Turn Left Where the Water Tower Used to Be

Building Life Foundations | Blog Post 8 of 8 (Success Without a Blueprint series)

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Ask for directions in a small town and you won't get a street name. You'll get a memory.

"Turn left where the water tower used to be."

Used to be. Not is. Used to be.

I grew up on directions like that. Norman, then Woodward, then Noble, then Slaughterville — every town smaller than the last, and every single one of them ran on the same system. Nobody gave you coordinates. They gave you a chain of things that didn't exist anymore, connected by things you were supposed to already know, held together by a man's total confidence that he'd just handed you perfect directions.

In Slaughterville, half the directions weren't even landmarks. They were people. "You'll pass Kenny's." Who's Kenny? "You'll know." I never knew. Fifty-some years later, I still don't know who Kenny is. I just knew I was supposed to pass him.

I used to tell that story for laughs. Standing in a gas station parking lot, forty minutes late, having "reconstructed" a Baptist church out of a mulch pile that used to be two different restaurants. It's a good bit. Gets a good laugh.

But somewhere along the way I noticed it wasn't just a bit. It was the truest thing I know about how most of us got handed direction on how to live.

Nobody Handed You Coordinates Either

Nobody sat you down as a kid and gave you a real map for who to be, how to handle a setback, what a man's supposed to do when everything falls apart. What you got instead was a landmark. A used-to-be. Some lesson your old man got from his old man, who got it from somebody before that — and by the time it reached you, half of it had already burned down or moved on, same as that water tower.

"Never let 'em see you sweat." Used to be true, maybe, in whatever situation it came from. Doesn't mean it's still standing.

"Handle it yourself, don't ask for help." Somebody's Kenny. You were told to pass him. Nobody ever told you what he looked like.

You followed the directions anyway. Most of us do. It's the only map we ever got handed.

You Can Follow Every Direction Right and Still End Up Nowhere

That's the part that stings worse than getting lost. I didn't do anything wrong following those directions — I turned exactly where I was told, went exactly as far as I was told. Still ended up nowhere close to where I meant to go. Not because I read the map wrong. Because the map was already out of date before I ever picked it up.

That's not a character flaw. That's just what happens when the landmark you're steering by isn't standing anymore, and nobody bothered to check.

Redrawing the Map, One Landmark at a Time

I'm not saying scrap the whole map. Some of what you were handed still holds up fine. The work is going back through it — landmark by landmark — and asking the honest question: is this still standing, or am I still turning left at something that came down years ago?

Nobody hands you a corrected map overnight. You do it one landmark at a time. Keep what's still true. Tear out what's gone.

Why This Matters for Rebuilding

This is most of what the Realign phase of the coaching program actually is. Before you rebuild anything, you've got to figure out which directions you're still following out of habit — not because they're true, but because that's just what you were told, and you never once stopped to check if it was still standing.

Skip that step and you end up rebuilding on the same bad directions. Then you're standing in a different parking lot, still lost, still forty minutes late, wondering why the new plan isn't landing you anywhere either.

Your Challenge

Pick one piece of direction somebody handed you a long time ago about who you're supposed to be. Ask yourself straight — is that landmark still standing? Or has everybody, including you, just been driving past it out of habit for years?

The Phoenix Within

At Building Life Foundations, we believe you're not lost because you're bad with directions. You're working off a map nobody's checked in a long time.

Realign. Rebuild. Renew.

If you're ready to find out which landmarks are still standing, let's talk. Schedule a 30-minute Alignment Call.