Episode 166: Stop Living on Autopilot—Here’s How to Take Your Life Back!

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Today Counts Show Episode 166

Preview

Jim Piper: Sounds very discriminating. And you know what? It is. It is discriminating. Sometimes we steal from our families because we don’t know how to–  The vast amount of power that is used is simply getting out of our orbit. It’s like 90 some percent. This is a person that has simply lost at sea. This is a person that is either burned out. I mean, they’re toast. So this is Netflix binges. This is honestly–

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Winston Harris: Hey everybody, before we jump into today’s episode, we’d like to recognize all those who make this podcast possible. The Lead Today Show is supported by all the generous donors of the Lead Today Community. Thank you so much for investing in shaping leaders through this podcast. Be sure to like and subscribe on whatever platform you are watching or listening to today. Alright, let’s jump into the podcast.

Introduction

Winston Harris: Welcome to the Today Counts Show. My name is Winston and I’ll be your host today. As always, we have the man, the myth, the legend.

Jim Piper: You’re actually doing it.

Winston Harris: I’m doing it. He told me, he’s like, “You’re not going to do it.” I said I’m going to do it. Stand by my word. Jim Piper is with us. How you doing today, Jim?

Jim Piper: I’m doing really well.

Winston Harris: I’m excited for today. Today we have a friend and new to the podcast, a financial advisor, Greyson Hanna. Welcome to the podcast, Greyson.

Greyson Hanna: Thank you guys. I appreciate y’all.

Jim Piper: Glad you’re here.

Living Intentionally and Time Management

Winston Harris: We’re gonna be talking about something pretty I think tangible and real for literally anybody that has a pulse. We’re talking about living intentionally, managing our time. Not necessarily time management per se, but being intentional with our time and with our life. Before we kind of get into the nitty gritty and Jim always just comes with gems and wisdom for us, I want to learn a little bit about what your life currently looks like, Greyson, and maybe how you might even have some questions around this idea of living with intention and living with being intentional with our time. And so what is your life kind of looking like right now? And maybe some tensions around all that you’re doing and how to make it all work.

Greyson Hanna: Yeah, well, I’ll definitely have some questions. That’s for sure. Yeah, like you said, I’m a financial advisor, so that’s by day. That’s my job. But by morning and night, I’m a husband to a beautiful wife. Y’all know her, Tess. Been married for over three years now.

Jim Piper: I can’t believe it’s been three years already.

Greyson Hanna: Yeah. Time’s flying. Time’s flying for sure. But yeah, I’ve been married for about three years. I just recently, last fall started going back to school. So I’m getting my MBA at UT Austin. And that’s a evening program. Balancing work and school.

Jim Piper: Is that a two year program? If you were going full time.

Greyson Hanna: Yeah, just under two years. Started last fall and I’ll be finishing up next summer. That’s on Mondays and Tuesdays. So fighting traffic to Austin, coming back same day, doing that twice a week. It’s quite a bit, but time management, learning how to lead myself is something I’m constantly trying to improve on for sure.

Winston Harris: How are you “balancing” all of that. What are some things that you often run into that you’re just like, “I wish I could just get better at that.”

Greyson Hanna: It’s a constant balancing act where I feel like I’m juggling three balls and one of them is constantly falling to the ground and picking that one up and then another one’s falling. It’s something that I’m still in the process of trying to calibrate. This conversation today is going to help move the needle for me to get better at that. It’s something that just again, having some sort of idea of what my priorities are and having an accountability partner, my wife being a great example of checking in on me.

We can always be accountable for ourselves by having someone that’s checking in on you, knowing what you’re going through and telling you where maybe you can make some changes definitely helps.

Defining Living on Purpose

Winston Harris: Jim, we’re kind of talking about this before the podcast. We’re not really talking about time management per se. What are we really talking about?

Jim Piper: I think I always wrestle with that phrase myself, right? The best I’ve been able to come up with so far is living on purpose. What does mean? And I was thinking about what we’re going to talk about today, really, what is it that we’re talking about? That’s the best I could really come up with, living on purpose. That’s what our lives matter. And coming from a Christian worldview, we definitely believe that our lives matter. So we all have 24 hours in the same day.

Winston Harris: Do we though?

Jim Piper: I think so.

Winston Harris: Doesn’t always feel like it.

Jim Piper: Well, you got two little ones at home. So your 24 hours might look a little different than mine and Greyson is still running ahead of that situation. We have different lifestyles, maybe, but we still have the same content of minutes in each day and week and what have you and what we learned to do with those matters a lot. In fact,  what we’re doing right now if you think about this episode is really about working on our lives, not just in it. There’s a lot of things that the three of us could be doing right now besides this, but what we are doing is we are working on our life versus just diving in with that.

By the way, that is what Stephen Covey called quadrant two, meaning very important work, but not urgent. We’ll talk about the four quadrants during the episode and how they are not just a theory, but how they can inform our calendar, whether it is proactively or whether we are evaluating last week or the month before, the quarter before, which you know, note to self, a lot of folks don’t do. So we don’t learn about how to change things in the future because we don’t look back.

It’s hard to look back because sometimes what we do is our calendar says this week is going to look like this or that and it didn’t go like this or that. So when you do look back, all you can say is, “Yeah, that didn’t happen,” but you don’t know why. I didn’t really plan on starting this way, but I’ll just throw it in since I’m on this run is I make sure at the end of every day that the calendar, even though it’s now passed, reflects what actually happened. That’s a humbling process. You can’t do that too many times and have some sense of self-worth without changing the ball game.

Winston Harris: That’s really good. To your point of an accountability partner, maybe this is an accountability tool, leveraging your calendar to hold you accountable to what you said you were going to do or wanted to do and making time. How much time would you practically say that takes you even?

Balancing Responsibilities and Time

Jim Piper: Well, let me answer it in a broad way, Winston, versus, you know. I will tell you. I think I do know exactly how much time that takes because I’ve been doing it for a long time, but they, and they are the people that are studying what we’re talking about, which is really effectiveness. That’s in another way, how do we live effective lives? The more responsibility we get in life, the common rule is the more time we need to spend in quadrant two, not the less. A little bit counterintuitive.

So you think that as you gain more responsibility, you’re going to be busier when you should be less busy and living more in quadrant two. With that said, gosh, I know this sounds bad, but sometimes I can actually tell you 75% of the time I don’t have to change it. I look at it and it’s– Now when I started this routine, a lot of times I wouldn’t change it because I look at it and be so discouraged. I would just move on because none of that happened.

But you know, sometimes that one hour meeting went an hour and a half. And so I will go ahead and stretch that little box to say an hour and a half because the phone tells me so, the zoom tells me so. It tells me how long I was doing that so I can look back and see. And so what does that tell me? Well, it might’ve been a great meeting, but I might not have stewarded that time as well as I should have.

So you learn about disciplines and whatnot. Yeah, I make adjustments probably a couple of times a week, but most of the time, because of what I’ve learned and because of the proactive way I plan my weeks, I don’t have to do too much.

Temperaments and Planning

Greyson Hanna: So you’ve been doing this for decades and I know me, the way my personality works is if I don’t do something exactly right, it really eats at me. So how long did it take for you to become comfortable with being fluid with your approach?

Jim Piper: That’s a great question. Well, that kind of brings up the idea of temperaments too I think because when I’m working with– We’ll throw out the Meyer Briggs as an example. When I’m working with an artisan, when I’m working with an idealist, when I’m working with a rational, when I’m working with a guardian, those are four temperaments.

A guardian’s timeframe is now. They kind of live in the now, just as an example. An idealist has great plans and ideas and usually blocks well but often struggles to follow through because they see fork in the roads all over the place and often take them because they’re an idealist. If you can get an artist and to do a calendar, then you– I’m a rational. I have to admit, it does fit my temperament a little bit better.

However, as a rational, I’m also an intuitive, which does mean that I can get moody. So I say, well, block myself some time. As I approach that, I’m not in the mood to do that. That’s a real thing that happens. So one skill set that I learned is if you do your calendar in a proactive way, you can move blocks around. There might be something else that I want to do, and I can move that block around.

But you know, the other thing, and your question is fantastic, because in a sense, the calendar informs you, tells you what to do, like an executive assistant, when it’s running properly, but you’re okay with it because you are the one who was upstream further to inform that EA, that process. So it’s another form of accountability. However, if you lose your sense of now, you lose your sense of opportunity, you lose your sense of grace, then maybe you’ve gone too far. Maybe if you feel like a failure, because you didn’t work through it, I would say that’s probably taking it for granted.

It’s kind like when people don’t accomplish goals. If they don’t accomplish goals, it’s usually for one or two reasons. One is that their plan is broken. The good news is you can fix your plan. Or you didn’t do what you say you’re going to do. A lot of people drop their head and they say, “Well, I’m a slouch. I’m lazy.” I don’t know that that’s usually the case. Usually the case is it’s probably somebody else’s goal. It’s not your goal. If it’s really your goal, because you really want to do it, you have the desire to do it.

So I come from a little bit of a different angle. I definitely don’t use these disciplines, this philosophy to beat people over the head. It’s a great question. I think I’m still learning. I’m still learning about myself and what makes me more effective. I’ll tell you this, and I’ve shared this in our last few podcasts and sidebars, and Winston’s been part of that.

Because I’m a starter, because I’m a catalyst, that’s my nature. So if I was coaching me, one of the things and hopefully now I can coach myself, but I love ideas. I love new projects. Now I’ve learned to say, “Okay, let’s go ahead and set that aside for a few days and see if I’m still interested in that a few days later.” A lot of times few days later, I don’t remember having the idea. Again, it’s learning about yourself and knowing what to do with these kinds of distractions that come in life. Does that make sense?

Busy vs. Full and Dealing with Downtime

Winston Harris: Yeah, it’s really good. I kind of want to circle back briefly before we jump into a specific tool and approach that you have around this topic. But you mentioned busy and I think busy for many of us is a badge that we wear. We’ve kind of, whether by osmosis of the culture, have learned to kind of put that on like, “How’s your week going? ” “I’m just busy. I’m just busy.” Right? We don’t really know how to approach that idea other than, I guess this is just how it goes. The older you get, the busier you get. I’ve been trying to use the word full just because busy has a negative connotation.

Jim Piper: You know when I ask you that question, you can’t say busy to me.

Winston Harris: I had a full week.

Jim Piper: Because busy to me means you don’t know what to tell me. That’s what it means to me.

Winston Harris: Greyson, maybe you can attest to this and maybe I think more so on the younger leader side. Sometimes you almost feel a sense of guilt when you aren’t busy, like when you don’t have activity and it’s kind of like, “What do I even do with Quadrant two time? What do I even do if I don’t have a meeting or–” I feel like I need to fill that with something. Have you ever wrestled with that?

Greyson Hanna: Yeah, you hit the nail on the head with me. I constantly battle and struggle with that if I’d have downtime. These days, it’s a little bit few and far between to have that. But when I do, I don’t know what to fill that time with. And then two, if I want to go do something that I enjoy, I almost have to justify it to myself. That’s where I think being proactive and setting aside that time and knowing how I’m going to use that time.

It just sets yourself up for freedom to think big picture, right? That quadrant two thinking. I know for me just taking the time because I’m so busy because I’m guilty of using that term. I don’t even know what my quadrant two content is. You know, what’s important but not urgent to me. What are the things I need to be tackling in the long term, a year from now, two years from now that I can start setting and planting the seeds now and thinking about big picture? So a constant struggle for sure for me.

Winston Harris: And I think big picture is a great segue to where you want to go, Jim, which is kind of back in a way. Not just looking right at quadrant two, but taking a step back. What does that need to look like even before we start to think about quadrant two?

Jim Piper: That’s great. Maybe if we could agree that we’re going to try to marry right now the what, which we said is something like living intentionally, living life on purpose, that kind of thing. So that’s the what and the why, but how do we get to the why? I’ve written some notes to myself just so I wouldn’t forget. And then I do want to describe those four quadrants, Winston, before we get into how about this, this whatever we want to call it, time management or whatever.

I think the first thing that I would want to say, and so we’re at 30,000 feet in this conversation right now is that leadership is an inside out proposition. It’s the weirdest thing. I thought we were talking about time management. Well, leadership involves leading ourselves. If we don’t learn how to lead ourselves well, then how do we expect to lead others well, right? It’s kind of like that thing that some people can throw in our face. If we don’t manage your own household well, how can we manage something larger? I hate it when we put it in negative terms. I like putting in this term. If you can lead well at home, then you can probably lead well anywhere.

Winston Harris: That’s good.

Jim Piper: I always try to work hard on what’s the positive side of that platitude that we often hear. When I mentioned leadership as an inside out proposition, some of the things that I’ve talked about in the past, tools that I’ve created for myself and there’s nothing new under the sun. So I probably learned this from that person, this from that person. And so let’s just give credit to everybody who’s a learner and a leader because we learn from each other.

But there was a day that I remember I was in a coffee shop and I drew a circle because if I take this big idea seriously, that leadership is an inside out proposition and then if I want to be a better parent, then that starts with me. If I want to have a better marriage, that probably starts with me. If I want to have a closer walk with God, then that probably starts with me. And you get the idea. So I wrote, I drew a little circle, then I wrote Jim, I put Jim right in the middle.

Then I sat back and you know, this didn’t happen super fast but over time, I wrote a circle outside of that circle that encompass that that little circle, but provided another space for me to write. The next most important thing to me in life I thought about was people, my relationships. Being a speaker my whole life, I already didn’t like gym, and then people. So I wrestled with that. And I said, “Okay, I think this is going to be good. I don’t know where this is going. But I’m going to share this with somebody someday. So I’m going to change Jim to person.” So my personhood, that’s where we start and then people.

And then when I drew another circle around that one, I ended up thinking about everything else in life: work, health, sickness, struggle, seasons, going to school, all these kinds of things. And so I wrote the word place. Before we can even talk about managing our time, I think it’s a good thing to sit back and think about how am I doing? Who am I? Where am I going? I give all kinds of questions.

So I’ll throw them out real quick that I like to do in my coaching and even coaching now. All right. So you guys interrupt me if I’m going too fast. Questions like this, what do you want to do with the rest of your life? I don’t care whether you’re 12 years old or you’re 85 years old. That’s always a good question. I can literally be on my deathbed and still, I think that’s a good question. Why do I want to do with the rest of my life?

So the person people place, the idea is if I work on creating a healthier me, healthier person, that’s probably going to overflow and influence better relationships. But we don’t have time for all this in this episode, but just real quickly, what I mean by that is then I began to realize that I can’t have the same kind of relationship with every person that I know.

Then I began thinking about Jesus’s following and you could break it down into multitudes. You could break it down to the 400. You could break it down to the 40, you could break it down to the 12, and you could break it down to the three. Now, not that we have to follow that model, but I began to realize, you know what? In order to be effective in my relationships, part of me work, part of the person work is I needed to realize that as I start bleeding into the people side, I got to choose my people.

Sounds very discriminating. And you know what? It is. It is discriminating. Sometimes we steal from our families because we don’t know how to create boundaries in other relationships outside of our family. And then finally place just real quickly there. Place is wherever we find ourselves in life ah that might involve work, going to school. Winston, you got two little ones at home.

I think what I have found to be very healthy in my life is to identify what season I’m at in life. ‘Cause if I can identify what season I’m in life, it helps me think better about, Winston, where I think you’re trying to lead us in this conversation. It really is an idea of thinking about life before I just dive into the calendar. And even more than that, what tools do I have to even dive into the calendar? Which we’ll talk about next is the quadrants.

Winston Harris: Yeah. And if I can kind of just circle back to this idea, which I think you’re hitting it pretty straight on, but the tension that a lot of us wrestle with is letting our life and the demands of our life form us versus interrupting that cycle and making a decision, “I’m going to inform the type of life I’m going to live.” I have to reconcile within myself first, to your point, who am I? What are my values? What are my desires? Where do I want to go?

And then from that place, how do I walk that out? How does my calendar reflect that? But if we never make time or we never ah take the effort and the thoughtfulness to reconcile and make a decision about who we are, then we will just constantly receive all the different demands, fatherhood, family, work, culture, life, and life is happening to us instead of actually living life, which I think is where you’re. Going initially is living on purpose.

Jim Piper: Yeah, I mean, let’s take, for example, Greyson is pursuing a masters of business administration. I think that’s what MBA stands for. I would call that a disrupting activity.

Greyson Hanna: To put it lightly. Yeah.

Jim Piper: And to choose to be a father, like you have, is a disrupting choice to do that.

Winston Harris: To put it lightly.

Jim Piper: To put it lightly. All right. Just make sure we’re all on the same page. Business celebrates disruptors, because that creates innovation that expands economy that pulls from more of God’s resources, from all of the talented people that he has reacted to your point and what you were getting at is that we can live a life where now we are to respond to things in life, that there are things that happen to us that come out of left field, as we say, that we have to respond to. But the systemic way that I believe that God has made us is to be disruptors. And we have to start by disrupting our own lives.

Let me give you an analogy. When a rocket– And we’ll talk about this probably if we have time later on the episode or we’ll have to do part two. The way to disruption is the creation of better habits. Not just ideas, but habits that you reverse engineer through a planning process, which we haven’t used the term yet. But what Jim uses is what’s called a playbook, speaking to the third person. Creating new habits is like a rocket that’s trying to explode out of our, I don’t know what the right word is, but I’ll just say our gravity.

Winston Harris: Orbit.

Jim Piper: Yeah, our orbit. And I don’t remember the percentages, but you guys might know this at the top of your head, but the vast amount of power that is used is simply getting out of our orbit. It’s like 90 some percent of the power of that rocket just to get out of, to disrupt. Then once they get into space, they use very little power. That’s a lot of what we’re talking about, very similar.

So I think what we do is we quit too soon because we underestimate what it takes to finish that MBA. What it takes to be a father who is present, realizing that though you got a ton of work to do, being present at that moment with your child is the most important thing you can do. And you are basically disrupting the rest of the chaos in the world. And you’re saying, this is what I’m going to do.

When I learned about the power of presence, it changed me as a person. That’s why I’m even more discriminating about what I say yes to and what I say no to. I try to meet with one person at a time and I try to take on one task at a time. But the world doesn’t like that. The world wants, especially nowadays with our mobile phones, texting, emails and what have you, they want me to be responsive right now.

And frankly, I want the world to be responsive to me also. I have very little patience for those that are not responsive. So I get it. But this is a life that God has given me to steward. If I’m going to serve, I need to understand how I’m going to serve so I can be better at serving. It can often be misunderstood for sure.

Winston Harris: You touched on this idea of a playbook. Walk us through what that even is. How would one leverage that, whether it’s the specific playbook you’re talking about or a general version of one.

Introducing the Four Quadrants

Jim Piper: Yeah. Can we talk about the quadrants first real quick?

Winston Harris: Yeah.

Jim Piper: Or at least let me define them. And I gave you guys notes on that. Let’s just look at it real quick. Because I think we’ve thrown the term quadrant two around already and maybe our listeners are already lost. So let me explain.

So Stephen Covey. I don’t know if it was actually original with Steve and Covey or if it came before him, but he definitely made it popular. That’s in the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, which even this morning I was listening to on my walk. I think it’s one of the most– When it comes to leadership, there’s a lot of great books today that are very innovative, very creative thinkers and man, they’re good.

But if you’re looking for classics, ones that, I just don’t think are ever gonna go away. There’s two by Peter Drucker. One is called The Effective Executive, and the other one is like Managing the Nonprofit. And you might say, “Well, why are you managing a nonprofit?” Well, when I read through that book, there’s principles in managing the nonprofit that the for-profit needs to learn that they will be better at if they did. The nonprofit has a lot to learn about being an executive on the other side. So both of those books by Peter Drucker and then The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey.

Quadrant One: Urgent and Important

So anyway, real quickly, so imagine four boxes, four quadrants, one big box broken up into four smaller boxes, right? And the quadrant one is entitled Urgent and Important and the definition of that is crisis, deadlines and problems. Now, in my ministry and in my work, the reason why I call them both is because I often tell my clients, I said, “I know you view what I do as a business and I suppose it is, it has business principles, but I view it as a ministry.”

That’s only because they haven’t looked at my playbook. My professional playbook is about shaping leaders. And I don’t see that as a business. I see that as a calling. I see that as a ministry in my life. So I do try to over deliver and under promise as we say.

So that’s crisis deadlines problems. And if you color code it, I think red is a perfect color for that. The truth is, and I don’t mean to be– I mean to be disruptive, not hurtful when I say most leaders live in quadrant one. That is where I’m going to diagnose, I know this hurts, where you’re being less effective as you could be. Because when you live in quadrant one long enough, everything that moves seems like you should be taking care of it. In other words, all you know is quadrant one.

Quadrant Two: Not urgent but important

Quadrant two, the best you can think of is going on vacation to Hawaii, which would be a quadrant two, but you’ve been living in quadrant one so long that when you get to Hawaii, it takes you three days to realize you’re in Hawaii. And then you get two days of enjoying Hawaii. Then you start thinking about the work that you’re falling behind on and you start cheating and doing your email and your texting and your phone calls. You’re living in quadrant one and you’re not as effective as you think you are because you’ve taught many of those that are working for you, that you solve their problems. You have an impaired, I can go on and on.

Quadrant two, the title is not urgent, but important. And this is things like planning, relationship building, personal growth stuff. You can throw in things like exercise, resting, whatever. I always think of big blue IBM. And I don’t know why, but I think Covey colored that blue. I don’t use blue for my calendar. I use green because green to me means grow.

If you look at my calendar, anything that’s green, whether it’s an appointment or a block of time or some activity, that means I am labeling it as quadrant two. So when I take a look forward, the first thing I’m looking for is I don’t have to get my magnifying glass out and to do a hard audit. I can see what colors are dominating my calendar and I do have red and I do have green. Now the other two colors I trade not to ever have. So let’s look at them real quick.

Quadrant Three: Urgent but Not Important

Quadrant three is entitled Urgent but Not Important. So why would those even be in our lives? Right? In other words, there’s somebody else’s highly important thing. So that’s interruptions, some emails and some meetings that you’re wondering why you’re in that meeting, right? Because you haven’t disrupted that issue. I do like this color yellow.

Winston Harris: Can we hang out there real quick?

Jim Piper: Of course.

Winston Harris: Maybe, Greyson, you can speak to this. I’ve experienced and I’ve worked and talked with leaders that have experienced the tension of maybe this is leading up or leading laterally, but you find yourself once again responding to the demands of being in this meeting, being on this call, even friendships. We can boil this down back to relationships. “Hey, come hang out with me, let’s go grab coffee, let’s go to this event.” And you just find yourself there. Maybe it becomes a rhythm and you’ve given people permission to draw you in, but you don’t need to be there. What do you do?

Jim Piper: You’re asking me.

Winston Harris: What have you done, Greyson? Have you done anything?

Jim Piper: I’ll speak to it. You may not like it, but I’ll speak to it.

Winston Harris: Greyson, what does that look like for you?

Greyson Hanna: I’m still figuring that out. But something I’m thinking through as we were just kind of talking about this, I feel like yellow is a symptom. If you’re in quadrant three. The color code is yellow. It’s a symptom of not having enough quadrant two time in your life.

Jim Piper: Very good.

Greyson Hanna: You said you color code it green for growth, but I also was thinking of the idea of sustainability, longevity, like you’re able to sustain life and sustain multiple seasons. It’s kind of like I had the analogy in my head of, I guess maybe it’s because I’m driving to Austin a lot, but getting oil changes and tire rotations. If you’re going down 35 twice a week, putting hundreds of miles on your car, going 80 miles an hour, you can’t just do that forever without taking your car in rotating tires, getting oil changes. Your engine’s gonna explode, your alignment is gonna be off.

That quadrant two time, the important stuff that’s not urgent, so it’s not top of mind, that’s going in, getting maintenance done. A diagnostic on your life, on your calendar, on your leadership, on your processes. If you don’t do that, then you start seeing things popping up on your calendars. Like, why the heck am I having these meetings? Why am I responding to this email at 12:30 in the morning? I mean, I catch myself doing that. It’s boundaries, but it’s a symptom of not having that quadrant too.

Jim Piper: That’s great. Yeah. And then when you guys get my age, you’ll notice that there’s a lot of softball pitches that are quadrant two. All my doctor visits, my dentists. You end up going there more, the older you get, but they are green and there’s a lot of people who ignore that. So that’s quadrant two. It’s a battle.  You guys hit the gym and I hit the gym, but I’m spending–

Winston Harris: Does it hit you?

Jim Piper: Yeah, it does hit me for sure. But yeah, if you look at my calendar, my dentist appointments, my doctor’s appointments, I’m having to be much more proactive. When I was 25, who needs a doctor? I’m running hard. That’s exactly right. Oil changes. When you were talking about when you were using the automobile as, you didn’t say that, but that’s what my mind went to. I thought, I saw my body. I go, “Yeah, oil changes. We’ve got to replace that shoulder. We got to do this. We got to do that.”

Winston Harris: What would you say to the leader that finds himself stuck in a responsive loop and they may be organizational savvy to come out of that?

Jim Piper: No, that’s really good. In most organizations, I don’t find bad guys. I just find systemic habits that aren’t the best. Systemic, and if I want to get negative and I don’t, but cultures that aren’t thoughtful enough. People get meeting to death. Patrick Lencioni and his work, Working Genius, talks about that. He talks about the different types of meetings there are. There’s really kind three main types of meetings. Typically we try to get too much done in a meeting because we’re trying to take all three phases of a project in one meeting and, then you got everybody, it just doesn’t work, you know?

So a lot of times you’re still going to have to go to those meetings because your organization is still maturing and understanding those things. But it doesn’t mean that you can’t ask the questions, you can’t– A lot of my coaching with junior leaders is helping them to do exactly that Winston is to learn how to become more proactive, ask respectful questions, make respectful suggestions about how we might be able to use our time better. A lot of that does go on.

I mean, that right there is probably an episode, but I would say you can be more proactive than you think you can be to get yourself out of meetings. That’s at least at a certain stage. For example, in every organizations, there’s usually big projects, and we get everybody rallied together because it’s a big project. If somebody had a little bit more knowledge about what we’re talking about, what they’d probably do is invite a, b and c to the– That type is leaving me right now, but it’s basically the ideation stage. There are certain people that are just better equipped for that. Then there’s that discerning and implementation stage and then there’s the execution stage. Those really are three different kinds–

Winston Harris: Activation maybe is the–

Jim Piper: Maybe, yeah, activation, there you go. So those are three different stages. Take somebody who has if we use Patrick Lencioni’s ideas, you take somebody who has tenacity. You are killing them if you are bringing them in those first two phases. You’re literally killing them and you’re wasting their time. And once you get around that corner, though, and you start needing people who know how to hold everyone accountable for tasks due, get ready to button this project up, then that’s where they come in.

Quadrant Four: Not Urgent and Not Important

It’s a long way to answer your question, but it is a real thing. Quadrant four is the most dangerous of all. If you find yourself in quadrant four, which is not urgent and not important, which they describe as distractions and time wasters and gray. This is a person that has simply lost at sea. This is person that is either burned out. They’re toast. They’re already toast.

So this is Netflix binges. This is honestly having one drink too many. Two drinks too many, doing things crossing lines, not paying attention to what we’re eating anymore, no longer working out. Saying what you think instead of having some emotional intelligence and holding back some of your words. When you get to quadrant four, you’ve already lost usually is the situation.

But you might be able look back at your seasons in your life, I know I can and say, “Man, I was just totally out of control there.” And what’s really crazy is a lot of time Quadrant Four comes after a big victory. Yeah.

Greyson Hanna: Let your guard down.

Jim Piper: You let your guard down and it sneaks in. It just has a way of sneaking in. So these are real, these are really important things. That’s why I don’t like to short circuit this in a conversation that we’re having because the how is important, but if all the things that we’re talking about, the what and the why, isn’t really embraced, you’re not going to do the how anyway. When these strike you, you go, “Goodness. Wow.” And then you go, “My life is too important for me to be in three and four and I’m going to be in some ones.”

And sometimes there is a season you guys were maybe 70% of your time isn’t quadrant one. You know, there are times when the ship is on fire and you got to bail water and you got to save somebody that’s dying. There are those seasons.

Winston Harris: Burp a baby at midnight.

Jim Piper: Burp a baby at midnight. Yeah. I don’t see that in my future.

Early Signs of Heading to Quadrant Four

Greyson Hanna: Jim, let me ask you this. So I imagine getting to quadrant four isn’t just a flip of a light switch. It’s a gradual transition.

Winston Harris: Decline.

Greyson Hanna: So what are some early signs or symptoms that you can spot before you find yourself fully in quadrant four or aspects of your life fully in quadrant four?

Jim Piper: Yeah, that’s great. I’ll take a stab at a few that I’ve seen, but there’s probably dozens and dozens, right? When you’re working in a job that simply doesn’t align to your strengths, that’s going to burn you out. Again, I’m referring to Patrick Lencioni only because he comes to mind since we’ve been exposed to that a lot lately in the communities that I’ve been involved with, even the workshops that I’ve led recently.

One of the things they talk about is there’s three kinds of containers that could possibly hold coffee. You have one that has a hole in the bottom. That’s when we’re working out of our frustrations, things that we’re just not good at that don’t fulfill us. And so just think about how long that coffee last. It doesn’t last very, very long. If somebody is working in that kind of a situation, because they don’t have a mission in life, they’re going to find other things to do and rarely are they healthy.

The second one is like you go to Starbucks and it’s amazing how hot that coffee is. And it does last for a good period of time, but you can’t leave it on the counter and come back four hours later and it’d be hot. It’s not. I don’t know about you guys, but I cannot take a cup of coffee from Starbucks and drink it. I got to set it down for five minutes. Those are competencies. One of the biggest burnout–

What research has shown is that we don’t usually burn out of our frustrations because we usually find that we get out fast. Where we burn ourselves out is when we develop competencies and people see our competencies and they keep giving us stuff for our competencies and we go, “Okay.” We’re receiving love from doing those competencies. And so we stay there, but there’s a burnout factor. It’s not mission focused. It’s not working that from the inside out, really thinking about where I want to go in life. What do I want to do?

So that’s where a lot of it comes from. That’s where it sneaks up on you. It’s not the frustrations, it’s the competencies. And then your genius is those where you get fulfilled. So normally you’re going to align that to some mission. And you don’t usually have to worry about that.

I would say another thing is that generally in life, you can’t fight two battles at the same time. That’s why when I work with younger people, I’m looking at that debt thing. We’ll talk about some definitions here about character in a little bit. But when your marriage is going sideways, and so now you have a battle there, and you got a battle at work, there’s only so much a person can handle. There’s only so many fronts that you can deal with. You have somebody close to you dying of cancer and you’re trying to focus on your work and these other kinds of things.

As a leader, it’s important to pay attention to the people in your life, to recognize that they are human and depending upon their temperament, they may tell you, they may not tell you. So everybody’s a little different. But I would say generally, if you see a change in somebody’s normal behavior, that is a symptom that tells you that they’re heading to quadrant four, three and four. Well, four, I’m just gonna say four.

Introducing the Playbook Concept

Winston Harris: It’s good. As we’ve unpacked the quadrants, you’ve alluded to this playbook as a response to or a tool to help us walk through these quadrants appropriately and view them well and even have a planned strategy for them. What is the playbook?

Jim Piper: Covey taught me the principles and I was all in at the age of 27. I was frothing at the mouth Covey fanatic. In those days, we didn’t have the software programs. You know, the little Apple computer was out. I don’t know if you guys remember that one with the little box, little window. You know, I owned one of those, but everything was still analog. Calendars were still written out with your pencil.

And so he created this very elaborate system. For me, it was exhausting. It taught me that I think that Mr. Covey, who’s no longer with us and I had the similar temperament, but if I were to have a scale of 1 to 10, my anal scale might be at a seven, which is pretty high, right? His was probably like a 10 point something. I realized that he really made– And this is no criticism to him. I think he’s one of the most brilliant minds when it comes to this that has ever lived on the planet, I just couldn’t keep up with his work. It was like a full-time job doing it all.

So back to Greyson’s question earlier about, how do you learn about yourself or whatever? But if I didn’t do that for like three years, I followed it like a religion and man, I learned a ton. One thing I did learn is I can’t do this. Rockefeller. Rockefeller, if you’re not familiar, was probably one of the wealthiest men in America who ran billion dollar organizations before billion was a popular term. Now we’re talking about trillionaires coming around the corner. Billionaires are almost like a dime a dozen now like millionaires used to be.

Well anyway, he ran all of his enterprises with a one-page strategic plan is what he called it. A one page. Now it’s kind of a lie because it was actually front and back. So all right, call it a two page. I said to myself, If he could run all those enterprises with a two page strategic plan, certainly I can run my life with a one page. And as time went on, it did become two as well. But I created what’s called a personal playbook and then a professional playbook. We also created a team playbook, but we’re not going to talk about that today.

The best way for me to describe a personal playbook and I learned this trial and error, but if I were to give it a different name, I’d call it my personal constitution. My personal constitution in my mind is a foundation, which creates strength for my professional playbook. And my professional playbook is important to me, but it wouldn’t nearly be what it is without my personal playbook. So let’s just maybe talk about some concepts on there.

Vision, Values, Purpose, and Goals

So one of the things that I’ve learned that’s different and a lot of this is going to be semantics. And so people might get frustrated with this, but if you give me a chance, I can talk through this. And as you guys ask questions and maybe share some of the things you’ve learned it’ll help. Let me just barf out all of the components of one first, right? So there’s vision. I’m going to share things with you guys though that’s probably different than what you’ve picked up on the streets, right? In school and whatever. But just remember, I’ve been there. I’ve been on that road. I’m not poo pooing anything. I’m just telling you what I’ve learned and what I share with my clients.

So there’s visions, there are values, there’s purpose, and there’s goals, goal steps. I’m sorry, goal categories, goal statements, goal steps. There are habits that are daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, semi-annually, annually. And then there are character elements. I know that sounds, “Oh my gosh, okay, I’m out.” Right? That’s a lot of stuff. That’s a lot of stuff. It’s a process and it’s a very important process.

Now let me go to the end. Let me go to the end. Let me talk about the equation and then let’s go ahead and talk about whatever you guys want to talk about from there. I put together all of those parts on, one document. You don’t have to have my document, I’ve actually have a portal that some of my crazy clients actually go into, enter the data and it spits out a playbook.

Alright, so you put together this playbook. I prefer and I always encourage people even though they’re in quadrant one, and they think they need to put together their professional playbook first. I’d pause and I sigh. I say, “Can we please work on your personal one first?”

Greyson Hanna: Well, that’s why they’re in quadrant.

Jim Piper: That’s why they’re in quadrant one.

Winston Harris: Right back to the profession.

Jim Piper: Right, right. Let’s go right to driving profits. We need more profits and yes, we do. We always need more profits. So anyway, whether we’re talking about a personal or professional, what I’m going to say now, so the equation looks like this. I create my playbook. Then what I do to my playbook then informs my calendar. You see, so we kind of skipped. We started talking about quadrant two.

How does quadrant two fit on a calendar? But do you just open up a calendar and start plopping in quadrant two? I would say no. I would say instead, what I do is I work hard working on my life, my personal life, my professional life. And then what I do is those ah Playbooks inform my calendar every Thursday evening. Every Thursday evening, they inform in detail the week that is to come and less detail the week after that and the week after that. But as I get closer to that week that’s coming, then it gets filled in. How does it do that? Well, it does it through three sources.

Usually the goal steps, the habits, and the character development elements. Those are the three things. Once I review each of the playbooks and then those three things get transferred onto my calendar. The playbooks inform my calendar. The world does not inform my calendar. My customers do not inform my calendar. My family does not inform my calendar.

One of the things that I think that Stephen Covey was brilliant on as he talked about a principle centered life. He talks about the difference between principles, values, and practices. That they’re different. Principles are unchanging truths that God has placed in the fabric of our existence that regardless of your religion, your paradigms, everybody knows about.

I know when I first read it I thought, I bet you I’m family centered. And I thought that was a good thing. I found out, no, it’s not a good thing because principles are bigger than family. They’re more important than family. They inform family. Principles inform business. Principle inform faith. Principles inform everything in those.

And that’s why for Christians who are familiar with your Bible, in Romans chapter one, Paul teaches that basically, what we would call observations, what we would call the world creation teaches us about God’s existence. And from that, we extract the principles of life that are here. They’ve been here since the Garden of Eden, and they’ll be here after I’m dead in the ground. These principles reign.

When we lead from the outside in, there’s nothing left. Because the outside, godless, less informed reality consumes us and requires more and more and more to where we are dead and we have nothing. So instead, we pull from the principles of life. We filter that through our playbooks. We inform our calendar and it’s kind of like you guys have seen that old analogy about putting the big rocks first, then the smaller rocks, then the gravel, then the sand and the water, right? That’s really the process. So that probably helps everybody think through that.

Then what I do is I cancel stuff. It happens every time. Because as I try to take an informed playbook, put it into the calendar, I go, “Oh.” The world has gotten in there first. And sometimes it’s not all bad. It’s good stuff. But almost without fail, on Thursday night, I’m asking somebody if they can move this or that, or I’m saying, “I’m sorry, I’m not going to do that.” Now you get better at not having to do that because you learned that, “Gosh, that’s uncomfortable. I don’t want to do that again. I don’t want to say yes. And then later say no, because that’s just not a good man.”

Winston Harris: Yeah. And I think what you’re speaking to a little bit is we touched on it earlier, but the more you reconcile who you are, what your principles are, what your values are, the more clearly upfront you’ll be able to discern or decipher what you’re going to agree to in the first place versus having to backtrack and kind of say, “I actually thought about that. I don’t really want to be a part of that thing.”

On the front end, you have more confidence and more clarity about what you’re willing to agree to. Then people have to respect that. If they don’t, obviously that’s a whole nother conversation.

Identifying Principles

Greyson Hanna: It might be a silly question, but I think it’s an important one because everything we’re talking about is rooted in principles. So if someone’s never sat down and thought about these things, gone through this exercise, how do you come to your principles? I’m sure a lot of people have heard of like the five Whys, you ask why five times. Is that a good way to go about it?

Jim Piper: Yes, that’s pretty–

Greyson Hanna: Because you’ve been doing it for a long time.

Jim Piper: Yeah, the five Whys, seven Whys. I think that even goes to like 13, 12. I mean, there’s different philosophies on that. And the reason probably why the seven or twelve or thirteen whatever isn’t popular because the five whys are hard enough.

Greyson Hanna: Two whys is hard.

Jim Piper: What Greyson is referring to is digging down deeper, right? Digging down, getting past the symptoms, getting past the what seems to be obvious and going through that. I don’t want to necessarily promote stoicism because stoicism in and of itself can become a religion, but there’s certainly nothing wrong with thinking more and observing more and traveling more and learning from other cultures more. That’s only helpful.

I mean, think about the things that you’ve experienced in your life outside of your norm and how that adjusted your paradigm. I mean, Stephen Covey tells a story, right, in his book. I’ll see if I can tell it real quick to get to Greyson’s question. So he’s on a bus. I think this is a true story he tells. He’s on a bus or train or something, airplane, something like that. There’s a man that has a couple of kids and these kids are just like going cuckoo. They’re just out of control kids.

Covey does a great job at kind of describing his much need for organization and neatness and, and no problems, right? While he’s describing that this was irritating him and everybody else around it, and he was trying to be patient at some point, he said he had a step in. So he carefully taps the gentleman on his shoulder and says in a very polite way says, “I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but your kids are basically acting like monkeys.” He didn’t say that, but you know, and whatever that was.

When he said that, when he tapped the guy in the shoulder, it was almost like the guy was somewhere else in his head and came back. And so when he came back, he looked around, looked at the kids and he goes, “Oh, it certainly looks that way. I’m so sorry. We just came from the hospital where these kids lost their mother and I lost my wife.” Covey said, I was operating on a certain paradigm at that point of how life should work and look. And then all of a sudden all the empathy in all of me came over me.

I think the answer isn’t an academic one. I think the answer is it goes back to a quadrant two because we could say, I mean, we could literally go in my library and pull out a book of stoicism and look at all the observations that would line up with your New Testament also Proverbs. You won’t see any contradictions there at all. Different language, different situations, different cultures, but deductive learning is never the best kind of learning, meaning someone gives you the answer. The best kind of learning is when you discover things on your own or in a group together.

Winston and I do it a lot um, and one of the funny stories we tell it, I don’t remember what it was, but we were at Torchies Tacos in Lincoln Heights, here in Texas and San Antonio. We were enjoying some chips and queso. I haven’t been exposed to it. So I was really enjoying that.

Greyson Hanna: It’s a good queso.

Jim Piper: Yeah. Good queso. I was drinking my diet coke and, I asked Winston a theological question I think it was, and it was a hard one. He acted like a true professor. He looks me straight in the eye, dead eye and he goes, “It’s a necessary mystery.” I will never forget that answer for as long as I live. It was also a great way to dodge trying to come up with an answer. But you know, there are many mysteries to the person who lives in ignorance, who doesn’t chase after God, chase after the mysteries.

I think that’s where a lot of things are found. Like for example, one of mine, that I believe is a principle. And I’ve only been touting it now for probably three or four years. But it comes from loss, it comes from gain. It comes from the intersection of loss and gain. I used to say that pain is a synonym for love. And now I don’t even believe that. I believe love and pain are two sides of the same coin.

I don’t really believe that you can love without also experiencing pain. If you’re experiencing pain, on the other side of pain, there is love. That would be an example of my own words that are also stated in some of these philosophers, but in different ways.

Winston Harris: Yeah. I think for me personally, to your question, something tangible or practical, even that of, I am learning and have learn is just the importance of connecting to people that may model principles well. Some might call this mentorship, some might call this discipleship, but an intentional relationship with somebody further ahead of you and you’re learning from their life and you’re seeing what you can extract from their life that makes sense in your context, that almost supersedes context.

You’re just seeing, man this, person is a person of integrity and I want to literally model that. I see the effects of their life and I want my life to align with that. But it’s because of that principle that I’m seeing them live out in different ways.” And so I just think being in proximity to and being intentional with mentors or people that you can walk alongside and learn from ultimately, I think is a practical way to start evaluating, “Man,  I can see that principle in their life. I want to start employing that in my life.”

Character Elements

Kind of walking through this playbook idea, I think we’re about to jump into maybe just some character traits that are necessary as we’re walking through this process.

Jim Piper: Yeah, great. So the reason why I brought character into it is again, because of what I’ve learned, right? I hope this episode doesn’t sound like a know-it-all episode because that’s not what it is. Instead, it’s more like a wrestling match. It’s more like you know, surviving through the desert. Being promoted to positions in my life at different times in my life that I was over my head.

It was not being able to recognize the insecurities that I already had in my own life. That I would say things that weren’t exactly true or weren’t right down the line. And then later say, “Why did I say that? Why did I do that? Why did I agree to something that I didn’t really want to do? And why did I say a white lie there? Why did I not expose everything? Why could I not make a decision? You know, why did that wound me? Why did that hurt me?

That’s where this is coming from. You know, it’s coming from I was so guarded when I was younger. I had to be. Whenever I made an error in baseball or otherwise in life, I had self-hate. My bar for myself was working against me because by nature, I’m an entrepreneur, I’m a risk taker, but I had these undeveloped weaknesses in me that were at war with those things. So I was a prisoner feeling like I couldn’t get out and be who I was.

To give you an example, when Phil Eastman, became an associate of mine in our work in his master thesis, him and I were talking. We were in Minnesota taking classes together, working towards a doctorate deal that I never finished because, and I know this is going to sound silly, but I finally had enough courage to ask myself, why am I doing this? And I couldn’t come up with a reason why I wanted to do it. I knew my dad wanted me to be a doctor. He wanted me to have that. That’s awesome. He never pressured me, but you know, they dropped stuff, drop hints and what have you. My dad is still with us today. Great man. Love him to death. Hope he listens to this episode.

But Phil asked me a question. He says, “Everybody uses the term character, but nobody defines it.” The best that we hear of is three things. Character is honesty and integrity. And then some wise guy came up with the idea, character is what you do when no one’s looking. Who could argue with that? Right? I mean, that sounds pretty good, but he went ahead and did a study on it. His study was beautiful. He came back and he wrote a book, which I still have in my library and it’s out of print now. But I have to kind of guard it because it was a shaper for me.

What he found was that there are literally seven elements of character. Four of those elements are centered around our temperament, which is interesting because Ezekiel chapter one, one of the oldest books in the Bible, lists the four temperaments. They’re listed right there. That’s why I always encourage people to take the MBTI because it kind of mirrors that. I’m not saying that’s the best temperament assessment. I’m not saying that. I am saying it’s a great foundational one to start with.

From that, he came up with, his research showed– I’m going to see if I can remember this, wisdom, justice, temperance, and courage. The New Testament, which to me is a very instructional book, not just for people of faith, but even people who doubt the story of Christ, it’s an incredible book to read. There are so many wonderful things that you can extract from that. Well, the New Testament affirms those four and then adds a supernatural group that I believe all humans have, yet takes a unique relationship with God for them to blossom, which is faith, hope, and love. Those are the seven character elements.

Now what I do with that is once I put my playbook together, now people have taught me this. Everybody’s taught me all this stuff, right? None of this is new with me. I just rearranged it and came up with my own phrases and stuff that worked for me. Well, I was taught by David Cook, one of the best coaches in our nation, that goals should not be easy, and they should not be impossible.

Although a lot of people will tell you that you need to reach for the heavens because if you fail, you’ll still have your high elevation. He pooh poohs that. And he also pooh poohs setting easy goals. He said they should be difficult. Goals should be difficult. Reachable, but difficult. There’s a lot of reasons for that that we don’t have time to go through in the episode. But when you apply logic to it, it makes sense, because it tests your desire, it tests your skill, what have you.

So when you put together your playbook, it should be difficult. So difficult means that there’s probably an element of character that you need to grow in in order to accomplish this playbook. That’s where I added in the character element. Can I identify what it is that’s going to keep me from achieving this goal? And then that would become part of my plan to work on and to develop.

Real quickly, let me share a couple other little practical things that kind of help everybody fill this in. I think I said earlier, once the playbook informs my calendar, what that looks like is I’ve got blocks everywhere. And then of course, there’s plenty of room for all the small rocks to come in and they find they find their place.

What I didn’t touch on earlier is how it can transform your family because it is no longer my calendar. Now it is our calendar. I don’t have a calendar that’s separate from my wife’s calendar. It has become one calendar. So it’s a dance which makes the blocks even more difficult. Now yes, some of them overlap. You know, she might be here doing this, I might be somewhere else doing that. But we have them both on there. So that’s something that we learned. It really only the last five years. So that’s kind of new for us, which is really cool.

Let me tell you some other nuances that has shaped my calendar. That won’t be your case, probably because of age, where I’m at in life where you’re at in life, maybe where the listeners are at in life. More than 90% of all my appointments happen on Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday. I don’t make appointments for Monday and Friday because of the self awareness of who I am and what I need so that I can be on my game Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday.

I don’t do well when I’m trying to scatter all these different categories in one calendar, but that took me years to learn. So when I’m in coaching mode, I’m in coaching mode. And you know, I’m like a horse with blinders on. I’m giving myself to these clients Tuesdays, Wednesdays, Thursdays. It’s that. My Mondays are for a certain thing and my Fridays are for a certain thing and my Saturdays.

Do I use task list? I don’t and I do. I don’t in the traditional way of using task lists. But if you open up any of my quadrant two blocks, you will find a list of tasks. This is how I’ve learned to deal with my moods. So anything that survives in that block of time that I’ve written in tasks, I open it up and now I’m in the mood to deal with those two tasks. I’m not in the mood to deal with that. Or now it doesn’t matter whether I’m in the mood or not. This baby’s screaming because it’s a quadrant one. So I got to do it. That’s kind of the realities of how I dealt with my own humanity. If that makes sense. I didn’t feel like I closed that loop well enough on that.

Practical Application and One Thing Focus

Winston Harris: It’s really good. If I can just speak to even just the practical thing that I am learning and this comes from just the reality of being married this year, fall, eight years married, two little ones, got three and a half year old and now one month old and pretty busy guy. There are oftentimes where working with volunteers, working with their schedules, responding, being responsive to the needs of those that I’m leading and partnering with. I found myself working after office hours.

My wife being an accountability partner, having the leadership to disrupt that cycle, if you will, for using the language that we’ve been using and us having a conversation to figure out, okay, what is a healthy way to still lead those that we’re responsible for leading, but also make sure that we’re healthy at home and where all things are in order. And so come into this agreement that, okay, let’s say, Monday nights are, if anything is going to be scheduled after office hours, meetings or events or whatever, let’s make that kind of the standard that we just know that Monday nights are gonna be after hours, potentially after hour meeting nights.

And that way, more so for her, but both of us, now we have this expectation that is understood versus previously, maybe it kind of felt like on her end, this came out of nowhere or there was a misprioritization of my work versus my marriage or my family. Us partnering together on the calendar makes it way more tangible and digestible. Now we can look ahead and say, “Okay, that specific Monday, we know what to expect.” And also at the same time, now we understand Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday feels differently because we’ve agreed on this Monday night thing. Just even that.

Jim Piper: You know what else that does for you is once you start putting in the big rocks, right? Then you get a little bit stressed out because you go, “Well, gosh, that only leaves this much time to get all this done.” No. What that means is you have all this time to get the most important stuff done. And so now you’re having discriminating more and more. So the secret isn’t about more and more. It is about what you throw overboard so that you will do the most important things. So that comment right there is drilling down to where this eventually gets you to.

To what you’re saying, Winston, I want to make this clear for Greyson and yourself and the listeners is that I want you to understand, set my personal constitution aside, because that covers my life holistically from a foundational base. But my professional playbook in no way tells you everything that I do. It only tells you what I’m going to do to accomplish this thing that I’ve listed. So it is very, very focused.

Let me throw in another thing if I can, because you’re on the calendar. If you go to my professional calendar, if you go down to the habits, you will see. I forget how it’s stated. I don’t know if you have it in front of you guys, but I can pull it up if it doesn’t. But it should say like one thing or–

Greyson Hanna: Yeah, daily. One thing.

Jim Piper: One thing. Okay, let me tell you what that means. And that’s the other thing. You know, you can code your playbooks so that you don’t have to worry about getting in the hands of somebody else. Because they don’t even know what the heck it means. Because there are some things on the playbook that are very personal, if you go to my personal one, especially, but you won’t know what it means because I’ve coded it. But I’ve learned that right? I mean, this is it’s a crazy invention.

But shoot, I’m gonna lose my train of thought. Oh, one thing. The game changer that I learned about 18 months ago that I’ve only been practicing for a year and a half. And it has brought a whole nother level. It’s I asked myself before I start the day every day. If nothing else gets done, what is the one thing that’s going to get done? And here’s how I make that decision. I go into the future and I say, “All right, let’s say this doesn’t get done. That doesn’t get done. Oh my gosh, what a nightmare if that’s it. But this does get done, how am I going to feel?”

And I can literally feel the relief. I could feel the sometimes excitement sense of accomplishment. And that becomes my motivator to let nothing else distract me from getting that done. So will distractions happen? Yes. Will interruptions happen? Yes. But no matter what, and I also share those with my wife every single day, and she’ll say, “What’s the one thing?” “This is the one thing.” “Okay.” So you can have a bad day, you can have this interruption, but this day’s not over until that thing is done.

So that does sometimes bring in the midnight oil. But I’ve already counted the cost and I’m going to do it. But a lot of times it doesn’t. It just says those other things have to be transferred over. And yes, now I got to adjust my calendar to reality, but I got that one thing done. I mean, how does it usually happen, you guys? The one thing doesn’t get done and that’s just becomes another thing. And then another thing. Then you get freaked out, stressed out, and you’re not a very good person.

Greyson Hanna: Usually that one thing you can get to tomorrow, which tomorrow’s not that far away. Tomorrow’s fine. But if you keep pushing it to tomorrow, next thing you know, it’s been three months. Now, depending on how important it was, you’re in a real pickle. Yeah, I know that’s good. The communications key. I feel like that’s a whole episode in and of itself by communicating.

I know personally, when I’m communicated to or when I’m communicating to the people that’s important to me, it prevents stories being made in their heads, which then has a whole other trickle effect. It ruins their day and it ruins the dynamic of your relationship and it sets a tone that you don’t want in the house.

Gravity of Comfort and Disruption

Winston Harris: I think what I find is that the gravity of comfort suffocates the potential for what we’re talking about, which is disrupting rhythms in our life or in our household or workplace that continually once again– When I say gravity of comfort, it’s comfortable to just accept the meeting that you don’t need to be in. It’s comfortable just to accept this is the season of life in our home or this is just where we’re at in our health or in our finances.

But to have the courage, to go back to the characteristic, to have the courage to disrupt that cycle and take the time to reconcile, okay, what needs to change? Who do I need to be or who do I want to be and what does that need to look like on my calendar? What does that need to look like in my personal constitution? But so many of us allow that the gravity of comfort just to keep us in the same place and we just keep in that quadrant one, quadrant one, quadrant one.

Greyson Hanna: That makes me think of, you remember back in school or if you’re at some sort of seminar, they always say, “No question is a stupid question because someone else in here probably has the same question.” That makes me think too, everyone is comfortable. Most people, unless they’re doing intentional strategic planning for their life like this, everyone’s comfortable.

And so there’s probably other people that think that that meeting’s pointless. There’s other people, your wife, your kids, they feel that there’s, we’re heading down the wrong path. We’re in a rut. But as a leader, we need to be the ones to make the change. They probably won’t even realize it till after you do it. After you say something, after you bring it to the surface that they felt the same way and they just needed that nudge to make the change that everyone felt under the surface.

Interdependence and Communication

Jim Piper: Yeah, there’s a progression, right? I think Covey teaches this too. Before we close this episode, I think this is worth it if you guys are able to do this. But I give you permission to look at the two playbooks I’ve given you. And there’s a spurning questions that you have, like, what is this and how does that work or whatever. Let me say this, Covey teaches this to what you guys are just talking about. Since we picked on meetings as one example, right?

And every progression of the most ultimate healthy place is interdependence, right? You’re in that meeting because people think that– I mean, have you ever been not invited to a meeting and you’re going, why wasn’t I invited to a meeting? Right? We’re weird. Right. We get a little bit upset for not being invited to a meeting and now we’re in a meeting. We’re going, “Why am I in this meeting?” Right? Let’s own some of that too.

We go from dependence. So we were very childlike in almost every process. Someone has to change our diapers, feed us. You get the idea. You can call that the onboarding process maybe. And then you go to dependence. You’re going, “Okay, I understand what I need to do to be effective.” But to get to interdependence, meaning part of what you know you what you need to do is you also need others.

And so that becomes an interesting, what’s the word I’m looking for negotiation, communication about to be to be more effective, I need your help. to consider this, maybe this is when I should be brought into the meeting. Just using that as an example, but making sure that you’re not portraying yourself as the butt head, but as somebody who understands as a member of the team, this is an important meeting. But the 30 minutes of this or that, I could be doing this. And how can we communicate that I do believe this is important meaning, I also– You know what I mean? So we’re trying to create that, right?

Winston Harris: Same thing with our spouses.

Jim Piper: Yeah, exactly. Because another definition of leadership is it’s a dialogue, right? It’s not directives, it’s a dialogue.

Winston Harris: That’s good.

Greyson Hanna: And everything has seasons. So that meeting might have been a very critical meeting at one point in time in the organization, and now it’s not quite as critical. So reevaluating and then having that communication of, hey, let’s just circle the wagons again. Do we need to keep doing this?

Winston Harris: I think the playbook dissection, if you will, warrants another podcast. I think we will land the plane here. How would you want to land the plane here? Just kind of wrap this up.

Ending Statement and Wrap-Up

Jim Piper: I just happened to have a statement that I think would be good to land the plane. You ready for this? I had to write this down because I haven’t memorized it yet, but I think it’s worthy of memorization. Almost like a Bible verse. Happiness, and you know, lot of Christians poo poo that word. I don’t think they should. Although I understand why they do. I mean, I guess I shouldn’t get distracted. Let me finish.

Happiness is the fruit of desire and ability. This is complicated. Happiness is the fruit of desire and ability to sacrifice what we want now for what we want eventually. I’m going to read that again. Happiness is the fruit of desire and ability to sacrifice what we want now for what we want eventually. That’s what a playbook is all about. That is what it’s about.

That is why you’re getting your MBA. You’re sacrificing money. You are sacrificing time. And you’re sacrificing time away from your spouse, Tess, because you’re envisioning something else. Not only is it giving you language that is going to align you to clients who use that language, it’s also given you understanding of more complicated concepts.

It’s building a sense of confidence in yourself. It’s also given you credentials. It is giving you things that you desire down the road, but you’re having to sacrifice for it now. That’s essentially what a playbook is, whether it’s relational, financial, whatever.

Winston Harris: That’s really good. I think that’s just an incredible way to say we want to live on purpose. We want to live on purpose. Looking forward to the next podcast. We’ll maybe do a deep dive into some playbooks and maybe almost kind of like a Q&A and pick your brain-

Jim Piper: That’d be good.

Winston Harris: -Jim on the specific playbooks and get more granular in it. Thank you guys as always for joining us and we’ll see you next time on the Today Count Show.

Outro

Winston Harris: Thank you for joining us here at The Today Count Show. Be sure to like and subscribe on whatever platform you listen to or watch, so you don’t miss any content. Stay tuned for more coming soon.
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