So we were finally meeting with the elder that I had been wanting to meet with for a very long time. This guy was going to be instrumental in stabilizing this part of the district where Village Stability was going in, as I write about in my book
“Game Changers”. Mullah Mike had a connection with this elder and finally, we were sitting down having a conversation and I was kind of nationally responsible for getting this program in play. I was so excited to be talking to this elder that I
literally kind of forget my principles and where I come from. So when the guy excused himself for a second, I’m like, “Mike, okay, so how are we doing this? What’s the plan? Here’s my agenda…how do you want to do this? And he said,
“Sir,” actually, I’ll tell you what he said in a second but let me just suffice it to say that it changed the way I thought about patience forever.
This is the third installment in the video blog for the MannUp report and for MannUp ladder inspiration. This is addressing the Rooftop Leadership approach, to inspiring people to climb up the ladders when there’s the proverbial tracer fire
going on everywhere. When there’s risk, high risk, high emotion, and to stand shoulder to shoulder with you and take a chance on your vision or your product on your services. Whether this is serving your customers or your prospects.
Whether this is keeping unity inside your organization, your company, your school, your police department, or connecting with the community. If you’re a law enforcement officer or just getting your kids to listen to you, we all face challenges in a trust depleted environment in a hyper connected environment where no one’s connected personally.
We all face challenges in inspiring people to climb up those ladders, don’t we? In the last couple of weeks we’ve been talking about the three P’s of rooftop leadership that can help you inspire people over time to go up those ladders and
take a chance and play a bigger game than themselves. Of course, those three P’s are presence, persistence, and patience. We’ve gone over presence and persistence and now we’re going to go over the final one, which is patience. You know what, I think it’s probably the hardest one. We talk a big game about patience, we try to teach our kids to be patient, but let’s be honest as westerners and certainly as Americans, we’re about the most impatient folks on the planet.
Just watch how people operate at a Taco Bell drive through, or watch how people are at the airport if someone gets in their way or at rush hour. Or watch how we are even impatient with our kids or our loved ones. You know what I mean? We operate in a contract society literally in the rat race every day and we are becoming more and more impatient as time goes on. It’s just how it goes.
A lot of what I’m about to talk to you about may seem like it makes sense, but frankly in terms of behavioral patterns, it’s counterintuitive and I encourage you to make an effort to integrate this third P into your life as well. Even though it seems
easy, trust me when I tell you that patience, when you are trying to inspire people to do something bigger than themselves, especially when trust can be low, is extremely difficult. As I was sitting there that day with that elder, and I was pestering Mike, how are we going to do this … He said, “Sir, here’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to drink some tea and we’re going to drink some chai and that’s the only plan we have right now because I want this guy to get to know you. I want him to get to know you as a man, as a person and to trust you. There’s no way that we’re going to get to these items on the agenda in one meeting and to do that puts the whole thing at risk. We’re going to have to have”
wait for it, “Patience.”
I felt like a pretty silly dude because I’ve known that for a long time as a career Green Beret that you’ve got to have patience. We all forget that though. We all get caught up in our agenda. We all get caught up in the top down pressure that gets brought to bear on us by our supervisors and our bosses and our loved ones, to get things done or our own internal perfectionism to get things done. I want it fast, I want it now, lets get it done. As a result of that we lose our patience and frankly we get sloppy, we make mistakes, we push people into corners they don’t want to be in. Scarcity comes into play and status and clan behavior that is very unhelpful in a Rooftop Leadership environment starts to happen. Just the way that Mullah Mike was able to go into these villages and be patient and build relationships that had depth and weight, I want the same for you in your life and business. I want you to have that kind of patience when it comes to building your customer portfolio. I want you to have that kind of patience when it comes to establishing relationships with the community where you serve as a law enforcement officer.
Look, I want you to have that kind of patience when you’re dealing with your kids and you’re teaching them life lessons that they’re going to use after you’re gone. You understand me? Patience, and it’s not easy but it’s a skill. Mullah Mike
understood that patience equals results, and not just any results but strategic results. Now here’s a few takeaways, some concrete things you can do right now to build your resilience for patience. Number one, is remember that all problems
are human problems and patience goes at the pace of the people involved in that problem. Do you understand that? I’m going to say that again, all problems are human problems and patience has to go at the pace of the people relevant to
that problem. If you try to push it faster than that, in many cases you’re going to marginalize those people who are most relevant to the problem and guess what they’re going to do? They’re going to shut you out and are going to have nothing
to do with you.
The secondary piece of this with that in mind, is to meet people where they are, not where you want them to be. This is one of the major game changers I put in my book, Game Changers, which you can get, by the way, at thegamechangersbook.com. But one of the major game changers is meet people here they are, not where you want them to be. When you’re working a problem it’s really important to look at the problem through the lens of the problem owner. The more that you can do that you will elicit a degree of empathy, and then reciprocity is immeasurable. Meeting people where they are not where you want them to be isn’t easy. Then once again, just like the last step, be incremental, go for base hits. Goal oriented behavior is key, you’ve got to know where you want to go. You’ve got to know where they want to go as well, and then be incremental with base hits as you do that. Stuart Diamond, the negotiator who wrote “Getting More”, who taught me and trained me as a negotiator drove that one into my thick skull.
Then finally, and this is key guys and gals, relationships are the asset. I don’t care what the situation is, 99.9% of the time when you’re dealing with a problem, the asset to that problem, the asset to your growth, the asset to your expansion,
the asset that will enable your vision, it’s a relationship or a series of relationships that are strategic. They are the asset. You have to have patience. How long does it take to really establish a deep human connection? How long does it take to
establish trust in a relationship? Often not as long as you think if you work with me and you take my trade craft training to heart, but it still takes time and it takes patience. So just remember, the relationship is the asset. Don’t put the transaction before the relationship and get impatient because you get what you pay for. You get a transactional situation that’s that deep and no one’s going to follow you to the rooftop.
There you have it, the three P’s. Presence, persistence and patience. Those three things if you employ them and you work at them, I promise you, you’ll find people following you up the ladders not because they have to, but because they
choose to and it can change how you run your life and your business. Again make sure you go to MannUp.com and join our tribe. This is a movement. This is a lifetime work of mastery. We’re always working on this stuff. I’m constantly
putting out this kind of content that’s going to help. Share with your tribe, get them to MannUp.com. This is leaders without titles who recognize nobody else is coming. Nobody with a title’s going to come fix this. It’s you and me. So go to
MannUp.com, join our tribe and help us with this movement. I’ll see you on the high ground.
