Facing uncertainty can be challenging – being a business owner facing uncertainty is tougher.
Red Direction helps you [fast track and] grow your business – authentically, pragmatically, and resiliently.
Starting the conversation:
How leaders respond to their mistakes fortifies or erodes trust within the organization.
Host: Jess Dewell
Guests: Paul Birkett, George Papadeas, Dominic Rufran
What You Will Hear:
People are not rational – emotion is part of being human.
The path we are one, we’ve chosen from each past action.
Communication, and buy in, for the goals your company has.
What we do now impacts what happens next.
Your response to external pressures is from past experience and skills practiced.
The way we show up – after hitting rock bottom.
Discipline is a skill to depend on when recovering from and working through mistakes.
You are responsible for holding the vision, even when you are feeling down or stumbling.
5 things to reflect on each week.
Everyone makes mistakes and experiences self doubt.
Be open, even vulnerable, where your head space is at.
What do you pull from past experience to fix a mistake or climb up from rock bottom.
Consistent reflection anchors the learnings we have from each bad and good experience.
Choose what to learn and then apply it to what comes next.
Past experiences point us in the direction to go forward.
It is BOLD to accept what is and choose to move forward.
Notable and Quotable:
Transcript
ANNOUNCER
Welcome, this is the BOLD Business Podcast. We want to thank our listener supporters who keep this podcast ad free. Find out more at reddirection.com/listenersupported. Your business has many directions it can travel. The one true direction of your company creates the journey for you to move toward a new exciting level. We call this the Red Direction. In today’s program, we delve into one idea. This idea is for you to apply to the opportunities and challenges you face. The idea will support you as you work on ever present situations, including how to stay competitive in a changing market, how to break through the business plateau, and how to anticipate the changing expectations of your stakeholders. This podcast will provoke ideas and will give you insights to be inspired. Jess Dewell is your guide Jess brings you a 20 year track record of Business Excellence with strategy and operations overlap. Your Path comes from consistently working from the public place, your unique True North. Now, here’s Jess.
Jess Dewell
Protected time to think, to dream to assess, to analyze, to evaluate is more important than ever before. It’s through that time that we have the ability to not only pause and take stock, but to make the choice of what the next step is right now. And that does not negate our long term vision just because the way we work has drastically changed. You are going to hear about the way we can learn from mistakes, tips to make sure that we’re staying active and continuing to move forward. And some starting points to use in your protected time. Each of the conversations that will be brought into this topic today are with leaders willing to get vulnerable. They’re willing to share what worked, what didn’t work. And most importantly, they’re allowing us in on their journey, a peek behind the curtain at what they were learning and how they learned it so that we can to. We’re going to start off with Paul Birkett. He is the CEO of automation finance. He brings 25 years of experience building data driven businesses in global markets.
Paul Birkett
People like to say that they’re rational. But we both know that people are not rational. They try to be rational. But at the end of the day, we’re human beings. And so anything we can use to try and take the emotion out of decisions is a good thing. And if there is data on something, you should use it. And that’s not to say, don’t go with your gut, but make sure that you’re as educated on decision as you can be before you make that decision.
Jess Dewell
Ah, this desire to be rational, and most often our head or heart or our gut will take over and then we rationalize it away. George Papadeas is the CEO of the Hoth, which is an SEO content creation platform. George’s contributions has allowed the company to create a system to support over 200 Thousand businesses, and his contributions have allowed the company to grow from $250,000 a month to $2.2 million in revenue per month. Let’s hear what he has to say about this too.
George Papadeas
A lot of times managers at every level when something goes wrong, and there’s a level of feedback to be given or a level of accountability, they avoid that conversation. Because one, it’s confrontational. And two, it’s because they think they might be too busy to have that conversation, in my mind, being too busy to give feedback and accountability to your future leaders of your organization. That’s how you effectively delegate and then grow your company.
Jess Dewell
Hmm, we all know it in times of high stress, do we actually do it? That would be the question. The path that we’re on and where we’re at right now comes from a combination of the skills, the actions and the way we think about what has happened in each moment up to right now. So when we have a North star when we have a vision that is so big, it transcends whatever individual or unique situation we find ourselves in, regardless of the chaos, regardless of the uncertainty, regardless of the things happening outside of our control, we can keep our eye on that vision. Dominic Rufran works with high net worth and successful families providing a comprehensive risk management plan. He is a former professional football player and his gain tremendous skill sets and disciplines that allowed him to achieve his dream of playing in the NFL.
Dominic Rufran
I know for sure my dream from playing the NFL, as is early as two years old and I literally remembering at such a young age doing push ups in my dad’s room telling him like hey, like that’s gonna be me one day, right? That’s gonna be it. You know, Troy Davis was my idol. I was watching him we do Monday Night Football. Just everything about the game of football just intrigued me so much and I just became obsessed with it. So such a young age. I haven’t really When I was three years old, and I was in preschool, and we had to take naps and be nap time, and the teachers would say, Tell everybody like time for nap time and I’m like antsy, I’m like, I just want to go outside and play football. I just want to go outside and play football. All the kids are sleeping. And the only way for them to get me to sleep is they had to bribe me saying, if you fall asleep, you can go outside and play football. And I had my football in my arm was falling asleep to it. So like I knew since a young age I wanted to play in the NFL.
Jess Dewell
All of that there’s an element that we’re going to talk about a little later in regards to discipline. George talks a little bit about processes that we need.
George Papadeas
I actually worked at Target, “Tarjay” as I like to say, in retail operations. for them. I ran logistics for a few stores in the St. Petersburg district, and I learned a lot from that. One, it really set me up for success when it came to The HOTH you’ll find at The Hoth a lot of our processes internally are very similar to those of target actually. So, thank you to Target for that one. The HOTH that allowed me to really open up my entrepreneurial spirit, if you will, and really go above and beyond what may be considered a better Practice to not only give our clients the best experience possible, but also help grow our team. So a lot of really cool things happened over the last couple years.
Jess Dewell
What can we draw on? Right? That’s what George is talking about where we’re at right now what can we draw on to overcome our problems and to realize the opportunities that we want from the experience that we’ve had so far, and sometimes it’s hard enough for us to know what that is let alone our teams. Now Paul breaks it down very well for us to consider.
Paul Birkett
It depends on the environment. So in a big corporate environment, my job is to mitigate You to get you to do what my goal is. That’s what at the start of the year you have a planning process and the planning process is get the sales guys to do thing one, thing two and three and three, your job is to figure out how you can get one, two and three on their list of objectives. If you can’t get on their list, the things not getting done to you better find a way to get it done. And ultimately, that’s what it is you have a scarce resource, and everyone has more objectives than they can ever achieve in a corporate session. How do you win share of hearts and minds to get them to do what you need to get your goals?
ANNOUNCER
You were listening to the ad free listener supported Bold Business Podcast. We will return to the show soon. Right now Jess is going to tell you about why we are ad free and listener supported.
Jess Dewell
I’d like to take a few minutes and tell you why we do not run ads on the bold business podcast. We’ve chosen to rely solely on you, our listeners for support. If you’re listening to this, you probably already know what I care about most. I care about the space between you and me, and you and your colleagues. And I care about the work that you do together and the impact that it makes for your business and for your community. The work I do comes from a deep curiosity about what makes businesses work. What makes Haifa winning teams, and what elements truly shape success. I’ve seen firsthand how information can help people make better decisions and change their results. Curating and presenting this information, though, is not easy. The vast amount of information out there, and the overwhelming amount of stuff that demands our attention and time, makes finding useful information, firsthand experience that is actually inspiring, that can help you with the big problems that you’re grappling with. It’s really hard. We do the due diligence for you. I am fortunate to have a great team to help me research and to share this information. One example is the preparation that it’s done for each program. We choose a question to explore, we look for people with the relevant information and experience. We do research for what the current trends are. And then we put it all together into a well produced program. And then we repeat, and then we repeat The production of the show notes and supporting information is also comprehensive. This shows in the positive response that we’ve received, people like to see our notable and quotables. They like to see the links that we have to the transcripts. And they like to have links and research to resources. And we bet I bet you do, too.
ANNOUNCER
So far, we’ve talked about how we put into the production of the Bold Business podcast. And why Jess feels it is so important to be ad free and listener supported. And now let’s return to the bold business podcast.
Jess Dewell
Yeah, how do you that is something that I know we all consider and we all think about on a regular basis, recognizing that everybody has their own agenda, even if they’re all bought into the team, even if they’re signing up and can’t wait to go with you wherever you lead them, recognizing and supporting them and what they want to do and what their objectives are, are as important as what having clarity around what the company’s objectives are, so that you can align the two together remove the obstacles that are needed. keep things moving forward.
Jess Dewell
So we get to step into a role more than ever before and many of us may hit some sort of a rock bottom here. I know I did twice. You have to check out the blog post for that. In the interim, though, listen to what Dominic says about unique leadership positions.
Dominic Rufran
I had a unique leadership position where everybody respect to me, but within the room in itself, the wide receiver room that I had so much pressure from another leader that was putting it on myself, that didn’t help me at all to hit my peak performance. I knew the things that I needed to do as a leader, but I necessarily weren’t going out there on the field because I had somebody else on my shoulder telling me like how terrible I was, wasn’t showing the attention was doing was just putting us down as a group who was just making it seem like we were be little than we were not humans. So we’d go out there on the field. We were so focused on pleasing Him, and therefore I wasn’t actually able to lead another group of people to help us accomplish the greater good of the goal.
Jess Dewell
Dominic was sharing about an external pressure, somebody’s speaking to him to his teammates impacting and influencing the way that the work was done and what was going on between their ears. When we are at the bottom when we are spiraling down. And when we are climbing back up or bouncing, whichever we choose to do in that moment, or whatever we can do in that moment. Just don’t forget that other people are watching you. And don’t forget just sitting down and being creative to get the deliverable done that you need to get done. You’re rolling up your sleeves and you’re digging in.
Dominic Rufran
In a leadership role, you’re not always going to be the top honcho or you’re not always going to be the person at the very, very top. You’re Sometimes in leadership, you are like the next person below etc. And for me when I was playing football, that’s theoretically what I was, I was a next person below, like the coaches etc. So when by the coach putting so much pressure on me and me trying to please Him, I was affected by not being able to lead everybody else by reflecting afterwards and I didn’t really realize this goal or realize this situation till afterwards, I was not the best leader that I possibly could have been, because I let somebody else get to me. And I told myself to this day, you know, the whole bounce back thing is I will never let another individual ever affect me like that ever again, to our effects the other people around me like I’m going to do me based off of my skills, expertise, and the experiences that I have going forward in life, but I’m never going to let another individual affect me to where it puts me at a lower level make me feel like I’m nothing or make me feel like I can’t do my job effectively.
Jess Dewell
Before we can do something about it, we have to understand the reasons behind it like the other person that you’re interacting with, in the meeting or the conversation or running into them. Somewhere around your house, maybe online somewhere, how do you ensure you’re connecting them to the larger company mission? How do you ensure you’re connecting them to that larger vision at all?
Paul Birkett
Knowing your customer, whether your customers, your spouse, or your kids, or the person you’re selling to, for the contractor who’s coming to work to build an extension on the back of your house, whatever it is, you better know something about them if you’re going to be selling to them, because we’re always selling.
Jess Dewell
And sometimes we look at that as a bad thing. However, if there’s a little bit of dissonance underneath that tension, it’s time to take a closer look, reflect a little more be willing to look a little deeper and see something we haven’t been able to see so far. That type of reflection comes down to being consistent in our actions, knowing what we can fall back on, maybe even more importantly, what discipline Do we have to keep moving forward in the face of craziness?
Dominic Rufran
The number one skill, and I think it is a tremendous skill that you need. Now when conquering business or you know, your dreams, etc, is discipline. If you don’t have discipline, you can’t accomplish anything. The individuals that do something one or two times and then fall off the bandwagon and then don’t continuously pursue it. Those are the ones that aren’t going to achieve their goals. But the ones that go day out, day in and day out every single day to chase and pursue a purpose or a passion are the ones who are going to accomplish something. And I remember days and days and days being by myself in the weight room, on the field, doing the things that other people weren’t doing to become the individual that deserved to play at that level and that stage and when I got to college things progressed in stuck with me to that same discipline and now what I do with business and everything else, I do Those same disciplines now progress just with different disciplines.
Jess Dewell
Sometimes our mistakes, they really almost halt things. They really throw a kink in what’s going on. George shares one of his
George Papadeas
When it comes down to a lot of mistakes that I’ve personally experienced growing leader is that when you delegate something to your team, and you have a certain expectation as to how it gets done, what you have to remember what you have to realize, what I had to learn is that folks aren’t going to do something exactly how you do it. And so that was massive thing I had to overcome, because I would make these tweaks here and there for the team members that I delegate something to and come to find out those tweaks didn’t need to be made. I was actually over managing these team members because they might have put their own little spin on the process, but the process was getting done and it was getting done in a very efficient manner.
Jess Dewell
How interesting, a clear set of expectations, an understanding of some communication that has occurred, and then letting people do it their way. What an interesting concept of a mistake. And by the way, we’ve all made it. I know I’ve made it. I was figuring it out as I went along. Now Paul, on the other hand, had some great experience and some very clear structures to work within.
Paul Birkett
I did four years of Procter and Gamble, and then I did 18 years of Pepsi. And at Pepsi, I lived all around the world. I worked on just about every business that that PepsiCo owns and ended up in the US in 2010. And so I worked with Pepsi for like, seven or eight years here in the US. The environment is very different. So within a corporate environment, you’ve got high performing people. They all have agendas. You’re objective is to make sure that their agenda aligns with your objectives, or at least doesn’t go across them in some way that stops you from getting to where you want to go. And so getting everyone on the same page at the beginning is very important to getting everybody to buy in.
Jess Dewell
Get everybody to buy in at the beginning.
Paul Birkett
And that was one thing that I was good at insofar as I would spend a lot of time making sure that everyone was agreeing to what the program was before executing anything. And the reason you do that is because when someone wants to start a run a solo mission or starts to deviate from the path that the group has agreed, you can go back to that original meeting and say, well just hold on a second. Didn’t we just spend an hour discussing that what we said was our objective was these three things. And we were going to do those three things. And now you’re trying to bring in this fourth thing or fifth thing. And so you can use that kind of alignment process to get people back on track.
Jess Dewell
Something that Paul talks about that is so important, it’s coalescing, bringing together all the different ideas so that all the work being done is done on the same projects at the same time guiding everybody on that mission, everybody on the journey toward that vision that True North or that North Star that you have for your company clear communication matters and being open and transparent matters.
George Papadeas
Vulnerability is a big one for me. that we show our team that level of vulnerability as well, because we’re going to expect that from them at some point when they become leaders or if they leave the organization to go somewhere else that that’s going to be expected of them as a manager or leader. vulnerability is a huge part of transparency. If you don’t have it, you’re going to be light years behind everyone else, in my opinion.
Jess Dewell
George’s spot on so many levels. And most of the time, these are the kind of mistakes that we’re making that everybody told us that we would make. And we didn’t believe them, because we thought we would just do a different than they did well. So there’s an idea of you’re listening to this podcast, you’re a part of the bold business podcast community, and you’re listening for a reason. I know, it’s fun. And I know it’s entertaining. And I know there’s real great tips and processes that are outlined here for you to grow the business and lead your business the way that you want at the same point in time, are you really learning it? Ooh, that gave me a little bit of a chill that tells me that maybe there’s more to do here, then be entertained and hear these great tips to actually do something with it before we can talk about doing something with those actions with our learning? Here’s another set of skills that Dominic shares that are important for being able to bounce back from mistakes.
Dominic Rufran
If I’m not empathetic? Why am I not empathetic? Am I not humble? Like why am I not humble? If you come to conclusion as a person, that your job or your expertise needs? those skills, then you have to do whatever you possibly can to find out how do I obtain these skills?
Jess Dewell
Yes. Are you willing to do what it takes?
Dominic Rufran
Obviously reading books is going to be a great way but then it comes back to the it’s not the word. It’s the who like, I think you have to be around those types of people to you can model those individuals call comes back to temperatures. A cliché quote, we hear all the time,” “You are a product, the five people you’re hanging out the most.” If I’m hanging around you, and I want to obtain your energy, your enthusiasm and I want to learn how to grow a business or be empathetic like yourself, like, I need to get around you because if my temperature for being empathetic is at 30 degrees, like I’m really cold, but you’re at 140 degrees, by me naturally being around you, you will heat my empathetic temperature up, and it’ll bring me up to a 70 because I am learning from you like I’m going through something and I see that you’re being empathetic to me, I’ll be able to learn from you naturally just by getting your vibrations and your skill set and feeling that energy. And then if I’m a great individual who wants to learn and progress and grow then I will go back to I took action by surrounding myself with you. Now I need to reflect, and I need to reflect in my own time will reflect, we need to be alone by ourselves, pen and paper with no distractions, no phone, no nothing and just sit there and be in our own thoughts with a pen and paper and write in journal, and just figure out who we are as a person. And by doing those things, I think we will learn those soft skills.
Jess Dewell
Let’s just be real sometimes, especially in times of stress, when we’re figuring out how do we pick up the pieces of whatever broke around us and keep on going. To actually really be able to see all the pieces that are around us, and maybe not just sweep them up and throw them away or sweep them up and put them in a pile, but actually see all of the pieces. And in that pause, decide what do we want to do with those pieces? In the business world, one of the things that I’m a big proponent of is the present retreat, the reflection that we can do ourselves as leaders, not only for us in our role that we’re in, but also for the companies that we lead present retreats are necessary. Here’s another mistake that I made recently, the first thing to go was a president retreat when times got tough, and I ended up with all these other tasks to do and how do you take on what your family needs, with what your business needs, with what your employees need with what you need in all of this stuff. And I let things that took up a lot of time go. I gave up my four hours of Present Retreat (TM) each week and I felt it after two weeks. It was very clear that that reflection time was incredibly important. And I had to figure out and prioritize had to put it back to keep my sanity. That particular slip up on my part, I let my discipline go came back and a bit me in the butt pretty big. It sent me back it set the company back because I wasn’t quite prepared for what showed up in each day because I hadn’t stopped. I hadn’t taken stock. Now we’re moving into the part of the program where we can talk about well, what can you do? What are the things you can do when you learn from your mistakes? How do you learn from your mistakes? Well, I’m going to start out and I’m going to talk about the concept of the present retreat. And one part of the present retreat that I do revolves around some sort of reflection, but also a smidge of always keeping that vision in mind, at North Star in mind in such a way that the questions that you ask you can start to be building the bridge, figuring out what the picture looks like whatever the right visual imagery is for you to move forward. This reflection and this assessment that holding up the mirror and taking a look at what really is happening, not the rose colored glasses version, the actual real reality of what’s going on around us. There are five things that you can think about the first the state of things, how does our organizational infrastructure hold up during times of rapid change and uncertainty? The second no the necessary things, what do we focus on? And how are we focusing on it? Number three, lean into your team. How much can I ask of them? Are they dealing with the same types of issues or even more difficult situations right now than I am? What does leaning in look like here? The fourth one, the strength of your sales pipeline and the current trends that are happening in your industry? What must you do to keep your pipeline healthy and fortified and flowing? How much do you have dapped to strengthen those relationships right now, and to speak to right now to continue to attract customers. And the fifth thing, it’s all about the opportunity. What must we do right now, even though we don’t want to, maybe it isn’t as important, but maybe it is, comes back to that discipline that we were hearing about earlier in the program. It’s really hard to do this by yourself, especially if you’ve just fallen down, especially if you’re feeling a little embarrassed or ashamed yet. Accountability always works better when somebody else can help hold you to it. George cheers on that.
George Papadeas
Peer accountability actually is the hardest part of all of this, in my opinion, something that we really just started working on just a few months ago, I can give high level accountability to my team members. My leaders can give high level accountability to their team members, but peer to peer we have a lot of trouble with because one we’re very close and so we’re all very friendly and happy. Do you have that hard conversation with your friends? And two is we’re all around each other 10 hours out of the day. And that’s the harder conversation to have. But how do we do that? It’s very easy. It’s our team members rely on us, we always go back to knowing that our team members rely on the actions of our leaders.
Jess Dewell
Oh yeah. When we don’t take action when we choose not to be accountable when we choose to be undisciplined, we stunt the growth of our business. That’s part of the story. Another part of the story Paul’s going to share, which is how each person with their own influences with their own agendas come together.
Paul Birkett
The first thing is to understand what are you good at. If you think of a Venn diagram, overlapping your skills, with the skills of the people that you’re working with, to try and find that fish where you can get the most amount of productivity in the least amount of time. Because the other thing is no one gets paid to go to meetings. You’ve got to be making, you’ve got to be making progress. And so given that meetings, if you don’t have any meetings and no planning, then it’s chaos. And if you spend your life planning, then nothing actually happens. So where’s that happy medium where you spend as little time as possible, but not less than necessary to work on a project. And get agreed of who is doing what, what is the playbook and how you’re going to execute?
Jess Dewell
A lot of that comes to your culture.
Dominic Rufran
Discipline is doing the hard things when you specifically don’t want to do them, right? Because you can wake up in the morning and know that you have to do certain things. But if you don’t do them, then it doesn’t really matter, right? Like, I know that I need to wake up and I need to meditate, I need to read I need to take a cold shower. But those are all necessary things that I don’t want to do, but I know that they’re going to get me to where I want to go. So when I was playing football, waking up at five o’clock in the morning, and hitting the weight room, driving my bike to the weight room when it was snowing outside in for the consequence of potentially slipping and falling and laying on my back and asking myself what am I doing here? That’s a real story right there was in I was in college, and we had a 5am workout and as freshman year and I was riding my bike in Laramie, Wyoming, which is negative 30 degrees probably at the time, and I was riding and I slipped in I fell off my bike, and I was in the snow. I just laid down my back for five minutes. And I contemplate I said, like, what are you doing with your life? Like, why are you here? Like you’re miserable. You hate this, like why? But somehow, someway, I got up, got back on my bike and pedaled and made it all the way to the weight room.
Jess Dewell
Fall down, get up, fall down, get up. How badly do you really want it? When it gets tough, keep going.
Dominic Rufran
And those are the little things that people don’t see behind the scenes, what takes discipline day in and day out to accomplish. And, you know, discipline, I think comes from having that purpose. Having that passion having a reason why, and eventually, over time, you just create really good habits for yourself that your body just pushes you through.
Jess Dewell
When our companies make mistakes when the individuals in the companies do something that could potentially derail offshoot, make us go backwards or be totally out off path off course to our true north. That’s something that we can solve. Here’s what George is sharing about that.
George Papadeas
That’s culture doc 101. And that’s something that our team members read on their first day during their on boarding is that we’re going to have very open and honest conversations here. And you have to be ready for them because it’s happening at every level. So George is getting his open and honest conversation from Mark, the CEO and the owner. I’m getting very open and honest conversations to my directors that report to me and it all trickles downwards. And so there are some times where we find where team members are more on the defensive side than the constructive side, I find sometimes I get defensive, I’m prone to that as well.
Jess Dewell
We’re all like that sometimes.
George Papadeas
I mean, it’s a human behavior sometimes that that we get put into. But at the same time, what we attribute it back to is to avoid that just listen, be an active listener. And part of my little leadership Manifesto, if you will, if I ever write it one day, is to be the best leader, you have to be the best listener. And I think a lot of those defense mechanisms that come up when you do get confronted, you can have those subside or kind of put them in the back of the room in your head if you just listen to what the other person has to say. Because when it comes to being a leader, when it comes to learning from mistakes, you have to be able to really piece everything together from the perspective of the other person. And if you’re not active listening, then what you’re doing in your head is you’re just trying to combat that person. You’re just putting an argument together without listening. And I find myself in that situation sometimes where I’m not really listening. I’m just trying to figure out what my comeback will be. And that gets everyone nowhere.
Jess Dewell
I know you’ve been there. I know I’ve been there. In fact, that concept of open communication, listening is not only underrated, he keeps coming up in the third season of this podcast The time is now the time is now to recognize the importance of the soft skills discipline, doing what others won’t do listening and really listening without thinking about what you’re going to say next.
Dominic Rufran
It’s funny that you bring this up because pressure has a very unique place in my heart because I love pressure but at the same time, pressure has destroyed me in certain situations. When I was a senior in college, I had so much pressure that I put on myself, because I wanted to play in the NFL. I was like, since the age of two, this is what I want to do. And now I’m in a place in my life where I’m have the centimeters, literally centimeters away from accomplishing everything. So every single game I knew was a resume that was going to get put on film, how I performed that day was going to essentially say if the coaches were going to want me or not to play at the next level, so I had that in my mind, but because of that, it just got so heavy and the burden got so hard that I actually performed at a lower level. You see, I still remember one game specifically, specifically. Now I was a team captain. I just gave a speech to the University of Wyoming, the football team, you know, got everybody hyped and excited. And then as we’re walking out the locker room, I was so nervous and had so much pressure that I just couldn’t like, I couldn’t really breathe. I couldn’t speak after that, like I could not perform even walking. So what I said to do to get that spit out of my stomach is I actually showed my finger down my throat To try to throw up to get rid of that feeling of just uncomfortability. And the feeling of feeling all that pressure. It didn’t necessarily help. But I just realized at the end of that game, and I saw my performance, the first three quarters of that game, I played so bad, like it was unbelievable how bad I played, I even got benched. That’s how bad I played. So it brought me back to a place where I wasn’t even close to the level of expertise that I was, but the fourth quarter came, and I just said, screw it, I’m just going to play I’m just going to have fun and I’m not going to put all this pressure on myself.
Jess Dewell
While I don’t hit rock bottom, often, I do spiral down and I do end up in a very low place. The thing is, I picked myself up and kept going. The stories that Paul that George, that Dominic are sharing here, the tips that go around that the things that I have been disciplined and practicing and sharing with you and falling back on are all the things I needed to recognize. The more experience we have will also change the way that we react and respond over time. Paul shares.
Paul Birkett
I think you’re right, you revert to your real self. It’s easy to keep up a facade when everything is going fine. But if you’re an argumentative, bad tempered person and things go against you, then that’s going to come out when you’re under pressure. And part of this comes with maturity. I remember when I was 25. I probably flew off the handle Now twice that age, it’s much harder to get me excited about something. Because look, at the end of the day. If you’ve surrounded yourself with good people, and something goes wrong, then something goes wrong. If you’ve been slipshod in your work, or if you’ve taken a shortcut, or if you’ve given someone to pass on something, because it was expedient, and it goes wrong, well, you only really got the guy in the mirror to blame because you kind of knew this could happen. And now it’s happened. And now you’re feeling bad about it? Well, let’s take some responsibility for our actions, because we will make mistakes. The question is, do you try and outsource that mistake or say it was someone else’s? Or do you accept that really, it’s your fault, and now you just don’t like the outcome?
ANNOUNCER
It’s time to take another brief break from our program earlier, Jess shared about what goes into each podcast and why it is so important to be ad free and listener supported. But why? Why should you consider becoming a supporting listener? Jess has that answer.
Jess Dewell
As a supporter, you receive full access to expanded show notes including formatted transcripts, links to all the resources, full uncut interviews with each guest, by the way, which also have their own transcripts and email notifications of new resources as they become available to you as a supporter. Supporters also receive exclusive access to a platform where you can ask your specific business questions to me. And you will receive a link to the bold business supporter podcast, which does not have a support call out any other content that we decided to publish in that channel as a value add, as well as access to carefully cultivated playlists that focus on key business and leadership topics. The BOLD Business Podcast is a resource that helps you and will remain free to you and to all. I do hope you find enough value in the podcast itself. And the additional exclusive benefits are worth it to become a supporter at a level that reflects its worth to you as an investment to your personal and your professional growth. The value you receive from our podcast is how we fund the necessary work and continue this work.
ANNOUNCER
And now let’s return to the BOLD Business Podcast for the rest of the show.
Jess Dewell
Personal Responsibility is the core of all learning.
George Papadeas
I confide in my team and I let them know exactly where my headspace is. It’s so important to tell your team that this is what I’m experiencing today. This is what I’m feeling I might not be able to give you my all or I might be reacting in certain way. Please don’t take it personal because this is what’s going on in my world. There’s so many things that that covers the vulnerabilities, the bigger part of it in my opinion, and it’s just showing them that I’m not a superhero. I’m still human as they are, and I’m not perfect. And so I’m going to tell you exactly where I’m at. Just so you don’t take things the wrong way. Just so you know. Know that I may need to take a step back for a couple hours burn a time out whatever that may be. And we do that at every level that mark the CEO talks to me about his issues and we try to solve them and I flow mine upwards to him I flow mine down to the team and we have to because we are moving so fast it’s just as it’s a it’s a necessity.
Jess Dewell
I’m reading one of john Maxwell’s books called leadership. One of the things he talks about in the very first chapter are cheetahs how fast they are. And what most people think of when they think of cheetahs is their speed. And that’s what makes them great hunters. JOHN Maxwell goes on to say it’s really the speed that plays a part. But what makes them great hunters is knowing exactly when to slow down, and being able to slow down the right amount without stopping. If we slow down that has an outcome if we keep on going full speed that has an outcome, knowing the timing, and which to choose in that time is a skill that comes with practice. If there’s a big mistake or an unintended consequence, we can show up to it without having to hit rock bottom without having it. shatter the world as we know it will take us by such surprise, we have no choice but to stop and look around eyes blinking.
Dominic Rufran
The biggest mistake that I have seen leaders rarely make is not having Any humility and not being humble. When you’re at the very top of the game and you’re a leader and you’re at the top of the food chain, you think that you are big honcho, that everything that you say that comes out of your mouth is the best thing that could become since sliced bread. And so when a project comes, your ideas are the only one that actually gets heard or that gets pushed out, to take execution on. A great leader needs to be have humility, where they are listening effectively to their team, where they’re listening to the ideas of other people, where they’re asking them questions about what do they think, taking in those ideas, really, really, really listening, and then putting that person in charge of the idea that they brought, not necessarily always having your idea, be the number one idea, but having somebody else in charge and coming up with the idea and executing it. That makes you a fantastic leader by allowing somebody to do that and not you being the one that’s always in charge of everything.
Paul Birkett
I don’t think I knew enough. To know if time would fix it or not. I ignored the signs for a couple of months. But even a couple of months is a long time to be ignoring a business when the business is on fire. And I mean on fire, like flames and smoke, not on fire, like doing fantastically well. So that was a crisis, a real crisis. And we got down to it was costing me about 70,000 a month to run the business. And I had less than 200,000 in the bank. So in two months, we were out of business. This is a very difficult business, because it’s highly regulated. It’s not a business, you can just suddenly shut down and suddenly start back up. Again. There’s a lot of planning and a lot of compliance work that needs to get done. So we got as close as you can get to running out of money.
Jess Dewell
Well, there’s a sticky situation Some of us have been in before and runway is everything. Cash Flow is everything. Being able to keep going is everything and being able to show up to that pressure and how to work with it and if stumbling happens, making ourselves back up and keep going is necessary to do that bounce back piece, that expanding our capability and our capacity for uncertainty. George shares about accidentally creating a little bit of uncertainty
George Papadeas
We had a high level piece of communication that was really meant for the leaders. It was a piece of communication that we needed to make sure stay tight within the leaders because if you go too far when it comes over communicating, tell team members the wrong thing. They start developing their own ideas, which is good sometimes when it comes to growing the business but it’s awful and other times when it comes to communication that doesn’t necessarily affect their department. I had made the mistake of sharing this piece of communication with have too many team members. And when that happened, the oh crap alarm started sounding when I had about 20 people outside of my office, trying to ask the same question a few different questions regarding this piece of communication.
Jess Dewell
Been there done that. Have you?
George Papadeas
And what that came down to in my learning from that was being open and transparent with the team is very important. We do that on a daily basis at the HOTH. But when it comes down to it, there’s sometimes information that different team members at certain levels really shouldn’t be privy to until there’s a solid action plan to accomplish whatever information that include or whatever problem that exists just because you want to make sure as a leader that your team can see you and interpret you as the person to look to move forward past whatever issues or problems you’re having. But really what I learned from that is, yeah, as a leader, you really have to watch what you say, because it could be something you might think is not a big deal, but to the team is a huge deal.
Jess Dewell
It’s true, saying what you think and talking to think with the wrong audience can create more problems than ever intended. Remember when Paul was talking about keeping the fake aid up that wall that when things are good, it’s easy to even if it’s crumbling a little bit to hold in place, and let it be? Well, once those crumbles start to become cracks which start to affect the foundation, it’s really hard to hide that So being able to hold up that mirror to be able to reflect on what has come before and to bring the right pieces of your past the right experiences that you’ve learned about or had directly to the table right now, to help you with the problem, you’re facing the mistake you are correcting, bouncing back from the bottom. Dominic brought a lot of tips and here’s another one for you.
Dominic Rufran
A lot of the times I think it’s also coming down to the not how but the who, I think when you don’t necessarily know the direction that you need to go at the time, you need to find somebody that has done it before. So if it is with sales, or how do I gain more business, or whatever the situation is, it’s who has done it before, and how do I gravitate and learn and cling on to them to get those same experiences so they can teach me how to do that.
Jess Dewell
When you’re reflecting as you go, when you’re taking that present retreat and asking the questions for the variation of the questions, new opportunities will present themselves that might be worth exploring, just like Paul is describing, and then to explore and explore some more.
Paul Birkett
And I started researching, researching because I’m a bit of a data nerd. Within three or four months, I bought my first mortgage so I actually had a manila envelope and in the manila envelope was a mortgage like when you go to buy a house if any of your listeners have bought homes, those documents Ever wonder what happens after you finish signing them. They ended up on my desk. I ended up buying his mortgage on a house where the borrower wasn’t paying, they lost their job was in southern Florida and Cape Coral. I ended up talking to the borrower. They had lost their job in the recession, they’d fallen behind on their mortgage and they couldn’t afford to pay. And see what happens is the bank which is a well known bank, they can say, Oh, hey, Jess, sorry to hear about that. Don’t worry about those missed payments, because if they say that to you, you’ll tell everyone down at your yoga class that XYZ bank you don’t make payments. And guess what happens? Everyone stops paying typically sell those loans to someone No one’s ever heard of someone like me. It doesn’t matter if I forget payments, because I only own one loan. So there’s no one else for them to tell. They just say Oh, some guy gave me a break. I thought this was great. This helps the homeowner so we say to the homeowner, Hey, you know what, all those payments you missed, forget about them. Don’t worry, just start paying again. So that was the problem solved.
Jess Dewell
Problem solved helping somebody out, changing the way things get done. Still following all the rules creating a way for a better outcome a desired outcome for all parties involved.
Paul Birkett
So I bought one and it was spectacular success. So then I bought 10 And that was another huge mistake because the 10 I bought, I got really, really lucky. And every one of the 10 worked out, I thought this business, I am so gifted, the universe has finally recognized my brilliance. Because all I need to do is buy these things, and they just turn into gold in my hand. It’s so easy. And so now I had done 11 loans, and I was able to talk to people about my track record. So I went out raising money. And I went to investors and I said, Look, this is your lucky day, you have just met the world’s leading authority in fixing mortgages. I know that two months ago, I was selling soda. But now I’m a mortgage banker look at my results. And I was able to raise quite a bit of money. Within a year I’d raise $20 million, and I went and bought 1100 loans.
Jess Dewell
The focus became on what was possible and not the process the focus became on figuring out how to scale and forgetting the roles that were necessary. To make the scaling happened.
Paul Birkett
And that’s when the business went on fire because managing 10 loans is not 10 times harder than managing one loans, but managing it housing loans is way, way, way harder than managing 10 or 20 or 100. It is an industrial scale business. And I was absolutely not set up for that. And not only that, at that time, around 2013, the economy start to take a little bit of a dip again, and all the people who were so keen to pay me the prior year, we’re now hiding from me, and I have 1100 of them. And I had a team that were, I’d hired them all from a bank, and they knew a little bit more than me, but that wasn’t saying too much, unfortunately. And so the team was the wrong team, and it was just a disaster. So I then went through kind of three years of brutal grinds to get those loans back on track, and we didn’t lose any money, thankfully, but it got very close to being a real bad real bad outcome.
Jess Dewell
You know, sometimes we have those close situations and we don’t even know that they were close situations until we have hindsight, Paul was in a place that not only did he have amazing success, he recognized when the water started to get warm and the water started to get hot, and that things must change. To ensure an outcome, he recognized that the achievement and what goes into achieving had to change from what got him his first 11 successes to be able to get the next set of successes and really, all of it repeatable achievement comes down to communication. George talks about the way work is done at the half.
George Papadeas
We’ve been talking about the honesty and accountability, that all fits into that we’ve experienced anything in everything you could ever think of in terms of internal issues, external issues, wins, losses, everything under the sun, when this really started, we came together as a leadership group. And we knew that there were some decisions that we had to make that were very quick and had to be communicated in a way that our team member state as calm as possible. And that was hard because it means specific. I mean, I’ll talk selfishly for a second. I’m thinking like, what the heck is going on with the world? Well, what am I supposed to do as a human? What am I supposed to do for my family.
Jess Dewell
Sometimes we do need to look at ourselves first, have you ever been on an airplane? Well, maybe not recently. But we have. And one of the first things they say is if there’s something that happens and those masks come out of the ceiling of the airplane, put your mask on first, and then help those around you. The same is true for us. We have to pause and recognize what do we got to do so that we can fully show up because it’s only when we can fully show up that we can make a difference for others. The expectations changed so fast that companies even that were planning still found themselves unless they were already remote, a little bit behind the curve when it came to the actual decision.
George Papadeas
The leaders got together, we figured out a plan very quickly. And we knew that we’re gonna have to shut down the office. And we took the social cues that we had. We found that the city of Tampa was shutting down city of St. Petersburg, we’re based in St. Petersburg, Florida, was about to shut down or there was about to be some legislation from the mayor’s office that was going to shut the city down. The NBA just canceled the season. And that’s just a social cue, or suspended the season, excuse me, not going to when it comes back, because I do need my sports. And then also the team member distractions that we had to listen to the team members personal issues, we had some team members that were super affected by this because one they had family and super affected areas. And two, we have team members that are prone to more health issues than maybe others. And so we knew we had to take action, we had to do it fast. We knew that we could do all of our jobs remote if need be. We prefer to be in the office just because we have a really cool office. It just promotes innovation and it holds us accountable to each other.
Jess Dewell
That extra stress that comes with the responsibility of those around you can be difficult sometimes. And recognizing that we’re not the only ones going through something hard can be difficult. when things aren’t unusual, yet. Two people could be having a bad day on the same day. Two people could be having. very difficult situations and part of their life at the same time, goes back to the skills being humble, being able to listen and being able to recognize that while we’re the center of our own universe, we are at the center of everybody’s universe. And that right there opens us up to be able to bounce instead of fall flat from the mistakes that we made, when we need to rally keep moving forward as an individual.
George Papadeas
When we as leaders make a mistake. And other people notice the team notices, we own it. And we tell everybody, they’re in front of the whole team as a group, when we have town halls or on an individual basis, we own up to our mistakes. We’re accountable for them. Because if we don’t show our accountability, how can we expect our team to be accountable in those situations, and the best part of all that is we get to share the learnings as well. And so when I learn from something, when I’m making a mistake with my team, which happens on a daily basis, let’s be real, I make sure I tell them exactly what I learned and hopefully not have what I believe it does, it trickles down. And so they have now learned something from my mistake. There’s such a profound effect that leaders can have on their team when it comes to sharing the learnings from their mistakes or sharing the mistakes that were made.
Jess Dewell
In the end, our ability to go from landing at the rock bottom and staying there to beginning to bounce a little to bouncing high and maybe even like me that I mentioned earlier, bounced them and climb some comes from what’s important to us and what we prioritize our personal values plays such a large role. See, anything is possible anytime, even amidst chaos and uncertainty, even amidst big huge mistakes. When I bring my values, even if I’m grumpy, even if I’m having a hard time, even if I’m a little embarrassed, and I’m recovering from a mistake, those values guide my way. And the vision of the company, that North Star is going to be what allows you to meet me with your values and whatever you’re dealing with and whatever you’re facing and How you choose to show up to the situation moving in the same direction. Think about it like bumpers on a bowling alley lane, right? We put them in when kids play so the kids don’t get gutter balls. And those balls can make it almost all the way down to the pins, if not all the way down to the pins. One of the things that I find fascinating is that we think that just because we’re adults, or we’re of age of adults, whether we are not, we don’t need those anymore. Well guess what? In a company, you are the bumper. Hi, I’m the bumper, the leadership team, who’s setting the strategy where that True North is and who’s holding the vision. Those are the bumpers on the bowling lane so that there are no gutter balls. Really that bowling lane, right we want to get to the goal, knock down the pins at the end. Those bumpers are a container. They are the constraints that we face. They are the direction with which we generally want to go or we think we want to go right now because that’s what we have put out into some sort Have a plan. And regardless of the mistakes along the way, regardless of the bumps, regardless of the setbacks, being able to guide everybody in that direction toward the pins at the end of that bowling lane, that’s where we can find our resourcefulness, those constraints automatically get rid of things that don’t help us fix a mistake or change course or recover or bounce. So let’s get the things that can’t help us right now out some pretty interesting concept that it can be very powerful to have some things be out the right things be out, the unnecessary things be out because in times of uncertainty when we really need to be as present as possible, and we need our wits about us more than any other time. We can show up. We have a process. We have something that we have been practicing. It helps us make fewer mistakes, the more that we practice it.
Paul Birkett
There’s one great guidepost the future, and that’s the past. So if you’re talking to somebody, and you’re asking them the questions that I did not ask, what should have asked, how many non performing mortgages? Did you return to performing status last month? And if they can give you an answer that has a number in a like, seven or three? If the answer is, well, it’s very important that you understand that when you’re working with a borrower, and you’re right, if the alarm bells are not ringing, they should be because this person is as we would say, in Ireland, spoofing. They’re talking blah, blah, but they’re, they haven’t actually done it. … And what happened was the team that were there by cold an organ rejection, because they just were not workers. They were mid level people from a bank, who had been hiding for 10 years hiding in a bank is like avoiding work, doing a little bit, asking a good question at a meeting but not actually doing any actual things. That’s what they been doing. And so very quickly, it became clear that they’d been talking about doing work but not actually doing the work. They just found reasons that they didn’t want to be there. And within three months, it became clear that they’d actually been doing Almost no work at all for the previous three months. So it’s now six months into this big pool.
Jess Dewell
Our True North our values play such a big part here. Paul’s alluding to that he’s recognizing that there’s the values. And then there’s the values applied to the way that work gets done. It’s always going to take longer than we want, because hindsight is 2020. It’s the journey and the way that we show up to those problems, which will determine how we face them and what the repercussions of those are to our right now and to our short term future within our companies. Being in the middle of a problem and having pressure from that problem and really feeling that may compound the overall experience Paul goes on.
Paul Birkett
And I’ve investors asking me every month for where’s the money is supposed to be like $100,000 a month coming in, and you’ve spent 3000 Where’s the other $97,000. So it’s not like you’re dealing with small sums of money. It’s serious sums of money. And so to keep the investors as calm as you can keep them because they then start worrying. Well, if it’s out by 97%, what else is going well, I get out there and late summer, and for August, September and October, we worked 20 hours a day, some days, seven days a week. I remember we went bowling once and we went to a bar to watch one of the big boxing matches once. So we just worked for 90 days without stopping the end of us just into in October. In October, the first I moved or I think was October the first we moved back to Manhattan, rented another U-Haul truck, loaded it up with all the stuff shut down the office in Ohio.
Jess Dewell
It’s hard to remember to take time. And it makes sense that the time goes by so fast, and all the problems are being addressed. And there’s already momentum that it’s hard to switch gears. But the sweetness and the success of being able to get to the end of a problem, to start climbing up and seeing what’s next. makes up for the short period of time in the grand scheme of things it takes to take stock of where things are at, to decide what’s going to be done, and to start taking action to make the change that you want to see.
Paul Birkett
And we started working in the two bedroom apartment, my business partner in one bedroom in the other bedroom. And a year later, we had seven people. So people would get to work in the morning, take off their shoes, because the people downstairs are complaining about the clip clop clip clop upstairs all day. And so when you walk into an apartment you expect to see even in New York apartment, they’re pretty small. You expect to see like a little sofa, maybe a coffee table a TV? No, no, no, no, we don’t have any of that. We’ve got IKEA desks all around the place and a daisy chain of extension cords every morning we’d unplug the oven, because that was one ring you could plug in extension into and then plug in seven laptop seven monitors along the desks.
Jess Dewell
Solving a problem at an organizational level has similarities to solving problems at an individual level, setting the future the same, dealing with mistakes the same because in both realms, we are the common element.
Dominic Rufran
The thing about being uncertain as human, I think we all are uncertain about who we are, where we’re going sometimes. And we’re especially afraid of the uncertainty of what comes in our own thoughts. Like sometimes we’re just humans, we’re afraid of being alone, because we’re afraid what we’re going to hear. There’s a crazy article that came out and statistically is like 60% of women and 30% of men would rather get shocked, like actually electric shocked than being their own thoughts by themselves with nothing around for 15 minutes. And when I heard that, it was just like, wow, like people really are afraid to be in their own thoughts and hear the uncertainty about who they are as a person and tell them hear themselves say like, I’m not great. I’m not a good person. I’m unhappy. I’m not enjoying my life, like all of these things. And you know, you have a car ride with some people and you’re driving and you have no music, no podcast, no nothing on and people will start getting antsy and start freaking out and they’re like, why don’t you have any music on like, why isn’t something on in the car because they are afraid to hear their own thoughts. And they are not comfortable. And there’s so much uncertainty in their life, because they’re human First of all, but also they have not done the practical steps that we were talking about, of uncovering, you know, the uncertainties and then reflecting and being around the right people and working towards this.
Jess Dewell
The more I think about it while it’s possible, so getting to know yourself taking the steps that are needed to get to where you want to go have the discipline to do them, even when you don’t feel like it even when nobody else does. Even when it seems like you’re all alone and nobody else believes in you. Keep on going because …
George Papadeas
Pressure makes diamonds. If you feeling this pressure, there’s a reason. And if you have it, you know that you could turn this situation into a diamond or into something even better than where you’re already. If you’re also feeling pressure, this will be my last preface point. There’s a reason why you feel pressure is because people are relying on you people trust you with this pressure. People are trusting you for some sort of answer. For me, that helps put me in the right mindset because I know if someone’s relying on me or someone’s looking at me for some sort of sense of purpose during this time of pressure, I’m going to pull through for them I’m going to make sure I come out on top for them. We’re in the pressure situation. How do we handle that? What do I revert back to? I think what you have to do is to Think about what’s worked for you in the past and what hasn’t worked for you in the past what’s worked in the past double down on that.
Jess Dewell
So facing problems facing mistakes, facing opportunities have something in common. There might be pressure. More importantly, what do you do under that pressure?
George Papadeas
Your reflection pieces and end up with some sort of action item? I think something we forget as business owner, operators, leaders, managers, whatever the label is SAS for help. I think that’s the biggest piece of it. That goes back to vulnerability as well. We’re entrepreneurs, we’re supposed to know all the answers, whatever, but we don’t. And I think it’s important to ask for help. It’s important to ask for help. For your team, the people that report to your manager or leader, friends, family, whomever that may be, I think that’s a really important piece to the whole puzzle if you can’t figure out what the action plan should be
Jess Dewell
We’ve shared mistakes. I’ve shared some opinions, practical tips have been given the importance of reflection is clear. And there’s still another element that we can abide by another tip that we can use as we are navigating, coming back from a mistake or hitting rock bottom and continuing to move forward.
Paul Birkett
Emotion is not enough and data is not enough. Warren Buffett always makes a great quote that I always remember, which is, he’ll only do business with people that he likes, trusts, and admirers. And there are three pretty different and pretty important boxes that you need to check. I’ve always found that business relationships that went wrong, sometimes businesses just don’t work out. But it makes it a whole lot worse if you don’t trust the person. And it makes it much harder to go through the downtime when you don’t like the person. And it makes much harder to do things that feel like thankless tasks. When you’re working with someone who you don’t feel like you’ve nothing to learn that you don’t admire them in some way. It’s easy to say but it’s very hard to do when you’re looking at someone and going do I like this person? Do I trust this person? Do I admire them? That’s a pretty high bar. It’s probably why Warren Buffett does relatively few transactions in a year.
Jess Dewell
Standards help us navigate all kinds of things, especially as we are recovering. From or bouncing back from or climbing up from the bottom, a new bottom that we’ve experienced, we’re always gonna fall down, we’re always gonna hit some sort of bottom. The values that we bring, and how we choose to have our standards woven into the way that we show up into the world are important tools for us as we navigate each situation we find ourselves in, because there’s always work to be done when we want something, and we’ll do what it takes to go after reaching our goals.
Paul Birkett
Time for some self reflection, but you’ve got to keep moving forward. You’ve got to keep doing the work that’s in front of you. People say, trying to find my passion and I’m trying to find what I should be doing with my life. And they think that that’s some sort of an introspective process. And I just don’t think it is. I think you do the work that’s in front of you to your absolute best of your ability until you’re exhausted. And you do find something in it that is alluring to you or you’ll find that you need to find some Something else. And if it’s something else, then go after that with all the energy that you have. You’re going to make mistakes. And if you’re not making mistakes, you’re not trying hard enough.
Jess Dewell
The harder the fall, the bruises that are leftover after you get back up and brush yourself off. It’s all good. You’re keeping on keeping on you’re moving forward. And that’s the thing. You’re putting yourself out there. No mistake, no risk, no opportunity to grow, no opportunity to see what you’re really doing. Made of and boy Are you made of a lot.
Dominic Rufran
I think of putting ourselves out there and I actually doing it for a reason that will allow us to progress forward reflection without it, you will come back to the point of being unhappy and I talked about this today, actually, in the LinkedIn post, about like, we necessarily don’t have a great idea of what happiness is. We Think that happiness is being on a beach or fame or cars, or anything that is materialistic things. So our daily lives are progressing towards that, like we are actively taking action to get those items. But we sit back and then we just realize that we’re not happy and we never understand why, like, why are we not happy? Like why do I not feel fulfilled? Why do I not have a purpose? Why do I not feel loved? It’s important to sit back and reflect and realize, like, hey, like, these things that I’m chasing like all of these money, fame, cars, like all of these things that I am chasing are not actually bringing me happiness. … Reflection is so important for our happiness as human beings. We need that reflection to have self awareness of who we are as people. We don’t have self awareness. We won’t Be happy, we won’t know who we are, we won’t know the purpose that we’re chasing, we won’t know where we’re going.
Jess Dewell
And we need to know where we’re going. And when we do make mistakes when we do hit rock bottom, we need to be able to look forward toward the vision that we have. Keep moving in spite of it, get up, bounce up, climb up and keep on going. A lot of this podcast was about reflection and the reflection of our mistakes are what allow us to decide how to move forward, when to move forward, how fast to go, all of the sharing that has occurred and even what we do with our reflections. Do we journal do we talk? Do we sit in silence and when we’re taking that protected time when worrying Engaging ourselves in a present retreat using the five parts, for just doing a quick reflection, understanding the status of things and being able to then move forward with some knowledge at a minimum, when we know where we’re going, even when we fall down, even when we slip up. Even when we’re not at our best, we can rely on our discipline, we can rely on our vulnerability, and we can rely on the consistency with which we make decisions to help us move forward and keep putting ourselves out there.
ANNOUNCER
The BOLD Business Podcast is brought to you by Red Direction, Jess Dewell dug into one idea in this program. Her goal is to ignite your creativity and spark different thinking with the presented material. How you apply this to your current priorities is up to you. We want to know what actions you take. Use hash tag BOLD Business Podcast and add your voice to this important conversation. Jess Dewell can bring the missing voice back into your company. With you, Jess will solidify your company’s True North, your unique Red Direction. Provided you are ready to work with Jess email her at Radio@Red Direction.com. Special thanks to The Scott Treatment for technical production.
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