Episode 405: Thinking Time - Lean In
Bradley Hamner recalls a ski fall from leaning backwards on ice as a metaphor for how entrepreneurs avoid hard problems, then get hit harder. Leaning in means tackling the toughest task first, scheduling thinking time away from stress, and asking mentors for help. It's a habit that builds confidence and stops small problems from becoming crises.
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Hey everyone, I want to share with you a story from when I was growing up skiing with the Hamner family and what it taught me about leaning in to challenges and problems and issues that are inevitably going to arise in business. So it was my very first time to go skiing. I went, there was probably 20 of the Hamner family went to Salt Lake City. I know we skied Alta, Solitude, some other places out that way. So if you're a skier, I'm sure you're probably familiar with that. Well, the very first time that I skied, I— they didn't— I didn't know what I was doing, so they put me in ski school. And I was kind of frustrated by that, but by the end of ski school, I was, look, able to get on some easy greens. And to give you a perspective, I think this is like 1996, '96. So I'm about 14, 15 at the time, so '95, '96 era. And I, I was able to ski some, some greens and some light blues enough on that first day, maybe that first afternoon, for at the end of the day for a couple hours. So the next morning I just get on the lift, everybody goes to the next lift, and they go to the next lift, and before I know it we're basically at the top mountain. I don't recall which one this is. I don't know if it was Alto or Solitude, but it was one of the two. And we go to the very top and they say, Bradley, what are you doing here? I said, well, I mean, I was just following you guys. And they said, well, this is all blacks up here. These are all black slopes. And I was like, well, I mean, what am I going to do? Now that morning it was very icy, so I basically went down on the first slope of my backside, and they decide as a group, hey, it's a little too icy for us to be up here today, we're going to wait till this afternoon. And so they take— I don't know what it's called, somebody listening to this that's a skier would know— but, you know, they take some, basically a path to get from one area to the other. So instead of going down the slopes, going down the, the lift, we end up kind of taking a path. And so this path was, you know, not steep relatively speaking. But this is my second day skiing and certainly my first time to ever really be on kind of an icy slope in the morning. And so as I'm going through, I start passing people. Well, I start getting nervous, and I hear some people in the back telling me, hey Bradley, you need to slow down, you need to slow down. And up ahead I could see where it would begin to turn. If I didn't turn, I would kind of go off what— I don't know what I would go off of, but kind of go off this mountain area, and there were some trees over there. And instead of thinking back on my training that I had the day before, what do you think I did? Well, I kind of panicked a little bit. Look, I'm 14 or 15 at the time, and I had grown up skiing— not a ton at all, maybe just a handful of times— slalom skiing on the water. What's very different than skiing in, you know, in the snow, you lean backwards. Well, in this you do the exact opposite. You lean in, you lean forwards. And so what did I do? I guess start getting nervous, I start leaning backwards. As soon as I do, my ski catches an edge, throws me forward. I have a bloody nose, bloody face, my lip was busted, and Michael George comes over to me and just classic Hamner family, the way that they would handle things. He said, well, we're going to call the ski patrol in, they're going to take you down, probably just need to ski some greens the rest of the day, you'll be fine, but we're going to go ahead and keep on skiing. And indeed, that's exactly what they did. Now look, that seems like cruel and unusual punishment, probably wouldn't do that today, but back then, hey, that's just how they handled it. Uh, and you know, there was I was fine from it. Well, it took me a little bit to kind of get my confidence, and that whole day I ended up skiing greens, and I kind of built my confidence back and was able to, for the rest of the trip, be able to, for the most part, ski, ski some blues on my first time skiing. So what that really taught me, and really is more of an analogy, is whenever I see either myself but also some people where they're challenged around finances their team, etc., the first tendency is not to lean into it. And now I'm going to talk about what does lean in actually mean. But they don't lean into it. They— it's easy to kind of lean back. And when we lean back, we kind of want to bury, we want to forget about it. We just don't want to deal with it. Just not today. Not today. I'll deal with that next week. I've got accountant thing I got to deal with, some taxes thing. I've got a cultural problem within my team. I got a team member issue. I just don't want to deal with it. I don't want to deal with that customer today. The first thing, we, we just tend to not think to lean into it, but we tend to lean back. And so oftentimes, whenever I've kind of leaned back in things, it's done exactly what it did when I was skiing. It would eventually— I catch an edge, it throws me face first into the snow, and then I end up regretting, I wish I had dealt with that leaned into it much, much earlier. So I think leaning in for us looks like a few things. Number 1, it can just be eat that frog. Just deal with that thing that I've got to deal with. Deal with that email. Let's handle it instead of it just sitting there. The EAS maybe put it in the right folder. EAS prompted me on it. Just let's get it done. Right? There's some times that we just need to eat that frog. There's some other times that maybe the issue is pretty large. Maybe we've need to go and do some thinky time. Maybe we need to like, you know what, I don't want to make an emotional decision here on this thing. I need to get away. I need to go to the Starbucks and, you know, have my day where I just need to spend some time thinking about it. Maybe we've done that. So maybe leaning in to it is maybe pick up the phone and calling your mentor, your coach, or one of your peers and just being able to say, I'm struggling, I'm struggling with this in this particular area. Will you help me? And as entrepreneurs, uh, I think all of us struggle with that question, is to be able to get to a place of saying, I, I don't know what— I don't know what to do here, but somebody else might be able to help me. Will you help me? And so the name of this podcast is To Lean In. Now hopefully it's just a reminder for me, but also a reminder for you, is that when challenging times come, and they will come inevitably no matter what, is the first inclination is to lean back, but maybe sometimes the best thing to do is for us to consciously, proactively lean in. Hope this helped. All right, until next time, lead well and go be great.
