Merging Better Team Habits and Productive Flourishing

Getting back to "one platform, one community"

Note: if you’re subscribed to both Productive Flourishing and Better Team Habits, you’ll receive this email twice today, once from each publication. But only this one last time. :)

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After a lot of reflection, I've decided to merge our Better Team Habits (BTH) publication back into the conversation here at Productive Flourishing (PF).

The TL;DR here is: regardless of whether you're a PF or BTH subscriber or whether you're a free or premium subscriber, you won't need to take any action. You'll have access to whatever you currently have access to plus access to the other publication.

The rest of this post is backstory and behind the scenes #CreatorLife stuff. If that's not your jam, please go do whatever is your jam now. For everyone else, grab a drink and prepare for a longer post. :)

There Were Cracks in the Foundations of the Decision to Split

As I wrote here, my goal with separating the channels was to experiment with having more focused conversations in each channel. Even before I began the experiment, my concern was that both channels would suffer. I've never seen a creator be able to maintain and grow two separate channels well. Inevitably, one of the channels gets prioritized and the rest are under-resourced and/or ALL suffer.

But what I wasn't honest with you all and, importantly, myself, is what I most wanted was to have everything at PF. My vision for PF is that it's a community where we discuss how individual, team, and collective thriving are necessarily connected. From the early days of PF, I've written about personal productivity for changemakers, being a better teammate, and leading well.

Additionally, the whole point of moving to Substack was "One Platform, One Community." What did I do? I pulled us to one platform, sure, but I split the community. In hindsight, it would've made more sense to push the first principle all the way and do the work of making the unified PF experience more coherent.

Since the earliest days of PF, my work on personal productivity and entrepreneurship have been the most well-received by readers. It's where the likes, clicks, comments, and emails come from. I've always thought my work in systems-thinking, teamwork, leadership, and strategy has been better or at least as good as my work on personal productivity and entrepreneurship and where I have the most useful perspectives to add, but the feedback has been the opposite.

It's frustrating to do the work of distilling three years of thinking into an accessible and practical thought piece and hear crickets when I publish it. It's hard to opt out of participating in the low-key outrage engine of social media and fight the dopamine feedback you get when you’re writing about the drama du jour. It'd be much easier as an author to focus on how to survive idiots, assholes, and stupidity at work, as well as writing titles with more expletives.

But feeding the outrage engine, reinforcing work misinformation, and dropping expletives for attention feel about as resonant for me as dancing on TikTok. These days, the more something is merely performative, the more I'm out.

My fear was that my perspective on leadership, teamwork, and doing our best work together simply isn't what others want to hear and, frankly, would get in the way of what keeps the lights on. I'm an author, yes, but I also have a business to run and people to pay. Paying six figures a year to produce content that didn't work wasn't a mere worry — it seemed to be the reality.

The important word there was "seemed." From a myopic perspective of what gets clicks, hearts, comments, and short-term and small-scale revenue, it's true that I should be focused on personal productivity. But from the more holistic, long-term, strategic, and purpose points of view, that's not true.

Fear, frustration, and myopia were the faults in the foundation of the experiment to explore spinning off a separate channel. When something is in the foundation or core of an experiment, it spreads to the rest, in the same way that companies and organizations are a shadow of their founders.

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The Courage to Fully Show Up

I've done a lot of inner spelunking to sit with my true fears about pulling BTH back into PF. Yes, there are the practical concerns about if folks are going to get and see the relationship between the different levels of work that I've always seen and thought about and if I'll "waste time" by publishing certain kinds of content when other kinds of content will be received better.

But those aren't the real fears; they’re just the easier fear, frustration, and myopia I've already spoken to.

I know from life and coaching that when we resist an obvious path forward, it's likely due to an identity tension and/or fear of success rather than failure. In this case, it's probably a fusion of both.

I contain multitudes and some of those multitudes aren't received well together in the different communities I walk in. The corporate and organizational communities I walk in are often antipathic and skeptical of the spiritual, philosophical, capitalism-critical, and humanistic approach that's a part of who I am and that flows out of me pretty naturally. The entrepreneurial and creator communities I walk embrace and appreciate those parts of me, but tend not to be interested in the systems thinking, organizational development, strategy, leadership, collectivistic, and process focus that are also parts of who I am and flow pretty naturally.

I've always navigated this well when I'm speaking and facilitating at events because it's pretty clear which aspects to downplay and/or I can sense who's interested in what in individual and small group conversations. When I'm brought in to speak or facilitate, I can craft or select the persona that's going to best advance the mission and medicine.

In a similar vein, when I'm hosting my own events — virtual or in-person — I know I don't have to curate a persona and can instead just be who I am. Folks who sign up to jam with me in events typically know what they're getting or at least are resonant with my vibe enough to be delighted when they see all the parts pulled together.

The fear of success here is that if I drop the persona crafting, I'm going to face rejection by all the communities because I won't be able to edit out the parts that are dissonant. New org readers will show up and be turned off by all the "West Coast woo shit" (I've literally been told this one several times) and new entrepreneurial readers will be turned off when I publish something that's not focused on tactics and how they shift their individual efforts to make more money quickly (ultimately).

As my team's headcount has increased, I've become more sensitive to the risk of showing all of my parts, especially as service contracts get bigger and bigger. It's one thing to "risk" being seen when it's your risk and what’s at stake is <$50. It's quite another when you're also risking other people's livelihoods and the stake is $50k or $500k.

If you've been around for awhile, you know that I'd tell someone in my situation to focus on their yaysayers and to preach to the converted or curious rather than allow dissenters to live rent free in their head too much. Practicing what you preach is hard, especially when it ties to lifelong challenges. In my case, that lifelong challenge is feeling like I never really belonged in any community and needing to be a social chameleon to survive because I already stood out.

It turns out that our best clients and referrers are folks who appreciate all the parts and how they're deployed in the work. Same for our best customers who show up for events, buy our products, and subscribe here. Any business strategist worth their salt will tell you to focus on cloning your best customers and clients.

It also turns out that splitting the publication has likely harmed us if for no other reason than because of how much cognitive effort I spend trying to figure out what goes where and how I can split a concept that has multiple applications into different pieces. Do I publish it on PF first and then write the team and leader version on BTH, then link back to the PF post? Do I rewrite earlier pieces from PF so they're more org-relevant, then publish it to BTH before I reference it in a new post on BTH? What do I do when PF readers might benefit from the BTH post or vice versa? How do I keep from bouncing people back and forth between the two publications, given how interconnected my work is? By the time I thrash with all of that, I have little left to actually write and making it easier to write was the main reason I moved to Substack.

Like many people, I'm dealing with a no-win scenario I've created about being seen. If I'm seen, people will reject me. If I'm not seen, I won't be successful. Best to shoot for mediocrity, round off the edges, and create all sorts of extra work for myself to dance in and out of the light.

Of course it's absurd when I see the words all put together. That's why it's important to write and share the words, in case you're caught in the same no-win scenario. (I can think of at least 30 folks who feel the heat of being called out right now if they're reading this. #SorryNotSorry)

In this moment, I see my own head trash and I'm so over it. I no longer have the TEA for it and it's too expensive to continue to hold onto it.

I have never been for everyone and never will be, if for no other reason than nitpickers are always going to find nits to pick. More importantly, I need to go back to the beginning — when PF was as much for me to share my wonderings, wanderings, and field notes as it was for anyone else.

I didn't really want to split my leadership, teaming, and organizational body of work from PF and instead opted to play the finite creator game rather than the infinite game I want to play and I'm best at. I got poor results from doing it because I had poor thinking and execution around it.

I've learned what I needed to and don't want to continue to pay to learn the lesson. Onward.

What's Next?

Regardless of whether you're a PF or BTH subscriber or whether you're a free or premium subscriber, you won't need to take any action, but you will notice more content and energy being fused back into here. Re-homing BTH here also opens up the likelihood that I'll get the PF podcast going again before too long, too.

Behind the scenes, we'll be pulling BTH posts back here and doing some website reorganization. My tentative plan is that we'll pull posts here but not send them out to everyone, though we may restack them over the next quarter depending on how much I start publishing new content. I mostly need them to be here since I have a content logjam because I want to reference posts that we're going to be migrating. For better or worse, I write in series and I'm stuck with some of the series being in the wrong channel.

If you're a BTH subscriber, stay tuned for more information. You'll still have access to everything you've had access to, but you'll also have access to the analogous level at Productive Flourishing. For instance, if you're a premium subscriber at BTH, you'll be a premium subscriber at PF for the same amount of time. I'll explain more in a dedicated email to you to help you orient to PF.

One platform, one community. For real this time. ;p