In 2008 the business started coming apart.
The properties went upside down. The cash side of the practice slid. The payments I had always been able to make, I could no longer make.
By 2009 our retirement savings were gone. By 2010 I had no income and I was floating a monthly negative on investment properties out in New Mexico that I had no way to feed. The mortgage company called three and four times a day. Every day.
I had squandered our life savings. I had failed. There is no softer way to write that sentence and I am not going to go looking for one.
I told my wife while we were out walking the dogs.
I was not asking her opinion. There was nothing left to decide. I could not fund those properties and I had no money left to try. I was telling her because she had a right to know, and I was braced for what that kind of news does to a marriage.
She asked me two questions.
You have your health, correct?
Your hands work, correct?
Then she said, so you can work. Let those properties go. And she told me she was sick of that mortgage company calling three and four times a day, every day.
Let them go.
I had spent months counting what was gone. Running the same numbers late at night and arriving at the same answer every time. She skipped all of it and asked about what was left.
I could still use my hands. I could still work. I had my health.
The next morning I opened the office and I was one hundred and ten percent present with my patient. Thankful. My health, my hands, my family, my wife's blessing, the avenue of prayer, and my faith in God were all still intact. Not one of those had ever been on the line.
It was a new day and a new beginning. That is what it felt like, and I still remember it that way.
I want to be careful here. I do not believe in taking the bad things that happen to us out of context, and I am not going to tell you that God arranged your hardship in order to teach you something.
But look at Joseph.
His own brothers sold him. Years in a house that was not his. Years in a prison he had not earned. And when he finally stood in front of those brothers holding all the power and every reason on earth to settle the account, here is what he said.
But as for you, ye thought evil against me; but God meant it unto good, to bring to pass, as it is this day, to save much people alive.
Genesis 50:20, KJV
Joseph did not get an explanation while he was in it. What he had was a posture. He was going to follow God and do good with whatever was dealt to him, and he was going to be clear about that whether the day broke his way or broke against him.
That is the part you can carry into a hard season. Not a reason. A posture. Clear either way.
Here is what happened in me after that walk, and I did not have language for it until years later.
I was convicted, and I had conviction to go forward in a new way. Then I got clear. Then I worked on my energy. Then I built a plan.
Conviction. Clarity. Energy. A plan.
Before that walk I had it backwards. I went looking for a plan first, because the plan is the only one of the four that feels like you are doing something. I filled pages. Projections. Steps in order. None of it survived its first hard week, and I decided the problem was my discipline.
Wrong diagnosis. I had reached for step four.
A plan built before the first three are settled is a page of instructions written for a man who does not yet know who he is in this, what he is aiming at, or whether his body can carry it out. It comes apart on contact. Mine did.
Confidence is a read on your odds. Your odds are bad right now, so confidence has nothing to work with and you will not manufacture it by trying harder. Conviction is different equipment. It holds no matter which way the numbers land.
Mine came out of that walk. I am not defined by my bank account. I am a husband, a dad, a brother, a Christian, a child of God. And I have another chance.
Yours will be your own sentence, in your own words. It has to be something you would still say out loud on the worst day of the month. Write it down where you will see it before the phone gets to you.
Not the whole way out. When the ground is moving the whole way out is not knowable, and trying to see all of it is what has you awake running numbers you already ran.
Shrink the question until it has an answer. My wife's question is the model, and I have never found a better one. She did not ask how do we fix this. She asked what do you still have and what can you still do.
Ask it that way. What can I still do this week. Name one thing, then put it on the calendar with a day and a time, the way a patient goes on mine, with a name and an hour and no negotiating.
I had the conviction and I had the next step, and I still did not have a body that could carry either one.
I was full of cortisol and thoughts of failure. Not sad. Not weak. Chemically running hot, for months, while performing competence for everyone who walked through my door.
What turned it around was not dramatic, and I want you to notice how unimpressive it is. I walked. I drank more water. And I worked on my presence and my compassion at the office, deliberately, with people who had no idea what my year looked like.
The five: breath, body movement, hydration, nutrition, and how you choose to view the challenge in front of you while staying centered. That last one belongs on the list with the other four. Your view of the thing is a physical input, and it changes what your body does for the next six hours.
Pick two and run them daily. Two, done every day, beats five done until Thursday.
A plan that is not on the calendar is a wish with good grammar. Get your highest priorities into the calendar, then honor the calendar. That is the whole discipline, and it is a smaller ask than the one you have been failing at.
Two blocks is enough to start. Give each one a title with a job inside it, and defend it the way you would defend an appointment with somebody else.
Conviction, clarity, energy, a plan. Every time I have watched a man come apart while holding a good strategy, the strategy was sitting on one of the first three being missing. Usually the third.
I have been a doctor for over thirty years, with my hands on people through every one of my own worst seasons. I did not get this order out of a book. I ran it backwards and paid full price for the lesson.
And before any of it, center yourself in Christ before the day starts asking things of you. In his mercy, and in prayer. Then do the best you can in the moment you are actually in, with the week you have in front of you and not the one you keep promising yourself. It works out better.
Put the weight down. Let's get to work.
If you are sitting in the hard thing right now and you cannot tell where you actually stand, point the Initiative Indicator Assessment at it. A decision, a project, a conflict, a goal you cannot tell whether to keep. It scores the ten forces that decide whether you follow through, hands you your three weakest, and gives you a plan for them. Free.