Learn and Thrive by Listening Through Our Podcasts

I understand where the question comes from, it’s just that I think you and I have heard this so many times between masterminds and podcasts things and people submitting questions. It just makes me chuckle because, I get that people don’t get the math right on this, Dave. So why are we trying to hire Virtual Assistants? Well, we’re trying to find more freedom in our life, right? We’re to find freedom so that I as the business owner or the manager or the leader of the organization can free up some of my own time to grow, to grow the business, or maybe I’m just working so many stinking hours, I need help.

Therapy is very powerful, so that leads us to our topic and our question. This is Episode 132. So the question is, as an entrepreneur, I wanna be at my best. How do I go about finding a therapist for entrepreneurs? And Larry, I think this is not just for entrepreneurs, really. The question is really for everybody. And the other thing that I wanted to say before we get going is that I think I’ve made a mistake and never gone to therapy. I wish I would have, like early in my life. It’s like, why, because I know for many, many years I’ve needed it, but I haven’t gone to it. And that’s one of the things that I’ve recognized that I need some therapy on a couple of things in my life. But then you, you’ve been smart, a lot smarter than me in this, and recognized that for you to be at your very best, you needed some outside help.

Folks you’ve listened and you’ve hung with us through these three episodes. Maybe what you can do is review them, go back and listen again. But the ones that we’ve mentioned recently, maybe there’s one or two things that you can adopt. I mean, there’s a bunch of them like Larry said, maybe 25 things, but maybe just one or two things that you can adopt that will give you the ability to be more resilient, to be able to take that edge where you’re at that burnout point and bring it down, bring it down just a little bit.

It’s great to volunteer and that’s awesome. But what really helps reset your perspective? Because sometimes burnout can be caused by, we get a skewed perspective that’s all about us and it’s my issues, and it’s my problems. And your world starts becoming all around you as opposed to getting outside of yourself. And especially to people, working with people that are less fortunate than you.

If you’re experiencing mental exhaustion or emotional stress or you’re feeling physically exhausted, you could be experiencing burnout or the warning signs of it. And that leads to fatigue, feeling disconnected, feeling worn out. Burnout is really just a form of extreme and I’m gonna use this word intentionally chronic stress that shows up and can manifest itself in really lots of dysfunctional ways. I’m using those words intentionally because this is serious stuff.

I think it’s easy to terminate, to part ways to set someone free when they’re a jerk, when they don’t share the core values, they have punched a client or they’ve strangled a team member and they suck at their job. Those are easy to do in my book. But it is, I get that, you know, we try to be compassionate. We try to help people, we try to coach people up and then coach them out. We try to be humane. It is a little bit more difficult when you have somebody who’s really sweet, really kind, but they’re just falling short of expectations. You know, when it comes to their skills, that’s a little bit more challenging for some people.

Well, this is where it’s so important for team leaders to really be a leader. And some of the most effective, inspiring leaders that I can think of have been great at being the role model. They show how it is to be an active listener, right? They’re socially sensitive to the group that is vital for a team leader.

As far as psychological safety, we’re talking about creating an environment where team members, where everyone feels like they’re being pushed towards their optimal performance. And that means that everyone participates rather than we’re gonna make it safe so we’re gonna shut some ideas down. That’s not what we’re talking about here, we’re talking about creating an environment where all ideas can be brought to the table because that’s how innovation happens. That’s how creativity happens, how problem solving happens.

And so what is a confidential work climate survey? Well, the first key is that first word confidential. People oftentimes will not give you their honest opinion if they think it’s going to backfire on them, okay. If it’s going to get me in trouble, if I’m getting my hours cut or I’m going to be somehow damaged or manipulated because I share my ideas with you. And so if you have a culture where any of that stuff is going on, don’t expect that the first couple of surveys you do will be honest.

Let me say one thing before that is, you know, you guys might have heard this before, we have talked about it. It’s a brilliant exercise. And you know, Larry mentioned doing this when we feel overwhelmed, but really this needs to be a regular part of our weekly planning, our monthly planning. Because even if we have a team, us as entrepreneurs, we tend to want to do it ourselves. Some of you may suffer like I do sometimes from the hero syndrome. And so you think that only you can do it well, and it’s so easy for that to-do list to just grow and grow and grow. One of the things that reminds me of is what is Jim Collins saying, his amazing book Good to Great, his first line is “Good is the enemy of great”. And if we don’t do this exercise on a regular basis, if we don’t take a look at our to-do list appropriately, we are going to get stuck in doing the good and we won’t get to the great.

As businesses grow, we have to take on more responsibilities and you know, you and I were just talking to about somebody who’s in one of our programs and their businesses growing, and they’ve got to switch up roles and it’s outside of their skill set to actually not just interview, but manage someone who’s in their stable of team members. Yeah. So this is a really good question. This is why masterminds are so darn important. You know, one of the things is if you’re in a strong mastermind of say 88 or 10 or 15 other business owners, they can help you with this kind of stuff.

I was going to say there’s a mindset issue with this as well, because a lot of times when you’re doing the strategic thinking, the long-term thinking, thinking of new offers, and we’re going to give you some examples of that other than new offers, but you are not getting like that much of a dopamine hit. You’re not getting to where you’re checking something off on your list. When you’re acting as a tactician, as a team member, you’re, you’re in the, you’re down in the dirt, executing, getting stuff done. And sometimes that feels really good. Yeah. And when you’re more doing the strategic, it’s harder to feel like you’re getting stuff done.

Smarter, Faster, Better is an amazing book, but there’s a chapter in there that talks about, I think, managing and teams and all that. And he refers to a project that Google did many years ago. Now this book was written, the copyright is 2014. So those of you are listening to it today, Google has changed a lot, but there’s still, you know, obviously one of the most valuable companies or their alphabet is. So I think we can learn a lot from them, whether or not you agree with any politics, but this was in 2014. It was a very different time when this was written. And there Google’s research is done probably around in like 2010, 2011, but people don’t change. So I think that research is really, really valid.

The best contribution we can make to our communities is challenging ourselves and teammates toward personal growth and development. Now, for you guys who maybe not be familiar with the flash points, they have a title like that and then there’s about 130 words to get us to really just start thinking. It’s a flash, it’s a real quick moment in time, help you to journal, to get your thoughts, thinking about how you can improve your life or your team.

When we started answering these questions, they’re really more limiting beliefs when it comes to building a team and ultimately a business and these limiting beliefs are things that I had to get over. Larry’s had to get over and you’ve got to be able to get over these things as well. If you’re going to build a business, you know, if you haven’t heard, what I feel is the best, very best definition of a business. I’m going to tell you what it is right now. And that’s from Dan Lok and he’s an internet marketer. And he said, a business is a profitable enterprise that works either with or without you get that with or without you. The key thing is without you, because if you aren’t working towards that, if your business is going to collapse, when you’re gone, then you’re really not building a business.

VAs can help you to be accountable. You can’t really outsource your habits, but they can help you be accountable. So that’s like at the top level, here is accountability. All right. And then of course, now we’re going to go through the different habits. Now, the first habit we talked about last time was having a regular exercise routine and that’s really energy management. So one is going to be a exercise routine. So let’s think about what could they do to help you. Now, if you’re an accountable to a VA, of course, then you can know when you actually need to change things up.

We’re going to share with you some of these five Keystone habits that we think are really super important, but one way I think Dave just kind of described this is that a Keystone habit means that this is a central habit that’s going to affect or govern some of the other key habits. That’s what I want to make sure that we’re understand that we’re talking about the same thing here. And these are really important because when you develop these good Keystone habits, it’s going to affect all these other areas of your life. It’s like this chain reaction, this chain of events are going to happen, and that’s going to develop positive outcomes.

If you’re a entrepreneur, a leader, or a high achiever, and you’re looking for tidbits of inspiration and motivation that you can share with your team members, there’s tons of resources on there. Go take a look at Yoogozi.com. That link is in the show notes, of course, but we’d love for you to go there. But Dave we’re in this series talking about habits, what are habits? Why are habits important? And today we’re really gonna be talking about how to create lasting habits.

Habits are really just a sequence or a series of events where you recognize a cue, you create a good response and you receive some sort of reward for it. Right? I can think about martial arts training or I can think about time and then the military. Whether the cue, somebody goes to throw a punch. And they work on it enough, there were flexibly. You learn how to block and then respond. And I remember the first time, not the first time I remember being in the military and learning tactical shooting. One of the things that gets pounded in your head in the beginning is that slow is smooth and smooth is fast. When you get the brain trained to actually just respond reflexively, it frees up a lot of brain work that you have to do.

I would say Larry, and this is one of the things that does spill over into other areas as well. If you create, I shouldn’t say create, create a community is definitely good and you want to do that, but also make sure that you are in community. We’re built to be in community, the be in community around these different areas, if at all possible, at least the ones that you’re struggling in. So like Larry, you, me and a couple of guys, we are in our own little community where we support each other, spiritually, physically, mentally, everything, right where we meet every Wednesday night. And the last couple of this month, we haven’t met a couple of times just because of the craziness going on, but we went a whole year and we, I think we missed just one time, but we are committed going 2022 to continue to meet every week.