Breaking the Circle for Leaders is the podcast for frustrated middle managers who feel stuck in the same patterns, working harder but getting the same results, as stress builds. In each episode, Jon Manning, author of Emotional Intelligence Unleashed, draws on 25 years of operational management experience at McDonald's, Pizza Hut, and Greggs, among others, to explore why conversations spiral, why teams resist change, and why the pressure never seems to let up. Not theory. Not corporate training. Real stories, practical tools, and small shifts in thinking that make Monday mornings feel different.
I'd trained for the Great North Run for six months. Three runs a week since March, never missed one. My sixth in a row, and this year I wanted it to be my fastest.
Two days before the race, four ton bags of logs were tipped into my back lane. I'd ordered them in August to beat the winter prices, and when the supplier offered me the Friday, I heard the price and never registered the date. I spent five hours throwing, carrying and stacking wood, and not once did I think about Sunday.
On the Saturday morning my legs ached, and I'd already worked out why the race was going to go badly. I ran it in two hours thirty-two, ten minutes off my best, and I told everyone it was the logs.
What I didn't mention was that it was hot, I'd stood in the pen for over an hour, and at halfway I'd have settled for two hours forty. I'd picked the one cause that was mine, and stopped counting everything else.
In this episode I talk about why we pin a disappointing result on the one thing we controlled, why judging yourself against a plan set months ago can turn a good day into a failure, and what to write down instead.
New episodes every Tuesday. Subscribe so you don't miss one.
Jon Manning is the author of Emotional Intelligence Unleashed. Thirty years on the shop floor, not a textbook.
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Are you kind of being stuck in the middle? Feeling trapped in it in this corporate little. It's time to break free. Time to leave the change. Welcome to break in the stern of the leaders.
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The Saturday morning, the day before the Great North Run, I stood in my kitchen and I told my wife exactly why the race was gonna go so badly. And I hadn't even run a single step yet. Welcome to Breaking the Circle for Leaders. I'm John Manning, and if you've ever done everything right and still come in under the number, you're in exactly the right place. You see, I'd been training for this one for six months. Back in March, I wrote myself a training plan. This was my sixth Great North run in a row, my seventh in total, my ninth half marathon. My best had always been two hours and twenty two minutes, and this year I wanted to beat it, but I ran it in two hours and thirty-two. And standing in my kitchen on the Saturday, I was right, the race did go badly, I just had the wrong reason why. It was August, and the weather is nice, but the thing you have to remember to do in August, or I do, is I have to remember to order the logs. Because if I don't order the logs from our wood burner in August, I have to pay winter prices, and in if I order them in August, I still get them in summer prices, so it saves a few pounds. So in August I ordered them four one tonne bags of logs, and so I made my saving, I messaged the supplier that always delivers them each year to me. I checked when the price went up, and if he delivered them at the beginning of September, that would be fine. Because he was telling me at the end of September he was going to put his prices up to the winter prices. So that all seemed good. So as always, I message him, often on WhatsApp, and he'll come back to me with a date. And he did like normal. He came back with the eleventh of September. I looked in my diary, it was a Friday. I could juggle a bit of work around and make sure I was able to put them away. So I said yes, that'd be great. I heard the price. I heard the date. I just didn't register that it was two days before the Great North run. Just two days before. Before the race, before the run I'd been practicing for and had a plan for the last six months. You see, my target back in March was to do less, to do it faster than two hours and fifteen minutes. Secretly inside I hoped to do it under two hours, but I knew that was always a very tall order. I am fifty six after all. So the plan had worked. On Tuesdays and Thursdays and Saturdays every week I ran. Without fail. On a Tuesday I drop my daughter off at school and I'd do what's called an easy run. On a Thursday my run would be more fast slow far slow and then on a Saturday would be my long run. I could run you know 16k on a Saturday, ten miles. All part of getting ready for the 13th of September 2026. The day of this year's Great North Run. So part of my plan was three weeks out. I had one last race, a 15k charity race run locally to me, and then I started gently tapering down. The week before I just did a 10k on the Saturday and my very last practice run was a 5k on the Thursday. During that week running up to the Great North Run, I'd been carb loading, eating pasta for it felt like uh lunch, dinner and tea, but not quite. But the whole week was focused around the Great North Run and giving myself the best chance I could to do under two hours and fifteen minutes. The Friday came. I dropped my daughter off at school like I usually do, and I needed to sort the yard out. There was some scrap wood in there, so I saw it up the rest of that and got ready for the delivery of four tons of logs. It was about 11 o'clock and the truck turned up. It reverses up the back lane, it tries to get as close to my back gate as possible, and off of the forklift on the back, we tip these sacks of logs. So we end up with all the logs mostly on the back lane and some just inside the yard. And then I have to move them. I have to move them quite quick because I'm blocking the back lane slightly. So I start and I move them all individually, and I get a rhythm going, and I'm throwing one with my left hand and my right hand, and I keep throwing them through my back gate. And after a while, the pile starts to move and it moves into my backyard. I probably handle each log two, three, maybe even four times by the time I've stacked them all up in the wood store. So I've moved all these logs and I've finally got them all away. And it's about three o'clock in the afternoon. I'm pleased for myself because what it means is now I've got enough time just to have five minutes to myself before I go pick my daughter up from school. So five hours spent, but I know that this winter we'll have all the wood we need for the log burner. But at no point while I was throwing the logs into the yard or stacking them up did I think about Sunday. Not once. Not one thought about how this may affect my preparation for the Great North Run. So I went to bed. I got up Saturday morning, on Saturday is the Great North Run mini run. And my daughter runs it and has for the last few years. And they have to run with an adult and so we always run it together, and I love doing it with her. It's not very long, but she has great fun doing it. And so do I. But I got out of bed and my legs were hurting. Not really badly hurting, but that muscular dull ache at the top of my legs. I said it out loud, I said to my wife, I hope these aren't going to be achy legs for tomorrow. The first time I linked the two things together, moving the logs 48 hours before running a half a marathon. So we went to do the mini great run in the centre of Newcastle. I ran it with my daughter, and my legs felt heavy then, but it's only just over a kilometre. So we were done. All the time I was walking around, I was getting more and more bothered by the ache of my legs. We finished off in town and went home and got the stuff ready for the morning. It's an early start on a Sunday. Sunday of the Great North Run. So I'm getting ready for the race on the Saturday. And the voice in my head is already starting to do a post-mortem. It's starting to break down what I was doing and how moving the logs is going to affect my race the following day. Why didn't I clock it? Why didn't I think it? Why didn't I just say get the logs the following week? After the Great North Run, after what I'd spent six months getting ready for. But I hadn't. I was getting cross with myself. I knew I was. Sunday morning came, the alarm went off early, and I went downstairs, and every step I could feel my legs. I could feel the ache in them. We got up and walked to the metro. We're on the metro with hundreds of other people, and you know they're all going to the Great North Run. They've all got running kits on, they've most of them have their numbers already on. And people are chatting to each other. Often the question about how do you think you're going to do? Oh good luck. Going to Newcastle City Centre, you have to walk quite away. You walk towards the pens. Cues and cues for the toilets, of course. But you've got to go before you run 13.1 miles. So you cue and you wait and you move, and eventually you're in the pen. You look at your colour and you go to the pen and the letter that it represents, and I stood in the pen. And the sun was beating down. It was hot. I waited in the pen for probably an hour. Whilst this was going on, you can watch the big screens and you can see the professionals start at the beginning. And straight after that, the red arrows shoot by above your head. The excitement's great. People are chatting to each other, there's a buzz starting. The excitement of about to start the race. But I knew my legs were heavy from the beginning. It wasn't ideal weather. It was the one day I wish the sun hadn't quite come out. It was feeling a bit warm. Clear blue skies, but still sore legs. I thought to myself, it's okay, I'll start and I'll see how I go. And if I need to adjust or change as we run, I will. I ran the first 10k and my legs by then were feeling heavy. At halfway, I knew I couldn't do my personal best. I knew that target had gone, and really now I was concentrating on finishing the race. Because this wasn't going to be my fastest year. I knew that now. But I needed to finish safely, so I continued to run to the end. You see, I had one clear goal that day. And that was to finish the Great North Run faster than I ever had before. I was still thinking then as I ran round why did I move the logs? Why did I order the logs? I've never thought so much about logs as I did that day. But I know why. Because the logs was the one thing I controlled, you see. I'd made that decision, and I was now living with that decision. The decision to have them delivered, the decision to put them away on that Friday before the Great North Run. I was now living with that, and that's what I could anchor on to and understand that that's why I was having a bad race. It's why I predicted it on the Saturday talking to my wife. What I hadn't really considered while I was running around was that it was a hot day. That I'd been in the pens for over an hour, and I am 56. You see, those were things I couldn't control. So I'd learnt not to take any notice of them. It reminded me back in my working days in corporate life. I had a pilot store that back at the beginning of the project would set targets and aim for things, and the biggie, the labour. So we'd set the labor, but as we'd gone along this project, we'd tried new things, we'd tried different products, we'd tried different ways of doing things to increase the level of service we gave to our customers. We tried all of these things, and then at the end of the year, you're doing performance reviews, or I sat in my own performance review, and the one bit of concrete measure you could do was the labour percent, and actually, all those other little pieces and those little add-ons and those bits that you tried are very hard to say that that's the reason why the labour hasn't come in, so therefore you just put it down to over-scheduling. We must just have too many people on, and that's why our labour's running too high. You see, only the scheduling was really the visible thing. Because who would write down all those little things as you were going? You just wouldn't, it's not practical. You see, at halfway in the Great North Run the other week, I looked at my watch and I reassessed and thought, do you know, if I could do two hours and forty on my current pace, that would be good. And I ran it in two hours thirty-two. And when people asked me afterwards how did the Great North Run go, I went, oh, it was okay. I did two thirty-two. I had le heavy legs, and I told them the story of the logs. But I never told anyone that actually at halfway I thought I'd only do two hours forty and I actually achieved much better and did two hours thirty-two. You see, I was doing what we often do in projects, taking the original stuff, the original figures, the original plan on those fixed numbers. Back in March, my plan didn't say 232 was a good result. So now I didn't believe it to be a good result. Even though other things had happened. The logs, the weather, the amount of people. It was hard to get round people when there's sixty-three thousand people running. You know, on the analysis afterwards on my watch, I ran half a kilometre further than the race distance, which is basically the weaving that you do around people. You see, I didn't know that we were going to be in the pen for that long. I didn't know back in March that I was going to order the wood two days before. And the managers in their reviews can it can be the same thing for them. Numbers agreed by the business at the beginning of a year. It's easy to forget what made the difference, made the changes, adjusted things as you went. So this week, take one thing that came in short. A month of project a year, and instead of naming the reason, write down everything that was actually on the road at that day, at that time. All of it. The bits that were yours and the bits that were never going to be. Because I crossed that line in two hours and thirty-two minutes. When at halfway I'd have settled for two hours and forty. I told everyone I did two thirty-two. I've not told anyone about the two forty. That's not letting yourself off. That's just getting it right. In the show notes below you can get hold of my free guide why your conversations keep going sideways and the one shift that could fix it. Thank you for listening to Breaking the Circle for Leaders. I hope you enjoyed this week's episode, and subscribe to make sure you get next week's too. And as always, I'm rooting for you.
