Yesterday was the Fall Equinox. Fall is an interesting time when the days get shorter and we start to slow down AND paradoxically also get busier--it's back to school season and harvest time.

It's time to gather around the fire/hearth/BBQ with our people. It's the time to make hearty soups and stews and break bread together.

It's the time when we finish harvesting a bounty from the garden. Our garden is still producing tomatoes, kale, chard and corn. The squashes will be ready soon. The watermelon my wife hopefully planted in spring grew, but we'll find out soon if it's edible. We're jotting down our learnings to inform what we grow where next year.

We're also pulling the dried up pea vines from the bamboo trellis they climbed, lettuce that has bolted and is now bitter and some things we're not sure what they are? All of this goes into the compost to decompose into rich soil that we'll dig back into the garden sometime in the future.

I have a practice of stepping back and reflecting on things at the turn of the season. These are the two questions I'm reflecting on this fall:
​What am I harvesting in my life? What am I composting?

Coaching

I want to help you get really clear about what's important to you for the rest of the year.

I know many people are unhappy in their current jobs and feel stuck because the labor market is tight. I also know that people are sitting on big ideas afraid to take the first step. There continue to be layoffs in many industries and people are simultaneously feeling grief and seeing an opportunity for themselves that didn't exist before. How do we navigate work and life in late stage capitalism?

I'm offering 8 of these one time 30-minute sessions each month. There are 2 left for September.

What coaching clients have had to say:

"The impact was affirming. I’m on the right track and moving at my own pace—and it’s okay to do and be just that."

"...our conversation solidified my understanding that the current environment I'm in is not good for me and that it's time to move beyond it. I can't say that I know exactly how yet, but our session gave me inspiration to expand my horizons."

"It gave me real clarity on the direction that I want to go and what's holding me back."

Templates for saying no

A friend recommended Mirya Holman's Aggressive Winning Scholars Newsletter and I loved this post about creating systems to say no. Academic faculty jobs have 3 components: research, teaching and service. Many underrepresented faculty spend more time doing service, which is not rewarded in the tenure and promotion process.

In corporate jobs there's the gendered nature of office housework, stuff like meeting notes, organizing team events or coordinating logistics, which often falls to women. This work is important for the connective tissue of a team but is not rewarded in promotion cycles.

Wherever you work, it's worth stepping back and looking at the patterns of what you say yes to. Is this serving you? By saying yes to these types of requests, what are you saying no to?

The Art of Fighting

I'm a huge fan of Priya Parker's work and I'm really enjoying this book about conflict and group relationships. She includes a wide range of examples from a women's taiko team and an open-water swimming group to family groups and workplaces.

I'm really interested in workplace conflict. 15 years ago I started managing a new team where there had been long standing interpersonal conflict that had been left to fester. I realized quickly I was out of my depth and started taking a series of courses on collaborative conflict resolution. These classes equipped me with a bunch of new tools and practice using them. This toolkit wasn't a silver bullet and I was able to work with my team to surface some of the dysfunction and craft agreements on how we wanted to work together.

I rarely read books in order, and I started this book in the middle, learning about ancient Viking conflict rituals and how they compared to Real Housewives Reunion shows. I'm mostly listening to Priya narrate the audiobook on Spotify, and then I'll grab the physical copy of the book to reread some of the passages or key points. I can already see how this book is going to help me level up around doing conflict better in service of deeper relationships with the people I care about.