Take Daily Action (2 of 5)

Applications are open through Friday, March 15th, to the Coaching for Leaders Academy. This is the second of five lessons on how to create meaningful movement on a leadership skill, using the same, 90-day framework used within our Academy community. Discover more and apply now.

Imagine for a moment that you wanted to get into better shape. Let’s say that you decided that the best way to do that is this: instead of trying to work it into your daily and weekly schedule, block a single Saturday a month to spend eight hours in the gym to just knock it out all at once.

Imagine you showed up to the gym, having not lifted a finger for the prior 30 days, and then spent eight straight hours working out.

Why not? Same number of hours, yes?

Of course, nobody would do this. Our bodies don’t work that way. The pain aside, it’s dangerous.

But even more of an obstacle, is the psychology…

How many of us, the physical limitations aside, would even want to work out for eight hours straight? The mere thought of that kind of commitment is enough to make most people not want to even get out of bed.

Learning a musical instrument? Same thing. Music teachers suggest we practice 10-15 minutes a day instead of 2-3 hours, once a week. It doesn’t work to do the latter. Your body and brain simply can’t condition fast enough to get the same benefits from one long sitting as they do from many short sittings (and yes, I’ve tried).

Learning to read. Learning to drive a car. Learning how to give a speech. Learning how to play baseball. Learning corporate finance.

You name it, virtually any skill that is hard for human beings to learn, requires many, small moments of action, versus one single event.

Except, for some reason according to a lot of organizations, leadership development. For leadership development, it’s perfectly fine for all of us to go to a 2-day seminar and be set for the year.

Of course, most of us know that’s really not enough. But, that’s what a lot of places do — or nothing at all.

Instead of just collecting knowledge a few times a year, I invite you to go a step further, and do what people do when learning virtually any other difficult skill:

Take one action, 5-10 minutes a day.

Berkeley professor and author of Great at Work, Morten Hansen appeared on the Coaching for Leaders podcast in 2018 and taught us how to create behavior change to achieve extraordinary performance. In his research of 5,000 managers and employees over five years, he discovered that those creating the most substantial and lasting behavior change would find 15 minutes a day to take action.

That’s why I’m inviting you to do as well. Let’s go back to the example in the first lesson. You’ll recall the identity that I am taking on is:

I communicate concisely in meetings.

That’s who I’m becoming — but it’s not the daily, tactical action to get there. Instead, the daily action is a step I can reasonably take, most days, to get me towards that goal.

As a result, I’m naming this as the daily action:

Once a day, I time myself speaking out loud a message I’m delivering later.

I mentioned Chris McChesney in the first lesson, co-author of The 4 Disciplines of Execution. This daily action is what he’d call a leading indicator. In and of itself, timing yourself once a day speaking out loud doesn’t get you to the result, but it is likely to start to towards results if you do it consistently.

That’s because, almost everyone becomes more concise when they start timing themselves. If you take that action, you’ll not only become more mindful about being concise, but over time, you’ll actually be more concise — even if you do little else.

Don’t worry about the results up front.