Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Sam.
[00:00:30] Hello, everyone, and welcome to tonight's episode of Pivotal Change. I'm your host, William Kahn, and we are going to be talking about pressure, performance in the type of people and their businesses who rise up and thrive. We're going to have a good conversation because I've been getting a lot of information in my networks that a lot of people are kind of stressing out over a couple of things. So I wanted to, as I often do, take a moment to just have an episode to myself with you, and hopefully you can grab a pen and paper and we can talk about the current market, the current economy, the current just dynamics going on in the whole Western hemisphere. And of course, this is now a global, global economy that is growing rapidly every day. And just talk about some of those concerns and really pinpoint what we all need to do to really not just survive, but thrive. So what we know and what we can probably feel, or if you're not experiencing yourself, you have friends, you have people in your network and group are probably feeling some of the pressure, is that the margins seem to just kind of be closing, kind of squeezing in, and we may not be fully uncomfortable, but maybe just biting our fingernails a little bit. That margin pressure is coming from a lot of different areas. And so I want to talk about a couple of them. And one of the ones that's going to be happening internally is where you probably, as an owner are feeling that margin pressure, but also your employees are feeling it, and maybe they're a little nervous, their knees are shaking just a little bit because there's some possible hints of job insecurity.
[00:02:00] We'll talk about some of that because the families are ultimately going to start feeling some of this financial strange from the workplace and from the offices and from the boardrooms. And you may feel direction, directionless, because your young people, your new hires, your future of your company is feeling a little directionless. So some of these recent layoffs, some of these closing of, like Spirit Airlines and things like that have made huge headlines. And people are still saying the economy strong, which I believe the bottom line base structure, the economy is strong. It is healthy, that there are pieces of the industry or pieces of the puzzle that may not be as strong as they once were.
[00:02:36] So people are getting laid off, while also everyone else is being told that everything is fine. And that can create pressure and ultimately some confusion. One of the primary areas that we, of course, are seeing is technology and AI and competition for this space, for this attention, is just accelerating everywhere. And it doesn't take you two seconds to use one of your AI platforms or even just a simple research to say, what is the growth? What is the chart? Is the history of just the last three, five years or three months of AI developments. And I'll just throw a little nugget at you and just say, hey, go look at some AI ads, even a video ad from like 12 months ago, a year ago, and compare it to today. And people are having a really hard time seeing through the illusion of what is real or not real on these types of ads. The other thing that comes along with this world speeding up overall is that expectations change drastically. They become a lot higher and faster expectations. Then people ultimately have technology and answers and results at their fingertips. Literally the push of a button. So patience is lower.
[00:03:40] Sometimes it's a good thing because we can all rise to a new level and new standard. But sometimes that's not good at all. When your patient runs out, it takes that much more to hold the relationship, to hold your ground and make sure that you're in the right situation. People get evaluated faster than ever. They either get hired on or dismissed or promoted or whatever based on all of this data, this collection, these metrics, these KPIs are all funneling in there. And I'm a big believer in those things. And you need to be tracking your progress, the progress of your team, the progress of your business. But with all that data at the push of fingernails, I can run a couple of reports and say, hey, I've got a cut, I've got 500 people in my company and I got to cut 10%. Boom. I just run some metrics and 50 people can get dismissed that quickly. And that's really cold, harsh reality in some places. So one of the reasons that the gap is widening in various areas is that we have a much broader gap between people. Though the chasm between disciplined and the undisciplined is all the more prevalent these days.
[00:04:44] So some of the things are that like what used to take a team, now, like one maybe skilled person could probably replace three or four people. And now some of these mundane, these time draining tasks can even be outsourced by AI and loosely, if at all, supervised in their administration. And you think about simple things just like cold email campaigns and responses and these chatbot helpers and these various agents that can execute various tasks, organizational methods, at the bare minimum, they can do that and replace a lot of people where you may have had a lot of administrative assistance in the past. So the people have to get really disciplined and the people that are undisciplined are going to be much more noticeable. The other thing that we're going to notice is the gap is widening between people that are adaptable. They can make pivots, right? Those pivotal change, they're not afraid to do that versus the people that are resistant and quote unquote stuck in their old ways or that's just the way we've always done it. And they think maybe they can just ride a wave of excitement because something new or different came out. They're going to hold fast. And I do believe that in certain areas, in certain industries, that's going to be the move. But I think probably 80 to 90% of the market, you're going to have to be adaptable in some way. That middle ground is disappearing.
[00:05:58] You're going to either be left in antiquity in the way that you function and service your product or clients and sell, or you're going to catch up and you'd be competitive. And you have to be looking into the future, looking at the way that things are going to change and keep your eye and your thumb on it at all times. Let me give you just a quick industry example from the accounting world.
[00:06:18] The business owners who have embraced advisory versus those who are just stuck in compliance and attestation services, they are getting left behind.
[00:06:27] You've heard it said on this show before. You've probably seen the markets and research and if you're watching business or finance channels, the old world audit used to be king, right? Audit used to be the king of accounting. That was the smartest, brightest, sharpest people. They would go do audits, they'd be the most organized in their teams. They raked in the big bills at these accounting firms, especially the larger accounting firms. Well now audits can be very streamlined, very automated and they don't have the profit margin that they used to. Even more so just the compliance work of tax returns, right? And bookkeeping services, they're not fully taken over yet. And the tax return completion, especially with any complexities at all, with maybe a high net worth individual or a, or corporate or corporation or company that has any niche services at all, you're going to need a person to massage and truly understand and get you inside those gap industry standards.
[00:07:18] And that's, that's one of the things that I can't do yet. But I promise you it's coming.
[00:07:22] So what you need is you need the analytical advisor. We've been preaching this for five or six years and that's what ultimately resulted in me being able to exit the accounting firm is that we grew it into an advisory firm that made it lucrative to another person. And boom, now it's been, now it's been pushed and sold off for, for some nice profits, you know, and that advisory services with the client demands are people don't just want to file their tax return because they have to. They want to find ways to elevate their children and save their money, invest in retirements, get extra write off and deductions that aren't going to raise red flags and aren't illegal. They want to go ahead and say, hey, I want to do what it takes to save the money. My family take advantage of the actual advantages available to me. And you need an expert and a person that can analyze, that can know the situation.
[00:08:10] And so if you're just sitting there doing tax compliance work, yeah, there's some bucks to be made in that industry. But that's not where the future is.
[00:08:17] Pressure is also exposing another great reality and it's the skill and education gap. So the education gap is something that people have fully credentials degrees that maybe they're not super viable anymore. Like some of these marketing degrees where people are specializing in content creation and posting are being completely replaced by dozens of these available AI platforms. So yeah, you could plug into that and maybe pivot your degree a little bit. But your education gap is now some of these degrees aren't as value valuable as they used to be. Some of the skills now are really honing in. It's always been extremely valuable to be a salesperson, to be able to close a deal and make a sales pitch.
[00:08:57] But now you don't have to do the dirty work of going through all of the cold process to get to a warm lead, to take a warm lead to a meeting and to a, a bid or to a, an analysis report that gives them the findings that you can finally close the deal. So the leadership gaps in addition are changing. People are trying to rely on technology too much. And technology is great for managing. It is not great for leadership, for tapping into people's core emotions and their motivations and their future versions of their self and literally putting a hand on somebody's shoulder and saying, hey, keep your chin up, we've got this. This is a tough period. Let's move through.
[00:09:36] You know, you've got the technology counselors and psychology sources and things like that, but it's not the same thing. It cannot replace that human contact, that human touch where you sit down over lunch with somebody and actually connect. And the leadership gaps are needed all across Industry, all across families, relationships, parenting, coaching, schools, everything.
[00:09:56] And then ultimately that comes down to a character gap.
[00:10:00] AI and technology can be pretty brutal and pretty cold. And just saying, well, you got to cut this person, cut this team, cut this project. And that takes something completely out of the picture. Doesn't allow for pivoting, doesn't allow for maybe some creative adaptation and things like that. So those character gaps are really important. Important that you don't lose your humanity. Another thing that's really important is how people perform under pressure. If we're dealing behind the scenes so much with technology and it comes time to have a friction moment, maybe something broke down or got lost. AI is far from perfect. Maybe some of the coding didn't give the exact results we were looking for. So we produced some bad information. We have to take it back, correct it and produce a good result. That's happening all over the place. Everything from shipping lanes and delivery companies all the way to legal analysis and structures like that. So you got to have that human component and you have to be able to perform under pressure.
[00:10:53] So let me give you an example from maybe a SWAT period. We have SWAT team members that come on the team. They perform in the trainings and the practices really well.
[00:11:02] But maybe we throw a competition out there and you have to go get really tired and exert yourself and shoot really fast and do these things, hit these targets. And while they're smooth and controlled conditions, they're fine. But when you put the heat on them, they don't perform. So now you have to be able to prevent that from happening in a call out or an emergency situation, heaven forbid. So what are the hidden mindset triggers? What are the hidden skills, the hidden characteristics that are not being taught and cannot be replaced by technology?
[00:11:29] The main thing I want you to think about as we go into commercial break is when all of this is happening, you need to understand that pressure didn't change that person that's not performing. It revealed them. And you can't use the AI, the technology, and all of these gaps that are getting created. You have to use discipline and human characteristics to fill that gap. We're going to continue this conversation in just a little bit after this break.
[00:12:17] Foreign.
[00:12:22] Welcome back to Pivotal Change. We're going to keep this conversation going about the pressures in the current market, the current economy and skill set gaps that are being created. And we talked about identifying a lot of those and what some of the general reactions are and how it reveals people on how they pivot. They refuse to adapt or they don't sharpen their skills for a new economy. But before we jump back into that conversation, I do want to let you guys know that you can catch this show and any of the shows on NOW Media TV by going and downloading the app. The NOW Media TV app. You can go to NOW Media TV or TV and you can go to the website, you can find pivotal change. You can download all of these episodes here and find me and other great hosts of many shows. Leadership, economics, business, finance, world events, all kinds of stuff. English and Spanish, Roku, iOS and you can even go to the YouTube page. So let's talk about wrapping back around to. Okay, we know that we need to respond in certain situations to relieve a lot of this pressure to be the people that, that rise up. But what are the some of the things that we probably know but maybe aren't just pinpointing and actually saying, and it's about how people respond wrong. So I want to identify some of the wrong things to do and I'll, I'll filter in, of course, some of the right things to do. But here's the number one thing that I think is probably the most dangerous, especially for leaders or any of these people that are in positions that ultimately ripple effect large categories of their business, their industry, their teams, whatever. Avoidance behavior. This is one of the most important. And when I write it up in my leadership philosophy, I call it procrastination or something like that. But avoidance behavior is anything from just picking up this phone and just scrolling, right? Whether it's scrolling at work, scrolling on your lunch break instead of literally taking five minutes to call the person back, scrolling when you get home with your families, your kids, and scrolling at the gym in between sets and not keeping your heart rate up, whatever it may be, those scrolling, those distractions, those notifications, start silencing those things, start turning them off, start deleting the apps that are wasting your time. Okay? What it does is it creates numbness.
[00:14:27] And if you do any of the psychological technological researches, you can go down there and I'm not even going to cite one of them, but you can find hundreds of reports that show that numbing avoidance behavior, especially through technology like scrolling and distractions at an all time high. And I don't think that surprises anyone. The other thing that we do in avoidance behaviors, we act busy. Like, oh well, you know what, I've got this big project that's due and it's really big client. I don't know. All the right answers can require some research, but passively and subconsciously I'm going to organize my desk real quick. It's not quite in the right order. Oh, I forgot. I got to run down the hall and tell Johnny about something that's happening this weekend so we can prep for next week. And you do this acting busy or acting productive instead of actually being productive. What that does is that creates you into a hamster where you just get stuck running on the hamster wheel doing all of these small, they probably have a purpose, right? They probably have a contribution. But all these small tedious tasks, these time wasting tasks, these other things that you should be doing other than that most urgent or that most high priority task that is on your list. So you got to really sit here and say, okay, what am I doing to avoid, right? And so a lot of your avoidance is some of the examples that I gave. But it literally could just be distracting yourself with the first category or acting busy instead. Sometimes we do it just not get another assignment thrown our way. We may, we make jokes where you say, hey, never walk down the hallway or never walk in front of the boss's office without a piece of paper or a file in your hand. He's going to see your hands on me and say, hey, what are you getting into? Come over here, let me give you something. But if you look busy walking with paper, right, they'll leave you alone. That's the busyness. Distract, distraction, right?
[00:16:06] So here's another one too. The average daily screen time in the United States for adults is at least six hours, but it's usually eight plus hours. So the six to eight hour range and something that my kids and I do in the family, we're not perfect at it, but we do it most Sundays when you get that automatic report sent to your, your smartphone and it says, here's your screen time. Right? So what we do is we're fair to each other because pretty well everyone in our house has jobs, right? My, my wife's running a couple of businesses, my son's now running a business and involved in another business with kind of like an internship position.
[00:16:39] And we look and we say, hey, your screen time was six and a half hours this week. Oh my goodness. But if that's your average, but if three of it was from like text messages and emails, we're going to give you a free pass. We're going to delete that from the equation and say, hey, you've got three hours a day of spare time that you cannot be scrolling, getting on Instagram, Snapchat, tick tock, whatever it is, shopping for houses you're never going to buy, whatever, you know. And so there's a lot of things that we can do because we also get the other thing where people say, well, I'm so overwhelmed, I'm so busy all the time, or I just don't have time. But yet you can go check every single phone in North America and find plenty of time, plenty of time that people are wasting. What if you just took 15 of those minutes a day and read two chapters of a leadership or skill based book in your industry? What would happen to your brain, your function, your confidence, your competence? What if you just signed up for a single online course? I know you're still on a screen, but instead of scrolling you're down, you're getting information, you're getting skills, you're getting trained. So it's not that you're overwhelmed, it's that you're undisciplined. And that's part of what we're talking on this. So set the access healthy notifications and healthy distractions. You can go download an app or even a lot of the social media apps and the game apps and give you time limits. Just put a time limit on yourself. I'm a 41 year old man and I can put a time limit that says, hey, if I play one of these brain wasting games for more than 20 minutes a day, it yells at me and then I got to put my phone down and realize, hey, you're being dumb. Get off your phone, go be productive, put those in place for yourself.
[00:18:15] Another big category other than avoidance and distractions is an excuse making mindset. Okay? There's, there's a quote that I like to use my own version of it is excuses are like armpits. Everyone's got a couple, then they all stink, okay? So stop making excuses, stop blaming other people. The blaming the economy, blaming your leadership, blaming just lack of opportunity, blaming your boss, your school, your friend, whatever, stop. Take accountability and on top of taking accountability, own whatever it is that you're getting into. That goes back to Jocko William's extreme ownership that I mentioned so often. Stop externalizing responsibility. Hopefully you've heard of something called the diffusion of responsibility. Here's a couple examples of it. Let's say, I don't know, an old person falls, falls over and appears to be having a heart attack. Everybody gathers around in shock and a guy that's down there trying to say, hey Johnny, are you okay? Looks up at the crowd and goes, somebody call 91 1, right? Well, if there's 20 people watching. Probably half of them got their phones out and the other half think somebody else calling. 911 Nobody calls the ambulance and old man Johnny ends up passing away because we did. We had a diffusion of responsibility.
[00:19:21] In a slightly different example, what if there's a neighborhood park, right? And you live in some homeowners association that says, hey, once a month every family has to go clean off the, clean off the equipment and rake the leaves, whatever. And then everybody else thinks somebody else is raking the leaves and cleaning the equipment. It gets rusty and unsafe for the kids and nasty looking. The park gets deteriorated and now the teenagers move in and graffiti the place and smoke weed on the weekends, making it unsafe for your kids. Diffusion of responsibility. The bystander effect. Get rid of it. Stop externalizing responsibility. Get up, do your part, do it yourself. Somebody else is being lazy, you take over their part, you get it done as well. And then you get the accolades, you get the promotion, you get the reward for it.
[00:20:02] Another big one in business owners. To dial it into the business is just blaming inflation. All fuel costs are up. Oh, I have to have more software these days. Oh man, my inventory this. And they never come in and start making these small shifts. They never reanalyze their budget. They never sit down with a, A team and sit here and say, pull up the numbers, let me see what we've got going on. Why are all these costs going up? And what do I need to do to mitigate costs? How can I bring this into my people?
[00:20:29] So it's the same type of environment, but you get different results depending on the person that is handling it.
[00:20:35] So the next thing that you can really get into is this victim mentality. And let me tell you what, this has always been a thing, but it is growing rampantly. Not just in North America, United States, across the world. Why is this happening to me? Oh, it's so unfair. Again, they might get into blaming their community or blaming God or whatever, but why is this happening to me? Hey buddy, this happens to everyone. What are you going to do about it? What did you do to cause it and what can you correct? What do I need to become to get out of this circumstance or out of this situation or through this hardship? What must I change in order for me to succeed? Regardless, those are the type of questions that can help you beat your victim mindset, okay?
[00:21:17] There's media narratives all over the place and they only focus on the system holding people back or they focus on unfair opportunity or whatever. The differentiations in the tax code or the political environment.
[00:21:29] But what they don't do is they don't say, hey, here's the real challenges and living in this environment and that this mindset doesn't move you forward. So here's a way to move forward. We have created a system. I'll throw a hot take at you. You know, you've got the whole ICE immigration thing going all over the place now. I'm going to reserve my exact comments for that. But I'm going to ask you a mindset. So if you don't like the current immigration status in the United States and you think it is unfair watching what the ICE agents are doing to go out and find people, look it up. Why are you wasting all your time protesting and marching around a facility instead of setting up a not for profit and funding it with your volunteer hours and your money and for a path to citizenship for all these people. If you don't like it, help these people. Instead of, instead of sitting there with a picket sign outside of the facility that just garners news attention. Do something about us. Don't be a victim. And wo is me. And look at me, the person that wants to help whatever cause or whatever supporting person, but I just can't do it because the system is bad. Go do something about it. You have an avenue, you have a path.
[00:22:35] Short term coping systems are another big one. Just seeking some type of relief going. Get your comfort food. Getting this comfort seeking behavior sitting on the couch. Oh, it's too hard. So I'm just going to quit or I'm just going to pass off the big task for an easy task job. Hopping from job to job or even career career. Starting to build a skill and never finishing the C certification or the degree. Oh well, they just keep changing the environment on me. Well then change. Make the pivot. And a really, really big kicker to this one is having no structure. You do not actually create a routine. Stick to it, set your alarms, have a plan, have action steps, be accountable to yourself. Wrangle somebody else in to be your accountability partner. Then you keep yourself living reactively to whatever action and reaction circumstances are thrown your way. You've seen me do demonstrations for action versus reaction. Whether it's, you know, people drawing a gun or playing the slap slap hands game.
[00:23:29] Act based on what you see. Act in your environment.
[00:23:33] So don't compare yourself and your undisciplined supposed routines to people that are structured. Like look at high level athletes and look at what they can get themselves into through the structuring. Okay, so if you don't control your day, then your day controls you. Get it on the calendar, get it in the notifications and get moving. And we're going to get after it some more right after this break.
[00:24:19] Foreign.
[00:24:26] I'm William Kahn and you're back with more pivotal change. If you kind of like what you're hearing, there is a place to, to find me five talents. Strategic Finance is the company that I'm working with right now where we broker a lot of relationships. We work with special things in the government like certain credits that help payroll tax dollars and your employees health benefits. But we're really big into networking, relationship building. We also offer a little this very specific niche advisory services with business entities and things like that. So if you're ever looking to hear more about this that's not on air or you actually have specific questions that you wouldn't want to send in and have answered over the air, you can always fill out one of these forms, get a hold of us, get a meeting with us. All of it's free. There is no cost to getting a meeting, sharing some information, have an introduction. So I just want to make sure you guys understand that, that you can get more out of this show pivotal Change and start actually taking steps in the direction to make the pivotal change yourself.
[00:25:20] So let's get back on this track with keeping up with the changing markets, the pressures that are surrounding us. We just talked a whole lot about the undisciplined side of things and what not to do and not, you know, how to waste your time and how to get the avoidance and scrolling behaviors. So let's talk a little bit more about what the behaviors do for those people that are performing differently. Those are different. So you're going to hear a little bit of the contradicting stuff to what I just said because that's the negative and this is the positive. So there's no denial when something comes across. When reality checks, you, you don't deny, oh, it'll get better. It's okay. It's not as bad as it seems. Nope. Reality check. We do the analysis. The information I have at time says this is a struggle we're gonna have to overcome and I'm not gonna delay in getting after it. I'm going to adjust quickly. Now you don't just adjust for the sake of adjusting, making change for the sake of change. You have to do your homework, you have to sit down. But you can still take all the relevant information, rely on your team, rely on the data, get all the input available and make those Adjustments exactly how Somebo says, Whoa, I just felt, felt a shift in the wind. So the captain on board gets the navigator, looks at the stars, look at the weather, look at the horizon, looks at the waves, and then they adjust course as needed so they don't get blown off course and end up in the wrong continent, right?
[00:26:32] So another good example of this would be businesses that pivoted quickly during COVID Most of them didn't just limp through and survive. They ended up thriving. They found some type of niche or some way to capitalize on this brand new world, this brand new environment that we had going. And the speed of adjustment matters. But there's one thing that I want you to know is that adjustments must be smooth.
[00:26:56] Smooth is fast, and fast is smooth. If you just jerk changes and say we're throwing out this system and plugging this one in. Migration could get set up. The trainings where people use to execute it could end up getting inventory loss things shipped to the wrong place. You could lose client projects and folders and things that were deadlines for legal matters. So you have to have a smooth yet swift adjustment when you do that. And that takes planning, that takes leadership, and that takes a culture of people understanding the vision in which you're taking them, okay? Another thing that they do is no blame, no excuses. Guess what? If you screwed up, you own it and you move forward, that makes you a lot more human and relatable as well. Instead of people thinking you're some robot in an ivory tower that can't make any mistakes. So don't make excuses.
[00:27:39] I already told you how I feel about excuses. So everything ends up falling on your shoulder. The buck stops here. Now can we move forward? Can we draw a line in the sand past the issue and move forward and grow? That's huge component. Maybe hard for some people to do, but that's what's necessary. The other thing is take for example, like an athlete, right? An athlete who loses, right? You've seen the ones, and I'm a big wrestling guy or football player that take off their helmet or their headgear and they throw it on the sideline, they kick the water bucket and they go march off down the tunnel and punch a wall and fracture their hand. And they're out for two, three weeks until the fracture heals.
[00:28:14] That's not a top performer. That's not how a proper person needs to make an adjustments. No excuses, just adjustments in the proper way. They go straight back to the training. They go seek a coach or mentor and say, hey, what Was it when I was on the line of scrimmage that got me beat? What was it that got that, that person to be able to get my wrist and flip me and get me on my back and pin me? What was it? I'm going to train. I'm going to make sure that never happens to me again. When I first started training Jiu jitsu, I did my first ever tournament and I was very skilled wrestler and those help in jiu jits, but ultimately those positions and submissions reign supreme. So I was working my way through the tournament and I got to the semifinals and I ended up getting tapped out and a, a straight up triangle. Right. So I got on the guy felt real dominant. He. I fought the triangle for a long time. Ultimately I couldn't escape and I got tapped out in a triangle in a competition that I felt like I was going to win. So I trained like crazy to make sure I never got triangled again. So I'm asking you a little bit of a SWOT analysis. You know, you got to look at what opportunities, what threats do you have and if you've been hit by a threat, are you looking at and are you saying in your business, I don't ever want to get triangled again? And making sure you never take that loss again. That requires you to build structures. You have to have routines in your system. Like there's a routine, even if it's some of the joyous things. Like every Friday, the third Friday, we all go to lunch together. You have systems in place and if you don't check your boxes and follow the systems.
[00:29:42] Yeah, you may be able to put a band aid on it and slide by for a while. But things will break down and people need to be held accountable. One of the big rules is it's non negotiable for us, is that your job is to do your very best effort in order to give the next person in the line down the line of the system and the workflow the best ribbon wrapped around it product you can. So go that extra mile, give them the best product possible, tee them up for success, so that when you're getting something handed to you, you know it's going to be an excellent shape so that you can just rock and roll and then tee the other person up for success.
[00:30:13] Non negotiables like that, especially about gossip and whining and complaint culture, not relying on motivation alone. This is something that really rocked my world. Several years ago I heard what you don't need is motivation. What you need is discipline. Motivation goes like this, right? I don't want to go to the gym today. And then you don't go to the gym today. Well, discipline says, even if it's not the best workout in the world, and I kind of feel lousy and I'm distracted mentally because, I don't know, maybe my dog is sick, right? You go to the gym anyway and you keep the discipline, you keep the consistency going. That's the difference from high level executives to high level leaders to high level salespeople and performers. That's what they do. They don't guess their way through the day. They've got it planned out. They stick to the routine, stick to the system, and they execute at the highest performance, whether they like it or want to or not. Okay, so lean into pressure as well. Something that leaders and high performers need to do is you need to lean into pressure. You're going to be scared and nervous about whatever pressure comes your way. Way. At first it's going to look at like a daunting task. But if you lean into it, you get the experience, you get the exposure, and you get something called stress inoculation. Stress inoculation is if for some reason I put you in a noisy, crazy environment and told you to perform a simple task, you would probably have trouble and your hands might turn on, you can't hear, you can't do things. But if I told you to do it every single day for the next 10 days, by day 11, you're like, oh yeah, here's the task, I can do it. My body has become accustomed to that stress. And there's good psychological ways to do that and negative psychological ways. And I'm not going to spend time getting down on the weeds on, on how to specifically do that in the good psychological ways. Because we want to have inoculation to good stress, right? The stuff that can help us perform better and go after and get it to be able to rise up in those big moments. And you rise up in those big moments because you ultimately fall back on the level of your training, the level of your systems, the level of your mindset development and the level of your conditioning. You don't just magically poof, pull out out some crazy ability like a superhero. You rely on all those things clicking because you put them in place. Some people shrink and some people get sharpened. And that's what we're looking for, is to lean into the pressure and understand that you're sharpening yourself. And then you have to constantly seek out ways to upgrade, upgrade your skills, upgrade your mindset. Up, upgrade your education, upgrade your spiritual life, upgrade your relationships, upgrade your community outreach. If you're constantly upgrading yourself, your brain is the best computer ever, right? And it will flood with experiences, talents, connection, wisdom, models that you've never felt before. And you will start to unlock doors. You'll have these light bulb moments showing up in your life across categories. And you need to be upgrading yourself constantly. Do not be complacent. Complacency kills, right? So one of my big things I tell people, once you stop or once you become complacent, satisfied, once you become satisfied, you stop improving, moving. And I'm not telling you not to be grateful for what you have and not to observe your blessings in life. What I'm doing is don't just sit back, kick your feet up because ultimately that stuff eventually wears and tears and rots out from underneath you. So be moving forward, be elevating, make yourself into a better person, a better version of yourself. That continuous improvement professionals. They're all learning AI in some capacity. We always say the funny term, oh, I know enough to be dangerous, right? You have to at least know enough to be dangerous, to have the conversations, to understand where the market's going, to understand where the development is going so that you can realize that this new system and this new product that's out there is for me or it is not for me. Go ahead and get yourself a couple of certifications. A lot of them are either free and not very time consuming and can actually be a real quick little one up. You know, you hit that Mario boop boop one up button in your career because you have a certification, because you just took a two hour online free course and got a certificate dropped onto your resume and your cv and now you're the, you're the guy or you're the gal for that at the office, okay? So always be investing in yourself.
[00:34:09] And then probably the last thing I want to lead out here with before we have to take another commercial break is control what you can control and do not stress and freak out over what you cannot control, okay? You can control your effort. It I always tell everyone, you may not be the smartest, the fastest, the strongest, the most skilled, but you can always choose to be the hardest working person in the room. Your attitude. You could have a lot of bad stuff going in your mind.
[00:34:39] Do a quick breathing exercise and check your attitude preparation.
[00:34:44] Again, if you're scrolling six hours a day on average, can you not proofread the report or the expectations that the boss sent out for Tomorrow's board meeting. Can you not reread the material one more time? Time. So that you don't have to constantly look down and reference your notes when you're giving the presentation or when you're making the sale to the client. Can you be consistent and show up and everybody knows exactly where you're going to be 15 minutes before the bell rings? Because you're the consistent one that's always the class on time. You're always in the meeting first, setting up and preparing for the meeting. You're going to have incredible opportunities. And then take coaching principles across categories, right? Athletes go and they learn something from gymnastics and put it into a baseball career. You know, football players take ballet lessons to increase their, their footwork. Business people from the finance district put implementations into their product delivery or manufacturing services. So it seems simple, but most people will just choose not to do it consistently. So we're going to finish off the final moment here on the standard you need to set for moving forward. Stay tuned. We'll be right back with the final segment of change.
[00:35:57] Sam so we've had a pretty encouraging conversation about the things to do now with this changing pressures, the changing market and the expectations. And some of it was, you know, what you just need to hear because you probably know it and others was about how to mark the calendar, how to change your notifications and how to literally spend your time differently. So we're going to keep moving forward in that and talk about the standard, because the standard is moving forward. So if you are not moving your standards, then you will increase the gap between you and in a free, efficient and wealthy based lifestyle. So just understand that this pressure is not going away. We may feel pressure in one part of the globe versus another based on economic climate, political climate, wars are going to happen and rumors of war are going to happen in economic systems and the value of the dollar and the bitcoin and the, and the ruble and whatever, the yen, all that kind of stuff is going to constantly fluctuate and change.
[00:37:19] The pressure is just going to increase and not decrease. Now, just because pressure increases doesn't mean that your life has to become more miserable, more anxious, more depressive. If you think about it, if you go weightlift in the gym and you go from a newbie benching 100 pounds to somebody that's repping out 225 pounds, did pressure increase? Oh yeah, it sure did. 200. 100, yeah. 200. 150%. I can do some math here in a second. And so that pressure increased Dramatically, right?
[00:37:51] But you're healthier, you're better for it, you're more capable. So don't let yourself decrease, increase with the pressure, become even stronger in all categories. The competition's also going to grow. There's more access to information, there's more, more at your fingertips than ever before. Knowledge, the speed of communication, all that kind of stuff. The gap's going to widen if you don't keep up. The pressure is not going away. Like I said in the last segment, lean into it.
[00:38:15] Continue to reach out for the continued automation in the areas this can help. Start thinking global. A lot of people will just open a mom and pop sh in their local town and that would serve their family for a generation or two or multiple generations. But now things are changes. We got shipping companies that can ship from anywhere in the world to your house in like two to three days, right? So you have to start thinking global. Think outside of your right now community, outside of your county, your region, your state and be willing to broaden your horizons and be able to really increase.
[00:38:45] And also the other thing that's important is that this is not just a phase in the economy or a phase in a decade's worth of time. This is a new direction and things are not going to change.
[00:38:56] So barring some giant sunburst from the, the sun, some electromagnetic pulse that resets the world for the Stone Age, this is where we're heading, folks. So the other thing that's really important is the average is no longer safe. Some people, and that's fine, are good for an average life. Hey, I'm happy to make the, the mean or median wages for, for a person in America and you know, have my, what is it, 4, 4.3 people in my family, my 2.3 children and do that kind of, that's great. But the average now is shifting, changing and it's not as safe as it used to be because again, you could have a Spirit Airlines issue, you could have an AI replaced to some job issue and your average is no longer there. So you have to be improving yourself in some way and just applying more effort alone is not going to be it. You have to have effort with all the things I talked about in the last clip and then you grow with that pressure. Right?
[00:39:51] A lot of these entry level jobs are going to be swapped out and you need to have higher level skills because the entry level job now is going to be what used to be a high level skill. And what used to be enough just isn't going to be enough anymore. Or it's going to, at the bare minimum, look different. And you need to look at and different and you need to walk and talk different.
[00:40:09] So adapt and grow or fall behind. Those are effectively your choices on the broadest version of what the economy holds. There's other areas as well. I'm, I'm encouraging all kinds of young people to get into the trades and the skills. Think about this scenario. You have somebody that's running a plumbing or electrical company or something like that, welding, okay? And they've been running the same style business. You know what AI can't do yet? It can't wire a house. Okay? AI can't come over and fix a leak or a burst pipe in the middle of winter. Those things aren't happening. So if you can go take somebody that's probably been in the plumbing and a lot of people have not been going into the trades over the last 10 or 15 years. And there's just been a recent uptick in the last two to three years. If you go into the trades now, you can come out of school making 60, 80, 100 grand in certain fields, which is a very comfortable week living.
[00:40:59] Hook up with somebody that's a local plumbing outfitter and you work for them for three to five years. You get in real good. You show your tenacity. You take these ways to grow, educate, learn about business and you now have an opportunity in five, seven years, this person wants to get out. They're 55, 65 years old and they're tired of working in the arthritis and their knuckles is killing them. You buy the business from them because you have a business strategy buyout that I'll just play you pay you out over the next three to five years as your retirement, I will accumulate the new business based off the profits. I'll forfeit my profits for those years and I'll live on my margin. And then in the meantime, you can explode those margins, taking all the technology, taking all of the pivots and all the global thinking that you've done and take a million $2 million plumbing outfit, make it regional, make it statewide, make it multi regional or nationwide. And guess what? Now you've got a 5 million, $25 million $100 million plumbing company. Then you're the executive at the top and you never get arthritis because you only did four years behind the plumber's wrench. So there's great ways to. And people just are not thinking globally. So there's a quick little one for you and there's methodologies to doing that. So that's where the massive separation is going to happen. That's where the access to the high growth tools is going to be happening, is because that guy that was a business owner was not thinking like an entrepreneur business owner, he was basically owning his job. So people building businesses and people building brands can do it nowadays for nothing or close to nothing with social media and the content development and you can create yourself, yourself almost overnight. I don't want to oversell. The overnight success position takes about 10 years to achieve overnight success historically.
[00:42:37] So opportunity is what I'm saying has never been more accessible than it is now. But with that opportunity is a greater call to responsibility.
[00:42:48] No one is coming to save you. Nobody is coming to put the spoon in your mouth and say, here's the perfect job for you. You're going to have to build it or major parts of it, you're going to yourself. Take that plumbing example, somebody built a foundation. But that wonderfully existing business of your dreams is going to take your effort building it over time.
[00:43:07] There's no external fix.
[00:43:09] The personal discipline and the habits have to come from you, right? There's no external fix. The internal fixes have to come from you. Your good habits, your ability. And guys, this is nothing new. This is what it took back in the 1920s, in the 1800s is the people that got on the routines, got in their habits, habits, applied, a little creative learning, they've been able to do that and become captains of industry. The difference is you can do it from a screen now, you can do it at a pace that is exponentially faster than what the last 150 years had even dreamt possible.
[00:43:42] But it all boils down to this. At some point it has to become your responsibility. And the day that happens is the day that you chose it to happen, that you took the accountability, you took the ownership, you created the habits, you wrote down your action plan, you held to your goal and you moved forward. And guys, that passion will come. I promise you that passion will come. You'll be able to make your first sale, close your first deal, run your first team, lead your first major project. And that is when responsibility is going to take a lot of that pressure and weight off your shoulder. But don't ever just settle for the I've arrived moment, right? That imaginary moment where everybody says, I'm sitting at the top in my C suite office in the corner and I can just kick back and you know, put red X's and green check marks on the things that I like and don't like. And think are good for the company. Or I can just sit on the beach with a margarita all day with my feet in the sand and read a good book and all I have to do is get on a zoom call, you know, for two hours a week and my multimillion business, dollar business will run itself.
[00:44:42] No, that is back to the diffusion of responsibility. And you've taken your hands off the steering wheel too much. Right? You want to build a business that represents an automatic driving car, but it's a legal requirement in most places to have a licensed certified driver behind the wheel. Right? So you have to be able to intervene if necessary. And you can let the systems that you've built in place over months and years largely govern themselves. But you always have to be the nice caring leader that's looking for opportunities, looking for the appropriate changes, ready to roll up your sleeves and jump out down in there and get to it. Okay, so there's faith in the foundation that you've created. Have faith in that foundation. Foundation. If you stay grounded under pressure because you purposely put yourself under pressure to learn or grow, guess what? You can even create artificial deadlines in your business to say, I have to get this project done by tomorrow close of business. And then you're going to force yourself to grind it out and get it done. So you know when a boss or the CEO comes down here and says, I'm slapping your table, Johnny, get this done. You're used to the pressure and you don't freak out. So the discipline, discipline, the purpose that you have in your life will rise to the surface. The belief will guard your action, that you can be a greater version of yourself. You can achieve the vision that you have actually written out. Write out your vision, tell it to a couple other people, and you all try to accomplish it together.
[00:46:05] So people who stay steady in hardship, they keep their breathing about them, they keep their head about them, they control those emotions versus those who spiral and get into the what if scenarios and all of the depressive thinking and the worst case scenario. They make all of the supposing actions about what everybody is thinking and doing behind the scenes. They make themselves the victim and the target of everybody's negative thinking. Those are the people that struggle. You can get out of that situation if you know that's something that you struggle with. Start talking about it, start writing it down, start making it. Half. Half of solving the problem is clearly articulating and writing the problem down. You're halfway to solving it. Okay, so what you ultimately root yourself in is what's going to determine how you respond under pressure, what you do to prepare yourself for grabbing opportunity, identifying skill needs, identifying relationship gaps and identifying ways to communicate and sell value. What you do to prepare yourself for that when the opportunity comes by. Well, that's what we do. We have luck is when preparation meets opportunity and people are going to look at you, you two years from now, five years from now, and saying, by golly, didn't he or she just really get lucky? No luck. Timing and opportunity and preparation all met. So here's what I want you to do. If you want to ask more about this, if you want help with any of this, go look me up on LinkedIn. You can go to William Kahn. It's got, you'll see all the stuff up there with the company information you want to do. Shoot me a message over there. You can go to the website and you can go to five talent strategic finance, which is the number five talents, sf.com look up either of those websites. You can get a hold of me. I'm happy to talk to all of you. It doesn't cost you a thing. Scroll through there, set yourself an appointment for free. And we can keep talking about this kind of stuff because I'm passionate about getting you to your next level. In the meantime, I want everyone to go out into the world and I want you to see the change and be the change. And we'll catch you right here. Next time on Pivotal Change.
