Welcome to the Best of Season 3 - on Resilient Entrepreneurs podcast with Two Four One. Remember to Subscribe - it could change your life.
EPISODE 46: Karl Schwantes
Resilience is not about trying to avoid stress, as much as we all try to on some level, I don't think it's about avoiding stress because stress is everywhere. And stress can actually be a good thing, if you harness it and use it in the right way. For me resilience is about the internal dialogue that you have with yourself about what that stress means. So someone once said to me that your mind can be a scary place, you should never go there alone. And it's really about what does that inner voice mean? Because sometimes it can be very unforgiving. “Ah you stuffed that one up”, or this or that or whatever. And it's being able to listen to that voice and realise that the voice isn't you. And how can you turn that and reframe that so that it becomes something that's positive and that you can show kindness and compassion to yourself through that inner voice. And just making sure that what you're seeing, you're not interpreting in a way that's harmful or negative.
EPISODE 45: Dr. Ayesha Peets Talbot
When it comes to health, you want to be eating right - number one. Moving right, so that's having some sort of exercise (two) Sleeping right, so those could be the top three. And those ones we’ve all heard about, but I like to take it a little bit further, you want to make sure that all your nutrients are right. So this is micronutrients. These are vitamins and minerals, there's so many deficiencies for us now and people don't have that on their radar so that's really big. And then lastly, make sure your hormones are right. And that's hormones for male and female. So male, really notice.. I know everybody's thinking testosterone, oestrogen, progesterone and those are the big ones but I'm also thinking thyroid, I'm thinking adrenal hormones as well, you want to make sure all of that is working really well. And if you're taking care and you've got all those five things nailed, then likely you're doing really good and your health is really, if you can focus on those things, then things are probably doing really good.
EPISODE 49: Judy Wilkins-Smith
What it's doing is it's breaking the generational spell. And I always say to people be very careful, we say that there is not magic, and we're not witches and warlocks and magicians, your words matter, they cast the spell, and the person either buys it, or doesn't. And if you buy it you're gonna get locked in. And if we're looking at money it's the same. If you watch people you will hear them say, “Oh, I've got enough to get by.” “Only greedy people have money”. “It's for liars, cheats and thieves”. Well in your case, this is probably true. Because if that's the only way you can see it, that's all that can show up for you. It’s breaking a multi generational cycle but there's wisdom even in that cycle.
EPISODE 52: Shenali Rajaratnam
We're really spending so much time at work. It's important that we have again, self care is considered a more feminine aspect of things, but is it really feminine? It's something that belongs to everyone. Even talking about how you feel when you're tired, stressed out, you don't have to hold it in just because you're a man, you can talk about it. You should be able to talk about it, express it. These are not, I would say, exclusive to any sex whether you're male or female. It's a human component of feeling when you're frustrated, whether you want to cry. I mean not that you should be crying at work but I'm saying it's okay to embrace these components of who you are.
EPISODE 68. Megan Gluth Bohan
Some failures we have, we have no one to blame but ourselves. It would have been very easy for me to look at my life and say, “This happened to me, I had no choice, I'm gonna stay in this ‘stuck’ place.” And then to your question and your point Vicki, that feels easy and comforting sometimes, especially when we don't know our way out. I think that's why people get stuck most often, it’s that we don't know how to get out, and we don't know how to ask for help, and so it's a lot easier to stay stuck. Which is then, again, made more difficult when you do want to get out and you realise that part of getting out means that you have to acknowledge another set of failures that belong to you. And so, that's hard. I think people avoid that, and I think that's why they stay stuck. I don't judge that because I've been there. I know what that feels like to do that. But I will say that life is far more rewarding if you can move through that. But it’s hard, it really is.
EPISODE 50: Russell Harvey
But the thing that's most common in the feedback is “The type of conversation I have with you, Russell is unique. I don't talk to anybody else in my life the way in which we talk to each other.” So I think it is actually genuinely what goes on in a coaching conversation, it's the fact that somebody is getting a very different, better form of support and positive challenge in that conversation. It's highly independent, it's one of the ethics of coaching is that you need to make sure that you hold all of your clients in unconditional positive regard. So the lack of judgement there is in a coaching conversation, it's really free. That is absolutely my intention is that people can say and do and think what they need to and it's okay, it's alright. Then it's about actually how useful are these thoughts and what you're saying, what you're doing, how are they benefiting you? How will they not benefit you?
EPISODE 70. Aziz Musa
At some point in my career I realised that knowledge is only one element of the path to success. A rather large element is being able to understand and control your emotions, and make decisions in times of difficulty, and I struggled with that a lot, I was very hot headed, I was very spontaneous, almost impetuous. And I think I recognised that relatively early; I had a great boss who pointed out to me and said, “You're doing a great job, you can carry on like this but if you want to grow, I suggest you go and speak to somebody”. And so I did, I always thought, ‘Okay, so I can get to 98% of my capability, but unlocking that last 2% is inside here, inside my brain somewhere, and I need to unpick that.’ And so I spent a lot of time with various therapists talking about different things, really understanding myself and my own reactions to things.
Resilience is partly a mindset and partly experience.
EPISODE 51: Maureen Falvey
What I'm interested in is making stuff happen, and getting off of our excuses, and moving into action, not letting fear be the guide. I just don't know that we need to spend 20 years talking about something. I think that we try stuff and be willing to fail, and we practise being courageous and cultivating confidence, but if we wait until we're ready, what would that mean? I think it's too long, I think it's too late. So I just started thinking about that, And like, ‘Is it easier said than done?’ I think ‘It is easier done than said’ that was a quote, who did I steal that from? Thomas Edison or no, Ralph Waldo Emerson said ‘Do the thing, and you'll have the power.’ And so I was like, Oh, yes, someone else feels the same way I do. But let's just start doing things, and let's move into action instead of conversation.
EPISODE 53. Dr. Dravon James
In the book, I start off by telling people that probably I'm not the first thing people would think of when they think of freedom, I'm a woman and I'm an African American in America, right? But freedom is a choice and it comes with sacrifice, it means that you must first decide that you will sacrifice certain maybe popular views. The view, we're talking about entrepreneurship, the view that quitting is okay, or the view that maybe certain people shouldn't do certain things. You're free to believe and think anything that you want to believe and think, that means you have to sacrifice following sometimes the party line, right? You have to say I choose this. It comes with sacrifice.
EPISODE 54. LaSean Smith
I believe as we continue to move forward, if you do not have a business rooted in values that - and here's the punchline - that you're willing to go out of business to protect, you are going to have a really hard time acquiring and retaining customers because increasingly, whether someone may say it's a purpose-driven business, or it's just a great branded business, most people aren't going to say Nike is a purpose-driven business but the promise is very clear. The values are very clear. They are largely trying to make everyone, the everyday person feel like an athlete and I'm paraphrasing their words, but it's very clear the journey and the mission that they're on, and trust is easy to lose, but I believe that if you don't truly lean in and start there, you can easily get distracted with so many things. And I, working in early stage software products in small companies, big companies, I naturally found myself in meetings with brand consultants and folks who are developing identities, and I was like, oh, goodness, this is so critical to the rest of the decision making, if you don't figure out what you stand for, and I'm not just saying culture posters that you put in the hallway at your office, but what you deeply stand for, everything else is harder, the website is harder, the product is harder, your go to market is harder, everything is just harder. And so why not invest the appropriate time and money up front? So it's almost like the teenage years, you’ve got to figure out who you are, your identity and everything else becomes a much easier decision process once you have that articulated.
EPISODE 58. Livia Jenvey
Your business is your baby, right? And you want to take care of your kids. So in order for you to take care of your kids, you’ve got to be taken care of as well. And that's the same, it's the same from.. furry kids, to human kids to your business kid. I think we've had this culture for so long about the hustle, the hustle, the hustle, the hustle and I think that has done a disservice for us as entrepreneurs. I think we need to start to look at it as, we need time for us and then we also need to have that other time to hustle, there needs to be a balance and making sure that we come first. Because if you don't, you're going to do things that are going to be really negatively impacting for your business, you're going to hate your business, you're not gonna be excited about what you want to do. And you may want to close your business down and stop being an entrepreneur. But that's a disservice because you, as an entrepreneur, if you are driven to be that person, that means that you've got something that's meant to change the world in a positive way. You have been given that gift to do that with whatever product or service you're putting out there. So it's ensuring that you are taken care of, so you can make sure that gift goes out to the world to really help people in a positive way.
EPISODE 47: Denise Carnihan
One day I said to my husband, I think I’ll take a tour to Africa, a tour group to Kenya and show them my Africa, and I call it my Africa because that's what it feels like to me. And he said to me, That's great, I've been telling you that! I don't know anything about taking tours or tourism, anything at all. He said you don't need to, just create an itinerary of all the wonderful places that you go to, and put it out on your Facebook, so I did. And I just literally put a post up on Facebook, my private Facebook page saying, Hey, I'm thinking of taking a tour group, I'll take eight people max, if you're interested send me an email. The next morning I had 52 emails!
EPISODE 48: Davida O' Brien
But I believe that it's worth it, I feel it within me that this journey is worth it. I feel like it's gonna be something more than I could expect. The conversations that I have with people when they taste it, or they are just talking about it, it really motivates me to just keep going because now I feel like I'm not doing it just for me or my son, which is something I would like to hand down to him, I feel like I'm doing it for everybody now, right? Because everybody's like, well, “when is it coming out? I can't wait.”, “I don't drink. I want to have something like this”, and I’m thinking, “OK now I have to get it done.”
EPISODE 64. Giuseppe Grammatico
No one wants to own a business I think, maybe I'm wrong by that, I think they don't want to own a business, because a business is a risk. It's a lot of work. I had black hair prior to starting, and you can see the whites, I think they need a business. I think the business is the vehicle and that to me is the minor stuff. What's the vehicle? Is it a franchise? Are you a consultant? Are you a startup? Do you own a gas station? To me, these are the various vehicles, and you can own them all. I invest in the stock market, I don't invest in real estate, you pick and choose what you're comfortable at like what Warren Buffett talks about. You do what you know, you stick with it and I think good things will happen at the end of the day. It sounds kind of basic, but it comes down to the basics.
EPISODE 55: Rana Salman
It's a gift to land an appointment with a buyer, with a prospect, even if they end up not buying from you. They are taking that time with you. Time is finite, right. That is the only thing I can't get back. And when I have an executive saying, yes, out of all of the salespeople that have reached out to me Rana, I want to meet with you, that is a gift that we need to make sure that we are not taking it for granted, and the way we show up matters.
And when you talk about respect that includes first impression matters. That includes; Do you have an agenda? What about your artificial communication? The way you show up, your attire. Are you sending the message that is saying, I am here to help you. I have taken the time to dress in a professional manner to show you that I am here to help you. Another thing is your attitude, right? People want to buy from people that have a positive attitude. There's research around how attitude impacts our performance but it also impacts other people's performance. It's contagious. So how are you showing up for these zoom calls? With a problem solving mindset and helping your buyers and respecting their time and adding value?
EPISODE 62: Aneace Haddad
Reel 3
What we're facing today is this constant onslaught of change, where it's no longer resilience of ‘Okay, here comes the big wave, let me steel myself and get through it. Ah, okay, I'm through the wave,’ because there's another wave. So it's more a sense of surfing the waves rather than constantly being battered by them. The resilience for me, it feels like, I know it has that sense as well, both senses that I just described, but I think most people use resilience in that first manner as I need to bounce back from something bad that's happening. And my angle is maybe it's not bad, maybe it's just the way we're livin, maybe it's just life and we're just going through that. And I don't know what word to use on that. Resilience is the word that's there.
EPISODE 59: Jill K. Thomas
I would say the ability to pivot. As an entrepreneur you have to learn how to say oh my gosh, there's no customers buying this product, maybe I should pivot and offer something that more people are interested in, the ability to make adjustments and changes when you need to, but also not seeing, like we talked about in July, not seeing the July slowdown is an indication that you're supposed to stop. Oh, my God, God doesn't want me to do this business because she hasn't sent me any clients. Right? That's not what it means. It means maybe you need to make some adjustments to your messaging, maybe you need to do 10 times as much messaging as you're actually doing, which is, quite frankly, usually what's going on. Or maybe you need to adjust your prices. Or maybe what you're doing isn't resonating with the public or maybe the public who wants your message isn't able to find it, there's usually something you need to do. But resilience really means just the ability to understand that there's more going on here and saying, Look, I'm not stopping because the indications are that it's not working, I'm just going to make adjustments to figure out what does work.
EPISODE 60: EUGENIA OGANOVA
Instead of doing all the things this is part of why so many people burn out and never get to six figures even because they're trying to do all the things and the things scrolling through their Facebook feed with the little $27 course on this and on that and on that, and then they think they need to be an Instagram star with perfect pictures. And then they need to have this amazing website and a 20 step funnel and then on top of it, to have a low ticket course and then all these freebies every week, and you don't need any of it. You just need you. You need confidence and you need understanding of what is the expertise, what are you doing, who is this for, what is your methodology, how to package that and then go talk about it.
EPISODE 66. Ben Kirk
The number one success habit that I've seen is this ability to do a weekly review, not just that, we can do the daily review as well, our daily planning and our evening wind down routine and planning and reflection. But the weekly is that Minimum Viable Dose that they need to do a weekly review of what worked this week, and what lessons we're going to take and apply to the week after, and that's what it all comes down to. And then the accountability side well, that's precisely what I do.
EPISODE 71. Max Lewis
That's what I see a lot of is those two things - that combo, they're talking to the wrong person, disempowering, not helping them, doesn't have the right advice, and be the deer in the headlights, they're just frozen, and they start talking to themselves and then they start disempowering themselves. “I have this amazing idea, but it's not gonna work because of you know, blah, blah, blah, or he'll never want to do business with me, or she'll never want to…” and you talk yourself out of it before you gave it a shot at coming to reality, bringing your idea or your dream to fruition. You have to break through that wall and just do it. Don't think about it, just do it. Have you ever seen someone try to get into a really cold pool, and they dip their toe? And they say, oh my god, it's so cold, and they dip another toe, oh my goodness no way, and they walk away and they come back. Or they get in, they’re halfway and every time the water touches they’re oh, oh… because oh my god it's freezing, and then you see another guy come in and jump in the deep end and he's like, ”Oh, actually, it's not that bad.” Because your body gets used to it immediately, right? So just jump in and stop overthinking it, and it's painless.
EPISODE 57: Tom Jackobs
I love it. What's AI? I'm just kidding! Haven't heard of it in the last six months. I love AI. And it's not going to come back and kill us all, it's not that smart, I don't think. But what it enables us to do is do things a lot faster. And so you combine a human with AI and now you can take your productivity and 10X it almost overnight. In the sales process, I see AI in that initial follow up process to get somebody booked for an appointment. So really good uses, I'm testing that out with my own stuff, to see how well it books and interacts with, and it's just chat, it's not voice. So how does it interact? Does it ask the right questions and learn along the way? So that is one aspect that's really cool and then content is the other thing that people are using it for quite a bit.
EPISODE 63: Josh Kropkof
The problem that so many businesses face is that they don't see email as its own thing, they really do see it as, oh, it's one of many marketing channels. And so they treat it the same and they put out a general branding message or a general advertisement as if they're talking on a megaphone, and that's not what it is, it's a one on one channel. So what's cool is you can build a relationship with the people on your email list. And you do that through, I would say two things. One is what I would call personality-based email marketing, where you write emails that come from you as a person, and you are not afraid to share things and just write like you talk and have this conversational tone in your emails and even invite responses.
EPISODE 61: Deevo Tindall
I realised that my resource, my time, my energy is a resource and is a commodity that I'm trading and every time I interact with somebody I'm either having a positive interaction or not so positive interaction. I actively seek out positive engagements now with people. I actively seek out positive clients that I know that I will bend over backwards for them, because they're part of the process and the solution. I had a couple of clients early in my business where I hired them because it was all this money. And I'm like, Oh my God, I made it, I just literally signed a half million deal with this client, and then she started asking me to promote all these things on social media that I philosophically do not agree with. And I can't get behind that. And I'm not asking you to judge me by my opinions, I'm just saying it's my business and my life, so if I'm going to support this and exchange my resources for that, I'm going to be empowered by it. And I need to be behind you, because if I'm behind you, I'm really **** good at what I do. And if I believe in you and you believe in me, dude, we can go to the stars. I shifted my mindset around that, and so once I sorted that out and started realising I'm actually hiring clients, just as they are hiring me.
EPISODE 65. Aderonke Bademosi Wilson
Even though I came up with the idea of the calendar in early 2023, it wasn't printed until October 2023. And that's because I had already picked out the images, I took the time over the summer to write the blog posts, I had done everything but then I stopped because I had to get past my nervousness and my anxiety around producing the calendar. And well, what if nobody buys it? What if people think I'm crazy?! Getting past the doubt within myself about something that was so personal to me, this is my art and while I am a consultant and have been in communications my whole life, I can get my client out there and noticed and talked about, to do for myself! And I've always been, for the most part on the other side, the other side, it's always easy to get somebody else ready, but then to get myself ready mentally. So I would definitely say, giving yourself time to push forward, but then be committed to it, being forthright in your delivery and your belief in yourself. And get past the fact that not everybody is gonna like your art in this case.
EPISODE 67. Zachary Leyden
Now the other awful thing that happened the first time was, I hired a guide that was supposed to get us through this ‘cause I didn't know the terrain well enough, I'm good at land navigation but I wanted somebody who was skilled on this terrain. And he said, “Great, I'm going to be there.” The day the children showed up to this spot, he was nowhere to be found.
Oh, no.
So that was chaos in itself, again what do you do? Do you just close down? I was like, “Okay, here's a map, here's a protractor, and here's a compass, I'm going to also teach you kids how to do land navigation. This is all a part of it, surprise!” And it turned out so well, the camp called me and they said, “This was the best camp that any of these kids have ever been on. It was amazing.” They had no idea how many fake-it-’till-you-make-it moments that I had to go through to create this perfect experience for them. And it went well. Doing it now, compared to doing it when I first started, obviously I have all the systems in place. I'm doing it all by the book of my curriculum that I've built. But I didn't have any of that back then, I was just shooting from the hip. And if I didn't say “Yes, we got it, let's put it together” — if I called off that first one, they would have asked for a refund for all of them I’m sure, because it would have been unstructured and unorganised. If I didn't fake it ‘till I make it, I never would have made it to this point where I'm now. I just bought a multi-million dollar horse facility in San Francisco.
Episode 73. Faisal Abid
It's being pragmatic. I think when you're dealing with risk, there is smart risk, and there's stupid risk. Stupid risk is I'm going to leave my job, go massively into debt for this business and that's like going to Las Vegas and playing the casino. Technically, there's a one in a trillion chance I could take out all my savings, put it on red, win it, and I'm a multimillionaire with $50 million in my bank. There's a 99.999% chance that's not going to happen. And so, I tell entrepreneurs, it’s like you're playing a game. Business is a game, and it's an arcade machine, and you have a bunch of quarters, and the more quarters you have, the better you'll get at the game, and the higher chance you have to win. That win could be anything, that win is defined differently for everyone. Maybe for someone that win is, “I want $10,000 in salary every month and I've won the game”, for someone else maybe that win is, “I want to take my company to IPO”. But the main fundamentals are you need to have enough quarters to keep playing the game. And so I've always thought of it as this is an arcade machine, and you lose all the time on an arcade machine, most of the time, but every time you play the game you get better, and so that's how I have operated and I continue to operate, where cool, I'm getting better at this, okay, no this didn’t work out. And sometimes it doesn't mean the whole business fails, it's like, just learning Google ads, I don't come from a marketing background but I learned about Google ads and I did an excellent job to grow Eirene this far, to a point where we now can hire a digital marketing manager that can run our Google ads. And most months I did not know what the hell I was doing, and we wasted a lot of money. But every time we wasted money I learned why it was a waste, and we kept playing. So it's about playing that arcade machine.
EPISODE 72. Andrew Olsen
You’re put on this earth with one body and one soul and one brain, so you can either try to change what you have or you can learn how to effectively work the machine. You can grind your gears for a long time trying to be someone else and trying to do something that you're simply just not meant to be doing and not enjoying, or you can really learn what you're good at and you can learn how to actually navigate things with what you've been given.
So I think being resilient is just to make sure you keep that in mind and also not giving up, you're going to probably fail more than you succeed. I know that I've failed. For every
one thing that I've done right, I've messed up 100 times. For every one good business, there's been five others that have lost money. So if you're looking at losses and fails as more of a learning experience than an actual loss, you'll never lose again.
