Chad Silverstein explains how leadership stress drains willpower, making you revert to bad habits when exhausted. He recommends pre-committed rules like no eating after a certain time or handing your phone to someone overnight to protect yourself when discipline runs out.
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If you ask any build to lead client what their disciplines are, they'll rattle them off. They have disciplines. Some are quirky, some are more consistent than others, some come and go. But built to Lead leaders have disciplines that they do that other people don't do, and they play with different ones. And it's important to understand that your disciplines are critical because your willpower will only last so long. You know, if you're leading anything and you have a lot of stress because you're solving problems and you're dealing with fires all day and you're hiring people and trying to grow company and you got a million things going on to do, lists, your assistant, your emails, whatever, whatever it is that you find yourself doing all day long, your willpower and the energy gets sucked out of you. And usually by the end of the day you don't have much left. And unfortunately, that's when people's bad habits come into play. That's when someone's in the kitchen. It's when someone grabs the drink, lights the joint, pops the pill, does whatever they do because they don't have the willpower to stay disciplined. And so I like to build fences, and I build fences and we call them build sleep guard rails. You put things in place to protect you from yourself. Because if you trust yourself, you're fooling yourself. Everybody's tested and the higher up the chain you go, the bigger the tests. So just because you're over overcoming certain things in your life doesn't mean that harder things aren't coming. And typically that happens for every leader, is that you kind of lift your level of thinking, your level of being, and then you have different types of tests that you're going to be up against. They get harder and they're more nuanced. Most people won't even see them as tests. And you will. And you gotta play with these different disciplines and you gotta have your go tos and you gotta put things in place to protect yourself against yourself. Because as you go throughout your day and as you are pursuing your opus, you will find there are certain times where you're full of energy and there are times where you deplete your energy. You know, it's amazing when you do things you don't like, your energy just gets sucked outta you. You can do something you don't like for a half hour and it completely drains you. And then you can be in flow for freaking 18 hours straight. And you're excited and you love it and you just, you can do it again. You can keep going and that's the one we want. You know, usually if you're really busy, that's a good sign. Doesn't even give you time to have bad habits. But make sure you have disciplines. Make sure you have these guardrails that you put in place for yourself. And if that means that you don't eat after a certain time, or you put filters on, you know, your Internet at home, or you turn off your phone and give it to someone in your house and say, don't give it back me until tomorrow morning. Don't sleep with it at night. There's a lot of things you can do, but just make sure that you do them. Play with different ones and figure out which ones are going to help you be more successful while you're on this journey.
