And in 2019, I started coaching full-time to share those lessons with you. And since then, I’ve helped over 300 engineering leaders from over 200 companies, everything from big tech out in the Bay to the Rust Belt here in the Midwest, to startups you’ve never heard of, but you will, literally hundreds. have landed their next promotion, some all the way to VP and recently even president. So grab your notebook and I’ll show you how it works. First, the journey of career growth. Engineering careers, they look a lot like this. There’s a ladder, a mountain to climb, and everybody starts at the bottom. Your job is to climb as close to the top as you want to go. But what I found is that every time you make a leap, something breaks or you get stuck because you can only work so hard and the strategy you used that got you here won’t get you there. So let’s build this out together and how these levels look. And look, I know different companies, different industries, you’re going to see a different number of levels, but these are the main levels we all pass through starting at the bottom. Being an engineer, junior right out of college. Oh man, I remember these days so fondly. Back then, I played in the 4v4 beach volleyball league on Wednesdays, the 2v2 beach volleyball league on Thursdays. I was in the band at my church. We practiced on Tuesdays, played on Sundays. This is back at a stage of our career that actually left us with some free time. We’re just learning. And frankly, it’s a lot of fun, but we want to get beyond this. The whole reason we’re here is to go make an impact. We want to grow and we get that first promotion. Let’s call it senior engineer, maybe IC+. You’re still an individual contributor, but now you’re taking on some bigger projects, bigger scope. You’re proving yourself more and you’ve been rewarded for doing more. And that means more hours. more output, more things going on, more projects, and it’s more competitive for those top performance ratings. And your career now really does feel full-time. You’re working hard all the time. And right at this stage is where the Y shape of engineering career ladders usually start between the technical and managerial paths. We’re gonna keep that simplified today and just talk about the managerial path, but know that it can go On either side. So we move from senior engineer to that lead or M1 manager role. And at this stage, things get a bit interesting. You often start to feel that sense of guilty at work and guilty at home because you’re working long hours and you wish you could get home on time for dinner, but when you’re at home, there’s still work to do. Work to do. It’s like there’s meetings all day and then you’ve got to do your own work at night after the kids go to bed or on the weekend. And it really begins to feel like you’re working overtime. The only way to keep up is to put in well beyond the 40 hours that are advertised as the full-time work week. But you still want to grow. And in fact, there’s a hope that maybe if you get beyond this level, things will get easier. And so you push and you push and you get to that senior manager level, that M2, leading leaders. And now things get really exciting. You’ve got managers on your team, you’ve got those really senior ICs on your team, you’ve got a bigger scope to lead. And I’ve had one-on-one conversations with over 2,000 engineering leaders since 2019. And most senior managers, their only tool up till now has been more hours to get ahead. But every hour is already spoken for. So you get up, your calendar runs your life, and bottom line, at this stage of your career, you’re out of time. You’re out of time. There’s no, no time left to give to anything else. You’re just executing what’s in front of you and hanging on for dear life, hoping that you make it to that director level. As a director, now you’re not just managing the people, you’re leading the strategy. You’re defining the outcomes. You’re leading the org. You’re making an impact across orgs. But there’s a problem at this stage because you were already out of time. Like, we ran out of time as a senior manager. So what do you do as a director? Well, you tap into the other buckets— your sleep, time taking care of yourself, self-care, your health, maybe your family, the people who love you. And I mean, you got executives above you pushing you for results. You’ve got so many people below you who need that help and guidance and mentorship and coaching. And you got to just take time from everything outside of work. And as a director, you’re living on borrowed time. And you convince yourself that it’s just a loan. You’re borrowing it temporarily and you’re going to give it back. Hey honey, when I finish this project. Hey kids, After Daddy gets back from this business trip. When you get to director, a lot of times it feels like you’re always taking out a loan from some other part of your life, but you’re ambitious. You want to make a long-lasting impact. And so we push harder to climb to that VP level and above, maybe pushing for CTO. You want to get all the way to the top where you can actually lead the vision. Have that long-term direction for the company. But heck, you’re already not sleeping that much. You’re already missing the kids’ sports games and dance recitals, and eventually the bill comes due for all that borrowed time. And I’ve talked to a lot of leaders at this level, many of whom have a big bag of money and on the other shoulder a big bag of regrets because getting all the way to the top of this mountain. has cost them their lifetime. It’s cost them their life. And frankly, this is why a lot of the managers that I talk to will tell me, Zach, I don’t know if I want to be a director or a VP, because when I look up that mountain and I see the trade-offs that they’re making, that just doesn’t feel like it’s worth it. Now, at the Oasis of Courage, where I coach, we’ve got clients all across this entire spectrum. We’ve got more junior people down here. We’ve got really senior people up here. But the majority, the biggest group, are in the middle right here, that manager, senior manager, lead, principal engineer level. Because as you already know, middle management is that place where most leaders get stuck. And it’s because right here is where you get to over and out of time. And to break through right there can be tough. I call the left side of this pyramid the default climb. Frankly, this is what’s being modeled. This is the results that a lot of people are getting, and people don’t want that experience. They don’t want to climb this. Maybe you’re looking at this and you’re saying, hey, there, that’s me. I see where I’m at. And you’re thinking, why would I want To climb this ladder, because at every rung we keep doing what got us here—more hours, more heroics—and the only proof that that’s going to get you to the next level is the fact that there is somebody one rung up, but they’re living a life that you don’t want. And it’s not your fault if you feel stuck or frustrated by that. I mean, that’s the default climb, and it’s the only climb that anybody ever showed you. And like I said, I know that side of the mountain because I climbed it and I, I got stuck. I got stuck way down here. I was in this level pushing for that first manager job. And as I started to ask myself, how can I accelerate? I just took the strategies from these more senior leaders who were my mentors and applied them down here. And guess what happened? Not something good. Divorce, depression, a lot of real deep frustration, just feeling disenchanted with the idea of career growth in general. So I asked the hard question, is there another way? And I made significant changes to how I approach career building, not the ladder, but how I climbed it. And I got promotions after that every year or two. I more than doubled my income. And the best part is I worked fewer hours than I did when I was stuck down here. So let’s talk about how we can shift to the right side of this mountain and do it differently. If we don’t want to succeed our way into suffering, we need a new way to climb this mountain. It’s not the ladder, it’s how we climb it. So at the bottom, honestly, it’s the same. Most people don’t have a lot of issues when we’re talking about engineer. Senior engineer. If you do, it’s because you made the same mistake I did of looking up the ladder and saying, well, I must need to work 100 hours a week to get the promotion. And you’re pulling from those bad examples above you, but you don’t have to choose between climbing the ladder and having a life. I believe that you deserve to go as high as you want to go on this ladder without losing your life to get there. And that only happens by design. Instead of the default climb, let’s design a different approach, starting with that transition to your first manager job. The first change that you need to learn is how to protect your time. If you follow the model of everyone around you, you’re going to get the same results in your lifestyle As everyone around you. So let’s learn new strategies and have the courage to hold those boundaries, which I’ll show you in a second. To continue growing though, it’s not enough to just protect your time. As senior manager, time management will not get you to the next level. You need to shift your focus to time investment. You need to learn how to invest your time. What is the return On your time invested? What are the strategies and tools that you need that will increase that return? And at this stage, you must put hours into those activities that help you to create results, build your reputation, and move you up the ladder. You’ve got to learn how to invest your time. Director. Oh, reaching director. Here’s the truth. This is where a lot of leaders will fall back to old habits because the pressure to perform is intense. You’ve got executives barking at you, you’ve got results to hit, and the buck stops here. You feel that weight of having landed that role. And so instead of leveling up, they just turn up the RPMs on what got them to that place and, and they fall back to bad habits. So if you want to succeed as a director, Now it’s time to do things that will scale with your growth. You need to learn how to multiply time. How to multiply time through the team. Learning to lead in a different way. Not about what you’re bringing, but how you multiply through the time of others. And last stage, hitting that VP or CTO level, this is where that deep Part of you, the reason you’re probably watching this video, that part of you that wants to make a lasting impact really comes to life. You get to be that visionary. And as a VP, this is where we enter legacy time. This is the time where you get to leave that legacy, cast that vision, make an impact that lasts well beyond your time in, in the role and maybe even on the earth. So how do you move From the left side of this mountain to the right, what does it take from you to go from default to design? What exactly are the keys to that climb? That’s what we call lifestyle engineering. And I will show you how we do that here in just a second. The good news is you can move across this mountain at any level and then start climbing In a new way, a way that’s not going to steal your life. I think about Danny. Danny’s an awesome leader who I worked with who was working overtime. He had not been to a single one of his daughter’s gymnastics meets for the season. He was missing out on other family things. He wasn’t sleeping well because he was working late shifts. He went through this process of shifting from the left to the right side of this mountain. And for Danny, that meant 2 significant outcomes. Number one, he landed a promotion and a role that he really wanted. But number two, more importantly, he was front row at the next gymnastics meet, cheering his head off. One change, 2 big wins. So let’s go through how this looks for you. And as we do, I want to highlight one final thing. That there’s a couple of levels here where people tend to really get stuck. The first one is right here, going from IC into that first manager role. That’s a leap where you go from being a maker to a multiplier. Multiplier. From a maker to a multiplier. Leading yourself and building things to leading teams and building people. And the second leap that really gets people is going from manager to director, from senior manager to director, less about just leading people and teams to leading the enterprise, right? Thinking like an executive, going from being a multiplier to a true visionary. And the things that you do at each of these levels that gets rewarded, that helps you to move up, changes as you grow. So I hope you’re excited for a lifelong learning mission here because it’s not just about being a great engineer. In fact, Kavita, amazing leader sitting at the senior manager role, and 6 straight years Kavita got told by her leadership, you’re doing a great job. Keep doing what you’re doing. You’re gonna be next in line for that director promotion. And for 6 years it didn’t happen. And she kept asking herself like, what am I missing? What do I need to do? She worked with me in the Blueprint program and landed her director promotion in just 6 months, working the same hours and having the same engineering skills. Like I said, it’s the same mountain. with a different climb. So what I’d love to do right now is dig deeper into the how-to. What does it take to move from the left side to the right side and to climb this mountain without losing your life? I’m gonna show you how to make those leaps. Let’s get into it. Hey, sorry to interrupt myself and yourself. If you’ve seen enough and you wanna know more about what it looks like to work together, send me the message on LinkedIn. My profile URL is in the description. Just DM the word tequila. I love to sip good tequila. Here’s actually one of my favorites right here. Fantastic. That’ll be our little secret code that I know you’ve seen this video. So shoot me the DM, the word tequila, and I’ll share with you the details of what it looks like to work together. So do that and I’ll see you soon. So let’s get into the director promotion plan. Again, it’s the fastest way I know to climb this mountain and make the leap to director without burning out. And here’s what the model looks like that encompasses the plan. The most important thing— let’s zoom in to the sweet spot, the outcome that we’re after. And what’s important is that you and I are aligned on this goal. If we’re not, click out of this video, go watch something else. This is not for you. But my goal for you and everyone I work with is what we call an on-purpose Promotion. On-purpose promotion. And what I mean by that is not promotion on the left side of that mountain where you feel like you have to choose between your career and your life. But work-life balance, it’s a broken model. Work is part of your life. And so what I want for you is a climb that creates more money, more impact, more freedom. And this can look different for different people. You might want career acceleration like JT. He was an operations supervisor at Skidmore Pump when he joined the program. Soon after, he made director, and now he’s president of the company in just 6 years. Or you might want to make more money per hour by just getting your balance back like Alec. Alec was working 70 hours and up Every single week when he started working with me. And in just 90 days, we got that to about 45 to 50 hours, still driving enormous impact. And his promotion came shortly after doing this work and reducing his hours, not by increasing them. So for you, on-purpose promotion might just be getting your balance back, or it could literally be on-purpose— Promotion. In the truest sense, like Mauricio. Mauricio, after finishing the Blueprint program, said, “I realized I was unhappy because I was living my life outside of my purpose.” After the program, he said, “My relationship with my wife and my coworkers has improved a thousand percent.” So you’re going to know that it’s an on-purpose promotion for you. Because you will have more money, more impact in your work, the thing that we’re really after, and more freedom for yourself, for your family, and in your life. And if that sounds like you and what you want, if an on-purpose promotion is a goal we can align on, you’re in the right place. And if you want title at any cost, then sorry, but this isn’t for you. Now, there’s 3 problems, 3 things that keep good engineers stuck on the default climb that are going to prevent you from moving forward. Let’s explore all 3 of these together. The first is that you have no map. No map. You can’t see what the next leap requires. You’re just guessing. You’re doing more of the same things. You don’t know where you’re going or how to get there. You do not have the map from here to where you want to go. The second barrier is that you have no margin. Every spare hour is already spent. You’re looking at overtime and borrowed time, and you have no margin to do the things that would be required, even if somebody told you what to do. And the third barrier is you have no method. You, you don’t know what the better way is. And even if you had a strategy to deploy, the old patterns are winning by default, and you’re so busy, and your systems and your habits and these things are not allowing you to break out and to break through. So if no map, no margin, and no method is what’s holding you back, what do we need to do instead? First, you need to create a career blueprint. Just like building a house begins with the architect and creating a blueprint for your career, you need to architect that career. You need to know where you’re going. You need to be confident that you can get there. Then you need to invest energy into your lifestyle. Lifestyle design. Don’t take that default Climb. Go to the design climb. Lifestyle design is about making sure that there’s no guilt at work and no guilt at home. And the third piece is now to install an operating system, to upgrade your personal operating system so you’re making progress every cycle and you are focused every day. Because where your focus goes, that’s where your energy Flows. So no map, no margin, and no method is transformed when you create a career blueprint, a lifestyle design, and an operating system. But what’s important is now we take these key ideas, these shifts, and we install the strategies, the tools, the actual plans and actions that you need. Because this isn’t just about learning a, a fancy shape and understanding these words. It’s about your ability to now diagnose and scan like a CAT scan of your own career to know what exactly do I need to work on first across all of the tactics, tools, and strategies in these 9 areas around the outside. And that’s what we’re gonna walk through right now. Now, before we do, let me just encourage you to think about this like we’re doing our own little stoplight. You know, a scorecard here, and I’m sure you do stoplights of some kind in your work when it comes to reporting, you know, different KPIs. But I want you to ask yourself, am I red in an area? Is this a big gap for me? Am I yellow? It’s something I’m doing okay at, but I need to improve. As I give you each of these tactics and the statements that define them, give yourself a score. Or am I green? Right? I’m really winning in this area. It’s a strength for me. And be honest. Be honest. Because I mean, a lot of the leaders I talk to mark most of these red and yellow. So be clear with yourself, be honest, and let’s go through all 9. At the end of this, you’re gonna have your first draft of the director promotion plan. We’re gonna be able to diagnose in your career what we need to work on first. So let’s get into career blueprint. The very first thing that we need to do is to clarify your vision. A clear vision is not just a job title, a salary band, or a SMART goal. It’s the full picture of the role and your life, how those fit together. It’s clear both logically and emotionally. And it’s not just a vector, it’s a vision. All right, we do that through a process that I call a dumb vision. It’s not about SMART goals, it’s about a dumb vision, really creating focus. Because a lot of people will say, I just want to go generally that direction, but they’ve got 2 or 3 or 4 things that they’re putting energy into. And one airplane at full throttle takes off, but 2 airplanes at half Both crash at the end of the runway. I think about Chris. Chris had been 10 years in one company, his retirement mapped out, and everything frankly was good enough, but he was lacking that clear vision. And he was thinking about the future and saying, I’m not really sure if this is working. I’m a little bit bored. I’m a little bit unhappy. Maybe something different. Would be better. And he worked through this process of creating a dumb vision, understood exactly what he wanted, made some bold moves. And he took that 4 or 5 years into the future retirement next step plan, and he pulled the best parts of that forward. He made a big change, moved across the country to be closer to family, took on a big director role that he’s extremely excited about for this next chapter of his career. A clear vision changes how you act. You can describe the role and the life you’re building towards three years from now in detail. All right, the more exciting and the more even scary that it feels, the better. Clarify your vision. Then time out before we go on to then. Let’s give yourself. A score as we go. It’s going to be good to keep track of these ratings. So be honest, how clear is your vision? Do you know where you’re going and what you want? And give yourself a quick red, yellow, green, either mark it with a highlighter or just put R, Y, or G next to it as we go. All right. You’ve got a clear vision. The next piece is bulletproof Confidence. This is you having the courage to act before you feel ready. This is you getting out of your head, because if you’re stuck in your head, then you’re dead. This is where we use what I call C4 challenges to crush comfort and create courage, to build confidence in yourself, to become truly bulletproof. And Keegan, a leader who I worked with, he was ready to quit engineering. He actually told me that his wife dragged him by the toe into coaching because she was afraid he was going to quit with no plan to support their family. And he said these exact words after 90 days of coaching: TL;DR, imposter syndrome died. I love that. Imposter syndrome died. Keegan went on to say, I look my fears And can no longer find them. I look for my fears and can no longer find them. Man, I think that’s awesome. I think that’s awesome. You want to be able to make decisions with incomplete information. You want to know that one bad meeting doesn’t change what you’re capable of. You need bulletproof confidence. So grab your highlighter, give yourself a score. How are you when it comes to confidence in every room and every situation where you need to be able to perform? as an engineering leader. The 3rd and final piece of career blueprint is a really important shift in your thinking and strategy. It’s to build your reputation. Building your reputation is all about learning how to work on your career and not just in your career. Everybody has told you to keep your head down, Do great work and let your work speak for itself. And it doesn’t. Your work does not speak for itself. It never has and it never will. Reputation building is about results multiplied by reach using tools like the Ninja Brag, which I’ve recorded videos on how to do that. I think about Curtis. When I talked about building reputation and I shared with Curtis what this is all about, he was at NASA, but he had been on a PIP in his previous company. And he joined coaching determined to not end up on a PIP again in a role that he really liked at NASA. He ended up getting the best performance review of his career just months later without doing more work. He was delivering the same kinds of results, But he changed the way that he went about building his reputation. And it got all the difference that he needed in getting to that next level. See, the people who decide your next promotion, can they actually name right now the biggest result that you delivered this year? How are you doing in building your reputation? This is an area that evolves and grows as you grow. And if you don’t change your strategies and if you don’t get proactive in building your reputation, It’s going to hold you back. It’s going to be a barrier in getting to those next levels. And if you’re at manager, senior manager already, you know it’s not just about how smart you are that’s going to get you to where you want to go. So give yourself red, yellow, green. How are you doing right now in building your reputation? Career blueprint is important. It’s going to help you to get to that next level on the career side. But remember, this is about achieving the success you want at work without sacrificing everything at home. So let’s move over and talk about lifestyle design. There’s 3 key areas to start building new skills, applying new tactics in your lifestyle design. The first one is to protect your boundaries. It’s not about forcing work into a 9-to-5 box. It’s about protecting boundaries in a way where you can be fully present with the priority in front of you. Are you able to be fully focused at work when you’re at work and fully focused at home when you’re at home? One of the fun exercises we do here is what I call the Terrible Twos. It’s practicing saying no, all right, and really learning how to draw a boundary even up the org chart. George, awesome leader who I’ve worked with. He’s one of my favorite humans. He was on the brink of burnout. He was really struggling. He was grinding, he was hustling, he was impacting his family. He went through this process of lifestyle engineering, learning how to design his lifestyle. And in just under 8 months, he got a promotion into a new leadership role. And in George’s words, without sacrificing my family life. That’s what you want. When you’re home, you’re home. When you’re at work, you’re at work. Work doesn’t steal from home. Home’s not stealing from work. You’re giving things what they need, protecting those boundaries. So give yourself a quick score. How are you doing in protecting boundaries? Are you red? Are you yellow? Or are you green? Are you doing a great job not letting these things blur and blend together in a way that steals from all of it? Speaking of all of it, the next piece is what I call whole life balance. Whole life balance is a different paradigm. People have talked about work-life balance for as long as I’ve been in engineering, but work and life at opposite sides of this scale is the wrong model. You can’t party so hard on the weekend to make up for 5 days of work that you dread and the Sunday scaries that come up because you don’t want to go back to work on Monday morning. So we go through the Life Mastery Pyramid and we teach you how to put that into the Wheel of Life to create whole life balance. It’s about integrating all of yourself, not just finding a way to get a little bit more time on the weekend doing something that you love. Matthew, he went through this program, and in the process of achieving and mastering Whole Life Balance, he went on to get 2 promotions, a $50K raise in under a year. And during that same year, with 2 promotions and a $50,000 raise in his base pay, he also launched a side hustle business. and was growing his family and did all of that in his own words without burning out. That’s what’s possible when you start to master these skills of whole life balance. So ask yourself, how are you doing in your life mastery across all of who you are? And maybe ask it this way, if the people closest to you scored you on the, your health, your relationships, all these other things, what would they say? Would you be proud of that result? Give yourself an honest score. How are you doing in whole life balance? Once you get that piece dialed, the 3rd chunk of lifestyle design is what I call maximizing energy. Here’s why energy is the key and not Time management, you can’t control time. It just keeps going, doing what it’s always done. Energy management is where you create the differentiation, okay? You can’t change the flow of time, but you can change how your energy shows up moment to moment. We’re gonna go through the 5 energy vampires. We’re gonna show you how you can actually use energy to your advantage. This is the true X factor to multiplying time is through energy, all right? Not through a better organized calendar. One of my clients, Neely, she’s an ex-Google hardware engineer. She’s now moving on to her MBA at MIT. She’s absolute genius. But when we were working together, she was doing 15 hours a week back to back, just getting crushed. And we had a conversation and she said, man, I’m really, The feeling, Zach, like I finish my workdays with nothing left in the tank. And I said, okay, well, let’s look at what’s going on for you, because she was at the time prepping for, you know, taking the GMAT and doing all these things to get ready for MIT. It’s a lot going on. I said, well, let’s look at how you’re managing energy. Nearly went through 2 more weeks, also 15 hours every day. Back to back. And what she said was, by changing my energy management, I feel like I’m getting home with something left in the tank. I know which parts of my week are draining me and which parts of the week are refueling me to be able to do what I need to do. We don’t want to work 15 hours a day all the time, trust me. But if you’re in one of those stretches where it’s happening, Energy management is so, so important. So give yourself a quick red, yellow, green. How are you doing in understanding, controlling, and maximizing your available energy? Not just for work, but for your family, for yourself, for your whole life. Career blueprint and lifestyle design. If we get these 6 elements we’ve already talked about, Clarify your vision, bulletproof confidence, build your reputation, protect boundaries, whole life balance, maximize energy. If you get all those things understood, you build those new strategies, you understand those tools and tactics, you are way ahead of people who are in your same seat. But if you don’t have an operating system to make sure that you use the tools that are in your tool belt to actually apply the strategies we’re talking about, then it doesn’t matter because Knowledge is not power; it’s implemented knowledge that is power. I’ll say that one more time: I don’t care how much you know; I care about what you do with what you know. Knowledge is not power; knowledge in action, implemented knowledge, is power. So for us to win at climbing to director while loving our life, the first thing that needs to happen is for us to install rhythms. Most people think just in terms of habits, but it’s, it’s not just habits. It’s about habits and rhythms. Daily, weekly, quarterly, yearly. How you plan, how you act, and how you learn in what we call the playbook. Making sure that you have one coherent system that is synced to all of the time horizons and rhythms that matter. I actually just brought on a new client to my mastermind named Brandon. He said he was hesitant to join because knowing he was gonna put 1, 2, 3, 4 hours a week into personal development, he thought, well, why don’t I just use that time to do more work? Wouldn’t it be a wasted time? doing this if I could just be working. But he joined the program and one week into installing his playbook rhythms, he said, wow, I’ve already gotten a 100% ROI in the first week. So ask yourself, do you have those daily, weekly, quarterly, yearly, long-term vision rhythms? That keep your habits and your routines moving, keep you calm when work is chaotic. Give yourself a score, red, yellow, green. How are you doing in installing those rhythms? Next, you’ve got to upgrade your mindset. Upgrade your mindset. Learning to think like the level above you. Not just work harder thinking at the level you’re at. Directors don’t think like managers, period. And a great manager doesn’t think like an individual contributor. Remember, you go from maker to multiplier to visionary. There’s a different way of thinking. And really learning how to control your state, your story, your strategy, Using your mindset, right? It’s like we not only need to learn how to hit the gas pedal harder to get to where we want to go, you need to learn how to release the brake pedal of the things that are not working for where you’re at. And most of us go through our engineering career driving with two feet, trying to hit the gas more when you still got a foot on the brakes. My client Aditi, she was in a challenging situation. And she thought, what I need is a new tool. She thought, what I needed is maybe even a new situation. Maybe I should change companies or go somewhere where I’m a better fit. But as we went through this process and I really showed her the importance of mindset mastery and how to upgrade and change her mindset, Niditi said, it was not a situation change that I needed. But actually a mindset shift. She and I started working together in May and she was promoted by December. Upgrade your mindset. It’s the foundation that all of these other strategies and tools are built on. Give yourself a score. How are you doing in your mindset? If you haven’t invested time and energy into that upgrade, It’s going to hold you back. The final piece of your operating system is one that I’ve been talking about a lot lately. It’s to fill your life raft. Fill your life raft. The life raft is a metaphor. If you were on a boat, the boat’s going down. And you end up on a life raft, and you can see land, but it’s a long way off. Who do you want in the boat with you? Do you want to be alone? Paddle by yourself? Probably not. You might tire out. You may never make it. But do you want people in that boat who are just going to sit and do nothing and be more weight for you to row? Of course not. But you know what’s even worse than that is when there’s people in your boat who are rowing the wrong direction. They’re literally rowing back out to sea. They’re rowing against you. And this happens to people all the time in ways that you may not see. For example, that one colleague who says they’re your close friend, but they’re always complaining. Pay attention to who’s in your life raft. This is a place where we will work through tools like the Proximity Power Plant. Making sure that your 360 PPP is dialed in, that you know who needs to be in your corner. I’m reminded of Suyog. Suyog is a rock star, senior director. He had that director title. He was running hard, but Suyog felt alone. He felt alone. They do say it’s lonely at the top. Maybe you can relate to this. He felt alone. So Suyog joined our program and stayed on in my mastermind because he wanted that tribe of mentors, that tribe of peers to bounce ideas off of, to support him, to be able to tell the truth about what’s working, what’s not working, and to be able to celebrate when things were going great. And Suyog said, oh, you know, this is something that I’ve never had before. So ask yourself, could you make a call to a mentor to a coach, to a peer, especially outside of your own company this week to get insight and advice and mentorship and coaching about a hard career decision? How are you doing in your life raft? Give yourself a score and let’s see, zooming out, how you’re doing overall in building that plan. Okay, so you have the whole picture. Like most people, you’re probably gonna see a mix of reds, yellows, and greens on this page. I want you to ask yourself, which 2 or 3 are the ones that if you could move those to green would have the biggest impact for you in the next 12, 24, 36 months? Which would those be? Circle those for yourself. And guess what? You just identified your constraint. You’ve got a first draft at your director promotion plan. Where are you gonna focus to accelerate and get to the next level? And behind each one of these 9 areas is a proven process, is a set of systems and tools and ways inside the blueprint that you don’t have to go figure that out alone, that we can implement and help you to accelerate and break through to the next level. And I’ll tell you, the thing about the reds, they don’t turn green on their own. Every review cycle that you stay on the default climb is another year, another cycle that you’ve spent either moving up a ladder that you don’t want to be on, or not going anywhere because you’re stuck. I’ve got an amazing leader I’ve worked with named Hadi. He’s currently a senior director at Intel, but he was principal level at SpaceX when he joined and started working with me. And Hadi said to me, I find myself wishing that I had embarked on this coaching journey a decade ago. And I’ve got a lot of people I’ve worked with like Hadi who wish they’d done this work a long time before. I don’t have anybody I’ve worked with who said, wow, I wish I had waited 10 more years before doing this. In fact, Aaron Hensler, amazing leader, he said that in just 2 months of working together, he had confidence that his leadership development had grown 3+ years of what would’ve happened if he had just done it Under his own strength, on his own, through failure, through learning. So if you want to get to the next level, you have a choice to make because you’re going to pay for your next promotion one way or another. You’re either going to pay with your time or you’re going to pay by getting the help that you need to compress those years into months like Aaron did. Doing more of what you’ve already done will get you more of what you’ve already got. And when you look at this picture, there’s a lot of pieces here for us to work on, but just 2 or 3 Shifting to green could make all the difference in the world for you. So if you’re ready to do something different, let’s get after it. Because if nothing changes, nothing changes. If you want to move those reds to greens, like I said before, just DM me the word tequila. It’s our little secret so I know you’ve seen this video. DM me the word tequila on LinkedIn. My LinkedIn URL, my personal profile is there in the episode description. Click that, jump over to LinkedIn, DM me the word tequila. We’ll start a real conversation. I want to know where you’re headed, what’s coming up red for you. We’ll make sure that what we have here in the Blueprint program is a fit for you, that my coaching is going to be able to help you. We’ll set up a short call to map that out. We’ll make sure you get everything you need. And look, if it’s for you, you’re going to know. And if it’s not, I wish you the very best. I hope that this has been helpful For you, but let’s not stay one day longer than necessary climbing the wrong side of the career mountain. Let’s do this.