Tag: self-improvement

The Skill That Felt Like Thinking

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Planning Week

Chris Guillebeau wrote something today that stopped me mid-scroll. He said the skill that built his career was something he hadn’t labeled for a decade. It came so easily he didn’t count it as a skill. It felt like thinking.

I know that feeling.

Years ago, I’d come home from work frustrated. I had explained something to a room full of people — a workflow, a process, why certain data points mattered — and nobody got it. They didn’t see the connections. They didn’t understand why it was important.

Then I’d explain the same thing to my wife over dinner. She wasn’t in data. She was a stay-at-home mom. And she’d say, “Well, that makes sense, because this connects to this connects to this.”

She got it. Why didn’t they?

It took me years to realize the answer: the knowledge wasn’t the skill. The translation was.

I’ve worked in data for almost twenty years. A few years in, I started noticing I could see how workflows fit together — what connected to what, where things broke down, what was missing. I could look at a process and tell you not just what was wrong, but whether the problem was something that was there and shouldn’t be, or something that wasn’t there and should be.

And I could explain it two ways. I could talk about it in plain terms — this disconnects from this, this connects to this. Or I could go technical — this is why we do this part first, this is why we do this part second. The ability to move between those two languages is what made the difference. Not one or the other. Both.

I didn’t have a name for that for a long time. I just thought I was doing my job.

Here’s the part Guillebeau nailed: the things you’re best at often feel like nothing, because you’re not aware of doing them.

For a long time, I thought I was going to be a performer — singing, competitive speaking, the kind of work where people see you. What I actually became was the man in the chair. The one who helps everybody else do what they’re supposed to do. I don’t need the spotlight. I need the work to make sense to the people doing it.

My wife was the first person to name it. “You’re a communicator,” she told me. “This is what you do.”

I may not have felt that way at first. I do now.

I want complex things to be accessible. I want to break down how things work so that people can do for themselves what they couldn’t do before.

I spent five years doing it before I noticed, and another five before I took it seriously. Now, it is what I do.

Not All About Me (Fourteen Years Later)

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

7-40 Challenge | Planning Week

In 2012, I wrote a blog post called “It Is Not All About Me.” I was writing about collaborative leadership — about casting a vision and then letting other people help shape it instead of dictating every step.

It was a good post. It was also about half of the lesson.

The 2012 version of me had figured out that you can’t lead by telling everyone what to do. That’s real, and it took some humility to get there. But what I didn’t understand yet — what took another decade of leading teams, starting new roles, and watching how people actually respond to vision — is this:

Most people don’t want co-ownership. They want a playbook.

They want to feel heard. They want to know that someone is paying attention to their input. But at the end of the day, most people want to be shown what to do. They want clarity. They want direction. And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that.

The leadership lesson isn’t “invite everyone to the table.” It’s knowing the difference between the people who want to build with you and the people who want the rule book. There’s a place for both. But the builders — the ones who want to collaborate, who push back, who make your idea better or replace it entirely — those are the ones who end up influencing everyone else.

Find them. Build them. Trust them.

I started a new job in the middle of last year. I am very accustomed to leading meetings. I’ve done it for years — setting agendas, driving conversations, pulling people toward decisions. Almost from day one, I had to start actively reminding myself to observe. Pick up the lay of the land. Learn the room before trying to lead it.

It was very hard to do.

The pull to assert yourself in a new environment is strong. You want to prove you belong. You want people to see what you bring. But I took the other path. I chose to serve first and earn credibility before spending it. It’s the right way to enter someone else’s house.

The other thing I understand now that I didn’t in 2012 is what it costs to let your idea go.

Not every solution I bring to the table is the right one. Sometimes I have exactly what we need. Sometimes I’m just the spark that gets the conversation rolling. Either way, we moved toward the goal of being better than we were. That’s the part that matters. Not who got credit. Not whose version survived.

I’ve been wrong enough times to know that being right isn’t the point. Getting somewhere better is.

Fourteen years ago, I learned not to dictate. Somewhere in the years since, I learned something harder: finding the right path matters more than it being the path you started on.

I’m sharper than I was. I hope I’m sharper in another fourteen.

I’m Tired, and That’s Allowed

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

I’m thirty-five days into the third round of a year-long challenge that has me running seven habits every day. Across the year I’ve kept a near-daily exercise practice, published two books with a third in proof, built and grown a daily Bible illustration project that’s reached a real audience, started writing songs again, held a demanding day job, and tried to be present for a marriage I take seriously.

Tonight I’m tired.

Not defeated. Not broken. Not in crisis. Just tired in the specific, accumulated way that catches up with you after four months of pushing the engine.

This post is about what to do with that.

What the Tiredness Actually Is

It’s physical, first. Four months of consistent training has produced real results — I’ve shed nearly ten percent of my body fat since June and gained skeletal muscle along the way. The body did what I asked it to do. It’s also asking for some recovery time, and it’s right to ask.

Some of the physical part isn’t training-related at all. Allergies have kicked up. The weather has shifted. The barometric whiplash that comes with changing seasons has me a little under the weather, in the literal sense. None of it is serious. All of it adds to the load the body is already managing.

It’s mental, in a way I notice when I sit down to write. Two months ago I was bursting with ideas faster than I could capture them. Lately I’m getting the needful done every day, but the creative shine has dimmed. Not gone. Dimmed. The fog isn’t blocking the work — it’s making the work feel like work, where for a stretch it had felt like discovery.

It’s emotional, in the lowest-key version of emotional. Not down. Not despairing. Just thinner than usual on bandwidth.

It’s not spiritual. The Bible study and the prayer have held. That’s the one input that hasn’t started to ration.

This isn’t burnout. Burnout has a specific signature — cynicism, dread of the work, joylessness, the sense that you’ve stopped recognizing yourself. None of that is here. What’s here is the simpler thing. I’ve been working hard, for a long time, and the body and brain are asking for some space.

What I’ve Already Quietly Adjusted

If I’m honest with you and with myself, I’ve already started conserving in places.

The other book projects have been getting fragments of attention instead of focused sessions. The Substack engagement has been scrambled. Brainstorming for the next round of work has shifted from intentional walks to whatever pockets of time I can find between obligations. I’ve been answering messages slower. The Bible illustration project and the daily blog posts are consuming most of my creative hour, which means everything else is competing for what’s left.

None of those slips are catastrophic. All of them are signals. The system is telling me where the load is too heavy, and I’ve been hearing it without quite saying it out loud.

Tonight I’m saying it out loud.

The Two Wrong Scripts

There are two stories the personal-development world wants to tell about this moment, and both of them are wrong.

The first is push through. The breakthrough is on the other side of the wall. People who quit are soft. Discipline means doing it anyway. That story produces broken people who think they failed when their body called the bill.

The second is honor your tiredness. Rest is sacred. You don’t owe anyone your hustle. Your body is wisdom. That story produces people who use self-care as cover for never doing the hard thing in the first place.

Both stories are absolutist. Both stories are wrong because they both assume the answer is universal. The actual answer is discernment — knowing what you can push through, knowing what you can’t, and being honest enough to tell the difference in real time.

I’ve spent four months pushing through. The pushing produced real results. It also produced this tiredness. The next discipline isn’t to push harder. It isn’t to collapse, either. It’s to look at what I’m carrying and decide, deliberately, what stays and what shifts.

The Streak Was Never the Point

When I designed the 7-40 framework, I wrote into the document that the streak isn’t the important part. The habit participation is.

I’m grateful to past-me for putting that in writing. It means tonight, when I’m tired and considering whether to skip something or shorten something or move a workout, I’m not breaking the system. I’m using it the way it was designed to be used.

If I decide to call Round 3 a few days early to take real recovery time, that might be the most important decision I make this round. Not because I’m quitting. Because I’m reading the data honestly and adjusting before the cost gets higher than the benefit.

The framework moves forward either way. Bible study stays. Gratitude stays. Eating and water stay. The workouts might slip a little. The reading might pause if my brain isn’t holding information well. The streak number doesn’t matter. The person I’m becoming by doing hard things consistently — that matters.

I am not worshipping the streak. The streak is a tool. Tools serve the work. When the tool starts asking the work to serve it, the relationship has inverted, and the honest move is to notice and correct.

What I Think Sustains This

Most people who try a 280-day personal transformation challenge don’t make it to Day 122. The ones who do come from a lot of different places — some run on extraordinary willpower, some on sheer momentum, some on a vision that pulls them forward, some on disciplines that were already in place before they started.

What’s sustained me here, I think, is honesty.

Not the absence of struggle. Not toughness. Just the daily practice of telling myself the truth about what I’m carrying and what it’s costing. I’m not pretending this is easy. I’m not pretending I haven’t been quietly cutting corners. I’m not pretending the streak is the prize. The journey is mine. The load is mine to design. And I’m no good to anyone — not my wife, not my son, not the work — if I run myself into the ground proving I can.

That’s what sustains it. Not toughness. Not surrender. Honesty about what I’m actually carrying and what it’s actually costing.

What I Tell My Wife at the End of Hard Days

There are days when my wife has worked herself to the edge — a long day of physical labor in the yard, or a stretch of caring for someone, or just a day where the load was heavier than she expected. At the end of those days, I tell her some version of the same thing.

You did an amazing job. You did everything you needed to do today. I’m proud of you. I admire you. Anything else that needs to be done, we can handle tomorrow. For today, it’s done, and you’ve done well.

I’m telling myself the same thing tonight.

I haven’t reached every goal I’ve set. I’m not in the shape I want to be in yet. There are projects in the queue I haven’t started. There’s work tomorrow and the day after.

But for today — for this evening, on Day 35 of Round 3, with seven habits done and one more day in the books — I’ve done what I was supposed to do.

I’m proud of myself. I’m grateful.

I’m allowed to rest.

The Beauty of Routines

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

Most writing about habits frames them as productivity tools. Build the right habit, do the thing, become the more efficient version of yourself. The vocabulary is discipline, willpower, accountability, consistency.

That’s not why I built mine.

I built mine to give my brain somewhere to go when it would otherwise reach for food, wine, or my phone.

The Architecture of Comfort

Around dinner time, every day, my brain wants comfort. That’s not a moral failing. That’s how the brain works. Stress accumulates over the course of a day, energy reserves drop, decision-making capacity gets thin, and somewhere in the early evening the system goes looking for something that feels good.

For most of my life, that something was food. A second helping. Dessert when I wasn’t hungry. A bowl of something while watching television. The eating wasn’t about hunger. It was about the dopamine hit my brain expected at that hour, in that mood, after that kind of day.

Wine had the same job, on the days that wasn’t food. So did doom-scrolling — the slot machine of the social feed, infinite small rewards for no real cost in the moment.

Three different behaviors. Same neurological function. The brain wanted comfort and it had learned three reliable ways to produce it.

The Substitution

Here’s what I figured out, slowly, over the past year.

The brain wants comfort. The brain will find comfort. The variable isn’t whether you give it the dopamine hit. The variable is which behavior you’ve trained it to associate with the hit.

Around dinner time now, the urge that used to send me to the kitchen sends me out for a walk. The urge that used to send me to a second glass of wine sends me to the floor for abs and push-ups. The urge that used to send me into the social feed sends me to a book or a blog post.

I’m not white-knuckling those choices. I’m not “resisting temptation.” I’m getting a real dopamine hit from the walk. My brain has figured out that the walk is comfort now. It produces the same internal reward I used to get from the thing I was overdoing.

The compulsion didn’t disappear. The compulsion got redirected.

The Compulsion Reframe

Some people would say I haven’t actually solved anything — I’ve just traded one compulsion for another. The behavior is still automatic. I’m still running on autopilot. I just happen to land on healthier shores.

That criticism is technically true. It’s also useless.

If compulsiveness is your method — and for most humans, in most situations, it is — then your job isn’t to transcend compulsion. It’s to choose which compulsion runs the show. Most of what we do every day is habitual. We don’t deliberate over breakfast. We don’t strategize about whether to brush our teeth. We’re going to do something compulsively at five in the afternoon. The question is which something.

And here’s the part most habit writing skips: the body cooperates with you eventually. Exercise releases endorphins. Walking outside resets your nervous system. Reading a book at night settles your mind. The compulsion that started as a deliberate substitution turns, after enough repetitions, into genuine desire. You’re no longer choosing the walk over the wine because you should. You’re choosing it because your body now wants it.

That transition — from forced substitution to actual desire — is the part that takes time. It also takes faith on the front end, before the brain has caught up to the new pattern.

When the Routine Slips

I’m 34 days into my third 40-day round of a year-long challenge. I haven’t missed a day. But that doesn’t mean I’ve been perfect inside the day. There have been meals I shouldn’t have eaten. Glasses of wine I didn’t need. Stretches of phone time that didn’t serve me.

The framework I run by isn’t never slip. It’s one slip is a treat. Daily slipping is a detriment.

The difference matters. A perfectionist framework can’t survive contact with real life — one missed day and the whole thing collapses because the framework didn’t have room for being human. The framework I’m using has room. It assumes I’ll slip. It just doesn’t let the slip become the new pattern.

The discipline isn’t avoiding the slip. The discipline is what you do the next morning.

The Whole Person

The seven habits I run every day aren’t a productivity stack. They’re an architecture for a whole person — spiritual, physical, mental, emotional. I have cravings across the full spectrum of who I am. I can meet them with good things or bad things. The seven habits are my way of meeting each one deliberately, before the brain decides for me what to reach for.

That’s why all seven exist. Removing one doesn’t just leave a productivity gap. It leaves a comfort gap that something else will fill. Probably something I don’t want filling it.

Hydration is just hydration. But a body that’s well-hydrated thinks better and feels better and works better. None of the seven are decoration.

The Kid in the Memory

There’s a kid still inside me who remembers opening the refrigerator a long time ago and finding nothing.

Not nothing-I-want. Actually nothing. The light came on, and the shelves were empty, and the question wasn’t what should I eat but is there anything to eat.

We’ve long since passed that. My family is provided for. My fridge is full. But the kid who looked into the empty one is still in there. He’s the reason food became my most reliable form of comfort. He’s the one who learned, early, that when food is available you take it, because there were times it wasn’t. That wiring didn’t disappear when the conditions changed. It went quiet. It didn’t leave.

He’s the one suggesting the second helping I don’t need. He’s the one noticing the open bottle of wine. He’s the one reaching for the phone when the day has been long.

He’s not bad. He learned what he learned, when he learned it. He just hasn’t gotten the memo about the new program.

I’m not trying to silence him. I’m trying to thank him for getting me here, and then choose something different now.

The routines are how I do that without having to argue it out every evening.

The Song That Outgrew the Woman I Wrote It For

~ David Willis ~ Leave a comment

It must have been 2013. We were at our Toastmasters club, and our mentor — a woman who had been in the organization a long time, the kind of presence who leads by example without announcing she’s leading — stood up to give a speech.

She titled it Watch Me.

I don’t remember every word. I remember the vulnerability. She had come through a relationship where the man she’d been with told her she wouldn’t make it without him. Then he left anyway. The contradiction was the part she wanted us to hear — you can’t have it both ways. You can’t tell someone they’re nothing without you and then walk out the door. But she had walked through it. She was standing at the lectern as proof. The title wasn’t a question. It was a declaration. Watch me.

I sat in that audience and felt two things at the same time.

The first was admiration. Her pain was real and she wasn’t hiding it, but the speech wasn’t a confession. It was a war cry dressed in survival clothes.

The second was anger.

I am married to a woman I have loved for twenty-seven years. I have spent every one of those years trying to be the kind of husband who does the opposite of what had been done to the woman at the lectern. The thought of telling my wife she couldn’t make it without me — and then leaving — is unimaginable to me. Not because I’m a perfect husband. Because love doesn’t do that. Love doesn’t do that.

I wrote a song after her speech. I called it Watch Me, after her title. It was her voice — a survivor speaking back to the man who had left her. Watch me, as I get over you. Watch me, as I do something new. I played it for her. She appreciated it.

I was proud of it then. I’m still proud of it now — because the thirty-five-year-old who wrote it was doing the work he could do at thirty-five. He heard a story that mattered. He gave her a song.

Thirteen years is a long time. And songs that get written for one person sometimes outgrow the moment they were written for.

What I Wrote This Week

I was going through old material looking for things I could rebuild with Suno, the AI music tool I’ve been using to arrange songs I’ve written over the years. Watch Me came up in the queue. I listened to the AI’s first pass at the original lyrics, and the words felt thin to me. Not wrong. Thin. Like the song was reaching for something it didn’t yet have the vocabulary to say.

I cracked it open. And what came out wasn’t a polish of the original. It was a different song.

The protagonist changed. The 2013 version was her. The 2026 version is a man — working class, pre-dawn shifts, a chain around his neck made of lies he used to believe. A bridge that prays through the worst of it and finds Someone bigger walking the rest of the road with him.

The song was no longer hers. But it was hers underneath.

What Her Courage Seeded

There’s a kind of empathy that almost nobody talks about. Most writing about empathy makes it sound gentle — sitting with someone’s pain, holding space, listening well. All of that matters. But there’s another kind of empathy, and it’s the one that made me write Watch Me in the first place.

It’s not gentle. It’s a cry for justice. It’s a sound that leads the charge.

When that mentor stood at the lectern and told us what had been done to her, the empathy I felt wasn’t quiet. It was furious on her behalf. I can’t believe a man did this to her. Love doesn’t do that. The anger didn’t belong to me — I hadn’t earned the right to it the way she had — but it could be channeled. Into a song. Into something I could give her.

That was 2013. The 2026 version is what happened when that anger sat in me for thirteen years and grew up. It stopped being a gift to her — she didn’t need it anymore — and became something that could reach somebody else. Some recovering man, somewhere, who needed a sound to use. The same fury, looking for somewhere new to go.

That’s what her courage seeded in me. Not just her song. The capacity to write somebody else’s.

What Songwriters Owe

Songwriters and novelists do this all the time. We inhabit experiences we haven’t had. Phase Defiant is a man writing a woman’s story. Watch Me started as a husband writing a survivor’s voice and ended as a husband writing a recovering man’s voice. Neither of which is mine.

The danger is obvious. You can get the experience wrong. You can flatten it. You can use someone else’s pain as a costume for your own performance. Every writer who picks up a story that isn’t theirs has to wrestle with whether they have any business carrying it.

I think the answer comes down to this: if you can’t be furious on the person’s behalf, you don’t have any business writing their story. If you can’t channel the anger that the situation actually deserves, you’ll write a polite version that doesn’t honor what they lived through.

The empathy without the fury produces something that sounds like a Hallmark card. The fury without the empathy produces something exploitative. You need both. And you don’t always know which one you’re holding until afterward.

I wrote the original Watch Me because I was angry for her. I wrote the new one because that anger had matured into something that could reach further than her one voice ever could.

The 2013 version ended with you are never going to put me down again. The 2026 version ends differently. The man in the rewrite isn’t talking to anybody anymore. He’s walking. Someone bigger than the lies you told, walkin’ with me down the rest of my road.

The defiance is still there. Underneath it now is something the younger me didn’t yet know how to write.

Survival doesn’t end with proving the other person wrong. It ends with not having to prove anything to them anymore. It ends with the road becoming yours again — even when you started somebody else’s story to find your way back to it.

That’s what her speech taught me. It just took me thirteen years to write it down properly.

Watch me.