The grind of rebuilding required many things; I had to earn the respect of my coworkers while learning as much as I possibly could (as fast as I could) about the operations of that new company, and I needed to intentionally invest some of the off-time this role provided into my relationship with Cin...
October 6, 2014 was my first day in a role with a new company since I was 19 years old. When the nail I had been laying on became uncomfortable enough, I had no choice but to develop a definite plan for making a change. Even then, though, definiteness of decision was what turned that plan into actio...
I had been with the same organization since I was 19 years old and was at a spot where I earned four weeks paid time off each year when I received the demotion promotion in late July of 2014. And if I’d max out at five weeks in March 2016 when I hit the 20 year mark, the most a salaried employee was...
The “demotion promotion” stung for sure, but it wasn’t anywhere close to the challenges we dealt with over the four or five years leading up to that. We had nurtured the seeds from each and were on much more stable ground, financially and emotionally. Truth be told, fending off foreclosure, reeling ...
Regardless of the challenge or adversity, the one seed I’ve nurtured consistently since my early teens has been a strong work ethic. That, coupled with so many other leadership attributes I’ve slowly in the years since, helped me navigate the near-foreclosure experience, the crazy lowball offer that...
As I’ve wrapped up each step in this process of Making the Best of YOUR Bad Situations, I’ve closed with five questions geared at challenging you to mine your similar experiences for the seeds of equal or greater benefit - and I’m about to do that here as well. Before that, though, I’ll detail one o...
From late 2005 to late 2007, Cindy and I dedicated nearly every waking hour that we weren’t working in our day jobs and invested every spare dime we could scrape up into the MLM business that had provided us with a glimmer of hope that we could someday climb out the ridiculous scarcity we had been b...
As much as I wish I could say that I learned to display empathy and earned cooperation quickly, I can’t. The adversities Cindy and I were working through during Matt’s elementary school years proved to be some of the toughest I had experienced to that point. While I have since been able to find the ...
Leading up to this point, I’ve referenced how consistency in the things we can directly influence through our daily actions can build self-control, courage, and definiteness of decision. Even the minor adversities I was faced with through my late teens and early twenties served as a foundation for t...
During a recent conversation about an idea for a chapter in a book she’s working on, Cindy shared how she often hears folks confuse explanations with excuses. She detailed how someone she coached was hesitant to go into any specifics about a particular issue because they knew “leaders didn’t make ex...
As I think back on Matt’s first few years of elementary school, I can point to far more things I did wrong than I did right. In complete transparency, I continue to sift through those scenarios today for seeds that can help me continue building the empathy I just didn’t understand at the time. And w...
In Leading With A Clear Purpose, I shared about the only time in my professional career where I remember feeling completely exhausted. I was routinely working 50+ hours each week in what ended up being my last full time job and nearly as much in our new (at the time) business. I stressed that sharin...
