Day 121: Sunday discipline…

To my mind, today’s BBTL book entry is the ultimate BTL “back to basics” recipe, capturing the essence of both becoming and remaining  Built to Lead.  

You see, building a strong CORE, authoring your OPUS and PoPing it out isn’t enough.  The same way training for and running your first half marathon in no way guarantees a lifetime of fitness, the painstaking, REAL. HARD. WORK. of becoming BTL in no way guarantees a lifetime of being so.  Getting there is one thing.  Staying there is another thing altogether.  BOTH require consistent, unfailing discipline.  

The BTL Sunday discipline, as Chet writes, involves studying your CORE and OPUS documents, measuring your integrity gaps, scoring your Productive Actions for the past week with a simple pass/fail, and strategizing your PA for the coming week.  Done weekly, this discipline ultimately dictates the actions taken daily. 

This consistent, unwavering, everydayness approach is at the very heart of becoming BTL.  You simply will not get there, much less stay there, if you’re not committed to identifying, owning and constantly closing your integrity gaps.  

Think of Sunday discipline as your measuring tool.  Done correctly, it measures the distance between where you are today and where you wish to be tomorrow.  Of course, defining that dream state — authoring your OPUS — must happen before measuring how far you must go.  But at the end of the day, it’s the action — your Productive Actions — taken EVERY day, which will define you and your future.  

This all sounds very obvious, I’m sure.  But if it’s obvious, if it’s so “basic,” why do so few of us do it?  Why is it so hard?

Because life.  

As Day 6 so eloquently reminds us, life is hard.  Life is filled with difficulties and distractions.  For ALL of us.  And it’s these distractions which take us away from the everyday effort required to become — and remain — BTL. 

I won’t bore you with my biggest and latest distraction.  Suffice to say, it’s likely no bigger or more distracting than yours.  But I am blessed with the weekly reminder, via Friday morning Band Practice, that the most important thing a Builder can do for himself AND his clients is to get back to basics and follow the Sunday discipline.  Doing so resets my focus, reestablishes my priorities, and reconnects me with my OPUS.  Trust me when I tell you how energizing this is.  Remembering what matters most — who I am and want to become, where I am and wish to go, and what I must do to get there — clears my windshield of all the bug juice and bullshit and allows me to see more clearly the best path forward.  And, as Marcus Buckingham once said, “Clarity is the antidote to anxiety.”  

More of that, please.