We were at GMA SHRM this week when professional speaker Paul Long walked on stage. You may not know him, but if you’re a Kansas City Royals fan, you might recognize him as one of the “Catsuit Guys“… two fans who became something of a cultural phenomenon in Kansas City for showing up to games in full cat onesies. The story was picked up by ESPN and The Wall Street Journal. The Royals eventually named them Fan of the Year.
The catsuits, though, were never really the point. The point was their choice to don the catsuits prior to heading to the ballpark. They were demonstrating a deliberate choice about what energy they were going to bring into a room before the room had a chance to decide for them. On purpose. Every time. Whether the team was winning or losing, whether they felt like it or not.
It turns out that’s also his entire philosophy, which he’s packaged under the name “Fundamism”, or the fundamentals of a fun and optimistic lifestyle.
The core observation is that all of us have loops we fall into, and most of the time we don’t notice we’re in one until we’re already deep inside it. A candidate ghosts an interview and the rest of the afternoon quietly unravels. A client call goes sideways and by Thursday it’s become a bad week. A bad week, left unexamined, becomes a bad month. These loops aren’t things we design. They’re what happens by default when we aren’t paying attention to the alternative.
Paul’s argument is that to break this loop you have to force yourself to interrupt it. Not to ignore the hard thing, and not to pretend the call didn’t go sideways or the new hire ended up not being a fit. But to take a deliberate break to go do something that gets you out of your head, and then return to work in a different state. His framing for why this works: you cannot be deliberate and overwhelmed at the same time. One of them has to give. And which one gives is, more often than we’d like to admit, a choice.
He closed with a quote from one of our favorite actors, Denzel Washington: “Without commitment, you will never start. Without consistency, you will never finish.”
Commitment is the pattern interrupt. It’s the decision, made on purpose, before the loop takes over, about what kind of leader you’re going to be today. What kind of culture you’re in the business of building. What kind of afternoon you’re going to have, regardless of what the morning handed you. And consistency is what gives that decision any weight. A single deliberate choice doesn’t build anything. The daily, unglamorous repetition of it does.
We often see this pattern play out when it comes to hiring: companies that genuinely want a great workforce but aren’t fully committed to what that requires on a sustained basis. And companies that had a burst of commitment, got intentional, invested in the process, but then gradually drift back to the default. Not because they stopped caring, but because consistency is a different muscle than commitment. You need both, and in a specific order. Commitment is where you are going. Consistency is what gets you there.
Paul’s underlying question to the room was simple: are you having fun? Not as a performance goal. Not as a culture initiative to be rolled out next quarter. As a genuine, daily choice you make before the day makes it for you. We’re strong believers that you should have fun at work (call us if you aren’t…), and Paul’s speech was a good reminder that the energy you bring to your team doesn’t have to be whatever your inbox decides it should be. It can be something you chose before you ever opened it.
So, are you choosing what you bring to your team each day, or are you letting the loop choose for you? And in case you are looking for a loop-breaker, try this. The laugh at the 14 second mark did it for us.
Until next time,
Your Spherion WI & Northern IL team