We are wired to chase the next stripe, the next paycheck, and the next achievement. But what if the cost is your connection with yourself, with your family, or even your own peace of mind? This episode is not about the lie of work life balance. Instead, it's about obsessing over the life that you want and building a life that you won't regret. Let's get focused. Welcome back to the Military Sherpa Podcast, my friends.
I am your host, mark, and this is episode one 90, part three in the Sherpa Code Series. In the last episode, we talked about how you have a responsibility, how it's not indulgent for you to be the healthiest person on the mountain. In fact, you can't lead people higher than you are yourself. Now today, Sherpa code principle number two is success means nothing. If you lose what matters to you most. Now Sherpa code principle number two is designed to be something that you implement.
It's designed to be something that you share with your team, and I hope that as we wrap this up, you'll do just that. So first, let's dive into the life that we're chasing. I. And for most of us, what we're chasing has been defined. It's been warped by the culture around us. Now, in Western culture, specifically in the United States, we chase after two things, predominantly our top two values.
If I was to look at your calendar, if I was to look at your bank account, what I would most likely find is that most of us are defining our success by status and by money. The things that we buy are often bought with money. We don't have to impress people that we don't know. You've heard some variation of that many times.
And the time and effort that we put in often goes into pleasing people who won't care about us 10 years from now, so that we have a better shot at climbing the ladder in whatever organization that we're a part of. The implication as we go into this episode is not that I don't want you to work hard. I want you to be the hardest working person on your team.
Ideally, I want your whole team to be carrying that weight, but when people look at you, I want them to see someone who's obsessed with being the best, who's obsessed with productivity, innovation, and efficiency. But if that's our only focus, if that's all that we're obsessed with, if that's all that's reflected in both our calendar and in our bank account, then ultimately we're gonna find ourselves hollowed out.
And what we often think is that the next milestone I. It's going to fulfill us that we're not happy now, but we'll be happy later that we don't feel secure with this number in our bank account. We'll feel secure with this number in our bank account, and so we chase after milestone after milestone, believing that they'll fulfill us, but they rarely do. If you're not content now, you're not gonna be content later. If you're not happy now, you're not gonna be happy later.
There is a diminishing return and once you get to a certain point in your finances where you have the house and you have a car and there's no bill collectors coming, money doesn't make you magically happier. I've never seen an unhappy person on a jet ski, don't get me wrong. That being said, after a certain dollar amount, money just doesn't have a strong correlation with how happy a person is.
And so what we're often chasing after rarely fulfills us in the long term because we didn't learn how to be happy along the way. And I don't think that most of us are chasing after status because we want people to be impressed with us. I don't think that we're chasing after finances because we want to be the beacon that everybody looks to, because we want to impress people.
But what I do think is that we're often chasing function and that we've allowed the dopamine center of our brain to rewire in a way that rewards sacrifice. That when I sacrifice, I get rewarded Mentally. I feel like I did something. That when I'm the go-to person, that when I stay late, when I come in early, when I just grind and get it done, the reward center of my brain tells me that I'm doing a good job. And the system around us is designed the military is gamified.
Yeah, the promotion system rewards progress in increments, just like a video game. In the beginning. You start getting promotions rapidly. It's like bam, you're an airman basic. Then you're an A1C. Then you're a C, and it all happens back to back very quickly.
Just like in a video game, you go through the tutorial and you get all of these quick wins, and then over time you're getting awards and you're getting upgrade training, and all these things are happening to you and rewiring your brain to chase. After that progress, you see people on stage, your brain says, I should be on stage. You see people getting promoted, you think I should get promoted? And we chase after those things, which is a good thing. I want you to be the best.
I want you to work hard. I'm probably gonna say that 75 times in this podcast episode, but if you're not careful, that becomes your identity. Chasing after milestones becomes your identity. Our values should govern where we land. If I say that I want to value fitness, that I want longevity to be a primary value for me, that should govern where I land 10, 20, 30 years from now. 20, 30 years from now, I should be more fit than my peers. I should be more healthy than the people around me.
But if it's not really a value, if it's just an aspiration, then it will fall by the wayside. And what does that look like? If you say, let's say that fitness is a primary value for you, but you never seem to make it to the gym, you're a liar. Because what happens is you're obsessed with work and so you work through your fitness hour. There's a great Chief Ed Diaz, who he had an incredibly high stress job.
He was the command chief of the Air Force Academy, traveling on the road all the time, more task demands than he'd ever had in his career. More functions, more hats. Every morning, this guy would post a picture. It was him out in the dark with a headlamp on his head as he was putting in miles. Why? Because fitness was a primary value for him. He was obsessed with it. He wakes up in the morning and off he goes. You should be obsessed about the things that you say that you value.
If you're not obsessed with the things you say you value, then they're aspirational values, not real values. You can't control your values any more than you can control that. You're interested in whales. Your brain just picks what you're interested in. I wish that I was interested in day trading and Bitcoin, but I'm just not. I wish I was obsessed with them because then I would be a lot richer than I am right now. But the reality is that the things that you value, for many of you, it's leisure.
It's video games, it's drinking alcohol, and so what do you do? If I looked at your calendar and how you spend your time, not what you schedule, but how you spend your time, I would start to see very quickly what you really value. You might say that you value promotion. Are you putting in the work? You know exactly what it takes to get there.
And at the top, it's the people that outworked their peers because when you get to the highest level, everybody competing is qualified and it's very rarely your qualifications that differentiate you. It's X factors. And so if we say that we value our family, but we're not as obsessed with having a connected, a healthy family as we are with work. Then your family will erode. You say that you value it, but you're not obsessed with it. So when you get home, you don't prioritize it.
People don't care how much you work. They care how much of your free time you devote to them, how much of your brain power goes towards them. Otherwise, they say things like, why don't you treat me like you treat your airman, implying you invest in others, but you don't invest in me. And for me, this was a realization that hit me like a ton of bricks when I had the most successful year of my military career.
I was in Air Leadership School commandant, I think it was 2016, and we were the Air Force Professional Development team of the year 12 outstanding. On my team five match comma awards and on and on. I could list all the accolades that we ended up getting that year and I didn't get promoted that year, which is not strange. I was in professional military education. The promotion rate is not really that high.
Yeah, but I didn't get promoted that year and my wife and I had to sit down and just come to the realization that, we did a lot. We were an award-winning team. I had massive influence. The right people knew my name, but unfortunately the impact on our family to do all of those things, we just so high and on our faith. And so what we decided was that we couldn't do that again. It just wasn't gonna be possible for us to invest that much time, effort, and energy in a way that was sustainable.
If it wasn't sustainable at that level, what were we really chasing? Because I have a primary value in my life, which is be the best. Whatever I do, I wanna do it as if unto the Lord. I wanna give everything that I've got. I don't wanna be second place. And so in my military career, it was the top or nothing. And so we decided to powow when we realized that the impact on our family was gonna be disproportionate, we didn't like it. And once we realized that.
Then we can start to craft a life that works, not a work-life, balanced life. I'm obsessed with my work. The moment that I wake up in the morning, my eyes pop open and I want to get to work immediately. If I have my choice, I'll come into my office. I have to force myself to go work out because fitness, I want it to be a value. It's an aspirational value, but I kind of balance between 1 55 and 1 65 because I let myself get a little outta control and then I'll get back into it.
So I feel fit again, and then I'll taper off a little bit. That's the season I'm in right now. I got myself fit. Now I'm tapering off a little bit again, trying to get back into it 'cause I wanna work. I'm obsessed with work. I'm just as obsessed with my work now as I've ever been. But I'm also obsessed with my family and so it's not work life balance, it's, I wanna be fully present in my office, the best at what I do, creating, multiplying, scaling, generating wealth and impact.
And when it comes to my family, I wanna be obsessed with them. I wanna be giving piggyback rides, going in the pool, reading bedtime stories to my girls, spending dinner time with my family at the table. They have to exist at the same time. Whatever you say that your primary values are, you have to be obsessed with them. It's not about work-life balance, it's about prioritizing the things that you value and cutting the things that you don't. Screw the noise. Forget the distractions.
What is on your phone that doesn't contribute to your top five primary values? Get rid of it. What is on your desk? What is in your office? What is connected to your television set that's not in your top five primary values? It should go. It has no place. It's a distraction that will prevent you from becoming what you want to be, and I don't care what you want to be. I look at one of the things I'm most proud of. I did the math the other day.
When I look at the people that were in my schoolhouse as an Aaron Leadership School comment on, two of them are currently serving as first sergeants. One of them is currently serving. He's leading the schoolhouse that we, he was in, one of them is about to retire. He's a chief master sergeant right now. Two of them went on to be stay at home moms. One of them is a military training instructor down at Lackland. This is seven people.
That worked for me in my short time as an Airman Leadership School, comma, and all of them went on to do drastically and dramatically different things. There's no more value for me in the two stay at home moms as there are in the two members that went on to be first sergeants. It doesn't matter to me what you value, what you value, obsess over it. And if I'm in a position of leadership over you, I'm gonna get you closer to that goal than you were before we started.
And I don't take personal responsibility for where they are in their lives right now. They did all that work. But I do take responsibility for helping to set them up and pushing them towards what they want it to be. You need to sit down and just write down human values. Take 20 of them, 30 of them, and then whittle it down to 20, and then whittle it down to 10, and then whittle it down to five. What are all of your values? Now let's talk about what your top five are.
Once you define them, then you can begin to guide your decisions. You can begin to create statements like ours. How does this impact the family? And that was something my wife integrated into our life very early. And the promotion challenges that I had often came because we ran things through the filter. How does it impact the family? And the math just didn't work out. And there was a time where I was obsessed with juujitsu, just obsessed.
Sometimes I was training 10 times a week, five times in the morning, five times in the afternoon. And I wanted to progress. I wanted to become a black belt. And so I wanted to train in the evenings and go to classes where I could actually start to make some more progress. Myself and my wife and I sat down and said how does this impact the family? Like, how does this benefit the family? And I was like, I couldn't really answer that question. So we shelved it.
I was already training 10 times a week. That was enough. And then it became time to have a different conversation with my wife and I said, I'm thinking about teaching jujitsu classes for the kids. What do you think? And it's we got out the equation. How does this benefit the family? And that one was a little bit easier. I'm gonna come and I'm gonna pick up the kids two nights a week and you're gonna get two nights off a week. Like check. That's great. Mom gets a break. She homeschools four kids.
Fantastic. Then the next step was, it's gonna bring US income and revenue and that'll pay for one of our car payments. We used to have debt at that time. That's a win for the family. And oh, I'm gonna get to bond with my children two nights a week and they're gonna get some responsibility 'cause they're gonna, the big kids will help me with the little kids class and they'll help me put out the mats and help me to discipline kids and stuff. And that's a win.
And so the formula was absolutely, so we started teaching an evening class for kids Juujitsu. It was an easy win for us because we had a filter that we could run our decisions through your values in and of themself. Everyone will say some version of my primary values are faith, family, and impact. It's okay, great. Does your life reflect that? Does your calendar reflect that? What do you mean when you say faith? Do you mean your personal relationship with whatever it is that you connect to?
Do you mean that you're involved in an organization that's doing work in line with what you believe in? When you say family, what do you mean? Are you breaking generational curses? Is it excellence? Do you want to connect it? These all make very different outcomes. Defining your values and creating filters that you can use in order to drive future decisions is where the magic is.
Your brain is a shortcut machine, and if you have values and you create decision making filters, future decisions become easier. You don't have to overanalyze every situation and it will make you honest. And when we don't do this, imagine if I had just come home and said, I'm gonna start taking a jujitsu class in the evenings. Relationships in my home would've degraded. My wife wouldn't have been very happy with me. Trust between us would've fractured.
I would've been making decisions that violated family values, and what happens with our teams is they experience a toxic load. When we reward sacrifice, sacrifice just gets rewarded with more sacrifice. We say yes to our boss because we don't wanna look bad. We say yes to our boss because we don't wanna lose favor. And our team carries the burden. Our young lieutenants and captains often really struggle with this.
Young lieutenants will say yes to things and then they'll come down, and senior NCOs are not equipping them and saying, Hey, boss, like this is a good idea, but you're gonna have to talk to your boss and you're gonna have to say, Hey, we're already working twelves. This is gonna make us work. Fourteens, is that what you want? Have that conversation with the captain or the major so that we can figure out what to do with it.
Because if I don't value my team and their off-duty life, then I'll just keep squeezing them and squeezing them. You are not gonna know the consequences of these things often until you've already sacrificed too much. And it's where the gap comes in, the integrity gap with the lie that we say, which is mission first. People always, and what we really mean is mission first people when they break.
And so what I want you to do this week, here's the activity first, I want you to write down brainstorm. 30 values, 30 things that you value if you run out of things that you value in life, things like relationships and food and travel and leisure and money and whatever, 30 things. If you run outta things you value, write down human values. Then I want you to whittle it down to 2010 and eventually get to five.
Once you get to five, I want you to put them somewhere that you can see daily, something that's in your sight lines, and then after that, what I want you to do is I want you to audit your filter. So look at your values. And then look at the last week. Where did you violate your values over the last week? I want you to think about it. I want you to say it out loud.
And then last, I want you to pick one value, and this week I want you to adjust your schedule so that if I was peaking at what you do, I would know that value is rising to the top. I would know, I'd be able to predict that value, not your calendar, but an actual schedule of your life if it had actually wrote down everything that you did. And you can do these prompts, you can do them alone, but if you want to do something more, you need to join the high ground. My private coaching group.
Military sherpa.net is where you'll find the high ground, and this is where clarity becomes action. Values are visible, and what we do is every month inside the high ground, we go through one Sherpa code principle. This month we're going to own your 1%. It's not too late to get in. Our coaching call is actually going to be in two weeks, so you still have time to get in on that coaching call.
And speaking of coaching calls, what we do inside of the high ground is we have daily reflection prompts, very much in line with the types of things that we're talking about here. Then we do two monthly coaching calls. So we do one coaching call halfway through the month to see where you are and help you get farther. And then at the end of the month we do some reflection looking back, and then we do some looking forward forecasting where we're going. We call that our monthly Sherpa huddle.
And all of it has some q and a built in and some coaching built in. So if you wanna join my private coaching community where you don't go through these things alone anymore. Then you go to military sherpa.net and you sign up right now. Military sherpa.net. Can't wait to see you in the high ground first coaching call is next week, and by the way, you get two weeks free and so you can join the high ground and you can cancel within two weeks. You don't get charged. It's amazing.
That's a gift from me to use. So I'll see you there, my friends. Let's go. I'm out.