Practice moderation. Overindulgence must be eliminated.
Specific activities quire specific conditioning. This observation is most evident to us in sports. Training for a diver is different than it is for a tennis player. Conditioning is a form of tending. Buildings have a lifespan. The lifespan of a high rise has different needs than a single-family home. It's the same with businesses, social causes, and other inanimate things. Everything in the world needs conditioning and tending.
We often take our own professional, mental, physical, moral, and spiritual needs for granted. Imagine we could pick any car we wanted—no charge. The catch is that it would be the only car we would drive for the rest of our lives. If we only had one car to tend to for the rest of our lives and our livelihoods depended on it, we'd probably take excellent care of it. Yet, we get one body and one mind for life. We might feel great today, but our bodies and minds need to last us a lifetime.
In addition to tending to the mechanics of ourselves, our cars, our businesses, our causes—success also requires moral and spiritual conditioning. We need to practice moderation. We must not over-indulge. Consider the mental attitude required to make a significant launch date for a project, product, or service—to dive to great depths or climb great heights, to save the sick, or to deliver a closing argument on a critical case. Appropriate rest, diet, and exercise help us mitigate the daily stressors in life. Increasing our professional fitness—our effectiveness in meetings, developing status reports, managing day-to-day briefings, and leading monthly reviews—can only get us so far.
When we are young, our goal is to be in better condition than anyone else. If others have a better capacity for conditioning then we do, there is little we can do it. Someone else will always be in better shape, more prepared, or able to beat us. As we age, we learn that being in the best possible condition we can is the genuine goal. We hope that will be better than others, but we don't know for sure. We try, every day, to be in the best possible condition we can and hope that we'll be better.
I've spoken to teams about dual responsibility—theirs and mine. As a coach, consultant, or manager, my responsibility for the design of how we go about our business—establishing a bar for professional fitness. I determined what processes we needed in place, how information should flow through the team, and the overall strategy for where we are headed. In business, professional fitness is a lot like sports fitness. We determine the plays (the strategy) and run the drills (meetings, methods, processes) that enable people to win (be as effective as they can be—giving the right message to the right person at the right time so everyone can move forward together).
The team's responsibility is between those mechanisms. The team has the potential to tear more down between meetings than we can ever build up in meetings. Treating others like they are an obstacle in the way, not getting sleep enough, impacting how they generally show up. They might absorb too much work because they didn't delegate it properly across stakeholders, driving them toward burnout and ineffectiveness. They could start hoarding information from other team members, ensuring their success. These are examples of behaviors holding us all back (not to mention stall the business) from attaining and maintaining optimal professional fitness. We can improve our conditioning, maybe, and overlook some of these issues. But we can't reach the desirable without mental and moral conditioning.
In business, a discipline toward effectiveness and efficiency is important. Effective meetings (whatever type of meeting we are talking about) is like a drill in any other sport. Effectiveness is the business version of being in good physical condition. But failure to address mental, moral, and spiritual fitness will limit even the best efforts toward disciplined effectiveness.
PRACTICE:
What do you regularly do to condition yourself professionally, physically, mentally, morally, and spiritually?
Recall one time when your conditioning efforts in each of the five areas paid off. How did you feel? What activities and behaviors did you do that worked?
COMMIT
[ ] I commit myself to becoming and staying fit professionally, physically, mentally, morally, and spiritually.
Alongside technical skills, people who can master a range of subjective skills are better able to influence, deal with ambiguity, bounce back from setbacks, think creatively, and manage themselves successfully in their pursuit of mastery. Learn more about applying craft skills in the modern world.