Chatterbot made this image from Terry’s Description

When I say WE, I am including the people who trained us. They also deserved better than they got, and (mostly) gave us the best they could!

The best mentoring I ever got came in pieces. Five minutes here from a superintendent who took the time, one hard truth there from an old welder who didn’t have to. Not the whole package, and not from one person… and I got better training than most! Most of our industry never gets the total package… So I assembled him myself. Gnarly V is all of those scattered leadership moments and mentoring moments, rolled into one.

Gnarly is my imaginary mentor, my Gandalf, my Yoda, my Tyler Durden.

A composite of every good moment or partial leadership win I could find, borrow, or imagine together.

If you need an engineering answer with reliable figures and accountable facts, he is the best of all of us.

If you want me to paint you a picture. Gnarly looks a thousand years old, but he has been doing this since before the hills had names, so he must be older than he looks. He quit smoking before it was cool.

If you look closely, you can see that his neck is just a little bit redder than yours, but it’s mostly from long days working out in the sun.

When Odysseus was cobbling together the Trojan Horse, Gnarly V was there with a hammer, a rock, a small clay cup half full of optimism and he was old then! When the walls of Jericho came tumbling down he was there with a rickety cart and a donkey hauling away rubble to some project that was behind schedule and over budget. I mean, Gnarly has SEEN things!

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Leslee Montgomery Speaking Mental Health Onsite

You (Chipper:)

Imagine you are chipping concrete. If you are lucky enough to say you have never chipped concrete, imagine your eyeballs rattling, your hands vibrating, your hard hat shaking on your head. It’s loud. Even with hearing protection on over your hearing protection it’s loud. You lug your heavy jack hammer to the next section, you pull the trigger and the sound hits you in the chest.

You have been three stories underground on P3 for days. It’s dark and you try to remember what sunlight feels like. The shadows are pressing in on your work light like they might swallow its glow. It’s wet. Even in summer it’s cold. Time has lost all meaning as your brain vibrates itself mushy. After lunch more concrete. Tomorrow? More concrete. Will this ever end?
Out of the corner of your eye you see someone waving to get your attention. Is she from Safety? Have you forgotten some rule you are about to get busted for? You turn off your jack hammer and walk over.

Instead of writing you up or giving you sh*t for something you forgot to do when your brain turned to mush, she offers candy and asks how your day is going. You take a chocolate, and something tells you you can let your guard down just a little. Construction sites are not filled with excellent listeners, and if they were, they would be too busy… constructing things. You are honest, and more open than usually feels safe. You tell her this is not rock bottom yet, but things at home are not great, and this basement has all of the conditions for depression. She listens in a way that you have never been listened to before. Somehow talking brings back a glimmer of hope you did not think you would see again. She tells you a joke that has some rough language in it but not a hint of unkindness. Laughing feels like a relief. Her name is Leslee, and she will be back tomorrow.

She moves on to P2 and you turn on your jack hammer feeling a little better about yourself, the work you are doing, even the company you work for. You had heard this company was different, but to be honest you had heard that before and those companies were just another disappointment in a string of disappointments! This company hires someone to walk around checking on the workers, making sure we are OK. That is something you don’t see many of the onsite leadership doing, and to be fair, they have their hands really full so it makes a lot of sense to let a professional do it.

Maybe it’s worth sticking with this company!

Leslee:

Leslee is definitely getting in her steps today! This site has so many workers hidden away in corners and most of them are actually working. Finally she makes it down to P3 and there is hardly anyone around. She sees one worker chipping concrete and even by the dim glow of his work light she can see by the deflated slump of his shoulders that hope is a distant memory.

Waving to get his attention, when he turns she notices a defensiveness in his eyes. This is a worker who has worked too long for one of those companies that cares about production over people, and compliance over safety, control over trust. She has talked to thousands like him though and I bet she can earn his trust.

This company has Leslee, which means that they have first pick of talent, people are more engaged in ways that support the overall mission, and people stay longer than they do at that other company.

YOU: Construction Leader

Because at the end of the day, your people will care about your projects and your clients as much as you care about your people. Not more.

That is not true for equipment. Most tools do not need daily attention. A hammer can spend the weekend locked in a Jobox and come back Monday exactly as useful as it was Friday. People are unlike this in every way.

That difference can trick us into using equipment logic on people. When a tool is not keeping up, we run it longer, add another one, or reach for something bigger. When a crew is not keeping up, our first answer is often more, urgency, then more bodies, then more hours.

More bodies can get in the way not to mention create onboarding, communication, and coordination work before they create useful capacity. More hours can drain the people we already have. If the same overloaded leaders have to absorb all of that, adding more can leave the team with less.

The answer is not always more. Sometimes the answer is giving the people already doing the work what they need to thrive: enough clarity to focus, enough support to recover, and enough proof that they matter to keep caring about the work. That prevents avoidable mistakes and disengagement before their tanks are empty.

Caring brings in better results than any other way of doing business, and Leslee is what caring in construction looks like!

Leslee is changing the face of Mental Health in Construction! Coaching her and listening each week to how much we boots on the ground calluses on our calluses people matter to her is the biggest reason I switch my book from Leadership to Leadership Under Construction!

Terry’s Book Leadership Under Construction will be available by the end of 2026

And she is wearing her boots out finding us in the wild to SHOW us how much we matter at a step count of over 50 THOUSAND steps a day! When she is not finding us one at a time, or speaking at all hands meetings, she is in boardrooms, ballrooms and convention centers speaking internationally to organizations in Building, Safety, & Mental Health.

Word is getting out about what she is doing to functionally improve construction on a human level which is getting her invited to speak everywhere from Entrepreneur Groups, Government, and famous Universities!

With Suicide twice as likely for us construction workers than in other professions1, and 6-9 times more frequent than accidental work place deaths, I dearly hope you have never had someone show up at work ready to jump off the top floor to end it all! If this kind of tragedy has visited your site, Leslee Montgomery is who you call. If you only take one thing from my writing today, call her before instead of after!

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Before I started my first business I was working for someone building wood frame barns. And someone had this idea to instead of standing the wall one section at a time, build a giant section and stand them all up together at once.

I had some concerns about how we would coordinate the number of people we needed to do it safely, and wondered if there was even a safe way to test how much wall we could lift. Because as we stand the wall it gets lighter and easier. If we have it at knee height and realize we can’t get it up to shoulder height, how do we coordinate letting it down gently without doing damage to our teammates?

But I was new and my questions did not have the power to put a plan on pause like they do now.

But no-one could give me a compelling answer either so I found someone with enough experience to either make our plan work, or shut it down. And it we got shut down without hesitation.

He had been on a lift that was about the same size as what we were trying to do and did not have the strength to do it. When they tried to coordinate letting it down gently a few guys tapped out leaving an even more unmanageable load on those still determined not to “fail.”

One guy blew his knee out.
Another one crushed his foot, and there were a collection of smaller injuries.

We were so grateful for the voice of experience that prevented us from a mass casualty scenario and got back to work.

The safety conversation has come a long way since then!

We learned to break large lifts into manageable lifts. We learned to test assumptions before committing the whole crew. We learned to ask not only, “Can we get it up?” but also, “What happens if we need to put it back down?”

Leadership has taught me the same lesson.

Most people don’t burn out because they are incapable. They burn out because they try to lift an entire wall at once.

A year’s worth of leadership growth.
An organization’s worth of culture change.
Every difficult conversation.
Every broken process.
Every relationship that needs attention.

All at the same time.

The voice of experience on that barn project didn’t just save us from a dangerous lift. He saved us from a dangerous assumption: that because something needs to be built, it must be built all at once.

Construction taught me that great buildings are assembled one piece at a time.

Leadership is no different.

You do not need to become the leader your team needs next year.

You only need to become the leader they need today.

Then do it again tomorrow.

Terry Barkman is a Consultant & Coach in Team Building & Leadership! Terry works with leaders to develop teams who work together successfully & sustainably! He is Thought Leader, Speaker, Author, and connoisseur of run on sentences. His upcoming book Leadership Under Construction goes deeper into how to get relational leadership working for your team!

Photo Credit Anita Alberto

Have ever worked on a team or lived in a place that did not believe in your right to Belong1? May they never recover from losing you! May their talent pipeline be empty and their clients find better alternatives!

I... WE believe in your right to BELONG!

Diversity ~ We believe in the right of any kind of person to BELONG.
Equity ~ We believe in creating equal access so any kind of person can BELONG.
Inclusion ~ We believe in inviting every person to participate, contribute, and BELONG.

BELONGING is life and everyone deserves life to the fullest!

Terry Barkman is a Coach and Consultant in Team Building & Leadership where nearly every team has one or more person with HSP! Terry works with leaders to develop teams who work together and thriving Neuro Spicy Hearts & Minds are an integral part of their success and sustainability! He is Thought Leader, Speaker, Author, and connoisseur of run on sentences. His upcoming book Leadership Under Construction goes deeper into how to get relational leadership working for your team!

He believes that BELONGING is a critical ingredient for Teams to Thrive!

Photo Credit Anita Alberto

Terry:
Most of what I write is directed at Leaders and Team Building, with a focus on Building as a Metaphor OR as a Career. Today is a closer look at what you or someone on your team needs in terms of Neuro-Inclusivity, and specifically Highly Sensitive People.

Most people think emotional resilience means being unbothered, having thick skin, not feeling anything.

If you’re an HSP, that perspective has probably made you feel broken because you feel everything: you feel it all deeply, instantly, and in high definition!

Leah:

I used to be weighed down by guilt and shame from feeling something was wrong with me. I was often withdrawn and exhausted from constant overstimulation. As a highly sensitive woman, I often felt like I was “too much” and “not enough” at the same time, which was exhausting to hold. Many women are conditioned to be emotionally aware and nurturing, but we’re rarely taught how to care for ourselves while caring for others. I became so attuned to what everyone around me needed that I lost touch with what I needed. Everything changed when I discovered a concept that blew my mind: true emotional resilience is not about feeling less, it’s about staying regulated while feeling more. Rather than focusing on giving more, it’s about staying connected to myself while remaining connected to others. When you master that, your sensitivity becomes a superpower, not a burden!

Terry:
As a man, I was told that I am not highly sensitive. I am not even sensitive. Even in a relationship, she is the one who is good at all that emotional stuff. I could not learn to be more emotionally aware, or even tap into what I notice inside myself. It would have been easier if someone had said these things explicitly. That would have given me something to push back against. The subtext of our culture is tricky though. I experienced these thoughts without ever asking if they were mine, if they were helpful, if they supported the kind of person I wanted to be/become.

The Lie We’ve Been Sold About Resilience

We’ve been taught that resilience looks like:

• Pushing through

• Staying strong

• Not letting it get to you

• Being fine

• Just dealing with it

For HSPs, this often turns into emotional suppression disguised as maturity. But you don’t feel less, you just store it in your nervous system. That’s not true resilience, that’s a survival mechanism that only heightens dysregulation.

Unhealthy Resilience: the kind that burns you out

Leah:

For years, my version of resilience was becoming incredibly good at carrying things. I carried buried trauma and grief. I carried responsibility, stress, and other people’s emotions. From the outside, I looked capable and composed. Inside, I was often exhausted, disconnected from my own needs, and running on sheer determination.

For me, unhealthy resilience sounded like:

• “I’ll deal with it later”

• “Other people have it worse”

• “I don’t have time to feel this”

• “I’m strong, I can handle it”

• “I have to just deal with it”

Terry:
I was also deep inside the “Toughness myth”

• Don’t let it get to you.

• Don’t show people what affects you.

• Don’t get hurt.

• Mask harder. Don’t let anyone see you!

• Don’t show your feelings.

• Don’t even feel them!

What’s actually happening when you do this:

• You override your body’s signals

• You disconnect from emotion to stay functional

• You pride yourself on endurance while quietly eroding within

This kind of “resilience” leads to:

• Anxiety that comes out of nowhere

• Emotional numbness

• Chronic fatigue

• Over-functioning in relationships

• Panic attacks

• Sudden breakdowns after long periods of “being fine”

• Withdrawing from your social life

• Health issues

Leah:

My body became the messenger for everything I wasn’t slowing down long enough to feel. There were periods when I experienced chronic fatigue, brain fog, pain, and a profound sense of disconnection from myself. I kept searching for the perfect solution, but what I actually needed was to start listening. I learned that my body wasn’t betraying me, it was trying to guide me back into alignment.

Terry:
One of the health issues I had from ignoring and over riding the signals my body was sending me, is Adrenal Fatigue. Which means whenever I needed to get through something, I’d push the adrenaline button and power through. And because the adrenal glands are part of the kidney system, this has left me with blood sugar that does not manage itself. I have to consciously check in with my blood sugar, and manage my food intake, my levels of engagement, my temperature everywhere and all of the time. If you do not listen to your body when it is whispering, if you do not listen when it is asking gently, it will keep raising the volume until you can’t ignore it anymore.

You’re not weak for doing this, this is your subconscious’ way of adapting. However, adaptation isn’t the same as health.

Terry:
Before I could invite healthy resilience, I needed to accept that I was not going to be what society was telling me a man “should” be. I needed to let go of the idea of fitting in with the kids who I went through grade school with, or the jocks I played hockey with. Since the beginning of history, going against the tribe has meant risking ostracism leading to death, so go easy on yourself if this takes some time and intentional effort to pull off!

Healthy Resilience: the HSP superpower

Leah:

Once I realized that surviving and thriving were not the same thing, I began tending to the root of this false sense of resilience. After the sudden death of my partner, I no longer had the energy to maintain the expectations, obligations, and roles I had carried for so long. Some days, I barely had the energy to get dressed. Grief stripped away everything that wasn’t essential and forced me to ask a deeper question: What really matters? During that time, my priorities completely shifted and rather than continuing to push through and perform, I began rebuilding my life from a place of authenticity, choosing what felt aligned, meaningful, and nourishing, and gently leaving the rest behind.

Healthy emotional resilience is the ability to:

• Feel deeply without flooding

• Stay present without dissociating

• Honor emotion without being ruled by it

• Move through intensity without abandoning yourself

This is regulated sensitivity. You still feel grief. You still feel joy. You still feel heartbreak, awe, anger, love. And in the midst of each of those experiences, your nervous system stays online.

You don’t collapse, harden, or disappear. You choose to be with it, to stay present. That is real resilience.

Terry:
Whenever I stop trying to “fit in” to the role others have accepted for me, I find something bigger than fitting in, I find belonging which is the most rewarding thing an open heart can open to! OK, not whenever. Sometimes I took it on the chin. Sometimes I was mocked. But I did learn to separate myself from things people would say which I used to believe. And rejection by people who do not get me is much less painful than rejection from someone who sees the creativity of my soul and the openness of my heart and knows that I am worthy not in spite of these vulnerabilities, but because of them!

Why HSPs Are Wired for This

What no one tells you is that HSPs aren’t here to be less sensitive, we’re here to be emotionally fluent. You just need some training and guidance to get there.

Your system is designed to:

• Read subtle emotional cues

• Process nuance and depth

• Sense what’s unspoken

• Hold complexity without simplification

When regulated, this becomes:

• Deep empathy without self-sacrifice

• Intuition without anxiety

• Compassion without depletion

• Strength without armor

• Powerful connection without over giving

This is living in embodied wisdom, thriving in leadership energy. It’s potent and healing.

Leah:

Some of my greatest gifts as a coach come directly from my sensitivity. While with a client, I notice subtle shifts in energy, emotions, and body language that others might miss. I can often sense the deeper story beneath the words someone is saying. What once felt overwhelming has become one of my greatest strengths because I’ve learned how to stay grounded while accessing it.

Terry:
What Thriving Leadership Energy looks like for me now is letting my super emotional awareness be a super power as I coach people, often in believing they are worthy of the life they only dreamed of before. Embodied wisdom means tapping into my somatic creativity to write things my people will find healing, rejuvenating, and inspiring!

Regulation Is the Missing Piece

Resilience doesn’t come from mindset alone, it comes from the nervous system. When your body feels safe:

• Emotions move instead of stick

• Tears release instead of overwhelm

• Sensitivity sharpens instead of exhausts

• You recover faster, not because you didn’t feel, but because you did

• You have more energy and capacity for fun and joy

Regulation lets you go into the depths without drowning which creates space for even more enjoyment and fulfillment.

Leah:

Regulation didn’t mean I stopped feeling grief, anxiety, disappointment, or heartbreak. It meant I developed the capacity to stay present with those experiences without becoming consumed by them.

I learned how to move emotions through my body instead of storing them. I learned how to create space for rest without guilt. I learned that sensitivity thrives when it’s supported rather than suppressed.

Terry:
There are a long list of things I do to increase and magnificently expand my capacity, and at the same time I am not limitless. It is important to guard my energy, to leave the party earlier than I might have wanted to, to mitigate harsh light with polarized glasses, to noise-cancel… just all of the noisy cacophony of industrialized life. Which, if you are an extroverted HSP like I am, it is another way of being different from what people might expect. I LOVE being around people, I just do whatever I can to connect with people not in clubs, or coffee shops, or noisy street corners. My places are skiing through mountain vistas, sailing beautiful archipelagos, meditating by quiet sea shores, reading in front of the fire, dancing on rich warm wood floors, and chasing waterfalls! Perhaps we will see you there!

The New Definition of Emotional Resilience

Leah:

My sensitivity has allowed me to love deeply, heal deeply, create deeply, and connect deeply. The gift was never becoming less sensitive, it was learning how to hold my sensitivity with wisdom, compassion, and strength. That’s what emotional resilience looks like for me now.

Say this slowly:

I am resilient: I can feel fully and stay grounded.

I don’t shut down or toughen up.

I stay connected, open, and present.

This is a super power for sensitive people: presence, capacity, the courage to feel and stay. It’s not numbness, hardness, or endurance at the expense of your soul. As an HSP, you were never meant to be less emotional… you were meant to be emotionally masterful.

Terry:
Your journey does not need to be the same as Leah’s or the same as mine. You are worthy of learning what works for you, how

you function best, and who you intend to share what with. We accept you. You are one of us. You belong!

Leah Rose is an Emotional Peace Coach & grief and anxiety expert who helps highly sensitive women heal after loss, open their hearts to love again, and create greater peace, vitality, and joy. Having walked her own path through profound grief after the sudden loss of her partner, Leah knows firsthand that healing is possible. Through her evidence-based coaching, programs, and retreats, she combines practical tools with mind-body-spirit approaches to help women reconnect with themselves, embrace life again, and move forward with confidence and hope. Today, she is grateful to be sharing a joyful life with her husband and eagerly awaiting the arrival of their first child.

Terry Barkman is a Coach and Consultant in Team Building & Leadership where nearly every team has one or more person with HSP! Terry works with leaders to develop teams who work together and thriving Neuro Spicy Hearts & Minds are an integral part of their success and sustainability! He is Thought Leader, Speaker, Author, and connoisseur of run on sentences. His upcoming book Leadership Under Construction goes deeper into how to get relational leadership working for your team!

For obvious reasons, there are not real live pictures of workers almost going up in flames. If we could have a realistic picture with the much bigger fireball so you could see what I saw when someone was in real and present danger (without putting someone in actual danger) I would love to bring you into that terrifying moment with me! Even the AI is extremely resistant to put this imaginary worker in peril.

Whether we are building buildings or ships (or for that matter software) generally it is poor form to offer criticism to people working on another team near you when nobody asked. Even a well intended suggestion might not be well received. But the uneducated opinion of someone who does not do the thing we are doing is usually the least helpful.

Unless someone is on fire and does not know it yet. This an exception which is (I hope) universal.

This happened to us at the Shipyards. Looking down through the deck of the ship I see a steel fitter on a ladder working on a piece of steel in front of him. He is focused on prepping the material for his next step and does not see the giant fire ball right beside his knees1. Clearly he is focused on his work because he also somehow does not feel the heat getting closer and closer to him as steel fitting torch hanging by its supply lines gently sways and rotates the ball of burning fire closer to his leg.

After decades not telling people how to do their job I now have to break out of that pattern.

Quickly I get down on my belly so my voice is close to him and I gently get his attention, knowing that if he is startled and moves quickly this all goes very wrong very fast!2

I point to inferno beside him and he quickly directs the flame away from himself and turns off the gas. Crisis averted.

As an electrician you could fill books with what I do not know about steel fitting. But I have been around fitters enough to recognize that the way they work expertly with fire and molten metal all day long looks intentional. This looked not intentional3.

When working on something within my domain my team gets really small. Whether that was electrical or now is developing leaders, perhaps it is only two of us. When it comes to keeping each other safe (and alive) suddenly every human I can see is on my team and I’ll help where ever I can!

Terry Barkman works as a coach and consultant with

Leaders to Develop

Teams who work together

so that your organization can sustainably

grow without burning you out!

He is Thought Leader, Speaker, Author, and

connoisseur of run on sentences. His upcoming book

Terry-Fied goes deeper into how to get relational leadership working

for your team!

Terry Speaks ~ Photo Credit Anita Alberto ~

Photo: Terry (the former construction professional) Barkman

This actually happened at a framing company I know! So all of the names have been changed to protect the innocently incompetent. The newbie was cutting dimensional lumber and passing the cut pieces up to the wood framing crew who wanted to be nailing it into place, but none of the cuts were right. When I say none that is not an exaggeration (I mean zero percent out of a lot!) …Most of them were not even close.

When one of the owners went over to the saw to sleuth out the problem, the newbie asked a very brave question. “How many 8ths are in an inch?”

Now I will give you that it takes less skill to read a metric measuring tape than a one in feet and inches, but if we are building a house out of 8 foot 2 by 4s and 4 foot by 8 foot pieces of plywood, reading that side of your tape measure is going to be mission critical!

To know which skills to teach and train someone in, you need to know which skills they have and at which level. When this owner found out that newbie could not read a measuring tape, he turned his attention to teaching.

Most construction types are hands on or visual learners,

a very few learn well enough when you tell them. This owner rightly identified this as an FFT1 problem, which means this worker was trying to do something for the First Time2. And the only way to get comfortable with fractions is to use them regularly.

So he patiently3 showed how the tape works, how to read it correctly, and get the right cut every time. He talked the newbie through it and let him try. He pulled the tape out to 78 and 7/8th inches and showed the different markings for half an inch, quarters of inches, and and the elusive 8th markings. Newbie counted them and could confidently say there were 8 8ths in every inch, and demonstrated his new understanding by correctly cutting 78 and 7/8th inch piece. Oh, the sweet joy of getting it right (FINALLY!)

Satisfied with a job well done our intrepid owner left the new lumber cutter with a list of pieces to cut and climbed back up to his work area.

Only to find out that all the cuts were still wrong.

As a business owner who is already doing too many things, I know how frustrating, disappointing and PAINFUL it is when your people are failing at what you thought was too obvious to teach!

The would be employee had memorized 78 and 7/8th of an inch and could make that cut as many times as necessary without understanding how to apply those same skills to cutting something 24 and a half inches long.

He even asked if there were 12 16ths in an inch.

Clever reader, I know you know this

How many 16ths are in an inch? 16!

How many quarters? 4!

… how many 8ths?

This is how the feet and inches side of the tape measure work

In the end this particular hire did not last.

He just was not cutting it...

(now you understand where that expression comes from!)

When we are hiring people to work with their hands it is so easy to ignore all of the other skills someone needs to be an effective teammate. This story is my constant reminder that we can teach any amount of practical and technical skills more easily that we can train for attitude of openness to learning, or the ability to understand and apply what is being taught.

In a world where we are already trying to do too many things in too many places, all at once,

Give yourself the gift of working with people who understand the secret success formula!

Let
Attitude

Communication &

Teamwork

Put your team back in A.C.T.ion!!

You do not have to do this alone!

Terry Barkman works as a coach and consultant with

Leaders to Develop

Teams who work together

so that your organization can sustainably

grow without burning you out!

He is Thought Leader, Speaker, Author, and

connoisseur of run on sentences. His upcoming book

Terry-Fied goes deeper into how to get relational leadership working

for your team!

Photo Credit Anita Alberto

A lot of business owners feel like no matter where you are, no matter what you are doing, you should be somewhere else putting out fires and getting a handle on what is falling apart over there. If you have felt this before, you are definitely in the right place!

This was obviously me back when I first became a construction electrical contractor.. That feeling of needing to be in too many places at once is exhausting, and by itself is enough to burn someone out, let alone trying to do all of the work that needs to be done.

For business leaders who are already working hard

The answer can not always be more horsepower, more force, more voltage!

When you add more voltage to a light bulb it will burn very brightly for a very short time. When you add to much pressure to a support it will snap.

Everything changed when I stopped trying to micro manage every project, and started thinking of myself as Leader, Trainer, and Mentor.

Then instead of hiring1 people who I could train to be like me, I hired people I could trust to accomplish clear objectives, and ask good clarifying questions where they needed more clarity to succeed.

If we are being honest, part of us knows lack of trust leads to all kinds of unhealthy and unproductive behaviors!

Including

• Micro Managing

• Over Communicating

• Under Communicating

• Making everything URGENT

• Bird Dogging…

I could go on. Lack of trust keeps us from giving our team the information, training, context to succeed. Lack of trust says organization crippling things like

“If you want it done “right“ you have to do it yourself!”

On the other hand, trust is the biggest preventer of burnout and the highest attractor of success! Trust your team to do things as well as you could because they have the tools, the training, the understanding, and the direction to do it. Eventually you will have teams that are better than you in every single area, and you will get to trust that your value as a leader is greater than being the best builder, electrician, or rocket surgeon on earth!

Trust yourself to do tomorrows work tomorrow, without taking on ridiculous and unreasonable expectations of doing it ALL today.

Trust yourself to fully unplug from work to give yourself the gift of returning fully recovered, rested, and rejuvenated!

Trust yourself to communicate effectively and your team to understand.

Your people need this version of you so that they can perform their best! Not just believing in what you can do, but believing in the best versions of them until they grow into another better best!

Resilience is being used to mean recklessly different things in the wild west of todays internet. Where it means sustainable, conscious, intentional, it will make you better, more content, more satisfied. Where it means hustle, treat yourself like a machine and ignore your limitations rather than growing your abilities, aware nesses and aptitudes it is doing more harm than good.

Remember,

Trust Yourself enough to Rest
Trust Your Team enough to let them succeed!

You do not have to do this alone!

Terry Barkman works as a coach and consultant with

Leaders to Develop

Teams who work together

so that your organization can sustainably

grow without burning you out!

He is Thought Leader, Speaker, Author, and

connoisseur of run on sentences. His upcoming book

Terry-Fied goes deeper into how to get relational leadership working

for your team!

Photo Credit Anita Alberto

Yes I designed my outfit to match the article, and yes I hired a professional photographer. Still, this is the moment I physically opened Pacific Yachting Magazine and saw my name in print for the first time! No I am not in the movie (how cool would that be??)

I did lead a band of adventurous band of explorers through the same waters the film takes place in. We climbed to the top of Ithaca, (Greece) and stood in the Castle where Odysseus lived before sailing away to fight in the Trojan War!

This is my story:

Matt Damon on the set of Christopher Nolan’s upcoming film The Odyssey

Part of the magic of casting off lines is a quiet agreement with uncertainty. Even the most carefully planned passage will offer something uninvited: a shift in weather, an unearned moment of grace, a lesson that wasn’t on the itinerary (or on the chart!)

Watching the trailer for James Cameron’s film The Odyssey transports me back to my own sailing adventures around Ithaca and the Ionian Sea—an ancient Greek island where the story of Odysseus begins, and where the wind seems somehow to whisper memories and draw out my sense of wonder.

Whether we take Odysseus as a myth or part of history he is legendary to us who love the sea. Told in the oral tradition and over centuries, this is THE sailing story. The original passage tale. Every voyage since—every offshore night watch, every anxious landfall—echoes it in its own way.

Fighting a war in the bronze age must have been the original type 2 fun - horrifying in the moment, and then easier to romanticize, the further the actual experience drifted into the past. Each of us draws a private line between the adventures we want to live and the experiences we’re content to read about from a comfortable seat by the fire. I’m grateful I didn’t have to fight for years at Troy, or spend a decade trying to get home again. I’m glad I didn’t have to spend the night inside the original Trojan Horse hoping this was brilliance and not madness. But I can fully picture myself and a group of sailors far from home and building an ambitious repair out of driftwood and sailing knots.

The sailor’s life, at its core, is a life of experience, of exploring ourselves and the places the seas bring us. I’m grateful to have circumnavigated Ithaca, to have stood on the beach where where Prince Palamedes must have beached when enlisting Odysseus and his crew in the fleet bound for Troy, to have climbed to the island’s highest point where what remains of Odysseus’s Bronze Age castle still stands, and to have looked down onto the seas where his ship once embarked. Standing there, the wind felt older than the ruins—steady, indifferent, and filled with secrets for those of us who listen.

It would be hard to imagine a more beautiful place to be lost. The islands are lush and sprinkled thickly in azure seas.

Sailing, after all, is less about destination than it is about permission to venture out and explore! Permission to leave to have the idea of a plan, and be fully prepared for the wind, waves, and tides to make us much later coming home that we intended.

When we first begin to sail, the ocean invites attention and humility. It asks you to notice. You learn to read clouds the way people once did, to feel pressure build in the helm, to recognize when the silence itself has changed. Seamanship comes with time, but wonder is there even in our beginnings.

For those who have sailed for years, the magic doesn’t fade—it refines itself. Drama gives way to nuance. You no longer need heavy weather to feel alive. Anchor watch under a full moon will do. The call back to the water becomes less about novelty and more about relationships. The sea feels less like an adversary and more like an old acquaintance—never predictable, but deeply familiar.

Odysseus wasn’t trying to conquer the ocean. He was trying like so many of us to return to the home he left. Of course after making his long way home, he found his home very different from what he left behind. This was not because it had changed so much, but because he had grown into a new person who saw his old things in new ways. This may be the oldest truth sailing has to offer. We go out to sea, and whether we intend it or not, we come back changed. Sometimes exhausted, sometimes refreshed, and always richer in experiences.

Every sailor who journeys long enough becomes a keeper of moments. That time the light began to fail before you could get to your anchorage. The wind that behaved so surprisingly unlike the winds from your home waters. The simple meal that tasted magnificent because of where you were, and who you shared it with. The conversation that stretched and opened in ways that can only happen while underway. The boat completes the journey; the experiences we have and the stories we share complete us.

In gratitude to my Crew, Sam at Pacific Yachting Magazine, Anita Alberto for capturing the moment, Martin Knowles for putting the physical magazine in my hands at just the right time, and Tina O for bringing out the magic in my voice and teasing out the way the story wants to be told!

Terry Barkman is currently finishing up his book The Sailboat Effect, named after the way we build teams on sailboats! He is a thought leader in Team Building & Leader Development. His writing, speaking, consulting & coaching are motivated by seeing more connected, effective and focused people come out on the other side. His favorite thing in the world is to coach teams from businesses and organizations to be better at teamwork, and the best possible place to do this is on a sailboat!

Photo Credit Terry Barkman

This week has been filled with Speaker Events, Speaker Adventures, and Networking, so I’ll keep it short:

Keep your boots Dirty and
Your hearts Clean Builders!

…and if you have special shoes for networking like Tom Watson in this photo, they can be clean too! Tom is the author of Man Shoes1 and every time I bump into him at an event he is a delight! Here is to each one of you walking the journey of becoming a better person in dirty boots!

Photo Credit Terry Barkman

Terry Barkman works as a coach and consultant with Leaders to

Develop Teams who work together

so that your organization can sustainably

grow without burning you out!

He is Thought Leader, Speaker, Author, and

connoisseur of run on sentences.

His upcoming book Terry-Fied goes deeper into how to get relational leadership working for your team!

Photo Credit Anita Alberto

Chuck Norris doesn’t wear a hard hat—the job site wears protection from him!

We love the legendary Chuck Norris,1 specifically because he is unstoppable, untouchable, indestructible. Its fun to pretend that everything he can do in the movies is real so long as we remember when and where to stop pretending.

Yes we are tough.
Yes we are capable.

Yes we are resilient.
We are not indestructible though.

If greatness is just good work repeated then we need staying power to keep repeating good work. We need the ability to keep doing it again after lunch, after the weekend, after this year and after next.

Staying Power is resilience made sustainable!

…And sustainable means we need to be honest with ourselves, perhaps more honest than we have been brave enough to be before.

Honesty means you might be tough enough to do anything, but no one is tough enough to do EVERYTHING! Except for (maybe) Chuck Norris!2 So unless you are really confident in your plot armor, you can’t go any faster than you can go.

The answer can’t always be more effort. We can’t just add pressure, add load, add voltage, add horsepower and just hope things will work out. Even when your things do not break, your systems will. And if your systems hold it together your people will begin to fracture.

Am I saying that some horsepower, nominal voltage, reasonable effort is too much? Of course not. As strong and capable people we are already applying pressure though.

Too much pressure is just as big a problem as not enough…

…and when too much pressure causes your equipment, your systems, your people to fail in a catastrophic manner, this is a much bigger problem than being just slightly under powered is.

Remember, Slow is smooth and smooth is fast.

My favorite part of any electrical project is turning on the lights for the first time. Because I am good at what I do, the lights get the right amount of voltage and they shine brightly. You do not have to be an electrical specialist, I just need you to understand that voltage is electrical pressure. Not enough electrical pressure, and the lights will not light up. Too much electrical pressure and they shine really brightly for a split second before they go dark and all the smoke gets out!

When smoke (and darkness) start pouring out of your lights, this is a catastrophic failure. It means we can not fix them and replacing them will take more work than installing the lighting system correctly the first time.

To be an excellent Team Leader or Team Builder, you need to understand how much effort is good, healthy, productive, and how much will lead to broken equipment, failed systems, and burned out people.

Optimal Effort makes you sustainable. Sustainability is the path to becoming a Legend!

1. Wear a hard hat.

2. Optimize your effort.

3. And remember that any career, and perhaps construction trades especially are a marathon, not a sprint!

Terry Barkman works as a coach and consultant with Leaders to

Develop Teams who work together

so that your organization can sustainably

grow without burning you out!

He is Thought Leader, Speaker, Author, and

connoisseur of run on sentences.

His upcoming book Terry-Fied goes deeper into how to get relational leadership working

for your team!

Beginnings are hard.

You do not have momentum, you do not have any systems in place.

What if you did not have to begin from the… beginning each time though? What if you could rely on your experience from all of the times before this one to position you trailer out of the way, you material close enough to be accessible but not so close it is in the way, your tools where they will be secure and yet still available?

The physical skills you learn as an individual contributor go a decently long way to in setting you up to be a supervisor. (with out maybe most of the human or leadership skills, but that is another article1)

The hard skills of management are also not things we could learn swinging a hammer. We need to learn to estimate time, to think three moves ahead, to hold the big picture in mind while not letting any of the mission critical details get away from us too.

Just like you have learned where you need your tools, and where you need your material, you now have to learn to order supplies in time that the work can keep moving, and not so soon that it gets in the way of work that needs to be done first.

It is all overlapping conditions. (which are dependent on other contingencies)

And if you think you can handle all of this effectively without a system, you have not yet worked on a project with sufficient complexity, a large enough team, on a big enough site, a tight enough deadline or with the kind of agility you need when the only constant is that things keep changing.

By the time you get to the big league, you will need a system, and the only way to be your best is to already be good at operating inside of a system with others who may or may not be in the office the same hours or even the same days as you are.

If you are very lucky, you will find a mentor who can train you in the ways of managing the system while still leading the people.

Because the system won’t be lead and the people will not tolerate being managed, at least not for long.

Know that going in!

The hard truth is that most industries are not good at recruiting for Leadership and Team Building Skills, and are demonstrably worse at mentoring for Leadership Skills, and barely passable at training for management skills. And Construction seems to be near the back of the pack. Perhaps this is because the inherent resilience needed to start from the ground up2 each time has trained us that we can overcome anything just by moving forward. The only thing I want to add to that is

Move forward with the Wisdom of Experience on your side!

Coaching was not available to me when I was a young and fiery Electrical Contractor.

What I wish had been available to me then is the wisdom of experience, the soft skills to enroll my team, the intuition to find my flow…

Why I became a coach is so that this new generation of builders and Team Builders do not have to solve every problem with blood, sweat and horsepower!

On a personal note, I will say that a part of me loved doing things the HARD way! There is something about getting up early after not a great nights sleep, fueling up on impatience and coffee and getting it done against a stack of obstacles and antagonism! Closing your eyes at the end of a long day with just enough concrete dust in your eyes3 to remind you of how tough you are... it does have an kind of a satisfaction to it. It is a recipe for a short career though!

In short, I was an adrenaline junkie. Every impossible deadline I met and defeated felt good because I could hack into my adrenaline and power through.

What being an adrenaline junkie cost me, was the health of my kidneys. So I am speaking from experience when I say that going full throttle works if you are in it for a good time, but it falls apart (and so do you) if you want to be in this for a long time.

So do not be a hack!

Find someone who can alloy your energy, vision, and determination with perspective, and let systems give you back the headspace you will need to level up!

Terry Barkman works as a coach and consultant with

Leaders to Develop

Teams who work together

so that your organization can sustainably

grow without burning you out!

He is Thought Leader, Speaker,

Author, and connoisseur of run on sentences. His upcoming book

Terry-Fied goes deeper into how to get relational leadership working

for your team!

On the tracks they can effectively and efficiently move tonnes of goods or hundreds of people. Off the tracks they sink, there tiny steel wheels do not provide the floatation they need to stay above the crushed rock (or mud, depending on how far they have come off the tracks) or the traction they need to get back to high ground.

They tip over.

Stuff get’s broken.

People get hurt.

Your team needs things to operate most effectively.

And perhaps the easiest way to think about what your team needs is to imagine them not having it. Recently I visited an office on Day 4. And not Day 4 of moving into a brand new purpose build building. Day 4 of shoveling out decades of clutter and refuse from what looked like a slow but determined bankruptcy. Day 4 of trying to figure out why the bathrooms were not working, and then get them to start.

The lights which are working are flickering, the air filters are not filtering the air. The heat has not been on in years. The water was undrinkable. There are offices without desks, elevators without power, shrapnel and broken glass everywhere…

Not to mention a thick film of grime just everywhere. The walls the floors, the ceiling, the doors and windows all under a slather of mystery sludge which was once smeared on and has now dried crusty.

There was not even any wifi!

They started a triage of priorities, grabbed a shovel (Figuratively AND Literally) and started putting the place back together again. It took time, it took effort and determination, but after detoxifying the space they completed a renovation which turned that place into a fully functional office space where people can be proud to work! And having a space you can be proud of is as important to working effectively as working effectively is to having space you can be proud of.

Before I became a Leader Development & Team Building Coach I was an Electrical Contractor, and I’ve worked cleaner and more organized construction sites! So
I have also seen a space go from dusty construction site to a fully sterilized state of the art operating room kitted out with everything a modern surgical team needs.

We could let it go the other way. We could let the office be slowly overrun by the decisions we are putting off. We could allow the surgical suite to slowly find its way back to rust and dust.

We don’t though. Without even giving it much thought we know on an instinctive level that offices are more productive when not cluttered, surgeries are more successful when we clean our space and our tools to the highest standards.

We organize ourselves so we know where each thing is before we need it!

Railway tracks have one supporting wood or concrete cross piece each step. People also need something supporting them every step of the way. The good news is if you get ahead of it, your organization can support your team every step of the way without needing you to physically hold them up every step of the way.

When something slips though, or when your business is building out a new area where not everything has been systematized yet, How do we get the train back onto the tracks?

Everything you do as a Leader and a Team Builder needs to be in answer to these questions. They always the same, even when the answers vary a little from one industry to the next.

• Which people does your team need?

• Which tools do your people need?

• What trainings do your people need?

• What work environment does your team need to do their best work?
  

We know these things, and then we get dirt in our eyes or too many things on our desk and lose sight of them. Especially those of us in industries where we start with mud, then we dig a hole and climb into it for weeks or months before we have built out the basement or parkade1 and we are finally working above ground again. Doing these types of work takes a certain toughness, a bit of gravel in your guts Johnny Cash unflinching determination! To start below ground we make ourselves drudgery resistant.

When the chances come along to get your team above ground though, to get your train back on the track, to increase traction and lessen rolling resistance, take them!

Once you made enough shifts from grinding it out to flowing, you develop a sense of it and you can start to create the conditions your team needs to find more flow. And creating conditions for flow is all we really need to take your project from the big engine with wheels stuck in the mud to the little engine that could!


Terry Barkman works as a coach and consultant with

Leaders to Develop

Teams who work together

so that your organization can sustainably

grow without burning you out!

He is Thought Leader, Speaker,

Author, and connoisseur of run on sentences. His upcoming book

Terry-Fied goes deeper into how to get relational leadership working

for your team!

Before I became Leader Development and Team Building Coach, I was an Electrical Contractor, and let me tell you, I felt this SO hard! Some days it was hard to breathe. My mind would cramp up with a breathless anxiety. It made it really hard for me to be effective solving even the easy problems which were right in front of me!

Some days I am speaking directly to those of you who are in construction and building trades, but this problem exists anywhere someone who is good at doing the thing gets promoted to managing people who do the thing, or much more complex owning a business where people do the thing. So if you are in software, the arts, or real estate…the same tools which work for people Building Buildings can be applied in your world.

Stick with me and I will show you the way out!

My clients have said all of these things: (I’ve thought some of them too before I learned leadership skills!)

If you want something done right, you have to do it yourself.

It would be wiser to hire a team that can be better than you at a few things and eventually scale to the point that for every single thing on your plate, there is someone who can do it better. This is especially important for those of us who do incredibly detailed and meticulous work. I am also a (recovering) perfectionist, and excellence is freedom from the prison of perfectionism!

I just wish I had one more (or a hundred more) of me.

No you don’t. For all of your brilliance, your team will be stronger if you do not double down on your own weaknesses.

Your employees are temporary, what matters most is how you treat your customers!

This one makes me physically ill! Nothing will keep your business small like not investing in the people who take care of your customers.

You can’t get good help anymore…

Good help is as available as it ever was. In a competitive job market you earn good people the same way we always have: You build them or you buy them. What is rare is leadership that can optimize a real world team with a collection of strengths and weakness.

The way out is simple, if not always easy.

You physically can not be everywhere doing everything all at once! Letting go of this is step one in releasing your organization to grow!

It takes a lot of growth to change yourself from the best technician with precise control into someone with relational leadership skills who is significantly less hands on with the final product. If it feels scary to trust someone to do what you can maybe to better, then you are doing it right! If it feels dangerous to not micro manage everything your people do this is the clearest sign you will see to get your…

Big Boss Bottleneck

…out of the way and let your workers…work!

What can be outsourced?
The first thing I outsourced was book keeping and taxes returns. Can I do my own? Yes. Can a professional do in more efficiently AND get me a better return? Of course! If you are good at what you do you can afford to hire specialists who are good at what they do.

What can be delegated?

The smartest thing I ever did was the first time I hired someone who could supervise a site so I did not have to be there. Occasionally I would still drop in there with coffee and encouragement; but MOST of my time was free to price quote new work, interview potential hires, and network with new and repeat clients.

What can be ignored?
When the most valuable thing you have is your attention, you want to focus it clearly on the people who matter. There are thousands of contacts in my phone, so if I get a call or a text from someone not in my top thousand, that is usually one to ignore.

What if I invest in my people and they leave? What if you don’t and they stay?!

What are you good at that is simplest to train or hire someone else to do?

Live in this world, and keep promoting yourself out of certain tasks as your team grows in size and capability. Just like I promoted myself out of being an on site supervisor, half fast book keeper, and barely amateur accountant. Every time I did it was an investment that felt like I could not afford; it freed me up to work on things I am most talented with, and in every case I was financially rewarded for trusting trustworthy people. I was breathing (and sleeping) better.

Here is to your effective days and restful nights!

Terry Barkman works as a coach and consultant with

Leaders to Develop

Teams who work together

so that your organization can sustainably

grow without burning you out!

He is Thought Leader, Speaker,

Author, and connoisseur of run on sentences. His upcoming book

Terry-Fied goes deeper into how to get relational leadership working

for your team!

Your people are the most important part of what you do, and seeing you work effectively together is my mission in life!

My writing really is for people who build teams, which is all of us. Whether your team is the group you are framing up a house with or designing a high rise with, the way we communicate, collaborate, and work together is what determines our ultimate success.

This article is for anyone who has been around long enough to see a project come off the rails, and wonder if it might be easier to keep it on the rails in the first place. Spoiler alert: It is!

While I am writing directly to teams who build literal buildings, building buildings is also a beautiful metaphor for the way we handle organizational growth or project completion. Whether you are a developer, a software engineer, or working in entertainment, your projects go through similar phases of designing, assembling, re-designing… And if we are being honest, no matter how professional we are on the outside, we have been through cluster were inside we swearing (and probably also back charging) So when and how do we start keeping our projects on the rails? Every chance we get, and on special occasions we also need to pause our ambitious, out dated, or complicated plans to make sure we are all pushing the same direction and our rails our solid.

Put the Hammer Down means two things:

Sometimes we just need to get this section of work done, and make that deadline. In this case Put the Hammer Down means go, Go, GO!! Living through today means we get to grow tomorrow.

Sometimes though we need to put our tools down for a few minutes to discuss what we are doing, and how we are getting it done. In this case Put the Hammer Down means Go, Grow, GROW!

• We do this to prevent costly mistakes

• We do this to prevent (another) injury

• We do this when we need to adjust our plan unexpectedly. (again)

To Build Your Team WHILE your team is building, learn how to put the hammer down, and when to put the HAMMER DOWN!

We humans are better prepared to focus on that next deadline than we are to take in information which prompts us to make meaningful and important course corrections while they are still cheap, and relatively easy. We default to solving the things that are easy to wrap our hands around, so when we want to choose a more balanced approach, lean towards cleaning up our communication, drive towards higher trust, dig into what motivates each one of our team members.

How much is it costing your organization to not understand

• How to be a better Team Builder so the right people stick with you?

• How to attract Better Team Builders to make your organization more effective?

• How to solve communication problems before they become costly?

• When do you get to be tactical, (adapting with changing circumstances) and when do you need to be strategic? (proactively creating the conditions necessary for success!)

• How to get the right kind of initiative from your people?

• How to get short term wins without compromising your long term goals?

External issues like weather or supply delays - This is just business as usual. Overcoming these things are the job you were hired for. What we do is summon a building (or software App, or human rights legislation…) out of nothing, against a staggering list of external barriers, and then we do it again!

The bad news is, it is our internal barriers which most often get in our way. The good news is, our internal barriers are the only thing we have any control over.

The A.C.T.ion Formula1 I use in my coaching reminds us that to skillfully navigate our internal barriers we need to give our attention and energy to

1. Attitude

2. Communication &

3. Teamwork

In spite of our training (since industrialization) to focus too much on the “hard” skills such as pouring foundations or raising up walls, it is our savviness with people, our relational intelligence, and our ability to build better leadership skills that bring together those easy to see “hard” skills and anchor them on to our common purpose and direction.

Every one of us work with people! Whether your people are focused on the structure, the design, or marketing of the build; the level of our Communication, Collaboration, and Team Work determines whether we will be greater or less than the sum of our parts.

So pick up your tools, collect your team, and lets PUT THE HAMMER DOWN!

About Terry

Before becoming a Thought Leader, Coach, and Speaker in the Team Building & Leadership domain, Terry was in construction for 20 years. Time spent with dirt on his boots and calluses on his hands prime his no nonsense approach to getting things done the smart way.

Then as both an electrical and general contractor this practical experience backed him up as he doubled down on Building Teams, Clarifying Communication, and Building success through Collaboration!

He always says “Do it once, do it right!”

In his free time Terry Loves to sail and sailing is all about Clear Communication, and Building Teams that are effective at managing Course Corrections as conditions never stop changing.

He always says “Make (most of) your course corrections small, early, and often!”

The Team Building we sometimes see in Construction, and often see in Sailing inspired him to write his first book

*The Sailboat Effect*

Your people are the most important part of what you do, and seeing you work effectively together is Terry’s mission in life!

Before I was a Team Building (and Leader Development) Coach I was in construction. I was a construction worker, a master electrician, and a contractor. Although humans have been building together since the dawn of civilization it is both astonishing to me what we can do and dumbfounding how bad we sometimes are at doing it.

One of the things that you need most on a construction team is people who are passionately committed to making something ordered, strait, plumb, square, and who can maintain that commitment while working in an environment that is chaotic, messy, unhygienic, unceasingly noisy, and perhaps most significantly, defined by the things we are willing to put off or ignore “until later”

There are material piles in the way, vehicles blocking access, and if there is a route to safely evacuate in the event of an emergency, it changes daily. Sometimes hourly. If you want to get somewhere to do a thing, you do not want to start from here because the best walkways are filled with dangers and guarded by red danger tape. The second and third best ways of getting to where you need might still open, but will they remain open long enough for you to get there? And if they are, will you be able to remember where enough of them are to cobble together into a navigable (if highly impractical) route. Once you get there it is lamentable how often things are not yet to the stage of completion where you can start your the work you have trained, supplied, prepared and shown up to do.

Things we take for granted in a finished building like fire suppression systems, adequate ventilation, and emergency exits are in disjointed stages of completion. Emergency exit doors get screwed shut from the outside. (WTF?!? How is this not a human rights violation??) Once that problem is solved, you may find that the emergency staircase that would otherwise get you safely to ground level has not arrived yet, and that first step is a big one! Or you will be lucky enough that your exit door is in place, working correctly, and by some miracle opens correctly out onto ground level… or at least it will once the ground has been put in… right now it is still a long way down into a muddy hole that does not look fun to climb out of with your now freshly fractured fibula!

When you talk to the gnarled veteran down in a hole getting it done in the cold wetness the story is always has the same headlines too.

“This job is a sh*t show!”

(or a gong show, depending on who we are censoring for. It is a direct quote) When I’m talking with Gnarly V, I always ask,

“Do you remember that job where they gave you everything you needed to do your job, the space to do it, all the information you needed, but they gave it to you before you needed it?”

Every single time the answer is an emphatic yes! Then I ask them what the name of the job was, the name of the company running it, or who they were working with at the time and somehow they always change the subject before they could remember. Because it is always like this. We are always making it up as we go along, there are consistently more changes than there should be, and despite all evidence to the contrary, we keep telling ourselves that the last one was better and the next one will be too!

Ask them if they remember the one where the washrooms were never clean, the plans kept changing and they had to keep tearing their work apart and starting over, and they will prattle off a list. Ask which site had say, the crane flip over or the slurry tank almost flushed into a pristine forest and I’ll bet their memory recall gets really crystal clear!

In spite of all of these obstacles, building still get… built. Somehow without all of pieces we need, without adequate information, without a real plan that could survive contact on the ground we still do the work. Chaos gets turned into coherence, ideas get hammered into plans, agreements are altered and pushed forward, and what we begin we finish.

Am I saying that we should let a lot of things slide? That the mess, the incoherence, the unfinished plans are all OK? Since you asked, I will say our work forever will be to endeavor for better planning, for clearer communication, for improved agreement keeping.

Where I am going with this though, is into gratitude for the people who are boots on the ground getting it done while we are refining our planning, our clarifying our communication, and our integrating our agreement keeping.

These are the people turning chaos into coherence, stuckness into momentum, and deficiencies into substantial completion.

These people look at a crater in the ground with confidence knowing that together they can conjure into that hole whole buildings towering into the sky!

So the next time you see UNDER CONSTRUCTION signs; or your street is blocked off by trucks, cones, and workers in hi vis vests; the next time you see someone with mud on their boots and grime under their fingernails, instead of focusing on the inconvenience, consider saying thank you for the person who lives in this truncated wasteland, so that you do not have to!

Here is to the women and men out in the elements, getting it done so we can have shelter, the people leaving their homes each day so we can have homes.

Celebrate the team builders who labor in the darkness so we can have light! Celebrate the calloused hands that form from the formless, making something be where there was nothing! Even when things keep going wrong day after day, week after week, thank you to those of you who wake up early every day to keep making them right!

Terry Barkman is a thought leader in Team Building & Leader Development. His speaking, writing, consulting & coaching are motivated by seeing more connected, effective and focused people come out on the other side. On land, at sea, from boardroom, to retreat center, to the ultimate sailboat experience; he will bring sustainable navigation to you and your organization!

Terry puts people first, ideas second, flow third.
Grammar matters any time it can be in service to the big three.

Terry Speaks ~ Photo Credit Anita Alberto

The one thing you will never see ducks do, is getting all of their ducks in a row. In a life filled with foraging, swimming, and avoiding predators, ducks spend 0% of their time getting into a row. The end up in a row because they have a clear leader and that leader has a clear direction. Whether they are looking for food, shelter from the elements, or just swimming somewhere sunny, Ma Duck picks a direction, and all the little ducklings follow. It is following a clear leader in motion that gets the ducklings lined up facing the destination. They know they have arrived when the leader stops being in motion, and the cute little formation scatters often in search of food.


When we are sailing coastal waters, or tramping around shores that invite us to explore while our boat is anchored, we get to see wild life living delightfully, wildly, with total unconcern for the metaphors we are trying to force them into.

What do we as Leaders and Team Builders mean when we say have to get our ducks in a row “first?” We mean we are not ready to begin, we feel underprepared, we are perhaps if we are brave enough to admit to it, afraid. Once we are fully prepared, the work gets easier, once we overcome our imposter syndrome or newly minted excuses, then we will be ready to “start.”

What Ducks, Sailboats, and Teams have in common is that we can not steer them when they are not moving. Once they are in motion, have chosen a direction, NOW we can steer a course, now we can refine more exactly where we are wanting to get to and precisely which path we will follow in getting there.

And the longer we wait to get moving, the harder it is to overcome the inertia of ‘stuckness.’ Once we are moving though, it is easier to keep moving, and possible to build on our momentum.

Am I saying that we should begin while we are completely unprepared? Of course not. Ducks prepare for swimming in formation by being ducks. No amount of waiting and hoping prepares us to be sailors. As sailors we first ensure we have food and provisions on board, we ensure our team knows how to get off the dock safely, we double check our equipment and gear. The movement of doing these things prepares us to be sailors so that when we untie from land, all that is left to do is start sailing!

Terry Barkman is a thought leader in Team Building & Leader Development. His speaking, writing, consulting & coaching are motivated by seeing more connected, effective and focused people come out on the other side. On land, at sea, from boardroom, to retreat center, to the ultimate sailboat experience; he will bring sustainable navigation to you and your organization!

Terry puts people first, ideas second, flow third.
Grammar matters any time it can be in service to the big three.

Someone on your team has been burned out in the past.

Someone on your team is burning out right now.

Someone on your team has burned out recently.

Here is how we as Leaders and as Team Builders can help:

When I first got into Film Making as a career I quickly learned that 80-100 hour weeks require a level of self care and intentionality that something closer to 40 hours a week just does not force upon you. My long term choice was to pursue endeavors that are less demanding and certainly not as all consuming as making movie magic.

While I was in it though, I was very intentional about using all of the self care tools I had, and developing more. How I got through those early years was by choosing short shows to work on, and so I did a burn out recover every 2-3 weeks. And a micro version on the “weekend.” Weekend is in quotes because if you work if you start at 0500 (5am) on Monday, and start 3 hours later each day, by Friday you are starting at 2000 (8pm) on Friday which if you ‘only work a 16 hour shift has you wrapping out at noon on Saturday. (in the industry we call it Fraturday. It blurs your sense of what is real)

On my very best weeks, by the time I had done the life admin of laundry, grocery shopping napping (hopefully) I had 2, maybe 2 1/2 hours of me time, and I spent every minute of it on the water sailing with friends. It was critical to get on the boat every weekend I could physically stand, because you need hope, something beautiful and worthwhile to hold on to to get you through the next week which looks excruciating and starts in just a few hours.

When the show ended though, I started with sleep.
What came next though was counterintuitive for me. What I wanted to do was jump in with really high quality self care and get maximum results for my investment of time and energy. Physically, mentally, emotionally though, I was not able to engage in high quality self care, which for me is one of the most compelling definitions of burn out as opposed to bore out or grey zoning.

Recovering

After sleeping as late as possible between Saturday around noon when the show ended until ideally Sunday morning, I am ready to start recovering. Perhaps stream a show.

Resetting

Maybe do some laundry. Some task that cues your body that you are in the early stages of the rebuilding phase. Feed yourself. Forage though. Do not attempt to do too much on day one by buying groceries AND doing laundry the same day. This makes you less upright and moving on Day 2, and trust me, when you are this depleted you do not have the emotional reserves to handle the despair and disappointment that come with regressing.

On day two you want to get groceries and make yourself something rewarding to eat. Something healthy if you can pull it off, but our bar for success better not be higher than we are capable of clearing.

Stream a show. Not because this is the pinnacle of self care. Use it as long as it is the highest level of self care you can sustainably reach for and shift to the next level when you are able.

Rest

It would be amazing if we could start here because deep rest is such a wonderful way of…restoring us. When rest is your step one this is really good news, it means you have gotten out of unsustainable work before burning all of the way out. One that works well for me, is relaxing in a float tank for a good long while. Sit in the sunshine or lay in front of your red light therapy lamp. Rest is mostly sleep though. Sleep that lines up with the diurnal rhythms of the sunrise and sunset, and is as deep as it can be considering the unsustainable things you’ve been pushing though. If you’ve been working crazy hours and fueling your work with caffeine and adrenaline it will take awhile for your body to feel safe sleeping for more than a few hours uninterrupted. Some light exercise is also good. Ideally somewhere beautiful, quiet, and that you feel safe.

Rejuvenate

This is the good stuff. Spend some time with a friend who restores you, meditate, do something creative like writing, painting, dancing. Meditate in a place that resonates for you. Personally I love looking at waves or fire. Having said this flowing rivers, waterfalls, forest bathing… There are quality options. Read things that you find inspiring, that enliven your heart and mind. Travel to some outdoor hot springs if the journey is not out of reach for you. Rejuvenate is still is most being, and a gentle being at that. If the journey to get too the hot springs is too much for you yet, this moves that option into the next stage.

Reenergize

In this stage you are beginning to do things that require you to invest a greater degree of energy up front, and give you a bigger abundance of cup filling while and after you do them. Skiing is one of these for me, so is sailing. Get out on a bike ride. This is also where I open myself up to connecting with small groups, dancing at events that have more than a handful of people in the room.

Experiment with things that might work for you. It is not so important to ask yourself is this inactivity/way of being/activity a stage one self care or a stage four selfcare?1 It is more important to ask yourself is this the stage my heart/mind/body are up for right now? while not rushing yourself or lingering too long in the ones which require little energy from you, and also have a smaller reward for you (Netflix) Your pace might be different from mine, and that is OK. Finding your best pace this time will re-energize you more fully than striving for someone else’s pace, even if that someone else is how you did it last time.

One thing I can promise you, your best pace is slower than you think it is. I know this because we burn our selves out by doing more than we can sustain, for longer than we can sustain it.

If you are like me, you may have to go through this cycle from Reset to Re-Energization several times before you can start to anticipate when you are pushing yourself to a pace which is unsustainable and course correct before it causes you to crash and burn out.

The important thing is to ask your heart, your mind, and especially your body what it is up for, learn to believe it and take action.

Terry Barkman is a thought leader in Team Building & Leader Development. His speaking, writing, consulting & coaching are motivated by seeing more connected, effective and focused people come out on the other side. On land, at sea, from boardroom, to retreat center, to the ultimate sailboat experience; he will bring sustainable navigation to you and your organization!

Terry puts people first, ideas second, flow third.
Grammar matters any time it can be in service to the big three.

I had a friend who used to say the first mistake of the day does not count. And I still have a friend who says the first pancake of the day is always going to be a mess. Personally, I am more of a waffle guy but perhaps that is close enough.

While I see the value in not counting our mistakes, and I see a lot of value in not calling a messy waffle or one lacking in structural integrity and aesthetic beauty a disaster since it is probably still delicious, and this might just not rank high enough to make it onto the scale of a bonafide disaster…

As a recovering perfectionist, I know the pain of never being good enough, and I know the temptation to make the people around me feel that too. It’s a lot of pressure, a lot of failure, a lot of blame with a side of villainization.

So you could make a compelling argument that ANYTHING is better than counting mistakes or striving for the impossibly perfect, and I would agree with you. Second worst is not where I’d like to finish though. It just feels too much like giving up.

Stop being such an imperfectionist is also double negative. And our minds are not good at picturing negatives (let alone doubles) which makes us ineffective at creating that picture as a reality in our lives. And consistently being ineffective is almost as exhausting ineffectively striving for perfection.

Where I have found rest, flow, and success, is in excellence. Aim for excellence, with the first waffle, with the first protype, with your first creative endeavor. Because you are worth investing some effort into, because aiming for excellence is the kind of practice that improves you, and because better waffles are a delicious by product of the person I am choosing to be. (and if it feels right for you, I am inviting you too choose also)

Giving ourselves the gift of second chances is a beautiful… gift. Giving each other the gift of time to learn and grow from the step they are currently on (not the step we wish they were on) is an excellent way for us to invite their excellence to grow and flourish.

We are better and our teams our happier when the we focus on our shared goals and our mutual attempt. Test this out with your teams, and report back to us. I bet that letting people improve from a place of flow, curiosity and excellence wins out over a place of impatience, judgement, and perfection in the fullness of time.

So LET the first waffle be good. Invite the second waffle to be good. You’ll get more ‘good’ waffles, and you’ll have more fun crafting them with care.

Terry Barkman is a thought leader in Team Building & Leader Development. His speaking, writing, consulting & coaching are motivated by seeing more connected, effective and focused people come out on the other side. On land, at sea, from boardroom, to retreat center, to the ultimate sailboat experience; he will bring sustainable navigation to you and your organization!

Terry puts people first, ideas second, flow third.
Grammar matters any time it can be in service to the big three.

Photo Credit TerrythesailboatCoach

Pictured here is my actual first waffle. Not the first attempt of my life, but my first of the day. My guests did not comment on the color contrast, the slightly off round edges, the one bit that got a little darker than the rest. They raved about how delicious it was, and we lingered in rich meaningful conversation while savoring seconds. (and treasuring thirds!)

So here is to second chances, and second breakfastses!

Photo Credit Sailboat Coaching International1

“We can not cook down here!” my crew shouts out from below decks on our sailboat. I move closer and signal that I am listening. “Can we drop anchor somewhere so we can finish making lunch? It’s too rough!”

We are in pretty deep water with rocky cliffs for shores, there is nowhere nearby to anchor and no welcoming shores in sight. If we wait until we get to a place we can anchor, lunch is going to be very, very late. Sailing burns a lot of calories, and our crew needs to eat soon before we run out of blood sugar. Also, we need our cooks to be safe and we want them to be comfortable so we don’t have to start looking for new cooks.

As a Leader, I want to always give my team what they need to thrive, even if it is not what they asked for. (or at least the way in which they asked for it) I tell them we can be anchored in two hours and I take the wheel.

Suddenly, as if by magic, our boat is no longer feeling the roll of the waves, no longer tossed by the winds, and no longer leaning over so far its hard for our intrepid cooks to handle sharps or fire.

The cooking team leader comes up to the cockpit to see what happened to the wind and the waves that so immediately stopped being a problem. She looks at me and says “How long will it be like this for?”
I tell her I can keep the boat smooth and level as long as we need to make lunch ready, and they go back to it.

What I did to make the boat easy to cook in was simple, if not easy. I ask the boat what it needed to be optimized, and gently, persistently, attentively, gave it all of those things before it had to ask twice. My two sails are my wings, and my crew is keeping them trimmed so they generate lift and quiet speed like the gliding flight of an albatross. Optimizing for the power in the sails, smoothness over the waters, and making gentle anticipatory movements of the steering wheel, I settled the boat right down.

What was the person who had just been steering doing wrong? Nothing, they were applying all of the same principles at an intermediate level. And ordinarily I want to give as much practice time to the novice and intermediates as possible. This situation called for mastery to ensure our hungry crew got fed, and I was the only one of those close at hand.2

What is Mastery? My favorite definition is The acceptance that we are never finished working on the basics. To put another way, it is just oceans of Preparedness. In the same way I want to give the Novice and Intermediate sailors as much time at the wheel as possible, I’ve had time at the wheel. I can step in and turn it on with no warning. No time to prepare, because I did my preparing in advance.

Could we have changed the itinerary we had planned? Of course! If we had not spent years preparing the skills that this moment required, we would have eaten our emergency rations and kept sailing. Lunch was magnificent though, and our crew had earned something both satisfying and delicious and we ate like champions!

Do we still need planning if we have an abundance of preparation? Of course we do. The more people we have involved, the more complex the terrain is, the stronger the tidal currents are, the more having a solid plan matters! What is also true as we add complexity is that a plan is meaningless unless we have the preparedness to pull it off (and the preparedness to make adjustments on the fly)

Here is to the preparedness AND planning that allow your team to thrive!

Terry Barkman is a thought leader in Team Building & Leader Development. His speaking, writing, consulting & coaching are motivated by seeing more connected, effective and focused people come out on the other side. On land, at sea, from boardroom, to retreat center, to the ultimate sailboat experience; he will bring sustainable navigation to you and your organization!

Terry puts people first, ideas second, flow third.
Grammar matters any time it can be in service to the big three.