140: Nathan Tanner | Telling Ourselves the Right Stories

Nathan Tanner is an executive coach who helps CEOs, founders, and leaders scale themselves and their companies. He has coached leaders at Silicon Valley startups and bellwether companies including DoorDash, Google, Autodesk, Electronic Arts, LinkedIn, Procter & Gamble, and Lyft.

Prior to becoming a full-time coach, Nathan was the VP of People at Neighbor, an Andreessen Horowitz-backed startup disrupting the storage industry. Prior to Neighbor, Nathan spent half a decade at DoorDash where he was hired as the head of HR and scaled the company from 250 to 5,000+ employees. There he built the company’s first leadership development program and coached more than half of the executive team. Prior to DoorDash, Nathan held several roles on the HR team at LinkedIn. He started his career on Wall Street at Lehman Brothers where he had a front-row seat to the largest bankruptcy in history.

Nathan is also the author of two books, Not Your Parents' Workplace, and his new book, The Unconquerable Leader. Nathan has been an advisor at Y Combinator and writes for Forbes, Inc., Fast Company, and other publications. He's an IRONMAN triathlete, holds an MBA from BYU, and was trained as an executive coach at the Co-Active Training Institute.

In this episode we discuss the following:

• When Lehman went bankrupt and Nathan struggled to get back into investment banking, he told himself the story that he wasn’t smart enough or talented enough. But then he realized that this story wasn’t serving him. He changed the story from, “I can’t do this” to “I haven’t done it yet, but I can figure it out.”
• Rather than tell ourselves the limiting story of, “That’s just who I am” we can aim to become the best version of ourselves.
• Identify the self-limiting stories we tell ourselves and reframe them into stories that serve us.

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LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nathantanner/

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