Financial Mentor: Creating A Wealth Plan That Actually Works with Todd Tresidder
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Episode Summary
Have you ever fantasized about never working again? We probably all do. But even if you never have to work a day in your life again, financial mentor Todd Tresidder said that won’t make you happy because when you can have everything and when you have lots of money, you end up not wanting anything. Todd says work is part of having a purposeful life. Even with large income streams, Todd is constantly developing wealth plans that actually work. Being a financial mentor and creating successful businesses is his passion and he helps entrepreneurs identify common errors and things to avoid in creating their wealth plan.
Listen To The Episode Here
Financial Mentor: Creating A Wealth Plan That Actually Works with Todd Tresidder
Our guest is Todd Tresidder, who graduated from the University of California with a BA in Economics and has a passion for creating successful businesses. He’s a serial entrepreneur since childhood like I am, and he went on to build his own wealth as a hedge fund investment manager before retiring at 35. He grew his net worth from less than zero at 23 to the point of financial independence just twelve years later. It’s no surprise I wanted to have him on the podcast and how he’s maintained his wealth is by remaining an active investor and using a risk management system for investing. He’s also the author of several books like How Much Money Do I Need to Retire? We all have that question pending in our head. Todd, welcome to the show.
How Much Money Do I Need to Retire? (60 Minute Financial Solutions Book 5)
Thanks, John. Thanks for having me.
I’m always interested to find out what that story of origin was. Since you talk about being an entrepreneur since childhood, can you take us back to one of your first entrepreneurial ventures as a kid?
I had my first paper route as a kid. Then I realized that if I’ve got a cool motorcycle, even as a little kid I could ride around the neighborhoods and deliver more papers and make more money and have fun. That was that first thing in finding efficiency and doing it faster, better, and cheaper. I made pretty good money in paper. I bought my first car at sixteen and then had a sailboat refinishing business, had a pool supply business, on and on and on. They just weren’t on top of the other, all the way through college and into adulthood.
I was also someone who had a paper route and I don’t know about you. I grew up in the Midwest, so I did deliver the papers in all kinds of weather including the sub-zero snow. What I think that taught me, and I’d like to see you learned some lessons is I did knock on these doors door to door. “Do you want to subscribe to the paper?” I had to sell it. Then I had to be the one to deliver it and then I had to go at the end of the month to collect the money. It was a full stop experience of what it takes to be an entrepreneur. Did you have similar life lessons from being a paperboy?
Absolutely, how do you grow your route? I would get extra papers and I would just start tossing them on people’s doorsteps and then the ballsy little kid would show up and try to collect for it when they never asked for it. I was such a crazy little kid. I didn’t know that that was unethical. People were nice. They go, “I’d never asked for it, but here, I’ll pay for it this month, but you don’t need to continue.” Then some people would continue. They’d like the paper and they go, “That was nice of you to start me, I’ll keep going.” It was funny how you build a business. I think even more so, John, it teaches discipline. Getting up early in the morning before school every day and you have to go deliver those papers. You run the business and you have to run your life in the meantime. I think there’s a beingness in that that transfers over in your professional life that is just powerful.
Let’s double click on the discipline because obviously you made a decision at a young age that you were going to be financially independent by 35. How much discipline did that take and what specific disciplines did it take?
Not that much, actually. I hate to disappoint you on that. Because what happened was I had the insight that if I want to be financially independent, I had become a master investor and so I skipped all the traditional routes. Most people, if they’re interested in finance and investing, they would go and become a broker or a financial adviser. I skipped that whole thing. I went straight to the hedge fund business, which is the rocket science of investing. I started developing quantitative risk management system and statistical risk management systems straight out of college. I was programming my own stuff. I had to build my own databases. I’m 57, so this is back in the 1980’s. It was very early on in computers. IBM came out with his first PC, Apples were still being made in a garage with Wozniak and Jobs. It was very early on. There were no databases for that you could even get a stock date. I had to hand key punch all my data in order to develop the methods. We’re talking early pioneer here.
What I learned was I had the insight that I had to become a master investor. I developed that skill and then we grew the business rapidly because we actually had it right. We knew what we were doing. We grew that business rapidly. My income grew tremendously straight out of college. As a result, I had a large income, but I didn’t spend much because I started college lifestyle days. I lived on a tiny fraction of what I made, socked away the rest. I never had to discipline myself. I could spend pretty much what I wanted and achieve financial independence rather rapidly.
For someone who doesn’t have your skill set about algorithms and math, do you have any suggestions on what they should do if they’re working for someone else or if they’re starting their own company and money’s tight, they don’t say like, “I’m putting all my money into my company. I’m not saving anything,” which is a story I hear a lot from entrepreneurs.
The thing about being an entrepreneur that’s dangerous is there’s a real tendency to put all your money back into your business. You do have to pay yourself and you have to carve money out of the business and get it over to your personal net worth. That way all your assets are not tied up in one location. If something happens to you, happens unfavorable to the business, you still have a nest egg to show for the years that you built that business. You have to start separating out the equity and start transferring stuff over the personal side and keep a separation between it.
It’s almost like paying yourself first.
I try to avoid the clichés. That would be one way of saying it. You can also just set up retirement plans, government-funded retirement plans. The nice thing with those retirement plans is they have a penalty if you break into him and people would say, “That doesn’t sound very nice, Todd.” It actually is because it keeps you from using it. It creates kind of a little bit of a firewall around when you pay a penalty plus you pay tax to get into it. You look and say, “If I pull a buck out, I only get to keep fifty cents of it so what the good is that I may as well leave it in there.”
In your book about how we should plan our retirement, you talk about The 4% Rule. That’s not a cliché. How did you come up with that and what is it?
The 4% Rule was actually created by William Bengen long ago, a couple decades back in research on US data. The 4% Rule basically says that on a 30-year retirement, so it’s a 30-year time span, you can spend 4% of your portfolio fairly safely. It’s pretty safe. The failure rate is extremely tiny on US data. It does fail on international data, however. When we say 4%, what you do is you spend 4% first year and then you adjust it for inflation every year thereafter. The amount adjusts for inflation. The reciprocal of The 4% Rule is the Rule of 25. The Rule of 25 gets a little more intuitive and a little simpler. When it says is you have to have 25 times your annual spending in assets.
[bctt tweet=”Work is part of a purposeful life.” username=”John_Livesay”]
This is all for conventional passive index asset allocation portfolio. Is it accurate? No, it’s not. It’s not perfect, but it’s close enough that you can use it as an indicator or direction to point for how much you need to save. Another even more intuitive way to understand it is the rule of 300. The Rule of 25 comes from the reciprocal of The 4% Rule. 25, 4% equals 100. The rule of 300 is the same thing, but it breaks it down to a monthly amount. That’s what makes it intuitive. It’s 25 times twelve months, 300. What it is 300 times your monthly spending amount.
For every $1,000 you spend per month that you need to support your lifestyle, it requires $300,000 in a conventional asset allocation portfolio. Then if you want to be more conservative you could make it $400,000. It would be the Rule of 400. That would be a very conservative approximation. 300’s probably workable, 400 for conservative. We can go into how it varies. It varies with market valuation and interest rates, so in as we record this, you’d probably want to be on the conservative side and you’d probably want to push towards the 400 number.
In your book, you talk about your simple three rules that allowed you to retire at 35. Can you share with us what those are?
What that’s doing is this talking about a very different approach. That’s the cashflow-based approach versus the asset-based approach. We’ve got to step back a second and understand the traditional approach to contrast it with what I’m talking about. The traditional approaches that you amassed this pile of assets. You’re supposed to scrimp and save, put away money into your 401(k) and into your savings and you build up this big nest egg and then when you retire you do nothing of substance and live off it.
Obviously for entrepreneurs that’s probably not very likely because entrepreneurs have what I’ll call the modern retirement, which is they’ll have cashflow streams, maybe some real estate. Maybe when they sell the business, they’ll sell it over time and get cashflow from that. There are a lot of different ways entrepreneurs get paid, but again, that’s the traditional model. You build a big pile of assets and then you amortize them down. It’s like a mortgage. Every payment the mortgage makes the balance grows smaller. Same thing in retirement. Every time you pull money out it gets smaller.
The three-rule system I created, basically it’s a cashflow model. Instead of worrying about accumulating these assets and then you have to figure out this amortization equation for the assets were like you have to come up with your life expectancy and you have to estimate the return on investment and you have to estimate inflation. All these things that are impossible for any normal human to estimate over 30-year period you’re supposed to do for normal retirement planning and in fact it’s impossible for the pros to do right, which makes it inaccurate. The cashflow based model is super simple and it’s super accurate. All it says is you have to create cashflow generating assets.
The cashflow produced by him exceeds the amount you spend each month and when you do that, you’re infinitely wealthy. It requires no fancy assumptions, you don’t have to worry about your lifespan. You don’t have to worry about outliving your assets and if you do it right, you don’t even have to worry about inflation. Let’s say you have rental real estate income or you have dividend growth stocks. Historically, income from those assets exceeds or approximates the growth of inflation and so you don’t even have to estimate for inflation, you had to estimate for lifespan, investment return, all that goes out the window. You have a very secure, safe retirement working with the cashflow-based model.
The other thing where it’s helpful is for people who retire early. You opened up and you pointed out that I retired twelve years after getting out of college. I’m almost 57. That was a long time ago and that’s why I created these models is because the traditional model doesn’t work for an earlier retirement. Because you can’t safely amortized assets over periods exceeding 30 years. There are too many variables in the equation. It’s not stable. Whereas the cashflow-based models are stable over very long timeframes. That’s where I developed a lot of these very alternative, very different ideas. They’re more stable, they’re safer. It’s because I had to have them.
A lot of people are always talking about the importance of diversifying their portfolio and obviously you’re talking about if you want to be successful, what I heard you saying was get into assets that generate cashflow, whatever that might be, whether it’s rental income or other investments. How important is diversification when you’re looking at stocks and bonds, or should all that be in real estate or should it only be in things like know and trust? What are your thoughts on that?
First of all, diversification’s valid. The joke on Wall Street, it’s the only free lunch on Wall Street where it lowers risk and increases return theoretically. Diversification done the traditional way is fine, which is diversifying by asset classes. You diversify stocks, bonds, cash, commodities, REITs, that type of thing. I’m losing myself traditional paper assets when I talk about that because that’s where it’s commonly applied. However, diversification done the smart way is where you take it a cut deeper.
You go outside paper assets because the issue with paper assets now as they all correlate. Everybody knows that intuitively when the market tanks recently went through a quick 10% decline, when it does that all the assets declined at the same time. Diversification is this funny thing where it works the 95% of the time you don’t need it and it fails the 5% of the time you actually need it, but it’s worth doing. Again, it’s not hurting you to do it as long as you don’t diversify into lower expectancy assets, in other words, assets that have a lower expected return.
That lowers the expectancy or portfolio which then hurts your average returns over time or your compound returns over time. Diversification done the smart way however, as you go outside traditional asset. You get into real estate, you get into your business, since you’ve got entrepreneurs, that’s another asset class to retirement. It doesn’t correlate at all because the neat thing about real estate, most of the time, the only time this will be an exception is in a credit crunch nationwide, like we had in 2008, 2009.
In general, real estate is very stable and not correlated accepting credit crunches. What you get is you get non-correlated returns with your business and that’s because they’re a micro-economy. The growth of your real estate is generally driven by the local economy, job growth and income growth. The growth of your business is determined by your business model. In fact, you can create a business it’s inversely correlated to the markets.
A great example is an attorney. If he specializes in bankruptcy law, his business is going to grow every time the market’s turned down and every time the economy gets in trouble. What you want to do is you want to contrast what you build in alternative assets with what you have in your traditional portfolio. You get non-diversified returns. The other thing too, you can look at diversification, go cut deeper and diversify by the strategy source of return.
In other words, even within paper assets, you can have the conventional buy and hold strategy, which is a passive approach, but there are active strategies as well in those active strategies to have different sources of return and they don’t correlate. Let me make this more tangible for most people in real estate. You can have active and passive strategies so you could have a buy and hold real estate portfolio, but you could also have a fix and flip portfolio. The fix and flip portfolio probably will outperform in a downturn because you’re going to get better deals.
Financial Mentor: Diversification is this funny thing where it works the 95% of the time you don’t need it and it fails the 5% of the time you actually need it, but it’s worth doing.
You’ve got to diversify by source of return as well as by asset class. That’s how smart investors do it. Then you want to make sure that the sources of return don’t stack up. The other thing about diversifying by source of return is it doesn’t start to correlate. The correlations remained stable even in adverse economic environments. That’s not true by diversifying by asset class. When you diversified by asset class the returns start to stack up and correlate. Diversification only adds value as long as you have non-correlation. That’s why source of return is actually a better way to diversify.
What are some of the mistakes you see people making when planning their retirement?
There are so many, you’ve given me a layup. Because I have a course in the whole course is about how you develop a wealth plan that actually work.
Let’s talk about the course so people can decide. People are desperate or at least hungry or thirsty for this. Don’t be shy in telling us what your course offers.
I’m not trying to pitch, but what prompt me was when you asked about all the errors. I’ve actually got a lesson right before they build their wealth plan, there’s a lesson teaching all of the common errors and things you want to avoid when you go to actually create your wealth plan. You build up to a point in that course where you develop all the knowledge, all the things you need. You actually know more than your financial adviser about how you design a wealth literally. I’ve got multimillionaires in the course and they are like, “If I had this knowledge twenty years earlier, I would have done even better.” It takes you from beginner level, starts with your resources, shows you how to harness your resources, convert them into conventional plan like we were talking about.
Then you convert them into what I call the advanced planning framework, which is the alternative assets, which includes your business in real estate. That’s governed by very different mathematics and limitations. All of these asset classes and all these strategies, they have different characteristics. Then you yourself, as you come to the equation you have specific characteristics as well. You have values, you have goals, you have resources, and they’re unique to you. Skills that you bring to the equation. What you do is you connect your unique situation to unique characteristics of the asset class to create a wealth plan that’s personalized to you.
On your Financial Mentor website, you have this great for phrase tagline, “Invest Smart, Build Wealth, Retire Early and Live Free.” I want to reverse engineer that for people because there are a lot of people that don’t know people that have retired early and don’t know what it’s like to live free. Would you describe to us, Todd, what does it feel like to be financially independent? Where you can in fact live free?
It’s been my life for so long. I don’t even know how to relate it to something that isn’t. How do you describe the color orange, except in contrast to the color red?
Do you see other people hating their job and how to go about it and living for the weekends and you’re living, you’re happy all the time? Anything like that would be interesting.
I don’t even distinguish. The only distinguishing difference between a midweek day and a weekend day is that my kids are in school midweek during school time. That’s the only thing I miss. I work on weekends. I play on weekdays. I mix it all up. It depends on where the opportunity is. I live opportunistically. If there’s something going on that I want to do, I go do it. I’m an avid snow skier. If it’s a powder day I’ll go ski. There’s a certain amount of freedom there. I vacation probably on average about three months a year I found is what I enjoy. If I do a lot more than that, then it becomes a way of life and I did do less than then I’m working too much. Here’s something that will surprise people is that work is part of a meaningful life.
The fantasy, it’s all or nothing.
People think that when you’re working hard and you need the money and you’re trying to build up, a lot of things happen like you start to covet goods when you have plenty of money. You don’t covet goods anymore. When you can have everything, you don’t want anything because you don’t value it. If you started acquiring endless stuff before you know it, you’re filled with clutter in your life and you have no freedom again. It gives you the opposite of the value you’re trying to honor in the first place.
I know you’re breathing it for the last 27 years, but for most people those are some valuable insights whether you retire early or not to keep that perspective in place is helpful.
For business owners, here’s one of the myths people do. They build up their business and the big dream is that big liquidity event day when they sell the business and they get a few million dollars and now they’re finally free. Wrong. What you want to do is you want to design the business so you have a life so enjoyable that you never want to retire from it. That’s the real goal. Not the liquidity event day but get the cashflow of the business and figuring out how to develop the business that you’re unnecessary so you have whatever freedom you desire right now. I’ve coached clients on this and it takes a few months. It’s not that hard. What you do is you start looking at anything that requires your time and you look at as a failure of your business systems. You start finding employees and developing business systems to replace every aspect of what you do that you can.
Then over time you may remove yourself from the business so you have the freedom you desire right now while you still have the cashflow of the business and that’s freedom. Because see what happens when you sell the business, you get a liquidity event, you have a bunch of money. First of all, you pay out a ton of it in taxes. That’s the first thing so you end up with a fraction of what you had before and then now you’re in an amortization equation, which I talked about earlier, and you’re living off those assets. While people think that’s free, you’ll be surprised once you start living off the assets what it does is it creates a scarcity mentality, because you know that every dollar you spend is a dollar. It’s like killing a soldier on the battlefield. Those are your soldiers on the battlefield of wealth and every time you spend, when you kill them, you slaughter them, and I’m being graphic to make it visual.
[bctt tweet=”When you can have everything, you want nothing.” username=”John_Livesay”]
What does is it creates scarcity and it’s the opposite of freedom, which is the value we’re trying to honor. Cashflow is freedom, assets are nice reserves. They’re great security but they aren’t freedom. It’s the cashflow from the assets that creates the freedom, and so your business is a valuable asset. You’re probably better off not selling it and paying the taxes and keeping the cashflow than you are to pay the taxes or sell it. Pay the taxes converted into income producing assets. They’ll produce far less cashflow than your business would in the first place.
Here’s a question that may not get asked a lot, or maybe you do, which is what are your thoughts on cryptocurrency and how that’s changing the world and is that a good investment?
Almost every interview asked me that, basically it’s a bubble. Back in 2008, 2009, I couldn’t talk to anybody without being asked about how you get rich in real estate and of course that was the absolute top and then the market or 2007, 2006 and then the market rolled over obviously after that. Same thing in 1998, 1999. Everybody wanted to talk to me about internet stocks and technology stocks and of course that was the final top. Here’s the thing, the blockchain is real. The blockchain’s a big deal. The blockchain is going to have impact. The great analogy actually is the Internet bubble in 1998 going up to 2000 top, the internet fulfilled its proclamation, it’s destiny. It has changed our lives. It’s a huge big deal. It was everything that they claimed it would be back in the 1900’s.
However, the stocks that people bought of many of them got slaughtered in the downturn and many vanished. Pets.com is a great example. All these stocks vanished from the scene and it was nearly impossible to put together a portfolio that would benefit from this big internet revolution, except in hindsight. You could do it in hindsight, but in real time it would’ve been extremely difficult to know who the ultimate winners would be and to whether all the volatility of went with the assets. The same thing’s going to happen with cryptocurrency and you’re already seeing it. Bitcoin went up to $ 20,000 and then it went down to $6,000 to $7,000. That’s a 70% decline. It’s crazy and if you think about it, no sound currency goes through fluctuations like that. If people run around and they think it’s a sound current center placement for a currency, it’s not. It’s pure speculation. That’s all it is.
Any last thoughts on how the average person can achieve financial freedom?
Save more than you spend and invest the difference wisely.
Todd, your Twitter is @FinancialMentor, your website is FinancialMentor.com. You’ve got several great books on this topic. Why don’t you list them for us?
The big main seller, the book that most people would be interested in is How Much Money Do I Need to Retire? Then the following book is The 4% Rule and Safe Withdrawal Rates. If people are interested in coaching, the book Don’t Hire a Financial Coach! Until You Read This Book is designed to protect you from all the fraud out there around and financial coaching. Frauds’ probably a strong word, I’ll call it overblown sales hype. There are legitimate financial coaching businesses and there are people who primarily New York Times bestselling authors who hire these companies who have floors of guys sitting in cubicles with headsets on, offering these high-end coaching programs and they don’t know anything. They’re following scripts, and so you’ve got to be careful who you hire and what you’re getting and understand that there are differences in quality.
Financial Mentor: Save more than you spend and invest the difference wisely.
All my books are consumer protection books. They’re all written in as a result of client need. My Variable Annuity book, I only wrote it because I had so many clients being ripped off by variable annuity salesmen that I felt the need to write a book that simplified and dumped them down to where the person had the tools and the knowledge they needed to counteract the salesman’s hype. It’s a brief book. It’s like 30, 40 pages. It goes through and it explains what a variable is, how it works in simple language so that when the salesman is hyping out, you can go, “Yes, but what about this? Yes, but it doesn’t fit my profile because I’m not that.”
It gives you the exact tools you need so you can counteract their hype and not get ripped off. Then the Investment Fraud book was also written because I have a remarkable number of coaching clients who are victims of investment fraud. You can look into the testimonials of how many people I’ve saved from fraud. You’d be surprised if you’re going to build wealth, you’re going to run into investment fraud so I wrote a book to protect you.
I have a book coming out, On Leverage, which the subtitle is How You Make More by Doing Less. It actually explains the distinction but it would be important for your business owners. That book is important. The feedback from the editors as they’re working on it is they’re surprised because they go into it expecting another junk-me to how-to business book thing and they’re going in it. Their response is, “I wish I’d learned this years ago.”
Thanks again, Todd. We appreciate your sharing your wisdom and it is wisdom when you actually lived it yourself and you certainly have done that. Thanks again.
Thank you, John.
Links Mentioned:
- Todd Tresidder
- How Much Money Do I Need to Retire?
- Pets.com
- @FinancialMentor – Twitter
- FinancialMentor.com
- The 4% Rule and Safe Withdrawal Rates
- Don’t Hire a Financial Coach! Until You Read This Book
- Variable Annuity
- Investment Fraud
Wanna Host Your Own Podcast?
Click here to see how my friends at Brandcasting You can help
Get your FREE copy of John’s latest eBook Getting To Yes now!
John Livesay, The Pitch Whisperer
Share The Show
Did you enjoy the show? I’d love it if you subscribed today and left us a 5-star review!
-
- Click this link
- Click on the ‘Subscribe’ button below the artwork
- Go to the ‘Ratings and Reviews’ section
- Click on ‘Write a Review’
A CEO’s Secret Weapon: How To Accelerate Success with Dr. Frumi Barr
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Episode Summary:
People make your business successful or not. To accelerate success, a conscious leader always starts with finding the right A players and having the right people on the team. Dr. Frumi Barr says that’s where the whole idea of concentrating on culture came from. One part of culture are the core values and another part is knowing what your purpose is, your why. She says your why is your engine that allows you to overcome challenges. Dr. Barr talks about her book, A CEO’s Secret Weapon: How to Accelerate Success, which offers essential techniques every CEO needs to know to have a huge advantage, as well as the most troublesome issues confronting the CEO every day and how to overcome each.
—
Our guest on the Successful Pitch is Dr. Frumi Barr who is the author of a book called, A CEO’s Secret Weapon. She’s an expert on knowing what your why is, the power of it and how to tap into it. She said a conscious leader is someone who is effectively flexible. She said when you figure out that it might have taken a company 100 years to get their culture where it is, it’s not going to be fixed in one year. She has a great story of how she was able to help a big company turn that culture around from being so negative, yelling and screaming, to being more cooperative. She said when you have your why in place, it helps you navigate the challenges that come along. It becomes your engine.
Listen To The Episode Here
A CEO’s Secret Weapon: How To Accelerate Success with Dr. Frumi Barr
I have Dr. Frumi Rachel Barr who is an entrepreneur having run several adventures herself, where she was a CEO and helps your team scale up. She lives her why, your purpose or your cause. She lives her why by creating a safe environment for leaders and their teams to talk about those tough issues that matter most to build profitable and sustainable manufacturing or distribution companies. Dr. Frumi is always beginning with the culture. What’s the competitive advantage of any company? She built successful businesses. She’s the author of a book called, A CEO’s Secret Weapon, How to Accelerate Success. It was ranked Top Business Book of 2012 and she got a foreword by Simon Sinek, the man who did the amazing talk on Start with Why. Frumi, welcome to the show.
Thank you so much. It’s a pleasure to be with you, John.
Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone
What a coup to get Simon to write your foreword. I know what a big deal that is to get somebody of note to write a foreword. If he’s talking about why, and you’re talking about why, he saw some similar branding things that he was willing to be co-branded with you on.
I started with John Strelecky who wrote The Why Café. In order to talk about his book, he also wrote The Big Five for Life, which are the five things you wanted, do, see or experience in your life to be successful. Right after I spent a weekend at a retreat with John Strelecky, I got so excited about businesses starting with why. A friend of mine at lunch said, “I just happened to have a book with me written by Simon Sinek.” It was serendipitous. I read Simon’s book. Simon would affectionately tell you that I stalked him. He agreed to work with me. Simon love speaking, first he wrote Start with Why and then he wrote Leaders Eat Last. He didn’t like consulting anymore, so I was very lucky that he referred me to clients who wanted to find their why, even older companies that might have existed for 75 years. That’s how we became colleagues.
Can you take us back a little bit further because you have a PhD and an MBA? When did you figure out your own personal why? The story of origin is what I’m looking for.
Those things start when you’re young with belief systems. There has to be a reason. My mother put me in school when I was three. I was small and I was extremely shy, so I would never lift my hand up in class. They thought that I wasn’t too smart, which is why I have all these credentials. I realized how important it was for people to feel safe in discussing what matters most. You could be in a corporate environment where the CEO shuts you down with a phrase and then that person’s afraid to speak up. It’s important in any team to take advantage of the smart people you have at the table and create that safe place for them to speak up. Challenge their thinking because it’s only when we challenge each other’s thinking that we make an idea better. That’s where mine started.
When someone’s there, the assumptions people make about you at that point and how that spurs you on, it reminds me of Barbra Streisand talking about her mother. If she hadn’t been such a tough critic, who knows if she would have been as driven. It’s a fascinating thing for me to find out what people’s original spark was to start their career. What made you hook into this culture and why aspect of your focus?
I’ve always been fascinated with people. People make your business successful or not. That’s where the whole idea of concentrating on culture came from. After culture, it becomes a strategy and execution in order to make a business sustainable. It always starts with finding the right A-players and having the right people on the team. That’s where I start.
Let’s double click on culture. I’ve had the ability to talk to Larry Senn who’s been called the Father of Culture and he’s in his 80s. Let’s do two different ways with this. One is if you’re Coca-Cola, a big brand that’s been around forever. They have a culture defined. The other is if you’re a startup. You’re less than a year old or you’re just putting a team together. Let’s talk about the similarities and differences on what makes a good culture.
[bctt tweet=”Your why is your engine that let’s you overcome challenges.” username=”John_Livesay”]
What’s important with culture is what the core values of the corporation are. We can have a very big company like Coca-Cola, any company that’s old or long-established often have core values on the wall. They don’t necessarily live those core values. They don’t necessarily hire according to those core values or fire according to them. It’s very difficult to change the culture of an established organization, although that can be done. If it takes 100 years to form a culture, it takes more than one to change it.
I can give you an example of that. A 100-year-old company that I worked with was a nonprofit, one of the largest nonprofits. They used to have a CEO who used to basically bark at everybody that it was a commanding control environment. He was the CEO for about 25 years and after he left, another CEO came in who was more of a servant leader. He had to deal with the shift between a lot of his employees being used to still barking at people. That was an uncomfortable environment for him. I worked with them for about five years. It took us about three years to shift the culture so that takes time.
What kind of values do you see in someone’s culture that makes them successful whether they’re new or established?
Let’s go back to the startups first. Startups have a unique opportunity to create their culture. When I first start working on a plan with a startup, they have a lot of aspirational values. They’re not necessarily values that they’re living. We create a set of values based on what the founders or the first team believe. At the end of the year, we review them and see which ones are actually living. The way that you measure whether people are living their values or not is the stories that they tell. Let me give you an example, and I learned this from John Strelecky. How would you bring those values to life?
One of the things that we suggest is what we call a book of email. Imagine that on the first day at a company, instead of just being given the policy manual, you’re also given a book of emails where you can see what people value. Imagine if someone wrote to you and said, “John, good for you. You upheld our value of extreme ownership.” You give a little story about what extreme ownership meant in that regard. In that way, the new employee is reading real things, not just a line on the wall that says extreme ownership or integrity. One of my favorite ones is aligned by McIntosh Trading, which is a Canadian company. One of their core values is, “Make mama proud.”
Would you say or do anything that would make your mom proud? If not, don’t do it.
Accelerate Success: Be able to share that message and cascade it down, no matter how large your company becomes.
You don’t want to be on the front page of the Wall Street Journal. That’s the way you create a culture of living values. What are the activities that you’re going to do to promote the values all the time? That’s the first part of culture is those core values and the second part of culture is knowing what your purpose is. Be able to share that message and cascade it down, no matter how large your company becomes.
Does that tie in to the why at that point?
Yes. I’ll give you an example. There’s a supermarket that’s been around for 80 years. It was started by grandpa. Why did grandpa start the company? It’s a little hard 80 years later to figure out exactly why he did it. We had this group of 24 people in the room. A supermarket has a drug pharmacy in there, it will have groceries, etc. Why would you unite all of those elements? As we were talking about this, the grocery people said, “Shouldn’t we talk about fresh vegetables?” The pharmacy people said, “Should we talk about the drugs we have?” Here’s the why. Infusing life with health and happiness. That’s the message they started sharing. They have that alive and well in every supermarket. You use that as the compass. If you’re making a decision, you ask yourself, does this fit? Is this an alignment?
The third part of culture is attracting the people who believe what you believe, like what Simon says. If you’re very clear about your core values and you’re very clear about your purpose, then you do what we call top grading. These are a series of interviews when you’re hiring someone. You explore whether they are fit according to their core values, core ideology, or their purpose. If people aren’t in alignment, you’re trying to put a square peg in a round hole.
What are your thoughts on diversity? Is that a value or is that part of a culture?
That’s a big topic.
You’re certainly qualified to answer that topic of how important it is. Why is it important? Anything you want to talk about on that, I’d be fascinated to hear.
I was invited to a dinner put on by women who lead. The big question that we were discussing in that dinner was Women on Boards. There was an initiative, Women on Boards 2020. The idea was to get to 20% because there really hasn’t been a diversity on boards of all kinds. The 2020 goal has been achieved. The goal is to go higher. The question is what do you mean by diversity? Everybody means something different.
Let’s take a very top line definition that it’s not a bunch of white guys over a certain age running the whole show.
Even if we talk about gender diversity, never mind all of the cultural diversity. Any board would benefit to having a broad range of diversity from people from different cultures. If you just take the gender diversity, it brings a much richer conversation. One of my initiatives for 2018 is to be on manufacturing or distribution company boards. I feel that at this stage in my life, looking at the next chapter, I have so much to offer a board and I never thought about it before. Recognizing that there’s so much emphasis on Women on Boards. I thought maybe it’s time. I’ve been in business for so long and I never really thought about being a woman. I did what I had to do. I’ve never pulled that card so to speak.
[bctt tweet=”A conscious leader is one that is effectively flexible.” username=”John_Livesay”]
Let’s double click on manufacturing and double click on distribution company so that people have a clear example of each one.
I bought a part of a company that had a unique design like Gucci Watch with interchangeable faces and interchangeable materials around the face, like wood or leather. One of my reps went into Sears, and this was in Toronto, and we’re supposed to have an appointment with someone from Sears. I said, “I think I should go instead of you.” I was young and he said to me, “You’ve never sold anything, aren’t you afraid to go in and see this buyer?” I said, “It’s my company and I have to pay the rent every month, so I think I should learn something.” I went in to see the buyer. I asked him a question that no one had ever asked him the ten years that he was a buyer. I said, “What do you need?”
The simplest of questions. He said, “I know exactly what I want but nobody wants to make these because I think they’re shocked.” He pulled out a picture from a gift show. It was a California sunset with a screen print to dial in the corner and a quartz movement. He said, “Can you make these?” I said, “Sure, no problem.” He said, “Come back in two weeks with six samples.” I called him a couple of days later. I said, “I’d like to make an appointment to do a site visit with you next week.” I picked him up and we went to a rehabilitation center that I had engaged. There were my clocks, rolling off the conveyor belt. He looked at me and said, “I didn’t expect this. What’s your plan?” I really grew my company from that moment to supplying 67% of Sears’ clocks. I supplied all the other catalog in Canada.
In addition, I flew down to Chicago and ended up having a reciprocal licensing agreement with the largest US clock manufacturer to import their clocks in pieces into Canada to avoid the 12.5% duty. That’s manufacturing. You have to be resourceful, you have to pivot and you have to be lean. I was into lean before lean was laying. I had two infomercial companies. Distribution can mean all kinds of things. In my case, it was having a very popular infomercial and then having to fulfill the product by media, etc. I’ve got a ton of that experience.
One of the chapters in your book is The Power of Why. Can you expand on that for us?
The best way to explain that is to talk about how I wrote the book. My initial idea of writing the book was to talk about how lonely it was at the top. That had always been my experience. I found half of the CEOs that I spoke to, I spoke to 50 from around the world, weren’t lonely at the top. The reason was they were in peer groups. They felt that they had that ability to share and get advice from their peers. The other half worked in peer groups and they were remote. Even though they wanted to be in a peer group, they were two hours out in Dublin or two hours out of Boston. It was too much work to be in a peer group. I asked him another question which was, “What’s your greatest challenge at this time?” My book was written as a distillation of the 40 challenges that I heard. Can you imagine 50 CEOs and I heard 40 challenges?
[bctt tweet=”Each one has their own version on how to use resources and when to use resources.” username=”John_Livesay”]
Each one had their own version on how to use resources, when to use resources and how to overcome people challenges or communication challenges. At the core of it, your why is your engine that allows you to overcome challenges. If you have a strong enough why, it’s at the core of getting up in the morning and being able to overcome whatever obstacle in your path. If you don’t have a strong why, I think either you’d be depressed or you want to give up.
Let’s play a little bit like we’re having a private conversation that people are eavesdropping in on. What you’re saying is a much deeper why. It’s not about just making money so I can support myself or my family. You’re talking about more of what’s your personal mission. I’ve put a lot of time and thought into this. I used to be on the self-esteem rollercoaster, being in sales for a large part of my career. I’m only feeling good about myself if my numbers are up, and bad about myself if my numbers are down.
I thought there’s got to be a better way to separate that. Who I am is bigger than my results. That’s what caused me to write my first book. That’s what gets me up and motivated to go out and speak to companies’ sales teams, is to get them off that self-esteem rollercoaster. I know if I can help other people get off of it, then there’ll be able to handle bad quotas, bad numbers, or getting laid off. That might be useful to the listeners and I certainly welcome your input on it, if you think that’s a good example of a why.
It’s a good example. Is this a story that you would tell someone if you first met them? That’s part of what’s important.
If somebody was interested in getting to know me, I certainly would talk about that.
Accelerate Success: Sharing your why is a personal thing. Nobody wants to share their core vulnerability.
That’s one of the ways you can tell that that’s really why. I want to share a story of a why with you. I belong to a networking group. It’s called ProVisors that were all professional advisors to CEOs. There used to be this gentleman who would stand up and talk about all of his certifications. He was a trust attorney. Every time I heard him stand up and say these things, the fifteenth time I rolled my eyes because I’ve heard that before. I said to him one time, “Why do you do this? I would be so much more inspired to hear why you do this.” He said, “Let me think about that.” Sometimes when you share your why, it’s really a personal thing, nobody wants to share their core vulnerability.
He stood up in another meeting where I was doing a why exercise with people. He mentioned that I challenged him to share his why and this was his first time sharing it. This was his story. When he was in law school, his parents dragged him to a trust attorney. It was a Friday and his parents were organizing their trust. A couple of months later, they left on a holiday and they were on the Pan Am plane that crashed. He spent the next two years trying to unravel their probate.
The reason he felt that happened even though they went to a trust attorney was that the trust attorney maybe did divorces on Monday and bankruptcies on Tuesday. Friday was his trusting. The reason these certifications were so important to him was because he felt that he never wants anybody to go through the pain that he went through. Imagine how people looked at him after he shared that. The one thing you can be sure of was that that man really cared about giving you excellent service.
If you’ve been there yourself, you have such empathy for people that they are drawn to you.
That’s why your why makes a lot of sense for you to share that because not everybody’s on that rollercoaster. It makes you much more likable and much more relatable. I don’t think there’s a sales person alive that doesn’t go through mornings where they wonder if they can still do it.
The burnout factor. You talk about in your book becoming the leaders that others want to follow. Simon even wrote about that at the foreword. It’s such a well-thought out structured book. I highly recommend it to people. In order for someone to lead, people have to follow you. It’s not about authority. What do you think is one of the key elements to becoming a leader that other people want to follow?
There are so many definitions of different kinds of leadership. There are authentic leaders, there are servant leaders, so many different kinds. The most important thing is to be a conscious leader.
Let’s distinguish. You mentioned someone else being a servant leader that took over someone who is authoritative. What’s your definition of a servant leader? We’ll dive into conscious leader after.
I would say a few words. A servant leader, you would say to people, “What obstacles are you facing and how can I remove them?” Servant leaders seem to focus on that. Authentic leaders seem to focus on being very transparent. A conscious leader to me would know when to be what, when you need to be a servant, when you need to be authentic. You can’t be one thing all the time. It’s like situational leadership.
There’s a little bit of fluidity that’s happening in the personality and the style. A conscious leader is all about effective flexibility. Are there any last thoughts that you want to leave us on leadership or the importance of why or how did you discover it?
[bctt tweet=”Think about what would make today a museum day, the kind of day you’d like to see if you had a museum of your life.” username=”John_Livesay”]
Why is a journey. You can’t just sit down one day and discover your why. It takes a little time to sit in the question. When people get uptight about whether or not they know their why, what I would tell people is live every day on purpose. Don’t just let life go by you. Think about what would make today, what John Strelecky and I call a museum day, the kind of day you’d like to see if you had a museum of your life. What is special?
I was in Grand Rapids, Michigan visiting a friend. I went to the Gerald Ford Museum. I’d never been to a presidential museum before. If you think of that as an example, we all can’t be CEOs or presidents, but if someone wants to make a museum of your life, that’s what you’re talking about, those key elements.
One of the things that my children mentioned to me is that I don’t like gifts necessarily. I like experiences.
How can we follow you on social media? How can people reach out to you if they want to have you on the board for their manufacturing or distribution company?
I have a very unique name so on Twitter it’s @Frumi, on LinkedIn it’s Frumi Rachel Barr and Scaling4Growth.com. [email protected], if anyone wants to send me an email. I love talking to people.
You’ve been a delight to talk to. Thanks for sharing your insights on why, leadership and conscious leadership.
Thank you. I love being here and I liked our conversation.
Thanks.
Links Mentioned
- Dr. Frumi Rachel Barr
- A CEO’s Secret Weapon, How to Accelerate Success
- Start with Why
- The Why Café
- The Big Five for Life
- Leaders Eat Last
- Larry Senn – previous episode
- Women on Boards 2020
- ProVisors
- @Frumi on Twitter
- Frumi Rachel Barr on LinkedIn
- Scaling4Growth.com
- [email protected]
- https://www.Sales4Profit.com/
- https://Youtu.be/M9rXdDbQ-3E
Wanna Host Your Own Podcast?
Click here to see how my friends at Brandcasting You can help
Get your FREE copy of John’s latest eBook Getting To Yes now!
John Livesay, The Pitch Whisperer
Share The Show
Did you enjoy the show? I’d love it if you subscribed today and left us a 5-star review!
-
- Click this link
- Click on the ‘Subscribe’ button below the artwork
- Go to the ‘Ratings and Reviews’ section
- Click on ‘Write a Review’
Landing On Your Feet with Sam Morris
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
When one’s sense of identity gets challenged, the whole foundation becomes loose. Even people who are ambitious and are making things happen in the world cannot predict when something is going to come along that is going to completely derail that direction. You have otherwise confident people who have been very successful in their lives suddenly questioning everything and going, “How did I end up here?” Zen Warrior Sam Morris talks about landing on your feet and knowing how to come back to building that foundation in a fresh way. Sam met an accident and became paraplegic due to a drunk driver. From that point on, he has been consistently working on reestablishing the foundation that he lost when his accident occurred. Sam says sometimes that building can come crashing down and you’re left having to find out how to build a new foundation. He now helps people to create that foundation and finding that inner strength that they didn’t even know they had before.
—
Listen to the podcast here
Landing On Your Feet with Sam Morris
I have a guest that I’ve been fortunate enough to have on before, Sam Morris, the Zen Warrior. Sam was on my show before and I’ve had the privilege of working with him one-on-one. When he told me, he had some new insights to share with us, I couldn’t wait to have him back on the show. For those of you who haven’t heard Sam’s other episode, his story is in 1999, he was leading a bike trip for nine teenagers across the US when he was in a car accident caused by a drunk driver, which has left him paralyzed from the waist down. He’s had to deal with surgeries and literally lying down for over three years. Two of those years were in the hospital, but Sam has an ability to not let anything stop him, including being paralyzed from the waist down. As he said to me when I first met him, “My legs might be paralyzed, but my brain and my mind is not.” Sam, welcome back to the show.
Thanks, John. It’s great to be here. Thanks for inviting me.
Your topic that’s very close to your heart and it needed more than ever is how can high performers and entrepreneurs recreate themselves after they’ve experienced some disruption, whether it’s personal like you went through or professional like I went through after being laid off. What is it that made you think, “I have something to say about this topic?”
I have encountered this particular thing over and over again with people who are ambitious, who were making things happen in the world, but you cannot predict when something is going to come along that is going to completely derail that direction. You have otherwise confident people who have been very successful in their lives suddenly questioning everything and going, “How did I end up here? I was on this track here and now I’m in this situation here,” whether that is a being laid off or whether that is getting a divorce or going through something that challenges one’s sense of identity. When one’s sense of identity gets challenged, it’s like the whole foundation becomes loose and people need to know how to come back to building that foundation in a fresh way.
[bctt tweet=”Disruption is a natural process, don’t take it personally.” username=”John_Livesay”]
When my injury happened, my accident happened shortly after finishing my bike trip when a drunk driver caused my paraplegia. From that point in 1999 to this point in 2018, I have been consistently working on reestablishing the foundation that I lost when my accident occurred. I’ve put in so many countless hours, days, months and years into working on sensing the core essence of who I am and the value that I offer that is independent of any circumstance. I happened to have a lot of practice in this area where most people, unfortunately, don’t have as much practice. It’s quite good that they don’t have that practice. I’m trying to make it easier for high performers and entrepreneurs to make that pivot. When something happens in their lives to make that pivot because that foundational identity that we build up over the course of years or decades can get compromised very easily.
It tends to happen periodically throughout people’s lives in some major way. It’s so easy to get trapped in the mindset of linear success where if I am X degrees successful now, then I should be X plus one tomorrow and then I should be X plus two next week. There’s this expectation that people put on themselves to keep on building on what they have already done. Sometimes that building can come crashing down and you’re left having to find out how to build a new foundation. That new foundation is what I help people to create. What I discover is that when people create that new foundation, they actually find an inner strength that they didn’t even know they had before.
What I’m hearing you say is that our foundation and our identity get tied up together and when we lose the foundation, either through a job loss, a divorce or a health situation, we also somehow feel we’ve lost our identity. That’s part of the challenge when the foundation goes away. Even if you just lose your house in a fire, that’s equally traumatic and that’s literally your foundation. In your case, your legs are your foundation. “It’s who am I without that foundation,” is what I’m hearing is the big challenge for most of us.
It’s exactly that. The “Who am I?” makes it very challenging to build a new foundation when you’re constantly questioning who you are and what your role is in the world because the way that you learn to function before simply no longer works. These things are very common. In general, I would say people experience this at least once in their lives past the age of maturity where something occurs that totally makes them question everything.
You said about this expectation that everything is going to consistently be a linear, straight line up. The minute it becomes a roller coaster, it makes us mad and angry in addition to scared because having been in the corporate world at Conde Nast for over fifteen years where every year was a quota and that quota was consistently set higher than the year before and you were expected to meet it. The following year, it was just endless, “We need growth, growth, growth.” Startups have the same thing. Anybody who’s in any accelerator, it’s the whole thing is, “How fast are you growing? Are you growing faster than the other startup that’s in here? Whoever grows the fastest gets the funding.”
Landing On Your Feet: Honor both what you can do and what you can’t do.
This fear of things never being fast enough. You better hurry up and get your funding before the economy tanks again or the bottom falls out of the XYZ stock market, home market, fill in the blank. What are some of your suggestions for everyone and the clients that work with you on, “I definitely either experienced losing my foundation and my identity along with it and I don’t know what to do because the things I’ve been doing aren’t going to work anymore?” How do we let go of expecting things to continue to be linear?
The first place to start is getting that the process is natural, that this is a human process. That it is not a personal thing so much as it is a human condition. A lot of people compare themselves to an idea of how other people are doing and think, “Their lives are so much easier. They are so much more successful, or they have so much more money or whatever than I do this and that,” but rarely do they get a chance to look under the hood and see what’s occurring in that person’s life. Even with the most successful people out there, there are massive disruptive circumstances that occur in their lives, which create the exact same challenge for one’s sense of identity and self-esteem and everything.
It doesn’t matter how successful you are. Those moments can happen. and they can throw you off for months or years, depending on how you process that situation. How you process your circumstances and how you move forward from there, a lot of people will stay in a state of paralysis for a long time. My physical paralysis has given me a lot of insights into the nature of paralysis because my physical paralysis for a number of years, created this emotional-psychological paralysis inside of myself that was actually a lot harder to deal with than the actual physical paralysis. I understand this very deeply from the inside out. Getting that this is just a natural process, that there’s nothing personal, it’s not saying anything about who you are, what you can do or not do or whatever it is, a time for reassessment.
It’s a time to get grounded and look at, “What can I do and what can’t I do?” Get clear about that and honor both what you can do and what you can’t do. A lot of people get caught in the trap of thinking they should be able to do more than they’re actually able to do. That’s a very unhealthy mindset if you get and it’s humbling. It’s very humbling to get clear on what you can do and what you can’t do. The vast majority of what there is to do, none of us can do. The vast majority of what there is that I could potentially do, I cannot do. I have to get clear on the very limited range of things that I can do and then commit my focus to those things without getting caught up in what I can’t do and think that I should be able to do.
The big takeaway for me on that is this process of being disrupted is natural and not something that you should sit around feeling sorry for yourself. “Why did this happen to me? Why am I in a wheelchair or why did I get laid off? Why did I get divorced? That must mean I’m a failure as a spouse. That must mean I’m a failure as an employee,” and this whole internal paralysis. You’re really big on paralysis or movement and using breathing, which is something everyone can do to not stay in the state of paralysis. Can you talk a little bit about that?
The breath is our most important tool that we have. I am constantly amazed by the power of the breath. The breath is a way of being able to access your whole system and get out of your head. When disruption occurs, the hardest thing is for people to get out of their heads. It’s the identity, identifying with what went wrong essentially. “What the hell went wrong? What does that say about me?” All that negativity comes in and it’s a very natural thing for people to have all of this self-judgment occur as a result of disruption. You can’t get away from that judgment at the level of just trying to think new thoughts. You have to actually have a tool to work through that self-judgment that actually puts you in touch with something deeper than those thoughts.
[bctt tweet=”Get out of your head by getting into your body.” username=”John_Livesay”]
Those thoughts are just projections. They’re not real, the what ifs. People get way too caught up in their thoughts. The breath is the way that you can process thoughts and feelings in the moment and stay in contact with yourself, essentially maintaining a relationship with yourself that is more holistic than your thoughts that you have about yourself or any temporary feeling that you may be having. By connecting to your breath and connecting to your body, it helps to still the mind. It also helps to process feelings and process thoughts so that the feelings that one is having don’t turn into this back and forth between thoughts and feelings.
It’s a common thing for people to get caught, essentially tripping out on themselves where they’re having some feeling and then they’re having some thought about the feeling which is inaccurate. The feeling just gets worse because the feeling doesn’t feel like it’s been listened to, which then creates another inaccurate thought. It goes back and forth like a feedback loop between thoughts and feelings. In the meantime, we’re not present the whole time that’s happening. We’re getting caught in our feelings and then thinking about the past or worrying about the future and we lose track of our presence. The breath is here to bring us back into presence. There’s a reason why every Zen master and every Yogi all emphasize the importance of the breath. There is a very specific reason why. That is because it actually helps you to contact yourself in such a way that it transcends any thought-based identification with one’s feelings.
If we lose our identity, when we get disrupted, and then we start identifying with our thoughts as being real, then it sounds to me like that’s a total recipe for paralysis.
It’s an absolute recipe for paralysis. I cannot tell you how many people that I have met and worked with who have or are experiencing that exact recipe for paralysis.
If the thoughts aren’t real, you’re catastrophizing the future or for separating and reliving the past. “I can’t believe he said or she said this to me and did that or this,” and you just get angrier about it the more that you think about it. Meanwhile, you’re not in the moment at all. You don’t have any tools to release that. Then you’re missing what’s happening in the moment, which may be great, but you’re still stuck on what somebody said or did to you. Whether it’s a divorce or getting fired or being mad at the person who hit you who was drunk back in 1999. You were clearly not in the present, if that’s what you’re thinking about all the time.
Not only is it key for anyone who’s gone through some personal or professional disruption, this is also key as well for productivity. People frequently talk about how they wish they were more productive or they wish they had more time in the day. How much time do you have where you’re actually present? What percentage of most people’s time are they actually present and not thinking about the past or thinking about the future? If you looked at that where people are truly present, it would be a tiny fraction of any given day. As they are thinking about the past and as they are concerned about the future, they are actively wasting time. They’re not truly focused on what is occurring right here in the present moment. That bouncing back and forth between past and future, not being connected to yourself, not being connected to your breath, bouncing back and forth, creates mental exhaustion, which then creates the feeling of, “I have to go home and pass out or watch TV for three hours, tune out somehow.” What they’re trying to tune out from is their own thoughts and their own feelings. If you breathed and stay present, then you can sustain your energy. You can sustain your focus throughout the day without feeling the burden of your own mental data crunching.
Landing On Your Feet: The focus of attention means everything in terms of the quality of work that you can do and achieve.
Those are two big things there. The reason we’re so tired at the end of a workday is not because the work was particularly grueling or even mentally taking its toll on us because we had to think so hard, it’s because our thoughts drain the energy out of us because we weren’t in the moment.
When you’re not in the moment, that automatically means you’re not connected to your breath. If you’re caught in your head thinking about past and future, you can be guaranteed that you’re not going to be sensing your breath and your breath is how you stay connected to your fuel source in your body because your body is the fuel source for your energy. As you’re breathing, you’re constantly recycling that fuel source into your body.
You’re bringing more life into your body. When we’re just breathing in our normal habitual way and we’re not paying attention to it, we have enough breath to stay alive. We have breath for our organs to keep functioning, and for our minds to keep functioning somewhat throughout the day. When we consciously breathe, then we’re consciously connected to the fuel source, that is our body. That is creating the energy that we need to be able to move through any kind of situation and not get caught up in our head and losing touch with what’s actually occurring in the present moment.
That element of productivity is also very interesting because the more present you are, the less you’re trying to multitask. Do you want to speak to that a little bit?
We can’t multitask and anyone who tries to, I don’t think is doing it at any given moment. You can only focus on one thing at one time. That’s not to say that you can’t have multiple things occurring at any given time, but the quality of your focus can only be looking at one thing at one time. We tend to convince ourselves that we can multitask or that we need to multitask, and ultimately, we end up putting less quality focus into the things that we’re doing because we were trying to focus on too many things at once. Nothing ends up going as well as it could if we were to choose to stay connected to ourselves. Focus on the one thing that’s right in front of us. Know that there are other things happening simultaneously that are going to require our focus but choosing where you are placing your focus of attention. For most people, they’re not choosing where to put their focus of attention. They’re bouncing back and forth between things, but the focus of attention means everything in terms of the quality of work that you can do and the productivity that you can achieve.
It sounds like you’ve got this idea that you’re turning into a book about landing on your feet from someone who can’t even feel his is the working title.
That was a catchy title that I thought it would be good for the podcast. My working title right now for the book, and this may change, is Why Not Me? which is like the antidote to the “Why me?” mentality. That’s our biggest problem. The biggest challenge that people face is having this underlying sense of why me? Why do I have to go through this? Why is it me who has to go through divorce? Why is it me who has to go through a job loss? Why is it me who has to deal with this god damn spreadsheet? All of the things that we, “Why me?” about all day every day, it’s, “Why not me?” puts it in perspective. As many times as I asked the question, why me following my paralysis, the only answer I ever got was why not me? Why shouldn’t it be me who goes through paralysis?
There are different forms of deep suffering that are occurring around the world. There are seven billion forms of suffering going on. Why shouldn’t I go through this particular form? There’s no reason why. Buddha said, “Life is suffering,” but it didn’t end there. You said that life is suffering and it’s that suffering that can serve as the catalyst for freedom. You have to first embrace the suffering before experiencing the freedom. The freedom that we are seeking is on the other side of the suffering.
[bctt tweet=”Your thoughts are not real.” username=”John_Livesay”]
Most people feel like if I can avoid the suffering, then I’ll feel free. You’re saying and so is Buddha, that you’ve personally had to embrace the suffering, figure out what you can and can’t do and make the best of that situation and that’s how you land on your feet.
People are constantly trying to avoid suffering and I’ll include myself. I’m oftentimes totally trying to avoid suffering. Then I realized, “I’m already suffering, but I might as well just embrace it.” There’s nothing to avoid. It’s just a matter of welcoming the experience because once you welcome the experience, once you truly do that, it neutralizes the energy of the situation. You’re no longer in a state of judgment where it’s wrong or right or good or bad that you’re experiencing what you’re experiencing. There is no longer an attachment to a label about the experience. It’s just the experience is what it is.
Do you have any last thoughts about how we can land on our feet, embrace disruption, whether it’s happened to us or hasn’t happened yet?
Trust your process, connect to your breath, connect to your body, connect to your energy source. Get out of your head not by thinking other thoughts or trying to think other thoughts but get out of your head by getting into your body, into your energy source because it is inside. They say the power is within. It truly is within. It’s not within our thoughts, it’s within our physical body and our energetic resources that we have available to us.
Get out of your head by getting into your body. So many of us think the answer’s in our head, “If I can just think about this enough, I’ll come up with an answer,” and that’s probably not where it is.
That’s trying to find an easy way out. When you’re trying to find this logical answer. It’s just like, “What’s the easy way out? How can I just get out of this situation?” You can’t get out of the situation. You have to go through the situation as opposed to get out of the situation. Otherwise, the situation will just keep repeating itself in new ways.
Landing On Your Feet: A lot of people compare themselves to an idea of how other people are doing.
Sam, how can people follow you? Give us your twitter handle, your website, all that good stuff.
My Twitter handle is @ZWTraining. Instagram is @ZenWarriorTraining as is Facebook. I do have a few spots open for private clients who are very committed to working through their own disruptive experience in their lives and using the challenge as a catalyst for growth into their next level of potential. They can contact me and apply through ZenWarriorTraining.com.
I was fortunate enough to get accepted and it changed my life. I can’t recommend that enough. Thanks again, Sam.
It’s been a pleasure, John.
Important Links
- Sam Morris
- Sam’s other episode – Sam Morris’ previous episode
- @ZWTraining – Twitter
- @ZenWarriorTraining – Instagram
- Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course
Wanna Host Your Own Podcast?
Click here to see how my friends at Podetize can help
Purchase John’s new book
John Livesay, The Pitch Whisperer
Share The Show
Did you enjoy the show? I’d love it if you subscribed today and left us a 5-star review!
- Click this link
- Click on the ‘Subscribe’ button below the artwork
- Go to the ‘Ratings and Reviews’ section
- Click on ‘Write a Review’
Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share!
Join The Successful Pitch community today:
- JohnLivesay.com
- John Livesay Facebook
- John Livesay Twitter
- John Livesay LinkedIn
- John Livesay YouTube