12

KEEP THE DOOR MOVING

“The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.”

—CHINESE PROVERB

Imagine you’re an architect of a new commercial building. It is in a busy, up-and-coming part of town, and there are only two rules for the project: the entrance has to be able to keep horses out, and no one who enters or exits will have to open the door for someone else. What kind of entryway would you design?

Normal hinge doors will not work. Neither will a sliding one. Your only real option is a revolving door. As legend has it, the revolving door was created by Theophilus Van Kannel in 1888 in response to these exact specifications. While there are other great benefits to revolving doors, such as keeping out noises and controlling airflow, what is wonderful about this invention is that the revolving door does not care who pushes it. It does not automatically refuse to move because of someone’s gender, race, or age. It does not have an expiration date, but rather keeps turning, day in and day out, when people go through it. The revolving door has two openings; one where you enter, and one where you exit.

Leadership is similar. You’ll achieve nothing unless you take the initiative and responsibility. If your actions can inspire, empower, and serve in order to elevate others over an extended period of time, then you can lead wherever you are. You can lead at work, in your family, or in the community. It is my hope that the stories, ideas, strategies, and tools in this book will help you to keep your revolving door moving. Aspire to let people in, then come out on the other side better than they were before.

The PTS Method: “Prepare to Serve”

There is a simple yet highly effective method to help remind you to lead this way. It’s what I call the PTS Method and is something I have put into practice in my own life, both at work and at home. It’s really a way to flip your mindset away from “you” to elevating others. Here is how it works.

When you change environments, you say to yourself, “Prepare to serve,” and then you put it into action. An example of changing environments would be when you get out of your car or off the train from your commute to work. Prior to walking into the office, you would simply say to yourself, “Prepare to serve.” Without thinking much after that or trying to do anything drastically different, you will have your people’s interest top of mind.

Try it when you walk into your house at night. Before walking through the door, say to yourself, “Prepare to serve.” You will be amazed at how willing you are to help out your spouse or your kids simply because you have changed your thinking. When you put the PTS Method into practice every day, you’ll quickly find yourself becoming a leader that your people want to emulate and follow.

If you have difficulty remembering, set a notification on your calendar to remind yourself of the PTS Method. Or try hanging PTS signs on doors as a visual reminder. The important thing is to find something that works for you and reminds you to “prepare to serve” when you change your environment.

I would be lying to you if I told you I was always able to remember the PTS Method. Leading other people is hard, and I make mistakes every day. I disappoint my team and I think about myself too much at times. I fail to serve, empower, and inspire others, and you will, too. This journey will never be a perfect one. There is no ultimate destination, but rather a constant state of improvement to reach. In moments of difficulty, I want you to reference the following:

Nunc Coepi

I am a faith-based man. Because of this, I like to weave reading and growing in my faith into my daily habits. I once came across a video of NFL quarterback Philip Rivers. He was being interviewed about the Latin phrase Nunc coepi, which he wears on his hats and shirts during interviews. The phrase means, “Now I begin.”

I found myself watching this video over and over because of this phrase. It stuck with me profoundly and has since become a part of my being. Day after day, I think about applying this saying in my faith walk; in the kind of husband I want to be; in the kind of parent I want to be; and in the kind of leader I want to be at work. Nunc coepi has given me the freedom to lose any guilt about my prior mistakes, errors, or poor thinking. It has been a vehicle I’ve used to transport me on my leadership journey. It has allowed me to forgive more, write better, and be more intentional.

In many ways, I don’t care how you have been leading up to this point. I want you to remember Nunc coepi, “Now I begin,” each day. It will help you start the day fresh and lead better in the present moment.

E + R = O

As someone who did not take my education seriously until I was in my midtwenties, I have become an avid reader and listener in order to play catch-up. Many books and podcasts have had a major impact on me, but one idea in a multitude completely changed my perspective. It started when I read Viktor Frankl’s book Man’s Search for Meaning. Frankl was an Austrian neurologist, psychiatrist, and Holocaust survivor. While being tortured in the Auschwitz concentration camp and watching people die both mentally and physically, he found that he still had the power to choose how to react to his circumstances. This gave him the power to survive. He wrote, “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.”

While Frankl’s book and story made a profound impact on me, I found a formula that compounded his insights in Urban Meyer’s book Above the Line. It followed Meyer’s story of coaching the 2014 National Championship football team at Ohio State University. In the book, Meyer shared a formula he had learned from Tim Kight of Focus 3: E + R = O, which stands for Event + Response = Outcome. The formula contains the simple idea that there are many events that happen in our lives; it is how we respond to those events that ultimately determines the outcome.

The idea, while new to me at the time, has been around for centuries. Marcus Aurelius, the famous Roman emperor and Stoic philosopher, discovered a similar idea during his life, which ended in AD 180. He wrote in one of his letters, “Our actions may be impeded . . . but there can be no impeding our intentions or dispositions because we can change and adapt. The mind adapts to its own purposes the obstacle to our acting. The obstacle to action advances the action. What stands in the way will become the way.”

What Aurelius meant, much like Frankl and Meyer, is that we control very little of what happens to us in our lives, but we do control how we respond to those events. It’s a simple idea that can take a lifetime to master. Whether this is the first time you have learned of E + R = O or it’s a reminder, the better you get at controlling your response the better your outcomes will be.

This idea provided such clarity for me in life. It has helped me have much better outcomes to the hundreds of events that happen in my life on a daily basis because I now understand I only control my response, not the events. Starting at the ripe age of three, I teach the concept to my kids to help them process, deal with, and produce better outcomes when outside events happen them. While it certainly is more difficult for a child to process and handle, it is never too early for someone to start taking control of how they respond to events. It’s my hope you will pass this along to your team, kids, or spouse because life isn’t fair. If there is one thing I know for sure, you and everyone in your life will have many events happen to you in your life that you have no control over. What you can control is how you respond.

Attitude and Effort

“There are two things you can control every day: your attitude and effort.” When Jay Wright, head coach of the men’s basketball team at Villanova, said this to me during an interview, it became like concrete in my mind. Be it because of the perceived credibility of his words to me or the fact that I had looked up to him for so long, they took hold. It immediately became evident to me that most of us do not take advantage of this fact that we can, in a world that is so often out of our hands, control these two things.

The word attitude simply means a settled way of thinking or feeling about something or someone, typically one that is reflected in a person’s behavior. While this is important for anyone to know, it is especially important for you. As someone who leads other people, if you grasp and take control of your thoughts and actions about events that happen or your feelings about someone else you will have a major advantage. While this sounds easy in practice, it’s extremely difficult to live out every day.

When there is a member of the team they just don’t see eye to eye with, most managers will allow their attitude to turn negative about that person and either hold a grudge against the person or put the person on the bottom of their team totem pole. While conventional thinking would confirm this is okay, it’s the opposite of what the best leaders do. They don’t allow those initial feelings or judgments about a team member to become an ingrained way of thinking. Instead, they reject them and allow themselves to lean into that person.

Effort, on the other hand, is simply a vigorous or determined attempt. Effort is about being relentless in everything you to do. Too many leaders give up too early because the job is hard and refuse to put their maximum effort in every day. The reason this lesson has taken such a hold on me is because it’s an excellent lesson to teach anyone in life. Every person on my own team controls their attitude and effort every day. It’s not something I can do for them, instead, I can make sure I control my own in a positive way, teach them the principle, and then just repeat it often. To give you an idea of how much I repeat it, every day when I drop my six-year-old off at school, the last thing I ask him is, “What are the two things you get to control today?”

• • •

Leadership is hard. So hard, most people avoid it, and those who embrace it often fail. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t pursue it or should give up, because failure is not final. Failure is a part of leadership, which means failure must become feedback, When you make mistakes, don’t beat yourself up, learn from it. If leadership were easy, everyone would be doing it. I am encouraged that you have embraced the responsibility of leadership and have rejected passivity. This world needs you to lead in a way that elevates others. The fact that you got to this point in this book shows me you are serious about becoming a better version of yourself, and that’s the hard part of the battle. But it is not the whole battle. Occasionally thinking about the principles in this book is where most people will stop, but not you. You are going to be different; you are going to turn knowledge into wisdom and make a positive impact in the lives of many people. When you do, I can’t promise immediate results or instant positive reactions from your team, but I can promise you are doing the right thing. The impact you make on others will go beyond your wildest imagination. It will be a force on this earth well after you are no longer here because the people you lead will remember and eventually elevate those they lead.

Anytime you see revolving doors, I want you to ask yourself a simple question: “Am I leading correctly?” Remember, leadership is about serving, empowering, and inspiring in order to elevate others over an extended period of time. You are a perfect person to live this out every day.