11. Leadership: Are You Comfortable With Mediocrity?

Hey, my friend, welcome back to Leadership in a nutshell where we're cracking the code of this driven mind. I'm your host, Kenny Chapman. This is episode number 11 with a simple question. Are you comfortable with mediocrity? Fair question, don't you think? Let's spend a couple minutes here today and let's break it down together. Now, of course, some of you are like, well, of course I'm not comfortable with mediocrity, Kenny. Well, well, let me ask you a different question and let's kick off and let's jump right in and let me reframe this. Let me just ask you this, my friend. Why are you comfortable with mediocrity? And you go, well, wait a minute, that's not fair. I'm not. I just said I'm not. Okay, cool. Then we're spending time together. You're joining me for this podcast. And thank you so much. By the way, if you're enjoying this, please subscribe. Please rate review those things. You know how powerful and important reviews are. We'd love to keep growing this community together. Got some really exciting things to share with you coming up shortly. But I just want you to think about our own mediocrity. How about that? My mediocrity is different than my mediocrity was when I was 17. My level of mediocrity is different than some of my other friends that are in business. My mediocrity is different within my health than other people. My mediocrity is different within my finances, within my business, within my influence, whatever that is. Right? Different people have different levels of mediocrity. So what I first want us to realize today and just own and it's okay is like, hey, we are okay with a certain level of mediocrity. If that's the case, let's raise the bar. I was very blessed to run a service business for 24 years. And while I had that company, I built a really solid leadership team that made it very self managing. I ended up selling it to one of the people on that leadership team that now runs a business on her own and her way and all those different types of things. And one of the interesting things as I built that team is I would ask anybody in my company, just ask anybody, what does Kenny absolutely despise? And anybody would be able to tell you mediocrity. Why? Because I want to play full out. I would rather completely suck at something and know it than to just kind of go along through life doing okay and everything's all Fine. I'm. I've got too much passion for that. We are only here for a limited amount of time. I know this from real experience in my own life. You know this from real experience in your own life. And when we start to go, wait a minute, if I'm just here for a minute, then let's play full out. And what that means is I'm going to play full out in some areas and go, wow, I'm not very good at that. That might not be part of my calling. So I can play full out in the areas where I'm in my unique ability, with my unique gift, with, where I can absolutely make a big difference. And so when you think about this, I want you to realize that we create mediocrity a little bit like classes of flying. And there are some statistics out there, some studies, some different things about socioeconomic class and how difficult it is based on where you were born, based on how you were raised to break class. And that is absolutely 1000% true. Also within that, you can find people that have broken their own socioeconomic. Easy for me to say. Socioeconomic, conditioning, class, reality, what the odds say that should be happening. I'm not minimizing anybody's circumstance whatsoever. What I am here to tell you is you can create what you want. I don't care where you're at. I don't care your financial situation. I don't care your level of, quote, unquote, formal education, because some of the best education on the planet has happens just like what we're doing here today and sharing real information in a real way with real actionable results. And so throw out socioeconomic class and let's talk about the class that you create. And I know that I've been blessed in my career. I didn't fly first class with the airlines, commercial airlines, until, I don't know, I was in my early 30s or something like that, and I finally got to fly first class, and I was like, holy cow, look at these comfortable seats and different things and all. And then you quickly realize, okay, well, one, it's costing me a lot of points. It's too much money, in my opinion, of my value proposition. Realize if people that were getting upgraded, that means they're on airplanes all the time. And, like, you know, coach is good for me. Fortunately, I'm not a big guy. I'm not super long legs, all that stuff. Here's what's fascinating. The first time the lovely Christy and I wanted to go to Australia, we started going, huh? Wait a minute. What Class of the plane do we want to be in? Right? Because now I'm talking about a 16 hour flight. That's a long time to be on an airplane for anybody. I don't care who you are. It's a long time. And I just got to thinking, you know, I heard this metaphor recently where sometimes we treat life like classes when it comes to flying. So what would be the ultimate? When you think about flying, like, what would be the ultimate class? And it's not first class, that would be private class, right? Where you just roll up onto the tarmac in your car, you hop out, somebody grabs your bags, they take you onto the airplane. Your favorite drink of choice is already made, your vegan lunch is ready to go. Whatever it is for you, maybe it's double pepperoni, double cheese pizza, whatever you want, they've got it. That is an ultimate class. Guess what? Some people actually do choose to fly that way. That's all fine. Now where do we go from there? Well, now we look at commercial. Some people now it's like, man, I want to fly first class. Okay, that's the front of the plane. I'm getting service, I get the hot meal, all the my chairs twice as wide. I get to kick it back, I get a hot towel. All these cool, amazing things happen, right? Then we start going down the ladder from there. And guess what? They don't call it second class because nobody wants to live a life second class, do they? But they do want to go ahead and fly business class, perhaps, or executive class, whatever. It's not first class, but boy, it's pretty darn good. And it's still better than the people in the back of the plane or whatever that. So now we start going down. And then from business class, now I'm moving all the way back to, maybe I'm in coach, maybe I'm in economy, maybe I'm, you know, then different airlines came out with economy plus and all, all these different things. What if we just said first, second, third, fourth? Nobody's like, man, I want to be fourth class today. I'm going to save some dough on my ticket. So what's fascinating though, is all those are different value propositions. All those take a different investment to acquire that class of that experience. Are you with me? Yes. Can you agree with that? Okay. Sometimes, like, you know, I went, yeah, I want to fly first class. And then I realized it was $27,000 to go to Australia when I first went in 2004, 2005, right when I first went, like, I guess Coach is looking pretty good right now. Christy, we're going to stand on our head in the back of the airplane for 16 hours if it's $27,000 round trip, right? However, some people invested that, because if that's not a big deal when it comes to finances, goes to a value proposition. Remember, it's no different than any price conversation, right? Price and value, they're always at war. Some people see that valuable enough, I'm going to go ahead and invest in that ticket. I want you to take the flying back to our own life situation and you go, huh? Where am I investing? In what class of life do I want to live? And I'm not talking just money here, my friends. Money is not. You know, I don't believe in the, oh, you should be poor and there's a badge. I've talked about that in previous episodes. I know that being rich doesn't make you happy, but. But I also want you to be clear that freedom comes in choice. What I'm looking for is the freedom to choose. If I want to fly first class, I want to have the money to fly. Yes, I've got the money to buy a $27,000 ticket. That's not the question. The question is, do I see enough value in order to do that in today's world, in my current circumstance? Let's find the balance, okay? I want to have the ability to choose with a conscious choice. Anything that I want to do in my life, the same is true for you. Now, let's tie back to mediocrity. How does this show up? Well, when you start thinking about, hmm, what about being comfortable? Sometimes comfortable breeds mediocrity. I'm not talking about being happy. I'm talking about being comfortable if I get a little lazy. Back in 2007, the lovely Christy and I took a six and a half month motorhome trip. I wanted to test my service business. I wanted to test my leadership team. We hit the road for six and a half months in our coach. I did a speaking engagement about every month to six weeks. And we rode around. And guess what we did. We ate a lot, we drank a lot, we sat a lot, we sat by the pool a lot. We did all these things. Amazing trip. 27 states in 18 months was like phenomenal, or 18 months. 27 states in six and a half months, I should say. And as we kind of went through the beginning of this trip, it was like the honeymoon of this vacation and this work environment. It wasn't. We didn't have zoom and different things. But I stayed in touch with my leadership team. I got reports and things. And so what was interesting is I went about the first five, six weeks, and then I had a gig, and I actually was working in an environment where I had to wear a suit. Notice I don't wear a suit when I train because I believe in authenticity, and I don't wear a suit any other time, so why would I wear a suit when I'm training? I believe in authenticity, but I. That's what it's all about. So I realized, like, I'm been wearing board shorts, flip flops, and T shirts. Drive my bus, coach. I'm driving it around lovely. Christie's getting me snacks if I want. We're drinking. I drank back then. So I get cocktails or whatever. As soon as we rolled into our RV resort for the evening, whatever the case was, all of a sudden I put on my suit and went, hmm, this is a little tighter than it was about a month ago when I did a gig. Okay, cool, whatever. Go through the gig. We're staying at a hotel during the event, so we work out and do our thing. Then I went about six weeks without another speaking engagement. I'm in my board shorts, we're driving, we're doing our thing. We're living life. We're sightseeing, we're eating, we're drinking. Next thing I know, I can't button my pants. My friends. And guess what? That was very uncomfortable for me. And I said, oh, wait a minute. We've got to change something. And from that level of discomfort, Christie ended up writing a book called the Six Step Diet. We created this health plan, this life plan, completely changed how we saw fitness, health, how we eat, all kinds of different things. My weight's fluctuated since then. I've had different routines. Right now, I'm in a very good routine. I'm very clear in my life. I was doing some different things back then that weren't serving me, that I've eliminated from my life. This isn't about that. This is about when you get uncomfortable and go, well, mediocrity is to, what? Buy a new belt, buy a new suit, loosen it up, figure it out. What about this? When you say tighten up? When I talk about finances, when I talk about budgets and companies, sometimes we go, we need to tighten the belt a little bit. Guess what that represents? Pain for people. Most of us don't want to tighten the belt because that's uncomfortable. Here's the reality. We all have our own mediocrity. The the challenge is many of us will look around and go, huh? Well, it's not that bad. America as a unit, the U.S. canada and Australia, all of us are getting heavier and heavier. So that means we all get to look around and go, well, I'm not as heavy as that person. We're getting more debt, more in debt. We go, well, I don't have that many payments compared to that person. We're creating our own level of mediocrity. Now. I believe it becomes time to change it. So when I ask you what? Why are you comfortable right now and why are you comfortable with mediocrity? I want you to say, I'm not comfortable with it, Kenny. I'm creating my own new reality. And your life, your success, your situation is just like a thermostat on the wall. You get to set the temperature and now go to work creating the environment that you want to have. And I don't believe for you and its mediocrity, this is leadership in a nutshell. I'm your host, Kenny Chapman. Thank you so much for cracking the code of this crazy driven mind with me. This has been episode 11. Can't wait to see you next time until we talk, make it better than fantastic.