Episode Details

In the original Karate Kid movie, Daniel spends what seems to be days of wasted time performing menial chores for Mr. Miyagi.

Four days of waxing the car, sanding the floor, refinishing the fence, and painting the walls.

The reveal comes when Daniel blows up and accuses Mr. Miyagi of taking advantage of him: “I’m being your goddam slave is what I’m being, man. For four days I’ve busting my ass and I haven’t learned a goddamn thing!”

That’s when Mr. Miyagi shows him how he's been learning karate all along, and he’s now got powerful defenses against punches and kicks firmly embedded in his muscle memory.

From that movie, my generation learned about putting in the reps.

Being a buoyant leader — one who maintains a regulated nervous system when things get tough — requires three things. And the third one has everything to do with reps done right.

Knowledge

First, you have to know what to do.

How to have the difficult conversation.

How to think strategically.

How to guide someone who’s struggling without disempowering them further.

Fortunately, knowledge is easy to acquire. Four gazillion business and self-help books are published every week, with dozens of frameworks for everything, and they mostly work fine.

But you’re not going to have a leadership breakthrough just from reading another leadership book.

The Body Has to Be Ready

You also need your nervous system to read safety rather than danger in the moment of action. When you’re triggered into fight or flight, what you know how to do becomes severely constrained by what your body thinks it needs to do in order to survive the next 30 seconds.

The problem is, most of us are carrying a heavy load of unmetabolized stress all the time, which means we’re just a sideways glance or a critical Slack message away from flipping into survival mode.

In order to follow a framework, you need your neurology to be in shape. Spending time every day de-stressing is critical for how you show up when the waters get choppy.

Defaulting to the Desired Behavior

You know what to do.

You’ve prepared your body so it has the capacity to do it.

But the thing about the frameworks in business and self-help books is, if they came naturally, you wouldn’t need the books.

If coaching for performance were the normal mode of conversation, I wouldn’t have spent so much of my career teaching leaders how to bring out the best in their teams.

What you need is a training system that turns the new behaviors into your defaults.

In other words, reps.

The Reps

What’s missing in most training and self-development plans is the reps.

You've read the books and listened to the podcasts. You've got a daily breathwork practice dialed in. On a calm Tuesday afternoon, you're the leader you want to be. But calm Tuesday afternoons aren’t where your leadership gets tested.

You discover on Thursday morning that marketing totally ignored your directive to double the number of webinars. Your voice gets loud, sharp, and angry before you’ve even realized that you’ve let it. And now your team is walking on eggshells or making a mental note to email that headhunter the moment they get home.

Or your director of sales is coasting on last year’s numbers, while insisting that the problem is lead quality. You need to have a difficult conversation with them, but you keep finding reasons to put it off until next week. And when you do, you soft-pedal the hard feedback so exquisitely that they miss it — and you’re relieved when they do.

Knowledge and body readiness are necessary but not sufficient when your ingrained habits are pulling you in the old dysfunctional direction.

Under stress, you’re going to default to that old behavior, unless you put in the reps so that the new and unfamiliar becomes second nature.

You’ve got to put in the reps. Wax o