Through the last six or so months of dealing with COVID and learning how to adjust my lifestyle and normal practices, one thing that I’ve really tried to focus on is self-improvement. That includes being a better leader, being more organized, having more positive thoughts, and being more physically fit and sound in body and mind.

It’s never easy to change habits, especially when you’ve been doing them for quite some time, but the thing that I’ve found is how much better I feel with a positive mental attitude all the time through more regular strenuous exercise, better dieting, and just an overall increased sense of self-worth. You can look at things through crises or pandemics and let them get the best of you, let them wear you down. But the thing I’ve found that has really been a blessing is my ability to have a better sense of improvement from all the things I’m doing at work, with my family, and through better exercise and dieting and having a better positive mindset and outlook.

It’s something that I really want to say focused on as things appear to be getting a little more back to normal. There’s no price tag on how much better you feel in body and mind when you clean up your act a little bit and condition yourself to be more holistic in your approach to all that you do.

The more things I come into contact with and the more opportunities I deal with, the more I am required to deflect negativity. Negativity breeds in many people much more than positive energy. To be a truly effective person and not get bogged down through other people’s negativity, you have to learn how to deflect the negative.

It is always a tough thing that you have to coach yourself through mentally to make sure other people’s circumstances, issues, and drama don’t impact you in a negative way. Situation after situation that I deal with always brings out the opportunity for upside potential. But with that also comes an amazing amount of negativity.

Training people around you, not just coworkers but friends and family, to be positive is something that I think I have really learned how to do, especially in the last year, but more throughout my career. Negativity will drag you down and will make you want to always go to a dark place. Whereas, when you stay positive, you don’t let the negatives even phase you. You keep on moving.

Negative situations will impact you every single day if you let them. Deflecting them becomes really more of an art than a science because you have to let yourself be trained to not let the little things, the small things, the immaterial things that become negative phase you in any way. And once you learn to deflect the negative, you truly can be a more effective person and have a clearer mind as you go through life.

As we settle into a new normal and get used to a new way of life, I simply find myself having to do more. More at work, more communication, more execution, more follow-up, more emphasis on management. Everything I used to have to do, it now seems like there’s just simply more to do.

There’s also more to do at home in my personal life. Having time to spend around my family, having time to spend around my kids, having time to spend around friends – it just requires more. More time, more emphasis, more energy.

I think that as we look at a new way of life in 2020, everyone needs to realize that more is going to mean more. That’s if you want to keep your head above water, keep paddling, keep winning, and keep succeeding. There simply is going to be a demand for more.

I’ve been absent from this blog and from writing for a little while. The last few months have created an enormous amount of stress across every aspect of life. So, I chose to take a 30-day hiatus to focus on exercise, diet, and not allowing for burnout.

Usually, in my spare time, I think about and conceptualize what I want to communicate through writing. I feel that writing is a very keen way of expressing feelings and thoughts. Over the last 30 days, I’ve taken a break and upped my exercise to be working out, in some capacity, every day of the week. I find that working out, especially when done early in the morning, sets the tone for the day. It provides energy, gets your mind right, gives you time to center yourself, and when you workout sometimes to extreme levels, you’ve already accomplished the hardest thing you have to do that day.

Everybody knows, you can read and learn about it, that dieting also leads to more energy. So, on top of exercising and burning fuel, I’ve increased and bettered my diet over the last 3o days to have optimal energy and be able to think more and consume more work. This has given me the energy that has been required to navigate these last few months.

In culmination with all of this was a key focus of mine to not allow burnout to creep in. When you operate a business, have a young family, and a lot of extracurricular activities and requirements, it is very easy to get burned out in a very short time. Stress can wear you down and chew you up almost immediately. But, in taking time to create some breathing room, I have found a new level of myself, my thoughts, my feelings, and my emotions, that has guided me better over the last 30 days than I’ve been guided in a long time.

For the first time ever, I spent 90 days at home not out traveling, not out growing the business that I started and have really grown over the last 16 years. Our business is born and built every day by being in front of clients and customers – reviewing results, building relationships, and finding newer alternatives. But COVID-19 marked the first time ever that I was simply not able to do that. And what I realized was that 90 days was long enough.

Ninety days was long enough to see the complacency that had crept in. I’m not talking about complacency over just the past 90 days, but more about the complacency that crept in during 2017 through 2019 when the economy was booming and business was rocking and rolling.

It was really easy to become complacent. Any problem that came into our company, it was always able to be fixed by either adding staff or going out and finding new business and new sources of revenue. What I realize is that I had become complacent over the past few years. It took 90 days of being off the road, having to create a continual routine, having to have ups and downs, and having to realize what it was going to take to come out on the other end. And that’s simply to be better. It’s simply to have a better caliber of the expectation that you hold for yourself.

I find myself more engaged in communicating with people. I find myself more attentive and more present when I’m at home with my family. Phones and emails and texts are waiting until family time is over, whereas before that didn’t happen. I find myself more physically fit by creating a very strict diet and workout regemin. I also find myself with a much more vast appreciation for everything that has been built and that I had not had the same appreciation for before COVID-19.

So, complacency will always creep in. And what you have to do is realize how to find it and how to fix it.

I was talking to one of our employees today wishing them a happy birthday, and while on the phone, they were talking about the challenges they’ve had over the past 90 days with COVID-19 and other similar things that have affected their personal life. This person reminded me that their mother taught them to look at things as the glass half full. Don’t think about the negative. Be focused on the positive. And always think about what you have, not what you don’t have.

This employee has been with our organization for a long time. It was such a refreshing reminder when she said, “Everyone has a choice. You have a choice in what you want your attitude to be. Attitude is a choice. And those who choose to have great attitudes generally end up with a better disposition and can accomplish more than those who are negative.”

It was so refreshing to hear somebody else talk about that and utter those words because it really made me remember that attitude is a choice. You have the choice to have a positive attitude and be happy, or you have the choice to not.

One thing I’ve found is that a lot of things are different through the COVID-19 pandemic and crisis. It has allowed me so much more time to spend and connect with friends and people who, otherwise during the course of normal daily life and business, you just aren’t able to connect with, especially as I’ve gotten older.

I’ve talked to more friends and family members, really just from having more time. I think it’s been a very eye-opening thing for me to do – spending time with people and talking to people, even though most of the connections and contacts are calls and aren’t face-to-face. But it’s really been eye-opening about the people who are important in my life outside of work and what it’s allowed me to do with them. And I think as anybody goes through navigating a crisis such as COVID, you’ve got to always find the positive. There is so much negative news and anxiety that if you don’t always find a positive, you’re going to be in a really bad place. And one thing that I’m very grateful that has happened during this crisis is that it has allowed me to connect with old friends, lost friends, and people who otherwise you just don’t really connect with.

During a time like this, a lot of people think that maybe I’m either bored or am attempting to drive them crazy because this is a time when I look at everything. Everyting meaning expenses, details, everything necessary to make both my career and personal life work.

What you find is, when things are really good, which they had been for a long time, you really don’t pay as close attention to every single detail or every little nuance of both your professional and your everyday life. But when you get to a time like this where there’s so much riding on every decision, moment, and movement, it is a time to inspect everything like you never have before.

And it’s not just about saving money. It’s about looking at the details, looking at the bigger picture, paying attention to everything that is going on. Again, not to be flippant about the past, but when things are good, and life is moving at a million miles per hour, you don’t have time to stop. You don’t even think to stop, nor do you need to. But, when you get to a moment in time like the one we’re dealing with right now in 2020 with COVID-19 disrupting our daily lives, you really get better and are able to make yourself better by truly inspecting everything.

Expect what you inspect now more than ever, and you’ll be a better person for it.

What I find myself doing during this time of unprecedented change and disruption is focusing on the things that I can control, and not worrying about anything beyond my control.

It has been said and repeated that this is probably the most unprecedented event in our nation’s history of this kind, rivaling only world wars that have caused this much death. As I go through day-by-day finding unusual times with our organization, family life, and the world in general disrupted, the thing I keep trying to do every day is make small improvements. Whether it’s at home trying to be a better father and spend more time with my kids, or trying to be a more understanding husband, and a better leader in our company.

I try to make a point every day to impact and make improvements anywhere I can. In the past, there was always too much going on and there was no big reset like this that formed my mind and mindset to make small improvements. I have always thought and believed that if you’re not improving every day in some way that you were somehow falling behind. And what I really think you can do to control your own destiny and impact your own life as much as possible during a time like this is focus on any way that you can make a small improvement every day. Because at the end of this, whenever the end of this is, we are all going to be people just trying to survive and get through life as we know it. And that success will depend largely on how much you have improved or gone backward during a time like this.

What I have found through this time of COVID-19 is that while things are more difficult than any time I can remember, in both my professional career and personal life, there is so much opportunity that keeps popping up, that you always have to be on the look-out for it.

Things that you don’t even consider are leading to opportunities everywhere because everyone is looking for answers. I think that’s why the ratings and viewership of the news programs and the talking heads on political commentary are so high – because people are looking for answers. They are looking for leadership during a time like this.

I think what sets real leaders apart from everybody else is that real leaders know to not put the blinders on and pretend like nothing’s happening, but to look for every piece of opportunity. Anything that can make anything better, they take it, execute it, and thrive off of it. That is what is going to help people either get bigger and stronger, or else in some way fall apart.

It takes kind of a weird mind to look for glimmers of positivity and true opportunity when things are so difficult. But I think that’s really what you have to do. I think you can never give up and that you have to always have enough self-confidence to you that you’re going to survive. And that you will find a way to survive, even if things are so difficult you can’t fathom them. That is what I think helps people find real opportunity in times of extreme difficulty.