Catching Everyone Up…

Unless you happen to be connected with me over Facebook… or in my immediate circle of family, friends, or clients… you probably haven’t heard much from me the past year or so. I was thinking back over the past several months and all the lost opportunities to connect that just haven’t seemed to make the cut.

Back in November… I really wanted to sit down and write an appreciations post to all the people that have directly or indirectly helped LeadingAgile get to where we are today. It didn’t happen. The past several years I’ve written an end of year retrospective post, recapping the previous years accomplishments and struggles and any goals for the upcoming year. It didn’t happen. Kimi and I even broke our 15 year tradition of sending out the Cottmeyer Family Christmas newsletter. There just wasn’t time.

So what has been keeping me so busy the past 6 months or so? That is the topic of this post. It’s a bit personal… but that’s often been the case with my posts on LeadingAgile… so I guess there’s really nothing new there ;-)

First of all… LeadingAgile has been doing great. We’ve all been about as busy as we want to be, and then some. We’ve got a great client list and have been doing some really fun and rewarding work and it’s kept us pretty busy. Whenever you are doing a small startup kind of business, you have to get it sustainable as quickly as possible. I think we might be there… it’s been fun, but it’s also been very time consuming.

As I mentioned a few posts ago, Dennis and I hired Rick Austin. About that same time Peter Saddington decided to focus on a few other projects he was working on, so while still a friend of LeadingAgile, he is not part of the company anymore. Business has been strong enough that we hired a 1/2 time office manager and are considering bringing on a few other coaches and strengthening several of our existing partnerships.

On the family front… Kimi and I have two kids in high school and one still in elementary. My oldest started driving back in March and is involved in several school and district level leadership groups. My middle son is the Senior Patrol Leader of his scout troop. My youngest is a three sport athlete. All three are straight A students. As you’ve might imagine, we are spending a bunch of time being involved with their lives. You start to realize at this point, they aren’t going to be home much longer, and we are trying to make the most of the time we have left with them.

Personally, I’ve been trying to focus a little more on maintaining balance. For a long time that mean backpacking and hiking… but lately that’s meant running. I started training to run a marathon a few months ago and I’m getting to the point where it’s a serious time commitment. I’m up to about 20 miles for my long runs and overall am running about 35 miles or more a week. I could write a whole post on my experience here… but for now, I’m running about 6-8 hours a week… time I really don’t have, but it’s important so I do it.

We’ve leveraged the success of LeadingAgile to take some nice family vacations… cruised the Caribbean over the holidays, took Noah to Disney over spring break… while the older two we on a mission down in Nicaragua, and are trying to figure out a long weekend we can make it to the beach sometime this summer. How does that saying go… you can sleep when your dead? That may just sum up our lives right now.

Seriously though… my focusing objective in starting LeadingAgile was ‘freedom of time and place’. I want to be able to work with the people I want to work with, on engagements that are fun and life affirming, and have the ability to spend time with the people I want to spend time with… doing the things we want to do. All that is starting to come together in a really positive way. Everyone is running at full capacity, but the rewards both personally and professionally have been great.

So… no big promises to write the book. No big promises to become a better blogger. No promises to stay in touch better or show up at more conferences… but those things are all on my list of things to focus on. I’m seriously toying with the idea of coaching less and building the business more. As soon as I figure out how that might impact my ‘freedom of time and place’… I’ll either move in that direction or not. It seems like that might just be the path to greater balance, but who knows… for me, it’s emergent.

Thanks for reading… happy Mother’s Day. Instead of running or working, the kids and I are taking my wife and her Mom out for a nice lunch up on Lake Lanier this afternoon. Have a great day.