Unlock Your Leadership Operating System: Daily Habits for Enduring Resilience | Scott McCarthy | Episode 366

Scott McCarthy [00:00:01]:
So many leaders out there still think that resilience is proven in the crisis. But you know what I believe? I believe that crisis only expose what’s actually already there. You see, when pressure spikes, you don’t rise to the occasion. You end up falling back on your systems and your training. And in this case, what that looks like. It looks like habits, recovery, clarity, discipline, physical state, emotional control. That is why the leader is always the first operating system of any team and organization. So if you’re ready to learn about your energy system and how it’s your leadership system.

Scott McCarthy [00:00:44]:
All right, let’s do this. Welcome one, welcome all to the Peak Performance Leadership Podcast. A weekly podcast series dedicated to helping you hit peak performance across the three domains of leadership. Those being leading yourself, leading your team, and leading your organization. This podcast couples my 20 years of military experience as a senior Canadian army officer with world class guests. Bring you the most complete podcast of leadership going. And for more, feel free to check out our website atMoving Forward leadership.com and with that, let’s get to the show. Yes, welcome one, welcome all.

Scott McCarthy [00:01:42]:
It is your chief leadership officer, Scott McCarthy here. And today we’re diving into talking about your energy. We’re talking about your systems that enable you to keep that energy because it’s absolutely crucial as a leader. And a few of the points today are gonna be taken out of my book. You don’t know shit about leadership and neither do I. And predominantly my interviews with former U.S. navy SEAL commanders, right? So this is not my stuff. This is stuff I’ve learned just like you in trying to be better, realizing I’m imperfect and you know, just trying to do what is right.

Scott McCarthy [00:02:29]:
Okay. And this really came about when I realized one day, like I was just leaking all over my team, I was losing it. I was frustrated, frazzled, I wasn’t clear. I was short tempered. And when I realized what was going on and I realized that, hey, like I was starting to lose my team, that’s when I realized I needed to make a change, you know, because the reality is this. And you could be in one of these camps, right? And that so many leaders out there still glorify exhaustion, grind it hard till the end. Long hours, constant availability, no white space in the calendar. And what you end up mistaking is depletion for commitment.

Scott McCarthy [00:03:26]:
Oh, if I got nothing left in the tank that shows I’m complete. I’ve been committed to the cause or the team or the organization. And you feel like you’re being productive, but the reality is you’re just spinning Your tires and going nowhere fast. And often what occurs is that fatigue wears a productivity costume. Okay? And you say, okay, so what? Got it Tired. But what’s the big deal? The big deal is this. And the danger is, is your judgment erodes when you start burning out and you start going down. And poor decisions become culture problems, become trust problems and become drift form of strategy, execution and values.

Scott McCarthy [00:04:23]:
We all know that as your values, you, your organization’s values drift, so does psychological safety. And then suddenly you see the team heading out the door, the team that you spent so many years even trying to build and build up and get there, and you start seeing them heading out the door. So, so those are some of the negative aspects about when you leak your energy and you don’t have a system to protect it. So let’s talk about how to protect it. And there are four things which you need to protect daily as a leader to remain effective in your judgment, in your decision making skills. So those four things are the clarity, thinking time, physical state and recovery. So let’s dive into each one of those and let you know, you know, talk about why they’re important and why you need to protect them daily. First off, clarity, you as a leader must remain clear on what’s important.

Scott McCarthy [00:05:49]:
You need to focus in on the big picture. So that means you have to avoid being sucked into the cloud per se. And what I mean by that when I say the cloud, the dust, all right, the ambiguous stuff around a problem. And as a leader, we need to focus in on when we are facing problems and being clear. What is the core problem? What is the core problem that we’re actually trying to solve? What is it that we’re trying to achieve here? So many other people will have their history, their biases, their perceptions, sometimes their own agendas and that will cloud the judgment around that. But use the leader. You need to protect your clarity and that is focus in on the core problem. What is it that you’re trying to solve or what is it that you’re trying to achieve? Focus on that and that will help you remain clear.

Scott McCarthy [00:07:11]:
Focus in on your objectives, whether that’s for the quarter, the year, the week, the day. Focusing in on those will again remove the noise around you and enable you to be clear. Clarity is crucial in decision making. It enables you to ensure you’re moving it the right direction. So that’s the first one. The next one is, you know, it sounds simple, but yet so many leaders out there don’t enable this. And that is thinking time. Time to simply process the world around you.

Scott McCarthy [00:08:02]:
Time to digest the problem set that you’re facing today. Time to think through the future or think how things have evolved. Like how many of you have actually sat down and think, okay, what does the AI revolution mean for me, my team and my company, my organization. See, we, we jam our schedules. Packed, packed, packed, packed. Yet at the same time we don’t enable ourselves to have these crucial moments where we simply are enabled to think. So block that time off in your calendar. Maybe it’s first thing in the morning, maybe it’s right after lunch, maybe it’s midday or mid morning, don’t care, doesn’t matter.

Scott McCarthy [00:08:57]:
Do what’s best for you, what works best for you, but find a place and block it off and enable you to think. Think about whatever it is that you’re facing with. For me, I enjoy it kind of mid morning to be honest. Get some big things out of the way and then you know what? Sit back. Got my priorities set for the day. The team is moving. What’s next? What am I missing? What does whatever mean for us? And enable that thinking time. I enable it so that I can be proactive to the changing world around me.

Scott McCarthy [00:09:47]:
Vice being reactive in the changes that are being pressed onto me. Thinking time is probably the thing that you need the most. Yet it’s the first thing we give up when our schedule gets tight. Protect it, protect it every day and you’ll see the difference immediately. Next thing that you must protect every day is your physical state. How many of you out there are running on next to no sleep? How many of you out there haven’t hit the gym and God knows how long? How many of you out there don’t remember the last time you had a nice good meal during the workday? It’s go, go, go all hours up until midnight, back up again at 5am, out the door at 6, not home until like 8. Run, run, run. In no time to sleep properly, no time to eat properly, and no time to train properly, I guarantee quite a number of you out there are saying, yeah, that’s me and that’s okay.

Scott McCarthy [00:11:19]:
It’s been me in the past too. I won’t lie. All right, I’m not perfect, I won’t lie. But yet it’s super important for us because ensuring our physical state enables our mental state to be resilient by getting, you know, enough sleep. I don’t buy into this eight hours of sleep a day thing because me, I’m good between 6 and 7 personally. Weekends, sure, 8, I’ll sleep in an extra hour just because I’m just. And most of the time that last hour, I’m just kind of flaked out in bed anyway. Just kind of chilling.

Scott McCarthy [00:12:01]:
But the moral of the story is get whatever it is that your body needs for sleep. Get out and move your body. Exercise regularly. I’ve adapted my training routine to my world, so right now it’s the easiest for me to do it late afternoons. So that’s why I do it. In the past it was easiest for me to do it at like 5am and as well midday. But the moral here is that I’m adapting the world around me to enable me to achieve gym time. Vice.

Scott McCarthy [00:12:46]:
Make an excuse to have it the first thing thrown out in a day. Now, no underwear model here, that’s okay. But yet I’m in still good physical shape and it helps me keep resilient, it helps me with my mental clarity. And if you want to double stack, I can even use the gym time as thinking time. Right? Sometimes I gain clarity and then I come up with a solution to the problem. Safeguard your physical health because it is the key to your daily resilience. So get at that workout routine, get in that sleep, eat healthily and you’ll see the difference immediately. Okay? The final thing you must protect on a daily basis to remain resilient is recovery.

Scott McCarthy [00:13:58]:
And no, I’m not talking about recovery from the gym, I. E. Oh, so you’re not too sore or you come back in peak condition to lift more. What I mean by recovery is recovery from the work. Taking your weekends, taking your evenings, taking vacation and actually taking the vacation. Okay, When I get home, my work phone goes into a drawer. There’s emergency people got my personal number for those. If it’s not, it can wait till tomorrow, same thing on Friday.

Scott McCarthy [00:14:41]:
Regarding the weekends, take my evenings and I take my weekends. And then when I go on vacation, I delegate decision making authority to someone else. And, and what that does is it recharges my batteries, it fills my tank up so that when I come back, I’m actually ready to go even harder and better than before. Okay? So protect that recovery, ladies and gentlemen. Again, it’s another one of those things that just simply gets eaten into. Yet so crucial for our resilience as leaders to enable us to make better decisions. Because at the end of the day, it is us who need to make the best decisions possible so that we can enable our teams to succeed. So again, those four things you must protect on the daily are clarity, thinking time, your physical state and recovery.

Scott McCarthy [00:15:51]:
So Before I wrap up here, I do have a few different points, you know, other points that are related to this, yet didn’t really fit into either of those four different things neatly. But one of the things you also want to look at is, you know, setting a non negotiable outcome for today. What’s my non negotiable outcome when it comes to think time? My physical state. Okay, you want to set those every single day. Another thing to think about is you want to protect your best mental hours first. Again, for me, it’s early morning. That’s why I have my thinking time in there, because I want to protect it. I want to make sure my mental power, my mental cognitive language load and capability is set at the best possible moment.

Scott McCarthy [00:16:49]:
Next thing is, you know, resilience. I guess what I’d wrap all this up with is this, is that resilience is built on boring, repeatable habits. Okay? Boring, repeatable habits enable you, you know, you can have boring, repeatable habits that enable your clarity, establishing your thinking time again. Boring, repeatable habits. Boring, repeatable habits of going to the gym, going to bed on time, packing a lunch, and then boring, repeatable habit of putting your work phone away, setting you out of office, shutting down at the end of the day, booking that vacation again, that all builds resilience. Because at the end of the day, it’s this. If you’re going to become the strongest leader out there, it’s not about being tough. It’s about having endurance.

Scott McCarthy [00:17:49]:
And resilience is that endurance. For us as leaders, we’re most disciplined by protecting our own internal systems. And in the end, raw willpower works until it doesn’t. So when willpower breaks out, your discipline is what’s there. It enables you to scale, whereas willpower just burns. So that’s it for today, ladies and gentlemen. If you like this, you can check out the podcast episodes that helped, you know, shape this one. All right, and those episodes are with Mark Devine, episode two, eight two, where we go into the secrets of elite team building.

Scott McCarthy [00:18:41]:
Mark and I unpacked the relationship between resilience, discipline and personal standards under pressure from his stories as a U.S. navy SEAL. You know, he frames around mental toughness, awareness, one day, one lifetime. And how this directly enforces the idea that your internal system determines how you lead when chaos hits. Next is with Faisal Hogue at episode two, four, seven. And in this conversation we talk about the importance of intentional thinking and disciplined mental space. He’s got a lot of work around focus, complexity, and navigating Uncertainty, which strongly influenced the section on protecting your best decision, Making windows and preventing noise from hijacking judgment. And then finally, Andrew Friedman, episode 173.

Scott McCarthy [00:19:33]:
His perspective on leadership capacity and sustained performance helps shape the deeper theme around the article. And that endurance alone isn’t resilience. You know you need systems to protect your clarity, recovery, consistency long before pressure arrives. So if you want to go back and listen to those episodes, you can go ahead on your podcast app again, that is 282-markdevine247, Faisal Hogue or 173 Andrew Friedman. Or you can just go to Lead, Don’t Boss forward, slash the episode number in digits so 282-247-173 and you can listen to the show right there in the show notes. Again, ladies and gentlemen, thank you for tuning in. Appreciate you all and members always Lead, Don’t Boss. Take care now.

Scott McCarthy [00:20:28]:
And that’s a wrap for this episode. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for listening. Thank you for supporting the Peak Performance Leadership Podcast. But you know what you could do to truly support the podcast. And no, that’s not leaving a rating and review. It’s simply helping a friend. And that is helping a friend by sharing this episode with them if you think this would resonate with them and help them elevate their performance level, whether that’s within themselves, their teams or their organization. So do that.

Scott McCarthy [00:21:00]:
Help me. Help a friend win. Win all around. And hey, you look like a great friend at the same time. So just hit that little share button on your app and then feel free to fire this episode to anyone that you feel would benefit from it. Finally, there’s always more. There’s always more lessons around being the highest performing leader that you can possibly be, whether that’s for yourself, your team, or your organization. So why don’t you subscribe? Subscribe to the show via movingforwardleadership.com forward sl subscribe until next time.

Scott McCarthy [00:21:40]:
Lead, Don’t Boss and thanks for coming out. Take care now.