How to discover your superpowers, own your story, and unlock personal growth | Donna Lichaw

Discovering Your Superpowers

Donna Lichaw: When superheroes discover what their superpowers actually are, they wreak havoc and they make a mess, and it’s uncomfortable. And even Superman tries to get rid of his superpowers. It’s hard to know what you’re really great at.

Meet the Guest

Lenny: How does somebody identify their superpowers, their strengths?

Donna Lichaw: Pull your superpowers out of your stories from your past, your present, and then eventually figure out how to apply them and transpose them to your future.

Kicking Off the Conversation

Lenny: The person’s story; this is central to becoming a better leader.

Donna Lichaw: The most effective stories are the ones that we tell ourselves. They may or may not be true; our brain doesn’t know the difference. Once you can really understand that, you may as well leverage it to be that hero.

Donna’s Origin Story

Lenny: Today my guest is Donna Lichaw. Donna is an executive coach, speaker and bestselling author. She helps founders, CEOs and executive teams level up their leadership skills and scale their impact while staying true to their mission, their purpose and themselves. Donna has worked with leaders at companies like Google, Disney, Twitter, Microsoft and Adobe, and she’s also the author of the book, The Leader’s Journey, which is what we spend our time on.

In our conversation, we talk about why the story that we tell ourselves has so much impact on our success and failure, why knowing your superpowers and also your kryptonite is so important to your career and how to identify these two things, how to reframe your feelings of imposter syndrome and actually use it as an advantage, how to identify your life goals even if you have no idea what they might be, plus a ton of examples from her coaching practice of people unlocking their career using her frameworks and how they went about doing this and so much more. If you enjoy this podcast, don’t forget to subscribe and follow this podcast on your favorite podcasting app or YouTube. It’s the best way to avoid missing future episodes, and it helps the podcast tremendously. With that, I bring you Donna Lichaw after a short word from our sponsors.

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Donna Lichaw: Thanks, Lenny. It’s exciting to be here.

Story-Driven Leadership

Lenny: We connected through a former colleague of mine who could not stop raving about how much value she got from working with you. Also, you have a new book app right here that I have, The Leader’s journey, and so I thought it would be awesome to bring you on and share your wisdom with a wider audience.

Donna Lichaw: Love the podcast. My clients love your stuff and newsletter, everything.

Why Being Your Own Hero Matters

Lenny: [inaudible 00:04:54].

Donna Lichaw: Very excited to be here.

From Story Shift to Career Change

Lenny: Amazing. And congrats on the book, by the way.

Validating Your Story with Data

Donna Lichaw: Thank you.

When Your Story Is Fact

Lenny: You actually were a product manager in a previous life. You’re also a designer in a previous life. These days you’re an executive coach. Just briefly, I’m curious what pulled you from product management design and the things you did before this life into executive coaching. And maybe another way to ask this question is what’s your origin story? And this is a little foreshadowing to the stuff we’re going to be talking about later.

Surprising Benefits of Team Transparency

Donna Lichaw: Actually, it’s funny, like all origin stories, there were actually multiple episodes, multiple moments that led me to an epiphany, but the biggest aha moment was when I was working several years ago, almost a decade ago at this point, with an executive team in Silicon Valley. And we were at a leadership retreat, and we were supposed to… At the time, I was a program on effective product leadership, how to be a great product leader, product executive. And the biggest thing that companies wanted at the time and teams wanted was their teams to be better storytellers. And it’s still something we hear today, which is, “To be a great product leader or leader in general in any industry is you got to be a great storyteller.” And so at the time, I was teaching and facilitating storytelling workshops and exploring that with teams. And it was a few people on this team specifically who I so appreciate their honesty and candor here, which is what this giant tech company is known for, very blunt people working there. And they pulled me aside halfway through the offsite, and they were just like, “Honestly, storytelling is not going to fix our problems. This is silly.”

And what they were able to tell me is that their leaders wanted them to be more effective by having greater influence. And these are terms that we throw around all the time. Be more influential and be a better leader, whatever that means. And what was happening on the ground with these executives was that they were all fighting. I’d hear, “Oh, the head of engineering is such a jerk,” or, “This person won’t listen to me,” or, “My team is demotivated. And I get it, but they need to step up and work more.” And there was just a lot of conflict going on here and there that storytelling wouldn’t fix. When that happens, and I talk about this in the book a bunch, no one wants to hear your stories. You have to actually be able to connect with people and to work with people and feel good as a leader in order to really step up and lead. I didn’t have an answer for this team at the time, and I left this offsite just honestly feeling terrible and not knowing what to do about it except telling them, “I think you got to go work with a coach because this is beyond my pay grade.”

But when I left that day, I just couldn’t stop thinking about this team because I had a hunch that stories were still a part of something but not what they needed. Telling stories was not the answer, and so I ended up spending what now is the next decade figuring out, all right, how do you become an effective leader? And of course because I can’t do anything lightly, once I went down that path, I ended up switching up my entire business. And now that’s all I do is help people be better, more effective, confident leaders who really make the impact that they want to make.

Imposter Syndrome: Helpful or Harmful?

Lenny: Along those same lines, what’s interesting is you actually found that this idea of storytelling was actually much more effective in your coaching practice. Instead of helping them figure out the story of the product, it’s the story of the person. And so transitioning into the meat of your approach to coaching, I think you call it story-driven leadership. Essentially, your finding is that story and the person’s story is extremely important and powerful in helping them level up as a leader and also seeing them as the hero of their story. I guess just with that foundation, can you just talk about why that is so powerful, the idea of figuring out your own story and why you need to be the hero of your own story and just what all this means?

Donna Lichaw: We all as humans want to be the hero of our own story. It’s how we live our lives, it’s how we make choices, it’s how we understand the world around us, and it’s how we communicate back to the world. With leadership, it’s much the same, which is we have a mission that we want to accomplish. No matter how big or small, it’s something; we’re driven to do something. If you’re a leader, you want to be a leader. You have to be taking yourself and you have to be taking people somewhere.

We also have obstacles, so that’s a part of any great story. There are challenges. It shouldn’t be easy. It shouldn’t be so hard that you fail, that’s a tragedy, but there are challenges, and it makes life more exciting. You don’t do it alone. It’s rare that a story just has a single individual. It happens, but that’s not most of life. And there are other elements that I ended up uncovering when I looked deeper into what makes the most effective leaders effective, and the biggest thing is stories that we tell people, it’s like the tip of the iceberg. And if anything, it even doesn’t matter, I’ve worked with a lot of folks who their teams say, “Stop it with the storytelling. Stop talking at us.” And they don’t want any of that.

But the most effective stories are the ones that we experience as we live life and that we tell ourselves as well because we have the ability by saying things like, “Oh, I’ll never succeed,” or, “Oh, she’ll never go for it,” or, “He’s such a jerk.” Or whatever the stories are, these are all stories. And they may or may not be true, they’re usually not true, but our brain doesn’t know the difference. It’s the most powerful ability our brain has is to understand and see stories everywhere. And so once you can really understand that, you may as well leverage it to be that hero in your life. And even as I say it out loud, it sounds so cheesy, but it’s true. This is neuroscience and psychology. We just want to be the heroes, and that’s what our focus is.

Using Kryptonite to Your Advantage

Lenny: I want to delve deeper into that idea there. People listening to this might feel like, “Okay, cool, let me think about the story of my life. This sounds like a fun thing I could do.” But I think your point is this is central to becoming a better leader, figuring out the story of you and that changing in your perspective on yourself and giving you more… Unblocking you I think is a big part of it. Can you just talk about more just the power and why this is so important? Because it not just like, “Cool, I’ll sit around and think about, oh, here’s my story. I was born here, I did this thing.” Why is this so important to do?

Two Types of Kryptonite

Donna Lichaw: And it’s a little antithetical in a way because it goes against what a lot of us believe, especially if we have I’ll say product backgrounds or just business backgrounds or tech backgrounds or anything where we’ve built things for people. For years, we’ve had this idea that we build companies in a user-centered way where, all right, build for the customer first and all else will follow. And there’s some truth to that on the one hand. And I used to think leadership was the same, which is, well, it’s not about you as a leader, it’s about who are you bringing along on your journey? And how do they need to be heroes? So how do you enable everyone you work with and everyone you want to follow you to join you and feel amazing with it? That’s the user-centered approach where it’s not about you, it’s about who you’re bringing with you and the impact you want to make.

But what I learned is that it doesn’t work that way. And you need to flip that, which is when you start with you first at the center of the equation, and then I’m going to do… Everything for me is a diagram. I’m thinking of concentric circles. Ken Blanchard has a great model for this where you start with you, it’s the inner circle, then you are able to lead yourself, then you can lead others. It extends to one-on-one relationships. Then once you’ve got that, you’re able to lead groups, teams, and then outward towards the business.

When you figure that out and you come from the inside out, it’s much, much more powerful because it’s not selfish like I would’ve thought years ago, but it’s purposeful. You, as human, we all are driven by a mission, by purpose, by a reason for what we do. And when we’re able to have that power us, it then empowers us to connect with others so that we can bring it to life. And especially in a business context, but this is the case in anything, communities and family, but especially in business. It has to start with you. You need fuel from somewhere. And if it comes from without, it’s like an eggshell that’s just ready to crack. It’s not sustainable if it comes from outside.

Superpowers and Leveraging Strengths

Lenny: Can you give an example of someone you worked with that changed their story and what impact it had on their career to make this even more real?

Donna Lichaw: I can think of a CEO I worked with a few years ago who on the outside was so put together. He was the CEO of a billion-dollar company, successful, raised money like no one’s business, was able to get people excited about what he was building, join him. And when we started working together, he had recently hired members of an executive team that were just superstars from Silicon Valley and just incredible. And they were so excited to work with him. He was so excited to work with them as well.

But on the inside, the story he kept telling himself was he’s too nice. Nobody listens to him was another story. “People don’t take me seriously,” was another story. And then there were what I call horror stories. This is not a scientific term by any means, but horror stories that he told himself were things like, “We’re never going to make it,” or, “They’re never going to listen to me,” or, “I’ll never learn to be a real CEO. And the problem with stories like that is they end up taking over your identity, they shadow and cloud your every day and actions you take and interactions you have with people. And when you focus on them so much, they very well will become true. That’s one example. I could tell you a little more about that, what we did about it.

Discovering Your Superpowers

Lenny: Yeah, that’s exactly what I was going to ask. Yeah, if you could share what you did to help shift his story, and then also just how do people do this for themselves?

Donna Lichaw: Perfect. In this case… And this is like everyone I work with. And this is absolutely something that everyone listening and everyone in the audience can absolutely do is take a data-driven approach to the stories that you tell yourself. For example, the story, “I’m too nice,” it could be true, it could not be true. How did we get down to the bottom of that? In this case, what we did is I went out there and talked to his team. And this is something you can do for yourself as well. If you’re extremely busy, you can have someone else do it for you. And I found out how people actually experienced him and his leadership. And I didn’t hear he’s too nice, I heard he is so heartfelt and so caring. And that’s a really cool thing. How rare is that to hear about a CEO, especially a founder? Oftentimes you hear the opposite, which is not really true. Usually when founders are not nice people, they’re insecurity’s at play. But in this case, yeah, people were like, “We love him. He’s wonderful. That’s why he recruited us.” And so great, all right, validated and a little debunked. Really nice, but not too nice. That was not a problem for anyone.

Then we’d hear things like… Okay, one story he told himself was, “People don’t take me seriously. They don’t listen to me. What’s going on? I need to command respect and they need to just do what I say.” And I hear this all the time. I’m using this one example, but this could be anyone that I’ve worked with. And what we heard from people instead was it’s not that they weren’t listening to him, but when you’re hiring super senior, whip smart executives to work for you, they don’t want to be told what to do, they want to have a grand vision that they’re excited about, they want maybe some goals to latch onto and help possibly with a strategy to get there, although probably they can got the strategy all on their own. And they want to then show you how they can help you and the business meet your goals and align towards that vision so that you can build the company that you want to build.

That story, “No one listens to me,” it was the wrong story to be telling. What the actual story was is that people wanted him out of their business and wanted to feel empowered doing their C-level and super senior executive level work. “But we don’t want him to be absent because when he does that, it doesn’t work. And it’s very frustrating when he just disappears for two weeks. So we need him involved, but want him to give us problems to solve. Give us a vision, give us problems to solve and let us do it for you.”

And so they were able to write a better ending of that story together. It was exactly like user research of any kind or customer discovery, which is you find out what could be possible from your customers and then ideally you co-create a better ending together. If you’re building products or services, that’s how you do it. If you’re a leader, you do it by showing up and helping others do what they need to do in a way that feels good for you and that aligns with how you want to be doing things.

And so this is one example, but I find using real research and data and actually talking to people is most effective. There are other ways to take best guesses, and I’ll use the product metaphor again, which is you can try things and experiment and then see how it works and not talk to your users, but you should probably talk to your customers, in other words, your colleagues and everyone who works for you, and really find out what is the true story and what is possible.

How to Identify Your Superpowers

Lenny: There’s all these stories that people believe about themselves, and to your point, many of them are not true when you actually look at the data, you talk to your customers, AKA your colleagues. I imagine many are actually true or there are feedback you get that is like, “You are not clear enough about stuff,” there’s things that you actually hear from other people. Does this approach help there as well? Or is there a different tactic for something’s actually, okay, you are actually too nice. It’s not just a story in your head?

Donna Lichaw: Absolutely. There are times when the stories that we tell ourselves are true. And when we go out and find out what’s possible, it is something that we’re doing that needs to change or isn’t working. And so one example is, and this comes up sometimes as well, one executive who I worked with once kept getting this feedback that she was too quiet. And when we went out and got feedback, it was true. People were like, “She needs to speak up more.” And this is becoming a problem because she was so quiet that her team thought she was not interested in them. And she would just sit back in meetings, not say anything, and they were like, “God, she sucks. This is the worst boss ever. I don’t even want to be at this meeting. And why is she here? Why am I here?” And it really was detrimental to them all working together.

And then she was frustrated because she was always wondering, well, why are they not performing? They’re not stepping up. And so it was frustrating all along. And it was true, as far as they saw it, her not speaking up was the problem. But when we got down to the bottom of what was really going on for her and not speaking up at these meetings is she was just listening. Her processing style was she had to listen, and then maybe a few hours later she’d have thoughts. And so even though the team said, “We do want her to participate,” what they really needed to know was it didn’t have to do with speaking or not speaking, what they really needed from her was to know that she was listening to them and that she actually heard them and was going to do something about it, and that she was quiet in these meetings, she was not checked out. And so simple solution for that, she could start trying to yell more and talk over people and be obnoxious, but nobody wants that either, and so she just started communicating with them more about, “Hey, this is my style. I’m a little slower. I often need a couple hours to really process things. I’m here, and I want you to know that.”

And the irony of establishing those lines of communication with your team when they’re not getting what they need is that you often end up doing the thing that you’ve been trying to do but failing to do anyway. Because she ended up talking more with her team just in communicating with them about her style, and then they started communicating their styles with her and with each other. And this is something that, it’s not in the book, but you might’ve heard of this idea of a personal OS that a lot of us like to have, which is, “Hey, these are my work styles. This is how I process, this is how I do things. These are great ways to work with me, and here’s how I’d love to work with you.” And they ended up doing a lot of that, and worked out really well. But it was true, she was not speaking up, and it was having a detrimental effect. But the answer was not talking more, it actually was listening more and just having a better relationship with people.

Why I Started My Company

Lenny: That’s an awesome example. By the way, on the personal OS, an another term for that I’ve heard is README, like your own personal README file.

Discovering Your Superpowers

Donna Lichaw: Oh, I like that too.

Adaptability and Energy Management

Lenny: Yeah, isn’t that great? It sounds like there’s these two buckets, it’s probably more buckets, but one is a story of yourself that is not true that you can disprove by looking at data, talking to people, and then there’s almost a story people have about you that they don’t quite get what’s going on. And then you could change their story by communicating, “Here’s what I’m really doing. I’m actually just listening and I’m actually really deeply paying attention.”

If we pick an example, say imposter syndrome, which comes up a lot on this podcast where people feel like, “I am an imposter in this role. I have no idea what I’m doing. It’s all going to crumble if I mess up.” Say someone has that in their head, everyone can tell I am an imposter and it’ll all crumble. How would you recommend someone that this is real or not to understand is this a story in my head or is this real? And what do people actually think? Do you go talk to people? How do you recommend people go about that?

Donna Lichaw: Certain stories we tell ourselves are actually quite functional and do not necessarily need to be rewritten. Imposter syndrome for an example, if you’re going around saying, “I feel like I’m an imposter. I can’t believe I’m doing this,” you can try to fake it till you make it, you can try to… I always think of… I’m totally dating myself here, but Stuart Smalley in Saturday Night Live in the ’80s and ’90s, he would look in a mirror and do his affirmations and say, “I’m smart, and I’m whatever.” And Doug-

Managing Energy-Draining Tasks

Lenny: I’m good enough, I’m strong enough, and gosh darn it, people like me or love me.

Donna Lichaw: There you go. It’s like you could do that, and it’s all very mechanical, and there’s ways to prop yourself up, but what if you took a counter-intuitive approach and looked at that story, I’m an imposter, and instead asked, “Okay, that’s a good story. How is that serving you?” Imposter syndrome, it’s something everyone has at one point or another. When we default to these behaviors of, “Oh God, I’m an imposter. Okay,” over and over and over again, I know it doesn’t feel good, but we default to that because it’s serving us in one way, otherwise it wouldn’t become a habit. And I always think of habits as an itch. If you have an itch, you scratch it, you feel better. There’s a reason why we scratch itches; it feels better. If you do it too much, it hurts.

And something like that, telling detrimental stories, have that impact. But when you can intercept them at just the right time and say, “Okay, what if that is true? How does it serve me to constantly say, ‘I’m an imposter whenever anything gets hard?’” One co-founder I worked with a while back, she did this whenever things got too hard. And then she was convinced, and founders have this a lot, “Who am I to be running this company? And what am I doing here? And oh my God, I can’t be doing this.” But when we looked at how that habit of calling herself an imposter served her, what she realized is that every time it kicked in, she worked harder. And it just meant she was hitting some kind of a growth edge. When she would jump into action, she would learn something new, she would read 20 books, she would go out, take a class, she would listen to podcasts and on and on. And she would get better at this new thing, it was fun for her, and then she would feel less like an imposter over time, so it was a very functional thing for her.

The problem is when she did that too much… I work with a lot of women who this is the case for. She often did way much work. And so she took on emotional labor for other people. She did 10 times as much work as she needed to do, actual work. In her role, she was playing COO and CFO and CEO. And it’s just like she didn’t need to be doing all of that. And so on a spectrum of it’s actually helpful, give yourself a pat on the back for jumping into imposter zone every time things get hard to the other side of the spectrum, which is, okay, but when it’s too much, you burn out. You’re doing way too much work for other people. You’re falling into these unfortunate conventional gender roles that doing extra work you don’t need to, so you want to find a happy medium. But I think that the trick is, with imposter syndrome, to not deny it, to embrace it as much as you can, but not embrace it so much that it ends up holding you back. Yes, functional. Even things that we think are bad for us are actually good.

Signs of Full-Body Resistance

Lenny: I love that advice. It’s so much easier to just, okay, yep, it’s true. Maybe I am an imposter, but here’s how he can maybe help me while I feel this. And this actually reminds me of another coach who did a guest post on my newsletter a long time ago, and her advice is, “Yeah, you probably are an imposter. You’re in a role you’ve never done before. And that’s pretty normal, and that’s okay. And here’s how you should approach it.”

Donna Lichaw: Yeah. Especially in tech where half of the roles we have are all made up. You’re probably the first person ever to have your role anyway, whether you founded the company or you’re doing something else at your company. Yeah, it’s a great thing. Embrace it.

Practical Tips and Stress-Relief Tools

Lenny: The takeaway advice there is essentially ask yourself, “Okay, this may be how I feel. How is it helping me?” And don’t try to push it down and convince yourself that you’re not necessarily an imposter, but how is this feeling helping you?

Donna Lichaw: How is it serving you? I have a whole chapter on kryptonite in the book, which is… It’s what I call kryptonite. And I use superhero metaphors pretty heavily in the book because I’m I guess a grown child and I like comics and superhero stories. And so are my clients, so I think because I work in tech, I get to do this. But I liken it to kryptonite, which is the things that we think harm us, actually when we look at how they serve us, they can serve a function. Like kryptonite for Superman, it’s how people are able to operate on him. They use a little kryptonite so they could get in there and do some surgery and then get out. It serves a function, but when it’s too much that can be detrimental. Yeah, how does it serve you? It’s a question that it’s so important and so, so powerful.

Product Frameworks for Personal Growth

Lenny: What are some examples of other types of kryptonite that you find leaders have? And how do you find that it ends up maybe serving them and being useful?

Leaving the Building to Experiment

Donna Lichaw: They’re the kinds that you should avoid and can avoid. For example, scheduling things is my kryptonite, but I do meetings for a living. And I love being in meetings, strangely, and so not scheduling is not an option, but there are ways around it. I automate everything. And some people hire assistants. And there are ways to do it. That’s the kind that you’re better off avoiding. There’s nothing that serves me about having to schedule things or my inability to schedule things properly. How is that serving me? You know what? I don’t care. It doesn’t matter. Just the kind that you need to avoid.

Or you could say toxic people or people who just don’t add anything to your life. There are kinds of just like, “All right, done. Moving on.” But then there are the kinds that it’s usually on the inner kryptonite side where you can look at, “Okay, well how does this serve me?” And so wide swath of people example is dyslexia. I work with a lot of founders, CEOs and senior executives who are dyslexic. It’s very, very, very common, especially for CEOs. You could say, “Well, that’s kryptonite, having to read things or do things with text.” And it can feel like that to a lot of people, yet when you look at the science of something like dyslexia, it’s not so much an impairment, it just means that your brain is operating at a different level in a different way than most people.

Same thing with ADHD. And you could extend it to autism and ton of other things as well. But when you’re dyslexic, you’re thinking spatially, you’re thinking big, you’re thinking visually, you’re not… Yes, you mix up letters or you’re struggling with big blocks of text; that’s fine. If you’re founding a company, you’re not in documents all day long anyway probably, so that ability to think big and spatially and visually is probably how you created your company in the first place, or if you work at a large corporation, how you catapulted into executive leadership that way because you’re a visionary and you do all these things.

I think kryptonite, the inner kind of kryptonite, that’s how I like to think of it, which is you think it makes you weak, but when you can look at how it serves you, it’s often not the case. It could be something that is often classified as a disorder like dyslexia, ADHD, and it could be quirks like the one earlier, “I’m too quiet.” Well, no, she was just a really good listener. She just didn’t realize that she had a poker face on when she was listening. And no one knew she was listening. Everything, just look at how it serves you. It’s the kind you need to avoid, the kind of kryptonite that you need to really look at and embrace. And once you embrace it, just like with the superheroes, it becomes ideally something that’s useful in small doses like Superman, or it could be something more like Hulk, which is you could say his kryptonite is his anger, but that’s also his superpower. And he can’t get rid of it, or if he does, he becomes Mark Ruffalo being really boring like in the latest Avenger movies and he is all meditating.

Why Superpowers Feel Uncomfortable

Lenny: Just moping around.

Donna Lichaw: Yeah, I don’t know what the point of that is. Yeah, that’s how I see Kryptonite. It’s actually a really, really amazing, amazing tool that we can all leverage.

Head, Heart, Hands: Three Filters

Lenny: The flip side of kryptonite is a superpower. And I definitely want to spend time here. I’m a big believer in this, you are too, of just how important it is to lean into your strengths and identify what you’re better at than most people and use that as your way of getting ahead versus trying to, say, just remove these kryptonite/things you’re not good.

For me, it was really a big deal. I actually worked with a coach while I was working. And this was in the biggest step changes for me is just realizing I’ll never be amazing at X, Y, Z, but it turns out I’m really good at these things, and so let me just use those things to achieve the things I’m trying to do. As one example, I’m never going to be an amazing public speaker. I hate that stuff. Even though I do this podcast, it’s not my strength. And it turns out I much prefer writing and sitting there and thinking, and that’s what led to this newsletter. I started doing the thing that was pulling me and was easier for me and ends up being really successful because that’s another way of achieving the same thing, it turns out. Here’s the question. Why is it so important to think about your superpowers? How do you identify your superpowers? And just how do you think about this area?

Donna Lichaw: On the one hand, there’s 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.

I’m going to give you an example. And it’s funny that we’re here talking about this because a while back, I remember 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. I hate sending emails, reading emails. I really struggle with it. But yet I have this newsletter that people love and people were begging me to send more of over the years. And at the time, I was like, “Oh, maybe I’ll dusted 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. No calls.”

Uncovering Your Subconscious Purpose

Lenny: I don’t know if it was that. I don’t know if it was that.

Donna Lichaw: Something like-

Quick Fire Lightning Round

Lenny: It was just I prefer to avoid calls whenever I can.

Donna Lichaw: Yes, there you go, “Prefer to avoid calls whenever I can.” It was very polite, right?

Top Book Recommendations

Lenny: Okay, yeah.

Favorite Recent Shows and Movies

Donna Lichaw: But it was, “Happy to answer any questions you have. Can you shoot me an email?” I don’t remember if this was my answer, but I think my answer to me was, “No, no emails. 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 I knew, okay, 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 having a meeting was not right for you. 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’ve been to write the email to you. And in the end, here we were having that first conversation, which is really fun, but it’s in a way that feels good to both of us. Play to your strengths and good things happen. 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.

Favorite Interview Question

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Favorite Recent Products

Donna Lichaw: 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, but 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.

Bob Iger as an example from Disney. I haven’t met him. I know people who’ve met him. And I just always hear, “Such a sweet person. So nice and such a great listener.” 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.

Personal Life Motto

Lenny: The big unlock for me was realizing that you can achieve all the same things using different strengths. You can be an amazing CEO being very loud, charismatic visionary. You could also be great CEO, being very quiet and thoughtful and deliberative and working in small teams versus like, “Hey everyone, listen to what I have to say.”

Donna Lichaw: Exactly.

Buddhist Mindfulness and Awareness

Lenny: Okay, how does somebody identify their superpowers, their strengths? I know there’s some tests they could take. Very tactically, what do you recommend people do? What do you send them to figure out here’s what I’m really good at?

Donna Lichaw: 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 StrengthsFinder test or there’s a V-I-A 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 it 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 present, and then eventually figure out how to apply them and transpose them to your future.

But if you look at 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, there’s a 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, 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 lit you up and that you were so excited about? And I would then look at something from your more recent past. 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 as moments in time and you can 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… God, 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, big tech company. They were obsessed with superpowers at this company. And so she would get these 260 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. 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 should be doing strategy and high level stuff. What is happening here?”

And she could say, “My strength is strategy.” And I hear that all the time. “I’m a strategist.” What is that? It doesn’t even mean anything. That’s not a superpower. I don’t know, that means nothing. But 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 then over time, she was able to shed the 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. Yeah, look to your past and you can pull out key moments and see what your superpowers are.

Wisdom from Dolly Parton

Lenny: We’ll link to these tests that you recommended just for people to explore. I took a couple of them, and they were actually really useful to me, so I think if nothing else, it’s a good little context to have while you do this other exercise. And I don’t know if I got this right, but one is think about peak experiences in your life, including childhood or mostly adult life, do you recommend?

Donna Lichaw: Yeah, I would go back as far as you can. Definitely childhood, childhood.

Final Wrap Up

Lenny: And peak meaning amazing, happy experiences? Is that what we should look for?

Donna Lichaw: 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 have a few, but… Well, no, let me ask. Enough about me, so other people can hear this in action, when was the time when you were younger or a kid or anytime in the past when you were just at your best, really lit up doing something that just fueled you?

Lenny: To me, I guess I think of not necessarily an specific example, but just accomplishing things always gets me energized. I did this hard thing. Selling my startup, that was a peak experience. There’s one.

Donna Lichaw: Selling your startup.

Lenny: Yeah. And starting the startup.

Donna Lichaw: And starting the startup. What compelled you to start the startup?

Lenny: I always had this goal of I want to start a company, which is a terrible reason to start a company, but I had a goal I wanted to start a company. I had set this goal, in two years I’m going to leave this job and start a company. And two years later, that’s exactly what I did.

Donna Lichaw: What was it about starting a company that made that something that you were so interested in doing?

Lenny: I wanted to prove to myself that I could do it, I think is the core of it. I keep reading about startups. All these people are doing interesting things. I want to just see if I can pull this off.

Donna Lichaw: Okay. You wanted to just see if you could pull it off.

Lenny: Yeah. And I also felt like I had the skills to do this compared to other folks that were starting companies and trying their hand at a startup.

Donna Lichaw: You wanted to do it because you wanted to see if you could do it and you thought you could do it.

Lenny: Yes.

Donna Lichaw: What’s so cool when you do this exercise, if we were to do it, we are not going to do it now, it’d 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. 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. You said you did the exercise. I’m curious to know what you came up with.

Lenny: What I’m thinking about as you talk about this is I was very shy my entire childhood, and I think people didn’t expect me to achieve big things because I was always just this nerdy, shy guy. I think there’s always this chip on my shoulder of I’m going to show people what I could do. I want to show that I’m capable of more. I think there’s a lot of that there.

Donna Lichaw: When you can look at that in context, what you could see is you 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 and when over indexing on, “I’m going to 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 problem solving, 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. Well, for the rest of us, you do it because you want to see if you can do it. Otherwise, it’s just to solve a problem. But when you’re a super senior executive, at some point you can’t be solving problems for everyone. And if you’re just in the weeds solving problems all day, that’s when you’re not doing your real job and you’re going to be the whole team and your whole company nuts. And so you have to figure out, okay, if this keen ability to solve problems is a superpower, how do you apply it differently?

Lenny: Yep. That super resonates. A lot of times, you just are interested in the problem. It’s like a puzzle and pulls you in. And that gets you in trouble.

Donna Lichaw: It can.

Lenny: To answer your question, what these tests told me my number one strength was adaptability, that I could just adapt to situations, which has pros and cons, but I super resonates. I find that I could just fit into things and adapt.

Donna Lichaw: And it’s a perfect example. And, as you see, it has its pros and cons.

Lenny: Again, just for people to think about, because I really think this is such an important topic and it makes me want to write a newsletter post about this, just how powerful it is to identify, here’s the things I’m very strong at and why it’s important to double down on those versus think about solving your weaknesses. Your advice here is maybe take these quizzes that’ll give you a sense of maybe your superpowers, and then think about your peak life experiences when you’re the most yourself I think is how you describe it.

Donna Lichaw: When you’re at your best.

Lenny: At your best.

Donna Lichaw: At your best. Yep.

Lenny: And there’s an element of also when you’re energized, which came up a few times on this podcast. Look for things that give you energy because there’s something there.

Donna Lichaw: Yes. 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 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 adults. It probably is a matter of outsourcing or getting help or supplementing. We don’t have to fix everything.

Lenny: There’s this guy that we’ll link to in the show notes, but another executive coach, Matt Mochary, who we had on the podcast who is just like a walkthrough of how to do an energy audit on your day so that you can identify what gives you energy. And this is actually exactly what led me to this path. When I left my job, I specifically paid close attention to what gives me energy after a meeting I had, after a call, after things I did in the day, and what zaps me of energy? And I just decided I will do more of the things that are giving me energy. And that ended up being this newsletter and eventually this podcast, so it really works.

Donna Lichaw: There you go. And I know Matt Mochary 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 exhausted, you’re burnt out; you are spending your energy in the wrong places. And so it applies 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.

Lenny: I imagine many people listening to this or feeling like, I wish I could not be in these dumb meetings that I’m in all the time and these stupid reviews. And there’s a lot of stuff you have no control over that also are very energy zapping. What advice would you give to people thinking that?

Donna Lichaw: Well, okay, let me qualify this with this is why I’m not a career coach, by the way. I don’t help people navigate how to change jobs or leave jobs because I think if you’re spending most of your time in your day doing things that are zapping your energy and you hate things you’re doing in your job, maybe you’re not in the right job. I don’t know, if I was a career coach, I would just tell everyone, “Oh 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. I’m pretty ruthless there, I think. This is what I still bring from product management, I’m ruthless when it comes to prioritizing things. And so-

Lenny: I love it. This is prioritization.

Donna Lichaw: Yeah. There you go.

Lenny: This reminds me of a Steve Jobs quote that I love of… His advice is just, “If you wake up every morning and you’re feeling dread for the thing you’re doing, it’s okay to wake up sometimes and feeling that and feel like, ah, I’m not excited about this day, but if it keeps happening over and over and over and over, that’s a sign that maybe you should make a change.”

Donna Lichaw: Yeah. I think there’s something there. And actually, to bring this back to kryptonite, if it’s something little, like let’s say Zoom fatigue for example, 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 I’m in meetings all day long. I love it. I love working with my clients. And they’re all over the world, so we can’t always travel to be with them. We do sometimes. They can’t always travel to be with me. But the video’s the next best thing, but it can be exhausting. And so does that 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 hacks for that. One, which is don’t schedule too many meetings a day. Great. Do lots of active stuff in between gym walks, whatever, try to get in-person social time, no meeting days.

And for during meetings, right here, I’ve got one of my squishies. There’s the neurological thing with Zoom where we’re just getting stimuli through our eyes 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 were chatting, it would be a very different physical experience that would close that circuitry for me and leave me more satisfied as opposed to on Zoom, my brain’s on the lookout for something. And so I, a lot of my clients do this too, fidgets help ground me when I’m on Zoom calls. And it’s like, okay, great. There are things you can manage, but yes, like that Steve Jobs quote or idea is if, 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.

Lenny: I really like that tip. That’s very practical. And buy something that you can play with with your hands. I use this pen, actually, is what I’m playing with usually with these podcasts. I need something squishy maybe.

Donna Lichaw: Yeah. Well, there’s-

Lenny: If there’s anything you recommend, let’s link to it in a show notes.

Donna Lichaw: 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 a superpower is starting things that I don’t finish. And so 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 all these things to get you through your meetings. And there are 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. But-

Lenny: I’ll take it.

Donna Lichaw: Good. I’ll put that on my list of things I-

Lenny: [inaudible 01:01:49] finish.

Donna Lichaw: … need to do, just also my kryptonite.

Lenny: Okay, there’s just a couple more things I wanted to touch on and then I’ll let you go. One is you have this interesting approach of using product frameworks that people know in their day-to-day building product to translate that to personal growth advice. And so in your book, you use that design thinking double diamond framework for helping people think about their own life and career. Is there a couple you could share that people can maybe think about and use of just here’s something you know in product. Here’s how you can actually use this in your life, in your career.

Donna Lichaw: I trained with Gestalt coaches and therapists when I moved into coaching. Gestalt 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, 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 learned to work, at least through Gestalt coaching and Gestalt therapy, was you don’t leave a session with me without having tried a little experiment first. The analogy there is 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 ideally, you do it for all the above. And so anything you think is true 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. It works with human psychology and all the things we want to create and learn in life just as well as with products.

Lenny: Is there an example of one of those little experiments you ran in a session?

Donna Lichaw: Bring 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, on the outside, she was actually quite loud. As a person, she was really loud and brash and all these things, it’s just that 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 it and stop beating herself up as much and started realizing, “Oh, that’s a good thing. Why am I so insecure and getting so angry at myself for doing this all the time?” That’s good. She started to chill out a little bit, but then the idea of a bigger experiment was in your next meeting later this afternoon, see what it feels like to sit there and just listen for 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 would been a 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 being like, ‘Yeah,’ patting myself on the back. ‘I’m a good listener. I’m a good listener. Look at me.’ Or not even good or bad, but wow, I’m really listening.” That’s all I ever want from people is just this 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 why waste a whole hour of her life when we could just do something in 30 seconds in the room right now? And so we tried a little role play of, 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. Oh my God, I have to do that for a whole hour?” And eventually over time, it got easier. It was very uncomfortable.

This is where I’ll bring up the whole superhero analogy. Again in superhero stories, when superheroes discover what their superpowers 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, “Wait, 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 look at me with my superhero supply kit. And I was like, “I really want to build a gift box. 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 how can I mass produce this? Where would I sell it? What about taxes? Oh, God. And 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.

Lenny: And I think a lot of the power there is you feel like, “Wow, there’s something new here I didn’t expect. And this is a new interesting learning. Let me see where else this can go.”

Donna Lichaw: 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 testing things not just how is it working and what are the numbers? Well, even with product, we’re not just looking at numbers all the time, but 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. And 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 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 take in 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.” Well, that will tell you something.

Or I hear this all the time, “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 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.” 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 this is so cheesy, but live a good life and make an impact and be a great leader and do all the things you want to do that way.

Lenny: Beautiful. The point you just made about how much of our thinking is driven by our body, we just had a whole episode on this a few episodes ago with Johnny Miller where we talk about the nervous system and how most of our neurons go up to our brain versus down from the brain and our body’s telling our brain what we’re feeling, so there’s a lot. If you want to explore that as a listener, that’s a great episode. We’ll link to it in the show notes.

Donna Lichaw: Okay, good, good.

Lenny: Okay, let me ask you a question that my colleague suggested. She gave me a few suggestions to ask you. And I imagine this is what worked for her in you two working together. Question she had is how as an executive coach do you help identify/bring out goals or wishes that people have in their subconscious but are unable to realize or articulate?

Donna Lichaw: 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. It 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?

And then if you’ve got something exciting, go back to the beginning and then imagine how you got there and just write that journey out. If you think of it as an experimental roadmap, then start thinking, all right, what’s the first thing I need to learn to know if this is right? Work your way towards that and onwards.

If you do that and you’re like, “I 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. It’s not like I’m subscribing to this anything you want in life, you just say it and accomplish it. I know life doesn’t exist like that, but 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.

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. But yeah, that’s my long-winded answer. Envision it, then figure out how you might’ve made it happen and go make it happen.

Lenny: I was going to say this is a great tease for a part of your book we didn’t get too much, so a good reason to go buy the book. Something I was going to say as you were talking is with this coach I worked with once, we did this exercise. And I was like, “Okay, five years or maybe 10 years, I’m not working anymore. Here’s what I’m doing. I’m living here. Family.” She’s like, “Everyone in tech is like in five years they’re not working anymore. They’re just done, they’re retired.” Everybody’s in that. That’s their future, which is not obviously realistic, but it’s hilarious.

Donna Lichaw: 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’ll end up being the case. And that you’re doing it true to yourself.

Lenny: And impact is another chapter in your book, which we also didn’t get to, so there’s a lot of context.

Donna Lichaw: So many teasers. Yes, go buy the book.

Lenny: So many teasers. Donna, is there anything you wanted to share or leave listeners with before we get to a very exciting lightning round?

Donna Lichaw: No, no. It’s been so delightful chatting with you. No, nothing else.

Lenny: Well, with that, we’ve reached our very exciting lightning round. Are you ready?

Donna Lichaw: I’m ready.

Lenny: First question, what are two or three books that you’ve recommended most to other people?

Donna Lichaw: Here’s a funny thing is 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, I had 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.

Lenny: No, I get this because this is what my newsletter was originally is I’ll just do my best to define an answer to this question I get often and put it together and make it really good so that I could send people, “Here’s my best answer to this question.” But every time I do that, they’re like, “Oh, brother, just sending your own blog post to me. Just tell me an answer.” I’m like, “But I’ve written the best version of it here. This is going to answer everything you’re looking for.” I go through the same pain. Okay, next question. Do you have a favorite recent movie or TV show that you’ve really enjoyed?

Donna Lichaw: A show I’ve been watching recently, and I feel funny saying this because the fourth season was on recently, and 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? The-

Lenny: Yeah, yeah.

Donna Lichaw: It was so much fun. It was all like what if the space industry was in an alternate reality and the last few decades were different than what they were? That was very fun. And for work stuff, a lot of my clients love watching Ted Lasso for all the leadership stuff. And it’s just such a sweet show. But yeah, For All Mankind is recent. That’s really fun.

Lenny: Next question, do you have a favorite interview question that you like to ask? Usually this is meant for people interviewing candidates, but is there anything that comes to mind when I ask this question?

Donna Lichaw: The question I always ask when I’m interviewing clients. Because if I’m not excited about what you you’re doing, we’re not going to work together. Yeah, I want to know what that is. And so imagine it’s a few years out and you’ve had the best however long, year or three years of your life, what would you be telling me? And I like to add a twist to that, which is from Benjamin Zander in a book called The Art of Possibility, where with his students, he used to say, “Give yourself an A. If you could give yourself an A at the end of the semester, what would you be writing? 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, 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 .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 on the spot. And we’re still friends many decades later. Yeah, that’s my favorite interview question all around.

Lenny: It’s similar to question people often using product of just what is the ideal experience that… What’s the perfect version of what we’re building? And let’s work backwards from that. Or what’s like the 10 X version?

Donna Lichaw: Exactly. Or if you want to add to that, if you could wave a magic wand, it’s the same kind of thing. What could be possible?

Lenny: I love the leveraging of product thinking into coaching. I love it. Next question, do you have a favorite product that you’ve recently discovered that you love? Maybe you already mentioned the squishy thing. Maybe something else comes to mind.

Donna Lichaw: My 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 fidgets.

Lenny: Well, if you can point us to your favorites in links, that would be awesome. I’m sure people are curious what you’ve discovered.

Donna Lichaw: Yes. I curate them. I will definitely do that.

Lenny: How amazing. I’m going to [inaudible 01:21:48] that.

Donna Lichaw: Yep. And there’s also the long one, the sticky monkey noodles. So many.

Lenny: Beautiful, purple.

Donna Lichaw: So many.

Lenny: Amazing. Do you have a favorite life motto that you often find yourself coming back to sharing with friends or family, either in work or in life?

Donna Lichaw: It’s 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, a physical sticky note on my computer monitor to remind me, which what it reminds me to do is get into what Gestalt folks call an optimistic stance. And I’m a chronic, serious, acute pessimist. Anyone who knows me, I’m cranky, but I love this reminder to be in this optimistic stance. 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, but wow, I just stubbed my toe and it really hurts. Isn’t that interesting? Let me feel that throbbing toe. Or, wow, someone on my team just talked over me in a meeting 20 times in the last hour.

Actually, this happened with a client recently. I was there at an executive team meeting, and someone kept talking over the CEO over and over and over again. And often when that happens, you 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. 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. 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 and at what you do accordingly.

Lenny: Very Buddhist, non-judgmental awareness.

Donna Lichaw: Exactly.

Lenny: Similar.

Donna Lichaw: It’s exactly that.

Lenny: Not deciding it’s good or bad.

Donna Lichaw: Yep.

Lenny: Final question. I’m surprised you haven’t used any Dolly Parton quotes in this conversation. Clearly in your book, you’re a big fan.

Donna Lichaw: That’s right.

Lenny: I’m curious, what’s a wisdom or quote that comes to mind that you think of from Dolly Parton that might be helpful?

Donna Lichaw: Yes, and thank you for reminding me, because that was originally what I was going to say, which is one of my… There’s so many Dolly 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.” That’s 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.” What more in life do you need than that? There’s all, yeah, Buddhist and Gestalt and mindfulness or whatever, but you could just do what Dolly does and you’ll be all good.

Lenny: Donna, thank you so much for being here. Two final questions. Where can folks find you if they want to reach out, maybe work with you? And how can listeners be useful to you?

Donna Lichaw: Great questions, as always. The best way to find me is through my website, donnalichaw.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 back, even though 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. Find me on my website, donnalichaw.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 talked about today are available there to play with as well.

Lenny: Amazing. I think we’re going to create a lot more superheroes with origin stories, superpowers, kryptonites, missions, impact, all the things you’ve written about in your book. Donna, thank you so much for being here.

Donna Lichaw: Thank you, Lenny. This was a treat.

Lenny: Bye, everyone. Thank you so much for listening. If you found this valuable, you can subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or your favorite podcast app. Also, please consider giving us a rating or leaving a review as that really helps other listeners find the podcast. You can find all past episodes or learn more about the show at lennyspodcast.com. See you in the next episode.

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