What is a wake-up call? When you consider it, there are many different types. According to Merriam-Webster, a wake-up call is something that serves to alert a person to a problem, danger, or need. The trouble is, you can't schedule them, and you can't opt out.
The wake-up calls you get when your alarm awakens you in the morning. When you get up from a good night's sleep to find that your favorite sports team lost the night before. When a news story breaks from your local community or country. When a longtime friend that you haven't heard from in years passes away suddenly. When you're awoken in the middle of the night with chest pains. When the CEO informs your company that you lost a strategic deal.
As I've reflected on starting 2021, all of these types of wake-up calls have happened to me. How about you? What is the most significant wake-up call you've received over the past couple of months?
Why Wake-Up Calls Keep Coming
The last few weeks have already shown us that the calendar may flip for the year, but the world never stops. You don't need me to reiterate the news headlines that have swarmed us already in 2021. There have already been numerous wake-up calls for individuals, communities, and our society as a whole.
The nature of a wake-up call is that it arrives without an invitation. It does not respect your calendar, your energy level, or the timing of other priorities in your life. Leaders know this reality more acutely than most. The person others look to for steadiness in turbulent times is often processing the same turbulence privately.
If we can't avoid these events, then how do we deal with them as they occur? That question has stayed with me. And the more I've sat with it, the more I've found that the answer has less to do with individual toughness and more to do with the environment we build around ourselves.
Lessons from Centenarians: The Longevity Plan
Last week, we had the opportunity to launch our first podcast of 2021: Driving Change: The Longevity Plan with Dr. John Day and Jane Day. I was fortunate to sit in the Days' home in beautiful Park City, Utah this past fall to interview them. In the podcast, we learned from Dr. Day and his wife about seven life-transforming lessons they discovered while studying and spending time with a select group of Centenarians in rural China.
These were people who not only lived past 100 but who remained mentally sharp, physically active, and deeply connected to those around them. Dr. Day, a cardiologist who has treated some of the most complicated heart cases in the country, came away from that experience with a fundamentally different understanding of what keeps people healthy, not just physically, but in every dimension of their lives.
As I've since reflected on their book, the interview, and my time with the Days, I wanted to share how one of the seven lessons they speak of can help you manage the wake-up calls that are guaranteed to happen in your life. These events can and do have a life-changing impact on our short and long-term health outcomes.
Principle Three: Build Your Place in a Positive Community
The lesson I've thought about most since that conversation in Park City is Principle Three: Build Your Place in a Positive Community.
Notice some of the keywords: build, place, positive, community. Each one carries weight. Community means different things to different people, but it's described at a basic level as "the people with whom you surround yourself." The researchers and the Centenarians they studied weren't vague about this. The community you belong to is not accidental. You build it, over time, through consistent choices about who gets your time and attention.
Do you surround yourself with positive people who help you build a positive place? Unfortunately, current events don't always allow us to be in person with community and fellowship as often as we would like. Nonetheless, we can be intentional about who is around us, even if our current situation is more virtual than face to face.
Why Your Brain Needs a Positive Community
The neuroscience behind this principle is compelling. When we experience a stressful event, the brain's threat-detection system activates. Cortisol and adrenaline flood the body. Thinking narrows. Perspective contracts. This is the physiological reality of a wake-up call in real time.
What research consistently shows is that a trusted community functions as a buffer. The presence of people we trust literally changes how the brain processes threat. The amygdala, which governs our fight-or-flight response, is calmed by social connection in ways that willpower and discipline alone cannot replicate. This is not metaphor. It is biology.
The Centenarians Dr. Day studied weren't just long-lived because of diet or genetics. They were embedded in tight-knit social structures where belonging was active, not passive. They showed up for each other consistently. And that consistent showing-up, the research suggests, may be as meaningful to longevity as any lifestyle factor.
For leaders, this has a direct application. The people you pull close in seasons of difficulty are not just emotional support. They are, in a very real sense, part of your capacity to think clearly, lead steadily, and recover quickly.
Choosing Positivity Is a Decision, Not a Temperament
Don't allow yourself to be surrounded by persistently negative people. Life is too short to be trapped by that type of negative energy. And the self-reflection piece that matters here is this: are you a negative person? If you are, then consider what the Longevity Plan offers on this point.
"When we decide to engage in the world with positivity, it seems that positive people appear all around us."
That quote carries something important inside it. Positivity, in this framing, is not a personality trait you either have or don't. It is a decision. A direction you choose to face. And when you make that choice consistently, it changes not just how you feel internally but who you attract into your orbit.
This is a meaningful distinction for leaders. We often talk about culture as something that is set from the top. And it is. But culture is also built one relationship at a time, one choice at a time. When a leader decides to engage with positivity, even in the middle of a difficult quarter or a turbulent year, they create a gravitational pull toward others who are doing the same.
What This Looks Like in Your Professional Life
Applying Principle Three in a professional context does not require a dramatic reinvention of how you work. It starts with smaller, more deliberate choices.
It means being honest with yourself about the energy in your current circles. Are the people closest to you in your professional network building you up or wearing you down? That's not a judgment of those individuals, it's an honest inventory of whether the community you're embedded in is helping you absorb the inevitable wake-up calls or amplifying their weight.
It means investing in relationships before you need them. Community built in a crisis is fragile. Community built over time, through shared experience and consistent investment, is resilient. The leaders who tend to navigate difficulty most effectively are rarely building their support systems in the middle of the storm.
It also means being the kind of person others want in their community. The same principle that attracts positive people to you applies in reverse. The leaders who show up with steadiness, encouragement, and genuine interest in others tend to find themselves surrounded by the same.
Starting the Movement with Yourself
Here is the take-home point for our personal and professional lives. If we surround ourselves in a community of positive people, there is no doubt they help us absorb the impact of the wake-up calls that are destined to happen. If you want to live longer and healthier, then be in community with those who share your beliefs and values.
This is not naive optimism. It's one of the most well-supported principles in both longevity research and organizational psychology. The communities we belong to shape our capacity to lead, to recover, to grow, and ultimately to perform at our best over a long career.
I don't know about you, but I certainly perform better in a positive community. And if that's true for most of us, then the best thing we can do for ourselves and for those we lead is to start building that kind of community right now.
Let's have this movement start with each of us, in our own personal and professional lives. Worth a conversation? Connect with us at Braintrust and let's talk about what building a coaching-first leadership culture looks like for your organization.
