🔥 5 Minutes of Leadership Fuel
✉️ This post is part of The 5-Minute Mentor — my weekly leadership newsletter. If you’d like to get it delivered straight to your inbox, click here to subscribe.
Welcome to The 5-Minute Mentor — your weekly dose of leadership inspiration, curated resources, and practical action. All in under 5 minutes.
Activating Your Genius in 5,4,3,2,1… 🤩
🫶 A Dose of Inspiration
Will this path enlarge me or diminish me?
— James Hollis
When challenges pile up, and decisions come at you from every direction, it’s easy to get overwhelmed. What if I choose incorrectly? What might happen ten steps down the road? Will I regret doing this but not that?
An easy filter might just be in Hollis’s simple yet deep question: Does this path enlarge or diminish me?
And I’d add… will it enlarge my ripple out into the world? Or diminish me and my genius?
Even the problems we wish would just go away might hold paths of possibility that enlarge us.
The answer might be surprisingly clarifying as you navigate your next few feet.
📥 Download the quote graphic to use in your next staff email or meeting.
🤓 A Dose of Learning
Early in my leadership journey, I noticed a pattern. A challenge would surface. I’d spend time analyzing it (with more than my fair share of worrying)… strategizing… finally taking action… reflecting… and eventually, I’d find myself on the other side of it.
Shew.
But wait… here’s the next problem. And here we go again.
I started calling it leadership whack-a-mole. You knock one challenge down and barely have time to reorient before another one pops up.
I’ve had countless conversations with leaders I mentor and coach about this exact thing. Part of why the name stuck is that it’s so relatable (and a little funny). The other part is that it’s freeing. Challenges are inevitable. And they’re also our purpose.
I first found Oliver Burkeman through Four Thousand Weeks (it lives on my Belief Bookshelf), and his follow-up, Meditations for Mortals, is also one I keep coming back to. In it, he puts this into words beautifully. On developing a taste for problems, he names a quiet fantasy so many of us carry: that someday we’ll get everything running smoothly and the problems will finally stop.
That day isn’t coming. And while we wait for it, every problem gets doubly heavy… there’s the problem itself, plus our frustration that it exists at all.
Burkeman shares the story of a friend who kept thinking she could finally do her job well if only all these problems would go away. Then it dawned on her: the problems were the job. They’re the reason the job exists.
That’s leadership. Problems ARE the job… and great leaders meet them with the purpose that’s already built in.
A few reminders I’m holding onto:
- Problems aren’t interrupting the work. They are the work.
- Waiting for a problem-free season keeps us from fully showing up in this one.
- A life with nothing to wrestle with wouldn’t be richer. It would be empty. The puzzles are where the meaning lives.
(Burkeman is careful to note that some problems are ones no one would ever wish for. This is about the everyday friction of meaningful work, not glorifying hardship.)
This idea is just one stop (in Week 2) on the book’s four-week journey. A few more that stay with me:
- Week 1, Being Finite: You can’t do everything… and meaningful work requires choosing. (This is also where the kayak lives… if you missed it, here’s how I wrote about it in Steer Your Kayak.)
- Week 3, Letting Go: Allow other people their problems. Supporting someone doesn’t mean absorbing their anxiety.
- Week 4, Showing Up: Everything remarkable was made by ordinary, finite people. People did that… and you’re people too. (This one gets me going❗️ and I may need to write more on it later.)
🎧 Listen to Oliver Burkeman’s conversation with Dan Harris on 10% Happier. The problems conversation starts around the 39-minute mark.
📚 Four Thousand Weeks lives on my Belief Bookshelf, alongside the other books that changed how I think. Browse the rest of my Dog-Eared Pages here.
🎬 A Dose of Action
Remember that challenge on your plate… the one you keep hoping will just go away?
Bring it back to mind. Then, instead of wishing it gone, try this:
👉 Name it as part of the job. Not an interruption to your leadership, but a piece of it. What changes when you see it that way?
👉 Find one small step. Not the whole solution, just the next move. One email, one conversation, one decision you’ve been putting off.
👉 Take it today. Burkeman points out that doing even one small thing about a problem is often what loosens its grip on us. The worry gets lighter once our hands are on it.
You won’t win every round of whack-a-mole. None of us do. But every problem you meet with purpose is part of the work you’re here to do.
One small step. Today. That’s Culture-of-Belief kind of leadership right there.
You got this. Let’s lead with belief.
In your corner,
Melody
Founder, Culture of Belief
P.S. Dental hygiene is officially a team sport… 🪥😂
Send them this link to join The 5-Minute Mentor.