A colleague once told me he lost his career over a text message he never sent. He typed it. His thumb hovered over Send. Then he set the phone down, walked away, and deleted it the next morning. “If I had hit Send,” he said, “I would have destroyed everything I spent 15 years building. The gate was my thumb. One inch of movement, and I would have driven through it.”
Most leaders obsess over the big decisions: which job to take, which strategy to pursue, which hill to die on. But those moments are downstream from something smaller and more dangerous. Before you make any significant decision, you pass through a gate. That gate is the moment when you choose what gets in and what stays out. The moment when you decide whether to send the text, speak the words, or act on the impulse. The big decisions we agonize over are just the visible consequences of a thousand small gates we walked through without noticing.
Yesterday we talked about becoming the Watchman of your own mind. Today, we need to understand what you are actually guarding: the gate. Not the outcome. Not the decision itself. The gate. Because if you lose control at the gate, you never get to make a decision. The decision makes you. You become reactive instead of deliberate, governed by impulse instead of principle. Every leader who has ever imploded can trace the collapse back to one unguarded gate: the moment they let something in that should have stayed out.
The problem is that most gates do not feel significant. The text message you fire off at 11 PM when you are angry. The sarcastic comment you make in a meeting when someone questions your idea. The slight exaggeration you add to a story to make yourself look better. These moments do not announce themselves as pivotal. They feel small, even justified. But a gate does not judge the size of what passes through it. It just operates. Open or closed. Guarded or unguarded. And once something passes through, it is inside the walls. Once you send the text, speak the words, or make the choice, you own the consequences.
The Watchman’s Protocol is built around this truth: leadership is not about making better decisions under pressure. It is about becoming the kind of person who does not let bad decisions get to the gate in the first place. You cannot govern a decision you have already made in the heat of the moment. But you can govern the gate. You can learn to see the moment before the moment, the split second when you still have authority to say, “This does not get in.” That is where self-governance lives. Not in the aftermath, analyzing what went wrong. But in the moment before, standing at the gate with your hand on the lever.
Proverbs 4:23 says, “Above all else, guard your heart, for everything you do flows from it.” Not some things. Everything. The writer understood what most leaders miss: the heart is the gate. What you allow into your heart determines what flows out into your leadership, your relationships, and your legacy. You do not rise to the level of your best intentions. You sink to the level of what you let through the gate on a Tuesday afternoon when no one is watching and the pressure is high.
So here is the question for today: What gates are you leaving unguarded? Where are you allowing thoughts, words, or impulses to pass through without inspection because they feel small or because you are tired or because you have convinced yourself it does not matter? Because it does matter. The gate you leave open today is the breach you will spend months trying to repair tomorrow. Small gates. Big consequences. That is the truth every leader learns eventually, usually the hard way.
Tomorrow, we are going to talk about why urgency is rarely the Holy Spirit. Because one of the most dangerous things that rushes the gate is the feeling that you have to act right now. But for today, just notice the gates. Notice the moment before the moment. Notice when something is trying to get in, and you still have the authority to say no. That awareness alone will change more than you expect.
I write about leadership at the intersection of timeless principles and modern workplaces. Follow for weekly insights on building teams that actually work. For more articles like this consider subscribing to my Substack at: https://christianleadership.now