Six months ago I made the emotional decision to run my first marathon. I am not sure what inspired it. I have never done one. My typical running workout for years has been three miles at a time…max. Two years ago I attempted a half marathon which I completed successfully at the sacrifice of severe leg injury. That was it for my running career so I thought. One day, I happened into a triathlon store and mentioned my leg injury in passing to the store owner who immediately identified the problem, the wrong shoes. He introduced me to Altra zero drop running shoes. I decided to give them a shot and sure enough, the leg injury healed and the pain disappeared. Problem solved!
With a literal new spring in my step, I committed to the marathon. I followed conventional wisdom and signed up for a local marathon and paid for it in full months in advance as a way to keep my commitment. As luck would have it, it was scheduled on the same weekend when several of my older daughters and their friends were coming in town for a wedding. They all were excited to cheer me on. The plan was set, the date confirmed, running gear in place, and the training began.
Then the pandemic hit. Marathon cancelled. Or at least the official one. I will admit that I had thoughts of throwing in the towel on this one and waiting for another day. But then again, anyone can give up. That’s the easy thing to do. So, I decided to continue training for marathon day as scheduled.
Anderson Marathon: No crowd. (Wedding was cancelled.). No official course. No running buddies. No official time clock except for my Nike Run Club app. It was a pretty lonely 26.5 miles (I added .3 miles for extra measure to do more than required!)
While my daughters who were going to be here were not able to come, I did have @AbbyAndersonMusic playing on my phone as I ran to keep me going. When I started down the literal “home” stretch down the driveway, I could not help but smile when I saw the surprise finish line banner designed and sent via FedEx Office from New York by daughter @AshlinAlmquist. The medal? My Eagle belt buckle I use when motorcycle riding, tied to a ribbon creatively designed by son Owen.
Mission accomplished. Goal achieved, despite the change in the world. Even when the world gives in, we don’t have to give up!
Reactions? The one that surprised me most from family and friends was that I was able to run the whole race alone without a running crowd to carry me, cheer me on, or create the momentum. Others asked why I kept training when I knew the race was cancelled. Then there the congratulations for which I am very grateful.
It’s no secret that the pandemic of 2020 has been and continues to be a new experience for all of us. There is really nothing in our lifetimes to which we can compare it. Even the 911 and the 2008 financial crisis pale in comparison to what we have gone through. Everyone has gone through the stages of grief multiple times: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, depression, depression and acceptance. When we are going through a crisis, we sometimes miss the true reality of what is going on until we are on the other side. Sometimes we just need something to hold onto, like a goal to get us through.
Maybe that is why I kept training, just to have something consistent to hold onto in the midst of change and upheaval. In any case, it gave me a lot of thinking time and reading time. (I am an avid Audible subscriber so I burned through quite a few books in the process.)
So here we are, ramping up into an altered reality. While we can hold onto some of the goals we had before and keep pushing forward, many of them need to be updated, changed, and modified based on things as they are now. What follows are what I call four “F’s” for remapping your goals and the path forward as you consider what’s next. Those four F’s are: Flocking, FIO, Focus, and the Future.
Flocking
Nothing teaches us more about the people in our lives than sheltering in place! If you were all alone, you discovered who you missed the most. In contrast, you may have spent more time with some family members than you have EVER spent before. If you are like many of the teams in our family of companies, you spent long hours working together virtually. If you are like many dental practice teams, you were separated for weeks from those you work with. Whatever your situation, it taught us a lot about who we flock with… positive and negative. As the saying goes, birds of a feather, flock together. Flocking causes birds to be of the feather, so you have to be very careful who you flock with! Here’s a flocking example with a lesson that can have dramatic, positive impact moving forward.
Early on as things were shutting down across the country, I received a phone call from a good friend who explained to me that he was putting together his “posse for the pandemic.” In case it has been a while since you have looked up the word posse in the dictionary, let me give you a quick refresher. A posse in historical times was a body of men, typically armed, summoned by a sheriff to enforce the law. The more modern definition is a group of people who have a common characteristic, occupation or purpose. It was this second definition to which my friend was referring!
The purpose? Make it day to day through the chaos and help each other sort through fact and fiction to determine what to do next. The format? A phone call every morning first thing to be each other’s sounding board. I was all in.
As the mornings progressed, I realized that much of managing life is not just strategy but emotional management. More often than not, we talked about what we were each feeling about what was going on and how we were going to manage through that. For that, I am so appreciative. It kept both of us moving forward. For me, it was one of the motivators that kept me training for the marathon. In fact, one of the calls took place on one of my early morning Saturday long runs. Those calls have kept me going in more ways than one.
In contrast, I had a professional associate who kind of dropped off the radar for about thirty days who later confessed that he had gone through some depression, like many people, and had gone into hibernation. It was a pretty rough for him. He needed a posse!
In the motorcycle riding world, a term has been borrowed from the flight world. That word is “wingman.” The wingman is a pilot whose aircraft is positioned behind and outside the leading aircraft in a formation. In motorcycle riding, it is a rider who is positioned behind and outside the bike in front of him or her. They ride in tandem because two are more visible than one and they can watch out for each other. It is much safer.
I’m grateful to have been invited to be part of a posse or to be an emotional and psychological wingman. It has kept me on track in so many ways and reminded me the value of having a posse or wingman moving forward. It is one way of flocking that can dramatically influence the flight pattern of both. So, who is in your posse? Who is your wingman?
Then there is the posse at work! There is nothing like a crisis to bring out the best or the worst in people. Let me share two examples of bringing out the best; two professional posse’s that have done remarkable work through the crisis who also employed the second F – FIO
FIO
Early on as things were shutting down, our team at the Total Patient Service Institute (www.TotalPatientService. com) was clear that everyone was headed into uncharted waters. We have a motto at ToPS – FIO – figure it out. While our team typically spends most days on the road working with dental teams around the country on-site, in their offices, as things started to come to a grinding halt around the country, it was clear that we needed to do something different. That something different was circling the wagons every morning to determine our WIN. WIN is an acronym first introduced to me by Dr. Bill Dorfman that stands for “What’s Important Now.” Each morning we would share our insights based on our conversations around the country from the day before with clients. Trends started to emerge and ideas formed. Each day it became clear what we needed to do to be of the most help to our clientele right now. Over the weeks, our team created and disseminated more content, faster than we have ever done. What took us months in the past, we were doing In days and sometimes hours. It was remarkable to experience and I will be forever grateful to the team for making it happen.
Jim Collins in his book Good to Great, popularized the term, “get the right people on the bus.” In many cases, it is more important who is on the bus than where the bus is going initially because the people on the bus will determine the direction. When there is synergy on the bus, the bus is going places! The second flocking lesson from the pandemic is reviewing who is on the bus. Who is in your posse? When it is the right posse, the right group of people, it can accomplish great things. Re-evaluate and reform your posse!
The second example of a great professional posse and F.I.O. comes in the form of our Crown Council team (www.CrownCouncil.com). As dentistry started to shut down and new OSHA and CDC recommendations were handed down, it was clear there was going to be a problem. With the increase in Personal Protective Equipment recommended in the form of N-95 masks and other PPE, and the shortage around the country, no one knew where they could get the required PPE.
Here comes F.I.O. again – Figure It Out. Joey Smith on our Crown Council team had connections that could provide certified PPE at a very reasonable price. Our Crown Council team put our heads together and decided to make it happen for those who needed it and do the whole thing at cost. It just seemed like the right thing to do. The orders rolled in and the PPE rolled out! The Crown Council is not in the PPE business, but thanks to a great posse and a FIO attitude, Crown Council offices were able to get back to work earlier than originally expected when the time came and help patients who needed treatment because they had the required PPE. A great posse with the Figure It Out attitude. Two lessons reinforced from the pandemic that I will carry forward: Make sure you have the right Flock or posse and keep Figuring It Out!
Now it’s onto the third F.
Focus
One of my all-time favorite business success stories comes from Amarillo, Texas, the home base for The Donut Stop, a locally owed donut shop chain. The Donut Stop successfully ran Krispy Kreme Donuts out of Amarillo in the early 2000’s with a well-executed counter-strategy based on its unique recipe and product offering against which Krispy Kreme could not compete. While I am not a big donut fan, I do love a philosophy that it represents. It’s what I call the Donut Discipline and it is all about focus.
In the Donut Discipline, the part of the donut that you eat represents everything in life over which you have little or no control. Things like the traffic, weather, the economy, how other people act, and a world-wide pandemic. One of my first “little or no control” memories was learning to snow ski with my dad when I was in my early teens. Those first few trips up the mountain were disastrous when we got off the ski lift. Without the skills and experience, we both ended up at the bottom of the ramp in a pile of skis, polls and twisted limbs. The first trips down the mountain were not much better. When we focus on things in life over which we have no control, we subject ourselves to the emotions or anger, fear, depression, frustration and the like; all negative emotions. It is a miserable existence just like those first snow ski trips.
Then there is the donut hole. Smaller than the donut, the donut hole represents things in life over which we do have control. Things like what we wear, who our friends are, what we choose to do each day, our own attitude, and the like. At about the same time that I learned to ski, I also joined the large Boys’ Barbershop choir at school lead by Julie Hewlett, a militant task master who we all loved because she expected nothing but the very best. The choir was made up of mostly the football and basketball team members at our school. Each day Mrs. Hewlett drilled a non-musically educated group of pubescent boys through the complexities of barbershop harmony. She was relentless and we were nearly impossible. Each day we focused on building on what we had learned the day before. Our skills gradually expanded one step at a time, note by note. When show time came in the form of a national choir competition, it was no surprise that the performance was flawless. It was truly an exhilarating experience and one of the highlights of our early educational experience.
When we focus on the things over which we do have control, we subject ourselves to the emotions of confidence, courage, enthusiasm, hope, and happiness. When we focus and act on the donut hole, we find that it expands as our influence does. The more responsibility we take over the things we can control, the more things we find that we can influence and control. The donut hole expands.
During the pandemic shut down, it seemed like the donut was huge and the donut hole all but vanished. During that time, an article appeared in The Washington Post featuring 102 year old Lucille Ellson born in 1917 at the out-break of the Spanish Flu. She lived through that and WWI, The Great Depression, WWII, and everything else that has transpired for the last 100 plus years. Of the pandemic, Lucille said, “To cope with this virus and all that is going on, I would tell people to not get stressed about planning too far ahead. You can’t do it. A long time ago, I started making a list every morning of what I had to do. It was the only thing I could control, and I stuck to it.” It is obvious that Lucille loves donuts or at least subscribes to the Donut Discipline, too!
The Future
So where do we go from here? Clearly things have changed and are changing. They always do. The one thing that never changes is that there will always be change. When they do, there are some things that we can hold onto that will help us map or remap the path forward. New realities present new opportunities. What does not change, however, is that:
- It takes the right flock to get us where we want to go. Flock carefully.
- We always need to F.I.O. or figure it out. The better the flock is at F.I.O. skills the faster the flock will fly to the goal new or existing.
- The focus for the starting point is always in the donut hole, not in the donut. Staying focused on what we can control today and working it out will always yield better results than trying to work from the outside in.
Flocking, FIO and Focus. Three skills that will lead us all to a brighter future.
