I am currently reading this book and it's a really annoying book, because it truly makes you sit down with yourself — in full honesty.

The book is called Reboot: Leadership and the Art of Growing Up by Jerry Colonna, who is a start-up CEO coach. The premise of the book is that you can only fully achieve your potential as a leader, if you "sort through the emotional baggage that is holding you back professionally, and even more important, in your relationships."

By Rachel P.

Four months ago, I went for my dream: building my company.

Rollercoaster, ups and downs... these expressions really don’t do it justice.

The highs have been ecstatic, the lows brought me to places where I didn’t recognize myself: At one point my co-founder and I were really struggling. “This is what a looming divorce must feel like” I thought. When I tried to pick myself up, I just felt stress, tiredness and sadness...

Some thoughts & tools I came across that helped me a lot

I am evaluating new career options and paths as we enter an uncertain economic future. A friend and I discussed VC and playing with different ways of how I could pitch myself and my story. 

Whenever I meet him, I learn something from him and I think highly of him. Being a VC himself, he said that it wasn't a good time right now to ask VCs for 30 minutes or a coffee, since they were all tremendously busy firefighting with their portfolio startups in light of the pandemic.

He then gave me advice that I found tremendously valuable on how to "break in". He said, Christine you should leverage your current company and ask for business meetings instead of asking for informal coffee chats.

Remember the lockdown love story I told you a couple of weeks ago? 

I managed to get into a relationship during lockdown and it was one of those love stories that couldn't be more romantic. I also mentioned that I was conscious and very aware that it was a social lab experiment and that we needed to see how we would work together in the "wild", when the lockdown ended. 

It turns out that my gut wasn't so wrong after all. We didn't make it and while the reflection process will still take a bit of time, here are three immediate things that I realize:

Good ingredients don't lead to good cakes.

Show, don't tell.

Probably not the first time you hear that? This is a small reminder of the things to keep in mind when speaking about anything with anyone, by Neil Bearden, an intense and bad-ass guy who teaches Storytelling at INSEAD.

While the webinar recording is not available, here is a quick 3-min. video by Neil that illustrates his storytelling points. It won't require sound on and I can only highly recommend taking those 3 minutes to watch it.

Objective storytelling: The whole point of you opening your mouth is to 

• Get attention
• Get remembered
• Get discussed
• Get sale (in case it is a business meeting)

Another great INSEAD webinar I attended talked about the Art of Communication and how we can project ourselves with our voices.

The ideas are not new, but the session served me well as a good reminder to be more conscious about using my voice. I also liked how the session described how different types of voices are generated in different parts of the body as it is visual and hence easy to remember.