A few years ago, John G. Roberts Jr., chief justice of the Supreme Court, was asked to deliver the commencement address at his son’s ninth-grade graduation ceremony. He gave the usual words of greeting, gratitude, and inspiration, but his speech then took an unexpected turn. Commencement speakers, he told his audience, typically wish the graduating class good luck, but he was not going to do that. Then he explained why:
From time to time in the years to come, I hope you will be treated unfairly, so that you will come to learn the value of justice.
I hope that you will suffer betrayal, because that will teach you the importance of loyalty.
Sorry to say, but I hope you will be lonely from time to time, so that you won’t take friends for granted.
I wish you bad luck—again, from time to time—so that you will be conscious of the role of chance in life and understand that your success is not completely deserved, and that the failure of others is not completely deserved, either.
And when you lose, as you will from time to time, I hope every now and then your opponent will gloat over your failure. It is a way for you to understand the importance of sportsmanship.
I hope you’ll be ignored so you’ll know the importance of listening to others.
And I hope you will have just enough pain to learn compassion.
Whether I wish these things or not, they’re going to happen. And whether you benefit from them or not will depend on your ability to see the message in your misfortunes.1
I’m not sure if a graduating class of middle school boys fully appreciated his words, but there is a lot of wisdom in them.
Life isn’t always easy, but how we choose to respond to misfortunes can make all the difference. Part of learning to lead yourself is realizing that you have two choices when you encounter a negative situation: you can resent it and just try to survive, or you can accept it, learn from it, and come out stronger.
For me, stride represents your forward momentum. It is part attitude, part courage, part faith, and part stubbornness. More than anything, not breaking your stride means refusing to let obstacles stop you.
Don’t let anything break your stride.
If you’ve seen a running back in the NFL tuck the football to his chest and plow, push, and pivot his way through a defensive line, you know what it means to not let anything break your stride. Good running backs never stop churning their legs, no matter what. They don’t care that a living wall of enormous humans is intent on dragging them down. They expect that. In fact, they thrive on it.
One of the stats that matters most for running backs is “yards after contact,” which refers to the distance players run after a player from the opposing team first touches them. Anyone can seem tough when they are first handed the ball, but it’s what a player does and how far he goes after contact that separates the great running backs from the average ones. A similar principle applies in leadership. All leaders have to battle through some form of resistance or opposition—that’s a given. What matters most is how we respond after first contact with that wall.
One of the best things you can do to overcome the resistance or obstacles you’ll face in leadership is to prepare yourself before the obstacles come. You do that by deciding ahead of time that you are not going to give up easily, that you are not a quitter. Even if people quit on you, even if life throws something unexpected at you, even if you fall and get up and fall again, you’re not going to stop. Your leadership legs will never stop churning. Try to foresee what things could break your stride and pivot around them. Learn from the things that stopped you in the past and be better prepared next time.
What Breaks Your Stride?
Not breaking stride means that, over the long haul, you consistently make forward progress. It’s a mindset focused on the long-term. Short-term obstacles won’t derail you if you’re determined to keep moving toward your long-term goals. Leaders who keep their stride are leaders who are committed to staying the course.
Even if their stride is temporarily interrupted by something, leaders find a way to get back to their pace.
Usually, your stride tends to be broken by something specific, not just by the general wear and tear of life. If you’ve ever gone on a run through a park or across a field only to trip on a random rock in your path, you know the feeling of having your stride (and maybe your ankle) broken by something unexpected. It’s dramatic, it’s jarring, and it’s painful.
In the same way, there are specific areas or instances that can cause us to break our stride as leaders. Below are four of the main areas that I have observed. If you remain aware of these as you continue down your leadership path, you’re much more likely to avoid tripping over them.
1. Relational Conflict
Some degree of conflict is inevitable when imperfect human beings work together. It’s not the presence of conflict that threatens to break your stride, but your ability to process it in a healthy way. It’s hard to advance when you’re facing conflict in your family or when team members aren’t getting along. It’s hard to focus on the future when hurt, regret, or bitterness keep your mind trained on the past. While there is no one-size-fits-all solution to relational conflict, you can decide to be the kind of person who engages and works through those issues rather than allowing them to stop your forward progress.
2. Financial Pressures
As with relational difficulties, financial challenges are part of life for most of us, at least from time to time. Lack of money can be a genuine and frustrating hindrance to advancement. However, while financial issues are real, money does not have to have the final say in your leadership. You will rarely have a budget big enough to do everything that is in your heart or written on the whiteboard in your conference room. If you do, maybe you need a bigger whiteboard! But a financial limit, like any challenge, isn’t automatically a bad thing. In fact, it can spur creativity and focus. It can cause you to be more efficient. It can make you ask hard questions that needed to be asked anyway, such as whether or not a certain program, project, or position needs to be adjusted in some way. How you choose to face your financial pressures is a key part of not breaking stride. Stay grounded, stay objective, stay positive. Even if you have to make cuts or sacrifices, even if you don’t know what the future holds (and no one does), don’t allow panic to set in. It never helps.
3. Unexpected Circumstances
Some circumstances in life are expected, or at least give some advance warning. For example, you have nine months to prepare for a new baby. That’s not nearly enough, as any new parent will tell you, but at least you know it’s coming. Other circumstances, whether positive or negative, arrive unannounced, such as a sudden job change or an illness.
Change is rarely easy, and yet life is full of changes. In the 1960s, psychiatrists Thomas Holmes and Richard Rahe hypothesized that any life event—desirable or undesirable—that requires significant change is inherently stressful. They developed a tool called the Social Readjustment Rating Scale that ranked various events according to the degree of readjustment required and the corresponding stress level produced in participants. They identified a whopping forty-three different life changes that people commonly face.2 And since stress is cumulative, if you’re facing multiple changes at the same time, you are going to feel the weight of all of those at once.
Bottom line: change is normal, and it usually involves some level of stress, so you need to get used to dealing with it. Just because life changes doesn’t mean you have to break your stride. You can adjust your stride, establish a new normal, and find ways to continue moving forward. It might take a little while to gain momentum again, but you will, because it’s your stride. It’s who you are, it’s what you do, it’s how you roll. If loss has derailed you, grieve in a healthy way, but don’t live there forever. I say that carefully, because some losses live with us for a long time—but even so, they don’t have to paralyze us. Avoid cultivating resentment toward whatever life has thrown your way, and don’t be angry when you face obstacles or resistance in the future. Instead, focus on adjusting to every new stage and learning to take steps forward again.
4. Moral Failure
For me, moral failure refers to an action that violates widely held standards that a person is reasonably expected to fulfill. I’m not referring to moral gray areas or issues of personal conviction, but rather to significant breaches of integrity. Historically, if you look at the impact of moral decisions by key leaders, especially leaders in the public eye, you’ll realize that morality matters in every area of life—in your marriage and family, in your finances, in your communication, and in everything you do as a leader. And who you are and what you do in one arena can’t help but permeate every other arena, which is why moral failure can have such an effect on your leadership stride.
If you have unresolved moral issues—words and behaviors that have compromised your integrity—it’s likely you’ve experienced some break in your stride. Exercise self-leadership by addressing whatever it is directly. Recognize the problem, apologize, and make amends where possible. Take time to deal with any issues underlying your failure. Did you lie because you were afraid? Lash out because you felt vulnerable? Make poor choices because you were in pain? Find help, find healing, find forgiveness—but don’t withdraw from life.
If you have not compromised your moral integrity but you are facing the opportunity or temptation to do so, please consider the long-term consequences. Look for the third option—the one that doesn’t involve moral compromise, but that deals with whatever short-term conflicts are pushing you toward regrettable decisions. Whether that means addiction counseling, marriage counseling, organizational restructuring, sabbaticals, or any other number of steps that can address the immediate hardship or pain, all of those are preferable to making a choice you might regret for the rest of your life.
These four things—relational conflict, financial pressure, unexpected circumstances, and moral failure—are some of the main obstacles that could break your stride, but there are others. As you move through life, keep an eye on your stride, on your pace of forward progress, and learn to identify (and avoid) specific issues that could trip you up.
Choose Your Mindset
Not breaking your stride in leadership is often a question of attitude rather than circumstances. That is, what matters even more than the issue you are facing—including the four mentioned above—is your mental strength and your choice to keep a positive outlook when facing it.
Napoleon Hill, author of the books Think and Grow Rich and Success through a Positive Mental Attitude, first popularized the idea of PMA—positive mental attitude—as a contributing factor in achievement and success. For Hill, a positive mental attitude is characterized by faith, hope, courage, initiative, generosity, tolerance, and other positive mindsets. These characteristics are not the exclusive property of gifted individuals but rather character qualities anyone can develop. Which means that regardless of your circumstances, your attitude is under your control—you get to choose your mindset. That’s the starting point for your PMA.
The term “optimism” is, in many ways, synonymous with PMA. Author and leadership expert Peter Northouse defines optimism as “the cognitive process of viewing situations from a positive light and having favorable expectations about the future.” He states, “Leaders with optimism are positive about their capabilities and the outcomes they can achieve.”3
Experts debate whether individuals are optimists or pessimists by nature or by choice, but regardless of your natural bent, your upbringing, or your leadership experience, you can still choose to take a positive point of view. Again, you determine your attitude. And on a related note, you also have a say in whom you surround yourself with. The people in your life and on your team can either promote optimism or fight against it. To the extent you are able, look for positive people, spend time with positive people, hire positive people, promote positive people. Whether you are optimistic, and whether you are surrounded by optimism, depends a great deal on you.
Positive Mental Attitude is one way of describing the power of optimistic thinking, but there are others. In his book Principle-Centered Leadership, educator and businessman Stephen Covey conveys a similar idea using the terms abundance and scarcity. According to Covey, leaders with a scarcity mentality treat life like a zero-sum game: gains and losses have to balance, so one person’s gain is another person’s loss.4 In other words, if you have this mentality and someone else gains something—praise, a promotion, an opportunity—you would experience it as a personal loss, which creates insecurity and competition because you don’t want to lose out. In contrast, if you have an abundance mentality, you would see the gains of others as gains for all—a win-win—and you would be far more open to the contributions and successes of those around you.
When you find yourself struggling with your attitude in a challenging situation, what’s your typical mindset? Do you have an abundance mentality or a scarcity mentality? Do you believe a win-win is possible, that there is enough to go around, and that you can work together to find a solution? Or do you feel afraid and defensive, worried that a solution that is a gain for others would be a loss for you? If you find yourself drifting into a scarcity mindset, recognize what is happening and recover an abundance mindset. Remember, you lead yourself—you can determine your attitude and choose to be positive.
I love this statement from basketball legend Michael Jordan, who was one of my childhood heroes:
I’ve missed over 9,000 shots in my career. I’ve lost almost 300 games. Twenty-six times I’ve been trusted to take the game-winning shot and missed. I’ve failed over and over and over again in my life. And that is why I succeed.5
Failure, resistance, lack, loss—they are an inevitable part of the fabric of leadership. But they don’t have to stop you. If you can find the “message in your misfortunes,” as Justice Roberts said, it may well propel you forward.