Michael: Hello everyone and welcome to HaBO Village podcast. I'm Michael Redman.
Kathryn: And I'm Kathryn Redman.
Michael: And this podcast is about helping small business leaders like you grow Passion and Provision companies that are full of profit, purpose, and legacy. We do that by thinking about all the different things you need to. We talk about the fundamentals, we talk about all the different aspects you need in running a business, the mental game, the physical game, all those kind of different games. It's awesome.
Kathryn: It's just a big game.
Michael: It's just a big game.
Kathryn: Business thing.
Michael: It is. It's good, it keeps us busy. Today we're going to continue our theme on what happens as a leader when you get distracted? One of the biggest complaints we see and hear about from leaders is how do I keep focused? When we're asking them the question, how do you grow your company to the next level and how do you deal with the day-to-day operations of the business? What are the biggest challenges you face?
Kathryn: What stops you from moving forward?
Michael: And one of the big ones, it's not the only one, but one of the big ones is this idea of, it has to do with something about getting stuff done. So it's like, am I working on the right things? How do I know if I'm working on the right things? How do I stay focused and keep moving forward? Well, if you don't know if you're working on the right things or not, that's a little hard, because when it gets really hard or it takes a long time to get results, you get stuck because you're like, "Am I really doing the right thing? Am I digging on the right place?"
Michael: I think about those old movies where there was a drought, they were digging for wells or something like that, and there's somebody out with a divining rod, and it's like, we could dig all day long, but it seems futile if we're not digging in the right place.
Kathryn: It would.
Michael: And you're looking for something that's going to give you hope that you're digging in the right place, that you're going to build a business, you're going to grow a business, and you're going to grow to seven figures, eight figures and beyond and you try and build a plan, right?
Kathryn: Yep, yep, yep.
Michael: This isn't easy. We've talked about this, right?
Kathryn: Not easy, but worth it.
Michael: It is worth it?
Kathryn: Most days.
Michael: Really?
Kathryn: I mean, I do have my days when I wonder. I mean, it'd be a lie to not say there's days where I get ugh, but occasionally.
Michael: Why is it worth it to you?
Kathryn: There are so many reasons.
Michael: Moment of counseling here, folks.
Kathryn: I know. Why is it? Try it out. I'm going to tell you what makes me not want to on days.
Michael: Okay.
Kathryn: And then I'll tell you why it's worth it.
Michael: Fair.
Kathryn: So what makes me not want to on days is it sometimes just feels so risky to be the one responsible for the money, right? So the idea of actually going somewhere and getting a paycheck on days and not having to be the one that self-generates said paycheck sounds just epically delightful on the harder days.
Michael: Especially when it comes to taking care of other people's paychecks too.
Kathryn: Yes, especially that. But after 17, going on 18 years of doing this, as scary as it sometimes can be, the freedom, the ability to do the things we want to do with the customers that we want to do them with, and to be allowed to define the way we want to do business, those things are really, really worth it. So I really love that, and I have the privilege of working with you, which just makes, it makes me not have to wonder what you did at the end of the day.
Michael: Right. Men, it saves on so much talking at the end of the day because you don't have to explain anything. You never have to answer the question, what did you do today?
Kathryn: Yes. The standing joke at our house is when Michael comes home a little bit after me or vice versa, it's, "Hi honey. How was your day?" We know how your day was because we've been together all day. But you just want to be normal.
Michael: By the way, for anybody who thinks we're together together all day long, our offices are like 40 feet apart.
Kathryn: It's true.
Michael: We have lots of tasks that don't involve us working together, plus we have a staff. So we have staff and clients and a rather busy office at times. So we're not always just like next to each other, but we do a lot of work together.
Kathryn: We do.
Michael: And we enjoy it. So let's get on with this. We talk about, obviously talking about why it's worth it, why it's worth it to you. Let's talk about this whole idea of how we're going to dig deeper into what are the... So here's what we want to do, folks. We're going to look at the different areas of the six areas of business that we have in the village. We've talked about them on this podcast, one of them being leadership.
Michael: What we're going to do is we're going to look at each one over a period of time and feaming in, I think, because I think it'd be really valuable because this is one of those pain points that you can address from multiple perspectives, and actually it's not like, "Oh, here's multiple choice, just pick one." You actually need to address this issue from all your different areas, because as you tune up your business in all the six different areas, we talked about this last week in the podcast, that you start to get to a place where it actually decreases the friction moving forward. It greases the rails, if you will, the more you have competence, the more you have all the areas in place and then the more you have competence moving forward.
Michael: So does that sound fair to you, Kathryn?
Kathryn: I think so.
Michael: Okay.
Kathryn: I think I understood what you meant.
Michael: Well.
Kathryn: Are you saying that we need to make sure that we're talking about all six areas and gaining competence in all of them?
Michael: Gaining competence.
Kathryn: Yes.
Michael: And making sure that we're taking care of the things that need to be taken care of.
Kathryn: Yes.
Michael: Because we talked about last week about having all six areas in your business is one of the ways to stay focused, making sure you have the big rocks on your plate, and then in each one of those understand the strategies, because it's kind of like the big rocks in each one of those areas.
Michael: So as we talk this week on leadership, we're going to talk about... Okay, so what are the big rocks in leadership? How am I going to be a better leader, especially when it comes to how do I stay focused? How do I stay focused and know I'm focusing on the right things? Because as a leader, the stronger of a leader I am, more mature of a leader I am, be able to focus and handle situations. We're in a transition right now in our company in our leadership where, and by the way, research says we go through...
Kathryn: Seven to 10.
Michael: Seven to 10. I was going to say six to nine, seven to 10 transitions as adults in our leadership, where the way we've done things has accomplished everything we needed to get us where we are, but the next season is going to actually require us to grow new skills and to develop and strengthen ourselves as a leader. Not just get better at what we're doing, but actually add new skills. So we're reacting and responding to the leadership challenges in a new way. That's what transition is about, and if you do not make it through a transition, if you do not acquire those skills, it's like climbing up a hill, and you just keep putting one foot in front of the other, and then all of a sudden you come to a place where you actually have to climb up some rocks, and you have to have some skills to get there to get to the next ledge where you can keep walking again.
Michael: It requires that climbing skills, it requires new tools, and if you do not figure out how to get over that ledge by acquiring the new tools, you're kind of stuck in that area you're in. You could walk around again all you want, but until you acquire the skills, you're not going to get further up the mountain. You're not going to get closer towards the peak of your potential and your company's potential. That's part of what helps you lead, move towards having a Passion and Provision company. That sound fair?
Kathryn: Sounds fair to me.
Michael: So as we're talking about that, we want to talk about some things, some tools, and pieces and parts that you need to be learning or have under your belt that are going to help you make the transitions, and are you going to continue to grow. In this area of leadership there's kind of like three things that cause growth that we talk about in training, adult training, instructional design and all that, and is you actually need to know stuff, you need to do stuff, and you need to adjust your emotions so they come in alignment with those things so your emotions don't sabotage you. We call that the affective area. That's a big fancy word. The affective is how we approach it. There's actually studies that have developed like six or seven levels of the affective, of how we grow through these situations.
Michael: The very first one is we pay attention. We realize that it is something that we need to do and we pay attention, and it moves all the way up to the point where we've already acquired new values, added to our value stack. We're not saying you go from totally changing your values, going from one person to another, but you're adding core key values that are valuable to the journey you're on, and then we sit there and we go, okay. So I'm going to adopt those, and then I'm going to adopt them and they're going to become so ingrained in me at the very top of that list that I'm teaching people these values, I'm espousing these values, not as these are the values I was taught, but these are the values I have. These are my values. I think they're really important. I have experienced them, so I believe they're important in a whole lot of levels, I'm going to give it to you.
Michael: So we need to cover those three areas in leadership inner game, right? It's a lot of theory.
Kathryn: It's a lot of theory. So you just used a phrase that probably we need to clarify and make sure that people understand.
Michael: Okay.
Kathryn: You used a lot of phrases, but we're going to start with that last one. So you just said the inner game.
Michael: Yes.
Kathryn: So one of the things that is really, really obvious and yet isn't always something that we remember.
Michael: You mean it hides in plain sight.
Kathryn: It hides in plain sight. Is that for every human being, but especially if we're talking about leadership, there is an inner game and an outer game. The outer game is what people see. It's your relationships, your tasks, how you get stuff done, how you interact with people, what can be seen, right?
Michael: Okay.
Kathryn: The inner game is everything under the surface that drives the outer game. The inner game, if you think of it like an iceberg, the inner game, there's so much more under the surface than what's above the water. So becoming self-aware, becoming someone who is seeking out understanding of who you are, how you function, why you think the way you do, all that kind of stuff, that's what it means to be working on your inner game.
Michael: Yep, absolutely. The inner game is this part of this stuff. Okay, let's jump into some of that introduction and philosophies out of the way, the theory. Let's talk about these three areas and what are some things you can do. So first of all, if you're going to grow in your inner game you've got to be more aware of the language, the vocabulary, and the stuff that we talk about in leadership development. That's that first place of going. You've got to learn the language. Learn more about it. Educate yourself about it. So often in our world we think that if we read a few books, first of all, we don't read much, so it's helpful. Read about leadership development, read some things that are really, really important about the certain skills that are involved in leadership development. What does it take to be a good leader, the language that's used in leadership development. Really encourage you to be a part of that and read about it, and study about it, and know about it. With us, we've been fortunate to study leadership development since we were pretty young.
Michael: I was fortunate to grow up in Boy Scouts, and Boy Scouts taught us a lot about leadership from the very beginning. So at 10, 12 years old I'm learning basic leadership skills that are going to, I'm going to build on the foundation over time. I know that when we were in college we had some phenomenal mentors, Bob [Sprague 00:11:12] being one of them, who taught us a tremendous amount about leadership skills and the inner and outer game.
Kathryn: Yep, for sure.
Michael: So you want to read about it, but one of the things that happens is over time, I could read a book 10 years ago and I could read a phenomenal book, but time goes away. We forget things, we get busy. So I think it's real important to read and study, and not only becoming aware of the new theories, and principles, and ideas, the new language, but continue to remind yourself about it.
Kathryn: Yeah. I think there was a study out that said that the average adult reads less than five books a year. Is that, I'm remembering it right?
Michael: Yeah. I think actually the average adult I think reads five books in their lifetime.
Kathryn: Oh, dear.
Michael: It's awful. Then when you have people that are studied and stuff like that, they might read five books a year, but the average adult reads, doesn't read. I mean, they're not books, let's talk about books. They read signs, and they read in the grocery store, and they read the tabloids or social media.
Kathryn: Yeah.
Michael: But I don't count that as reading reading.
Kathryn: So there are really, really great leadership books out there.
Michael: What do you think a couple or three of them would be worth telling people about?
Kathryn: So probably a classic is The 7 Habits of Highly Effective Leaders, right? Stephen Covey.
Michael: Yeah, absolutely.
Kathryn: I mean, just phenomenal book.
Michael: This book has been around a long time. This is not an old book.
Kathryn: It's not an old book, no, but it's a classic.
Michael: It's a classic. It's a really ... Sometimes people go, "Well, in today's world it's not current enough." So that's just old, that's old stuff, no.
Kathryn: Principles is principles is principles.
Michael: Yeah. It's a phenomenal book. If you haven't read it, you need to read it.
Kathryn: You need to read it. Yeah, you need to get it done.
Michael: Yeah, you'd love to see it.
Kathryn: You'd love to see when it happens. Another book that, if you don't mind sort of the angle in the faith perspective, there's a very, very well-known book called The Making of a Leader by Bobby Clinton. Studied like 3,000 leaders, and it's-
Michael: More academic.
Kathryn: More academic. It's a little harder to get through, but again, really, really great principles of leadership, and principles of how leaders develop and grow. Even some of the language we talk about, the transitions, and how you move through transitions, and what a transition is about. Those things are all from Bobby Clinton's work.
Michael: Yeah, phenomenal leadership. He's a Christian, and whether you're a Christian or not, he's referenced by a lot of people on the research that he did, and over 30 years, I think he said, of research. It's just phenomenal stuff. Really good stuff. He's one of those people that we've studied, and our friend, good friend and leadership coach Terry Walling, who's been on this podcast, was a student of Bobby's and studied under Bobby's, and then kind of took on the legacy of taking on a lot more of Bobby's work and developing it even further. So that's a really good one. Okay, a third one.
Kathryn: So one of the really key areas that is important to grasp if you're going to be a good leader is emotional intelligence. So there's a lot of work that's been done on that, but one of the ones that's referenced a lot is called Emotional Intelligence 2.0 by-
Michael: Really easily accessible.
Kathryn: Yeah, Travis Bradberry, I believe. So that's a really, really great book. Again, it's how do you go beyond just what's happening on the surface and understand how your emotions function, how other people's emotions function, so that you can interact in more and more healthy and productive ways, because it's amazing, even with seasoned leaders, it's amazing how many of us self-sabotage. Where something gets triggered and if we're not paying attention or we don't understand why, we can react really badly and behave really badly.
Michael: Yeah, we can.
Kathryn: Yeah, we can.
Michael: Yeah, we can.
Kathryn: I just did a few days ago. So it's really important that we are aware enough to be thinking about why is this happening right now, what is this emotion that I'm sensing and feeling? We said this on the last podcast, don't think that that's just something that women face, men, because by golly, you all have emotions. Sometimes you have a harder time articulating what they are, but part of emotional intelligence is beginning to identify so that you can then understand why you have the emotions you do, and what's happening, and what's triggering those, and then how to grow. So emotional intelligence is super, super critical for leaders.
Michael: A super common emotion for men is anger. Anger and frustration as opposed to sadness or anything else. We feel those things, but you'll see this more often with men because, especially when we were younger, we were taught to respond more often than not, don't cry, but if you get angry and frustrated, that's okay. So you see that in many ways. So we do self-sabotage. If we're going to start with knowledge we're going to build, there's a lot of great books on leadership, and we recommend more in the course and we've talked about more on this podcast, but today, I mean, those are three really good ones. Making of a Leader, The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, and Emotional Intelligence 2.0. Great stuff just to kind of like, if you're going to just continue to regularly educate yourself and casually read and those kind of things, really helpful.
Michael: So okay, we start with when we're growing, and transitioning, and training ourself, with start with a knowledge. We develop a vocabulary. We start working on that, then we have to learn skills. There are actually, what good does it do us if we read a bunch of books and we-
Kathryn: If you don't actually implement them.
Michael: Kind of espouse of all of them, and we can talk about the concepts and principles, the conciples.
Kathryn: The conciples.
Michael: My brain is working faster than my mouth.
Kathryn: The conciples and the princepts.
Michael: We move forward going, okay, I have to implement this stuff because I'm, again, I'm not going to get over that next transition if I just learn about the things that you're supposed to do in that transition. I've got to actually figure out how to do it, and they're not just read once, do, super easy, and done. We have to retrain ourselves in certain ways, train ourselves in new things to do and retrain ourselves of old habits and change them. So there's a couple of things that we recommend on that. One is you're going to have to learn these leadership skills. So for one, you're going to have to learn how to retrain yourself somewhat on how to think about stuff. You're going to have to control your thoughts. How do I retrain my thoughts on the way systems are supposed to happen.
Michael: Let's be more practical. When somebody on your staff blows up, or makes a mistake that costs you and your company money. How do you respond? Now, you may respond in a great way. It may be really mature, it may be great and everything else, but if you're like most of us, you hit moments where you're like, "What's your problem? Why did you do that?" The first time, okay, let's assume we're all magnanimous. The second time.
Kathryn: Depends how big the loss was.
Michael: Right. Here's one. I love this one. Our friends, one of our friends who has since passed away, Doug Hignell, has a company and had a guy selling in the commercial real estate area, and they lost the company. He made a mistake, the guy made a mistake, and lost the company $20,000. Now, we're not talking about a guy who is making $300,000. We're talking about somebody who is making probably less than six figures or close to just barely six figures, and they just cost the company 20 grand. Now, do you fire the guy? I mean, this was a dumb mistake, folks. And I actually heard about this story not from Doug, but from the guy who made the mistake. He told me this story because he was talking about how cool Doug was. What he did was he made this mistake and he really expected to be fired, it was that bad of a mistake. Doug sat down with him and talked him through it, and said, "Okay, what happened? How did this happen? What did you learn?" And he's like, his response, he chose to be gracious and kind and say, "Those things happen, mistakes happen. If I fired everybody for just always, for making mistakes every time, we wouldn't have anybody working here probably." He probably wouldn't be working there. They made it through it, and the guy kept his job, and he was telling us because he couldn't believe how gracious Doug was.
Michael: We can't all afford to keep somebody who makes a $20,000 mistake, it would be really amazingly challenging for us to keep somebody who made a $20,000 mistake for our company. Yet, how you respond to people making those kind of mistakes, ones that hurt, and how are you gracious, are you training. Did they make it because you didn't train them well enough? Did they make it because you didn't lead well enough, or did you hire people thinking, "Well, they're all adults, they should know better." And then they made a mistake on something that you're like, "You should've known, and you're out." Sometimes yeah, but a lot of times we don't think enough as leaders to go, what was my responsibility and should I have prepared you? So when these things happen and we find out about them, your immediate response, your thoughts and your emotions, will tell you a whole lot, even if you're good at controlling them and masking them, it will tell you, even if the rest of the world around you don't see them.
Michael: So you're going to retrain yourself on how you think about think, how do you think about situations, how you think about training, how you think about hiring. There's all these things you've got to retrain yourself on, what a leader is going to look like at the next level.
Kathryn: Yeah, I think of something really, really practical, is in the money arena, right? What does it take to retrain your thinking about how you spend your money, about how you access training and resources. We talk a lot around here, and Michael has to remind me on a regular basis that this is not just an expense, it's an investment, and there is a big difference in the mindset between investing in something and just having to pay for it. So even just small things like that, like how you orient your mind to think about what this cost is so that you can be positive about it, especially if it's in an area you need help, as opposed to this sort of resentment that you have to pay this money.
Michael: Yeah. There's a lot of things that you can flip that perspective on when you're doing it, and hopefully you're asking the question, am I spending this money, are we doing it because it's an investment? And you can get caught in the place where you resent things because you just look at them as an expense. You've taught me really well, and even more. I mean, we carry the values about having employees and taking care of them, but the idea of when you pass out paychecks, or if people have direct deposit, you're passing out your stubs.
Kathryn: Yes, I'm quite the same, you know, but.
Michael: But you're passing stuff out, and you say to them when you hand it out.
Kathryn: I say, "Thank you for the privilege of paying you."
Michael: And why did you start that?
Kathryn: Because I went through a season where things were really hard and I found myself beginning to resent having to pay folks, especially during the season where I wasn't able to cash our paychecks sometimes in order to cover theirs. So I realized that I was building up these just little slivers of just kind of resentment. So it was an active choice to train myself out of it and saying those words out loud over and over again helped train me out of that.
Michael: Yeah.
Kathryn: Where, you know what? It is a privilege, and I don't want to take them for granted, and I know they work hard. So to say that for me is to retrain my thinking. So yeah, it started and I just haven't ever stopped.
Michael: Resentment and bitterness are two slivers, little things that can sneak in, in our emotions and our minds, they can become infected, just like a sliver in our skin. It's such a small thing, if you've ever gotten a sliver of metal sliver, or a fiberglass sliver, literally it's difficult to see, and sometimes impossible to see with your eyes, but you're running your fingers over your skin, and you know because it hurts.
Kathryn: You're like, "Hey, there's that again."
Michael: It's there. I was reminded again because I was doing some repair work at the office, and I was messing with a fiberglass sink. All of a sudden I couldn't figure out why I had these two spots in my arm that just hurt under the skin, and I couldn't let it out. I just had to let it work its way out because I couldn't see it, but I had fiberglass.
Kathryn: Ouch.
Michael: And those things can build up. So you go to be careful. When you said slivers, that's what I was thinking because they add up, and you have to be careful with them. So you're developing new thought patterns, you're developing new ways of looking at information and assessing things, and your example of retraining yourself, and turning, and changing the way you looked at our employees and paying them, is a great example that leads into a couple of different things that we recommend. If you're going to start working on your skills, you're reading books, there's knowledge, that's really helpful, and you're starting to identify things. You need some activities that you're going to start doing, some things that aren't just read, but things you can actually do. So there are leadership exercises and training exercises that we recommend. There's actually two phases that we teach courses in that we learned from Terry Walling, and one of them involves an exercise where you're trying to figure out more of your contribution. Where are you, where is the direction? And you do a timeline exercise.
Michael: I have discovered that the timeline exercise is phenomenal for our lives. It's also phenomenal for the seasons that we had recently in our business, the last year or three years, or something like that. Especially when you get to three to five years, a lot of water is under the bridge in a company. So this timeline exercise is really powerful. Talk a little bit about the timeline exercise, Kathryn.
Kathryn: So the timeline exercise you're really looking at kind of sort of two or three different significant things. One is just what are the important events, whether they were great or whether they were painful.
Michael: Positive or negative.
Kathryn: Positive or negative. Typically if you're doing this, let's pretend you're doing this in a big piece of butcher paper with sticky notes, right?
Michael: Which is how we teach people.
Kathryn: That's how we teach people. So yellow sticky notes for all the stuff that's positive, and then we use pink sticky notes usually for things that are painful. The first thing you do is you just write all the sticky notes down and put them kind of in the order that they happened. Then the next part of it is really identifying okay, within that, what are themes that you see? What are the recurring lessons or the recurring themes that you begin to see that as you reflect kind of come up over, and over, and over again. Then the next step really is identifying the turning points, those are transitions, right? What significant events caused enough of a shift to where you would call that a turning point or a transition. So you kind of go through these exercises.
Kathryn: It does several things. One, there is so much power in perspective, in just looking back and remembering the different things that got you where you are. In doing that, really trying to sort of suss out the themes and what you've learned, and what that says about who you are, what that says about how you're shaped and molded, what it says about your best gifts and skills. So where you really saw yourself shine, and just were like, "Oh my gosh, this is what I was meant to do." And in the places where maybe it didn't go so well, or you lost a key client when you thought everything was fine, or whatever else. There's multiple things in business. So those types of things, and I would say I rarely would do a timeline where I would separate personal and professional, because I think there's too much weaving together and one impacts the other. So I would typically mishmash all of that stuff together, because that also just informs the flow of my life, right? So that's what we talk about when we do a timeline.
Michael: It's really powerful, folks, because you just have the opportunity to see the flow of things in your life, and how things have moved your life around. You have these inflection points where, when Kathryn and I got married, we lived in the Bay Area. That was a major inflection point because all of a sudden we're married, and we're starting a whole new season of life and everything else, but then within six months we had the opportunity for work and some other stuff to move to Colorado, from San Francisco, Bay Area. We started an incredible three and a half years cycle that had massive ups, great opportunities as a young married couple, lots of neat things happened, lots of really hard things happened, a few really hard things happened that were extremely pivotal in the way we view leadership, the way we viewed the responsibility of leadership, and ultimately what happens when bad leadership blows up and how it impacts everybody else, and it can actually impact other people around you for years to come. It has so much potential influence, potential energy. Then we ended up needing to move, sell our house and move Colorado and we moved back to California and moved back to Chico.
Michael: Okay, you have an inflection point of marriage, you have an inflection point of career wise moving from California, where we'd always been, or most of the time, and then moving towards Colorado. New people, new scenery, new everything, and then an inflection point again where we went back to Chico, and then another inflection point where I went back to college at 30 years old. That's a lot of stuff, and you go, that's just how we got there. It's more than how we got here. Each one of those has things that are valuable in it. So you look at this timeline exercise and you can start to see, if you apply that to different things that happened in your life, you can go, oh wow. What are the good things that came out of that? What are the hard things that came out of it? And for instance, we have known people who have had employees who have embezzled. The things that people say when they've been hurt that bad, somebody's betrayed them that bad.
Michael: When we say things to ourselves, or even out loud, I will never blah, blah, blah. I will never trust anybody again with that. I'm always going to do that now because I will never trust. I've seen those companies cap. One of them in our town capped and has been around for probably 35 years, and it is the same small little company. They've never been able to grow. I mean, they survive, but that's it. So you go, you don't want to do that for your company. If you want to grow this Passion and Provision company, you want to do that.
Michael: So that training exercise, and then there are some other exercises we teach in a more advanced course that are just ways of continuing to refine what is the best thing you should be doing in your company. What are the best tasks that you should be responsible for and what should you be saying no to. As a friend of ours wrote a book, Say Yes to No. You want to say no to way more things than you want to say yes to, so that you learn to pick the good things, then you want to pick the best things that you can do. So there's exercises that are going to help you work through that. So that's developing skills, and when you can learn to do that and repeatedly do that without trying hard, you know you've started to ingrain those skills into habits, really good habits.
Michael: Now, then there's your emotions. As we talk about those and kind of go from knowledge, to skills, to emotions, we talked about these values and beliefs we have, and we get to capitalize on the really good emotional habits and patterns that we have, the emotional reactions we have that we were taught as kids, we might have learned through seasons of our life, growing up, that we might have been sharpened by being a parent, or being a spouse, having great mentors. Those are great things, and we learned values that were really congruent to growing a Passion and Provision company and growing a successful company.
Michael: We also because we've been hurt at times, we developed wounds, and things that are emotional inside that cause us sometimes to consciously react, and a lot of times to unconsciously react. We do things over life and we forget that we didn't know if we could do anything. We didn't know how to heal over a situation, or instead of healing we kind of let it callus over, without dealing with the under arching problem, and when that happens, you come along with a bit of an emotional...
Kathryn: Baggage.
Michael: Yeah. I want to say deformity. When I keep thinking about my thumb, you would never know it if you were looking at me, but if you started seeing how I move my thumb around and everything, I don't have full mobility in my right thumb, and it's because I broke my arm really bad when I was a kid. They put it back together, it healed, there were some challenges. Then I got the car accident, I rebroke the same arm, and there was so much about my body that was beat up in that car accident, everything else, that nobody noticed that my thumb had been broken or sprained in a way and stuff, and it healed in a funny way. That happens. It's like we get used to that limp, and then we don't even think about it emotionally. Learning to heal through those things.
Kathryn: Is your thumb limping?
Michael: My thumb limps.
Kathryn: You just kind of switched body parts on me for a second there.
Michael: Some days, well yeah. Yeah.
Kathryn: But you do, you get used to it. It heals wrongly or it doesn't heal, and you just live with it, and when that happens with our emotions, then that impacts how we respond to other people, how we respond to situations, how we interact, how we think, and process, and view the world. So the more you can sort of sit back, take time, and learn about those kinds of things, what's happening with your emotions, why are you acting the way you're acting, why you're thinking the way you're thinking, so that you can retrain, those things become really, really crucial.
Michael: One of the things that we're going to say that we're going to recommend here is that's going to help all three of this areas, it is getting a leadership coach. We really, really, really believe in coaching. We are coached, we have a coach, we do coaching, and we're not full-time coaches, we add it into working with our clients and everything else, and we have realized the power in our own lives and in the lives of those we coach, how breakthroughs can happen, how patterns could be broken, how emotional things can be spot because we can't see them. A coach doesn't come along and say, "I see this, look at this." Blah, blah, blah. A coach comes along and helps walk through the process of really asking questions, and the way we coach and we were taught to coach is about 80% coaching and about 20% mentoring. Coaching is pulling out, mentoring is pouring in, because there's times when we just through a coaching process, we really don't know, and that's the point where we need somebody who is going to move in that mentor role, but when you invest in a good coach, when you spend money, it really is an investment in a good coach.
Michael: A leadership coach is going to help you, and what they're going to do is two things. They're going to help you actually acquire the knowledge. They're going to help you actually acquire skills. They're actually going to help you with the emotional stuff, and partner with you through much of that, and you need to be vulnerable and grow, but you've got to learn that those are the things in those three areas that are skills you need and are things that are holding you back.
Kathryn: Well, and a good coach is going to give you an action plan for walking through what is it that I do, what are the steps that I can take, what are the things I need to pay attention to, right? So when this happens, stop and ask yourself. Okay, let's pause and just think about that for a minute, right?
Michael: Yeah.
Kathryn: So the thing we say about coaching is we need to be coached because, I don't know about anybody else, but I need somebody smarter than I am to ask the questions I don't know to ask myself. The interesting thing, and I think this is true for good leaders, is most of the time, part of the reason coaching works and asking good questions works is because you already know the answer somewhere. You're just not asking the right questions to get to them. So somebody outside of you can help you identify by just asking you the right questions. I mean, that's just super, super powerful.
Michael: Yeah, incredibly powerful. So when you're working on your inner game, when we're trying as leaders to say things like, I work on all these different things, I have all these different projects that are coming at me, these different things I have to deal with, the different hats I have to wear. I'm trying to decide which one to focus on. When I'm working on my business and not just in my business, which is really hard to find time, and I have so little time to do it. What am I going to do, and then how can I have the confidence to invest in those things and stay with them over the long haul, believing that if you keep working in those areas, they actually do bear fruit, but it may not be quick fruit.
Michael: These three things of working on the leadership area and building out and knowing knowledge, and getting the experience, and developing those skills, and then retraining or adding to the core values and emotions that you have that help motivate you and don't trip you up. Because when you're sitting there working at your desk, and all of a sudden out of nowhere somebody calls and says, "Hey. So and so is on the phone." And you don't like that person, or you have a problem with them, or they hurt your feelings and they treated you like trash or whatever, and all of a sudden you have this emotional reaction. You think of them, you hear them, and you have this emotional reaction that sidetracks you. If nothing else, it's like, dang it. Why is that person taking so much of my mental energy? I shouldn't have to give it to them. How do I stop? Those type of things are things that we want you to be strengthened for and move in those directions, and learn the skills to stop those from happening or dramatically reduce those, but when they do happen, how do you handle them quickly and efficiently in a healthy way so that you can eject them without just pushing them away so that at some point they bubble up.
Kathryn: The emotion is not the person who is bugging you. You're not ejecting them, you're ejecting your emotion.
Michael: Sometimes you are. Sometimes you say no to that person and you say, "No, you're not around anymore." But yeah, the emotions are the ones we're talking about. Okay, that's a lot, but this is really kind of a deeper conversation about leadership development and how do we answer that question of how do I stay focused. How do I know what to pick and choose out of the so many things that I have, I only have so much time, what do I choose to work on, and then how do I have the confidence to lean in on it, and then how do I stay focused on it so that it yields the fruit I need?
Kathryn: Yeah. If you're running a company, you have to be working on leadership development for yourself, and it's going to be difficult for you to lead people or train other leaders if you're not growing and learning in leadership.
Michael: It's harder to get that stone moving from not investing in at all to investing in it, but once you get that momentum moving and you just keep it going, it really is a lot easier. You deal with some challenging things, but you know what? We're leaders. We get to look inside and we get to do the hard work, and part of the hard work is mastering our own selves and be good leaders of ourself.
Kathryn: Indeed.
Michael: So that's one more piece of building a Passion and Provision company, hopefully that was some really good practical stuff for you today. We've got some books, we've got a few exercises, we've got the idea of getting a coach, and really moving into that idea, the thought process of nothing else and warming yourself to the language and the concepts in leadership development, and that is radically going to help move your company forward, and it will give you more passion and more provision.
Kathryn: Which is a good gift.
Michael: Which is a great gift. We love it. So we want to just say thank you, and if this was at all helpful for you, would you do me a favor? If you're listening on Apple Podcasts, would you please hit subscribe? And if you're listening anywhere else, would you hit subscribe or whatever version of subscribe is on the different platforms, because so many different platforms are out there.
Kathryn: Join me.
Michael: We're just now on-
Kathryn: Follow me.
Michael: Spotify, and we just appreciate that. That helps other people know. Spread the word, share this with folks, and we would love your feedback. Any kind of comments, we love the occasional phone call into the office, even if we can't take the phone call, leaving a voicemail message. Some of you have done that, and I want to tell you, it's meant a lot to me to hear how what we're saying is positively impacting you and encouraging you to move forward, or a thought, an idea from the podcast or anything else. Thank you for your time, thank you for listening, and thank you for helping us spread the idea that building a Passion and Provision company is actually possible and that more people can do it. So for that, I'm Michael Redman.
Kathryn: I'm Kathryn Redman.
Michael: This is the HaBO Village podcast. Have a great day.
