In an increasingly asynchronous and distributed workplace, it’s super important that managers learn how to leverage the strengths and avoid the pitfalls of a text-oriented way of communicating.

Done right, asynchronous communication can increase clarity, make decisions more durable, and even enforce equitability within teams. But done wrong, it can hinder progress, create churn, and even add unnecessary stress and anxiety.

Here are a few things you can do to be sure you’re getting communication right in your distributed teams.

You want something in your career. What is it? Advancement in specific skills? Bigger problems to solve or bigger teams to lead? Occasion to showcase your unique talents? The chance to work with specific people you look up to, and to learn from them?

No matter what your ambition, your ability to achieve it is built from two parts: your resolve, which is your capacity to do the things you must do; and your environment, or the presence of opportunity.

I call this the “ambition to opportunity ratio.”

This is one of my favorite mottos, one that I’m working very hard to live up to myself:

If you want to be good at something, you have to be OK with being bad at it for a while.

For as long as I can remember, I have had anxiety about being bad at things, and it has held me back. Do you struggle with failure? Do you want to know how to fix it? I might be able to help.

“Impostor syndrome” is a belief that you don’t deserve the success or luck that you enjoy. In the tech world, it is often a sense that you aren’t “living up to” the title you hold, or team you lead, or something like that.

Impostor syndrome can be quite crippling, because it robs you of the confidence to take risks, make mistakes, and grow as a person and an employee.

These are some of the tricks that I’ve discovered for overcoming impostor syndrome and freeing yourself to grow, learn, and create.

Are you an “analyzer?” Do you like to know all the details about a situation before committing to an action? Do you sometimes find yourself stuck in a cycle of evaluating and re-evaluating options?

Whether you are or not, you almost certainly work with people like this. One of my internal saboteurs is the Stickler, and he likes to tell me to “do it perfectly or not at all.”

This is a recipe for disaster or—at the very least—for stagnation.