In this solo milestone episode, the host celebrates the podcast’s 400th release, expressing deep gratitude to listeners, guests, and the production team for their support. He outlines the show’s composition—about 250 interview episodes and the remainder solo or collaborative episodes—and reflects on his role as a facilitator rather than an advocate, emphasizing the importance of listeners applying critical thinking to guest insights rather than accepting them blindly. The host shares a personal anecdote from a recent trip to New York, contrasting it with his life in Alabama to illustrate how productive dialogue can occur across differing political, religious, and ideological perspectives. He encourages listeners to extract at least one actionable idea from each episode, acknowledges past disagreements with guests, and reaffirms that such disagreement is healthy. The episode also revisits the podcast’s rebranding from Club Capital Leadership Podcast to Above the Business and teases new initiatives planned for 2025, ending with a hopeful call to “lead well.”
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Well, it is our 400th episode. And in this episode, I'm not going to just share some of my reflections and in particular, really just one reflection. But I think that what I share hopefully will be of benefit to you, not just in my own experience around 400 episodes, but I think there's one particular thing that you're going to be able to take away to implement both in your own personal journey and with your business. But before I get there, let me just share with you, uh, just token of gratitude. I feel so grateful that, you know, many of you have listened, been longtime listeners of the podcast. You've sent messages to me about certain episodes, have been able to help, help you personally, helped your team, helped your business, and it really means a tremendous amount. And that if each episode just impacts positively one person, then that means it was worth it to me to do that episode. And yes, of course, we want to continue to grow and reach new audiences, but really I do this to be able to serve. And it means a lot to me whenever you reach out and share what episodes, et cetera, have been impactful to you. So as we get into the hundreds of the episodes, which is kind of wild to think, we've roughly done around 250 episodes have been interview-based episodes. The rest of them have been some form of kind of a collaboration or one of the solo episodes that I've done. And over those 250 odd episodes, many of them have had guests on that I've disagreed with some of the things that they're sharing. Probably not everything, but some of the things that they've shared, I've kind of disagreed with that or taken a different stance. And by and large, I can only really think of one instance in particular that I've kind of verbalized that to the guest. And it really And the reason is, is because I don't think that that's really my role to do that. We bring them on to get their opinion, and my job is to try to bring it out from them as much as possible and allow you to be able to decide what do you believe, what's best for you. Well, I say that because I think that When I look back, just generally speaking in my career, that there's been times where I've just blindly accepted whatever it is that someone is sharing. And I just took it on its face value as opposed to giving it some critical thinking and to think, do I actually believe that? Who else shares a symptom, a similar thought pattern? Have I experienced that myself? Is that challenging to the way that I think now? Have other people expressed something different from that? What do I actually believe? And again, my role on the podcast isn't to offer up oftentimes my own personal view. Of that. Maybe I will occasionally, but just to really bring it out of the guest itself. So what's the real takeaway here? I think the real takeaway is that as we go into another 100 episodes, and when we reach 500, uh, around this time next year, or we do another 500 episodes and we one day hit our 1,000th episode, that there's going to be guest on that we have that you may have had a different opinion, uh, than what they do about how to grow your business, about personal development, how to develop your team, how to encourage your team, how to reward your team, how to incentivize your team. Every angle of business is what we attempt to try to approach to just really the game of business. And there's going to be people that we bring on that you're probably going to disagree with their way of thinking, and that's okay. I, I record this because it's, uh, I don't talk about politics really at all. I don't get into politics a tremendous amount. But I know as we go into over the next month or so that there's oftentimes a lot of polarization that's happening in the political world to separate people based on, on their beliefs. And I think this is also true of religion as well. And at the time I'm recording this, I'm actually up in New York. I visited a friend, got to play some incredible golf courses for just a short trip. New York couldn't really be a more different place in a lot of ways than Alabama, where I live. And yet, so many of the people that I met up here were absolutely wonderful. They may have different beliefs than I do. They may be politically maybe different than I am, etc. And that is okay. We were able to continue to have great dialogue and discussions. It was just absolutely great to be up here. And I met so many amazing people that I hope to stay in touch with. And I think that can also be the case when it comes to or comes with people that we're learning from. Maybe that when you go to a conference and you hear speakers or the speaker, we go to a coaching program event, that there's this idea that you have to kind of take everything right from the person. I don't necessarily think that's the case. I think oftentimes if we get one sentence, one word, one mindset shift, it can be worth the time away and worth the financial investment, etc. So as you go through, going through the rest of 2024, going into 2025, and you're around other business owners that have different beliefs and strategies and way to think about growing the business, as we have different podcast guests on for the next 100, 200, 400, 500 episodes, that there may be even, uh, for that matter, when I share on solo episodes. There may be areas and ideas that you may completely disagree with the way that I approach it, and that's okay. That's okay. If it helps you to be able to arrive at your own conclusion, or maybe it helps to deepen your belief in something in particular, then I believe that that was worth it. I'm so grateful for the last 400 episodes. We've had some amazing guests. I want to give my thanks to them. I want to give the thanks to the team that we have. There's so many different people on the team that impact this podcast to deliver it to you week in and week out. I've shared it before, but I want to give, obviously, to all of them my sincere gratitude to have them on the team. We've had the exact same team working on the podcast from the very get-go. And if it wasn't for them, you know, sometimes pushing me, prodding me to get episodes together, nudging me gently along the way, and they all, they show up in a way to serve. And so if it wasn't for them, then we certainly wouldn't have a podcast. I'm grateful for that. I'm so excited for what we've got coming up over the next year or so. We've got some really amazing progressions. It was roughly about a year ago that we were full on. It was actually December of last year that we announced the rebranding of the podcast from the Club Capital Leadership Podcast to Above the Business. And we're really excited about a couple of new initiatives that we're going to pull together for 2025. All right, everyone. Hope this served you well. Until next time, lead well.
