Ep 314: Don't Wait For Someone Else To Fix It with Doug Lennick and Chuck Wachendorfer

What if you could step out of the day-to-day and see your business from a whole new perspective? Welcome to Above the Business, where we empower you to rise above the daily grind and embrace a higher way of business ownership. It's time to build your business by design. Welcome to another episode of the Above the Business podcast. My name is Bradley Hemner, your host. On today's episode, we have Doug Lennick and Chuck Wachendorfer. They wrote the book Don't Wait for Someone Else To Fix It, subtitle: 8 Essentials to Enhance Your Leadership Impact at Work, Home, and Anywhere Else That Needs You. I really enjoyed the back and forth conversation with these guys. We ended up talking a lot around emotional decision-making and really not even just emotional decision-making, decision-making in general on this episode. I think you're going to get a ton out of it. Without further ado, here's my conversation with Doug and Chuck. Chuck and Doug, welcome to the podcast.

Thank you.

Thanks for having us, Bradley. Great to be here.

Great to have you. Well, we love to start with background and origin story. I love to hear the journey about how people got to where they are. Chuck, I'll start with you. Why don't you share a little bit about your journey and background?

Absolutely. Uh, I'm actually on my third career. So I started as an engineer out of college. My dad was a mechanical engineer, so I thought, you know, following his footsteps, I'd be able to generate a great living. I was good at math. And sadly, after about 6 months or a year out of college and had secured a very good engineering job, I realized I hated engineering. So that left me with a choice in life at 23 or 24 years old. Do I go back to school? Get an MBA? Do I get a law degree? Do I get another engineering job? But about that same time, American Express was hiring financial advisors. And since I was good at math and I enjoyed having money, I thought I might be good at— as a financial advisor. And so I started at 24 years old, uh, you know, helping other people manage their money, plan for their future. And it was a tremendous learning experience, not just about what people do with their money, but how to invest, learning from the mistakes people have made over their lives. And that is a career that I did for about 17 years at American Express. That's where Doug and I met, probably 35, 40 years ago almost now. I ended up running regions of financial services for American Express, and then I found myself at another career crossroads about 20 years ago where I didn't want to raise my kids in the city that I was living in. I didn't want my boss's job. I had plenty of money, and I needed some time to figure out what else I wanted to do with the rest of my life. And so that gave me a chance to take a couple years off. During that time, Doug and I were talking about the company he was founding, Think— which is now Think to Perform. And Think to Perform allowed me to do what I do best, which is, um, developing people. Uh, build— I enjoy building a company. I'm a builder by nature. I'm not good with maintenance. I like creating things, like building things. And so I joined Doug about 2004 and have been with him 20 years, uh, next June, and building this fantastic organization we call Think to Perform.

Oh, that's great. I agree with you on the building. I love the the process of building and creating things. I totally agree with you. Doug, love to hear your journey.

Well, yeah, I, that was, I enjoyed hearing the, a little piece of what Chuck just said I hadn't heard before, so I enjoyed hearing that part of it. Uh, but the, um, he and I both started, actually, we, we, we joined what is now Ameriprise Financial. We were both advisors at a time when that itself was an entrepreneurial job. I mean, you took all the risk. The company didn't pay you to work. You paid to be there in essence. And so we were entrepreneurial and I've always been an entrepreneur, you know, 50 years ago, literally 50 years ago this month, I started my training with what is now Ameriprise, but I also had started a year earlier, a company that was located one block away from where I'm at right now in downtown Minneapolis. So I was a 20-year-old guy and we started this company and I've started many of them since. Both Chuck and I went on to executive careers within American Express. And so I took a, a, a, and even during that time I still was investing and doing other business deals. And so we decided, uh, this would be the thing to do cuz our interest in Chuck and I shared the interest why we wrote the book, but we really are interested in why do people do what they do? And isn't it, is it possible or isn't it possible, but is it possible that one could really be who they would ideally like to be more often? And so we built a company helping people aim to be their ideal selves and help them be creators and builders and make a difference. That's the deal. And, and so that's kind of how we got here. And it's been, you know, I, although we both remember not working here, it's so long ago, it seems like we've been here a long time. We're— but it's been fun. We've had a fun ride and we're really happy to be on your show. So thank you very much, Bradley.

Thank you.

And we work, I think, as, as you mentioned, Bradley, a lot with, uh, small and medium business owners. We understand the challenges they're up against. We've also worked with large organizations, nonprofits, athletes, and really what we're trying to do is help improve decision-making under pressure. So what you can know is decision-making has twice the impact on our performance than talent and skill combined. I'm not saying talent and skill don't matter. We were just talking about football, uh, before we started the record button. But, uh, decision-making has twice the impact on performance than talent and skill combined. And unlike our IQ, which we can't improve, we can with practice and focus and effort become better decision makers. And we make about 35,000 decisions a day, most of them we don't think about. And as a business owner, what you want is to empower your people to make decisions about the business consistent with how you think about the business. Because if you don't empower your people, you become the bottleneck.

That's right.

Like every decision has to run through you and that slows the growth of the firm, the organization. And so whether it's individual decision-making or organizational decision-making, we work to align that.

And what we have found out, Bradley, which is kind of really kind of an interesting thing is we've discovered the competencies that help one make the optimal decisions tend to be emotional and moral, not cognitive and technical. So cognitive and technical competencies basically are table stakes. In order to play the game, you have to be smart and you have to be technically good. But the, and, and Chuck described it really, really well. We use, you could put it into a formula. Your people like formula. It's talent plus skills plus decision-making, as Chuck described it, equals one's level of success at an individual performance level. And by a factor of 2 to 1, as he said, decision-making matters most. And the competencies are emotional and moral. Can I do the right thing really well under pressure? Which is what Chuck said. Can I do the right thing really well? I can cheat that night. My, that's not a sustainable proposition. That might be a good short-term solution to get an A on this test, but long-term it might, might not be that good if I actually need to know the material. Hmm. So cheating maybe isn't a good idea. So we try to rule that out. So we got integrity. You gotta throw that in there. So we, we try to encourage people to aim to be their ideal selves. In fact, that's our first essential of the 8 essentials. That's the first one. And if you're successful, if Bradley Hamner can be the best Bradley he can be, you know, unless you're a sociopath, you're gonna be a hell of a contributor to society. And, and we know that. So if you can aim and hit your ideal self, you'll be a difference maker. And I'm sure you're pretty dang close already. I'm sure you're a difference maker now. So I'm guessing you're ideal pretty often.

How, how does decision making— help separate for me, Chuck, this one thing. Is decision making though something that I develop as a skill along the way?

Yes. And it's also something you can teach. And so what we have in the book are kind of 8 essentials, we call them. And you don't have to, by the way, use all 8 essentials to see a difference in your life or your organization. But, you know, back to what we were talking about as a business owner, in order to align decision-making, in order to help people think like I do about the business, They have to know a few things. They have to know where the business is headed.

Mm-hmm.

That's vision. They have to know what the business stands for. Those are values. They have to be able to manage themselves, as Doug is suggesting, emotionally. And we can get better at all those things. And by the way, it's not about being perfect. None of us is perfect, but it is, can we get a little bit better every day? And that's what we teach in the 8 Essentials. The 8 Essentials, you know, the book Don't Wait for Somebody Else to Fix It, is a toolkit. It's a book meant to be used. It's a workbook. We give exercises that help people demonstrate and use and apply those 8 Essentials. One of them is this notion of improving decision-making. But in order to be a better decision-maker, I gotta know where I'm going and I gotta manage myself well. A lot of times what we find in our work at Think to Perform is people think about leadership as me, you know, influencing a group of people, which is true. Leadership is about influence, but leadership begins with self-leadership. It's me managing myself better because it's the only person's behavior I can control. And the better job I do at controlling my own behavior, the more influence I have with other people. So you think about, you know, people in our own lives who don't have great relationships, aren't effective with other people, usually it's because they lack self-awareness.

Mm-hmm.

And so we teach an exercise to improve self-awareness.

Mm-hmm.

And you can compare like As Doug is saying, how am I really like right now and how do I want to be ideally? And sometimes I notice how I really fall short of who I hope to be ideally.

I think it's kind of like when you were talking about Bradley going to the Auburn-Alabama football game. You know, there's a different guy that shows up at that game than shows up almost every other day because of your passion for the game. And so, you explain to your son as an example, I might not be my ideal self for a couple hours, you know, and, and, and the reality is that's true for all of us. Nobody's ideal all the time. But, but a lot of people don't know when they aren't. See, the difference that you have, it all starts with self-awareness. So Chuck has alluded to and And I'll add to it. It just, just say what Chuck said again, but he talked about relationship effectiveness or leadership effectiveness, relationship leadership effectiveness. How effective I am at relating to Chuck is largely a function of how effective I am at managing me. If I don't manage me very well, I don't relate to Chuck very well. Now, how well I manage me has everything to do with how I make decisions.

Yeah.

You know, so how effective I am at managing myself in the presence of stress and pressure and difficult decisions. It's tough.

Yeah.

I, I'm gonna, self-awareness.

I, I wanna admit that I, and I've shared it different times, whether it's through a solo episode or on here. That I can look back on some of the decisions, some of the really poor decisions that I made. Those decisions that I made were always made from an emotional state. Always.

True.

Um, true for all of us. Uh, I'm not saying that I haven't made logical decisions that ended up being not the right move to make. Okay. Yes, I have. That doesn't mean I'm perfect in every decision that I make and everything works out. No. But some of the biggest mistakes that I've made in business I can trace back to being emotional in the moment. Now, here is one part of this that I'd love, Doug, for me that I can look back on is when I hear emotions initially, I would always think angry, frustrated, pissed off, you know, things are not going the way I want them to. So there I go through a rampage through the, through, through my organization. Well, yes, I did do that too, but actually some of the worst decisions I made is when I was running emotionally high, right? And I thought, well man, everything that I touch is working out, so we'll just double down. Let's hire 4 people at one time when the reality is the financial said I needed to hire one. So no, I'm just gonna triple down and go all in. And now I just wasted $150,000 in, in revenue.

Yeah. I love what you just said. You're a young guy, so you, you have youth on your side. You might not remember when Alan Greenspan was chairman of the Federal Reserve, but he's famous for putting two words to do together to describe investor behavior at that time. This was in the 1990s and the two words were irrational exuberance. So what you just said is when you were flying high, you made some of your most critical mistakes.

Yep.

Yeah. And, and what we would say is, and you said it really nicely, I liked how you said it. We'll say it this way. Irrational decision doesn't always not work. It sometimes is rewarded and rational decisions don't always work.

Mm-hmm.

You know, so, but on average over time, the data will say that rational decision making does better than irrational decision making. Yep. And we teach people how to be rational under pressure, how to make the best decision under pressure. And whether it's an athlete who makes a stupid decision in the fourth quarter of the football game, costing the team a field position and maybe the game because they just did something unsportsmanlike at just the wrong moment. That's a decision.

Yep. Yep.

Might have been the most talented skill either.

Yeah. It might have been the most talented skillful player on the field.

Yeah.

No, I think that's actually a really good example. So it, how do I, Chuck, in the moment, when do I need to know that it, what is like, what does it look like? Like I'm emotional about something. To back myself out and then try to get my central nervous system calmed down and then be able to collect data. Now here's the deal. In a football game, which is typically different than business— I'm not saying it's always— there's a lot of parallels in sports and business. Some of them don't always apply. In sports, you can't just call a timeout and say, sorry everybody, I got to get my emotions together before I can, you know, handle this. It's like, I mean, you call a timeout for 30 seconds, but I mean, you you know, the game is still got to go on, right?

Right.

And I'm a golfer, so, you know, like in, in, in major championship, it's like you can't call a timeout and go sit for an hour and say, let me get my emotions together before I, I play the back nine at Augusta, you know, or something like that. Like, you got to keep playing, right? In business, typically, that I've seen, most of those big decisions, I can remove myself emotionally from the, from the moment without, you know, being detrimental to a team member, a partner, a customer, a client, etc. But yet sometimes I still feel that, man, how do I actually get my— get control of myself to be able to make a better decision? Does that make sense, Chuck?

You know, I'm going to set you up, Chuck, once more. I'm going to set Chuck up a little bit more for this because Chuck really did an extraordinary job a number of years ago. Chuck and I were working together to help a company that's a, was domestically headquartered to launch a business in India. And, and what he did with that group with using this tool we call the 4 Rs, he actually helped them understand how to build that right into the very nature of their business. So You asked the right guy the question. I just thought I'd give him— blow his horn a little bit first. There you go. Back to you, Chuck.

You know, I'd say here's the difference between a football game and real life, if I can make that comparison. In the football— in a football game or any kind of a sports game, you know how many timeouts you have, right? And you know you got to call a timeout, and that's the coach's job. And the coach's job to call a timeout is is when he sees her, she sees things getting hot where people are emotional and out of control. The difference is in life we don't always have that awareness, right? We don't, you know, so it's, it's when I don't pay attention to myself that my decision-making behavior is most at risk. So to your point about how do I, how do I get better at decision-making, first of all I gotta pay attention to what's going on for me. We're all hardwired to be emotional first, logical second.

All of us.

And when we get emotional, our emotions sacrifice accuracy for speed. They want us to respond very quickly and are usually wrong. Emotions aren't good or bad. It's what I do with the emotion that makes it good or bad. So it's okay to be excited. It's okay to be angry, but it would be more effective for me to say, Bradley, I'm upset right now, than for me to yell at you, right? Because if I yell at somebody, the tendency is to yell back, and that's when the situation escalates. So we've all heard the expression sleep on it. When we sleep on things, we calm down. When we're calmer, we can think more clearly. Our emotional brain hijacks our logical brain. That's our physiology. We're all hardwired that way. So the 4 Rs that we talk about in the book Don't Wait for Somebody Else to Fix It, which is decide wisely, is— begins with recognize. What am I feeling? How am I thinking? Um, what am I doing, right? Because if I notice I'm getting upset then I know my decision-making is at risk. If I notice I'm getting excited, you, or euphoric, I know my decision-making is compromised. That leads to the second R, which is reflection. And to your point about like, the game keeps moving, life keeps happening, it doesn't take long. If I can reflect on what's important to me, what I'm grateful for, who I love, change my breathing, Because when I get excited, I breathe from the upper part of my chest. If I can take some deep breaths, I can oxygenate my blood and calm myself down when I think about what's really important to my, my values, my goals. And when I'm calmer, and it doesn't take more than maybe 30 seconds or a couple minutes for me to calm myself down, so I could do it in a game.

Yeah.

But I got to be, I got to notice I'm getting excited.

Yeah.

Or I'm getting emotional to do that. When I'm calmer after the second R, that's reflection, I can then reframe. That's the third R. Reframing is evaluating my options.

Mm-hmm.

So I, you know, I could do option A, but I might also have option B, C, and D. And what are the trade-offs with those options? So I don't have to, do something unsportsmanlike on the field, I could maybe make a better choice. I can still be upset but not hit somebody illegally. Or I could not maybe lash out at somebody in my organization because they made a mistake. I might make that an opportunity for us to learn. So that leads to the fourth R, which is responding. So it's recognize, reframe— I'm sorry, recognize, reflect, Reframe, and then finally respond, which is the decision.

I love that. I love that. I, I, I love frameworks first of all, because it takes concepts or like these bigger 30,000, 40,000-foot view things and brings it down to, okay, yeah, but how do I actually do that? And so having a framework like that really helps. And I wanna share for people personally, like it, I don't want to be devoid of emotion. I don't want to be like— I can be a very passionate person to get people bought into the vision of what we're doing. And if I was just devoid of emotion and everything was like I was flatlined across the board, like, I don't want to be that. Like you're talking about Doug earlier, my ideal self. I can be a very passionate person. If you ever played golf with me or play basketball with me, like I am, I am absolutely going to try to beat your tail. See the Jordan jersey behind you? Like, I am a very passionate person and I'm passionate in business. I just don't want to make decisions from some of those places where I'm, where I'm at. Like, there you go, there's the Jordans right there. Yeah. So like, I don't want to remove my emotions. I just want to be able to channel that in the, in the right places. I'll tell you an honest story about this. Like, I've got some, you know, admittedly big Alabama fans and I got some text messages after that game that were, you know, they were poking at me pretty good and I was like, I do not need to respond to this text message right now. Like, I will fire off something that I do not need to say, and I don't want to hurt the relationship. I'm just being totally honest with you. When you're in the moment, in the stadium, there's something that gets a hold of you that I was like, I do not need to respond to this. And then let me tell you what happened. 20 minutes later, maybe 15 minutes later, I get a text from my brother that says, your mom is in— I put mom in the hospital. And you're talking about in a moment reframe. That's honestly good. My mom is in the hospital right now. Look, she's, she's recovering and doing fine, but like, it's amazing how much I flipped from perspective in the moment's notice of coming off of, you know, obviously an emotional game to like, oh my goodness, this means nothing compared to, to that. Right.

That was the reflection you had, Bradley.

Right.

Yeah. Put things in perspective. That's what reflection is.

Yeah.

And in fact, what I would say, Bradley, is you somehow have developed yourself where you're intuitively doing what we teach people to do because most people need the tool. You're using— we're labeling for you what you're doing. You were recognizing, you did reflect. You did reframe and you did respond. All we're doing is, is moving from an unconscious competence to a conscious. Yeah. We're saying you were unconsciously, unconsciously competent. Now, how much better can you be at helping others when you move from unconscious competence to conscious? And that's why, since we've talked sports, why some of the great players who are unconsciously competent are not the best coaches because they can't transfer that knowledge and, and skill to somebody else because they, they say, what, do it like I do it. You know, what I do is I do this and that and then I dunk it.

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No, that's a great— that's great. Wayne Gretzky, I read the story about Wayne Gretzky. Like, yeah, he was a coach for a period of time. I'm not a hockey person, but like, he performed very poorly. Like, his teams never really made it to the playoffs or anything like that. Like, he wasn't able to transfer, like, the way that he did things to ultimately being able to be, be a coach. I want to transition this to business too, because obviously I think the sports analogy— but I'll share with you one that was about 3 months ago. One of my business partners and I were really going at it and going at it not in a disrespectful way, but we very much disagreed. On the vision and like where things needed to go. We were on opposite ends of that. And, and it was full of— I mean, it was tension. I mean, it was tension. There's no question about it. And the thing that was back in the back of my mind about this that maybe will help some other people is my dad. I caught more things from my dad than I taught— than he taught me.

Okay.

I caught a lot from my father. But one thing he did teach me, he said, son, always prioritize the relationship. And then the back of my head, I told myself, like, uh, prioritize the relationship here. Like, financials, money, like the business growth, etc. Like, prioritize the relationship. And that kept me from saying some things in the heat of the moment that I probably would have said because I was like, well, wanting to be brutally honest. Yeah, but I didn't need to deliver it that way. And so I tried to back out of that. Chuck, thoughts on that?

Yeah, we have, uh, and we talk about in the book this what we call a goal achievement triangle. I think it's going to be particularly relevant to the point you're making. So you draw a triangle, and on one corner you write goals, on the second corner you write tasks, and then the third corner you write relationships. So the goals, tasks, relationships. So in order to achieve our goals, we got to get stuff done. Those are tasks. But we also need the help of other people. Those are relationships. When we get stressed or under pressure, we tend to focus on task at the expense of relationship. What does that look like? Well, I don't have time for this right now. Can you make it fast? Can we talk about it tomorrow? You know, that kind of a thing. And it actually makes goal achievement harder. We tend under pressure to disconnect from people. Close our door, isolate ourselves, and it actually makes goal achievement harder.

Yeah.

So what really impacts goal achievement are relationships, to your point.

Yeah.

So I don't care what kind of business you own, the best source of any new customer or client is a referral. That is a relationship-based activity. The best source of any new employee is a referral. Right? Because you have great relationship with your employees and they want to refer their friends and family to work here.

So one of the— I was trying to think through some situations where people— because I think it's super important. Like, I think that like this doesn't get talked about enough about how to deal with these situations. So I was trying to think about a situation to where something really rubs me the wrong way that I have to regulate myself. And here's one of them. Is if somebody gives me honest feedback, right? And like, I want the honest feedback if it's positive. After this podcast, if I asked Chuck and I said— Chuck and Doug— and I said, hey Doug, um, I'd love for you to give me some honest feedback about how I did as a podcast host. And Chuck shares, oh, I thought this was good, thought this was good. I think honestly, I think this can be better. I don't think that was, that was very good. Well, that's helpful, right? But then sometimes you're like, oh man, I don't know. That really, that, that, that was hard for me to, to navigate through. So Doug, what I'm asking is, when we, we, especially as leaders, we oftentimes don't get a lot of feedback coming upwards, right? Because we're the ones kind of pushing feedback down to our direct reports and we say we want it. And then the team kind of gives it to us, but they're kind of like, I think I'm just gonna tell him what he needs to say, what he wants me to hear, right? Or what he wants to hear or what she wants to hear. I'm just gonna say what they want to hear versus actually, Bradley, this really bothers us when you do this, right? And so I want to handle that well, and I want to set that stage up to handle it well. How do I do that, Doug?

Well, it actually starts with the same process of the 4 Rs. It starts with you recognizing How soliciting that feedback, how it feels to them and to you. So if we explored the first R a little bit more, we did, did it real fast. So that recognition R, I wanna recognize how I'm feeling, like I am feeling however I'm feeling about the feedback. So when I get feedback and it's honest and not positive, how does that make me feel?

Mm-hmm.

And if it doesn't make me, if it, it heightens me feeling I'm not feeling so good right now, that moment of recognition is critical for me to understand I am not as prepared as I wished I was. To receive the feedback I just asked for. Mm-hmm. Because I can already tell I didn't like it. Doesn't feel good. Mm-hmm. That's recognition. Now I reflect and I do this fast and I reflect quickly and I say, truth is I need the feedback in the big picture. Feedback is what's important to me. I prefer positive feedback, but only if it's true.

Right.

You know, I don't want people making stuff up because I genuinely want to be better. So then I can reframe my thinking. I'm, you know, I was thinking this, I was thinking, yeah, I don't know so much. I like your feedback anymore, Bradley. You know, I like half of your feedback. Half of what you said made a lot of sense to me. But that other half, you missed a lot.

Yeah.

You know, that part where you were criticizing me, you just didn't even see what was happening. You blew it. You know, so if I can reframe now and say, no, I'm going to change my mind. The classic reframe. We, you know, we talk about reframing. Winnie the Pooh decided to change his mind so he wouldn't have to change his shirt. I, that's what I'm doing. I'm reframing and then I respond. So that's how I handle it. The second part of the recognition though, is to recognize what the other person is experiencing. That's called empathy. So when our, our fourth essential is embrace empathy and compassion. Empathy is understanding somebody else. Compassion is doing something about it. Compassion is empathy in action, much like service is gratitude in action. If you're grateful, then do, you know, be of service to somebody, and that's a way to show your gratitude. As opposed, it's nice to say thank you, you know, and be, it's nice to be empathetic. I feel bad for you, Bradley. I'm not going to do anything. I, I hope somebody else does. I'm gonna wait for somebody else to fix it. That's why we wrote the book. We said, hey, if, if I actually care about you, maybe I could do something. So that's that second part of the recognition. And then the third part of the recognition is what's making us feel the way we're feeling? What's making Bradley feel the way he feels and Chuck? And Doug, what? Because there's 3 of us in this conversation, and all 3 of us have our own experience going.

Mm-hmm.

And the better each of us gets at paying attention to us, ourselves, and what we want out of this experience and this connection, the better off we will be at handling the emotions that come our way. And we will even accept and handle well the ones that don't feel good to us. We have to recognize it doesn't always feel good to get criticized. I don't like it personally.

You know, one, Chuck, that I was thinking about that I think makes sense but it gets hard is that if I unnecessarily receive, and this would be relevant for a lot of our audience as insurance agency owners, I receive a negative Google review, and the customer was absolutely out of line, and they write a nasty 1-star review, and they're wrong in everything that they say. And it's hard for me to then to be able to show empathy to that and see it from their perspective when, if it's like, what, you know, that, that's, that's a one-sided thing. And it's hard not to emotionally respond to that in the moment and say, like, well, let me tell you what, you know, obviously that's not the right thing to do. Um, but that's an example of like, ah, you know, I don't want to have to rewrite that, you know.

Yeah, the opportunity that we're talking about here, Bradley, is to go from being emotionally reflexive to becoming emotionally reflective. So I notice how I'm feeling instead of me just reacting to how I'm feeling. So I get a negative comment online about my business, emotionally reflexive. If I act on that reflex, it might be to rip the person a new one, but that's probably not the best choice. So I have to become emotionally reflective, which is notice that I'm getting upset, think about what's the outcome I want to create here. We all have a choice. We We can either be right or be effective. And oftentimes when we're getting frustrated or when we're, you know, reading somebody the riot act, it's because we're trying to be right and it doesn't always mean we're effective.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And that's where it gets back to what you were saying earlier about the relationship. Uh, I, I need to be honest. I don't want to distort reality. But I don't need to tear somebody down to do that.

Yeah, that's such a good point. I, um, I, I'll mention this guy on here because he's, he's puts himself out there, um, to give people, um, understanding. His name came up earlier when I was talking to somebody, um, but like Grant Cardone, um, you know, he's a big personality. Some people listen to this podcast, may you may love Grant, You may absolutely not love Grant. He is a very polarizing figure. He has very polarizing views on a lot of things, which obviously he's got a huge following. I'm not here to give my opinion on that, but what I am going to give my opinion on is one thing, is he absolutely went online and ripped somebody publicly who given some— had gave him some criticism. And when I saw that, I thought, I don't think that that actually built him up anymore. Like, to your point, he might have been right, but he wasn't necessarily effective in that moment. Right. That to me, the right versus effective was like, yeah, he might have been right because he was making his point, but the way he went about it was not necessarily effective. Now, does he care what my opinion is? Clearly he does not care.

Maybe not. Yeah, right.

Right. He doesn't. But I thought that that was relevant to that, to say that went way beyond what it actually needed to be. And this is somebody who catches a lot of criticism and hate. I mean, obviously I'm criticizing him for the way he handled that, admittedly, but that was one of those things where it's like, was he right? Probably. Was he effective? I don't think so, personally.

So, right.

Well, the other thing I think, just to continue on your point, Bradley, is listening does not mean I have to agree. So I, I want to listen to you. I want to understand what's going on for you. I want to understand why you wrote that comment. How could we do better? And you, you may give me some feedback that I don't agree with, and I don't necessarily need to say that, but I want to listen and really listen to understand where you're coming from, as opposed to listening to defend my point of view.

That's a good point.

Yeah, you know, and that's hard to do. I have to be really present and self-aware to not get defensive and just listen. And, and just as, as Doug was saying, empathy doesn't mean I feel what you feel. Empathy is I recognize how you're feeling. So you sound frustrated, you look upset, tell me more about that, because then I, I have, have the opportunity to understand and maybe help you get unstuck. And a lot of times what leaders— one of the probably the most misunderstood concepts is this concept of empathy. Empathy is not letting people off the hook. Empathy is about understanding why they're stuck, what's getting in their way, so I can help them get unstuck. That's why empathy is so important.

Yeah. You, you mentioned brutal honesty earlier, Bradley. Which is a common term that people really like that Jim Collins popularized. And, and it, and it allows people to feel better about being brutal. We approach it differently. We say there's nothing that requires you to be brutal. You could be compassionately honest. You could be brutally honest, but people enjoy being brutal. Sometimes. So I prefer being brutally honest. Well, it's not as effective. I'm just as right as I was when I was compassionate, but I'm way less effective. Brutal honesty is less effective than compassionate honesty if you actually want the other person to kind of make a switch. You know, it's, it's that old saying, you know, beatings will continue until morale improves. I mean, I can beat you until you smile, but soon as I leave the room, you're gonna quit smiling and you're gonna curse me. So, you know, so the idea of being brutally honest is overrated.

I think that I, I think I would, I've never heard that before. I've never had somebody said that, but I would agree with that. I've had a friend, was way outside business. Shared with me some things that he delivered in a way of complete honesty and transparency to me about some things that he had that from literally 10 years ago in our friendship. This is one of my best friends growing up, and I didn't know he had been holding that. And he shared that with me and said, hey, this situation To me, I don't even remember it. Don't even remember that situation. But I was dismissive in the moment to him, and, and, and, you know, it— and, and, and that bothered him. And I appreciated so much his level of honesty, but it was through, through compassion. And I was able to then say, I am really sorry for that. I can look back on that and say now that that was wrong for me as a friend to have handled that situation that way. I had no idea that I had handled it that way. And I was able to hopefully be able to express my, you know, regret in that, from that situation. But he shared it from not from a place of brutal honesty, but from a place of compassion, honesty, and said, hey, I just want you to know this had really bothered me and has bothered me for a long time, and I really need to let this go. And he shared that with me. I was like, man, thank you so much for that. But it wasn't—

yeah.

Brutal in the way of like, I'm gonna beat you over the head with this. And, and I think that that's kind of an example of what you're, what you're sharing there, Doug, is I wanted to hear that. Had he handed it to me with a sledgehammer, I mean, I hope I wouldn't have responded, you know, uh, reflectively, emotionally. Um, but the way he delivered it, didn't cut corners, didn't— I mean, he just shared what it was. But he didn't do it in a way that caused me to have to feel like I needed to be emotional. I got a question, Chuck. How did you guys come up with the name of the title of the book? That's one of the things I really love a lot is the title.

It's kind of a funny story. So we were imagining this book about 5 or 6 years ago. We wanted to write a book that was a leadership book that would stand the test of time. And we didn't want to write a business leadership book. There's 1,500 business leadership books published every year. So we wanted to write a book that anybody could use anywhere to improve their lives, the lives of those around them. So Doug has written several books with the, with the word intelligence, and he wrote Moral Intelligence in 2005. He wrote two, uh, Financial Intelligence is probably 2009 or '10. And so he— we were thinking about leadership intelligence. And as we were shopping for publishers, the first publisher we talked to, uh, was having a conversation and he said, you know, I don't really— you know, I, I really don't get the whole leadership intelligence title, but it sounds like don't, don't wait for somebody else to fix it. And the publisher ended up turning us down But we loved what he suggested to us, and that became the title. And so Wiley, our publisher, loved the title, but it wasn't something we came up with.

Well, and we have to also, in fairness to Wiley, we have to say that Wiley actually had first— we were like conditional free agents. Wiley had first right of refusal on our book. So Wiley wanted the book anyway. So even if the other publisher said we wanted to do it, we could— if Wiley wanted the book, they got it. And we're happy to work with Wiley, but Wiley didn't come up with the name They Like It. So Chuck and I were— we got a good laugh out of that conversation. And we do appreciate— we won't mention the publisher. But we do say thank you.

Yeah. Yeah.

It's a good title.

Yeah. No, I, I, I do, I do love it. Well, this has been a great conversation. I know people are gonna want to connect with you guys, but before we close out, name of the podcast is Above the Business. Chuck, what does working above the business look like for you?

You know, it's a great question. I, I think about it like reimagining the business. You know, we all get stuck in a rut from time to time. And one of our Doug and I's mentors has a saying that everybody wants to be in a groove, but nobody wants to be in a rut. And wisdom is knowing it, knowing the difference. And so when I am above the business, I'm reimagining the business. I'm thinking about where I want the business to go, what's the direction for the business. And that then drives my decisions and behavior when I work on the business or in the business.

That's good. I love the groove versus a rut analogy. That's really good. I've never heard that one before. Doug, what does above the business look like to you?

Well, you know, similar to what's been said, I would just simply say above the business to me really is, it's kind of one of the things that I say all the time is the purpose of business is no more to make money than the purpose of life is to breathe. So what are we, what difference are we trying to make here? And that gets into the reimagination that Chuck talks about, because we're going to have to continually reinvent ourselves to continue to, to make a difference. And so above the business to me really is about why are we here? Like we genuinely as Authors and as executives at Think to Perform, we genuinely want to enhance the world through improving the decision-making and the performance of the individuals and organizations we touch. That's our vision. And everything that we can do to contribute to that is above the business, and then it becomes on the business, and then it becomes in the business. And, and it's that capability to, to stay evergreen, which is not easy, you know, cuz the, it's really easy to get in the rut because we do things that work and then we just do it again and again and again. And then pretty soon the rut becomes a groove. So thanks, Jeff Stiefeler is our mentor who said that. So we'll give him a little shout out. Thank you, Jeff.

So people want to pick up the book and connect with you all. Where would you point them to?

I would say our website is think2perform.com. It's the number 2, the word think2perform.com. We teach people to e-think motion so that they don't just mote. So go there. And then I would go to your favorite bookstore or online and, and order the book. I really would encourage you to get the book and use the book. The book is meant to be a workbook, a book you actually use. It's a tool book. And as Chuck said earlier, just open it up and use it. So, and if anybody wants, they can reach out to us. Our, our emails are easy. It's our first name, first initial, last name at thinktoperform.com. So if anybody wants me—

Barnes Noble, Amazon, Porchlight, all online real retailers will carry that book.

Awesome, guys. Really enjoyed the conversation and, uh, love to have you back on in the future.

Anytime, Bradley.

Thanks for having us.

Thank I think I have a personal preference for whenever I walk out of an episode with some sort of a framework or something that I can take an idea and then, you know, what do I do with that? You know, you ever had that feeling? Well, this one, I really like the framework of the 4 Rs: recognize, reflection, reframe, and then responding. Look, the episode ended up speaking a lot about— and of course we pulled a lot of sports analogies in to how do you make decisions in the right way about not being as emotional in making those decisions. And I think that that was worth us kind of coming at it and spending as much time on it as, as we do. Because look, yes, I've shared with— on the episode myself, um, kind of vulnerably about the times that I've been emotionally high, emotionally low, and made decisions. But I've also heard, more importantly, from A lot of clients that I work with and other people who they similarly have faced this, they're frustrated with an experience of a customer and they take it out on the team. They're frustrated with lack of production when they get, you know, the numbers and the revenue numbers from last month and their profitability is not where it needs to be and things aren't just moving forward and they're looking at, you know, the scoreboards that they have in their business if they have some and You know, they're just, they're just frustrated. And a lot of times, you know, we can be really good firefighters, but man, we can be better arsonists at times in our business. And I think like emotional decision-making is kind of a part of that. And I don't want in any way to say that, oh, I've got that licked. But I do think that I have been able to learn really through a lot of pain about stepping away from some of those emotional decisions and being able to get some perspective. Being able to recognize how I'm feeling, have some reflection, reframe it, and then be able to respond appropriately. Now, I certainly didn't have that 4 Rs, but I do think that that is really helpful for me because again, I've learned I don't make very good decisions when I'm making emotional decisions, either high or low. And at the same time, I don't want to be just completely How would you say? I don't want to be completely bland, you know. I don't want to be like, uh, flatlined, you know, where to where there's no emotion. I don't think the team would buy into that energy. I mean, if I was talking very like, you know, that was a good podcast. I mean, even just me saying that would not be positive energy on this podcast. And yet I don't want to be completely bouncing off the walls because that would be, you know, that would be annoying, uh, to listen to. I would be annoying if I was listening to somebody on a podcast like that. So I do think that that was a big part of our episode today. I also think that a couple of the one-liners that I think Chuck said really resonated with me as well. You know, compassion is empathy in action. Do I want to be right or do I want to be effective? And, you know, I was telling the story about Grant, and maybe some of you disagree with me on that, and that's okay. That's not going to, you know, affect me. That's how I happen to see that situation. And some of the stuff Grant puts out, I like. I think he has certainly a unique way of approaching certain things. You know, he can be at times a bull in a china shop, but he is uniquely himself. I will give him absolute credit for that. And that is definitely one thing I do admire about somebody like that, is that he is him whether you like it or not. And, and, and that's fair. And so I hope that even for myself, that I come across as genuine and authentic to all of you about— here are some things that are working, here are some thoughts, here are some things that have not worked, you know, for me— and just do it in a way that I'm learning and I'm sharing. And that's really what I personally want my life to be about, is just to be able to learn and to be able to share some of these things and to tell stories from my— either myself or from some of the clients that I've been able to work with. So really enjoyed having them on. Go to think2— the number 2— think2perform.com. Pick up the book, Don't Wait for Someone Else to Fix It. At the time this episode drops, we are just finished up our very first annual, the first event in the event series we're going to be running in 2024 under the Above the Business brand. So if you want to be kind of in the loop about the future events, in fact, we're doing one, the very first part of 2024 as well. So if you missed the annual, then certainly go to abovethebusiness.co and keep up with all the happenings that we have. We'll certainly try to do a good job of keeping you up to date about some of the events, and even not only the events, but why are we doing the events. I mean, the events are set not to be just random, but a specific— they're there for a specific reason and a very specific, very clear outcome. We're not doing events just to do events because it's a good idea. There's a certain rhythm a structure that's in place. And so if you want to keep up with what we're doing on some of the events, get on our newsletter. Go to above the business.co, above the business.co. Appreciate our podcast sponsors. Coach P, go to coachpconsulting.com. Autopilot Recruiting, autopilotrecruiting.com. Of course, Club Capital, go to club.capital. We really work with some of the best of the best vendors that are out there, whether it's been Today app, Autopilot, Coach P, uh, Club Capital. They're really the best at what it is that they do. We don't just go out randomly to try to find sponsors just to have a sponsor. We really want to be able to work with people that we know that they do an exceptional job of serving and advancing our mission to be able to help build, build better business owners, but really specifically help you to be able to build your business by design and not by default. So you want help in recruiting, finding A-players, having better pipeline of people coming into your organization, go to autopilotrecruiting.com. And then if you want some help for you and specifically your team, if you're an insurance agency owner, go to Coach P Consulting. They do twice a week calls, be able to help teach, you know, scripts and what's working, and even some mindset things specifically in your insurance agency. Dave and his team do an exceptional job. Go to coachpconsulting.com. If you, uh, have heard me talk about, you know, using financials, and even like this episode is kind of an example of this, Being able to not make emotional decisions with your money really comes with having really great tools, having somebody that's a partner, having perspective. What are other people doing? I mean, how much should I invest in marketing? What about my team? What about building costs? What about, you know, all of these things? Club Capital can give you that. I mean, they can really give you data and insight that you just can't get even if you love your accountant. Okay. And they go, you know, they, they, you play golf with them, or, you know, you run with them, whatever, they're just not going to have the insight that Club Capital has to be able to help you to be able to make great decisions. So go to club.capital, book a no-obligation demo with somebody on their team, and find out how they can take that back office and really make it a strategic decision-making partner for you in your business.

Party of one.

This is a good episode. Till next time, be good.