Do you feel ready to take the next step in your leadership journey? Are you daunted by the challenges in front of you? Are you uncertain what might come next for you? Hi, I’m Seth Dobbs and this is the Principle Driven Leadership Podcast. Where I share principles of leadership, along with examples of how to apply them to help make you be the best leader you can be.

These principles are based on my years of experience as an executive leader in building teams and organizations and in coaching others to become leaders themselves. And I believe that not only can anyone develop leadership skills, but that everyone can and should develop leadership skills.

I think they’re essential in helping you achieve your best in whatever way you might be trying to make an impact. And that’s because leadership skills help you better influence others to effectively create durable results. And leadership is a journey. So for this episode, I’m going to wrap up this season with a story involving a personal journey over the past year and a few lessons learned from it.

I started the season and episode zero by briefly alluding to the fact that getting this season out and published was a journey in itself. Now, the main theme in the previous season, season two, is that leadership is all about handling change and the unexpected. I’ll say that the road to season three brought plenty of the unexpected.

As background. First, I’d just like to explain I script and record most, if not all, episodes for a season prior to launching the season. Main reason is this makes it easier for me to manage my time throughout the season. The impending weekly deadlines of the podcast can be a bit of a challenge for me in my day-to-day job.

So I like to start the season, start the launch of it when I have everything recorded and ready, so that I’m actually confident that I can meet those weekly deadlines. This approach also allows me to make sure that there are underlying themes that connect the episodes of a season that make it kind of a cohesive whole, even though each episode is meant to be independent.

Of course, there’s usually a few delays and hiccups along the way for any season, but for season three, there were a couple major changes that created significant delays. The first problem was that I rearranged my office where I record my podcast. I did some quick testing of the new setup. Everything seemed like it was working great. So I recorded a bunch of episodes, only spot checking each one. It wasn’t until I started editing the season that I realized in many of the episodes, really most of them, my voice would periodically cut out.

Not a lot, but enough that it was not good. So I had to start again, and this is where the second and more serious change occurred for me. I tore my Achilles tendon and spent several months somewhat bedridden and many more in a slow recovery. This took a lot of time and energy and it wasn’t until recently that I’ve been able to refocus on this podcast.

And of course, in the process of this personal journey, I observed life lessons that make for good leadership lessons as well, which I’m going to share. In a brief content warning. I’m gonna talk a little bit about injury, about pain, about surgery. Nothing too deep though, but just wanna let you know. So technically I didn’t at first tear the tendon.

It started as a sprain, and the doctor put me in a surgical boot, essentially, to let it heal, to give it the support and all that it needed to give it that time. Now, over the course of several weeks, it felt like it was healing.

At least the pain was receding enough that it felt like it was healing. So I started moving around a lot more quickly to my normal pace, just wanting to be done with all of that and to feel back to normal.

Unfortunately, I snagged the boot under something. My body torqued and the Achilles tore. I knew immediately it was torn. And so I made another doctor’s appointment. They sent me for an MRI and declared it 90% torn. And I’ll tell you, I can’t imagine what a full tear would feel like, but I was given the choice then of three things:

I could let time try to heal it , they could perform a tendon repair. Or they could perform a full tendon replacement surgery. Now, in my mind, there was only one option, the full replacement surgery. Nothing else was going to yield the results that I wanted, which was to have the best chance of having a fully functional tendon that I could hike on again without aching.

So my doctor, she was able to schedule surgery for me several days later. Over that weekend, we set up a bed in our living room so that I wouldn’t have to deal with stairs. I could be close to everything, and I was off to have the procedure done. Fortunately, the surgery went great, no complications, and I was sent home the same day.

I was not allowed to put any weight or pressure on that injured foot for several weeks, and then after that I went through a roughly four week process of first weaning off the crutches and then weaning off of the post-surgical boot. Then physical therapy started. I’ll describe physical therapy, at least for quite some time,

as basically just amounting to learning how to stand properly and learning how to walk properly. Things I’ve done for the majority of my life. It was a humbling experience in its way, and as I record this, I’m around 10 months post-operation and have not fully recovered all my leg strength and tendon flexibility, but I am able to walk two to three miles at a good pace.

Uh, and I think my stride, my gait, like the way I walk is actually, far better than it used to be. Now that’s something that’s really just in hindsight, I never thought there was anything wrong with the way that I walk besides a bad pronation. But I can tell now when I walk my feet, ankles, calves, legs, like all of it, just feel better.

I can’t find a better way to describe it. So throughout this journey, I learned or perhaps relearned several lessons that I’m going to share with you. So the first lesson was facing reality. As I mentioned, it was immediately clear to me when my Achilles tore that it had in fact torn. I didn’t try to sugarcoat it to myself even before I saw the doctor and got the official word.

And when given the different treatment options, I didn’t wanna settle for half solutions.

For many of us, surgery can be daunting, and it could have been really easy for me to try to convince myself that a 90% tear wasn’t so bad that one of the lesser solutions would be the way to go, but the other solutions wouldn’t have guaranteed the outcomes I wanted nor removed the negative outcomes I wanted to avoid.

So I had to face reality, and in doing so, I took the path that I had to take to have the full replacement surgery. The same goes for leadership. I spoke about this before, specifically in season one, episode six. That is the notion that you need to face reality or face disaster.

It’s important to be able to recognize the fullness of a problem that you’re faced with, so you don’t settle for half solutions. Sometimes a bandage for a problem is fine, but sometimes you need to tackle something very daunting, scary, even in order to get the results that you want.

The next lesson that I relearned was Go slow to go fast. Now, this is one of my favorite enabling principles. I think about it all the time, and yet I forgot about it over and over again in this process, in fact, forgetting that principle is what got me into trouble to begin with. So full confession, over the year or two preceding my injury, I’d gotten very outta shape.

So I was in the process of trying to get back into various activities and exercises and stuff. But unfortunately, I rushed them leading first to a knee problem and then the Achilles sprain. And then after it was sprained, I wanted to get better so badly that I rushed that and started assuming I was fine and caused further problems.

I so being bedridden for several weeks after surgery gave me a lot of time to think about this. To really work on getting into the right mindset, for my recovery. And so far, so good. In the early weeks, I stayed strictly at the prescribed pace of activity, no matter how good I might have felt on a particular day.

And I followed the physical therapist instruction strictly for as long as I was working with them. And as the months went by, this led me to getting stronger at actually a slightly faster rate than normal. I didn’t let that make me decide to move too quickly, but fortunately that was a good out outcome.

And now I’m at a place where I can work harder and make more rapid progress. And this is the case with leadership. It can be hard to be brave enough to slow down, to take a stop in the middle of a busy project, to look at things, to throttle your desire for positive outcomes so that you can actually take the time to ensure you get the results you’re looking for.

Developing this discipline can be life changing as a leader and just in life in general. The next lesson was that sometimes you have to relearn what you think you already know.

I know how to stand, I know how to walk, and yet I couldn’t. And in the process of relearning what I thought I already knew so well, I realized I wasn’t as good at it as I thought I was, as I should have been. It’s hard for me to admit, but that was really the case. I’ve been, again, I’ve been standing and walking all my life.

But realize that I’m not doing it as well as I could. This goes for us as leaders, as well as professionals. We’ll earn promotions, titles, recognition for things that we’re good at, to the point that we lose sight of the notion of continual improvement. The thing is, the best leaders are curious. You should push yourself to learn new things, to try new things, but you should also remain continually open and even curious about what you think you know.

We can always grow, we can always improve. The next lesson was that you can make excuses or you can make time. A friend of mine had the same surgery that I just had several years back, and he told me that he still hasn’t fully recovered his calf strength because he dropped off of physical therapy for various reasons.

I told myself I wasn’t gonna let that happen to me yet I quickly realized how easy it is to make excuses instead of making the time to do the work. And that’s even with some exercise being simple enough that I could do in a chair only required a few minutes. Yet I still found there were times that I’d realized I was looking for reasons not to do it.

So this process, this recovery, has been one of continually refocusing and making the time to do the work. There are so many activities as a leader that you could relegate to little things that are trivial that you don’t have the time for. For some, it might be just making casual conversations with team members, which serve to keep relationships strong.

For some, it could be just going through weekly planning exercises or paperwork or whatever it might be. We all have these little things that we can make excuses for not doing. Or we can hold ourselves accountable as I discussed in episode nine this season. that’s what I’ve been trying to do. The next lesson, and this is really important for leaders:

Get the support you need. Reaching meaningful outcomes never happen alone. I was fortunate. I had great support throughout the doctors, the nurses, CNAs, the physical therapists, everyone involved were wonderful. And of course my family was incredibly helpful throughout as well.

And so this is the case with leadership as well, needing support, not only just reaching the outcomes we lay out in our visions, which require teams to support to even take ownership of, but we should also think about the support we need as individuals in our own leadership and professional and personal journeys.

Thinking about the mentoring and the coaching that we need, finding the people that we can blow off steam with so we can stay strong for the people that we lead. Finding the people that force us to face realities that we don’t wanna face, or simply the friends and colleagues that can help ease our journeys simply by being a part of them.

There are many ways to construct the support network, but the important thing is making sure that you do. And the last lesson I’ll talk about is be patient with yourself. Don’t get too frustrated with yourself when you can’t achieve the things you want. Learning to hold yourself accountable while also giving yourself the grace to make mistakes will help you through your journey.

It’s help me through this recovery, and the thing is, journeys by their nature are about the long haul. Whether it’s recovery from surgery or your own growth goals, it can take time. But stay inspired, stay motivated, keep working. And remember, you’ll get some things wrong before you get them right. And this is the path I’m on now. In episode 16 of season one, I talked about hiking my first fourteener, which is hiking up to a 14,000 foot elevation peak.

My goal for this year is to hike my second one. It’s a bit ambitious from where I am today, but my physical therapist believes I can get there. But to do that, I need to face the reality of how hard it’s going to be. I need to go slow at the right times to be able to build the strength and endurance to be able to go faster.

I’m gonna relearn how to hike. I need to make times for little things like just learning how to work with trekking poles. I’ll need support in training from my hiking partners. I’m gonna need to be patient with myself. It’s not gonna be easy. But with hiking, as with leadership, I know that if I do all these things, I can achieve even the biggest outcomes I set my sights on.

Thanks so much for joining me this season. Please subscribe, follow, comment, and share with a friend if you liked it, and send feedback and questions to contact@pdlpodcast.com. I’ll close by observing that leadership lessons can be life lessons, and life lessons can be leadership lessons and that’s because at heart leadership is a very personal skill.

Leadership is all about people, which is a topic I’m going to explore in a lot more detail in season four.