Donna Lichaw: preference

Transcript context

…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? 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. s, 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.…

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