Build a Business That Gives You Your Life Back

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The subtitle for the 7 Steps to the Freedom Lifestyle is Design and Live Your Ideal Life. So when I talk about your life, I want you to think about what's the life that you would have, regardless of whether or not your business was funding it or that you had the time. This is where that trap happens, where you can build a business for freedom, but that business can become the thing that's actually taking the freedom away. So a lot of people build these bigger businesses, but it doesn't necessarily mean that they have the life that they want. So how do you do both?

If you're like many of us, your life, your world, the things in front of you is absolute chaos. And I'm so excited today because I'm bringing in somebody who's known as the Simplify Guy. He helps turn chaos into palatable action. Palatable, meaning action steps that you're actually going to enjoy consuming. I love that. And, you know, Damien Reid, all the way from Toronto, amazing, amazing individual. He's an international bestselling author, entrepreneur, and strategic advisor with over 40 years of experience building and scaling service-based businesses and entrepreneurs since the age of 13. Can't wait to hear that story. He combines deep entrepreneurial experience with senior corporate leadership and more than a decade of transformational training and leadership development work. He's the creator of the 6 Stages of Business Mastery, the 7 Steps of Your Freedom Lifestyle, and the 12 Key Life Areas Frameworks. And we know we're going to hit some frameworks today, all designed to support sustainable growth and long-term performance. He's a Full Focus Planner Certified Pro, has delivered training to tens of thousands of people across North America. and actively contributes as a facilitator and coach with A-C-C-E-S-S, Access Community. I was like, whoa, I thought that was a— and for men of color, he also held board-level roles earlier in his career. I was so excited. That was a good one, Eric. Welcome, Damien.

Thank you, Eric.

I love it. I was reading your bio earlier. I was like seeing all these frameworks for the TMs. I'm like, all right, I know it's going to be a systems conversation. And Damien happens to be a city leader of our Toronto chapter of Speakeasy Mastermind. And part of us talking in advance is I was just loving the fact that he was really organized, had great systems, and that actually makes him an incredible leader in its own right within our community. So excited to get the chance to selfishly know you better after all you've done to the community. Welcome. Welcome.

Thank you. It's so great to be here. I'm excited to have the conversation.

Nice. Nice. All right. I'm going to talk here that I want to say at the beginning. So we're going to thread through this that you wrote. It says that the real entrepreneur challenge isn't choosing between Ambition and freedom is learning how to build a bigger game without letting the game own you. I'm gonna say that again. The entrepreneurial challenge isn't choosing between ambition and freedom. It's learning how to build a bigger game without letting the game own you. And that's a big quote that I know you live by and you teach. So I want to break that down as well. Um, and I'm just kind of planting that seed, but I want to go back because you talked a lot in the bio and the notes before the call about you started your entrepreneurial journey since 13. Let's go back in time. You know, where was Damien born? Where'd you grow up? Where'd you start this journey?

So Damien was born in South America. Damien, I started talking to myself in the third person. That's never a good sign.

Yeah.

I was born in South America in a tiny country called Guyana, which most people hadn't heard of until very recently when it came into a lot of oil off the coast. So now it's one of the oil producing nations.

Wait, what's the country? I didn't catch that.

Guyana.

That's in South America.

It's in South America. It's a very interesting country because it's located geographically in South America. But its culture is Caribbean.

Okay.

So it's got a lot more in common with like Trinidad and Jamaica, Barbados than it does with the other countries that are in South America.

Is it an island out there?

It's east of Venezuela, west of Suriname and north of Brazil.

Wow. All right. Well, I got some map research after this. I'd check that out. I imagine not a huge population there.

No, about 95% of the population lives within a mile or 2 of the coast. The rest of it is all, is all jungle.

Oh my goodness. Wow. What a journey. So when did you come to the States?

Well, Canada was where I came. I had a lot of relatives in the States, but my mom chose to follow the family that came to Canada. And I was 10 when I came to Toronto.

Okay. So you're 10, you make it out there and you go to this whole new world and the eyes open up and you're like, oh my gosh, big city compared to where you're in.

Yeah. She, They picked winter to move us, which was—

Talk about the culture. Yeah. Where you were, it was nice and sunny all the time. Yeah.

We're pretty close to the equator, so pretty warm.

What's the snow like?

Fortunately, I had traveled fairly often to New York because we had a lot of family in New York.

Okay.

And as a kid, I'd gone there a fair bit, but yeah, I was not a big fan of the snow and trying to fit in as a newcomer into Toronto and that whole world.

Yeah. Wow. Wow. Okay. So now let's fast forward 3 years. You're 13. You have your first entrepreneurial journey. What was that all about?

So little Damien is in his basement and he loves music. And I used to periodically like have little house parties and I would, I would play music and my friends wanted to have their own house parties. And I guess I was pretty good at playing music. So they started hiring me to play music at their house parties. And that went on for about 7 years.

Okay.

Just until just before I went off to college or university. And by that time I was competing with— MuchMusic had a video roadshow. So we were putting on stage shows with music and pyrotechnics and lighting and so forth that was at that level. And then there was a radio station in Toronto, a fairly large radio station that was also doing these roadshows. So we were competing against them for the high school dances and the university and college dances at the time.

Wow. So you, I mean, obviously your craft got better. You were just deep all through high school. You were a popular kid.

It was a lot of fun. It was a lot of fun.

I could imagine. I could imagine. Wow. Okay. Then what? You go off to school?

Yeah. So see, you know, my school journey was a little fragmented because for most of my life, I thought I was going to be a doctor. And I went off to school for pre-med and something happened during one of my labs and I made a decision and connected dots that really weren't connected in reality. And I thought I'd never be a trauma surgeon based on what I made that mean. And so I left school and I went into the business world and I started my corporate career, which was the last thing in the world I ever thought I would do would be working in an office. And I was fairly successful at that. I worked in telecommunications and in the sales and marketing area and climbed the corporate ladder, if you will, for several years. And While I was doing that, I went back to school to, to do my business administration. Yeah. And then the rest of my career is a seesaw. So I had corporate time, entrepreneur time, corporate time, entrepreneur time.

How do you do both? I mean, I feel like once, once you sort of like get that entrepreneurial sniff, like a lot of these conversations I'm having, like us entrepreneurs were like misfit when we're doing the non-entrepreneurial. And all of a sudden you're like, what the heck am I doing? I got to live on this side of the world, of the island. Was that, were you kind of juggling and all of a sudden—

I felt it. I felt it right from the time I started work. Because, because what happened when I went into the corporate space was I tried to run my departments like my own business, right up until the point I started butting heads because I was in a corporation. Right. So then, you know, you can imagine how that, you know, how that unrolls, right? We don't need to get into how that turns out.

Yeah. You're like, are you juggling for my job here? Like, yeah.

I'd say there's like 3 corporate sections. There was telecommunications and then I was doing my thing and then I went back into corporate and I went into agency side. So I worked agency side for a while with a major telecommunications client. And then I went and did my entrepreneur thing. And then I did personal development. So I was doing training and development for an international training and development company, leading their top leadership programs and seminars and so forth. And that's where I honed some of those leadership and training and development skills that I was building while I was in the previous corporate roles and also sort of dabbling with and experimenting with when I was doing those stints as my own. And then once I left that space, there was no going back. And that, that's where I'm at. It's been 15 years now, I think straight.

You found the lane, you found the love. Okay. This is the world. Okay. So let's get into some of the big lessons you learned and the big thing you're talking about. I mentioned that quote you said earlier. And you obviously learned the hard way. And I know there's a story in there about some big decisions you've made along your life, especially coming back and giving up a lot just to take care of your mom back in Toronto. Walk me through a little bit about what you learned.

So I had 3 burnouts by the time I was 35. And I learned the hard way what staying up all night and working and, you know, yes, it can produce results, but at what cost? Right. When I last left corporate, at first I wasn't clear about what I was going to do. And the more and more I thought about it, I started looking at why were some entrepreneurs failing and why were some succeeding? And we all know the stats of why entrepreneurs fail and how many fail. And I said, there's got to be another way.

Right.

It's got to be another way. So I wrote the first book that I wrote was all about habits. So I went from a You know, like you said, I'm kind of a systems person. So maths and sciences were my majors. So, you know, I'd be like, okay, let's look at this.

Break it down.

And so I broke it down. I looked at 52 habits. The book, the concept of the book was 52 habits where you can earn this freedom that you want to have as an entrepreneur. And the premise of the book was there's no habit that we have in life that's neutral. So we're either moving ourselves closer to freedom or further away from freedom. However you define freedom, we could have A whole conversation on the podcast about freedom and the definition of freedom, but people define that in different ways. So whatever it is in your mind that you define as freedom. So take something very simple, like drinking water. So if you're going to drink the right amount of water, then your brain has the hydration that it needs to function properly. And you're going to be able to produce better quality work. And that's an action that's going to move you closer to the kind of freedom that you want. If you starve your body of water and you're dehydrated, then you're operating in a detrimental state and that moves you further away.

Or if you're drinking alcohol all day versus water, you're probably going the wrong direction.

Yeah, exactly. Right. So you could apply that to sleep. You can apply that to food. You can apply that to the people that you hang around with. There's lots of different things. And so this book looked at, you know, I just gathered 52 habits that most entrepreneurs are sort of playing with and dabbling with. So that's where I got started in this thought of how do we do this? And then the further and further I got and the more that I worked with clients and the more success I was having, starting to realize that most of my clients were dealing with a pretty common issue, which was like this information overload. So if you think it's, it's worse now than when I started to create the frameworks, but if you think about The number of podcasts we consume, the number of books that we read, the YouTube videos, the social media that we get, the AI outputs that we get. And quite often there's contradictory information in that. So how do I sort this out? How do I actually make sure that I can move from point A to point B and accomplish what I want to accomplish? And that's where the 7 Steps to the Freedom Lifestyle Framework began. It was like, I'm going to take all of this learning that's out there in the world. And I'm going to synthesize it down to just the core important things. If you know what you're— let's start with the fundamentals. What's your purpose?

So these are, are you giving me the steps now?

No, I haven't started giving you steps. The first step is actually getting clear about who you are. So we're going to get clear about your passion, your purpose, your vision, Right. And we've got it. That's the foundation of who's Eric, who's this guy that we're actually dealing with. And so that, I'm not going to go through all the steps right now. We'll get back to that.

Yeah.

But it's synthesized from there to say, okay, if I'm only going to do these things at the base, what do I need to do to actually make sure that I'm successful? And I wanted to create it in such a way that People would, you know, there's that parable of teaching a person to fish rather than giving them a fish. I wanted it to be self-sustaining and I wanted it to be something that people could take as a system and a structure and walk away and not need me again. And so about a year ago, I endeavored to build this in a particular way. I said, no entrepreneur will ever not be able to access this. And I decided to do it in 3 stages. One was if people wanted to work with me individually, they can always work with me privately, which is You know, piece of cake. We know how that model works. Second was if people can't afford to work with me privately, then they can work with me in a group setting and they still get every single thing. And then I was like, okay, and now I'm going to put this thing into a book. So if you have, you know, $25 and the book is going to come out in November, you got $25, you can buy the book, you can download a free workbook and you can get it so that nobody has to not have access to the process to be able to do this. And I spent probably about 4 or 5 years building this. In a way so that people could plug— if you want to plug other things in and add things to it, great. But you don't need to. It's enough to have you get clear about where do you want to go? What do you want to accomplish? How big do you want it to be? And it includes all the different areas of your life. So it's not just business.

So it's a whole book. The step 1 of 7 Steps to Freedom that you have all about helping you get clarity. And that's what the book is on.

The book is about all 7 steps.

All 7 steps.

Yeah, it includes the full 7 steps. It includes, it includes the 6 stages of business mastery. And tied into that is, is the 12 key life areas framework.

What's it going to be called? Do you have the title?

I have a working title for it. I don't know if I love the working title. Wait, I got to tell you, let me look up the working title. It's like literally sitting in my, on my capture pad.

Well, I ask people to comment if they like the title or not. Yeah.

Tell me if you like the title. So it's right now the working title is 7 Simple Steps to Your Freedom Lifestyle: How to Design and Live Your Ideal Life as a Passionate, Mission-Driven Entrepreneur. So it's the title and the subtitle is there.

I like it. Not bad. I'm sure you've played with AI and try to continue to refine.

That one actually, interesting enough, that's the one thing I haven't been playing with AI on. That one's been sitting, but I've been, you know, I'm in process of writing a book. I always write the title last. Like when I wrote the book, did you, when did you write the title for your book, Eric?

It continued to get refined towards the end too. Like I had some ideas and then the title, actually, I think I was going to keep the main title was kind of locked in. Although my AI advisors along the way, cause I worked with professional book coaches and then I also had, you know, threw it to AI to give me feedback. It was toggling between proximity pays and then stuff around isolation tax, which was another, it was a concept I had. My AI agents had a debate and proximity pays won.

But I love it when the agents are having their own debates.

Yeah. They were having their own debate. So, but okay. So now I'm intrigued for those listening. You get a lot of frameworks here. Let's take one of them. If it's the main one and let's break it down.

Sure.

Okay.

Yeah, we can do that. Why don't we do the 7 steps? Okay. So that's probably because everything else sort of feeds from the 7 steps. So when we start with the 7 steps, I like alliteration. So I'll give you the 7 steps and then we'll talk about what each one of the steps looks like. So the first one is assess.

Assess. Okay.

The second is analyze. The third is architect. The fourth is actualize. The fifth is align. The sixth is adapt. And the seventh is ascend.

Ooh. All right.

Okay.

All right. So assess, analyze, architect, actualize, align, adapt, and ascend.

Ascend. Yeah. So I already talked a little bit about assess. So assess is getting clear about the core elements that are things that are important to you. So those, those things are your values, your mission or purpose, and your Okay.

And when I'm doing this, thinking about, this is not 7 Steps to Freedom. I do it from the sake of my business. I do it as me, as this is you your whole life. Love it. Okay.

So the subtitle for the 7 Steps to Freedom Lifestyle is Design and Live Your Ideal Life. So when I talk about your life, I want you to think about what's the life that you would have regardless of whether or not your business was funding it or that you had the time. This is where that trap happens, where you can build a business for freedom, but that business can become the thing that's actually taking the freedom away. So a lot of people build these bigger businesses, but it doesn't necessarily mean that they have the life that they want.

That's right.

So how do you do both?

Yeah, I've been guilty of that and sitting there right now, having, having wanted more freedom and I'm stuck. So yeah, I'm listening. Everything you hear on this show comes back to one idea, proximity. I wrote the book on it, literally. Proximity Pays, my bestselling book available now at proximitypays.com.

All right. So second one, analyze. Analyze is really about getting clear about what's the reality. So the first step is like, where do I want to go? I suggest people to set out a 10-year vision because 10 years is far enough out that your mind can still create it as, as gosh, the word just went out of my head. Aspirational was the word I'm looking for. You can still create an aspirational outlook. But it's not so far away that it's absurd. And we can work backwards to like a 5-year milestone, a 3-year milestone, or a 1-year milestone, which is a later part of the system. So get yourself clear where you're going and what matters. Now, step 2, we're going to find out what the heck is actually going on. So we want to know when we look at those 12 key life areas, how are you doing across those 12 key life areas? How are you doing with your family? How are you doing in your social area? How are you doing With your wealth management? How are you doing with your wellbeing? Right? So all of these different areas of life, we want to get a check-in on how am I doing? And maybe you say out of the 12 areas of life, you know, 5 of them are working great. 5 of them are okay. 2 of them really suck. Right? So now we know what they're— we're clear about where things are. And we also want to get clear about where our business is. And so that's where the 6 stages of business mastery come in. And I could deviate, but we're not going to go over there right now. But each of those 6 stages of business mastery are designed to say, okay, if your business is at a particular stage, let's say your business is at formulation, which is stage 1, do you have an actual plan for your business or are you just flying by the seat of your pants? And a plan doesn't need to be a 25-page document that goes to the bank. You could have a 1-page business plan, but what's the plan? Right. And then from there you move to the next stage, next stage, next stage. But if we have time, we can go back to that. So you know how the business is doing, you know how you're doing. It's all a step 2. So we're already onto step 3. So in step 3, we're actually gonna create the plan.

Okay.

So we're gonna work backwards from that 10-year vision, right? In each of the 12 key areas of life and identify what do the milestones look like? So where, if I assume that I will hit the 10 years, what will I have done by 5 years out.

Very simple. And you do that in each of the 12 areas. Yep.

And you do that at the 5-year milestone, the 3-year milestone, and then how far will I be 1 year from now? What you're doing is you're starting to get your limbic system and your subconscious very clear about what it needs to accomplish in the next 12 months in order to keep you on track. Now people are off. Some people will come to me right away and say, oh, you know, life changes and things happen. And they're like, yes, it does. But Then your plan will flex. It's like an airplane trying to fly on a path with autopilot. It course corrects like hundreds of times in a minute, but it knows where it's going. So you can bring yourself back to that path.

Okay.

So now you've got the plan. All right. So step 4, which is actualize, is to start to roll that plan out.

Okay.

That might mean that you need to look at how you're going to accomplish those things. I got myself really deep now into AI agents. I have an AI agent called Faye, who's my chief of staff. And she is managing, you know, 5 or 6 different streams of businesses and business things that I'm involved with. And it's kind of the traffic control and, you know, rolling out that plan. So for some people it's AI, for some people it's an assistant, for some people it's just sitting down and planning it out.

It's almost like the architect was working backwards 10 years to present. Now you're going forward and saying, okay. Now that I know where to do, what are the first actions and steps I'm doing to start on this plan?

Yeah. How do I do that? And that's where my, that training in that Full Focus System came in really handy because it, what it does is you could take those 1-year milestones, you turn them into annual goals, you break them down into steps. What are you working on each quarter? What are you working on each year? Again, I'm not reinventing the wheel here. I'm just giving people, like, as I said very early on, What's the bare minimum to actually accomplish your life? This is it. It's not overcomplicated. One of the other things that I should have mentioned when we talked about analyze is that it's also important for you to get a sense of who you are using whatever system you're comfortable with. So I tend to favor the Kolbe system. Some people use DISC, others use— I know Heather was, Heather was on for an interview with you recently and she uses—

Human Design.

Human Design. I don't care what it is. Just Find out what you're all about. And when you're going in to do the work for actualize and align, which is the next step, build the structures that support how you operate as a human being.

And I'd say now with AI being able to, once you have your scores or using AI to get your scores, I think it's just so powerful. I think everybody should be taking their personality tests and feeding it to AI to help them.

Absolutely.

Whatever you're doing. I was just using the Human Design funny that I did. With my family. And then like, literally, how do I work with my son and my wife and my daughter was just quite interesting. And then I used to teach my company, we were a Myers-Briggs shop for a little bit and okay, like how do we cross-work with each other based on our letters?

When I know that for my clients or for prospects, I plug it in all the time and say like, if I'm using AI to help me create a pitch or a proposal email or something, I always use that to be like, use this to help me Right. The approach and the pitch. I have a client who leads in Colby. She leads with quick start. So if I ever give her an excessive amount of detail, like she's the person who sends back 2-line emails, she doesn't even bother really with saying hi.

Yeah. What are your numbers?

I'm a 6-4. I just had 6-4-7, 6-4-7-2 or 6-4-7-3.

Okay.

I also lead with quick start.

I'm a 3-7-8-3.

8-3.

Which one's the quick start? Is that the—

Quick start's the third one.

I thought that was the call.

Yeah, I did say 6473. 6473 is accurate.

I'm a super fast quick start and a low fact finder. You're at least mid on a fact finder.

So I need a little bit of information before I go. Okay. So 5 is Align. And I sort of touched on that, which is you're putting in these customized structures that maximize the time that you spend in your zone of genius.

Right.

So The idea here is to spend your time doing the work that you're good at, you know, delegate, outsource, AI support tools. Like I'm not, some of this is ideas of how you want to do it. There's no right formula. The formula is what's right for you that actually helps you do that.

Yeah. And I think the biggest mistake I've seen others make, there's such a disease on people not being able to delegate correctly as entrepreneurs, number one. And number two, I think it's The faster you know your weaknesses and identify them and get your ego out of the way to admit that you don't like these areas and you can replace yourself, it is such a win for yourself. You don't even realize it because you're going to be able to do it, staying in your area of genius way more, doing things you love to do versus the stuff that's dragging you down. And got to get the ego away and say, yes, well, I have to delegate that off and I got to take a step back to get others to do that or get my AI agents or whatever we're doing. But yeah, no, I'm glad you touched on that one.

Hey, with AI agents being able to do so much, you really don't have an excuse because the cost factor.

Yeah.

goes way down. I mean, you, I'm still an AI first, like AI with human oversight kind of person. I don't think, you know, anyway, but we, that's a whole different conversation. Okay. 6.

Adapt.

Is adapt. Okay. So the system's not going to work right the first time. The structures aren't going to deliver everything. You need to actually be monitoring, doing check-ins. I'm a big fan of weekly, in the Full Focus System, they talk about weekly previews, quarterly previews. So Doing quarterly planning, doing weekly planning, and being critical about what's working and what's not working so that every single week you look at what did I want to accomplish this week? Did I accomplish it? And I do it based on percentages. You know, here were the 3 things that I said were the major 3 things I wanted to accomplish this week. What percentage of those things that I did? What worked? What didn't work? What am I going to start? What am I going to stop? And you're updating and adapting that behavior consistently. I think sometimes we get so comfortable in that this is the way that we do it. We don't challenge the premise that we started with when we were back in the actualize and the architect and we built out the system. So build adaptation into your systems.

Yep. And then now once you do have it working, it's time to ascend.

It's time to ascend. So that has you go all the way back. So you draw a circle. Ascend brings you back to assess. So you now look at what's next for mastery and then commit to it as like sort of an ongoing excellence cycle. So you go back to assess, you're looking again at your vision. My vision's still current. Is my, uh, is, are my values still the same? Am I committed to what I said I'm still committed to? And it's okay to say, you know what, I had a chance to think about this thing that I put into my 10-year vision. And that's not quite the way what I want. Like in the last year I got married. And so. This thing that I thought I wanted to do as a single guy, because I'm a single guy, I don't really want to do that anymore because now I have a partner and some other things are more important to me. So I'm going to change that and that's okay. And then the process repeats itself. So that if you think about that cycle, the natural kind of timing for the full cycle to go is about a year. And you do annual, when you do your annual plan is when you would come back and look at You know, your vision as a whole. But you're doing that adaption stage at least once a quarter.

Got it.

And you've got mini adaption going on every week.

So I can see why you are the simplify the chaos into a palatable action. I can see you made it palatable because, you know, you're trying to get people to take steps on things they love to do.

Yep.

Love the system. I look at this as almost like goal setting, multidimensional, especially when you take the 12 different areas that you're analyzing. Now I imagine the biggest issue is the people staying on pace, like staying on rhythm. It just seems like you need almost like an accountability coach for the average lackadaisical entrepreneur who can't stay focused. How do people stay on track with this kind of thing?

Look, there's no shortage of discipline in the entrepreneur world. You know, we have discipline for the things that really matter to us. How do I deal with it is that I really only want to work with people that are willing to identify the work that there is to do and are willing to do the work. Some of us are willing to do the work. Others are not willing to do the work. Some of us are willing to do work until midnight. We're not willing to do the work to actually get up and go to the gym and manage our wellbeing. And this is a whole life system, right? So back to the first book I wrote, which was all about the habits, right? You just got to stop and get like, if you don't sleep, you don't function. If you don't eat, you don't function. If you don't surround yourself by the people who have lives and things and aspiring to the things that you want, you don't grow. You don't elevate. This is one of the things about Speakeasy that I love is that I'm constantly challenged by the people that are in this community. It's like, okay, well, that person's doing this or this person's doing that. And okay, well, why, why am I not doing that? And how, what do I need to do to actually bring that up? So just this community alone is so powerful in creating that space that is a challenge and We all have discipline in our businesses or we wouldn't be successful. We wouldn't be in this particular community. And I know I'm speaking just to the folks that are in this community, right? When I say that, but in the world in general, successful entrepreneurs have discipline. So this is a matter of choice. And if you want to have the life that you say you want to have, then it is going to require the same discipline that it takes for you to have the things in your life that you actually have now. Because you applied that discipline and it's not complicated. It's just that simple.

You just got to follow the formula and the formula you laid out, I think is beautiful. You had a story that we didn't get to share yet, but I want to talk a little bit about it. You've had a lot of successes and you've learned some tough lessons as well. And you've made some choices. And yeah, let's go back to maybe the story you shared on the pre-work, if you will, that we had about your mom and heading back to Toronto.

Yeah. Wow. I just got emotional when you said that. So I decided several years ago, That I would set up my life so that I could live a digital nomadic lifestyle. I wanted my life to be run in a backpack and I built my businesses and things that I was involved with, with that in mind. And then I, just as I was about to go and launch into that, I decided that I would get a dog and I would take on training this dog. His name is T'Challa as my service animal, and he would travel with me. So Since I was a teen and I have dealt with mental health issues, I'm quite public about it. And I, and I'm also in the process of starting a nonprofit to support entrepreneurs who deal with that. So yeah, we're trained to tell that. For anybody who is listening to this and is thinking about training a service animal by yourself and privately, I suggest you think again, cuz it's not as easy as one might, might imagine.

So legit service animal, not a—

Legit, not a fake service dog.

No, no.

No, you know, the kind that costs $20,000 to train kind of thing. And he's— he and I are in that process right now. Our trainer feels that T'Challa could do anything. And it's just now a matter of me having the discipline to make sure that he gets what he needs in order to be able to pass the assessment.

What kind of dog?

He's a long coat German Shepherd. Yeah. So just think German Shepherd with a shag. And so he's pretty cute. So yeah, so that was all set to go. And as I was sort of putting that plan in motion, I realized that my mom was not really okay on her own. And so I moved back to my childhood home so that I could support my mom in aging in place and staying there as long as she wanted to stay. And we're just at the point—

Take your time.

This morning she was in a lot of pain. My mom's 91 and she's dealing with like severe back pain and like sciatica pain and You know, she told my brother about a month ago that 91 is a lot harder for her than 90. She really feels it. You know, she was willing a couple of months ago, she finally decided that she would go and look at some retirement homes because, you know, the things with the mobility that I could see that kept me there, it's, she's starting to feel it now. I could see it before, but she, my mom's really proud. My mom, I was raised by a proud Caribbean single mother.

Wow.

Who, strongest woman in the world I know. Strongest woman in the world I know. Yeah. So seeing her this way is really challenging, but I, you know, as I said to my brother, we're both alive. She didn't kill us. She did her job. So it's our turn. And I know that's not always a popular opinion, but that's how I felt about it. And so, you know, that's what I had, I think just because we create a freedom business. or a business that gives us access to freedom doesn't remove responsibilities from our lives. And, and sometimes making the right choice means choosing the thing that is important and that matters. But I still, you know, what I love about the ability to do that is I, I had the ability to choose that freely because of the freedom that I built.

You had the ability to make that decision and go back where others may not have. And that ultimately Part of the goal and the freedom you strive for.

Yeah. You know, and I think one of the happy points in my mom's day is to interact with T'Challa. He's got her wrapped around his finger. He does this thing, you know, he does this thing where he goes, he sits down beside her, he backs up to her and then he waits. And if she doesn't rub him fast enough, he talks to her over his shoulder.

When am I getting my butt scratches?

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

So I love it. Well, thank you for sharing that and being a little vulnerable with us and all the lessons here. The, I know we got to wrap in a minute here. When's the book come out again?

November? November.

Yeah. All right. So we'll still let it keep us posted. We'll post about it when it comes out. And I think hopefully those listening can be one of your first buyers and support. I'm excited about this framework. I think anybody could use— a lot of us need good systems. Good entrepreneurs oftentimes are all over the place, wackadoodle, need a good structure and system going. And I imagine if anybody's interested in working with you to help them with the accountability or the one-on-one, we'll have your information down below.

Yeah, absolutely.

Anything else that I didn't get to cover that we wish we talked about?

Nothing that's specific, but on the accountability side, I just launched that, that group option. So, you know, people can reach out and if they want interest in the group option or the private options. So yeah, sometimes what you need, and when I built out the system for this group system, sometimes what you need is that community. I've, I've really gotten that clear. A lot of us entrepreneurs, we tend to be little loners sometimes, right? But I have really enjoyed being together in like the Speakeasy community. And it inspired me to tweak. I was going to launch a particular kind of program. And then I was like, no, no, no, I really want to launch something that has more community in it, even though, you know, it's going to deliver accountability, it'll deliver the framework and all of that, but I want people to feel like they're doing this journey, this freedom journey, this freedom lifestyle journey with other people in community. So I'm really excited about that, but yeah. Yeah. And then folks feel free to reach out and connect and happy to chat with folks about whatever they might be struggling with.

Awesome. Well, appreciate it. Thanks for bringing it today. Great to get to know you personally better and hope— send mom some love, love, and give the dog butt scratch for me. And we'll chat soon. Thank you so much, guys. Yeah.

Thank you, Eric. Appreciate it.

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