Bryan David Falchuk's Blog: Do a Day Blog, page 3

Do You Live Life Like It’s a Job? Here’s How to Break Free

Many of us end up living our lives like we’re employees–and it does not have to be that way if you know how to change the game

Adulthood is full of lots of amazing things, including responsibility. But it is a double-edged sword that can lead you down a path of all the Have To’s like paying bills, cooking, cleaning, running errands and more. If you are not careful, pretty soon your life outside work becomes another job, full of tasks you have to complete.

What is the alternative? These things do need to be done, and if you do not do them, who will, right?

The alternative is living your life.

It sounds hokey and maybe a bit idealistic. But it is possible.

As an adult, I too have lots of responsibilities. A few years ago, my wife became chronically ill, so the responsibilities on me increased substantially, as did the cost of not handling those responsibilities. I very quickly got into a pattern of doing to the point that I was miserable to be around because every distraction from the list of things on my shoulders just felt like it would add to this mountain of growing responsibilities that was crushing me.

The way I describe it to people is that my wife and son were the family, and I was working there. That’s not on them at all. They did not do anything to make it this way. It was completely because of my perceptions and priorities.

And the biggest problem with the situation was that it was a vicious circle–the more I just did tasks, the more pressure I felt to do tasks because my role as the doer was getting more and more entrenched. I could not see how anyone else could do any of what I did, and I kept telling myself that over and over.

Until I had a wake-up moment. I realized while I was provided the things my family needed, I was also robbing them and myself in the enjoyment of those things. I decided to make a change.

Do I still have a lot of responsibility and things to do? Of course. But I also learned to step back at times, and that if some things wait, the world somehow will keep turning.

So how can you make this change to stop being an employee of your life and start participating in it? Here are three steps:

1. Find and Focus on Your True Motivation

I wrote about this in depth before, so I will give you the short-hand version of it here. Take some time to stop and ask yourself what you really care about. What matters to you above all else? Why are you doing all these things you keep doing?

And whatever answer you give yourself, ask why. For example, if you say, “If I do not do these things, then X will happen,” ask yourself why X happen matters to you. Get down to the deepest level of what you really care about.

And focus on that when the whirlwind of life seems to be asking too much of you (and only you).

2. Talk to Those You Are Doing For

One major mistake I was making is that I was not prioritizing my needs. I knew I was struggling, but if I stopped to take care of me, then everything else would fall apart.

What I failed to understand at the time is that if I did not stop to care for me, then I would fall apart. And if I fell apart, then other things (and people) would definitely suffer.

With a bit of fear in my voice, I decided to talk to my wife about needing to take some time to work on myself. I was afraid she would not see how we could make that work because of how much was going on and how limited our time already was. Shockingly to me, she was unbelievably supportive. She just looked at me in the eyes and said, “I am so glad you finally see how important this is. We will make it work because we have to.”

Everyone I coach has been through this dance where they think they cannot put time into their own needs only to find that their family has been trying to get them to do that for a while and totally supports it.

Working on you could mean talking to a therapist, meditating, working out, going on a short solo vacation, making time to read or anything else that gives you time for you. The only thing I would advise against is making it about finding the money to spoil yourself. Material rewards are great in the short term, but the emotional lift you get from them fades quickly, leaving you in the same spot as before (only now with more financial pressure from having spent on something you stopped valuing).

So sit down and have that conversation. You will be surprised.

3. Learn from Each Success

One of the best ways to grow is to learn from doing. As you make a bit of time for you, and see that everything did not come crashing down around you as a result, pause and take that in. The more you can do that, the easier it will be to stop yourself when you get in the Life Employee pattern and need to break free because you will know that it is possible.

This post is inspired by my best-selling book, “Do a Day: How to Live a Better Life Every Day” available in print, eBook and audio book formats . It originally appeared in my  Inc.com column on November 8th, 2017 .

Unable to Focus at Work? Try Starting a Side-Hustle

Rather than distracting you from it, having a side project that speaks to your interests and passions could help you be even better your day job.

Many of us love our jobs. Many more of us may not–or may not right now. We go into it with the right intentions, but as time passes, what was once exciting and new becomes repetitive and draining. As we get more experienced at a company, we get loaded on with more responsibility that might take away some of the freedom we once felt.

The result can be that we start to burn out (at least a bit), and may end up less productive, or feeling less productive.

This is a recipe for destruction–either we end up leaving the job, or we end up wishing we were leaving the job.

Who wants that?

The surprising answer to guarding against this is to take on another job. More accurately, pursue a side-hustle–a different job that speaks to your interests, passions and abilities, and ideally is different from your day job. That could mean you work on your art by night while you are a lawyer by day. Or, like me in my early career, I was a management consultant by day and did website development for small businesses in my free time.

Whatever it is, a side-hustle should allow you to engage in something you are really interested in personally. With that as the only guiding rule, here’s how it can help rekindle that spark in your professional life.

Having a Creative Escape

No matter how great or creative your day job is, often it ends up being repetitive and can be filled by more process tasks than you wish it had. That can lead you to yearn for a truly creative escape, or one that works a different part of your brain.

We all need to flex our thought muscles in different ways to stay mentally alert and engaged. Here’s where a side-hustle can help the most, and why it needs to be based on something you are passionate about to really benefit you all around. It can be your chance to work in an area you genuinely care about. Your day job may not afford you those chances to paint, work with the homeless, write poetry, take photographs or whatever else you find yourself most interested in personally.

That little bit of work that purely speaks to your interests can bring the spark back into your life that allows you to be more productive and creative in other aspects of your life.

In my current life,  I have a side-hustle, which is the side of me you are experiencing right now. By day, I’m an insurance executive. While I love my day job, getting to dig into leadership and motivation issues through my writing and coaching work has allowed me to engage in my day job with an energy and perspective I would not otherwise have. Rather than being a distraction, it has been additive to my primary work.

Learning Greater Responsibility

One thing many of us lack in our day jobs is responsibility. Most of us ultimately work for someone else, whether a boss, investors, shareholders, etc. If you freelance or just have a small business of your own, you get the chance to be your own boss and answer only to yourself (and your customers). That can be freeing and teach you a lot about responsibility in a way you would never get in your day job.

That can also translate directly to bettering your day job performance. You suddenly understand at a much deeper level the importance of having a quality work product, meeting deadlines, getting customers to pay on time, the cost of all the inputs into your work and more. It’s not like you were ignorant to these things before, but when you deal with them with your name attached to the repercussions, you understand how important they are more better. And that means you are likely to take them even more seriously in your day job, and the people you work for will appreciate that.

Creating Option Value in Your Career

While I have been saying side-hustles can help you be better at your day job, they can also help protect you from the instability that may exist in that day job. Sometimes, jobs do not work out–people get fired, laid off, etc. Having a side-hustle can help protect from that in a couple of crucial ways.

Firstly, it bolsters your resume to create options for what you do next. If you only have one career path in your resume, that can limit the roles you can apply for going forward. For example, if I wanted to do web development full-time, it would be much easier with my side business building websites than if I had just been doing management consulting.

Secondly, it creates some income protection. While a side-hustle may not pay what your main job does and likely does not come with benefits like health insurance or a 401k, it may bring a little extra income you can use to get you through a period between day jobs if things do go South. You may even find that you can make your side-hustle your main gig if you find yourself available full-time, and the investment you put into setting it up already allows you to make that shift seamlessly.

A Word of (Positive) Caution

One word of warning here–you may love your side-hustle so much that you leave your day job. And that’s ok.

Just be aware that you may be embarking on a new career rather than just having a creative outlet. Go consciously down whatever path you choose, and it will work out great.

This post is inspired by my best-selling book, “Do a Day: How to Live a Better Life Every Day” available in print, eBook and audio book formats . It originally appeared in my  Inc.com column on November 1st, 2017 .

Giving Tough Feedback Is Hard. Not Giving It Is Worse

No one likes giving tough feedback. Don’t let that be a reason not to give it, because it only gets tougher.

I have had a lot of success in my career. I wrote a book on how to be successful. Yet, shockingly (not really), even I have had  struggles and  failures along the way. That includes the crumbling of what I thought would be a career for the rest of my working days.

That job ending was not the actual problem–how it ended was.

A Lesson I Learned First Hand

To save you from all the ins and outs, basically a political shift started a path to there being no place for me anymore. It stinks, but it happens in business. The thing about the company is that they never really like having direct conversations with people about things like that or performance issues.

The reason? Those conversations are hard.

Instead, they just make the employee uncomfortable by changing their responsibilities, reporting lines (above or below them), or suddenly shift their performance ratings dramatically from top performers to serious issues with no warning. I saw it happen several times over, but always assumed there was more to the story than I could see, and there must not be anything unprofessional going on.

I had never even thought about how you can avoid severance by just making the person want to quit.

What a great financial strategy, right? Well, have you ever seen what it costs to get sued for wrongful termination? It is always more than severance.

I saw a few of these situations play out with more of a front-row seat, and realized there was a pattern.

And then it was my turn.

I raised that there was no real place for me after the political shift, but my boss assured me that was not the case and I was still needed. He painted a few possibilities like some acquisitions they were eyeing that would mean new opportunity to me. It sounded a bit hollow.

Then out of the blue, everything changed. They did a few very uncomfortable things with no real logic or clear explanation. I should have left then, but I was the only earner at home, and they kept saying they needed me despite all of that and just needed these other things to work out.

It finally got to be too much, and I just raised my hand and said we need to call it what it is and move on.

Business is business. Things change, and sometimes that means people are no longer needed. Or people struggle to perform as expectations or situations evolve. It’s unfortunate, but it’s reality.

Avoiding The Truth Costs The Employee

When you dance around the issues, and just try to get the person to quit by making things uncomfortable for them, you not only are taking away their job (which you’d be doing by being up front about it), but you are also adding in emotional distress that can have a lasting effect. People leave a job questioning themselves in ways they should not. And they carry that into future jobs and interactions, with their new-found insecurity getting in the way of their performance and professional relationships.

It is not dissimilar to romantic relationships where someone is cheated on. Often, they go into their next relationship suspicious and treat their new love as if that person is cheating on them–even if they are not. That next relationship is doomed by the emotional damage from the first, and the same thing happens when people are mistreated to get them to leave a job.

Avoiding the Truth Costs Every Other Employee

If you let them underperform or be a bad fit without taking action, think about the impact on everyone else. Other employees have to carry the burden of that person’s under-performance. Or they have to deal with that person’s attitude or behavior. Again, not dealing with the issue because it can be tough to do creates higher costs than you may realize.

And it will hurt your reputation as a leader. When your staff sees you allowing a situation to linger that makes thing hard on them and damages the culture of the organization, they will think less of you as a leader.

How To Do It Right

So what do you do to do this right? It is pretty simple, actually. Just tell them the truth as soon as you see it brewing. If it is something they can fix, then giving them the heads up allows them a chance to make things better before it is too late. And if it is about their role no longer being needed, just do the right thing, tell them that, and be supportive through the severance process.

The tough conversation might take an hour or two. While that may sound like more than you want to deal with, the alternative is months or even years of discomfort with residual costs for you, the employee and the organization that can go on for even longer. Do the math, and the answer of which path is better becomes obvious.

Let them leave with their dignity and career story intact. Let your other employees get on with their jobs free of the burden of an employee that no longer really fits in.

This post is inspired by my best-selling book, “Do a Day: How to Live a Better Life Every Day” available in print, eBook and audio book formats . It originally appeared in my  Inc.com column on October 31st, 2017 .

1 Simple Exercise You Can Do Right Now to Become a Stronger Job Candidate

Doing this exercise can help you understand what you really want in your next job so you can go find it.

Years ago, I was looking for a new job, and could not really figure out what to do. As a management consultant, I could see myself doing lots of different things, and was having trouble getting my story to resonate with the Human Resources people screening resumes. The problem was, I had no clear direction in what I really wanted to do or why I–above all the other candidates–was the right person for the job.

Then I had a call with a mentor who gave me a very simple exercise that helped me figure out what I really wanted so I could be a more compelling candidate for the right job.

It was deceptively simple, yet really hard.

He told me to take a piece of paper, and draw a line down the middle. He had me write “Must Have” on the left and “Must Not Have” on the right. Then he told me to list three to five things in each category.

There were some ground rules. A Must-Have could not just be the opposite of a Must-Not-Have (for example, “Must be able to sleep in my own bed each night,” and “Must not travel overnight,” would break the rules). He also told me to write it in a way that someone who found the paper would understand what I meant. For example, “Must work for a great boss,” isn’t descriptive enough because we all define great bosses differently. Say what it is specifically you want in a boss that makes them great.

I took a stab at it, and then shared it with him. He pushed me on every point I put on the paper to really get under the surface of things. For example, if I had written, “Must make at least X dollars per year,” and got an offer that hit all my other points but was five-thousand-dollars under that number, would I take it? If the answer was, “Yes,” then either the amount I put down was wrong, or earning at least a certain amount was not a must-have.

He also challenged me not to make everything a response to the situation I was leaving in my old job. That is, if you had a bad boss or did not like the work you were doing, do not waste your bullet points on things that are just not your old job. Think about what you wish you were doing. Do you want to work alone, or with people? Do you want to manage people? Work with your hands? Work with kids? Have a social impact? Not have to deal with customers directly?

The things you put down are not right or wrong, they just need to really matter to you.

When I do this exercise with people I coach and mentor, I ask them to really test their answers by questioning what they wrote, asking themselves, “Why?” a lot, and not being afraid to change answers or remove things from the list completely.

In the end, just like I did, they walk away understanding what “perfect” means when they say they want to find, “the perfect job.” That gives them the direction they need to identify types of roles, companies, locations, etc. that would really be ideal for them, and helps them craft a successful application because the intent and purpose shines through.

If you are wondering how it turned out for me, after doing the exercise, I received two amazing offers within a couple of weeks. Unfortunately, I ended up picking the wrong one, but I cannot really fault the exercise for that!

If you want to try it for yourself, you can use this template I created to get started.

This post is inspired by my best-selling book, “Do a Day: How to Live a Better Life Every Day” available in print, eBook and audio book formats . It originally appeared in my  Inc.com column on October 18th, 2017 .

Want To Win Against The Competition? Learn from Steve Jobs and Stop Competing Against Them

Steve Jobs ignored competitors when creating the iPhone. Learn why this is so important if you want to revolutionize your business.

Every business has competitors. If you don’t yet, you will. That’s the nature of business. And well-accepted that the best way to beat the competition is to out-compete them.

Or is it?

It may sound counter-intuitive, but actually the best way to beat the competition is to ignore them.

Why? Anchoring.

Anchoring is when you overly-focus on one piece of information, and then your thoughts and actions are bound by that knowledge. For example, in running, it was universally accepted that humans could not run a mile in under four minutes. No one had ever done it despite any attempts made. Then Sir Roger Bannister did it in 1954 with a 3:59.4 time. His record lasted exactly 46 days until someone without the anchor of a sub-four minute mile impossibility was able to do it. Even Bannister did it against just two months later in a photo finish with another sub-four runner.

The lesson applies directly in business, too. When you define your actions by what the competition is doing, you miss opportunities to transform your industry and enter a new space without any competition.

Free of that anchor, you can focus on the art of the possible, and even total new ideas that have seemed impossible before. Technology is always changing and enabling things that were never possible, so freeing your frame of reference of what exists to what you could do can drive tremendous success.

Let’s look at a business example to explore the idea further. In the world of mobile phones, everything had keypads until RIM, as BlackBerry was known back then, stopped looking at competitors and put a keyboard on them. Huge success for BlackBerry.

Then Apple asked why buttons had to be pre-defined. They asked what could be done if you had no buttons, but rather the freedom of complete flexibility. Steve Jobs made a big deal of that during his famous reveal of the original iPhone in 2007.

While RIM, Motorola, Nokia and SonyEricsson were tweaking keyboards, data speeds and industrial design, Apple ignored all of that and asked what a mobile device could be without worrying about what it already was.

And look how things turned out–Apple is the only one in the list of major mobile phone makers that’s still relevant in smart phones.

Apple did not even focus on themselves. They had the hugely successful iPod. There were lots of renders of an “iPod Phone” going around the Apple rumor sites, with a round, click-wheel dial-pad (can you imagine!). Sure, Apple could have just expanded the iPod’s capabilities to be able to dial numbers, but how successful would that have been?

It would be incremental, not revolutionary.

It would have been fine. Who wants to be fine when you can be transformative?

This post is inspired by my best-selling book, “Do a Day: How to Live a Better Life Every Day” available in print, eBook and audio book formats . It originally appeared in my  Inc.com column on October 11th, 2017 .

There’s 1 Key to Overcoming Challenges (Hint: You Have to Transform Your Life)

Thinking you can be happy by fixing one problem area of your life won’t work. You need to change the broader picture.

We all have some struggle we face in life. Some challenge we seek to overcome that seems insurmountable, or keeps coming back after we think we’ve beaten it (raise your hand if you’ve lost weight only to gain it back again).

This applies to challenges in all areas of our life–fitness (the weight-loss yo-yo), business (beat one competitor only to have another one rise up)
, relationship issues (get past one fight with your significant other only to have another one later), and more.

Why is that? Why do challenges often seem insurmountable in the long-term even when we may over-come them in the short-term?

It’s because these challenges are all just symptoms of a bigger issue.

The reality is, we are complex and interrelated beings where how we feel about one thing in our life bleeds into other areas. We take work problems home with us. We bring home problems to work. We think getting through this one thing will make everything better.

And it never happens.

As a life coach, people come to me for all kinds of different reasons. Whatever brings them to me invariably becomes just one part of what we work on because you can’t make meaningful, lasting change in your life by compartmentalizing each problem as if it exists in a vacuum.

What I’ve learned is that the path to overcoming any challenge is overcoming all challenges. We have to transform our lives as a whole or we will repeat the cycle of having difficulties we struggle with.

Let me share an example from a great young woman I worked with on her fitness–we’ll call her Stacey. She came to me about getting in shape–something she had lost after college. She also found herself unsatisfied with her job, and seeing herself stuck there. She was also living at home, and, while she had a great relationship with her parents, she really wanted to be on her own.

The reality is that all of her issues actually started with how she felt about herself, and her overall sense of lacking a purpose to what she was doing. She had sort of fallen into several aspects of her life–her job, her physical condition–rather than consciously deciding on any of it. And now she was waking up to feeling directionless and pretty unhappy with herself.

We started with being more self-compassionate, by looking at what she’s accomplished and allowing for those things to matter. She was always quick to diminish anything she’d achieved, so we instead spent time talking about why they were real, meaningful achievements she can and should be proud of them. She was very uncomfortable saying things like, “I’m smart.” “I did really well at that.” Or, “I’m a good person.” But the more we talked about it, the more comfort she had with it, and the harder she found it poke holes in the idea that she really was a good person worthy of success.

With the foundation of possibility, I helped her to find her true motivation in life. That started with a series of questions I asked her to get her thinking about what really matters to her, and then a lot of challenging of her answers by asking, “Why?” Over and over again.

Through the process, she understood better what really mattered to her–saving people’s lives.

With a better sense of self-worth, and an understanding of what matters to her, Stacey was able to lay out things she genuinely wanted to achieve.

She stopped making excuses, and focused on some key things she could do right now to impact her story. She made real changes in her activity level and food choices. She enrolled in a graduate program in the medical field. She saved her money to be able to move out into her own place.

And most importantly, if you followed her on social media, you’d notice that her pictures all looked different. She was smiling.

This isn’t a movie, so it didn’t all go perfectly. She had plenty of tough moments and had to put in some serious hard work. But despite that, she moved forward into a new career that makes her central in life-saving emergency medicine work, has been in the best shape of her life for several years now, has an amazing apartment and is still smiling.

She’s such a great illustration of the need to look at transforming our lives holistically to overcome challenges we face in any one area.

This post is inspired by my best-selling book, “Do a Day: How to Live a Better Life Every Day” available in print, eBook and audio book formats . It originally appeared in my  Inc.com column on October 6th, 2017 .

What Becoming Vegan in 1 Day Taught Me About Success

#DoADay
Becoming Vegan can unlock an ability to tackle any challenge and find success throughout life.

I’ve been living a healthy life for while, and kept toying with the idea of being Vegan. Whenever I thought about it, I started to get stuck on situations that might pop up where I was concerned about how I’d manage.

Business dinners at steak restaurants, travel, my son’s birthday where he’d want me to have a piece of cake with him. You name it, I was worried about what I’d do in each of these situations, and would keep talking myself out of doing it.

One night while reading the autobiography of a Vegan ultra-endurance athlete named Rich Roll, a brilliant notion struck me.

I said out loud,

“I can just do it tomorrow. You can do anything for a day. I’ll do a day.”

I realized that all these what-if moments of the future were not happening right now, so why not at least give it a try.

So I woke up the next morning without any fear of some moment that may or may not happen in the future, and just made the choice to eat Vegan that day.

It was actually really easy. Much easier than I had thought it would be.

So I woke up the next day, and said, “I can do a day today, too.” That was nearly three years ago.

I haven’t been one hundred percent Vegan one hundred percent of the time, but anytime I’ve strayed, I looked at why, learned from it, and then committed to making a new set of better choices the day when I woke up.

This isn’t just about being Vegan. The simplicity and power of the idea of committing to do what you have to do in one particular day without fear of what might happen later was so freeing. It allowed me to do something I thought I could not do.

I started to apply the same approach to many more ‘impossible’ challenges I had never even started, like running a marathon, taking on a new job at a very senior level in a function I had no experience in, or working for a terrible boss. It’s also how I dealt with nearly losing my wife to a chronic illness, and how we deal with the that illness today. Of course there are tough moments, but we are not facing all of them at once right now.

If you look out from today at all of the difficulties you may face, you can very quickly shut down and never even attempt anything you want to achieve. But when you are free from that weight, and you face only as much as you will face today, everything becomes far more manageable.

The idea was so powerful, it became the name of my first book, Do a Day. It’s also the approach I used when tackling writing the book. Each day, I did the work I needed to do that day to get me closer to publishing, regardless of how much still was left to do.

So, you may not be interested in becoming Vegan, but surely you face something in life that seems like too much as you look out at all of it that you see in front of you.

Turn your gaze a little closer, and go get it.

This post is inspired by my best-selling book, “Do a Day: How to Live a Better Life Every Day”  available in print, eBook and audio book formats . It originally appeared in my  Inc.com  column on  October 4th, 2017 .

3 Lessons Marathon Training Taught Me About Success–And What You Can Learn, Too

Learn the key business lessons endurance running teaches about succeeding over the long term.

Like a growing number of people, I have had the honor of running a marathon. I say “honor” because it has served me in so many different ways beyond the physical benefit I received from the training. Surprisingly, I took away far more life lessons than running lessons from both my training and the actual event.

I’ve found that the crossover with business is really strong, and especially in these three key ways.

Capabilities Build Over Time

When you start training for a marathon, unless you regularly run that kind of distance (26.2 miles), you start off being unable to run it.

That’s okay.

My training plan was 20 weeks long, and my first long run was just eight miles. But when I was done, I still had 19 weeks of successive progression and capability building ahead of me that would prepare me to run the final race distance. If I worried too much about the distance ahead and how I was not physically able to complete it yet, I might back out. Or I might push myself beyond my current capability and end up getting injured, which would force me to back out.

Worrying about your inability to do something you have to build to is likely to lead you to quit, or perhaps not even start. And pushing yourself too soon may result in failure.

Think of all the amazing start-ups out there and the task ahead of them. The idea generation, concept building, fund raising, team building, etc. The amount is huge, and too much for many. But if you look at it as a successive building of capabilities that you will get through one by one, it is less scary.

Imagine a new product launch that your company is depending on that seems too far off. You can rush the product to market, but it likely won’t be ready for prime time, or you won’t be ready to support it. And then you lose your customers.

The original Jawbone Up was a great (and very costly) example of this. The product was rushed to market, and ended up failing at such a high rate due to defect that Jawbone refunded every customer and took the product off the market, allowing Fitbit to step into a market newly warmed up for fitness trackers that Jawbone couldn’t serve.

Playing The Long Game Is the Surest Way to Success

We all know the parable of the tortoise and the hare. Ultimately, the tortoise, who goes at a slow and steady pace with the ultimate goal in mind wins while the hare, who is all about going as fast as possible to pass the competition no matter what ends up burning out early. This is at the heart of the number one advice all newbie marathoners get – don’t go out too fast! You end up burning out, and not being able to finish your race. The runners who don’t get pulled into early races with others end up enduring and hitting their target finish time much more frequently.

This idea resonated with me as I’ve worked with companies competing across the time spectrum. Some have been very focused on making their quarterly numbers, while others are thinking about where their market will end up.

The ones playing the quarterly game do better in the near term, but they do so at the cost of their ability to endure and success. They make short-term choices like not investing in people or systems because it helps their bottom line when they report their next quarterly earnings. After a few years of competing this way, though, the gas runs out of the tank. They find themselves with burnt out staff, systems woefully outdated, and no real solutions on the horizon. The companies I’ve seen that work this way end up shells of their formers selves, acquired, or out of business.

The long-game players make some decisions that may not be as good today (e.g. plunking down big bucks to rebuild their core systems), but invariably they are here tomorrow, thriving.

There are plenty of great examples here. Amazon kept investing in the future of their business despite others saying they were spending their money with no immediate results. Look how that turned out. GEICO and Progressive spent massive amounts on marketing – many multiples of what their larger competitors spent – and ended up becoming two of the top five insurers and some of the only ones to consistently be profitable.

Don’t Lose Site of the Competition without Looking Right At Them

During the race, something I did that really helped was to tune out the runners around me. This kept me focused on my own performance without getting pulled into getting pulled into mini races that just burn me out early.

I kept tabs on some key metrics like my heart rate, pace, distance covered, distance remaining and a few other things. I knew where I stood and how I was doing relative to what I had defined as success.

I also kept a general awareness of my surroundings without overly focusing on any one person or thing. That saved me from tripping over someone who fell, and to see how to safely get to the sideline to tie my shoelace without causing a pile up.

This is such a great analog for dealing with strong competition. You need to have a goal and metrics in place to watch how you’re performing or to adjust in real time. You need to be aware of market conditions.

But you can’t just look at one competitor and start racing against them. You will get pulled into being overly-focused on their actions, and end up being reactive rather than creating a winning strategy that only you can execute on successfully.

Think of it this way. Only I knew what my ideal pacing should be, not the person who challenges me mid-race to speed up. Only you know your strengths and what resources you have. Don’t let a competitor define how you use those strengths and resources by leading you around by the nose. If you end up going head to head with them, let that be your own decision based on the overall objective you want to achieve rather than because they essentially goaded you into it.

A great example here is Southwest Airlines. While all of their competitors were buying each other, Southwest just stayed the course, delivering on the strategy they had set out on. They’ve grown well, while also being one of the most profitable and highest-rated airlines in the business (that’s saying a lot since airlines often lose money and are generally not rated positively). At one point, they were more profitable than the entire US airline industry combined.

This post is inspired by my best-selling book, “Do a Day: How to Live a Better Life Every Day” available in print, eBook and audio book formats . It originally appeared in my  Inc.com column on September 27th, 2017 .

The Best Leaders Know This Is The Key to Making Good Decisions

Good leaders know the cost of making decisions for the wrong reasons, and how to build the mental toughness to avoid doing it.

I recently wrote about how the best CEOs use a mindful approach to overcome the most common leadership mistakes. While CEOs may specifically worry about being great leaders, we all have situations where we haven’t made the best calls. We just usually don’t realize it until it’s too late.

So what can you do?

The answer is the same–apply mindfulness to keep from falling into the most common mistake everyone faces when making decisions–making them from a place of insecurity.

Mindfulness is the practice of maintaining a nonjudgmental state of heightened or complete awareness of one’s thoughts, emotions, or experiences on a moment-to-moment basis, according to Merriam-Webster. The part about nonjudgmental is the key to this lesson.

So many of us go through our days thinking about what we did wrong at some point in the past. How we performed poorly on something at work, mistreated someone, or messed up in some other aspect of our life. Or we are judging others for what they did to us.

We project that judgment out in the future, thinking about the next time that situation will happen, or when we’ll have a run in with the person we yelled at or who yelled at us. We fear telling our boss about our mistake.

All of that judgment ends up piling up and influencing our decisions in the present moment. That is, we make decisions today due to insecurities caused by things that happened before, or may (or may not) happen in the future.

Let’s play this out for a minute. If you messed up at work, you get really down on yourself for it. Then you start to worry about what it will mean for your career prospects, compensation, or even whether it will directly threaten your employment if it was a big enough mess up. I know, I’ve been there.

When this is how you operate, you engage oddly with people, or avoid them entirely rather than facing issues head on and resolving them. You don’t think clearly about the lessons to learn because you fixate and ruminate on what happened.

What about the other side of the coin–worrying about the future? Lot of companies do planning around how to respond to competitor actions. While it’s good to know what you might do in the face of a competitive threat, if all of your planning is about responding to others, you miss out on all the opportunity around you. You spend your present time focused on all the ‘what if’ moments of the future that may not even play out.

Arianna Huffington put it really well when she blogged about mindfulness. She wrote, “Stress-reduction and mindfulness don’t just make us happier and healthier, they’re a proven competitive advantage for any business that wants one.”

It’s not just about feeling rested or being at peace. When the mind is preoccupied by insecurities around the past or future, it’s left with too little capacity to succeed in the present. How can you possibly seize the moment if you spend all your time and energy on moments past or moments that may never materialize?

Simple. You can’t.

This post is inspired by my best-selling book, “Do a Day: How to Live a Better Life Every Day” available in print, eBook and audio book formats . It originally appeared in my  Inc.com column on September 13th, 2017 .

If You’ve Made a Huge Mistake at Work, You Can Recover With This 1 Simple Approach

A big mistake at work doesn’t have to be your undoing–unless you allow it to be.

Have you made a mistake at your job so bad that you think you’ll get fired? If not fired, maybe you feet you did something to guarantee you’ll never get a promotion.

Everyone makes mistakes. And we all should do our best to take ownership for our mistake and correct it. What we do after that is what makes the difference in derailing our career or not.

Here’s what you need to do: Let go of it.

When I was a management consultant earlier in my career, I made a big mistake. It was very public, and the impact was significant–there were millions of dollars between what I had advised and what the ‘right’ answer was.

I was designing the operations for a company that was integrating nine acquisitions. I planned out all of their future offices and staffing needs, down to the individual people who would be needed.

My main contact at my client called me to say something seemed really off with my projections, and he asked if I was accounting for the “other data.” I gulped, and asked, “Other data?”

I had overlooked an entire portion of the dataset he provided me. The impact: People who were about to get early retirement offers would be actually be needed. Offices that were marked for closure suddenly needed to stay open. The organization needed to be about ten percent bigger than what I’d told everyone.

I felt horrible.

I was embarrassed, nervous, ashamed and sick to my stomach. And those feelings were not just present on the day I found out what I had done wrong. I felt that way for a month–four times longer than the time it took to fix the mistake, explain to others in the firm what happened, and take responsibility for it to the client.

After about a week, the world moved on. But I did not. I punished myself much longer than anyone else did, and not in a minor way.

It impacted my work on my new project, it impacted my interactions at work and in my personal life, and it impacted my mental and physical health. I doubted myself all the time. I was about to get promoted, so while I was certain that was out the window, I was also pretty sure I would actually get fired.

My annual performance review came at the tail end of this incident, and there was literally no mention of that mistake at all. Not a word was written, not a score was impacted.

What did come up, however, was my attitude and interactions in the past month–the time just after the incident leading up to my review. The actual mistake was not an issue, but the way I let it spill into every day after that and impact how I did everything was where people took issue with my performance.

Rightfully so. And that’s what was standing in the way of my ability to get promoted.

While we cannot avoid ever making a mistake, we can certainly be responsible when we make them and do what we can to correct them.

The biggest thing we must do is remember that we are human, we will make mistakes (yes, even big ones), and that’s okay. We can still be good, valuable people, employees, leaders, friends, spouses, and parents.

It’s about having self-compassion–something many of us lack these days. We get so caught up in negativity and the drive for instant satisfaction, instead.

Allow that positive feeling about yourself to take hold instead of the ones of doubt, failure and fear. It’ll help you recover from any mistake quickly and completely so you can get back on the path of success.

This post is inspired by my best-selling book, “Do a Day: How to Live a Better Life Every Day” available in print, eBook and audio book formats . It originally appeared in my  Inc.com column on September 6th, 2017 .