Well it’s been just about thirty days since the GLS.

Thirty days since Mr. Encouragement himself, Chris McChesney delivered, with his nice smile, these simple words, “Execution is harder than strategy.” (Trigger alert: rant ahead.)

I just spent $199 to hear that? Dude, I go to these conferences to get pumped up, not face reality. Tell me something I can do to change the world, my world, in three steps. Don’t tell me that applying what I heard at the GLS is hard. Make it look easy. You know. The way Alan Mulally so calmly talked about turning Ford Motor Company around and leading it out of $17 billion in debt.

A great many of us came out of the GLS all fired up to change something about our life (or something in our spouse’s life J), our leadership behavior or organization. And now 30 days later, exactly 87 of us know where our Summit notebook is. The rest of us, well, we intend to get back to it and review what struck us as really important. Later in September, you know, when things settle down.

So this got me thinking: What would Mr. Encouragement actually say to me?

Schmidt: Listen, Chris. I was slammed in August with some serious work pressure.

McChesney: “The whirlwind is all the work done every day just to keep things going.”

Schmidt: Lots of irons in the fire, travel, home stuff, you get it.

McChesney: “When urgency and the important clash, urgency wins.”

Schmidt: OK. I’ll get my GLS notebook out. BTW, I took away at least five or six things to reflect and act on.

McChesney: ”You might find it hard to let go of a lot of good goals until you start serving a greater goal.”

Schmidt: The challenge is to identify and isolate on the one thing I can actually act on.

McChesney: “Don’t go big, go narrow. Focus on the Wildly Important Goal—a WIG—a goal that makes all the difference. Failure to achieve this goal renders any other achievements inconsequential.”

Schmidt: OK. I’ll find one wildly important take away from the GLS and focus on it. And what about the rest of my GLS notes?

McChesney: “There will always be more good ideas than capacity to execute.”

Like many of you I was challenged in my spirit and my mind and came away from the GLS with some solid ideas. So this week, I pushed into the whirlwind of my Summit notebook and identified my WIG taken from Dr. Travis Bradberry’s talk on emotional intelligence:

“Self-awareness is awareness of your tendencies.”

In the year ahead, my WIG is to strengthen my awareness of what’s going on in my body, in my thoughts and how I come across to others. As Bradberry said, “emotional intelligence is a flexible skill that can improve with effort.”

Ok. I’ve got my WIG. Your turn.

Time to WIG out.