Hey Reader,

We have a fireplace in our bedroom, and a few weeks ago something moved into the chimney.

For four nights it scratched and nested, and I lay there in the dark building a whole creature out of the noise. A squirrel, at least. Maybe an opossum. Something big and furry and clearly plotting against me. By the third night I was running on no sleep and sure we had a real problem.

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So that Sunday we called a wildlife guy. He listened to our video of the racket, said he was ninety percent sure it was a squirrel, then actually looked.

It was a beetle. A female Hercules Beetle, one of those big armored ones, but still. All that lost sleep and catastrophizing, for a single bug.​
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Here's what it has me thinking about.

The beetle was there the whole time, exactly the size it always was. The only thing that changed those four nights was the story I told myself in the dark.

Organizations work the same way. The board conversation nobody wants to start, the handoff that keeps getting pushed, the issues that keep popping up. All of it is there whether or not anyone says it.

Naming an issue does not create it. It just brings it down to actual size. In the dark, mine sounded like an opossum. In daylight, with someone who knew what to look for, it was a beetle. He carried it out, and that night I finally slept.

The relief didn't come from waiting it out. It came from facing it.

So, two practical things this month.

How much runs through your hands?

Think about how much of your organization quietly runs through one set of hands. The logins, the funder who only calls one person, the reason that one task is done the way it's done. More often than not, those hands are yours.

A team that can run without you gets built in the ordinary months, one handed-off task at a time, long before anyone needs it to.

Here's a small one. Pick a single thing that only you do, something that was never yours to hold alone, and give it to someone else. Walk them through it once, then let it be theirs, even when they do it differently than you would.

And if you're a shop of one with no one to hand it to yet, write it down. A simple SOP means the knowledge outlives the day you're too busy, or too gone, to explain it in person.

Thank people when you don't need anything

Summer is slow(er) for a lot of us, which makes it the right time for the thing everyone means to do and rarely does. Thank your donors when there's no ask attached.

A short, real note that says we saw what you did, and here's what it made possible. People give again where they feel seen, and a thank-you in July is one of the highest-return five minutes you'll spend all season.

Try five this week.

Before I Go

A few things I'm into right now:

• One of my clients is a dental clinic, and their CEO fully talked me into Burst floss. I now have opinions about floss, and I'm a convert. (Also getting dentist videos in my instagram feed.)
• We're playing a lot of UNO this summer. With a 12 and a 7 year old in the house, it gets intense. What summer games are you enjoying?
• Two books recently made me cry in a good way, Atmosphere and The Correspondent. The second one has me wanting to sit down and write an actual letter, on paper.
• If you're navigating a leadership change, or starting to think about your own someday exit, that's the work I'm building something for right now. It opens September 1, and I'll share more soon.

*Not affiliate links, just stuff I like.

For now, hit reply and tell me what's shifting in your world. I read every one.

Talk soon,
Heather

P.S. If you know a foolproof way to keep beetles out of a chimney, I'm all ears. Preferably before the next one starts impersonating an opossum.

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Heather Hooper ​​​