My New Leaderboard
In my last post, I discussed how my professional coach had challenged me to come up with my own leaderboard to determine how I wanted to measure my future success, rather than defaulting to the leaderboards from my past. This question caused me to reflect on the things I truly value and ways I want to measure my life going forward.
While I’m still reflecting (and the work of reflection is never really done, is it?), here are seven measures for my own personal leaderboard that have occurred to me over the past few days:
Stewarding My Gifts: I once read that “God’s gift to us is our potential; what we do with it is our gift back to him,” which is another way of saying we have an obligation to be good stewards of how we’ve been gifted. The term “privilege” has become so loaded that we’ve lost the heart of what it means: unearned advantages. For me, I recognize that I benefit from all the typical privileges of someone who looks like me and grew up in the particular time and place I did. Perhaps my most important privileges, though, are less obvious but equally unearned by me: I was lucky enough to be gifted at birth with a healthy body, a curious mind, and a naturally happy disposition. I recognize that without any one of these gifts, my life could have been completely different. I strive to steward them well every day of my life through regular exercise, feeding my mind with new and growth-producing things, and feeling gratitude for all the ways I’ve been blessed. What are your unearned advantages or gifts, and how are you stewarding them well?
Pressing Into My Whetstones: Whetstones are stones used for sharpening knives or tools, without which a piece of steel remains dull and useless as anything other than a paperweight. Adversity serves much the same role in our lives if we let it, turning us into sharper, more useful versions of ourselves. Like most people, I have experienced my share of adversity, despite my privileges noted above. I grew up in a home that was broken in just about every way imaginable—by divorce, mental illness, and substance abuse. My brother and I learned at a young age to fend for ourselves and seek out teachers and experiences that would equip us to avoid the mistakes we had witnessed in our home. Later in life, amidst the joys of a wonderful marriage to my college sweetheart, I experienced the pain of losing her far too young to ovarian cancer and later lost the middle of our three children to suicide following lengthy mental illness. As painful as these experiences were (and remain), they have sharpened me in ways too numerous to mention to become a better father, a better husband the second time around, a better lawyer, and a better man. How are you pressing into the whetstones of adversity you’ve experienced?
Loving Well: Through the use of Jedi mind tricks I am not prepared to disclose publicly, I managed to convince two remarkable women to open their hearts to me: my first love and first wife, Danielle; and my “September Song,” whom I married on September 15, 2018, Kristy. They each have taught me so much about loving well and being loved well in return. From Danielle, I learned my heart could be entrusted to someone else, notwithstanding the lessons I learned in my childhood home. I learned what it was like to grow in faith together, how to turn mistakes into “design opportunities,” and how to model for our children a loving, imperfect marriage. From Kristy, I am learning to laugh again deeply and frequently, that doing things together is much more meaningful than doing things for her, and that vulnerability is the first step to true intimacy. What are you learning, and teaching, about loving well through your close relationships?
Iron Sharpening Iron: There is a classic scene in the movie, The Town, in which a bank robber played by Ben Affleck is feeling the heat from the FBI and says to one of his partners in crime played by Jeremy Renner, “I need your help. I can’t tell you what it is, you can never ask me about it later, and we’re gonna hurt some people.” Renner, without asking any of the thousand questions most of us would ask in that situation, simply responds, “Whose car are we gonna take?”
Among my many blessings, I’ve been given a remarkable group of best friends throughout my life who similarly have been by my side when I needed them most —though, being my friends, they normally slip in some sarcastic cracks along the way about having to bail me out again or pretty much anything about my personal appearance. I have tried to be a true friend to them in return, walking with them through their greatest successes, their most painful losses, and everything in between. Scripture uses the metaphor of “iron sharpening iron” to describe how friends can sharpen each other through their interactions. How are you sharpening your friends through your interactions with them, and how are you allowing them to sharpen you?
Raising Great Adults: When our kids were young, their mother and I used to talk about how our job wasn’t to raise great kids, it was to raise great adults. We recognized it was not the job of our children to reflect glory on us through their achievements, but instead to develop the habits and personal characteristics that would make them successful adults and parents of their own one day. Our job also was to love them unconditionally while encouraging them to discover how they were uniquely wired and teach them what it meant to be respectful, responsible, and faithful.
While our family has had its struggles, I am immensely proud to see the kind of adults my daughter Sam and son Jackson are becoming: Sam, the wise counselor, gifted writer, and loving wife; Jackson, the talented artist, deep thinker, and compassionate friend. My children love me enough to tell me so in every phone call and in-person interaction. They also are secure enough in my love for them to disagree with me to my face nearly as often. While a parent’s job is never done (as my senior colleagues like to remind me), I can rest easy in knowing that a job well begun is half done, and they are off to a terrific start. What are you doing to encourage the young people in your life – whether in your role as parent or other relative, or as a volunteer for organizations like Big Brothers, Big Sisters or your local church -- to grow into the best version of themselves?
Crafting My Job: Setting aside generational differences over whether we should “live to work” or “work to live,” the reality is that most of us spend more time working than we do anything other than sleeping (unless, of course, you’re like George Costanza of Seinfeld fame and have managed to combine the two). While we don’t always get to do what we love or love what we do, my experience as a leader and a coach is that most people have a much greater ability to influence the course of their careers than they believe. “Job crafting” is a delightful term I’ve heard used to describe how we can look for opportunities to customize our jobs to be more in line with our strengths, our passions, and our aspirations, typically to the benefit of our organization and our own sense of engagement and job fulfillment.
I’ve had the opportunity to use job crafting in two different careers: as a practicing lawyer who invested deeply in the development of people within my own law firm as a leader, mentor, and colleague and as a professional coach helping individuals and teams accomplish their professional and personal goals. In both roles, I try to approach my responsibilities in a way that is consistent with my values and takes advantage of my particular gifts, rather than following someone else’s template, and my job satisfaction has been much greater as a result. A “job” is the work we do because we have to, while a “vocation” is something we are called to do that provides deep fulfillment. What are you doing to turn your job into your vocation?
Working Out My Faith: The invisible thread binding all these measures together is my faith life, which merits a much longer and even more personal post. There is great value in secular teaching that much of what we need to learn is already within us and the way to achieve greater levels of human development is to look inward. I believe true transformation, however, requires looking beyond myself to a Creator who has a greater plan in mind for me than I could envision on my own and who cares less about who’s on the leaderboard than who is being served.
My faith says we are to “work out our faith with fear and trembling,” which I take to mean not only feeling a deep sense of reverence, but also continually striving to learn more, love more, and lose myself in something greater. This faith has given me indescribable peace and a deep sense of purpose without which none of these other measures would have been achievable. How are you working out your faith to shape the way you measure your life?
The Masters is the first major golf championship of the year and the only one played at the same course every year, which lends an iconic, almost eternal air to its leaderboard. While the goals I’ve listed above for my own personal leaderboard aren’t the only possible ones and don’t necessarily lend themselves well to measuring my performance against others, it seems to me they’re pretty good measures for determining a meaningful life. I invite you to apply them to your own life or add your own suggested measures in the comments below.
In the meantime, do you think it’s premature to wonder how long it would take Amazon to deliver a nice green jacket in my size?
Mike Tooley is a Co-Founder with Upstream Principles LLC, a coaching and consulting firm dedicated to helping individuals, leaders, and teams go upstream to discover solutions for their leadership and employee development challenges. As a certified Leadership and Strengths Coach, Mike is committed to serve as a guide to help others discover, and live out, who they are designed to be.