Entrepreneurial Wisdom | Ep #42

Hey everyone, I'm Chris Plackey and this is how to Lead for Female Entrepreneurs and Founders. Because the best way to grow a business is to grow the person who's running it. Let's go ahead and get started.

Hello. Hello. Welcome to the podcast today. I hope you're doing well wherever you are and you're enjoying. I'm sure it's a crisp day day most of the world. Unless you're down under enjoying the summer.

It'S a little bit chilly everywhere else. Let's see. I have so much I want to talk with you about. I.

I always want to hear from you too, so I just want to always extend the invitation. If you are on Instagram, ping me. If there's a topic you are wrangling and you want some insight, just drop me a DM and tell me. Hey, have you ever thought about a podcast on this? It's always fun just to hear what you all have to say. And as a reminder, if you're a listener and you haven't written a podcast review on itunes or any of the other podcast platforms, I'd certainly love to invite you to do that. Head on over to iTunes, give it five stars, of course, and then take a screenshot of the review that you wrote on iTunes and DM that to me on Instagram. Chris Plackeycoach and we'll send you the book list that I put together a little while ago that has some really awesome books on it that I think are really powerful for women like you and women like me. So take a listen. I am also still currently scheduling appointments as we near out the year here for women who want to join me in the Founders Lab at the beginning of the year.

It's a wonderful time to invest in yourself and think about next year and the commitments that you have to really becoming the leader and the manager of your business that you want versus just focusing on, you know, generating revenue and all the other things that I know get your attention every day. If you have a team already and you're struggling to manage them, I know I can help you and I would love to do that for you and help you see that 2020 is a kickoff year for a whole new way of thinking about leading and managing your team. So if that's you and you're ready, head on over to Chrisplackie.com join that'll have all the information you need to know about the founders and the process for getting started is to book a call with me. So again, that's Chrisplacky.com.

Join so take a peek. So I think about you a lot. And I also, you know, I think about my clients a lot because we talk all the time. And, you know, one of the.

Goals I guess I have for my clients is that they end up with a level of independence in how they ultimately can resolve and independence and confidence, how they resolve the challenges that they face in their business. And the same is true for you. And I've heard from a lot of you who are podcast listeners that honestly, just by applying, you know, the tools that I share here, you're able to get better results for yourself and your business. I know we can amplify that if we work together personally, but just the fact that you're already doing that is so wonderful. Right? I'm so glad that you're finding some of this powerful. So, you know, my husband's a physical therapist. I think I've shared that with you a couple of times. And it's been interesting. As you know, he's been a PT for years, long, long, long time. And we've talked about, like, the difference between chiropractors and physical therapists. And this is, this is certainly my perspective, not his and certainly not everybody else's. But I'm sharing with what I see. What I see in the world is that physical therapists, you go to a physical therapist to learn how to recover, to learn how to take care of yourself, to get stronger, to, you know, get new mobility, to be out of pain, and to ultimately be able to care for yourself and manage an injury or recover from an injury and become independent and not have to keep going to a physical therapist. Right? Like, the, the relationship with your physical therapist might return if you injure yourself again or you do something again. But the goal that I see with my husband has with his patients anyway is, you know, healing and then training and really helping you get stronger and then being able to manage it on your own. In my experience, a lot of chiropractic practices, it's kind of like maintenance, right? Like, everybody who goes to a chiropractor that I seem to meet always just goes to their chiropractor. And so it started me wondering, like, do chiropractors actually make people better long term, or do they just treat symptoms over and over and over again and not. And not really teach maintenance and healing and recovery and strengthening that gets you to the point where you're independent of your chiropractor? It's kind of a random example, but. And I don't mean I, I don't have a judgment. I just notice it. And I think about my clients, and I think, okay, my goal is probably more what I think about in terms of physical therapy, that I want to get you to a place where you're independent of that. And so as I was thinking about this and thinking about my clients, who, as I've watched women that I've worked with for, you know, six months or a year or even longer, they're in such a different place than the women who I just start with. And I realized, oh, that's entrepreneurial wisdom that they have now that they didn't used to have. And I kind of think about the growth of how you engage with your own insight and your own knowingness as an entrepreneur as kind of three big buckets. They're. The first bucket, which is where maybe a lot of you are in, is kind of that.

Gut level. So the way that you make decisions, the way that you build plans, the way that you handle circumstances is through your gut. You just feel your way through it. You don't really know what you don't know, and you don't know anything else. And so you just trust instinct, gut, and maybe the advice of others. There's a lot of leverage of other people's perspective at this phase, too. This is where a lot of people, obviously, this is where most of us start, especially when it comes to managing and leading and building teams. Because most entrepreneurs were never trained in this space. Some of us were because we came out of a corporate culture and we got training. Right. But even still, I could say the same. For me, I had tons of training as a leader in the company, but I had never been taught how to manage my own business. Right. Which is why, again, I'm going to always remind you that Brooke Castillo and I co created a program called the called Entrepreneurial Management. And it's actually something that you get as a client of mine in the Founders Lab.

It's an incredibly powerful program. If you want to check it out, you can just go to the life coach school or you can just go to entrepreneurialmanagement.com and check out the program. But if it's interesting to you and you know you want to work with me, just keep in mind you will get that as a part of the program as well. But we aren't really taught that. And so what I watch, all of us when we get started, is in that hustle phase. It's just all gut. We don't know how to negotiate contracts very well. We don't know how to have business partnerships. I've watched a lot of my clients, they kind of come to my door and they've had a really train wreck of a business partnership, which it seems like is very common and how to, how to bifurcate responsibilities and who's, who's going to do what and you know, even having a prenup ahead of time. So if you're currently contemplating a business partnership, do more research and get more information. So that's that first phase. And unfortunately then in that gut instinct phase, we can lack self awareness and we can also be overly dependent on others and we don't trust ourselves. So we're, you know, we're maybe not trust ourselves, but we're constantly second guessing which also results in a lot of shiftiness in our business, a lot of change, a lot of movement because we're impulsive and we're not really grounded in anything, in an approach and a philosophy, in a vision. We don't have values, you know, we don't have these things established. And so then we're kind of flopping the wind. Right. I think it's a normal first step. I think it's a normal process that we have to go through and we have to just tell the truth about it. What I want to do is invite you out of it because I, I think it, I think, in fact in, in my interview with Kelly Roach a couple episodes ago, she talked about Franken businesses, right. And I think that's what ends up. We get stuck in that context of a Franken business when we are just all go, we're all gut, we're all instinct and we're not really relying on anything bigger than that to help us create and manage a business.

The second stage I watch my clients in is what I call the knowledge stage. So this is when you start to sign up for stuff like you start to take your first and be involved in, maybe your first mastermind or maybe you take a course or maybe you, you do buy the entrepreneurial management program or you do sign up to start working with me. And in that first window of time, let's say the first 30, 60, 90 days, you're in this knowledge phase where you're just consuming content, you're consuming ideas, you're consuming insight, you're trying tools, you're trying a new way to say something to an employee, you're trying a new way to think about your business.

And it's a lot of aha's and it's a lot of open, open mindedness required and it's also a lot of feeling completely inadequate because you've gone from gut instinct, which was like, okay, well, I don't really know what I'm doing, but I don't really know what I'm doing, so I'm getting it done. Then we get into knowledge and then we start to realize like, oh, oh, these are all the things I should have been doing.

And we can be, we have to be careful that we don't use it against ourselves. Right? So equally in the knowledge phase, we're also very dependent on other people. We're dependent on a teacher, we're dependent on a coach, we're dependent on a mentor. Now, I don't think that's wrong. I just think that we have to tell the truth. Like we're still suspending what we know and we're believing it's outside of ourselves. But now different than the gut phase. We now recognize there's more to know than I thought and there's more systematic processes available to help me with these problems I face in my business that I haven't been following and that I haven't integrated. And so there's a long stretch of growth in here where you take all of this content and ideas and practices and tools and you start to push them in to your company. And as you might imagine, this is the most painful part of growth. The, you know, the gut part isn't terribly painful because you're just doing what you think you need to do, right? You, you're just like, you're second guessing yourself all the time, but you're like, I don't know, I got to keep going. Knowledge is when we know, like, okay, we have to unlearn what we've been doing because it isn't getting us what we want as far as managing our business. But we have to then learn new things and try new things, which is always just a stretch. I had a client that I've been working with for, well, let's see, March. So what is that, about nine months? And she is doing so much great work in her business. She has replaced employees that were not getting the job done. She's probably just about to replace the, the employee that really needs to go. So she's making huge strides. She's really in it. And she said to me, this is such hard work. It's been very hard for her and she knows it. And she's had a business for a very long time and it did find for years until it didn't. And she just hit the wall with, I can't find good people, people aren't staying, people aren't doing what I want. And she just knew she had to dig in and do the work. But I really want to emphasize, like, she's been working very hard and trusting. You know, she's in the founders lab. So she sees other women in the group who I've worked with longer, who are on the other side of this. And so she knows what's ahead. But that's, you know, that is the part that it's just the gauntlet we all have to go through. So the knowledge phase is this. There's also hope because we see it. We see like, oh, look, there's a roadmap. Oh, look, there's foundations and fundamentals I can put in place. There's. But you have to do that work, right? So that's in that phase. That, to me, that's where you start when you start working with someone like me. And it feels invigorating and hopeful and overwhelming.

And we have a little bit of like, self critique of, dude, why didn't I know any of this ahead of time? Well, you didn't know it. Now you do. And you have the tools to help you. All of that is to get to the goal of wisdom, which is really the parallel that I've been making. I started with, with that PT chiropractic example. What we want to do is get to a place that you as a business owner have a level of wisdom about your business and about how to manage it and how to lead it that is internal. So it's no longer just gut, you know, raw.

Sporadic kind of decision making. And it's not in the knowledge space of, you know, very calculated and thoughtful, sort of when you're in that learning phase. Now we have compiled and put together both your intuitive knowledge of your business and the systems and the processes. So now you have wisdom. And wisdom never leaves you. It's yours, but it's grounded in facts, it's grounded in real tools. It's grounded in proven strategies that you get to leverage over and over and over again. And that's my hope for you. So I have women at all stages of this, right when they first hire me, it's gut. And we have to do a little deprogramming. Then we get into knowledge, which is when the real consumption starts, and we start applying things and we go through the process of that being fun and horrible all at the same time. And then we get to wisdom. And I have several women who I've now worked with for 18 months and more who I would say are there and they come to the call and they still like to work through their challenges. They still want to come and work it out and get feedback and check in. But they have this. I know that if they didn't have the space that I've created for them, they would be okay because they've arrived at a level of wisdom and that is priceless. And that's my goal for you. Because once you're at wisdom, you're no longer emotionally charged by all this stuff that happens in your business. You're no longer affected every day by the things that happen in your business. And you're so much more capable of being strategic and level headed and really grounded in the way that you think about and make decisions for your business.

It's a, I believe, a ambitious and worthy goal to achieve entrepreneurial wisdom. To get to a place where you know you can handle anything from anyone at any time in your business and you have the skills and the mindset that's going to get you through it. That's my goal for you. Now, a lot of you, because you take what we do here and you apply it, will get a lot more traction. If you want to take that to the next level, I think you have to reach up and you've got to get more help, right? We all do. I think we all have to know that about ourselves. So I hope I've given you some insight. This is kind of one of my more heady podcasts, but I've just really been thinking about, you know, how do we get people to the point where they're out in the world sustaining, growing, loving their business from a position of real grace and what I call wisdom. And to me that's going through and recognizing gone this gut phase, the knowledge phase, and then ultimately with the goal of getting to the wisdom phase. And we can't skip. We have to, we have to do the work to achieve that. But then once you get there, it's never going to go away, which I just think is so brilliant. So thank you so much for tuning in today and I will talk with you again next time. Foreign.

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