Getting Tough with Yourself

One harmful mindset that can keep a leader from fulfilling his calling and potential is self-coddling. This is when he convinces himself he deserves a break, and runs to something that ultimately harms himself.

The WWII Marines of K/3/5 had been fighting on Guadalcanal for weeks. C-rations had run out, and the men ate twice daily portions of coconuts and wormy rice they’d confiscated from the Japanese. 

Actor Ashton Holmes (l) portrayed a young Sid Phillips (r) in The Pacific. Photo courtesy Valor Studios.

PFC Sid Phillips (featured in HBO’s The Pacific) grew increasingly concerned for his hometown friend, W.O. Brown, racked with severe dysentery. Everything W.O. tried to eat ran straight through him. There was no medicine. No cots to lie on. The sick were simply stretched out on the ground. W.O. grew so emaciated he was too weak even to sit up. Flies covered him as he lay in his own diarrhea.

“It was bad,” Phillips reported in an interview with me. “I didn’t think W.O. was going to survive.”

Each day, Phillips carried W.O. to the ocean and helped him get clean. I asked Phillips if he remembered any specific conversations he had with W.O. during these times of carrying him. Here, I was expecting a poignant story. I pictured this young battle-hardened Marine carrying his nearly-dead buddy to the water. “Keep holding on,” Phillips would whisper. “Have courage. Just think of mom and apple pie.” Something like that.

But Phillips just chuckled. “Oh yeah, I remember. I told W.O. to stop being such a faker and take a salt tablet.”

The response threw me. I asked Phillips (who eventually became a medical doctor) what his strategy was.

“Well, it didn’t help a man to overly commiserate with him,” Phillips said. “If you did, it just depressed him. But if you kidded him, it made him smile. The ribbing was all good natured. He’d fire back some wisecrack at you, and soon he’d get to fighting again.”

How does this apply to leadership today?

Phillips respected W.O. Brown as someone who had the capacity to get up and go on. So let’s believe the same about ourselves.

Anytime a man is in a downed place—i.e. he’s annoyed, angry, tired, hurt, lonely, stressed, or frustrated—he is tempted to become overly sympathetic with himself. He gets that insidious, creepy, pampering mindset that tells him he deserves a break—just this once.

I’m not talking about kicking back on the couch with a bag of Doritos. Not that kind of a break.

I’m talking about blowing it: the lie that it’s okay to run to a favorite vice. We’ve all got them. We run to whatever ultimately harms us, because we’ve convinced ourselves it helps. It’s the worst form of coddling.

What’s the solution?

Get tough with yourself. Knock it off, ya faker. Take a salt tablet, and get back to the battle. Sure, frustrations exist. But you don’t need that bottle. You don’t need that porn. You don’t need to give in to that moment of rage on the freeway. You’ve only convinced yourself you do.

By the way, the strategy works. W.O. Brown survived the dysentery—and the war.

Question: How have you seen entitlement thinking creep into people’s lives today? In addition to adopting a no-coddling mindset, what’s the solution?

The Precise Moment You Train For

Ever feel like you want to go live in a van down by the river? You want to quit your calling, drop out, or choose a less challenging path?

Wayne Cordeiro, an author I’ve worked with, has felt this way, but pressed forward anyway. For the past 35 years, Wayne has worked as a pioneering preacher. He’s entered some of the roughest areas of Hawaii’s cities and helped people lead better lives. All people are welcome at his churches, including gang members, prostitutes, drug dealers, and the homeless. The calling is rewarding. But the calling is tough. The 60-year-old, Harley-riding, son of an Army first sergeant says he has got a lot of good years behind him, but he’s not ready to quit any time soon.

So how does he keep going?

A few years back, Wayne signed up for one of the most grueling water races in Hawaii’s oceans. He began an intensive training regime. Each day for eight months, he ran, lifted weights, and paddled for hours. He knew he would need strength and endurance to paddle his canoe the 41-miles across a treacherous channel between Molokai and Oahu. Currents run swift, and waves can exceed 8 feet.

At 6:30 a.m. on race day, Wayne hit the ocean along with 100 other racers. The five-hour race exploded to a start. The first hour, he paddled on pure adrenaline. The second hour, he dug deeper. The third hour, the pace took its toll, and racers began to drop out. By the fourth hour, Wayne was in agony. He wondered why he had ever signed up for the race. He arms and back cramped. He struggled to breathe. His eyes ached in the constant glare of the sun.

Just when he was at the point of giving up, a thought rushed at him. This was exactly what he had been training for. Not for the race, but for this precise moment in the race. Anyone can begin a race—it’s easy to have energy then. And the end isn’t the hard part either—anyone can sprint to the finish.

You train for the middle.

The middle is when no one is around or cheering. It’s when everything in you screams to quit. It’s the point where you’re depleted and long to drop out. That exact moment is what you train to overcome.

“I realized that if I dropped out of the canoe race,” Wayne said, “then it would nullify the hundreds of hours I’d put into preparing for this very moment in the race. Suddenly it was like nitrous oxide was added to my tank. I dug my paddle in deep and pressed forward. It ended up being my best race.”

How about you? What do you do when you want to go live in a van down by the river? How have you prepared for the precise moment you’re tempted to quit your calling, or be unfaithful to your spouse, or stomp out of a board meeting in anger, or give up your race? 

Two Words to Never Forget

Hostilities exist.

President F.D. Roosevelt spoke those two powerful words within his legendary “Day of Infamy” speech to Congress December 8, 1941, one day after Pearl Harbor was attacked by the Empire of Japan. America rallied to arm itself, safeguard its families, and take action against the hostilities that threatened it.

What do you do when you encounter a hostile world? President Roosevelt’s words are as true today as they were 70 years ago. Hostilities exist. They just exist in different forms.

Today, your job might be threatened by a toileted economy.

Or you’ve got little kids, and there’s no way you’d allow them to play at the park alone, like you did as a kid.

Or a driver on your commute home swerves all over the freeway like a crack-addled madman.

Or 105-mph winds menace your home in a late-summer horror-storm.

What’s a leader to do?

Early this morning before I stepped out the door for a run, I stopped by the hall closet and palmed a device that helps answer this reality: bear spray—a powerful type of mace. The area I run in is a heavily-wooded nature preserve where wild animals roam. Just two weeks ago, a jogger spotted a cougar crouched on the trail.

Nature can be savage. A cougar will lie in wait for a victim, spring down from a tree, and rip out his jugular before he knows it. Usually a cougar is hungry for deer or rabbit. But cougar attacks on humans do occur. I don’t know if mace would save a life in a cougar attack. But at least when I carry it, I feel some reassurance. At least I’ve got a fighting chance.

Here’s what I think. When faced with hostilities, the wise leader takes two actions:

1)      He safeguards his life and family. This means he chooses best practices up front. He evaluates situations and circumstances for prudent living. Some situations he avoids. He changes plans, inconveniences himself, delays gratification, or says no for the sake of protecting what he holds most important. He asks, “Maybe I shouldn’t be running on this trail in the first place. Maybe I should be running somewhere else.”

2)      He keeps living anyway. Even though hostilities exist, there is no reason to shrink back from life. Potential for danger lurks around every turn, yet the wise leader lives courageously. He doesn’t succumb to unnecessary risks, but he presses forward in a good and sensible direction, understanding that challenges will inevitably arise. Sometimes he chooses to run in nature preserves, knowing full well that cougars might be on the same trail.

President Roosevelt was right. Hostilities exist, and those are two words a wise leader never forgets. It’s not that we need to view life as a continual problem to be solved. Life is an adventure to be experienced. Still, we need to remember it’s not always a safe world out there.

Your turn to talk. How have you experienced the existence of hostility, and what have you done to safeguard your life, and to press forward with courage, or both?

Welcome! This Blog's For You

I am the last writer in America to start a blog. I’ve resisted for a variety of reasons. Mainly, because blogs take work. At least good blogs do. And … well, I’ve been working. You know, writing books, the other day job.

I’m also about as low-tech as they come. You should see my cell phone: all you can do with it is phone people. What do I know about blogs?

But a few things began to break down my resistance.

To begin with, I started actually meeting you—the good folks who read my books—and I like you. This startling revelation comes from an introvert who doesn’t normally like people very much. But you, you’re different. You’re smart. You’re funny. You’ve got a sly sense of humor. And, mostly, you care about this world. You ask big questions. You care about your family and friends, and you know there’s got to be something more to life besides the bowl of bran flakes you had this morning.

So I wanted to start a blog where we could talk. I envisioned us hanging out in a rec room together watching TV. We’d talk about deep subjects, about what we don’t know, as much as what we do. We’d talk when the commercials came on. Sheesh, I hate it when people talk when I’m trying to watch TV.

Another big reason for this blog was that the good folks over at Heritage Builders* made me an offer I couldn’t refuse.

“Come syndicate with us,” they said. “We won’t pay you anything, but we’ll give you exposure.”

Exposure—you had me at exposure. An author who has exposure is an author who has everything.

“Uh, how much exposure?” I asked.

“Dozens of hits,” they promised. “Our blog page is just getting started. But stick with us, we’re going to be huge.”

Dozens of hits. Well, Rupert Murdock, look out.

I had one more question.

“You’re sort of a conservative, faith-based organization, aren’t you?” I said. “Nothing against anybody who thinks this way, but a lot of my readers are blatant liberal atheists. And I like them, too. How can I write a blog for you guys and them, as well as everybody in the middle?”

“Find the common ground,” they said.

So, I liked that approach. No matter who you are, no matter what you believe, you’re welcome to read this blog.

We hemmed and hawed about a subject and a title for a blog, and finally some intelligent statistician noted that 58 percent of my current readers are male. This made everyone’s ears perk, because men don’t normally read books, and to have this many men reading mine is a huge marker in today’s publishing arena. Basically, it means I’m an anomaly when it comes to authors. For some reason, the men who care about the same things I write about would rather turn off their video games and open a book for fun. So thank you very much.

I had one last question.

“What about women?”

“What about them?” they asked.

“How can I write a blog titled ‘Men Who Lead Well,’ and not alienate the other important 42 percent of my readership?”

“Figure it out,” they said.

So, there you have it. If you’re a man, this blogs for you. If you’re a woman, your input is also valued. Come here to learn how men think. Or, come here to help set us straight.

The last one’s probably more accurate.

Stay tuned. I’ll be blogging once a week on Wednesdays. There might be more than that, but that’s the agenda from the get go.

Comments? Questions? It’s your turn to say anything below.


* Update 1/2013: Heritage Builders reshuffled their organization and closed their bloggers' page, ending syndication there. No worries, folks. You're here.