Facing the Mirror

My senior year of high school was a whirlwind. While I did the bare minimums to skate through my required classes, I was working as hard as I knew how in what turned into a full time job before I even graduated and dove in head first to every other kind of shenanigan I could find as soon as I clocked out. The seeds from even the most insignificant adversities were there, I just wasn’t bothered about finding them!

During the winter of that final year in high school, I carried a heavy workload from Sunday morning through Thursday night. I was off nearly every Friday and Saturday, not because the grocery store manager was that compassionate, but because I ran out of hours. (Hourly employees being paid overtime in the grocery business back then was  cardinal sin…) Here’s where I’ll insert one more reminder that idle time is indeed the devil’s playground; that’s exactly what started each Friday as I drove out of the school parking lot and went on until I finally grabbed a few hours of sleep before reporting back to work at 5am on Sunday.

I had become friends with two of my older coworkers since transferring stores. Both were ten to fifteen years older than me, and both had made decisions that resulted in them not having a driver’s license. They lived nearby and often worked the closing shift with me so I frequently gave them rides home. I soon built up the courage to ask whichever I was driving home on a Thursday night to buy me beer so I could get an immediate start as I left school on Friday. What could possibly go wrong?

As if keeping the six pack of Ice House long-necks on the floorboard of my vehicle parked on school property wasn’t pushing the envelope enough, having either of those guys buy beer and carry it to my vehicle before the store closed bumped against any possible boundary. After a few months of that, the grocery manager grew suspicious and questioned us. We didn’t get in any actual trouble, but it certainly scared me enough that I found a different process for securing my stash before my days off.

As much potential as that had for disaster, it still wasn’t enough for the moment of brutal self-honesty I really needed. I could list dozens of other close calls that should have served as the slap in the face necessary for me to begin facing the mirror. Since they were just close calls, and since I was far too hard headed for my own good, the seeds weren’t identified and they clearly weren’t going to grow on their own. Thankfully, those seeds weren’t completely wasted; I found them years later and have nurtured them ever since. We’ll circle back to that later on, though.

By the end of the summer after graduating high school, I was on track to start the management trainee program within the grocery store chain - I just wasn’t interested in it. I took a job back in construction early that fall, which meant I had evenings and weekends to go all-in on the nonsense I could only squeeze in on Fridays and Saturdays previously. After a year and a half of that, doing everything in my power to live out an AC/DC song in real time, I had a moment of brutal self-honesty where I realized I needed a change.

I’d love to tell you that this was where I got my shit together, gave up drinking and all the other dumb stuff, and pursued a college degree with vigor; it wasn’t. But scraping ice off the rafters to drive nails through several layers of roofing metal with a broken hand was enough to make me realize that I need to do something different. After blindly floating applications for a couple of months, I accepted an entry level position in a manufacturing facility. I thought that would be just what I needed to re-engage in school and conquer the world. What ended up being, at least at first, was a bigger paycheck to fund the same nonsense I had been doing on a budget. But even facing the mirror for just a minor change in direction forced me to take ownership of situations I wasn’t completely satisfied with, and that eventually led to a few small career wins. Before we dig into those in more detail, think about how self-honesty in adversity reveals seeds that blame obscures. That is truly the starting point for leadership self-control. Be sure to block some “mirror-time” of your own and honestly assess one ongoing bad situation. Be sure to write down at least one truthful insight it offers.