159. Courage, Guts, and Persistence

Foreign. Welcome back to the show. I'm so excited to have you. And I just love, love, love this time of the week when you and I get to just take a moment, take a little bit of a break. Although sometimes working on our mind doesn't feel like much of a break, but we get to share a couple minutes and kind of think about our thinking. Episode 1 59. Courage, guts, persistence. This is what we want to talk about here today. You know, I, I'm big on this topic, and I. And I also have done so much work on myself and on my mental understanding and freedom. Mental freedom. Not just physical freedom, but mental freedom around this, you know, kind of who, who you want to be and how you want to show up in the world and some different things. And, And I think that, you know, courage is, Is one of those things that gets a little bit lost in leadership. And we think that to be courageous, we have to be doing, you know, whatever the world might call is like, epic things, like totally off the, off the wall. Like, oh, you know, I've. I've got courage. So I'm, you know, I think about the military, right? So I was a. I was a soldier. I was a good soldier. I was in the regular United States army. And I, you know, had buddies that went Special Forces after basic training and boot camp and different things like that. And, and it was like, damn, you know, those, those guys are super courageous. But I was courageous in my own walk, and that's what I want us to get today. I want you to think about courage not the way that it's been defined for you, not in the way that it's been necessarily sold to you or how you've bought it. There's always a buyer and a seller when it comes to information, when it comes to perspective, when it comes to mindset, when it comes to all these types of things, right? And so whatever you're buying, however anybody's selling it, I just want you to take a step back today and realize, my friend, first and foremost, you are courageous. Like, you show up, you get in the game each and every day, and that takes courage. There's a lot of people that don't do that, and we're not here to judge those people. We're not here to allow our ego to kick in and have a conversation that we're, quote, better than those people, or those people don't have life figured out or any of those things. We're just here to take a step back and look at ourselves and go, you know what? I Show up. And that's what it's all about. That's where courage begins for me is the ability to show up when it's not popular, when it's not necessarily the easiest when it comes to, you know, sometimes it might just feel a little bit easier to just stay in bed. Right. And when you, when you have the opportunity to show up at those times, that takes courage. And it takes courage to change the world. And I learned a long time ago, I used to have a goal of like changing the world. And I learned a long time ago that you don't change the world, you only change activities and you don't change other people, you only change yourself. Okay, now what does that mean? I believe, and you can challenge me on this if you want, but, but I believe that the best way to change the world is to change yourself. When you change yourself, when you have, and guess what? That takes massive courage. It takes courage which then it takes massive guts. And then in order to affect long term change and change that sticks, it also takes persistence. And so courage is kind of the first of our trifecta. That's the, that's kind of the oomph to get it going. It's like, okay, this thing might not go the way that I want. It took courage for you to say yes to your current role in the business. If you're the owner, then for you to start the business, to buy the business, take over the business. If you're in the executive leadership team, you're responsible for all the results. Many times more so than ownership. Ownership has an investment. You are the, you know, there's an owner, there's an investment in the executive leadership team for sure as to be able to get the results that, that ownership desires or investors desire. There's courage in middle level management that can sometimes become no man's land in a way. No, no person's land. It's like middle level. A lot of times we need to have the, the technical skill and capability that the work's done is generally how we end up in middle management. Right? We were good at that. Fill in the blank of whatever the widget is, you know, in the home service space. I'm a good electrician, I'm a good plumber, I'm a good H Vac technician, I'm a good salesperson, I'm a good call taker, I'm a good dispatcher. And then I get elevated to managing one of those departments and that can turn into no person's land because now I'm not Actually physically doing the work that I was kind of brought up to do. But I'm also. I haven't spent my. My time, life, energy and effort all around interpersonal communication skills, human interaction, human motivation, human pushback, human fear, all, you know, all the different things that show up for managers on a daily basis. Right? It takes courage, baby. It takes courage. And you're doing it every day and you're showing up, and I want you to honor that in yourself, because courage is just. It's about taking risk, it's about jumping out there. And, you know, for me, it's. I see risk a little bit, kind of like a little bit how I feel about failure. I don't believe in. I don't believe in failure. I only believe in results. Now, what does that mean? I can have calculated, you know, odds, if you will, like calculated risk where, you know, lovely Christy and I recently liquidated an investment that we had that just stopped feeling good. You know, we had some cash in an external fund that wasn't backed by the FDIC and different things, and it just didn't feel right anymore. And so we liquidated that capital to move it. And, you know, I'm an investor that I invest all wholly in in our own businesses and the companies that, that we operate or like have amazing executive team run those businesses or entire teams run the business, I should say. That's where I want to put my cash. And we're getting ready to do some more investing in the business and so different things like that. So, yes, I could say, well, that external investment was risky. So let me pull that dough and let me put it in our own business because it's less risky. Well, there's risk in everything you do. There's risk crossing the street. Right. But we can certainly mitigate some of those things based on. For me, I like to invest in people and meaning the people that I surround myself with, I'm investing in them, their education and many times in their experiences. Meaning that I have to allow people to make what the world calls mistakes because in my mind, that is investing in them, having experiences. If you have the right team and they learn from experiences, then you're going to get years of return on an investment of an experience. That's how I see it. We could probably record an entire podcast around investment experience. Right? Or return on, return on experiential investment. I don't know. We'll come up with something. But the point is it takes courage to show up every day. And that's what I want you to Realize now let's move to guts. Guts is something that, you know, generationally, we, we crucify the other generations and oh, this person's lazy. This generation's lazy. This, you know, it takes guts to be a kid right now. It takes guts to be an adolescent right now. It takes guts to be an adult right now, whatever that definition is. I don't know. Please don't make me one. I don't, I don't want to be one. Well, I just, I laugh at that because I hear people talk about adulting and I don't know, maybe it was my childhood, maybe it was the way I was raised. I don't want to go back to kidding. I know that. And obviously now that reminds me of the kidding around, like, oh, I'm just being a kid. I'm a grown ass adult. But I love life. I love having experiences, I love having fun, I love joking around, I love just enjoying life. I love experiencing everything. So I believe I'm kind of a child at heart. And it takes guts to live your true core truth. And that's one of the reasons I'm so big on authenticity. And I want you to think about that on this podcast. I talk a lot about authenticity and you probably ought to lucky, thank your lucky stars that, you know, that you're not in some of the team meetings that I run or that I might, you know, my team runs most of the meetings, but I might take a segment or something. And it's about being yourself. It's not about letting yourself off the hook as yourself. It's about leaning into who you are and what you're here to do on the planet. And that is authenticity. So I want you to really be mindful of that and own that and honor that. And that takes guts. When you show up as your true self, when you've been taught your entire life, you need to be a certain way, you need to act a certain way, you need to look a certain way, you need to get a certain kind of a job. Many of us, I mean, that's why Christy and I named this company the Blue Collar Success Group, because I'm blue collar through and through. Lovely. Christie has a, she's got an educa, a formal education. She has a degree. But if I brought her on the, the show today, I guarantee you she would say that she's got more education from her life experience from leading and founding and leading and marketing and business and being involved with client work and all the different things that, that she does and, and continues to do. And has done and continues to do. I should say it takes guts. It takes guts to be yourself. So love on yourself a little bit and feel good about where you're at. You show up with courage and then you honor your guts to get in the game at a deeper level of authenticity. And then we move to persistence. And persistence is where most people burnout, if you will. They, they kind of, they, they fizzle out, right? So I, I, I show up and I'm going to take risks. Even though I don't know how it's gonna, how it's gonna play. I, I, I look at, you know, I'm gonna dive into my, my gut check and I'm gonna, I'm gonna be gutsy with my approach because I'm gonna push through even when there's adversity, even when, when I have naysayers, when people are telling me I can't. The only person that matters that you right now as you listen to this. And this isn't some like, you know, oh, well, cliche kind of a thing. This is truth. And I don't get on here to blow smoke up your tail every week. I get on here to speak my truth. And if my truth resonates with your truth or challenges your truth, then we are both doing our job here. And that's what it's all about to me. And so when you realize, like, okay, I'm gonna do this and here's the deal, that's the easy part. The courage to show up, that's easy. The guts to tap your authenticity, that's easy. The challenge is in persistence. The challenge is doing it day in, day out. Until you change the neuro association conditioning in your brain. When you start realizing that there's neuropathways in the brain. When you study the brain and they fire together, and when they fire together, then they actually wire together and they create like this neuro highway in the brain. And so you know, it. Like back when I, when I had addiction challenges, all I had was I wired neuro pathways to where they, they, they started building together and they wired together and then they became strong. And then I got to a point to where, oh, it's five o', clock, I need a drink. And then it got to a point to where, ah, that's not doing it for me. Let's move it up in the day and all the different things and that, you know, that's a whole nother, that's a whole nother story, but that's where the stuff comes from. So as soon as you realize, oh, we had a big sales day, and immediately you go, oh my God, I hope tomorrow doesn't suck. That's a neural pathway. When you are held hostage by a top performing team member and you immediately go, yeah, but we can't make it without them. They sell too much, they bring in too much, they install too much. That's a neuropathway. And so the persistence to change the neural pathway is really what I want you to think about today. It's easy to have courage for a minute, it's easy to have guts for a moment. But it takes a lot of gumption to have that persistence to continue on, to continue moving forward, to continue driving yourself, to continue challenging yourself, to continue getting up when you get knocked down, to continue doing things different than most people do them. Let's face it, if you're successful in what you're doing today, you're probably doing it very different than most people do. I'm not saying most people aren't successful. I'm saying that when you honor your own truth of what success is for you, it doesn't have to be 80 hours a week, completely stressed out, no time with the children, not enough money to go around. It doesn't have to be that way. Our society's bought that. Our society has kind of accepted that. And it's a cultural thing. You know, the lovely Christy and I were watching a documentary on, on Tokyo the other night at the time I'm recording this and, and, and they, they were talking about that, you know, that this guy was getting into the culture and like, yeah, you know, oftentimes it's kind of expected that you go to work and then you go drinking with your co workers and your boss and, you know, different things. Like, wait a minute, what you, like, you go work with them all day and then you go party with them. There was a time in my life when I thought that was awesome and I built my businesses that way. I don't recommend it. I recommend what, what, you know, what you learn from it. So I won't. I'm not mad that I had the experience and I don't wish that I, that I wouldn't have had the experience. But I do want you to realize you can shortcut that. But anyway, in Japan, culture, like, you'll go out and you're like, you're kind of meant to party all night long and then just go back. That's a cultural thing. And what I believe in the trades, that, you know, this kind of, you know, belief that we're not that smart as an, as a, as an industry in blue collar businesses. And we, if we're not very smart then we have to work with our hands and we have to work like crazy and we have to do these. You can't name an industry that we don't influence the blue collar trades. We're the reason the world goes round and I believe that 100%. Show me something that exists without airflow, without water and drain and without the ability to power. I mean, come on. That's what it's about. So remember when. Oh well, by the way, conventional wisdom is shifting a little bit and I'm not against college, don't get me wrong. I'm against people not doing what they're on the planet to do. I'm against buying somebody else's version of your life. I'm against buying somebody's story about who you are and what you should be. That's all that I'm against. I want you to lean in with full on courage, with full on guts and full on persistence as you stay the course. It's going to get hard. It's been said if it was easy, everybody would do it. Well, guess what, we're all having a human experience and sometimes it's not easy. And when we realize and we shift our perspective and we do the work today that most people aren't willing to do, that's when life really frees up. And it's not about most people. It's about you. It's about you today. Your courage, your guts, your persistence. When today I'm Kenny Chapman, your host of leadership in a nutshell. I'm super honored that you spend some time with me here today. Kick this to somebody. Give us a rating, a review. Follow us on like the blue collar social media, stuff like that. Just stay in touch, keep moving yourself forward until we talk. Make it a better than fantastic week and I'll see you real soon. Thanks for being here.