In 2008 I lost our retirement savings and our investment properties.
I told my wife while we were out walking the dogs. And I told her I did not want to let the properties go. I had reasons. I was ready to give her every one of them, in order, the whole way around the block.
She said, let them go. Who cares.
Then she asked me the question that turned my life around.
Can you still work in the office?
Sit with how good that question is. I had spent weeks doing an inventory of what was gone, running the same numbers late at night and getting the same answer. She skipped all of it and asked about what was left.
I could still use my hands. I could work. I had my health.
The next morning I opened the clinic and put my hands on people all day, and not one of them knew. I was grateful, and that is the honest word for it. I could still make a living for my family, and losing everything had not killed me. My closest friend and colleague was going through ALS at the time. He was losing everything in the way that does not give anything back. I knew exactly how much I still had.
Before that walk, I went looking for a plan.
That is what a capable man does when the ground opens. He opens a notebook and starts building the way out, because building the way out is the thing that has always worked for him. I filled pages. I had projections. I had 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.
Conviction. Clarity. Energy. A plan.
Most men in a hard stretch start at the plan, because the plan is the only one of the four that feels like doing something. 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, and I can still say it word for word.
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.
So shrink the question until it has an answer. My wife's question is the model. She did not ask how do we fix this. She asked 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.
Here is the part nobody warns you about. 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. I walked. The walking was already in my life, it is where my wife asked me the question, and it became the first thing I did on purpose rather than by accident. 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.