David Turner calls this Your Stone Tablet. The Summit Tablet is your offensive playbook, your I wills: the climbing document that gets you to altitude. The Valley Tablet is your defensive commandments, your I will nots. There comes a point where the second one is the more powerful of the two, because breaking a streak feels worse than missing a goal.
Picture sitting in a car pointed uphill on a steep grade. You’ve burned a lot of gas on a hundred-mile climb. Forgetting the parking brake and waking up with the car back at the bottom would be devastating. My hand reaches between the seats every single day. Firm upward pull. Hold. That’s what a Thou Shalt Not feels like: protection of hard-won progress, not restriction.
I’ve coached inside a company in multi-year decline. Strategy misfires, revenue down year on year, multiple rounds of layoffs. The team had stopped looking up at the summit. My coaching calls were brutal: peers fired, bosses fired, rah-rah sessions that were tone-deaf. I tried more techniques than I can name. The one that worked consistently was a Valley Stone Tablet. Five commandments, nothing more. Examples from actual clients:
- I will not react or lose my cool in any public setting.
- I will not engage in water-cooler bashing of my peers.
- I will not depend on my current job as the only source of my energy.
- I will not tell myself I am trapped.
- I will not blend who I am with what I do for a living.
The people who held their tablets walked away with outcomes I can point to. They self-selected out before they burned a bridge they couldn’t rebuild, and they left with no scorched earth.
I lost my cool with my board in a meeting. How do I make sure it never happens again?
Log it, with the date and the time, and put it on your tablet.
I was a private-equity-backed CEO. Year one, revenue up 22% and EBITDA up 95%. Year two, AWS launched a competing product and our pipeline went dry. It was the deepest valley I’ve navigated as a CEO, and through every body blow and every hard board conversation I held the Four C’s: calm, cool, collected, consistent. Until December seventeenth at 4 p.m. The PE directors were hammering me without full context of the market, and I lost my cool. On a one-to-ten regret scale, a six. Not the worst breach imaginable. But I had been preaching and modeling the Four C’s to my team and to everyone I coached, and in the hardest moment I became a hypocrite.
That date is etched. December seventeenth, 4 p.m., is on my stone tablet, and the streak since then holds. Anyone can write down “stay calm.” Very few can write “December seventeenth, 4 p.m.: never again.” That’s the difference between a goal and a commandment.
My job has become my whole identity. How do I separate who I am from what I do?
Make it a commandment: I will not blend who I am with what I do for a living. Separating your integrity and your identity from a time-bound, situational job title is the single most valuable skill the clients who held their tablets came away with. That skill doesn’t expire. The tablet is permanent. The job is not.
I feel trapped in my job. What do I do?
Two of the five commandments are written for this moment: I will not tell myself I am trapped, and I will not depend on my current job as the only source of my energy. When you’re depleted and backed into a corner, discipline erodes, which is why you decide these things in advance. The tablet isn’t about climbing. It’s about not sliding while you work out what’s next, so that if you do leave, you leave on your terms with every bridge intact.
Is there a December seventeenth in your career, a specific breach with a timestamp you carry? Have you logged it?
David has spent 13,400+ hours coaching CEOs and C-suite leaders at companies from $50M to $27B in revenue, and sits in on his clients’ talent reviews, where promotions are decided. Before coaching he spent 24 years in executive seats, including CEO of a PE-backed technology company and SVP of Sales & Marketing and Managing Director at DigitalGlobe. More about David