8 Tenets of Success #2- Be Intentional

In this episode of Average Joe Leadership, we continue our series on the 8 Tenets of Success by exploring the second tenet: Be Intentional About All You Do.

Success rarely happens by accident. Great leaders don't leave culture, communication, relationships, or results to chance. They are deliberate in their actions, decisions, priorities, and the way they invest their time.

In this episode, we discuss what it means to lead with purpose, align your daily actions with your vision, and avoid the trap of simply reacting to whatever comes your way. We also explore how intentionality impacts team culture, accountability, decision-making, and long-term success.

Whether you're leading a school, a business, a team, or simply striving to become a better leader, this episode will challenge you to examine whether your actions are moving you toward your goals—or away from them.

Because at the end of the day, successful leaders don't just hope for results. They are intentional about creating them.

Transcript

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All right, welcome back to the Average Joe Leadership Podcast, where we are unlocking the leader inside of you. Or if you are already a leader, maybe where you are just refining and developing those leadership skills that you already have. My name is Joseph Melms, and I am learning and leading right beside you, where we are diving in each and every week to have just discussions and just an opportunity to kind of dive into some thoughts and ideas circled around leadership so that we can be the better, the best leader every time now. So let's just dive right in. Last week I started an eight-part series that are called The Tenets of Success. Again, this is just kind of something that I came up with a while back as I've kind of wanted to develop my own model, idea of leadership, so that I can, if anybody ever asked me, you know, kind of what is your leadership surrounded in, or what is your leadership ground in, and what are your ideas and philosophies behind that? These eight tenants of success are kind of my framework that I feel like will help us all be successful in whatever endeavor that we want to do. And so I would recommend for all of us to kind of start to pencil our own ideas. You don't have to call them tenants of success. I've seen people call them pillars of success. Um, you can call them boulders of success. It doesn't really matter what you call them. But what I would encourage everybody to do is either find a set of uh foundational core values or core expectations or whatever you want to call it that you can call your own, that you can consistently ground your work in and strive for. Really, these are things that we should be doing in our everyday leadership that are gonna make us better leaders, that are gonna produce better results within ourselves, but also our people and the people who follow us and the people that we lead each and every day. So, uh last, like I said, last week started with that. And the first one we talked about last week was have a clear vision. And then I remember I told you guys that we changed that from having a clear vision to having a clear direction, because direction is almost more important than having a vision. And so if you didn't catch that one, just click, you know, pause on this one and head on back and listen to that one first. Uh, ultimately, all of these can be standalone, so uh don't stress that as well. Because today we're gonna talk about the second tenet of success of success, which is be intentional in all you do. This one sounds super simple. And in theory, uh, this could be a very short podcast because it really does sound simple. We should always be intentional, and you might be thinking to yourself, well, of course I'm intentional in everything I do. And on the surface level, I think that we believe that. I think that we strive for that. But then if we really start to evaluate our everyday life and evaluate the things that we do, what I think we we realize is there are a lot of things in our lives that, and realistically, that's kind of the antithesis of this particular uh tenant is that realistically, if we evaluate our life, what we think we find is that we're doing a lot of things that don't align, that actually are counterproductive, that will eventually slow our progress down in accomplishing the goals and the success that we're looking for. Uh for example, I mean, again, just think about how often that you doom scroll on your phone. I mean, how many times, and I'm guilty of this, you know, you get wrapped up doing something on your cell phone and it takes you down a rabbit hole. You look at a Facebook post, the next thing you know, you're looking at 17 Facebook posts. That Facebook post leads to a, you know, oh, I gotta find this on Amazon, and so now you're searching on Amazon, now you're reading reviews on Amazon, next thing you know, you've just wasted two hours of your time, all because you were Facebook scrolling and you came across something that was not productive. Or how about, you know, you're playing a game on your phone and you're like, you know, I'm just gonna play this for a minute, and the next thing you know, that minute turns into 60 minutes, and you've just burnt an hour of being counterproductive. And that is definitely not being intentional. Now, again, my naysayers out there, I know what you're thinking. Some of you guys say, Well, I gotta have mental breaks, mental health breaks, I've got to have, you know, time for myself, some rest and relaxation time, and I'm not arguing that. And we're not gonna talk a whole lot about that in in today's episode of the podcast, but you do need to have, you know, uh, mental health breaks, you do need to have kind of rest and relaxation, you need to take some time to recuperate, rejuvenate. And sometimes that is the purpose that is gonna be intentional. You're going to be intentional, intentionally resting and relaxing so that you can recover and be the best version of yourself the next day. Oftentimes at night I'll be working on something, and then I'll finally get to the point where I'm like, okay, I'm done. The work that I do on a regular basis never actually is accomplished, but I go ahead and say, okay, I'm done for the night because I know I need to shut my computer, I need to stop working on whatever I'm working on so that I can get a good night's rest, so that I can go to sleep, have a good night's sleep, so that I can get up and be more productive the next day. So some of those mental health breaks will factor in being intentional, even though it may not be directly connected to the work that you do. So this is a really great uh tenet for success because it goes across every particular work or industry that you can think of. It goes into team sports, it goes into you know individual sports, it goes into everything. I know that uh one of the things that I used to teach my son, and that's not just my son, but some of the athletes that have played ball for me over the years, especially as they were learning, and I I coached baseball for a long time, as they were learning to pitch, everything that we talked about was every throw that you make when you're warming up and getting loose, you want to do that with intentionality. So a lot of times when you look at youth sports and you watch coaches or kids warm up on the sidelines before a game, you just see them kind of throwing the ball around the yard. And they're not really being intentional about it. But if you make every throw count, then as a pitcher, you can be working on grips, you can be working on location, you can be working on mechanics, you can be working on a lot of things every time you throw as you're just getting loose. You're just getting warmed up to play, but you're getting you're doing it with intentionality to better prepare yourself. The same thing goes for you know a position player. So maybe you're throwing the ball over the top because you got to make a harder, longer throw. Maybe you're throwing a ball sidearm because it's a quick release though, maybe you're just you know being quick, you know, in and out of your glove to make the throw. There's just a lot of intentionality behind everything you do rather than just catching the ball, throwing the ball, catching the ball, throwing the ball. So at some point, there's that intentionality in everything that you do. So, what does this look like? So, what does this look like in our day-to-day operation? Whether you're working in retail or you're working in a church or you're working in a school, what does being intentional in all you do look like? Well, I will tell you this: it starts with the mindset. So it starts with the idea of wanting to be the best version of yourself every day, wanting to improve, wanting to have drive, focus, and having that positive self-talk and having that vision and that um motivation to want to be great, to want to be successful. Because if you don't want to be successful, if you're not going in the direction, then at the end of the day, you're not gonna want to do the sacrifices and put forth the effort it requires in order to be successful in all that you do. So it starts with that mindset, that winning mindset. It starts with a clear vision, a clear direction, as we talked about in the last episode, knowing exactly what you're waking up and going to do. It starts with, you know, getting yourself mentally right, getting your head mentally right. It's about understanding a lot of different things. For me, it's spiritual. So when I wake up in the morning, part of my morning routine is my time, my quiet time with God. It's my it's my time to get into the word and get into scripture and then again lean into God for all that I'm gonna do. That's just me personally. For some people, it's about the drive matters. I was just talking to uh one of my outgoing um co-workers, and he took a job that's gonna be significantly closer to his house, and I said, you know, you're not gonna have that thought time uh on that drive, you're not gonna have that decompressed time on that way home. And so some of some of the intentionality about getting your head right is is about simply blocking out the distractions that are gonna take you away from the work. You know, it's it's about getting your head right. So here's the thing you know, a lot of us are everyone, not a lot of us, everyone deals with personal issues, everyone deals with distractions, everyone deals with setbacks, everyone deals with failures, everything, everyone deals with emotion, personal emotion. But at some point, if we're gonna do everything with strict intentionality, we have to get our mind right. Part of getting your mind right is going to be clearing out those distractions. Uh, you know, one of it's not one of my favorite movies, but a movie I like uh because centered largely around baseball is for the love of the game. And Kevin Costner is a pitcher for the Detroit Tigers, and one of the things that he does, and he's an all-star legend pitcher, is he will use the term clear the mechanism. And so he'll he'll stand on the mound, he hears all the people cheering in the stands, booing them, heckling them, you know, and then he just says, clear the mechanism, and everything gets quiet and he's focused on what he's there to do. Sometimes our mindset, that's what we've got to do. Sometimes that drive to work, that prayer time, that quiet time, is getting your mind right and prepared so that you can be focused and intentional on all that you do. So the first step to being intentional on all you do is get that mind right. And then from there, what's the planning? What planning went involved to being intentional? Because again, it's hard to be intentional in everything that you do if you haven't planned for it. You can't wing it and truly be intentional because what happens when you're winging it is you're gonna start to find filler time. You're gonna start to start to find time where you're just trying to figure it out. And when you're just trying to figure it out in your in-game mode or in action mode, that's no longer being intentional and you're wasting a lot of opportunity. You're wasting a lot of productivity, a lot of time, which could be costing you sales, it could be costing you revenue. Uh, in my case, in education, it could be costing us time where we could be growing our students, growing our staff. And so you got a plan. So you want to be intentional about the plan because the plan itself is going to allow you to be intentional about the things that you're gonna do throughout the day. And if you're somebody like myself who is not great with time management, my wife always gives me a hard time because you know I'll say, Oh, we got 20 minutes, we can we can make it. We're no problem. And then I never factor in some of the traffic that's gonna occur or something that's gonna pop up or whatever. And so if you struggle like I do with time issues, then when you do the planning in order to create more intentionality, then what you're gonna do with that planning is you're gonna factor in the time. You're gonna have timestamps, you're going to have check marks that you're gonna put in that planning that says, hey, I've got to focus and I've got to be locked in in order to do that. Let me put some time marks and time indicators on there. Um, calendaring is another great way for your planning. So, right now, that's one of the things that that uh our district has rolled out over the last uh couple years, and I think this is great across every industry, is that we calendar everything. I live and die by my calendar. My calendar in and of itself is an intentional checkbox, it's an intentional checklist of things that I've got to get accomplished. But I've also got to use my calendar to block out time so that I can plan, block out time so that I can execute various tasks throughout the day and so that I can be sure that I'm staying on target. Because what happens is if I don't block out that time, it's easy to get distracted. It's easy to get off task, it's easy to get pulled into a conversation that has no value to what I'm trying to accomplish for the day. It takes away the intentionality and everything that I'm doing there. And so now again, I'm wasting time, and wasted time means wasted results or could be lessened or reduced results. So planning is going to be key. Using the time increments, time markers, using calendaring is a great way to start looking at those things, but then create your roadmap. You know, there's other items out there, uh, such as Google Keep. That's something that I've used with my teams in the past in order for me to give them tasks and keep them on point. Right now, I've created uh a new sheet of my own that I've just kind of created on my own. That's basically a task list. It's got due dates on there, it's got different things. So that planning keeps you on your path clearly. And then from there, what about professional development? How are we going to get better at whatever it is we want to do? Um, one of the things that we take for granted oftentimes is pouring into ourselves. When we get a job, I think people forget how important it is that no matter what job that you have, that you're pouring into yourself so that you can grow in that. One of the things I never thought about was professional development as I became a coach and a teacher years and years and years and years ago. But as I got into the industry, professional development is hugely ingrained into what we do. One of the things I've noticed over the course of my personal development and growing is that there's professional development everywhere. I was in the military, it wasn't called professional development, it's called training, it's called operations, it's called different um movements, it's called different things, but we were doing professional development all the time, and I didn't realize that's what actually was happening. My wife is a nurse, she has she has to do uh education hours all the time, and that's her version in the nursing world as professional development. Real estate agents are doing continual education all the time. In order to have these high-level certifications and these certificates and all these different things, you've got to maintain a certain number of professional development hours all the time. So, with that being said, when you have the freedom to choose your professional development, are you choosing professional development just to knock out hours? Or are you choosing professional development that aligns with your particular goals, that aligns with your particular strategies for what you're trying to accomplish? You know, what I do, I could go and do professional development on a myriad of things. I could go and do professional development on, you know, health and wellness. And that's one of my favorite things personally to do, anyways, is my own personal health and wellness. And I could go sit hours in training that would be considered professional development in education, and I would learn about nothing that I didn't already know, but I could check the box, get my professional hours, and call it good. Or I could sign up for professional development and be intentional about what I'm signing up for. So, like right now, one of the biggest things that we're focused on, as you've heard in some of these other previous podcasts, is culture. And so I want to I want our campus culture to improve. I want our community culture to improve. And so I don't have all the answers for that. I don't have all the answers for anything. So spending time listening to podcasts, um, reading articles, reading books, you know, going to different trainings on culture is going to be intentional about my upcoming goals for the 26-27 year. And so honestly, for those of you guys listening to this leadership podcast right now, are you're pouring into your own leadership development. And my hope is if you're being intentional about pouring into you, you're listening to this leadership podcast because you want to grow as a leader or you at least want to have uh thought-provoking opportunities. And you're not just listening to this as you know, somebody that's like, hey, I just like the sound of this guy's voice, which I don't know why you would. But uh, in any case, make sure that professional development is something that you are being smart about and you're choosing the correct things. Again, a golf pro, I just got done watching the U.S. Open this weekend and and you know, was disappointed that my guy Scotty Scheffler couldn't win another one, but man, that guy finishes so high every time. But Scotty Scheffler isn't gonna be one of the world's greatest golfers if he just says, you know what, I got to get some professional. This is obviously hypothetical and completely hyperbole, but you know what, I got to get professional development hours for the PGA. So I'm gonna go and I'm gonna go uh work with uh uh the Texas Rangers and I'm gonna work on my curveball. Scotty Scheffler working on a curveball, logging professional hours, spending, you know, eight, ten hours working on a curveball is gonna do nothing for his golf game. And so that would be that would be Scotty Scheffler not being intentional about his own craft. Again, crazy scenario, hypothetical or hyperbole, but you get my drift. Don't waste your professional development time, don't waste your professional development monies on things that are not truly going to grow you. Now, with that being said, let me add this one little pro tip here. I tell this to every staff every single year. A lot of people don't like to do professional development. A lot of people don't get excited about professional development because there's a lot of professional development out there that's not great and it's not relevant. And so what happens is that we go to professional development with a negative mindset, and then we walk out of there having gained nothing. We'll spend three, four, five hours at a professional development and gain nothing out of it. What I will tell you is this have a better positive mindset, a growth mindset that says, no matter what, my goal and every professional development I go to is to take one thing away from that professional development that I can use at a later date. I can use in the craft that I'm doing on a regular basis. So my goal for everybody when they listen to this podcast is that you can take at least one thing away from this, whether it's a thought or an idea, whether it's something that you can, you know, try back on your own industry, your own office, your own leadership. That should be your goal when you do any kind of professional development. Is what is one thing I can take away to work towards my personal growth, goals, and accomplishments that I want for myself. So be intentional about that professional development. And then your goals. Are your goals intentional? Are your goals intentional or are they just random? And I know that again, this is a very simple podcast, but it at the same time, it's not. Oftentimes, I've worked I've worked in schools before that gave us arbitrary goals. There was this one year I worked for a school and they were doing this plus 10 um initiative. And essentially what they were saying is they wanted us to improve 10% in every single area across uh the campus. Well, that sounds great, right? It's the whole t-shirt of 1% better. It sounds great, it's a great idea, um, and it's a great goal, but at the same time, we're also told, on the other hand, to have SMART goals. So smart goals are those attainable goals that that are aligned specifically with the data that we're producing and everything else. So just to arbitrarily say, hey, let's do 10% across the board isn't logical because in some areas we need to grow more than 10%, if I'm being honest with you. But also in some areas, we need to grow a growth of four to five percent is gonna be a good gain, a good growth. So, in all reality, when we're talking about creating goals, we need to create goals for ourselves, for our industry, our company, our business, our customers, our consumers, our students that are aligned with the data output that they're already doing. So we have to be intentional. We can't just do arbitrary goals. You know, one of the things that I find to be interesting is that when a new teacher, a new teacher will ask me, you know, hey, what is the goal or what does success for a new teacher look like? So I have two answers for that. One, uh the first part of that is I want you to come in and I want you to be a successful, insert the blank, English, math, history, CTE, it doesn't matter, teacher. I want you to come in and be the best teacher you can be. And the reason I put it so generically is this I'm not gonna give a new teacher the cushion or the safety net or the blanket that says, I just want you to kind of you know figure it out, learn, get better, you know, grow. Of course I want you to do those things, but I want my twin. Your veteran teachers to do those things as well. When parents send their kids to school, they're not sending their kids to school and they're not sending them with the idea and the notion that, well, they've got this new teacher, so they're not going to learn as much as if they would have had this veteran teacher who's teaching right next door. That's not fair to the kid. That's not the expectation. So what I'm expecting that teacher to do is teach the snot out of whatever they're supposed to teach, no matter what. Now, the caveat that I will give a new teacher is that they should be hungry, they should be desiring, seeking out every opportunity to grow, to be coachable, to see other successful teachers. They should be, they should be Bambi on ice, trying to run and trying to figure it out and watching and trying to get better every day. Now, again, flip side of that coin, I want all my teachers to do that. I want my veteran teachers to do that as well. But I'm gonna I'm gonna be intentional about pushing my new teachers in that direction and staying on top of my new teachers, and then I'm gonna have conversations on the side with my my veteran teachers. But at the end of the day, the goal for my new teacher is going to vary a little bit than the goal for my veteran teacher, but their expectation is the same. So please keep that in mind. Expectation of growth is the same across the board. The value, the number of growth, the actual data point of growth may vary based on the output that you're already dealing with. So the growth of a new teacher should be exponentially more than the growth of a veteran teacher. Everybody should be growing. But you've got to make sure your goals are intentional and not arbitrary across the board. Because everybody is different, everybody learns at a different pace, everybody produces at a different pace. And at the end of the day, if your goals are blanket across the board, then what's going to happen is that unless you are building in other incentives and other things like that, what are they driving for once they hit that goal? So the goal should also be fluid with that being said. So if you're being intentional, you have this goal, you set this goal at a realistic level. If they hit that goal, move it, shift it, change it. Be purposeful about everything you do, including your goals. And then finally, the last thing I would tell you, there's there's a whole lot of things that can go into this, of course. And we can debate and have this conversation for two hours. But the last thing I'll tell you, just like any other good program or good thing you do, is evaluate and review to make sure that what you're doing is is being intentional. So at the end of the day, you know, when you've created your plan, and maybe it's a sales strategy, when you create this sales strategy, then evaluate the still strategy. Hey, am I targeting the customers that are buying my product? Or is this a sales strategy that just seems fun and exciting? Or is this a sales strategy that I found on Instagram because this is what they're saying to do on Instagram? Or is this a sales strategy that somebody else pitched me and I didn't want to do the work and so I just took it? Or, like I said, you review and you evaluate and say, does this align with my data? Does this align with my company, my business, my organizational needs? Does this align with my personnel? Review that is your plan, is everything you're doing aligning with your personnel? Because again, this year, like I said, we're focusing on culture. If we had an outstanding culture already, that would be a waste of time. I wouldn't need to focus on culture. We're gonna have to focus on our newer teachers this year because this is gonna be the first time in a long time we're gonna have a large number of brand new teachers that we haven't had in the past. So that's gonna change our plan on how we're going to handle our staff this year. In the years past, we didn't have to focus on large quantities of new teachers because we only had a few here or there. So you need to make sure you're evaluating and saying, does that what I'm doing, is it intentional? Is my plan intentional? Do I need to tweak this or do I need to tweak this? Is it outdated? That's that's the other thing that happens. It's outdated. Now, what I would also tell you from a leadership standpoint is if you're a leader of several teams or different tierings of teams, make sure that your expectations, your goals, your uh what you're driving those other teams below you are realistic as well. Because there's nothing worse for a leader than to set a level set a goal, set a plan in place, but you didn't evaluate or you are not part of the front line to understand what's truly happening at that level for your team. Let me give you a better explanation for that. And I'm gonna use education because it's it's it happens a lot. So I've worked in districts before where uh I've had, as a campus principal, I've had bosses who have no idea what happens in the classroom because they don't go to the classrooms. I've had bosses who have no idea what the students are like because they hadn't been a teacher for 20 plus years. And since they hadn't been a teacher for 20 plus years and haven't been on a campus for 10 years, they're giving directives, they're setting expectations, standards, and goals that are unrealistic with the current learners, the current staff that we have in there because they haven't done it. A lot of the people that uh work at Central Office now in education are not deal have never dealt with trying to be a campus leader of with the teacher shortage. Right now, we're dealing with a teacher shortage that we've never seen before. So we're getting a lot of you know, second career teachers, we're getting a lot of outside the industry teachers, we're getting a lot of brand new teachers, and it changes the way you have to handle and manage a school. And some of the central office folk haven't done that before. So as a leader, we have to make sure that we spend time researching, getting to know, talking to the stakeholders, and collaborating to make sure that we uh get the full picture, even if we are not directly entrenched in that. That's where that distributive and collaborative leadership comes into play to make sure you're getting input and feedback from your people so that you know what's really happening, so that you can truly give and set standards and expectations that are intentional and align with what the people are actually dealing with at that level. So, as a leader at a high-level leader, you're gonna have to really evaluate and review all the way down the chain because you're gonna have to review are your goals, priorities, and standards and directives, are they aligned with the company's vision? And then are they aligned with what your people can actually accomplish, what your what your staff can actually accomplish. And then are your leaders underneath you setting intentional goals? You need to make sure you're checking them. If I have my English teachers and their goal is basically to, well, I'm gonna get kids to read. Okay, well, that's great, except that doesn't hit all of our learners. We have much bigger fish to fry than just teaching them how to read. Yes, in high school, these kids should already be reading. Are there kids that we have to teach how to read 100%? But we should also be focusing on analyzation of our analysis of the literature. We should be focusing on annotating the literature, we should be focused on, you know, synthesizing the all the different stuff that's happening in literature. What's the author's purpose? What's the tone? What's the mood? We've got to be able to have our students dissect all that information from reading, not just be able to read the words on a page. So there's so much more to that. So you've got to make sure that your English, I have to make sure my English team is leading and is intentional and is purposeful. Why are we reading the book? Well, kids just need to read. They need to read. They do need to read. But is there intentionality? Is there connection? Is it connected to what our history teams are doing? Are we having cross-curricular? So we've got to evaluate and be intentional about all those things. So just a quick recap. We've got to have a good mindset, we've got to plan, and we have to make sure our professional development is aligned, make sure our goals are intentional, and then we've got to evaluate and make sure all those things that we just talked about are truly aligned with the intentionality of what we're trying to accomplish, the success we're trying to have. Because if any of those things are out of line, then we are going to be counterproductive or we're going to be wasting time or resources or finances. We're going to be not, we're not going to be able to optimize our success. So we want to be better and align all those things. The last thing I want to tell you is this it's what it is not, what being intentional about everything you do is not, it's not busy work, right? It's not, I remember I worked for Southwest Airlines a long, long, long, long time ago before I even graduated college. And I worked in research and records. And so just like most companies, they kind of, with a new person, they kind of slow rolled you and they they taught you a few things here and there, and they're like, hey, get the hang of this thing here and there. Well, um, I'm a fast learner, you know? And so after a while, the little tasks, the menial tasks they were giving me, I was getting done in just a couple hours. And so I had a lot of time to kill. And so I would ask for more work, ask for more work. So then they just start giving me busy work. And so the problem with that is one, I really wasn't helping towards their goals. I wasn't helping towards the company's goals. Number two, I was disengaging as an employee because now I, while some people sure want to get paid for nothing, I wanted to have a purpose. And so busy work not only is counterproductive, not only is a waste of time and resources, but could also really push your people away if you aren't using them to the worth that they are and have. Show them that you value them by giving them work that is intentional and purposeful. Now, in order to do that, you've got to plan and prepare. So you've got to have a plan A that says this is what we're gonna do today, and a plan B, what if we get done or something goes awry? And a plan C that if what if both things happen? What if it all blows up? So busy work is not intentional. Not at all. It's not purposeful. Even if, even if you're giving work that is aligned to the action, it's sometimes busy work still is not productive. So for example, if we run out, we have extra time and I don't have the extra resources, I'm gonna use a baseball analogy here. If I just throw my son in the cage and I said, Hey, I'm gonna go over here and work with these kids, you get in the cage with your friend, and y'all hit, you know, y'all just get some swings in. That's a common thing that happens at baseball practice. Well, if the friend is just tossing really soft, and my son is just raking constantly, he's not getting anything out of that because he's not getting off-speed pitches, he's not getting the velocity that he should be getting accustomed to. He's just arbitrarily swinging, he's making himself feel real good. His chest is pumping because he's he's raking these balls that are super slow and easy, but we're not really getting better. There's no intentionality behind it. So that busy work is aligned to the work that he's doing, but it is not intentional to actually get him better and help him or help the team. So busy work is definitely not intentionality. Free days. How often do we have days where we just are not productive? And you know what, we're just gonna go in today, we're gonna show our face, and we're just gonna have some seat time. And again, I'm not saying that everybody's perfect and everybody's gonna work, you know, eight, you know, every minute of eight hours or 10 hours a day, but oftentimes we cannot just say, hey, we're gonna have a free day. Now, that is not to say the intentional, like, hey, we're gonna have a company picnic day where you're gonna get paid, but we're gonna do some team building, we're gonna do some relaxing, we're gonna do some uh morale lifting. Those things are still intentional. You still need that. But when you basically say, hey, I don't have anything planned for today, we're gonna give you a free day today, then we're not being intentional. So I see this a lot in shops, right? So uh shops come and you got no business today. For again, hyperbole here, but you got no vehicles, no cars, no trucks coming into the shop. Are you giving your people a free day? Are they just collecting a paycheck that day? Or do you have something else that they're working on? Do you have an old car in the back that you're practicing doing this or that? Do you have something that these these guys can work on? One of the things that my wife does when she's at work, because when she's not, when she doesn't have a patient at work, that's when she does her continuing education. So she does modules, uh, they'll have mock codes and scenarios, they'll do different things in order to practice when they don't have, you know, high volume number of patients. So free days are not being intentional. So, and again, I already mentioned it earlier, but not but winging it is not being intentional either. Because again, if you're just winging it, there's a chance that that's low value. And if it's got low value, you're not putting out or not getting a lot of um uh you're not getting a lot of return on your investment on something that you're winging because uh most of the time when we wing it or we do something and we fly by the seat of our pants, it's a lot easier than what we would normally do. So that is also not being intentional. So again, tenet of success number two of eight is be intentional in all that you do. Um, and again, not overly complicated, but we do need to make sure that we are always being purposeful because everything we need to do should matter. And and one of the things that you'll notice, and and I'm gonna do a little, again, spiritual connection. So for me, I'm a spiritual guy. If you haven't checked out my um uh average Joe Faith podcast, search it up. You can check it out as well. But one of the things that I fully believe in it is is Colossians 3, 23 and 24, which is you know, whatever you do, work at it with all your heart. As if you're working for the Lord and not for men. And I truly believe that's our purpose, right? And whether you're uh a Christian or not, we all have a purpose. And most people that walk this earth believe that they're here for a reason and have a purpose. And so, whatever that purpose is, you should be going after it with all your heart and all your intentionality. Once you buy into that and dig into that, your ceiling is ridiculously high. And what you're gonna find is you're going to do a lot less doom scrolling, you're gonna watch a lot less TV, you're gonna be more intentional about everything that you do. Uh we're even at my house, we're even intentional about our health and our lifestyle so that we can be intentional about all the things that we do that surround not only work, but also our home life and our family life. So, again, this isn't solely locked into your industry or your work. This is also being about being intentional about being a good dad or a good mom, be intentional about being a good son or a good daughter, be intentional about your faith, be intentional about your health. All of those things matter. So, again, I hope, like I said earlier today, that you took at least one thing away from this that you can apply to your life and your leadership. But guys, as always, be better today than you were yesterday. So do something today to be better tomorrow. Thank you guys for listening. And always, let's grow, people.