Do you consider yourself resilient and what does that mean to you? In this podcast, Resilient Entrepreneurs with Two Four One, we chat with business owners about what resilience means to them as they share their inspiring stories and life lessons.
What we've learned running our own business, is you're never alone even when it feels like it. So tune in anytime to this podcast. We're always here for you celebrating resilient entrepreneurs just like you. We're Laura and Vicki from Two Four One - a marketing company for early stage business owners who want to launch, grow and be resilient.
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Reyna Drake joins us today. She's a fantasy fiction author, a leadership coach, and a Business Development Strategist and she teaches a concept of dynamic growth. It's her passion and she sees it as the single most powerful force available to us, each of us as individuals, personally and professionally as entrepreneurs.
With years of experience and decades of academic research, Reyna guides her clients to kickstart their dynamic growth and to implement sustainable change. Her business is Lead and Thrive and she challenges us to reimagine success. Can't wait for this conversation. In this episode, we're going to hear how ineffective leadership is what holds back a lot of businesses and we're going to tap into what makes Reyna resilient. She has a seven-month old as we record this, so we know there's a lot of resilience in that household. Reyna joins us from the beautiful Gold Coast in sunny Queensland, Australia. Welcome, Reyna.
Thank you, thanks for having me.
It's our privilege. Let's just talk about resilience right off the bat. What is resilience? What does that even mean to you?
To me, resilience really means having indomitable will and I'll expand a little bit on that, to have an indomitable will is to have a will that cannot break. So even when you collapse, you are able to sustain your focus, and you get back up. So with that, because in business, you will always have hurdles, things will come from the left field and take you out and so, of course, with some strategy and planning, you can mitigate a lot of those risks. However, you cannot know what you do not know and so having that indomitable will, or that will that does not break, regardless of what happens is really really important, so that's what, in my view, resilience means.
Hmm so is it something you decide to have? Or is it something you train yourself into? How does one get indomitable will?
Well, I think it's very much, it's both, you decide to have it and then you train yourself. Because you can say I would like to be resilient but if you do not take any steps to make yourself resilient then it is not going to happen. So you do have to train yourself and unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on how you want to look at it, it would take a lot of difficult situations and a few failures on your belt to develop that will. But so long as I suppose you have, you go into everything knowing that you will not give up no matter what, then when you do fall down, you can pick yourself back up.
Yeah, I hear you there on the failure. So you almost need the failures in order to learn the lessons to get stronger. Right? Do you have a mindset around failure, what does failure mean to you?
For me, failure is not an option, that's where I start. Because it means that once things get tough, I cannot say well, I can.. I'll accept, I'll give up, ‘Oh I give up, this is too hard’. I don't even go there anymore but to be fair, I had to go through those times where I say, you know what, I give up, I can't do this anymore, before I got to a point where I realised that no, no, no, no, no. Whatever happens, failure is just not an option so if something doesn't work out, or you find yourself face to a wall, then the primary thought in your mind or attitude should be okay, what's next? What else can I do? What other strategies can I put in place? What other options do I have in order to get out of this or to achieve X? There's always a way.
But we have to be very mindful of our own mind, right? The mind is a powerful tool, it is a powerful machine, it can do so much for us but with that power comes a bit of a drawback because if we do not train it accurately and if we do not take control of our own minds, it can lead us astray and it can get us into all kinds of trouble. So if you wire your mind to see issues or problems as a block, then it is really hard to find solutions when those issues do arise. So it's important to train your mind to see problems as opportunities, as opposed to blocks.
Such an important conversation and it's a real shift in thinking, isn't it? And here we are, as we record this at the start of a new year and maybe this is an opportunity for people to take stock and think that they might do something differently this year and that something different could well be an internal shift in, how do we perceive the world? How do we process and what happens to us and happens for us?
Correct. Very much so. And I think especially for entrepreneurs and new business owners, or people who are thinking of going into business, one thing one must really think, appreciate from the get-go is that you are going to face challenges. It is part and parcel of running a business, you cannot avoid this, no matter how smart, no matter how strategic you are, no matter how many resources you have at your disposal. What changes is what kind of issues or concerns you have to deal with. But the fact that you have to deal with challenges does not change. So if you go into business taking this into account and accepting this fact, when you do come face to face with these challenges, you know that it's not the end, it's just what.. it's the nature of business. So it can help you continue where you would otherwise have clocked out and say I can't do this.
I think that type of attitude too, helps take the emotion out of it, when you can pull the emotion out of the sting of a challenge and realise, oh, this is just something I have to deal with, it's not something that's meant to attack me, you can change your mindset around it.
Yeah, yes correct.
The other important thing is to see the business as an exercise in logic. Because business primarily functions on rationality, its market dynamics, everything is cold and hard. Now, that does not mean that we don't bring emotion and passion and feelings to the business, the way we do that can be our point of difference as opposed to our competitors for instance, because if you approach business from a mechanistic perspective, you can lose a lot of people, you can lose a lot of customers. It is important to take the human factor into account, right, however, before you even get to that point, you need to acknowledge that business is mechanistic, primarily.
You have a product and you have to sell it and this is how you have to sell it. These are the things that appeal to people, do people want what you have to offer? And how do you frame that offering such that it is appealing to your target audience? And how do you market? How do you get to this target audience? So it has a lot of mechanistic elements and so, if you understand that primarily business is mechanistic in nature then it helps you accept the mechanistic feedback, it gives you.. the market gives you.
For example, some customers don't like your product or if some have this complaint or your.. this particular.. say, marketing strategy did not work so you don't take it emotionally, you don't go, oh, you know, I'm a failure. I didn't. no! It's just that okay, this didn't work, something else, it can work. And what can I do differently? Or what did I do here that wasn't quite right and oh, how can I pivot?
And so I think that's an important factor when you're starting a business understanding that it is mechanistic in nature so do not go into it completely emotional, understand, which will, because then that allows you to divorce your emotions a little bit from the function of the business. But when you're dealing with your customers and your clients, you can bring in the emotion and have that human element.
That's important. And I wish it's something that I had taken on board and taken to heart myself, a decade or more ago when I went through the very experience of feeling that well, a business that I had created, I had to bring it to a close and sell off, and it felt like the deepest personal failure of my existence. Because I hadn't made that separation, for me, that business was me, it was everything that.. it was what I was worth, it was what, aside from the financial loss which..that's damaging in itself on many levels but I think emotionally, if we just see our business as an entity, as a business, as something that we're working on, like a plant that you water and nurture and it grows, but that plant isn't you and if that differentiation is clear, then I think we can get through anything.
Absolutely. Absolutely. And, look, I can.. I know it sounds very good, it's easy to sit here and say, Oh, feel this way or think this way, right, because I've been there. So, before I started thinking this way, I had to start from somewhere and I started with the emotional element of things, right? I didn't really see my business as a business so much as my brainchild, this was my baby and that's how I called it and of course, as you would know, or you'll be aware language is really powerful. How you frame things in your mind and how you verbalise it is extremely powerful, as in dictating how your attitude is to that thing. So if you call something your baby and it's not working, you feel the loss even more personally. And so I appreciate that it's not easy to go from, especially if you're starting a business because you need the passion, you need to have this feeling of creating something first before you even set up a business. So the difficulty is how do you get.. foster that feeling in order to create a business that you love and that you would stick with, without then carrying that feeling through when you are running that business? It is not altogether clear how you can separate that, or at what point you should separate that. So take it with a grain of salt, me sitting here saying ‘do this and do that’, but I do appreciate that it's not so straightforward and it's not so simple.
But one thing that helped me differentiate was actually I read a book called Extreme Ownership and this was fundamental for my.. for a change in perspective, because it allowed me to see my business as a mission, as in a military mission. It's a book written by two US Marines and they go through a host of mindsets and skills that leaders on the battlefield possessed and how those skills and mindsets are implemented. It's a brilliant book and I would strongly recommend it to any entrepreneur or anyone actually in life because you can use these skills in your private life as well as in your business.
But it allowed me to see my business as a military mission and when you view it from that perspective everything becomes cold hard facts and logic and it's important to repeat as well that this is not how you will deal with your clients, this is how you deal with your business. Right? So with your clients, of course you have to be more compassionate and understanding and make sure that you are opening your heart almost and understand that you're speaking to human beings, not just numbers on your zero check book.
Relationships are everything aren’t they?
Yes, absolutely. Absolutely.
I was just going to ask you to go back to the beginning of your business and tell us a little bit about how you started out as an entrepreneur because what are you talking about, there's a lot of things that you've learned over experience and reading, like you said and talking to others and you grow as an entrepreneur. But in the beginning stages, we’re all starting out, fumbling, fumbling along, figuring it out, how were those beginning years, months for you?
I have to say that I had the privilege of having a golden start, I really did. For me it was exciting, it was fun. So I came into business, almost I fell into it if you willI. I have a law and politics background, that's what I studied but on the side I am really a fantasy buff and nerd and so I'm a bit more airy-fairy so I'd never felt like I would fit within the legal, let's say machine, because I felt it was too cold for my liking but I entered, I studied law because I thought, oh, I want to change the world. Until I studied the law and realised mmm, maybe the law and politics are the problem. So then I got a job with this gentleman who was a business strategist and had been for 20 years and he was a family friend at the time. So after writing a thesis that basically had me blacklisted from the law field, don't worry, my supervisor told me not to write it and I said, Wait, you're telling me not to do something? That's exactly what I'm going to do! So anyway I ended up working with this gentleman and he was an ex-navy guy as well so he had that militaristic approach to things so it was really interesting and informative, seeing the way he viewed people, the way he studied body language in order to inform how he dealt with individual clients, what pressure points are, how to frame his delivery essentially, and after working with him for a while, an opportunity came up to coach a young girl. And because throughout my education and university years I'd been in leadership roles and I've mentored other students, he thought, hey, I think this would be good for you and he recommended me to this particular family and once I started doing that, it just blew up, it just went from there. Because I started coaching this young girl and then the mom came on board because she said ‘I want in on this one’. And then soon after, it happened to be a family that was quite well, I suppose I had a wealth of businesses, that had several businesses and I started coaching their leaders and their managers and yeah, the business sort of grew from there and then it spread by word of mouth and I got corporate gigs, and so yeah. It was pretty, I have to say it was really smooth sailing to begin with and exciting and fun.
Well, you make it sound like smooth sailing but when you talk about it, that takes a lot of bravery to step into the new spaces and I'm sure that road had many bumps in it but you, with your attitude and your approach you just didn't even see them as a bump and that’s great, I'm gonna jump this and keep going so I love it.
Yeah, to be fair, there was a lot of.. there was some fear and anxiety. I have admittedly there was a lot of anxiety because it only took.. in my view at the time it only, I thought it would only take one failure for the whole operation to explode and for me to end up upside down somewhere, but thankfully I was so passionate about what I was doing and I believed so strongly in the fact that people, that leadership was central to actually changing the world, I went from thinking, Okay, I need to be in law and politics in order to change the world to realising that actually change can happen, or needs to happen first at the individual level and if you have individuals in society who have mastery over themselves, who understand how their own mind works, who understand what their trajectory in life is, what their purpose is and have the discipline and let’s say, clarity to lead effectively in their lives and in whatever they're doing, then you will have a better society overall. Because those individuals not only excel in their personal lives, they excel in their relationships, they will excel in their business or endeavours, or jobs and if they're excelling in those areas then you know that the family is going to excel, if everyone's doing it. If the family excels, the community excels and it has this huge ripple effect. So I was, let's say, had a dogged pursuit or had a dogged attitude to making sure that every individual I met, I left being as a more effective leader with clarity and purpose. So that did help me overlook a lot of the challenges that I faced.
Yeah, that's it right there. When you realise that what you do impacts other people, you get out of the perfectionism of yourself and into the ‘I’m needed to help others’ and I think that really helps you get through those challenges. But it's funny that when you said about, you thought just one failure which is going to wipe you out, I think that's a very common fear of most entrepreneurs, especially in the startup stage is, one, client that doesn't pay me is going to wipe up my business or one time this will happen… you just have that constant anxiety about it. But that's not really the reality because it keeps going, it keeps going and you keep growing. Absolutely.
And it will come back to how you pivot once you face those issues or those challenges and often, when it comes to the business itself, there's very little you cannot amend. The business is a really fluid structure and you can mould it and shape it however you want to fit the way you do things. So you needn't really worry if you've structured your business in such a way that is not entirely functional or effective or efficient in the moment, that comes with time. You learn and you adapt and you amend things as you go. The scary part is okay, clients, oh, my God, I've messed up this particular session with this client, will I.. is that it? have I lost my contract now? How do I bridge or have that client… how do I recuperate that client? So to me that was the biggest fear and that was the biggest challenge and I found that being honest and being confident were two things that clients really appreciated. Because particularly with what I do, I'm dealing with other business owners and managers so they understand the difficulties and the pitfalls of running a business, they understand that mistakes happen. So if you're honest with them and say, Look, sorry, that was my mistake and then you're confident in recuperating and coming back with the adequate, with what they expected in the first place or with an improved process, then they respond to that, they respond positively and in fact, that can have them respect you even more because they're like, wow, this person is real, and they can bond with you knowing that okay, my struggle is, I'm not alone in my struggle, even the person coaching me or helping me is also, can also make a mistake. So that becomes actually a strength in your relationship with your client rather than a detriment.
True. So you teach dynamic growth in your business development strategies and looking to see what is dynamic growth and some of what you were just talking about, is that part of it?
Yeah, essentially, dynamic growth ultimately has two components. One, it focuses on tailoring the program to the specific client or customer. And on the other hand, it also focuses on how you mentally help that client grow. So for one, I may have a client who is, let's say, who knows what they're good at and knows what they can make money from. But they may not know what is good for society or what they can do that can bring them money and that they're good at doing, but which will also be of benefit to the community. So that the way you would coach that client is different to someone who knows how they can help the community but they don't know what they're good at. Right? So that's one element, tailoring the program to the individual.
And then it would come down to that particular individual's way of learning and how they grow mentally. So people are different in the way they assimilate things. Some people grow more rapidly than others and others find certain language or methodologies resonate with them and for others, it doesn't. So all of this you have to take on board when you are coaching a client.
I should take you back a little bit and talk to you about one of the.. I suppose the underlying structures of our delivery process, it's this concept called “ikigai”. “Ikigai” is a Japanese concept meaning purpose, basically the ‘reason for being’. I don't know about you but if you've met someone who doesn't know why they're doing what they're doing, or where they're going with themselves, they cannot lead effectively. And you will find that they're rudderless and unsettled and there is this sense of not knowing and anxiety just permeating everything they do. Now when that individual is put in a position of power and leadership, then you find that attitude and that uncertainty about themselves and their own journey and where they're going in life permeates the way they lead, right. So what we do is we make sure as part of a dynamic growth process, we make sure that our leaders understand what their purpose is, what are you here to do? It doesn't really, it doesn't matter what position you're doing if you don't want to do that.
I can teach you all the principles of effective leadership, how to manage staff effectively and get the most out of them. I can train you in a whole range of concepts and things that basically help you implement these, but it won't really take you anywhere if the whole time you're sitting going, ‘I wish.. I want.. I want to be on the beach, I don't want to be in an office’. So first and foremost we have to establish where do you want to be? Do you want to be here to begin with? And is this your purpose? Is this where you want to be? And once we've established that, then we can train you in the tools and the skills you need to be an effective leader. But it's hard to separate these two because essentially learning to figure out your purpose and where you're going in life and how you're going to get there requires a fair bit of leadership as well.
You have a diagram on your website Reyna, which I think describes it beautifully and we can put it in the show notes for people. But just to kind of touch on it, there’s four intersecting circles, and one is What you love, one is What the world needs, the other is What you can be paid for and then the fourth one is What you're good at, which is interesting that what you love or what you're good at, are even separate circles. So I think there's a whole delightful concept there that we could unpack, but I guess, is that the way that you're helping people to define their purpose?
Correct. Correct. Because where these four things intersect, that's your purpose. I particularly, I have a gripe with some of the messaging that we've had for the last few decades, especially to young people and to people in general saying to follow your passion, that nothing is more important, right? Your passion is all it's at. Well, okay, if you don't need to feed your family and if you don't need to contribute to society, or..
Exactly. It's one of those things that have driven me crazy too, or just find your purpose, but no one actually tells you how to find your purpose. There's no guidebook, well, there probably are a lot of books written on it. But there’s no clear path to finding it but I liked the way, and I've been fascinated by “ikigai” for a while because of those intersections of not just what you love but what you're good at, because that's something to remember too, you gotta be good at it and then really share it with the world and inspire others to get on board as an employee, as you're building and scaling and all these things too.
Exactly right. And look, it doesn't mean that you have to be good at what you have a passion for straight off the bat, that's not what we're saying here but if you have a passion for something, you do have to be good at it, ultimately the chances are that you will have some skills in this area because that's the nature of passion, it drives you to pursue a particular thing and so you tend to develop your skill, but it's important to make sure that it's not just having the feeling is not enough, having the skills is also important, right. And having the skills as well is not enough, you also need to be able to be paid for it, and then that also is not enough, it has to have some positive use or value to your community and to society. Because we don't find our, we don't find fulfilment in life by just doing things that we want for ourselves on our own. We are social beings and you will be surprised how absolutely amazing you feel when what you're good at and you can get paid for it and you love doing it, also happens to help people in the process. You will find that nothing, you will have that indomitable will we were discussing before, becomes so easy to cultivate because you have something beyond yourself, outside of yourself that you are working towards. It's not just about yourself, and it makes it super easy to keep at it.
It's so true. And I can say even in my own personal life, when I was a teenager, I loved art, like I was a really good artist and I took every art class I could and I stayed late every day at school to do art and I wanted to figure out how could I, I wanted to have a career where I'd make enough money to live on, right? So that was the money part of it, what can I be paid for? I didn't want to be a starving artist, so I went into graphic design as a field because it was the way to do art, something people needed so I figured that out early on and it was a good, it was a good career choice. And then you grow and evolve as it goes on but yeah, that's something I think young people, if any young people are listening, this is the thing you should look up, figure out what your “ikigai” is, and pursue that because I think success will follow. Inevitable.
Absolutely. Absolutely. And when we mention success, you start realising that success starts becoming very personal and you develop this personal definition for success, rather than this external blanket view of what success is supposed to look like. Because when you're pursuing your “ikigai”, you realise that that's your success and it's different, it may be completely different to what someone else's success is. Someone else's success might be a million dollar home with it's Jaguar in the parkway and what have you, some gold watches, whatever. And your success might be sitting with someone and absolutely changing their lives, right? And sure you might get paid for and you may just have an average home and whatever but seeing that the impact you have on someone else could be your definition of success. So I think you when you follow your “ikigai”, or when you figure it out and then you develop the discipline to pursue it and persist in it, in its pursuit, you really hit the jackpot, that's the best way I can put it, you hit the jackpot because you find yourself that your work no longer feels like work and you just have this drive and nothing will, you find things have to be really, really, really dark for you to even consider stopping.
Reyna talking about the jackpot, I honestly think we hit the jackpot by being able to have you on this podcast. Honestly, this has been so fun and so informative and of course, I'd love to talk for another hour, but we do keep these short and punchy so that people can get on and get great inspiration and wisdom. So thank you so much for being part of Resilient Entrepreneurs and you've taught us so much sharing your wisdom, it's a gem. Thank you so much.
Brilliant, thank you so much. Thanks for having me was an absolute privilege and pleasure.
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Thanks for joining us on Resilient Entrepreneurs, we're Laura and Vicki from Two Four One. We love supporting entrepreneurs, especially with mindset, marketing and motivation which is why we’ve built an incredible community of business founders who meet weekly in the Level-Up League. If you'd like to know more about it, look u s up at www.twofouronebranding.com
