Perhaps you are one of the 10,000 people per day in the U.S. that are turning retirement age and are channeling Johnny Paycheck in letting their bosses know that they can give your job to someone else.
Good for you. So what’s next?
Perhaps your Vision Board for retirement includes a picture of you on a beach drinking a Mai Tai and watching the waves roll in. Or maybe a golf course in Boca Raton.
No worries. No stress. Just sunshine.
Not everyone would get bored with this routine after a few weeks, but I would. So what’s next after that?
Organizational leaders, whether in business, politics, or non-profit, often miss some important things when managing their organization. In almost all cases, it’s because they 1) don’t have a good “30,000 foot view” of what is going on and 2) a diverse group of advisors is not assembled and consulted.
Take Vladimir Putin for instance. He’s making a big mess. I originally gave him much more credit as a leader than he deserved. But he chose to surround himself with “Yes Men” and the result has been catastrophic. If you have any doubt of this, I encourage you to watch Putin Scores 8 Goals.
I made a “Stupid List” for the company I worked for that detailed the top 10 things the company did not address. It was mostly in my head, but it helped me keep my sanity. One of the things on my list was that we never really sat down and addressed the big problems facing our company. It was like the company was running on automatic and continued patching an archaic operating system.
My Stupid List
This all changed when one of the managers got the idea to hire a consulting firm. The first thing the firm did was sit us all down and have us diagnose our own problems and then implement solutions.
We needed an outsider to tell us all to sit down and talk about how we can improve. Wow. That was a big miss.
Hiring consultants is a great idea for any business. It’s like hiring a marriage counselor or a therapist. Outside perspectives are great. They can solve big obvious problems that can’t be seen by insiders.
In our case, the obvious issue was that we didn’t sit down together and discuss what was wrong with the business.
And that’s exactly what we should be doing with the pandemic – sitting down and thinking about the things we can improve on.
With this in mind, I have made my own list for the pandemic:
Top 12 List of Stupid Things We did During the Pandemic:
For our gym, scheduled workouts have been a positive development during the pandemic.
Since the early days of the pandemic, Fay’s Fitness changed to a scheduled model of exercising to limit the number of people in the gym. Now, everyone that exercises here has timeslots for their workouts.
If you read my blog, you know I workout with three 50-something women. I keep playing with the workouts and the class format. We experiment with all sorts of things like eccentrics and drop sets added to the routine. For the last few months we’ve done Lift 4 on Beachbody which is a combination of hypertrophy workouts and HIIT cardio.
These women have stuck with me through all of this. Go figure.
This month, we went back to the basics of building strength: Lifting heavy, pushing limits, writing stuff down.
