This is episode number six of the Cult of Startup podcast and today's guest is Jeremiah Miller of 14Leaders. Hello everyone, this is Luke Baird and welcome to another episode of the Cult of Startup podcast where it's my job to unveil the original startup stories of businesses and that ranges from technology to food products and in this case, professional leadership trainer. Today's guest is Jeremiah Miller, a professional leadership Coach who in 2009 started his journey out by doing speaking engagements and wrote articles when every opportunity presented itself. It was not long after marketing himself he began to have requests for one on one coaching.
While still working as 9 5, he would work mornings and late evenings with high level CEOs and executives. Once he had enough clients, he was able to jump ship and commit full time to leadership training. We cover a variety of topics that relate to helping you become a better leader. From how to filter what attributes you need to find at a new hire just to ensure that they are able to endure the bumpy road that a startup might go through.
To also how to get your state of flow and get more done. Please enjoy and thank you for listening. How's it going today, Jeremiah? Luke, what's up man?
It's going good. I'm glad to be here. Awesome. I am super stoked to get into this interview because you're a little bit different than the traditional entrepreneurs I've interviewed because you are an inspirational person that helps leaders gain more momentum in what they're doing for their businesses.
But before we hop into that, I want to hear about your background. Yeah, sure thing. Yeah, I'm so lucky in what I get to do for a living. It's crazy.
Actually started out as just a passion of mine, just a hobby and I quit my job to do this full time about six years ago. Really this my story, kind of long version and I'll speed through. It starts back when I was a kid. I grew up without a dad, so my mom and dad divorced when I was 3.
My mom remarried when I was about 6 and then she divorced my stepdad when I was 11. And pretty much the rest of my time I didn't really have a father figure. I was in sports, so I had coaches here and there and definitely buddies and teammates and stuff. But I didn't have that mentor in my life.
And what I've learned since then is when you grow up without that sort of positive male role model, you, there's a lot of dysfunction that you gain in your life. For example, like I didn't, I. I used to be really bad at. I avoided conflict.
I never wanted to have conversations where people get mad at me or angry or I feel like I was letting anybody. And I just didn't know how to handle that. I wanted to be liked by everybody. And, you know, that worked okay.
While I was in school, I went to Cal Poly. I was a kinesis major, Kinesiology. And I graduated. I was going to be a college wrestling coach and a professor.
So I wanted to do. And then I got out of. Graduated from Cal Poly, and I got a job offer to do tech sales in Silicon Valley. And the starting pay was, like, twice as much as I'd make as a tenured professor.
So I said, all right, I'm going to go do that. So I actually haven't used my degree at all, my Kinese degree. But I went to work in tech, and I really liked. I worked for a company called Verisign up in Mountain View.
This was in 2000. So this was, like, right when the bubble was bursting. I remember my strike price for Verisign stock, like, $215 a share, which might have been the exact peak of the. Of the stock and never recovered and ultimately ended up going down very low.
But I really. I really liked working in sales. This, the tech sales environment reminded me a lot of what it was like to be on a wrestling team. So my sport was wrestling, but I liked the sales environment because it was competitive.
You know, there was a bunch of other guys and girls, and we were all trying to outwork each other and outperform each other. And that really appealed to me. So I. Even though I had never had previous sales experience, I just.
I totally dug it. And I moved up the ladder a little bit. I became manager there at Verisign. And then my wife and I moved, got married to a girl I met at Cal Poly.
Actually met her at the library. Not this library, but the bar called the Library. And so we moved away from the bay area in 2002, we moved over to Sacramento, and I got into the mortgage business. So we moved.
I remember in 2002, I had two job interviews on one day when we moved to Sacramento. One was with WebEx, which was doing a tech sales job, much like I'd done before. And the other one was with a mortgage company called America West Mortgage, and that was doing direct consumer sales, which I'd never done before. And that intrigued me.
And I turned down the WebEx job and I took the Americas job. And I immediately just loved the mortgage business. I loved. It was.
It was a pure Sales environment. You know, we weren't selling a product really. It wasn't something you could touch and feel. We were selling benefits, we were selling ourselves.
And it was really, it was a relationship sale as much as it was, you know, like a money saving sale. And that really appealed to me, selling myself and selling this intangible thing that could help somebody. But so I liked the job. I did not like the company.
So within about six months of working at America's Mortgage, I quit, got my broker's license, and me and two of my buddies that I'd met, America started up a mortgage company. So I was a broker of record. And we started that in, that was in like 2003. Ish.
And we grew that from just the three of us in this like 250 square foot office suite to their peak in 2008. We had about 45 employees, we had three offices, and we were doing right around a couple hundred thousand dollars a month in, in commissional revenue. So we grew this thing really fast. We had a blast doing it.
And I learned a lot about myself during this process. So 2008 was when we closed the business, and 2008 was we had the mortgage meltdown. I remember walking in my office one morning and there was an email from one of the biggest banks that we did business with. We had a pipeline of like 15 loans with them, which was worth maybe, maybe $150,000 to us with this one bank.
And it was just an email letting us know they were shutting down and all of our loans were lost. And that experience, we went through that like time and time again. There were hundreds of banks, many of which we did business with, just closed all within, within a couple months of each other. And so I got to ride up and then I got to, I got to kind of write it on its way down as it crashed all over us.
And I learned a lot about myself. I learned a lot about business. I learned a lot about leadership and going through that cycle of boom and bust. And I learned that I was a crappy leader was the primary thing I learned during that time.
You know, I had a business with two partners, which can be tricky. The fact was, these two partners were a couple of my best friends, which adds a layer of trickiness to it. Yeah. And because I was a conflict avoider, we didn't have a lot of really crucial conversations when we were building the business.
So among three partners, we didn't have clear cut roles and responsibilities. We just kind of all shared and everything. We didn't have any Sort of accountability among us. And we weren't good at providing accountability for employees because we just wasn't our style.
We're all really loose with, with how we ran our business. Casualness perpetuated a bad culture. Absolutely. Yeah.
We didn't set clear expectations, we didn't provide accountability. We didn't do a lot of the like, good structural things that you need to grow a business. You can get away with that when it's just you and buddies, but when you have, you know, dozens or hundreds of employees working for you, that just doesn't work anymore, things fall apart. And then you brought a really interesting point.
The characteristic that you did have was being a conflict avoider. What would you say about that? Oh, boy, it's really common. Yeah.
I myself am definitely somebody's conflict. You know, it doesn't feel good to. So here's one thing I've learned since then is fear of rejection is the most powerful fear we have. People are more scared of being rejected than they are of death.
It's why people don't like public speaking. It's why people, you know, we get freaked out when we have to dance or perform in public. And it's being judged and being rejected. That is the fear.
And that's the most powerful fear we have as adults. So conflict is just an opportunity to reject somebody else or to be rejected. Right. We have a chance that we're going to upset somebody or they're not going to.
Like, we have to say we're going to let somebody down. And for me, that fear was overpowering. And so, for example, we've got a problem in our company. We'd have like a low performing employee, for example, and we had a manager that worked for us who was not doing a good job, but he was a friend.
And I didn't want to, I didn't want to have a conversation with him. I didn't want to let him know that he wasn't doing a good job and there were things he needed to change, he needed to fix in order to keep his job. So I didn't have a conversation. And what I was, I would wait until it became a crisis.
So, you know, until basically I went until I had to fire him to have a conversation about his performance when you could have fixed it beforehand. Totally, yeah. It would have been totally fixable if I would have just had a conversation with him earlier and laid out, hey man, here's you're doing well, here's you're not doing well. And we need to get a plan around this.
Otherwise you're, you know, you're not going to be on the team much longer. But so I wouldn't have those conversations. And that's actually, you know, accountability is one of the hardest things for companies and for leaders to get their hands around. Every, every CEO I work a lot of executives, a lot of business owners and CEOs and everyone I work with and even people I don't work with, they talk about accountability as if it's the most important thing they can have.
Everybody wants to build a Campbell company. They want culture of accountability with accountable employees, but nobody knows how to do it, even big, big corporate. I worked with a biotech firm, had about 60,000 employees worldwide. And I coached a bunch of their, their leaders.
And you know, here's a, here's a big corporation worth billions with a robust HR department. And like everything you think you need to run a really well, good organized business. And they didn't know how to do accountability. You know, they wouldn't.
Most businesses think accountability is something that happens when you mess up. It's a punishment, right? It's consequence. And that, that is, that's getting it wrong.
We work with our clients on, we call the holy trinity of leadership. It's clarity, strategy and accountability. So we teach, we teach people how to set clear expectations and create clarity for their employees about what the goals are and the obstacles and things like that. And we help them learn how to build strategy.
That's another thing most people don't, aren't really clear on. What does it mean to, what does it actually mean to have a strategy? Is that strategies in relation to like internal metrics or in relation to how you become a better employee, it's strategy around any goal. So you know, a strategy is a plan of how you're going to hit your goal.
Well, when I ask when most people think of strategy or most people have a plan, all it is is a spreadsheet. Like in most organizations, a plan is a spreadsheet of, especially sales organizations, of what numbers you want to hit this month and then what numbers you're gonna hit next month and the following month. And. But it's not, it's not, it doesn't dive in and say how you're going to increase sales or how you're going to hit the goal.
It just makes projections about what you're going to do. Okay. So we teach people how to actually build, build a really good strategic plan. And we teach people how to provide effective accountability.
And it is primarily positive reinforcement. There's a Couple rules with accountability that we teach, one is the 10 to 1 ratio. So accountability should be 10 pieces of positive feedback for every negative feedback you get and that most people think of accountability as a negative. We define accountability as measurement and feedback.
So if you're providing your employee or your team member measurement and feedback on a regular basis, then you're doing a good job with accountability. All right, so I want to maybe pull out of this scenario based. Yeah, I personally, when I'm working with an employee, I sort of show them tough love and then I try to show them an increase of like, gratitude or thankfulness for the work that they do. Is that or is that not a positive approach to take for somebody's accountability?
Yeah, yeah. When you say tough love, you just mean like you tell them the truth about their performance. Yeah. Telling the truth.
That you need to express a certain amount of tough love, but that you still care about them, that you're, you're there for them, but you kind of gotta put it out there and like them. Understand? Totally. Yeah.
It's. You should, as a leader, you should be looking for reasons to brag on your people. Right. So you should be seeking out every day the people who work with you or for you are doing a good job.
But most, most leaders don't. They just take it for granted. They're like, well, yeah, of course they are. It's their job.
They really want a cookie. Right. This attitude about the leader is entitled to his people doing a good job. And so he doesn't appreciate it.
He isn't giving positive feedback all the time. So I find a lot of times the CEO of the company, the only interaction his employees are having with them are when things are wrong. You imagine every time you see your boss calling you on your phone, you know your about get blown up. That sucks.
Oh, that relates back to what you said earlier. That's. Bosses don't. Bosses will wait until it's crisis mode to communicate to their employees.
Exactly. So if you, if you're, if you're looking for reasons to give positive reinforcement, not making stuff up, but like just acknowledging the good things people are doing on a daily basis, then when you do have negative feedback, they're not going to be defensive. They're used to you. You acknowledge they do a good job, so when they do a bad job, they're open to the feedback.
Interesting. So I'll give you some kudos here. So I have a close friend who got hired by a company that you consult for, and he told me that when the first few days he got hired for this company. The owner of the company called him and asked him if there was anything he could do for him and how his first few days of experience were.
Wasn't his manager the owner and founder of the company? So that is awesome. So very positive reinforcement for him. He's like, I love the guy who called me.
He. I love the CEO. He's a good guy. Yeah.
What a way to gain loyalty. Yeah. Right. So is that part of your entire program that you teach people?
It is, it is. It's. We teach leaders how to get people to. How to get people to do what you want them to do because they want to do it.
So most leaders are. Most managers are like, they have to. They have to drive everything at the business. If they don't follow up on it, the job doesn't get done.
And most leaders leave that way. It's like they're constantly following up and cleaning up the mess after their employee or fixing things or doing it themselves. And. And they build this culture of.
They build this culture where everyone's. Everyone's just barely doing enough to keep their job, and they're doing it because the boss wants them to do it, as opposed to a leader like the guy you just talked about, the CEO who called his new employee. Right. Who is inspiring and motivating his employees to be their very best.
And there's. There's a. There's a strategy to that. Life.
Business is a game. This is one of the things I've learned since I've been coaching the last six years. Business is a game, and life is a game. There's a strategy to playing the game.
And if you want to influence somebody and you want them to see your perspective and your point of view and to agree with you, there's a specific strategy or there's actually multiple strategies for how you do that. Right. So. But whereas most people run their life or run their business in a really reactive way, they show up and they put out fires and they answer emails, and they just get through the day, and then they go home and they're exhausted and they're not present with their loved ones, and they wake up the next morning and they do the same thing all over again.
That doesn't have to be that way. Yeah, it's really empowering. When I realized that if I was, I could be intentional about what I want my life to look like and what I want to accomplish and who I want to be. It wasn't just.
It wasn't left up to luck. It Wasn't left up to, like, all these external factors. I actually had a lot of control over what my life looked like. That was one of the most powerful things I've learned since I've been doing leadership coaching.
It's amazing. It's like magic. Yeah. All right, let's.
Let's get back to doing your leadership coaching. I know that at the very end of the crisis there that happened in around 2000. Yes. You started doing coaching.
Tell me a little bit about that. So I know about this. Principles. I want to hear that story of how did you convert from being basically a mortgage broker to being a life coach.
Leadership coach. I was sitting on the floor of my 4300 square foot home that my wife and I had lost in foreclosure, and we had moved everything out of this house. It's a huge home. And I was sitting on the floor and all the furniture was gone.
And I'm just like, my head's in my hand. I feel like a total failure. I'm sobbing. I feel like I've let everybody down in my life.
I was dealing with anxiety and depression. I was on meds. I was just a wreck. And this was in 2008 when we shut the business down and, and I, I, I didn't take ownership of it.
I, I looked, I blamed it on the economy. Like, we, our business failed because of the, you know, the, the mortgage and, and banking turmoil. Um, I blamed it on my partners. I blamed it on our employees.
For about six months, I found every excuse why it wasn't my fault that our business failed. And I had to lay off 45 people. And for whatever reason, you know, my wife had a big part to do with it. She was constantly talking to me and helping me and, and helping me see that I was where I was because of choices I made and because, you know, I was dealing with the consequences of my own actions.
And for whatever reason, sitting on the floor of this huge home, moving out into this little rental condo that we had, it just hit home with me. And I realized, they're sitting on the floor. I realized that I was not a victim of my circumstances, but I was exactly where I was because of choices I'd made, actions I'd taken, things I'd done. And I realized in that moment, sitting on the floor, that I.
It sucked. First of all, I acknowledge that I was not happy. I did not want my life to be like this. But I also acknowledged I didn't want to give up on being a leader.
Like, I wanted to build Things I wanted to learn how to lead, but I realized I didn't know how to do it. And because I didn't have a role model, I didn't have the mentors. And so as they're sitting on the floor, I realized I want to be a good leader. I don't know what the hell that looks like, but I'm going to find out.
I'm going to do it. And so I did find them. I actually found multiple mentors and I read books and I went to conferences and I studied, I studied leadership as a discipline. Like it became a hobby of mine.
And, and I learned, man. And I started going from reading about it and listening to others speak on it to writing about it and giving talks myself. And again, this is a hobby. I wasn't making a profession out of this.
I just really loved it. It meant so much to me because I needed redemption. I had failed, I had fallen so hard and I needed a way to redeem myself. And this was my path to redemption.
So I started writing and speaking about leadership. Just like, you know, I was a speaker at the Red Club, for example. I'd be there at 6:30 in the morning on a Thursday at the country club and there'd be 17705 year olds in the audience not paying attention to a damn thing. I.
But at least I was practicing, right? I was, I was talking about something I was passionate about. And in 2009 I got a call from somebody who'd been at one of my talks and they asked me if I, if I did coaching. They said, hey, I really like what you said.
It made a lot of sense to me. It resonated. I'll hire you as a coach to do coaching. Well, I didn't do coaching, but I had a full time job at the time.
I liked it. I was doing, I work for, directly for the CEO of a big mortgage bank. I had a good job, but I'm an entrepreneur, right? So he's like, do you do coaching?
I said, hell yeah I do coaching. He said, well, what's it look like? What do you charge? And I said, why don't we meet?
Let's meet for coffee next week and talk about it. And so I went home and invented what I charge and what my coaching program looked like. Yeah, that was my first client in 2009. And then over the next year or so about the next year, I got a couple more clients just again, just by accident.
It was just, it wasn't intentional. It was people who read something I wrote or who saw Me speak or who knew what I was doing and wanted like, wanted me to help them. And I was doing this. My job started at 8am, my full time job.
So I do coaching. I made a coaching client at 6:30 in the morning or I made a coaching client on the weekend or after work. And then In March of 2010, after I'd been doing this kind of part time thing for, or just evenings and weekends for about a year, I gave notice at my job and decided to do 14 leaders full time. And I did that because really my wife challenged me.
She knew I was passionate about this. She knew that I was totally like in my purpose. I was on purpose, I was alive, I loved it, I was good at it. And she said, listen, we don't have kids yet.
We have some money saved up. If you're going to really do this, if you're going to make a run at this, now's the right time. And so I did quit in March of 2010 with three clients bringing in about $2,000 in monthly income. So I took like a $10,000 a month pay cut.
Yeah, just like a big pay cut. That's not a big pay cut. And, and that was, that was six years ago. Awesome.
I have a question for you. Yeah. Why was having your wife support so important for you to make this leap? Because I couldn't have done this flower.
I needed her. She's my greatest ally. Allies are something we actually coach people on how to build allies. And I call this intentional ally management.
But my wife's my biggest ally. An ally is somebody who believes in you and believes in your purpose enough that they're willing to sacrifice for you. Right. They're willing to help out in the hero's journey, which is the story archetype that like Star wars and the Matrix and Lord of the Rings and basically every adventure movie or most movies are based on this, the story archetype of where you have an ordinary person at the beginning of the story and then they're just living their normal life and then they receive a call to adventure, right?
It's like this opportunity to do something bigger than they've done before. And it scares the hell out of them, but it excites them, fires their heart, right? And so they, they refuse the call to adventure at first because they're scared. But then with the, with the encouragement of the mentor, they like the wise old man, the Obi Wan Kenobi character, they accept the call to adventure and they, they step down the first step on the new path and Immediately, everything's really hard.
It's called the road of trials. It's part of the story. And the road of trials is where you build allies, right? So every adventure story, the hero never does it themselves.
It's an important part of the story. It's an important lesson. There's no such thing as a self made man. We need people who believe in us and who are willing to help us.
And my wife is my number one ally. It's important to have people like that in their lives. Otherwise, uh, otherwise we'll give up. Right?
Because it's hard. Starting your own business is hard. Um, following. Following a passion is hard.
Like these, these big goals we have in life are difficult. And if we're the only one who's on board and fired up about it, if we're the only one putting energy into it, we're going to fail. So Andrea, I wouldn't have started this without her, and I wouldn't have, I wouldn't still be doing, I wouldn't be successful if I didn't have her as an ally, like helping me and supporting me and holding me accountable to doing the things I need to do. That's awesome.
And I love that, that you, you two work as a team. So what if you don't have a spouse? How, how can somebody possibly seek out this kind of ally either in their current office or from friends and family? Yeah, good question.
You don't need a spouse. Your ally doesn't have to be related to you. They can be really, they can be anybody in your life who believes in you and believes in what you're working towards. So there's a few different types of allies.
There's a mentor, mentor, somebody who's, who's already been there, done that. Right. This is someone who's already accomplished what you're working towards and they can, they can, like, share their wisdom with you and, and keep you on track. So mentor is one type of ally.
I highly encourage all my clients to have mentors. I act as a mentor for a lot of them. But, but having somebody in their life who is further on towards accomplishing a similar goal to what you have and someone who's willing to check in with you and see how you're doing and also, you know, call you on your BS if you're. One of the reasons we fail to hit goals is we give up, right?
It gets hard and we give up too soon. And so having a mentor or having another ally who's willing to check in with you and see how you're doing and make sure you're staying on courses is vital to accomplishing the goal. So how do you find an ally? Well, you want to seek out other people who are working towards something and become their ally.
So the best way to have somebody be your ally is be their ally first. So find somebody in your life. Maybe they work with you, maybe, maybe they're just a buddy, or maybe you know them through church or something like that, or maybe they're a family member. Find out.
But it's gotta be somebody who is passionate about something, they're working towards something and help them. Right? Find a way to help them and add value to them, and they'll turn around and do the same thing for you. We have a process called the care and feeding of allies.
And essentially you write out an allies list. So I actually have a spreadsheet, and most of my clients do too. And what I have to do is write out a list of all the people in your life who are already your ally. So they do that.
Maybe there's, you know, two, three, four, ten people who already believe in them and have their back, right? And then I have them add to that list. I say, okay, who are the people that you know that if they were your ally, that would be a huge help to you? And so they write, they add people to the list.
And then I ask them, okay, who are the kind of people, maybe you don't even know any specific people yet, but who are, who are the people who are in the position to help you if you only knew them and they wanted to help you? And so I have them, they add kind of some additional information to their ally list. And so they've got a list probably of 15 to 20 people total. And I say, okay, so this is your ally list.
Some current allies and some prospective allies. Now, your job is to find out what's important to the people on this list. You've got to figure out what their goals are, what's important to them, what are they working towards, number one. And number two, you have to find a way to reach out and add value when you don't need anything, meaning the people on this list, you want to reach out and find ways to help them.
Not when you need help, but just out of the blue. And you do not need anything from them. And if you make a habit of that, then they'll become your ally. And when you do need them, they'll be there to help you.
And they'll probably actually seek out ways to help you. Maybe it'll be to connect you or introduce you to somebody influential who can help you. Maybe it's going to give you a job, or there's all sorts of ways they can add value, but until you know it's important to them, until you're adding value on a regular basis, they're not going to come. Your ally.
This principle, I believe it feels somewhat backwards because I've seen people go, well, I need a mentor. And he immediately just calls me, hey, can you be my mentor? And I don't think that always works as cleanly as I would hope it would, because they're busy. So you got to serve them beforehand before you can get something in return.
Absolutely. What's the scenario where you've possibly seen that occur for somebody you've mentored? Yeah. Okay, so I coach some executives at this large biotech firm I referenced earlier, global company, and he had a problem.
His problem was he had a hard time finding good people. So his, his employees were PhD geneticists who also happened to be salespeople. So totally different skill sets. Right?
You have the super technical skill set and sales. And so he needed to have a network of these people who wanted to come work for him. But he never put any time into recruiting until he needed to hire somebody. And then he did a normal thing, right, LinkedIn.
He used their internal resources, the recruiting resources, to find somebody to fill the spot. But once he figured this out, once he realized this was a problem for him, he wanted to have a pipeline of like eager, qualified people so that when he did have an opening on his team, he didn't have to scramble to find somebody. He already had like four or five people to choose from. So what he did was he joined some different professional organizations in this area with the intention of building allies in leadership of those organizations.
So, for example, there's a geneticist, professional geneticist or genetics organization. And he joined and he attended meetings and he got on the committee and he just found ways to add value. And because he, he was a regular, because this was just now part of his networking group, part of his peer group, he made friends with the other, with really well connected doctors, PhDs and professionals in the area. And what happened for him was as he needed to fill roles on his team in the future, he did not have to like use LinkedIn and use his recruiter, because all he had to do was go to his allies, the people he knew that were on the committee or that he knew that was the president of the organization.
And they had, I mean, they had dozens of qualified people. They could introduce him to. So he put in it. He realized where he wanted to focus his effort.
He knew that recruiting good people was a problem for him. He realized that waiting until the last minute, until he needed somebody to find a good person to hire who's not working for him. And so he focused his ally building efforts on, on meeting and getting to know connectors who could introduce him to all the qualified candidates he could need, he could want when he actually needed hire something. And I probably lowered his cost on hiring quite a bit, big time.
And people came to him like people that he used to have to chase and pursue to come work for him. Now he was on first name basis with and they came to him seeking out opportunities. So he just totally flipped the whole thing on his head. I love that principle.
It sounds like in marketing you have like the push versus pull marketing. Yes. So he's taking that approach that allows them to attract to him rather than, hey, could you work for me? You know, it's funny, push versus pull is one of the core principles that we use in coaching.
It's the idea of, you know, pushing is, is getting someone to do what you want them to do because you want them to do it. Right. It's, it's ordering people around and getting answers and telling people what to do. Being a dictator, being directive is pushing pushy.
And then polling is getting someone to do what you want them to do because they want to do it. It's getting buy in and getting them to be willing to take it on and drive it themselves. All right. I love that principle, getting buy in.
I want to talk about that and I want to talk about the attribute of grit, which is something we talked about earlier. Yeah. So explain a little more about getting buy in from other people as a leader. Yes.
So the, A lot of times when I first start working with clients, one of the misconceptions they have about leadership is as a leader, they always have to have the answer. So if there's a problem in their business, they feel like in order to add value and be a good leader, that they've got to come with a solution. The problem with that is if you're the leader, you're always the one coming up with the solutions, or you're always coming up with fixes or solutions to solving the problem. Then you're having to convince the people on your team that they should listen to what you want.
Right. You're now having to sell your ideas constantly to the people on your team. And, and people resist. People do not like Being sold to, whether it's a product, a service, or an idea.
So this idea of that, the leader always has to have the. Always has to have the solutions. Wrong. What I tell my clients, the leader should not always have the answer.
You need to give your team a chance to come up with answer and actually be a part of the solution. So rather than. Rather than always have the answer that you're then trying to convince people why we should do it this way, you should ask really good questions to your team so that they can help come up with the solution. So giving that ownership essentially of those ideas.
Absolutely. Even if the answer is alir, allow them to sort of come up with that themselves. Absolutely. Better if they say it than if you say it.
What if they don't come up with that themselves like that? How would a lear approach that in a amicable way? Step one would be to task. So if there's only one solution and they don't come up with it, then you can offer it up and ask for their feedback and ask for their ideas about it.
So we're talking about push versus pull, right? Yes. The pushy way to do this would be to say, okay, well, we have a problem in our business, here's what we're going to do to solve it. Because you're gonna have people resist and that you're the one having to put energy into driving it and convincing people.
And when it doesn't work out, or if it doesn't work out, people give on it easily because it wasn't their idea in the first place. Right. But if instead of pushing, if you pull, if you lay out the problem, your team, if you say, listen, we got the problem, here's what it is. What do you guys think we should do about it?
And if you don't get ideas that you like, ask more specific questions. It works. If you have good people on your team then, and you ask the right questions and you're a good listener, they're almost always gonna be able to come up with at least as good of a solution as you did. Oftentimes better.
But let's say they don't. Then that's when you offer your idea. Okay, what do you guys think about this? And just get their feedback on it.
See, buy in. They don't have to come up with it entirely to have buy in, but they have to be a part of the process. Actually, in one of the things we do with clients is help them develop their vision, statement and core values for company. And what we have the leader do is come up with just like the basic, just the basic idea of their vision statement.
We don't want them to create the whole thing themselves and polish it and then present it to their team because there's no buy in. Right. Their team wasn't part of creating it. So instead we have, we have the CEO or the executive we're working with, come up with a basic idea, kind of the root of it, and then take those ideas to their team, lay them out, ask for feedback, ask for ideas, ask for input.
And as a team, then, you know, take that feedback and then ultimately turn it into final product. But that's the process of buying. You go in as leader, you ask the right questions, you put some ideas on the table and you get feedback from people. And just that process, even if you don't use their idea, the fact that you included them, they feel respected and ultimately they'll buy into what the final solution is, even if it wasn't the one they wanted.
Yeah, it sounds like you got to sort of facilitate them towards that goal and enable them to actually make that accomplishment down the line. Exactly. All right, so we talked a little bit about specific employees. I know that you are a big fan of the word grit as an attribute for a new hire.
Why is that? Yeah, so grit, grit means the willingness to sacrifice short term comfort or gain in order to accomplish a long term goal. And this was actually identified. Grit is not just a slang.
Grit is an actual area of study, a psychological study. It was first, I think it was in the 90s. There was a couple researchers at University of Pennsylvania and they were studying West Point, West Point Academy freshmen. So West Point is like one of the hardest colleges to get into in a country.
Not only do you have to have like perfect grades, extracurriculars, sports, but you also have to have a letter of recommendation by your congressman or by the Vice President of the United States. So it's like no joke, right? To get in the best of the best, go to West Point and they, they notice something though. See, West Point makes you show up.
You don't just as a freshman, you don't just show up when school starts. They make you show up about eight weeks early over the summer. And you go through a boot camp of sorts. And they call this boot camp Beast Barracks because it's really hard, right?
For eight weeks you're learning skills, you're learning rules, you're. You're working your butt off. A lot of physical, physical work. A lot of study, right?
So there's, there's this really intense period of time, eight weeks, where there's all these obstacles in your way, physical, you know, obstacles. It's hard. You do a lot of running, a lot of, a lot of pt, a lot of study. You don't sleep all that much, right?
So it's a really difficult time. And what they found is 1 out of 20. So 5% of these top notch, smart, charismatic, strong college freshmen drop out. And they couldn't figure out why because it didn't seem, when they looked at the statistics on it, it didn't seem to make sense at first.
It didn't seem to follow any sort of like demographic order at all. You know, type A personality, successful in all these things. They were all like top students, they were all top athletes. They couldn't figure out why some were quitting when they finally like they accomplished a dream, right?
These kids, most of them wanted to go west once since they were little, so why would they quit? And what they found was this attribute called grit. And again, grit is the willingness to sacrifice short term comfort or gain to accomplish a long term goal. And, and since then this has been an area, an intense area of study.
And what, what we found out about it is grit, more than any other single attribute, is a predictor of success. So if you have people of similar talent level, similar intellect, similar emotional intelligence, the one who has more grit is gonna be more successful. So as a hiring manager, how do I spot that in an employee? You wanna look for perseverance.
So people who demonstrate grit are people who have had to really struggle and suffer to accomplish a long term goal. So if you find somebody who, for example, I can use me as an example. I was a wrestler through high school. I got a full ride scholarship to Cal Poly as a wrestler.
And I think the greatest thing about wrestling, about anything else is that you learn how to suffer. Like it's really hard. Not only is it really hard, but it's also really scary because you have to go out on a mat and like face off against one person, right? There's no team tied behind and you have to cut weight.
So it's like there's all these factors involved in wrestling that make a great, a great cultivator of grit. Because you can't survive in the wrestling program for years, or you can't survive in a lot of athlete programs for years and have a high level of success without grit. So athletics is a decent indicator of it. But if you can, if you can explore the employees past and find instances where they've had to persevere for a long period of time in order to accomplish something that was really important to them.
That's, that's an example of grit. I like that. And I feel like those kind of people have a competitive edge sort of instilled in them, but they, they know what it takes to be successful. Well.
And they're willing. You know, overnight success takes 15 years. Yeah, right. But if you don't, if you don't have grit, you're not willing to push through the hard times, you'll quit, right?
If you don't have great, you'll quit. And so, and there's a lot of things in life that are really hard. So if you, if you, if you can surround yourself with people who have grit, if you can hire people who have grit, find business partners who have grit, find a spouse who has grit, then ultimately you're more likely to be happy and more likely to have the kind of life that you want. Oh, and by the way, you have to have great yourself, right?
So. So you can, you can build grit. Grit is not just something you're born with. You can build grit.
You practice it. I swam Alcatraz two years ago. I. That was my first ever competitive swim.
It was my first ever swim that was longer than two laps in the pool. Right. I was not a swimmer. I was scared to death of sharks.
I hated cold water ever since I was little. I never, I refused to swim in the ocean or rivers or lakes or anything because I was scared of what was down there. And I took on this. A friend of mine challenged me to swim albatross.
He did all the time. He's the longest swimmer. And I. The reason I accepted it was because this exact thing, I wanted to practice grit.
I love that. Okay, so I love the subject of grit, and I love what we talked about that. I've got one more thing here in my notes before we run into our rapid fire questions at the end. Yeah.
We talked a little bit about getting into your state of flow. And I really like this concept because I myself am very add adhd. In addition to that, all of us sort of succumb to distractions now because of social media and all the other things that are buying our attention. How does one get into their state of flow?
So state of flow is. It's like grit in the sense that it sounds just like a slang or jargon word, but it's actually, it's actually an area of study. So psychological state of flow has been studied seriously since the late 60s. And it's that if you've people call it also being in the zone.
So if you've ever had that experience where you're, you're doing some activity and three hours go by and you look up and you're like, whoa, like three hours already went by. Yeah, those, those activities where you just, you lose time, right. And you feel refreshed coming out of it. Even if it was, even if it was like a physical, a physical activity, but you come out of it feeling refreshed, you feel clear headed, right?
These, that's the state of flow. And actually just around the radio this morning, there's a new study out that shows that, that doing art relieves stress, even if you're a really crappy artist. So it's not, it's not that you're creating something good. It's that the act of sitting down and actually creating art reduces stress.
And the reason it reduces stress is because art is one of the, one of the most common ways that people find flow. I find flow in one on one conversation. So I can have a talk with somebody and just be so focused and so like immersed in our conversation that I will 90 minutes like that and it's just, it totally fills me up to be in conversation. Some people find it gardening, right?
Some people find it surfing. Surfing is a really common flow activity. I had a client who found it analyzing data. He loved looking at spreadsheets and figuring out pulling, pulling out meaning and figuring out like why certain numbers and why certain results happen from spreadsheets.
That was his, his flow activity. But the important thing is we all have different activities where we find that sense of flow. For some people to be washing the dishes or vacuuming. So just to sort of nail this down, ideally getting into a state of flow improves your overall optimal output.
It improves your overall optimal output, it reduces stress, it, it recharges. You can re energize so you feel more awake and it makes you happy. So if I'm, let's say I'm super stressed out at my job and I need to get into my flow, what are some examples of how I should approach that? I should do it right in the morning, midday.
What do most people usually use as their strategy for that? Depend on what your flow is. So for some I have a client whose flow is writing. So what she does is, is she has time blocked throughout the week, just about every day, a half hour where she can stop working, find a quiet place and just write for 30 minutes.
If so, it's gotta work in your schedule. But flow can be you Know you don't have to do it for an hour. The important thing is that you get a flow activity in every single day. If you go more than 24 hours without flow, you develop symptoms of general anxiety disorder, which is like a.
Not just being anxious, but it's like a legitimate mental illness. We are not meant to go long periods of time without flow. So if you're stressed out or if you're like, if you're, if your day is just crazy and you're busy and you're running from anything and putting out fires and there's a lot of stress in your day, then carve out time in the middle of your day or somewhere that will work to do whatever your flow is. Go for a walk, go for a run, write, read, listen to music.
And for me, one of my flows from my previous conversation you had is, I like to do the smallest task or have all my tasks I need to get done in one day. I do the smallest one first, so I have something accomplished right away, whether it's on your email or give me a quick call or something like that. Then I'm like, all right, I'm in the mood to get more things done. Yeah, that's good.
There's. There's a. I have a little 15 second flow activity, which is. It's a little gratitude meditation I do.
So every email I send, I don't have an automatic salutation that pops up on email. So I don't have like a doesn't say kind regards zero mile automatically. At the end of my email, it's blank. And what I do is I write in with gratitude from Jeremiah.
And for about 10 seconds, 15 seconds, I just close my eyes and I focus on why I'm grateful for whoever I'm sending that email to. And it doesn't matter if it's someone I've never met or it's someone I'm close to. There's always a reason to be grateful. And I find that just taking that 10 seconds, 20, 30 times throughout the day as I'm sending emails gives me that little tiny sip of flow.
That's awesome. I love that it completely changes your mindset for the rest of the day. Totally. Or you can shift your mindset partway through the day and make it even better.
Awesome. Thank you for covering those concepts. I think understanding flow and understanding grit are two key items to finding success in the workplace or just as an individual in general. You know, it goes back to the idea that life is a game and business is a game.
There are These are, these are simple strategies, right? If you understand flow and you understand it's a thing and it can help you. Well, now you, you can have a strategy to put it, to sprinkle it in throughout your day, right? Whereas if you didn't know that, then you're going to lose the game.
You're not going to be as effective as the next guy who doesn't know that. Same thing with grit. If you understand grit and how important it is, not only will you practice grit yourself because you want to build that muscle, but you'll look for people and partners, employees and other people to be around who demonstrate grit. It's their strategy in anything.
Yeah. All right. This leads me actually to a question from one of our listeners, which is, how do you not put down employees or business partners like co founders when they mess up? How do you not put them down?
Yes. Here's what I do is I don't, I don't. I'm not a very judgmental person. So I coach a lot of people and I hear the worst things, right?
I hear people admitting to and examining, like, their worst failures. And here's my trick is I know how many people I've hurt in my life. I have messed up so bad. I've hurt people who love me.
I've betrayed people. I've let people down. I've lied, I've cheated, Right? Like, I've done all these things in my life.
And just having that perspective helps me. When someone else messes up, we tend to judge other people on their results and we tend to judge ourselves on our intentions. Try flipping that, right? It doesn't help anybody to beat somebody up when they mess something up.
It actually is an insecure behavior. Confident people do not have to put people down when they make a mistake or when they mess up. Now, you should ask questions, right? If somebody messes up, the leadership thing to do is ask a question.
Hey, what happened? Tell me about that. What do you think went wrong? What lesson did you learn from it?
What would you do next time? Those are the things that are helpful. Beating somebody up, not good for anybody. I really like that a lot that you sort of have an introspection with the person before you decide to jump on the fact that they possibly messed up or did something wrong.
Well, here's the truth. Every important lesson I've learned in my life, I've learned through failure. Like, I don't learn through. I don't learn a lot from my wins, and I think most people are that way.
The big lessons we learn through struggle, we learn through pain. We learn through rejection, we learn through suffering. Right. We learn through failure.
We. You ask any top businessman, top entrepreneur, they'll say the same thing. The more failures you have, the quicker you learn, the quicker you become successful. So if you treat.
When employee or a partner messes up, treat it as a learning opportunity. That's all it is. It's a lesson. So ask questions, let them sit in it and learn something from it.
It's not bad to mess up. It's bad to mess up and not pay attention to it and not learn from it. Yeah. You don't give them, you're not offering them the chance to learn from what they did and have an opportunity to actually teach them.
Absolutely. That's a problem with, as a leader, coming in and cleaning up problems or cleaning up mistakes. Right. Let give people a chance to clean up and to fix their own mistakes.
Definitely. Definitely. Well, I got a handful of rapid fire questions here before we conclude things. All right, I'll try to give you rapid fire answers.
All right, let's go. First question. Favorite quote. Favorite quote.
Abraham Lincoln said, I destroy my enemies when I make them my friends. I love that. Why did you choose that? It is so powerful.