Annual Letter 2024

Dear Friends, 

It’s hard to believe that we are kicking off our fifth year in business and sending our fourth annual letter to you all. It’s been a heck of a run so far, and it feels like we’re just getting started! 

Looking back on 2023, it feels like a year of completion, transition, and maturation. In both business and life, our team experienced a lot of growth and change. After three years of hard work and dedication, Brandon graduated with a Master of Divinity, Leadership from Denver Seminary. Blayne and his family traded living in sunny Tampa for 10+ years for all four seasons of Maine. We added a full-time team member and deepened our relationships with other partners and small businesses to help us advance our vision and mature our processes. 

And while we’re updating: 

• Kelly began taking on responsibilities as Charge Nurse and led three women’s bible studies while facilitating a marriage group with Brandon.

• Jeni spearheaded the effort to sell a house, buy a house, and move our family…twice! And still found time to teach yoga, learn some guitar, and be an absolutely amazing mother.

• Jaden completed One Station Unit Training (OSUT) at Ft. Moore and is stationed at 1/32 Infantry, 10th Mountain Division, Ft. Drum, NY

• Dylan graduated from high school (a year early), started working, driving, and getting super strong. He’ll be off to college this summer. 

• Elli joined the AXO sorority, made the Dean’s list in the Fall semester, and enjoyed the beginning of the Coach Prime era for the CU Buffs! 

• Dalton is an official teenager, is crushing Florida virtual school, and continues to blow our minds with a skateboard or snowboard beneath his feet.

• Penny is becoming a star, and she knows it. She loves art and music and is totally obsessed with Taylor Swift. We’re gonna have our hands full with this one.

We came into 2023 with some momentum and kept it going with a few awesome events to start the year, including a mainstage presentation at Thermo ImmunoDiagnostic Division’s National Sales Meeting, which was an absolute blast. 

Something else that we did early in the year was a deliberate, no-kidding strategy meeting in Breckenridge, Colorado, that provided so much clarity on where we’d been and where we wanted the business to go. Brandon and Blayne spent a couple of days locked in a condo strategizing and planning and then spent a weekend skiing and snowboarding with Kelly and Jeni. After that, Applied Leadership Partners was on a course for an amazing year. 

Our intentions coming out of the retreat were: 

• Continue to meaningfully but responsibly grow revenue.

• Limit air and overnight travel to (2) trips per partner per month.

• Generously share truth and love in a way that creates value beyond our clients.

• Continue challenging ourselves and grow. Embrace nervousness.

• Maintain freedom and agency regarding how and with whom we work.

• Create a functional, professional business with a small, tight, agile team.

Here is a quick overview of how we did in 2023 by the numbers, and then we’ll talk a bit more about how it happened. 

• 61 total client engagements (24 in-person, 37 virtual). We nailed it on travel days!

• Revenue was up 63% over 2022 while maintaining similar profit margins. This is actually more growth than we were shooting for and certainly stretched us at times, but we’re thrilled with it!

• We added Sarah Holzhalb to the team in April as Director of Marketing and Business Development. Her work has been incredibly valuable in shoring up the business and setting the stage for future growth. The numbers don’t lie. 

• Marketing Year Over Year growth by the numbers (2022 vs. 2023)

• Total Followers - 133% 

• Page and Profile Reach (users) - 292%

• Page and Profile Impressions - 311%

• Posts - 476%

• Post Reach (users) - 306%

• Post Impressions - 288%

• Video Viewers - 463%

• We launched a monthly newsletter that we’d love for you to subscribe to and share with friends.

• We’ve had a blast recording new episodes of our refreshed Applied Leadership Podcast. We aim to release two episodes a month, and you can listen and watch on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, and YouTube.

• We also sold and subsequently wrote a book! The manuscript is complete and is off to the publisher. It’s been a long, difficult, and rewarding journey so far…and we know that there is much work still to do. Please stay tuned as we work toward a big release in early 2025! If you’re interested in learning more or would like to purchase books for your organization, send a note to operations@appliedleadershippartners.com.

In 2023, our offering expanded but was also sharpened. We added some new content but also refined some of our most requested modules of instruction and found new ways to deliver them. We created and delivered: 

• Brilliance In The Basics sales skills training. Teaching the core, human aspects of effective selling. Participants learn and practice the skills needed to build genuine, trusting relationships and close business in the real world. This offering is suited for sales organizations that use an existing model but wish to increase sales effectiveness by improving their reps’ human dimensions of selling. 

• We created our Front Line Leader Program, which is designed for front line leaders, especially those newer to management roles. The program is delivered through engaging videos and an accompanying workbook. It is self-paced and able to be scaled across an enterprise. The program is ideal for companies in service industries, retail, and hospitality. 

• We focused more keenly on Advising leadership teams, deepening our relationship with key partners, and serving leadership leadership teams who are navigating growth, change, and uncertainty. Being in the same foxhole with these incredibly talented and committed leaders is a gift we do not take lightly. 

• We also upped our game in Keynote speaking and had the privilege to speak from the main stage at a number of conferences, kickoff meetings, and events. 

While we worked with several new clients last year, our business is mostly growing deeper. We have some wonderful, long-term partnerships where we feel truly part of the team and are able to really understand the organization, the people, and their needs. We absolutely love having these kinds of relationships and feel that we can add so much as real partners to an organization. 

In the coming year, we aim to continue doing more of the same while growing meaningfully and responsibly. We are having a great time with this work; we love the people we work with, and the primary goal is to keep it going. This business is our infinite game. We’ll do that by deepening relationships with our long-time clients, by reaching out and establishing new partnerships, through the expansion of our Front Line Leader program, and by (slowly) bringing some new faces to the podium. We’ll continue working behind the scenes on our book to ensure that it comes to life in a way that will deliver as much value as possible to everybody who reads it. 

We’re also very proud that our business and teammates are making good on our commitment to servant leadership. Over the past year, Blayne served as the chairman of the board of the Armed Services Arts Partnership (ASAP) and helped them to serve over 1100 veterans and military families members through their amazing programs. 

Brandon has recently joined the board of directors of Gallant Few and will be working to support the Army Ranger community. Of note, we also made $5,000 contributions to both organizations to help support and advance their missions. This is huge for us, as we started this company with the goal to be generous and give back, and it feels wonderful to be in a place where we can do this. Ideally, there will be much more to come. 

Finally, we want to leave you with a few broad thoughts on the year ahead. In the way that 2021 was the year that everyone couldn’t wait to start, it feels like 2024 is one that a lot of folks would prefer to skip altogether. We know that many of you are rightfully concerned about the state of things socially, financially, and geopolitically. It seems that almost no matter who you read and listen to, they’re predicting, or at least alluding to, some form of calamity before the year is over. For our part, we can’t offer a look into the crystal ball. We don’t know what will happen in Ukraine or Gaza, and we have no clue how the Presidential election will play out. We’re not sure if inflation will get worse or better, and we can’t tell you what will happen with stock prices or real estate. Here is what we can offer, and we hope it’s helpful. 

1. Pay Attention and Participate. Do your best to stay engaged in what’s happening in your community and the world around you. Do so in a way that gives the space for sanity and reflection. Be informed without being consumed. Take small actions where you can. Help a neighbor, vote in a primary election, go to a school board meeting, raise money for charity, volunteer in your community, or whatever makes a positive contribution, while allowing you to live your life. 

2. Prepare. Prediction is a fool’s errand. We cannot predict an uncertain future, but we can prepare for it. Consider your circumstances and some of the variables at play, then figure out what you, your family, and your business can do to either weather difficulty, or seize an opportunity. This might look like saving a few bucks or getting healthier or repairing a relationship. It may turn out to be a rough year, and it may not, but you’ll be prepared either way. 

3. Press On. We can’t sit on our hands and wait to see how it all turns out. Please don’t just mail it in this year. If others want to do that, fine. You’ll just be that much further ahead come 2025. Continue to invest in your skills, your team, your projects, and your family. If you’re paying attention and prepared, you can confidently move forward, knowing that you’ll be able to adapt or adjust if needed. 

We’ll close this year’s letter by simply saying THANK YOU! Too many people to mention have offered their belief, support, and encouragement to us over the past 4 years, and our business and lives would not be nearly as fulfilling without it. We’re off to the races in 2024, and we can’t wait to see you out on the trail!

All our best, 

Brandon, Blayne, Sarah, and the ALPs family

Imperfect, In Earnest

If you’ve looked around lately, you’ve surely noticed that the world seems a bit troubled at the moment. And while it’s hard to know if it’s any more or less troubled than normal, the vibe certainly feels particularly heavy right now. And if you’re anything like us, you’re probably spending at least some time thinking about what you can/should do about it, which is a very difficult question to answer. 

On one end of the spectrum, we could simply throw our hands up and just say, “the hell with it”. We could easily decide that the world’s problems are too big and too many for any of us to do much about it…so let’s just have some fun and let it burn. 

On the other extreme, we could decide that we need to solve all of the world’s problems and not take a moment of rest until we do! We might feel like there is no time to waste - no time for fun or joy or humor or relaxation, because the fate of the world is upon our shoulders. 

Clearly, there is a lot of room between the two ends of the spectrum, but finding the proper balance can be hard. How do we exist and participate in a world that needs so much work? How do we use our precious time on this earth to both make it a bit better AND enjoy our lives? This is a question that has been on our minds and we’re hearing from our partners too. We’ve heard it most often from our fellow military veterans. Those wired and trained for service can find it particularly tricky to manage this dynamic. 

So this Veterans Day, we’re sharing some thoughts that we hope will provide you with some perspective and encouragement as you navigate life in a world that can feel a bit overwhelming at times. First, some perspective…

Armistice Day

Many of you may know this, but Veterans Day was originally introduced as Armistice Day. The 11th hour of the 11th day of the 11th month (11/11/1918) marked the end of hostilities in WWI. Of course, back then it wasn’t called World War One, it was known as "The Great War" or by some as "The War to End All Wars". Looking back over the 100 or so years since, it is obvious that it was not the world to end all wars. Less than 20 years later, Europe and eventually the entire world was aflame with WWII. Then only five years later there was Korea. Then Vietnam…and on and on it goes. 

Whether we like it or not, our history is marked with a continuous string of armed conflicts, and while we can all hope that this trend will change in the future, our history (and our current observations) suggest that likely isn’t the case. We think this is a big reason that we continue to revere and honor serving in the military and make a big deal out of Veterans Day…because while we can and should pray for peace, we know that war is a part of our lives.

Struggle and Progress

Wars are not the only challenges our nation has experienced over the past 100 years. While international conflicts provide notable marks on the timeline, we’ve had plenty of domestic struggles and many victories too. We’ve been constantly confronted with things that simply do not live up to our ideals. And in many cases, we’ve fought to reconcile and overcome them. From women's suffrage to the New Deal to Civil Rights to Technology, we've had to face our flaws, and try to find a better way. America is a complex and unique place. Our history is full of things for which we should be incredibly proud, and others for which we feel embarrassed, even ashamed. There is an inherent messiness that comes with the pursuit of big and great things. And it can be difficult to wrap our heads and hearts around this messiness, but we believe that we must. Because just as America has done over the past 250 years, we each strive, in our own way, to move forward, imperfect yet in earnest. 

Our Choice

This complexity and inescapable messiness is what we are all faced with everyday in our own lives and careers - this dichotomy of what's broken and what's possible. We see it all around us, in ways both big and small. We can’t help but recognize so many ways in which the world seems beyond repair, but if we look closely, we can also see so much cause for hope. If I wake up early in the morning and read the news, I might be totally bummed out. But when I go get my little daughter out of bed and she asks for a snuggle, all seems to be right in the universe. It seems that things are not totally dark nor totally sunny, there is both, and we have to accept that.

If we truly care about making things better, we must be willing to acknowledge what we find wrong, ugly, and in need of change, AND we must be able to see the beauty and humanity and possibility in the world. Veterans, if anybody, can certainly appreciate this. We have seen the absolutely horrific things that people can do to one another AND we’ve experienced the astounding power of brother/sisterhood. We’ve watched unspeakable destruction AND we’ve witnessed unimaginable kindness in the midst of that destruction. So what do we do with all this? We can see it all, the good, the bad and the ugly - but what we choose to focus on is what will make all of the difference. We get to decide how we manage our limited resources. We get to choose whether we want to be totally disengaged, totally overwhelmed, or perhaps something more productive. We encourage you to find a healthy, middle path. 

Some Encouragement

Our Veterans Day message to you is this. Whether you are a Veteran or not, here are some things that will help you to effectively navigate a world that is so full of both challenge and opportunity:

1. Stay in the Fight. Do not be discouraged or dissuaded or otherwise convinced that you do not matter or can't make a difference. You do and you can. We need you engaged. You can’t help if you don’t show up. When things seem tough. Just keep going. As we always said at Ranger School, you never quit at night. Just keep going till daylight and see that doesn’t help you stay with it.

2. Look it in the Eye. Don't be afraid to acknowledge challenges and difficulties in the world...or in your own life. There’s plenty we’d prefer not to see, but we can’t just look away. Accepting that something is wrong is the first step in addressing it. Just because something is wrong, doesn’t mean that everything is. 

3. Do What You Can. Stay focused on what is within your control/influence. Don't be overwhelmed or distracted. Ounces make pounds and pennies make dollars. And small things don’t just add up, they compound! Progress can be slow, but will accelerate if we keep making deposits.

4. Do It Together. Veterans understand the power of teamwork and camaraderie. And we know that when we put the mission first (ahead of self, identity, background, etc.) we can accomplish great things. Do not go it alone! Lean on each other. Invite others to join. And if things do feel like too much, reach out, and get connected to help. 

Bottom Line, We Need You!

We know that it is easy to look at your TV or laptop or phone and see all of the ways in which the world is struggling. It’s also easy to throw our hands up and convince ourselves that the problems are too big and too far away for us to do anything about them.

We don’t want you to look away from those things, but we also don’t want you to be consumed by them. 

Whether it is across the globe, in Washington DC, down the street, or at your kitchen table - we want you to recognize the flaws and the possibilities. We want you to remember that your efforts will not be perfect…but that nothing done in earnest is ever done in vain. If we do that, we can continue to make our lives, communities, and the world a better place...together. 

HAPPY VETERANS DAY!

You're Looking Right at It

We humans tend to overcomplicate things, especially our personal challenges. We spend countless hours and dollars searching for the answers. We listen to all the podcasts and read all of the books. We write in our journals, meditate and ask for advice - ever hopeful that if we just keep thinking about it, we’ll eventually find a clear, and ideally painless, path toward what we’re seeking. 

I’ve noticed this tendency in myself, and it’s something that I’ve thought about a lot in recent years. I’m sure you know what I’m talking about. We all have times when we know something is amiss. It is keeping us awake at 3 a.m. or consuming our thoughts while we’re driving in the car. We can literally feel that it needs to be addressed. And here is the worst part - in most cases, we know what we need to do. 

For many of our most difficult problems and greatest aspirations, we can find relatively simple solutions or strategies to get us where we want to go. The big gap between where we are and where we want to be is less often about knowing what to do and more often about actually doing what we need to do. But instead of taking swift action, we opt instead to just keep thinking about it. Why are we doing this!?

Whether it is a hard conversation that I need to have, a bad habit that I need to break, or a limiting belief that I just can’t shake, I’ve found that there are always simple and obvious steps that I can take to move meaningfully forward. I will literally say to myself, “Blayne, you’re looking right at it”. Yet, still, I can struggle to do what I know needs to be done. 

With the benefit of some personal reflection, lots of help from trusted advisors, and dozens of consulting engagements, I’ve identified three big obstacles that most commonly stand in our way. 

1) We conflate challenging with complicated

The first obstacle is that we believe that big problems require big, complicated solutions. There is something unsettling about the idea that a seriously troubling issue could be remedied by a relatively simple solution. It is almost as if that invalidates our worry and suffering. Or perhaps it makes us feel foolish for letting it persist for as long as we have. And the more time that passes, the more we convince ourselves that we’re dealing with some kind of intractable challenge - it must be, or we clearly would have addressed it by now! 

To help myself overcome this dynamic, I’ve embraced a mental model called Occam’s Razor. This heuristic suggests that when considering multiple hypotheses or explanations, it’s best to favor the simplest one. Parenting young children has really helped me with this. I love the acronym HALT - Hungry, Angry, Lonely, Tired. When a kid is upset or misbehaving, it typically stems from one or more of these four basic issues. It’s unlikely that they have some kind of learning disability or festering resentment toward their parents; they probably just need a snack and a hug. Adults aren’t much different. 

When I’m having some kind of existential crisis and feel totally exhausted, I probably don’t need to rethink my career or move off-grid; taking a half-day and going for a hike with my wife might do the trick. 

Feeling sluggish and unmotivated on Monday morning? Should probably skip pizza and beer next weekend.

Getting the silent treatment from a colleague? Maybe just ask how they’re doing.

Is the sales funnel looking a little thin? Might try doubling the number of prospecting calls for the next 30 days and see what happens.

And we need to be careful because for whatever difficulty we’re facing, there is surely some kind of industrial complex built around it and plenty of vendors looking to sell us a cutting-edge solution. Some of them may work, but I’d guess that most of them are making money by appealing to this sense that important problems must have sophisticated (and expensive) solutions. 

2. We don’t like the obvious answer

The second obstacle is that the obvious solution is simply unappetizing - we just don’t want to do it. Simple doesn’t equal easy, and while the answer may be very straightforward, it may also be painful. 

Not all problems can be solved by a long weekend at the lake or a couple of late nights grinding away. Some challenges require us to make hard decisions. We may have to disappoint somebody or hurt their feelings. We might need to kill a project that just isn’t working out. We may even have to walk away from a relationship that’s killing us. We don’t want to do these things because they suck. And we’re willing to continue suffering a little every day in order to avoid the obvious yet uncomfortable truth. 

“No question is so difficult to answer as that to which the answer is obvious. ”

— George Bernard Shaw

How many people do you know (including yourself) whose life would be markedly better if they could just make one big change? Can you hear yourself saying, “Dude, you just need to quit drinking,” or “This job is ruining your life,” or “You can’t keep eating like this,” or “You’re a great guy, but this isn’t working out, and I’ve got to let you go”...I bet you can. In so many cases, if we’re being really honest, we are clear on what needs to happen. But since we don’t want to do it, we hold off and look for some kind of workaround to emerge, or my personal favorite, the situation to “work itself out”. Any time I catch myself hoping that something will just buff out without my intervention, I know I’m in trouble!

3. We don’t actually want to solve this problem (or achieve this goal)

The third and most overlooked obstacle is that we don’t actually want what we say we want. As a young economics student, I was fortunate to learn the critical difference between stated and revealed preferences. There are a bunch of reasons why we tend to have serious gaps between what we say we value (our stated preferences) and what we truly value (our revealed preferences). It starts during childhood. We want to please our parents and teachers. We want to fit in with other kids. We want to be normal. And in the process, we develop all these ideas about what we should want out of life. We seamlessly adopt the beliefs and values of the people around us, which is just an adaptive human behavior, and it all works just fine until we wake up during our second year of law school wondering why the hell we’re doing this. 

 When you dig into a troubling aspect of your life or career or relationship, you may discover that you can’t even articulate why you’re doing it. It is entirely possible that you’ve made it a good ways down the road without pulling over to check the map. 

Maybe you don’t actually want to be an author or an entrepreneur or a lawyer or whatever title you once felt like you should be? Is it possible that you’re not sticking with your training plan because completing an Ironman really isn’t that important to you? I don’t know the answer to any of these questions, but I’m sure they are worth asking. In moments of frustration or doubt, you may well decide you’re absolutely aligned with your goal, and you just need to power through, in which case see obstacles #1 and #2. But if you look closely at what you’re pursuing and discover that it’s just barking up the wrong tree, then the obvious action might be to simply move on. 

We live in a world chock full of choices and possibilities, and it can be difficult to navigate. Don’t make it harder than it has to be. You have intuition, and it can help you. So the next time you’re feeling especially jammed up and you’re not sure what to do, ask yourself these three questions:

• Is there an obvious solution here?

• Am I willing to take a necessary but uncomfortable action?

• Is this what I really want to pursue?

My guess is that at least some of your hard problems have a simple solution, and you’re looking right at it.

Play to Win

There is a massive difference between Playing to Win and Playing Not-to-Lose.

I can’t remember when I was first introduced to this concept, but I’ve come back to it over and over again throughout the course of my adult life. 

Whether you’re familiar with this terminology or not, you’re undoubtedly familiar with what this looks and feels like in application. A person or a team comes out of the locker room, starts having a great game, and jumps out to a big lead. At some point, they look at the scoreboard and realize, “damn, we’re way out in front, this is our game to lose.” And then things start to unravel…because they stop playing to win, and start playing not-to-lose.

When we start playing not-to-lose, we get tight, we try to avoid mistakes, and we focus our attention on what can go wrong. Every bad break or minor goof-up becomes evidence that victory is slipping away. This, of course, leads us to be more anxious, less confident and ultimately defeated.

The terrible irony of playing not-to-lose is that it virtually guarantees that you will, in fact, lose. This could be something as small as choking on the 18th hole of a golf match. It could also be spending 25 years in a soul-sucking career. 

I see this commonly in high-achieving individuals (including myself) that seem to regularly bump up against some sort of glass ceiling. They go out into the world, launch into an endeavor, execute like crazy, and before long, they’re having success. At some point, they get a glimpse of the “scoreboard”, realize that things are working, and the whole dynamic starts to shift. You’ve probably heard this referred to as Imposter Syndrome or Self-Sabotage. Some even call it Fear of Success, which is a term I especially dislike because I don’t think that’s what is really happening. 

We’re not afraid of being successful. We’re afraid of losing whatever level of success we’ve already attained. We decide to forego an opportunity to move forward because we’re worried that we might end up going backward. It’s just good ole fashioned loss aversion. When we started our lives as kids with practically nothing, we were totally free to dream big, follow our curiosity, and aspire to something special. But once we’ve built up a nice little stack of chips, be it money or reputation, we now have something to lose. We know that continuing to move forward requires us to keep those chips on the table and put them at risk. We also know that whatever comes next will likely be more difficult than what has come before. The competition will be more fierce, the stage will be bigger, the expectations will get higher…and that is scary. 

While this is all perfectly rational, it is no way to go through life. Sure, we need to accept that striving, competing, and otherwise putting ourselves out there comes with risks. That part is straightforward. What we often fail to account for is the cost of inaction. What are we risking by staying put or holding back? Life is short, and as far as I know, we only get to play once, so it seems like we should probably play to win!

“Play to win, but enjoy the fun. ”

— David Ogilvy

Playing to win doesn’t require us to take wild chances and totally throw caution to the wind. It simply demands that when life requires us to take a gamble, we bet on ourselves. And why wouldn’t we? We got here for a reason (probably several reasons) and there is every likelihood that we’ll continue to succeed. If you look at your life critically, the evidence will almost certainly suggest that you’re far more likely to progress than regress. So rather than waiting for the scales to rebalance or the “other shoe to drop”, let’s reject that entire mindset and ask ourselves a basic question: If I move in this direction, what’s the best that could happen? 

By shifting our focus to the very real opportunities and possibilities ahead of us, we can tap into the positive energy that got us here in the first place. We can build on the momentum that we’ve already created, lean on the confidence that we’ve earned along the way, and pursue the life and work that we truly want. Playing to win gives us permission to imagine something amazing. We can turn our wins into blowouts and championships into dynasties. And perhaps more importantly, we can shake off a bad game (or season) as a necessary part of the process rather than a sign of impending collapse. We can play hungry without playing scared.  

Finally, it is important to note that Playing to Win is not the blind pursuit of “more”. I love the metaphor, but I realize that “winning” is a loaded term and very tricky to define. Maybe we can think of it as the pursuit of better? It is so personal and unique to each of us. I personally keep coming back to the concept of alignment - playing to win means working and living in a way that aligns with my actual values, priorities, and desires. If I’m wrestling with a decision or start to feel myself getting tight, I just ask myself, “What would playing to win look like here?”

We can do this together. I’m convinced that our companies and communities would be much better off if they were full of people that were playing to win. So let’s start placing some bets on ourselves and our teammates. What’s the best that could happen?

PS - If this blog hasn’t convinced you to play to win, maybe this classic rant from the legendary Herman Edwards will.

The Danger in Keeping Our Options Open

Our world today is full of options. We can choose from 30 different kinds of orange juice, a million shows on Netflix, and virtually limitless ways to spend our time. I suppose that makes us fortunate, and it’s worth acknowledging the incredible abundance that most of us enjoy. But I’m not sure that it is making our lives or our businesses any better. All of these choices come at a cost, and perhaps a much bigger one than you think.  

Because as much as the world is full of options, it is also full of uncertainty. We’re not sure what things will look like in the future, or even how we’ll feel. Often, when faced with so many choices, we simply decide to make no decision at all. We keep our options open. We wait for better information. We wait for the perfect option to show up - or at least for some of them to fall away so that the decision is made for us.  

Big decisions make us nervous because we might not be happy with it tomorrow or next week or next year. What if we chose poorly? What if something better comes along? We are terrified of, and often paralyzed by the idea of giving up our precious optionality. And it’s not because we’re afraid of the option that we DO choose. Our fear is all about what we might miss out on. That’s right, our FOMO is what’s holding us back, because we know that by taking one option, we’re passing on so many others. But here is the thing, we will never be able to do everything. And if we don’t accept that we can’t do everything, we’ll end up doing nothing. 

There is no inherent value in optionality. None. 

All of the value resides within the options themselves, and none of that value is actually captured until an option is exercised...and the optionality goes away. 

It’s only when we choose to invest our time and energy that we can start seeing returns. Compounding is the most powerful force in the universe, but you cannot benefit from its power if you’re not invested. Be it a stock, a business, a skill, or a relationship, time under tension really matters. We can’t just wait for something (or someone) great to come along, we have to choose a path and make it great. 

• What’s the best training plan to help you get strong? The one you follow. 

• Best nutrition plan for maintaining a healthy weight? The one you can stick with.

• Best investment strategy for retirement savings? The one you commit to for 30 years.

• Best school district for your kids? The one you actively participate in. 

You get it.

The danger is not in making the wrong choice, and it’s not in passing up an amazing opportunity. The danger is in failing to commit. We have the power to make almost anything great if we commit to it and take care of it.

We sometimes fool ourselves into thinking that half-stepping or half-assing our way through life’s difficult decisions will protect us from disappointment or heartbreak or looking foolish. We think it won’t hurt so bad if it was only a half-hearted attempt. Right? That’s wrong. Nothing hurts worse than wondering how things might have worked out if we’d only done it wholeheartedly. 

Maybe you’re familiar with the term “plan shopping”? You know, like when a friend invites you to a party and you tell him, “yeah, sounds fun, maybe I’ll stop by”, because not-so-secretly you’re wondering if something better might come along. We’ve all done it. And we all should stop, because in addition to it being inconsiderate, it prevents us from really engaging with the people and activities that make life great. Our obsession with keeping our options open is robbing us of the ability to enjoy and appreciate what we have - which for most of us, is a lot. 

To be clear, I’m not talking about blindly picking a path nor dogmatically sticking to it. We should take some time to identify and consider our options. And we should feel free to change course when things are truly out of whack. What I am saying is that we should make the best decision we can and give it our best shot. Because if you really want to have great options, you should be the kind of person that consistently does your best...right where your feet are. 

Themes

It’s hard to believe, but Q1 is OVER. How’s the year going so far? Have you had a chance to look back and reflect on the first three months of 2023? If not (which is totally understandable), we suggest carving out an hour or two to review your goals for this year and see how reality is stacking up. And if we may be so bold, we also recommend revisiting the way in which you go about setting goals in the first place. 

Most of us are great about using the start of a new year as an opportunity to set strategic plans for our businesses and make some personal resolutions - but most of those aren’t intact after a month or two. As we said in the Army, no plan survives first contact with the enemy. In a culture filled with OKRs, KPIs, and AOPs, it can be really difficult to broaden our thinking and look beyond this month or quarter. To be clear, we believe in having clear and measurable targets. We understand that benchmarks and guideposts are great ways to stay motivated and determine if we’re on track. However, we believe they are insufficient for doing the two most important things that leaders are responsible for, especially during uncertain times - setting a clear vision and making difficult decisions. To do those things, we must be guided by something more substantial. 

In 2019, I adopted the practice of establishing a theme for the upcoming year. Some may call it an intention or a mantra. My skepticism of all things “woo-woo” led me to choose a different word, but regardless of your preferred term, it really seems to work. In both personal and professional matters, I’ve found that having a clear theme helps me to set purposeful priorities, adopt positive behaviors, and limit distractions. My theme can reorient me when things get nuts and encourage me to be patient when I’m frustrated. More than anything, having a theme helps me to stop pretending that I can plan everything out in perfect little steps and Just. Let. Go. 

Joseph Campbell said that “If you can see your whole life laid out before you, it’s not your life.” Let that roll around in your mind for a few minutes. I’m not sure what that means to you, but I take it as a call to focus much more on the direction I’m trying to go and much less on each step along the path. 

Themes are deep commitments that can guide us when making proactive decisions or responding to unexpected circumstances. We need something to lean on when life isn’t going according to plan or giving us all of the information we need. So what do we do when we come to an unplanned fork in the road? I like to start by asking a simple question that sounds something like, “Is this consistent with my theme?” or “What would be consistent with my theme?” Once I run a decision through that simple filter, it often won’t require much further analysis. We typically have a good idea of what we need to do, it’s just sometimes hard to do it…so we belabor the process of deciding.   

We can never be certain that we’re making the right call, but we can usually tell if it feels right. That gut feeling is coming from somewhere. It may be rooted in something like your values:

What is important to you? Who do you want to be? How do you want to treat people? 

It could also be rooted in your theme: Does this move us closer to our goals? Is this a distraction from our core objectives? Is this consistent with what we’re trying to build here?

And what’s truly amazing about this is that we can very easily share it with our teams. When everybody is armed with this kind of clarity, your organization’s ability to solve problems, serve customers, and seize opportunities goes through the roof. You can’t create a flowchart or checklist that covers every possible scenario your people will have, but the good news is that you don’t have to! When a leader can articulate and demonstrate themes and values, teams tend to follow. 

So please, keep setting goals and building project plans, and establishing budgets; those things are important and will definitely help you manage your business. But before you do that, take some time to pull up a level and think hard about your theme. See if you can find a word or phrase that will set the compass for you and your team. You might be surprised how the other stuff more easily falls into place. 

P.S. - In 2023, my theme is “Enthusiasm.”

• I only want to pursue and prioritize things that I am passionate about.

• As important, I want to embrace and be enthusiastic about the “ordinary” parts of my life.

• This one word helps shape my attitude, gets me back on track when I’m meh, and provides a wonderful filter for assessing opportunities.

Well Traveled

Over the past few years, our work has required a lot of travel. We’ve historically averaged about 2 trips per month, but Q4,22 and Q1,23 have been much busier. In fact, we’ve been in 7 cities over the last 6 weeks. This is what we like to call a “high quality” problem. We love going on the road to spend time with clients face-to-face AND we appreciate that all of this time away from home comes with a range of challenges. We also appreciate that we are not alone in the road-warrior lifestyle, so we thought we’d share a few principles that we apply to keep us focused, healthy, connected, and SANE.

Awareness: We both have wives and kids, and they have their own busy lives to manage, so having shared visibility on upcoming business trips is critical. It is important that we are as engaged in, and supportive of, our home lives as possible and nothing screws that up faster than, “I can’t drop her off at school tomorrow, I’m flying out at 6am!” Make a shared calendar and publish it within the house in whatever way works best for your family. We have a 90-day calendar printout on the kitchen table which gives us enough foresight to deconflict all of the moving pieces.

Connection: Whether we’re traveling for a day or a week, we remind one another to make the effort to step away from work and make the phone call home. Say hello, send a text, do a Facetime call. Even if it’s just a short one, the thought and the effort makes a difference. Last week on the road, we noticed that a key leader in the organization we were supporting stepped out of a session, then came back a few minutes later. She was checking in with her kids. And that’s good leadership in our book!

Routine: Keep things simple where you can. I always park at the same place and take the same routes through the airport. I also have a checklist of stuff that I need on the road (chargers, AirPods, hygiene kit, etc.). Reducing variables helps reduce mishaps. As partners, we stick to the same routine for almost every trip: Whoever arrives first rents the car unless an Uber is easier. We get to the hotel, review and rehearse for the partner engagement, have dinner, ONE drink, and off to bed early to be fresh for the next day.

Wellness: This is where having a like-minded partner is super helpful. We do our very best to stay disciplined to our health and fitness practices while traveling. Every morning on the road, we get up and get a workout in together. We make the most of what’s at our disposal. A great hotel gym is nice, but we’ve done a ton of air squats and burpees in the hotel room and we’ve covered countless miles on less-than-scenic routes. Fitness is a priority. Be kind to your body, you need it to be sharp. Eat well. Order the cobb salad wherever possible. Avoid excessive amounts of alcohol. Have one vodka-soda, then switch to just club soda, nobody will notice. And get some good sleep. Sleep is everything. Lastly, and we struggle with this one, try not to over-caffeinate!!! 

Agility: Pack what you need, not what you could need. We’ve turned minimalist packing into a sport, and have probably taken it too far, but it really helps to stay light and move easily. We favor awesome rucksacks from our friends at GORUCK, but you do you. We’ve also converted most of our wardrobes to pants, shirts, and shoes that are highly comfortable and versatile. I basically don’t wear anything that’s not wrinkle resistant, machine washable, and 4-way stretch. Technology!

Invest in Your Sanity: If you travel more than 25% per year, get a club pass and TSA PreCheck. After traveling for years on a non-profit budget, we finally decided to spring for the club and it has been a game-changer. The clubs offer a base of operation when delays happen, and you make the money back on coffees and meals, not to mention the free checked baggage. Last month I was delayed seven hours out of Phoenix. I set up my mobile office for the day in the United club and got so much done!

Being on the road can absolutely wear you down under the best of circumstances, so it’s important that we apply some discipline to our travel. Our work is a blast and we’re very lucky to be able to do it. The goal is to do it at a level of health and harmony that allows us to keep doing it for years to come - because real success is effectiveness x sustainability. And that’s a life well traveled.

Annual Letter 2022

Dear Friends, 

We are embarking on our fourth year at Applied Leadership Partners, which means it’s time to share our third annual letter! If you haven’t been following along thus far, you can check out our letters from 2020 and 2021, but here’s a very quick recap of where we’ve been and how it’s gone.

We launched our business in March of 2020 and within 2 days of our website going live, the world totally shut down, our first four gigs canceled, and we were left wondering if we’d ever even get off the ground. But since we couldn’t do much else during lockdown, we stuck with it and adopted the theme of “Respect the moment, be generous”. By the time summer was over we’d written a bunch, done a number of pro-bono (or deeply discounted) engagements and figured out how to teach, coach, and facilitate over Zoom. By the end of the year, we had some awesome partnerships in place, were doing meaningful work, making a few bucks - and decided to keep it going!

Leaning into 2021 with some momentum, we felt a little like the dog that caught the car - so we decided that our theme for the year was “Get in!”. It was a year of significant growth as our client base grew both wider and deeper. We were able to really clarify our offering and systemize our approach, which actually allowed us to provide even more customized solutions to the organizations that we served. At the end of our second year, it was clear that we had a real business on our hands. The work was making a serious impact, we were being challenged to stretch our abilities, and we were having a blast doing it. 

So going into 2022, we felt proud of ourselves and confident in our future, AND a little overwhelmed by the prospect of continued growth. Looking back, the year was a bit of a blur. Candidly, we failed to have an honest-to-goodness strategy session, though we committed to a theme from the onset: “Do. The. Work.” And while we did continue to refine our process and tighten up the business, we rarely stopped to take a breath and look up. We really would have liked to have written and shared more than we did in 2022, but we didn’t because we were totally swamped with creating and delivering programs for our clients - what we call a “high quality problem”. We wanted to get a book deal and hire a person or two and improve our marketing, but we just never quite had the gas to make any big moves. And while we did secure a literary agent, bring in a couple friends to help on a big project, and make some strides with our website and social media, there is still A LOT of meat on the bone.

All stated, the big headline was that our business is working and our lives are full! Our current clients have consistently invited us back and word-of-mouth has brought a number of new partners through the door. Our revenue increased by over 77% and though it was stressful at times, our little business has been getting nothing but green lights. Upon reflection, there’s a serious lesson here.

I used to have a basketball coach in 6th grade that would say, “when you run a play and it works, you run it again, and you keep running it until they stop you.” So simple, yet so profound. In a world where we all feel like we should be doing more and our business should be growing faster and everyone else is crushing it; it is important to pause, stand back, and assess the things that really matter. Continue to keep your purpose front and center, take stock of how far you have come, learn from all the ups and downs, and charge on with new insights. Sometimes you just need to keep doing what’s working and give it time. 

It may go without saying, but we are pumped about 2023! We’re approaching this year with enthusiasm and joy, and we hope it comes through (and we’re happy to share that our 2023 Strategy Session is on the books for early February - in Breckenridge…it won’t suck). Here’s a short list of some of the things that we are most excited about this year. 

Continue to deepen our relationships. We have a handful of clients that we’ve been with for over two years and we really feel like part of the team. We have loved being able to consistently engage with leaders and teams through a combination of training, coaching, and facilitation and we believe that everyone truly benefits from this model. The trust and confidence that these organizations put in us mean everything, and we’re pumped to keep moving down the trail with them.

Scaling up. The truth is, we spent much of 2022 on planes and in airports and while traveling and being face-to-face is how we prefer to spend time with people, we simply can’t be on the road 40 weeks a year. We already have a bunch of work booked for the first half (which is awesome) and we definitely want to work with new companies and teams. So we’re working on ways to deliver value in more scalable ways. That might look like a little more virtual engagement. It might involve adding some teammates. We’ve also built an amazing, 12-module, Leadership Development Program that is delivered through a series of short videos with an accompanying workbook. If you’re looking for a highly effective AND scalable way to bring leadership development to your enterprise, restaurant chain, or retail business, we’d love to talk with you about it, so drop us a line here.

Write and share more. We love to think deeply, converse openly, and share generously - and we need to be more intentional about it. In 2023, we will be more disciplined and consistent when it comes to our blog, social media, and book. There’s no shortage of ideas and insights at this point, we just need to focus on this aspect of our practice and make it happen. We really appreciate everybody that reads and shares our stuff. It feels awesome to know that we’re adding something to the conversation. We commit to doing it more seriously in the coming year. 

This past year, many organizations experienced the flip-side of COVID-19 and the incredible economic growth of 2021. In 2022 we saw businesses deal with significant financial pressures and the changes that naturally accompany such pressure. Our partners have navigated reductions in force, organizational realignments, shifts in strategic plans, and leader burnout.

To that point, some key topics on the horizon that we are already preparing for in 2023 include: 

• More consolidation and reorganization as companies experience financial pressure

• Sales force optimization and reinforcing the basics of business development

• Establishing clear priorities and focus

• Aligning (or re-aligning) teams to move forward after change

• Leading people through uncertainty and adversity

• Applying practical leadership and communication skills

To start wrapping things up, we want to take a few lines to thank and honor our families, who have been a bottomless source of support and inspiration for our work. They have put up with our travel schedules, encouraged us to press on, and thrown a flag when we need to chill out. Their love and wellbeing is why we do this and Applied Leadership Partners is nothing without them. 

The past year was one of many highs and plenty of lows. We’ve been tested at work and at home. We’ve said goodbye to loved ones and made some new friends along the way. By way of updates:

Brandon and Kelly are now empty-nesters, losing Elliot to the University of Colorado and Jaden to the US Army Infantry. This new arrangement has presented its fair share of both opportunities and difficulties, but the whole crew is doing great and figuring it out together!

Blayne and Jeni, on the other hand, are in the thick of raising three school-aged children and all that comes with it. It’s a life full of birthday parties and dance lessons and trips to the mountain bike park - fast, fun, and exhausting.  

Finally, we want to thank you. It is impossible to overstate how much the support and encouragement from our friends and colleagues means to us. Every time we get a thoughtful note or a generous introduction it reminds us of what it feels like to do work that matters. We wish all of you a very Happy New Year and we hope that you’ll find enthusiasm and joy in the year ahead. See you on the trail!

All our best,

Blayne and Brandon

Useful is Better Than Brilliant

Before we hit the GO-button on anything (presentation, speech, workshop, or even a blog post), we get nervous. And I'm good with it. I want a career and a life that makes me feel nervous on a regular basis. The nerves remind me that I'm alive, and that I give a shit. I'm not hoping that they go away, yet still, they must me managed.

This is where having a partner comes in handy. We have the ability to offer each other perspective and encouragement before we step into the arena together. And after years of doing this, we've gotten pretty good at knowing what the other needs to show up and bring his best. There are a few key phrases that we almost always come back to - and they are all about shifting the focus off of us and onto our audience. We say things like:

"What do these people need to hear right now?"
"Resist the urge to be profound."
"Just tell the truth."

and my all-time favorite...

"We'd rather be useful than brilliant"

It's not exactly the stuff you see in Hollywood locker room scenes, but it works, and here's why.

1) It reminds us that we are there to serve. Our job is not to be applauded or validated, it is to provide valuable and applicable insight to leaders and teams that need our guidance.

2) It reminds us that we have everything we need. We don't need to reach for the perfect metaphor or catchy phrase. We've done the work. We know what we're talking about.

3) It reminds us to be US. Audiences find trust at the intersection of credibility and relatability. We're both credible and relatable, without trying too hard. They don't need us to be clever or cute (or the most decorated Special Operators on the planet). They just need us to be sincere.

This quote from C.S. Lewis is one that we live by at Applied Leadership Partners. It gives us permission to be patient, to be humble, to chop the wood and trust the process. If you're starting a new business, new to a big role, or launching a creative project - I think it will help you too.

Earning a Title vs. Doing the Job

There's a big difference between passing the test and doing the job. 

I remember watching the Green Berets going into Afghanistan in the weeks after 9/11 and wishing so badly that I could be there with them...and not in the motor pool. As a 2LT, I pestered the SF recruiters about submitting my packet. They were nice, but basically said, "slow down skippy, you've still got some work to do." They were right. 

As a Scout PL in Baghdad, I had the privilege of working with some studs from 5th SFG, and the deal was sealed. If I was ever going back to war, I wanted to do it with these guys. 

A few weeks after getting home from Iraq, I went off to SF Selection and Assessment. While there, I felt something in me shift. At a point, my burning competitive desire to "pass the test" gave way to something bigger. I no longer wanted to get selected for the Q-Course, I NEEDED to be a Green Beret. 

One early morning while we were waiting for the chow hall to open up - tired, sore, and dreading another day's worth of abuse, we were told to "MAKE WAY!" by an instructor. We all moved over so that a group of truly haggard looking students could go to the front of the line. They were recently "liberated" SERE school grads, and I remember thinking "Damn, those dudes look wrecked." Then I thought, "Shit, I'm wrecked and if I think they're in rough shape, that course must be brutal."

It was in that moment I realized that the completion of every training evolution is just a new starting line. I realized that difficult courses weren't about accomplishment, but preparation. In the years since, I've told every aspiring Green Beret that the key to passing Selection is simple - understand the work of an SF solider and if you NEED to do that work, you'll be fine. If you're looking to prove something to yourself or others, or if you just love a good challenge, you're probably wasting your time. 

Same could be said for most of life's important decisions. Whether you want to be an entrepreneur or a CEO or even a parent, earning the title is the easy part. Doing the job is the real work. 

Getting Everybody on the Same Page (Screen)

There’s been an awful lot written about the numerous advantages and disadvantages of remote work. We’ve read a bunch of it, and we suspect you have too. So rather than bore you with our grand unified theory on distributed work, we thought we might start offering some bite-size, useful ideas that you can take and actually apply to your business. To start, we want to talk about the importance of sharing a common “leadership language” and how that might be the best way for you to start truly aligning your team.

Alignment is kind of our thing at Applied Leadership Partners.

We believe very deeply that while agreement (harmony of opinion) is very nice to have, alignment (harmony of effort) is much more valuable.

Therefore, we spend a great deal of our time working with clients to help them align their teams around everything from brand and strategy to more specific topics like how to effectively have difficult conversations. Over the course of the past few years we’ve witnessed teams make big steps forward by simply taking the time to think hard about what they’re doing, incorporate and reconcile perspectives, and get everybody on the same page.

This is where sharing a common leadership language really helps the cause. As you might imagine we, as leadership development professionals, spend lots of time thinking and talking about all of your favorite leadership buzz terms, like: empowerment, ownership, accountability, empathy, innovation, and so on. To be clear, we like these words and think that they are all great things to strive for. However, what we typically find is that leaders and teams have not taken the time to adequately define and share these important, but somewhat squishy terms. We will often ask questions like, “what do you mean when you say empowerment?” or “what does it look like for someone on your team to actually be accountable?” We generally get a pretty long, vague answer. It’s ok, we get it. Most people don’t feel like they have the time to really dig into this stuff. They have some sense of what these words mean (to them) and use them when/if they seem appropriate.

The problem is that while most leaders have a general understanding of key leadership terms, most teams don’t have a shared or common understanding. Make no mistake, this is a real problem that holds teams back. It is also a huge, and often very efficient OPPORTUNITY to move teams forward. And though it may seem counterintuitive, distributed teams may be able to do this more quickly than those who share the same office. We’ll give you an example.

Screen grab from our presentation with over 200 employees across the country from Freedom Financial Network.

We recently had the privilege to work with the great folks at Freedom Financial Network. They have leaders and teams scattered all over the country, and they wanted to know how they could better empower (there’s that word) their people and get them to work more confidently and independently. Through the power of Zoom, we hosted a one-hour, online workshop with over 200 participants where we provided a simple, clear, and shared understanding of Empowerment and Accountability. We discuss the relationship between these two words, the core components of each, and most importantly, how they could apply the framework to their world.

In less than an hour, we were able to get a large group of leaders completely aligned on this critical concept while retaining 95% of logged in participants (n=195) for the duration of the presentation. That’s both effective and efficient.

I would like to share my appreciation for the great event you led this morning! The topics were relevant, the pacing and delivery style very engaging in a tough zoom environment (where you get no body language, feedback, or affirmation) and your answers to the questions asked were well thought out and impactful - thank you!

- KP, Director, Community Events and Culture, Freedom Financial Network.

Nobody had to get on a plane or stay in a hotel or pay for catering. It simply required an intentional date on the calendar, a Zoom line, and a couple of skilled presenter/ facilitators. We would submit that these kinds of engagements deliver a very attractive return on investment, and are accessible to almost any organization that is serious about leadership.

If we can be helpful to you and your team, we’d love to do that. Contact us and let’s see if we are a good fit for your team. But you can absolutely do this sort of thing on your own. Here’s one way to approach it.

1. Take some time to consider the most important ideas, concepts, or terms that your people need to be aligned on. It could be your strategy or values or priorities or even just a word.

2. Go to your journal or whiteboard or wherever you do your thinking and write down what YOU mean when you use these terms. Then try and write it for an audience. Write it in a way that would allow you to share it. This will really help you to clarify and refine your own thinking.

3. Make the time/space to consistently share this stuff with your team. It could be in an email or a video or a Zoom meeting or whatever medium(s) work for you.

If you can make this investment of time and energy, your team will start to align on the things that really matter and the whole organization will move with much greater confidence. Take advantage of the tools at your disposal and get your crew on the same page. It’s more important now than ever!

A very sincere thank you from us at Freedom. That was an incredible presentation. We’re getting requests already for more, and people are asking where’s the recording!

- Vance Rodgers, Director of Engineering, Enterprise Application, Freedom Financial Network.

Cover photo: @thkelley via Unsplash.

Impact vs. Contribution

A lot of talented, driven people wrestle with the notion of Impact. They feel compelled, even obligated to leave their mark, or what Steve Jobs called “make a dent in the Universe.” I think that, for the most part, this comes from a good place. We want to use our gifts to do something that matters. But for many of us, the need to make an impact can have undesirable side-effects. We can alternately feel that our lives and work are too important or totally insignificant. So we’d like to start off 2022 by the offering you a little encouragement and providing a slightly different perspective on Impact. We’d suggest that you might do better, and feel better by thinking of your effort through the lens of Contribution.

Maybe it’s just semantics, but I’ve found this re-frame to be really helpful. It’s a great reminder to take the focus off of myself and put it on others. Instead of thinking about how I am going to go out and impose myself on the world, I consider how I can support the people and causes that I care about. How can I be a positive and meaningful contributor to the work and life of my partner, kids, clients, neighbors, etc.? To do this I have to ask them, and then I have to listen. I don’t need to get them to buy-in to my vision. Rather, I need to try and see things through their eyes. Over the years, we’ve learned that the best way to be significant is to help others achieve their goals.

Another nice thing about contributing is that it doesn’t require you to have any particular role or title. How to effectively lead without authority is a very common topic in our practice and a very real challenge in many organizations. And where we usually recommend people start is with building trust and demonstrating value, or said differently…show that you are committed to contributing to the success of others (or the collective). Doing this will quickly make you a valuable (and valued) person.

Focusing on contribution is also great fo keeping you out of what I call “The Existential Ping Pong Match”. This will be familiar to many of you. It’s the back and fourth between feeling that our work is going to save the world, and that none of it really matters. It’s our difficulty in finding an appropriate balance between arrogance and indifference. But if we just think about how we can contribute, even in so-called small ways, we tend to calm ourselves and simply do the next right thing.

Every major philosophical and spiritual tradition has some version of explaining our universal interconnectedness while reminding us of our relative smallness. They encourage us to embrace that tension, to remember that all of our actions matter, but that none of them change the world on their own. I personally find Don Miguel Ruiz’s “4th Agreement” to be the most useful cue: “Do Your Best”. Those three words are both empowering and freeing. Just do your best. We don’t really know which of our actions are “big” or “small”, so we’re wise to simply do our best. We don’t need to worry about what others are doing or have accomplished. That doesn’t have anything to do with us. We either did our best or we didn’t.

So as you look into 2022 and think about the impact you hope to make, perhaps you could take a moment to shift your perspective and consider how you might make a positive and meaningful contribution to the success of others. Take a few minutes to write down the people and issues that you care about: family, employees, customers, vendors, colleagues, neighbors…and think about how you can do your best to help them. You don’t need to worry about your impact or your legacy…your contributions will take care of that.

The Whole Truth

I spent my entire Army career as one of the “guys on the ground”. It was a charmed path that took me from Tank Platoon Leader to Scout Platoon Leader to Special Forces Detachment Commander, with each successive role moving me closer to my soldiers and further from the flagpole. 

That kind of experience, especially during times of conflict, provides you a certain perspective on things. It gives you an appreciation for nuance and subtlety, for detail and variation, and for the very human aspects of the business of war. There are no abstractions on the ground. 

I found a lot of pride and satisfaction in living out on the tip of the spear, of seeing things up close and personal. It was a big responsibility for a young man and one that I took seriously. It felt like the work we were doing was all that really mattered. We were the ones in the fight. We bore all of the physical risk. Of course we knew the truth about what these wars were all about, because we were on the ground - and to a combat soldier, there is no truth except the Ground Truth. 

The problem, I would discover, is that the Ground Truth is not the Whole Truth.

I first started to notice this in 2004 when I was in Iraq. As a Brigade Reconnaissance Team (BRT) platoon leader I would regularly work with the brigade’s various battalions, each assigned their own Baghdad neighborhood as battle space. And I was often stunned to realize that while they all knew their areas very well, these large, sophisticated units didn’t seem to have much of an idea of what was going on just one neighborhood over, much less across the entire city or region. It was almost as if they were all fighting their own little wars, all contained within some imaginary lines that we drew on the map. I remember thinking (and probably uttering semi-respectfully), “you know that the enemy doesn’t give a damn about these battalion boundaries, right?” Way back then, I could see the limitations of the ground truth, but my youth and hubris kept me from really learning the lesson.

About ten years later, I found myself leading an awesome nonprofit organization called Team Red, White, Blue (RWB). With over 150,000 members and chapters in over 200 cities, Team RWB was all about the ground game. Our mission was to deliver local, consistent, and inclusive opportunities for Veterans to engage with their communities in positive ways. Every single week, Team RWB chapters hosted thousands of run groups, workouts, and community projects. And almost all of that was led by volunteers. These leaders knew their communities, understood the Veteran landscape, and cared deeply about their members. Their passion was undeniable and their energy was inspiring. We were crushing it. All we had to do was keep our focus on the ground and the rest would take care of itself, right?

If only it were that easy. As we’d quickly learn, small things don’t become big by accident - and as powerful as inspiration can be, it probably won’t help you make next month’s payroll. We became acutely aware of this in the spring of 2014 when, through a series of missteps, oversights, and bad breaks we almost ran out of cash and crashed our big boat of awesomeness right into the rocks! It was time to shift our focus a bit. We had to figure out a way to balance the creativity and initiative of our local chapters with more sustainable financial and operational practices. If we didn’t, the whole thing was going to fail.

So sometimes, as much as we preferred high-fives and atta-boys, we had to be the bad cop. At times we were the brand police and had to say, “we’re sorry but you cannot make custom t-shirts in pink”. Sometimes we had to be the finance police and would say, “we’re sorry but we can’t double your chapter’s budget even though the local Chevy dealer donated $10,000”. As you may imagine, none of this went over particularly well. We got a lot of pushback from hard working volunteers that were making things happen. From the staff’s perspective, we were just trying to keep the Team RWB freight train on the rails, but from the chapter’s perspective, we were putting up roadblocks. As more and more of these conversations were happening, we became concerned that the staff could go from being a source of inspiration to a wet blanket. Finally, I heard the magic words - “you guys don’t know what’s going on ON THE GROUND!”

My response: What?! How dare you! I’m a ground guy! For God’s sake, I lead my local chapter!

If there was a problem it certainly wasn’t that I didn’t appreciate what was going on at the ground level. If anything, it was that THEY didn’t appreciate what was going on at the strategic level. THEY didn’t understand all of the things we had to manage to keep the organization healthy. THEY couldn’t see the bigger picture.

And who’s fault was that? MINE.

That’s right, while I had a good (but not full) understanding of the ground truth, I had failed to consistently communicate the broad truth. It turned out that things like strategic vision and national partnerships really matter to the folks on the ground, and understanding their implications helps local leaders to make good decisions and move confidently forward.

From that point on, we started making big changes. We became much more transparent. We communicated proactively. We included key volunteer leaders on all reports to the board of directors. We started regional leadership summits, where chapter leaders would come together to share successes and challenges - and the staff would have the opportunity to share what was happening at the regional and national level. There was no more local business or national business, just leader business. And we were no longer simply pulling information from the chapters, then pushing information back. We were engaged in an ongoing dialogue. 

When we started doing this, we discovered that there weren’t different versions of the truth, just different perspectives. In order to be truly successful, we had to stop debating whose truth was more true. Rather, we simply had to combine our various perspectives to paint a fuller, clearer picture of our situation. 

Big, collective endeavors require us to dig into the details and really appreciate how decisions affect the lives of those closest to the problems. They also require us to zoom out, see the bigger picture and recognize the broader implications of local action. Most importantly, they require us to stop believing that any of us have a monopoly on the truth. We need to start listening with the intent to understand, speaking with the intent to inform, and cooperating with the intent to improve.   

And that’s the whole truth.

The Danger in Keeping Our Options Open

Our world today is full of options. We can choose from 30 different kinds of orange juice, a million shows on Netflix, and virtually limitless ways to spend our time. I suppose that makes us fortunate, and it’s worth acknowledging the incredible abundance that most of us enjoy. But I’m not sure that it is making our lives or our businesses any better. All of these choices come at a cost, and perhaps a much bigger one than you think.  

Because as much as the world is full of options, it is also full of uncertainty. We’re not sure what things will look like in the future, or even how we’ll feel. Often, when faced with so many choices, we simply decide to make no decision at all. We keep our options open. We wait for better information. We wait for the perfect option to show up - or at least for some of them to fall away so that the decision is made for us.  

Big decisions make us nervous because we might not be happy with it tomorrow or next week or next year. What if we chose poorly? What if something better comes along? We are terrified of, and often paralyzed by the idea of giving up our precious optionality. And it’s not because we’re afraid of the option that we DO choose. Our fear is all about what we might miss out on. That’s right, our FOMO is what’s holding us back, because we know that by taking one option, we’re passing on so many others. But here is the thing, we will never be able to do everything. And if we don’t accept that we can’t do everything, we’ll end up doing nothing. 

There is no inherent value in optionality. None. 

All of the value resides within the options themselves, and none of that value is actually captured until an option is exercised...and the optionality goes away. 

It’s only when we choose to invest our time and energy that we can start seeing returns. Compounding is the most powerful force in the universe, but you cannot benefit from its power if you’re not invested. Be it a stock, a business, a skill, or a relationship, time under tension really matters. We can’t just wait for something (or someone) great to come along, we have to choose a path and make it great. 

• What’s the best training plan to help you get strong? The one you follow. 

• Best nutrition plan for maintaining a healthy weight? The one you can stick with.

• Best investment strategy for retirement savings? The one you commit to for 30 years.

• Best school district for your kids? The one you actively participate in. 

You get it.

The danger is not in making the wrong choice, and it’s not in passing up an amazing opportunity. The danger is in failing to commit. We have the power to make almost anything great if we commit to it and take care of it.

We sometimes fool ourselves into thinking that half-stepping or half-assing our way through life’s difficult decisions will protect us from disappointment or heartbreak or looking foolish. We think it won’t hurt so bad if it was only a half-hearted attempt. Right? That’s wrong. Nothing hurts worse than wondering how things might have worked out if we’d only done it wholeheartedly. 

Maybe you’re familiar with the term “plan shopping”? You know, like when a friend invites you to a party and you tell him, “yeah, sounds fun, maybe I’ll stop by”, because not-so-secretly you’re wondering if something better might come along. We’ve all done it. And we all should stop, because in addition to it being inconsiderate, it prevents us from really engaging with the people and activities that make life great. Our obsession with keeping our options open is robbing us of the ability to enjoy and appreciate what we have - which for most of us, is a lot. 

To be clear, I’m not talking about blindly picking a path nor dogmatically sticking to it. We should take some time to identify and consider our options. And we should feel free to change course when things are truly out of whack. What I am saying is that we should make the best decision we can and give it our best shot. Because if you really want to have great options, you should be the kind of person that consistently does your best...right where your feet are.