279 – If You Can’t Get Out Of It Get Into It

John (Intro): Over the last two decades, I’ve been on an insatiable quest to learn everything about leadership. What makes the best leaders so good? After running companies small and large over the last 20 years, today I speak on stages worldwide to audiences interested in that same question. My name is John Laurito. I’m your host, and I invite you to join me on this journey as we explore this topic and what makes the best leader so good? Welcome to Tomorrow’s Leader. 

John: Over the last two decades, I’ve been on an insatiable quest to learn everything I can about leadership. What makes the best leaders so good? After running companies small and large over the last 20 years, today I speak on stages all across the world to audiences who are interested in that same question. My name is John Laurito. I’m your host, and I invite you to join me on this journey as we explore this very topic and what makes the best leader so good. Welcome to tomorrow’s leader. 

John: All right. Welcome to today’s episode of Tomorrow’s Leader, where we dive deep into all things leader-related, related to leading yourself and leading others. I’m John Laurito, your host. Welcome back from a fantastic hopefully a fantastic Memorial Day weekend. I had a wonderful weekend. I hope you did, too. I hope you got time. Time to spend it with your family, your loved ones, and the people that you love and care about the most. And I also hope you got time to reflect on what is Memorial Day. And we are broadcasting this in I noticed 66 different countries. I have listeners in which I am so grateful for all of you. In the United States, we celebrate Memorial Day, which is the celebration and remembrance of those that gave their lives the ultimate sacrifice, that gave their lives fighting to protect the rights and the freedoms of those in this country. So I want to make sure that that does not go without notice and certainly without many, many thoughts and much, much gratitude to those and all the respect in the world to those that have and are fighting for their country. So with that said, I want to tell a little story. It’s all about today’s topic, which has to do with leading yourself. 

John: And inevitably, when you lead yourself better, you lead other people better. I had somebody tell me a great, great quote recently that I loved, and that’s the theme of today, which I’m going to get to the quote in a minute. But it kind of starts with a story. I remember being in a meeting. This is going back a number of years. I was running an office in Boston and we had I think I’m going to say maybe 20 leaders that used to get together on a call every morning at 8 a.m. every single day for like 15 minutes. And I remember and I was running the largest office in the country. These were all people running large offices and very, very capable leaders. And we were going through every morning a 15-minute call to go through the results of yesterday. And I forget what exactly it was, but we’re kind of going through and round robin, everybody had to report these numbers, daily numbers, and it was like this tedious, monotonous, just really nobody liked it, everybody hated it. 

John: And even my boss who was running it did it really begrudgingly. He didn’t want to do it. It was something pushed down from corporate this and that. It was just any event, it was a bunch of B.S., But we all hated it. And we were there on a call one morning and I remember there was somebody who had we were on a conference call. So it’s just phones. It wasn’t,

you know, Zoom or anything like that. And I remember somebody left their microphone open and you could hear them. Somebody must have walked into their office and you could hear the pure, clearly loud as they’re you could hear them say, and I don’t know me and I’m on this stupid call, stupid call every single frickin morning, 8:00 in the morning. 

John: We go now. We’re all listening to this. And I’m in the office with my boss, so he’s running the call. I’m in the office there and he interjects and says, “Hey, Joe, we can hear your phone. Your phones are not on mute. And apparently, the guy’s still in here, too. Keeps going and he’s telling this person he came to the office. He’s like, I’m on this call.” The stupidest call every morning is such a waste. 15 minutes. I go through 8:00 in the morning, these stupid numbers and he’s, you know, bitching and complaining and this and that. The bottom line is he was saying what we were all feeling. 

John: I mean, we all felt the same way. He just had a voice and unknowingly on an open mic and the boss heard. Anyway, you know, Boston take it personally or anything like that. He felt the same way, to be honest with you. He wasn’t even, you know, would not have by choice, been doing this. And that was part of the issues with the company as a whole. It was just kind of run as a top-down, you know, didn’t have the ability to really lead. It was a lot of order taking, so to speak. 

John: But nevertheless, that was a period of time that this was taking place. But I remember that period and really hating these calls and realizing it wasn’t going to change. The fact that I hated the calls weren’t and everybody hated the calls wasn’t going to change the fact that these calls were happening. It wasn’t going to change the fact that every day I had to report my numbers. And it just kind of struck me at that point that I had a choice. And that was either to go into these calls with this really negative attitude and start my day in a really negative place or change my whole mindset about it and go into it with a little bit of a different or a lot of a different attitude and. 

John: And I had somebody tell me recently this quote, which I thought was great if you can’t get out of it, get into it. I’ll say that again. If you can’t get out of it, get into it. Now, we all have things in our life that this could really apply to, right? Those things. And you might be a brand new leader. You might not be a leader yet or a former leader or trying to get into the role. You 

might be a mid-level leader trying to get to a senior-level leader. You might be a senior-level leader trying to get to C-suite, whatever the case may be. 

John: There are some things in the course of your day or in the course of your week or in the course of a quarter that you have to do that you don’t like to do. You just hate to do it. Maybe you dread it, but if it’s something you have to do, maybe you’ve got maybe you’re the CEO and you’ve got to present to the board every quarter. You know that’s a there’s a lot of pressure in that. You know, there’s a lot of anxiety. 

John: Maybe your senior leader, your part of that, whatever the case may be, if you can’t get out of it, then get into it, change your mindset and make a decision that you’re going to go into it and approach it with an entirely different attitude. This money, these are daily rather called at 8 a.m. My attitude could very easily have changed one of two ways. One, I could start my day, go wake up in the morning, be like, Oh, God, I got the stupid call. I got to get there at 8:00 in the morning and go through these numbers.

John: I hate this. Or I could say, listen, I’m going to get my cup of coffee. I’m going to chill out. I’ve got 30 seconds that I report my numbers. I’m going to listen, everybody. My goal is going to go into that and feel excited to give my numbers because I had such a great day the day before. My goal is to outdo this person or that person or everybody. My goal is to report better numbers than everybody else on that call, whatever. Play a game with it and say, okay, can I get something different out of this? If I can’t get out of it, let me actually get into it and pretend at first that sometimes you got to do that. 

John: Sometimes you get to pretend that you love it, that you’re like, okay, all right, awesome. If I truly did love this, what would it feel like? What would I be thinking? What would I be doing? And all of a sudden, your attitude truly does change. Now, my day went from starting on a bad note to starting on an oak. I went from starting a B.A. to starting a neutron, though, to ultimately being like, All right, not only do I not mine these things, I kind of like them, especially on the days that I have good results to report. Instead of being a punishment, it became a little bit more of an accolade and more recognition. And then I changed my thought. 

John: I said, You know what? When I become the boss and I get to a point where, you know, I can make the decisions, I’m going to choose from my own personal experience. I don’t want to do this. This is not something that I benefited from. I know this is not the way that I want to lead. And again, you know, my leader was in a position he didn’t have a choice at that point. But I made the decision that when I get to a position it is my choice. I’m not going to do this. So you learn from those experiences. But again, if you can’t get out of it, get into it. 

John: So ask yourself, you know, am I suddenly if this whatever this task is, maybe it’s you know, maybe it’s doing a totally different type of recruiting for four people. Now, I can’t recruit, you know, college grads. I’ve got to recruit experienced people. And it takes a whole different skill set. I don’t like it. I love recruiting college kids, not going to recruit them. Well, is the direction of the company going to change back to what it was? Probably not. If your organization is moving in a new direction, it’s moving in a new direction for a reason. It’s moving away from what you were doing is something else. 

John: So if you don’t like that change, you have to be real and say, okay, is it going to suddenly change back? I don’t know many companies at all that have moved back to what they were doing because again, they’ve moved away from it for a reason. So you have to be reality based and say, okay, even though I love that old way of doing it, if it if it’s not likely and realistic that it’s going to change back to that, then I can’t get out of doing this new way of doing it the new way or new system or new approach or new strategy. Then let me get into it. Instead of complaining about it, being negative about it, and having these just, you know, stressed out, anxious negative thoughts. 

John: Let me change it into something that’s positive. And let me say, okay, let me dove into this head first. All right. I’m got to use a new system. I get a switch from, you know, one CRM over to a different CRM or switch now to Salesforce. And I’m used to using something totally 

different. And I don’t like the new system, whatever it is. Well, I can’t get out of it. Right. I’m going to have to convert. So let me just dove into it instead of trying to get out of it, let me get into it. So that’s my theme for today. Think about it.

John: There’s something in your life, something in your week, in your day, in your month that you may hate. And it’s just it’s an attitude thing and you can’t get out of it. If you can’t then make the decision to get into it. If you can get out of it, get out of it, especially if it’s not productive, then push hard to get out of it. But if you can’t get out of it, get into it. Simple message. I love that quote. I want to pass it on to you in this quick little ten-minute episode. 

John: So with that said, I hope you have a great day. I hope your June is now started off on the right foot. By the time you listen to it, it will be June. It’s not quite yet. It’s May 31st right now as I tape this, but I hope your years are off to a great start. I hope your summer. I hope you get great plans for the summer. Think about activities, trips, and people. You’re going to see all kinds of cool stuff and tell me about it. I love to hear about that. I’ve got some pretty cool plans myself. 

John: So in the meantime, like, share, subscribe, all that kind of good stuff, let me know your ideas and thoughts right after this. Some tape in an episode that was given to me, an idea by one of our loyal listeners. So I appreciate that you’ll hear some props to that person as well as the next topic. If you tune in to the next episode and in the meantime, go down below, give a five-star review and I will see you next time. Thanks. 

John: Thanks for joining us on today’s episode of Tomorrow’s Leader. For suggestions or inquiries about having me at your next event or personal coaching, reach me at John@lauritogroup.com. Once again, that’s john@lauritogroup.com. Thanks. Lead on. 

John (Closing): Thanks for joining us on today’s episode of Tomorrow’s Leader. For suggestions, or inquiries, about having me at your next event, or personal coaching, reach me at john@lauritogroup.com Once again, that’s john@lauritogroup.com. Thanks! Lead on!