Sharpen The Saw
LISTEN ON YOUR FAVORITE PLATFORMS
Audio Transcript:
Well, I'm not proud to say I did not at all flourish on last week's Flourish Friday. And I want to talk about that. But first, real quick. we appreciate a review. Obviously. As always, give us how many stars you think we're worth. If we've said something that's been beneficial to you or you've taken something out of this podcast, please review it, add some comments, whatever you can do.
We are grateful for it. So last Friday, yeah, I sure. Thank you for getting out an episode that was prerecorded from something else we did. I was not able to record a podcast. I didn't even know what planet I was on. I was in the air. yeah. Great. It's a I rate five star. Go to the air.
I'm just kidding. Obviously. And I'm being a jerk about it. I've found myself how to get there. I found myself in a spot where these last as you know, we've talked about this. I really refocused on my health. towards the end of last year, I found. Yeah, in my time, you know, I'm always kind of doing this.
Thanks for always optimizing. I get it, but I really had some good successes. And what I did with that, that, that new energy and that new bright is, is I poured more work on I just piled piled, pile piled. And what happened is I began to feel that wear on me. And I didn't take the right measures, and so ended up in the air with some stubborn stuff and whatever else.
And you don't need all the details. But the point is, I wasn't to gear myself one day myself. And so, I think that happens to maybe a few of us in earshot right now where we just got a lot going on. Right? So we're we're dads were moms. We got we got our families going on. Husbands, wives, partners, whatever.
We've got our community. That's, maybe they're frustrating or there's something. There's opportunity. You know, it's not always the bad stuff. It's all the good stuff. You're excited about the things all of that creates. Yeah, stress in our bellies and whatnot. and then obviously there's, there's there's work. Right. And whether whatever your role is, it's it can be heavy at times or it can be a lot.
And again, I think what I, I'm not here to say stress is bad. I think stress is actually fantastic when I'm stressed it when it's when it's proper, when it's when it's coming out of you know, in waves or in in moments that we can have that stress and distress and stress de-stress. That stuff is magic. And really, I think, shapes us to be even better.
And so we can spend our buckets on that. So it's this isn't a anti-stress podcast. I'm not saying, you know, don't stress yourself. Don't do things. Yeah. You actually I'm I'm okay with that. I think that's part of what what gets us there. I'm also saying okay does come back. So yes, I had too much on my plate, all these things.
But I also wasn't even though I was up take care of myself. I wasn't like, super take care of myself. I was doing enough to get some benefits. I was feeling better, put it right back into to work and whatnot. and so there, there is this notion of it's there's just that whole rain barrel effect. I think I can move there's every analogy.
There's nothing under the sun but the idea of, okay, each rainstorm fills it up a little bit. Just a little bit. Well, if you have lots of storms going on at one time, whether that be work life, diet, movement, stress, whatever it is, that all adds to the barrel. And, I just had the barrel overflow on last Friday.
So here we are. What am I doing about it? And you know what I'm not doing about it? Let's talk about what I'm not going to do. I am not going to be the victim here, and I'm not going to, you know, believe that lie that you have to throttle back or stop being awesome. Now, I'm going to keep being awesome and I'm gonna try to be awesome.
Let's put it that way. I'm going to try to be awesome at what? At what I'm doing, at work, at what I'm doing at home and what I'm doing in my community. Absolutely. father found a friend, man. I'm going to I'm going to try to be awesome there, but I'm also going to try to be awesome at taking care of myself and applying that same level of of rigor and and energy and all that towards making sure I am taking those moments to be still and be quiet and take care of myself and eat right and move and all the things right.
And again, everybody's got a different plan. Your plan may be different, my plan, but you got a plan. And what I found is as I ramped up the the self-care stuff suffered and I spent less time taking care of self because I was feeling great. Now I can push on and it's just, stupid. Maybe you're. Maybe you're listening and you're 25.
Okay, great. You still have limits. maybe you're 35. You still have limits. 45, 55, 65 the limits become, just a little more near and dear. And so I just, I but I refuse to see myself as a victim. I can crank it. I Craig, with the best of me and I will and I will continue to, but I will focus that same level of excellence on myself.
And I think that's, that's important. So that's that's where I am. But I'm also there's something's got to do. Right? So when I look at my world, three areas that make sense to me that need some focus. And, you know, your situation may be different, but I you know, upon my reflection, this is where I'm at. One is workload.
I've just got too much. Doesn't matter how much I manage the the deck chairs in the Titanic, I have too much work on my plate. And that doesn't mean. Oh, I'm, you know, irreplaceable. But it just means I'm not managing myself. I'm not communicating. Well, I'm a delegating. Well, I'm not engaging in collaborating. Whatever it is. I'm not prioritizing.
It's too much. It's not. It's not anybody else's fault. I'm not a victim. I've allowed too much work to pop on my plate. so there's approaches, there's all these things. So I'm putting in some plans to look at my workload on a routine basis and make sure I'm being realistic about what I can accomplish. Again, I'm not saying I'm going to, you know, lower my expectations for when I'm probably I probably need to adjust expectations here, there, especially on the ramp up in the healing journey.
But it's not about like, oh, let's just ratchet it all down and numb ourselves and be half the employee we should be, or half the CEO or whatever your role is. but I do need to be realistic about the workflow or the workload, and I've got to make sure I'm not overwhelming myself with workload. That's just too much.
so that's one workload. The second one is all about really my schedule and looking at what I'm doing and when I'm doing it. And I'm pretty, pretty good about that. I mean, is that pretty. Well. But again, I will let things bleed if I put something on the calendar for me to take care of myself. And there's something that pops up with work or whatever, it's a soft place to land and I end up replacing it, whereas I wouldn't reschedule a customer call or something I'm doing externally, or even something a lot of times internally with work, or if I've got, you know, and this this goes to the bigger picture too, obviously,
when you look at schedule or time management, you know, if the kids have an important event, I meet it. Or if my wife needs me for something, I meet those things. So I try to put those in my calendar when I can, as at all, and I tend to not run over them. But if I've got stuff for self-care and they're soft placement, it pushes, it flattens, it goes over and it's gone.
And then that time is spent. So I need to do a better job from scheduling management and those two tied together. Obviously there's workload then their schedule and I you got to tie those together. and then I think there's, there's another aspect of, of task management that comes with this. Like how I'm doing this. If a project management.
So I've got the workload, I've got my schedule set now, the actual execution and how I'm going about that. And you know, if you're listenership you probably have this stuff pretty well sorted out. But I think all of us could always use tweaks in mind. My needs are tweak. I've got a little bit of a little bit too much frenetic where I'm bouncing around.
I've got a lot of task switching. I don't have as as maybe, well managed, well managed tasks sometimes, or tasks management, project management where I need to improvement there. So those three things so it's it's it's workload. It's schedule. It's project management or task management. Those three areas for me I'm going to be all over that for the next period here.
The next 90 days of, you know, I'm in a 30 day sprint focusing heavily on those. And, we'll see where I go. And I'd love to hear things you're doing, but but again, I do want to circle back. I am not a victim here and I won't I won't take that victim path. And I think that's super important when some of us get in these situations and it's natural to go feel like, oh, I better, you know, cut way back and and maybe you do.
Maybe you do need maybe this is not this is not what I'm playing here. This is real stuff. I mean, the the your asset is you. You are the asset. You're the golden goose. You can lay lots of eggs. You're not you're you're not an egg. You're the goose. And if you aren't taking care of the goose, you're in real trouble, right?
Hopefully you guys know that that, that fable. All right, so what else? All right, so what's next? I do want to talk, like, more broadly. and I don't want to spiel self-indulgent. We're talking about me. So ends up more broadly. What are we doing at the company? I think this is an interesting thing. We just there's a there's a, phrase that I stole from Stephen Covey way back in the day called Sharpen the Soul.
And I've always had some integration of sharpening the saw in my calendar for forever since then. So you were talking a couple decades worth of always having some notion. Now what I follow it and what I do it, you know, that's all things. But but the the analogy is think about somebody cutting, whether you're using an ax or a chainsaw or a or whatever else, sharpening that blade allows you to move faster through your work and whatever your work is, you know, your metaphorical work.
And if you just keep hacking away, you just keep grinding with the chainsaw. at some point it's not very sharp. And it's also then not very effective. And you're putting a lot of effort, but you're only getting a little ways in where if you took the moment, start, stopped for a second, sharpen that, so then went after it.
It's it's more effortless. It's there's effort involved. But it feels that way. It actually is just like a hot knife through butter. Right. As you're cutting. So that analogy take that in and and and I'm looking to continue to apply that in a more and with more, more earnest. Right. I'm going to be more honest about it. And more deliberate about making sure it's there.
But with the company we did that this week, we actually a complete coincidence that, the, the Thursday night that I wig out the following Monday and through Friday and the weekend the following Monday, our company begins to sharpen the saw a moment where we're taking a moment, take care of ourselves. And what that means is we're doing all kinds of things in there.
But I want to go back to the metaphor for just a minute. when I was a kid and we were, we were cutting wood, whether it was my grandfather or my father or, you know, a bunch of bunch of folks. you know, those times to sharpen the saw were great because it did to get a little bit of rest.
Right? There's there's that. But also it was it was cool because then when you got back to work, I mean, you could, you could go a lot faster. So you could kind of get there and get out. But that was also time to sit around and share wisdom. I mean, I was learning all kinds of cool things from my grandfather and my father, whomever.
And it was just it was a really neat moment. And so we we really, you know, in some cases really planned it out. In other cases, people just kind of naturally bought into the metaphor where this week we had a series of events each day of this past week where, we had trainings. So we had learning learning scenarios where we go through.
We had we had time in the morning, we had learning stories. Then we had the afternoon. It was basically blocked off for different things each day. and each individual person. Yeah, we all have our own inner Socratic needs and things. We're able to focus on things that were important, but there was some kind of like guidance of what need happened, the company, whether there's process, approved approvals.
Right. Every periodic process, approvals, cleanup, inbox cleanup, counter cleanup, all the things that that tend to get loose. It's kind of like, like a spring cleaning moment. we had that, and it was pretty cool. I mean, for a first, we kind of rolled in with some some folks just just really just dove right in and embraced it.
And the team was great. And I found it to be really impactful, a positive, a real positive. And so we're going to do it again in the fall and we'll see. I imagine then now after everybody's had a taste and we go into this thing and prepared, it's really going to be impressive. So I would encourage you if you've if you've got this kind of be able to, to influence this thing in your organization or your team, that kind of notion, whatever it looks like for you guys might be valuable, maybe might be worth trying out.
It it was it was cool for us. So anyway, with that, I think, you know, this week, it's been an interesting week for me. It's been a week of of humility, but humble myself a little bit. it's been a week of clarity. And, you know, as I look going forward, I've already talked to you about the work models that I need to look into.
You know, the workload, the schedule, the task, the test tracking, but also my own personal focus, my own personal rhythm needs to be, needs to be looked at and improved. And ultimately, I need to be accountable. I need to be accountable to myself. I need to be accountable for those that I love. When you are a father founder, friend, you've got lots of folks count on you.
And that's not an ego trip, but that's just a reality. And what an idiot I would be to not take care of myself, to be able to be whatever I need to be for those around me and for myself. So, yeah. So that's that's kind of my focus for now. I don't know, we all have wake up calls.
We have different things going on. Let's see where this one goes. Follow me. Yeah. Oh, my feet to the fire. Okay. Hold me accountable. Let's hope that I, I get there. I'd love to hear things you're doing. that that you found has been helpful for you in these situations where it would be great, but, but yeah, I think at this, what I would ask is if these are valuable to you, you know, share these with a friend.
Who. All right. Let's say share with a friend who, takes great care of themselves in this way and or share them with a friend who maybe needs to take care of themselves. and before they get a situation like I'm in. Because I'll tell you, I do feel grateful. Not all situations in where I can be talking to you on a podcast later and everything's okay.
And I just got to focus more, right? So, Yeah, life is precious. do things, I hope, wherever you may be. I hope you take care of yourself. I hope you're on a path. And I hope you're flourishing.
Alex Reneman is the founder of Mountain Leverage and Unleash Tygart and host of Flourishing w/ Alex Reneman. For 20+ years he has worked as CEO of Mountain Leverage, honing the concept of flourishing and experimenting with it in the business. In July of 2024, he decided to begin to share this idea with others, which led to his podcast, social content, and the plans for other initiatives in the future.
