Your Leadership Is Built in the Ordinary, Unseen Daily Reps

A lot of us are tuning into the Super Bowl tonight. It’s fun to watch and it’s easy to turn it into a cliché story about stepping up in big moments.

It’s also easy to forget that teams make it to the Super Bowl because of many small moments. Every play we see today is the last link in a long chain of ordinary reps.

Early lifting workouts when no one feels like being there. Film sessions where the details are repetitive and boring. Walk-throughs where nothing dramatic happens. Many small habits that build the foundation for sixty minutes in front of millions of people.

When we’re looking at our goals, we often measure ourselves by the achievement instead of the journey that got us there. The visible moments. The big presentation. The promotion. The crisis we handled. The one conversation that went really well… or really badly.

Those moments do matter, but that’s not where we build our life and our leadership. Our practice lives in the ordinary week. 

How we show up to a 1:1 when no one else is watching. Whether we follow through on the thing we said we would do. How we respond the third time someone makes the same mistake. What we do with the thirty minutes between meetings.

None of those things will make the highlight reel but they will decide what we’re capable of when the stakes are high. The hard part is when the ordinary reps do not feel urgent or important.

I’m guilty of it myself. I almost didn’t finish this post today. Many times it just feels like work I could do later and think it won’t matter if it slips. 

But the players on the field today don’t get to skip practice and expect to perform, let alone make it to the Super Bowl. 

Yet we do it and we see bad leaders do it all the time. We skip the reps and hope we will rise to the occasion when the big moment comes. Most of the time, we don’t rise to the occasion. We fall back to the level of our training. We fall back to whatever we practiced when no one else was looking.

It’s not about grinding harder or sticking with what’s not working. It’s about being honest about which reps we’re actually doing, which ones matter, and which ones we let slide when we shouldn’t. 

We can’t control how well the other team plays or whether we’ll have the opportunity to play in the big game. But we can control what we’re practicing each day.

If you looked at your last week as practice tape, what would you see?

Where did you take one less rep than you planned? Where did you avoid a conversation you knew you owed someone? Where did you let your attention drift instead of staying focused on the work that actually mattered?

We don’t need a perfect week. We just need one or two reps we’re willing to take more seriously, even if nobody else ever sees them. Then, when the big moment comes we’ll have already practiced being the kind of person and the kind of leader we hope shows up when the stadium lights are bright.