DAY 8/90: Habits and Experiences

10 July 2022

The Power of Full Engagement. Atomic Habits. The Power of Habit. The Happiness Advantage. They all talk about the importance of rituals, routines, habits, whatever you want to call them. They’re the things we do without thinking about them. It’s important to intentionally create habits that define who we want to become, and equally important to identify the habits we’ve developed that will interfere with our goals, our mission and how we define ourselves. After all, we define who we are by what we do consistently.

The War of Art. Do the Work. Turning Pro. All from Steven Pressfield. They each address what gets in the way of our ability to succeed. It’s The Resistance. On The Give Team we call it the Baby Voice. It’s that omnipresent persona always steering us toward the easy thing, or the thing that’ll give immediate gratification.

When I first read The Power of Full Engagement, it had a huge impact. At the time life was full of noise and not much order. Much of the technology that is everywhere today was just getting started. The barrier between work and home was broken with the advent of e-mail on laptop computers. Whatever barrier remaining was shattered with the advent of Blackberries and Palm Pilots evolving to iPhones and tablets. There was no natural escape. You’d get sucked into the new work, and there was no balance.

Jim Loehr and Tony Schwartz appealed to the athlete in me, since Loehr is a sports psychologist and spent his career helping athletes perform. They pointed out that as humans we’re not built to stay on at full throttle all day. Failing to pay attention to our fitness physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually results in poor health and poor relationships. Their premise is we need to approach life more like athletes. Athletes spend 80% of their time preparing and 20% performing, and in the business world those numbers are flipped. Life is not a marathon, but a series of sprints; periods of intense engagement followed by periods of intentional disengagement.

In 2012 I was fortunate enough to take the concepts in The Power of Full Engagement to the next level when I attended the Corporate Athlete Program at the Human Performance Institute here in Orlando. It draws people from all over the world, and over 3 days goes deep on how to bring your best energy to the moments you have on earth. It starts with a 360 degree assessment of where you are, where several people who knew me well filled out a survey about me. The program starts on understanding the truth of where I am, and reconciling that with where I want to be.

The key to ensuring success is establishing the right RITUALS aligned with the mission, and making sure there’s detail on WHAT will be done, HOW it’ll be done and most importantly WHEN it’ll be done. These should be prioritized and non-negotiable. Establishing the ritual ensures two things: (1) it’s far more likely to be done if it’s how you define yourself, and it’s something you do without thinking; and (2) when things go sideways in life (and they will), the rituals will remain because their what you do.

This past week has been a period of assessing goals, and making sure the rituals are aligned with what needs to be accomplished over the next 90 days. We’ll work together on this as a team.

The Give Team Program starts with a lofty promise. As coach, I can help team members get almost anything in the world they want. It takes four simple steps. But while those steps are simple, they’re not easy. If they were easy, we’d all be millionaires with six pack abs driving exotic sports cars. Those steps are:

Set a goal (it has to be the RIGHT goal, specific to you and who you want to become);
Make a plan (it has to be a realistic plan that you’ll be able to do);
Execute that plan (you have to do the actual work); and
Overcome challenges.

Understanding and mastering the four keys to energy - (1) Sleep; (2) Nutrition; (3) Movement; and (4) Breathing - will be key to establishing and maintaining momentum toward your goal and your mission.

Those habits are the bricks being stacked. They’re the actions taken daily, and if done with intent, precision and passion with your best energy, then the sky is the limit.

This week we’ll be setting those goals for the Q3 challenge while we also launch ROUND 2 of the STACKING BRICKS CHALLENGE. Each teammate will be setting a PHYSICAL GOAL and an INTELLECTUAL GOAL. The physical goal will be something measurable that aligns with our season goal of running the Spartan Beast in December. The intellectual goal can be something related to summer school or reading, or learning something of interest.

A key element to this program will be MAKING THE PLAN to include RITUALS, which will be promises made to everyone on the team. It’s not about just setting the goal. We all need to put in our work too.