Dee Davis (00:09)
Good morning and welcome to the Management Under Construction podcast. I'm your host, Dee Davis, and today I'm gonna get a little bit of Les Brown on you today. If you don't know who Les Brown is, you are really missing out because Les Brown is the master of motivation of everything personal and business. He's my go-to guy whenever I need a little bit of reinforcement, a little bit of
boosting if I'm feeling like things are just not going my way I'm feeling a little down I turn on Les Brown and I listen to that man and I'm telling you he's just chock full of wisdom. So let me tell you how Les Brown has helped me recently. I've been pitched into a situation that is difficult to say the least.
I am working with hundreds of people who are doing very hard things every single day. And as we all know, working with other people is the hardest part of what we do. It's not building the buildings. It's not getting them validated and commissioned. It is the act of building, which involves other people and their personalities and their moods and their personal situations and everything that goes with it.
We're human beings. We are complicated people. So I'm thrust into this situation. I'm jumping on a moving train. This job's been going for a couple of years. I'm thrown into the middle of it. And I have to learn who all these people are, figure out how I fit into that situation, figure out what everybody's got going on. And we've got some people that are tired. They're grumpy. They're
not very enthusiastic. Maybe they don't feel like they've been really heard or listened to for a while. Well, I can't let that get me. I can't go to work every day and let that get me down. I can't go to work and just give in and roll over and say, well, it's too hard. Because what am I doing all day if that's really what I'm there for? And there's some people there that have all but given up. And they're grumpy and they're moody and they just
don't want to anymore. And that's always going to happen on these long jobs. These are marathons, folks. These projects go for years and years. That's one of the things that's difficult for me to explain to people when they say, what job are you working on now? It's the same job I was working on two years ago. My jobs last two to five years typically when I'm working on them.
So I'm not starting a new job every week, I'm not starting a new job every month, I'm not hopping around doing a whole bunch of small stuff. Usually I am on one or two large things that last a very long time. And when you do that, you gotta pace yourself. You can't come out of that gate in a marathon going a thousand miles an hour because you won't be able to sustain it. That's one of the reasons why small jobs and big jobs are very different.
It's the pace that you have to prepare yourself mentally and emotionally for. So I go to my buddy Les Brown and I say, Les, I want to hear some of your wisdom. I'll put some links in the show notes for you if you want to listen to some Les Brown and discover his wisdom. But a lot of what he talks about is attitude. We get to choose our attitude every single day.
When we wake up in the morning, we get to decide what today is going to be like. And the ultimate freedom is choosing your attitude no matter what happens to you that day or around you that day. We can't choose the things that happen to us or around us or amidst us, but we can choose how we react to that. And that is
Absolutely the most freeing thing that I can think of, guys. Honestly, do you want to go to work every day and just be miserable? I don't. I want to go to work and be happy about the people that I'm working with, the projects that I'm building, the relationships that I'm building. I want people to be excited to see me when I come around the corner. And that's not always easy when you're the owner's rep, the commissioning agent.
The quality person, the safety person. People aren't always excited to see us when we walk around the corner. Sometimes we get the God, here they come again. Okay, well, how can we work on that relationship? How can I make sure that people are happy to see me and that people are wanting to work with me? You know what's happened to me since I started this job and I decided I wasn't going to let all this get to me? I have had multiple people.
On multiple occasions, come up to me and make a point of telling me that I'm making a positive difference on this project. When was the last time that happened to you? It hasn't happened to me in a very long time. And it's 100% because I am choosing my attitude every single day. I don't bounce out of bed every morning.
I wake up tired sometimes. I don't want to get out of bed. I would like another cup of coffee. I would just like to take a day off in the middle of the week. But I don't always get to do that. So I have to choose how it is gonna look today, Dee. That's 100% up to me. Even when something really, really bad happens. I could have had a terrible day on Friday.
Something really not okay happened on Friday. And it was the hardest day, that I've had on this project so far. I'll do a whole other episode on some of the things to watch out for, some of the pitfalls that we have in construction, and especially people that are younger in the industry. But it Suffice it to say it was a hard people day. And hard people days.
Are sometimes the hardest ones to get through because we have hundreds to thousands of personalities we have to deal with every single day, and not all of them are our favorite, and not all those situations are our favorite. But it's up to us how we react to that. Now, I could have been mad, I could have, come home and thrown my bag down and said, This is ridiculous, I'm not gonna do this anymore. I could have done that, but that's not what I did. I chose.
To have a better attitude about it. I chose to say, Well, did I do the very best I can? Yes, I did. Would I have done anything different? No, I really don't think I would have. I think I did everything that I could have possibly done. Okay, then let it go, as the girl in Frozen sings, let it go. Because holding on to that stuff, holding on to that anger and that negativity and that.
This isn't worth it, and I just can't, Sometimes you just have to cut it off at today. You really do. I have sent myself to bed before when I've just had a terrible day and just it seems like nothing's going right. And I've just said, you know what? I'm going to bed. I'm going to wake up tomorrow and it's going to be different. But that's the key. You have to wake up tomorrow and make it different. You decide.
What your attitude is going to be, so make it a good one. Thanks for joining us. We'll see you next time. Have a great day.
