TN50#189_Better Basics Performance & A New Baby_27 January_2025

Hi Team,

Sometime life throws some wonderful challenges at us.  Like being a brand-new dad who wants to do everything he can for his new baby girl and his very exhausted wife.  If you know what I’m talking about, you know what I’m talking about.  So when life throws a wonderful wrench in the works and all the old systems designed to keep you operating at a high level of physical, mental and emotional performance aren’t working from a schedule standpoint, what do you do?  Easy right?  You throw in the towel and let all those years of hard work go to crap for the good of the family!  Or…

Happy Monday and welcome to The Next 50 #189 I like to think of personal performance in 3 components: physical, mental and emotional.  My framework focuses on 4 Buckets: Eat, Sleep, Move and Think.  This blog is my sandbox for sharing information that you might find useful for your personal performance.

… you adjust your framework or plan.

In this case I, of course, mean THE BETTER BASICS FRAMEWORK that I teach in my Better Basics Performance (BBP) coaching program.

My friend and client, Stan the Man, I will call him Stan for short; finds himself in this very situation.  And like many first time Dads, Stan had a vision or what his first baby-leave was going to be like.  All the family, safe, warm, well fed and well rested.  The whole day managed by 9 am; leaving hours of extra time to really dial in his personal performance before heading back to work after over a month at home.  With just the free “THINK” time alone he’d probably figure out that incredibly important problem we’ve all been noodling on for a decade or so – how to keep his car warranty from expiring!

Two weeks into his baby-leave, Stan found himself a bit out of sorts and in fact he hadn’t even figured out the car warranty thing!  Bringing a new baby home was compared to “the fog of war” on more than one occasion in my years in the military; it was no different for Stan.  We needed to take the time to reimagine what right looked like for Stan’s personal performance maintenance.

During one of our strategy sessions the one thing we locked in on was that there were multiple windows in the day, all be it somewhat random still, when Stan would have at least 30 minutes to focus on his personal performance requirements.

Some of these opportunities would occur with his new wingman, woops wing-baby girl, riding shotgun all snuggled in her bassinet.  So all we did was develop a one-sheet Minimum Effective Dose (MED) opportunities list and a tracking matrix.  This made it easier for Stan to quickly pick an option for his random windows of opportunity, when they occurred, and over the days of the week, Stan could track what he was able to accomplish so he could stay balanced with his MED plan.

Here’s the plan we came up with, sketched out on paper.

Is it perfect, no, what plan is?  Has he figured out that car warranty problem that plagues us all?  Nope.  It’s simply Stan’s current best guess solution on how he can max out his opportunities to be the best new dad and husband he can be by maxing out his attention to maintaining his personal performance edge.

If this makes you feel a bit lazy based on your current set of circumstances, GOOD (-:

Get off your butt and get busy and let me know if you need a quick strategy session: alex@fpp.llc.

Who do you know that could use this information? I bet you can think of a couple of people before you click the next email, please share the post with your team and anyone who might find it useful and let me know what you think!

Have a good one,

Alex

PS. My prayers continue to go out to all my Friends and their neighbors in and around Los Angeles, California!

Header Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash