12: Is It Time To Course Correct

Welcome: 00:00

Welcome to Leaders Lift Episode 12. I'm Greg Cunningham and I'll be your host and virtual coach for the next 30 minutes or so.

Intro

Over the last several weeks I've laid out my version of a leadership development program. We started out with foundational elements and went clear through to the point where anyone going through this program would have a solid plan to work on for…well, however long it takes.

One of the things that I did not address is just how dynamic these development plans need to be. If you were working with me on your plan, we would just get through all of those elements, build it into a plan and then assume you could just follow that to the letter and everything would be just fine. I have never seen that happen.

Sure you might be good for a few days or even weeks, but the one thing that I can guarantee is that eventually you will need to adjust that plan. While there will likely be many things that go well, there will also likely be things we didn't anticipate and unfortunately probably some things that just won't go well. That's all to be expected.

So what do we do in those cases? We course correct. That's what I'd like to talk about today. I'll share some stories about course corrections I have had to do in my life, course corrections I should have done and talk about this concept in more depth.

Pre-Roll

Before we start talking about course corrections, just a quick reminder that if you haven't subscribed or followed the podcast, go ahead and hit that button. Also, be sure to follow me on Instagram at ldrslft or follow Mt. Nebo Consulting on LinkedIn. I'm constantly posting in both of those places. That's where I announce new episodes and where I'm sharing more tips and tricks to help you on your journey. I'm also dipping my toe into the youtube waters. You can subscribe to my channel by using the link in the show notes or by searching for Leaders Lift in youtube.

Ok. Let's get started.

Little Lift Recommendation: 01:57

Before I go into story time and use it to lay the foundation of today's topic, I want to recommend a book for you to read. This is a book that anyone who is a tech geek, is a fan of the iphone or even uses an iphone might be interested in reading. It's called Creative Selection by Ken Kocienda (amazon affiliate link in the show notes). The reason I'm recommending it is that he actually has a pretty good story about a professional course correction he had to make before he started working on the iPhone. It's a great story and talks about several key elements of course corrections, including some things you should do and so things you shouldn't.

Topic Introduction: 02:38

When I think of course corrections, the process I recommend you go through is as follows:

1 - Recognition - first you need to recognize that something is off.

2 - Identify what is causing the offness.

3 - Analyze the situation

4 - Evaluate the situation against your priorities (what you want to get out of life and your plan to get there)

5 - Decide if a course correction is needed

6 - Identify possible new courses

7 - pick the one you feel is right for your situation

8 - Build a plan or change an existing one

9 - Get to work

10 - Be ready to tweak and adjust as needed

Story Time: 03:22

I have a whole bunch of stories about course correcting from my life. Hopefully that's not because I have constantly been heading down the wrong path. I don't think that has always been the case. But as we learn and grow and mature we often find small or even large course corrections that we should make.

The story I settled on is from early in my career and family life. I may have shared some of this already. If this sounds familiar, I apologize for the repetition but there are some aspects of this story that are very relevant to our discussion today. Also, if any of you find yourself facing a similar decision, please don't assume you can follow my example. I wouldn't necessarily advocate taking the same path that I did.

What I'd like to do today is tell the story (it's kind of long as it spans several years - not all course corrections take that long) and point out how I handled the steps I just mentioned.

After that, I'll step out of story mode and cover some other things related to course corrections

Here goes:

Background

I didn't have to work very hard in high school to get solid A's. I'm sure I worked harder in the various extra curricular activities and I believe it would have taken more effort for me to get bad grades. Coming out of high school, I had high expectations of myself, my family expected great things and so did most of the teachers I had. Just for context, I went to a pretty small high school. We had the first class to graduate 100 students and we hit 100 exactly. So I knew pretty much everyone in town and then knew me. One of my teachers told me shortly before graduation that he expected to see a Dr. title before I was done. That was actually my plan. I wanted to go to medical school.

In my first year at college, things went well. I did realize that I was not nearly as disciplined when it came to studying as I needed to be. I just hadn't learned that in high school. But I made it through.

I then took a two year break to serve a church mission in Brasil. There I got a whole other type of education and really grew during that time.

When I came home from Brasil, I got married before I went back to school and we started our family shortly thereafter. We were on the same page about starting our family and medical school. We knew it was going to be a challenge but we felt we were up to it.

First Road Bumps

My struggles got to be 10x worse that first year back. The first sign of real trouble was when I struggled to get through organic chemistry. I had never struggled at anything. I had been told that it was the one course that weeds out those that are really committed to med school and those that aren't. Maybe that should have made me pause and evaluate the situation. I didn't, I kept trying to make it work the rest of that school year.

After that year, I realized that if this kept up, I would not make it through 2 more years of undergraduate, 4 years of med school and then everything else that I would have to do before I could actually start practicing medicine. My scholarship was in jeopardy (which would have compounded the situation) and I just didn't see a way to keep going down the path.

So there is step 1 - recognized that something is off. I did. And step 2 - I identified that what I was trying to do in school was the source of the "offness". We can debate later if that was right or not. And then looking back on the situation, I did what probably a lot of folks do. I pretty much skipped steps 3 -8 and went right into step 9. I'm sure I thought it was the right thing to do at the time. It was kind of the right thing, but not completely. If I had gone through those other steps I might have saved myself another year of misery and student debt. Let's continue with the story.

So what did I do: I decided to change my major to something easier. There was still this pressure that I had to have a college degree to make it in life (I've talked about that in other episodes) so I tried to pick something that I could handle. I don't even remember what I changed it and it did not help at all. Things actually got worse if you can imagine that. Just an interesting side bar - during this year, I took what was considered to be the toughest undergrad class, Genetics, just because it sounded interesting and I did just fine. I didn't understand at the time why but looking back I think it was because it was something I enjoyed. Changing my major away from medicine and into something like business or political science was not a good change because I didn't care, I felt like I had already failed and I hadn't identified the root cause of why I was struggling. So don't skip a bunch of steps and move straight to an action plan.

Somewhere in the middle of all of this I received a pretty significant leadership assignment at church. It was taking many hours each week. So as a recap, I was a full time student, was working 40 hours a week, had this large church leadership assignment, we were managing apartments (so we could afford rent) and had expanded our family into the multiple kids range. I was certainly struggling everywhere and school is where I struggled the most. I'd go to the library to try and study (because it's hard to do in a 2 bedroom apartment with kids running around) and either fall asleep or get distracted. I had no desire to go to classes and for sure I wasn't learning much.

It's pretty obvious that something had to change and that my first attempt failed. At this point we actually decided to do step 3. It would have been nice if I had a manual back then listing out steps 1-10 for me. But I didn't. And it's possible that I wouldn't have appreciated them even if I did. Sometimes it's only through your own experience that we learn these skills and then we refine them as we apply them in our lives and teach them to others.

Step 3 or analyzing the situation was actually pretty easy. We had too much on our plates, I didn’t currently have the skills or drive to be successful in school and something had to change.

Step 4 was taking our current situation and evaluating it against what we wanted out of life. We had a lot of goals and being a doctor was just one of them. We also had the goals to not have my wife working outside the home while we raised our family. We also considered our commitment to God and our church assignments as what I'll call "immovable". We believed then and still do today that if He asks us to do something, he will provide a way for it to happen.

So our priorities lined out like this:

1 - God

2 - Family (that meant me having time to be a husband and father)

3 - Providing for the family

4 - Church service

5 - Schooling

We have found that over the course of our lives those have been our main priorities. Sometimes 2-4 shuffled around a bit depending on the time and the situation but that was our goal.

Number three was the biggest concern for us. I was working as a security guard (it's the kind of job you got as a student back then) so I didn't make much more than minimum wage and I was putting in 40 hours between Friday and Monday. That made church service more difficult to complete and gave me less time with the family considering school and church stuff during the week. We were managing our apartment building to get a discount on rent and my wife did daycare out of that two bedroom apartment. Even with that, and most young families went through something similar, we were barely getting by.

We knew at that point that we were currently doing did not align with what we wanted out of life. And we also realized that I had made a mistake in just assuming if I changed my major that would solve the problem. So the answer to step 5 was obvious - yes a course correction was needed.

Step 6 - options for course correcting. Assuming that our top two priorities couldn't change here are some of the options we had.

For providing for the family: I could try to find a better job. My wife could try and find a job. I could get another job. She could get another job.

For church service: I could ask to be excused from that assignment and free up some time.

For school: I could try and find something else that would be more interesting and working on my study skills and drive to be successful.

Those were all options.

What aligned most with what we wanted to get out of life was for me to find a better job, one that would pay better and would allow me to have time for family and for church service. Notice that I don't mention school in there at all. For all of this to happen, school would have to be set aside. Either completely or at least partially or temporarily.

For step 8 we decided to throw out our existing plan and build a new one entirely. Something like this:

First Steps

• I would look for a job that paid better, had potential career opportunities and had hours that were more conducive to our goals.

• School would be put on hold. That would take off some of the time pressure as well as alleviate some of the financial concerns.

• We would find a way to tell our families (probably the hardest step was telling my mom that I was done with school).

Other Steps

• Let our family "settle'

• Find ways for my wife to reduce her "work" so she had more family time too. This would only be possible if I was able to better provide on my own so we could stop managing apartments (managing low income apartments is not an ideal environment for young families) and she could reduce the amount of daycare she was doing.

• Keep serving as best we could in the church

Things to Keep In Mind

• Look for career opportunities that did not require a degree

• Be open to the need to go back to school at some point

Once we had prayed about it and felt that we were headed down a much better path, we got to work. I actually went back to a job that I had right when we got married. It was at the call center for a large regional bank. It paid better, was a better environment, I had better hours and because it was a fast growing organization, it opened up so many career opportunities.

Eventually we moved out of the apartments into something we didn't need to manage. My wife reduced her daycare to a more manageable amount and we kept serving.

Years later, our situation allowed me to go back to school and get my degree.

Throughout all of this time, we kept an eye out for other signs of a need to course correct and we were much quicker to do so. Sometimes that was to improve situations. Other times it was to take advantage of an opportunity to learn and grow.

I know that was a pretty long story but I believe it is a good example of how we can let outside pressures and situations get to the point where we have to course correct. It's also a good example of how when we decided to actually be deliberate about our course correction how things turned out much differently than when we just let the wind blow us wherever.

Looking back, I wish I had done the evaluation much earlier. At the same time, the lessons I have learned from this experience and the resulting paths that we have taken in life have gotten me to where I am today. I'm not always great at course correcting, but I have gotten much better about going through this process before things get so bad.

Hopefully this helps you develop your own version of a process to follow when things don't seem to be aligned and a course correction might be necessary. And you can learn from my experience.

Mid-Roll: 16:26

Just a quick break before I move on from story telling mode. If you are enjoying this episode or have enjoyed any of them so far, you can help promote the show by sharing it with others (using podcastplayers have an icon that's a square with an arrow pointing out of it for sharing. I also have a survey up on my website for feedback. I'm also dipping my toe into the youtube space. For now I'm just sharing some shorter clips from various episodes. Like everything, I'll work to refine the content there and maybe I'll get into some longer form video.

For links to all these resources and for other ways you can support the show, check out the show notes. In most podcast players they are part of the interface and you can click on the links and go directly to the sites.

Now back to our regularly scheduled program!

Heavy Lifting: 17:22

That story has had a tremendous impact on my life. Not just in learning how to deal with course corrections but it set me on the trajectory to get where I am today. We never know how things might have turned out if we made different decisions so I'm not going to dwell on that. What I'd like to do now is just talk through the concept of course correction and some of the lessons that I have learned.

In my story, it seems very obvious that something needed to change. I know that when we are in the middle of challenging situations like this, sometimes we don't see the need to make a course correction. Sometimes we need an outside party or some external stimulus to help us take a step back and realize what is going on. This can be even more difficult when it's not some major course correction or when the impact of something is not obvious.

I remember a doctor once talking to me about my high cholesterol. He shared with me that there really aren't any outward signs of high cholesterol. You need a blood test so diagnose and then figure out the right treatment. Similarly, there are probably hundreds of situations where we may not even notice something is off. We need to learn to look for the small subtle signs that there is something going on. Not all of these things may be as impactful as high cholesterol but if we have too many of these little things, they can really add up.

My early career mentor used the phrase "it's like being nibbled to death by ducks". Small, unimportant, minimal impact situations might be completely manageable or even ignorable by themselves. But when they all add together, they can become a big deal. And sometimes we won't even realize that we are adding these things together. Not to use another old metaphor but it's like putting a frog in a pot of water and then heating it up. Eventually the frog dies and it didn't even know it was in danger.

So what are some of the signs to look for. You probably have some that are very personal to you. I know I do. I'll share some generic ones and a couple of personal ones as well. Hopefully this will help you start identifying your own list. I do want to make it clear, that the signs and symptoms I'm going to talk about need to be taken in context. What I mean by that is that if any of these are having a significant impact on your life and making it hard for you to function, please get the help and support that you need. This podcast is not meant to take the place of those kinds of resources in your life. If you find yourself in that kind of a position, please get the level of help that you really need.

Probably the topic of the day that is a sign of the need for a course correction is burnout. I can hardly go a day without seeing one or more articles or publications talking about burnout and it's signs, causes, how to mitigate, etc. This morning when I woke up, I felt pretty drained when I thought about sitting down at my desk and getting to work. I read that as a sign that something is off. Maybe not anything major and I might need only to take a break to course correct but it is a potential sign.

Sunday afternoons, do you start dreading the return to work the next morning? When you get up do you have to fight off the excuses and "force" yourself to get moving. Do you find yourself slugging through your task list? Do you find yourself working more hours and making less progress? If anything like this applies to you then you may be headed down the burnout path and you may need to dial it back a little or even a lot. Or maybe you need a larger course correction. Sometimes if we can figure out a good way to dial things back, we can recharge the batteries and then move beyond the burnout. For more on dialing it back, go back and listen to episode 10. If you try to dial it back and it's still a problem, try working through the course correction steps.

Maybe it's not burnout. Maybe you are missing deadlines or milestones or maybe the quality of your work has either plateaued or maybe even taken a step backwards. Or maybe the work you are doing no longer holds your interest. Has a project gone sideways (this is one where you need to see if you need a course correction or maybe just the project does)? It could also be that your team is struggling or not making the kind of progress you expected. Sometimes we just get into a rut and we go into cruise control.

That leads to another sign - have you stopped growing? Do you feel like you are just coasting through life? This one might be hard to recognize as an issue. When we get comfortable in a situations, sometimes it hard to tell if you are just going through the motions or coasting. I'm not saying that coasting is always bad. But if you realize that you have been coasting for a long time, that might be a sign that a change is needed.

Now, just a bit of a clarification here. If we are going through a period of stress or a rough time, then coasting is not a bad thing. In a talk by Dieter F. Uchtdorf he talked about how trees slow down their growth and how when a plan encounters turbulence, most often the right thing to do is slow down to an optimal speed (most would think you need to speed up and get through it as soon as possible). Scientists can look at the rings of a tree and know when they faced a lack of water or other resources to help with growth. Similarly for us, if we are in a time of stress, we probably should slow down our growth and should focus on the things that matter most and we may even need to do something to recharge.

I want to wrap up this section and talk about one other sign that something is off and you probably need to find a way to course correct, or at very least find a way to dial it back and recharge. What I want you to watch for are the times when your default behaviors that can be potential pitfalls seem to get more extreme. Let me give you an example.

My introvert personality style has gotten less severe over time. One of the signs that I need to dial it back is when I start to retreat away from others more so than usual. Then if things get really out of whack, I get to the point where I don't want to be around anyone, even my own family. The drive to be isolated gets to be very extreme. That's when my head starts making plans to take the camp trailer somewhere for a week and not take anyone, even my family with me. Shortly after I start thinking this way, I so into silent mode. It's not that I'm mad at anyone, I just don't want to talk to anyone (and there are quite a few folks in my house and it's hard to avoid them all.

I've learned overtime to see this signs. In most cases, I can use some of my techniques to recharge my batteries and I can come out of this pretty quickly. Then there are other times where even my recharge or dialing it back techniques don't help me get back to a normal state. Then I know that something bigger is going on and I need to evaluate my course and determine if a correction is necessary.

This kind of thing can happen with any of your default behaviors that you have been working on. If you have figured out how to mitigate some of your potential pitfalls and they are back, then you need to take notice and figure out what you need to do about it.

That leads into our final sub-topic for today, and that's how to make effective course corrections.

If I keep using the example of my levels of introvert, you can see how initially it makes sense to try and recharge or dial it back. Then if that doesn't work, you need to take bigger steps. Sometimes that is a small course correction. Sometimes that's a big course correction. But you may also need to get some outside, even professional help. I’m going to focus on the types of corrections where you don't need professional help.

First of all, course corrections, big and small, I wouldn't say are ever really easy. Almost always it requires you to admit that you were wrong (even if it's only to yourself). That's not very fun. But then as I showed in the 10 steps above, it always requires some mental effort, planning and then determination to follow through. If the course correction also involves others, it's going to require collaboration, trust, communication and all of the things that go along with building and maintaining relationships. If you have already impacted others or if your new course will impact others, then this is a great opportunity to work on demonstrating some of the attributes of true leaders. Things like humility, transparency, a willingness to apologize and build or restore trust, etc. This are especially important if you are making a course correction for a team you are leading.

As you are evaluating the need for a course correction, you may also want to think where the correction is needed. By that, I mean does the situation need a course correction or do you personally need a correction. Let's say you are leading a very detailed project. It's requiring you to use influence management techniques, to be extremely detail oriented and has put a ton of pressure on you and the team (most of whom don't report to you). If that project has gotten derailed (deadlines missed, not heading in the right direction, team is dysfunctional, etc.) it's probably time to course correct. But where do you start? The real problem could be anything from not having the right skills on the team to your leadership on the project. Maybe you have a key team member that is not pulling their weight or maybe you have had too many of your potential pitfalls impact the project and now it's floundering. It could be that the project does not have the right objectives or it could be that you have realized that the details and logistics around project management are just not for you and that's what is holding the team back.

In this example we have identified potential changes to the project, changes to the team and changes you may need to make in your leadership style. We even identified the fact that maybe you have not put yourself in the place of most potential because you are trying to take on a role that just doesn't match up with your skills, drives, etc. So what do you do? I would recommend that you start by evaluating yourself and trying to make personal course corrections, or at least evaluate what impact personal course corrections might have on the project. Some of these corrections might be very small but could make a huge difference. Maybe you realize that lately you have been dominating the air time in the team's project meetings. That's something you can apologize to the team for and then give them opportunities to contribute more. Or maybe you identify that if someone could help with the project to do follow up that it would allow you to focus on some of the strategic items and would help the team be more accountable. In that case, maybe someone on the team that is more detail oriented would want to step into that role.

Maybe there are larger corrections that need to be made. Maybe the one team member that is not pulling their weight needs to be put on notice that if things don't change, they are going to be replaced on the project. Maybe the team is burning out because of the tremendous amount of pressure, and while it seems counterintuitive, maybe they need to dial it back for a day or do something to recharge their collective batteries.

This is all part of analyze the possible course corrections and if the corrections would be positive or negative.

In all of these scenarios, even the small ones, this is when true leadership becomes so critical. A manager might just sit the team down and tell them they are failing and that they had better get their act together. They might used a lot of fancier and even nicer words but that's the message. Or they may take the approach of telling the team that everything will come together and that we just need to keep at it. Both of those scenarios are garbage and kind of match the definition of insanity - doing the same thing and expecting different results.

A true leader might do something like this. Let's pretend I'm the project leader and I've pulled everyone together for a meeting to discuss our current state.

Me: Team. I wanted to bring everyone together as I really need your help to figure out why the project has gone off track. Now, I'm sure when I said that, everyone immediately started thinking about all the things that are going wrong. Hold onto those thoughts as we are going to get to them shortly. We know that we are behind schedule and in talking with all of you individually, I think we are all on the same page that it just doesn't feel like we are on the right track and that something needs to change. In thinking about this, I have identified a couple of things that I have been struggling with that I believe have contributed to our current state. First, I've been dominating all of our team meetings. I have not done a good job of including all of you, especially those of you that are less likely to share your opinions. First I want to apologize for that and I like to start working on that here in just a minute. Second, I'm struggling to keep up with all of the logistics like managing the project plan and follow up on the to do's with our team and with others. So I'd like to get your input on ways we could improve there as well. And then third, I'd like us to go back through the original project objectives and determine if they are still relevant and then discuss where we are at on each of them.

That would be my intro. It's a great speech. But then after that I need to be a true leader. I need to put my money where my mouth is. For the rest of the discussion, I would need to use many of the things we have talked about. If we assume that trust hasn't been completely destroyed, then I need to work on giving everyone a voice, and that includes drawing out those that may disagree or are hesitant to share their opinions. I'll probably have opportunities to hand back the marker. There may be an opportunity to give someone a development opportunity (tackling the project plan and follow up). This is also a good time revisit the environment we are working in. Has it become a tense environment where everyone feels like failures are punished so they have stopped giving their best efforts. How can you reset it so that it's intense, where everyone knows best effort is expected and is willing to give it? Can you demonstrate optimism that what the team has come up with will get you back on track? I could go on and on.

I know this is a bit of a rabbit hole but I wanted to give an example of what it make take to put in a large course correction, or even a series of course corrections around a situation. This kind of an approach could apply to a lot of aspects of your life. Think about working with one of your kids that has decided school is just not for them or that they would just rather hang out in your basement all day instead of going out and doing something with their lives. These are all situations where a course correction is needed, but it is not necessarily within your control. So you have to demonstrate true leadership.

Now, what if a deeper, personal course correction is required. Those are tougher and could take longer to work through. What if you come home from work day after day and are frustrated and frankly unpleasant to be around. Maybe your kids or spouse find a polite (or maybe more straightforward way) to tell you that something needs to change. That's very similar to what I went through in trying to figure out needed to change in the story I used at the beginning of this episode. I wasn't around for the family much, and when I was, I was not the most pleasant person. I was not doing well at anything. And yes, some of the solution was that I needed to make some changes to the situation. But what probably did not come out in the story were the deeper personal course corrections I had to make. One correction is that I had to recommit myself to the priorities that my wife and I had agreed on. I also had to give up on that dream of becoming a doctor one day and all of the benefits (prestige, wealth, etc.) that I envisioned would come along with it. I also had to be willing to take my medicine from my family, especially my mom, for such a dramatic course correction.

Even more recently I have been working on personal course corrections. One of those is the need to not be so intense about everything. That's one of the reasons I did the episode on dialing it back. I needed that as much as anyone else. I'm also working on not always being the one to dive in and solve my families problems or the problems I run into with friends, at church or in the community. It's not that I'm not willing to help or be a support in those situations, but I used to have this huge drive to just jump in and solve the problem right then and there, whether the other party wanted me to or not. I've realized just how much that impacts my well-being. But even more so, I've realized how much it can hold others back. The trigger for me on this was when I read about handing back the marker in the book multipliers. I came to the realization that my default behavior was rip the marker out of someone's hands If they wanted it or not) and then to show them how the problem should be solved. So I'm very grateful for that.

One other quick story. I apologize for there being so many personal stories in this episode. It seems like maybe I haven't quite figured out this course correction piece completely.

Several years ago I realized that I was burning out. I was running the companies IT support group. That included teams in the US, India and the Phillippines. While I didn't travel overseas a ton, that was wearing on me. It also felt like I was on-call 24x7. I loved helping execs and being the hero when one of them called from an airport with a tech issue that had to be solved right then. But I was not doing a good job of stepping away and recharging as needed. Add to that the normal problems that come from implementing new systems, processes, managing an outsourcer and I was just tired. I also realized that I was feeling trapped and not growing anymore. So all the signs were there that I needed to make a change and soon.

Cutting to the end of the story, I ended up going to our VP and requesting a move into a more strategic role. He was actually very understanding of what I wanted to do and we agreed on a move. It was the right thing for me do to at the time. I started to find a better balance with things outside of work. I was able to do things, even during the day to recharge my batteries. I saw one of my direct reports promoted to handle my old duties (which is always extremely satisfying). And I started to learn and grow. That actually led me to learning about digital transformation in the mortgage space which I have been doing to some extent for the last 10 years or so. It was a good move and I'm very grateful for that course correction.

That move also reinforced kind of the last thought I'll leave you with. And it ties into the need to sometimes slow down or dialing it back. This is actually the second time in my career that I moved backwards in order to move forward again. What do I mean by that? The first time was when I went from being a VP at a bank to a sr. manager at a title company. Even the director that hired me questioned why I would want to move from the bank where I had the title and a much larger scope to his position. Then in the example I just mentioned, I moved out of a director role with a very large scope to an individual contributor role.

In both of these circumstances, the path that I chose was a deliberate course correction on my part. The first time, it was true that I would be giving up the VP title. It's also interesting that most of my peers and even some of my direct reports from that job are still at the bank and are now Senior VPs. So it's likely I would have been on the same path. But that path was not right for me. What I needed at the time was a new challenge. The new job would give me an opportunity to build an organization from scratch and that's not something I would have ever been able to do at the bank.

In moving from the director to individual contributor role, I honestly didn't know where it would lead me from a career standpoint. But I knew I need a course correction to put my life more in balance so I course corrected and started moving down the new path with my mind open to new possibilities. It's helped me get to where I am today.

So if you find yourself in a position where you have already tried dialing it back to no success. And are now on step 7 (choosing the course correction that is right for you) and it goes against what everyone around you might be saying (you have to get a college degree now or if you take steps backwards in your career you will never recover), don't be afraid to do what you believe is right. If you always do things the way everyone else does them, you will get the same results or end up just like them. So maybe it's time for you to step onto that path that is uniquely yours. Or at least take the first step. They great thing about most of the paths in our lives is that there are plenty of opportunities to course correct. We rarely back ourselves into such a corner that we can never get out of it.

So build up the courage to take that first step and then just keep looking for the times when you need to make additional course corrections. If you get good at doing this, you have a much better chance of having the kind of journey that helps you get the most out of life and live up to your fullest potential.

Wrap Up: 39:06

That's it for today. I don't know about you listening to this but I'm pretty warn out. I've found myself reliving these memories and parts of my life and then looking at my current situation. I think there are some course corrections that I may need to make. Some of them are small and maybe some bigger ones. Some are personal like those I mentioned earlier. Others are about demonstrating leadership to help situations and relationships improve. So I need to figure out which are most important, build my plan and get to work.

If during this episode you have identified even one small course correction that you want to work on, then it's all worth it. I hope you'll have the courage to do what needs to be done to get the most out of life.

Post-Roll

Thank you for tuning in. All of the relevant resources can be found in the show notes. Also, keep an eye on instagram, linkedin and now youtube as I'm trying to post tips and recaps on those channels on a regular basis. Don't forget to check out my website and see what other resources I have that can help you on your journey to get the most out of life and help others do the same.

That's it for now. Go out there and find someone to lift!