The Leader To Leader Podcast

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Nelson Mandela once said, “It always seems impossible until it’s done.” I know few people who embody that quote more than Bear Grylls. This is the fourth and final part of my key takeaways from the 2019 Global Leadership Summit.

I hope you have enjoyed listening to these episodes as much as I have enjoyed recording them! I’ve tried to keep them simple, short, and practical. My intent is always to make valuable use of your time. If it’s crap, you should shut it off and I should shut it down. Fortunately, there was a massive amount of content from the Global Leadership Summit.

Bear Grylls If you don’t know who Bear Grylls is, let me give you an idea. A former member of the British Special Forces, Grylls has climbed Everest, crossed the Arctic Ocean in an inflatable boat and starred in his Emmy-nominated TV show Man Vs Wild (which became one of the most-watched programs on the planet with an estimated audience of 1.2 billion).

He also hosts NBC’s hit show Running Wild with Bear Grylls as well as groundbreaking series on National Geographic, Netflix and Amazon. He is a number one best-selling author and has sold over 15 million books. These include his autobiography Mud, Sweat and Tears, and this year a powerful new book on faith called: Soul Fuel.

Not As It Appears If you know who Bear is, then you know him for all his successes. They are astounding. Just watch a single episode of Man vs. Wild and you’ll capture a glimpse of his incredible sense of survival. But Bear is more than the sum total of his many successes.

His humility is equally astounding. In my notes, I titled his session Learnings from the Valleys, Battles, and Struggles. I don’t recall if that was his title – but I suspect it was. Often, when we see the end result, we gloss over the difficult road one must travel to their destiny.

I knew Bear was British Special Forces. What I didn’t know was that he didn’t make the six-month cut. So, as you can imagine, he was gutted. Man, you don’t have to be special forces to feel the pain that happens when you fall short. Especially when you have spent massive time and energy to achieve an outcome that is alluding you.

More Failures Than Successes As is often the case, his pain became his progress. So please, PLEASE, listen closely to what he said. Bear said he had far more failures than successes. What’s your response to failure? Because how you answer this question very well could determine your destiny. Failure is a part of your journey.

Because of this, Bear says that there are no shortcuts to your goals that avoid failure. Think about this for a moment. You will never experience fulfillment without hard work, but hard work is no guarantee that you will succeed. Harsh, but true.

Nothing More To Give He said that your reaction to failure is important because life doesn’t always reward the brilliant or talented – and I would add that it doesn’t always reward your hard work. Just the opposite at times and you know what I mean if you have ever been kicked in the teeth for doing the right thing.

Bear was saying that during Special Forces training you literally encounter points where you have nothing more to give. I know some of you live and work this way. You dig deep each day and leave it all on the floor holding nothing back. He calls this being mighty in spirit.

I don’t know if this will surprise you, but it surprised me. He said that of the four of them that graduated Special Forces training, three had failed previously. I guess failure was a part of the journey!

Fears, Battles, and Giants Bear said that we all face battles and giants. It reminds me of the famous quote from the late 1800s:

Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle.

Ian Maclaren

Our job, Bear says, is to embrace the difficulty. Because life rewards the dogged. Life is meant to test us, so when you encounter trouble, you are living! The answer to fear is facing it.

So here’s another really important thought: the marks and the scars make us real. This is REAL life. Not cushion, comfort, or simply cruising but crushing. The things that leave a mark confirm we have been living. The only way past fear is through fear and Bear says fear is a constant part of every journey map.

Fire To Move Forward Don’t allow discouragement to take a foothold. You have to move forward when everything in you wants to give up. Those are hard times. You might be having one of those times right now. Lean into it and find the fire to move forward. He calls this finding the extra. It’s a small word, but important. Because it’s the difference between ordinary and extraordinary.

When you look around and you see everyone else giving up, let that be your trigger to give more. I heard this statistic recently and may have even shared it on a previous episode, but physical trainers believe that our minds want to quit somewhere between 40% and 60% of our actual physical capacity.

Back in episodes 078 and 079, Brandon Bruce addressed this when we were talking about his massive bike rides for Alzheimer’s fund raising events. He said one way he increased his mental endurance was by always reminding himself that he could ride twice as far as he had ridden. That kind of endurance is needed for life.

Remember, you can handle twice the adversity you’ve seen – bring it because you can take it. What if David had thought he had met his max battling a lion and a bear? Do you think Goliath would have fallen that day? I don’t. Your struggle produces growth.

Blow On The Ember Bear says it only takes an ember to ignite that flame. Hang onto those embers so you can fan the flame of endurance! Never. Give. Up. The storms make you strong. And that leads to Bear’s final “F” word.

Faith You will need faith to keep going. He says that the summit is coming. We all have our Mt. Everest to conquer, but it’s up to you to silence the voice of doubt.

Where does your strength to persist come from? Bear finds his strength and power in Christ. He calls life a journey of courage. As a result, he chooses not to walk that journey alone. A critical aspect of his relationship with Jesus is that he is known, loved, and forgiven – even when falling and failing.

Final Thoughts I’ll leave you with these final thoughts from Mr. Grylls. Your dreams will require failure and the presence of fear. If they aren’t present, then your dreams aren’t big enough. Never. Give. Up.

You will find true wealth in being grateful and kind. Seek humility and know your place. Don’t be an idiot – so remember you are lucky to be alive! Be kind and helpful.

True wealth is in relationships – so don’t miss out on the true value in life. YOU ARE VALUABLE, SO STAND TALL!

Resources Mentioned In This Episode: The Leader to Leader Podcast Episode 141: Global Leadership Summit Takeaways Part One

The Leader to Leader Podcast Episode 142: Global Leadership Summit Takeaways Part Two

The Leader to Leader Podcast Episode 143: Global Leadership Summit Takeaways Part Three

Thanks for Listening! I want to hear from you! I appreciate your honest feedback so reach out and:

Leave a note in the comment section below.
Email a question to mark@markslemons.com.
Share this show on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

Now, go lead like someone you would want to follow!

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As you probably already know, this is Part Three of a series on my key takeaways from the 2019 Global Leadership Summit. I said that I would follow up with a summary of the leadership tips that I picked up during the August event and man, there was a lot to try to summarize for you! My intent was to only share the most practical and applicable points – those things you could take and then put to use immediately.

Today’s episode captures my attention (and my heart!) just like it did almost five months ago during the Global Leadership Summit. I’ll do my best to convey these points with the same conviction that I felt when they were made to me. This is probably one of the most difficult because I have so much respect for his wisdom and insight.

A Global Leadership Summit Treasure Patrick Lencioni is the author of eleven best-selling books. I hope you’ve heard of them and I hope they are on your shelf! The Five Dysfunctions of a Team should be read by every serious leader. And if you are looking for help with disengaged team members, take a look at The Truth About Employee Engagement.

Dedicated to providing organizations with ideas, products and services that improve teamwork, clarity and employee engagement, Pat’s leadership models serve a diverse base from Fortune 500 companies to professional sports organizations to churches. Let’s get to the content and fill your head with some great thoughts that are sure to provoke growth!

Too Many People Have Influence Pat’s session starts with a comment that on the surface is rather humorous. But like all great jokes, there is more than a smidgen of truth in it. What he said was that a lot fewer people in the world should become a leader. Then he went on to say that a lot of people in the world have influence…and probably shouldn’t!

That candor is classic Lencioni and I find that frankness refreshing. At the same time, it can be disturbing because Pat isn’t talking to others…he’s talking to me! How often do we completely miss valuable content because we’re sitting there thinking “wow, this is great for (fill in the blank) to hear!” or “(fill in the blank) should really listen to this!”

Why Are You Leading? That’s the point: Pat is asking you to evaluate what you have to offer others. What’s at the center of why you are leading? Don’t you think that’s an appropriate question for attendees of the global leadership summit…you know, a room full of leaders? He says there are only two reasons:

To do whatever you need to do to serve the people you need to, or
For rewards like attention, status, or power

Can you answer that question for yourself right now? Why are you leading? It’s important to answer it honestly because if you don’t, you might be disappointed with your results…and you could disappoint others as well. If you are willing to serve others, to meet their needs, then your perspective shifts from what benefits you to what benefits others.

Think about how many responsibilities you have as a leader that will never be rewarded. If you are motivated by the reward, then your performance is going to diminish. How often have you thought that leadership is a sacrifice? I’m guilty – I’ve probably even said it in so many words. Alan Mulally has said that leadership is a privilege and a joy!

Those are certainly two very contrasting views. I hope you don’t view leadership as a pain. It certainly requires effort, but there should be joy in the exertion! So, how do you know if you’re rewards centered? Well, sometimes it’s apparent in what they will attempt to avoid. Pat offers these five signs.

Avoids Difficult Conversations No one enjoys a difficult conversation or confronting poor performance and any other significant issue. Yet, it’s shocking the level of damage that can be done when it’s avoided. I would rather you boldly address a problem and do it poorly than letting it go unchallenged. It’s unhealthy to the team and organization when you avoid issues.

The truth is that the more often we do it, the better we will become. If you aren’t sure how to approach it, then grab another leader and practice! Understandably, preparing in advance, rehearsing and sticking to your points will not only make this survivable but communicate a level of concern to the one you are speaking with that’s missing in off-the-cuff discussions.

Avoids Managing Direct Reports Again, your problems go away if the people do, right?! Rewards-centered leaders avoid having to manage direct reports. Having direct reports means things like monitoring performance, providing guidance and direction. You are likely going to have to get your hands dirty. Patience is required.

Managing means more than just sitting at your desk. A great leader is present. You know what your team is working on. Because you are in tune, you offer coaching – this is critical. Coaching, not doing it for them!

You keep the team aligned and working together. No silos! Maybe most importantly, you stay on top of things. This means no surprises – at least none that generate as a result of team performance. Your team members need and thrive in an accountable environment.

Avoids Running Great Meetings When was the last time someone told you that you run a great meeting? Meetings shouldn’t be a dreaded component of a business day. When conducted efficiently, they are value-adding. Rewards-centered leaders could care less about meetings and they lose interest easily.

Pat says that one of the best ways you can tell if a leader is doing a good job is by attending one of their meetings. When the meeting is inefficient, the leader often is as well. Have you seen the leader who spends the entire meeting looking at their phone, or their email?

I’m not exaggerating here. One of the most important meetings that I attended weekly had a responsible team leader from another part of the organization who literally played games on his phone during the meeting. And, he wasn’t embarrassed when others in the room would call him on it. And that’s exactly what was required to gain his participation.

I’ll leave you with this thought from Pat on bad meetings: bad decisions result from bad meetings. The results can be catastrophic.

Avoids Team-Building Sessions I wish I had a dollar for every time I heard a supposed leader complain about “rah-rah” team-building sessions. A rewards-centered leader views this as a complete waste of time. Once again, disinterested and unable to connect with the purpose or intent of building unity of vision and clarity of purpose, the rewards-centered leader outsources the responsibility.

Some of the best moments in my professional career were the result of team-building sessions. Getting to know another team member’s personality, or how they approach problem-solving was immensely helpful to me. The rewards-centered leader outsources team building to functions like human resources.

Avoids Repeating Important Messages Finally, a rewards-centered leader will never overcommunicate. Once and done, right?! Wrong! I’ve shared multiple times that a message must be communicated up to nine times before team members will hear it. Additionally, some of your messages are so important, you must repeat it daily. Think about safety for example.

Great leaders reinforce messages over and over again because the last time you say something might be the first time someone hears it. Pat goes on to say that you are the CRO: the chief reminding officer. This is how you keep others focused on the task. Repeat it. Frequently!

So, are you leading for all of the right reasons? I’ll wrap up this Global Leadership Summit summary episode with this final thought from Mr. Lencioni: politics and dysfunction thrive in an organization run by rewards-centered leaders. Break the trend and become the only real type of effective leader: a servant leader. Because truly, that is the only type of leader who makes everyone better.

Global Leadership Summit Conclusion Next week, I’ll conclude this series on key learnings from the 2019 Global Leadership Summit with what I learned from Bear Grylls of Man vs. Wild fame. So don’t miss that – you definitely want to hear his unique perspective on learning from hardship and difficulty. You are awesome – and only getting better!

Thanks for Listening! I want to hear from you! I appreciate your honest feedback so reach out and:

Leave a note in the comment section below.
Email a question to mark@markslemons.com.
Share this show on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

Now, go lead like someone you would want to follow!

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Back in August, I attended the 2019 Global Leadership Summit and I said that I would follow up with a summary of the leadership tips that I picked up during the event. While there was so much great content, I’m only able to pick my key takeaways and share them with you in a handful of shorter episodes over the next several weeks. Each episode contains tips that you can put to use immediately. This is Part Two.

The takeaways from this second episode come from Danielle Strickland. If you don’t know who Danielle is, she is a pastor, author, and justice advocate. Having spent 22 years as an officer in the Salvation Army, she is an Ambassador for Stop The Traffik. Her calling is to empower people to transform the world.

Leaders Don’t Just Survive Change I’ve heard Danielle speak several times and she always brings a powerful principle. This session of the Global Leadership Summit was no different! She led with this: leaders don’t just survive change – they thrive in change.

Think about the difference. Imagine this: you run towards what others fear. If it causes the crowd to panic, you grab control. Can you recall a time when you stepped up or into what others had abandoned? In my opinion, change is often responsible for driving away those who are more comfortable managing than leading.

Your Life Is Like A Tree There are so many analogies that others use to give us a different perspective on life. Danielle says that our life is a lot like a tree, specifically, it’s like a fruit tree. I’ve always liked this particular analogy because it requires examination.

I want to take a quick aside here. If you are a great leader, you understand the value of not just introspection, but also extrospection. They are important because they impact the point that Danielle is making. Do you regularly take time to think about you?

Introspection is understanding my emotions, circumstances, and cumulative knowledge. Extrospection would be knowing how this will impact my reaction (potential or actual) to events. As a result, you can think of the combination of these two factors as the reflection that allows you to evaluate why you do/feel what you do/feel. Furthermore, this enables you to see the proverbial writing on the wall and alter undesired behavior before it occurs.

Inspect Your Fruit So, Danielle says that we must confront bad tasting fruit on our tree. She goes on to say that our actions produce the fruit. Fair enough. But where do the actions come from? Our values. Because our values are connected to our behavior, she says that we have to look at our roots to understand our values.

Where are the roots? Most of the time, they are hidden from view and underground. We have a tree in our front yard that is a little more than a year old. When they planted that tree, they put a post for support. But you don’t leave that post in the ground indefinitely, do you?! No! Why? Because if you do, the roots won’t go deep and allow the tree to not only grow, but to stand in adverse conditions.

Danielle describes our roots as deeply held beliefs that feed our tree. Now if you have bad fruit, what do you think that means? Obviously, you better take a look at your roots. What do you believe? Why do you believe that?

Similar to the point Danielle is making, Gandhi once said:

“Your beliefs become your thoughts. Your thoughts become your words. Your words become your actions. Your actions become your habits. Your habits become your values. Your values become your destiny.”

Mahatma Gandhi

On The Way To Better Tasting Fruit She says that we must expose those deeply held beliefs to light and truth. Can they stand up against what is right, honorable, and productive? Or, instead, are they found to be selfish and damaging to self and others?

You can change what you think and believe. This, in turn, will then change your thoughts and actions. And if your actions and values change, then so does your destiny. Walla! Better testing fruit! We all know that this is not easy, simple, or fast. It’s hard work to change what you think/believe…and absolutely necessary.

Danielle says that your productivity depends on what you believe about yourself. Therefore, the key to improving your productivity is evaluating where you need to change. If you are resistant to change, then you are going to have difficulty improving your productivity.

Change: A No-man’s Land She explains why it’s so hard for us to entertain change. Change is like a no-man’s land. You’ve left what you’ve known, but you also haven’t arrived where you are going. I really resonated with this idea. You can’t stay where you’re at, so you embark on a journey of indeterminate length to a new destination!

Here’s the process that Danielle utilizes to describe this transition. She says every change starts with a movement from stability to instability. This period is full of unsettled and disturbing feelings that result in fear. Next, we move from fear back to instability and then to stability again.

Disruption Is Not A Threat She says that disruption is not a threat. It’s simply an invitation to new normals. And if there’s only one thing you remember from today’s episode, I want you to remember this: there is no change to the future if you don’t disrupt the present. Because of this, my encouragement to you today is that you embrace disruption!

Next week, I’ll be sharing what I learned from Patrick Lencioni. So don’t miss that – you definitely want to hear this one. Until then, go embrace some disruption!

Thanks for Listening! I want to hear from you! I appreciate your honest feedback so reach out and:

Leave a note in the comment section below.
Email a question to mark@markslemons.com.
Share this show on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

Now, go lead like someone you would want to follow!

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Back in August, I attended the 2019 Global Leadership Summit and I said that I would follow up with a summary of the leadership tips that I picked up during the event. While I’d love to share it all with you, I’m going to pick my key takeaways and share them in a handful of shorter episodes over the next several weeks. These will be tips that I believe you can put to use immediately. This is Part One.

The takeaways for this first episode come from Craig Groeschel. Craig is a pastor, podcaster, speaker, and New York Times bestselling author. He’s also the global champion for the Global Leadership Summit. This episode is dedicated to the value bombs he dropped during his opening session. So let’s get started!

Everyone Wins When The Leader Wins Everyone wins when the leader gets better. So simple, and so true. Leaders make things happen and every leader must focus on making a way for those around them to improve. A rising tide lifts all ships. You will never regret investing in yourself or others. And PLEASE, stop waiting for someone else to invest in your growth. Take that responsibility for yourself.

Next, was a concept that will be hard to describe without you seeing what I’m talking about. Imagine a graph with QUALITY on the Y-axis (the vertical axis) and COST on the X-axis (the horizontal axis). Now, imagine starting in the left-hand corner of that graph and drawing 60% of a frown. So you start up and to the right, but it starts to slope back down to the right. This graphic represents diminishing returns. What it means is that initially, and early-on, your investment (think in terms of dollars or time) will produce movement up the QUALITY axis.

Diminishing Returns Eventually though, you reach a point where continuing to invest will not only no longer improve the quality, but it actually reduces the quality! Think of it in terms of writing a blog post. Let’s say it takes you an hour to produce something half-way decent. After another hour, the quality of the content is good enough to publish on your website. If you spent another hour on it, you might be able to improve the quality by an additional 5%, but spending more time is only going to provide fractional increases in quality.

GETMO Craig’s point is that our job as leaders is to understand where the inflection point is on the curve. In other words, where does the graph start to curve the wrong way (diminishing returns)? Often, we get to a point where further revision damages the quality rather than improving it. He uses a clever acronym that he calls GETMO as a reminder not to keep pushing towards diminishing returns. What does GETMO stand for you might ask?

Good
Enough
To
Move
On

You’ve heard it before: perfection is often the enemy of progress. Maximize your investment and generate as much return as possible without going down the curve of diminishing returns.

Bend That Curve I love this next thought: Craig asks us to consider how we can bend the curve up so that we obtain higher quality for the same cost. Think about the blog example again. After you’ve been practicing for a while with your writing, it’s likely that you can produce blog content that is of a higher quality for the same time investment. You have essentially bent the curve up. It’s powerful – you’re getting a higher return for an equal or lower investment.

Think Inside The Box…huh?! So how do you bend it? Craig offers two answers. First, think inside the box. If you are like me, that probably messes with your head a bit because we emphasize thinking outside of it. He offers this insight to help us wrap our minds around the point.

Thinking outside the box introduces inefficiency because there are unlimited options. Constraints drive creativity. As Plato would say, necessity is the mother of invention.

You find this frequently in Kaizen Events. Because work expands to fill the time-frame you allocate, you intentionally keep it short. A Kaizen Event might only be three days long, but it’s intense – full attention is required. This is the type of constraint Craig is talking about.

If you will constrain your budget, constrain your time, constrain your options, then the likelihood that you can bend the curve up increases accordingly. Craig says that the constraint leads to the breakthrough! I think that’s pretty exciting – and sensible – given that you don’t have an unlimited supply of resources (human, financial, time, etc.).

What can you do with what you’ve got? We all need a little MacGyver at times. Well, I’ve got this shoestring, this potato, and this piece of gravel – yep, got everything I need to make build a working proton torpedo!

Burn The Ships Here’s the second answer Craig offers to the question of how we bend the curve: burn the ships. It’s the famous phrase uttered by the Spanish Conquistador Hernando Cortez once they landed on the shores of the Yucatan in Mexico. There was no plan b. Everyone is committed to selling out. No excuses, no turning back.

In order to reach this level of commitment, the team has to understand the WHAT. As Brene Brown says, clear is kind. There’s no room for ambiguity here. As a leader, we don’t just cast vision. We provide clarity of purpose.

As you know, mental ascent to the WHAT doesn’t work without a burning desire for the WHY. Who cares? What does this matter? To us? To the team? Does it change the lives of our customers? How about our stakeholders. Why are we bothering with this?

If you are completely committed to the WHAT and consumed by the WHY, then Craig says you figure out the HOW.

It’s bold and risky when you sell out to a path of action. But you don’t have a choice. Now isn’t the time for timidity. You will get to choose. Will you concentrate on your doubts, your insecurities, and all of those negative voices ringing in your head? Instead, choose to step into confidence!

Everyone wins when the leader gets better! It’s up to you to work with the resources available to figure out how to bend the curve!

Thanks for Listening! I want to hear from you! I appreciate your honest feedback so reach out and:

Leave a note in the comment section below.
Email a question to mark@markslemons.com.
Share this show on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

Now, go lead like someone you would want to follow!

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I know this happens to you at times. You hear something, and then you hear it multiple times and all of a sudden, you recognize that you need to sit up and pay attention! That happened to me recently. It started with a simple reminder: consistency is foundational to our effectiveness. But it didn’t end there – I heard it multiple times in a matter of a couple of days. I knew it was time that we revisited the topic of consistency together. And it wasn’t just consistency. It was connected to the difficulty of things worthwhile.

Consistency: Critical Trait For Great Leaders Here’s my fear and I know it’s a bit irrational. My fear is that once I dedicate an episode or two to a specific topic, I fear that you might tire of hearing it again. Truly, I’ve got a special place in my heart for consistency. I know how important this trait is in great leaders.

I dedicated a couple of episodes to it: LTL 052: Why Consistency Is King and LTL 087: The 180-Degree Leader And The Power Of Consistency were released in 2018. Both more than a year ago.

But you heard me say recently that a message has to be repeated as many as nine times for it to take hold and make a difference. And I heard this point about consistency no less than four times 48 hours along with another critical point: John Maxwell recently said on his podcast that everything worthwhile is uphill. There are no shortcuts or easy paths to things we currently, or eventually will come to, cherish.

So, because this topic is super important, I’m going to spend a few minutes unloading a massive amount of value in a short period of time.

Don’t worry – all of this is in the show notes and you’ll be able to check it out on markslemons.com. Don’t try to write it down. Today, I want you to think about the words I’m saying. And then I want you to think about what it means to put them into practice in your life. I want you to visualize implementing what you are hearing/learning. Some of this is not new, but all of it will change your life if implemented.

Make Sure You Are Repeating Right Actions First, what do you think of when I say consistency? You can be consistently bad at something and it will likely wreck your results. To clarify, doing the same thing over and over doesn’t produce great results when it’s the wrong thing over and over. Aristotle said, “…virtues are formed in man by his doing the right actions.” Our success is based on establishing a regular routine of practicing our habits…specifically, the good habits.

Eric Holtzclaw wrote an article for Inc. back in 2012 where he formed five rules around consistency. His first rule? Measure the results. Is what you’re doing consistently moving the needle?

Measure Results Don’t judge it too early or too late. He recommends waiting for at least six months to evaluate the effectiveness of your habit. Sometimes it’s a matter of making simple changes versus a complex overhaul.

Maybe what you are doing only requires a slight modification. Consistency rewards patience, so don’t be too hasty with your changes. Small changes can often bring big rewards.

Be Accountable Next, Eric advises that you be accountable. Often, it’s difficult to measure effective accountability. So an example here might be helpful. Brendon Burchard says that part of being accountable is having clarity. You establish clarity. The most successful leaders seek clarity for everything they do.

If you tell your team that you are going to run effective meetings, then be accountable to that goal. One way you can do this is to make sure that you bring clarity to every meeting you attend. Whether you initiated it or not! You make sure that everyone understands the purpose, the intention, the aim, the goal, and/or the desired outcome. If it doesn’t exist, then the meeting adjourns until you can define clarity.

Consistency With Clarity Consistency in this regard will make it clearly obvious when clarity is absent. Everyone will see it. If you want accountability, then make everyone who sees it accountable to say it when they see it. Not just with you, but with each other.

Brendon says that this level of clarity is required not only in meetings but in every act of a leader’s day. The most successful leaders are those who have clarity for each moment. Are you demonstrating consistency in developing clarity? For everything you do? Every day?

Surprisingly, this was new to me. As a result, I realize I’m not nearly as intentional as I need to be with regard to my daily activity. Think about it. Do you have clarity about why you are doing what you are doing each moment? This is challenging for me.

Why Are You Listening Today? That means you better know why you are listening to this podcast today. In your mind, have you already determined to extract value from the 10 or 15 minutes we spend together today? If not, this might just be noise and filler. Muda (the Japanese word for waste). Not because there isn’t value, but because you aren’t extracting it.

Obviously, this is true for every area of life. Brendon would tell you that clarity of purpose for everything you do is a key ingredient in producing the outcomes you desire. Remember, we are creating value from our consistency.

In an interview with Brendon, Brian Tracy shares a quote from Goethe, the famous German philosopher. Before I share that quote though, I want you to know that I have a link in the show notes for you if you want to watch that interview. You can also get Brendon’s new book called High-Performance Habits for just the cost of shipping and handling for a limited time. It also includes an audio version of the book which is pretty cool.

Everything Is Hard Before It Is Easy Anyway, during the interview, Brian brings up the German philosopher’s infamous quote that “everything is hard before it’s easy.” If you want to make a positive change in your life, you can bet that if it’s worth doing, it will be difficult.

Just ask someone who had to work to lose 50 lbs. Or someone who stopped eating sugar, bread, or gluten. Have you spoken to someone who learned a new trade recently? How naturally did that come to them? The truth is, as Mr. Maxwell said at the beginning of this podcast, everything worthwhile is uphill. There is no coasting to achieve something meaningful.

I want to leave you with two final points today. First, Brendon notes that to make change last, you must raise necessity. He says that all of the most successful leaders regardless of industry, have the ability to understand the need to ramp up their energy.

Raising Necessity And Ramping Up Energy They are able to assess why “I must succeed at this right now, in this very moment.” It goes without saying that they rise to the occasion. Each one understanding why it’s necessary that I win here.

A leader has an uncanny ability to raise the stakes for themselves. They make their performance matter! When it comes to motivation, a leader provides their own. So, can you see how important it is to do this with ongoing consistency?

Simply put, this ties nicely back to the idea of clarity. Because they have taken the time to understand the outcome they are targeting, they also know exactly what’s at stake. As the saying goes, failure is not an option.

For each person, the “why I must succeed at this” will be different. Your motivations will be different than mine. Neither is invalid or less meaningful.

What Is Your Why Both are critical for you and me to feel that it’s not only good but necessary to win in this very moment. Friedrich Nietzsche famously said, “He who has a why to live can bear almost any how.” And that’s a good thing…because anything worthwhile is uphill.

If you are going to spend the effort getting uphill, you better make sure your training partner is consistency.

Resources Mentioned In This Episode: The Leader to Leader Podcast Episode 052: Why Consistency Is King

The Leader to Leader Podcast Episode 087: The 180-Degree Leader And The Power Of Consistency

Brian Tracy’s Interview with Brendon Bruchard

Eric Holtzclaw’s Inc. post Power of Consistency: 5 Rules

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Leave a note in the comment section below.
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Isn’t it awesome when you run into validation for a perspective unexpectedly, especially when it’s from an authority that you respect? As you know, I’m a proponent of not allowing others to control my future due to unforgiveness. Episodes 136 and 137 were dedicated to the issue of resentment and the problems it causes us as leaders when we don’t resolve it. It can sometimes lead to a controversy regarding forgiveness.

So I came across a post from someone who I admire greatly in the LinkedIn community. I always read his comments because he strikes me as well-balanced, genuine, with a high degree of integrity. His name is Mark A. Smith and he’s a speaker, writer, editor, and Sr VP of Sales at Frontpoint. He was commenting on a question that had been posted to Liz Ryan who is the Founder and CEO of Human Workplace, also an author.

So here’s the question posted to Liz:

Q. My ex-boss from two jobs ago sent me a connection invitation on LinkedIn, with a long note gushing about what a great coworker I was. Spare me. He was horrible to me. I quit without having another job. I guess he is job hunting. That’s the only reason he would reach out to me.

What should I do? I’m not going to connect to him. He did not apologize for or even acknowledge the brutal way he treated me.

Before I give you Liz’s response, I want you to put yourself in this person’s shoes. A horrible manager that drove you to quit your job seems to be “making nice” and wants to connect – no apology for the past. What would you do?

It’s easy to be overly simplistic because it didn’t happen to us. Maybe think about something painful that did happen to you. What if it was that person? Could you operate in forgiveness with them?

Frankly, Liz’s response surprised me. Here’s her answer:

A. Ghost him. You are not responsible for checking your LinkedIn inbox on anybody else’s timetable, or at all. Many if not most evil bosses have amnesia when they run into you years later. They remember what a great coworker you were, but forget what a snarling beast they were.

So Mark typically calls a spade a spade and doesn’t hide his feelings. Here’s what he said in comment to Liz’s post:

This is atrocious advice. The strong act. The weak are acted upon. Forgiveness is the supreme act. Forgiving freely shows tremendous mental and emotional fortitude and takes away any power that negativity once had over you. Forgiveness is merciful to the offender and redeeming to the offended. He may not have known how brutal he was. If you are a powerful person, you won’t be afraid to tell him. Doing so maybe his chance to change, and that kind of change can have far-reaching implications in the lives of anyone he impacts. If he’s still a jerk, well, you tried. Your hands will be clean.

Years ago in the mortgage industry I had a truly terrible regional boss (my direct boss was terrific). He was condescending, added stress to my life, and never helped me once. A few years later, after the crash, he reached out to me. He told me he had some forced clarity and could see what a schmuck he was to me, and others – he wanted to apologize. He was sincere and it was plain to see he really was trying to change. I forgave him and now think fondly of him. If I would’ve ghosted him, I would’ve missed that redeeming experience. Forgive. Early and often.

This isn’t popular. Especially with people who feel victimized. As one comment stated:

I’m appalled at the number of people suggesting forgiveness and acceptance of an abuser. I’m deeply struggling to understand what having this high percentage of people in the workplace next to me means for those of us who have been/get abused in the workplace. Quite frankly, it’s terrifying! Forgiveness in her heart someday, sure, for her own spiritual growth, but that does not require interaction with him ever, not if she doesn’t want it to.

And I want to point out a few things. First, I don’t advocate acceptance of abuse or treating it as if it’s inconsequential. People must be held accountable for their behavior in the workplace. But forgiveness isn’t tied to the correct outcome.

Second, if you have been, or are, abused in the workplace, then you know that it’s your responsibility to say something and work to stop it. Leaders act. They certainly don’t risk that silence might mean it happens to someone else.

Third, I want to point out that the sex of the victim was not revealed in the post. This comment assumed a man abused a woman, but that’s not in the original post or response. Why is this important? Because unacceptable behavior doesn’t only target one sex. Unacceptable is unacceptable whether it happens to a man or a woman. Forgiveness isn’t dependent on sex either.

The woman noted that she’s terrified of the “high percentage of people in the workplace next to me” who are willing to forgive even those who have abused them. I’m more terrified by those who are unwilling to forgive. I would not wish a future of bitterness and hostility on anyone.

And what does this mean to those around you who God-forbid if they ever make a mistake because now they may become one of the unforgiven? Don’t allow this sad way of living to impose it’s control on you.

You don’t have to be friends with that person, you don’t have to hang out and pretend bad things never happened. You don’t even have to connect with them on LinkedIn. But for your sake, you have to be able to move forward by forgiving.

It reminded me of another media posting I saw this week that I want to share with you. It was an experience where the poster was sharing a challenge she had getting her money refunded from a well known MLM company. She was getting brutalized in the comment section – mostly by those defending this particular MLM – for describing her experience which wasn’t like theirs.

Then she did one of the most admirable things I’ve ever seen – she told people how it happened. Then, she offered some forgiveness to herself.

This woman (I’ll call her Tracy) had been approached by a girlfriend (Amanda) to hang out together, just some girl time, right? Well, it would appear that it was a little more calculated than that on the part of Amanda. When Tracy arrived at Amanda’s home, Amanda said she and her husband, Tim, had started a new business. Amanda wanted to know if Tracy would be willing to allow Tim to “practice” his really rough presentation on her.

Most of you have probably sat through a presentation like that, some of you may have been the ones who gave a presentation like that. Hopefully, none of you were deceitful in your approach. There are few things more painful in a friendship than being deceived by someone you thought was a friend.

Tracy was didn’t see that coming. Now, she’s on the spot and agrees. Not because she has any interest, but because she feels awkward saying ‘No.’ Which, by the way, is always the best answer when you aren’t sure. But you can relate – I mean she’s already at Amanda’s house. So, Tim proceeds with the presentation and Tracy realizes this isn’t just practice, there’s an ask: they want her to sign up.

Now she feels super weird and wonders how this affects her relationship with Amanda if she says ‘No.’ She doesn’t want to crush their dreams and so, thinking that she’s being polite, she signs up at a cost of a little more than $300…with the intention of immediately canceling and getting her money back. So literally, the comments are attacking her for being honest about how it all came down and her chosen approach to make her way out of the mess.

So, I said she did something super admirable. After telling everyone how it happened, she admitted what she wished she would have done differently. First, she wished she had told Amanda ‘No’ when asked about the presentation. She was acknowledging that in the moment, she could not find the strength or courage to say ‘No.’

If only she let Tim and Amanda know that she didn’t have any desire to participate after the presentation. She recognized and admitted that she handled the whole situation incorrectly. It was refreshing to see her owning everything that she could have done differently.

I feel like this is imperative. It’s the try, fail, learn, improve, reenter process perfectly executed. We try something, make a mistake, learn from it, change how we do it in the future, and reenter the fray! We offer forgiveness to others and ourselves and keep moving forward. Isn’t that what our lives should look like as leaders?

Resources Mentioned In This Episode: Amy Robles site thinkenriched.com

The Leader to Leader Podcast Episode 136: Why Leaders Can’t Afford The High Cost Of Resentment

The Leader to Leader Podcast Episode 137: Move Past Resentment To Take Control Of Your Future

Thanks for Listening! I want to hear from you! I appreciate your honest feedback so reach out and:

Leave a note in the comment section below.
Email a question to mark@markslemons.com.
Share this show on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

Now, go lead like someone you would want to follow!

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Have you ever blown it? I knew it…you are! I tell people all the time that those who listen to my podcast are perfect – they don’t need me because they don’t struggle with human things! Ha! If only that were true. It’s hard to talk about being humble because media often represents humility as weakness.

Regardless of your political leanings or affections, have you ever seen a less humble man than President Trump? Actually, I have. To clarify, the world is littered with arrogant and unapologetic men and women.

Humility is strength. It’s the ability to admit when you’re wrong and to identify or admit your flaws or shortcomings. But taken to an unhealthy extreme, it can lead to shame. And we must avoid shame.

I’ve never been a fan of the saying “Shame on you.” And that’s because shame identifies with worthlessness or being unworthy. It’s due to how shame makes you feel. Shame makes you want to hide your face or run away. It’s feeling like the exposure will guarantee that no one will ever want anything to do with you again. Ever. So, is that how you want (or how you want others!) to feel?

People often contend with shame by attacking themselves or attacking others. And can you blame them? Have you seen how injured animals behave? I’m not saying people are animals but I am saying that feeling cornered and hurt, lashing out shouldn’t be unexpected. Similarly, you’ve heard the saying that hurt people hurt people. Shame built part of that foundation.

Who’s hurting in your world? Do you see them? Do you notice them? Are you connecting with them or do you avoid them? Each living, breathing human has inherent worth. Not just you and me, but all those we disagree with as well. Not just the ones that look like us or think like us, but even the ones who rub us the wrong way!

I guess what I’m asking you today is whether you can practice humility, laugh at your mistakes or yourself, deal with the embarrassing missteps we all make and prevent the slide into shame? As leaders, we get to set the example. It’s our job to show people how to lead with strength even when we’ve made mistakes.

Because humility isn’t only required when experiencing mistakes, I want to share with you a few examples of humility in action when experiencing success. Success isn’t always what it appears to be. Consequently, neither the journey or the amount of effort is accurately represented.

I heard Dave Ramsey say one time how misguided people are when assessing his success. During an EntreLeadership podcast episode, he described the mountain top of success as literally just standing on the top of all my failures. Dave said that he refused to let his failures bury him.

In spite of failure, you have to keep digging deeper to find, and hold onto, that determination that you will come out on top! But this is true for all successful people. We just don’t see it as clearly.

So, sometimes humility shows up when we acknowledge that our success isn’t at all how it appears to others. And it’s noteworthy to point out the possibility that this is not success at all! Have you heard the analogy of climbing the ladder of success only to find it was leaning against the wrong wall? Is it possible that because of success, you lost things that were far more valuable than the prize you were pursuing?

Humility isn’t shy about identifying the hard work and preparation that paved the way for success. Rather than being embarrassed about it, humility honors the sacrifice required to reach this pinnacle and all those who preceded us. And this leads to one of the most admirable traits of a great leader: she recognizes that the contribution of each individual produced the result of achieving this milestone.

I’ll bet you hadn’t thought of humility like that before! When we are frank about our effort, we kill the notion that just any old level of commitment can produce this result. We also kill the notion that putting in the effort guarantees the outcome. Sometimes humility is forced to acknowledge that we can’t say exactly why it worked this time!

John Maxwell, Michael Hyatt and Dave Ramsey all talk about the Momentum Theorem as it relates to leadership. And the principle is this: when you have momentum, you look smarter than you really are. Everything appears to be easy.

It’s like a flywheel that was already in motion. It appears to be spinning effortlessly and consequently is going to take significant resistance to slow it down. We know that objects in motion tend to stay in motion – in other words, it’s easier to keep it going than it is to stop and start again.

This is the one thing I want you to remember from today’s episode: while humility acknowledges all that went into moving the flywheel, it’s critically important to keep the wheel turning. In other words, don’t allow your team to lose momentum! It’s much, much easier to sustain even small amounts of momentum than stopping and having to get it going again.

It applies personally and professionally. The flip-side of the Momentum Theorem, when applied to leadership, is this: when you don’t have momentum, you look dumber than you are!

There will be times when it looks like you have no idea what you are doing. When you start with practical steps to initiate some momentum, just like the flywheel, you are going to encounter a lot of resistance. Don’t let that stop you!

You will have to scrape and claw for every inch of progress. Think of it this way: the flywheel has come to rest and you have to initiate movement again. This takes massive effort. Once it’s spinning and the team is benefitting as a result, it’s much easier to sustain and some of the resistance (not all) will diminish.

So be humble in your failure and success while focusing on maintaining momentum so you can move yourself and your team on to the next big achievement!

Resources Mentioned In This Episode: The Leader to Leader Podcast Episode 136: Why Leaders Can’t Afford The High Cost Of Resentment

The Leader to Leader Podcast Episode 137: Move Past Resentment To Take Control Of Your Future

Thanks for Listening! I want to hear from you! I appreciate your honest feedback so reach out and:

Leave a note in the comment section below.
Email a question to mark@markslemons.com.
Share this show on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

Now, go lead like someone you would want to follow!

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I’m excited about today’s episode. Last week, in Episode 136, I talked about why leaders can’t afford the high cost of resentment. Well, today I’m going to show you how to move past resentment to take control of your future.

Initially, you might be wondering why this matters. It’s a reasonable question. Furthermore, it would appear that many people have used resentment as a form of motivation. Instead of getting past resentment, it seems that storing it up fueled their success.

Surprisingly, this doesn’t work out the way you might think. Imagine that one person who you have always sought approval from – the one who you looked up to, admired, or revered the most. The one who you dreamed of getting a “great job” or an “I’m proud of you” or an “I love you” and truly meant it when they said it.

Instead, that one told you that you would never amount to anything. That one crushed your spirit verbally, emotionally, and physically. That one not only made you feel worthless but also made sure to point out every single action you took that validated their assessment of you: worthless.

Listen to me: no amount of achievement, whatever that looks like to you, will remove the sting of those words. As a result, no amount of money, accolades, trophies, recognition, or publicity can make up for what you wanted to hear from that person. It’s because you are designed to be relational. The other stuff is secondary – I didn’t say it doesn’t matter; I’m saying that people matter and how they behave toward us matters.

Because no matter how much fuel you have to stoke the fire of performance and achievement, you are actually allowing someone else to control your future. And that fuel is inexhaustible. In other words, you will never reach a level of performance that you can look back and say, “There – now I know I’m valuable to you. Or “There, now I know you will love me.”

Why? Because you can’t control what someone else does, says, or thinks as a result of your actions. If that person that you can’t please dies tomorrow, are you done living because now you have no one to prove wrong? Of course not. What I’m advocating is that there’s a better way. But you will have to move past resentment to take back control of your future. So trust me, you have a future worth living!

So to break it down, I’m going to summarize parts of a brilliant post written 10 years ago by James J. Messina. The title of the post is Handling Resentment. If this doesn’t help you to move past resentment, then I want you to let me know.

First, what is it? How can we define resentment? We need to know what it looks like if we are going to move past resentment. Consider the following:

harboring animosity against a person or group of people whom I feel has mistreated me
anger over a negative event earlier in life that I have not taken time to resolve
seething, aching, emotional turmoil I feel whenever a certain person is present or a past event comes up in discussion
feeling unjustly victimized with no resolution to the problem or simply suffering in silence

Mr. Messina refers to it as a cancer that robs you of contentment in your life and could potentially be the source of your depression. You have to deal with it because it can destroy you.

So, how does it start? There are so many ways because as humans, we are really good at hurting each other! Think about these:

accepting negative treatment from others passively, never expressing negative feelings about it
agreeing to do something for others while feeling taken for granted or taken advantage of
seeing others succeed who have not worked as hard as I have
my good work or competency goes without recognition while others who are more in favor get that recognition I crave
feeling embarrassment as a result of someone intentionally belittling me
experiencing consistent rejection, lack of approval, and abandonment by another
being the object of discrimination or prejudice
trying my best to please someone but no matter how well I did, it was never good enough

Okay, so we now know what it looks like and how it starts. How does it affect me?

I’m touchy or on edge when I’m around or think of the one I resent
I deny any anger or hatred against those whom I resent
feel angry when the one I resent gets recognition or accolades
seemingly stuck in my efforts to grow as a person
refuse to forgive past offenses and hurts
can’t get on with my life
will not open up to trust others, especially in new relationships

Does this sound like the kind of person you can’t wait to be around? If you had to choose who you would spend time with, would you choose this person? Is this the one you would select to learn from or to model behavior you want to emulate? Of course not!

James points out that all of this culminates in irrational thinking. Is it any surprise then that we start thinking everyone is out to get me? That no one wants me to succeed? Maybe we take it one step further: others are actively working against me so that I will fail.

It’s all about who you know. I’m without merit or value, an utter and complete failure. Actually, I’m guaranteed to be a failure in anything I do. Wow, I hope you find yourself in some of these thoughts. They are contagious and breed without stopping…until you stop them.

Get a grip on yourself. I said in the previous episode that leaders own their results. And we certainly don’t allow others to control our future. Don’t allow yourself to abdicate responsibility for your life. Everyone else is not to blame for my life. You are an overcomer, so act like one!

It doesn’t do any good to talk about what resentment looks like without talking about how to move past resentment and regain control. If you aren’t helpless, then what can you do?

Look for it! Where is resentment hiding? What is your commitment level to moving past resentment? It’s more comfortable to stay where you’re at and continue to ruminate on your negative emotions. Forgiveness is hard. I don’t think you can or should forget, but I do think you choose to forgive.

Am I stuck because of the resentment I feel? Here’s another great challenge. Can I list the people or events that I resent? Am I willing to work to forgive that person or myself for allowing it? How would it feel to let go of that? I promise you that there is peace on the other side of forgiveness.

The crazy part is that we have shackled ourselves to our pain. The great news is that you can also free yourself! You don’t have to look to others for approval or recognition. Get it from yourself! Set a goal and achieve it. Look at the innumerable resources available to improve your self-esteem.

No one can stop you from making a better you! Choose one thing. Decide that you are going to improve one aspect of your life and do it. Nothing is stopping you. Affirm yourself – yes, tell yourself how great you are. I’m not talking about arrogance, I’m talking about countering all the negative crap you’ve been pumping into your head and heart.

Change it! Visualize and imagine what it feels like to be successful at this one thing you have chosen. Picture how it feels to be happy with yourself! What does it feel like to be a winner? Not because you got the promotion, not because you lost the weight, not because you made the team, you win because you are working on being the best you that you can be. Anyone can do that!

Is it easy? No, if it was easy you wouldn’t even be in this position to start with. Don’t kid yourself. You spent years, maybe decades, building the belief system you have in place right now. You aren’t going to dismantle that overnight. And you probably aren’t going to be able to do it alone.

You need people that you can rely on to be honest with you. Maybe it’s a group of close friends, maybe it’s a spouse, maybe it’s a counselor, psychologist, coach, or therapist. What you don’t need are enablers. You know who I’m talking about. You don’t need to be running to bitter, angry, hostile people for advice on how to deal with your resentment.

So if you don’t have a pen, then you will need to check out the show notes because I’m going to give you the five steps that Mr. Messina recommends to move past resentment.

Step 1: Identify who the people are that I resent and what they did to make me resentful. Write it down, no shortcuts. As I write each one down, ask

How real or imagined are these offenses?
What has the specific resentment against each of these people done to my attitude about me and my future?
How paralyzed am I in my efforts toward personal growth by the resentment I carry toward each of these people?

Step 2: Develop a new way of looking at my past, present and future life. To do this, I need to write down the answer to the following questions:

What irrational thinking am I locked into because of my resentment?
How will ridding myself of resentment help me to develop a positive belief system in my life?
How can I loosen the bonds and work out the anger over those I resent?
What blocks my attempts to express my anger openly?
How hard am I working at overcoming my blocks to anger?
What new behavior do I need to develop to freely express my anger and rid myself of energy-draining resentment?
What new rational thinking do I need to develop to overcome the negative impact of my resentment?
How will my life be positively impacted by getting rid of my resentment?
What new behavior do I need to develop to ensure that new resentment doesn’t arise?
What new attitudes and approaches do I need to develop after ridding myself of resentment?

Step 3: Now that I’ve considered a change in attitude and belief system, I need to:

Write a letter (I will never send these letters so I can be brutally honest and straight forward in them) to each person I resent. In it list all real or imagined offenses.
Try to explain why each person treated me badly. Was it real or imagined?
Forgive each person, letting go of the offenses

Step 4: Once I’ve let go of all of my resentment, visualize my life, present and future, without the negative impact of resentment. Write this vision down and affirm its reality daily.

Step 5: If I am still bogged down by the negative effects of resentment, then I need to go back to Step 1 and begin again.

Wow, that sounds like a lot of work Mark. I know. That’s because it is a lot of work. And as a result of this work, you will move past resentment and take back control of your future. So, yeah, it’s not easy. What price are you willing to pay for relief?

My sincere thanks to Mr. James Messina for posting his article. Check it out (the link is in the show notes) when you have a moment. Let’s commit to move past resentment – life is too short and you are too awesome to allow others to control your future.

Resources Mentioned In This Episode: The Leader to Leader Podcast Episode 136: Why Leaders Can’t Afford The High Cost Of Resentment

James J. Messina post on Livestrong.com titled Handling Resentment

Thanks for Listening! I want to hear from you! I appreciate your honest feedback so reach out and:

Leave a note in the comment section below.
Email a question to mark@markslemons.com.
Share this show on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

Now, go lead like someone you would want to follow!

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It’s usually not my intention to allow the introduction to direct the content for a podcast, but I felt like that needed to happen today. I want to share a couple of stories with you that are examples of why leaders can’t afford the high cost of resentment.

And while this might be a little longer than usual, I think it’s important because I want to give you an example of what I’m talking about. After a meeting this week, I wanted to grab a few mins at the gym before heading home. So, I jumped in the truck and headed toward the gym. At the intersection where the gym is located, there had been a serious accident. Several vehicles were on tow trucks and one of them facing the wrong direction toward oncoming traffic. So obviously it was significant.

Even as I’m telling you this, my heart goes out to the people who were involved. I don’t know if you’ve ever had an accident, but it’s a terrible feeling – especially if you caused it! There were people traumatized sitting on the sidewalk being attended to by emergency personnel. Shell-shocked is a good way to describe the scene with many tears. I don’t expect this was done on purpose and whether texting, running a light, or distracted by someone in the car, or a favorite song on the radio, it’s likely that someone regrets a moment of inattention to the most important thing we can do while driving: drive!

So I couldn’t reach the gym because they were redirecting traffic. I turned right, went up a couple of blocks, and made a u-turn. In the midst of all of this, I had not realized that there was also road construction happening right before that intersection as well.

So I make my u-turn and they have barriers set up to direct traffic into a single lane (it’s a three-lane road) while they are working on spot paving repairs for two of the lanes. There’s a break in the barriers so it looks like I can turn right out of this left-hand lane into the parking lot for the center where my gym is located.

So I pass some of the road construction equipment and cross through the break in the barrier ONLY TO REALIZE THAT THE ENTRANCE HAS FOUR CONES ACROSS IT PREVENTING ACCESS! Man, I’m in a mess now. I can’t get back out to the left lane I was in. There’s construction in front of me and behind me.

Additionally, there are two or three cars behind me trying to do the same thing I’m doing! At this point, I know that I made a big mistake. So I do the only thing I can. I get out of the truck and move two cones so I can enter the parking lot. I didn’t put the cones back because I knew the other couple of cars were coming in behind me.

By the way, did I mention how foolish I felt at this instant? Major OOPS! As I’m getting back into the truck, I see one of the road construction guys and I can see he’s pretty upset. I can’t hear him, but I see him on the bucket loader throwing his hands up in the air like “what the heck are you doing idiot?” So I yelled “Sorry!” and then pulled in and parked.

Now I could have left it there. But instead, I made the incredibly long walk back across the parking lot to the area where they were working. The cones were back in place (I suspect one of the crew took care of that). I saw the guy on the bucket loader and approached. I was able to explain that I didn’t realize the entrance was closed and offered my apology again. He was fine, but it was awkward for me.

As a leader, you always own your mistakes. If you don’t, then you leave situations like that creating misrepresentations. What do you mean? I mean this: if I don’t own it, then the guy on the front-end loader thinks all drivers are idiots who don’t care about the safety of themselves or the people working the project.

If I don’t own it, then I think all construction workers are easy to aggravate and have zero tolerance for mistakes made by drivers who are in an unfamiliar situation. Neither of these misrepresentations is accurate. In this instance, I was a bonehead.

Since I have significant safety training, in hindsight, I recognize the mistake. I should have gone to the intersection, turned right, and turned right again into the parking lot. Clearly, it would have been a better choice than my apparent short-cut that became a long-cut.

This is a rather trivial example and a great analogy of what happens in our teams regularly. There are reasons for the circumstances we find ourselves in – and believe it or not, you don’t know the entire context. You have a limited perspective. My knowledge grew as I was exposed to more and more information. The initial accident was quite possibly the result of the construction.

I didn’t even know about the construction when I made my choice to u-turn and come back to the gym. Obviously, I didn’t know about the access to the parking lot being obstructed.

I make a mistake as a result of my ignorance, my lack of information. Imagine if, instead of owning it and the difficulty or danger that I created for others, I ignore it. Or worse, I pretend that it’s really how this should be done. My arrogance, ignorance, or stubbornness cause damage to the team’s ability to operate optimally.

As a leader, that’s not acceptable. When we allow excuses or blame to take the place of acknowledging what could be improved, what I should have done differently, trouble is coming. And there is a very real cost for not addressing these issues. When you allow resentment to persist, when you start to become a victim or nurse the wrongs that have been done to you, you change. And not for the better.

And here’s the irony. I mentioned this back in Episode 127: Overcoming Your Pain To Step Into Your Greatness. If you missed it, make a note and go back to listen to it. The irony is this: by hanging on to resentment, you are giving another person control over your life. That is the antithesis, the very opposite, of leadership. Leaders own their results.

So don’t take my word for it. Take a look at what Dr. Leon Seltzer said is the cost of resentment in an article he wrote for Psychology Today:

Prolongs mental and emotional pain—and may even exacerbate it
Leads to long-lasting anxiety and/or depression
Precipitates vengeful acts that put you at further risk for being hurt or victimized—and possibly engulf you in a never-ending, self-defeating cycle of getting even
Prevents you from experiencing the potential joys of living fully in the present—vs. dwelling self-righteously on the past wrongs inflicted on you
Creates or deepens an attitude of distrust and cynicism—qualities that contribute to hostility and paranoid thinking, as well as an overall sense of pessimism. Such a bleak perspective prompts others to turn away from you!
Interferes with your cultivating healthy, satisfying relationships, and lead you to doubt, or disparage, your connection to others
Compromises or weakens your higher ideals, and adversely impacts your personal search for purpose and meaning in life
Robs you of vital energy far better employed to help you realize your desires, or achieve goals that you coveted earlier
Undermine your physical health. The chronic anger that is bitterness can raise your stress baseline, thereby taxing your immune system
Blinds you from recognizing your own role, or responsibility, in possibly having been vindictively harmed by another
By keeping you in a paradoxical state of “vengeful bondage,” erodes your sense of well-being.

Many of those should cause you to shudder. The cost is too high to drag around your resentment. You can’t afford it. It will cause your emotional bankruptcy. So stop.

Okay, maybe you say “You are convincing me that there is a better way.” But how do I let go of these things that caused real hurt, pain, and disadvantage? First, let me say that the pain you felt is real. You have been wronged. You were the recipient, in many cases, of physical, emotional, and psychological pain that you did not deserve.

I’m not advocating that you should pretend like it didn’t happen. What I am advocating is that you shift away from resentment and toward forgiveness. Remember, this is about revoking control that you give to others when you hang onto anger, resentment, and bitterness. Learn from it, don’t allow it to repeat (to the extent that it is within your control).

This is a big topic and difficult to treat in a matter of a few minutes. So rather than hurry up and offer a few quick ideas to handle resentment, I’m going to be more thorough. I will dedicate the episode next week to move past resentment and take back control of your future. Until then, remember these words from the former President of Poland, Lech Walesa:

It is hardly possible to build anything if frustration, bitterness, and a mood of helplessness prevail.

Lech Walesa

It’s worthy of our time and attention. If you displace resentment, you open yourself to greater potential. Don’t miss next week!

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In the previous episode, I was able to share some of the experiences that shape who I am. This isn’t Part Two of that discussion. Yet I recognize that I didn’t offer any explanation for how those unique aspects about me impact my approach to leadership. So, today is my opportunity to do that as I talk about four solid principles supporting team growth.

You likely already know some of this, especially long-time listeners of the podcast. As a result, you will have to resist the temptation to zone out. Stay engaged, because there is some significance here that I haven’t had an opportunity to share with you before.

Why Do This? People will sometimes ask me why I do the podcast. You know that I’m passionate about leadership. I want you to be a great leader and I want to improve my leadership skills. So how do I do that?

Consequently, it’s not an accident. As with anything you value, you will certainly discover the need for intention and purpose. Like most of you, I had moments where I was profoundly impacted by a high-quality leader. You know the kind of leader I’m talking about. In short, they have all the great characteristics you and I look for in someone we want to follow.

As a result, our time with them not only makes a positive impact – it changes us. We realize that quality leadership isn’t magic, rather it’s purpose. And that’s why I’m here: to dispel myths and give you practical tips for leading well.

If You Leave It To Chance… Because if you leave it to chance, then chances are it ain’t gonna happen! The worst thing that I can imagine, is you end up with a new leadership role and no mentor to guide you in that role. To clarify, a company doesn’t purposefully place you in a position to fail. People are busy. And that is precisely why you must not leave mentoring to chance.

If you are a leader, then you must find new and struggling leaders to come alongside. If you are a newly appointed leader, then you must search out those who have gone before you. Those who can give you the kind of guidance, advice, and encouragement, to keep you from repeating their mistakes.

All of us have an obligation to raise up the next generation of leaders. Because that team member has an opportunity to change the company, the customer, and the experience in a unique and impactful way. So how do you do this? It’s not five easy steps, but there are some useful tips that I want to share.

How Can I Make My Team Better? First, John Maxwell says he starts each day by asking “How can I make my team better?” You don’t have to lead the team to ask this question. To clarify, you become a leader by acting like one. That means leading even when it’s not your title, responsibility, or position.

When I heard this, I remember thinking “Great, but I don’t have a team.” And in this moment, I recognized that we are a team. You and me. We form a team. How so? Well, we are engaged in the same work and activity of developing leadership ability! And this is the very definition of a team.

When I ask this question, “How can I make my team better?”, I promise you that I have you in mind as I answer it. Every day, whether looking at content or studying principles, I’m asking if this will propel us to progress.

Am I Being An Example To My Team? And that leads to the next question that John asks: “Am I being an example to my team?” Ginger has frequently asked me why I continue to push hard to meet the publication deadline for this podcast. It’s a practical question and one that I struggle to answer clearly when I don’t have this question in mind.

But the reason why I press to continue to meet the publication schedule is that you are important to me. Not only do I not want to let you down, I want to deliver because I know it’s important to you just as it would be important to me. I want to be that example of consistency and do what I say I will do until I say that I’m doing something different.

Am I Creating An Environment Where My Team Can Learn? The third question that Mr. Maxwell asks is a massive undertaking for any serious leader. Am I creating an environment where my team can learn? This one matters deeply to me. I expect you can relate. Maybe you also have worked for or currently work for, a company that doesn’t have a large training budget.

When you start thinking that their limitation prevents you from effectively training or being trained, then you have lost half the battle. First, training is not the responsibility of your employer. Second, every good training program identifies that personal investment is the best way to guarantee return on investment. In other words, how badly do you want it?

Third, you have a virtually limitless set of resources available to you at low or no cost even if you choose not to invest heavily in your leadership training. There are more books, audiobooks, and internet resources than you could possibly consume in a lifetime. Pick one and devour it with your team.

As the leader, you set the tone for the learning environment. Don’t accept excuses for why skillset can’t be improved. Maybe those excuses worked a hundred years ago, but not in today’s easily accessed information age.

Going Deep The last question that I’m going to leave you with today is also one that John Maxwell asks himself. “How can I build the depth of my team?” If you are like me, you might frame this question in a sporting context. Think first string, second string, third string, etc…

As I have contemplated this, I recognize it’s so much more than “next man up.” The depth that should concern each of us is not how many players we have who could assume a starting role. That’s our immediate tendency. And I’m guilty! It’s a bit of succession planning which is very necessary.

Here though, I’m talking about going deep and extracting the capability each team member has to bring to the game. You are extremely capable. Think of this: there are some physical exercise studies that say our brains kick in starting to limit us when we have reached approximately 40% of our limitation.

We know that we use only a small percentage of our mental capability. You, your team members, me, we have virtually limitless untapped potential that is waiting to be discovered. So how do we get at it?

Shake It Up I think you have to shake things up. Go do the stuff that makes you uncomfortable. Take on a challenge that doesn’t look realistic. I’m not advocating that you do something dangerous or foolish. I’m saying you have to intentionally place yourself in the stretch.

Take on the project or the assignment that no one wants. Find the customer or the client that is impossible to satisfy. Leave the safety of what’s known for the sake of living a challenge. The road will rise to meet you. A leader who takes on a challenge isn’t asking her team to do anything she won’t do herself. And that is extremely compelling for any team.

Resources Mentioned In This Episode: The Leader to Leader Podcast Episode 134: Distinctives and What Makes Us Different

The John Maxwell Leadership Podcast Focused Thinking Part Two

Thanks for Listening! I want to hear from you! I appreciate your honest feedback so reach out and:

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I was listening to Ray Edwards recently where he was sharing on his podcast 10 Uncomfortable Truths About Me. As he, Sean, and Tiffany were getting ready to sign off, he said something that I loved. Some of the things he shared in that episode (#399 if you want to listen) were going to clearly separate his people from those who are not his people. He was talking about distinctives, calling attention to what makes you and me different.

Too often, we forget this principle. You aren’t meant to be a perfect fit with everyone you encounter. You know that I regularly refer to you as unique. There’s something special and different about you that won’t resonate with everyone you meet.

Being all things to all people doesn’t work – there’s a tribe, a group who gets you. Those are the ones you have to find and plugin with…deeply. You have to be okay with that. You have views, opinions, and interests that will separate as well as attract. These unique identifiers may even cause others to work against you. Don’t worry about separating yourself and identifying as different. This is how it should be.

What are your distinctives? Lean into them. They not only shape you, but they also pull in (or push out!) others as you find, build, and connect with your tribe. I think there are challenges with words like “tribe.” Sometimes it sounds exclusionary to me and the reality is you are excluding people when you are being honest about who you are because you and your message won’t connect with everyone you contact.

So here are some distinctives about me.

First, I’m a Christ-follower. I would hope that in every single thing I say and do, that you see or hear Jesus in it. Part of the danger of telling you this is that you assume I’m some kind of religious nut job. Some of you are already certain that I am. I’d like to think that I’m not religious at all and instead value a sincere relationship with Jesus. I mean this from the bottom of my heart, not preaching at you, Jesus has changed my life.

Second, I had a HUGE fascination with trucks when I was young. There were truck drivers on both sides of my family. I grew up shifting gears for my Uncle Wayne as he delivered fuel between Denver and Greeley, Colorado. And it consumed me. I was forever building trucks out of Legos and drawing them no matter how poor of an artist I was. When I drew them, they came to life for me. And trust me, if you have never been in the cab of a truck, it is an exhilarating experience.

The highlight of my young life was getting to go in the truck with my Uncle Larry and my cousin Larry Jr to Grand Island, Nebraska. That memory is only outdone by getting to ride in the truck with my hero, my cousin Doug Steinbecker, from Greeley, Colorado out to Portland, Oregon.

I was hooked. It ran in my blood. My Uncle Larry and Uncle Dale owned a very successful trucking company that they started in Greeley, Colorado called Steinbecker Brothers. They started with one truck, then two, then three. At one point, they had more than 300 trucks and 500 trailers.

I worked hard from the time I was young. I mowed lawns as a pre-teen and not only paid for my part of the equipment but also paid for the dirt bike that I bought with my own money.

When we moved to Greeley, I got my dream job! Working in the wash rack for my uncles at their trucking company. Literally, I was driving trucks pulling trailers before I was driving a car. It was crazy and I loved every moment.

But like all glamorous things, the shine can wear a bit and expose some of the more challenging realities. Truck driving is a very hard life and owning/running a trucking company is even more difficult.

Fortunately, my parents watered a seed of interest in computers with a massive investment in the mid-80s to buy an IBM Portable PC and dot matrix printer. As a result, that paved the way for me to find a career in technology. But things don’t always go as planned.

The third distinctive that is different about me is that I was nominated to attend the U.S. Naval Academy by Senator Hank Brown in Colorado. In part because of all the diesel smoke that I inhaled, I had no desire to attend the Naval Academy. I wanted to go to the Air Force Academy.

It was my job as a young adult male to make questionable decisions, so instead of pursuing the Naval Academy, I entered the workforce right after high school. I was working full time in my early 20s living in north Denver when I decided to go back to school and get my degree. I was married with two kids before completing that degree in 1999. It took me almost eight years to get it done, but I didn’t have any student loan debt when I finished.

I can tell you that I worked extremely hard for that piece of paper. And I’m forever grateful for my employer at that time who paid most of my tuition as long as I maintained my grades. Ginger and the boys were so patient with me. I could never have done it without their support.

It wasn’t easy and it was absolutely worth it for me. I pushed both of my boys HARD to get degrees. In hindsight, I don’t think that was smart or helpful. As a matter of fact, in many instances, I think it can be damaging to push your children to get a degree. So, no, I don’t think everyone should go to college.

I’ve worked with some BRILLIANT people who do not have a degree. And that’s part of their list of distinctives. Not only are they more intelligent, capable, and qualified to lead than their degree-holding peers, in my opinion, they were (and are) unfairly discriminated against because they didn’t have a piece of paper saying they know how to study and take tests.

I believe that degrees have great value to those who apply themselves to the process of learning. I don’t believe that degrees qualify you as learned.

Fourth, both my wife and youngest son faced life-threatening illnesses. This is one of the distinctives that I don’t wish on anyone because it’s brutal, frustrating, frightening, and makes you incredibly thankful for each and every day. I know how crushing bad news can be and I know what it’s like to struggle through things you don’t understand.

It drove me to my knees on multiple occasions and while it didn’t always turn out the way I wanted, there was always a deep peace knowing that I wasn’t alone. There’s nothing more tragic than going through circumstances like these feeling isolated with no one to turn to – if that’s you, then tell me! You don’t have to go through it alone!

Fifth, I spent more than 30 years in corporate America working for two different companies. I worked for a medium-sized company for eight years and a Fortune 500 company for 23. Not only do individuals have distinctives that separate, so do organizations and cultures.

While they both had their share of issues, there are so many good things that I could tell you about either of them. I’ve known myriads of business owners at companies of various sizes. Entrepreneurs, small, medium, and large business owners, CEOs of both public and privately held companies and I can say this with 100% confidence: thank God for all the risk-takers who employed the rest of us!

Business owners, corporations, bankers, investors, shareholders, they aren’t evil. There are obviously some very bad people in this world. And there are some very, VERY, good ones. The answer to our problems is not vilifying those we don’t understand or disagree with. Dialog, not diatribes, will bridge the gap from where we are to where we want to be.

I’ve been burned and I’ve been blessed in the companies I worked for. And I can say that I’m genuinely grateful for each experience that continues to shape me into the individual that I am today. My distinctives are going to be different than yours.

So, here’s the thing: I want you to take a few moments today and think about your distinctives. What are some of those experiences in your background that have made you into the woman or man that you are today?

You have a story – some of those things will attract people to you and others will repel. That’s okay. Because your story will resonate with certain folks, you need to invest deeply in them. What makes you different, what makes you distinct, makes you valuable.

Resources Mentioned In This Episode: The Ray Edwards Show Episode 399: 10 Uncomfortable Truths About Me

Thanks for Listening! I want to hear from you! I appreciate your honest feedback so reach out and:

Leave a note in the comment section below.
Email a question to mark@markslemons.com.
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Now, go lead like someone you would want to follow!

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How many times have you said, “Wow, I didn’t see that coming!” or “That was completely unexpected!” Sometimes it’s good, but most often it’s not. Like you, I have my fair share of these surprise moments. But today, I want to offer some practical tips on how to respond when you are thrust into an unexpected circumstance.

Because of my line of work, I hear stories all the time about people who have found themselves in shock over a recent circumstance. Think about it, there are tons of examples:

failing an important exam that will impact your career
experiencing divorce
receiving an unexpected bill that exceeds your emergency fund
losing a job
being notified of an audit by the IRS
experiencing the death of a spouse/friend/parent/child
finding your home or car broken into
having your home destroyed by a fire or natural disaster
losing significant savings over a bad investment
having to declare bankruptcy because your business failed

These are just a few examples of the things that seem to come up more frequently than any of us would like. Some of them are way more serious than others. By themselves, they are tragic and when you combine more than one, it can feel overwhelming – like you can’t go on. But you can. And that’s the most important thing for you to remember today: you can go on.

I was reminded of this recently when my son was telling me about what was happening where he works. The company had to make some very difficult decisions about how to continue operating. As you can guess, they were having to lay people off and an impact is felt by the families of several employees who were told that it was their last day.

Yes, it was unexpected. Not shocking maybe. An incident like this generally has some signals leading up to it that might indicate a problem on the horizon. But even if every one of the people in that company could say “Yep, we knew it was bound to happen!” that doesn’t make it easier when you are watching your friends, peers, coworkers, and even arch-nemesis leaving the office for the last time with a box in their hands containing several years of blood, sweat, and tears.

It actually was very emotional for me when he first told me about it. I felt like I was thrown right back into the feelings I experienced over different periods in my career. I have been the one delivering this kind of news and I have also been the one who was receiving it. Neither is better than the other.

Trust me, I’m not downplaying the significance of these events. It can be so painful. Like you, I can literally feel what that person feels who has just been told they don’t have a job here anymore or hearing that a close friend or relative has died. These unexpected events will tear a massive hole in your heart leaving you feeling scared, scarred, confused and alone.

And there were times I didn’t think I would make it through it. So this is a fantastic opportunity to talk about it. So I am. The first thing I want to remind you of when you find yourself facing the unexpected: you aren’t alone. You aren’t the only one who ever dealt with this. People much less capable than you survived. And you will too.

The second thing to remember is that emotions flow in cycles. I talked about this in more detail in Episode 109: Leading While Leaving. Go have a listen and learn about the Kubler-Ross grief cycle to know how emotions run from denial to anger to bargaining, to depression, and finally to acceptance.

You don’t necessarily move through them in order and you might move quickly from one stage to another. In other instances, you might move much more slowly and even skip some. The point is that there is a process and you need to let that process happen. It can be a mistake to push through or past this too quickly.

Next, I want you to consider resilience and fortitude as more than just pithy words about how you go on from here. I talked extensively about the value of fortitude in Episode 35: Fortitude: Six Steps To Increase Your Ability To Endure. For the rest of this episode, I want to talk about how you increase the other element: resilience.

When the unexpected arises, you start making a myriad of choices. How you respond is within your control even though what happened might have been completely outside of it. So what does it mean to be resilient?

The technical definition is interesting: the capability of a strained body to recover its size and shape after deformation caused especially by compressive stress (from the Merriam-Webster online dictionary). Michael Kay defines it as the ability to regain or maintain a positive outlook and persevere in the face of challenge and adversity (from his Forbes article How To Prepare For The Unexpected: Before It Happens).

You might think it’s foolish to put on a happy face but there is too much evidence to support the idea that smiling improves your attitude and your outcome. Choosing your attitude is of monumental importance to increase your resiliency. You have to “go pro” in choosing your attitude.

Words can never adequately convey the incredible impact of our attitude toward life. The longer I live the more convinced I become that life is 10 percent what happens to us and 90 percent how we respond to it.

I believe the single most significant decision I can make on a day-to-day basis is my choice of attitude. It is more important than my past, my education, my bankroll, my successes or failures, fame or pain, what other people think of me or say about me, my circumstances, or my position. Attitude keeps me going or cripples my progress. It alone fuels my fire or assaults my hope. When my attitudes are right, there’s no barrier too high, no valley too deep, no dream too extreme, no challenge too great for me.

Chuck Swindoll

Your attitude will affect your resilience.

Next, take a different perspective. I wish I could tell you the details of the people that I have spoken with who said they would never have made the changes needed if it hadn’t been for the unexpected. This is a good opportunity to look at what needs to change in your life.

I’ve shared before how going through my own personal experience of losing my job forced me to reevaluate how I was managing my career and the changes I had to make. Maybe you weren’t courageous enough to leave the safety of something you were comfortable with. Now you have a chance to start with a fresh perspective and a clean slate. Don’t underestimate the value of this chance.

I want you to always be confident that you can handle the challenge(s) that you are facing. It doesn’t mean it will be easy and probably means some pain in the process. As long as you are drawing breath, you have something to offer this world and the people around you. Continue to focus on helping others when you need help yourself. Givers gain. It simply means as you look for ways to help others, you will find help for yourself.

Finally, in the Forbes article I mentioned earlier, Michael Kay recommends the following:

Try approaching a challenging situation as if you are the only person in the world who can make it better. Ask yourself: if anything is possible right now (divine intervention and magic aside), what three things can I do to improve my circumstances?

You may not be able to take every step at this very moment, but you can start to create a plan that you can execute over time until you have started to create positive change in your life circumstances.

Michael Kay

That’s valuable. Too often, we feel like we don’t have what it takes to get through this unexpected event. And while there’s more too it than “3 Easy Steps To Get Through Anything!”, you can survive and improve. So, the time you feel overwhelmed, remember to:

choose your attitude
try a different perspective and use this unexpected event to make positive changes to your life and stay focused on helping others
ask yourself what three things you can do to improve your circumstance

This isn’t easy and will require practice, but it’s worth your effort!

Resources Mentioned In This Episode: The Leader to Leader Podcast Episode 131: Building People, Teams, and Processes with Micah Rowland Part One

The Leader to Leader Podcast Episode 132: Building People, Teams, and Processes with Micah Rowland Part Two

Michael Kay’s Forbes article How To Prepare For The Unexpected Before It Happens

The Leader to Leader Podcast Episode 109: Leading While Leaving

The Leader to Leader Podcast Episode 035: Fortitude: Six Steps To Increase Your Ability To Endure

Chuck Swindoll’s blog post The Value of a Positive Attitude

Thanks for Listening! I want to hear from you! I appreciate your honest feedback so reach out and:

Leave a note in the comment section below.
Email a question to mark@markslemons.com.
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Now, go lead like someone you would want to follow!

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Welcome to Part Two of my conversation with Micah Rowland. Micah isn’t your everyday builder. As Chief Operating Officer of Fountain, he builds people, teams, and processes that have taken multiple companies from 50 to 300 people and beyond, and $5 million to $35 million in revenue.

After starting his career as a software engineer, Micah Rowland earned a Stanford MBA before switching tracks to management consultancy. This unusual path from engineering to business led him to roles with industry leaders, such as McKinsey & Company and Starbucks, where he worked in global strategy and brand management before gravitating toward startups in the SaaS space.

Over 17 years, Micah has worked with companies ranging in size from 30 employees to over 100,000 and multiple startups from Series A to Series D funding. Through this journey, he has learned how to solve problems in everything from leadership and organizational development to operations, strategy, and pricing.

With Fountain, the Series A-funded startup providing hiring automation software for today’s high-velocity service economy, Micah now helps to solve problems on a different scale. He credits being allowed to make mistakes and learn from them for sharpening his leadership, coaching, and human development skills. In fact, developing those skills has led him to discover what he most enjoys about his work — helping people grow both personally and professionally through the rewarding friendships he’s been able to build in the workplace.

Key Takeaways From Micah Rowland * In a coaching relationship, the most important characteristic is teachability * You must be open to being told that you are wrong or that you need to modify your approach * It’s up to the coach to create an environment where the learner feels secure * The McKinsey model says we ALL have an obligation to dissent, to disagree and even create conflict when we aren’t aligned * Manage that conflict in a way that doesn’t allow the team to be torn apart by disagreement * Consequences for failure aren’t borne by a team member, they are borne by leadership * Fear is the number one inhibitor of creative thinking * Fear prevents an individual from taking initiative * An organization without creative and inventive thinkers won’t scale or be able to retain key talent * An investment is made with an expectation of return * When a leader provides personal or professional development for a team member, it’s a gift * A gift becomes a powerful motivator, especially when you see what others did for you * Make sure you aren’t treating human beings as objects * Leadership is about people and if you are going to be good at it, you have to care about people

Resources Mentioned In This Episode: Fountain’s website

Follow Fountain on LinkedIn

Connect with Micah Rowland on LinkedIn

The Leader to Leader Podcast Episode 131: Building People, Teams, and Processes with Micah Rowland Part One

Thanks for Listening! I want to hear from you! I appreciate your honest feedback so reach out and:

Leave a note in the comment section below.
Email a question to mark@markslemons.com.
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Now, go lead like someone you would want to follow!

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Welcome to Part One of my conversation with Micah Rowland. Micah isn’t your everyday builder. As Chief Operating Officer of Fountain, he builds people, teams, and processes that have taken multiple companies from 50 to 300 people and beyond, and $5 million to $35 million in revenue.

Key Takeaways From Part One * A clear understanding of why things are happening (curiosity) is necessary to correct and improve * Problem-solving in a startup is complicated by the fact that any particular problem may not belong to any single person or group * You have to learn to apply abstract knowledge to unfamiliar situations – it’s good to be stretched * Start by introducing team members to the idea that there is a process for problem-solving * McKinsey & Company Seven-Step Problem-Solving Process: 1. Define the problem 2. Disaggregate the problem to identify the key issues 3. Prioritize the most important/impactful issues 4. Formulate hypotheses to resolve each of the issues 5. Analyze to understand whether you can prove/disprove the hypotheses 6. Synthesize the results 7. Reach a recommendation * It’s an iterative process with stages 4-7 that refine the recommendation by reevaluating assumptions and improving analysis * The stages can be learned independently and there are tools supporting each of the steps * Once you have introduced a tool like an issue tree or logic tree, give team members a chance to practice with exercises on real-life business situations * The most powerful results come when you work side-by-side with an experienced leader who demonstrates the process * You multiply your capacity by apprenticing your team through complicated processes * Be laser-focused and precise on problem definition: what is in-scope and what is out-of-scope * Part of problem-solving is acknowledging that your depth of knowledge may inhibit further progress and other expertise is required * Deprioritization is just as powerful as prioritization and equally important to call out what you are NOT going to do as a part of this exercise

Resources Mentioned In This Episode: Fountain’s website

Follow Fountain on LinkedIn

Connect with Micah Rowland on LinkedIn

Thanks for Listening! I want to hear from you! I appreciate your honest feedback so reach out and:

Leave a note in the comment section below.
Email a question to mark@markslemons.com.
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Now, go lead like someone you would want to follow!

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If you are in the U.S., you just celebrated the Labor Day weekend. Because I thought it was clever, I named this episode The Labor Inspector in honor of this most joyous occasion!

But it got me thinking about how infrequently we stop to measure the results of our actions. I’m guilty! Most of us are definitely busy and you all know that being busy is not equal to being productive. That’s never good; actually, it’s dangerous. Especially when you have been in a period of massive busyness with no time for evaluating the result. I’m going to come back to this point in a future episode, but for now, I want to focus on inspection.

Desirable Outcomes Or Dismal Results This requires stopping for long enough to critically think about what you are doing. If it’s leading to desirable outcomes or dismal results, then the answer might be more obvious than when it appears to not really matter one way or the other. Here’s the challenge: with some tasks, you are too close to know whether what you are doing has potential. This is the single best reason I know of to have mentors and coaches.

Ahhhh, but if you are going to have a mentor or a coach, then you are going to have to check your ego at the door! It means being willing to be transparent and sometimes that’s not comfortable. To open ourselves for critique or judgment can be painful and embarrassing – especially if you thrive on the praise of others. I’m going to share a real-life example.

Recently, I had some feedback from a sales leader about my level of passion in a sales call. I feel like I’m passionate about what I believe in, passionate about the products I represent, convinced that we are providing tremendous value and service to our clients. It’s all good! How could I not be passionate about it, right?!

You Need A Shot Of Espresso Or Something! And these were his words, you need to take a shot of espresso or whatever you have to do to amp yourself up – you are really thorough, but you have to bring more energy. He wasn’t saying that I needed to caffeine up, I was plenty awake. He was calling for intention and focus on my delivery. And being mindful of not just what I’m saying, but why and how I’m saying it was the goal.

If you know me, you know that I can talk. But that’s frequently a curse as much as it is a blessing! Get to it, get to the point, with efficiency and energy! I’m not talking Chris Farley “living in a van down by the river” energy – just energizing and causing others to feel it too!

So, I have to decide when someone is willing to provide that feedback, do I acknowledge that there’s room to improve? Or, do I simply dismiss it and say “No, I think it was fine the way I handled it.”

Seriously, think about the guy who reads the slide deck. Everyone is nodding off and he persists word by word, line by line, slide by slide. BORING! No one feels compelled to do anything but nap with a presentation like that. So here were two key lessons for me that I took away from this that I want to share with you:

Responding To Feedback First, if he hadn’t said anything, I might not have noticed. I was in my groove, doing my groove thing. The same as you. you do your thing…mostly out of habit and almost on autopilot. Wake up! Change gears. Break the monotony and evaluate what you are doing. Even worse, if he would have inadvertently praised the effort, I might have thought I did it correctly.

As it was, when I went back and listened to myself, thought through the conversation, considered my thoughts and feelings before and during that meeting, I couldn’t avoid concluding that he was right. An information download will never automatically equate to passion and energy. People don’t need information, they need a reason, a motivation, to act and respond.

How Well Do You Know The Topic Second, part of the reason why we don’t manage our energy levels sufficiently is that as much as we might not like to admit it, we either know our material too well, or we don’t know it well enough. If we know it too well, we are just repeating the script, saying the same thing we’ve said the last thousand times we said it. If we don’t know it well enough, we get stuck putting everyone to sleep because we are reading the slide deck.

A little observation of the audience should help immensely here. If they aren’t engaged with you, then you have to respond. More of the same is going to increase the level of disengagement. So read the audience and respond accordingly.

Always Bring Enthusiasm And here’s one other little tip for you: it doesn’t matter if the audience is feeding your energy level. You have to bring enthusiasm on your own. Just because an audience member isn’t happy to be there doesn’t mean you have to become unhappy to be there as well. There’s a reason why it’s called labor. It’s the great challenge all leaders must undertake: producing engagement where it doesn’t exist.

So on this labor day, take a second to inspect your own recent labor and get someone to help you if you aren’t able to do it objectively. Commit to being open to change where it’s needed so you can improve the results.

Thanks for Listening! I want to hear from you! I appreciate your honest feedback so reach out and:

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After the snafu this past week of failing to release the previous episode, I got to thinking about other things I’ve done that were easier to hide. Some stuff is so embarrassing, it’s easy to understand why a human will hide it. Other things are so horrendous that we would be horrified if anyone ever discovered it. There’s a lot of it that is just plain stupid. But one thing is for certain: your past makes you human.

Can you imagine your dog thinking “I hope no one saw me dragging my butt across that new rug in the living room last week!” Note to self: make sure no one is in the room when I need a little cleanup. Or do you think your cat is hiding from embarrassment because you posted that video where he fell of the counter?

It’s a uniquely human characteristic. I’ve done some stupid stuff. And they are things you would never know about if I didn’t tell you here. I started doing stupid stuff at an early age: dirt clod wars anyone? Any BB gun infantrymen out there listening today? How about roof jumpers? You know who I’m talking to…especially if you had a trampoline.

One of my earlier moments of human brilliance was when I used my dad’s two-wheeler (moving dolly) to pry up one end of the concrete lid that covered our septic system. I really wanted to see what was in there. The problem is that I couldn’t manage to lift it off by myself. I was only a little guy, probably six or seven.

So, I got my sister Jodi to help. I pried up one side and had her put her hands under it so I could go pry up the other side and then we would discover what was under that lid! Unfortunately, her little four-year-old fingers couldn’t hold it either and she started screaming! So, I ran to get Dad to take it off her fingers.

Jodi always seemed to be in the wrong place at the wrong time with me. So here’s one for the record books and I’m praying my folks aren’t listening to this episode. My sister and I were pretty young and she had broken her leg skiing that winter. THAT was not my fault.

She had a spiral fracture from a binding that didn’t pop off when the ski was turning…and turning…and turning…ouch! It was the beginning of summer now and she was still in an ankle-to-hip cast. This becomes an important fact momentarily.

The entrance to our neighborhood was right off a very busy street on the north side of Denver. Our next-door neighbor lived on the corner next to that busy street. Because that street dropped over a hill just past the entrance to our neighborhood, her backyard was elevated several feet above the street surface.

It was dark. Our parents had company and what were a bored boy and his sister on crutches to do? You do things in the dark that you would never do during the day. Actually, you do things that you would never do again no matter what time of day it is! I’m pretty sure you have to be human to realize this.

Jodi and I went out of our backyard into the neighbor’s backyard. I swear, there was no malicious intent at this point…just tremendous opportunity. So as we are watching the cars go by, we are standing on some dirt…and rocks. Rocks. A badly behaving human’s best buddy. So I pick up a few of these little gems and do what you only wish you could have done.

I toss them as high into the air as I possibly can. Over the road. Let’s see what happens. In fact, I can’t recall how many I threw before one connected with a target. And boy did it cause a stir! A real hornet’s nest at that point. SMACK! It wasn’t a big rock, but I can still hear it. Then squealing breaks. Then a lot of swearing.

And I was running. I was almost in the backdoor of our house when I realized that Jodi was missing! She did her best to beat it out of there as fast as she could, but the crutches had slowed her down. It turns out that she only made it to the back patio of our neighbor’s house where she was hidden from the road.

And I knew that any moment, the lights were going to go on because swearing guy isn’t calming down and I would think everyone in a two-block radius can hear the commotion. So I carefully sneak back over to the neighbor’s patio and Jodi is scared.

Somehow, I convince her that we have to go NOW. Screaming guy is going to come flying up over that little hill in about two seconds. So we make a dash for our backyard…or at least as best you can on two crutches. We get into the house and nonchalantly make our way back to our bedrooms to get ready for bed. I’m not kidding – I remember brushing my teeth…trembling.

That’s not the end of it. I don’t know if anyone came to the door that night. Maybe I’ve blocked it from my memory. But from my bedroom window, I remember seeing the flashing lights from a patrol car and I was sure that these were my last moments of freedom. I was going to the big house. Kiss your mom before you go, son. Maybe she can bring cookies once in a while.

You might think that I immediately told the truth and made my confession to my parents about what I did. Nope. That’s what I would expect from my kids, but that’s not what I did.

And lest you think stupid stuff stops after elementary school, nope. Not for boys anyway. Part of the reason we behave like paranoid parents is that we know what we did as children. Because we were teenagers, we know what heights of stupidity are achievable.

Try to top this human achievement: I had multiple accidents…in a single night…on my way home after work ON MY BIRTHDAY on snow-packed and icy roads. I had a great vehicle – a 1969 Volkswagen bug. I was coming up to an intersection with a stop sign. The car in front of me had already made his turn and was waiting at the next stop sign.

He was driving a 1970 boat and the rear end literally reached all the way back to the stop sign that I was desperately trying to stop at. Alas, an object in motion tends to stay in motion when there’s no friction to slow it down. It completely caved in the hood of my car and there wasn’t even a scratch on his.

If you know anything about VWs, you know that it wasn’t the most formidable of vehicles. It was low-impact, but damaging to my car. I’ll never forget it: the boat captain got out of his car and I expect he was in his 70s. The first thing he says, and I quote “What the hell are you doing?”

Um…testing out the strength of your bumper compared to the weakness of my hood? Trying really hard to stop? Fortunately, he agreed that SS Boaty McBoatFace was not damaged and he could sail on home unimpeded by this blustery storm. I, on the other hand, would have a lot of explaining to do…and would experience two more “bumper kisses” before arriving unsafely home.

Even as an adult human, I did things that I wouldn’t do again. For instance, when I first landed a job as a Systems Administrator for Jacobs Ranch Mine in Gillette, WY, I wanted to make an impression…and boy, did I! The mine was about 50 miles from town. There two buses that left each morning a little before 7A. Everyone had an opportunity to ride the bus out to the mine in the morning and back in the evening instead of driving out to the mine each day.

Cool benefit, right?! Right. Unless you stand out like a sore thumb because you wear a tie every day to work…at a mine! In all seriousness, I suspect that a high percentage of the men on those buses didn’t even know what a tie was, much less own a tie. I’ll bet the majority had not worn one in the last 25 years.

The kind of men I was working with were rough. They grew up in hard and harsh country. Their dress clothes were clean jeans and their favorite boots. There’s a reason why there’s a bucking bronco on the Wyoming license plate. These are men who rode horses, not bicycles.

One man, I loved him. His name was Jim Land and Jim was the plant manager. The plant was where they crushed and stored the coal in silos, then loaded it out into gondola train cars. Jim had been at the plant for a long time. He told me one time that when he was a kid, one of his favorite things to do was catch rattlesnakes, then put them in the freezer.

After several minutes he would get them out and play with them because they would be cold and slow. When they started to warm up, he would either put them back in the freezer or take them out and release them.

I felt like I needed to reflect a professional image – they felt like I was an idiot. No one ever counseled me otherwise. It didn’t matter that I had worn a tie to the office for 8 years prior. This was not that environment. I certainly didn’t know my audience as well as I should have.

At the same time, standing out isn’t always a bad thing. It’s good to be remembered…unless you are in your underwear. White briefs. That’s the worst my friend. And for whatever weird reason, that dream still happens once in a while. I’m in the office and suddenly realize…yep, nothing but whitey tighties! Dang it! Not again. And of course, you have to leave the meeting to go find your pants. It’s SO embarrassing.

And here’s the thing: I am telling on myself today. You have your own naughty, cooky, laughable, embarrassing stories. And that’s cool. Tell them. It makes you human. You aren’t perfect – you’re relatable. And the next time you get nervous before talking to that person or that group, the next time you start to sweat and your heart pounds as you dial that number, just remember that on the other end is someone who has some screwed up stories just like yours.

Yep, you’re human. Welcome.

Thanks for Listening! I want to hear from you! I appreciate your honest feedback so reach out and:

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Do you have a green thumb? Maybe you are a master gardener. You can make anything grow! If this isn’t you, you can probably think of someone you know who has a masterful touch with all things potted or planted. Whether soil prep, positioning for appropriate sunshine, or knowing exactly how much water is required, they make a thriving environment for growth.

Green Thumb For Growth For others of us, it’s like art. You can’t draw a straight line, but comparatively, you could replicate the Mona Lisa before you could make a plant grow! It makes me laugh because I know there have been times when a little research might have been the difference in the survivability rate of a particular plant. And guess what? You can’t do the same things in Arizona as you do in Utah to grow a plant outside.

Ginger and I are definitely finding that out first hand! For instance, I love jalapenos. Ginger always planted a few in our garden when we lived in Utah. They were wonderful and would freeze well if I didn’t eat all of them. My dad, Larry Slemons, always had a variety of pepper plants at their home in Colorado and would also share keeping me well-stocked.

It started further back than that though. My mom’s sister, Aunt Shirley, and Uncle Bob, live in Stratford, Oklahoma. And my earliest memories of being at their place, were of Uncle Bob eating jalapenos with EVERYTHING. Literally, he ate them all the time.

Because I was introduced to them fairly early, I’ve always liked the hot/spicy side of food. Whether mexican, asian, indian, etc…, I like it with some kick. I don’t like hot just for the sake of it though. I enjoy it when it adds something to the food besides just burning your mouth! And jalapenos have always been my favorite. I like certain ghost pepper salsas and habanero peppers are good, but my default is generally jalapeno.

All Things Aren’t Equal So what does this have to do with creating an environment for growth? Well, when we got to Arizona, we thought we would plant a jalapeno plant in a pot (we don’t have a garden here) and see if could produce some jalapenos. But the circumstances are considerably different.

You are probably a plant expert, but I didn’t realize that jalapenos do best when the temperature is between 65 and 80 degrees. Here in Arizona, that means winter. We’ve had summer temps this year as high as 116 degrees. A jalapeno will start to struggle to produce fruit when the temperature is above 90 degrees.

So, as you can guess, results will vary. While the soil and water requirements aren’t different based on the two locations, the temperature and penetrating sunlight is definitely a big difference. Even plants that love the heat and require full sun, like our lemon and grapefruit trees, can be damaged if you don’t guard against the unmitigated exposure to full sunshine in the heat of summer when the trees are young.

The Environment For Growth If you don’t take the environment into account, whether subtle or major cultural differences, the growth that you might experience can be hampered. And it can be discouraging. On a personal level, you might have found that a change has inhibited your ability (or your team’s ability) to grow. There are few things worse than gardening without results.

Is there a more difficult job than farming? My granddad was a farmer in Nebraska. And while I did not grow up on a farm, I got to listen to innumerable stories that convey both the thrill and the heartache of farming. Ginger’s parents live in southeastern Colorado. Lots of farms that focus on wheat and corn. Again, more stories than I can recount where hardship and difficulty were prelims to moments of great success.

And that reminded me of a post I saw from Mr. Gary Frey on LinkedIn. I’ll include a link in the show notes where you can check it out. He was talking about how often seeds are sown in tears. Think about the plight of a farmer. He or she plants with many factors out of his or her control.

Creating A Place For Growth It takes a lot of effort to prepare the soil. If you think of this from a leadership perspective, it means you are building an environment where trust, transparency, authenticity, inclusion, accountability, respect, encouragement, and motivation are all infused. When it comes to cultivating and soil preparation, there are no shortcuts.

You can think of attitudes and morale as being the sunshine. Maybe recognition, reward, and teamwork as rain or irrigation. And here you will find that certain elements are out of your control. When it comes to the things that will destroy a crop, whether weeds, insects, or disease, it’s up to you the leader farmer to identify it early and deal with it quickly.

Decisive Action Procrastination is not a friend. Resistance will show up every time you need to act. Farmers don’t wait for perfect conditions to get started.

But even when you’ve done your best, even when the farmer did everything right, there is no guarantee that good fruit is going to be produced. As a leader, the same as a farmer, you can’t lose heart. Whether you are looking at your own growth or the growth of your team, you have to keep sowing seeds.

Imagine a farmer who stops sowing seed but still expects a bountiful crop. It doesn’t work that way, does it?! You can plant and nothing may grow, but you can be SURE that there won’t be any fruit if you don’t plant. This truth does not ease the pain of the expectant farmer.

Below The Surface But Gary said something that I want to remind you of today as leaders:

…We can’t see is what may be germinating below the surface.

To anyone out there who feels like you’ve faithfully sown seeds in the lives of others or your efforts to grow your business have been in vain, I want to encourage you with this:

Keep sowing…

Gary Frey

Because as leaders, you know that nothing grows when it’s not planted. And that’s leadership. Things didn’t grow when you thought they should. Everything seemed perfect and nada. Nothing. Then you see that hard soil, that person who doesn’t seem to hear a thing you say, but under the surface, the seed you planted is germinating.

Nothing Grows When Seed Isn’t Sown Don’t get weary. I know there are times when it’s hard to persist. Do what you know to do to adequately prepare the soil. Whether that’s you, your team, the organization, or your community. Soil is in your control. Then sow the seed. Give every seed the best chance for success by keeping the detrimental destroyers at bay. Remove whatever has the potential to destroy the crops.

And like a good farmer, be patient. Trust. It’s not always going to work out. But your effort is not wasted. Even when you are sowing in tears. Don’t stop. What doesn’t get planted will never grow. Then rejoice when the harvest comes.

Seriously, is there anything more rewarding than seeing your sowing produce fruit in someone else’s life? It’s worth the effort, the pain, and the tears when the fruit is on the vine. So keep sowing! You are going to reap a fine crop someday!

Resources Mentioned In This Episode: Gary Frey’s LinkedIn post Sometimes We Sow In Tears…

Thanks for Listening! I want to hear from you! I appreciate your honest feedback so reach out and:

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I had the privilege of attending the Global Leadership Summit in August. I’ll be sharing some of my key learnings from that event in future episodes; however, attending the Summit reminded me of something I had seen back in May. It was so powerful that I want to share it with you today. Erwin McManus gave a presentation at the Global Leadership Summit in 2018. Boiled down, it led to the title of this episode. You must overcome your pain in order to step into your greatness.

If you don’t know who Erwin is, he’s a prolific author, cancer survivor, international speaker, and a pastor at MOSAIC church in Los Angeles. His latest books are The Way of the Warrior and The Last Arrow. Trust me when I say that he’s unlike any other man you know. For example, he embraces his uniqueness and he always speaks/writes in a way that uses story powerfully.

The Pain Of Average His greatest fear growing up was that he would be average. Being raised in the shadow of a brother who seemed to excel at everything he touched, Erwin saw himself not as just average, but below average. And it wasn’t just Erwin who saw himself that way, his step-dad did his best to reinforce this with Erwin at every opportunity.

We have pithy sayings about how “sticks and stones may break my bones, but names will never hurt me.” Because of that saying, many grew up believing they shouldn’t allow a label to cause them pain. That what others say or think is somehow not a part of who we become. Unfortunately, we all know that isn’t true.

Succumbing To The Opinion Of Others How others see us can have a direct impact on how we see ourselves. As a result, it’s a battle to overcome the pain of a label or a stereotype and the mental exertion is intense – no one can do it for you. There will be times when you want to succumb to the opinions of others. And that’s a problem because when you do, you hand control of your life to another.

Have you taken the Enneagram personality test? I’ve talked about it before and you can go back to Episode 022: Are You My Type? More Tools For Building Team Trust and listen to it to learn more about it. Anyway, on the Enneagram, I’m a Three, Achiever. And so what does that mean? Essentially, I’m success-oriented, adaptable, excelling, driven, and image-conscious.

Therefore, my most basic fear is being worthless. And, as a result, my second greatest fear would be someone thinking I’m worthless. Erwin’s point about fearing average was resonating with me. So these fears can lead me to unhealthy behaviors.

Unhealthy Behavior For me, unhealthy means associating value with accomplishment. As if I would only be loved if I am extraordinary in some endeavor. There’s a constant pressure to be outstanding in whatever I do and that is not only intense – it’s draining.

There’s an underlying anxiety about personal value and expectation of myself that I always operate at maximum efficiency. At my worst, it’s easy to lose focus and fall into busywork. Here’s the strangest part of my behavior at home with Ginger.

Because my relationship with her is secure (we are both committed to Jesus, each other, and our marriage), I will keep a positive mental attitude at work all day, only to come home and be a dissatisfied, sullen, snarky and childish with her. It’s like I’m free to let my guard down with her and it’s not okay.

So if I allow it, unhealthy tendencies for me would make me a workaholic who fears the pain of failure or humiliation. I will want to impress others (man-pleasing) and spend too much time wondering what others think of me.

Resisting Fear’s Mastery Slyly, with beguiling intent, fear begins to shape our behavior. And before we know it, our leadership is confined to our fears! Any pain we experience as a result of realized fears, simply evidences that our position is rational. See? I knew that this was not just in my imagination.

We start to tell or remind ourselves of these stories. What pain awaits us if we step out of these confines. In the meantime, fear establishes mastery. We have become a slave to a cruel master. So, do you want to know the irony? As a result, we willingly give up our freedom. Please thoughtfully consider this point.

Anything To Avoid Pain We are afraid because we don’t want pain. In our mind, pain = bad. Pain = limitation. In your mind, can you visualize the boundary lines being drawn? Because of the self-imposed boundary, I will choose to give up my freedom to pursue my dream. Because of my fear of pain, I will choose to allow my talents to lie dormant. Maybe I will disappoint someone, or myself. Because someone might think my effort is insufficient, then I will choose to not live in the light of experience.

And who can blame us? Erwin points out that you and I live in the mythology of greatness. In addition, I would be shocked if you aren’t daily, possibly hourly, comparing your normal moments to everyone else’s best moments. Yes, the ones that show up on social media.

This is what you won’t want to hear: pain is part of life. Pain is life. For some reason, we think that my life should not include pain. If I just do things right, then I can avoid pain. What a shallow misnomer. It’s actually just the opposite! That is, if you do things right, you will absolutely encounter pain head-on.

Walk In Your Pain Erwin contends that you must learn to walk in your pain. There are no shortcuts. He goes on to say that you have to be willing to go through pain, crash through it, to encounter your greatness. Pain does not have to define your life.

In Episode 051: Failure Isn’t Final, I talk about how failure is not an end…unless you let it. Erwin says that your future is on the other side of your failure. And that’s hard for us to imagine when we see the significance or the size of our failure. I don’t blame you for questioning how this could lead to something good.

As you already know, I’m a Christ-follower. My faith allows me to see things differently than I might otherwise. But make no mistake, having faith does not mean that I always see things from a spiritual perspective. I don’t. It’s often one of my greatest frustrations. I want to look at my circumstances, see them from God’s point of view, and be encouraged.

I’ll bet that it happens like that 30% of the time. I’m horrified by some of the things I’ve felt given my profession of faith. But here are two final thoughts that I want to leave you with today from Pastor McManus:

You Aren’t Defined By Your Worst Moments Firstly, God doesn’t define you by your worst moments. We have all done things that given a mulligan or a do-over, we would choose differently. That does not define you. The fact that you would do it differently might actually result in a more accurate definition of who you really are.

Secondly, Erwin said that you and I want God to meet us in our faith. But the reality is this: He meets us in our faithfulness. Your faith does not make your life easier. It doesn’t take away the pain. It makes you stronger.

The Irony Of Faith As a result, your faith gives you the strength and the courage to step into the fear, to walk in your pain, and know that on the other side, you will step into your greatness.

Resources Mentioned In This Episode: The Leader to Leader Podcast Episode 022: Are You My Type? More Tools For Building Team Trust

The Leader to Leader Podcast Episode 051: Failure Isn’t Final

Erwin McManus GLS18 Session Notes-The Last Arrow

Any links to Amazon are affiliate links. The price doesn’t change, but I receive a commission for purchases made through those links.

Thanks for Listening! I want to hear from you! I appreciate your honest feedback so reach out and:

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As you know, this is the third episode in a series on excellence. If you missed the previous episodes, here are the links to Episode 124 and Episode 125. This is a fun series for me and hopefully, you find key learnings along the way. I am always looking for what I didn’t know previously and this episode is no exception. The title for this episode actually drops from a quote mistakenly attributed to Aristotle. “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”

Unfortunately, he is not the one who originally came up with that clever quote. And while the words are not Aristotle’s, the thoughts certainly are his. So, in this wrap up of the topic, I will share a few helpful examples of his thoughts in practice. And just to clarify, the quote, is accurately attributed to Will Durant. He wrote those words in a book he titled “The Story of Philosophy.”

Aristotle and Will Durant In it, he took a couple of different thoughts from Aristotle. The first is a quote which said,

“As it is not one swallow or a fine day that makes a spring, so it is not one day or a short time that makes a man blessed and happy.”

Aristotle

I find those words compelling and want to hang onto the thought for a moment. A swallow or a fine day is not responsible for making the season. And it isn’t a day, or a moment, that is responsible for making a man blessed and happy. I would also argue that it isn’t a day or moment that makes a man cursed and miserable. Certainly, we often exaggerate the impact of a single moment, positively or negatively.

And the other quote speaking of virtues said,

These virtues are formed in man by his doing the actions…

Aristotle

So Mr. Durant’s combination of the two phrases produced the now-famous quote misattributed to Aristotle where Will said,

We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.

Will Durant

The words communicate an important message to us who are trying to develop excellence. This isn’t a one-time event. Subsequently, excellence is formed in what we repeatedly do.

A Holistic Commitment To Quality Robert Glazer from Acceleration Partners sends a weekly email that he calls Friday Forward. In a recent email, he describes excellence as a holistic commitment to quality. Additionally, he says that inherent in the principle of excellence is improvement. For instance, to emphasize this point, he uses an example of being an excellent horse and buggy repair shop…in 2019.

Can that really be considered excellence? On this point, he and I might disagree. Because if you have attended a parade recently, or at any point in your life, it’s likely you saw a horse and buggy. There are still cadres of enthusiasts who love buggies. If you have a reputation for being excellent at restoring buggies, is it possible that you have an audience to serve with your talents? I would say the answer is a qualified ‘Yes.’

That talent is not unlike those who restore cars or build hot rods. The passion is deep. And these men and women dedicate a large part of their life to their craft. I don’t know if they could ever experience adequate compensation for their talent. Yet, I seriously doubt any of them would stop doing it just because they could make more money doing something else.

If you are able to offer a valuable service to a niche interest group, then it’s possible that your excellence can secure revenue for performing your talent. Everyone has to earn a living, so it’s not like money is not an issue. I’m not convinced it’s the main issue when you are repeatedly practicing your craft. Because I’m not convinced you can dedicate this level of effort to something you aren’t truly passionate about.

Change And Re-examination In fairness to Robert, this isn’t his point. His point is that change and reexamination are necessary to determine whether this is still relevant or could be done better. Imagine for a moment being content with DOS or Windows 3.1. Or the first luggable phone from Motorola… Those things were great for that moment but weren’t meant to be the answer for all time.

To clarify, this is why yesterday’s successes are not sufficient for today’s problems. A constant cycle of ideation, validation, implementation, evaluation, and iteration or change where we repeatedly do is necessary to incubate excellence. You must repeatedly do. Create a habit.

Do you let circumstances interfere with excellence? Do you bring your best each day? More importantly, do you expect that from your team?

Building On Past Experience Excellence builds on past experience. You create a culture of excellence by starting with a commitment to do the little things right. If you don’t know whether you are doing the little things right, ask! I’m certain your employees, team members, customers, and vendors would be happy to share their perspective. Small things make a big difference.

So how do we see excellence in action? Well, sometimes it’s a combined effort of seeing what it isn’t in contrast to what it is or should be. For example, Robert Glazer has a post on his Friday Forward blog that describes just such a scenario by one of his reader’s, Daniel Gross. Daniel had a problem with a gas forced air heater for his house. If you have ever lived in a cold climate, you know how important this piece of hardware is to not just your comfort, but in the extreme cold, it’s the ability to keep your pipes from freezing and your heart pumping.

So Daniel had purchased a maintenance contract on the heater from his gas supplier…you know, just in case. Probably will never need it…but just in case…The gas supplier logically outsources that contract to a local HVAC shop. Upon inspection, the technician noticed a gas leak at a control valve and in wanting to keep Daniel’s family safe, suggested that the heater be turned off until it could be repaired. Well, the weather started to cool off and after five days of no heat and lots of phone calls to the company, they finally scheduled to come out to replace the valve.

The technician arrives on the scheduled date, with a new valve in hand, and….it doesn’t work for that model furnace. An important detail here: before leaving, the tech (who remember didn’t do any repair and was likely there for only a few minutes) asked to use the restroom and doesn’t bother to flush the toilet when he’s done. Two more days of phone calls with the company and no heater. Finally, the company declares the furnace obsolete and unrepairable. In addition, they tell Daniel that they are voiding the agreement.

Obligation vs. Passion Can you feel the tension and frustration building? Truly, there are few things more frustrating than trying to BEG someone to do what they should already be doing. No one likes to feel as if their problem doesn’t matter. The cynic in all of us wonders if the revenue generated in a maintenance contract might have long been forgotten and now you have just become a non-paying customer who we are obligated to serve.

There’s a big difference in feeling an obligation to and being passionate about those you serve. This doesn’t sound like passion to me, and we are a long way from the repeated practice that is leading to excellence.

So Daniel calls his local plumber, Jason Green. Jason had the part on his truck. Wait? I thought the furnace was unrepairable and obsolete? He would come out the next day to do the repair. Now Jason is a busy dude. He does good work and has a full book of business. And in spite of this, Jason shows up…ON A SATURDAY…to get Daniel’s furnace back in operation. AND, unlike many in this space, he cleaned up after himself when the job was finished.

While Jason was making the repairs, Daniel had gone outside and noticed these words on one of the doors of Jason’s work truck: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”

Quite a contrast, isn’t it? I’ll take a Jason any day of the week in any industry. The repeated practice of making good decisions each day, large or small, is producing excellence. Robert ended this post with a very appropriate quote:

How you do anything is how you do everything. Your “character” or “nature” just refers to how you handle all the day-to-day things in life, no matter how small.

Derek Sivers

So, I’ll leave you with this question. What actions are you repeating that are building excellence? No matter how small, those actions repeated, those little things which become a habit can point you to developing the kind of reputation you want with your customers, your team, your manager, and your family.

Excellence: the quality of being outstanding or extremely good – it’s within your grasp. Repeatedly practice doing small things right and develop good habits. It’s right there for you, so go do it!

Resources Mentioned In This Episode: The Leader to Leader Podcast Episode 124: What Does Excellence Look Like In Leadership

The Leader to Leader Podcast Episode 125: Four Areas Of Focus To Increase Excellence

Robert Glazer’s post on fridayforward.com Being Excellent #98

Caelan Huntress’ article on mission.org My Favorite Quote Of All Time Is A Misattribution

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If you missed last week’s episode, we talked about what excellence looks like in leadership. And in an effort to increase our clarity, I’m going to spend some time in this episode looking at four areas where you can focus your effort to increase the presence of excellence in your life and work.

As a quick recap, here are some of the major points from last week’s episode:

Excellence will cause you to stand out
Excellence will force you to narrow your focus
The risk with developing excellence is you slip into perfection
Excellence is a lifestyle, a commitment to a way of living
Doors open when you commit to excellence

Lory Hough wrote an article called Does It Have To Be So Complicated back in 2015 for the Harvard Graduate School of Education. One of the points she made in that article was that if you ask your own questions, you take greater ownership of your learning and deepen your comprehension. It leads to discoveries on your own rather than being dependent just on the supposed “experts.” And in the absence of obvious solutions to complicated challenges, the answer to complexity is sometimes to simplify.

A Student Just Like You I am not an expert on excellence. I’m a student just like you. My job is to present thought-provoking information and content. Your job is to consider what I present, fact-check it for yourself, and then draw conclusions that help you to grow in your leadership competencies.

So as I focus on these four areas today, I’m including some great questions that you can ask yourself to measure your performance and pave a pathway to improvement. They aren’t substitutes for your own questions. I want you to come to your own conclusions, your own discoveries because you thought about it for a minute. Because you challenged yourself with a question which made you think. The questions I’m providing are simply meant to start the conversation. Are you ready?

Attitude isn’t everything The first area is attitude. Attitude isn’t everything because if it was, our world would be in much worse shape than it is. Think of how many bad attitudes you encounter every day! Thankfully, our world doesn’t hinge on our ability to choose a good attitude each morning when we get out of bed! Now, attitude may not be everything, but I do believe it’s quite possibly the most important thing and I’ll venture that without a good attitude, excellence will forever elude you.

What do people say about your attitude? Do you have a reputation for being cross or grumpy? Are you egotistical and hard to get along with? Do others find you unapproachable? What would your customers say? Do they enjoy doing business with you? Do you always have to be right? Can you have a conversation without making others feel small?

Is your tendency to see things positively or negatively? Are you overly optimistic or weighed down with pessimism? You might think that you are bound to struggle for instance if you aren’t optimistic. Or maybe you believe that because you are more solemn, you can’t produce excellent customer service. Neither is true. You will have to understand your behavior and then adjust accordingly to produce the result you desire.

Excellence Start With A Focus On Discipline The second area is discipline. Excellence starts with a focus on discipline. Remember the quote from John Maxwell last week?

Consistency is the prerequisite to excellence.

John C. Maxwell

Do you demonstrate commitment to habits that will propel your growth? Are you fixed on the process regardless of the outcome? Have you decided to make a change and come what may, you aren’t about to let it go? It reminds me of Will Smith talking about what sets him apart. I mentioned this back in Episode 032.

He never thought he was the best actor, the best looking, the most intelligent. But one thing was sure. He was 100% committed to outworking you. He said if you and he got on treadmills at the same time, you could be sure that one of two things was going to happen: you would get off first, or he would die.

So where does your discipline rank? Are you under control or a loose cannon? How you behave in public is a good starting place, but know this: how you respond in private eventually shows up in public as well.

What are you doing to improve your emotional maturity, your emotional intelligence? Or were you not aware that there are others in the universe that you occupy? Do you recognize that your childish tantrums and fits erode trust and produce instability?

Discipline Is Doing More Of What Matters Discipline is doing more of what matters most even when it’s time-consuming, uncomfortable, or just plain hard. Rarely does excellence not require fortitude. Are you distinguishing yourself from the rest of the pack through disciplined habits? Your ability to stay focused and on-task when others are distracted or have lost interest produces staying power.

The bridge between wishing and accomplishing is discipline.

Harvay Mackay

Who You Are When No One Is Looking The third area is character. Who you are when no one is looking? Would you be tempted to do something you know is wrong if there was a guarantee you would NEVER get caught?

Excellence will never be found in the company of compromise.

Mark Slemons

Are you committed to doing what’s right every time? No matter the cost? I can hear it already: “Mark, you have no idea what you are saying. Do you have any idea what you are saying?” Yes, I’m saying that you will not experience excellence.

Do you blame or do you take accountability? This is massive. Can you honestly say that something like this has ever come out of your mouth? “This is on me – I’m responsible and I will make sure that it not only gets corrected and also that it doesn’t happen again.”

Can you identify a blind spot that someone has revealed to you in the last six months? How about the last year? If you have no idea of your blind spots, it’s because you aren’t asking. There is no reason why you shouldn’t be able to identify something multiple times a year that you didn’t know about yourself previously.

Transparency invites excellence when you’re dedicated to improvement.

Mark Slemons

Bringing Others Along The fourth area of focus is people. Who are you bringing along? Who are you investing in? What are you building that will outlast you?

For example, I had a manager one time who was threatened by the notion that a new hire would want his role. So you know what he did? He prevented ANY possibility of that by refusing to hire anyone with ambition. Now THAT should scare you. Are you surprised to find excellence thwarted in that environment? Do you think there will be any lasting legacy? What will succession look like? It’s an awful mess.

What work are you doing with your team to understand how you are fueling or inhibiting their success? Do they know that you are committed to them? To the mission? To the company? Are you equipping them to succeed whether or not you are there? Or do they only hear you bad-mouth others behind their backs leaving your team to wonder what you say about them when their backs are turned? Do they hear encouragement and optimism? Are you cheering them on?

Who are you mentoring? Have you met with someone in the last six weeks that was for their gain, not yours? Some people won’t like this, and maybe you disagree; however, I believe that it is necessary to identify high performers and invest yourself in their future success. If you have a team of 10, my guess is that two of them stand out above the others. Give them the coaching they deserve to succeed.

How You Lead Will Be Imitated How you lead will be imitated. You don’t abandon the other eight, but you must make sure that you establish a legacy. Make sure that excellence persists after you depart. Trust me, when you replicate you into those two top performers, the whole team will benefit. Those two are also going to impact the other eight. The bar raises for the whole team. So go find your 20% and invest yourself in them.

This journey isn’t about perfection. Rather, it’s about a relentless focus on improvement. Becoming a superior version of you. To clarify, not a perfect you – think about the fallacy in that. Do perfect things ever improve? No.

And this isn’t about being dissatisfied with you – just the opposite. Because I want you to go to bed each night knowing that you did your best. That’s it. It’s that simple. Do your best with your attitude, being disciplined, working on your character, and bringing others along. You can’t go wrong and you will find excellence increasing as a result.

Resources Mentioned In This Episode: The Leader to Leader Podcast >Episode 124: What Does Excellence Look Like In Leadership

Lory Hough’s article Does It Have To Be So Complicated

The Leader to Leader Podcast Episode 032: No Excuses: Never Count A Great Leader Out

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We have a tendency to lack clarity with some of the words we choose. Semantically, some of the words we use don’t make sense or don’t accurately convey what we want to communicate. Excellence can be one of those words that require additional definition. What do you think of when I say “Excellence?” And what does excellence look like in leadership?

What Does Excellence Look Like I love my truck. It’s a 1990 Chevy K1500. The pickup has always been a work truck. I bought it around 2004, so I’ve had it for 15 years now, and I never thought of it as anything but a work truck. Not a show truck, not a classy truck, no leather seats or the feel of your favorite recliner when you sit in it, just an extended cab work truck. I’m not in love with the color (red) outside or inside (red again which makes absolutely NO sense to me). But it has always run well even though it leaks a lot of oil now.

And if you look at the bed of the pickup, it’s gnarly. Nothing pretty about it. And because of that, I was never afraid to haul stuff in it. Any stuff. Rocks, wood chips, lumber, dirt, trash, furniture, appliances, motorcycles, bicycles, and snakes (but that’s a story for another episode), etc. I wasn’t afraid of scratching it or hurting it – it’s a work truck. It was nice, but not perfect when I bought it, so I have never been afraid to use it as a work truck.

So, I even lent it to people. What could they do to it that I hadn’t already done? Scratch it? And it has been a godsend. Useful is an understatement. It’s four-wheel drive and ate the snow for breakfast. I can’t think of a situation where I wasn’t confident that the truck would perform as needed.

Standing Out The only thing I did beside typical mechanical maintenance was bought some bigger rims and tires, but that’s it. No lift kit. No paint job. I didn’t even replace the radio and cassette tape player. Just a work truck. So was that truck excellent? It’s a great question, isn’t it?

My initial response is “Yes, of course, it is. The pickup met my needs and demonstrated significant utility.” If I think about the function, the performance of the task, I’m left to wonder if it really was excellent. Did it do the task better than any other truck could?

And here’s the thing: we can get all cross-wise if we aren’t clear about how we are defining excellence with regard to a particular object in a particular circumstance.

There were a few times that I pulled trailers with my truck. If you have listened to this podcast for a while, then you know that we moved to Phoenix last year. On two different occassions, I pulled U-haul’s 6’x10′ double-axled trailer. With the trailer and truck both loaded, it was a lot for the 350ci V8 to manage – especially on the mountain hills between Salt Lake City and Phoenix. Again, it was functional, but if I’m honest, I have to say it was less than excellent.

What Is Most Important Did it hurt me when I could only manage to go 50mph in a 75mph zone? No. Did it matter that the 10+ hour trip took longer because I couldn’t always go the speed limit? Nah. How about the safety risk? Going 25mph to 30mph slower then the rest of the cars on the road is dangerous even if you are in the right lane. Or what about on the two-lane road behind an underpowered RV? Could I hop out in the passing lane and blow past them? Not very well even without a trailer!

There are circumstances where one particular factor is more important than another. Does failing to excel in a single area mean that overall, excellence is lost? I think it requires stepping back and looking at a bigger picture.

Avoiding Perfection Remember this bigger picture because I feel like there is a significant risk with excellence. You might already recognize it. It’s the ‘P’ word. That’s right, perfection. The danger is that it can lead you to a place where you can never be excellent at anything because you fail to do anything. Therefore you get caught in a vicious cycle of constantly reiterating, revising, and adjusting the product.

Excellence Causes You To Stand Out Failing to excel in any area is a problem because it likely indicates a lack of distinction in what you offer. This doesn’t mean that what you offer isn’t valuable or helpful. It does mean that you aren’t separating yourself from the competition. There are LOTS of trucks that could do the job that I described above. To clarify, excellence should cause you to stand out.

But is excellence subjective? I don’t think so – at least not entirely. There are some clear expectations that are met in the presence of excellence. I know there’s no way in a short post to comprehensively define what excellence looks like in leadership. So let’s start with the definition:

Excellence is a fact or state of excelling, superiority, or eminence. This, my friend, is the best of the best. And I love what John Maxwell said.

Consistency is the prerequisite to excellence.

John Maxwell

He also said that consistency builds your reputation. We both know that it doesn’t take long to ruin a reputation, but building one is quite another matter.

It takes more than a single moment. But excellence isn’t momentary – like when you are voted the #1 something. You can be the number one saleswoman and not practice excellence. You can outperform your competition and still not be excellent.

A Commitment To A Way Of Living Excellence is a lifestyle. Subsequently, it’s a commitment to a way of living that says each day that yesterday wasn’t good enough. Today, I have to be better. You live it and you breathe it. This is you competing against you! You are never really satisfied – there’s a dogged determination to learn and improve.

I recognize that it takes more than a few minutes of sharing some cool story or great quote to leave us with something meaningful. So I’ll end today with an example that Ann Miura-Ko gave in an interview with Tim Ferris on his podcast that I believe demonstrates the type of excellence we are talking about.

If you don’t know who she is, maybe you’ve heard of the VC firm, Floodgate that she started with Mike Maples, Jr. You’ve heard of Lyft, right? Well, Ann was one of the first investors before they became Lyft. Ann is super sharp. She has a Bachelor’s in electrical engineering from Yale, her PhD in math modeling of cybersecurity from Stanford where she also teaches on entrepreneurship. Her dad was born and raised in Tokyo, so obviously a very traditional Japanese family.

He came to the U.S. speaking very little English and got a PhD in mechanical engineering. Literally, he’s a rocket scientist who worked for NASA. As Ann tells it, from the time she was very young, even just five years old, he was asking “Hey, is this world-class?” and “Is this really the best that a five-year-old could ever do?”

A Great Example When she got to Yale, she had an opportunity to work in the office for the Dean of Engineering. At that time, it was Allan Bromley. Her dad told her to “Make sure you do a world-class job.”

…and I said to my dad, “I’m photocopying and filing. There’s no such thing as world-class there.” And he said, “Well, I’d still think about it.” … I remember standing in front of this photocopy machine with a stack of papers thinking to myself, “What is world-class in this situation?” I decided it was really crisp copies where you couldn’t tell that it was a photocopy. And so, I remember really trying to make the color match and everything was straight and I spent a lot of time on the details.

And when I was filing things, I didn’t just hand write it. I got a label writer and made sure it was printed out on labels. And I really tried to do everything as well as I possibly could. And I remember I was getting doughnuts and I would make sure I got the fresh donuts instead of the ones that had been standing out in the basket for a while. So, every step of the way, it was, “What can I do to make this experience for the Dean or for his executive assistant a delight moment?”

So, I’m a junior at the time…and I’ve been working in his office for, I think, two years. But, he barely knew my name…one day he pokes his head out of the office and the executive assistant was out. And he said, “Who are you?” And I said, “I’m Ann Miura. I’m your student assistant in this office.” And he said, “Oh, I’ve heard of you. I need you to go and give this friend of mine a tour of the engineering facilities.” And he’s like, “I know you’ll do a good job. Sarah has told me you’re great.”

Ann Miura-Ko

And to make a long story shorter, unbeknownst to her, she gives a tour to none other than the CEO of Hewlett-Packard at that time, Lou Platt. Because she is so impressive to Mr. Platt, he invites her to shadow him for two weeks during spring break, which she smartly accepted!

Excellence Opens Doors

He drove himself around in a Ford Focus. I remember this. We would go to different meetings and he took me around. And one of the days actually, Bill Gates came to make an announcement about .net with Hewlett-Packard. And so, it was an incredible event that happened. I got to sit backstage and see everything that was happening.

And Lou Platt invited the photographer to come in and actually take a picture of me talking to Lou, and I didn’t really think about it. But after the fact, I get back to my dorm and Lou Platt has sent me a thank you letter saying, “Thanks for coming to visit. I thought you would enjoy these photographs.” And there are two photographs in there. I framed them in my office now. One is a picture of me sitting on the seat talking to Lou and then the second picture is Bill Gates sitting exactly in that spot that I was sitting in talking to Lou Platt.

And, you know, to me, mentorship means so many different things. I’ve had so many different examples of mentors. But, to a junior in college who literally is a nobody, he was such an incredible example of mentorship…He just sort of took this girl and said, “You know what? You have something and I see it. I’m going to show you something even greater.” And to me, it was such a gift. It was so incredible because I hadn’t even thought about my own personal potential ever.

Ann Miura-Ko

Now that is a compelling example of excellence that opened a door. And Lou’s willingness to offer some mentorship had a dramatic impact on Ann’s life. Don’t ever underestimate the value of your time…and you probably shouldn’t spend too much time evaluating someone’s success by the car they drive!

Please come back next week because I’m going to share four areas where you can focus your effort to increase the presence of excellence in your life and work. Don’t miss it!

Resources Mentioned In This Episode: The Tim Ferris Show Ann Miura-Ko — The Path from Shyness to World-Class Debater and Investor (#331)

Thanks for Listening! I want to hear from you! I appreciate your honest feedback so reach out and:

Leave a note in the comment section below.
Email a question to mark@markslemons.com.
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In Episode 122, I told you about Kyler Murray’s long history of winning and I share some ways that you can prevent expectations from producing failure in your life. What I didn’t talk about then, but I want to talk about now, is why winning does not equal success. So often we seem to think that those terms are synonymous. That is, a win equals success. I understand how you could think that; however, that is simply not the case.

Some Possible Criteria You and I have criteria that we are using constantly to determine whether we are winning or losing. There is infinite criterium but here are some you might be using:

Deal size
Sales volume
Period revenue
Key performance indicators
Net promoter score
Return customer count
Cost per click
Return on investment
Promotion
Customer survey results
Recognition
Reputation
Likes
Friend or connection count
Email list size
Number of 5-star rating/review

Frequently, our view would be positive of those events we judge to be a win and negative of those we view to be a loss. If your criteria for a win is a five-star rating/review, then by your criteria, a three-start rating/review is a loss. Imagine what would be lost if you ignored everything other than a five-star rating/review?

Second Place, First Loser No team starts out thinking “Wow, you know if we can just finish in second place this year, that would be great!” It’s particularly interesting right now when you look at the money being thrown around to attract the greatest talent. Earlier this year, the richest contract in professional sports history was signed by Mike Trout and the Los Angeles Angels. The amount? $430 million for 12 years. Surprisingly, the top 10 largest contracts signed have all been baseball contracts except for boxer Canelo Alvarez who is trailing only Mike Trout.

You have massive movement in National Basketball Association as the most valuable players in the league make their moves to position themselves for their best chance to win a championship in the 2019/2020 season. Money is flowing like crazy as these players receive contracts worth well more than $100-$200 million. You have Kyrie Irving and Kevin Durant teaming up in Brooklyn. Kawhi Leonard and Paul George in LA with the Clippers. Lebron James and Anthony Davis with the Lakers. Now obviously, these aren’t the only talented players and many would argue that they aren’t individually even the best players. And that’s not really the point. Some will argue Lebron James is the best, but even if that is true, it wasn’t enough for the Lakers to even make the playoffs during the 2018/2019 season.

It Takes More Than A Single Superstar The point is this: as with most things in life, it takes more than a single superstar for a team to experience the heights of potential. If you measure success by championships, then every year, there are thousands of the best athletes in the world who are absolute failures. Even if the Nets, Clippers, and Lakers all have the best season they ever had, only one, or possibly none of them, will win a championship.

So, all I have to do is just surround myself with the best talent? If I do that, then I’m golden, right?! It sounds good in theory until you look at the results. Just head over to TheSportster.com and read about the 15 most disappointing super teams in sports history. It’s appalling! There is no excuse to assemble that much talent and then fall short of the goal. Baseball, basketball, hockey, football, even the Olympics are full of talented individuals, possibly the very best in their sport, that fell short.

I think some of the answers to this dilemma lie in the previous episode where we identified that too much focus on the win can actually produce a loss. Constantly examining the minutiae of your performance under a microscope can be distracting and result in worsening performance.

Focus On Success, Not Winning Here’s the warning that every leader must heed: even when expectations are reasonably placed, you must know how to keep the attention focused on success, not winning. Success can be achieved with or without the win.

Don’t turn off the podcast! I know you are thinking that this is madness. More participation ribbons for everybody. Or an argument for grading on the curve or the elimination of grades completely. Everyone gets a trophy because you’re all winners in my book. No. That’s not it at all.

You Can’t Win Unless You Know How To Lose What I’m arguing for is a recognition that the definition of success does not have to be a win. Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, the famous center for the Los Angeles Lakers, once said: “You can’t win unless you learn how to lose.” The reason why winning does not equal success is that success can occur even in a loss.

I know you still think I’m crazy, but I want you to hear me out. Maybe you’ve heard of Morgan Wootten. He is a former high school basketball coach at deMatha Catholic High School and has the second most wins as a head coach in basketball at any level. Listen to his thoughts:

“It’s often been said that you learn more from losing than you do from winning. I think, if you’re wise, you learn from both. You learn a lot from a loss. You learn what is it that we’re not doing to get to where we want to go. It really gets your attention and it really motivates the work ethic of your team when you’re not doing well.”

Morgan Wootten

Motivate To Learn And Improve We’re getting closer. It’s not just about winning or losing. It’s about the motivation to learn and improve. I talked a lot about success in Episode 95 and Episode 96. If you define success as John Wooden does, then you know that:

“Success is peace of mind, which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you made the effort to do your best to become the best that you are capable of becoming.”

John Wooden

But you don’t get a pass here. Coach Wooden went on to say that our tendency is to hope things will turn out the way we want them to but we don’t really do everything that is necessary to turn those hopes and dreams into a reality.

It’s a double-edged sword, isn’t it?! If success is peace of mind because you know you made the effort to do your best to become all that you are capable of becoming, then it means you did everything necessary to create that reality. Unfortunately, I’m not sure that most of us can point at our level of effort and say we did our very best to become the best that we are capable of becoming.

You Don’t Get To Blame Fate Instead, we would rather blame luck and the circumstances that seem to be out of our control. Coach Wooden’s dad used to tell him don’t whine, don’t complain, and don’t make excuses. Whatever you are doing, do it to the best of your ability. No one can do more than that. And if you will do that, regardless of whether you win, you are going to experience success.

But don’t forget – it’s not luck! I talked about this extensively in Episode 119, so I’m not going to go into it again here. Go listen to that episode if you missed it. Actually, go listen to it again if you already heard it. The lessons are that important!

One of Coach Wooden’s favorite poems addresses the topic of luck. It’s written by former Major League Baseball umpire, George Moriarty and is called “The Road Ahead or the Road Behind.” And here it is for you as we start to draw down this episode:

Sometimes I think the fates must grin as we denounce them and insist,
The only reason we can’t win is the fates themselves have missed.
Yet, there lives on the ancient claim – we win or lose within ourselves,
The shining trophies on our shelves can never win tomorrow’s game.

So you and I know deeper down there is a chance to win the crown,
But when we fail to give our best, we simply haven’t met the test
Of giving all and saving none until the game is really won.
Showing what is meant by grit, of fighting on when others quit,
Of playing through not letting up, it’s bearing down that wins the cup.

Of taking it and taking more until we gain the winning score,
Dreaming there’s a goal ahead, of hoping when our dreams are dead,
Of praying when our hopes have fled. Yet, losing, not afraid to fall,
If bravely we have given all, for who can ask more of a man
Than giving all, it seems to me, is not so far from – Victory.

And so the fates are seldom wrong, no matter how they twist and wind,
It’s you and I who make our fates, we open up or close the gates,
On the Road Ahead or the Road Behind.

George Moriarty

Bring Your Best No excuses. Yesterday’s trophies and successes are not sufficient for today’s challenges. Each day holds the opportunity for you to bring your best effort. Don’t open yourself up for the possibility of regret. Give it your all even if you don’t think anybody will see it or care – you will. If you are willing to do what others won’t then you will have a life that others can’t.

And it won’t always be easy. It’s difficult to give your best day after day. And I feel you – you might think that where you’re at is a dead end. Nothing of value here and winning isn’t an option. You might even feel like you’ve lost the ability to hope.

So lean on me for a moment as I remind you that all hope is not lost. You make yourself a candidate for positive change when you decide that whatever you are doing today, you will bring your best. But luck doesn’t control your future, you do. So give it your all and count it a success!

Resources Mentioned In This Episode: Leader to Leader Podcast Episode 122: Preventing Expectations From Producing Failure

Morgan Wootten quote

Top 15 Most Disappointing Super Teams in Sports History by J. Francis Wolfe on TheSportster.com

Leader to Leader Podcast Episode 095: Are You Measuring The Right Things

Leader to Leader Podcast Episode 096: The Definition Of Success

John Wooden TED Talk from 2001

Leader to Leader Podcast Episode 119: Obsession, Opportunity, and Superstition

Thanks for Listening! I want to hear from you! I appreciate your honest feedback so reach out and:

Leave a note in the comment section below.
Email a question to mark@markslemons.com.
Share this show on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

Listen to the show using your favorite platform: Spotify | iTunes | Stitcher | Android | RSS

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Forty-two wins. No losses. Three straight state championships. Three championship game MVPs. Gatorade Player of the Year. Possibly the best athlete ever produced by the state of Texas. Do you know who I’m talking about? If you said “Kyler Murray,” you are correct! Are there any higher expectations of an athlete? Maybe. But here’s a more important question: how do you go about preventing expectations from producing failure?

And that question matters more than you might realize because the answer matters not just in sports, but in life. I really wanted to title this episode “So You Know How To Win But Do You Know How To Lose?” This isn’t pedantical – it’s a legitimate question that should cause you to pause.

It’s crazy how prolific Kyler has been. Not since Bo Jackson more than 30 years ago has there been a player like Kyler. If you don’t recall, Bo Jackson was the only player EVER to be named an All-Star in both the NFL and MLB. He played two professional sports at the same time for four years. From 1987-1990 he played for both the Los Angeles Raiders and the Kansas City Royals. Some consider him to be the best athlete who ever played professional sports.

I mean really, how’s this going to work for Kyler? He was drafted by the Phoenix Cardinals, a team that finished last season with a record of three wins and 13 losses. Do you think there are any expectations with this draft pick?

No matter what team he plays for, whether a dynasty of winning or an agonizing string of losing seasons, whoever brings Kyler in is going to think something like this: “We just paid you a whole lot of money and now you need to give a return on the investment.”

What started my contemplation of this episode is wondering how someone who has only known winning could possibly handle the very real probability of losing? And I’m not just talking about cliche or being a good sport.

The stronger your performance, the longer your win streaks, the more dominant you are, the higher the expectations. And no matter how hard some might try to adjust expectations, they seem to take on their own momentum and build over time. It’s as if they generate their own inertia.

It’s not always a bad thing. If you recognize it, then you can manage it. You may even be able to use it to motivate. For instance, think about the current U.S. Women’s National Team in soccer. Regardless of what happens, most of the world has come to expect them to be the FIFA World Cup champions once the dust settles in France. That pressure starts to build as the expectations heighten long before the players enter the pitch.

So what do they do to stay focused? Focus on the coming game. Work on their training. Concentrate on personal improvement, study, and preparation. They aren’t reading the papers to see what the odds are or trying to dive into the drama of the past. No. They are consumed by the present preparations.

The stakes are high. Failed expectations can lead to severe outcomes. I doubt anybody has unreasonable expectations about a bridge. You should reasonably expect that the bridge is constructed to adhere to the exacting engineering standards that are required to support the intended traffic. Failing to meet the expectation can be the difference between life and death.

Initially, you may think it extremely unlikely that you are participating in anything remotely as dangerous as building such critical infrastructure. But that would be overlooking the death machine you operate daily. It’s a reasonable expectation that others have of you that you don’t operate your vehicle while impaired or text while driving. It’s not beyond the skill level of any driver, regardless of how long they have been driving, to refuse to get behind the wheel after drinking or to leave the phone inaccessible while driving.

Some other expectations are a bit less reasonable. A soccer player being shot and killed for scoring an “own goal” in the 1994 Olympics is an example. Or how about a politician serving a mixed constituency where someone is always going to be unhappy with your performance? At times, we create unreasonable expectations by making promises we can never keep.

One Thing You Can’t Control One thing is sure: while you may attempt to set or adjust expectations, you have no control over what someone else expects of you – reasonable or otherwise. So I want to share with you what Steve Berglas says in an article he wrote for Forbes back in 2012. He says that there are three ways high expectations can produce failure. More importantly, I will share his tips on how you can prevent it. Are you ready?

Paying Too Much Attention To Your Performance First, get out from under the microscope. Can you relax your way to success? That is definitely as ridiculous as it sounds. There are however limits to the level of scrutiny that you should apply to your performance. If you aren’t cautious, your ridiculously close examination will actually hurt your performance.

Mr. Berglas gives the example of what happened to Michelle Kwan in the 2002 Winter Olympics. Leading up to the events that year, she was all but given the gold medal as expectations loomed large in the build up. This is a woman who won every competition she entered…except the Olympics. And it actually happened to her twice! The first time was in 1998.

Everyone thought Michelle would win gold that year and Tara Lipinski came out of seemingly nowhere to upset her. In 2002, the hype was there again and it seemed very likely this would be Michelle’s year for gold. But as an antidote to over-examining performance, a woman who wasn’t even expected to medal had the night of her life. That woman was Sarah Hughes.

How did she win, you might ask? Especially when you consider the level of talent in an Olympic game. Not just how did she outperform Michelle, but all of the other great competitors on the ice that night. Her answer was pretty simple “I skated for pure enjoyment… That’s how I wanted my Olympic moment to be.”

Now you might not have a pending appointment with a cadre of Olympic judges, but I believe her simple advice will ring true for you as well. Do what you are doing with pure enjoyment. Every moment for the love of what you are doing…even when you don’t love it. You impact when you throw yourself at your task as if the outcome is your moment to shine.

Trust Yourself Steve offers this little bit of wisdom that you must apply to your life: “Trust yourself. Prepare assiduously, then let go of the urge to control how well you deliver; just deliver.”

Wanting To Win Too Much Next, be cautious of wanting to win too much. So, here again, obsessing about the win can actually cause you to lose. Think about the instances where you absolutely could not afford to lose. Those moments when the win was vital to your future. There are a few people who would say that focusing on the potential negative outcomes that could result from a loss motivated them to make sure they didn’t.

Generally, that doesn’t work very well. You will produce your best effort when confident that you will go on living your life regardless of the outcome of the circumstance you face. The shackles are removed when you understand that you have inherent worth that is not the result of an outcome.

Think of it this way. Imagine a negotiation. Many people approach negotiation as a zero sum game. In other words, there is a winner and a loser. That happens sometimes. But if your approach to a negotiation is “win at all costs” then a failed outcome is intolerable. Do you see the danger? Are there limits to the extent you might go to win?

How many people do you know who “won” but because of their newfound reputation failed? Not uncommon. Wanting to win too much is not nearly as effective as recognizing that there is joy in the journey.

There are limits you will go to and choose not to exceed. If a negotiation doesn’t produce an outcome that satisfies both parties, then don’t do the deal. Your disinterest in conducting business at any cost can be extremely helpful in your negotiation. It’s an attractive quality to the other party and can introduce trust.

The Craving To Control Applause This probably sounds funny if you work in a corporate environment, so let me state it another way: you crave being acknowledged. There’s nothing more frustrating than having a manager who takes credit for your work or effort. If you have any length of experience, you’ve been there and know the feeling.

Why does it bother us? Partly because your work matters. Therefore, you care and work hard to produce results. Sometimes the people that need to know about your work aren’t hearing about it. Listen in to Episode 40 and Episode 41 Brag, Swag, or Sway for some really good reasons about why (and how!) you must talk about yourself.

But there is a risk. If you live for the accolade or the recognition, it’s a bit like expectation. You can’t control it. There’s no way to guarantee that you will get the recognition from the audience that you believe you deserve. And that can be damaging to you. Dale Carnegie said it best: “The person who seeks all their applause from outside has their happiness in another’s keeping.”

If you are a poor performer, then the attention you will draw is different! It’s not like I’m saying not to work hard or produce results. Imagine if you decided that you were never going to deliver on another objective because your boss was going to get all of the credit. Shortly, you will have another boss because you will lose that job.

Do your best, but don’t think for a moment that you control how the audience responds or reacts to your performance. There are times when an audience simply doesn’t recognize your talent and ability. It will happen. If you spend your effort focusing on whether they will like you, Steve says you will simply create a situation where you generate performance killing anxiety.

Be satisfied that you have done your best and recognize how little control you have in how others will respond. Fanfare or angry mob! When you’ve done your best you can be satisfied with the knowledge that doing it differently wasn’t an option.

I’m Not All That So, the best piece of advice that Steve Berglas offered was at the end of the article. He said sometimes you just have to remind people that you aren’t a savior. Remember, it’s a team sport and we are in this together. And beware, because I’m likely to disappoint you as some stage. I’ll do my best and you can be certain of that.

Make sure to listen in next week when I will share some thoughts about why success and winning are not the same thing.

Resources Mentioned In This Episode: Steve Berglas’ article on Forbes The Three Major Ways High Expectations Cause Failure and How To Prevent Them

Leader to Leader Podcast Episode 040 Brag, Swag, or Sway: Why You Must Talk About Yourself Part One

Leader to Leader Podcast Episode 041 Brag, Swag, or Sway: Why You Must Talk About Yourself Part Two

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Welcome to Part Two of my conversation with Carey Jenkins. If you missed Part One, then you can listen to it here. Carey took an unconventional path to CEO of Substantial, a Seattle-based digital product studio. And while you may not know who Substantial is, their clients do. Clients that include such big names as Amazon, Mercedes Benz, and the Wall Street Journal.

A theater major who also pursued a journalism degree, Carey had to discover what moves her. An adventurous spirit combined with strong motivation, she found Substantial to be a welcome fit. She joined their client services team in 2012.

Carey began working with a career coach to ready herself for a CEO position at Substantial before it was even available. She became Substantial’s CEO six short years later in 2018.

Carey knows how to turn dreams into reality. This episode is packed with tips and pointers that will propel you to growth in your current role while helping you to think about the next one. There is so much good content here and I note my key takeaways below.

Key Takeaways From Part Two * Transparency and authenticity will always benefit a transition * It’s up to you to search out those who would benefit from your experience – it’s invaluable when you make yourself available to those who are looking to grow * You get energized when taking on the opportunity of a lifetime; just remember that others are not living the same change you are – give people time to adjust and energize on their own timeframe * Momentum and progress take time – being impatient will make this more difficult and increase the likelihood you internalize it as failure * Recognize and celebrate incremental progress * Sacrificing your health or sanity is not going to serve you in the long term * Technology is a large part of our lives and needs – manage it thoughtfully and ethically * Great product builders deeply understand a problem and then successfully build the simplest solution possible that makes life better * Become a better storyteller, especially the way you talk about yourself

Regardless of the path taken, unconventional or typical, you can leverage your experiences and commit to learning how to think like a CEO or other c-suite executive.

Resources Mentioned In This Episode: Substantial’s website

Substantial’s Hello Epics Trello Power-Up for creating easily identifiable links between cards on your Trello board

Follow Substantial on LinkedIn

Connect with Carey on LinkedIn

Any links to Amazon are affiliate links. The price doesn’t change, but I receive a commission for purchases made through those links.

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Welcome to Part One of my conversation with Carey Jenkins. Carey took an unconventional path to CEO of Substantial, a Seattle-based digital product studio. And while you may not know who Substantial is, their clients do. Clients that include such big names as Amazon, Mercedes Benz, and the Wall Street Journal.

Carey began working with a career coach to ready herself for a CEO position at Substantial before it was even available. She became Substantial’s CEO six short years later in 2018.

Key Takeaways From Part One * Stop procrastination – be thoughtful, but jump in and get started * Be on guard against impatience * Don’t be afraid to change dreams – sometimes you can’t tell whether something will satisfy until you pursue and achieve it * The people we assume are cut-out for c-suite positions, the group of people that are anointed because of business school, background or gender, is not the full group of those capable of filling c-suite positions * Your first step to obtaining a c-suite position is being able to envision yourself in that position * You need relatable models to help you imagine yourself in a c-suite role * Coaching is integral * Choose a path that allows you to have an impact * You must have a growth mindset – it helps you do your job and make good decisions * Purpose to learn and grow with intention, especially in the area of your blind spots (which you will need others to help you discover) * Literally, everyone has to learn how to do something. EVERYONE. The entire job of a CEO or c-suite role is to learn. Every. Single. Day. * Weak leaders are closed to learning something new * Women feel they have to be overqualified for a role and men feel they have to be partially qualified – women need to overcome their mindset in this important area

Regardless of the path taken, unconventional or typical, you can leverage your experiences and commit to learning how to think like a CEO or other c-suite executive.

Resources Mentioned In This Episode: Substantial’s website

Substantial’s Hello Epics Trello Power-Up for creating easily identifiable links between cards on your Trello board

Follow Substantial on LinkedIn

Connect with Carey on LinkedIn

Thanks for Listening! I want to hear from you! I appreciate your honest feedback so reach out and:

Leave a note in the comment section below.
Email a question to mark@markslemons.com.
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Admittedly, I have an obsession. I’m obsessed with you obtaining your leadership potential. I want the absolute, very best for you. There is nothing that would thrill me more than for you to have an opportunity to experience the kind of success that most people only dream about. This episode will help you come to grips with the fact that this is not inconceivable. But there isn’t room for superstition: your success does not require luck.

You have probably heard it said that luck is preparedness meeting opportunity. There’s a lot of truth in that pithy saying, isn’t there?! Though there is a disproportionate amount of weight often placed on the idea of being lucky as opposed to being prepared. And maybe it’s justified. When you think of someone who has gotten lucky, it might be that the impossible became reality or somebody was able to transition from ruin to a life well lived because of a chance event. I suppose that by comparison, some might say it takes a lot less work to get lucky.

Have you watched a baseball game recently? You might think that superstition belongs only to a few quirky no-namers but you would be wrong. I found a cool little article on BleacherReport that I will link to in the show notes. Here are a few of baseball’s more famous superstitious players for your listening pleasure. You decide if they truly could have had an impact on the player’s performance:

Roger Clemens used to go to Monument Park and touch the Babe Ruth plaque before every home game that he pitched for the Yankees
John Wetteland used to play for the NY Yankees. He would only wear one cap during the entire year. No matter how sweaty, dirty or faded, he only wore that one cap. In 1996 when they went to the World Series, he wouldn’t wear the World Series cap and made them sew the World Series logo on the cap he was wearing that year.
Mike Hargrove earned the nickname “The Human Rain Delay” because of how long his pre-batting routine lasted as he stepped up to the plate
Hiroshi Yamauchi, who at one time was the owner of the Seattle Mariners, never saw the team play a live game even when they played close to his home in Japan (you might remember Mr. Yamauchi as the owner of another very famous company…do you know it? If you guessed Nintendo, you are correct!)
Wade Boggs ate the exact same meal before every game (fried chicken) and always wrote the Hebrew word chai on his bat (means life) IN THE BATTER’S BOX
Joe DiMaggio used to touch second base every time he ran out to his position in center field
Turk Wendell was one of the most superstitious players in baseball and it would take me too long to tell you all of his routines. One of the most interesting? He always had four pieces of black licorice in his mouth when he hit the mound at the start of an inning. Between innings? He ALWAYS brushed his teeth and grabbed four more pieces for the next inning!

These were a few of my favorites:

Jim Leyland managed several teams including the Florida Marlins, the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Detroit Tigers. When he was with the Tigers he led them to become the American League champions in 2006 and had a record of 95-67. They duplicated that record in 2011 but lost the ALCS that year. But during the year, they had two record long win streaks that season: one was 11 games and the other was 9 games. Apparently, Jim’s underwear had a lot to do with it because he wore the same pair of boxers each day they continued to win – no washing until the win-streak ended! Gross, eh?! Trust me, that’s not as gross as it gets – just look up Moises Alou’s (ah-low) routine.
Jason Giambi would wear a gold thong to help him find his way out of a slump (maybe Leyland helped him see the significance of undies).
Finally, Mark Teixeira wore two different socks and it happened the first time on accident. For those who don’t know, Mark played for the Yankees at the same time as CC Sabathia. Mark’s number is 25 and Sabathia’s is 52. Through a simple mixup in the locker room, he accidentally put on one of CC’s socks with one of his. So one sock had the number 25 and the other, the inverse, or 52. He did exceptionally well in that game (two homers, and six RBIs) so he kept it up for future games!

You can thank Bleacher Report for that insightful reporting. Lest you think it’s relegated only to the world of sports, Gallup did a little poll back in the late ’90s. They found that 72% of Americans possessed at least one good luck charm! I don’t know about you, but based on what we just read, I’ll bet it’s a little higher with baseball players! Now in defense of ballplayers, some of what they do is simply routine that has ingrained a habit which allows them to focus. It’s not all superstition.

We aren’t immune, however. Think about it: knocking on wood, avoiding walking under a ladder, a rabbit’s foot, or even saying “bless you” when someone sneezes are all pretty common. But here’s the problem: superstition doesn’t work.

“What?!” you say, “Have you considered those who are consistently lucky (or consistently unlucky!)?” Well, I haven’t, but Professor Richard Wiseman published a cool little article titled “The Luck Factor” back in 2003 and he did check it out…thoroughly!

Back in the early 90s, he took a more scientific look into the concept of luck because he wanted to know why some people are consistently lucky, while others, without bad luck, would have no luck at all. Why do some seem to get all the breaks? Especially when you and I know people who seem to experience one disaster after another.

So, Professor Wiseman placed advertisements in national newspapers and magazines asking for people who considered themselves exceptionally lucky or unlucky to contact him. Over 400 extraordinary men and women were willing to participate in his research. There was a wide variety in age from 18 to 84 as well as walks of life: business people, factory workers, teachers, housewives, doctors, secretaries, and salespeople.

After carefully examining diaries, personality questionnaires, and intelligence tests, they would also come to his laboratory for experiments. The findings were able to demonstrate that luck is not a magical ability or the result of random chance. The exercise was able to definitively prove that people are not born lucky or unlucky.

Instead, Professor Wiseman said that “although lucky and unlucky people have almost no insight into the real causes of their good and bad luck, their thoughts and behavior are responsible for much of their fortune.” His research was able to show that lucky people generate their own good fortune via four basic principles. They:

are skilled at creating and noticing chance opportunities,
make lucky decisions by listening to their intuition,
create self-fulfilling prophesies via positive expectations, and
adopt a resilient attitude that transforms bad luck into good.

Further, Mr. Wiseman goes on to say “Lucky people consistently encounter such opportunities whereas unlucky people do not.” This might surprise you, but to prove his hypothesis, his volunteers were given a newspaper. His request was simple: look through it and tell him how many photographs were inside.

On average, those who count themselves as unlucky people took about two minutes to count the photographs. Those who consider themselves to be lucky took just seconds. Why? There was a half page message in type two inches tall on the second page of the newspaper that said: “Stop counting – There are 43 photographs in this newspaper.”

Isn’t that incredible?! Hard to imagine that anyone could miss it, but there’s an explanation. Remember those personality tests the volunteers took? Well, it turns out that those who view themselves as unlucky are much tenser and more anxious than their lucky counterparts…and anxiety disrupts people’s ability to notice the unexpected. They are too focused on looking for something else. The perfect job, the perfect mate, the perfect vacation, the perfect car…do you see a trend here?

Are you trying so hard to get it right that you are missing the opportunities blowing right by you? Professor Wiseman said, “The harder they looked, the less they saw.” Before you throw up your hands and relegate yourself to perfectionist purgatory, it doesn’t have to be like this! This isn’t a death sentence – you can alter your ability to see opportunities. But it’s up to you. You are going to have to introduce variety and change to disrupt your patterns of normality.

You’ve heard me take multiple times about neuropathways. You create new ones by forcing your lazy brain out of energy conservation mode. That means taking a different route to work. Brushing your teeth just before you leave the bedroom rather than immediately after waking up or using your opposite hand to brush your teeth.

Imagine picking apples in an orchard daily. When you start, you can go anywhere and find fruit. After a while, your repeated returns to the same spot diminish the result. He says: “It is easy for people to exhaust the opportunities in their life.”

Always talking to the same people, visiting the same places, or doing the same things reduces potential. New or even random experiences increase the potential for new opportunities.

Yet, it isn’t just about creating opportunities. It’s the way you handle misfortune as well. Seeing things that didn’t work out the way you would have liked in a positive and resilient way is critical.

He uses an analogy of going into a bank. While you are waiting, a robber enters, fires a shot, and the bullet hits you in the arm. Unlucky people say “Yep, sounds right. Wrong place, wrong time. Just my luck. I get shot just trying to deposit my paycheck!” Contrast this with the lucky person’s perspective: “Oh my goodness! It could have been so much worse! What if the bullet went into my head or my heart?! I’m so fortunate to be alive…and now I have this crazy story to tell!”

It’s counter-factual, but lucky people imagine how the bad thing could have been and feel better about themselves and their lives. And this, Professor Wiseman says, “helps keep their expectation about the future high, and, increases the likelihood of them continuing to live a lucky life.”

If you are unhappy with your luck, then start creating chance opportunities by breaking daily routines and use counter-factual thinking. When things are bad, get thankful and express gratitude for what you’ve got remembering how things could be worse. Enjoy your experiences and ease up a bit on the intense focus so you can see what’s happening around you and be aware of the opportunities. They are there! There’s evidence demonstrating a high probability that this will work for you.

There’s more to discuss regarding success and excellence. But first, don’t miss next week!

It’s the first of a two-part conversation with Substantial CEO, Carey Jenkins. If you can imagine everything that you would need to do in order to become a CEO, it probably starts with the business school you chose, then how well you network and establish connections, making sure you have a career history demonstrating successive levels of advancing through the business ranks…and certainly, those things can all be helpful.

But what if you didn’t go to one of the top business schools? What if your network isn’t flowing over with stereotypical CEOs who can help you get places? Or what if your success has been in non-traditional industries? Then what? Does it mean you aren’t qualified to lead at the highest levels? Of course not. Don’t miss next week and listen in to Carey’s unconventional path to the office of CEO and get inspired!

Resources Mentioned In This Episode: Steve McKee’s article on SmartBrief The Ministry of Culture

Bleacher Report article Baseball’s 50 Weirdest All Time Superstitions

Professor Richard Wiseman’s article The Luck Factor

Thanks for Listening! I want to hear from you! I appreciate your honest feedback so reach out and:

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Welcome to Part Two of my interview with Lelani Craig. If you missed Part One, you can find it here. Lelani is the President of CommGap International Language Services. With more than 25 years of experience in the language industry, she is an accomplished conference interpreter as well as a certified court interpreter. As a result, she is not just an authority on the language of business but knows a thing or two about the business of language.

CommGap is a translation and interpretation company which Lelani started in 2000. CommGap works with more than 200 languages. Additionally, Lelani owns Global 1 Voice, LLC which offers medical interpreter training, language assessment, language classes, and compliance consulting.

Lelani currently serves on the Board of Directors of the Association of Language Companies. She is also one of the organizers of the Silicon Slopes Localization group, a member of the Utah Women Tech Council, and recently organized the Utah Chapter of Women in Localization. In addition, she serves on Advisory Boards for The Global Chamber and Lango, a technology company. As a mentor and speaker for University entrepreneurial programs, Lelani frequently speaks for leadership and mentoring groups.

She received awards from “Count Me In” and American Express in 2004. In 2013, Lelani was selected by Goldman Sachs to participate in their 10,000 Small Businesses Program. In addition, she was chosen by Utah Business Magazine as one of Utah’s 30 Business Women to Watch in 2014. Furthermore, adding to her impressive list of accomplishments, she was awarded Hispanic Business Woman of the Year by the Utah Hispanic Chamber of Commerce in 2017.

Key Takeaways From Part Two * Traditional marketing doesn’t work in every industry, so always pay attention to client feedback and referral rates * What additional need does your client have that you can meet * Make your client look good * Understand client needs, not just the service they are asking for, but also the one they don’t even know that they need yet * Don’t dream big; instead, think bigger * Fear will keep you back if you let it – be open to the possibility of trying to do something that makes you uncomfortable * Comfort will keep you from pushing yourself, so beware * Mentoring has a significant impact on your team members * Growing big and fast isn’t always the right answer for a small business * Quality is key and growth that damages quality will hurt the company in the long run * Don’t believe every article you read about entrepreneurs and startups – you can grow a multimillion dollar company without funding

Resources Mentioned In This Episode: The Leader To Leader Podcast Episode 117: The Business Of Language An Interview With Lelani Craig Part One

CommGap International Language Services

Global1Voice

Follow CommGap on LinkedIn

Connect with Lelani on LinkedIn

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Welcome to Part One of my interview with Lelani Craig. Lelani is the President of CommGap International Language Services. With more than 25 years of experience in the language industry, she is an accomplished conference interpreter as well as a certified court interpreter. As a result, she is not just an authority on the language of business but knows a thing or two about the business of language.

Key Takeaways From Part One * Don’t grow up – or at least don’t get complacent and lose the desire to know and ask questions * Hang onto your inquisitive “I wonder what it would be like…” mindset * If you don’t try it at least once, you won’t know if you like it or not * Don’t be afraid to take the opportunities that present themselves * It takes a while to learn custom and culture – give yourself time * What makes you different can prove to be your advantage, so don’t shy away from the thing that makes you stand out * Learn everything you can regardless of your role because it may add value to your entrepreneurial endeavor * Resources, contacts, and network connections grow with time and experience. Eventually, as your business matures, the connections with software and systems speed the results

Resources Mentioned In This Episode: CommGap International Language Services

Global1Voice

Follow CommGap on LinkedIn

Connect with Lelani on LinkedIn

Thanks for Listening! I want to hear from you! I appreciate your honest feedback so reach out and:

Leave a note in the comment section below.
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Today’s episode is powerful. If the content doesn’t move you, then in all seriousness, I would ask you to take some time and reevaluate what’s important. The title is simple enough, Why Success Starts With Service; however, I’m certain the task of implementing these principles will require a lifetime to master.

This episode releases on Monday, May 27th, 2019. For those of you listening in the U.S., you know that it’s Memorial Day. It’s a three day weekend and I hope that you made the most of your time away from work. On this special day, I remember all of the brave men and women who have put on a military uniform and made their way into the unknown.

In particular, I remember my uncle, Wayne Slemons. He died earlier this year on April 18th. It makes me sad, but also proud. While I have no idea whether his service in the U.S. Navy brought him any significant feeling of personal accomplishment, I know he was always proud of his service and his contribution to our great nation.

And I remember my dad, Larry Slemons. The stories of his experience in the U.S. Marine Corps have held my attention for 50 years. Again, I’m proud of him, his service to our country, and grateful that our time together remains. It would take me hours to tell you how my dad has positively impacted my life.

When we remember the sacrifices of those who serve, we must also remember the sacrifices made by those who stay behind. It’s often the service of those behind the front lines that get overlooked. Today’s episode is a tribute to them. Specifically, today’s episode is a tribute to Rae Wilson and approximately 55,000 other women who served at home during World War II. They are evidence that success starts with service.

You might recall that in >>last week’s episode that Ginger and I were in Seattle for our daughter-in-law’s graduation. Rachel got her Master’s Degree from Northwest University and we were there to celebrate. Fortunately, we were able to attend the commencement and hear some fantastic speakers. Well what I didn’t tell you was that one of these speakers was Dr. Dick Foth.

You might not recognize his name. He’s an author, speaker, podcaster, mentor, and Pastor who was the President of Bethany University from 1978-1992. And on this day, he was the commencement speaker at Northwest University.

He said many meaningful things on this day, but one topic stood out. I don’t consider myself to be a history buff. Our oldest son, Nehemiah, (Rachel’s husband) fills that category nicely. I’m always amazed at how much he knows about history but World War II was particularly intriguing to him. So Dr. Foth told us a story that he read by a gentleman named Bob Greene.

Bob was a sportswriter and in the early 2000s, took to writing a book that, pardon my pun, was out in left field. But this story captured my attention. That book title is Once Upon A Town: The Miracle of the North Platte Canteen. And in that book are stories that will stir your soul.

Dr. Foth mentioned a woman named Rae Wilson. This 26-year-old woman was at the epicenter of what came to be known as the North Platte Canteen. So here’s the story of Rae and the beginning of the North Platte Canteen:

On December 17th, 1941, Rae had heard a rumor that her brother, a company commander in the 134th Infantry Regiment of the Nebraska Army National Guard, was going to pass through North Platte on their way from Camp Joseph T. Robinson near Little Rock, Arkansas. The train was supposedly going to arrive at 11, but by noon it hadn’t shown up. Now, remember, you aren’t allowed to discuss or share troop movement information, so no one knew if this was even accurate.

I expect many people were beginning to question whether the rumor was true, but at least five hundred relatives and friends of local servicemen came to the depot in hopes of getting to see loved ones. When the train finally arrived around 430P, the crowd cheered, but it wasn’t the 134th. It was a National Guard regiment from the same company, Company D, but from Kansas, not Nebraska.

What to do? Well, the crowd gave the soldiers the gifts and the food that was originally meant for their own sons and wished them off. Rae wasn’t satisfied. She thought this was something the community should commit to doing until the troops stopped moving through North Platte. I seriously doubt that Rae was looking for a way to establish the principle that success starts with service.

She did write a letter to the editor of the local paper, The Daily Bulletin and said the following:

I don’t know just how many people went to meet the trains when the troops went thru our city Wednesday, but those who didn’t should have.

To see the spirits and the high morale among those soldiers should certainly put some of us on our feet and make us realize we are really at war. We should help keep this soldiers morale at its highest peak. We can do our part.

During World War I the army and navy mothers, or should I say the war mothers, had canteens at our own depot. Why can’t we, the people of North Platte and other towns surrounding our community, start a fund and open a Canteen now? I would be more than willing to give my time without charge and run this canteen.

We who met this troop train which arrived about 5 o’clock were expecting Nebraska boys. Naturally we had candy, cigarettes, etc., but we very willingly gave these things to the Kansas boys.

Smiles, tears and laughter followed. Appreciation showed on over 300 faces. An officer told me it was the first time anyone had met their train and that North Platte had helped the boys keep up their spirits.

I say get back of our sons and other mothers’ sons 100 per cent. Let’s do something and do it in a hurry! We can help this way when we can’t help any other way.

-Rae Wilson

The North Platte Telegraph. September 17, 1973

So here a young woman identifies an ability to serve complete strangers. Treating other mother’s sons as if they were their own. And would you like to know just how successful this endeavor was? I thought so!

Success Starts With Service This little town of 12,000 people opened that canteen. And with the support of approximately 55,000 female volunteers, from 125 surrounding communities as far away as eastern Colorado, a service movement was born.

From December of 1941 until April of 1946, 20-30 trains arrived for their ten minute stop in North Platte. Ten minutes for a serviceman or woman to get a hug and some grub from someone who loved them as much as their mother. Seven days a week for five years, these women served over six million members of our military.

No government funding. Not a cent from the city, county, state, or federal government. 100% of what was served was baked with love and brought from the farms and tables of thousands of homes in the heart of America. And please remember, this was during rationing – something I would bet the majority of listeners today have not and will not experience in their lifetime. You stood in line for sugar, butter, flour, milk. And from this, these people gave, and gave, and gave. Not from their wealth, but from their poverty.

I wonder how many discussions occurred around the dinner table where the family decided to miss a meal so a few soldiers could have one? How many gave up their food for a friend who they would probably never see again? If you want to understand the impact, read some of the interviews Bob Greene had with soldiers in his book. These men saw some of the most brutal war scenes in history. And they were moved to tears by the sincere love and concern of these women in a ten minute stop in North Platte, NE.

You have no idea how much a glass of cold milk, a sandwich, a piece of pie, and a cup of coffee meant to these soldiers. One captain said it was the kindest any of his soldiers had been treated during all of World War II. In ten minutes, these women fed, played with, danced with, and gave gifts to soldiers who would remember their simple acts of kindness for a lifetime.

Bob said, “If you want a guide book on how to be a great American, it happened right there at the North Platte Canteen.” This wasn’t just successful – Bob called it a miracle. And he explained how resistant he is to use that word. That this little town of 12,000 people so dramatically impacted the lives of more than 6,000,000 is, in fact, miraculous.

And so today, with you, I remember through the words and actions of these most honorable women at the North Platte Canteen, through the initiative of a single 26-year-old woman and her letter to the editor starting one of the most powerful volunteer efforts in our history, that my greatest success starts with service.

To all those women and men who have given their lives in service to our country or those who have served or are serving in any branch of the armed forces, I say, “Thank you for your service.”

Resources Mentioned In This Episode: The Leader To Leader Podcast Episode 115: To Be A Great Leader You Must Have This

C-SPAN2 video of Bob Greene talking about his book Once Upon A Town at the Evanston, IL Public Library back in 2002

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Once Upon a Town: The Miracle of the North Platte Canteen

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How many times have you heard that there’s this mystical, mythical, or magical key to unlock a hidden treasure? You know what I’m talking about: six steps to financial independence, three keys to obtaining influence, 1,084 things you must do to be a good parent. Right?! It can be a little annoying. I purposefully did that with the title of this episode: To Be A Great Leader You Must Have This.

Yet, no matter how annoying, disappointing, (or both!) most of that content has some valuable insight. An insight that if you take a moment to extract, and apply, has the potential to benefit you greatly in your future. There is very little content produced that will not benefit you at all.

What Is Your Expectation? This is not the episode that will unleash your leadership potential if you will just send me $999. It’s not the episode that will catapult you to the top of your organization – although, for $2,995 I can provide that.This episode will not give you a pattern that you can replicate and therefore obtain your heart’s deepest desire.

Every Great Leader Wants To Improve Instead, I promise that you will hear a tip, find a point, discover a lesson that you can implement to improve your leadership skill. And maybe it’s a letdown. Every great leader has a natural desire to improve. And if that’s your mindset, I can deliver with this content.

It’s kind of funny when things happen unintentionally. Today’s episode is kind of like that. I don’t mean that there was not a plan for the episode, but rather an unintentional connection to a previous episode.

Back in Episode 44: Four Perspectives On Service, I shared some thoughts on serving. It just so happened that this was emphasized by commencement speaker, Dr. Rick Rigsby, at Marrisa’s graduation. Marissa is our daughter-in-law. And I guess in keeping with the tradition – it is commencement season you know – I want to share some thoughts from Rachel’s commencement. Rachel is our other, and first, daughter-in-law.

You Can Learn From Just About Anything She recently graduated from Northwest University with her Master’s degree in Obviously, we are all very proud of her. Just like we are all proud of any achievement obtained by our loved ones. I personally feel like there is always an opportunity to learn regardless of the environment in which I find myself.

This commencement exercise was no exception. What’s funny is that several others who attended the exact same commencement exercise heard the exact same speakers and yet, walked away with entirely different perspectives. Some of the emotions were shared and consistent, others were quite different.

No One To Blame But Yourself It reminds me again that each moment is what you make of it. You own the right to determine whether you will or can benefit. Because it’s up to you, there isn’t anyone to blame if you learn nothing. So the most controversial was the student address that was given by one of the graduating undergrad students.

She shared a couple of things that shook me. I love that. It’s a wonderful feeling to know that you have just received a challenge to your perspective. The example she used was from Shakespeare’s play, The Merry Wives of Windsor. Maybe you’re familiar with it? I’m not going to go through the entire storyline as that would take too long here.

Affection Or Deception? I’ll just say that there is a character, Falstaff, who intends to increase his financial position by obtaining the affections of one or both of two wealthy and married mistresses. In this process, another character, Pistol, is having a conversation with Falstaff in which he asks for a loan from Falstaff.

Falstaff: I will not lend thee a penny.

Pistol: Why, then, the world’s mine oyster, Which I with sword will open.

And this became the premise for the young woman’s address to her peers, and to us, the proud educators, parents, family, and friends of all those graduating. I’m not sure what you think when you here “the world is my oyster.” If I introspect, then I initially would say that I view it as my opportunity. My ability to make the most of any situation.

The World Is My Oyster It means that I will have to work for what I get. That effort will be necessary if I am to gain success. I’ve not seen any oysters that open by themselves. It takes an object (a tool) to open the oyster. And this is where the analogy admittedly begins to fall apart.

If you think about using skills or talents to open oysters, then you understand that they can feed you (ignoring for a moment that eating an oyster might be the most disgusting thought you could imagine).

If you don’t work, you don’t eat. You will have to use your tools to derive gain. So far so good. This part of the analogy works…it’s the next part that produces a failing.

So the story goes that if you open a high number of oysters, then you might be fortunate enough to find a pearl once in a while! The problem is that the oysters that contain pearls are generally inedible. So…do what you want with the analogy.

Gain Through Exploitation Not every oyster has a pearl. You can think of encountering the pearl as an astounding success. Falstaff and Pistol were looking for a shortcut, or at least a formula, to obtain their financial independence. And here’s the part that Abby shared while addressing her peers that made me sit up and take notice: “the world is your oyster” in the eyes of Falstaff and Pistol was gain through exploitation.

Ouch. It leads to several powerful questions:

What motivates my behavior?
Why am I bent to achieve a particular outcome?
Are my intentions noble or dishonest?
Would I be willing to exploit another for my personal gain?
Have I dedicated myself to conquest? If so, for what purpose?

Naturally, there are many other good questions besides these. It did make me wonder where in my life were my motives less than honorable or pure? What lengths would I be willing to go to in order to secure these outcomes?

Richest Treasures Gained Through Wonder In continuing her thought, Abby wonders aloud if the richest treasures are obtained instead through wonder. I mentioned how I experienced this several weeks ago when I used it to introduce Episode 113. On a morning run, I was taken aback by the beauty and depth of a blue, cloudless sky.

There was nothing new about it. I was just noticing it again. Maybe it’s a blade of grass, a piece of fruit, a tree, a star, or a hummingbird that arouses wonder and amazement. The wonder is what moves me to learn. I suppose you could argue that exploitation is an equal motivator, but I hope you see the value in shifting to wonder instead.

Viciously Guarding What You’ve Gained So I’ll end with this thought. When your treasure is the result of exploitation, it likely results from a scarcity mindset. In other words, there are finite resources and you have to take someone else’s in order to secure your own. I suspect you will find that treasure obtained through exploitation is viciously guarded.

If we are busy viciously guarding all that we have gained, is there room for sharing with another? What if that sharing could cause them to overtake you? Are you willing to share your time and resources to the advancement of others in the cause of furthering wonder?

As a leader, you owe it to yourself to consider whether the trait a great leader can’t afford to be without isn’t the desire the learn, but the willingness to give of himself or herself for the advancement of others.

If that’s accurate, then the most logical question that follows would be what are you willing to give yourself away for? My suspicion is that in this answer is a load of life fulfillment, wonder, and joy.

Resources Mentioned In This Episode: The Leader To Leader Podcast Episode 44: Four Perspectives On Service

Thanks for Listening! I want to hear from you! I appreciate your honest feedback so reach out and:

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If you caught >last week’s episode, you know we are talking about how to create conversations that generate inspiration and engagement. I’m always looking for a good question. There are so many questions you could ask, but I’m talking about the kind of question that makes you stop and say “Now THAT’S a good question.”

Initiating Memorable Conversations As a leader, this should be critically important to you. Whether you are talking to a team member, your manager, a client, or a stranger, you need to be comfortable initiating memorable conversations. If we are honest, a high percentage of our conversations are anything but memorable.

I expect that you want to stand out. Not to draw attention to yourself, but to differentiate you from your peers. You know this: anyone can fill the void (or silence) with meaningless words. How many people do you know that consistently ask thoughtful questions? It follows that the ones you respect the most are likely great at asking questions which generate inspiring conversations!

When was the last time that someone had a question for you which had the opposite effect of inspiring? Instead of engaging, it made you want to run away. I experienced this recently while attending a networking event.

Don’t Do This So this particular event was one that I had never attended previously. It was close to the house (literally, only a few minutes away) and at a restaurant that I had seen several times before. It was free and just a simple meetup which I sincerely appreciated.

As I entered the room, there was a registration table where you signed in. I didn’t have an issue with providing my contact info as I had submitted it online in order to register. And I do want to know when future meetups occur. What I thought was kind of interesting though was that the host/co-host were realtors. Again, it doesn’t bother me; however, I thought it was an interesting way to acquire some names and contact details.

I’m not exaggerating here. I take five steps away from the registration table where two gents are talking. The one stops almost mid-sentence, sticks out his hand, and says “I’m Charlie,” (I’ve changed the names to protect the guilty) and without taking a pause or a breath, says “so what’s your story?”

It was just…weird. How do you respond to that? Should I start at birth? Do I just talk about the last six months? How much should I share? I was a little surprised.

A Good Book You might recall that back in Friend of a Friend. If you haven’t picked it up yet, do yourself a favor and check it out. That episode rightly points out why you should avoid the “What do you do?” question.

So on this point, I’ll give Charlie credit. At least he asked about my story, whatever that means! Nice guy. Wrong approach. A little thought before showing up at the event would have allowed him the opportunity to have a question up his sleeve that no one expected. Something that would impress. But, alas, opportunity lost.

Now obviously, this was an attempt by an individual who was uncomfortable or nieve about how to initiate a meaningful conversation.

An Unintentional Outcome So as the discussion moved along, or shall I say, as the discussion was drug along, I made an interesting discovery: this gent is a life coach. In fairness, he might be the most exceptional life coach on the face of the earth. I don’t know. What I do know? That’s not the first (second, or 200th) place that I’m going to turn for life advice.

And this is why I’m taking the time to do this episode! I want you to look like you know what you are doing. You should be empowered to use thoughtful and thought-provoking questions ESPECIALLY when you are trying to engage with a potential customer! Being talkative is not enough.

Getting To What’s Important I can bore you to tears with so many words on topics you don’t care about. You know the kind of person I’m talking about. They seem to have an infinite number of details about something you’ve never heard of and couldn’t possibly care less about! That’s not you though. You are smarter than that. You know what every person wants to talk about: themselves.

This is such an important skill. You want the questions you ask to be productive, stimulating, and attention-grabbing. Relisten to href="https://www.markslemons.com/ltl-077-the-question-you-should-never-ask-when-meeting-someone-new/" target="_blank" rel="noreferrer noopener">>Episode 77 for some ideas.

But here, I want to focus on some questions that will work well regardless of the environment. They are useful both with those whom you know and those who you will soon get to know. I came across several of these questions in an Inc Magazine article written by Elise Keith (the link is in the show notes) and others are my own.

Fantastic Questions So here we go. Check these out:

What are you passionate about achieving this year?
What has been your highlight (or lowlight) so far this year?
If you could travel anywhere in the world, money is no object, where would you like to go?
What are you reading right now? or What is a book you would recommend?
Do you think to talk or talk to think?
Are you energized by a crowd or does it deplete you?
What is your favorite time of day and why?
How do you prepare when it’s time to do your best focus work?
What personal or professional accomplishment are you most proud of?
If you had to share the single most important life lesson with your favorite young person, what one would you choose to share?
Do you collect anything?
What are you grateful for?
If you could pick up a new skill in an instant, what would it be?
What was the first significant thing you bought with your own money?
What is your favorite restaurant?

And maybe it’s a tired question, but it’s a good one: if you could share a meal with any person in the world, alive or dead, who would you choose?

I guarantee you, if you will use one of these questions instead of “What’s your story?” or “What do you do?”, no one will leave that conversation thinking “Man, that was weird!”

Try it out and let me know how it goes.

Resources Mentioned In This Episode: The Leader To Leader Podcast Episode 113: The Unintentional Impact Of Careless Conversations

The Leader To Leader Podcast Episode 77: The Question You Should Never Ask When Meeting Someone New

Elise Keith’s article in Inc. Magazine 28 Icebreaker Questions to Start Your Next Team Meeting

Any links to Amazon are affiliate links. The price doesn’t change, but I receive a commission for purchases made through those links.

Thanks for Listening! I want to hear from you! I appreciate your honest feedback so reach out and:

Leave a note in the comment section below.
Email a question to mark@markslemons.com.
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If you’ve been listening to the Leader to Leader podcast for a while, you know how I value stimulating the right conversation. I use the word “right” intentionally. Anyone can fill the void (or silence) with meaningless words – I’m interested in the conversations that generate inspiration! How do you avoid the unintentional impact of careless conversations?

Practice, Practice, Practice Well first, I think you have to let me make the case that damage can occur when a conversation isn’t thought out. It’s not easy to do; however, anyone can do it. Huh?! Like all skills that require effort to master, having meaningful conversations takes practice.

If you are gifted with gab, then you might think “I’m all good here – moving on to another podcast.” I don’t want you to stay because this podcast is better. Please stay because I think what I have to offer you will help.

And this isn’t a guilt trip! We’ve all had careless conversations like the ones I’m about to describe. I just want you to think about it a little before you engage. Talk for the sake of talk is not value adding for the participants. When you know how to generate meaningful conversation, it will actually feel a little awkward participating in conversations about the weather.

That doesn’t mean that there isn’t a place for these types of conversations. There are plenty of instances where this type of discussion is perfectly acceptable. But when was the last time you did something because it was “acceptable?”

The Acceptability Test It’s acceptable to be viewed as an average performer. Are you good with that? It’s acceptable to be a perfectionist and never put anything out there because you don’t feel like it’s good enough. How’s that working out for you? It’s acceptable to binge watch seven seasons of your favorite series on Netflix. Was that productive?

The point is this: when you participate in a careless conversation, it can have a devaluing impact on the participants. Ever had one of these conversations with your spouse?

Are You Listening To Me Me to my wife, Ginger: How was your day? (while I’m staring at my phone)

Her: (intuitively knowing I’m not hearing anything she’s saying) Well, it started a little weird when the Easter Bunny tried to carjack the person next to me. Then at lunch, I was approached by the guy who sends all of those emails from Africa saying that I’ve inherited a lot of money. Turns out it’s true. He showed me a briefcase loaded with cash, some of which I used to buy groceries for dinner tonight. Since we just had igloo meatloaf on Saturday, we’re having your favorite tonight: tuna and Jello pie!

Me: Wow Hon, that sounds great. You had a really busy day. (having missed everything she just said, and in my mind feeling like I can tick the box “speak with my spouse”). The worst part is that this leads to being together while completely apart!

And if you want to be apart long-term, go ahead and use the recipes for igloo meatloaf or tuna and Jello pie. Nothing says love and warmth like an igloo meatloaf. No, I’m not kidding. These are real recipes. You heard it here first…or, maybe you have been going to counseling for the last three decades because your grandma heard it first and made it for you.

Easing Your Conscience I recognize that this is an extreme and silly example. Hopefully, you can recall a similar conversation with your spouse, child, friend, or coworker that validates my point. These careless conversations don’t do anything but ease your conscience – they contribute zero value. And worse, inadvertently, they can damage our relationships.

Proximity ≠ Spending Time Together My wife, Ginger, said something a while back that I think we all need to acknowledge: being in the same geographical proximity is not equivalent to spending time together. Your conversations have to be intentional and purposeful. They should be designed to indicate that you care about the person you are talking to. A careless conversation doesn’t do this.

Imagine this circumstance. It plays out thousands of times per day in businesses all around the world. You have an important deadline approaching and you require input from your leader. You send a text or email with several questions. The response you receive answers only one of them.

Frustrated, you send another note and ask the other three questions that didn’t get answered the first time. Your leader responds to two of the three. Of course, the one that didn’t get answered is most important. You are now on your third engagement and have wasted more than an hour trying to get answers to questions you need to simply do your job.

Listening Communicates Care Regardless of the medium utilized, it’s a time waster to participate in careless or thoughtless conversations. No one wants to participate in these discussions. And like me in the example I shared where I provide a distracted response, the other person feels like you don’t care enough to pay attention. It doesn’t matter what you say.

It stands out when it happens to you. I want it to stand out when you do it to others. This isn’t about people’s feelings…at least not directly. It’s about engaging your team and being productive, improving efficiency, and eliminating waste. There is no reason for your team to have to chase you because you are careless in your response.

Shutdown Distracted Conversations Have you ever had an opportunity to have an important conversation with someone you respect or admire? Maybe you’ve been waiting for a while for this moment. Is there anything more disappointing than recognizing that the other participant is so distracted that there is nothing you can do to hold their attention for any length of time? I’ve learned to shut down those conversations.

There is no use sharing important words or thoughts or questions with someone who isn’t listening. Move on as quickly as you can. You don’t need that level of frustration. It doesn’t hurt to communicate this as well: “It seems that I’ve caught you at a bad time and you have many other things on your mind. Let me know if there’s a better time for us to talk.”

Being “available” or physically present isn’t doing your team any favors. Validating them with good listening skills is one of the highest compliments you can pay someone who takes time to talk with you.

The Only Person In The Room It’s often said that one of the best examples of making you feel like you are the only person in the room was the way President Bill Clinton would lock eyes with, and actively listen, to what you are saying. He was a pretty important guy with a lot of demands for his attention. What a compliment to have someone say that they felt they had his full attention.

I recently read Donald Miller describe the reason why he switched rental car companies. The company he had been using had a great “script” for “engaging” with the customer. Maybe if you had never rented a car before or it was your first time renting from company X, you would feel like they “cared” about you. The tenth time you had the same identical conversation might change your opinion.

What Donald described was a scripted list of questions that he quickly caught and could anticipate. It made me laugh when he described how he jumped ahead in their script with a coming question that the agent was going to ask and then answered it for them. Stunned silence, right?! The agent is baffled and has a look like “What just happened? I don’t know what to do next.”

Do They Feel Heard This is no different than when you try to script conversations for representatives in your call center. Granted, a guide is necessary to prevent needless action, but come on! When the same customer is calling about the same problem that they have had for three days in a row now, is it really necessary to go through the script with them? It’s careless conversation that will leave the customer feeling like you really aren’t listening.

Regretfully, I can recall instances of failing to follow my own advice. But I’m committed to improving. I hope that you are too. No one wants to be the person with something important or significant to say that’s completely missed by a room full of people who need to hear it. But alas, their attention is devoted to their open laptops, looking at email, or whatever else they might have to do. And they leave your words to fall on dead ears.

You Validate Through Listening Don’t be that person. Leave your device behind and listen closely to the one that’s talking to you. As you exercise good listening skills, you communicate and validate how important they are to you. Be the one leader that this person encounters who will leave that conversation saying “Wow, she really listened to what I was saying. I felt like there was no one else in the room.”

Next week, I’ll share with you a handful of questions that you can use to stimulate the kind of productive conversations you desire. It’s always good to have a question or two on hand to demonstrate how you are different. You aren’t wasting time, or participating in careless conversations, you are inspiring and engaging. So tune in next week where I will share some good questions you can use to start a productive conversation.

Resources Mentioned In This Episode: Thanks for Listening! I want to hear from you! I appreciate your honest feedback so reach out and:

Leave a note in the comment section below.
Email a question to mark@markslemons.com.
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Listen to the show using your favorite platform: Spotify | iTunes | Stitcher | Android | RSS

Now, go lead like someone you would want to follow!

Building a StoryBrand: Clarify Your Message So Customers Will Listen

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I hope that you have enjoyed the last couple episodes on liminal space. As I mentioned in Episode 110, I had not heard of the concept before it was shared by Thomas Winninger and I feel very fortunate to have been able to share with you some of the things that I learned as I investigated this topic. And today, I will share with you some final thoughts that will wrap this up.

There are a couple of other folks out there who I found insightful when discussing liminal space. Emily Perlow gave a TEDx talk back in 2014 called Leadership in Liminal Spaces. This talk was recorded at Worcester Polytechnic Institute in Vancouver and I thought she introduced a couple of key points through examples that can help us understand liminal space.

I shared previously that the Latin root of liminal is the word limin which means threshold and how it referred specifically to the transverse beam in a door frame. The example I share is the tradition of a groom carrying the bride across the threshold.

This is indicating the move from something known to something new and unknown. It’s exciting, and if we are honest, a little terrifying! And that’s okay. Courage is moving forward in the face of fear.

What Liminal Space Feels Like So the examples that Emily uses really help us to connect with the feelings of liminal space. She identifies the lead up to liminal space as separation. This is an event that transitions us from what is known. Many cultures have practices that we refer to as rights of passage.

For instance, young boys moving into manhood might have a tribal expectancy of a trial or test. They leave the tribe and head out alone to face an extreme condition. You are leaving everything you know, taking a massive risk, a monumental gamble on yourself, and betting that you can overcome this great obstacle.

If you succeed, it will not only give you a tremendous boost to your self-confidence, but also a sense of achievement and a community who recognizes that you have become. That is, you will be doing something that you’ve never done. And some will think you aren’t capable of doing.

Can You Survive It And until you have done it, you yourself don’t even know if you can do it. Who are you? What are you made of? Are you capable of succeeding in this great difficulty?

And there’s always a rub, right?! It’s not just doing something you’ve never done, or going somewhere you’ve never been, it’s all about the discomfort that results from not truly knowing what you are getting into.

You really aren’t alone though. There’s this companion who is always with you: one who brings you great confidence and certainty or one that brings you the great terror of failure. Yes, it’s your thoughts. Not so easy to escape them.

You were comfortable where you were at – you knew how to function there. Maybe you were happy, maybe you weren’t, but what’s certain is that it was known.

Habit Power It’s like driving the same route to work for the last 10 years: you could almost drive it with your eyes closed. And that’s a problem. It leads to complacency. Too much confidence. You stop being aware of necessary changes that will keep you on top of your game.

You don’t just know the turns, you know the potholes and the narrow spots. If someone asked, you could probably tell them within 15 seconds how long the journey would take based on time of day or hitting the long or mistimed traffic signals. Emily refers to these as scripts. Scripts are directives.

One way to look at liminal space, she says, is to think about traveling to a different culture. You don’t know the language, don’t know where you are at, you’re struggling to communicate and understand the people there, not only do you not know what’s next, you don’t even know what’s expected! That’s liminal space. Crossing the threshold into something new and actually having to figure it out as you go.

Complacency Killer No wonder we try to skip past it so quickly! But that’s a mistake, isn’t it?! There’s a miraculous component of being in liminal space. It’s the antithesis of complacency.

Here, you are hyper-sensitive and keenly aware. The old scripts aren’t going to work and you have to go about the hard work of creating new ones. This is where creating new neural pathways comes in.

Your brain is lazy! It wants to conserve energy, not deplete it in this new survival mode. Habits and repeated patterns help your brain conserve energy. If you want to create new neural pathways and preserve brain health, then you need change. You need liminal spaces, thresholds, that challenge your old paradigms.

It’s why you should listen to music you don’t like or take a different route to work or use your opposite hand to brush your teeth. These force you to adapt and change and become! How cool is that?

Your Greatest Asset Don’t be afraid of the liminal spaces in your life. Embrace them as opportunities for growth. When you’re the new person to the team, you bring a fresh perspective. Don’t ever forget this. Simply because everything is foreign to you at this moment, you are blessed with a unique perspective. Find it. Use it. Help others who are blind to it.

Your greatest fear (the unknown) actually becomes your most valuable asset. You aren’t encumbered with a bunch of historical baggage weighing you down – rather, you are free to see it differently. It’s as if there’s a built-in right to challenge the process. In healthy organizations, it’s encouraged because leaders recognize that it benefits everyone!

Innovate, Don’t Emulate Here’s another aspect Emily mentioned: critical thinkers don’t copy and emulate. That’s the easiest way to repeat the past mistakes other’s have made. Instead, they forge a path for themselves. It might look like paths others took. You can’t help that.

Own your decision. Slow down, sit down, think it through, and make the best decision you can with the information you have. You will forge it based on your decision to not just blindly copy how someone else did it.

Can you see the connection between this process when you are in liminal space and good listening skills? As you listen, it’s not to respond. It’s to understand. You are inviting others to express or share. You are engaging. As a result, this unknown starts to feel less frightening and more collaborative.

Emily says that we move from liminal to reintegration. Don’t force it. Take your time. Enjoy this space. The transition from separation to liminal space and finally to reintegration shouldn’t be rushed. Maximize the benefit.

Self-Determination Finally, one last thought. In another TEDx talk, this one in Portobello, Edinburgh, Mike Small shared something in a talk called Liminal Land. Please remember this: liminal space affords you the ability for self-determination.

This is the opposite of dependence, which, by the way, happens very subtly. In this process of transformation, from who you were, to who you are becoming, you get to make space for hope.

You don’t have to stay the person you’ve always been. Things don’t have to stay the way they’ve always been. There’s a place for metamorphosis – a change so significant that no one recognizes you. You can determine to abandon cynicism and believe that positive change can happen.

And it can happen not just in the world, it can happen right inside you. Embrace the space to become who you were destined to be. The world needs that from you.

Resources Mentioned In This Episode: The Leader To Leader Podcast Episode 110: Getting Comfortable With Uncertainty

The Leader To Leader Podcast Episode 111: The Best Actions To Take During Uncertainty

Emily Perlow’s TEDxWPI talk Leadership in Liminal Spaces

Mike Small’s TEDxPortobello talk Liminal Land

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We started talking about the concept of liminal space in the last episode. If you missed it, you can go back to Episode 110: Getting Comfortable With Uncertainty and listen to it when it’s convenient for you. As I shared in that episode, Thomas Winninger defines liminal space as that space between two points of existence. It’s often accompanied by a high degree of uncertainty. And that leads us to today’s topic: the best actions to take during times of uncertainty.

Your Tendency To Hurry The problem most of us have with liminal space is our desire to rush through it. I mean really, who wants to hang out in discomfort? Or possibly pain? And we are surrounded by these instances of liminal space, but we don’t recognize them because we are rushing through life.

And that’s terribly unfortunate because this is the place where we have the greatest opportunity. To clarify, this is the space where we learn about ourselves, see how strong we really are, understand how we can do things differently to produce a different outcome, and truly comprehend the things that we value the most.

I’m not trying to be trivial, but I do want to demonstrate how this works in normal, everyday circumstances, and not just the ones that are a major life change. Remember, liminal space is that space between two points of existence where we are moving from where we were, and who we were, to where we are going and what we are becoming.

You run out of gas on the interstate. You were in a hurry AGAIN, and by the time you left your driveway, you were already five minutes late. Now you are going to be late AGAIN. As you whip out your phone and call your best friend, you know that you are going to be delayed an additional 15 minutes while he brings you enough gas to get you to the nearest station. Might as well check Facebook and Instagram, right?! Wrong!

How To Utilize Liminal Space Do you see the liminal space here? Maybe you can take 15 minutes and evaluate how you got here. Ask yourself some questions like these:

How are you feeling?
Do you enjoy this?
Are you aggravated?
Do you love your life?
Does it seem like things always go wrong for you?
Why do things go right (or wrong) for you?
Are you happy with the outcomes that result from your choices?

There’s no right or wrong answers, just introspection. What if during those 15 minutes, you came to conclude a general dissatisfaction with being under the constant pressure of running late? Now what? Maybe a change is required.

What if you changed your routine so you always left 10 minutes earlier than needed? That would create time for you to stop and put gas in your car on the way to your appointment. It would free you from the pressure and stress that comes from always being behind.

Or maybe you recognize that you don’t really take time to care for the things that you depend on daily. When was the last time you checked the pressure in your tires? Do you even know where the dipstick is to check the oil or transmission fluid in your car?

You aren’t bad because you don’t, and maybe it’s time to identify what has lacked the attention it deserves and address it. Liminal space affords you the ability to evaluate where you are and where you want to be. The idea is that you don’t make the same mistakes repeatedly.

I know that this might sound funny, but you must think of liminal space as a gift. These transitional periods, thresholds, are so valuable to us. Challenge and question yourself and what you believe about you! These positive questions can lead you to positive results and growth.

Prepare For It Every year when we lived in Wyoming, the same warnings would come out. These signaled that the winter season was upon us. That snow would start falling soon. And you never know when it’s going to stop.

Snow all the way up until June is not uncommon in the places where we lived in Utah, Wyoming, and Colorado. People lose their minds when they aren’t prepared. You do ridiculous things when you panic. Panic will cause an intelligent human to seemingly lose every ounce of sanity. And the outcome in adverse conditions is rarely good.

Snowstorms would arrive in Wyoming packing a massive punch. The combination of wind, snow, and horrible cold could take a bad situation and make it deadly. If you traveled anywhere within Wyoming in the winter, you knew that it was important to tell people when you were leaving and when you expected to arrive. If you didn’t show up, then someone would know that something was wrong.

The state authorities always said to stay in a disabled vehicle. In other words, don’t go for help. It might seem like you would die before someone found you, but leaving the only protection against the snow, wind and cold almost guaranteed it. And every year someone would die.

The stories were horribly sad. Many times, folks weren’t prepared for the harsh conditions. They didn’t have a blanket, a candle, a match, a bottle of water, a granola bar, etc…in case their plans went south.

Don’t Panic Now, this is where the trouble starts. I don’t know if you knew this, actually, you are so smart and well-read that you probably have heard it already, so I won’t belabor the point. When you are lost, the most important thing you can do (besides not panic) is to stay still, maybe sit down, and think. You are a smart cookie.

Thinking about it first can be a tremendous aid in not ending up dead. And this is wild: when you are experiencing hypothermia, not only will you eventually stop feeling cold, you will actually start feeling hot.

And what do you do when you feel hot? That’s right, exactly what you shouldn’t do when hypothermic: you take off your clothes. They have found hypothermia victims without the clothing they had that would help them to survive. That’s freaky.

Slow Down Your tendency is going to be to rush through this process. Relax. Breathe. Your body is going to resist this with every fiber of your being. Flight or fight, right?! It’s ingrained in you and adrenaline wants to kick in and take over. Don’t let it!

Force yourself to sit, to contemplate, to consider. You might still make the wrong decision. And if you do, it will be for the right reason: you thought about it and made the best choice you could given the information you had at that moment. You can’t ask for more than that.

Question What You Believe To Be Real Our brains are powerful, working to convince us that something is real that isn’t – like a mirage where you would swear that you could see a beautiful pool of water in the desert. You can’t believe everything you see or feel. You might need some outside help here, so don’t hesitate to ask others to help you evaluate how you are thinking about things.

Elite fighting forces spend massive amounts of time training their brains to overcome their inherent system defaults. Limitations our brains impose that say you can only get to here and no further. You are capable of incredible things. Yes, you right there. The one laughing thinking that’s impossible. My life is a wreck! You, my friend, are capable of achieving at a level far beyond what you imagined possible.

But it won’t happen if you don’t choose to take control of your life. You will have to question every limit that your brain poses to you. Like those elite men and women, you will have to reprogram how you think about you, about your capabilities, and adjust your attitude to reflect this new path that you are embarking on. Some of the steps are clear and everyone can do them. But not every candidate makes it through the elite training schools.

The ones who do are not miracles of genetics. Unusual physical specimens. Maybe that’s a characteristic of some, but the characteristic that EACH one has is mental toughness. And that didn’t happen overnight. It takes years of effort, but progress is immediate. You start by deciding that you don’t accept the false limits that your brain tries to enforce.

Abandon Fear And Regret It doesn’t matter what brought you to this point. You can’t change that now. There might be value in trying to identify what steps you can take to avoid arriving here again; however, beyond that, you are likely doing a disservice to yourself. Equally, you don’t want to live in the future. You can not live imagining that It’s all going to be better when I….fill in the blank.

Those experiences brought you here. It’s very possible that you feel paralyzed with fear now that you’ve arrived in liminal space. Maybe your liminal space is of much greater magnitude. Your spouse left you, or you made a monumental mistake and now you have a felony on your record, or the company where you worked for 15 years has suddenly changed its plans and you are no longer a part of those plans. How will you go on?

I heard this quote recently on the Catalyst podcast where Danielle Strickland shared this gem during her talk at the Catalyst West conference in 2018. Her topic? Courage. You can check it out with the link in the show notes. Danielle said this:

“Fear is the currency of oppression. If you are operating in fear, you are a candidate to be oppressed or to become an oppressor.”

Take Courage Courage isn’t the absence of fear. It’s that ability to go forward in the face of fear. Given where you are at, it’s taking the next best step given the information that you have at the moment.

Like those elite warriors, begin training your brain to remove the limitations. Train your brain to act instead of hiding out. Do you know what happens to hunters who stay in the cave? They starve. The answer is not retreating to the safety of comfort. You have to charge forward into the uncertainty.

I’m not promising you that the outcome will be everything you could ever have wanted. I’m promising you that you will be satisfied that you did the best you could given your circumstances and what you knew at that moment. You are going through a transformation. You are neither what you were before coming upon this threshold and you are not yet what you will become.

What Do You Want To Be So think about it. Don’t rush through the uncertainty. What do you want to become? Set a course for that and move toward it today. Don’t tolerate the fear or the limits that say “You could never do that.” or “You could never become that.” Take control and decide that you are pushing past the limits, pushing past the fear because the goal and the outcome are worth the pain.

And there is pain! Not just what you’ve experienced, but I promise there’s more to come. And never has the saying been truer: no pain, no gain. My guess is that the moment you embark, resistance will go off the charts.

Remember Steven Pressfield’s book, The War of Art? Your body, your brain, is going to fight you on this. Decide now that you won’t allow resistance to deter you from your goal of becoming.

I believe in you. You can do this. Face your uncertainty. Start preparing now. Don’t panic. Slow down and breathe. Question your supposed reality. Abandon fear and regret. Decide what and who you want to be and make a move towards that goal today.

Uncertainty will always be present when you choose to live like this. I hope that doesn’t disappoint you. This wasn’t “Five Easy Steps To Eliminate Uncertainty.” If you are going to grow and progress, you will get to do it in the face of the unknown as you transition through liminal space and across the threshold.

Resources Mentioned In This Episode: The Leader To Leader Podcast Episode 110: Getting Comfortable With Uncertainty

Danielle Strickland on the Catalyst Podcast

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The War of Art: Winning the Inner Creative Battle

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Uncertainty is uncomfortable. Most of us are not okay with the unknown. For instance, sometimes simply saying the word makes us edgy. At other times, you find yourself literally having no idea what is next.

Imagine driving in a blizzard – scary right?! Every landmark, whether it be the painted lines on the road, mile markers, guard rails, fence lines, barrow ditches, everything that can possibly guide you is missing in a blizzard. Sometimes it’s so bad you can’t even see the tail lights on the car in front of you.

The wind is causing the snow to swirl and at moments your headlights almost seem to reduce what limited visibility you have – like you could see further and more clearly if you just turned them off. It’s terrifying! You have no idea what’s next.

Uncertainty Ahead And that’s what today’s episode is about. How do we get comfortable with uncertainty? Maybe you just lost your job or found yourself in a failed relationship. Maybe you’ve lost a loved one or finding yourself an “empty nester.” Or maybe you just hit a milestone birthday. As a result, any of these events can bring us to points of uncertainty about the future.

We all experience this. So much so, we often think we are unique in how severely it impacts us. In other words, you aren’t unique. To clarify, these emotions that you experience aren’t just real, they are powerful!

Liminal Space I heard Thom Winninger recently share something new, well new to me anyway. Tom is the author of Your True DNA and he addresses this topic in that book and on a YouTube video about a concept called liminal space. Often, this can be a painful space between two points of existence. It doesn’t have to be painful, but in our instant, microwave culture, we often make it painful! Or at least, we make it more painful than it needs to be.

Therefore, it might be good to start with a definition here. Merriam-Webster defines it as relating to or being an intermediate state, phase or condition. The root word is actually the Latin word limin. It means threshold. So this noun refers to the point at which a physiological or psychological effect begins to be produced.

Crossing Into Something New It was actually used to refer to the transverse beam in a door frame. So this becomes an important point. In many cultures, it’s a tradition for a groom to carry the bride across the threshold, the limin. The space between two points. The significance of this event is representative of leaving what you’ve known because you are crossing a space, into something new.

So here is another word that you are very familiar with that contains liminal. That word is subliminal which means below a threshold. Usually, when we use that word, as in the context of subliminal messaging, we are referring to a sensation or thought that is being triggered below the threshold of consciousness.

Below The Threshold Of Consciousness I don’t know if you remember when advertisers were toying with subliminal messaging on movie screens. James Vicary’s infamous study at a theater in New Jersey in 1957 confirmed an astounding capability that our brains have to be influenced by a sensation triggered below the threshold of consciousness. By flashing a couple of different messages on the screen every five seconds, each displayed for only 1/3000th of a second at a time, consequently, the audience consumed 18.1% more Coca-Cola, and 57.8% more popcorn.

Or rather, that’s what James declared…and that’s what the media latched onto. Unfortunately, his results could never be duplicated and future studies never identified a meaningful difference in consumption habits when subjected to subliminal messaging. You heard it here first…or maybe you already knew that. Yeah, you are smart, so I’m sure you already knew his study was a hoax!

But you don’t need below the threshold of consciousness programming to get comfortable with uncertainty. Remember, this is part of the human experience. So, what you must resist is the idea or notion that being here is a bad thing. Uncomfortable does not equal bad, and because there is discomfort there is also an avenue for growth.

Liminal spaces are quite common in our lives. Think about the number of times you find yourself at thresholds. They occur more often than you realize. But this is also part of the problem. You don’t realize you are in liminal space, or a liminal moment because you tend to rush through it as quickly as possible.

Now What? Hang on to this definition of liminal space. Next week I’ll come back and share some practical tips when wrangling with uncertainty. Be encouraged. Get comfortable with not knowing what’s next. It happens often. Once we recognize that we are in liminal space, we can use the steps in the next episode to benefit from uncertainty.

Resources Mentioned In This Episode: YouTube video of Thomas Winninger Discussing Liminal Space

Snopes article on subliminal advertising

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What Got You Here Won't Get You There: How Successful People Become Even More Successful

Your True DNA!: Discovering God's Gift Within You!

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So, if you missed Episode 108, you can go back to catch up on my personal story as it relates to leading while leaving. As I mentioned previously, I had no intention of leaving Rio. In the roles that I had in their Shared Services group, I found real satisfaction and meaning. It felt like I could make a difference and I reveled in the joy of that feeling. Until it all came undone. Leaving when it was not your choice can be brutally difficult.

Change Is Coming And late in 2017, I could see that everything was about to change again. All I had worked for was about to come to an end but I was actually able to take a different perspective because I had been through several versions of this over the years. It felt like practice. Although, this was also a game I didn’t really want to play.

Nothing good comes from comfort. And while we don’t enjoy being uncomfortable, it creates the impetus for change. In facing the very real likelihood of a premature departure from my plans, my response was different than that of the others in the team.

I had already been through the process that cost me my job and while I might not have handled all of it correctly, I handled it well enough to survive. As a result, I was able to gain a perspective that I could share with others.

Your Experience Can Help Others And here is why you don’t want to avoid the difficulty: if handled correctly, the experience will facilitate your ability to help others. Because of my past, I could relate to the trauma inflicted on them as they had to deal with something that many of them had never imagined.

The announcement was made in October of 2017 that the Commercial group in Salt Lake City would be merged with several other Commercial teams in other Rio Tinto business units. It was not clear where the consolidation would take place, but we heard a lot of rumors. They were mostly large, metropolitan areas in the northeast U.S. that you would picture being home to financial institutions or other Fortune 500 businesses. What we knew for sure was that Salt Lake City was not being considered, nor Denver (the two locations in the western U.S. where Rio Tinto already had a large number of employees present).

And this wasn’t happening just in the U.S. It was happening in London as well. The Commercial team there knew that consolidation was occurring. And while London would continue to be a headquarters location for Rio, that location would not be considered for the newly consolidated European Commercial team.

Denial It was like a punch in the gut. People were in denial. This is the first phase of the Kubler-Ross grief cycle. People were confused. Why would the business do this? How could this possibly make sense? Our group is closely tied to the operation, so how could we move thousands of miles away into different time zones and still manage to do our jobs? People raised one rational reason and justification after another to explain how this could not happen. Of course, Rio would understand their folly and step away from this monumental mistake, right?!

Believe it or not, denial is a good thing, at least initially, for some people. It keeps you from washing away in a flood of emotion that you aren’t ready to handle. When someone’s first response is “that will never happen” or “this makes no sense” then you might recognize that they are engaging a natural mechanism to protect them from overwhelm.

Everyone knows that denying it doesn’t prevent it. Denial is how they want to see things turn out. It’s not a reflection of reality, but a desire. Trying to understand why they are denying helps you see how to help. Because those hidden or protected feelings are going to start coming to the surface as reality continues to present itself.

It’s important to note here that these five stages aren’t all experienced each time. Nor are they experienced in order. Someone might only experience one or two of the stages. For instance, you might skip denial and go straight to the next of the five stages, which is anger.

Anger So, the leaders in the Commercial group made the decision to consolidate the U.S.-based team members in Chicago. I have some very good friends that live in the Chicago area. They love Chicago and are extremely happy there. If you have spent time in Chicago, you know that there are beautiful areas and friendly people.

Depending on your personality type, life status, role or position in the company, or maybe family history, Chicago might be a perfect fit. For most of the folks in the Salt Lake City or Denver offices, it was not. For a myriad of reasons that included quality of life, access to recreation/hunting/fishing, cost of living, traffic/commute, property values, tax structure, and a million other elements that come into consideration, it simply didn’t make sense for a high percentage of the team members.

When things start to take a turn and you know that you will soon be on the outside looking in, you can feel alone. Abandoned. Disregarded. Even though you may have been the one to choose not to go, you find yourself blaming others. Blaming leaders who don’t know you, don’t know the value you contribute, making decisions without having all of the facts. It makes your blood boil.

No one is listening to you – this is not going to work! And those emotions can boil over onto your family and friends. Unreasonableness. Irritability. Frustration. You might feel like a ticking time bomb.

You don’t want to hear this, but it’s good that you are angry. Dr. Christina Gregory says that as a leader, “you should encourage the anger. It will dissipate. The more you truly feel the anger, the more quickly it will dissipate, and the more quickly you will heal. It’s actually going to do damage if you try to suppress it.”

So help people process their anger. Is it fair? No! Is it right? No! This whole mess sucks! The quicker you can get to the emotions behind the anger, then the quicker you get to move forward from it and watch it diminish.

Bargaining Next up, the third stage of grief is bargaining. So back in 2008, the outsourcing initiative was in full swing. The end was coming and I knew that by 2009, my job would be gone. This stage of grief is vivid for me as I reflect on my behavior. Let me first say that I’m glad I did what did. As a result, I forced the kind of career change that you would never choose unless you were able to recognize the need for disruption to kill comfort. In hindsight, it was the best thing I ever did. But this stage can present a false hope, that you can avoid grief if you are willing to make a large enough sacrifice.

It’s possible that underlying my decision to take this new career path was some bargaining. At the core, you are trying desperately to get back to the way your life was prior to the event. We had two boys at home and I didn’t want to risk the disruption that could result from uncertainty.

In my opinion, you are vulnerable here. As a result, this can cause you to make short-sighted decisions. Decisions that will cost you in the future. Be careful in this stage. And remember this: nothing is going back to the way it was. Your only option is to go forward the best way you know how.

I took a demotion to keep a job. That created some financial pain over a few years but not nearly as great as what I would have to experience if I didn’t land another job quickly. In my case, the benefits outweighed the drawbacks; however, I know now that this was an attempt to avoid grief.

And that’s okay, but I wonder if I would have dealt with that decision differently knowing what I know now? It caused me to stretch and grow, so I’m glad I did it even though I’m not certain I fully understand my underlying motives at that time.

Depression I imagine that jumping from Anger to this fourth stage is pretty common. Depression settles in when you feel like the circumstance has spiraled out of your control. So, surprise! It never was in your control!

The lonely and desperate feelings that can accompany depression are frightening. Some describe it as paralyzing. As with all of the stages, individuals experience varying degrees of severity. It can be debilitating.

There’s some disagreement about the value of medication. What is not disputed is the value of counseling. There are times when you spiral so quickly, you don’t feel like you can prevent the momentum. Make an appointment and go talk to someone who can help you get perspective.

There is no substitute for being able to talk about and process your feelings. Don’t sit on them. Many employers offer an employee assistance program. You don’t have to be at wit’s end to take advantage of these services.

Go seek out a counselor when you don’t need one. Get a different view of your situation. Above all, do not struggle with thoughts of suicide by yourself. Reach out immediately. Contact your doctor, make a visit to your local hospital, call a suicide prevention hotline, call a friend or family member, whatever. Just please, PLEASE, don’t try to deal with that by yourself.

When you feel down or empty, don’t think you’re alone. This is not abnormal. It can be hard just to get out of bed when everything you’ve worked for feels like it has been stripped away. But this isn’t accurate. It hasn’t all been taken.

No one can take your personal growth. You are handling one of the more difficult challenges thrown at you in life. Losing your role, being forced out, choosing to leave, or however it is that you got here, you can grow as a result. You will be different, stronger, and more capable of handling adversity. That has value which could not be obtained in any other way.

Acceptance The last stage is acceptance. And here is something else that Dr. Gregory said that I want to emphasize. Acceptance is not saying that this is all okay. It’s not good. It’s saying that this is not okay, but I’m going to be okay.

The new reality is no longer being able to work in the job you love. It’s going through the pain of looking for a new role, possibly having to move and likely disrupting your life. But you will be okay! I wish we had time for me to share with you the numerous stories I have of how these terribly difficult circumstances resulted in new roles with new companies with better outcomes as a result.

You Will Be Okay It looks terribly bleak when you are in the middle of it. Everything you’ve known has been stripped away. The way you see yourself, the way you imagine others see or think of you has been challenged to the core. Believe me, I can relate to the emotions that flood your soul when going through this. It’s not easy, but you will be okay.

So, work with yourself and with your team to recognize these five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Don’t try to shortcut the process and limit the emotions. Talk through it, experience empathy as you walk with others through their challenges, and don’t set up camp here either.

Next week I’m going to talk about how to get comfortable with not knowing what’s next. I’ll share some great insight that will help you with your time in liminal space. Liminal space? So what the heck is that? Well, I guess you’ll have to listen in next week to find out!

Great leaders have a better future because they create it. Go create yours and I’ll talk to you next week.

Resources Mentioned In This Episode: Srikumar Rao’s YouTube video How to Eliminate Stress and Anxiety FOREVER
The Leader to Leader Podcast Episode 108: Leading While Leaving: My Story
Blog post by Christina Gregory, PhD on psycom.net The Five Stages of Grief: An Examination of the Kubler-Ross Model
The Leader to Leader Podcast Episode 107: Leading While Leaving: Things You Must Never Do
The Leader to Leader Podcast Episode 106: Leading While Leaving: Things You Must Always Do

Thanks for Listening! I want to hear from you! I appreciate your honest feedback so reach out and:

Leave a note in the comment section below.
Email a question to mark@markslemons.com.
Share this show on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

Listen to the show using your favorite platform: Spotify | iTunes | Stitcher | Android | RSS

Now, go lead like someone you would want to follow!

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I did not intend to draw out this series. Yet, I also realize that this topic is resonating and there was some additional information that I want to give you. I know that I have not addressed an important point, so I thought it would be useful to run through an actual scenario for you and share some additional personal experience. When I talk about leading while leaving, I want you to know my story. It lends credibility to what I’m asking you to consider.

This will lead us to the grief cycle – no, don’t get all depressed. I don’t know why that word ‘grief’ bothers me so much. Maybe it’s because it makes me think of emotion so heavy that a person feels like they simply can’t go on. At the same time, I know it can be that heavy and maybe that’s how it impacts you. Before we talk about that though, I want to share some of my experience.

My Story Back at the end of 2017, it became clear that changes were coming. This wasn’t the first time. I’ve been through several corporate upheavals in my career and this one was different. This wasn’t the first time there was trouble. I went through a bankruptcy reorganization with a previous employer, constant rumors and eventual sale of one of the businesses where I worked, continuous attempts by companies to acquire parts of the business that employed me, and one very large failed attempt by another large company to buy the entire company I was working for (which resulted in a “poison pill” purchase of a large aluminium company in Canada to stave off acquisition) and a myriad of reorganizations in between that constantly threatened the status quo. But this time, I knew there was more potential to dramatically alter my life.

I went to work for my employer, Rio Tinto, back in 1996. We were living in Casper, WY when I had the opportunity to move our family to Gillette, WY. For those who don’t know, Gillette is a small town in northeastern Wyoming between the Black Hills of South Dakota (where you will find Mt. Rushmore) and the Big Horn mountains outside of Sheridan, WY. We were in Gillette for nine years and it was a great place to raise our two boys. We made great friends there and loved it. I don’t know if you have ever experienced this, but when I told people in Casper that we were moving to Gillette, I heard things like this:

“Oh, that’s a very cliquish community”
“Everyone is going to know everything about you; gossip is a real problem there”
“It’s very hard to connect in Gillette if you are an outsider”
“Your children will have difficulty making friends there”
“If your kids play sports, they will have to be the best-of-the-best to actually get to play in organized sporting events”
“The coaches in pee wee football “draft” their eight-year-olds and you would think you were competing in the NCAA South Eastern Conference”

Don’t Believe Everything You Hear Everyone had a reason for why this was not going to be an easy move for us. Well, I’m glad to say we didn’t listen…and only one of those things was true: the coaches in pee wee football were a bit over-the-top and there was always some backroom trading of sky-gazing, distracted, eight-year-old talent to form the team with the greatest potential for taking the all-important pee wee league championship. In a room full of adolescents who derive more satisfaction from body humor than trophies, it was ridiculous and emphasized how many people have their identity tied up in performance. But the rest was outright fabrications. Don’t believe everything you hear.

I had various roles in Gillette and through a period of time, experienced some success and took on increasing levels of responsibility. This led to an opportunity to relocate to Salt Lake City where I would take a more senior level role in a regional shared services operation. Remember all those things people told us about moving to Gillette? It started again when we told people we were moving to Salt Lake City:

“Oh that’s a very cliquish community”
“Everyone will know everything about you because all of the Mormons gossip about their neighbors”
“It’s very hard to connect in Salt Lake City if you weren’t born there”
“If you aren’t a Mormon, then your children won’t have any friends to play with”
“You will be excluded from neighborhood get-togethers and the neighbors will pretend you don’t exist if you aren’t Mormon”

And on and on it went. I actually had a coworker who moved away from Salt Lake City because of this. And he had moved to Salt Lake City from overseas! He interpreted everything that happened to him and his family through this lens. If anything went wrong, if the neighbor frowned, if someone said something unkind to one of his children, they were convinced it was because they weren’t Mormons.

The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy The flip side of believing what you hear is that you can turn it into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Were there some people who experienced great difficulty or possibly some religious bias because they weren’t Mormon? Of course. But I will tell you that Ginger and I did not expect that…nor did we experience that. It might have been really frustrating to those who were trying to demonstrate bias and we were just oblivious to it. Just kept coming to the parties they didn’t want us to attend! Ha!

And guess what? Most of our neighbors were Mormons. And we loved them. And I think they loved us too – at least they acted like it! Our children played together. We knew their families. Laughed with them and cried with them. Did life with them.

And did we experience moments of bias as a result of not being Mormons? Probably. Did I notice? If I did, it was momentary. I chose to believe that it would be fine and it was. That also was a self-fulfilling prophecy. You can decide that you will use this lens when handling the difficulty of whatever situation you face.

It was exciting in Salt Lake City. The city was obviously significantly larger than Gillette (which only had 24,000 people) and the climate was much more pleasant in the winter. My wife hates the cold! So this was far less brutal than the Gillette winters were. And I truly loved the people I was working with.

I am fortunate to say that during most of my 23 years with Rio Tinto, many managers in my group were great leaders. Many team members and peers were great leaders. These are men and women who I respect and they were able to contribute to my growth as a leader. It wasn’t formal mentoring, and for a large company, it was surprising how informal it was. There wasn’t great succession planning, but they gave me insight into ways I could learn to lead successfully.

Find Great Leaders And Connect With Them That was also a choice. I want you to remember this point today (an element that I also mentioned in the last episode): you are surrounded by choice. You get to make the most of your situation each and every day. Maybe you are learning everything that makes for bad leadership experience. Or learning how to avoid a disastrous outcome. It might not always be positive. It might be the things you don’t want to replicate.

Regardless, you are surrounded with learning opportunities no matter how much you love or hate your role or your circumstance. Don’t forget this. It’s no one’s job to make sure you benefit from where you find yourself. That responsibility belongs solely to you. Whether you are in a role or with a company for four months, four years, or four decades, it’s up to you to learn from your time there.

I had no intention of leaving Rio. In the roles that I had in Shared Services, I found real satisfaction and meaning. It felt like I could make a difference and I reveled in the joy of that feeling. Until it all came undone. Like all large companies in the late 90s and early 2000s, there was a heavy emphasis on outsourcing.

Practice What You Preach I won’t bore you with the details, but Rio decided at a high level to undertake significant outsourcing initiatives in many areas of Shared Services. We moved to Salt Lake City in 2005 and by 2007, the end was clearly in sight. This was not my plan and it was not my choice. So I did exactly what I recommended in the previous episodes: I worked to do my best to ensure a good outcome for Rio even though it would mean outsourcing my own job.

Thankfully, my reputation preceded me, those methods worked, and I was picked up by another part of the organization. This time, I was working in the Commercial team. I was still a part of Rio Tinto and focused on operations in Salt Lake City. I worked with a great group and I was thankful for the new lease on my career. But that’s all it was: a lease…with an unknown expiration.

I literally worked for more than 10 years with a dark cloud hanging over my head wondering if this would be the last year. Remember, as I shared earlier, the vision that was imparted as a young man was that of working for one company until retiring. Whether you subscribe to that philosophy or not, it shaped some of my expectations and desires. Now I didn’t go to work every day hating my job or despairing over my future; I just had a very constant and real knowledge that this was all very fragile – more fragile than I wanted.

You Don’t Always Get What You Want And this was the reality. The business was going to change. Sometimes you can be a part of that change and sometimes change means you are going to be excluded. In hindsight, I realize that there were some things that I could have done differently that would have positioned me for greater success.

One thing that I want you to think about: many of you focus on building relational equity. I think it makes sense. Being well connected in your organization is important. The unfortunate mistake that you can make is thinking that it’s sufficient.

Expand Your Networks You should always be looking to expand your networks. And not just inside. Expand outside too. Engage strategically – think about the people you can impact positively with your talents, your role, your team. Open your eyes not just to those above you, because their positions are precarious. Especially, the higher they are in the organization.

More than once, I took a step back and saw that those who I thought would be a help in my career progression. And you know what? They were gone. They were no longer with the company, in an unrelated group function or business unit, or in another part of the world where the opportunities were limited.

I never thought about it like “Boy, I need to hitch my wagon to that horse!”, but I found that it’s very easy, especially in large organizations and over a long period of time, to find others have moved on. And if you chose to tie your horse to that wagon, your opportunity may have vanished as well. Some knew you and your work very well. In order for that relational equity to be beneficial, you have to maintain contact.

I mentioned this in Episode 077, The Question You Should Never Ask When Meeting Someone New, which by the way, is one of the most popular episodes on the Leader to Leader podcast, so check it out if you haven’t already. And it’s worth repeating here.

David Burkus in his book Friend of a Friend has some great research on networking. One of the things he found makes this peculiar point: when you are looking for a new role, it’s likely not your closest and most regular network contacts that are going to help you. It’s not because they don’t want to. If they could, they already would have done it.

Renewing Cool Connections David recommends that you reach out to the ones that are a bit cool. Network contacts that you haven’t spoken with for a while. He said that these contacts are the ones most likely to benefit you at this stage. This is why you have to continue broadening and refreshing your network while not relying on that network as being your golden ticket.

So I’ll finish this story next week and I’ll walk you through the five stages of grief in the Kubler-Ross Grief Cycle. The reason why I want you to come back for that episode is this: you might not have experienced one bit of trauma from a dramatic career change; however, I’m certain others around you have.

It’s important for you to recognize where folks are at in this cycle so you can understand how to help them through it. Your job as a leader is to bring your best effort in assisting them to a healthy perspective of this type of dramatic change. You have the opportunity to make a lasting impact when you manage this correctly with your team.

It’s easy to look past, and maybe even seems a little too touchy-feely, and you are a fool if you don’t take the time to understand a very basic human condition and response to trauma. People live for and die over, their jobs. Their identity is often intricately tied to their work. You aren’t the company psychologist and no one expects you to be a mental health expert.

At the same time, you owe it to yourself, your colleagues, and your team to understand the state of their well being and help them through this challenging time. Don’t miss it.

Resources Mentioned In This Episode: Thanks for Listening! I want to hear from you! I appreciate your honest feedback so reach out and:

Leave a note in the comment section below.
Email a question to mark@markslemons.com.
Share this show on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

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Friend Of A Friend . . .: Understanding the Hidden Networks That Can Transform Your Life and Your Career

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As I mentioned earlier, this is Part Two of a two-part series called Leading While Leaving and today, I’m talking about things you must never do. As you can imagine, this is actually a very long list, so I’m going to keep it manageable for you. I will focus on what I think are several of the larger items. If you avoid these, then you will avoid some the ones we don’t cover in detail.

This is isn’t theoretical. I had an opportunity to live this. I’m so confident of the results that I’m able to say this will help you too. If you did not listen to the previous episode where I talk about the things you should always do, you can listen to it here.

Leaving isn’t easy. Leading while leaving is even more difficult. So how do you do it in a way that is beneficial for your team, for you, for your leader, and for both your current company and the one that you will work for next? Well, it starts with making a choice. And this is what I mean: you choose the outcome.

But Mark, you don’t understand. They ended my career. Maybe you feel like they intentionally made a mess of my life! They treated me unfairly or simply they hurt me. It’s important to grieve. I said in the last episode that I would come back and address this topic. And I will do that. Because this is real, I’ll talk about the five stages of grief next and how it relates to leaving a role in the next episode.

Never Forget That You Choose But more immediately, I want to talk about your choice. No one and that means NO ONE, gets to decide how you respond to unfavorable circumstances. You are the sole proprietor of your attitude, your response, and your effort. Because no one can take your choice. This sucks and I hate my life or this sucks and I know that I’m bound for brighter days. I choose to live for brighter days.

Never Blame Others Never blame others. It’s the easiest and, at the same time, the most difficult of the “nevers.” It’s the easiest because it’s entirely up to you and it’s the most difficult because many times, we feel a need to identify a source of our pain and lay it at their feet.

Your pain is real. It’s likely that people did not treat you in a way that is acceptable and maybe the blame for something that wasn’t your fault fell on you. This could all be fact. Indisputable. And much of it is water under the bridge. You can’t go back. As a result, looking for someone to blame is not going to relieve your pain.

Here’s a complimentary thought: you must assume that everyone is operating with the best of intent. Whoa! That’s heavy and worth considering for a moment. Regardless of how intelligent this particular change seems, if you stop and consider that everyone involved is doing the best they can, it orientates you and forces a different perspective. This is massively valuable as you consider your exit. I love this thought and attribute my ability to leave well as a result of thinking the best about people, even those with whom I disagreed.

Never Entertain Bitterness Never allow your heart to get hard because of how someone may treat you. You must not entertain bitterness. You have likely heard the definition of bitterness as drinking poison hoping someone else will die. Uh, that’s not going to work and it will make you much more miserable…and miserable to be around as well. Does this surprise you – right, I didn’t think so!

We are all guilty. Even though we know better, it doesn’t stop us from trying to find relief taking a little sip of the poison. I want the best for you, so I must warn you of an unintended effect. If you drink enough poison, it will change you into a person that you don’t want to become. As a result, you will find yourself being less transparent, less vulnerable, and less authentic. I know that this is not the result you intended, so leave the poison capped tightly…and definitely out of the reach of children…and adults!

Never Allow Your Pain To Spill Out Never allow your hurt and pain to spill over onto those closest to you. Contain it, don’t deny it. We have a tendency to be our worst selves with those who love and care deeply about us. I don’t have to tell you that they weren’t responsible for this. So, when you think about how unfair your experience has been, do not forget how unfair it is to punish your loved ones for it.

Never Question Your Value I’m not sure there’s a most important “never” here, but if there was, it might be this one. Never allow this chain of events to lead you to question your value. Yes, question the quality of your decision making. Absolutely challenge your thought process that governed your behavior over the last six months. Ask other leaders to assist you in analyzing ways you could improve.

However, all of that is very different than saying this sucks, so I must suck. You can’t afford to take this personally because that’s like slipping the lid off the jar of poison to take a sip. If you fall into this trap, then you might go through this process and fail to learn. It’s hard to learn anything when you are constantly questioning your self-worth or inherent ability to make a contribution.

Never Give Head Space To Negativity We all have our fair share of detractors. When you are in a challenging spot, the voices that want to drag you down seem to get turned up a bit! My recommendation is to tune it out. There may even be those who want you to compromise your leadership and respond with anger. They may even want you to contemplate how you might repay those responsible.

Never Compromise Your Integrity What’s worse is that you might be in a position where you could. You must never compromise your integrity. It’s a slippery slope when you start contemplating paybacks. Pretty soon, you can justify your behavior as a reasonable response to the wrong(s) you suffered. You will think that stapler really does belong to you even though it doesn’t.

I experienced this. When I was leaving, there was a way that I could compromise and walk out with something that belonged to the company. After 23 years, you can bet that it would have been easy to justify in the eyes of many people. But I knew if I did that, I would be doing something that I knew wasn’t right even if I could legitimately justify it…or rather “get away with it.” Others had done it, but that didn’t make it right.

Never Stop Learning It might not feel like it, but this environment is learning rich. Never stop learning. You have an opportunity to discover more about yourself and what you are capable of in the most difficult of proving grounds. Everything is on the line and there is no guarantee about how this will all turn out. Don’t jeopardize it by wallowing in self-pity.

NEVER, NEVER, NEVER TALK TRASH Okay, I know I said this earlier when I told you that the most important “never” was to never question your value. That one is huge, but this one is even bigger. So if you can remember two of them, this one is more important: NEVER, NEVER, NEVER…NEVER! talk trash about the organization, your team, your manager, the executives, anyone or anything associated with that organization. Don’t do it!

To be clear, I’m not saying you have to praise it or them. I’m not saying that you can’t have an honest assessment that drives a conclusion in your mind. 99% of the time, there’s no need for you to share that. There are exceptions and sometimes that info is required to prevent damage to shareholders or stakeholders, but this is pretty rare. Your experience is real and valid. Sharing how awful they are isn’t going to help your situation.

I experienced this recently in one of the groups I participate in where senior leaders gather to share their best efforts and information in pursuit of their next role. It was honestly quite shocking when it unfolded. This individual was not just disgruntled, but vocal about many things this company had done wrong. No one was safe from the ire being released.

After telling us how others believed this person should be the next CEO and proceeding to go on and on about how an unfair process resulted in termination, the facts were quickly clarified. Frankly, the whole thing made this person look silly.

Clearly, many of us have legitimate issues with how a particular process unfolded and the impact it had on us; however, if you aren’t cautious about the level of detail you share, and the way in which you share it, you run the same risk. Don’t fall prey to the temptation to throw a company or someone else under the bus for being an idiot. It doesn’t change anything and it may even damage your reputation.

Remember this: in spite of the position that you find yourself, you are demonstrating a desire to change. You wouldn’t have listened today if you didn’t think you could improve. And you are becoming a better leader because of it.

There’s a right way and a wrong way to leave a role. These tips will help you keep your head on straight during a confusing and trying time. If you have some thoughts, then take a moment and share them with me. You got this and I believe in you!

Resources Mentioned In This Episode: The Leader to Leader Podcast Episode 106: Leading While Leaving: Things You Must Always Do

Thanks for Listening! I want to hear from you! I appreciate your honest feedback so reach out and:

Leave a note in the comment section below.
Email a question to mark@markslemons.com.
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This is Part One of a two-part series called Leading While Leaving. Today, we are going to talk about things you must always do. Next week, I’ll talk about the things you should never do.

Leaving an organization can be terribly difficult but it doesn’t have to be. There are so many good reasons why you find yourself having to decide “should I stay or should I go now?” Sometimes the decision is made for you. It could be that you would never choose to leave but someone chose for you. Regardless of the reason, leaving is a natural part of the career life cycle.

One of the things that I admire about younger leaders is the way they refuse to allow the organization to define them. Because it doesn’t define their identity, they are far more adept at leaving when it’s time. Some leave too early, but that’s a topic for another episode.

So if you are a young leader, then recognize the struggle that exists culturally for those considerably older than you. Those men and women left home with a vision. A long tenure was not exceptional. Security was the goal. A good retirement plan and health benefits were a plus.

As a result, many hoped they would retire from the first company that hired them. “Does this company have a future that I can measure in decades?” is not an unreasonable question if you look at their value driver. Long equals safe and so safe equals being able to pay for college or cancer treatment.

You have a skill-set, an approach to your career, that can assist those who feel lost in a sea of instability. My health insurance premium is the most expensive cost in my household budget. It’s more than my mortgage payment. This is what many want to avoid and it causes fear or anxiety to grow at an alarming rate.

Remember, past generations were taught to value longevity. Many have a misguided view of loyalty, thinking that if they just do everything right, then they can stay as long as the company continues to operate. You, my young friends, have the advantage of expecting tumult and unpredictability. It’s one of your greatest strengths. You don’t have an unreasonable expectation here.

You want to make a difference where you work and you value contribution or recognition more than a guarantee of employment. So I want you to practice empathy and open your eyes to see your team members who are nervous about being in their 40s, 50s, or 60s, fearing that they will have to go look for a job. It brings great strain. And not just on the employee (or soon-to-be-unemployee) but on their spouse, their children, and their community as well.

As a younger leader, one way that you can make a massive difference is by refusing to fall into the trap of only hiring people like you. Search for, and find value in, those who don’t look like you, think like you or react like you. Dig deep for skillsets that are complimentary. So find what’s missing in your team and don’t let age, race, or sex interfere with your commitment to building an effective team.

And it falls on the shoulders of every leader to overcome discrimination regardless of what form it takes. I encourage you, actually, I implore you, to put aside your assumptions about capability as it relates to age, race, sex, religion, political view, etc. You hire for attitude and train for competence. It might feel like a draft where you have no idea what you are going to get, but that’s why you have an interviewing and hiring process. Thoroughly vet your candidates and save yourself the pain of moving too quickly with a hiring decision.

What does that have to do with anything? EVERYTHING! Sometimes an employee will leave because they were brought into the wrong role. Maybe they leave because of a terrible manager or an inefficient leader. Or what if they had expectations and you never took the time to discuss those with them? Believe it or not, it’s not a bad thing to be leaving one role for another. Especially if you have been in a roll for a long period of time.

Start Looking When Challenge Is Absent I wish that I had paid closer attention to this advice earlier in my career. If you are in a role for more than two or three years, you should look to move on. Good leaders look for ways to challenge their team. So if you aren’t being challenged, then start looking for other alternatives. It doesn’t mean you have to leave the company. Look internally as well as externally. Speak frankly with your leader. If your leader can’t help you then you will get to create your own challenge!

When it’s clear that the organization is not a good fit for you, assess the likelihood of whether you will be able to affect change. If it is clear that you will not be able to impact it, then don’t waste valuable time and energy. Make the decision and move on.

Identify Key Learnings Look, if you could have done things differently, you might choose not to be in this predicament. Maybe all of this is happening through no fault of your own. The best thing you can do when encountering undesirable circumstances is intentionally look for what you can learn from the experience. This is important: don’t miss an opportunity to educate yourself on handling a significant challenge.

It would be easier to run away. You’ll want to! You know that job opportunity you turned down last month? Don’t waste your time wishing you had taken it. Because you can’t undo the past, the decision is made. So make the best of it – and honestly, these opportunities don’t come very often.

Increase Your Involvement This one will make you mad. Instead of running away, I recommend that you figure out how to increase your involvement. I know this sounds counter-intuitive, but what can you do to embed yourself in the undesirable process? It sounds like treason and there will be those on your team who don’t understand; they are baffled by what they believe is your ignorance!

But there is a method to your madness. When you work to ensure the success of a transition and offer maximum effort though you are negatively affected, it helps you. What? How is that possible? Don’t misunderstand. Everything is different now. Hopefully, you now recognize that working to and then beyond burnout, is not benefiting you or your standing within the organization. This is another lesson that I was slow to learn. You know what the right amount of effort looks like. Make sure you give that.

By increasing your involvement during your time remaining, they will not be able to ignore this. Because it’s uncommon to see this kind of effort, not only will it be impossible to ignore, you will stick out like a sore thumb. Mission Accomplished. You want and will hear everyone talking about you. This time, it will be for good reasons!

Engage In The Transition Transitioning when you are leaving can be agonizing. If you didn’t choose to go and you now have to hand-off your responsibilities to someone else, you might be tempted to reduce your effort. That would be a mistake. In my experience, you want to be known for tireless effort to ensure the success of your successor!

As you might expect, this is incredibly difficult for some leaders to get their head around. As a result, they are slow to act in a way that is beneficial for their team, for the incoming leader, and for the company. It might not seem fair, but your job has not changed even though your role has: make the team a success. Ouch.

When you look back, you will be so glad that you did all you could. No one will be able to say that you “checked out” or even worse, that you worked against the transition. You will gain massive amounts of respect as you do what no one expected. So give it your best.

Ask For References, Recommendations, And Endorsements Because you have done such an exceptional job while working in your role, this is easy. Your manager, your executives, your team members will be happy to give you a reference. If they know someone working in a company or industry where you would like to work, then they will gladly make a recommendation. It’s easy to endorse you when you have demonstrated the qualities of a great team member. Remind yourself and others of your contributions. You have added value; therefore, it’s good to talk about it.

Leave As A Professional I know the type of people who listen to this podcast. It goes without saying that you always leave as a professional. You maintain the bridges you have built, keeping them intact and refusing to burn them. You will be pushed beyond what you thought you could bear at times, but it’s critical that you remember this: it is not worth the momentary satisfaction of putting someone in their place. That will make you look small and petty. Keep it professional at all times.

Be Grateful One additional way to maintain your professionalism is to be grateful. So treat everyone politely. Note, I intentionally did not say to treat everyone with respect. Not everyone deserves respect, but they do deserve being treated with basic human kindness.

Grieve Finally, it’s okay to grieve. Expectations weren’t met. You invested time and energy, maybe even blood, sweat, and tears. It’s frustrating and painful for things to turn out differently than planned. As a result, you may find yourself hurting. So don’t try to hurry past this. I’ll come back on a future episode to discuss the five stages of grief – you will instantly understand the connection and hopefully find hope in the fact that you aren’t a weirdo for feeling so passionate about your job.

You get to choose what you focus on. Maybe you are leaving because you chose to, or maybe because you were forced. Either way, CHOOSE to expect a brighter tomorrow. Great leaders have a better future because they go create it!

Join me on the next episode of the Leader to Leader podcast when I will talk about the things you should never do when leaving. You are a leader whether staying or going so make sure you act like one!

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If you are like me, you probably find yourself thinking about how cool it would be to know everything! Like having a superhero ability or power to know what was going to happen before it did or how a particular event was going to turn out. But what if there is a reason why it’s good that we don’t know everything in advance?

You might remember Doctor Strange in the Avengers Infinity War movie. After he arrives on Thanos’ home planet of Titan and learns the scope of Thanos’ plan, he starts analyzing the possible outcomes. Tony Stark sees him flickering, kind of like how your VCR tapes used to temporarily distort. Of course, it never does that during the scenes you don’t care about, right?!

Doctor Strange comes to and says he has checked 14,000,605 scenarios and found only one where the result was a good one. He’s visibly shaken by the event. Michael Carlisle from tor.com did some quick math and determined if he was able to process/assess an outcome every two seconds (sounds aggressive, but Doctor Strange is a superhero after all!) then he could pretty much have done that in only 11 months.

I won’t spoil the movie for you, but that’s a pretty heavy burden to carry. As cool as we would think it might be to know how everything is going to turn out, most of us aren’t capable to carry that knowledge without negative side effects. And certainly, I don’t know anyone who has the time to process through even a few hundred thousand event outcome possibilities, much less multiple millions!

As usual, there is some irony in this. If we had all of the information, we wouldn’t have the time to properly assess it and avoid the perceived negative side effects. What do I mean by all of this? Well, I use that phrase “perceived negative side effects” on purpose.

I’m not denying that the tremendous struggles we encounter are undesirable. I’m really sensitive to this right now. Many of you have expressed encountering great difficulties that you could never have imagined. Some are with health, some are with career, some are relational, and all of them are heartbreaking and some even border on soul-crushing.

Knowing The Future Would Change It Would you want to know that you were going to have to deal with the death of a child? What if you knew that you were going to catch your spouse cheating on you? Would you want to know that you were going to nail that big account? Is it good news to know in advance that you saved more than you needed for retirement?

I’m not being flippant. A failing business or a failing relationship is not a joking matter. There is an immense pain that accompanies this type of suffering in our life. Whether the news is positive or negative, if you knew everything in advance, your response to these circumstances would constrain your growth and your potential.

Because Knowing The Future Would Change You If you knew this in advance, you might decide to never have children to avoid the pain of loss. You might choose not to allow yourself to fall in love because of the coming betrayal. Would you slack off on your efforts with the big account knowing you were going to wrap it up or fail to pursue other equally important accounts because the one you wanted was in the bag? Maybe knowing you had plenty for retirement would cause you to spend frivolously instead of calculating the best ways to extract meaningful memories from every dollar you spent.

When I was considering this episode, I was tossing around different titles. I’m cognizant of the message that an episode title conveys. I don’t want to focus exclusively on the difficult or the traumatic. There is good to be drawn out of every struggle. Your story and your experience make you powerful.

Then I heard an interview with Carly Fiorina. If you don’t remember, she was the former CEO of HP and presidential candidate in the 2016 election. You might also know that she has a new book releasing soon titled Find Your Way: Unleash Your Power and Highest Potential. If you aren’t familiar with her, I would challenge you to do a little investigation. She’s clearly a very capable leader and she said a couple of things that have stuck with me.

Leadership Is Overcoming Constraints First, she said that leadership is about overcoming constraints. She went on to make a very interesting point here where she distinguishes the leader from the manager. Both are extremely important with very specific responsibilities. And this is not derision of a manager. Virtually every leader is a manager; however, not every manager is a leader.

One way in which they differ is that often, a manager has learned how to manage within the constraints. As a result, the constraint remains and the manager gets the job done in spite of the constraint. Think of a time where you managed a circumstance in spite of a constraint.

Manager vs. Leader Let’s say that you have a role in customer service. Imagine that a disgruntled customer is unhappy with your company’s product. As a manager in the customer service department, you are constrained by a policy that caps your compensation to an unhappy customer with store credit or replacement of the product. As a good manager, when the customer emailed regarding their complaint, you immediately responded and requested a phone call with the irritated customer.

When you got them on the phone, you made sure to listen with sympathy and were able to restate exactly what the customer was upset about. You commit to taking the customer concern to the product team. You end the call by asking the unhappy customer if they would like store credit or a replacement product. The customer is not interested in either and requests a refund which you are unable to grant.

You realize that once you hang up, you will likely lose this customer for good. A manager ends the call there. He or she thanks the customer for their valuable feedback, and commits to updating the customer with any response from the product team.

A Leader Takes Action So, what does a leader do in this situation? A leader acknowledges that the constraint is not satisfying to the customer. Rather than working within the constraint, a leader addresses the constraint and approaches his or her leader with a request to modify or eliminate the constraint. You request that management authorize a refund as an additional option should a customer reject either store credit or replacement product.

So, here’s how a well-known company recently implemented a novel approach to address customer satisfaction issues. If you take a call from a dissatisfied customer, then you have the freedom to spend up to $1,000 to address their concern. Every employee, every day, at their own discretion. Do you know who’s most motivated to keep the customer happy? Everyone.

It’s not good business to frequently spend up to $1,000 to resolve customer complaints. It’s much better business to thrill your customer from the first moment they contact you. But when one slips through the cracks and you fail to deliver on their expectations, do you think they might have a good chance of returning as a satisfied customer? You bet they do.

Do Not Expect It To Be Easy If Carly is correct and leadership is about continuously overcoming constraints, then you are never going to run out of material items in which you get to demonstrate your ability to “lead.” I’m not sure why we think this should be easy. Leadership is challenging. That is how it works!

Because it’s a matter of perspective. What if you viewed each day as a puzzle? It’s a new problem set that has multiple solutions and therefore your quest is to find the one that best reduces or eliminates the constraint your team faces.

Small Acts As Well As Bold Strokes And the second thing that Carly said that stuck with me was this: leadership comes in small acts as well as bold strokes. Minor decisions every day result in significant outcomes over time.

So maybe you can’t authorize your team members to spend up to $1,000 to resolve a customer issue today. That’s okay! A small act like handwriting a thank you note to a first-time customer might be just as powerful. Do not underestimate the cumulative effect of a multitude of seemingly insignificant behaviors.

If you knew how all of this was going to turn out, you wouldn’t be very motivated to give your maximum effort. No one wants the trauma or pain. Who in their right mind would take the most difficult path to arrive where you sit today?

The Journey Made You But the journey has made you into a capable leader. Not knowing has increased the significance of the adventure. You give your all each day because you recognize the power of small, simple acts.

Take a look at your environment. What constraints should you be pushing against, challenging, diminishing or removing? Your team, your customers, your employer will thank you for leading in a way that improved the outcome for everyone involved.

Don’t miss the next two episodes. I’ll be talking about leading while leaving. These are things you always and never should do as you prepare for a departure from a current role. Some good things coming up and I’ll share my personal experience with you. Until then, go demolish a constraint!

Resources Mentioned In This Episode: Thanks for Listening! I want to hear from you! I appreciate your honest feedback so reach out and:

Leave a note in the comment section below.
Email a question to mark@markslemons.com.
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Listen to the show using your favorite platform: Spotify | iTunes | Stitcher | Android | RSS

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Find Your Way: Unleash Your Power and Highest Potential

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Have you grown bored of the myriad of ways that gameification has occurred in business? Well, let me pile on with another overused analogy! I want you to level up your leadership and I’m going to offer some tips on how to do that today. But in order to level up, you first have to understand where you are at with regard to your current leadership skillset. I know it’s hard to explain your video game addiction, so I want to share a couple aspects that present compelling reasons you can utilize to justify to your parents/spouse/friends/coworkers your love of the fictional electronic worlds you revel in!

The Bright Side Of Failure First, did you know that the failure rate in video games is ~80%? This is pretty cool because those of us less skilled lose more frequently. What? How is that cool?! You see, we wind up demonstrating more emotional and physical resilience because of our incredible talent for losing! That’s especially true when compared to our non-gaming counterparts. That means, like athletes, there truly is a lesson to be learned in losing and a benefit to be gained.

As you know, I live in Phoenix and our professional basketball team isn’t doing so hot right now. Without delving into all of the politics of running an effective sporting team, competing interests, desire for profit, community relations, etc…I was actually watching their loss recently to the Cleveland Cavaliers. It’s a streak no professional athlete would be proud of – 16 losses in a row at this point. That’s bad, but do you know what’s worse? The 76ers lost 28 straight games between the 2014-2015 and 2015-2016 seasons. They broke their own record! No bragging rights. That 28 game losing streak was after losing 26 consecutive games in the 2013-2014 season.

As I was thinking about that, I wonder how frustrating it is to be Devin Booker or DeAndre Ayton – good players in their own right, actually both of them are listed on the top 25 under 25, but definitely not in the right place at the right time on this Phoenix Suns team. And I’m not saying that these are the only good players on the team. They are a young team without the benefit of leadership that comes from having several veterans in their midst. On another team, they very well could be heading to the playoffs, maybe even a championship.

From Rookie To Veteran And yet, this is how the process works. You are young, possibly immature, and new to this level of play. The competition is stronger and you find yourself making lots of mistakes. But there is hope. You want to transcend into a dependable veteran who, over time, has significantly reduced the negative plays that result from immaturity.

It made me think, how hard must it be to find yourself in this difficult situation? A professional (no matter your profession) has to mentally prepare in a way that disregards the dreadful mistakes of the past – learn the lessons, and move on. It’s the school of hard knocks where not everything goes right all of the time…or even some of the time. Sometimes we lose – sometimes we lose BIG!

Resilience Resilience is needed to step back on the court each night. Confidence in my preparation, my training, my routine, my dedication to improvement. Those are the things that help us move on from the mistakes made in the past. To level up, you will have to improve this facet of your game.

And what about that Philadelphia 76ers team? Well this year, by winning percentage, they are currently the fourth best team in the Eastern Conference and the seventh best team in the NBA. That’s a pretty dramatic turn to go from the worst of 30 teams to the top quartile. But I’ll bet those years felt like an eternity to the players, the organization and the fans.

Improve your resilience. Am I telling you to go play hours of video games? No, but I am telling you any challenge you take that forces you to deal with loss/defeat will increase your resilience if you let it. Seriously, do you think the 76ers are going to fall apart after a three-game losing streak now? I don’t. And you won’t either. A loss just brings the motivation to do better next time. A fiery determination to refuse to let that happen again.

Goals No team sets out with a goal to be just sort-of okay. Imagine if you asked me, “Mark, what’s your goal for the Leader to Leader podcast in 2019?” Would you tune in this week if I answered that question with “I want each episode to be tolerable.” Here’s the irony: along the way, I know I’m going to produce some real garbage – stuff that I wish I would never have said or stuff I wish I would have said!

Sometimes I listen and I’m like “How could I have missed the opportunity to nail that point?!” I recognize that I’m not going to knock it out of the park with each episode. Really, I know that, but each time I sit down to prepare and record an episode, I strive for one that is memorable, helpful, and excellent.

In order to level up, you are going to have to set a goal and go for it. Yes, you might fail. Yes, you might fall short. But there is great joy and satisfaction in the stretch. Trying, especially when you are unsure, brings dramatic improvement.

And it’s not just about boosting your confidence (which it does), you grow and eliminate rookie mistakes. So challenge yourself! There are many ways to reward effort and I’m not going to dive into them but remember to celebrate the victories. You have to experience something that keeps you coming back. Just like when you dropped a quarter in Galaga, got the second highest score, and knew that first place was within reach.

Community In life, you need a team. You need a community. Having the support of those around you is absolutely critical when you look at how to level up. They need you and you need them. Surround yourself with those who are committed to honestly engage you in the areas where you need to improve. This requires not only a bit of transparency but also humility.

Let me tell you what doesn’t work. When you come to me and say “Mark, I know you want to improve your leadership ability. You asked for honest feedback when you blow it. I saw something earlier today that I think you should be aware of. The way you handled that situation actually made the matter worse rather than resolving the issue.” If my response is denial, if my response is defensive, if I tell you all of the things that you should have done better (i.e. deflection), then I’ve lost one of the greatest benefits of being surrounded by a caring team.

Feedback Leaders do this ALL THE TIME. They ask for feedback, then refuse or deny it when offered, and wonder why others don’t view them as effective. Please, utilize this point. Marshall Goldsmith has an awesome way of handling feedback. Because guess what? Some of the feedback is going to be crap. It’s going to be flatly wrong. However, your response doesn’t have to go sideways. He offers these tips:

Marshall Goldsmith’s Tips For Handling Feedback 1. Positive: thank them for taking time to provide you feedback 2. Simple: mention that you have received positive feedback, that it’s helpful and makes you feel good 3. Focused: there is behavior that you would like to change, you want to apologize for this bad habit, and you want to work on being (stubborn, opinionated, a poor listener, etc.) 4. Fast: ask for ideas about how you can improve in the future – just listen

It’s hard to do if you are working to defend yourself, easy to do if you are looking to those around you to offer guidance on ways to level up your leadership. So these are the things you can do today to level up: work on your resilience, set a goal and go for it, do life in community having a method for handling the feedback you are bound to get!

While it isn’t easy, and you can expect some failure along the way, it’s worth the effort. I believe in you and others are depending on you to continue growing your skills. Don’t give up. Go back and listen to episode 103 and remind yourself of the kind of leader you want to be – don’t settle for less!

Resources Mentioned In This Episode: Leader to Leader Episode 103: Where Are You In The Five Levels Of Leadership

Inc. article from Marshall Goldsmith How To Respond Like A Leader

Heleo blog post The 7 Essential Insights from Jane McGonigal’s Superbetter

Thanks for Listening! I want to hear from you! I appreciate your honest feedback so reach out and:

Leave a note in the comment section below.
Email a question to mark@markslemons.com.
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Man, we are close to two years of Leader to Leader podcasts. Next episode is the two-year anniversary. If you knew the difficulty at different points during that two-year journey, you would be as amazed as I am that I never missed releasing an episode during this time. And, actually, that’s meaningless. It doesn’t make the podcast more valuable because it’s consistent. If you consistently produce garbage, I’m not sure there are a lot of positive takeaways there. It is, however, a good time to pause and reflect. As I was doing this, I had to ask myself if what I’m doing is contributing to the growth of leaders. To understand if you are growing, you have to know the five levels of leadership and where your skills sit within those levels.

I know it sounds arbitrary to try and evaluate your leadership on a scale. And, in many ways, it’s more subjective than any of us would like. There are truthtellers, those who will gladly tell us exactly where we sit. Ask a disgruntled employee or team member. Have a conversation with your manager. Talk to someone you respect in the leadership space.

Getting An External Perspective You will find many who are capable of not only assessing, but also providing you a “no-holds-barred” answer to your question. This could sound silly, but when I need an honest assessment of how I’m doing, do you know where I go first? My wife, Ginger. I know she’s not an expert in all things leadership. What she is though, is a master at calling out my behavior that is opposite of what I expect of others.

It’s embarrassing to admit, but I have a really good recent example of this. The other day, we were driving in some pretty heavy Phoenix traffic. The roads were wet as we have had quite a bit of rain this month. You wouldn’t think a desert would be cold and rainy, but it was. If you have been listening to this podcast for any length of time, you probably know that anyone else traveling on the same road I’m on is likely to get a rise out of me.

Seriously, I am so glad that you can’t hear what I’m thinking when I’m driving. There are very few people that I would encounter on the road that I would have positive thoughts about. I hate it and I’m working on it. It’s not how I want to live. I’m not exaggerating though, it’s really bad sometimes. Twice in two days I literally had to maneuver to avoid being struck by other cars in traffic. Not justifying, just wanting some sympathy…ha, just teasing. I’m sure I’m just as bad as everyone else.

An Honest Assessment Now here’s a place to get honest feedback. From the person sitting in the front passenger seat. When they are wearing looks of terror, when they can’t release their grip on the door handle, armrest, dash, whatever they have reached to hang onto for dear life…then you might be driving badly. It’s funny, but you’re listening and you know you are either the driver or the one half-scared out of your wits!

Now, I’ve been driving long enough to let my habits make me a really bad driver in some instances. Huh, not supposed to work like that Mark. You should be so learned after all these decades of driving that you have become somewhat of a pro, a real driver-whisperer if you will. I’m not a horrible driver, but I won’t be in the driving hall of fame.

My loving wife took time to remind me that I was following the car in front of me a bit too closely. Do you know how she knew that? Right, because for the last 20 years I’ve been talking about the four-second rule when behind another vehicle. Do you know what you are supposed to do when the weather is bad? Dingdingding…yes brainiac, increase the following distance.

What was I doing? Following too closely. She was right. I wasn’t following my own advice. I wasn’t doing what I expect others to do (when they are right on my butt going 65 mph on the interstate). Isn’t it interesting how the story changes when you are the tailgated vs the tailgater?!

John Maxwell’s Five Levels Of Leadership It reminded me that we all need someone to tell us what we already know. So regardless of where you are on the five levels of leadership, I want to remind you of what it means to not be just a good leader, but what it means to be a GREAT leader. So, John Maxwell has what he calls the Five Levels of Leadership. What I want to do here is to quickly go over them and then ask you to assess where you see yourself.

Level One – Position It’s the lowest level. You got here because the role you fill on the org chart says you lead these people. A person leading at this level only has followers because they have to follow. John says “position does not automatically result in influence.” It’s very hard for instance to lead a group of volunteers if this is your leadership level. Why? Because nothing requires a volunteer to stay. If you can lead volunteers, then there’s a good chance that your skills have transcended Level One.

Virtually every leader will find themselves at Level One at some point during their career. And it’s not a bad thing. At this stage, you develop some self-awareness and understand what you need to improve if you are going to experience leadership success. When you find yourself here, John recommends that you lead yourself. How would you lead you? If you had to give yourself advice for improving your skills, what would you tell yourself?

Level Two – Permission For the first time, relationship enters the picture. People have chosen to follow you because you have given them a reason to want to follow you. Personally, I find this to be a rewarding stage. When you find yourself here, you start to get a glimpse of what is possible when you positively impact others. That’s exciting! You won’t like everyone you lead. In this stage, the stretch is understanding how to make the most of difficult situations. Maybe a personality conflict or strong difference of opinion makes you aware of the challenges to leading those who aren’t always in agreement with you. What can you find to value in or about them? John says that when trust grows here, it often leads to respect.

Level Three – Production I mentioned the excitement in realizing what’s possible, and Level Three is all about producing results. It’s identifying that now you don’t just impact your team, but your team is impacting the company’s customers. You are developing credibility and folks are drawn to that. You want to work with and for leaders who are able to get results. The reward for doing well at this level? Your success results in tougher problems being assigned to you and your team. It’s not easy, but it’s fun. The trust between you and your team members grows and you see the underlying motivation as a sincere desire to do what’s best.

Level Four – People Development Mr. Maxwell sums up this level with one word: reproduction. Think about how many companies you know that have zero ability to manage succession. This level corrects that issue. You are developing other leaders, bringing them along by investing in them, mentoring them, sharing your wisdom, providing insight. You aren’t trying to make them just like you. Thank about it. You didn’t get where you are by hiring team members who all act and think like you do. No, you want the individual to come out – the unique leader that is in them to be exposed! At this stage, John says people are following because of what you have done for them personally. What are you doing to help your leaders grow today?

Most of us will be content to reach Level Four leadership. It’s an honor to see other leaders step up and take on a new role or challenge and do well, in part, because of your investment in them. It’s like when your children make you proud by making a good decision that you left to them. I relish that level of impact. There is joy that comes from seeing someone benefit as a result of you engaging in their life.

Level Five – Pinnacle As you can imagine, you don’t get here quickly. This only happens when you have been in the game for a long time. It also won’t happen automatically. In other words, being in the game a long time doesn’t mean that you reach maximum potential. John says intentionality is required. The ultimate self-sacrifice is required: you have to be willing to invest your life into the lives of others. There’s great power in achieving this level of leadership. I don’t actually mean personal power – here, you are creating opportunities that other leaders and organizations don’t. I’ve talked before about leaving behind the resume and build your legacy. This is where legacy is built. John says that a leader at this level transcend their position, their organization and sometimes their industry.

It’s an honor to lead at this level – a great responsibility. I hope that your goal is to lead at this level regardless of where you find yourself today. John says that the goal with the Five Levels of Leadership is not to move away from one level to grow at a new level. Instead, these five levels of leadership build upon each other. In other words, Level three leaders still need to do the things that make Level two happen. They just add Level three strategies to the mix. And as they become effective at Level three, they are ready to layer on the goals of the next levels.

Don’t miss next week’s episode. I’ll share with you some ways that you can Level Up your leadership. No matter where you sit currently on the five levels of leadership, I’m proud of you! You would not have gotten to this point in the episode if you didn’t sincerely want to improve your leadership skills. You are on your way!

Resources Mentioned In This Episode: John Maxwell’s Blog Post The Five Levels Of Leadership

Thanks for Listening! I want to hear from you! I appreciate your honest feedback so reach out and:

Leave a note in the comment section below.
Email a question to mark@markslemons.com.
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This week, I touch on a sensitive topic. It’s one that could be uncomfortable based on your circumstances. How many times have you had the recognition that you need to set limits or establish boundaries, yet have NO idea where or how to start? I came across a blog post on the Crisis Prevention Institute website that attempts to break down the process and make it easier to find a starting place.

If You Feel A Desperate Need For Boundaries, You Might Also Feel Fear About Setting Them Look, I feel your pain. First, if you are feeling a desperate need to set boundaries, you are also likely feeling an equal number of concerns about what happens if it goes wrong. Whether you are talking about a boss, a team member, a direct report, a friend, a spouse, or a child, there are real consequences that can result because you set limits or boundaries to acceptable behavior.

Set Effective Limits And Communicate Them Second, this is one of the greatest challenges in leadership: setting effective limits. This may or may not surprise you, but setting limits actually makes people feel safe. Knowing the limit introduces the power of choice. Who doesn’t want to feel empowered to determine their outcome?

Be Honest With Yourself You know that great leaders communicate their expectations. There’s no guessing about where you are coming from. It requires transparency and honesty which results from diligent effort over time…and making your share of mistakes.

Being able to check yourself and understand the motivations for your expectations while being open and accepting of feedback that challenges your assumptions is all part of the process.

#1 – Your Limit Is Not An Ultimatum If your only objective is to make life easier for you, that might not be a good reason to place an expectation on others. Think about it this way: can you see it from the other person’s perspective? Do they feel your kindness and concern in your approach? Would they say that your intent is to help him or her to succeed?

Or, is this coming across as frustrating, aggravating or demanding? It’s always a balance between meeting the needs of the day and not being overbearing or unreasonable. The goal is to be both respectful and flexible while making sure the objective is met.

Maybe you can hear the difference between these two ways of saying the same thing:

“Our culture, the way we work, demonstrates respect for our customers and for our team members. One way we do this is making sure we show up for our shift ready to go and fit for duty.”

That sounds quite a bit different from this:

“If you are late, you will be fired.”

If you are like me, you might immediately shift to the team member who is constantly late. Note: this requires a different conversation and you will have to have it! However, by being clear that respect and consideration for team members and customers is demonstrated by showing up on time, you have set the stage for a conversation.

That might not be very complicated when the hearts and minds of your team are engaged and everyone is pulling the same direction. It can feel intimidating when you know that ANY requirement is going to be viewed as unreasonable or interpreted as just another example of your methodical and over-the-top way of controlling others.

Whether true or not, there are instances where this is how the other person(s) is going to feel. To say it’s unreasonable for them to feel this way doesn’t change their feeling. Certainly denying that control is your motivation isn’t going to make everything better and will likely have the opposite impact of invalidating their very real feeling.

Engage, Don’t Alienate So how do you set limits in a way that engages versus alienates? The last thing you want is to destroy the very chemistry you are working to build. Unsurprisingly, choosing your words carefully and how you communicate any expectation is going to be essential to a successful outcome. But that might also be the most important place to start, that is deciding what a successful outcome is going to be.

Cooperation, Not Compliance This was a key point in the post from Crisis Prevention: aim for cooperation, not compliance! The truth of the matter is this: just because you set a limit doesn’t mean it won’t be violated. If you have set it and communicated it, there should not be a lack of clarity when that individual willingly chose to push or overstep the limit. There is often a form of consequence when a limit has been exceeded and that person should be able to use that information to make an appropriate choice.

#2 The Purpose Of Limits Is To Teach Consider this when setting a limit. Maybe you have a team member who regularly comes to you at the last minute for your assistance to meet a deadline. I mean end-of-day, last minute. It’s predictable and you can see it happening a mile away.

By establishing your willingness to assist a week before the deadline, your intention is to teach your coworker that planning to assist around your current obligations is feasible. When they come to you at the last minute, your refusal to put aside other deadlines or personal obligations in favor of supporting them isn’t punishment. It’s reaffirming that you have previous commitments that aren’t movable last minute. Obviously, there are exceptions, but remember, this is routine for your coworker – not a one-time event.

You aren’t “teaching them a lesson”; rather, you are identifying that planned assistance is possible. Procrastination that delays until the last possible moment isn’t an acceptable way of working together.

Here’s the weird part: by offering a choice (approaching you earlier rather than later for help), you have empowered them. Huh? I know – it sounds strange, but by choosing to delay, they have chosen not to get help from you. Interesting isn’t it?!

#3 Setting Limits Is About Listening Here’s another semi-strange one: taking the time to really listen will help you better understand the other person’s thoughts and feelings. Do you know what’s important to the other person? Have you listened long enough to understand it?

Here’s a great example of listening. You have a team member who has a tendency to react with strong emotion when challenging the quality of their performance. You’ve seen how well they performed in the past but recently, it’s gotten worse. Any time you raise it, it seems to end with little or no progress and worsening attitude towards you and the team.

Maybe it’s time instead to focus not on their performance, but on them! What if the reason the performance has dropped off is that their spouse lost a job and in the interim, they have taken on a side gig that reduced their sleep by four hours per night? Does it resolve the issue? No. You still have a requirement about how their job is to be performed.

I’m not advocating that this is the solution, but what if you could offer them an additional hour of sleep in exchange for reducing their lunch from one hour to 30 mins? It’s possible that reducing their daily work schedule by 30 minutes could more than make up for the lagging performance. By listening, you’ll learn more about what’s important to them, and that will help you set more meaningful limits.

So I said I would offer you some ideas about where to start.

Five Things To Consider When Setting Limits * Explain which behavior is inappropriate * Take the time to explain why it is inappropriate * Give reasonable choices with consequences * Allow time to make a decision * Be prepared to enforce the consequences

If you have time, and if you are faced with setting limits for someone you work or live with, then do yourself a favor and take a moment to check out the Crisis Prevention Institute website below for more ideas on ways to set limits.

Remember, you are doing this to create an environment that is conducive to teamwork. Whether at home, at work, or in the community, respect yourself and your needs. Do it for others, and expect them to do it for you.

You are empowering by offering others a choice. They choose the outcome and you are helping them to make the best choice possible.

Resources Mentioned In This Episode: Blog post on Crisis Prevention Institute titled How To Set Limits

Crisis Prevention Institute website

Thanks for Listening! I want to hear from you! I appreciate your honest feedback so reach out and:

Leave a note in the comment section below.
Email a question to mark@markslemons.com.
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Listen to the show using your favorite platform: Spotify | iTunes | Stitcher | Android | RSS

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This is Part Two of my interview with Manu Sood. So, if you missed part one, you can click here and go listen to it. As I said last week, all leadership can be challenging; however, I also believe there is an art to female leadership. Manu is an accomplished leader with almost 20 years of demonstrated success in developing and executing strategic roadmaps in the fast-paced corporate work environment and that is part of what has shaped her leadership style.

I have known Manu for more than 10 years and have seen her collaboration skills in action across the organization. She has loads of expertise in application development, software platforms, APIs and system architecture. Her depth of experience in team leadership, hiring and retaining top talent is a result of working with these technical teams.

She’s an electrical engineer, but don’t let that fool you. She is certainly an expert in technology but hasn’t lost her ability to understand and connect with the most fundamental human elements of successful teamwork.

In her own words, she says “I like putting order to chaos.” So, she’s here today to talk with us about the art of female leadership. But trust me, this isn’t a podcast just for women. Her leadership tips will ring true for male and female leaders alike.

Here are some key leadership pointers that Manu gives us which you will want to take away from this episode:

You have to grow and leave your comfort zone – everyone performs best in the stretch
Focus on situations, not persons
There is a commonality in the concerns raised by team members, listening to one could reveal how most are feeling
Leadership agility means you are just as adaptable as you expect your team to be
The best ideas come from trying, failing quickly, and learning
The people closest to the work usually have the best ideas
Failure is part of learning
If we succeed, the credit belongs to the team. If we fail, then the leader takes the responsibility.
Leading volunteers requires understanding a different set of motivations
Becoming a part of a new culture doesn’t mean having to forget where you came from
Pay it forward – you are blessed, so figure out how to give back
Employees need continuous learning and fresh challenges to stay motivated
Embrace failure and take a risk on yourself and others, especially women

If you listened closely, then you heard Manu share an important point multiple times. She said that as a leader, we must each become a student who learns every day then go teach it to someone else.

Manu’s Pillars of Strength: 1. People are the strength of the team, so treat them with respect 2. Have a clear inventory of your strengths 3. Be credible

So what will you do with what you have heard today? If you take Manu’s challenge seriously, then you will find someone and share what you have learned. Because your knowledge has increased, I think you must talk to someone! So don’t wait.

Resources Mentioned In This Episode: LTL 100: The Art of Female Leadership: An Interview With Manu Sood Part One

Girls Who Code website

Thanks for Listening! I want to hear from you! I appreciate your honest feedback so reach out and:

Leave a note in the comment section below.
Email a question to mark@markslemons.com.
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Listen to the show using your favorite platform: Spotify | iTunes | Stitcher | Android | RSS

Now, go lead like someone you would want to follow!

Build an A-Team: Play to Their Strengths and Lead Them Up the Learning Curve

Women Who Don't Wait in Line: Break the Mold, Lead the Way

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You are going to be so happy that you listened in today. All leadership can be challenging; however, I also believe there is an art to female leadership. Today is part one of an important two-part interview. I’m joined on this 100th episode by a stellar leader. Her name is Manu Sood. She is an accomplished people and technology leader with almost 20 years of demonstrated success in developing and executing strategic roadmaps in the fast-paced corporate work environment.

She’s a sparky (an electrical engineer) with a great personality.

In her own words, she says “I like putting order to chaos.” She’s here today to talk with us about the art of female leadership. But trust me, this isn’t a podcast just for women. Her leadership tips will ring true for male and female leaders alike.

Here are some key leadership pointers that Manu gives us which you will want to take away from this episode:

Do not allow a fear of failure to make you risk-averse
Pay people according to their contribution and performance level
There is no failure that you can’t recover from, so take a chance
Never stop learning because it leads to advancement
Teach everything we know to anyone who wants to learn
Success begets success so pay it forward
Don’t be blindsided by your limitations and ask for help when needed
Let people put a voice their problems before you propose your solutions
Define what you want to be known for and be deliberate in deciding your legacy
Remember, legacy comes from actions, not words
Intentionally network across geographies and disciplines, not just for contacts, but for knowledge
A mentor is invaluable for career progression

Manu’s Pillars of Strength: 1. People are the strength of the team, so treat them with respect 2. Have a clear inventory of your strengths 3. Be credible

Make sure to tune in next week for Part Two of this interview with Manu. There will be more great pointers and key recommendations that will improve your leadership skills.

Thanks for Listening! I want to hear from you! I appreciate your honest feedback so reach out and:

Leave a note in the comment section below.
Email a question to mark@markslemons.com.
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Listen to the show using your favorite platform: Spotify | iTunes | Stitcher | Android | RSS

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If you are a Fleetwood Mac fan, I probably just tossed you back about 40 years. Don’t Stop Thinking About Tomorrow was actually on their album Rumours that released in 1977. This song certainly wasn’t about leadership. Actually, there was a pretty consistent flow of drama in that band and in the relationships between band members. As a result, many songs were written about each other! Strange but true. What’s even stranger is that in some cases, band members performed the songs for years not having any idea it was written about that band member! So, I suppose ignorance is bliss.

I know that it sounds ridiculous; however, I’m sure Ginger would tell you I’m a little slow catching on sometimes, so I’m not casting any stones here! Anyway, I feel like one of the many secrets to successful leadership is walking that fine line between being fully present in the moment, and keeping a keen eye on the future. You can’t be too much about either.

Misplaced Attention I’ll tell you this: many a business and businessman or woman has come to ruin when their attention is misplaced. Too much focus on the present will result in decisions without regard to the future. Too much planning for the future and you will overlook the pressing decisions facing you today that could prevent you from experiencing your planned tomorrows.

These decisions can be terribly costly in the long-run. I’ll give you an example. If you allow the present to consume you, then it’s possible that it could jeopardize your future with a decision meant to impact your present.

As many of you know, I worked for more than 20 years in the mining industry. If you have been around mining, you will know that the work is hard, the days are long, and the environment is extremely challenging and often unforgiving. Most receive compensation that takes all of this into account. I wish you had time for me to recount the number of stories where a good-paying job was jeopardized for some short-term gain.

Short-Term Vs. Long-Term One of the more ridiculous ones had to do with fraudulent expense account submissions. In this case, you are talking about a person who has a six-figure income trying to gain a few thousand dollars of benefit by submitting expenses for approval that were never incurred.

Think about this: let’s say hypothetically that you are earning $80k per year. You have a chance to “cook the books” or let’s say you are offered a kickback with a vendor on a product the company purchases. Either case, you are going to produce half your income in additional revenue. You’ll come up with an extra forty grand. That’s a lot of money.

And when you are focused on the short-term, you won’t think about how 40 years of $80k per year will generate $3.2M of income. You can be overtaken by the idea that you could increase your salary by 50% right now! Here’s the rub: it’s only 12.5% of what you earn over the 40 year period at 80k per year.

Now put that into context. It’s not even $20 per week over a 40-year career. But I’ve seen it happen. They will take the gamble. Risk $3.2M gained through honest, hard work for a dishonest, illegitimate $40k today. That’s short-term thinking at it’s worst.

He or she isn’t thinking about a felony. I doubt that a five or ten-year prison sentence has crossed their mind. A career in shambles with an inability to get anything near like the job they had is not front and center. I’m almost certain they did not stop to consider how their personal reputation would be destroyed and how it would change their relationships with family, spouse, children, etc…

A Lasting Legacy This podcast isn’t about fraud. It’s about short-term thinking that can lead to disaster. At the core, it’s a lack of regard for legacy. They stopped thinking about tomorrow. You can’t afford that.

It’s the way a boxer prepares for a fight. One foot in the present, one anticipating every moment of the future. No inordinate amount of focus on either but recognizing that a balance between the two is required to produce victory.

It’s a coach who constantly reminds her team not to overlook today’s opponent while she has been focusing their attention on the championship. Both are required. Once victory is obtained over today’s circumstance, our focus shifts. This is the tension. There’s a job to do today and an objective on the horizon. Both are important.

Even though the goal ALL SEASON was to reach, and win, Super Bowl LIII, neither Tom Brady or Bill Belichick of the New England Patriots was thinking about that at 6:39 PM Eastern time on Sunday, January 20. This is the tension. You have a job to do today and are continually reaching for the next objective.

The Load You Carry Many of us will never go to bed at night carrying the load that an executive will who leads at one of the largest corporations in the world. Still, there is plenty to learn from these men and women. I’ll share another example to make the point.

Roberto Goizueta was the CEO of Coca-Cola Company in the 90s. He again demonstrates the tension of leading today while thinking about tomorrow in a speech that he gave in 1997. He says:

A billion hours ago, human life appeared on Earth. And A billion minutes ago, Christianity emerged. A billion seconds ago, the Beatles performed on The Ed Sullivan Show. A billion Coca-Colas ago was yesterday morning. And the question we are asking ourselves now is: What must we do to make a billion Coca-Colas ago be this morning?

I’m not sure if the significance of his statement resonates with you. Coke started in 1886 and during the first year of sales, nine drinks per day were sold for total sales that year of $50. Guess how many drinks Coke sells per day now? 1.9 billion. That’s ‘b’ – ‘b’ as in billion. I would say Mr. Goizueta and subsequent leaders at Coke have continued to work hard today while keeping an eye on tomorrow. This is no easy task.

Five Tips To Generate A Legacy So how do you generate a legacy? John Maxwell offers these five tips in his book, The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership:

(1) Lead the organization with a “long view” Too many people try to make short-term gains enacting decisions that bring long-term pain. Don’t get suckered into making yourself look good while putting the team, department or company at jeopardy. Reason through the long-term impact of your decisions and do what’s best for the company.

(2) Create a leadership culture I don’t mean just one or two at senior levels. When someone walks into your business, they should know right away that you are serious about developing leaders. From the shop floor to the boardroom, you must be intentional about creating the next generation of men and women who will carry the vision and mission of the organization forward.

Did you know that when Jack Welch left GE there were dozens of folks that the board knew could be selected as CEO and the company would not miss a beat? Did you know that there were more than one hundred candidates internally who would be able to handle the job with a small amount of additional training? Now that’s a strong commitment to leadership development.

(3) Pay the price today to assure success tomorrow Many of the decisions you will make might sacrifice immediate gratification in favor of achieving a far-reaching goal. There’s pain associated with making those types of choices.

For instance, you might choose to spend more on preventative maintenance. While this might reduce your bottom line because of the increased expense, the longer life of your asset pays off in the long run. You might not be thinking that the same is true when it comes to investing in your team’s development or investing in yourself.

It’s like that old exchange where one senior leader says “What if we train them and then they leave?” and the other says “What if we don’t and they stay?” Pay the price and don’t wait for someone to pay it for you.

(4) Value team leadership above individual leadership This might be the most important point in today’s episode. The load is far too heavy for any one person to carry it alone.

The process of building an effective leadership team starts with hiring the first person. So make sure that each team member will “buy in” to the model you want to create. If not, no matter how great the individual talent, they won’t be worth what it will cost you.

Select only those who are willing to be a part of the team, but additionally, only those that are willing to build the team. So, this means that they understand their obligation to raise the leadership capability of the team. It’s not just the CEO who’s responsible for building a great team. Every level of the organization has to demonstrate a commitment to the team leadership ideal.

(5) Walk away from the organization with integrity I want to dive deep on this one, but I will save it for a future episode. When it’s time to leave, just do it. So don’t draw it out. And I shouldn’t have to say this, but don’t try to manipulate things from behind the scenes.

When it’s time to hand over the reins, don’t keep some of them in your hands while handing of few over to another. As a result, this will create confusion…and a real mess.

So it ties back to tip number four: if leadership has been all about you, if your identity is wrapped up in your job function or your title, if your value and worth are determined by your daily activities, this will not end well. The best thing you can do is raise up great leaders who will step in, take your role, and do it as well or better than you ever did. Therefore, it’s actually a compliment for no one to even know that you are gone.

I’ll leave you with this quote from Mr. Goizueta. He said “Leadership is one thing you cannot delegate. You either exercise it, or you abdicate it.” So lead. Don’t stop thinking about tomorrow. You can’t afford it. Lead like no one else – you won’t regret it.

Resources Mentioned In This Episode: Coca-Cola FAQs

Roberto Goizueta quotes

Thanks for Listening! I want to hear from you! I appreciate your honest feedback so reach out and:

Leave a note in the comment section below.
Email a question to mark@markslemons.com.
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The 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership: Follow Them and People Will Follow You (10th Anniversary Edition)

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Have you ever heard someone ask a version of this question: Why do I frequently fail to connect? Why do I struggle to create a genuine, authentic, honest-to-goodness connection? It feels so elusive! You and I both know that 1,000 Facebook friends or 10,000 Twitter followers will not equate to a single, solitary, authentic connection. Hopefully, you can count an authentic connection or two in that mix, but the majority aren’t meaningful relationships.

I blow it in this area too when I forget a few key principles. They are important and like all important things, we need to be reminded of them. You must repeat important messages. In some cases you have to repeat an important message nine times before the listeners grasp or comprehend how it applies to them.

These might sound like things you already know. I’m asking you to treat it like you never heard it before and lean in to figure out how to apply it and allow it to make a difference in your life.

Too Much Interest In You First, you have too much interest in you and not enough interest in others. Unfortunately, you can’t hide this fact. No matter how hard you try, when all you think about it is you, you will find yourself unable to hear what the other person is saying because you are preparing your brilliant response. We’ve all been there. We are all guilty. It’s important to bring incremental improvement. You won’t always do it right, but acknowledging you lack in this area and committing to improve is progress.

Reverse the order. You start by expressing interest in them. In your arsenal of tools to create connection, you pull out…you guessed it: questions. You ask genuine, sincere, heartfelt questions. Then you shutup…agght…hey…no….stop it! Your job now is simply to listen. Can you repeat or paraphrase back to them exactly what you have heard? This skill is immensely valuable.

Go listen to Episode 76 Authentic Relationships As The Bases For EPIC Conversationsand Episode 77 The Question You Should Never Ask When Meeting Someone New for some great ideas about the kind of questions you can use to stimulate powerful conversations. It’s easy to use these questions and not feel like you are struggling to keep a conversation going.

You Are Serving Not Selling The second reason you fail to connect is that you forget that you are serving and not selling. Yes, I know. If you aren’t selling, you aren’t generating revenue. We all know the number one cause of business failure: lack of cash flow.

I didn’t say that you shouldn’t sell – my point is you have no basis for the sale because you fail to connect first. When you think about who your audience is, who is the person, not an automaton, the living, breathing, emotional, reasoning, thinking, flesh and blood individual that you are talking to? Do you understand her well enough to be able to communicate her need?

Have you thought about that need, about the emotions and pain behind that need, to the degree that you can you can express for him how he feels each time he is confronted with that need?

Is your desire rooted in your own need for dollars? Do you feel a need to improve their condition?

Are you lying awake at night thinking about how to eliminate that pain from her life? Can you say that your satisfaction in seeing that pain eliminated, that result obtained, exceeds your desire for compensation? If you are serving first, they will see it and feel it. Your attempt to connect is not an attempt to sell. It’s to start a genuine conversation and understand how you can help him.

You Fail To Empathize With Others Yes, you are the expert in all things; thus, you have little regard for dissenting views. You are dismissive of how someone else feels because any logical person would not feel that way when understanding your viewpoint. You are so certain of your view, your position, your expertise, that it is near impossible to validate feelings to the contrary of your experience.

And it’s destroying your ability to connect with anyone who doesn’t see it the same way. Everyone else is an idiot. Crazy. Lunatic. A fool if they don’t see it your way.

Empathy is the simple act of putting yourself in another person’s shoes and trying to understand the topic from their perspective.

Let me give you an example. Please, I know you are likely active while listening to this podcast. But what I’m about to share will revolutionize your ability, your capability in this area.

Focus on what I’m about to tell you. No amount of rational, logical, well-meaning, even loving explanation of the facts as you understand them will magically remove what has been imprinted on another person’s heart. Let me say this again: no amount of rational, logical, well-meaning, even loving explanation of the facts will magically remove the message imprinted on another person’s heart.

My Mom, Diane Slemons (love you Mom!) sent me an email many years ago. Karen Sparks wrote the message. Karen is not talking about business. She’s not talking about networking. Karen is talking about children. Specifically, children, they have adopted. Some of these children were orphaned, others abandoned, and all suffering tragic neglect during critical years of development.

If you don’t remember anything else from this podcast, remember this:

What They Believe Is True Is Infinitely More Important To Them Than What Is Real Think about that. The people you are interacting with, your need for empathy, is in part due to this fact that supersedes all of your most amazing data: what they believe is true is infinitely more important to them than what is real. Karen says this:

There is a belief they hold that colors life for them and that is this, I have to look out for myself because no one else has. No one is to be trusted. I’m on my own.

For example, no matter how full the pantry is they are convinced there is not enough to eat, and the fact that they’ve been told that it’s not time to eat yet only confirms the fear to them that they will not eat. No matter how consistent you’ve been at providing three meals a day in your home, there is still one thousand questions a day regarding meal time and what will be served and if there will be seconds.
Learning how the orphan thinks has given me a radically new understanding of how humanity responds to God and why the gospel has been so misunderstood. An alienated mind only has a certain way of seeing things and therefor is left with few options as to response.

She goes on to say this:

In my home, I’ve realized that it can never be up to the child to change their responses but it must be up to the parent to prove their faithfulness. A neglected child only knows neglect, until they know something different. It’s up to the new parent to show them love and consistency so they can learn trust and therefore learn new responses.

You Are The One With Something To Prove It’s powerful and moving to me to think that even as adults, we want to know that someone cares about us. I want to know you are not going to simply use me. In fact, I want to know your concern about my well being extends beyond my pocketbook.

Is this resonating with you?

You don’t change someone’s mind with facts, figures, spreadsheets, and presentations. Trying to overwhelm their doubts, their concerns, with stats doesn’t work.

Demonstrate first that you hear them. That you understand their questions. Any person who has been in their position would absolutely be wondering the same thing. Then you go about demonstrating your track record of faithfulness in this area that demonstrates I care about you. Effectively, you are saying “You are worth caring about.”

Even if you don’t buy my product or service or even simply don’t buy what I’m saying to you right now, I’m not changing. I’ll be expressing this same care to you, this same concern and compassion for where you’ve been, and this desire for you to get where you want to go. With or without me.

I’m going to be faithful to my sincere care for you and my desire to serve you. Faithful to serve my team. Faithful to serve my customer. You will find me to be authentic and committed to my vision, mission, and values. I will serve you with solutions that reduce and eliminate your pain. Isn’t that a noble purpose? Isn’t making life better a grand goal? It’s attainable.

It starts with authentic connection.

Resources Mentioned In This Episode: Leader To Leader Podcast Episode 76 Authentic Relationships As The Basis For EPIC Conversations

Leader To Leader Podcast Episode 77 The Question You Should Never Ask When Meeting Someone New

Thanks for Listening! I want to hear from you! I appreciate your honest feedback so reach out and:

Leave a note in the comment section below.
Email a question to mark@markslemons.com.
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Has this podcast taken a decided turn to fantasy? Instead of leading in business will we now begin discussing leading a group of treasure seeking dwarves into the dark hollows of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Middle Earth? Will we investigate the types of drakes and worms guarding their hoards of gold? It’s entertaining for sure, but the maybe not-so-obvious answer to that question is “No.” Awwww. I know, sorry to disappoint; however, stop toying with dragons and get intentional is a great name for this episode. Once we spend a bit of time setting context, I think you will agree.

Why Dragons To answer this question, I have to tell you that what led to this was a concern over trifling. More specifically, the definition of the word might help: trivial, unimportant, insignificant, inconsequential, petty, minor, of little or no account. What I was pondering was the frequency with which I had been derailed in my objectives. Often, this was because I was trifling. The word is ironic to me because it implies that I was dealing with something trivial, unimportant, insignificant, inconsequential, etc…But the irony is that the impact was anything but insignificant.

If you know anything about dragons, you know that they are cunning, deceptive, hypnotizing and according to Mr. Tolkien, love a good riddle…but don’t laugh at a dragon, or it will be your last laugh. Maybe you’re a huge fan of The Hobbit. If you recall, Smaug was the dragon from whom the dwarves intended to steal treasure. Another good bit of knowledge about dragons: they know their treasure, reportedly down to the ounce. So lifting a goblet is undoubtedly going to be obvious to a treasure so jealously protected.

And he’s been around for a while. According to Tolkien’s timelines, Smaug is a spry 171 when Bilbo encounters him. That’s a long time to be accumulating and guarding treasure. He’s fearsome by all accounts. A destroyer. Funny thing is I’ll bet Smaug was a cute little bugger when just a wee one. Note, I don’t know lad or lass, male or female. Tolkien doesn’t say and I’m not going to venture a guess. All of us can think of the story where someone finds a cute animal infant and thinks they are going to take it home and raise it as a pet. Whoops, small lapse in judgment there.

Dragons Everywhere Remember, the dragon is cunning and deceitful. Gaze into its eyes and you risk becoming hypnotized and controlled by the dragon. Do you know anyone who gets hypnotized by the dragon in their hand? Yes, its name isn’t Smaug, but probably Galaxy or Pixel or iPhone. I know, I know. C’mon Mark, stop trying to be so dramatic. My point is this: for some, a mobile phone, or social media, or Netflix isn’t a dragon. You aren’t enticed by it, you control it. But just because you do, that doesn’t make it innocent for everyone else.

I’ve known a lot of people over the years who take WAY different positions on alcohol. This is not a podcast in favor of prohibition. There’s a good portion of our society who can have a bottle of beer or a glass of wine and be done. There are others, like my cousin Doug, who couldn’t control the dragon and drank himself to death. Regardless of your personal ability when it comes to alcohol, you have to acknowledge it’s destructive power. There. So now we’ve dealt with the glaringly obvious. If you are still listening, you can say, “Okay Mark, time to tell me something I don’t know.”

Shape Shifters You might be waiting a long time because I believe most of you listening already “know” much of what I’m sharing. However, today, you need to be reminded. You don’t play with dragons. They aren’t friends. Only you can quickly recognize the dragons in your life.

So maybe you aren’t a raging alcoholic or strung out drug addict and your dragon(s) are a bit more hidden. Is your dragon named procrastination, fear, inferiority, low self-esteem or imposter? The things that take you in a direction that you don’t want to go. The deceptive, manipulative things that leave you hurting or regretting the choice you made and kicking yourself for letting it happen again.

Your Dragons What distracts you or takes you away from your goal? This might be a dragon you’ve been toying with. For some, a hard stop is required. You can’t afford to give it any time or attention. Stephen Pressfield in The War of Art describes this as resistance. It’s everything that wells up in you, and around you, designed to prevent you from doing something valuable. To prevent you from contributing meaningfully. At best, resistance keeps you from making progress on the things that matter, and at worst, it moves you further away from realizing a goal.

You might get weary of hearing me talk about it. In my estimation, one of your most effective tools for slaying dragons is intention. Who do you want to be? What do you want to become? What’s the goal you are trying to achieve? Why is it important to you? These questions, once answered, give you structure to build intention. There’s a purpose to living. It’s not just eating, working, relaxing, and sleeping. A life of intention is how people go debt free in 10 years paying off hundreds of thousands of dollars in credit card, mortgage, and student loan debt.

You Have To Plan To Slay A Dragon They didn’t wake up this morning and say “You know what, I’m going to eliminate my debt today.” The Jones’ dragon – the one that says you have to have as nice a car, as nice of a home, as great a job, as beautiful a body, as those around you – is going to have to be slain if you want to conquer debt. A new way of thinking has to be established in your life if you are going to go debt-free. Maybe it starts with a zero budget. This is the process of earmarking every dollar of income and deciding in advance how you will appropriate each dollar to household needs, savings, and debt reduction. As you can imagine, much focus is required if you will win this challenge!

More than 20% of my past episodes on the Leader to Leader podcast specifically contain references to the value of intention. Being unaware of, or nonchalant with, the dragons in your life is a plan for disaster. For example, if you don’t plan your day, the day will mercilessly control you. The art of reviewing your day (at the end of a day) and preparing for your day (the evening before) is a great example of how you prevent your day from “happening” to you.

Michael Hyatt says that you must identify the three big things that you are going to achieve this year and build them into three goals for a quarter that leads to three actions taken each day to propel you toward those goals. Since we aren’t talking about goal-setting, what I want to identify is the very intentional and strategic plan of knowing the big items you are going to address on any given day. It takes discipline and practice to make this routine in your life. Don’t try to do it all at once.

Implementing An Effective Plan There’s a reason why micro-commitments work with your customers: it psychologically creates momentum and it will work for you in taking down your dragons. Here are a few tips:

Pick one thing at a time Sounds logical, but pick one thing that you want to be intentional about. Maybe you want to target getting eight hours of sleep each night. So start with that and work on going to bed at a time that allows you to get eight hours of sleep.

You are going to want to create patterns of intention. So don’t stop once you’ve successfully created a pattern of getting eight hours of sleep. Pick the next thing.

Expect to struggle a bit You might find that you only got eight hours on three nights this week. That’s okay. Today’s your chance to get a fourth. Be gracious with yourself and try again. If it didn’t work today, try again tomorrow. The point is keeping up the effort. If you didn’t get eight hours any night this week, try again tonight. When you find the cause, don’t hesitate to slay the dragon. If you know that the biggest trip up to getting sleep is watching more Netflix then you should, I recommend incorporating an intentional shut-down for the evening where you remove yourself from electronics 60 mins before bedtime. At least then Netflix won’t be the cause of lost sleep.

Review your progress This is brilliant. It’s not something we talk about enough. I heard Jeff Walker say recently on his YouTube channel how important it is to focus on intention and then he threw in this little nugget: do a review after a month. What’s working and what isn’t? Are you frustrated and uptight because of the pressure of the goal? Are you happy with the results? Can you tell a difference? Are you targeting the wrong behavior (i.e. this change isn’t producing the result you were targeting)?

You aren’t married to this, so change it up and try again. But remain intentional. If you live a life of intentional effort, then you will master the dragons and not become hypnotized by their beguiling desires to render you useless.

Resources Mentioned In This Episode:

Thanks for Listening! I want to hear from you! I appreciate your honest feedback so reach out and:

Leave a note in the comment section below.
Email a question to mark@markslemons.com.
Share this show on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

Listen to the show using your favorite platform: Spotify | iTunes | Stitcher | Android | RSS

Now, go lead like someone you would want to follow!

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So what is your definition of success? I mentioned in Episode 95 one of the best definitions that I’ve ever heard. John Wooden said, “Success is peace of mind, which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you made the effort to do your best to become the best that you are capable of becoming.” Because the definition is so deeply personal, I don’t want to come across as defining it for you. Rather, I want you to consider the question and define it for yourself. Don’t overlook the massive value that comes from looking in the mirror and knowing that you have done your best on any number of fronts.

The Wrong Measures I would submit to you that is not the trappings: the size of your bank account, where you live or the elegance of your home, the car you drive, the toys you own, the vacations you take, or the myriad of other luxurious measures. These may indicate the accumulation of wealth or dollars and that is hardly a measure of success. For some, it has become an indicator or ruinous failure. For the record, this is not an argument against wealth. Instead, it’s about using a measure broader than dollars to determine the quality of the life you are living.

There’s an article that I came across in Business Insider called “How 9 Incredibly Successful People Define Success” that you should take a look at. If you are like me, then you are a bit cynical regarding the ability of these folks to connect or relate with life as you and I know it. At the same time, they have a valid perspective and experience that can shape our own thoughts on the matter.

Refuse To Settle I’ll share with you a few of the key comments from the article starting with Ariana Huffington. The Huffington Post founder noted that money and power aren’t the only two valid metrics of success. She points out that too often we settle for a lesser life than we could have. She said that you must consider the following:

well-being
wisdom
wonder
giving

What Will They Say About You At Your Funeral Maybe the most soul-shaking slap in the face comes from this quote in her new book:

It is very telling what we don’t hear in eulogies. We almost never hear things like: “The crowning achievement of his life was when he made senior vice president.” Or: “He increased market share for his company multiple times during his tenure.” Or: “She never stopped working. She ate lunch at her desk. Every day.” Or: “He never made it to his kid’s Little League games because he always had to go over those figures one more time.” Or: “While she didn’t have any real friends, she had six hundred Facebook friends, and she dealt with every email in her in-box every night.” Or: “His PowerPoint slides were always meticulously prepared.”

Our eulogies are always about the other stuff: what we gave, how we connected, how much we meant to our family and friends, small kindnesses, lifelong passions, and the things that made us laugh.
― Arianna Huffington, Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-Being, Wisdom, and Wonder

― Arianna Huffington, Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-Being, Wisdom, and Wonder

Is Behavior Aligned With Desire To be cherished by your spouse, family, friends, and community is a great success criterion. Maybe this sounds morbid, but I think it’s pertinent: what would you like for people to say about you at your funeral? Is that the life you are now living? For example, I want people to say “That man loved and preferred his wife like no man I’ve ever known.”

How does that align with the way I speak to and behave toward Ginger every moment? Therefore, I directly control this measure of success. Stephen Covey said, “If you carefully consider what you want to be said of you in the funeral experience, you will find your definition of success.”

Maya Angelou, the acclaimed author, said: “Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it.” So, do you like yourself? Maybe you struggle with some self-contempt. It’s gone from dislike to disgust. I feel for you and there aren’t many of us who haven’t been there at some point in our lives. But the beauty is that the story is not complete. Who you were, the things you wish you could undo or unsay, the poor decisions, all of that is done. You are not the sum of your past mistakes. Today, you can choose the behaviors that you admire and act on them. Become the person you want to be.

No Room For Comparison Also, this has nothing to do with comparing yourself to others. Others who you think did it right. Others who have what you want. They aren’t the answer, nor are they the problem. Instead of comparing, go back and listen to Episode 11 of the podcast. There are some great tips here on stopping comparison. I said, “Comparison is deadly because it keeps you focused on what you can’t control!” You must break the cycle of comparison.

Then there are the periods of great wandering. Maybe you are too familiar with the feelings of isolation that come from so-called wilderness experiences. It’s frustrating when your contributions or your efforts to contribute appear continuously thwarted. Not surprisingly, you will be glad to know that Winston Churchill can relate. He said, “Success is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm.” He’s a reminder that the road is neither easy or friendly. So, you will have to steel yourself to persist in the face of challenge.

Also, if you haven’t seen the movie, Darkest Hour, please do yourself a favor and see it. The movie recaps Winston Churchill’s first 20 days in 1940 as Britain’s newly selected prime minister while Western Europe is crumbling under Hitler’s assault. I’m moved as I recollect in hindsight the significance of the decisions made during these incredibly intense moments and the world we live in today as a result of such principled men.

Hard Work Thomas Edison would also relate with you. It’s commonly known that Mr. Edison had a work ethic most men cannot match. He said, “Success is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration.” Notice how he doesn’t say that success is related in any way to your passion. Apply yourself fully, regardless of how much you enjoy what you are doing, and success will be yours.

Don’t skip past any of this too quickly. Life is short. And life isn’t a fairy tale but there are many truths in the exchange between Alice and the Cheshire Cat in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland:

“Would you tell me, please, which way I ought to go from here?”
“That depends a good deal on where you want to get to,” said the Cat.
“I don’t much care where—” said Alice.
“Then it doesn’t matter which way you go,” said the Cat.
“so long as I get SOMEWHERE,” Alice added as an explanation.
“Oh, you’re sure to do that,” said the Cat, “if you only walk long enough.”

Brian and Anthony would tell you that being intentional in designing the life you want is key to your success. So don’t waste the life you have. It’s short. It’s unpredictable. Make it count!

Great Quotes From This Episode: “Success is peace of mind, which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you made the effort to do your best to become the best that you are capable of becoming.” – John Wooden

“If you carefully consider what you want to be said of you in the funeral experience, you will find your definition of success.” – Stephen Covey

“Success is liking yourself, liking what you do, and liking how you do it.” – Maya Angelou

“Success is going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm.” – Winston Churchill

“Success is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration.” – Thomas Edison

Resources Mentioned In This Episode: ESPN article on Anthony Myers

Leader to Leader Podcast Episode 95: Are You Measuring The Right Things

Business Insider article How 9 Incredibly Successful People Define Success

Leader to Leader Podcast Episode 11: Nothing To See Here

Thanks for Listening! I want to hear from you! Reach out and:

Leave a note in the comment section below.
Email a question to mark@markslemons.com.
Share this show on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

Subscribe to the show using your favorite platform: iTunes | Stitcher | Android | RSS

Finally, I would appreciate your honest review on iTunes. Your ratings and reviews really help and I read each one.

Now, go lead like someone you would want to follow!

The post LTL 096: The Definition Of Success appeared first on Mark Slemons.

Thrive: The Third Metric to Redefining Success and Creating a Life of Well-Being, Wisdom, and Wonder

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Peter Drucker famously said that what gets measured gets improved. So the next logical question is whether we are measuring the right things.

If you saw the movie Moneyball, then you will immediately understand the point. Babe Ruth is considered one of, and possibly the greatest, hitter of all time. But his batting average was actually not the best. He currently ranks 10th all-time at .342. When you look at home runs, he’s 3rd all-time with 714 and 2nd if you look at his runs batted in (2,214). In other words, if you go strictly by his batting average, you might not give him the credit he deserves when you look at the bigger picture.

In Moneyball, Brad Pitt’s character, Oakland A’s manager, Billy Beane, teams up with Yale economics graduate, Peter Brand. They use a different method to evaluate a player’s ability to contribute to the organization. Because this is more accepted now, you would be forgiven if you thought that is how baseball teams have always managed their personnel. At the time, it was a massive change. As a result, it was nearly impossible to convince folks that they had been studying the wrong metrics.

It’s very easy this time of year to focus on the wrong metrics. Everyone is talking about goal setting as we approach the end of 2018 and barrel ahead into 2019. While I’m a big fan of goal setting, I’m not going to talk about it here. Goal setting won’t have a lot of value for you if you aren’t writing them down and staying accountable. I’m a proponent of Michael Hyatt’s Best Year Ever. Because of this, I have taken the course and read the book. But before you go off goal setting, this episode is more concerned about where you’ve been. And based on that, determine if you have been measuring the right things.

The late great coach John Wooden said this: “Success is peace of mind, which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you made the effort to do your best to become the best that you are capable of becoming.”

Notice how there isn’t anything in his statement about fame, accolades, money, position or even recognition. There are two words present in his statement that I will emphasize because they connected with where I wanted to take this episode. Those two words are peace and effort.

When I think of peace, especially in the context of Mr. Wooden’s statement, I think of it as that sense of satisfaction where I can look in the mirror and be content with who I am. That I have become the best version of me that I can possibly become. Part of being you is connecting with others so everyone benefits corporately from who we are individually. Brene Brwon said that the absence of love and belonging always brings suffering.

Ginger and I visited a church this weekend and a pastor, Mark Morgan, who has been in some form of ministry for the last 46 years, was retiring. He shared some incredibly poignant thoughts that I thought were tremendous reminders of the importance of YOU being YOU! As he gently reminded those attending, we all have things we don’t like about ourselves. Things that we question or constant reminders of previous failures. Maybe we’re plagued with thoughts of inadequacy or have never been bold enough to take the steps to fulfill our dreams.

Whatever they are, they nag all of us. You aren’t unique in this. As a result, whatever your role, do it well or do it poorly. What Pastor Mark said was critically important was knowing who you are and being true to that. This connects well with what Coach Wooden meant regarding success. Be the best YOU that YOU can be!

Our past doesn’t define our future. We choose who we become. Many believe, and maybe you believe, that what happens in your life is unique and therefore makes you into who you are. The truth is that hardship is normal. We don’t all experience the same things, but hardship, difficulty, pain, and heartache – they are part and parcel of this life.

Part of the reason why this life was not meant to be lived in isolation is having others to help us through these difficult moments. As Pastor Mark was talking about his relationship with his Dad, he said that one characteristic his father exhibited was fortitude. That is the ability to live through any situation life brings and maintain emotional, mental, and spiritual balance.

I like that definition because it balance lends itself to peace. As a Christ-follower, I attribute much of my ability to maintain this balance to the supernatural assistance I receive as I choose to share my load with Jesus. I’m not going to allow any circumstance to steal my ability to deal with it. But I could not say that without having Jesus in my life.

But don’t misunderstand: I’m not saying that now all of a sudden, there’s no effort required on my part. Hardly! There is a cost to being the best YOU that YOU can be. It’s not easy and will require 100% of your committed effort. As you know, if it’s worth achieving, there will be a cost. when you look back on the meaningful things in your life, you will find that it cost you – maybe not dollars, but certainly time and energy. Therefore, you have to ask yourself if you are willing to pay the cost to be the best YOU?

Here’s the thing: I don’t want you to spend your life chasing something that you thought would make you happy only to wind up miserable in the end. Because of this, I think it’s important that you step back and evaluate what you are spending your time and energy pursuing. You very well may be aligned with a noble pursuit…but that won’t make it easy. It is going to take effort.

Admiral William McRaven said, “If you want to change the world, start by making your bed.” In other words, you must dedicate yourself to accomplishing small things to prepare you for accomplishing big things. So, if you want to write a book, start with writing a word. Maybe you want to lose five pounds in the next 12 weeks. So start by going for a walk instead of sitting on the couch for the next 30 minutes. Or if you want to become a better husband/father/friend, find someone that you think exhibits the characteristic and ask him for his best tip! But for goodness sake, start!

I’ll leave you with this final thought from Pastor Mark Morgan: character trumps gifting, talent and capability every time. When I hear those words, I know that for us as leaders, it means part of our look back is to determine how we should measure our character. Subsequently, where is my energy required to produce peace in my life and in my home? I don’t think you will ever go wrong focusing on improving your character.

Great Quotes From This Episode: “What gets measured gets managed.” – Peter Drucker

“Success is peace of mind, which is a direct result of self-satisfaction in knowing you made the effort to do your best to become the best that you are capable of becoming.” – John Wooden

“In the absence of love and belonging, there will always be suffering.” – Brene Brown

“If you want to change the world, start by making your bed.” – Admiral William McRaven

Resources Mentioned In This Episode:

Thanks for Listening! I want to hear from you! Reach out and:

Leave a note in the comment section below.
Email a question to mark@markslemons.com.
Share this show on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

Subscribe to the show using your favorite platform: iTunes | Stitcher | Android | RSS

Finally, I would appreciate your honest review on iTunes. Your ratings and reviews really help and I read each one.

Now, go lead like someone you would want to follow!

The post LTL 095: Are You Measuring The Right Things appeared first on Mark Slemons.

Your Best Year Ever: A 5-Step Plan for Achieving Your Most Important Goals

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When I say stress, I have to believe that your immediate response is not one of “oh, yes, I think I’ll start my day with a little dose of it just to get it started right.” Is stress a friend to you or more likely, do you perceive it as a foe? Most of us do everything we can to avoid it. Besides, who can blame you? Just take a look at the list of ailments we attribute to this condition: * Heart disease * Asthma * Obesity * Diabetes * Headaches * Depression and anxiety * Gastrointestinal problems * Alzheimer’s disease * Accelerated aging * Premature death

We have been talking about burnout in the last couple of episodes. In Episode 93: On The Edge Of Burnout: The Indicators And How To Stop It, I shared Dr. Sherrie Bourg Carter’s idea that the symptoms of burnout exist on a continuum. They start out as stress but over time, and with repetition, the stress leads to burnout. Most importantly, her definition of burnout is “a state of chronic stress.” So what could I possibly have to say about stress that could move it from foe into the friend category?

Change Your Perspective Don’t worry, I’m not going to try to convince you, but Kelly McGonigal is. Kelly wrote a book called The Upside of Stress. Surprisingly, research indicates that the way in which stress affects you is due primarily in how you think about it. Ouch! I’m not a fan of personal accountability when it comes to one of my favorite excuses!

People who believe stress is enhancing, are less depressed and more satisfied with their lives than people who view it as harmful. They have more energy and fewer health issues. Their approach facilitates the ability to be more productive at work experiencing increased happiness at the same time. They also have greater confidence in their ability to cope with challenges, and even find meaning in difficult circumstances – all good reasons to examine whether a change is needed in our perspective!

What Is Stress So what is stress? A common definition is that it’s a physical, mental, or emotional factor which causes bodily or mental tension. It can result from external factors – think of your various environments such as work, home, or community. The weather, social settings, and your boss can trigger this feeling. Less obvious forms result from our internal condition. An illness or even our psychological state can produce stress. A serious injury requiring surgery or recovery could be another example.

Stress is your body’s way of responding to the demands placed on it. When you feel stressed your body reacts by releasing chemicals into the blood. These chemicals are cortisol and adrenaline. As a result, these chemicals are actually meant to help you – your body is pretty amazing. You likely think that stress is toxic and should be avoided at all costs, but that’s probably just adding to the pressure.

What We Know About Stress You might not recognize Kelly McGonigal, but she’s a pretty famous psychologist who has spent a lot of time in the lecterns at Stanford as well as TED talk stages. She tells us that most of our knowledge of stress comes from a significant amount of testing done by Hans Selye on lab rats. His results have created the majority of the perceptions that we carry about it. Because of this, he was actually known as the Grandfather of Stress and even received Nobel Prize nominations ten different times for his work. Well, there are certainly some people that you know who behave like rats, but the tests that were performed don’t look much like your life or mine.

This is what a typical day looked like for one of Selye’s lab rats. You’d start off with unpredictable, uncontrollable shocks. Then you’d get thrown in a bucket of water and forced to swim until you started to drown. Then, finally, you’d get put into an overcrowded cage with other rats where you would fight over inadequate supply of food. McGonigal rightly points out, that this isn’t stress – this is the Hunger Games for rodents!

What We Believe About Stress So this research and published findings along with a big dose of mythology have produced the generally negative mindset that most Americans have taken on with regard to stress. This translates into beliefs that stress will:

deplete health and vitality
debilitate performance and productivity
inhibit learning and growth
produce negative results and should be avoided

When you take the perspective that stress must be avoided, Kelly says that you will wind up defaulting to methods like these to cope with it:

distracting yourself from the cause of the stress instead of dealing with it
focusing on getting rid of feelings of stress instead of taking steps to address its source
turning to alcohol or other substances or addiction to escape it
withdrawing energy and attention from whatever relationship, role or goal is causing the stress

Choose Your Response And See These Benefits But as you already know, you have a choice about your response to stress or stressful situations. Holocaust survivor, Viktr Frankl, says “Between stimulus and response there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.”

When you choose to view it as enhancing your life, then experiencing stress will:

enhance performance and productivity
improve health and vitality
facilitate learning and growth
viewed as positive and to be utilized

Therefore, it feels as if you are facing the challenge of stress head-on, as something that can be overcome. Rather than coping, Kelly says using stress to your advantage results in:

accepting that a stressful event has occurred and is real
planning a strategy for dealing with the source of stress
seeking information, help, or advice
taking steps to overcome, remove, or change the source of stress
making the best of the situation by viewing it in a more positive way or by using it as an opportunity to grow

Just taking this perspective for a few moments actually causes me to feel better about the challenging circumstances that I face. I hope it’s having that effect for you as well. It’s going to take some practice to think this way and develop a habit or response that aligns with how we want to behave. The stress isn’t gone. We didn’t ignore it or pretend it wasn’t there. I’m acknowledging it and taking away it’s power by deciding to address it.

I’ve said many times that you will get the life you always imagined. It’s true here as well. If you expect stress to produce the negative effects we mentioned, I can assure you that it will. If you expect stress to produce a positive effect, I can assure you that it will. Kelly shares how people who have a positive view of aging actually add an average of eight years to their life and have an 80% lower risk of a heart attack. Your mindset not only helps you in the moment, but also influences you to make better decisions in the future, leading to better outcomes. She says it’s as though mindset matters twice.

Here are some alternative perspectives of stress that you must consider if you are going to change how you think about stress.

Stress Helps You Engage Stress will actually help you to perform. What? I definitely didn’t see that one coming, did you?! It focuses your attention, heightens your senses, increases your motivation, and mobilizes energy. Surprisingly, this is true even when the stress doesn’t feel helpful, which is the case when people experience anxiety. Listen to how Kelly describes this:

When you start to feel your heart pounding or your breath quickening, remember that this is your body’s way of trying to give you more energy. When you start to feel tension in your body, remember that the stress response gives you access to your strength. Are your palms sweaty? Good, that means you are close to something that you want. Do you have butterflies in your stomach? Embrace them – it’s your guts way of saying that this is something that matters.

So what does the traditional avoidance advice look like? Well, it probably sounds something like “Calm down,” right?! If you do that, you risk missing out on the energy and strength she just mentioned. So instead of taking a deep breath and trying to calm down, her advice is to take a deep breath and sense the energy that’s available to you. And like everything, it’s not just knowledge, but action. You have to use that energy to your advantage.

View Stress As A Tool To Connect Kelly describes this as “tend-and-befriend” – a response that enables us to protect our children rather than get paralyzed with fear. Here’s the sciencey explanation of what’s happening in three systems in your brain.

It activates the social caregiving system, which is regulated by oxytocin. It produces empathy, connection and trust.
Activates the reward system, which releases the neurotransmitter dopamine. Dopamine results in feeling more optimistic about your ability to do something meaningful, and primes your brain for physical action, ensuring that you don’t freeze under pressure.
It activates the attunement system, which releases the neurotransmitter serotonin. When this happens, your perception, intuition and self-control are all enhanced to ensure that the actions you take have the biggest positive impact.

McGonigal says the “tend-and-befriend” response makes you social, brave and smart. Sounds quite a bit different than trying to avoid stress, right?! As you are listening, I want this to restore hope that you CAN deal with stress.

Therefore, putting this to practice means looking for opportunities to do something for somebody else that goes beyond your regular responsibilities. But Kelly warns that your brain is going to tell you that you don’t have the time or energy to do it…and that’s why you should. It doesn’t have to be a big deal. Most importantly, even a small action on someone else’s behalf will produce the desired result.

Use Stress To Grow What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger…well, that might not be the best analogy here, but research confirms good can come from harsh or traumatic circumstances. So, think of these benefits that result from enduring great difficulty or trauma:

a sense of personal strength
increased appreciation for life
spiritual growth
enhanced social connections and relationships with others
identifying new possibilities and life directions.

It’s not because the bad thing that happened is really good; no, it was bad. REALLY BAD! Instead, the good comes from your approach to dealing with it. Besides, you have to respond either way, so you might as well have positive expectations while walking through it! Here’s the cool part: you’ve been here before and you aren’t recognizing it. When you stop and reflect on your incredible fortitude and perseverance – everything you had to do to make it this far – it should inspire you to believe that you will make it through this too!

I’ll leave you with this recommendation for combatting stress from R. Morgan Griffin:

breathe deeply
focus on the moment
reframe the situation
keep your problems in perspective

You are an overcomer – so don’t let circumstances weigh you down! Every path worth walking in this life will present you with challenges. So, don’t run from those challenges – embrace them. You’ve got more tools and knowledge than ever before so it increases your ability to deal with larger and larger challenges. The choice is yours and that’s the beauty: you get to choose your response.

Resources Mentioned In This Episode: The Leader to Leader Podcast Episode 93: On The Edge Of Burnout: The Indicators And How To Stop It

10 Fixable Stress-Related Health Problems by R. Morgan Griffin

Thanks for Listening! I want to hear from you! Reach out and:

Leave a note in the comment section below.
Email a question to mark@markslemons.com.
Share this show on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

Listen to the show using your favorite platform: iTunes | Stitcher | Android | RSS

Finally, I would appreciate your honest review on iTunes. Your ratings and reviews really help and I read each one.

Now, go lead like someone you would want to follow!

The post LTL 094: What You Don’t Know About Stress appeared first on Mark Slemons.

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I’ve had way too many conversations recently with folks who have pressed the limits of their physical and mental abilities. What is it that causes us to press ourselves so hard? How do you determine if you are on the edge of burnout? Are there indicators that you have gone too far? Can you stop it? And maybe most importantly, what do you do about it after you’ve experienced it? Simple Answers? Hardly. There are no simple answers to these questions. One thing is for certain: this isn’t just in your imagination. It’s real. VERY real and not to be trifled with. Don’t believe me? Ask the leader on the other side of burnout who lost everything that mattered (peace, spouse, children, freedom, true identity) while achieving what didn’t (the property, the promotion, the practice, the prestige, the power).

While there are many ideas and things you should try when stopping the momentum of burnout or trying to recover, one size does not fit all. It’s a common frustration for those suffering from it. It feels like nothing works or maybe more appropriately, nothing works quickly enough. The amount of time it took getting to burnout or enduring it, will correlate to the amount of time it will take to recover. It’s not a one-to-one relationship, but you aren’t going to repair the damage done overnight. There’s no 12-step program or 30 days to recovery. Figuratively, some of you are going to “walk with a limp” for a while and possibly longer than you imagined.

There are a lot of resources out there that talk about burnout. Some of them are very good and helpful. A frequent criticism is that many of those resources are woefully lacking on recovery from burnout. As a friend of mine says “Anyone can diagnose burnout, but no one knows you and what recovery will look like for your experience.” Consider this as you listen to this episode. I’m not supplying solutions, but some very good ideas that you can consider.

This Won’t Work * being pushed or told to get over it and move on * telling yourself or others telling you to “man up”, “rub some dirt on it”, or “stop being so sensitive” * drinking another pot of coffee or take any kind of stimulant in an attempt to restore some of that lost energy and zeal * self-medicating with drugs, alcohol, food, sex, etc…

These aren’t solutions and they will leave you with a great deal of frustration and potential harm. Unfortunately, it takes a long time for folks to come to the realization that they are contending with this insidious destroyer. Often, it’s only in hindsight that we recognize the toll that burnout took.

What You Must Do Today * Recognize it * Take action

The whole point of this podcast is to equip you to lead well. I believe it’s my duty, my responsibility, to make you aware of the dangers and help you and your team to navigate the dangerous road. Most of our corporations, schools, non-profits, churches, and hospitals are filled with driven people with a vision. Something so big it could never be accomplished in several lifetimes, let alone the one you have been given. There’s always one more report to file, patient to see, paper to grade, parishioner to visit, phone call to return or email requiring a response.

Many leaders, especially those who haven’t dealt with burnout, have zero ideas of how to help their people through this. You owe it to yourself to develop the insight to recognize it – for self-preservation, but also for the preservation of your team.

Taking What It Can Get I’ve shared this analogy several times and it’s appropriate here again. There is nothing malicious or evil about what a business will take from you as an employee. The job of any business is to maximize the utilization of its assets. The higher that the mean time between failure (MTBF) is for a piece of equipment, the better. If I get 96% utilization out of one piece of equipment and 69% out of another similar piece of equipment, then comparatively, I have to wonder why one is doing so much better than another.

I will work to extract maximum value from my assets. You do this on a personal level as well. Most people don’t want to buy a new car every few months. When a big purchase is made, you want to maximize the value and utility you get from the car.

People, however, don’t fit this paradigm. but the business can’t distinguish one asset type from another. Maybe you find yourself thinking “How could I have worked 80 hours this week and feel like I haven’t made a dent in my workload?” The reality is that if you work 80, the business will take more. If you work 100, 105 is better. Anyone up for 120 this week? Not enough. There are some very real and essential problems that understaffed and inappropriately resourced businesses need to address. The point here is not what needs to be fixed, but the reality that it will take as much as you give it and not be satisfied.

The Most Important Two Letters Of The Alphabet It’s up to you to learn how to say ‘No’. If you don’t master this, one of the shortest words in the English language, you will likely find yourself experiencing burnout. So what exactly are some signs of burnout? Remember, it’s easy to diagnose – more difficult to recover.

Some Signs Of Burnout Dr. Sherrie Bourg Carter is a psychologist and author of High Octane Women: How Superachievers Can Avoid Burnout, wrote an article titled The Tell Tale Signs of Burnout … Do You Have Them? for Psychology Today. I’m going to refer to her list of indications that you are facing burnout.

One interesting point here: she notes that most of these symptoms are on a continuum and start out as stressors that lead to burnout. Her definition of burnout is a state of chronic stress that leads to:

Physical And Emotional Exhaustion * Chronic fatigue * Insomnia * Forgetfulness/impaired concentration and attention * Physical symptoms * Increased illness * Loss of appetite * Anxiety * Depression * Anger

Cynicism And Detachment * Loss of enjoyment * Pessimism * Isolation * Detachment

Feelings Of Ineffectiveness And Lack Of Accomplishment * Feelings of apathy and hopelessness * Increased irritability * Lack of productivity and poor performance

If you recognize them early, you can act to reduce their impact. How?

Burnout Is Not A Terminal Condition Although it certainly requires a change in lifestyle, once you recognize it and act, you can alter the course. Dr. Shimi Kang, a Vancouver-based psychiatrist and frequent speaker on the subject of workplace and mental health says how you live and the choices you make also affect burnout. She recommends making sure your daily life includes the following:

Play
Others
Downtime

Dr. Bourg Carter adds these to the list:

Make a list of all the situations that cause you to feel stressed, anxious, worried, frustrated, and helpless
Next to each item on the inventory, write down at least one way to modify that situation to reduce its stress, and then begin implementing them into your routine
Delegate as many things as possible
Take breaks between big projects
Turn off electronic devices
Resist the urge to take work home
Reinforce effort, not outcome
Consider a support group

My heart goes out to you today. It was not my intention to offer some trite formula to fix this all up and make you better. I sincerely want to offer you hope. Burnout is not the end. It’s a chance to restart and do things differently. Be patient with yourself as the progress will be slower than you wish.

Next week I’ll talk about stress, so don’t forget to listen in – maybe we can reduce the impact of burnout by changing how we look at stress. Come back and find out.

Resources Mentioned In This Episode: LTL 092: A Burnout Tale

The Tell Tale Signs of Burnout…Do You Have Them? by Dr. Sherrie Bourg Carter in Psychology Today

Thanks for Listening! I want to hear from you! Reach out and:

Leave a note in the comment section below.
Email a question to mark@markslemons.com.
Share this show on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

Listen to the show using your favorite platform: iTunes | Stitcher | Android | RSS

Finally, I would appreciate your honest review on iTunes. Your ratings and reviews really help and I read each one.

Now, go lead like someone you would want to follow!

The post LTL 093: On The Edge Of Burnout: The Indicators And How To Stop It appeared first on Mark Slemons.

High-Octane Women: How Superachievers Can Avoid Burnout

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I had the opportunity recently to meet with a dear friend who went careening past the border of burnout. This dude is one of the hardest workers I know. There are people who talk about working 80 hours a week and there are those who do it. This guy is one of them that did it. And not just for a week here and a week there. He developed a multi-decade run of working like this. Maybe you can relate. I’ve worked a lot of long hours in my career, but if I’m honest, this is territory that I touched and never really entered in a deep or long-lasting way. This is the kind of work where you don’t have a life outside of work. We’re talking 12 to 16 hour days six to seven days a week. God help you if you are traveling and working like this. Staying sane is a literal challenge – this isn’t figurative. You probably think “That’s a young person’s game.” The ones who burn out aren’t tied down, or don’t have any commitments. Statistically, you may be right; however, I don’t know them. I know the kind who are married, with families, with responsibilities outside of work as well. and for either one, the dangers and lingering effects are equally damaging.

The Comparison Trap So I wanted to share one example (because it’s pertinent) and a bit of the conversation as it occurred. Then, I’ll share what some of the experts say about detecting and avoiding burnout. I’d like to think that if we pay attention to the warning signs, we can avoid the very real and devastating consequences of pushing ourselves too hard for too long. I’m not going to name names, but you all know the big ones who tend to glamorize the “hustle.” You’ll feel pretty silly if you listen to them for very long and likely feel ashamed of your effort based on what you are hearing.

If only I could function on four hours of sleep – then I could KILL IT! More likely, at best, you’ll kill your productivity or efficiency, and at worst, bring the very real possibility of physical harm or death. It’s not as glamorous and it sure doesn’t sell a lot of books, but there are plenty of successful businesswomen and men who don’t work ridiculous hours or schedules. This isn’t an argument against doing what needs to be done. You will have to sacrifice things that are important to you for periods of time to get results. I’m warning you against a lifestyle choice.

There are obvious physiological and genetic differences that allow some people to function at a much higher level for a longer period of time and seemingly without doing ill harm to themselves. They are the exception. Enough scientific study and evidence confirm that the majority of humanity does not function this way. I want to kill the stigma that connects weakness or a lack of mental toughness to acknowledging that you need rest and recovery.

Every person is different and the key here is not how others work, but how you work. Maybe your neighbor never seems to need sleep and you aren’t functional without nine hours. It would be foolish for you to actively work against your physiological makeup and lessen your sleep because your neighbor doesn’t need that much. Here’s the point of our discussion today: assess where you are at and take care of YOU!

A Recent Example So when my friend put a name to what he was dealing with, he concluded it was burnout. And guess what? It didn’t happen overnight. It wasn’t like he woke up and said, “Hmmm, you know what? I’m burned out.” It was much more subtle than that. It happened over a period of 20-30 years. And it’s scary because it wasn’t obvious. He very well may have been one of those with the physiological or genetic ability to handle it for a longer period of time; however, even those types can push over the edge.

His experience is dreadful. Hindsight is 20/20 and there were indicators along the way. As you can imagine, getting older complicates our ability to discern whether the issues are the result of aging or attributable to other factors. Here is a short list of some of what he experienced:

no time to exercise
both spouses worked and had obligations outside of work which made healthy eating a serious challenge
increased blood sugar, blood pressure, and cholesterol levels that pushed dangerously close to a diabetic condition, and a serious risk of heart attack
forgetfulness – initially a struggle to remember a word or phrase, but got worse as time progressed
lack of clarity
inability to handle multiple things at once
irritability that was damaging the relationships with family

This isn’t a comprehensive list. Rather, it’s a microcosm or a small example of big problems.

Forcing Others To Suffer With You He came to realize that his family was suffering because he was suffering. The cost was real to them. In many ways, he unintentionally forced them to participate in his dysfunction. That had the very real effect of making them dysfunctional as well.

My personal experience in this area is a reflection on the number of times I’ve modeled a dysfunctional work ethic to my family and team. Working unreasonable hours when no one else is often referred to as “superhero” behavior. Your the only one who can do this. In case you didn’t know it, superheroes are not exceptional leaders. Your team doesn’t need a superhero. They need a healthy and efficient you – a great leader who is ready to utilize all the resources available to her and create an outcome through the best use of those resources!

I don’t really ever remember working 40 hour weeks. In my 30 years of work experience, I know exactly two gentlemen who controlled their work schedule. They worked exactly eight hours each day. And I mean exactly eight. If a meeting started 30 mins before their start time, they would be unapologetically late. If it ran past 5P, they left. Middle of a meeting? Didn’t matter. Key to the meeting? Didn’t care. They were done and left unapologetically.

Training Others In Your Work Style After I was done being angry about it, I had to admit that I was a little jealous. There were times when they were definitely in the wrong for not prioritizing what was happening at the moment. But that was the exception. I imagine that 90% of the time, it created no challenge. This was the schedule and they trained you with their behavior. If you needed them, you worked around their schedule. One of them was extremely talented. I never saw him waste a single second. He was 100% on from the time he walked through the door until the moment he left at night – he literally gave you his very best for those eight hours. When you have identified the value you bring, you get to set the rules.

I felt like when Friday night hit, I was completely spent. Nothing left. And for more than 20 years, I’m sorry to say that my family got leftovers. They got what little I could muster. I love my wife and sons. They have always been precious to me. But I realized over Thanksgiving how this massive drain impacted my recovery. It’s not like after Saturday and Sunday I was recharged and ready to hit it again. I probably needed more than those two days to truly get back to a place where I could do another 60 or 70 hour week.

Missing What Matters I was active with our boys. As such, I was a parent who participated as much as I could. I was generally able to attend their events and was physically present quite a bit. My wife, Ginger, would tell you that even though I was physically present (both with the boys and with her), a consequence of allowing the ridiculous work schedule was that I was always ‘on’ and often, a million miles away.

I had a realization that hit me like a ton of bricks over Thanksgiving. Ginger’s Dad has a computer hooked up to their TV and when they aren’t watching it, he has pictures running as a continuous slide show. These pictures go clear back to early family photos all the way to events that happened earlier this year.

So during our time at her folks, I saw this picture of our oldest son Nehemiah, when he was probably 12 or so and he’s in this inflatable boat on a small pond in Gillette, WY. He loved that little boat. And this thought struck me: of all the times I was home on the weekend, I could not think of one time where I went out to the garage and threw that boat in the truck. Then went in the house and told Nehemiah, “come on, let’s go to the lake and use your boat.”

It would have thrilled his heart and I completely missed it. I wasn’t gone but I wasn’t making time for the thing that was important to him rather than whatever was important to me. It was the consequence of allowing myself to be overworked. I was not able to think or see clearly something that right now is WAY too obvious. This is what I want you to avoid: don’t be so busy that you miss what matters. I’m not saying don’t work a lot. I’m saying don’t let work overtake you and cause you to miss things that you will look back on one day and wish you had prioritized.

Are You In A Fog So my friend described his experience like this: he felt like he was in a fog. He felt like he missed much of what mattered. He realizes it now but you don’t snap your fingers and recover. It will take years to undo what has been done. If you focus too much on recovery, you will take on the same obsessive behavior in trying to recover that put you in that condition in the first place. It’s ironic but necessary to recognize this. Once you are here, there is no fast track to repair. People aren’t going to understand who haven’t dealt with this.

It’s like running your car out of oil. Once the engine seizes, you don’t just add oil and wallah! Everything is good again. Start the car and head on down the road. No sir. You are in for a tow and some time serious time and money in the shop. You aren’t going to be better in six months. When you spend 30 years creating a mess, you don’t fix it in a few days. It will take more than a couple of visits to the therapist or reading a few self-help books. It’s a process to recover. this is why it’s WAY better to prevent the damage than trying to repair it once it’s done.

DO NOT MISS NEXT WEEK! I’ll share some common indicators that you are approaching burnout and how to stop it before it overtakes you.

Thanks for Listening! I want to hear from you! Reach out and:

Leave a note in the comment section below.
Email a question to mark@markslemons.com.
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Listen to the show using your favorite platform: iTunes | Stitcher | Android | RSS

Finally, I would appreciate your honest review on iTunes. Your ratings and reviews really help and I read each one.

Now, go lead like someone you would want to follow!

The post LTL 092: A Burnout Tale appeared first on Mark Slemons.

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In episode 90 of the Leader to Leader podcast, I shared about Scott Harrison’s big dream with charity:water. His mission is to bring clean drinking water to every person on earth. I don’t think you can even raise the topic of charity without raising resistance. I don’t know what it is, but as soon as a need is expressed, we start protecting ourselves, our assets, our time, etc… After all, My Momma Didn’t Raise No Fool Why is giving such a challenge for us? If I think that I’m about to be suckered or if I think you will take advantage of me, then, of course, I will raise my guard. Maybe I’m not certain where my money is going. Maybe you saw the recent news about the GoFundMe account that was set up to supposedly assist homeless veteran, Johnny Bobbitt. It appears that Kate McClure, Mark D’Amico and Mr. Bobbitt had intended to commit fraud. And, it’s not GoFundMe’s fault. People are going to find ways to manipulate and twist good things into bad no matter what they are. But I would caution you to…

Guard Against Cynicism I was traveling a few weeks ago and had stopped into a fast food place to grab a sandwich on my way back to the hotel. As I go inside, I’m standing in line and there are only one or two people in front of me. I order my sandwich and I’m in line waiting to pay.

While I’m waiting, this younger gent comes in – I’d say he’s in his 20s, and he has this brochure in his hand. He approaches the woman who was in front of me as she’s leaving and they exchange a few words, not very animated, soft tones, and he moves in towards me. I’m thinking, “Okay, this is easy. I don’t live here so when he tells me about the event next door that’s happening next week, I’ll be like ‘Sorry, I don’t live here and won’t be in town next week.’ and that will be the end of it.”

You Don’t Know The Answer Before You Hear The Question Or maybe he’s going to ask me if I have a job with a little fringe tear-off and I can call him to put him to work tomorrow. Or maybe he’s got his price list for his sunglasses for sale on the table around the corner. Now notice what I’m doing. I have NO idea what this gent is going to approach me with, but I’ve decided that I know and I know I’m not interested. And here’s an important point.

When it comes to the ask, stop acting like you know whether you should or shouldn’t before the words even come out of someone’s mouth. You likely have no idea what they are going to say, so stop being unreceptive until you hear them out.

Ouch So I’ve got my list of excuses…except my list didn’t include one for what he wanted to talk about. His 10-year-old nephew had been shot and killed earlier that weekend, caught in the crossfire of a gang shooting. Another innocent paying the full price for someone else’s stupidity. So what was the young man doing in the restaurant? What was his soft-spoken request?

He was trying to raise money for the family to pay for the funeral expenses. His handwritten paper told the story and, in true marketing fashion, at the bottom were three options: $25, $50 or $75 dollars. No write-in, no $5 option, just an expectation that if you were taking the time to read, you would take the time to give.

He was right. I gave. Not $25, $50, or $75 – I gave him the only $5 bill I had in my wallet. He didn’t reject it. Instead, he thanked me for my kindness with a fist-bump and then disappeared out the door into the dark.

The story was real – it was all over the news. The shop manager didn’t seem bothered by his presence. And there certainly wasn’t anyone to vouch for him or confirm his supposed connection to the child or the family. It’s entirely possible that I was scammed. Who knows. Here’s what I do know: I’m not going to let my heart get to a place where it’s so hard that I won’t be open to the suffering of another person.

So this is the point:

You Have To Work To Stay Vulnerable There’s a lot of wrongdoing out there. And if you think someone is just waiting to take advantage of you, you’re right. Likewise, if you think someone is out there that sincerely needs your help, you are also right. Imagine rejection after giving your heart to another. It’s risky to put yourself out there again but that risk pays off massively in terms of a life filled with joy and love.

It’s not easy though. I’m embarrassed to tell you this story, but I’m going to anyway at the risk of you thinking I’m a cold-hearted mean guy. I’m not – but I am going to show you the juxtaposition. It was AFTER the event in the sandwich shop that this occurred. Not several years, not several months. Days, maybe a week or two…

Slow Learner It’s not unusual for me to work late. When I’m traveling for work, it’s easy for me to just keep going and miss a meal. Many of you listening know what I’m talking about. Skipping meals isn’t wise, and at the same time, sometimes missing a meal while traveling isn’t the worst thing.
On this particular day, I didn’t eat lunch. Things were busy in the office and I usually try to have a half-way decent bar in my bag for just such an occasion….which if I’m honest, happens more than occasionally! Otherwise, I wouldn’t pack a protein bar around in my bag. Anyhow, I missed lunch. We worked late and the hotel is a short walk from the office.

I drop my stuff at the hotel, I’m looking at my watch, and I’m thinking, okay, it’s about a five-minute walk to the place that’s going to close at 9P and it’s like 850P, so I’m like “perfect, I’ll just barely make it.” So I go get my massive American burrito (because nothing in small in America) and I’m walking back to the hotel.

There are homeless people and panhandlers in most cities. They feature more prominently in some locations than others. I’ve traveled a lot for most of the last 20 years and I think what surprises me the most is their presence in cold temperatures. That is heartbreaking to me.

Baby, It’s Cold Outside – How’s The Temp Inside Just because it’s cold outside doesn’t mean we can allow it to get cold inside…inside our hearts, right?!

So on the way to grab my burrito, the thought crosses my mind, that I’m going to have to choose what I do if I encounter one of these folks on the way back to the hotel. It doesn’t matter to me what you call it, but I’m a Christ-follower and I know when the Holy Spirit is speaking to me. And this, this is definitely that voice. It’s not commanding or demanding, but it is convicting (not condemning).

So I’m thinking okay, if I encounter a homeless person, I’ll act and hand over my burrito. So get this. It’s not a long walk to the restaurant, it’s several blocks. I get all the way back to the intersection where my hotel is…and…just before the intersection, there he is. The huddled mass of individual humanity sitting in a pile of coat, blanket and whatever else he can find to fight the temps.

And I got a little upset. If you know the voice I’m talking about, I started arguing. But there wasn’t a counter argument. There was no “thus saith the Lord, give thy burrito to thy neighbor.” Nope. Here’s what I heard. “I didn’t tell you to give your burrito. There is no question of obedience here.” So by now, I’ve crossed the street with my precious and headed to the Lobby. And I’m like “right, so let me eat my dang burrito in peace, GOSH!”

Do What You Know To Do And I hear this deep in my spirit: “You don’t need me to tell you to do good to someone. When you do it, you can trust that you are simply reflecting My goodness to you.” It’s moving to me even as I recount this to you – I am so grateful for God’s goodness – not His blessings, His goodness! So by this time, it’s clear that the choice is mine. I’m in the elevator headed up to my room. I don’t know. I’m on the 24th floor or something. I get up there and I’m like “how am I going to eat this thing?”

I’m not wondering if I’m going to eat tomorrow. As a matter of fact, I’m not wondering if I’m going to eat three times tomorrow. It’s mine if I want it. But somehow, I don’t think that this is the world that the gentleman on the street is living in. He is wondering. Not just about food, but about where he’s going to sleep tonight, maybe if he’ll live through the night. Maybe wishing he wouldn’t.

It’s an easy decision now. I head back down. The elevator takes an eternity to get to the Lobby. I’m on a mission now, right?! I head out of the Lobby to the sidewalk. Make sure I’ve got napkins and a fork in the bag – the hotel is full of them, the street not so much. I get to the intersection and I’m worrying a little. The little mass of man is missing.

This Opportunity Won’t Always Be There I cross the street, I look. I don’t find him. It’s 10 mins max. I walk around the area. There are some alcoves between the buildings, and I’m looking but finding zero signs of life. No one around ANYWHERE! Now I’m upset for an entirely different reason. I could have made a difference in someone’s life and I didn’t.

Don’t take it for granted, this opportunity to serve won’t always be there for you. I’m not saying there might not be another opportunity to serve a neighbor, to serve a team member, or your leader. Or to serve an elderly neighbor or a need in the community. There will always be a place for you to plug-in and serve. What you might miss is THIS opportunity. The one you face today. This may be the last time this one comes up or around.

So I was meeting with some of my favorite people in the world, the mastermind I participate in weekly with Val Brown and Rick Marion. Rick was talking about a book he is reading called The Rock Warrior’s Way, and how the author, Arno Ilgner shares that when you miss the next grab on a climbing route, there’s a tendency to be hard on yourself and feel like you blew it. You focus on the mistake rather than the opportunity to learn and improve.

Then Val was talking about how we have to focus on showing up. Between the two of them, they made an incredibly important point that is summarized in this quote from Val:

“Show up the best you can every day.” – Val Brown It really is as simple as that. How do I show up when I don’t feel like doing something? What if I don’t do it as well as I expected to? Do the best you are capable of doing right now, in this moment. Self-esteem and improvement build from the effort, not from always producing desired results.

And that’s why I do this podcast. I’m showing up every week doing the best I’m capable of in each moment. Getting an episode done so I can look at the pretty list and tick a box is not my priority. I’m doing it because I care about the quality of what I deliver to you. I invest in preparing value for you each week. A small principle, a practical step, a useful thought or practice that you can implement to make a change in your life.

There’s nothing worse than the feeling of having an opportunity to make a difference and not. Don’t let that happen to you. Show up full force for the opportunities presented to you today. There is no such thing as wasted effort when you are working to improve your life and the lives of others.

Don’t shortcut – invest in making yourself the best, most capable, equipped leader to serve those you lead. No wasted moments. Willing to give freely – your time, your talents, your money, in the service of man. Don’t let cynicism harden your heart. Think the best about people and assume that you will make an impact with your gift.

Resources Mentioned In This Episode: LTL 090: What Is Your Big Dream

Attorney: Woman in GoFundMe case says she was used and set up

Thanks for Listening! I want to hear from you! Reach out and:

Leave a note in the comment section below.
Email a question to mark@markslemons.com.
Share this show on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

Listen to the show using your favorite platform: iTunes | Stitcher | Android | RSS

Finally, I would appreciate your honest review on iTunes. Your ratings and reviews really help and I read each one.

Now, go lead like someone you would want to follow!

The post LTL 091: Reducing Resistance When Approached With Need appeared first on Mark Slemons.

The Rock Warrior's Way: Mental Training for Climbers

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If I ask you about your dreams, will you have any that you can talk about? Do you have a big dream? Have you put aside making an impact on the world so you can pay your rent? If this sounds like you, I want you to remember how you felt when considering the pursuit of your passion. Back in Episode 70, I talked about the importance of water. And the impact water has on our well being is staggering…and it’s not just for fitness freaks! Most health experts recommend starting your day with water. So, whether you add a bit of lemon, a dash of cinnamon, or try to burn your throat with cayenne, it seems everyone has a recipe to get your day started right with this wonder elixir.

As you probably know, we moved to the Phoenix area recently. Trust me, the significance of water has taken on a much greater meaning for me! People die each year here as a result of dehydration, so it is on everyone’s mind and still, not everyone takes good care of themselves in this area. So, if you need a primer on the importance of water, then go take a listen to that episode.

I also mention the work of charity: water. Scott Harrison founded this incredible organization to bring clean drinking water to parts of the world that need it.

Amazingly, I was able to see Scott speak in Phoenix recently at the Dave Ramsey EntreLeadership 1-Day Event. If you don’t know Scott’s story, check it out for yourself. His new book Thirst just released and 100% of the proceeds go right back to charity:water. I’m going to give you the condensed version because my intention here is to inspire and challenge you.

Scott wound up a caregiver for his mother at a very young age due to carbon monoxide poisoning in their home. It almost killed his mother, but she lived and had a terribly difficult life as a result. I’m doing it an injustice with this brief description. I can’t begin to describe how hard it was on her and the family. Scott is an only child. He took care of his mom while his dad worked to provide for the family. I suppose over the years that took a toll. He wanted out and as soon as he was 19, so he went to New York City.

The Dream Is A Nightmare He went to become a star. As a keyboard player in a local high-school band, they were going to make it big. As happens to many bands, it fell apart. He was left to pursue Plan B. That plan had all of the trappings of what appeared to be a wild success to his young brain. By the time he was 29, he was making more than $200k a year as one of the hottest club promoters in New York City and had the women, booze, drugs, cars, etc… to prove how successful…and shallow…he had become.

He came from nothing and made himself something; however, the something he became was not able to satisfy. He despised who he had become. So, he left it all. I mean everything. He sold all that he had and began looking for a place to serve. Remember, he’s famous. He’s well known and mostly for all the wrong reasons. When he decides that he wants to live a life opposite of the one he’s living, it’s extremely difficult to get anyone to believe him. All the big charity names you can think of – they didn’t want near him. His reputation preceded him and they weren’t interested.

But he wasn’t going to be denied. He continued to look and wound up agreeing to pay a charity to let him join them! Isn’t that hilarious? I mean how serious do you have to be to pay to volunteer?!

The Cost To Live A Meaningful Life Similarly, it’s entirely possible that to bring meaning to your life, to satisfy the purpose of your life, you might have to take a dramatic course correction and the cost will likely be high. This was the place Scott found himself. So Scott joined Mercy Ships and his first visit was to Liberia. To say he was shocked was an understatement. I want you to pick up the book, so I’m not going to tell you a lot more about his personal story.

Instead, what I want to get to is the monumental challenge that he undertook. As he served around the world, he sees a simple, fundamental need was going unmet. A large portion of the world’s population does not have access to clean drinking water. He witnessed people drinking from green swamps. Certainly, they were drinking from water sources that you wouldn’t let your animals near.

52% of disease is caused by a lack of clean water and sanitation. One in 10 people, (more than 600 million people) are drinking bad water. And when I say bad, I mean disease-laden, death in liquid form, bad. When you see the pictures and you hear the stories, you will understand how horrific the effect is on these people, these families, and these communities. So Scott decided to change that.

Finding Your Mission He decided that he would spend the rest of life making sure that everyone has clean water to drink. That’s a big mission. Jim Rohn once said “Ask yourself, ‘How long am I going to work to make my dreams come true?’ I suggest you answer, ‘As long as it takes’.”

Drilling a water well is affordable by first-world standards. You can drill a new well for $10k. What’s difficult is most of these locales can’t afford the $1M in capital that is required to buy a drill rig. Likewise, they can’t afford the engineers or the hydrologists. The problem is obvious; the answer is obvious. In contast, getting the funds is not.

What Is Your Why There has to be a “why” for going to the effort to make the dream a reality. Scott’s why is simple: water changes EVERYTHING! When kids have clean water, not only does their health immediately improve, so does their learning and economic condition. Every $1 invested in bringing clean water to a community brings $4-$12 in economic returns. That’s pretty significant!

Hear Their Concerns As you can imagine, there are many doubters. 42% of Americans don’t trust charities. 70% believe charities waste their donors’ funds. So Scott setup charity:water to put 100% of the donations received into projects. I’m not sure if that is registering with you. 100% means there was no money to pay Scott, no money to pay a staff, no admin or general and administrative cost bucket. All of it went to serve the community. It’s harrowing and you will want to read the book to find out how they narrowly avoided shutting down.

You might face an equal challenge to bring your dream to life. Here are a few things Scott said that I think will help you with your dream:

Guilt Is Not A Good Motivator This doesn’t work. Can you recall an ad that makes you feel guilty? Maybe it’s an ad for an agency that does great work. They stop animal abuse, feed starving children, treat horrific disease. But ads that make you feel guilty can make you turn away, not press in. Scott said that the best brands NEVER use guilt or shame. Think about Nike’s approach to fitness. Do they spend a lot of time shaming? Do you see them run ads that degrade or denigrate? Just the opposite. They tell the viewer “Greatness is inside you.” They tell you “Just Do It” because they believe you can do it.

Participation As Celebration When was the last time you celebrated achievement? Moving one step, no matter how small, towards the goal, is worth rejoicing! Spend time celebrating and you make everyone’s perspective shift a little. What gets the attention on report cards? A’s or the C’s and D’s? Check yourself: sometimes we overlook the A when a D is present. Don’t let that happen. Impossible tasks don’t happen without momentum. Accomplishment generates momentum.

Involve Others You know the saying: if your dream is so small that you can accomplish it by yourself, you aren’t dreaming big enough. Hopefully, your dream scares you a little. As a result, it makes you feel a little insecure or makes you question your capability. Now you’re dreaming! It has to be bigger than you and you have to be able to keep coming back to your why so you can all press on when it gets hard.

Become A Master Storyteller In order for the dream to get traction, you are going to have to do more than simply tell others about it. Consequently, you have to do this in a way that makes them want to be a part. Innovation takes all different forms. You might not realize it, but you can innovate in telling a story. You see people use their birthday as an opportunity to tell others about a favorite cause. Asking for donations instead of gifts is an example of innovative storytelling.

Virtual reality caught Scott’s attention. So, at a fundraising banquet one night, they put a VR headset on each attendee. They show them what it feels like to be there, with the community, when the drill hits water. As you can imagine, everyone is going crazy and dancing!

At another event, they put an iPad at the seat of each attendee. At exactly the right moment, each attendee got to use that iPad to see and hear the first-hand account of a person who was in need of clean drinking water. Neither of these might be right for telling others about your seemingly impossible dream, but you must find a compelling way to tell your story.

Make The Dream Theirs This was one of the most insightful things Scott said that day. You aren’t the hero in the story. It’s not “my” story; it’s “our” story. The most powerful movements result when others adopt the dream as their own. So, help them see how the dream can be theirs too. Scott began to realize how critical it was for local people in the communities they were helping to get involved. They needed local representatives to own the projects. He said that you are inviting people to the table of compassion, generosity and saving lives. Who doesn’t want to be a part of that?

You might think that after 12 years and more than $330M dollars invested in thousands of wells that the mission is becoming a reality. You probably think that most of the world must surely have access to clean drinking water by now. Actually, you would be mistaken. Scott said that even after helping more than 8M people to access clean water, only 1/78th of the problem has been touched. There are still 663 million people in need. But that does not deter Scott.

Don’t Give Up As you look at the size of your task and it looks as impossible as ever, remember your why and recall the progress. You are closer than you were. Certainly, it will be the hardest thing you’ve ever done and totally worth it! I’ll leave you with the quote that Scott left with us:

“Do not be afraid of work that has no end.” Avot de Rabbi Nattan

Resources Mentioned In This Episode: charity:water website

LTL 070: Wilting From The Inside Out: Get More Of This Critical Element!

Thanks for Listening! I want to hear from you! Reach out and:

Leave a note in the comment section below.
Email a question to mark@markslemons.com.
Share this show on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

Listen to the show using your favorite platform: iTunes | Stitcher | Android | RSS

Finally, I would appreciate your honest review on iTunes. Your ratings and reviews really help and I read each one.

Now, go lead like someone you would want to follow!

The post LTL 090: What Is Your Big Dream appeared first on Mark Slemons.

Thirst: A Story of Redemption, Compassion, and a Mission to Bring Clean Water to the World

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In Part One of this series, I shared five steps you can take to restore trust when trust is broken. Today, I will share five steps to recovery. These are practical steps you can take that will propel you on the healing path when your trust has been violated. This two-part series has been challenging. There’s no amount of time that I could dedicate to the content that would make me feel like it was adequate to assist you as you listen. At the same time, it was important to me to give you something that you could implement quickly. These tools are not simple or easy, but they are effective. You know this about me already: I’m a Christ-follower and, in my estimation, many of these options fall short of their intended effectiveness if Jesus isn’t in the middle of them. But you don’t have to be religious for these steps to work for you. So please don’t stop listening and give these ideas a chance to go to work in your life.

Here are the five steps to recovery after trust has been broken:

Forgive I know – I started with the one that is the hardest. Let me first say that forgiving is not forgetting. I’m not asking you to ignore the pain you feel when recounting the way in which your trust was violated. I’m not diminishing the raw feelings or emotions you experience when recalling those horrid moments. The problem is that there is a tangible and real cost of hanging onto and persisting in those emotions. Unresolved conflict, bitterness, resentment: they could affect your physical health.

Repeated studies, like this one from Johns Hopkins Medicine, indicate that the act of forgiveness lowers the risk of a heart attack, improves cholesterol levels, improves sleep, reduces pain, reduces blood pressure, and lowers anxiety, depression, and stress. The connection increases as you age.

Karen Swartz, M.D., and director of the Mood Disorders Adult Consultation Clinic at The Johns Hopkins Hospital says “There is an enormous physical burden to being hurt and disappointed.” Chronic anger puts you into a fight-or-flight mode and produces undesirable changes in heart rate, blood pressure, and immune response. Those changes, then, increase the risk of depression, heart disease, and diabetes, among other conditions. Forgiveness, however, calms stress levels, leading to improved health.

Kevin and Cheryl Rose are special and long-time family friends who recently moved to Arizona so Kevin could receive treatment from Dr. John Murphy at the AZ Good Health Center in Tempe, AZ. Dr. Murphy built his practice around integrative and holistic care. In other words, you don’t treat the body separate from the mind, separate from the emotions. All must be aligned for the best treatment outcomes. Forgiveness is a critical contributor to the outcome.

How? You aren’t crazy. Your next question probably sounds like this: How can I possibly forgive? You were damaged deeply by the other person(s). You can imagine that simply saying “I forgive you” probably isn’t going to get the job done. It’s part of the equation, but the real power is backing it up with action. One element that empowers this action is deciding to forgive whether they deserve it or not and whether they asked or not. Let that sink in for a moment. If you evaluate the long-term damage that we do with our actions and our words, none of us deserve forgiveness.

Sometimes it is possible to speak to the person(s) directly. There are times when folks are completely unaware of the impact that their behavior is having on others. They will appreciate you taking the risk to say as much. Other times, it’s mean-spirited and malicious with intentional disregard for those on the receiving end. As you can imagine, one relationship has a great chance of improving while the other is headed for dissolution. Don’t waste time trying to talk through issues with someone who does not have the decency to hear you out. It’s virtually impossible to make this assessment if you don’t try.

Forgive And Love Yourself Often, the hardest person to forgive and love is the one looking at you in the mirror! How many terrible decisions have you made in your life where you continuously and viciously remind yourself of your shortcoming? You wouldn’t treat another person or animal the way you think about yourself. So start here. We are all imperfect and have blown it in ways we never imagined possible. Those moments are not reflections of the person we are or that we desire to be, so remember this about those who hurt you.

Your worth is not determined by how others treat you. You have inherent and intrinsic value. I believe you are a reflection of God and made by Him in His likeness. Imagine an artist who designs marvelous works of art. Now imagine that one piece of art begins judging the value of other pieces. Is that not ridiculous? The only one who gets to determine the value of the artist’s work is the artist.

You have value because you are fearfully and wonderfully made. I believe that you are unique and deserving of honor because of this. There aren’t a lot of people who will take the time to remind you of your inherent value. I recommend that you remind and reinforce this yourself to yourself. Often.

Radically Adjust Your Expectation Of Others At a leadership retreat several years ago, I vividly recall a pastor’s wife talking about the pain she had experienced over many decades in ministry. I’m not sure if you know this but people can be terribly unkind. While it’s supposed to be different inside the church, it’s often more pronounced because it is not supposed to be that way. No one is immune to the attack, not even the innocents hit by supposedly “friendly” fire. She said that she had come to realize that the only way she could love others was to free them from her expectations.

I’m not advocating the elimination of standards. I am promoting the idea that we are often unreasonable in our expectations of ourselves and others. Our standards for justice and mercy are often skewed based on bias. That bias can unfairly weight the scales against, or in favor, of ourselves. The result is that we can be overly harsh on ourselves or too easy on ourselves. Rarely do we have the capability of determining the correctness of our expectations. This you can know with confidence: you will disappoint yourself and so will others.

Are you prepared to deal with it when others let you down?

Maintain A Standard If you don’t have a standard then abuse is a distinct possibility. Do not abandon standards. You should be treated with dignity and respect. This is an appropriate standard. Relationships are founded on trust and it would be impossible to have an authentic relationship if you did not hold to this standard.

You can forgive without violating the standard. If you are consistently misled or mistreated by your leader, it is reasonable to forgive him or her while looking for alternative employment. There is no requirement that you always be treated “fairly” and yet when there is a pattern of mistreatment, you must determine when it violates your standard and take appropriate action.

You should not tolerate abuse. Physical, emotional, mental, or sexual abuse should be reported and addressed with immediate consequence. When I managed Site Support and Service Desk operations in the Americas for my employer, there was a situation where an employee threatened physical harm to one of my team members. The standard for acceptable and appropriate behavior demanded that the situation be addressed immediately by Human Resources. That’s what a standard does: it clearly defines unacceptable behavior.

If you don’t have a standard for what is an acceptable treatment of your person, then define it. It’s one way to make sure that you don’t tolerate it in the future.

Don’t Do This By Yourself I know this doesn’t seem possible. You feel alone in the midst of the betrayal. It would be much easier to crawl into your shell, or better yet, a cave and remove yourself from the pain and the drama. There is no healing in isolation. You aren’t the first to be betrayed, and you won’t be the last.

The world is full of survivors like you. Find them. Listen to their story, their survival experiences. Often you will find steps they took that will propel you on your own journey toward healing. As you work against isolation, you will find this key point to be true: you can not superimpose your past experiences onto others.

It’s the beauty of doing life in community! You will realize that there are wonderful, trustworthy people in your life. People who have your back, who genuinely care about your well being. They might be in the next room, next door, or thousands of miles away. Whether virtual or face-to-face, these people remind you that you have good reason to hope for a better future.

I’m one of them.

Thanks for Listening! I want to hear from you! Reach out and:

Leave a note in the comment section below.
Email a question to mark@markslemons.com.
Share this show on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

Listen to the show using your favorite platform: iTunes | Stitcher | Android | RSS

Finally, I would appreciate your honest review on iTunes. Your ratings and reviews really help and I read each one.

Now, go lead like someone you would want to follow!

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I’ve had some powerful discussions with several people over the last few weeks. I find that these conversations often occur in spurts. It’s not that I KNOW it’s going to happen this way, and yet the saying that bad news travels in bunches seems to play out more often than I would like. I suspect you feel the same. I spend a significant amount of time talking about trust. How to establish it, how to build it, how to sustain it, the value it brings and why you don’t want to damage it. What I haven’t done is talk much about what to do when trust is broken. Today, I’m going to do just that and share five steps to restore trust. As I browsed back through the episodes, trust has been a prominent player in the content I publish. More than 30 episodes either reference or are specifically dedicated to trust. Some of my best work is about trust. In particular, I view the series I did on trust in episodes 20, 21, and 22 to be fundamental and cornerstone content for a healthy, effective leader:

The Science Of Trust: Characteristics Of Male And Female Leaders

Building Team Trust With Vulnerability

Are You My Type? More Tools For Building Team Trust

But here’s the kicker: we’ve all blown it. Each of has violated the trust a manager, a team, a community, or a customer placed in us. Maybe you have broken trust with a friend, spouse, or child. You understand the pain that results as well as the consequences. Relationships drive business – you know that. Customers do business with those they know, like, and …. trust. So what do you do when you’ve blown it? You and I both know that one size does not fit all, but there are some guiding principles you can use, and modify, to fit your particular circumstance.

Here are five steps you can take to restore trust.

Own It I don’t think there’s anything more important than acknowledging the damage you’ve done by violating another’s trust. That’s why step one is owning it. You might be able to think of an example where you owned it. I can think of several. I’ve made HUGE mistakes with my team and the path to reconciliation always begins with identifying where I went wrong.

Sometimes our mistake was not taking action. It was letting it slide thinking it would improve on its own. That’s rarely true; however, there are great leaders in my life who chose not to make mountains out of molehills. One of the best mentors I ever had who was a master at this practice is Pastor Don Wight at Calvary Community Church in Gillette, Wyoming. That man knows, he just simply knows, when it is time to take action, sometimes uncomfortable and confrontational action, and when it was necessary not to overreact. These men and women are priceless treasures in your life and I’ll tell you right now, you NEED wise counselors in your corner.

And believe it or not, you have them around you right now. They are there for you. Some physical, some virtual. People you can depend on as you walk through tough stuff. Don’t underestimate the value of having someone to talk to. I mentioned the group of EPIC people that I met with on a regular basis in Salt Lake City (LTL 076: Authentic Relationships As The Basis For EPIC Conversations). This group was formed to provide exactly this type of support. Be intentional about creating that group NOW. You want those people surrounding you as you maneuver your way through difficulty. And don’t make the mistake of surrounding yourself with people just like you.

Exhibit Humility While Demonstrating Empathy So, no excuses. No blame. No justification. Just simple owning it. I messed up here and I wish I wouldn’t have. Do you know the definition of humility? It’s not groveling. Merriam-Webster defines it as “freedom from pride or arrogance” – it’s the exact opposite of claiming that I do everything right.

Proverbs 11:2 says that pride leads to disgrace, but with humility comes wisdom. That is pretty clear. Wisdom travels with the humble.

There’s a great article in The Economist titled Davos Man and His Defects, from early 2013 that is worth a read. It concludes with this statement:

If leadership has a secret sauce, it may well be humility. A humble boss understands that there are things he doesn’t know. He listens: not only to the other bigwigs…but also to the kind of people who don’t get invited, such as his customers.
—The Economist, 26 Jan. 2013

And this principle underlies all the efforts of a great leader. She listens and she empathizes. As she considers who is represented at the table, she pursues the voice that isn’t heard, the one that isn’t speaking up. She acknowledges she doesn’t know everything and wants, actually needs, to understand where you are coming from. It sounds something like this:

I violated your confidence in me. I’m ashamed of how I mismanaged this thing. It was important to you and I didn’t handle it correctly. More importantly, I can see how this made you feel and I’m embarrassed to say I didn’t consider that sufficiently before acting the way I did, choosing the words I used, or simply managing the physical communication through body language and facial expression.

It’s A Long Game These words aren’t going to make everyone better. These words simply communicate, without hedging, that I’m accountable for my mistake. I’m looking at it from your perspective and engaging with the impact I had on you, your company, your trust in our relationship. But you must keep this in mind: no amount of words is going to return things back to normal. You aren’t waving a magic wand to make all of the hurt, disappointment and injury disappear.

As a leader, your perspective has to shift. Things aren’t going back to the way they were. The bigger the violation, the larger the consequence. There are so many examples that come to mind for me. I wish I could describe to you the myriad of ways in which this plays out over long periods of time. Shareholders or communities response to unethical leadership. Saving a few dollars and compromising the quality of a product that directly and negatively impacts a customer. Intentionally deceiving or misleading team members.

We are talking about restoring trust and often an organization is forced to make a decision to move on without the offender. Damage control requires an immediate action before other parts of the company or the customer base is negatively impacted. Unfortunately, the longer term implications of broken trust are not fully considered or understood. Short-term decision making for ease or gain can often carry a price far greater than an individual, team or company was willing to pay.

There’s a great quote from Kevin Plank, the founder and CEO of Under Armour, that applies here:

“Trust is built in drops and lost in buckets.” – Kevin Plank

As one who has violated or broken trust, you must recognize that it will take time to restore trust. Constant, repeated, consistent, and predictable behavior is required to reestablish yourself as trustworthy. Most leaders dramatically underestimate how important this is and how long it will take.

Living With Pain: The New Normal There are many sad parts of violating or breaking trust, but this is one of the most difficult. It’s both the good and bad news: you can’t change the past. You will have to live with the pain you have created. Remember this: it is a mistake to force others to move past this too quickly. In many ways, the reason you want to move past it is the pain it causes you each time you are reminded of your problem-causing action.

Fundamentally, you are lost here. It’s not about you – it’s about the others you have damaged. You will feel that pain for a long time to come. Every time you are reminded whether accidentally or on purpose, you will want to crawl under a rock. Running seems like a great option. Don’t!

Like it or not, the pain isn’t going away. Whether a pinprick or a knife to the heart, you will feel the impact of your action for longer than you wanted. Time will help but you can’t short-circuit the process. Those who pay for your actions will have a long memory. You will likely throw your hands in the air and say “Are we still talking about this? Will we move on?” Yes, they are still talking about it and you will instead have to revert to humility combined with empathy to validate them and take the time needed.

Adjust Your Expectations Things aren’t aren’t going back to where they were. You might think that the best thing that could happen would be stepping into the time machine and returning five minutes prior to your life-altering decision. If I could just go back there, everything would be okay because, in hindsight, I would choose differently. You see, I actually believe that. Experience is a marvelous teacher. I believe you, and I believe myself as well; we would do it differently if we could knowing what we know now.

But I know what I know because I messed up. I would rather learn from another’s mistake than to make it my own but that’s not how life works. At least it’s not how my life works. Because of my mistake, I now have an opportunity to become a different person. It doesn’t feel like it, but it’s a gift. Joy isn’t going to come because things went back the way they were; joy is coming because you learned from the past and it’s making you into a better leader.

In most instances, I would bet money that because of what you have been through, you will never choose that path again. Some of us aren’t quick learners and we make the mistake more than once before we finally get it. Don’t let that be you. Consider your past. Contemplate that part of your history that you would rather forget. Consider others who have done what you might be tempted to do and how it turned out for them.

To Be Continued… Please, do not miss next week’s episode. Part Two of this series is equally important: I’m going to talk about the five steps you can take to recover when your trust in another was broken.

Are you practicing these five steps to restore trust you have damaged? If not, today is the day to get started. You will be glad you did. Don’t give up – this journey is not for the faint of heart, but I believe in you. You can do this and you will come out on the other side a better leader for it. Don’t delay; start now.

Thanks for Listening! I want to hear from you! Reach out and:

Leave a note in the comment section below.
Email a question to mark@markslemons.com.
Share this show on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

Subscribe to the show using your favorite platform: iTunes | Stitcher | Android | RSS

Finally, I would appreciate your honest review on iTunes. Your ratings and reviews really help and I read each one.

Now, go lead like someone you would want to follow!

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When I wrote the title for this episode, I had an epiphany. Have you ever had one of those moments when you are just certain that something is right even though you aren’t sure why? Today was like that for me. I knew that The 180 Degree Leader was my topic. The power of consistency doesn’t really do the episode justice in terms of a subtitle. But I can tell you that this topic contains way more subject matter than we can possibly cover today. So I was thinking about my leadership style. Actually, I was thinking about OUR leadership style and I started thinking about the ways in which it’s unique. Let me give you an example. Early in my career, it was clear to me that the organization that I was working for valued the ‘D’, the dominant personality type, in the DiSC profile. And to be honest, I resented it. It’s not too surprising to you that while I have some ‘D’ characteristics in my personality makeup, it’s not my dominant personality type. I’m much higher on the ‘i’, or influencer.

Personality Profiles And Leadership Ability When I think back to many of the high ‘D’ personalities in my life, whether work or personal, they were blunt, dominant, manipulative, demanding and arrogant. Now, please don’t misunderstand. I was young, didn’t know a lot – still don’t know a lot! – and my judgment was hasty. I’ve grown to appreciate the need for all personality types in a team. High ‘D’s are often the visionaries and the ones who keep the business pushing to achieve results. Most importantly, high Ds require great leaders to keep them connected to the rest of the team.

As I mentioned in Episode 082 Leading When Disaster Strikes, I grew up in industry. My Dad was a self-employed General Contractor who instilled a deep work ethic in me that I’m forever grateful for. He was an honest man who ALWAYS did top quality work. Dad was and still is a perfectionist and that’s both a blessing and a curse. He was a straight arrow though and the lines between right and wrong were always very clear to me. Thanks Dad!

So in industry, oil and gas, as well as mining, you find a lot of Ds. I don’t know that it’s disproportionate, but it’s substantial. And thankfully, I think it’s changed over the last 20+ years. So here is the part that I resented, both then and now: a personality profile doesn’t determine your ability to be successful as a leader. You can’t use a personality assessment to bucketize a person into a category. A successful leader is one who can influence in spite of her personality type. Because she knows her weaknesses and understands her strengths, she wants a full complement of personalities in her business. Others who aren’t like her but can make up for her areas of weakness.

Doing The Opposite Of What Comes Naturally In many ways, the leader has to do exactly the opposite of what is most comfortable. Because left to our own tendencies, we will surround ourselves with people who look, act and think like us. The most “diverse” among us will gather then exclude those around us when we stop being intentional about involving those who think differently than we do. So that’s one context for the title of today’s episode. The 180-degree leader does the opposite of what’s comfortable to them.

But as I dug deeper into the concept of 180-degree leadership, I discovered a principle in filmmaking that some of you are probably familiar with. Hang with me here because for a couple minutes it’s going to seem like my voice on Val Brown’s Camera Ready podcast. In my estimation, this principle is equally, and potentially more valuable than the first.

The Establishing Shot And The 180-Degree Rule In film, the director is constantly working perspective. She has to coordinate the establishing shot. It’s essentially drawing a straight line between the actors/actresses engaged n the scene. This establishing shot keeps the audience oriented as the director maintains all camera angles within a 180-degree arc of that straight line. All camera footage is shooting on the same side of the line as the establishing shot! My son, Nehemiah, has done a lot of video shooting and editing – I hope he’s proud of me for recognizing something that is likely a most basic 101 type of principle!

You don’t realize it when viewing the film, but subconsciously, your brain engages with the 180-degree rule continuously when you are watching the flow in a scene. Violating the rule instantly introduces confusion. For example, if you imagine a scene in a football game and the team with the ball is moving from the left-hand side of your screen to the right-hand side of your screen, maintaining the 180-degree rule establishes that all shots occur from the same side of the line. Your brain can keep up with that whether the camera is behind, in front or in the middle of the action. It makes sense.

Story Flow Imagine if you were watching the same game and all of a sudden, the camera angle switches to the other side of the line. Now it appears to the viewer that the team with the ball is moving from the right side of your screen to the left side. This is completely disorienting and your brain spends way too much time trying to figure out, losing track of the story.

This rule is used continuously to keep the viewer engaged with the action. A car that leaves a home and drives from the left side of your screen to the right means you are viewing the passenger side of the vehicle. In the U.S. anyway. When that shot line is maintained, your brain interprets that the car is moving further from it’s originating point. It’s consistent with your brain’s expectation that distance is being increased from the starting point. Now, imagine the car is suddenly moving from the right hand of your screen to the left and you are viewing the driver’s side of the car.

What are you thinking? You are now believing that the direction of travel has changed and your brain switches to tell you the driver forgot something and is returning to the originating point. If that’s not the case, and you aren’t trying to communicate this in the scene, then you can imagine the confusion that it introduces. Suddenly, what was making perfect sense before is now completely unintelligible.

There are reasons why directors violate this rule at times: they use it to introduce drama or to purposely disorient the viewer. Imagine a scene of panic where someone is lost in a forest. Violating this rule would increase the drama and tension as well as helping the viewer to connect with the disorientation of the actor or actress.

It gets more interesting as you have multiple action lines within scenes. Each one establishes a new 180-degree rule that informs how the video cameras will be placed. These action lines shift continuously in scenes with movement and engagement. The establishing shot is constantly considered for each new engagement.

Best of all, when you want to intentionally shift to the other side of the action line, you can do it by shooting from the side of the action line the camera is already established on and roll film while you circle around the actors/actresses to the other side of the action line. The director can establish new camera angles without losing the viewer!

Action Lines So what does any of this have to do with leadership? Well, you, my friend, determine the action line. You must intentionally establish the execution of each shot, each interaction, planning how it is going to progress…in advance. When you become good at this, you can make it look natural and even unplanned. But that’s your secret: you plan very, very well.

Power Of Consistency If you missed Episode 052: Why Consistency Is King, do yourself a favor and go listen to it – your team will thank you for it! There aren’t many leadership traits more valuable than consistency. You plan, practice, review, adjust and do it again. Over and over. So when it comes time to execute, no one is unsure about their position or where they are going. No one is disoriented because you were unpredictable and lost them. By maintaining a level of predictable consistency, you will not lose your team once the action starts.

There are some brilliant sports analogies that demonstrate this principle. Wayne Gretzky’s father, Walter, famously said that “you skate to where the puck is going, not where it has been.” The principle of knowing where you and your team are heading is a distinct and powerful competitive advantage.

This is similar to the way a quarterback in football takes the snap, drops three steps and throws the ball before the receiver has finished executing his route. When the receiver turns at the precise, and repeatedly practiced, point on the field, the ball is arriving as soon as his eyes are turned back towards the quarterback. That’s the level of execution you are striving for as a leader. You know your team, you know their talents and abilities, you position them to shine by getting them the ball at the precise moment that enables maximum benefit. It’s art and it’s beautiful and you are crazy if you don’t think this takes a lifetime of practice.

The Right Way To Change Direction I want to end with this: when you change direction, you must take your team with you by walking them through the change. No reckless or careless movements allowed. By bringing them along, you increase the potential for buy-in and full engagement. Ask questions, give them a chance to voice their concerns, ask them to help you make the necessary changes. This is a much better method than altering course without warning.

So there you have it. I love the concept of the 180 Degree Leader. It’s not just doing the opposite of what comes naturally or avoiding lazy leadership. It’s leading in a way that doesn’t disorient or confuse your team because you established the shot, you thought about the action line, you acted in a way that built confidence because you are consistent and if course correction is required, you communicate.

Thanks for Listening! I want to hear from you! Reach out and:

Leave a note in the comment section below.
Email a question to mark@markslemons.com.
Share this show on Twitter, Facebook, or LinkedIn.

Subscribe to the show using your favorite platform: iTunes | Stitcher | Android | RSS

Finally, I would appreciate your honest review on iTunes. Your ratings and reviews really help and I read each one.

Now, go lead like someone you would want to follow!

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The title for this episode is a bit provocative. However, the content is some of the most important content I have ever produced. And I feel like that’s saying something as there are almost two years of episodes that have released on the Leader to Leader podcast. I’m going to share with you 3 reasons […]

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This episode will touch a nerve. No one likes to be lied to and even more so when the stakes are high in a critical negotiation. Some are experts at telling lies. People like Frank Abagnale, who Steven Spielberg brought to life on the big screen box-office hit, Catch Me If You Can. Frank conned […]

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Are you looking to grab a massive advantage in your next negotiation? It may surprise you to learn how much advantage you gain as you prepare. Carrie Fisher, maybe you know her as Princess Leia, once said “Everything is negotiable. Whether or not the negotiation is easy is another thing.” EVERYTHING is negotiable? It sounds […]

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You might think from the title of today’s episode that I had a drowsy Uber driver. That couldn’t be further from the truth. I didn’t have to wake him up – his story is full of lessons for those of us asleep in our careers. This is a shout out to my new friend, Chris […]

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A recent email from the General Manager at the operation where I worked reminded me of a key leadership challenge. When times are good, everyone is getting along, production is flowing, customer retention is strong, revenues are up and costs are down, and the team is all aligned and pulling in the same direction, you […]

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In this episode, I want to birth a new desire, a new curiosity, as we discuss some great questions that you should be asking. I’ll share some insights about how these questions open you up to possibility of revolutionary change and could quite literally alter your destiny. It’s a big promise, and I can deliver […]

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Have you ever stopped and wondered “How many questions does a child ask in one day?” Well, as I was considering this episode, I felt like it was pretty ironic that we spend so much of the early years of our lives asking great questions (they were foundational to our development and a key to […]

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This is part two of my interview with Brandon Bruce. Here’s the link so you can go listen to Part One if you missed it: LTL 078: Endurance, Entrepreneurship, And Patience: An Interview With Brandon Bruce Part One. Brandon grew up in a small California town of 800 people and had only one classmate in grade […]

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This is part one of my interview with Brandon Bruce. Brandon grew up in a small California town of 800 people and had only one classmate in grade school. Seven years ago, he co-founded Cirrus Insight and has helped grow the company to $12m in annual revenue, 58 employees, and #41 on the Inc. 500 […]

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The last two episodes have been on the topic of powering through discomfort to make authentic connections as the basis for EPIC conversations. If you missed those episodes, you can click the links in the show notes below. Hopefully, after listening in, you are convinced of your need to expand your connections, but not connection […]

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If you missed the last episode of the Leader to Leader podcast, stop right now and go listen to episode 75. I don’t do a lot of episodes that require you to listen to one before the other. In this instance, I believe there is value in listing to Powering Through Discomfort To Authentic Connection […]

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If you are like a majority of people, you probably feel a little apprehensive when you think about being in a room full of people you don’t know. What will you talk about? You might have spent lots of time debating whether you even want to go. The excuses pile up and there is something […]

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As many of you know, life has been anything but normal or predictable for me and my wife, Ginger, over the last several months. At the end of 2017, I knew that massive changes were going to impact my department at work. I would have to face an important career decision: I had to choose […]

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Have you ever tried to do important work while you were in a bad mood? Have you ever tried to have a crucial conversation when you are feeling depressed or hopeless? Man, that’s a real struggle, isn’t it?! So much of life depends on us bringing our best – being positioned to rise above the […]

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How well are you tracking in your leadership journey? Ouch. That’s a tough question, isn’t it. Sometimes I just get slapped in the face as I contemplate my lack of progress in different areas. I have concluded that we have to assess and plan to avoid the pain of inaction. The Battle For Positivity It […]

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There is a lot of pressure on a new manager to perform. Although it’s a different kind of pressure, an equal amount is applied to an old manager in a new position. It can feel like all eyes are on you – watching, critiquing, judging, and evaluating every single thing you do. It’s not all […]

The post LTL 071: Stop Acting Like The Smartest Person In The Room appeared first on Mark Slemons.

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It’s summer here in the northern hemisphere and I wanted to share some interesting facts about dehydration. And for all my friends down under in the land of Oz, you can still dehydrate even in the winter! If you are not drinking enough water, you might be wilting from the inside out. Drinking enough of […]

The post LTL 070: Wilting From The Inside Out: Get More Of This Critical Element! appeared first on Mark Slemons.

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There is one capability that you must develop as a leader. This ability, more than any other, will determine your success as a leader. The best news: this trait can be developed by the most experienced or the newest leader. No matter how well you have demonstrated this ability in the past, you can improve […]

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This is Part Two of Reflect and Respond: Don’t React. If you missed Part One, you can listen to it here: LTL 067: Reflect and Respond: Don’t React Part One. Respond Or React Leaders don’t just lead at the office. They lead well in all areas of life. In my opinion, the reason why many […]

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Reflection isn’t typically a part of our day; however, a moment to reflect might mean you are able to thoughtfully respond and don’t react to your circumstances. It doesn’t happen accidentally or by coincidence and requires intention. You aren’t going to magically identify an unused 30, 15, or even five minutes of time in a […]

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Have you stopped to think about why emotional intelligence is important to you as a leader? What is it about emotional intelligence that brings any benefit to your team or your workplace? I’m going to share with you my answers to that question today. You may have heard of Marcel Schwantes. He’s the principal and […]

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Today’s episode offers some practical tips you can implement today on how to improve your emotional intelligence. Even if you think you have it under control, I recommend that you visit these tips and choose one to practice this week. In last week’s episode of the Leader to Leader podcast, I talked about rating your […]

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As a leader, you know the importance of being able to demonstrate emotional intelligence. But answer this question honestly: when was the last time you stopped and evaluated your emotional quotient? On A Scale Of zombie To Oprah Where Do You Rate Your Emotional Intelligence? It’s a funny question when you think of how much […]

The post LTL 064: On A Scale Of Zombie To Oprah Rate Your Emotional Intelligence appeared first on Mark Slemons.

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I know – when you see the title, you’re like oh man, another podcast on sleep?! And besides, if you are like me, you have heard some great tips on managing your sleep already…but I’m always surprised at how many people need a reminder or don’t know some of the fundamentals about sleep. There are […]

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I came across this article in Fortune magazine by Fran Hauser, who’s the author of The Myth of the Nice Girl. The article title was actually what caught my attention. The article title was How to Address Inappropriate Behavior Without Making Enemies at the Office. That article connected nicely to conversations I had with people […]

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I’ve had several conversations recently regarding the disappointment and pain that comes with lots of effort and little gain. I’m not a doctor, psychologist, or mental health professional and I don’t play one on TV or the internet; however, I do think there are some things you can do to reverse the tide when you […]

The post LTL 061: Recommit To The Battle Against Discouragement appeared first on Mark Slemons.

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I like to think that I try to avoid wasting time and admittedly, there are instances when my self-control is lacking. Sometimes I can redeem these moments by being intentional, even in my “down” time, to fuel some creativity or insight. I’ll give you an example. I watched a very tense Game Six between the […]

The post LTL 060: Do You Have Control Of Yourself appeared first on Mark Slemons.

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Doesn’t today’s episode title sound like a meme? Community service: it’s not just for hardened criminal on parole anymore. I love it and it makes me laugh every time I read it! Now, I can’t take credit for the title. That honor actually goes to a gentleman named Jeremy C. Holm. If that name sounds […]

The post LTL 059: Community Service: It’s Not Just For Hardened Criminals On Parole Anymore appeared first on Mark Slemons.

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So you know you have some problems with your thought life. You can’t seem to shake those nagging sensations that you aren’t enough. Like somehow you don’t measure up physically, mentally, emotionally, spiritually, financially, intellectually, relationally – you name it, you have a deficit. Well, the battle against self-limiting beliefs is not for the faint […]

The post LTL 058: The Battle Against Self-Limiting Beliefs: An Interview With Val Brown Part Two appeared first on Mark Slemons.

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Have you ever found yourself thinking something about yourself that just isn’t true? Or have you caught yourself believing something someone else said, or told you, about yourself that was an absolute lie? If so, you aren’t alone. You won’t be the victor in the battle against self-limiting beliefs without some serious effort. In Part […]

The post LTL 057: The Battle Against Self-Limiting Beliefs: An Interview With Val Brown Part One appeared first on Mark Slemons.

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It seems like the world has come to an end. Everything you worked for has been flushed down the proverbial toilet. 13 years of your life have just vanished before your very eyes. You thought you were building sweat equity but now you are on your own and it doesn’t feel like you have anything […]

The post LTL 056: Four Steps To Restore Calm After Losing Your Job appeared first on Mark Slemons.

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You’ve been hearing the rumors for weeks. Another round of cuts is coming. Unfortunately, they weren’t just rumors – its bad news and you’re on the receiving end. When your boss started the meeting with “I have some bad news…” you thought you were going to faint. Your head is spinning and your heart is […]

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This is Part Two of my interview with Marty Liccardo. Part One can be found here. He’s here today to help us understand what a leader’s response to abuse should be and how to deal with a serious, complicated, and critically important topic. While it might make you uncomfortable, please press past this and learn how […]

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Today’s topic might seem unusual to you. Because it is unusual, I hope it makes you think seriously about something we don’t often talk about. It is likely that you will find yourself uncomfortably close to a situation you never imagined whether in your organization, your community, or your home. What should be a leader’s […]

The post LTL 053: A Leader’s Response To Abuse: An Interview With Marty Liccardo Part One appeared first on Mark Slemons.

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Have you ever found yourself saying “Wow, he/she is so lucky.” Most of the time, luck had little to do with it. Think of a personal goal that you have. I’m not going anywhere – I’ll wait. Maybe you want to lose ten pounds, start a business, get a degree, buy a home, get a […]

The post LTL 052: Why Consistency Is King appeared first on Mark Slemons.

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Are you really making progress, moving forward, if you aren’t failing? What if failure is a necessity? I know this is going to sound strange, maybe even illogical, but failing and surviving will actually prepare you to take bigger risks and fail less often. If you are caught in a trap of continually seeking security, […]

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This is Part Two of my interview with Tom Jackson. Part One can be found here. Tom is the President of Steel Encounters, Inc (SEI). SEI is a specialty contractor and structural steel supplier headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah, with annual revenues exceeding $100 million. Tom has 35 years of construction industry experience. He […]

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Tom Jackson is the President of Steel Encounters, Inc (SEI). SEI is a specialty contractor and structural steel supplier headquartered in Salt Lake City, Utah, with annual revenues exceeding $100 million. Tom has 35 years of construction industry experience. He has filled many roles from job site worker, up the ranks through the field and […]

The post LTL 049: Journey From Work Site To Corner Office: An Interview With Tom Jackson Part One appeared first on Mark Slemons.

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Influence anyone in seven minutes or less. Now that’s a provocative sounding title, isn’t it! C’mon man, really? Seven minutes? Seven minutes and I can get them to do anything I want? Uh…NO, that’s not what I said. There is a line that we have to draw between influence and manipulation. We know that leadership […]

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You might be wondering why we should even discuss maintaining momentum when harassed by hardship. After all, it sounds…you know, hard! Can’t we talk about something lighter? Something fun? The simple fact is that all of us are going to experience challenging times during various stages of our career. You know the likelihood for dramatic […]

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What is the number one priority for every leader? How do you create an environment that facilitates maximum productivity? A place where people give maximum effort, feel outstanding levels of job satisfaction, where deep currents of trust and cooperation flow strongly every single day. It sounds like a workplace utopia and it’s closer than you […]

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Well, it’s that time of year. Another podcast rehashing the same stuff that comes up every January. What are you going to do differently in 2018? What’s your one word, your three words, your paragraph? This is the year you will write your book, right? The year you are going to get 1,000 clients, 10,000 […]

The post LTL 045: How To Get The Feedback You Need appeared first on Mark Slemons.

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The topic of initiative and service has come up frequently for me recently and I thought it would be appropriate to share some insights with you that I have gained over the last couple months. It seems rare to see folks take initiative. Maybe even extremely rare. About ten years ago, I was given a […]

The post LTL 044: Four Perspectives On Service appeared first on Mark Slemons.

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Are you able to be content in your current circumstance? Can you learn to be content in your current context? It’s tough for driven leaders to experience a deep sense of satisfaction. “How can I do this better?” or “How can I improve this?” are all too familiar questions. While there’s nothing wrong with wanting […]

The post LTL 043: Why Looking Forward Can Be As Distracting As Looking Back appeared first on Mark Slemons.

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I know. Seriously, did you really need to do a podcast on listening? Recent experiences indicate that some of the people I interact with (including myself!) could use a refresher. A senior leader in our organization recently reminded me of how critical it is to really stop and listen to what someone is telling you. […]

The post LTL 042: Leaders Listen appeared first on Mark Slemons.

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When it comes to establishing your credibility, you have to talk about yourself. This is difficult, especially for those who subscribe to the theory that you let your work speak for itself. In an ideal world, everyone would automatically be able to figure out how great you are because your work speaks volumes while you […]

The post LTL 041: Brag, Swag, or Sway: Why You Must Talk About Yourself – Part Two appeared first on Mark Slemons.

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When was the last time you took credit for a job well done? You know, you gave a little toot to your own horn? For many, this is a decidedly challenging step to take. We don’t want to brag. No one wants all swag with no substance. But I’m talking about the kind of credit […]

The post LTL 040: Brag, Swag or Sway: Why You Must Talk About Yourself – Part One appeared first on Mark Slemons.

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Who’s the most difficult person you ever had to lead? Maybe you immediately think about someone at work or a difficult customer. But you know that leadership isn’t about position or title, it’s about influence and you are doing that every day with a myriad of people. If you think about it that way, maybe […]

The post LTL 039: The Most Difficult Person To Lead appeared first on Mark Slemons.

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Respect is a funny thing. Sometimes it’s hard to know if you have earned it, but it’s pretty obvious when you don’t have it. Merriam Webster defines respect as high or special regard, the quality or state of being esteemed. How is it that a person who is disrespected, uneducated, has an upbringing that is […]

The post LTL 038: Respect: Stop Building Your Resume And Start Building A Legacy appeared first on Mark Slemons.

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We ended episode #36 on optimism with a key point: you must learn to work with, not against, those with whom you disagree. So doesn’t disagreement mean you aren’t unified? Unity is not a lack of disagreement – today, we look at how your team can achieve its maximum potential. Unity is a primary ingredient […]

The post LTL 037: Unity: Primary Ingredient For Producing Exceptional Results appeared first on Mark Slemons.

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What if I told you that you could boost productivity, increase potential for success, build endurance, improve morale (yours and others), reduce or prevent conflict, and boost value (yours and your company’s) by focusing on a single character trait? Would you want to know what it is? I would. It’s optimism – the mighty miracle […]

The post LTL 036: Optimism: Greatness Awaits You appeared first on Mark Slemons.

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Suffering is a part of life and life presents us with agonizing events – things we would never have intentionally chosen. Sometimes it’s the result of bad choices that had consequences, but often, it’s simply because the world isn’t perfect. Things are broken. The law of entropy says that things tend toward disorder. It’s never […]

The post LTL 035: Fortitude: Six Steps To Increase Your Ability To Endure appeared first on Mark Slemons.

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I guarantee that today’s episode will inspire you. If it doesn’t, you can have your money back! We all aspire to be great leaders. So, if there was one thing that we could work on to grow our influence, what would you choose? I’ll bet you think of your speaking skills or networking. Maybe you […]

The post LTL 034: A Consistent Trait Found In Great Leaders appeared first on Mark Slemons.

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If you’ve ever wondered why you are here, or where you are headed in life, then you understand why purpose is so important. Today, I am joined by Kevin Monroe. Kevin is a leadership consultant and executive coach. His mission? To help high achievers connect with their higher purpose. He also hosts the Higher Purpose […]

The post LTL 033: Your Higher Purpose: An Interview With Kevin Monroe appeared first on Mark Slemons.

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CEO, Jean-Sébastien Dominique Francois Jacques, has a saying: “The markets won’t save you. Commodity prices won’t save you.” His point is that high prices and great markets have the potential to hide a multitude of evils. Your customers won’t save you either. So think about this for a moment: your customers default to price when […]

The post LTL 032: No Excuses: Never Count A Great Leader Out appeared first on Mark Slemons.

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I know you’ve heard it and you may even have said it yourself: it’s lonely at the top. Well today, we are tearing down this popular leadership myth. On the surface, it doesn’t seem so damaging, right? In fact, it’s understandable. The most common use of the phrase is when we are empathizing with the […]

The post LTL 031: Lonely At The Top: Tearing Down A Popular Leadership Myth appeared first on Mark Slemons.

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There are no shortcuts through life’s grinding moments. I know you have experienced many. Maybe you have had, or are currently having, a tough time with a relationship – a spouse, child or parent can weigh heavily on you. They are often the most important thing to us and when things are going south, it’s […]

The post LTL 030: Leading Through The Pain appeared first on Mark Slemons.

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As a leader, one of your roles is drawing the absolute best out of the people on your team. There’s nothing specific to a particular industry or business that makes this easier or more difficult. Humans are amazingly complex and beautifully individualistic which means when you are addressing challenges, one size does not fit all! […]

The post LTL 029: How To Cope With Difficult People appeared first on Mark Slemons.

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Episode 27 was fun. I really enjoyed the learnings from looking at Saroo Brierley, Ray Kroc and the McDonald brothers. In this episode, I address concerns I have about distinct character flaws I noticed in the last one. After much contemplation, I landed on several key questions and comments. What does success look like to […]

The post LTL 028: The Floundering Founder: Character Matters For Great Leaders appeared first on Mark Slemons.

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Life is stranger than fiction. You hear it a lot and then you experience it or witness it and you can hardly believe it. This episode is kind of like that. You might recognize that the title, Your Leadership Ability Determines Your Effectiveness, is John Maxwell’s first irrefutable law of leadership: the Law of the […]

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Have you ever wondered what separates success from failure? There are lots of components and intricate moving parts. I’d argue that one of the most important is the power of purposeful connection. If you listened to last week’s episode, you will know that I shared a story about my grandparents, June and Lola Slemons, and […]

The post LTL 026: The Power Of Purposeful Connection appeared first on Mark Slemons.

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Have you ever noticed how tempting it can be to talk yourself out of pursuing your passion? There are many reasons why you must resist the urge to settle. Listen close. Scoot your chair up, this is really important. Now lean in and get this critical point: I settle and accept significantly less than I […]

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Think about training for a moment. It sounds so parochial. But it’s critical to expanding our skill set. Are you willing to invest in your own education? If your employer stopped paying for your training, would you be willing to invest in yourself? Today, I’m going to talk about five things I learned at Influence […]

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Can you recall someone sharing a hateful or hurtful opinion about your dream? Maybe it’s an aspiration from childhood or something that came to you at work one day. When you step out and dare to share it, it’s almost like you wince with just one eye open! Opinions are shared frequently, especially online, and […]

The post LTL 023: Dream Stealers: Handling Encounters With Those Who Do Not Get You appeared first on Mark Slemons.

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This is the last in a series of episodes dedicated to building trust in your team. Last week in Episode 21, we looked into building team trust by being vulnerable. Today, we answer the question “Are you my type?” and give you more tools for building team trust. Three tools you can start using today […]

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Last week in Episode 20, we looked at the four dimension of interpersonal trust and talked about the biological differences between female and male leaders. It’s one thing to understand the barriers to trust, but have you considered building team trust with vulnerability? It’s hard to build trust! You might think that it takes a […]

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Last week in Episode 19, we discovered that more than anything, your team wants to trust in leadership. I mentioned that according to a survey run by ToleroSolutions, Scott Span found that 45% of respondents believed that a lack of trust in leadership was impacting their work performance. Have you taken a look at the […]

The post LTL 020: The Science Of Trust: Characteristics Of Male And Female Leaders appeared first on Mark Slemons.

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Can you guess what your team wants more than anything? The answer may surprise you. You wouldn’t be wrong for guessing recognition, empowerment, more pay, the opportunity for advancement, better benefits, etc… The list is endless, but none of those things are most important. So what is this mysterious desire of the masses? Trust. More […]

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The inspiration for today’s episode was a little odd. A friend watched a mockumentary about multi-level marketing (MLM). They thought it was humorous, so I checked it out. Wow – it actually was pretty full of important lessons, not the least of which is today’s topic of leading without manipulating. You’ve heard it said that […]

The post LTL 018: Leading Without Manipulating appeared first on Mark Slemons.

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Leaders face many challenges. Of all the challenges they face, one frustrates me more than others. That challenge is leading when no one else is. I don’t mean things aren’t as good as they should be. I mean there are no examples of good leadership around me. Immediately, you should be questioning my last statement: […]

The post LTL 017: Leading When No One Else Is appeared first on Mark Slemons.

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Few things are more important, or more difficult, for leaders than communicating clearly. With so much riding on being able to get your message across, it’s a common struggle for your message to be misunderstood, or missed entirely. Believe it or not, improvement is possible. In this episode, we are going to discuss five familiar […]

The post LTL 016: Five Familiar Communication Challenges: Which One Will You Commit To Avoid? appeared first on Mark Slemons.

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Since the purpose of this podcast is to share information about leadership, it’s fun to look at the leadership journey of executives as they reflect on their careers. Sometimes, they are obnoxious, arrogant, and full of themselves. Other times, they are humble, contrite, and wish they could do some things differently. Jacques Nasser is a […]

The post LTL 015: Leadership Advice From 30 Years In The Corner Office appeared first on Mark Slemons.

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The results were not as expected. The disaster has hit close to home or within it. Real events present real choices about how we are going to respond. But the key word is “choice” and you have one. So, what do you do when your attitude is causing you to implode? When your response could […]

The post LTL 014: What To Do When Your Attitude Is Causing Your Implosion appeared first on Mark Slemons.

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It’s so easy to allow our focus to be consumed by tasks. Whether it’s making sales calls, updating a budget, filing reports or just doing our best to lead well, it’s easy for our attention to slip to tasks. Isn’t there more than preparing the next speaking topic, the next podcast, the next sales seminar […]

The post LTL 013: At The Roots: Leadership Lessons From A Charter High School appeared first on Mark Slemons.

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Is good good enough? Do you yearn for something better? Have you thought that you needed to come up with something new to get noticed? Sometimes new isn’t improved. Imagine climbing Mt. Everest and telling a sherpa “I do not need you.” Imagine thinking “If I take their advice, then somehow, this won’t be my […]

The post LTL 012: I Do Not Need You appeared first on Mark Slemons.

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How many of us have ever thought “there’s nothing very exciting about me?” Like someone is standing beside you directing traffic around you saying, “Nothing to see here, move along please…” Do you imagine that you have little to contribute? Is there a voice in the back of your head that’s always reminding you of […]

The post LTL 011: Nothing To See Here…Move Along Please appeared first on Mark Slemons.

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Are you overwhelmed by fear? Does the economy, disruption in your industry or aggressive competition leave you with a knot in your stomach? Do you feel isolated and vulnerable? As a result, these feelings disorient and cause panicked or irrational decision making. Surprisingly, there are many similarities between operating a business and the devastating, often […]

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This episode is all about the challenge of getting started. Have you ever heard this question: you want to do what? Are you crazy? Some of you might have been asked this by a stranger, friend, coworker, spouse, or a child…and honestly, as parents, who hasn’t asked their child that question?! There are moments when […]

The post LTL 009: You Want To Do What? appeared first on Mark Slemons.

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If I told you that you could have a rich life, one that you loved without sacrificing your own happiness, would you believe me? You might of if I told you before you got your job, got married, or had children. Maybe that seems a bit impossible now. But today’s guest believes that it’s not […]

The post LTL 008: Helping Women Live A Rich Life appeared first on Mark Slemons.

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When was the last time you were tempted to compromise your integrity? If you are human, it had to be recent because we are all subjected daily to alter who we are in response to the pressure to “get ahead.” It’s hard enough dealing with the personal temptations to compromise, but what do you do […]

The post LTL 007: What To Do When You Are Asked To Compromise Your Integrity appeared first on Mark Slemons.

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Have you looked at your life recently and said something like “uhh, this does not look like I thought it would!” Welcome to the club! Life often has a way of turning out differently than we expected. Sometimes better, sometimes worse. Too often, we get wrapped up in what we can’t change: the past. We […]

The post LTL 006: Uh This Does Not Look Like I Thought It Would appeared first on Mark Slemons.

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Have you ever felt like you couldn’t give another ounce of effort even if your life depended on it? Does it seem like the demands in your current job are so overwhelming that you are on the verge of a crackup? Do the words overworked and underappreciated describe exactly how you are feeling? Maybe you […]

The post LTL 005: What To Do When You Are Overworked And Underappreciated appeared first on Mark Slemons.

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Many of us don’t work in the same office as our manager or leader. Maybe you work from home, work in a satellite office or possibly on a different floor than where your boss / manager / leader sits. It’s true, there are not very many good substitutes for spending time face-to-face with your leader […]

The post LTL 004: How To Get A Promotion When Your Boss Doesn’t Even Know Your Name appeared first on Mark Slemons.

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There are so many causes for low morale. Some of them are outside of your control: layoffs, outsourcing, “rightsizing” – and it might not even be within your team – it could be your co-workers in finance or tax or IS&T, projects that get canceled or have funding stripped, the sale of a business (or […]

The post LTL 003: What To Do When Team Morale Is Lower Than Congress Approval Rating appeared first on Mark Slemons.

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Most of us, at some point in our career, will wind up reporting to someone who is younger than we are. Have you ever had a boss who is part of another generation? Six steps to take when reporting to a younger manager: #1 Stop trying to get him to see it your way #2 […]

The post LTL 002: What To Do When Your New Boss Is 20 Years Younger Than You appeared first on Mark Slemons.

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How many times have you blamed others or maybe your circumstances for failing to reach your potential? We’re all human and there is no question that our context has impacted us; however, in order to move forward from here, we have to acknowledge and own our contribution to our current condition. We have a choice […]

The post LTL 001: Five Signs You Are Self-Sabotaging Your Success appeared first on Mark Slemons.

The Leader To Leader Podcast: Recent Episodes

Mark Slemons