Episode 229 – Alex Fichera

[00:00:00] Hello and welcome back to The Hero Show. My name is Richard Matthews. Today I have the pleasure of having on Alex Fichera. Alex, are you there?

I’m here, how you doing?

Yes. Awesome. I’m glad to have you here today. I know we were just chatting before we got on. You’re you’re in Denton, Texas home to one of my favorite restaurants in the country. So how’s everything going out there right now?

Hot. Everything is brutally hot. Oh it’s not so bad. We’re used to it during the day. It’s when you get no relief in the evening time that people start to worry. So we’re doing all right. People staying indoors. But yeah, if you ask me straight up hot.

Yeah, yeah. I just put two new air conditioners in our RV because you know, Florida Summer’s here, if you don’t have the air conditioners, you are sweating.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s it. Just when they tend to go out too, right? Isn’t it convenient?

Yeah. So ours actually went out right at the end of last summer, and then we had all of winter, and I was like, eh, I don’t wanna spend two grand on air conditioners before, you know, winter time. So feel like uncomfortable. [00:01:00] This you know like okay now it’s uncomfortable new air condition are set.

Yeah, hopefully you didn’t get, you know, done up on the price there on that. It’s like 2000, then 4,000 now. Cause they’re like, I know you needed.

Yeah, that’s funny. Ok, so what I wanna do here before we get into the interview is just go through real quick on your introduction so people know who you are and then we’ll dive into your stories. Alex is an accomplished Business Strategist, Leadership Coach, and Author of the influential book, the Business Athlete, with Extensive Experience in Enhancing Organizational Performance, Alex definitely links sports principles with business leadership.

As the founder of my Performance Coach, his commitment lies in empowering leaders and teams to achieve their peak potential renowned first dynamic and practical insights. Alex offers a fresh and transformative perspective on leadership. His understanding of resilience, adaptability, and strategic thinking shaped by sports refine in business stands at the core of his approach. So you do coaching for businesses based in the coaching from sports?

Yeah, right, exactly. It’s like, wait a [00:02:00] second, this guy cheated the system here. He’s combining two things and it’s working. Yeah, exactly. So taking, you know, it’s taking tried and true practical strategies and practices and applying them to modern day, you know, challenges and, and issues.

So I was fortunate enough to take a sport. I played soccer I played internationally and here domestically as well to take it far enough along to see the business side of it and be able to have some other great experiences that kinda of created that lens. And you know, the ability to communicate those things is sort of where I get, you know, my fun and joy is to share that experience with others who are like, Yeah, that makes sense to me too. So it’s like, ok.

As an international soccer player, did you or did you not really enjoy Ted Lasso?

So yeah, so Ted Lasso, I’m just enjoying the fact and I really don’t think people understand what’s about to come here for soccer, you know, with the World Cup. But the whole Ted Lasso movement, I’m on board with it, you know.

It’s fun. It’s a [00:03:00] good way of kind of breaking the ice and getting people into it. Cause that’s what needed. I believe there was like this hard line between people loved it, and hated the sport it was like can we have some fun with this like let’s move forward here, so.

Yeah. And Las Ted Lasso did a good job of helping me understand how to actually watch a soccer game, which, you know, is useful for an American who doesn’t watch soccer a lot.

That’s, what I got all the time. And it was like that I could not communicate. So I will thank the creators and producers of Ted Lasso for doing us all that favor. Cause we’re like, come on, there’s gotta be a better way here.

Gotta be, we gotta crack the American market. And they did. So, you know, that’s a good, a good thing. I, so do you, just outta curiosity from business insight stuff, what you know about soccer, do you think Ted Lassos gonna have an impact on how many people are watching the World Cup?

Absolutely. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That’s, I would say more. And you can see with some other things like in the news Leon o Messi, you know, I’m sure you’re familiar with the name in sports most people are, the Argentinian [00:04:00] player is gonna be going to Miami. So, I mean, this is just another indicator and another sort of gravitational pull in this.

I think in this country, it’s gonna kind of be inevitable, but without a doubt it added more eyeballs to the sport. And just like you were saying, just a little bit more understanding of what I’m watching here, and I think you said it best, how should I be watching this? Because that’s the key to it. So that was quite insightful from Ted Lasso that you picked up.

It’s one of my favorite things. It you know, cause one we travel full-time and one of the things I’ve learned is that cause you know, one of the things you do when you travel is you visit people and you learn the things that they like, right? So, you know, whether you’re going to a tequila place and learning how to drink tequila or going to a winery and learning how to drink wine is when you find an expert who can teach you how to enjoy something it changes everything for you.

And so, like I, you know, I mentioned those two things specifically cause we stayed with a friend of ours who owned a winery. And I never liked wine before until someone who really knew how to do it taught me [00:05:00] how to sit down and taste a glass of wine and how to evaluate and it like, enjoy the process. Same thing with like I had a friend of mine who runs a, I don’t know what it’s called, but a distillery for tequila.

And he shoved me how to drink tequila. And I’ve always hated tequila before and I still don’t particularly love it, but I can like have a small neat glass of it and actually enjoy the process. And Ted Lasso sort of did the same thing for soccer. I was like, I watched soccer games before and I’m like, I don’t get it. I don’t know what I’m watching. But now I can actually pay attention to the game and see what’s happening and like enjoy the process, so to speak.

Those are some serious life lessons intertwined there with the, with everything and that ability to keep those people, finding somebody who’s passionate enough to communicate that level and how it inspires other people to, you know, challenge your own assumptions. And gosh, that’s a isn’t that something that’s refreshing in its own, the ability to challenge your own assumptions and find something new and beautiful.

Yeah. Absolutely. And it’s, I don’t know, it’s one of my favorite sort of life lessons is realizing that everything is good. If you either have it [00:06:00] prepared well or you understand it well.

Yes.

If you don’t like it, it’s probably one of those two things. It wasn’t done well. Or you don’t actually understand what you’re.

Oh yeah, when you unravel preferences and why we gravitate to something versus not. I bet you find those exactly right there. Those two areas, it’s like, yeah, something’s not right there. So.

My conclusion was I’ve always hated mushrooms, and then I had, I finally had someone who really knew how to take care of a mushroom. And yeah, and you have mushrooms that are really taken care of well, and you’re like, oh, I see why people like these. Right. And it’s that sort of like, when you get to that elevated level of something and you realize, oh, whether it’s food or sports or business, someone who really understands how to communicate whatever it is that you’re doing, it changes whole experience.

For sure that same experience with mushrooms and a lot of other foods. My wife would probably come in and say, yeah, well I’ve been, you know, getting them to introduce more vegetables and things like that, even though I eat a lot of mushrooms, I don’t [00:07:00] know, you know, but I share that with you.

Yeah, yeah. My wife’s the same way. She’s like, listen, she’s learned to become a really good cook in the kitchen and is constantly expanding my palette, which works out well. So what I wanna do before we get too far into this, is I wanna talk about what it is that you’re known for, right? So what’s your business like? Who do you serve? What do you do for them?

Great. So the sort two sort of intertwined businesses, IntuitoGroup is our we’re a general contractor for HR projects, is the most simplistic way I can put it. I do have some experience. We work a lot with construction industries as well, so that helps.

But we oversee small and medium size businesses. Projects that they need to scale in the HR realm. So if it’s strategy, structure, process, people, technology, those sorts of areas we’re able to facilitate by kind of using our connections and our expertise over the time to bring the right people together. We do a little bit more of a specialized type of operation.

So we do like to get in there and make it relevant to the company we’re working with. [00:08:00] But really a lot of our work, and my work specifically is done with our coaching arm of Intuitive Group, and it’s called My Performance Coach. My Performance Coach provides just like it says training and coaching to really that.

We specialize in middle management level. That sort of tier, anyone sort of is like you know moving right up into a leadership position. We’re finding themself at the cusp of right up there on the boardroom level. We do a lot of we partner with other groups to do a lot of CEO and boardroom coaching.

But really you spoke about it in the intro, the business athlete is our coaching methodology that’s been created over 15 years. And we use that as the basis to just improve the lives of everybody and knowing that that’s gonna improve the work. So we try not to differentiate between work and life and just say, we’ve got a holistic person here that wants to do more and can do more. And, that’s what we’re here to make happen.

Yeah, I love the whole not differentiating between work and life. That’s one [00:09:00] of the things we talk about regularly on this show is like, I think that metaphor that we have the legal scales of work life balance. I think that it’s a terrible metaphor because it’s not reflective of reality.

And my improved metaphor in my own humble opinion is a rubber band where, you know, sometimes you really, you stretch the rubber band. When you are really trying to put an effort or learn something or get something accomplished or finish a project, you stretch the rubber band, but you have a limit.

If you keep stretching and you never stop, you’ll break the rubber band. So if you wanna actually have forward momentum, you need to know where that stopping point is so you can let go. And that’s how you get forward momentum. So you have to go from working states to rest states. And so I always tell my businesses that I work with, that you have to give yourself permission to play.

Absolutely. So you’re actually speaking about concepts in the business athlete methodology, we call those routines of oscillation, the ability to stretch yourself to the point of new growth, but be able to recover and do it again and again [00:10:00] versus what we get is people just stretching and then they snap.

That’s burnout, right? They’ve overstressed and they don’t know how to do that. But, you know, you spoke, I mean, it is, I’ll speak to it probably I’m sure again at some point. But yeah, the differentiation. I think as humans, I have a background in anthropology, that’s my degree. So a lot of cultural studies specializing in business anthropology.

And so I do a lot of times looking at and observing cultural factors, how people interact, human beings fascinate me in general. And we, what I have found is that as humans, we do a great job of getting in our own way, we create complexities when we don’t need to create complexities, and we end up finding creative ways to create like this internal conflict that spills out into these other areas.

And so one of them is like trying to wrestle with this conflict of having to be somebody at work versus somebody away from work instead of being an integrated person. Right? That’s just as right there. So that’s only one of these like multiple [00:11:00] ways and a lot of our coaching that we do is helping others get out of their own way. And it’s amazing that, you know that. You know, they look at it and they’re like, wow, the answers were really right there in front of me and everything. It’s like yeah.

Yeah, we hear a lot about that on social media nowadays about being, you know, learning to be authentic and, you know, I don’t think people really know what that means, but being authentic is just like, it’s literally just, I am who I am.

And I bring my strengths and my weaknesses to the table at work, at home, everywhere that I’m going. And, you know, but like, that’s it’s who you are.

Yeah, we you know, you hear every, I mean, you know, you meet, we kind of chatted before, you know, with you’re moving around a lot. You get to meet a lot of different people through your podcast, you do as well. And so it would be fair to say that you, run into a lot of people right now that are frustrated, stressed, you know, it’s kind of a very tentious sort of time out there.

And so why add more tension and more stress onto it? Right? Let’s kinda simmer these things down internally because there probably are some things that really are worth stressing over and you gotta tackle [00:12:00] them. These ones are not the ones you should be. So.

Yeah, absolutely. So what I wanna find out then is, we talked a little bit, you, how did you get into performance coaching? I know you started off in the soccer world and you said you’ve been doing this for 15 years. How did that happen? How did you go you know, were you bit by a radio actor spider that made you want to get into business? Did you start a job? Sort of, how did you become an entrepreneur.

It was inevitable. It was truly inevitable. It was something that I wrestled with and soon to find out. It was just, there’s something in the DNA, it’s in the blood, so I, you know, you don’t fight it, you find a way to live with it, right? It’s sort of making peace with it. I’m sure there’s a lot of superheroes that’s what it is I just learned to live with it.

By no means calling myself a superhero. So actually when you’re working up the ranks of being a professional athlete like myself, there’s a lot of us who are trying to get up to that upper echelon where we’re getting full-time minutes, we’re getting the sponsorships, the limelight.

I mean, that’s what we’re going for. That’s what we’re working for. But the [00:13:00] reality is there’s a whole pool of us who are fighting for minutes, who are scratching at it, who are having to work two, three jobs on the side, you know, to pay for our new nutritionists and stuff while we’re still with the team and the club and things like that.

So a lot of those jobs require us to either go train and coach skills camps, youth teams. A lot of it is go do, you know, work with your hands, construction, landscaping, those sorts of things. So those things were going on while I was traveling around getting the people doing all that I mentioned I had gotten my degree.

So at the same time it was actually kind of easy because when you travel you just, you meet different people and places. So like cultural studies seemed quite in line with everything. So I went for that route when I had gotten out though. And sort of decided to hang up my boots and call it.

I took a job that was, you know, it was this may resonate with a lot of people. This was, I did things the hard way. I found out what I didn’t wanna do first, which if anybody has done it that way, knows that’s a very [00:14:00] painful process. But once you get through it once you get through it, you’ve sort of like you know, you set it and forget it.

You know, the Ron Propel, you’re good for, you’re good to go. So now you know what you don’t want. It’s only up to you at this point. So I took a job, you know, very high paying job, but it burnout was the end result of it. I mean, living the fast life and lane.

I was working as a marketing director for a golf operations for multimillion dollar company. And so I was using a lot of my sports background to develop you know, golf events and do all that. So very high paced and everything. And as I was doing that and suffering burnout, one of the things I came out of it with was the connection with people during that time period whether I met you know, somebody that was coming in for lessons or somebody that was coming in to talk about what else they can do at this facility and this entertainment.

Sports always seemed like to connect with their business and start talking about, you know, issues or challenges and connecting the analogies and doing [00:15:00] all that. And it really was this catalyst. So when I left that, I was fortunate enough, my father actually had a coaching and consulting company.

So I met with him, told him about sort of my passionate at the time for behavioral studies, understanding teamwork and things like that. And man, since then I’ve been able to work with, gosh, just, you know, really hundreds of leaders and spend thousands of hours training and in their worlds, observing them, working with them, understanding dynamics and interactions and just being able to take those experiences and pass them along to every single person that I go work it so.

It’s a cool story too, you know, I think everyone sort of resonates with that. You go through things you don’t like doing to get to where you wanna go. I know I’m a terrible employee. I’ve been fired from every job I’ve ever had. But I’ve pretty good entrepreneur on the other side of that, so. [00:16:00] It like you learn all this thing you don’t know to know everyone that okay here’s where I fit.

I’ll tell you a funny story real quickly here because how I knew I was cut out or not cut out for a nine to five and I had to create my own company of business, right? That tapped in the spirit. I actually went and did get a job. It was really, I’m not gonna say the company, but it was, you know, it was really at the bottom layer there, sort of, it was kind of mail room, but it was electronic mail room and everything going in there.

And I wanted to start from there and say, you know, see where this goes. I know if you have, but I was actually let go for being too productive. I was doing too much of the sorting where it threw off the team dynamics where they accounted for overtime, the people that were working there before me.

And so I was doing so much work, I was actually upsetting the flow of everything. And I soon found out that it’s like there is a system and a structure here. Alex, you must play along with it to some degree, or you’re just gonna get off the Island.

[00:17:00] So I had a similar experience. I didn’t get voted off the island, but I was director of marketing for a big company. You know, and they gave me like no staff, so it was me. And I didn’t need all the money they were paying me. So I used my own paycheck to hire my own assistants and a couple things.

And I also was really good with building systems and whatnot. Cause, you know, I was entrepreneur and the president of the company was like, I don’t understand you. He’s like, he’s like, I, you get 10 times the amount of work done of anyone else in the company, and I don’t understand how you manage that. So, and I was like, cause I don’t look like as a job.

When you realize that and you realize you have what it takes to just go ahead and put it forth, the effort yourself, I mean, it’s like, oh yeah, I’ll just go ahead and do this now over here. So that’s a good one.

I did. I, that’s actually the one job I didn’t get fired from. I worked for them for 18 months, got what I wanted out of there and then I quit and I left a large six figure paycheck to go to nothing.

And have since built up this company or Push Button Podcast Company to quite a bit larger than that. But it’s[00:18:00] when you can do 10 times.

It’s I mean that’s how the stories start, right? It’s leaps like that. You know, and that’s, I mean, that’s, at the end of the day at all, it’s all about action and moving and taking a step and doing that. So.

Yeah, absolutely. So what I wanna talk about real quick then is your superpowers, right? Every iconic hero has superpowers, that fancy flying suit made by their genius intellectability the to call down thunder from the sky in the real world feels Hero’s have what I call a zone of genius.

Which is either a skill or a set of skills that you were born with or developed over time, right? And they energize all the other other skills. Skills. And what I like to frame it for people is if you look at all skills, you develop there’s probably a common thread. That ties them together. What do you think that framing your superpower is.

That’s a great question. I would, and thank you for defining it the way you did. That helps me a lot when it’s like the skills and ability over time. I would say my superpower is my ability to see in others what they can’t see in themselves.

To be able [00:19:00] to communicate that in such a way that influences their own self-reliance in action. So the ability to see, I know. Did that hit for you? Is that right?

Yeah, you have the same superpower as my wife. And we’ve been trying to come up with name for this cause I dunno what the name is for. We need to come up with the name for it. Maybe we can do that today. But it’s the ability to see future potential that other people can’t see and then help them bring that into reality.

Yes, yes. There you go. I’ll tell you what I’m glad to know we’re on the, I’ll be thinking about it and we’ll see if we can’t figure something out here. That’s awesome.

Yeah, it needs game, right? Like other people, you know, there’s things like, empathy is a superpower and like systems building superpower. But like that, what is that is like a potentiometer, I don’t know. It’s like see the potential. Yeah. And you see the potential and then you can help people bring it into reality. See the future.

Potentialism, right? Like I would be a potentialist one who can only see potential, right?[00:20:00]

And it’s really interesting skill because it applies to so many different things. Right? And where it’s a skill that a lot of artists have. Right? You know, Michael Angelo, whoever did the David carving, he was like, I didn’t see a rock. I just continued hitting the rock until the thing that I, you know, until David emerged.

Great de notion.

Seeing the potential.

Yes, yeah. Maybe I should have expanded it. That was great. Expanding beyond others, it’s just being able to see that potential, something that’s where it is now. And that vision for what’s beyond it. Oh, I like that.

Yeah, so knowing that’s your superpower, how does that impact what you guys do or what you actually do with your clients?

Well, it’s what I find with my clients and as I shared before, you know, a lot of it is, you know, removing what’s in their own way. And that that’s a different than saying, here let’s add more things to your bucket. And I’ve learned people don’t like that. They feel they’re very busy already. So if you tell them, I’m gonna remove [00:21:00] things outta your way, they can usually get to understand that.

So, and, but that’s not enough. You know, it’s really conceptual. And you have to give people a reason why. And they have to have purpose. And that’s really when I do things like change management or talk to people about behavioural change or moving change, it’s like you can’t go anywhere unless you’ve answered their question first.

And that is, why should I change? Why should I move? And it’s like, it’s great Alex. I know that you see, but why? So when you can bring out that potential, they can’t see, and you can bring it there in front of them, and then. Show them how to really grab a hold of it. That is the spark that they’ve been waiting for.

They can’t get their own spark going. And once you get that spark going, then everything is kind of smooth sailing on a lot of it. So that ability to see that resonate and connect with [00:22:00] that individual in that moment where they are most needing you to connect with them, it lights a spark that will literally flame your work together for going on. So I think it’s start of law.

Yeah, yeah It’s one of the things that I find really interesting and why I very much enjoy that particular superpower and all the people I’ve met who have it is the actual work required to be amazing at whatever it is not really that right? It’s not as hard as people think it is the hard work is convincing yourself to do it, right?

It’s that why it’s seeing the potential and it’s seeing where you could be and then connecting with that and like that it’s a gift. Your gift is a gift that more people need to interact with in their lives. If you want to, if you wanna really accomplish things, you need to have someone in your life who has that gift.

Oh yeah. You know, it’s, you hit on a good note there cause a lot of the business owners I work with you know, this is a level up [00:23:00] from some of the middle management culture, but even leadership in general you know, leadership is a, it at times can be a very lonely place to be.

And that’s, it’s okay, you know, it’s okay, but it does get very lonely there and. You can find yourself lacking confidence simply because you don’t have anyone to confirm things you’re seeing or listening to or hearing or to help guide you in that sort of way. Somebody who’s got your back in that sort of way. And it’s not a knock on anybody in the organization.

There’s just specific roles and what those roles, responsibilities are. And to your point, the role and responsibility of helping you see that in yourself and do that is a critical role we all should look to invest in. Cause that’s what it is. It’s an investment in yourself, not a cost outside yourself, you know?

Yeah. And it returns in space.

Oh, that’s the, if I have to convince one more person that the investment dollars put into yourself versus, you know, put out there, gosh. Come on, come on.

Oh, man. [00:24:00] And it’s the right back to like our very first discussion about experiencing new things when you realize that the work that goes into getting good at something is, it’s always the same, right? You go through, I call it the period of secretude, right? And you get through the secretude then you start to learn the basics, and then you don’t have to focus on, like, there’s a process and it’s a process that you can learn, and then you can just start applying it to everything.

And you can get good at all sorts of things. And you can get good at really fast. And like the first sort of kicked down that road is having some experience with either yourself or a friend or a coach who can show you the potential that you don’t see.

And that’s where I gravitated to sports. And let me just share with you why I think sports is the, it really is the best bet. And why I would tell people is because, you know, without getting too far off track here, we’re in a very, you know, if we look at the cultural forecast, we look at where we are in Western values, business values, and [00:25:00] we can map this out.

There’s plenty of smart people that have done this. Dr. Michael Drew you know, people in books who look at forecasting where we’re are moving as a society and how those cultural things impact the rest of us. We went through a pandemic you know, everything coming outta that, things are really shaken up.

It’s culture shock for ourselves and our organizations and we’re really trying to come out of it, still trying to make sense of things. And so what I say to anybody who’s in a mode of where things are really agitated, again, don’t add more to it. You need to stop for a second. Let it all sort of drop so you can see clearly and. In going forward, this is gonna be tough terrain. We need to connect with people and we need to look for the low hanging fruit. The easiest way to connect with people and what the data shows is that at minimal, three out of four of your people you work around [00:26:00] have some sort of tie or connection to athleticism or sports.

That is a connection, like any other connection across the board, right? That’s like as close as you’re gonna get to like a universal thing. So again, I say when you’re in this area, look for something simple. Number two I would say is look for something that you’re already doing. And people are amazed. I just say, look, did you have a team meeting last week?

Yeah, we had like five of them. Well, team meeting, you’re already using the language. So sports is not unfamiliar, it’s already in your culture. It’s an very sort of accessible connection point. Use that to start the wheels of motion and get things going. What we know about getting things successful, especially in sports or business, is you have to build momentum.

You have to get these small bits of confidence and those amassed to these giant wins. And so quit thinking about, [00:27:00] it’s great to have the end in mind, but then come back to the start and get yourself these little wins. And some of these little wins are just connecting with somebody on something basic that opens the door to the deeper conversation that then moves things along in a way you didn’t have moving before.

So I find it to be simple, already natural and in play. And if we just like a, you know, like an ingredient to a beautiful dish, let’s just, you know, add a little, a pinch more of that into the equation.

Sports and athleticism is like a, it’s a universal human language. We all understand it, and it’s one of the things that, you know, if I’m in one sport and you’re in another or we’re interested in another. We can connect a lot about those things despite the fact that they’re different sports.

And one of the things that, like I do and I’ve discovered I tell my friends and family, I collect skills the way that the way that other people collect AMS or coins. So like, I’m in the, currently in the process of learning martial arts with my son. So we’re doing like, you know, four hours a week of martial arts training and we’re learning to windsurf.

[00:28:00] So we’re windsurfing on, you know, a couple of days a week. We’re actually gonna go this afternoon and pick up another windsurf board. And we hike. And we kayak and we roller blade and but so we have all sorts of things that are sport related. We don’t play any team sports though, but it doesn’t matter because the connection to the athleticism and whatnot allows you to connect to other people.

And one of the things that I’ve discovered at collecting all these sort of like athletic skills over my life is that it gives you more opportunities to connect with people and to build stories. And really the way that you build relationships and build connections is by. Hearing someone’s story and then seeing your story reflected in theirs and sharing a story back with them.

And that’s how relationships are built. And sports and athleticism is just such a common thread through everyone’s life that it’s a great way to connect stories with each and actually build those relationships and make things happen.

You said it right there. It’s a universal language and then it allows you to kind of dive a little bit deeper and [00:29:00] explore more of what the sort of richness you can pull out of those experiences. You know, whether it was ourselves when we were playing, when we were younger, or we’re a parent and we have kids.

I mean, we put them in there because we want them to learn these things, right? It’s an incubator for those of us that played at a professional level, we just stayed in that incubator a lot longer. So we’ve got the reps, you know what I mean? Like we did the drills a lot longer than you, and a lot higher intensity in much more pressure situation.

So we can speak to that, but it applies very much to your own professional world. You’re in the same sort of scenario doing these things. And you know, when talking about burnout, one of the sort of core concepts is energy management in the methodology, and that’s really about holistic leadership and managing your energy like an athlete would, because I don’t see a difference between a business professional and a professional athlete. You are exerting, you know.

There’s two things you said that I really want call out cause they’re super important. [00:30:00] So one is energy, right? So you in business and in life, anywhere. Everyone talks about time being your most precious asset. And that’s true because you can’t get it back. But actually I think it’s second.

Your most precious asset is your energy. And if you can protect your energy, you can do anything you want. And this is something that has really been hit home. I’m gonna share a sports story for you from my coach. This the second point I wanna make in a second. Our martial arts coach was talking and he’s been talking so much to us, and it’s only just started to recently click about if I can control my energy, right?

And he’s talking about breathing and my heart rate. And he is like, and I, you know, I track my heart rate for every one of our things. And I’m getting to the point now where I’m learning to control my heart rate while exerting really hard. And so, like, you know, two months ago, some of these exercises I’m getting into a hundred sixty five heart rate, and now I can keep it in the one 20 at the same level.

Right? And it’s learning how to breathe and control your energy. And he’s like, listen, if you can, when in a sparring match, or if you ever had a real world fight or something like that, if you can keep your [00:31:00] energy 50% longer than the other guy, you always win. Right? Always.

And so there’s two parts to that. One, I think energy is super important, and two, having a coach is the thing that unlocks everything. And it’s, we see that in sports all the time, right? And every time I’ve tried to learn something, I said my son and I next sort of goal with windsurfing is we’ve gotten as far as we can get without having a coach.

And it’s just, you know, because we’ve done so many sports things, you realize that like you there’s only so far you can get until you have someone else who can look at you and who is farther along than you and be like, Hey, here’s where you’re messing up. Here’s what you could change. Here’s how you need to think about this thing and how you do these things.

A coach really helps open up your potential. And yeah. Anyways, those are just two things I really wanted to hit on from what you said.

Kudos to your coach for really integrating that stuff. I’m familiar in the martial arts realm and I know energy and breathing techniques are just massive. They’ve contributed so much to everything. To your point about the second point first on the coaching side of it it’s not to say an individual can’t develop and do well on their own [00:32:00] but I can assure you it will take much longer because A, you don’t have somebody helping you navigate who’s been there before.

And B, you will find creative ways to not max out. That means you’ll find creative ways to keep yourself just happy enough and never exerting just past, which means you will never really level up to where you need to go. That’s the role of a coach is to say, ah, I’m gonna push you a little bit tougher here, but don’t worry, I’m not gonna break you.

We’re gonna recover and we’ll go back. Right? Cause muscles, you gotta break them to build them stronger, right? Like, this is all a language we’re being told, but there’s a lot of noise out there. You know, we miss some of the obvious things. That’s why I like to be able to try to bring things in a very simple sort of way, is because things are very loud and very noisy, and in a world with a lot of loud, noisy stuff, you know, we miss some very simple things.

And to your first point about energy so Jim Loehr, Dr. Jim Loehr kind of started this way back in like the nineties, probably even before that with [00:33:00] athletes and looking at really in energy management, sort of four areas, physical, emotional, mental, and spiritual, and how those different energy capacities are actually all intertwined.

But each one of them requires a little bit different skillset to play around with like different routines to keep those levels in each one of those areas at its max or recovering. So for instance, I’ll bring you through one of your workouts, I’m sure after you go and get a good workout and physically you walk out of there emotionally feeling very positive, you have a good vibe about you.

Right? So you’ve got a good vibe going and you feel you are probably more able to focus and use your mental abilities. Maybe it’s to learn a new skill or do something. You’re in a good place. I’m open, I’m receptive. I’m able to learn and develop and use my mind for its purposes.

When you’ve got those three going, your spiritual energy is fully connected. You have purpose, you have direction, you have value, you feel these things. And so [00:34:00] we look at, we train people to be really hyper aware of their own sort of four chambers to self recognize when one of them is impacted and what routines can you do to get yourself back in line. And so that it’s, you know I tell people, if you have me coaching you for like.

A long period of time then I really feel like I’m failing you because at the end of the day, I’ve gotta coach you up to self-reliance because that’s what it’s gonna take. Coach is always good, but if don’t own it yourself, I can’t do nothing.

A good coach knows how long that takes. Right? And it’s different for different things, right? Because we, you know, I’ve talked to coaches for the windsurfing and they’re like, listen, to get good to where you can start progressing on your own three or four, maybe five sessions with the coach, and you’re done.

My martial arts instructor, he was like, this is gonna three or five years. Like it’s gonna take five years if you’re not willing to put five years in, let’s [00:35:00] not start, kind of thing, right? Like it depends on what it is you’re doing, but your coach will know how long it takes to get to that point. And, you know, I’m just realizing, you know, the difference of what it actually takes to get to self-reliance in different arenas.

And business is no different, right? I tell people now, like, there’s so many people that are looking for, you know what’s the magic, you know, way to grow my company. I’m like, there is no magic way to grow your company. It’s gonna take it. Like, if you’re not willing to put in 10 years to become world class, don’t start, right?

Because it’s gonna take 10 years. And if you’re willing to put in the 10 years of effort, you can dominate whatever place you want to be in, right? Cause nobody is willing to do it.

Yeah I would give them, the only secret I know of is to you know, have a high performing culture with high performing people. Like, I mean, that’s, you know, and then you go down the waterfall of how do you do that? You know, it’s but again, there is no magical, it takes, I mean, and that’s a lot of this, you know.

It does takes determination. It takes, you know, a reason for you to wanna do it. But it’s been amazing to work, you know, I have some people who, you know, [00:36:00] they’ll come and they’ll say, Alex, we, you know, we’re, our team is suffering from communication issues, you know, or something like that. What they perceive to be the problem and the issue, or, you know, we have a time management issue.

And so you go in there and they want you to come in there with a wand and do like, some sort of like session that somehow is going to, you know, bestow upon them this mighty skill that I have somehow acquired. It’s like, it doesn’t work like that. And in fact, back to my model that I was sharing with you on the four of them, when I go and I talk with the people in that room and I look at them.

It is not a mental problem. It is not a skills issue that they have. It’s an exhaustion. It’s a burnout. It’s a stress deal. So I take them back again to that sort of physical, emotional, mental, spiritual. How can you develop somebody mentally if they are physically not in a space or even emotionally to receive it? Now you’ve wasted a whole bunch of people’s time, energy, and resources just because you think it’s a [00:37:00] mental thing.

It’s like they’re just not happy right now. Like they’re emotionally stressed if you fix that problem, oh, we never had a time management issue. It’s like, yeah, you had an energy management issue, not a time management issue, you know.

It’s one of the things that I’m really looking at a lot right now as a owner of a company with a growing staff is how, how do we manage that? And I’m new at this, right? You know, as far as growing into the, these things, first one I’ve grown to this size and one of the things that I am experimenting with is cause we’re in some really new territory with all sorts of technology things that are happening that you know, you’ve heard the iron triangle, right?

You know, better, cheaper, faster, pick two, right? Yeah. We’re looking at how do we break the iron triangle using a lot of the tools and automations and AI stuff that are available. And specifically looking for my company. How can I make it so that anytime my staff needs or wants to go to their kids’ baseball game at one o’clock in the afternoon, [00:38:00] that not only can they.

But it would be like a company requirement that you should absolutely show up at your kids’ baseball game because our company built developed to support people who live lives, right? Who are real people and have families, and have kids, and have interests outside of their job and are here because they have their own goals and wishes that they wanna get to.

And realizing that their work here contributes to our larger vision, but it also contributes to their vision in their life and trying to figure out how do we build that into the culture and leverage as much of the new technology to make that possible. And what I’m seeing so far early in this game is that it’s really effective at having a group of people who love what they do and show up full of energy and show up ready to, you know, to take on the world together.

Man, that is, you know, if you’re hiring, now’s the time to put that plug, because anybody listening is like, yeah, I wanna come work for that culture. I wanna leave what I’m doing. But I already told [00:39:00] you I’m not a corporate guy, so that’s not gonna work. We’d have to partner something. There’s I wrote down a note here. If you saw me writing down in a second.

We talked, okay, so I said I like to keep things simple. And so in the methodology in the business athlete, I guess that’s one of the things when you write a book now, you can tell people, oh yeah, that’s in the book. Make sure you go and read that.

So to your point here, right? To your point, it helps the book is also a guide to help one, whether an business owner or an individual develop an energy management plan. That is to have a plan to manage not only your individual, but think of it in levels. We talked earlier about the ability to be flexible, right? And that ability to have a model or something that breeds with you is a little bit better than one that restricts you.

And so we want the fabric of our methodology to be breathable. That means it can be applied at multiple layers. And if we expand culturally, the individual, you’ve got the individual, you’ve got the team, you’ve got the [00:40:00] organization, so you can begin to apply things. Both macro and micro. So the book helps you also develop a plan to look at your company as its own individual and just as you would look at your own, okay, you know, where’s my physical, emotional, mental and spiritual energies right here?

What are my routines to develop good physical energy, emotional energy, that now I look at my departments and my organization the same way. So let me look at the physical nature of my organization, right? How are people getting their rest currently? What kind of policies do we have in place? What’s our work environment look like? Is it conducive?

You know, okay, then I wanna look at my organization emotionally, right? So when we talk about where people’s stress levels are, how we’re communicating with one another, those sorts of things. So I think the model allows you the flexibility to think about your organization as you would yourself.

And [00:41:00] try to do that. And I think that’s a great key for any entrepreneur or business owner is look, you’ve got in this to start your business. Don’t lose sight of that. Learn more about yourself. You’ll learn more about your business. That’s how it goes. And so you can really create something that is truly authentic in you if you spend the time listening it and then apply that, you know, at that sort of scale.

Yeah, I love that. And we’ll definitely make sure there’s a link to the book in the show notes for this, cause it’s probably a good thing for people. I do wanna flip the coin over though, right? So we talked about this, the superpower is, you know, we’re, we don’t have a name for it yet, but the ability to see potential. Every superpower has that flip side, right? Every Superman has a kryptonite. Well, you can’t remove her bracelets of victory without going mad. I wanna know what your flaw is that has either held you back something you struggled with.

For mine. You know, I’m a systems guy, so I’ve always been really, really good massive superpowers in building and developing systems, which the flip side of [00:42:00] that is it also makes me a bit of a perfectionist, which keeps me from, you know, shipping and, you know, keeps me from paying attention to things like my own self-care.

So I would do things like, you know, let my clients walk all over me and not have good boundaries or, you know, work to the week hours of night. And I learned to fix a lot of those things, but I think more important than what the flaw is. How have you work to overcome it so you continue to grow?

That’s a great way of framing a flaw. And I would do the same, you know, I’ve worked with Gallop and Strength Finders, and they would also, you know, instead of saying a weakness, it’s a misapplied strength, right? So instead of a flaw, it’s a misapplied superpower, you know, to the extent that how you mentioned it.

It would be the what I’ve had to learn is discernment, and that’s the ability to skillfully choose what to fully go with energy-wise and not just because you can see it all and you can do it doesn’t mean you should be putting all your energy into it.

And I guess what one of the practical things I learned was [00:43:00] when it’s not reciprocated, right? Like that creates a lot of tension and comfort when I believe, oh, I see this in you and you should be doing this, or I need to be taking this product over the here, but it, there’s nobody there. Nobody wants it or they don’t want, right?

Like, so you end up spending a whole bunch of energy in a place where it’s like fools gold, right? It’s just led by passion and it doesn’t have a, you know, engage. So that’s what I would say what I’ve had to learn and you know, credit to other people.

I didn’t learn those things on my own. I learned a lot of lessons on my own that way. A lot of it was getting around people who did have good discernment and having them help me through those to learn, so.

It’s such an interesting flip side to the ability to see potential is the problem with being able to see the potential is that you can see the potential in everything, right? You have to decide what things are actually worth pursuing because again, you do have limited resources. We talked about time and energy, so you can’t bring everything, their full potential.

And the other side of that is not everyone around you can see the [00:44:00] potential, so you have to have the same discern and who’s ready to actually. See that potential themselves and willing to push forward there. Because a lot of times, again, that time and energy you have to put into it, is it worth to help them take, you know, take that to the potential and some things it’s not, and some things absolutely are, and that’s where you have to build that discernment muscle to decide where am I gonna take my superpower and actually apply it.

That’s a, it’s a painful process, but I love it all the same. Right?

Yeah, yeah. One of the interesting superpowers, we talked earlier about, you know, superpowers are the things, skills that you’ve developed or things that you were born, right? I was born with the whole system stuff. One of the things I’ve been learning through this show and having done this for, you know, 250 episodes or so now, is I’m starting to see all of the, there’s not a lot of superpowers.

There’s a few categories of them. And so I’m starting to be able to see them and communicate about them a lot better now than I was, you know, a couple of years ago. So it’s interesting to.

You’re the collector of [00:45:00] superpowers. That’s right. You’re just sitting there, you know, everybody’s like feeding their superpowers over to you and you’re just sort of like soaking them all in, so you gonna be their.

Yeah, yeah, I’m gonna have to write a book about it at some point. And, just go through them, because there’s, if I had to guess, there’s probably about 12, there’s about 12 superpowers that everyone who comes on is in one of those categories.

I bet you would see that link up with some other archetypes and some things like that. You would find some consistencies in correlation there. That’d be interesting.

Yeah, yeah. Probably that would be good. So what I wanna talk about, and you mentioned this for for a minute and I wanna dive into it a little bit more, but it’s your common enemy, right? And every superhero has an arch nemesis. It’s a thing they have to constantly fight against in their world and in business we generally put it in the context of your clients, and it’s a mindset or a flaw that you’re constantly have to fight to overcome so that you can actually get the people, the result that came to you for, right? What’s that enemy to you they have to fight against with your clients.

You have some great questions on this podcast [00:46:00] and it really, it’s very thought provoking. And for anybody who’s looking to join, I didn’t get these ahead of time, so I’m sitting here thinking. The arch nemesis it would be the sort of, for me, it’s a mental sort of thing, and it’s the dialogue that there it’s the false sort of notion of this ego in the wrestling with this ego in a sense that doesn’t even need to exist in the first place.

A tension between sort of what the eye wants and what they need sort of deal. And you go through an exhaustive process with those thoughts and understanding them, but only to come out and realizing that there is no conflict. You know, you create what you have. And, you know, I don’t look at my own ego as you try not to judge it.

You try not to be judgmental about it, as in it’s good or bad. It’s again, back to the skillful usage of it, knowing who’s in the driver’s seat and when is [00:47:00] this ego necessary and valuable, versus when does it need to know its place and be, you know, restrained. All skills you learn, you know, through a lot of this stuff, through contemplation, meditation, these things.

Wrestling with thoughts. So I hope that answers, I mean, I feel like I answered in that sort of sense, is that wrestling with that sort of that personal want or where I want to go with what they need and it creates more of a listener in that moment that I have to really kind of split it right down the middle and just observe and listen and go back to it, so.

So that went a weird place in my head, and I wanna see if this actually lines up or not. So I’m gonna ask you this question, and maybe it’s off of left field, maybe it’s not. So what I saw in that, in myself is that ego, earlier in my entrepreneurial career for me was I want to get to a particular goal that I thought I wanted.

And so I worked my ass off to get to that particular goal, which was, [00:48:00] you know, I mentioned this earlier, lack of self-care, right? And that perfectionism, like, you know, obviously I can get here if I just work harder and do more and just do the things that I think I need to do. And so I was working 12, 18 hours a day, six days a week, and dropping dead on the last day and doing nothing.

But, and, you know, being unhappy and being unproductive and not actually making progress towards my goals, even though I thought I was, and realizing instead that what I needed to do was I needed to take care of me. What I needed to do was I needed to give myself permission to play. And I started playing with, I started playing with creative restrictions on my time for work.

I started going from like, Hey, if you know it, maybe instead of, you know, 12 hours a day, six days a week, we just do eight hours a day, six days a week, and maybe it’s just five days a week, and then maybe it’s just six hours a day. Maybe it’s just four hours a day. And now that I’ve started doing that, I average two to four hours a day, four days a week.

And we have a rapidly growing company[00:49:00] which is wonderful and. What it forced me to do is start looking at what are the things that I actually need in my life, which is spending more time with my kids and learning martial arts and learning to windsurf and doing other things that are, like on the self-care side, learning to cook, right?

My wife and I have gotten really good in the kitchen and learning to take, you know, cook better, eat better, sleep better, have better sex, just all across the board, like taking care of me has made me significantly more productive in my company and growing it. And what’s interesting is, like I, my ego never would’ve let me admit to myself that those were the things I needed to spend my time on.

Cause what I thought I needed to do is I just needed to work harder. And when I gave that up and started looking at how do I take care of myself better, my income has exploded.

It’s amazing, right? Like it would, looking back on, you’d say, well, I wouldn’t give myself that advice. That sounds quite counterintuitive, right? It’s like counterproductive to what I was doing, but it’s like it worked. No. That what a great example and resonates with.[00:50:00]

Is that where you go?

Yeah. Oh yeah, resonates with me. A hundred percent. And what we were just talking about, like if you were to ask me the question about those four areas of energy that we were talking about, and you say, Alex, which one would you tell people which one’s the most important? And I would say to you, well I’ll tell you which one’s most important, but where the easiest place to start, easiest place to start is at the physical.

That’s when people say, oh, I was out for a walk. And, you know, I came up with the best idea. When we go do something physical, we usually create the chain reaction. But the spiritual energy is where you have like limitless fire in your belly kind of thing. This is what ultimately needs to get figure it out.

And for like us, it sometimes takes hard lessons, right? We have to go and experience something to that degree to find ourselves in that area where we have to be reflective and take the time and go back and really dig down deep. So this applies again, the companies, right? So a company that’s agitated in that way needs to go revisit their values, their [00:51:00] mission statement, their vision, right?

Individually, that’s what you did. Right? You went back and you said, I need to fix this core area right here. And what you found was that the ego isn’t a problem because what I’ve heard, there’s still somebody there who wants to be a great dad. There’s still somebody there who wants to be a really good business owner, who wants to be able to have a good podcast and really inspire other entrepreneurs in the same way.

What’s wrong with that? There’s nothing wrong with that. It’s the target you created to point your ego towards and say, look, I’m not fighting with you here. I understand we’re just headed in the wrong direction. Let’s point ourselves over here and see what we can do with it. You know, it’s a great asset if you know how it operates, but like you said, it’s really skillful.

I mean, people don’t understand, like you’re up against, this is the number one competitor. I always tell people, they say, who’s your number one competitor? Myself? Myself, every day, every day. That’s that, that everybody should view it. It’s that ego. It will, they’ll find ways to keep itself happy and keep [00:52:00] itself, you know, fat and full and.

It reminds me of the shiny object syndrome that a lot of entrepreneurs have. They wanna change their mind on things. It’s cause they’re working even tired. You know what, solved my shiny object syndrome cutting back the amount of time I was working significantly.

No, you can’t stop working. That’s, what.

And now like when I show up to do the things, I kick ass. Right? But I kick ass for towers a day. That’s all you need.

You’re backed with by all the leading science too. Like so I’ve got a certification with neuroscience of business and mighty, and they’re professors up there with what they’re knowing about. Like just decision making and hours on the body and when you can actually max it out and stuff like that.

Like you’re right past a certain point. You’re not getting any more productivity numbers, you’re actually eating into your productivity at that point. And we have the, what’s cool with neurosciences people need visuals to understand it. They [00:53:00] need to see some real hard concrete things. So like, we’ve known all this stuff, but now it’s like the fact that your gut speaks to your brain in such a way that it’ll really make you think about what you put into your body.

If you’re somebody who wants to be sharp and wants to be making the decisions and facing challenges every day and helping the people in your company, or helping your company grow and do that you wanna be equipped with all your faculties. Fully focus, much energy as possible.

Yeah. You’re gonna eat well, you’re gonna work out, you’re gonna have things that you’re playing in your life. Like if you wanna show up.

That’s it.

You’re not gonna be working eight hours a day because you will not show up and kill it. Right? You’re not gonna work 12 hours a hour, gonna work yourself for your bone.

And like you mentioned, you know, you have to have the hard experiences to like realize when you’re making mistakes. The story I always go back to I once thought to myself that, you know, if getting further just takes working harder, how about I try working 24 hours a day and see what it’s like to go without sleep?

And you know, anyone who’s workaholic has been there. I made it about three days before I was [00:54:00] puking in the bushes and realized that was a terrible idea’s.

Terrible idea to put that, but you know now, right? like I know what not to do. So it’s I tell here, here’s a sports analogy to wrap up. The point on this one is I deal with a lot of we talk about being brand conscious too, as athletes. It’s about off-field performance as much as it is on field performance.

And actually the secret is this, for your entrepreneurs, what you do off field determines the success on the field. So what you do away from your business is what makes your business successful. And I can’t harp on that enough because everybody’s looking to add more things to their business.

And I’m just like, you’re asking me to take away frustration and stress and all this sort of stuff, but you’re asking me to give you more stuff and bury you deeper. I want to take the stuff away from you, you know?

The things that have made the biggest impact on my ability to perform [00:55:00] have been sleep eight hours a day. Food, like learning how to cook and actually, like, we make everything from scratch every day. And we have the time to do it. So food, sleep, exercise, which is generally, I call it, you need to have athletic hobbies, right?

Like windsurfing or martial arts. Things that are fun that you’re like, I want to do more of that. And good relationships, good sex. Like those are the ones. If you get those taken care of, you can knock it out of the park.

Yeah, absolutely. Right? It’s like, no, it’s too simple. It’s like, look, I don’t write the rules on this thing. These are tried and true. You know, if it’s still not something you wanna take a step forward, then maybe this is not compatible and that’s ok.

In the understanding too, that you’re like, these are rules for high performers and if you don’t wanna be high performer, you know, whatever. But if you wanna be high performer, you need to, you.

Yeah.

Take these things.

And scale it. It’s not that, okay, so your example, we’re cooking every day. Start with, [00:56:00] you know, going out less one time a week or a month, right? Like, and cook the food there.

All the other benefits, you know, the shopping for it, the, you know, the cooking of it, the aromas in the house, the financial gain from not doing it. It’s like you are tapping into a new level of life. It’s right there outside your grasp, if you willing to step up and take it like come on.

So just an interesting sort of like tidbit on the cooking thing. The better we’ve gotten at cooking, the more we enjoy doing it, the better we eat. And the, it’s like an upcycle thing where like, now we’re no longer satisfied with shitty restaurants or even okay. Restaurants like we want, we like, I’m gonna go out, I wanna go to someplace that like, there’s a real chef who’s treating food well because I wanna eat food that I can’t cook better myself at home.

And I’ve discovered most of the time, like 80% of the restaurants we go to, I could make it better at home and it’ll be, it’ll taste better, it’ll be better for me [00:57:00] all the way around. So now when we do go out, we enjoy it a lot more because we’re more selective about where we go and what we eat when we go out and we’re looking for new experiences.

Like my wife and I just went to a cool Filipino restaurant yesterday. We’ve never been to one of those before. And so it’s like this upcycle thing. And we’ve gotten to the point when in the kitchen we’re like, we spent $500 on our Christmas present this last year for ourselves.

It was plates. We bought $500 worth of plates. Cause we’ve gotten so good in the kitchen now that we’re like, we’re starting to look at how do we develop meals, right? That look good and present well. And all of that again, it goes right back into learning performance and learning how to learn and improving yourself and improving your body.

It’s cooking is one of those skills that like man. That has had a bigger impact on my business. Probably it, like I said, it’s in that top four. It’s, you know, it’s athletics, cooking, sleep, sex. Those are like, those are big.

I added it in there and saying, you know, we’re just trying to add a little bit more of this ingredient, right? Like, the sports is already probably in a culture at some point, and people are like, yeah, that tastes good. Just put another pinch of it [00:58:00] in there. It’ll work, right? Like, just turn it up a little bit. You know.

So I’m gonna skip my normal questions cause we did hit our hour mark here. And I want to ask you one last question before we go here. And it’s your guiding principles, right? One of the things that makes heroes heroic is that they live by a code.

You know, for instance, Batman never kills his enemies. He only ever brings them to Arkham Asylum. So as we wrap up interview, you wanna talk about the top one, maybe two principles that you live your life by, something maybe you wish you’d known when you first just started out on your own hero’s journey.

Again, another great question. Principles along the way. Yeah, I don’t wanna create too much dead space on here. I mean, we touched on it a little bit. One of the principles is the principle of self-reliance in that, in this world, you’re truly only accountable to yourself and your actions.

And that’s not selfish. It’s sort of like that is the best route to helping others and being everything you can to this world is starting at your own level and working there. And so, [00:59:00] the principle of self-reliance is one I have nurtured and just you loaded it at some times because it’s a lot of responsibility.

I mean, you’re taking it on a lot and it’s hard to manage, but it’s worth it. And it enriches the lives of not only yourself, but others around you. You know, and that’s what I aim for. And so the main principle, I guess the higher level principle there is to really just you know, leave things better than you, than you found it.

I love that. That was one of the first principles I learned from a from my mentor when I was in high school, was to leave, leave everything better than you found it. He’s like, whether that’s a person or a place right? If you can leave someone with a smile, you’ve done good, right? Like, and so leaving people better than you. That’s a great, great principle. And the other thing on the self-reliance that popped into my head while you were talking about that was self-reliance requires knowing when and how to hire a coach.

It’s so true. Yes, yes.

It’s so true.

It’s like, yeah, [01:00:00] when people come, it’s like, great, you’ve already done the first step. Like you’ve done it, right? Like, I don’t, like you should already get a gold star if you’re contacting a coach and like, Hey, I wanna talk about this dude. It’s like, great. You’ve already done the hardest work.

Really. It’s like, you’ve made that first one. Now we’re ready to rock and roll, you know?

Well, I think that is a great place to wrap our interview, but I do finish every interview with a simple challenge. It’s called The Hero’s Challenge. I do this to help get access to stories that I might not find on my own, cause you know not everyone is out doing the podcast rounds like you and I do.

So the question is simple. Do you have someone in your life or in your network that you think has a cool entrepreneurial story? Who are they? First names are fine. And why do you think they should come share their story with us here on The Hero Show? First person that comes to mind for you.

Ooh, entrepreneurial story will, first person that comes to mind for me. Well, I mean, I’ve been fortunate enough, and I’m not shy from saying this because I know a lot of people don’t have this sort of privilege, but I had a very great parental upbringing and a father who was a mentor a coach an inspirational sort of figure.

My mother as well, but my [01:01:00] father from a business sense in that his stories and the world he lived in and what he created, you know, first banking software, computers, and venture capitalism and things like that. I’ve always found those stories to be quite insightful, funny you know, from an era that I don’t think I can access much anymore. So that is a hero I think could be a hero to others.

Awesome. We’ll see if we can get an introduction, maybe get him on the show. That’d be cool. Not everyone says yes, but when they do, sometimes we get some of our best episodes out of our recommendations from that. But you know, in comic books there’s always the crowd of people at the end who are cheering and clapping for the acts of heroism, so are analogous to that on this show as we close.

Where can people find you If they want your help in the future, where can they light up the bat signal, so to speak? And hey Alex, more importantly where is who the right types of people to actually reach out and ask for your help?

Great. Yeah, let’s start there. So the right kinds of people you know, somebody that just needs that spark. They may not see it in them. They know there’s something there. They may not know exactly what it is, but they need that spark. They need somebody else [01:02:00] there to kind of elevate it up.

So if you’re moving from a sort of sole contributor to a contributor through others and you really need that extra sort of care or just, you know. Again, sometimes people feel this stuff already, so it’s like they have this little inclination all they need is a spark and the thing just starts up in fire.

So if you’re looking for a spark to just let that fire, you know, rage. You can find us MyPerformanceCoach.com. We’ll get you to our website. All the social medias I’m on. I love people connecting with me. I’ve been doing TikTok videos at BizAthlete. So trying to move the TikTok videos on and create some good content for people to apply things on a regular basis.

You know, that’s, I like giving practical, you know, things. So if you come and work with me, just know we’re getting down the business. We’re not sitting around talking about it, we’re doing it. So that’s how it goes.

Yeah, so MyPerformanceCoach.com is that the address?

That is the address. Yes, sir.

Yeah, I’ll make sure it in my show links. Do you have any words of wisdom for my audience before I hit this stop record button [01:03:00] we’re done for today.

Keep listening to podcasts like this, you know, who and what you surround yourself with has a massive difference on who and what you become. So keep supporting these sorts of podcasts and listening to this kinda information, and you’ll do just fine.

And I always appreciate the plug. Of course, listen to this podcast we love that. Thank you so much for coming today Alex, I appreciate your time.

You got it. Thanks again.