Our Story

“It’s easy to have principles when you’re rich. The important thing is to have principles when you’re poor.”  
Ray Kroc 

About the Principler Team

Each individual member of the Principler team brings their own set of shaping experiences to everything we do.

Combined, we have more than 300 years working as soldiers, elected officials, business and technology innovators, religious leaders, professors, teachers, coaches, entrepreneurs, physicians, mental-health practitioners, statisticians, and quality experts. And most important, we are spouses and parents. 

The Tools Out There

In our daily wrestle to get things done and become better, like you we have felt the satisfaction of improving in one area of life while failing miserably in others. Constantly falling short seemed to undermine the progress or proficiency we had previously worked so hard to make. 

We have tried self-help options and attended more than our share of professional, leadership, and management trainings, read thousands of books and articles, and combed through countless blogs and websites, looking for answers.

We also tried traditional systems and approaches—many of them expensive and time-consuming—for performance improvement and consistency across our various life contexts.

A Lot to Be Desired

After exploring and applying such materials, over time we noticed a number of problems with them, such as these:  

• Instead of teaching universal principles, commercially available offerings tended to pigeon-hole people’s thinking into a particular system.  
• Content in books, blogs, and courses generally led to being dependent on them rather than teaching users to rely on their own principle-based thoughts and actions.  
• What promoters delivered amounted to clever storytelling that reinforced a few concepts but gave limited attention to actual usable principles for which their system was positioned as the answer. 
• Opinions expressed by experts and influencers rarely began with principles. Instead, they promoted theories that offered little practical application or lasting value. 
• Individuals who understood principles in their area of expertise typically didn’t teach how to apply principles outside of their domain and provided little substance or guidance on how people actually acquire and apply principles.
• The time required to pore over an endless supply of content in print or electronic media in search of gold nuggets for lasting self-improvement was too much for any person to do alone.  
• No principle-based framework existed to guide proper application of principles to users’ situations. 

Start Your Engines

In addition to noting the failings of available solutions, we looked inward and recognized our inability to consistently think, say, or do the right thing. Sadly, our own approaches were lacking too. We learned firsthand what Dr. W. Edwards Deming, noted American statistician, electrical engineer, business professor and consultant, observed about achieving desired outcomes: "Inspection is too late. The quality, good or bad, is already in the product.”

To address these disconnects, we delved deeply into what a life system consists of. We came to liken it to an engine with pistons, powered by fuel, and maintained properly.

The engine is our thoughts, which is driven by the three pistons of mental strength, emotional resilience, and spiritual well-being. We pay the price for premium fuel—principles—which contain the highest octane and lead to the best performance.

The maintenance or conditioning of our engine is affected by society, culture, and our own experience. When each piston functions in sync with the other two, an optimal mindset is the result, which will take us down whichever road we want or need to go.

The Power of Space

Put another way, Victor Frankl wrote that “between stimulus and response, there is a space. In that space is our power to choose our response. In our response lies our growth and our freedom.” One of the many benefits of living by principles is that they govern the very space in which we act. 

In the military, the principle of “train to fight”—meaning that the way you train is the way you fight—suggests that training must be realistic and performed to standard so that if and when you have to go to war, you are amply prepared and ready.

The unique way we deliver principles provides that very guide for preparing you for the best possible performance in your most difficult decisions, problems, or situations. And it helps you to be consistent in your life-space choices instead of undermining yourself without realizing it.

Principle Your Way Through

We all marvel at great feats of accomplishment in many disciplines including sports, dance, art, music, science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and more.

At Principler, we have studied gifted performers who perfected their craft to reach their highest level of artistry through painstaking practice and effort. We have researched the foundational principles they applied that led to their achievements.

Based on our experience, we have become convinced that the bedrock of one’s life must be principles, and these lie at the heart of being prepared for challenging and new situations.  

At Principler, this is who we are—unassuming yet determined individuals who are laser-focused on helping you raise your PQ so that you don’t flinch or shrink from challenges as they come, but instead principle your way through™  them with confidence, wisdom, and peace.