Chuck Norris doesn’t wear a hard hat—the job site wears protection from him!

We love the legendary Chuck Norris,¹ specifically because he is unstoppable, untouchable, indestructible. Its fun to pretend that everything he can do in the movies is real so long as we remember when and where to stop pretending.
Yes we are tough.
Yes we are capable.

Yes we are resilient.
We are not indestructible though.

If greatness is just good work repeated then we need staying power to keep repeating good work. We need the ability to keep doing it again after lunch, after the weekend, after this year and after next.

A lot of business owners feel like no matter where you are, no matter what you are doing, you should be somewhere else putting out fires and getting a handle on what is falling apart over there. If you have felt this before, you are definitely in the right place!

This was obviously me back when I first became a construction electrical contractor.. That feeling of needing to be in too many places at once is exhausting, and by itself is enough to burn someone out, let alone trying to do all of the work that needs to be done.

For business leaders who are already working hard

The answer can not always be more horsepower, more force, more voltage!

Here is to the women and men out in the elements, getting it done so we can have shelter, the people leaving their homes each day so we can have homes.
Before I was a Team Building (and Leader Development) Coach I was in construction. I was a construction worker, a master electrician, and a contractor. Although humans have been building together since the dawn of civilization it is both astonishing to me what we can do and dumbfounding how bad we sometimes are at doing it.

Your people are the most important part of what you do, and seeing you work effectively together is my mission in life!

My writing really is for people who build teams, which is all of us. Whether your team is the group you are framing up a house with or designing a high rise with, the way we communicate, collaborate, and work together is what determines our ultimate success.

This article is for anyone who has been around long enough to see a project come off the rails, and wonder if it might be easier to keep it on the rails in the first place. Spoiler alert: It is!

Beginnings are hard.

You do not have momentum, you do not have any systems in place.

What if you did not have to begin from the… beginning each time though? What if you could rely on your experience from all of the times before this one to position you trailer out of the way, you material close enough to be accessible but not so close it is in the way, your tools where they will be secure and yet still available?

Trains are useless offroad…
On the tracks they can effectively and efficiently move tonnes of goods or hundreds of people. Off the tracks they sink, there tiny steel wheels do not provide the floatation they need to stay above the crushed rock (or mud, depending on how far they have come off the tracks) or the traction they need to get back to high ground.

They tip over.

Stuff get’s broken.

People get hurt.

This week has been filled with Speaker Events, Speaker Adventures, and Networking, so I’ll keep it short:

…and if you have special shoes for networking like Tom Watson in this photo, they can be clean too! Tom is the author of Man Shoes¹and every time I bump into him at an event he is a delight! Here is to each one of you walking the journey of becoming a better person in dirty boots!

This actually happened at a framing company I know! So all of the names have been changed to protect the innocently incompetent. The newbie was cutting dimensional lumber and passing the cut pieces up to the wood framing crew who wanted to be nailing it into place, but none of the cuts were right. When I say none that is not an exaggeration (I mean zero percent out of a lot!) …Most of them were not even close.

You do not have to keep feeling like you need to be everywhere, doing everything all at once!