Pilot: Thinking Out Loud
Consistently and publicly
Unnecessary Note: You will notice odd formatting below because I write my drafts in an application called Roam Research. The brackets are used to create bi-directional linking. If that communicates nothing of value to you, pretend you didn’t see this 👻.
Where do we begin? This question dominates my everyday thinking and might be the greatest barrier to ever beginning at all. As much as I enjoy and seek to lean into complexity, I have a deep tie to knowing where the starting line is.
The reality is the starting line for every new project or venture comes from the accumulation, and more importantly, the capturing and organizing of past experiences. What may have shown up as an isolated moment of insight or in the weeds of a broader project is almost always the core of a future project.
The likelihood of this transformation goes through the roof when it is captured, organized, and distilled with intention. This is the philosophy behind the Building a Second Brain ([[BASB]]) course provided by [[Tiago Forte]] of [[Forte Labs]].
While listening to the first few episodes of the [[BASB]] podcast, it occurred to me that so much of what I’ve been putting off until some later moment — looking for a sign from the universe that it’s time to act — was caused by my inability to prioritize expressing my ideas over making sure my ideas were worth expressing.
It’s frustrating to even write the above sentence because I already know (or at least believe in) the power of testing half-baked ideas and getting input no matter how small the sample size. I literally just led the launch of a brand new conversation series at my day job called [[Learning Out Loud]] for this exact reason. My boss was itching for a space to get her ideas out into the world thanks to the many valuable conversations she has with thought leaders on a weekly basis. It just made sense to create a space that was contextualized as “let’s learn together and see what shows up.”
I need to do that myself, so here I am.
I’m not even going to look back, but I’m pretty sure I wrote a similar piece in October 2020. Another declaration to learn out loud and see what shows up. What makes this different, or so I believe, is that my need to learn out loud feels more connected to what I want to create.
In particular, I want to develop and present my thinking on leadership and career development — a space where my ideas are many, but also mostly in my head or scattered in disorganized places.
What is rather meta (I hate using that word, but it applies too well here) is that where I want to begin thinking out loud is where I believe leadership and career development begins. Or, I should say, where I believe an individual will provide themselves the greatest opportunity to maximize their career and leadership potential.
Given my somewhat recent exposure to the world of Personal Knowledge Management ([[🌐 PKM]]), I’ve come to learn that managing our knowledge opens up our minds to connections we could have never made without a system in place to capture, organize, and distill those intellectual assets.
Tiago Forte talks about the limitations of our working memories — we can only hold so much before we have to let something to make room for something new to come in. It’s like having a full voicemail inbox — once your working memory is full, you can’t receive the next important message and are limiting the capacity for what you might create. And, more importantly, you are limiting your capacity for who you might become.
To have a space where you can save the information that matters to you, and always have the ability to revisit it long after it’s left your working memory, is one of the most empowering assets you can have for yourself.
This matters in the context of career and leadership development because it creates a training facility where you can consistently work on the fundamentals while also up-skilling through the accumulation of new information and the recycling of old information that now holds a different function given the new context it’s being engaged within.
What all of this has revealed for me, specifically thinking about what I want to write about when it comes to leadership and career development, is an opening to share what I believe is a very unique starting point for people seeking this development in their lives. It has opened up a new level of thinking that I personally have come across within this context and is an exciting place for me to feel like I have a unique and meaningful contribution to make in this space.
A phrase came to me while on a long road trip a few months back that fits this “learning out loud” idea perfectly. As I marinated on a variety of things related to leadership development, and the very real personalization needed for every person embarking on such a journey, the tagline for my coaching work moving forward has to be: Leadership is a Conversation.
If you happened to click the link above for the Learning Out Loud series I’m working on at my day job, you’ll notice the tagline: Transformation Requires Conversation. Yes, that came from the “leadership is a conversation” idea above. A nice back pocket idea that helped me in a pinch to get a landing page up a few hours before announcing the series to our readership.
So, what I hope to do in the coming weeks and months is to use Medium as a space for playing with half-baked ideas and reflections. And, as those ideas become more complete expressions of what I hope to provide future coaching clients, I’ll create a more buttoned up article for my website. The first few articles for Medium will be all related to [[🌐 PKM]] as I’m building my own foundations in [[Roam Research]].
Stay tuned.
