The People, Process, & Progress Podcast - Lessons Learned from 2024 and Tools I'm Doubling Down On in 2025 | S4 Ep6

Episode Date: December 30, 2024

In Lessons Learned from 2024 and Tools I'm Doubling Down On in 2025, I'm sharing a roundup of non-family and friend influential people, products, exercises, mindsets, and tools I found helpful in 2024 and that I'll build on going into 2025.

Welcome to this year-end episode of the People Process Progress Podcast. I am your host, Kevin Pinnell, and I'm going to share things that worked really well for me in 2024 and that I recommend for you in 2025 or right now. You don't have to wait two days, I guess, and things that I will continue to use and people that I will continue to follow and listen to and skills to continue to develop that I've found very helpful this year, and I hope you do too. But first, please silence your cell phones, hold all sidebar conversations to a minimum, and let's get started with the People Process Progress Podcast.

Thanks so much for sticking with me. I'm going to get started with the most impactful external people. And I say external because there are some givens to me. There is God that I believe in. There is my family, my kids, my wife, mom, sisters, brothers, all those folks, all my close friends. They are always going to be an influence to me. So I would advise you all to do the same thing. Reconnect with folks if you've lost touch.

But that's a huge part. So these are folks that I don't actually know, but that I've either read their work or listened to them or followed them, et cetera, and continue to do so this year with great impact on myself that I believe they can have great positive impact on you. The first one is Jocko Willink, talks about extreme ownership, right? That's step one. That's pillar one that I've talked about. We have to take ownership of where we are and where we want to be. And what I've learned and I think what I've watched and heard him do is work through the darkness. Trauma you've had in the past, things you've been exposed to, perspective we've gotten from readings he's done on his podcast or talks or his leadership examples are very helpful for us, but it starts with us. And that's something that Jocko certainly cemented to me. And I recommend his book, Extreme Ownership and the Discipline

Equals Freedom Field Manual on Spotify, the audio version. I like it better than the book, but get both. The second person is Viktor Frankl. He wrote Man's Search for Meaning and was the founder of Logotherapy. He was a Holocaust survivor. His family was killed during World War II. And I reread his book again earlier this year. And what he provides to me and continues to and did this year is to remember my why as I figure out the how. And I went through a really hard time with my dad being sick and then dying earlier this

year. And Frankel provides a great perspective, and I highly recommend you read his work, Man's Search for Meaning. The third person, and again, this is not an exhaustive list, there's many other people, is Wim Hof. I got more into his breathing techniques again this year, way more regular cold exposure and reading about his resilience as well. He went through a lot of things and how he took it upon himself to help be proactive in his healthcare. And through his breath work and his cold exposure, he's changed millions of lives, including mine. And it's made

a big difference. So Jocko Willink, Viktor Frankl, Wim Hof, check them out. I will link to them on the post of this on peopleprocessprogress.com. Now I'm going to share supplements. What are the things we can take? There's no hacks. It's a combo of good eating and things like that. But these are three supplements that have helped me get in better shape, stronger than I've ever been, less inflammation, that kind of stuff. The Versus creatine. It's great for recovery and gains. Again, I'm not a doctor, so the caveat is check with your doctor before you start these things. But creatine is a game changer for not just your strength and your muscles, but your mind.

The second one is magnesium glycinate. I take it in the evenings before I go to sleep, a couple hours before I go to bed. It's a great smooth muscle relaxant. We're usually deficient in magnesium. That's what a lot of the science says from folks that I listen to that are legit. And it really helps me sleep better and deeper. The third thing I take is a joint warfare. That's a Jocko fuel product.

And that helps my joints. It's got glucosamine, conjoin, turmeric, some other things that help the inflammation down and keep my joint mobility. And those are three things. So creatine, magnesium, glycinate, and joint warfare. Exercises. So what are exercises that I've found the most impactful to me this year? And I've been exercising pretty regularly since 2016 or 17. As an older person, certainly exercised before that, but walking is number one for me. I warm up with it. I walk a mile, walk my dogs a mile, I do whatever exercise I'm going to do.

Then I walk another mile or run or something. But walking is excellent. Move a muscle, change your thought. If you're feeling anxious, if you just need movement, something, go for a walk. Do it outside. It's a game changer. The second is weights. Some kind of weights.

Barbells, dumbbells, kettlebells. It doesn't matter. But muscle is a longevity hack. It's not really a hack. It's just that the more muscle you have strong, strong legs and strong grip actually can be a predictor of your longevity and your health. And so by lifting weights, you you build your grip up some and a lot really depending on what you're doing, and doing squats, things like that. So lift some weights, all kinds of work, you don't have to do one kind, If you see an influencer or whatever saying this is the only thing that works, not true. There's so many different kinds of benefits and ways to lift weights. The third for me is I got back into

jujitsu, which is a crazy high intensity interval style workout, which gives me self-defense, connection, those kind of things. But the mental strengthening of pushing through getting crushed from someone that's way better than you. And it's cardio king to me i've simulated this on an assault bike right doing tabatas all out 10 seconds or 20 or 20 and 10 nothing simulates a workout like jujitsu and it's helped me cut back down on weight and get back into a connection so in exercises walking weights jujitsu if you don't want to do jujitsu, do another martial art. It's really good. It's active, but jujitsu also gives you practical self-defense skills. Foundational tools. I'm going to get into tools, productivity, and then planning tools. So the first one for me is faith. It pulled me through some really dark times and really sad times. My

grief this year over my father, and it is very helpful and something I'm glad I reconnected with was my faith in God. I would implore you to explore your faith in whatever you think, something bigger than yourself. Mindfulness. I do this regularly and it's 10 minutes a day. It's taking time to listen to your breath, to listen to your body, to be outside, to do something. And it's really helped me moderate my mind. And I'm not perfect. I get angry sometimes and sadness and that. But it really helps you calm yourself down. The third is love,

right love, help my relationship when it wasn't going well this year and help me have perspective on how I acted towards other people, right or wrong. And I think faith, mindfulness and love focusing on those things can really have a big impact on everything else you do, all the other stuff I've talked about on this list. Productivity evolution. So these are things I learned as a mix between for myself and at work as a leader in the healthcare IT space and program and project management. And the first one is delegation. And I've done this before, but really ramping that up and empowering folks because that's what it does. It empowers your team members to lead and innovate. And that's how more efficient work happens, better teamwork. And like the words, it's how we get new innovations. The second is be strong in the basics, right? Be able to jump back

into what got you where you are as a leader. Because sometimes we need to. I've had to jump back into projects and help and it was tracking and doing things and looking at charts and planning out and helping folks plan communication all the stuff that project managers do but it keeps up your skills as a leader because you need to be as competent if not more than the folks that work for you when you come up in the same you know realm as me whether it's public safety emergency management or program or project management the third is have an open and agile mindset right there? There are always innovations to be had and it can be the official agile methodology or just having agility in what you think,

not just, hey, will we use this tool for this long? So we have to keep using it now. What's wrong with the tool? What do we keep? What do we not keep? What about the workflows? How do we solve the human problem versus the technical problem?

So to be more productive for yourself, delegate to others, have strong basics, and have an open and agile mindset is what I'd recommend. And then here are some planning tools that I'm going to recommend that have worked well for me, that I've learned from others, that I've evolved with others. The first is user stories for life and work, right? As a blank, I want or need to blank so that I or we can blank, right? And the blanks, the first one is as a whatever your job is or as a 50-year-old man wanting to get in better shape. I want or need to have better health so that I can live longer and be here for my kids and wife, etc., right? And you can change it to professional things or specific projects, but it's just such a great way to encapsulate a really outcome-driven plan.

The second thing is have regular stand-ups. I do this with my team members. I do this on projects, whether it's once a week, every day, depending on how the project's going. And a quick thing when it's kind of a whole team that I find very helpful and good bonding is what's a positive thing going on, what's done and what's to be done. And that's pretty much it, right? And not everybody has to present. It's very helpful. It's brought a lot of cross pollination across team members that I work with, or they're on my team. And when you have a project that is stumbling, it's a great way you're like, hey, we're gonna have stand ups every day. So we can talk through this. So we're not doing kind of the

Hey, it's been three days and I haven't heard, et cetera. We're on the, we're on there. We're being objective. We're being transparent. We're talking on the, on the, you know, zoom or teams or whatever product you're going to use. And we're going to work through those. And those ones, it's really focused on when you have a problem project, you're doing the standup. That's again, what do we need help with? What are we focused on? What are the barriers? And that's it. The third is data supported discussions and decisions, right? So let's set some dates based on the reality of what we can do based on the rate we've been able to work or not work.

Let's look at the kind of issues we're having and why they're happening, right? And we can use all this depending on whatever system you use, a spreadsheet or a ticket system or something else, and you can pull it out. It's really easy to look at. And then you queue up this objective info and you discuss it transparently, right? We've seen these kinds of tickets over this amount of time. So how are we going to solve it? Do you have all the people you need? If not, let's solve that problem. So how we use the tools and what tools we use is write user stories for your life and for work, have regular standups to solve the

problem. You can do that at work or at home. And use data-supported discussions and decisions, right? That applies for a project, scope, schedule, cost, quality, all that kind of stuff. Or it applies for what are your home finances? How's the house? Like what's the list of things to do? I hope this list of things that I have found helpful in 2024 help you now and into the next year. They've really helped me get to a better place mentally and physically. And that doesn't mean I'm where I want to be or need to be ultimately. But they've helped me either be steady, pull myself up out of a time when I wasn't steady, or elevate myself above where I thought I could be. And so thank you all

for helping to elevate the People Process Progress podcast, for rejoining me if you were here before, if we're coming on, if you're new, please go to peopleprocessprogress.com for more information, to contact me, to ask questions. And I'll have links to all of these things, at least the stuff I use. You can use it, check it out on your own, do your own research. It's always good. Remember, hope ignites us, plans guide us, and action transforms us. Godspeed, and I'll see you all next year.