Project Revolution

This is me 8 years apart. What changed?

Well, most project managers aren't trained for our work.

I know I wasn’t and neither were thousands of PMs I have talked to.

We were trained inside the work.

People say experience is the best teacher, but doing the work isn't the same as training for it.

I lived this difference with combat sports long before PM.

I trained and taught Muay Thai, had my Physical Preparation Specialist Certification, and my dream was to train elite athletes.

I carry those principles into how I train project leaders today.

In sports, you recreate the competitive environment during training. You cannot predict everything that will happen when the fight starts, but you can prepare your body and mind to respond when it does.

Project management carries that same uncertainty.

The difference is that most PMs never get practice reps. We take every hit live.

A single scope change can take over the day. One stakeholder escalation can consume your afternoon, often with no idea how long you will need to stay “on.”

We accept this constant state of alert because we are told, “that’s project management.”

Your body knows better.

The tension follows you home. By Friday night, you are collapsed. By Saturday, you have nothing left for the people you worked all week to provide for. By Sunday you are dreading Monday!

Here's what sucks:

Survival gets rewarded like high performance.

The project keeps moving, so nobody sees the cost. You always find a way, so they give you more work.

You are breaking down while everyone calls it great ex*****on.

The work looks fine. You are not.

You do not have to spend your career operating this way.

You can build the physical and mental endurance to remain clear when the project gets ugly. You can learn to recognize trouble earlier without running your entire career on adrenaline and caffeine.

It's all hard work, so choose your hard.

Choose the hard of reacting to chaos every day and collapsing at the end of every week.

Or the hard of building yourself into someone who can meet complexity without allowing it to consume you.

Both are hard.
Only one gets easier over time.

The photo is me then and me now.

I was getting the work done back then. I am carrying significantly more today with far less damage because I finally learned to train for the work, not just survive inside it.

Stop measuring your value by how much chaos you can absorb.

Build the capacity to execute without losing yourself in the process.

One of the most ruthless ex*****on systems I’ve ever studied was built for combat, not project management.

It was built by a man who knew that loyalty to one style makes you predictable, rigid, and fragile.

He studied every system he could find, kept what had maximum impact, and abandoned the rest.

Bruce Lee.

Project managers face the exact same trap: method attachment.

And that's the most dangerous thing that you can do in this profession.

We choose a framework to organize the work, then defend the framework long after reality tells us it’s failing.

The method stops serving the projec the project starts serving the method.

Thats sooo backasswards..

Everything Lee taught attacks that delusion:

Be water: Flow when softness is needed. Crash when force is required. Cut through what looks impenetrable.

Absorb what is useful: Test everything against reality. Discard what doesn't work, keep what does, and engineer what is uniquely yours.

Know yourself: If you don’t possess it, you can’t give it. If you cannot influence yourself under fire, how then can you influence others in the fire?

Hack away the unessential: Ruthlessly strip away every meeting, metric, and process that does not directly move the mission forward.

Act: Knowledge alone is not power. Knowledge in motion creates power. Nothing changes until you move it.

Never let the process become a substitute for real progress.

Some of the best project management training never happens in project management.

Where did yours come from?

A keynote should do more than fill an hour on the agenda.

It should create energy, challenge thinking, and give people something they can actually use.

That is what we built High Voltage Keynotes to do.

⚡ Leadership.
⚡ Influence.
⚡ Ex*****on.
⚡ Real-world tools that connect to performance and results.

We are currently booking upcoming events.

And if you want to go deeper, ask us about our workshops.

Energy gets attention.
Ex*****on gets results.

Lead and rock on!!!

Check us out here: projectrevolutionllc.com

*****on

You return to work to find 100s of emails. Sound familiar?

I keep hearing different versions of the same story.

Leader returns to work after weekend to a
mass amount of emails.

• Not after two weeks off.
• Not after one week off.
• Only after a weekend!

🔥Every message marked important and urgent.
🔥All with more than 36 people in the “To” line.

This on top being expected to deliver the work they were hired to do.

How many of you have been here?

• Do a few minutes of work.
• Go to your inbox to find the right thread.
• Stare at the screen, figure out what changed, then respond to the masses.

Return to work to rebuild momentum that got interrupted. Repeat until the day is gone.

When one leader I've coached raised the issue, the response was:

🔥“That’s just part of the culture here.”

This is an alarming response.

The organization has accepted constant interruption as the cost of belonging.

People are expected to deliver focused work inside a culture that prevents focus.

That is not communication. It's an organization spending people’s attention without tracking the cost.

Your best people may not be overwhelmed by the work you hired them to do.

They may be overwhelmed by everything required to communicate around it.

Before you blame ex*****on, look at how much of the workday is spent on inefficient communication.

Sometimes the work did not fail. It died by email.

How much time do you feel is wasted a week with inefficient email communication?

This guy tried to kill me with a forklift.

In reverse.

I was new to the company and had been brought in unexpectedly.

The forklift wielder had been working there through a temp agency.

One day, he threw the forklift into reverse and came after me.

It was wild. I ran and got out of the way just in time.

When I told my supervisor, he seemed more miffed than alarmed.

“What did you do to p**s him off?”

Apparently, I existed.

They brought us into a room together to work it out, and two things became clear very quickly:

1. He was not really mad at me. He was mad at them.

2. Leadership brought me in without communicating what was happening.

3. Apparently, he was under the influence.

He believed I was there to take his job.

Nobody told him that.

Leadership left a blank, and fear filled it.

That is what happens when leaders make changes without explaining them.

People create their own version of the story, decide what they are about to lose, and react as if their version has been confirmed.

That is how silence creates toxicity.

People protect territory nobody was trying to take.

They turn coworkers into enemies.

Sometimes they try to run over the new guy with a forklift.

If leadership does not tell the story, fear will.

And fear writes wild stories.

Also, drugs are bad, m’kay?

Have a wild story of your own? Share below.