All right, welcome back. So before we move on to the meat of this video, I want you to take a second and look at this list of qualities that you wrote down, that are exhibited by great leaders. And I'm curious how many of the qualities of a great leader overlap with your values. So flip back a few pages in your workbook and look at your values. Look at the words you want to be used when people talk about or describe you, and see how many of those words are showing up again, as qualities of a great leader. All right, just a cool thing to look at and to kind of keep in mind and again, all of these little tricks and tools are our anchor points that we can use to make sure that our values are guiding our actions, right.

Okay, so we're going to talk now about one of the major responses abilities of a leader. And that is the fact that you set the ceiling or the standard for the individuals who follow you, or the people in your charge, right? If you are in a position of leadership by title, if you're a coach, if you're a manager, if you are general manager, or you know, whatever the title might be everybody in your charge or below you on the organizational chart, you set the standard when I owned and ran my gym, how substrings I was the guy, right? So if I said 200 pounds is like the heaviest squat possible and that was the standard or the ceiling. Nobody in that facility was ever going to squat more than 200 pounds. Or if I said, you know, hey, my standard for nutrition is you know, eat a spirit dress and chicken breasts Monday through Friday and then eat whatever the hell you want on Saturday and Sunday.

That would be the standard for everybody in my gym. Unless they went outside of me and outside of my facility to find their own standards. If they had done that they quickly would have outgrown me and move beyond my facility, they would have seen the limitations of what I could teach and coach and help them and they would have moved on. So our responsibility as the leader is to recognize that we set the ceiling We are the standard for what everybody else can get to. But within that, we have to recognize that that means we have to constantly be learning and elevating and expanding as that 360 degrees sphere, right? If we were the size of a lacrosse ball and we stayed that way, for the entirety of our life, people would not stay with us for life.

They would outpace us out, develop outgrow us and move on and needs Somebody else. If your sole focus if your sole business is on getting people from, you know, Point A to Point B and once they get to b and move on, then that's fine, you focus on a to b. But if you are interested in you know, being there for the duration of people's journey, keep in mind that you also have to grow and expand in order to not hinder their growth. Another way of thinking about this, this is a lesson from the book, fuck your feelings. So, if we think about when you grow, when you have a plant in a pot, the plant can only grow as large as the pot allows the root system to expand. We are the pot for ourselves and for others.

If we don't grow, we don't expand or give them space hold space for someone else's roots to grow and develop it. We stymie or stunt their growth. You know. So if we want the plant to be able to grow bigger, it has to move to a bigger pot. If you think of yourself as a pot that is constantly growing and expanding and holding space for others growth. And that's not a problem, isn't it?

And so, within this conversation of the ceiling and standards, I always like to define standards with an example from my good friend Logan Gilbert. And Logan is one of the smartest, most thoughtful people I know. And when he was a guest on better human project he described use the analogy of drawing a palm tree to talk about the standard, right and so you'll hear some overlap in this with the pot the ceiling, even though the conversation we had in section one, about closing the gap, right. And so, what I want you to do in your workbook, you're going to turn the page and you On the next page where you have space for notes, or on the back of this one, I simply want you to hit pause right now. And I want you to draw a palm tree. Okay?

Doesn't matter how good you are at art doesn't matter how good you are at drawing, hit pause, set a timer for like two minutes. Don't spend too long on this and draw palm tree. All right, you got your palm tree out. So now, here's the thing. And this is straight from Logan's analogy, right? So we all in our head, before we can go to paper, have to have a visual representation of what this palm tree is going to look like.

Right? That's our standard. And then we put the thing on paper, we bring the thing into the real world, we make it real, it becomes a reality. The gap that we talked about earlier, the gap between the visual standard the visual representation and What we put on paper? That's everything, right? You probably, unless you're like Leonardo da Vinci, you know, you probably drew a palm tree and you're like, Man, that thing sucks.

I hate my palm tree, right? So, even Leonardo or any artist, when they first begin, they recognize that that gap exists. The difference is they are committed to closing that gap. Now, drawing palm trees may not be your thing, right? But whatever your thing is, playing the guitar, writing songs, writing a book, whatever it is, you have a standard. Right and and based on our conversation a minute ago about the size of the pot and setting the ceiling.

I challenge you to recognize where your standard or your ceiling is. But ask yourself, can you raise that can it get higher? And don't be afraid to have a gap between where you are or what you can bring into reality and what that Standard is, because I would argue that worse than falling short of your standard would be hitting your standard and realizing that your standard isn't good enough. Right? What if my standard for you know, drawing people was you know, I'm just gonna draw a stick figure? Right?

Well, okay, I nailed that. I can do you know, I can, I can take what's up here and I can get it on paper, right? But is what's on paper worth a damn. Is somebody gonna pay me for this? Does somebody want to see that? Now, again, look beyond the analogy here.

We're not talking about art, but it's whatever your thing is, how can you be the best that you can be at your thing? Right. And so when we talk about great leaders, when we talk about successful people or high performers, we're talking about people who have set really high standards, and have committed themselves to closing the gap. Closing the Gap is everything. It's life. The gap will always be there.

And learning to accept that and and find peace with falling short of our expectations is part of the process. And I promise you, when you can fall in love with the process and doing the work, you will find peace in pursuing the journey. That's what it's all about. I don't think we touched on that enough. In section one. We will come back to this at the very end in section five when we talk about focusing on actions not outcomes, but I want you to be process focused, not outcome or result focused in the book, Bhagavad Gita.

There's a passage that says we are entitled to our labors of love, not necessarily the fruits of our labors. If we're doing it for the result, always chasing results. We're going to get, you know, headaches and we're going to be upset and we're not going to be happy with gonna set ourselves up to just be driven crazy. But if we can find a joy in showing up and, and drawing or whatever the thing is the process to close the gap every single day, then we can find happiness and longevity in whatever our pursuit is. So, set your standard, set it high, committed to closing the gap and work constantly to closing that gap. And I'll see you in the next video.