The Art Of Leadership Breakthroughs Are Found In The Fundamentals

A tool we use in the mastermind is called The Ruckus Maker Mindset Tool™.

It focuses on five fundamentals: eating, sleeping, moving, meditating, and unplugging.

When a Ruckus Maker chooses to master these fundamentals something special happens …

They set the conditions that promote leadership breakthroughs.

But a word of warning …

Ignoring these fundamentals is costly. Your leadership will flatline and begin to atrophy.

At Better Leaders Better Schools we believe that everyone wins when YOU get better. The easiest way to get better each day is to master these fundamentals.

Eat your way to success

“Your diet is a bank account. Good food choices are good investments.”

— Bethenny Frankel

We’ll start our focus on food — one of my favorite topics because I LOVE to eat.

You know that food is fuel, right?

If you buy a nice car you can’t put lower grade gasoline in it. Well, you could do that, but over time your car would perform worse and worse, until it stopped performing altogether.

The health practitioner, Ann Wigmore says, “The food you eat can be either the safest and most powerful form of medicine or the slowest form of poison.”

Medicine or poison.

My friend Joshua Spodek (an actual rocket scientist) is also insanely conscious about the food he eats everyday.

Josh breaks down food choices into two categories. Food and Doof.

Food is anything natural, appearing in nature. Doof is everything else. Anything processed and everything that comes in a box.

So if you want to keep your diet super simple, eat more Food and avoid at all costs Doof.

Food is the first step of the Ruckus Maker Mindset Tool™. The next one is sleep, but don’t snooze thru that section!

Momma wasn’t lying when she said you need 8 hours of sleep.

“A good laugh and a long sleep are the best cures in the doctor’s book.”

-Irish Proverb

It can be a struggle to turn off work. When you finally do, there is barely any time left for yourself and family.

If you are getting less than 7–8 hours of sleep a night you are impairing your performance.. There is no other way to say it.

Less sleep is correlated with poor performance.

Just look at what neuroscientist and sleep expert Matthew Walker found:

“Ten days of six hours of sleep a night was all it took to become as impaired in performance as going without sleep for twenty-four hours straight.”

In addition to under performance, a lack of sleep has been scientifically linked to:

• Depression
• Lower emotional intelligence
• Lower alertness
• Poorer ability to reason
• Worse communication
• Difficulty remembering
• Higher weight gain
• Negative impact on glucose levels leading to pre-diabetes
• Increased stress hormones (and wrinkles)

All from a lack of sleep!

Once the alarm clock sounds, it is time to get up, and to get moving …

Momentum in the gym leads to momentum in life

The last three or four reps is what makes the muscle grow. This area of pain divides a champion from someone who is not a champion.

-Arnold Schwarzenegger

The first personal trainer I hired was Victor — a former NFL player.

I curse his name to this day.

Just kidding, but back in the day I cursed at Victor in person. I thought he was trying to kill me.

I wasn’t trying to make it to the NFL combine, but he was training me like I was.

Each training session was hell. Afterwards though, I felt like an incredible bad ass. That confidence carried with me throughout the school day.

That confidence also attracted my then girlfriend (and now wife).

You can be as competitive as you like and regularly do CrossFit or train for an endurance race like a marathon or triathlon.

Or you can just walk …

According to the Mayo Clinic, there are a range of benefits when a leader regularly does a brisk walk. They are:

• Maintain a healthy weight and lose body fat
• Prevent or manage various conditions, including heart disease, stroke, high blood pressure, cancer, and type 2 diabetes
• Improve cardiovascular fitness
• Strengthen your bones and muscles
• Improve muscle endurance
• Increase energy levels
• Improve your mood, cognition, memory and sleep
• Improve your balance and coordination
• Strengthen immune system
• Reduce stress and tension

These benefits increase as you increase distance and duration.

So whatever you do, move your body each day and when you need a midday break, know that you can recharge your battery through the power of meditation …

Meditation is the most underutilized leadership tool in the toolbelt

“Mindful leaders know how to repeat success patterns and overcome failure patterns.”

-Amit Ray

Do you ever find yourself in a negative situation and wonder, “How did I get here again?”

It seems to blind side you, but in reality it is a negative pattern that is scratched into the groove of your brain and consciousness.

Making the same mistake over and over again isn’t insanity. It’s a lack of self-awareness.

And the single greatest way to improve your self-awareness is through meditation.

Years ago we read a great book called Search Inside Yourself by Chade-Meng Tan. He started as an engineer at Google. Later in his career, he taught one of the most popular courses on the Google campus which focused on Mindfulness.

According to Chade-Meng Tan:

“The more we are able to create space between stimulus and reaction, the more control we will have over our emotional lives.”

I can attest to this. The greatest benefit I’ve received by consistently meditating is seeing the emotions bubble up inside of me.

Since I am aware of my emotions in the moment, they are less likely to make me do something I will regret later.

What a gift for the “always on” and stressed out Ruckus Maker!

My meditation mentor, Jack Kornfield, says, “When we get too caught up in the busyness of the world, we lose connection with one another — and ourselves.”

Meditation is like unplugging from the world for a moment, mentally. We also need to unplug physically to achieve top performance …

Unplug from the Matrix. Neo (and you) will survive.

The antidote to exhaustion isn’t rest. It’s wholeheartedness.

-David Whyte

Dr. Michael Gervais who works with Olympians and players on the Seattle Seahawks says:

“On the world stage, we do not talk about working hard. Everybody works hard. Everybody is a freaking hard worker … and they’ve got this incredible talent to go with it. It’s exciting and it’s fun to work hard.

[Top performers] talk more about science and the art of recovery so that we can work hard on a regular basis and we don’t burn ourselves out in ways emotionally, physically or sometimes spiritually so to speak that we can’t go the distance.”

Ruckus Makers unplug because they know that recovery is essential to optimal performance. Anyone else that tells you to work harder and put in more hours has no business giving you any insight (other than what not to do) regarding leadership.

Anyone that expects you to be plugged into work 24–7 and not burn out has their head up their you-know-what.

In his book, Deep Work, Cal Newport describes his end of the day ritual. It’s a checklist of items that he does.

The items on the list don’t matter. It’s that he has a routine and once the ritual is over he literally says to himself out loud, “Shut down complete.”

What works for me is doing my end of the day journal routine. Once I close my journal, that signals to my brain that work is over and it’s now family time.

The best way to start unplugging is to turn it into a ritual and keep that time sacred.

If you don’t hear it from anywhere else, hear it from me — you have permission to set boundaries around work and to unplug.

I’m telling you, the leaders who practice this out perform their “always on” peers 10-out-of-10 times. And they get to see their family and have time to themselves as well.

Could you use more margin in your life?

Often, school leaders work at an unsustainable pace. Can you relate?

If you’d like to do something about that, I am hosting a 5-day challenge in December that will give you practical tools to increase the margin in your life.

Live on your terms!

I have yet to meet a school leader who implemented what I teach and has not gotten what I call “bonus time” results.

Test me! Test the tools!

And join the challenge here: https://betterleadersbetterschools.com/margin