Heather Travine (5:22)
I want to talk about this idea of the courageous CEO and there's been a number of things that have sort of an impetus for the inspiration for this particular topic. It's something that I am definitely working on in my own coaching work and have been for a long time. But really this last year especially, I've been diving into it and I was recently listening to a podcast interview with Gary V. Gary Vaynerchuk and he was asked the question, what do you think is the difference between the $700,000 a year shop owner and the business owners who scale to ten plus million hundreds of millions of dollars. And I thought his answer was really interesting. He said risk tolerance. He didn't say talent. He didn't say luck, although there's always an element of luck in things. He didn't say hustle, which is kind of what I expected him to say. But how many examples do we know of people who hustle? A lot. And, you know, you may even have examples in your own families of people, you know in your personal network who were the hardest workers that you could possibly know. But they're just playing. They're hustling inside of a game that is just too small to produce really epic results. And he goes on to kind of give some context and says that he has invested in more companies that have gone bankrupt than in companies that have actually been hits or winners, if you will. And he says that he invested $200,000 into Facebook. Like in 2008, he had $236,000 in his savings and he took 200,000 of it invested into Facebook. And his attitude about it was that he's going to learn so much regardless of whether or not that investment hits. Now, we all know the spoiler alert to that story. That investment really hit for him. But I thought it was interesting that him and these two gentlemen that are having this discussion. And it's basically the idea that the people that are having the huge results are deciding to play on a bigger stage. They are deciding to make big moves. And so today's topic, I want to unpack how to become a courageous CEO. Because Gary's example of risk tolerance and really taking big risks can only be come to fruition for you if you have the courage to go out and create big things. And so courageous CEO you could call it mature CEO is one of the coaches I work with calls it being a mature CEO is kind of her take on it. Courage doesn't feel good when you are experiencing. Sounds so lovely. And if you've been watching any of the trainings in msa, you know this is not the first time that you've heard me talk on this topic because many of you have been told when I look at somebody like Gary Vee, just as an outsider, I'm like, I would describe him as confident. And I had been told all my life, like, you have to be confident, you have to be confident. And I was like, I keep waiting for this confidence to just be granted to me. And as you know, you actually don't need confidence. You just need courage. And if you haven't had a chance to watch it yet. I definitely recommend going back and watching Courage over confidence, the lesson on courage over confidence as well. So I want to talk today, and we're going to kick it off with talking about five traits of courageous CEOs, what they have. And then I want you to kind of notice where you may not be being the courageous CEO, because if you become a truly courageous CEO and honestly, a courageous leader of your life, there's nothing you can't create because you will keep taking the massive action necessary to make the big moves that you need to make in order to get big results. When I look at all the successful coaches I have worked with, all the clients I have coached hundreds and hundreds of clients at this point, and even my own success, if I were to pinpoint one characteristic, it would be their ability to keep taking action and betting on themselves, despite their emotions and despite the circumstances that happen in the world, or despite even the circumstances or results that happen from them taking that action. So let's dive into the traits of a courageous CEO. I'm going to give you some pragmatic frameworks to walk away with today, and I want you to really start noticing this because this is trait number one. The first trait that a courageous CEO has is their awareness that they're stinking impacts everything. Their thinking impacts everything. Their thinking impacts their ability to, like, how they show up to implement work. It affects their ability to be able to make big moves. It affects your ability to be able to recover from setbacks, which we're going to talk about here as well. It is really the key to being able to show up and to create big results. Many of you have heard these stories before, because when I discovered this in my own work, it has changed everything for me. And I discovered this later in life. And I had done, like, a lot of personal development therapy, other things throughout my life. I mean, I had. I was in therapy as a child for anxiety as well. And I just, you know, I really believed. I believed there was a certain amount of things that were within my control and that many of the things happening were just outside of my control. And, you know, there's like, kind of a spectrum. Like, none of us are perfect at all, really. Actually having 100% awareness on how our thinking is impacting everything that we're showing up to. But there's a spectrum on this. Some of you are probably over here, closer to, like, having a lot of awareness on this, and then some of you are still over here. And one of the questions that can be helpful is If I were to ask, or it's a. As a coach, I can tell kind of where people fall on this spectrum when I ask a few questions, if I ask a few questions about someone's business and why things are the way they are. So why do you think your revenue is this? Or why do you think this isn't working? And if they give me a lot of story about circumstances that are outside of their control, oh, the economy's bad, oh, a new competitor opened up across the street, I can tell that they're over here more. Because the more you attribute your thinking and your action and behavior to the results you're creating, the more you will actually be able to control the results that you create. Now, of course, there are outside circumstances that are affecting everything all the time. Right. One of the examples I think of is that I give all the time is. And what really made me dive into this work and integrate this work with the marketing and the sales and the menu strategy is covid19 and how I had 150 something aesthetic clinics that I was working with in a social media membership and literally everybody's doors were closed. We had US and Canada based businesses we were working with and the circumstance was our doors are closed. Okay. Now when I look at the clients I worked with that we were able to help coach through some of the thinking that they had, right? So some of our clients, this is the end. This is we're doomed. And then some of our clients that really dove into coaching with us, we were able to shift that thinking and to have different thinking about how this is an opportunity for me to like really double down on my marketing. This is an opportunity for us to really figure out our skincare styles. Really figure out, could we do sell these things? Could we do sell these things? You know what, we're going to be close for a month. We're going to double down on our marketing and be able to hit the door running when our doors open again. And the clients that I had that were able to manage their thinking were able to have exponential growth even during COVID 19 or directly after when their doors were able to open again because they had awareness that their thinking was impacting whether or not they were going to show up and take the action items necessary to actually lead their business to success despite the fact that COVID 19 had closed their doors. The time in my life that I've shared with many of you before that this had the biggest impact on me is when I had the diagnosis of my hereditary cancer syndrome. So have a Lot of history of cancer in my family. Both of my parents had cancer young. My mom was in her 30s, my dad was in his 40s. And so my primary care doctor recommended that I got genetic testing. And so I went and got genetic testing done. And long story short, I was diagnosed with a hereditary cancer syndrome, genetic mutation called SDHB type 1. And this predisposes me to endocrine tumors. I was 40 at the time, and the genetic counselor who was giving me this news with my husband said to me that the average age that these two tumors present is 30. And I was 40 at the time. When I found out, and each of my daughters has a 50% chance of having this same genetic mutation. I was absolutely devastated. I spent the next two weeks in just total misery and grief, which is I was allowed to do and is fine. You don't want to not have grief when grief is meant to be had, what have you. But there was this point in time where I was like, gosh, my. My life happiness is over. That's really what I believed at the time. I was like, this isn't just impacting me, it's impacting my three daughters. And that is when I found the model and thought work, and I discovered that I could decide to see it differently than how I was seeing it. I couldn't change the fact that I was given this diagnosis, but I could change my thinking about the diagnosis. And I shifted my thinking to be that I am so lucky. I have the most amazing team of doctors at the Mayo Clinic that are watching my care. I'm being screened so heavily, and if I end up having one of these endocrine tumors, it's going to be caught so early that we're going to be able to treat it. So I'm just using this as an example to say I switched my thinking around. Something that I could give you a lot of evidence is something that I could have felt doomed about if I chose to think that way. So the awareness that your thinking is impacting everything is something that a courageous CEO starts to notice about everything. Trait number two is deciding how you want to think and feel about things. The more people you serve, the larger your team gets, the more you will have to expand your capacity for discomfort and emotional things, things that would knock me out emotionally even a few years back, I can now get through in.
