[00:00:07.390] - Chris
Welcome back to the Head Heart and Boots Podcast. I'm Chris.
[00:00:10.830] - Brandon
And I'm Brandon. Join us as we wrestle with what it takes to transform ourselves and the businesses we leave.
[00:00:18.110] - Chris
What do you think?
[00:00:19.230] - Brandon
It was kind of serious.
[00:00:21.170] - Chris
Should we laugh?
[00:00:25.890] - Brandon
What's happening, my friend?
[00:00:27.460] - Chris
Well, apparently we're a little bit off kilter because we don't have quite the right video frame here. We started this out with you convinced that my shoulder was taking up more of the frame space on the left side. So audience right.
[00:00:41.610] - Brandon
I'm not going to mess with the camera angle to attempt to fix it.
[00:00:45.050] - Chris
So I think it probably doesn't matter, but let's leave it to the audience. Do you guys care? Do we have a problem with our frame? Is something you OCD folks? Are you having difficulty listening to us because we're a little bit off center? I don't know. Anyway, I got that out of the way.
[00:00:58.680] - Brandon
I know. It's bothering me.
[00:00:59.760] - Chris
Direct message us LinkedIn. Let us know if that's a problem for you. We'll try to accommodate.
[00:01:04.650] - Brandon
We'll cut the frame up. My friend, you've been kind of pumped to do the show that we're doing today. This topic, this is something that comes up with you. I've heard you reference it before. It's certainly like the individual components of it have come up quite a bit with you. Clearly, it stuck.
[00:01:23.230] - Chris
Well, I don't want to drop this up too much, man. You're kind of giving me this rad set up for me to give sort of a seven point sermon on this thing. But you're ready for this one? Yeah. No, I have. So what we're talking about is The Four Agreements. And the Four Agreements was written by Don Miguel Ruiz. Many of you that are listening to this, you've heard of this book. Maybe you have or haven't read it or you read it a long time ago. That was kind of my story. I first dug into this. Somebody recommended or I saw it on a blog post or whatever and checked it out. And then, like many great books in my life, I've started rereading some of them here in my forty s. Yes. I think I'm finally starting to connect the dots about why this stuff matters. It's like the first time we read some of these personal development or business books. I think a lot of times we just don't have enough experience or context to really apply it. We're like, oh, that's really good, but we just don't have the framework yet to realize we need it.
[00:02:18.110] - Chris
Right.
[00:02:18.610] - Brandon
Or even it's just your situation changes, and so it makes it some at times more applicable, or maybe just more in front of mind, maybe recent experience, whatever the case may be.
[00:02:29.450] - Chris
Yes. I don't know what it is. Maybe it's just you kind of spend your 30s sort of getting your teeth kicked in and all the lessons and learning, and you go in your 40s are like, okay, I think I want to try to do this thing a little bit better.
[00:02:39.870] - Brandon
Yeah, that's fair.
[00:02:40.920] - Chris
Okay, so here's the four agreements. Ready? One, be impeccable with your word. And when I first read that okay, well done. So be honest. There's a life principle, and of course, it's such a good principle that how much do we struggle to actually do it? Right? We'll come back to this. We'll unpack these as we go.
[00:03:01.150] - Brandon
Give us the overview.
[00:03:01.910] - Chris
Let me give you kind of the overview. Okay, this is what it says. So I'm inside the cover here. Dominoes breaks it down for us or his editorial assistant, whoever it was. All right. Be impeccable if you were. Speak with integrity. Say only what you mean. Avoid using the word to speak against yourself or to gossip about others. Use the power of your word in the direction of truth and love. You get a little bit of flavor there. This is one of those definitely.
[00:03:27.710] - Brandon
On the side there's a little woo woo. Yes.
[00:03:31.710] - Chris
So the first time I read it, I think that's one of the reasons why I dismissed it, to be honest. I had a hard time filtering some of the woo woo new AG kind of language. Yes, it doesn't bother me as much anymore. But anyway, number two, agreement. Don't take anything personally.
[00:03:47.490] - Brandon
That's the ego check.
[00:03:48.860] - Chris
Oh, boy. Oh, yeah. All of these really just slam my ego in the nose. Okay, so don't take anything personally. Nothing others do is because of you. What others say and do is a projection of their own reality or what we might say, the own story in their head. Right. It's their own dream that they're living in. The terminology uses, which I actually have grown to like. When you read the book and I recommend it, you start to translate what these words like in your own kind of experience. It does connect, you know what I mean?
[00:04:19.780] - Brandon
Sure.
[00:04:20.200] - Chris
And it goes on. When you're immune to the opinions and actions of others, you won't be the victim of needless suffering. He talks about in this chapter, that particular chapter, just how much suffering we create for ourselves because we take the actions, the body language, the words of others personally. It's personal. They're attacking me. They're reacting to me with this bad behavior. This is all about me and mistreating me, taking advantage of me, whatever it is. But don't take anything personally. Okay. Number three, don't make assumptions. We've all heard the phrase, it makes an ass out of you and me, right?
[00:04:54.960] - Brandon
Yeah.
[00:04:55.890] - Chris
If only we really practice that again. As I'm reading this stuff, I'm like, okay, yeah, this is old wisdom. This is something that our parents or grandparents or a teacher, these are the truisms that have been echoed to us throughout our life, and yet I don't think we were taught to actually take them really seriously. And I think that's what he's doing is he's taking these principles as, like, religion in a way, like the same way that some of us go to church every Sunday because it's the thing to do well. It's like, how seriously do we actually take these things? So don't make assumptions. Find the courage to ask questions and to express what you really want. Communicate with others as clearly as you can to avoid misunderstandings, sadness and drama. Okay, we'll come back to all these with just this one agreement, you can completely transform your life. Number four, always do your best.
[00:05:47.910] - Brandon
Always do your best. One is interesting too, because it's this idea, it's this context, right? You are probably going to read this, but it's that context of that's the one thing you can do. Because granted, there are times where you're more capable than others, more energy than others, more life, more skill, right? All the things. But if we're always doing the very best we can with whatever context we're currently in, you can do that. You can commit to that. Yeah, that's an interesting one.
[00:06:15.770] - Chris
It is.
[00:06:16.260] - Brandon
I mean, they're all good.
[00:06:17.050] - Chris
What they say here kind of echoes what you said, your best. Did you memorize us? Your best is going to change from moment to moment. It will be different when you're healthy as opposed to sick. Under any circumstances, though, simply do your best. You said it just as good. I didn't need to read Dons. Yeah, Don. She's only the author. Okay, you know what? This book also kind of tugs at some of the same places, kind of in my mind, heart or whatever, as leadership and self deception, which we've talked about a lot, being in the box versus out. When we're in the box, we're in our own little dream. We're locked in our dream. We're not aware of other people's dreams. We're not aware of other people being just like ourselves. And a lot of times we do this as leaders, we do this as coworkers, we do this professionally and personally, where we have something we want, something that's important to us, could be a challenge or a struggle we're dealing with.
[00:07:04.660] - Brandon
Sure.
[00:07:05.120] - Chris
And in that moment, we can find ourselves in a box where no one else's dreams and problems and fears and aspirations are as important as ours, and we start to objectify people, and then we start to trample over people and use people and manipulate and miscommunicate and make assumptions and do all that stuff. But there's something about the four agreements that connects to that for me, too, parallel, you know what I mean? For sure.
[00:07:27.180] - Brandon
Yeah.
[00:07:27.820] - Chris
Okay, so we start stop. Yeah, man so be impeccable with your word. I mentioned in the book. He unpacks it a lot. It's a short book, too, by the way, on Audible, I think it's 2 hours and 15 minutes, something like that. It's a pretty quick thing. Right? So it's a good great little Saturday, Sunday deal to work through this weekend. Well, I guess, yes, you're going to get this Tuesday and you can carry this into the weekend. There you go. But he talks about how it's not just about not lying. There's a line there about gossip and the way that we talk to ourselves that I think is really interesting.
[00:07:59.700] - Brandon
Yeah, that's actually the part that stuck out to me was the reference to our internal dialogue and how this plays in that, to me, that was the part I kind of honed in on because there's a reality, man, that if I'm honest with myself, I am like my own worst enemy. Not all the time. There's phases, right, where I think we do a better job than others. But there are times like I treat myself like garbage. Like the kinds of things I say to myself or don't say to myself, I guess, can be pretty interesting. It's things that I probably would never do to somebody else, right? And so it stops you in your tracks. You got to ask yourself the question, like, if I don't treat anybody else this way, why is it that I allow myself to treat myself that way? That was the part that stood out to me in that book, and obviously, you referenced a much broader work there, but that was the piece that it just like, oh, man, there are many times I would not even consider saying the things I say to myself to another human being.
[00:09:00.370] - Chris
It's terrible, right? And of course, one of the things he talks about in the book, and now I'm actually potentially confusing this with Eckhart Tolley's, a New Earth or The Power of now. And so all this stuff starts to flow together right, as you're taking these things in. But I believe there's a section in this book where he talks about, and I think it is in this chapter and be impeccable with your word and how we talk to ourselves. He says this thing, he said, what is just punishment for wrongdoing? How many times do we punish ourselves for our wrongdoing? And he says that the typical person punishes themselves a thousand times over for a single wrongdoing. Right? We failed our marriage, whatever. We mistreated our children. We performed poorly at our last job. We didn't take something serious. We flaked out on a project, whatever. And how long does that judgment and shame and disappointment in ourself or self loathing, how long do we repeat that message about failing on that thing? How many of us carry that forward? I was just talking to a family member about an extended family member who after 30, 40 years is still lamenting a divorce that they went through.
[00:10:17.500] - Chris
And the way what happened went down, it still plagues them. And I was thinking about that in my own life, how often I referenced back to past failings as though they're still a part of me, a label.
[00:10:29.440] - Brandon
That you've slept on.
[00:10:31.290] - Chris
I think that's me sabotaging myself. And that's what he kind of talks about is we sabotage ourselves with our words.
[00:10:39.310] - Brandon
So being peccable with your words, I think impeccable. I think he referenced the fact that it's Latin, right, to be without sin. What was interesting to me is just thinking about that, like the kind of the overarching context of that, of communicating in such a way that it's without sin. Obviously, we've got a mixed group in terms of religion and not religion for those that listen. But I think what's interesting here that caught my attention was this idea of and you can say good or bad, positive or negative, right? You don't want to take any kind of spiritual or religious references there. But it's this idea of everything that we're doing, our body language or posture, the language that we're using, how we're talking, the distance between us and our audience, whatever the case may be, it's always coming from this perspective of doing good with it. Like, is what you're communicating going to a equip someone, enhance their performance, make them better, give them support, encourage them, give them clarity on winning or not winning right. When it comes to performance or beating expectations. And so it's interesting, I think, how little weight we give to the idea.
[00:11:50.380] - Brandon
It's the same boat as just influence in raw form, big time. Like, what are you using your influence for? And I think one of the things that I will slide into as a leader is I forget how often, or I guess it's just subconscious that I slip out of this role where what I'm communicating, how I'm communicating, what tools and resources I'm using to communicate, is being done for the benefit of the other person. Am I really thinking about this conversation from the perspective of what can I do to make this a better experience for the other individual? And most of the time I don't know if it's most of the time, but often it's really self centered. It's really internalizing something. So I'm trying to communicate something in a way to get what I want, get my way, get out of a situation, or repel this individual or this experience. And it's interesting we've talked about this before. My wife is always a big proponent of being for something rather than against something. And I feel like in some ways that's what he's saying here is using our communication to be for something and not against something.
[00:13:00.180] - Brandon
And maybe a practical way that we see this play out is drawing attention to people or team members, for example, that are exceeding the expectation. They're in pure alignment with our mission and our vision for our company and really taking the time to just basically communicate like, oh, wow, that was a job well done. And because we do that, it orients everyone towards, oh, if I do more of that, right, even if it's subconscious and it's not done at a conscious level. That's always so more powerful, so much more powerful than when we come into a room and just wreck, drop the hand grenade, get pissed off, go off the handle, which is kind of like, what's up, kettle right for me, because that's a challenge place for me. But we see that. We see that in our clients. We see that in a lot of business environments where the teams have kind of migrated towards leadership's attention and everything is on the stuff we need to fix, which makes sense to a certain extent, but then we're communicating that all the time. So again, instead of getting what we need to add to the team by pointing towards what's happening, well, we're just hyper focused on the stuff that's not working.
[00:14:07.480] - Brandon
And we come at it with a negative. Like, we don't want to be this, we don't want to do that. We need to get away from these things. And I don't know. I don't know if the correlation is direct there, but that's what I walked away with was just this idea of what I'm saying, doing and communicating. Is it having a positive impact? And if not, can I switch something or change something here to make it impeccable?
[00:14:30.220] - Chris
Yeah. Another word that's coming up for me, as you say, that is intentional, I think, in Western culture. And I know I'm like over generalizing here, but I think being reckless with our words has become very socially acceptable to spout off, to sound off, to make judgments about things. And even in some contexts, I think more so. And again, I'm not down in any way on the blue collar trades and the service sector because I think it's one of the most exciting sort of areas of business that there is. But I think in general, it's historically been more rough and tumble because it requires a lot of grit to be in this industry for any period of time. It requires a lot of grit. But I think part of us kind of figuring out our industry and whatnot I think it's just become really acceptable for us to have as leaders oftentimes in this industry segment, to a degree, it's acceptable to just explode with our words, right? If something's going wrong, just to deal with it. You show up to a job site and stuff is not the way it should be. Our industries and I just mean construction and home services and just these blue collar sectors.
[00:15:39.940] - Chris
I think there's still an acceptability to kind of just shooting from the hip.
[00:15:44.990] - Brandon
Apologize later, apologize later, maybe.
[00:15:47.630] - Chris
Rough and ready. I think being impeccable with your word is also about being intentional, of really thinking, how is this going to land? Where's my ego in this? Before I say this out loud.
[00:15:57.990] - Brandon
Sure.
[00:15:58.440] - Chris
Like, my anger, the spark of anger I'm feeling from what I'm seeing or what I just heard. Right. Okay. How much of this is my ego. How many gaps am I filling in on the story here? It's thinking. It's saying, my words are so powerful. And I think it's true of everybody. We've talked about this before, but when you're the GM or the owner, a key leader, and you've got the power of God in your job title to that employee, you have the power to fire them, take away their it's about considering, like, creating a discipline around the pause before we react.
[00:16:32.790] - Brandon
And I think the opposite is true. Like, we often don't say anything to our personnel we withhold. That's a great way to reference it. Like, we fail to give very clear and honest feedback about a performance, or.
[00:16:49.300] - Chris
We round off the edges because we're afraid of hurting fear. Yeah, we can't handle it. Yeah.
[00:16:52.960] - Brandon
We don't want to lose this employee. We don't want to back them into a corner, whatever the case may be. That in itself, though, is out of alignment with being impeccable with our word. Because ultimately what we're doing then is failing to give our team member guidance and feedback on how they're doing. So we're leaving it up to them to draw some kind of perception or to draw some kind of connection between what we've talked about in the past versus how they're performing now. And that, in and of itself is not doing that individual anything's beneficial either. Right. So it's like the pendulum can swing between these two places where we're either doing something negative by the way that we're approaching it. Either we're lying, not false truths, we're not speaking with integrity, or we can also withhold, like you said, information, feedback, communication, and it's just negative. Right. So it's a bit far reaching when we think about this, but I like the simplicity of it, of being impeccable with our word. I e just attempting to communicate in such a way that the goal is to enhance or support the individual. You, the team, and the you part is important.
[00:18:00.940] - Brandon
Like remembering that ourselves have to be considered in this equation right. Just as much as a downline employee, a spouse, a partner, or whatever the case may be.
[00:18:10.420] - Chris
I think one other thing, and then we'll move on to the next one is gossip.
[00:18:14.120] - Brandon
Yeah.
[00:18:16.670] - Chris
When I read that and I've read this now several times, right, I think to myself, I'm not a gosper. But then when I actually reflect on it and I consider, I realize I'm a gospel. Yeah. That means different things to different people. But I realized if I'm honest with myself and I consider all the times that I'm needlessly talking about any number of people, I can catch myself. And I'm not consciously trying to build myself up by making other people sound terrible or whatever. But subconsciously, I realize I do that a lot. A lot of times it's just in passing, and sometimes it's me even engaging with somebody else who brings up another person or makes a comment about another person and I jump in. There's all these different scenarios, I guess. Also too, as a key leader, right, here's a question for us and anybody who's listening is how often am I talking about my employees? And my intent is not directed at building them up and supporting them and caring for them. Even when I'm talking amongst colleagues, as a leadership team, or as department heads, undoubtedly there's going to be times where we have to talk about an employee sure.
[00:19:23.480] - Chris
Or talk about a colleague. There's a problem, there's disunity, there's performance issues, whatever. But I think it becomes a really slippery slope. And we've seen this, I've done it, done it, and we see it all the time. I think it's a common form of drama that takes hold in a company is when the leaders start to cross that line between, hey, we're troubleshooting, we're coaching, we're holding accountable, we're having to deal with behavioral issues or whatever, with a team where we're kind of regularly disparaging a person's personality or default behaviors or whatever. And it becomes more of a I think you can become more of that gossip thing pretty easily.
[00:20:03.970] - Brandon
I totally agree. That was one of the things that we have always tried to do well. Certainly we are human and we've had teams that were better at it than others in terms of time and just how we were carrying ourselves. But there's this when we talk about safe work environments or environments where employees are engaged and committed, one of the biggest things that has to happen in an environment like that is it needs to be safe. And when I say safe, I mean the team has got to develop good conflict management skills, right? And one of the things that we have kind of always tried to do is direct people first and foremost back to the individual that they felt had wronged them or that they had this exchange with that created an outcome that they wasn't positive. Right. And whether that was encouraging our employees to be more direct with us, like, hey, circle back with me. If we have an exchange in the hallway or in passing or during a meeting or whatever, and you walk away with an overwhelming negative feeling like, come talk to me about it. We reference you have already the show, like the story in our head and that principle of just going to this individual, the person that can actually make a difference right in this scenario and just being honest with them and saying, look, this probably wasn't your intention, but this is what happened.
[00:21:21.310] - Brandon
This is what I walked away from in our conversation. And I think what's really special about that, when you develop just kind of a default behavior that always directs somebody back right to the individual that they have an issue with or had that exchange with and then setting the stage for I'm not judging the hell out of you. This was the impression I had. I'm not even saying that that impression is accurate. That's actually the whole point while I'm here is I want to be able to know, right, if it was intentional. Was it an accident? What did I miss? What did I fill in the blank with? Whatever the case may be?
[00:21:53.690] - Chris
Hey friends.
[00:21:54.430] - Brandon
Hey listeners.
[00:21:55.200] - Chris
We're doing something a little bit different with our ads. So you've been accustomed to hearing some ads with our favorite partners and companies in the industry. Now we actually have a product page, our partners page, on our website. So floodlightgrp. Compartners want to give you a quick rundown though, of the people that we're partnering with and we believe in is really go to resources in the industry. The first one is restoration erp.com, right? ERP are an important part of our sales process, our customer development process. And why reinvent the wheel? The restoration ERP platform is awesome. It can be customized to your business, branding and all that kind of stuff and has all the components to really create a value add for your commercial client. Accelerate job Management Software everybody needs job management software and we have just found Accelerate. Not only is their team just really great to work with, when they get ideas from customers, they throw it into the product roadmap and they implement it. They're really advocating for the contractor and trying to create a software solution that works for them. Actionable Insights. We recommend actionable insights all the time, right?
[00:22:58.300] - Chris
All of us is restoration operators are looking for turnkey resources and training solutions that we can take our team to the next level and AI when it comes to estimating and matterport and a lot of the other essential tools we're using, they are an awesome resource and they're always coming out with new great stuff.
[00:23:16.530] - Brandon
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[00:24:20.310] - Chris
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[00:24:39.600] - Brandon
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[00:24:53.090] - Chris
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[00:25:01.870] - Brandon
Thanks, guys.
[00:25:05.970] - Chris
I'm sort of notorious for bringing up the love word and sort of making things soft and squishy, right? But I just I wonder what how an employee what an employee would feel like if a senior leader came to them and said, hey, story in my head, and they added this phrase, listen, here's the story in my head. I'm not saying it's true and I care enough about my relationship to you as your leader to check it. I don't want to assume that that's what you meant. Sure, I care enough about you as a leader. I want to check in and make sure whether I'm right or wrong with the story in my head, it's because I care. Anyway, different ways we can show people slapping the care. We need to do two parts because we could spend like an hour and a half on this. One of the stories he gave about this, about gossip was really good in the book, he gives us an example of college student okay, so college student registers for their classes. College student A is talking to their roommate. College student B and says, oh yeah, I signed up for a survey of American literature, blah, blah, blah.
[00:26:08.620] - Chris
And the other roommate says, oh, I took that last semester. Do you remember this from the book? Have so and so professor? Yes, that's his name. Oh, that guy is the worst. And he's kind of a purse, so watch out. Like pervert professor, whatever that is. And he talks about how often that kind of exchange takes place and how does that when we accept or we hear that kind of gossip about somebody, whether it's true or not, we often don't even try to validate. Well, why would they say that?
[00:26:42.840] - Brandon
Like the seed is planted.
[00:26:44.050] - Chris
The seed is planted. We heard it, and now it is going to affect our body language or posture towards that person. So that student is going to show up to the first thing in classic, man, this guy's a jerk and he's a perv. And they're going to be on. Guard, they're not going to be engaged with the material, all that stuff. And yet we don't know. Was it because this person got a terrible grade? Right? They did poor work and the professor called it out and wouldn't give them you know what I mean? Like, who knows?
[00:27:08.530] - Brandon
Well, inevitably, once the seed has been planted, once we start down a certain trajectory, right. We have a hypothesis about a situation. Really what ends up happening most of the time then, is all the incoming data just continues to affirm that we don't really come at it with it from a neutral investigative perspective where it's like, I'm going to take in information and make a judgment. It's like I've already made a judgment. Now I'm just listening for things to affirm what I'm thinking, which is it is interesting, and I think we can set the stage like that for our employees. Right. I know there's been scenarios where I've probably talked one of my department heads and said, hey, here's my perspective on so and so. And the reality of it is I had a limited look of that individual's performance because of just the inherent title that I had or the place in the organization. Maybe there was just too much distance between their work effort and what I got exposed to, or whatever the case may be. But inevitably, what I may have done now is planted a seed in that department head who is going to have a much closer relationship, is going to be able to see their day to day work, may be able to influence that performance in a much more positive way than I am, based on my current situation.
[00:28:18.330] - Brandon
And ultimately, there's a strong chance now, though, that department leader is not really trying to develop that leader to the same extent because they're waiting for them to fail. That's right. It's like now the data coming in just confirms what I planted or what maybe what I may have said, and now the effort stops. And I think often what happens in most of these cases, these are subconscious things. It's a little erosion that we allow to happen that ultimately have a profoundly negative impact on what we're building or trying to do. So we should keep moving. But this one is really interesting to me.
[00:28:50.380] - Chris
I know.
[00:28:50.820] - Brandon
And it's one of those things, too, where I think if anybody spent any time, like in or around church, which as an American, like a lot of us have, right. I think one of the things that you kind of learned in that was it was kind of this idea of how you treat your neighbor concept. And really, at the end of the day, it's amazing to me how much power our words have. We've made references before that. It's like the ship, the rudder on a ship, right? It's this tiny little piece in the whole context of this giant boat, ship, whatever you want to call it, and it literally governs the direction of the entire situation.
[00:29:25.380] - Chris
Well, it's like another biblical reference, I think. Doesn't the Bible refer to the tongue as a two edged sword?
[00:29:31.290] - Brandon
Right?
[00:29:32.320] - Chris
Cuts through flesh and bone and marrow. It's like it can create great encouragement and pleasure and love, and it can also create destruction. Right?
[00:29:42.410] - Brandon
And here's the thing, dude, I want to come back to this gossip piece because I think this is really important. I think there's a reality that we lose touch with, and that is if you're the kind of individual that people hear talking shit about people, they know you're not safe. They just know it. Even if it's fairly subconscious and their guard is up. They know if most of the time when they're around you, there's somebody in your sites, there's somebody that's not getting spoke about very well. There's some negativity in the way that you communicate and what you're talking about. You just need to understand that you're creating a sphere of influence where people don't trust you.
[00:30:21.560] - Chris
Yeah. And they won't tell you it, and.
[00:30:23.440] - Brandon
They won't tell you. In fact, they may not even be able to articulate it because it may not be a friend of mine things. But I can almost guarantee you, I mean, just think about yourself. Think about ourselves in situations that we've been in. Do you have friends, employees, peers, co workers that they just kind of are always talking crap? Are you super excited when you're around them? Do you really feel motivated? Are you trusting? Is your guard down? Are you being your best? Right, or are you filtering? Just think about the impact that those people have on you as an individual and just remind yourself, like, I have an opportunity to choose to be which of those two? Again, I think it really even goes as far as saying it's just a matter of just make people's names safe, right? Like how you speak about them. And dude, that is so hard. It's so hard.
[00:31:14.320] - Chris
You know what's hardest about it is I think this also plays into the desperation brain that we can feel as business owners. We feel like we're backed in a corner. This person is not good for our business, not a culture fit, but we need them right now. I think a lot of times that creates that gossip mode that we get in because then we're just lamenting this person, that person, and it's this cycle. We're actually probably making them worse in their attitudes and behavior because I feel like I've observed this and I've probably lived it in some ways at different points in my career where when it starts to flip over from problem solving and strategizing on HR stuff and helping to course correction stuff with employees. And it switches over into this complaining and gossiping about who they are and how they act and all this kind of stuff and what their problems are. And all that. I found it fundamentally changes my behavior and body language towards them moving forward. And they know it, they feel it, and I think it's possible some of that creates those termination behaviors. We learned from Amy, where it's like employees, they start to show these termination behaviors because they feel uncomfortable, they don't feel wanted, they don't feel trusted anymore.
[00:32:20.510] - Chris
We tend to become more micromanaging of those people, too, and call them out and be more obsessive about details, and then every single wrong they do, it just turns into this ugly, and it's all driven by just this subconscious thing. I just think we don't think about it. We don't really step back and say, what's going on here with this person? How am I treating them, and how is this affecting it anyway? Okay. All right. I think that was good. This is going to have to be a two parter. Okay. Number two, don't take anything personally.
[00:32:53.470] - Brandon
So much easier said than done, right?
[00:32:56.300] - Chris
As a business owner, I think as a business owner, especially in the early days, because oftentimes as business owners were the last to get paid. Right. It's like when I had my state farm office, I had four employees, actually. My first year, I was like, that was a little bit of miscalculation, to be honest, but a little more payroll than I probably needed or should have had, but I was the last to get paid. You have these pay periods where it's like, well, guess I'm not drawing on this. Round away till next month. Hopefully things will be better. Right. Your employees are first to get paid, and they at least they should be. Yeah. I think it's hard not to take poor performance or attitudes by your employees sometimes personally. Who do you think you are? And it doesn't even feel good saying that out loud, right? Because it's like, yeah, well, listen, they're just people like me. They want what they want. They need what they feel like they need. They're fallible, they're going to screw up. It's not like just because we pay somebody that we're entitled to perfect performance. We're paying a human.
[00:33:58.080] - Chris
Right? But I think that's an area where we can really get indignant and take things personally as an owner, where it says, hey, I'm providing this livelihood to you. So I took risk. I continue to take risk in order to provide you a career opportunity. Anyway. I know I've felt that in previous ownership roles where you just can get really indignant and be like, man, how dare you? Like, who are you to say this? Or how dare you treat my business with such to be so reckless?
[00:34:30.070] - Brandon
It's funny that you say my wife often says this around, of course, in the context of our kids, but she'll make the comment, your self centeredness is impeding on my self centeredness. And it reminds me a lot of this. I think the challenge in this, don't take it personally perspective is right, is that most of the time what's happening is that we're approaching a conversation and exchange of friendship relationship, and we're coming at it from a very self centered perspective. Right? So it's like, of course we're assuming that it's a personal attack. Of course we're assuming that it's out of their understanding for what I do for them that they're making these comments, are not making these comments. And then the reality of it is, though, is that that individual is so self consumed and so wrapped up in their own life, their own issues, their own perspective, they're not even thinking about the impact on you.
[00:35:19.940] - Chris
Last night last night I did. What is this? Marriage and family therapist. I'm going to have a marriage moment here. Oh, man.
[00:35:28.070] - Brandon
What is their name?
[00:35:28.940] - Chris
Gottman. John Gottman.
[00:35:30.250] - Brandon
Okay.
[00:35:30.720] - Chris
John, I think Julie Gottman, husband, wife, marriage and family therapists run the Gottman Institute up in Seattle. Sort of like they do a ton. It's a psychology school. Anyway, so they create counselors and whatnot. The Gotmans are kind of the preeminent marriage and family therapist, and they talk about bids for affection that we're constantly in relationships, particularly marriage relationships. We're making bids for affection. We want to be touched, we want to snuggle, we want to sex or whatever it is, but it's bids for affection and bids for affirmation. There's this whole dynamic between couples, right? One person makes a bid, the other person either responds and sort of meets them and sort of provides that affection or whatever, or they don't. And that often is where a lot of the strife and stuff happens in a relationship. Anyway, so last night I made a bid for affection. Now, Mind, you were in the middle of a huge remodel. The kids are back to school this week, and my wife was just not feeling the affection, so to speak. Right.
[00:36:24.430] - Brandon
And leaving that vague enough.
[00:36:26.700] - Chris
Yeah, whatever. Everybody knows what I'm talking about.
[00:36:28.910] - Brandon
We all made those bids sidearms hugs.
[00:36:32.230] - Chris
And I had a reaction to it in my own head. I was like, I really was taking it personally for a moment, for a little more than a moment. But I finally, as we were getting ready for bed and stuff, I was connecting with that. I was like, wow, part of me is really frustrated my bid went unrecipricated. So it's every area of life.
[00:36:51.640] - Brandon
Oh, yeah, right.
[00:36:52.830] - Chris
It's every area. I'm sure I'll have a kid's story example by tonight, but it is it's just a knee jerk reaction that I think we all have, because it is we want what we want as humans, and I think sometimes we're not willing to say that out loud. I'm a selfish person. Like, we are wired to take care of ourselves, and I think that's where it comes from, is whenever we are trying to take care of ourselves and our little lizard brain and somebody blocks that, hey, what's wrong with me?
[00:37:20.230] - Brandon
Well, and I think this is huge from a coach ability perspective, right. It's like the easier it is or the more consistently that you're in a situation where you're taking what is happening personally. It's going to be very difficult to learn in that environment because we just spend so much time and energy rebutting. Arguing against refuting. Tearing down whatever we can to belittle that opinion or perspective in an effort to protect ourselves. Protect our ego. Protect that. We ultimately just lose out. I mean, there's just this massive loss of opportunity to learn when we take things personally. And again, I'm bad at this. I mean, I've gotten better, I think, as I've gotten older, just trying to at least in the moment, like, okay, take 30 seconds, let's breathe through this. My initial reaction is being defensive right now. I can feel it. I'm probably taking this personal, okay, what can I do right now to get my head out of this place? I would say that some of the situations that were the most challenging, that taught me the most, I had to do something in the moment to get out of that headspace so that I could take advantage of what I was experiencing.
[00:38:26.170] - Brandon
And we see this a lot with Downline personnel. I know as a leader, I get frustrated over the years as I've tried to develop somebody. Right. We talk about like, often we're in a position where we can see a couple of corners down the road and we're looking around that next turn and realizing how close this individual is to pay raise, increase in opportunity, and they stop short. And so then we're really frustrated with that individual and it's like they were just more coachable, right? So it's really easy for us to look to outside individuals and see others. Well, it's not even the judgment, it's the see how this lack of coach ability because of ego and because we're.
[00:39:05.650] - Chris
Taking it personally stops them.
[00:39:07.900] - Brandon
And we're like, man, it's ten more feet, you're almost there. But then we don't do a good job of turning that inward and saying, OK, where do I see this in my own behavior? Are the relationships? Are there people speaking to me or interacting with me? I'm taking it personally, I'm getting defensive, my guard is up. And so I'm not able to take advantage or learn in the situation. And honestly, this happens a lot between employees and employers. Because you think because we have a title or maybe we've been with the organization or in the industry for a longer period of time than this person, our guard is up. We're not good at hearing their perspective, their influence, and being able to take advantage of that. I mean, we see this a lot. When new people come to a team, there's a reality that their perspective is a little cleaner. It may not be more accurate necessarily than somebody else's, but it's also not as tainted or filtered by previous experience from that team.
[00:40:03.360] - Chris
They haven't become accustomed yeah, exactly. To the behaviors.
[00:40:08.790] - Brandon
And they're not the same things everyone else is. They're not stepping over that. Whatever. There's an opportunity for them to be catching and seeing things fresh. And, man, I would tell you that's one of the hardest groups for me to learn from is when I have a new team member. Very difficult for me to remain in a place like my knee jerk response and reaction to most things is they don't understand. They haven't been here long enough. Right. Or you come up, it's easy to create excuses of why what their input is. Saying to me isn't valuable. And really, there's an opportunity during our onboarding for a totally different subject, really, but to set the stage, to make sure we can here and get some insight from this fresh set of eyes on our team, it doesn't mean you throw anything out. You don't start from scratch. Because it's very possible that their time on the team has been too short for whatever perspective they offer to have a ton of value. But I'd say more times than not, there's value there. There's an opportunity. Right?
[00:41:05.560] - Chris
Yeah. Fresh eyes. Right. The power of fresh eyes. Maybe we can end on this. He talks about this concept of we're all in a dream. We all have our own dream.
[00:41:14.800] - Brandon
Yeah, I do remember that.
[00:41:16.420] - Chris
It's interesting. And the more I think about that and all of that, it's very helpful for me to consider that I have my own experience. Like, there's things happening behind my eyes. I have all this self talk that you are totally unaware of, and you have all of this processing of me, of what we're doing, of what the rest of your day is going to look like, positive and negative. All the things. You have your own inner world that I will never be fully aware of no matter what.
[00:41:48.030] - Brandon
Right.
[00:41:48.340] - Chris
Just the way that you think and react and interpret things. And all of us are that way. All of us have this dream, this reality that's happening up here. And when you step back and you consider that, I think it helps with not taking things personally. Sure. Because it reminds us, like, okay, we're all a mixed bag at any given time. We've got suffering inside. We've got something that, whether minor or major, that we're dealing with in terms of relationships or health or professional, whatever, there's an element of suffering inside all of us. I think, at all times. There are things that are going well, there's things we're proud of, there's things we're ashamed of. There's all these things. And when you start to zoom out from an employee interaction, or you've got a difficult employee, or you've got a difficult colleague, and at least just taking a moment to say, okay, I'm in a dream, I've got my own dream what potentially is happening within them that would be showing up with this kind of behavior. Why? Because I think the older I get, the more I start to believe that people aren't evil.
[00:42:49.470] - Chris
I think maybe there are exceptions to this. It's that most people are not evil. Most people are behaving out of a place of suffering or having been harmed. There's a dream that they've been placed in. None of us picked our parents. There's a dream that they have built in their head of how they interpret the world, and parts of it may be broken because of broken experiences that they've had. Right. Traumas and so forth. So anyway, yeah, dude, we got to do a part two.
[00:43:18.030] - Brandon
Well, and here's the reality with this, too, is that the opposite can be true. I mean, how many times are we around people that actually their perspective is much more enlightened from the perspective of maybe they haven't had the same experience as negative experiences that we've had. And so instead of kind of being tainted and negative, they could be approaching a situation from a much more enlightened and positive direction, and we have an opportunity to get a fresh perspective and a fresh set of lenses and be like, okay, I need to take in more of that reasoning. Right. Because I clearly have some issues with the way that I see things. I don't know, you kind of swirl a little bit, and it can get a little confusing, but I think that's super powerful.
[00:43:57.800] - Chris
Good. Quick summary. We'll come in with part two, and we'll hit assumptions and always do your best on the next episode, but yeah, so what are the two we covered be impeccable with your word. And it's more than just not lying, right. We might benefit from considering our words. It's that pause, and I think I almost would say it feels like, as a leader, that's our responsibility we have to put on. They don't be perfect at it, but it seems like that should be part of our path. Pursuing that.
[00:44:24.330] - Brandon
Yeah, I agree.
[00:44:25.200] - Chris
Pursuing that pause before we react. Right. Leaders respond. Leaders don't react anywhere. The second one don't take anything personally. We just unpacked all of that. I mean, it relates to gossip. It relates to the way we react and overreact and inappropriately react, all that kind of stuff to others and even to ourselves. That's good. All right, well, listen, if this has been helpful for you, right, for provoking sort of new thoughts or connecting dots or this stuff resonates with you in some way, please share it. That's one of the easiest ways that you can help out. The Head Heart Moods podcast we really love is a passion project for Brandon and I.
[00:45:00.940] - Brandon
Absolutely.
[00:45:01.430] - Chris
So sharing is caring. I just thought I was clever. Sharing is caring and other ways you can connect with us. So we do at Floodlight, we do one on one consulting with restoration company owners, runs the gamut. We work with companies that are newer to restoration, helping them get set up in a way that they can avoid some of the mishaps and accelerate their growth and scale. And then we also work with medium and large size restoration companies. We usually always have a mix kind of in our portfolio of clients, helping them find tune their process, make more EBITDA, more profits, develop their downline leaders, really help them build a business that they can operate as a business and not be an owner operator, helping people scale and get ready to sell their business. Some people, some of you want to do that. Of course, the PE crazes going on, but how do we build a healthy business so that we could sell or we could get to that point and choose to keep it? Because we like our business and we have the right role in it. That's what we help people with. Also, if you're onboarding a commercial sales leader and you're looking for a turnkey onboarding and training solution to equip them so they can go effectively chase commercial, you'll want to check out our Commercial Sales Master course.
[00:46:05.180] - Chris
That's a real affordable option that you and your team can use over and over again as you onboard salespeople sales manager to your team, etc.
[00:46:11.800] - Brandon
Et lay the foundation.
[00:46:13.340] - Chris
Yes, you can have us bring Brandon for a live workshop. We got one or two we're doing this fall, later this year, and we have some schedule availability for Q one of next year. So if you're interested in that, you can reach out to us. But otherwise, we appreciate you listening.
[00:46:27.260] - Brandon
Absolutely.
[00:46:27.820] - Chris
We enjoy doing this, and we'll keep doing it as long as you guys are listening. So, yeah, look us up. Floodlight. Find us on LinkedIn. Also check out our Follow Our Floodlight Friday Livestreams friday Mornings That's another way you can connect with us on LinkedIn. And I guess that's it. Okay, again, until next time.
[00:46:43.190] - Brandon
See you later. All right, everybody. Hey, thanks for joining us for another episode of Head, Heart and Boot.
[00:46:50.090] - Chris
And if you're enjoying the show but you love this episode, please hit Follow, formerly known as subscribe. Write us a review or share this episode with a friend. Share it on LinkedIn, share it via text, whatever. It all helps. Thanks for listening.