How to Reinvent Yourself (Service Drive Revolution Drive By)

Foreign.

Welcome everybody, to service Drive Revolution in your Friday drive by.

What we want to do is give you something to think about going into the weekend. A little motivation, a little food for thought, something to kind of tickle, tickle your subconscious and make you see things a little bit different than you did before. And the voice of God was reading me this question and I thought it was perfect for the Friday drive by. So we have a special guest, the voice of God, today on the drive by. Voice of God. Could you read the question?

The voice of God is here.

On a Friday. This one comes from Jay on YouTube.

That's J in Spanish.

This one comes from. Hey, on YouTube.

Chris, I'd love to know how you proactively, quote, unquote, fixed yourself. You mention you did some reading and started figuring it out. I struggle with being a servant leader while at the same time maximizing my effectiveness. I get it. It's on me, and I own it. I work to be more effective in everything I do and understand. It's a process. Aside from reading, more suggestions are welcome on what to read. What disciplines did you embrace to get you over that behavioral hump? Thank you.

It's a. It's a great question. I've been working on leadership training for our on demand platform. And I kind of came to a weird place where the funny thing about leadership training is a lot of people do like, these, what I'll call, like Hallmark card.

Ideas for leadership training. You know, like.

You know, the law, the lid, or things like it's lonely at the top and that sort of stuff. But what I find with leaders and actually, Jay, if you look, I. I started to answer this on YouTube and I sent you a response because I, I saw the, the question when it came in and.

Inspired me just because the thing that I took away, which, which I find is maybe the most important ingredient in what you're asking, how do you fix yourself? Is that I felt like you had a. A very.

Internal locus of control, which means that you're owning. You're owning it, right? So you're asking the question from a point of view of how can I fix myself? Not, you know, a lot of people say something like, well, how do you not hire dumb people? Or, you know, that sort of thing where you're saying like, how do I own it? How do I fix myself in order to do it? Which I, you know, really love. Because that's the, the key ingredient to this journey is you won't get anywhere until you start owning it. Until you own a hundred percent of the outcome, you. You won't start to get better because it's too easy to blame everybody else. So in the. Back to the leadership training. So in the leadership training that we're. We're filming, I struggled because leadership has this.

You know, idea that there's like, do this and people will do that, and it's. It's about leading. But the thing that I found about leadership, it's this saying that I absolutely love, and I say it to myself all the time, is who you are speak so loud, I can't hear what you say. Let me say that again. Who you are speaks so loud, I can't hear what you say. And it ends up at the end of the day that most of leadership, maybe, you know, maybe 90% of it is who you are. Your, Your character, your insecurities, your past experiences, your prejudices, all of that walks in the room before you do. And so it's really hard to be a leader that's effective if you don't have all that under control. And so when I was writing this leadership training, which has been one of the most.

Rewarding experiences and fun during, during this COVID lockdown, because I just had time to just work on it and think, and I wasn't in a rush, and I really got to go really deep into. In certain areas, and I'm putting it all into the content. But the, the thing that I found is there's inner leadership and outer leadership. And the, the biggest section right now in the content is the inner leadership. Because if, if you don't fix who you are, people aren't gonna follow you. If you, if you walk in and you have all these insecurities and you're winging it or you're, you know, you're BSing people or you're faking it until you make it, people aren't going to follow you. They're just not people. People can intuitively, even if they don't know why, they intuitively know that you're not authentic and you're not genuine. And so the best leaders are authentic. The best leaders are. Are honest. They care about people, and they have a. They have a cause. And so if you don't, if you don't understand how to fix yourself, then, you know, you're, You're. You're never going to be an effective leader at the end of the day. And we've all worked for leaders, and I think everybody can, can kind of like do an inventory and understand that if you're scared of public speaking or you, you're socially awkward. Those things get in the way of you being a good leader. You know that I don't, I don't have to tell you, everybody has some sort of thing that they know affects them from being a really, really good leader and really, really, you know, authentic and resonating with a group of people in a way that, that a good leader would. And so how, how did I fix myself?

I.

It, you know, I can't, I can't.

I can't put into words all of this and you know, in a, in a drive by, but I'll kind of go through the, the timeline. The, the first time I.

Ever, like, really realized I was broken was when I went through my divorce. And maybe you've heard me tell this story before. I know I told it on, on Business Outlaws, but.

In my divorce, it would have been really easy for me to blame my ex wife. She did certain things that if, if I tell you, like, oh, you know, cheated or whatever.

Everybody would say. And even when I tell the story the way I'm telling it now, even after people go, no, that she was wrong, and it's like, no, she wasn't wrong. Like, if I'm the leader in the household, I'm the man of the house, and my wife decides that she'd rather be with somebody else.

I did something wrong if I'm the leader of the house. And so most people can't put their head around that. But when I decided to own the responsibility for my divorce, and it took me a little while, I came up with a whole page of things that I did wrong now until I decided, and this was my mindset, was if I don't accept this and fix myself, I'll carry all of this into my next relationship. And I was so devastated because I've come from a broken home. I didn't want to be divorced. I always had this idea that I would marry one person and I would be married forever. And so it was a huge failure to me that I was going through a divorce to begin with. So I didn't want to do it again. I didn't want to be one of those people that's divorced five times, right? Because at the end of the day, if you're divorced five times.

At some point it has to be on you, right? And so I really wanted to fix myself. So I did a couple things. I said, I'm not going to be in a relationship for a year. And I sat down and I made a list of all the things that I had done wrong. And it ends up I made a really, really strong case for. I would have cheated on me if I was that, you know, if I was in her shoes because I did things that were passive aggressive. I didn't fix things that I should have fixed.

There were a lot of things that I overlooked. There were things that I did wrong. But all of those things are not characteristics of a good leader, of a good man or man of the house. However you want to look at was it was an absolute failure on my part. And now through that exercise I learned like ownership is a, is a big deal. Later on I read Jocko's book Extreme Ownership and he has a great story in there about owning the outcome and that even, you know, kind of dug that hole deeper about how important ownership is to all of this.

Because in his situation in the military and you know, going into, to Iraq or Afghanistan, I forget where the story is based in the beginning of that book, but the idea that he had blue on blue so you know, friendly fire, shooting at each other and he owned it where most of the time somebody would say, oh well, it was their, you know, it was this group's fault or their fault. He said, no, it's my fault because I'm in charge and the buck stops with me. The thing about that story that blew me away is their, their thing is life and death. And our thing in business is not life and death. You can, you can run a business into the ground and you don't die. You can claim bankruptcy, you can start over. But when you're out there protecting our country and serving our country and you make a mistake and somebody dies, you have to, you're either dead or you're going to live with the idea that somebody, you know, under your command died. That's a heavy thing. It's really heavy. And so my divorce and that kind of just made me think about ownership in a different way. And then.

I've learned like I, I had a couple years ago, there was somebody with the dealer group, that huge high profile dealer group.

And we ended up signing them up and then it went sideways from there. They didn't do what we asked them to do. They were know it alls just a typical like they're losing in service. There were amazing at new car sales, they sold a lot of new cars but their service department customers hated them. They were losing hundreds of thousands of dollars every month and we couldn't fix them. And I, I knew going into it it'd be one of the, you know, biggest fixes. We, we'd ever done, but I thought we could do it. Like I, I wanted it. They were high profile and it didn't work. Like, I don't know, six months into it we just, we shook hands and said, hey, you know, we're not, we're not a match. They weren't doing what we were asking them to do. They were, they were arrogant. They thought they knew it all because they knew how to sell cars. So they hired us.

Kind of thinking that we had some magic, that if they didn't change their behavior, they still were going to have success because of our track record. But the truth of the matter is, is when it came to fixed stops and service, they were morons and they didn't know what they were doing and they didn't want to listen because they were their, their, you know, they were just ignorant at the end of the day. So I'm sitting there and this I've put. So my team has put so much work into it and it's like, it's so easy to say they're morons and it's their fault. But the truth of the matter is.

If you go back, I had this rule, if you go all the way back to the beginning of our relationship, I had a rule that if anybody wants to change our contract, I won't take them as a client because every time I've gotten a lawyer involved and changed our contract, it ends up they're, they're terrible clients to begin with and it never works. But because this group was so high profile and I wanted it so bad and I got deal heat and the whole thing, their lawyer, their in house lawyer wanted to change our contract and I said no. And they came back and I said, okay, well this, you know, this means we can't do business together. And the, the kid, the dealer's kid running the, the dealer group was like, you can't do this, I need you. And he, like, he sold me, right, because they're good at sales, he sold me on it. I made a little compromise on the contract and then, you know, we went to work and it didn't work. And so at the end of the day I can sit here and say, oh, you know, they're morons, they don't know what they're doing. But they told me who they were. I knew exactly who they were back when we signed the contract, but I got greedy. And that's, that's the, the, the power of owning it is if you, any, any failure, if you go all the way back, you're gonna figure out where you took the wrong turn if you own it. But if you don't own it and everything else is always everybody else's fault, you're going to keep just being that battered wife for getting divorced every time you go into a relationship or failing over and over again. So the first step in, you know, a long winded answer to your question was ownership. I had to own everything was my responsibility. Even the things that aren't my responsibility were my responsibility. I had to own 100% of the outcome. And so if I let somebody into a scenario, it, whatever it is, it's my fault. Even if I didn't see it coming, I'm going to own that and I'm going to learn for next time, if a client didn't work out, I could go all the way back in the process. And why, why did I let this client into our family? They weren't a fit for our family. What, what mistake did I make that I let them in? Or where did we make a mistake along, along the way? Right? So that becomes very, very, very powerful. When you, when you absorb ownership at that level, then the next thing that I figured out.

And this is the one that is even harder, but you can't address this one until you own everything. 100% is you got to love yourself. I didn't love myself and I don't, I don't know. There wasn't a book that I read, I think in, in conversations with one of my closest friends, Big Mike, who I do the Business Outlaws podcast with. We, we'd had conversations. He has some, some really unique views. He's a really smart, smart guy and has been through a lot, just like I have. And.

I, I didn't love myself. I worked myself to death. I was driven, but I didn't really ever like who I was. I never, I never stopped and did an inventory of, you know, who, you know, who are you? And I'll tell you that there was a video by Jordan Peterson. It's the, the one where he does lectures on the Bible and it's called, no, I think Noah and the Flood. He's, he's wearing a checkered tie in it. But it, there's two Noah videos there in the, in the Bible one, but it's like Noah in the Flood and he's wearing a checkered flop tie. And if you go 45 minutes into that video, we'll, if, if you're watching this on YouTube, we'll put a link in here. But if you go about 45 minutes in and you start watching it. No, no, no, sorry. Go 40 minutes in and start watching it. Because I think at 45 is where the hammer drops. But he starts talking about how he was. He. He started to see himself as two different people. And there was this one person out there, you know, doing things and trying too hard and being aggressive and argumentative and whatever. And there's this other, like he had like a split personality, which we all do, right? Our personalities are complicated. But this one up here, the other one was looking down on that one and going, that's not who you are. That's. That's not real. That's not true. And when I was watching that, I thought he, he said, so I had to choose which one to be. And I thought he would say he got rid of the critic. And he says. And he goes. So I decided to go with the critic. And I was like, what? Well, you decided to go with the. What do you. And he goes. And I, and I, you know, what I learned was I had to stop saying things that made me weak. I remember I was in a, in a dump hotel in Florida. It was 11 o' clock at night. I'm laying in bed, I can't sleep because I just flown in from the West Coast. I'm watching it on my iPad in bed. And I, I maybe watched that like 50 times because it resonated with me so much. Because yeah, I, I was two people, but I didn't. I hated this person. I hated that person. And I was the critic and I like. And so he says in there, he says, you have to stop saying things that make you weak.

When.

Which really means you have to stop thinking things that make you weak. So I, like, I really started working on like, the things you're saying are either getting you closer to who you really are or further away. Stop. Stop trying to please people and be yourself. Be authentic. Maybe. You know, a lot of times, like I have this crazy skill set and this, this crazy view that the, the boys and I were talking about earlier, like. Cause I joke that I, that I am a licensed interrogator. Well, sometimes I can tell people are lying and I tell them you're lying. And I think it's funny to get a reaction out of them. But people don't like the truth. They don't like you to tell them, especially when they're lying. They don't want you to tell them that they're lying. People don't like the truth. And so you end up building your personality around pleasing People, instead of being authentic to yourself, now there's choices there. You don't have to tell them that they're lying. You can just keep it to yourself. But you don't have to try to please them. You don't have to let them, you know, control the narrative. Because what happens is if you're just trying to please people and you're not being authentic, you don't like yourself. And so, you know, the thing from that and talking to Big Mike and all that is you got ownership. And then, like, I need to. I need to learn to love myself. I need, you know, I need to treat myself like somebody I actually like. I need to value my time. I need to. Like, I need to spend time doing the things that I like. Like, I love working with. With leaders and managers and teaching them how to be better at business and sharing what I've learned. I love the fact that we're in hundreds and hundreds of shops all over the place where actually it's like over a thousand, and we get to learn and see what's working and what isn't. I love taking in all that information and sharing it with other managers. I love being that, that, that, you know, conductor of that information for everybody. But there was tons of things I was doing that I didn't like that wasn't authentic to me. That was driving me crazy. And I was doing it to please other people. And so once I started to love myself, I won't take a client if I don't want them. I don't care. I'll go broke. I just don't care. But the funny thing is, is I'm make. I'm making more, and I'm more successful than I ever was because I'm being authentic and it resonates with people. I'm not perfect. I don't know everything. But at the end of the day, I'm authentic. And I'm telling. I'm telling the truth. And I'm being who. Who I really am. And I like myself. And I think that ends up being the most important thing. Like, people still screw me over. People still lie to me. People still use me. But at the end of the day, I'm going to be myself. I'm going to be fair. I'm going to give people a chance. But once I'm done, I'm done. Like, that's. That's it. I. I have to stop doing things that make me weak. And so every thought you have, every action you have moves you closer to where you want to go or Further away. And you like yourself more when you're authentic to who you are and you like yourself less. You even start to hate yourself. If you're spending most of your time thinking about things, doing things that aren't really genuine to who you are, that's it. And so those. Those two things, at the end of the day, I think were my biggest breakthroughs as far as just being a functioning human. That came from, you know, a broken home, raised by a single mom, grew up a missionary's kid in Mexico. Like, religion had let me down, People had let me down, life had let me down. Like, you know, it's all on me. Like, now I've. I have a completely different outlook on things. It's my. It's mine to. To go get, because I'm owning it. I'm in charge of my own destiny. I have an internal locus of control, and I like myself. And once those two things happen, everything else kind of gets easier, and I don't know if they could happen the other way. I don't know if you could learn how to love yourself before ownership. To me, it seems like ownership has to come first because you would make excuses on loving yourself and you would keep lying to yourself.

That just. That math makes sense to me. But I. I don't know. I've never talked to, you know, somebody like Jordan Peterson or Dr. Pratt about it, but that's. That's how I. I fix myself. I would say, as far as books go.

Maps of Meaning by Jordan Peterson is a great book.

His book 12 Rules for Life would be great. There's.

There's.

I'll.

I'll put. I'll put a few books in the description of this for you. Also that I. That I think might help, but that's my. This might be the longest drive by that we've done, but it comes from the heart. I think it's a great question, and I just. I can't say enough how I love the tone of the question is ownership. Like, how do I do it? You're not. You're not deflecting. You're not projecting an external locus of control that it's everybody else's fault. So thank you. J.

In Spanish or J. And now after all that, I want you to do me a favor and check out this preview from next week's big show, Service Drive Revolution.

Next week on Service Drive Revolution, Jeremy is on vacation. He doesn't care about us. He doesn't love us. He just left for two weeks. Maybe this one might be a little bit more exciting than usual. I always felt like when I was an advisor, I was actually protecting. Protecting people from other advisors. Did you guys know that Ford was going to release the new Bronco on OJ's birthday? The questions today are really, really good.

God smiles upon these questions.

The voice of God. Thank you, voice. I'm kind of envious of your voice. Honestly.

It seems like management could care less.

The Hub.

Do personality profiles work? My experience with these personality tests is they're a lot like horoscopes. Out of a hundred people. Your last place in this and that. I mean, it's brutal.