

from the guests. Today, I'd like to share six lessons I've

learned over the past 12 episodes of unleashing your

great work. Let's do it. The first one is it turns out that

great work is hard to claim. Even the greatest people among

us mere mortals stop a little when they're asked what is your

great work? And they wonder, is it great work? Am I doing great

work? I'm sure I could be doing more of it. But is what I'm

doing even great. Am i Great. So many of my guests have

explicitly said this to me, usually just before we get

started, some of them have said that preparing for their

interview really like threw them for a loop and made them stop

and consider who they were, what they wanted for their life. And

these are people that I admire, who I would go to the mattresses

over like declaring that their work is great work. And I think

it was thinking about this, that allowed our conversations to go

so deeply so quickly. And for that I'm really grateful. But

here's what I have to say to them and to you. And in my

moments of vulnerability to myself as well. We are already

doing great work we are. Our job is to do more of it, which is to

say, to do more of what excites us. And it comes from our

experiences and our insights, to do it in community with people

who value what we value. And to leave our world a little better

than we found it. Of course, we can do more of that every last

one of us could do more. And every last one of us is

absolutely doing some of that now, which is actually a great

segue to the second thing I've learned about great work doing

this podcast. And that's that great work has movement. Great

work, because it keeps us on our evolving edge changes. It was

great work in the beginning. And it's great work now. And yet.

It's different. Its shifts and changes over time. And sometimes

it shifts and changes radically. Take Mike Canino from Episode

11, for example. He was a restaurant executive turned

speaker turned coach. Alyssa from Episode Three was a

bureaucrat running an integrative health clinic at the

VA. And then she turned to private practice therapist. And

then she turned into an intuitive business coach. Trish

from Episode Five ran a green energy store for 30 years before

doing the coaching and speaking and launching a movement that

she's doing now, Linda, you glow from Episode Seven was a farmer.

And yet none of these experiences were irrelevant.

Each and every one of those experiences are brought forward

into who we are now currently showing up in our great work.

This has been a wonderful realization for me, because I've

struggled at times to show up as my complete self because I know

that I confuse people. I am 100% committed to school change. I

have deep, wide and passionate opinions about education,

teacher preparation, school change, the epidemic of Math

Readiness, on and on it goes. And right alongside that I help

accidental entrepreneurs to acknowledge they have a business

and ease into the work of marketing and sales and I speak

to colleges and corporations about great work and I'm trying

to change our perception of the world of work and our place in

it to a lot of people all that sounds really desperate. To me

on the other hand,

it feels like home. I have cared I do care I will always care

about all of these things. And it works for me. Because great

work isn't like a soulmate, where everything is on the line

with this one commitment. And if you stray from this single

commitment, You are betraying your great work. It's not like

that. Instead, great work when it's done right is more like a

best friend. Your job is to show up for your great work. Bring

all your joy and your enthusiasm and your honest conversation.

And when great work says I want to go do that random thing. You

just update your damn LinkedIn, and you go do it. That, for me,

at least is what makes it fun. Now, of course, it means that

I'm struggling not to do a million things at once, which

actually brings me to the next thing I've learned about doing

great work. Great work really tends to involve overworking,

and we all need reminders to stop. This reminds me of a

moment in Ulisses interview in episode three, where she was

telling a story of someone who came to work with her in private

practice therapy, and asked her to help her be less tired. But

she wanted to be less tired without stopping her 100 hour

work week while still going to grad school and working out five

times a week and only sleeping four hours a night. She wanted

to do all of that, but also be less tired. So Alyssa said, so

you want me to help you be a robot? And yes, yes, we do. This

person with her ridiculous request is all of us. When you

are doing great work, you need help refocusing on the

competitive advantage of resilience. This has been a

really calming and quite galvanizing, for me to realize

how utterly widespread overworking in the name of great

work is I yammer on about this all day, every day, and I still

struggle with it. I handle it. I take I force myself to take

breaks, I force myself to stop working. I refuse to work on

weekends. And this is because I'm 100% convinced of my

argument. And I've seen the way that taking these breaks and

protecting my resilience changes the caliber and the speed of

migrate work. But oh, it's hard. And it's nice to know, I'm not

alone. And it makes me even more committed to helping myself and

others figure out how to do great work without sacrificing

everything else. Which brings us directly to the next lesson that

I've learned. Great work must be enjoyable, or it immediately

gets too serious. And that quickly gets old. When the work

we are doing feels really serious like it matters, it's

important and everyone needs to take it very seriously, we lose

track of why we're doing it in the first place. This can cause

us to subvert our work away from greatness towards guarantees,

focusing on doing it right.

Instead of following the call of great work. Trish Blaine says

that we have to be driven by original desire, and prioritize

what makes us feel alive. I think it keeps us from ruining

our lives and sacrificing every good thing in the name of our

great work. Either way, we win when we make sure that we're

doing things in a way that we enjoy. And listen to the meta

aspect of me saying that we all need to figure out how to not

overcomplicate things and make everything so serious is an

exact example of the next lesson. Great work often

involves teaching what we ourselves needed to learn. So

many of my guests have shared that their great work started

out as something they personally struggled with. They struggled

with speaking confidently and now they help others speak

confidently. They felt unseen as a minority student at school.

And so they've worked for decades, to bring the focus back

to student voice. They struggled when they first learned how to

manage teams. So they help others who are struggling with

the same things. And it makes a lot of sense from where I sit.

As I mentioned, I have worked for years in teacher

preparation, teaching aspiring teachers about psychology. And

I've noticed a huge difference and how effective teachers are

based on whether they have a natural affinity for what

they've learned. Because if you learn something quickly, and

without any struggle, you're not usually a great teacher. This is

because you have no idea what went into learning your craft.

When you struggle on the other hand and you work at it. And you

watch yourself overcome challenge. You can develop some

really solid theories about what's likely to go wrong and

how to get around those things. And it's that kind of knowledge,

what we call pedagogical content. knowledge in the

teacher prep field, or knowledge about what it takes to learn

something. It's that knowledge that makes you a great coach, a

great teacher and a better consultant and certainly a

better manager. The final lesson that I've learned about having a

podcast is that it's fun. You know, at first, when I was

thinking about starting a podcast, all I could think about

were the technical hurdles. I was consumed by thoughts like,

how does a podcast get from my computer to the internet? And

like, what is SEO for podcasts? And how do you get people to

listen to a podcast? So I was sort of taken by surprise that

it was so fun to do. The solo episodes like this one, are

quite a lot like writing a blog, something I've loved doing for

decades. But it has this added performative aspect of recording

it, which I didn't think would delight me, but it does. And

I've enjoyed adding like little bits and pieces two episodes to

see how they work like a sound effect in the first episode, or

doing voices in the episode on getting out of the box, and

trying interesting elements that just aren't there in a written

blog. Now, some of these elements like I think the

retrospective on Jim Henson from the second episode, I think it

really worked well. And there were other things that did not

work. Like there were these law and order like Klungkung style

chapter headers that I tried once, and they literally

startled me when I listened to it so I took them out

immediately. But even so was fun to play. All of this is to say

here at the end of my dozen episode retrospective that I

like having a podcast and I hope that you enjoy listening to it.