Ep 569: Redefining Work for the Long Term | Caleb Guilliams Episode Recap
AJV (00:01):
Are you working just to retire? Now, the reason I ask is I think it’s important to share the actual definition of retirement. The actual definition of retirement is to be taken out of service. So knowing that that retirement means to be taken out of service. Let me ask that first question again. Are you working just to retire? Now, if I had asked you that the first time, you would say, yes, I totally plan on retiring. I think most people in the United States plan on retirement at some point. But do any of us plan to be taken out of service? Are we saving all of our money so that we can just no longer be useful one day? I don’t, I don’t think that we would say yes if we were asked in that way. When people go, Hey, are you saving for retirement? What if we were actually asking people, are you saving so that you can no longer be of service to your community,
AJV (01:09):
I don’t think most of us would say yes to that. I don’t think most of us are planning and saving to no longer be of service at age, whatever. And so I thought it would be important to talk about where did this concept of retirement come in? And there’s no judgment being passed here. If you’re retired or you’re about to retire, or you do wanna retire one day, this is not a judgment call. This is a redefining what work means and redefining retirement. So it’s not this thing that we work for and work towards one day to be taken out of service, but it’s, it’s a rea, it’s a reallocation of our knowledge, our skills, and our time. But I think some of the, the hardest walks that I have walked through with friends and family are the people who have lost themselves, lost their identity, lost their purpose, lost their passion lost their excitement and life after they retired, or post-business sale.
AJV (02:15):
Now, I think that that is a dangerous thing that I’m not I’m not promoting that your identity should be tied to your work. I’m most certainly not saying that your identity is not what you do, but I think there’s another component of it that we as human beings, were created to create. We were created to work. Now we were not necessarily created to toil. And in my beliefs as a Christian, that happened after the fall, right? That happened when sin entered the world that we would toil for the rest of the days of our life in this current earth. I don’t believe that’s how it was meant to be. I don’t believe that’s how it will be one day. I do, however, recognize that is how it is today, but that’s not how it was meant to be. We were built to create and cultivate and to rule.
AJV (03:07):
That is, that is what our job is. We were created to be of service to one another and to the planet, right? So this concept of retirement has always been a little foreign to me. I, I, I think I was very fortunate. I, I consider myself very privileged to have been raised by several generations of entrepreneurs. My grandfather worked into his eighties and as soon as he did retire in his eighties, it was a sharp decline in his health. And I, I think it very much had to do with he lost touch with service and serving his company and his team, and his employees and his family. My dad is now in his mid seventies, and I, I hope that he never retires fully. His workload definitely looks different today than it did 20 years ago. He might disagree with that, but I think it’s really important that he has purpose and enjoyment in his work.
AJV (04:03):
And that is the purpose of this email is to, to enjoy what you do so that it doesn’t always feel like work, is that you’re living into what you were created to be and to do and to provide for this world. And I just, I come from an upbringing where I got to see my family of business owners actually contribute to the community and to our team members and to each other, and doing it in a way that was life giving, not life taking. I know not all jobs can be life giving all the time, but I do also believe that that’s a decided choice that we make. We get to make the choice to be excellent at what we’re doing no matter what that job is. And I have had jobs and the hospitality and restaurant industry to you know, pay commission, only pay cold calling, selling tickets, traveling full time to leadership roles and sales management roles, and you know, being paid to speak.
AJV (05:04):
There’s a large variety of roles that I’ve had over the course of time. And it doesn’t matter what your role is. It’s a decision that we all get to make, to go regardless of what I’m doing. I choose to be the best at what I’m doing right now. It’s a decided decision of excellence, of being good at what it is for the sake of giving it your best. Because we can learn something and grow in every season and in every role that we have in our life. Now, I also wanna get back to what I started with is this concept of retirement and where did it come from and how has it snuck into our culture that gives people an out to no longer create and cultivate in the way that we were actually created to do. And so I thought this would be a really interesting history lesson super quickly.
AJV (05:58):
But in the pre-industrial area pre-industrial era, most Americans worked as long as they were physically able. There was no formal retirement. A lot of that was physical labor, right? And so maybe those years were shorter
AJV (06:50):
Depression, and it established a government funded pension to provide social security for older Americans, right? Much of that due to the, you know, time of life that we were in with a great depression and needing more ways to support those in their older age. Not a bad thing. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, that’s a good thing. Then we get into the 1950s and sixties and company pensions became way more common. Not as common today, but very then, but this is where the whole idea of retirement and no longer having full-time, working hours began to really kick in. And retirement was really seen at age 65, right? Then we get into the 1970s and the 1980s that is when 401k started to come on the scene. That wasn’t until the eighties, like that’s when I was born. Like this is not something that has been around for, for a very long time.
AJV (07:47):
And I think this is really important because if you just high level, go back, it was not until the fifties and the sixties that retirement was even a thing, right? That’s not even a full generation ago, right? That’s my dad’s age. My dad was born in 1951, so at the time of him being born, IE that’s why my grandfather worked until he was 80. Retirement wasn’t a thing, right? You worked until you were no longer physically able. And one of the things that has been coming up a lot in our family, and we have aging parents and friends and who have aging parents, and a lot of talk about retirement. And here’s the thing that I just wanted to share with you guys in a long about way to be honest, is find something that you can do for the rest of your life.
AJV (08:37):
Find a way to be in service to a group of people for the rest of your life. And retiring from a, for a formal nine to five is one thing, but retiring in general so that you can golf and play video games that, that, that’s not being of service. That’s, that’s not the goal of retirement. The goal is not to work your whole life and not give back. The goal is to work until you can find more time to give back to the younger people, and to develop the next generation, and to create new leaders and to use your skills and experience to educate and inform and help develop an entirely new generation of people who will come after you. I find it odd that our most experienced workers, leaders, employees, the ones who are retiring, are the people we have the most to learn from.
AJV (09:27):
They’ve seen it all. They’ve been around the block. They’ve been through different economies and market conditions and recessions and depressions and life and death and marriage and babies. And they, they have so much to give. These are not the people we want leaving our workforce. Y’all. these are wildly experienced and important people in our job force. This is an very important part of our workforce. Now, the working hours look different. Can they look different? Should they work different? Sure. Those are all things that are good and fine. I’m just encouraging you to not work for retirement, but find a work that you can do for the rest of your life so that you are never taken outta service.
Ep 568: Building Better Wealth with Caleb Guilliams
AJV (00:00):
AJV (00:56):
So I invited my friend Caleb, onto the show to talk about money today because I think he’s got a really unique perspective, a young, fresh perspective on something that I would say most of us are looking for the gray hairs in the industry to learn about financial peace and financial wisdom. And Caleb is not that in fact, let me give you a little bit of his background. Caleb Williams is the founder of Better Wealth, and not only is he the founder of that he founded it at 21, the Age of 21, right? So, again, when I say Young, fresh Perspective, he’s not 21 today, but he started it at a really young age, and I think that’s a really important component of the conversation of how do we look at it in a new and fresh way, which is what you’re gonna get today. He’s also the author of the bestselling Bug, the And Asset. He hosts the Better Wealth Podcast and The Better Wealth YouTube channel. He also speaks to thousands around the world on how they can be more efficient with money and have more intentionality in doing it. So, Caleb, welcome to the show.
CG (02:07):
Hey, it is a pleasure to be on here, and I’m just so grateful to spend these next couple minutes with you and your audience, and we’re gonna have a lot of fun today.
AJV (02:15):
It’s gonna be great. And I have to tell you too, it’s like, as you, you know, we’re really big on titles at Brand Builders Group and Better Wealth is such a great title, right? One of the things we talk about all the time is, does it pass the I Want test and back to this importance of this universally applicable episode of, I think we all want better wealth, not always more wealth, but better wealth. And that’s it. The huge, honestly, it was one of the key foundations of why I wanted you to come on the show today is, you know, I think, I think sometimes we think about wealth and money as how do I get more of it? Yeah. And I’d love to kind of reframe some of that today for our audience, audience. But before we do that, I do wanna help everyone get to know you just a little bit. And as I mentioned you got into the financial world at a really young age, then you founded Better Wealth at 21. Yep. How, how, how did you do that?
CG (03:13):
I’ll, I’ll, I’ll make this quick, I’ll make this quick, but I, I think context is key. So I’m the oldest of six kids, grew up in central Wisconsin. My dad’s a PhD molecular biologist. My mom was a nurse. Talk about opposites of attract. My dad has no friends, very smart. My mom loves people. I, and she’s also smart, but in her own way. And I grew up homeschooled and, and, you know, grew up dyslexic and like, wasn’t sure what I was gonna do, but I was always fascinated around business and money. I got a job at a, at a chicken farm when I’m 15 years old, I apologize to all the vegans. So if you’re a vegan and you get offended, get off right now. But I, I literally gutted chickens. Oh my. And I made a dollar for every chicken that I processed.
CG (03:56):
And 15-year-old Caleb was given two books, good To Great by Jim Collins and The Richest Man in Babylon. Hmm. And those two books, especially being someone that reading was really tough. I forced myself to be a student of those concepts. One of the books is about level, level five leadership and like this idea of like, rallying people. And if you get the right people on the bus, you’ll be able to go to new heights. And at 15 years old, I’m like, I love this. And then the Richest Man in Babylon is like a parables of how anyone can be wealthy. And just going back to the basics of you gotta pay yourself first and all that good stuff. And so I remember, you know, being 15 years old and being like, I wanna do something in the money space, which led me to get a job at a bank when I was 17 years old.
CG (04:37):
Now, one thing you gotta know about me is I look young today, but if you’re not watching on YouTube, like I have kind of what you could maybe call a beard. But you know, when I was 17 years old, I’m the oldest of six kids. My younger sister was taller than me and looked way older than me. And, and again, like I looked like I was 12 or 13. So working at, at a bank was, had its own challenges to begin with. But what I did and what I committed to, and maybe as the first writer downer, is like I wanted to defer on money and learn as much as possible. And working at a community bank I became an HR nightmare because I would sit in on meetings, they gave the 17-year-old the, the ability to open the bank and close the bank.
CG (05:15):
‘Cause I would, after clocking out, I would just stick around and work and go to networking events. I would talk to the CEO of the bank about how we could be more profitable. And so I was definitely, I took that opportunity and ran with it and learned a ton about money. At the age of 18, I got to work in our investment department. And then at 19 years old, the person I was running our inve investment department at Community First Bank took, took another job. At 19 years old, I became the youngest person to step into the corner office and to many people’s horror
CG (05:58):
And people, for better or worse, saw me grow up at this bank. And they knew that maybe I wasn’t the smartest kid, but I would work my butt off to serve them. And so there’s a lot more to unpack. Stephen Covey, I’ve been indirectly impacted by him so much, made a mission statement, which simply read to help people see and reach their highest potential. I realize that money is not the number one reason why people get divorced. It’s up there though. But it is, it is the thing that if you don’t master, if you don’t understand it is, it’s a tool. And most people are using the tool not properly, and they’re living to a fraction of what their God-given potential is. And I think that’s a shame. And so it was like, I wanna do everything that I can to help people with that.
CG (06:39):
And so through that journey, learned from a ton of people. A big blessing in disguise was I didn’t have a direct mentor. So I didn’t learn like, maybe like an average way to think about money. I really got to stretch and be stretched. And through that process, I realized that I’m gonna die someday.
CG (07:22):
And people thought I was crazy. It’s like, you look like you’re 15 years old who’s gonna meet with you on the internet. And ignorance is bliss. And now we are, we’re, we have clients in all 50 states, and we have coaches in every time zone. We, we do insurance, we do invest, we have an investment arm, we do tax planning, and we have a fractional family office arm that helps six and seven figure entrepreneurs be more efficient with their money. And that’s the story in a nutshell. And there’s a lot of lessons that we’ve learned. We can talk about anything that you want, but there’s a lot of lessons. I currently now live in Nashville, Tennessee, and so grateful to be neighbors with you.
AJV (07:55):
You know, I love that story for so many different reasons, but what I love it most is it just feels like you found your calling in life at a really exceptionally young age, which gives you such an amazing opportunity to make a profound impact on the space that you’ve decided to be in. That’s, that, that’s like such a, that’s such a gift, right? Yeah. And I also love that you’ve done some really hard sucky jobs. Like, I don’t know, gutting chickens for a dollar chicken might be the worst job of all time. It might, it might be. I
CG (08:34):
Loved it. That’s the weird thing. I loved it. And I would go back to it tomorrow if I had to because it, I have so many memories, and actually some of the ways I think about money are going back to those jobs of like trying to be efficient. Yeah. And realizing that some of those universal principles are, are how we use money. But I, I’m with you. I’m, I’m, I’m not complaining about doing what I’m doing now,
AJV (08:57):
But, but I love, I, I think, and genuinely speaking, I’m a mom of two little boys who are five and seven, and we’re constantly talking about like, how do we ensure that our kids know the value of hard work? And, and I think it’s just so important. So I love that you kind of have that background and history. And then also just like the importance of reading and books and learning and all of the things. There’s so many things I love about your story, but one of the things that you said in there, and this is where I wanna start our conversation today, is you said money is a tool and most people just aren’t using a properly. So I would love to start there, like, what do you mean by money as a tool and how are people using it improperly?
CG (09:42):
Yep. We’re gonna, we’re gonna start with two words. I’m a big framework person and it’s wealth efficiency. And so when I, when I get the opportunity to speak to people, a lot of, a lot of times, you know, having a company called Better Wealth, a lot of people have mental thoughts on what wealth is. Usually when I say wealth you think of net worth being rich, having money in the bank account. And one of the, one of the different reframes that I try to encourage is asking the audience, how do you define wealth? Because if you, if your definition of wealth is foggy or not clear, then how in the world are we supposed to accomplish something that we’re not really clear on? And so the, the story that I used and I ask is, would you trade places with Warren Buffet? Warren Buffet at the time of this recording is worth over a hundred billion dollars.
CG (10:27):
And he’s one of the world’s wealthiest on paper, if we’re gonna use that definition. Men. And yet majority of the people watching and listening to this podcast, do you really think about it, wouldn’t even think about trading places with Warren Buffett because he’s also over 90 years old and not gonna live that much longer. And so there are things in our life that we value potentially more than money in a bank account. And so on a macro level, we get it on a micro level, if you actually believe that you’re disrespecting or, or not being true to that definition of wealth. And so our definition of wealth at Better Wealth is intentional living. You, you cannot be wealthy if you’re not intentional about your life. And the way that I think of Intentional Living is a couple categories. It’s your God-given skill sets. It’s how you use your time, it’s your relationships and how you use your resources.
CG (11:17):
There’s obviously more to that, but at the end of the day, those are like the four categories that we look at. And we, and we really try to identify like, what does an intentional life look like? And, and that’s where we start. And so you can’t be wealthy if you don’t live intentionally. The beautiful thing is it, an intentional living looks different for me than it looks like for you, but my encouragement to you is, is get really clear about like what what brings you a lot of joy in what you get to do. Like, you’re totally right. I have found something that I love. I don’t love all the aspects of my job, but I love the mission that we’re on and that I, I wake up excited and I want that for everybody. And so that, and then the, the, the relationships that you have and how you use your resources and how you use your time, super key.
CG (12:01):
So wealth is really key and, and we wanna make sure that we wanna lean into that intentional life. The second word is efficiency. It’s interesting because efficiency sometimes gets a bad rap. Even your husband who has a, a TED talk, that with five million views uses efficiency. And a lot of times people, sometimes the efficient thing is not what you should do because we are maybe not, not figuring out the right end goal. But the way that I define efficiency is, is something like this. It’s getting to your desired result by removing all the friction. And so to be efficient, you need to get really clear about that desired result. I would agree that if without the desired result, just removing friction to remove friction is, is not gonna help anyone. And that’s what a lot of people look at when it comes to money.
CG (12:45):
You should do this, you should do that. But it’s like, why? And so when we are trying to be efficient, we have to get clear about what we’re going or what our desired result is, and then removing any of the friction that’s getting in the way of that. And so what is the desired result? It’s that tangible, intentional life. And so the example is, I, I live in Nashville, but if I wanna get to California, I’m really clear about where I want to go. I could walk there and it would take me like a long time
CG (13:38):
And let’s eliminate that because the intentional life becomes the standard, becomes the metric that I reverse engineer everything by. And I think that is the first thing that I wanna encourage every, everyone to, to have the freedom to do is don’t let a financial advisor, don’t let me, don’t let someone on TV tell you the most important thing. Get really clear about what that looks like for you. Retirement is not biblical. It’s actually, it’s the definition of retirement is to be taken out of service. I don’t know why retirement’s even a goal for any, I don’t think any of your audience wants to be inspired to like retire someday. And so let’s get that out of our vocabulary. Let’s figure out what we want, like what that God-given calling is for our life. And then let, let’s that be the thing that we’re reverse engineer everything else by, and we can get into some of the other frameworks, but like that is a key deal, is like intentional living and then removing friction so that we can live intentional and making sure that that intentional standard is a thing that trumps cash flow, net worth good debt versus bad debt.
CG (14:36):
All of those are many frameworks, but should elevate your ability to live your one life. Well,
AJV (14:42):
Okay, well first of all, that is the most impactful
AJV (15:31):
So I love that. I love that. I also loved your side comment on retirement. I don’t know if I talk a lot about this on the show, but I know I talk a lot about it in my Instagram stories. But we don’t believe in retirement in our house. Like people say all the time, like, Hey, what’s, what’s the end goal with Brand Builders Group? And I’m like, I don’t know. We don’t have one. Like we don’t, we there is, there’s not some event that we’re working towards. We’re not planning on selling it or we don’t wanna retire. And it’s like until, until the Lord takes me home or my business is my ministry.
CG (16:05):
That’s right.
AJV (16:06):
And I think I, so I love just that, that whole concept of like, okay, first of all, retirement is not the end goal. Yeah. So let’s, let’s reframe that and now let’s start from there. So I love that. So I love that. So I’m curious to hear from you then it’s like it with this concept of wealth efficiency, right? Defining wealth, defining efficiency what is it that you see that is causing friction? Like what are the things that are causing people to not use money properly? Or where is the friction in this wealth concept?
CG (16:41):
Love it. And I’m gonna go through the next framework, which is the, the wealth framework. And stop me at any time. ’cause As you can see, I get really excited about this, but, okay, so now if we understand wealth efficiency, okay, now, now let’s get into like what that actually means. I, I have a problem with people that just stay in the clouds and don’t actually get tactical. And so this is, this is the way from a dyslexic mind, how you can understand this. And hopefully you can draw a picture in your mind as I speak. And so when I am speaking with someone on a whiteboard, I’m drawing a, a, an individual of a stick, a stick figure. And this stick figure represents you. And so we’ve already identified that it’s clear that you should get clear about what you want. If you don’t know where you wanna go, it’s like the Alice in Wonderland at the fork in the road.
CG (17:26):
Any road will get you there. Welcome to America. And, and if you’re Canadian, welcome to Canada
CG (18:10):
And in fact, your number one asset, which is your ability to create, doesn’t even show up on a traditional balance sheet. That’s how messed up that is. And so once you get clear about what, what you want, the next, the next conversation that I’m always looking for is how are you creating this thing called currency or cash? We’ll talk about that in a second. But a lot of times we divorce ourself from like cash from value. And, and you, you can really only create two fundamental things, a service or a product. Those are, and if there’s a third, please, please let me know. But someone can fundamentally create a service or a product. And just because you exist doesn’t make that service or product more or less valuable. We, we, we all know people that do the same thing on paper, but one gets paid a lot more.
CG (18:55):
An iPhone and an Android are not the same, right? So there maybe someone could charge more for one of those products. And so the idea is to get hyper-focused on am I creating the most value and really focusing on that. And what I find is a lot of people ask me, like, Caleb, what should I invest in? Should I do this Roth and other things? And I look at their financial situation, I say you should invest in nothing until you triple your income because you’re, if you wanna look at me with a straight face and say that what you’re making is, is optimized for your, for your situation. And a lot of times that’s, that’s just giving them the permission to quote unquote invest in themselves. But I can’t think of a better investment early on than making sure that you’re, you’re maximizing, this goes to our business owners.
CG (19:38):
If you’re, if you’re in business and you’re not reaching the heights that you know deep down that you can, it may, you may not want to tie up your money in other things until you’re really making sure that your printing machine is able to print out money. I’ll stop there. But then I, I wanna share what you do when you get money, but I find that so many people skip that step. They go, they wanna know where they should invest their money. Should I pay off debt? And all these things, we’ll, we’ll get to in a second, but I’m telling you, majority of the people listening to this probably need to hit pause and figure out ways that they can be more valuable, create more valuable services, or more valuable products to the marketplace. And cash flow or currency will reward value creation.
AJV (20:18):
You know, I love that you said this because we literally had this conversation a couple years ago and it was like, you know, we started Brain Builders Group, what, six years ago? And it was a couple of years ago, and we were, you know, deciding how we wanted to grow it and did we wanna grow it, and what, what, what did we wanna do with the money? And we were actually sitting down with our financial advisor, and this was like, again, like three years ago. And this was the conversation. And at that time, this was rates were still pretty good in a couple of different places and you know, better than they were in the last 12 months. And it was such a fascinating conversation. We were sitting here, we were listening and also doing math in our head mental math, and then we pulled out a calculator and we were looking at each other and we were like, literally the, and if you just think about this in really tactical forms, it’s like the rate of returns on any of the investments that we were talking about were half of our own profit margin.
CG (21:17):
Yeah.
AJV (21:17):
And we were just thinking, why would we put all of our money into these funds that are getting half of the return that we would be getting if we just reinvested into ourselves and reinvested into our people and reinvested into our business? Because our profit margins were double what any of the rate of return turns were even at that time period. And I think it’s a fascinating concept to what you’re saying. It’s like, like how often are financial advisors actually saying, well, hey, let’s talk about your profit margins. Let’s talk about how, how good you are doing versus where should we put your, your money in terms of funds or, you know, the market or whatever. But it was, it is literally what you were just saying. And it’s like, Roy and I recapped after the meeting and we were like, yeah, actually I think that BBG is the best investment that we can invest into right now. So we’re gonna, and it’s almost exactly this conversation you’re having, but realizing you are your number one asset. You are your best investment, and at least you can have some influence and control over what you do versus anything else that’s happening.
CG (22:23):
I I, I even, I’m, I’m writing, I’m writing a lot right now. I’m forcing myself to write some of these concepts down. And I was doing the math around just someone getting a $5,000 raise versus like investing and like breaking down the math and showing, okay, 8% compounded over a period of time, like, awesome. And then just like what a $5,000 raise would look like. And just showing them on paper of like, even if you’re not an entrepreneur watching or listening to this, like just by figuring out a way to make yourself more valuable to the marketplace, which is your employer is just something that I believe every single person going into college, going outta college, we gotta understand how this works. And I think it’s one of the things that we don’t talk enough about, but if, if, if people can be, if people can really maximize and optimize that space in their life, everything gets easier as, you know, making more money, just life gets a lot easier. It, it also covers up for a lot of mistakes that we make on the back end, and we can afford to make, quote, unquote, more mistakes. I say that tongue in cheek because we’ve really are are em, we’re creating emphasis on creating more cash and the person that’s creating more cash in the long run has just more options. And so that’s so yeah, I think you said it perfectly.
AJV (23:36):
No, I love that. And I think that’s a really important just reminder to all of us. It’s like, before you start investing elsewhere, just take a really good hard look at where are you investing in yourself? How are you helping yourself become more valuable? Because that’s, that’s the number one place to start. Awesome. That, that whole concept, I love that. That’s so good. Okay.
CG (23:57):
All right. You’re gonna love this next piece. ’cause I, I think what I’m gonna do is I’m gonna simplify this so dang easy where people will be able to get, ’cause a lot of financial, the financial side gets really complicated and they almost, people wanna make it complicated so that you trust advisors, you know,
CG (24:37):
Okay? Hear me out here. It can either be consumed or it can be saved, can be consumed. So I, I already know the Christians that are listening to this. Well, what about tithing? And I’ll, I’ll get to that. Okay. When you make money, there’s only two categories that can go consumption, which I’ll, I’ll talk about lifestyle. Think of lifestyle or saving, which is a verb to hopefully invest and multiply. Okay, we’re gonna talk about consumption first. When I make money, my dollar’s only capable of doing one of two things. Lifestyle or saving. Let’s talk about lifestyle. Lifestyle could look like taxes. Well, Caleb, I don’t like, taxes doesn’t affect my lifestyle. Well, if you don’t pay your taxes, you’re going jail. So taxes is a cost of living your life. It’s just the cost of living your life. Jail free paying debt is a, is a form.
CG (25:27):
Your, your debt service, your, that’s part of lifestyle. Your coffees, your intentional decisions that you make, intentional or unintentional. That’s the cost of living your life. And so really the three categories are spending debt and taxes are like the three categories we could get. We could get a bunch more nuance, but at the end of the day, the hacks here are track your money. It’s amazing when you start being intentional about like, why am I spending money and just like tracking it and then start asking the question like, am I actually spending the money on like what I care about? And what a lot of times we’ll find is we’re spending money to impress people for maybe some trauma re like, as a kid, like we can get really deep here, but a lot of times we’re spending money on things that aren’t actually helping us live more intentionally, but doing it for other reasons.
CG (26:21):
And so when we track that money, we just start having just better conversations. One of the best things that we do for clients is just help them track their money, because most people won’t do it. But if you’re, like, if you get a spending report every single month it could be painful, but it’s, it’s hard to hide when you start categorizing where your money’s going. Second thing is taxes. Nine outta 10 business owners are overpaying on their taxes. And I don’t know about you, but I want to legally pay as little tax as possible. I’m all about paying the government, but I’m all about paying the government as little as possible. And so without getting super in depth, there’s, there’s, you know, deductions, credits, things like depreciation, different tax strategies that you can go down. For any of your audience that reaches out to me, I can, we have a one page tax checklist with five categories. And within those categories, there’s a bunch of areas like in deductions and credits that you can take to your CPA and make sure that you have this checklist to see if there’s areas that you can save more money. That alone AJ is fun because on average a business owner is able to save 20 to $30,000 with that checklist just by taking it to their CPA and, and maybe asking certain questions or doing certain things that help you pay less in taxes. So that’s fun. Let’s pause right there. The
AJV (27:39):
Last, I wanna make sure that people hear this right, there is a one page checklist that Caleb is happy to give to you. And so if you wanna get that, then Caleb tell them where they should DM you.
CG (27:52):
You can, you can email me at [email protected] or go on to my Instagram at Caleb Williams and the, just trust the last name. Hopefully it’ll be in the title of this, of this podcast. I’ll put it on the, and if, yeah, it’ll be in the show notes. And so just if you reach out, I’d be more than happy to give you that. And we have a wealth efficiency packet, which is every framework that I’m talking about, whether it’s debt and other investments, like all these, I’ll give you the whole packet just to help you be more efficient, remove friction to get to your desired result. So yeah, we
AJV (28:24):
Did kind of recap that, right? Taxes, we, we all believe pay your fair share and not 1 cent more. So That’s right. How do you tighten that up?
CG (28:33):
Yeah, I, the, I I should go on a rampage here, but one of my good friends, Tom Wheelwright, who’s the CPA for Robert Kiyosaki, wrote the book Tax Free Wealth. He has a, a perfect analogy of this. He’s like the tax code, which is thousands and thousands and thousands and thousands of pages long. It’s like two or three pages of like what you owe. And then the rest is like a treasure map of finding incentives on how to not pay that. And so it’s just, it’s one of those things where you, you wanna start becoming treasure hunters and figuring out, Hey, how can I partner with the government essentially and create more value for the government? And oh, by the way, if I create more value for the government, they’ll, I’ll pay less. And so it’s just really, really cool and incentives work.
CG (29:13):
So, and then the, then the last thing when it comes to consumption is looking at debt. I have a, I have a non Dave Ramsey approach to debt. But I, I think about it this way is, I think when we’re, when we’re talking about debt, we really need to separate it debt and what you’re doing. A lot of times people marry those things together, but debt is just a tool in itself, and a lot of times it, it can be an enabler to make you make bad decisions. So I just wanna acknowledge that if I was talking to someone that was really pro Dave Ramsey, I agree personally debt can enable bad decisions. But when I’m looking at just for my personal life, I’m, I’m asking two questions. Should you buy these things? And then if I answer yes, then the next question is, what’s the best way to purchase those things?
CG (29:58):
And so for me, I look at cash flow and I just go to, if I’m already gonna determine to buy this home or this car, I don’t ever want debt to be an enabler. I don’t wanna buy this car because I can get it with debt. I wanna make the decision. And that that’s a, maybe a different podcast in itself because it’s like, how can you know what to afford? But once you make that decision, then I go back to what’s the best way to purchase that thing? And you can either use debt or use cash. And by the way, cash on the, on the top of your dollar bills says federal reserve note. So if you really wanna go down the rabbit hole, like cash itself is a form of debt because once we went off the gold current standard, every, all the, the, the dollar bills are just a form of debt.
CG (30:42):
So I get less emotional about whether I’m using a mortgage or not. And, and I just look at from a cashflow perspective, what gives me more control, what allows me to have greater cashflow that I can save and what limits risk? And in a lot of cases actually a 30 year mortgage and debt can, can actually be that thing that checks a box for a lot of people. Again, I I maybe I’m, hopefully I’m not confusing people more in saying that. I just wanna give you permission when you look at the lens through efficiency versus being debt free or not, it just allows us to be like, okay, what gives us more control? What allows us to be more efficient? Sometimes debt is that tool that we use on the saving side and the consumption side, but sometimes you can have toxic debt that’s just killing you, and you need to eliminate that, and that will free up a ton of cash flow in itself. So cashflow is what we really optimize for, or not, not something arbitrary like being debt free or not.
AJV (31:38):
Yeah, I know. I love that. And I think that’s, again, it’s using debt with guardrails, right? Yeah. And it’s like,
CG (31:44):
It’s using it as a tool.
AJV (31:45):
Yeah. It’s like making sure it’s a tool and you’re not flying off the cliff, right? And I think that’s true, you know, sometimes with cash too, it’s like, you know, it’s like, you know, sometimes if you’re just all cash, right? If everyone, if you know, it’s like we were all just hiding a bunch of cash and, you know, boxes under our beds. It’s like, is that really the best utilization of that? Right? So you can kind of go both ways, but I love that. So these consumption things, taxes, debt spending. What about saving?
CG (32:12):
All right, so, so, okay, so your dollar can only do one of one of two things. It can either be consumed and part of consumption is tithing, by the way, because that is the choice that you’re living your life. So if I decide I’m going to ti 10% in a way, I am voluntarily choosing a 10% tax as a part of my rich life, that’s just like, just something I want to be upfront with. But that’s a, that’s a lifestyle decision. Okay? So, so the beautiful thing is if you, if you make money and I figure out, I only need to know one thing, I either need to know how much you save or how much you spend, and I can determine, I can essentially model out your entire financial life. So if you make a hundred thousand dollars a year and you save 10,000, what are, what’s your lifestyle?
CG (32:56):
$90,000. We don’t have to do a whole budget to figure that out. It’s really quick. So that’s what, that’s a a life hack because part of that we can model out and say, okay, $90,000 today, this thing called inflation. Like what, in 30 years, what do you need to be having coming in to just maintain your current lifestyle? So that’s, that’s something that’s valuable. And understanding that your money’s only capable of doing two things, but okay, if we want to save money, going back to the richest man in Babylon, pay yourself first. Pay yourself first. There’s, there’s something really, really incredible about forcing yourself to, to save money. Saving is a verb. And so a lot of times a huge focus of ours is helping people be more efficient and then taking those inefficiencies from lifestyle and transferring them into savings category because majority of people are saving a fraction of what they need to.
CG (33:45):
But saving is, is a verb. And then what are we saving for? And, and we’re saving for investing and investing is a, is a multiplier effect. And one of the things that we, we try to determine is a lot of times people say like, what should I invest in? Should I invest in real estate? Should I invest in stock? Should I invest in myself? Should I invest in the stock market? And it, and there’s no right or wrong to this I wish I could tell you, like, do this thing, but it really comes down to everyone’s individual, you know, goals. And some people come to us and they, they realize like, I need to reinvest in my business. And so they, they’re in business, like for your example is like, that is helping me live more intentionally and oh, by the way, is gonna outperform any real estate or stock portfolio that I’m doing.
CG (34:33):
We have clients that are day traders, they really understand the stock market. Amazing. We have people that love real estate. Amazing. So it’s really identifying going deeper and saying, okay, what is this asset? It not only is gonna help me be more intentional, but it’s gonna create more cash flow. What’s the best way to be able to do that? And I’m not a fan of retirement, but I do think we need to be planning towards areas where our, our assets, whether it’s our business, whether it’s our stock portfolio, real estate portfolio, is creating enough cash that gives us the ability to do really whatever we want. Some people call this financial independence, some people call this financial freedom. But it, it’s just this idea of like, I have a system set up where I am able to live on my terms and to be able to make choices the way that I wanna make them, and I don’t necessarily have to go to work.
CG (35:24):
So that would look like in a business, having an operator do your thing. Or that could, and, but that’s ultimately you making the choice to continue to live intentionally, which a lot of our friends, aj, continue to work because work, they don’t work for money. They literally, literally are working because that’s what their God-given purposes for. And so all that to say, the saving is a verb to invest what you invest in. You can go through a process called investor DNA, which is something that I didn’t necessarily come up with, but it’s the idea of like, we’re all built a little different. And so instead of saying, is this good or bad, look at you and figure out where should I be spending my time and money? And then that will start highlighting where you should focus on. And then the last thing in this whole framework is risk, a risk management umbrella.
CG (36:09):
We could have, we could be crushing it, making money. We could be being super efficient in how we spend our money. We could be saving a ton, but if something medically happens or if something like a hurricane or a tornado comes and, and wipes out our business or on our, or our home and we don’t have it properly insured or having special risk management, like everything could be wiped out. And so as unsexy as it sounds like, you really do need to make sure that you are creating a, a moat and an umbrella around the life that you’re, that you’re living. And, and again, I don’t necessarily need to go into any more than that other than the checklist. I can give you a checklist to make sure that whenever you’re meeting with someone to help you, you, you can go through and make sure that you have all the risk management areas in your life checked. And, and then we’re, we’re cooking with gas. When you’re, when you understand that you’re your greatest asset, you really get clear about how you create money. Understand, once you create money, your dollars are only capable of doing two things. We can focus on optimizing or we can focus on multiplying. And then at the end of the day make sure that you’re creating a, a, a moat, a fence on umbrella around what you’re doing. So to, so that not one disaster can wipe it all out.
AJV (37:25):
This is so good, and I’m taking so many notes,
CG (37:56):
Yep. I, so, so any
AJV (38:00):
Personal recommendations?
CG (38:01):
Yeah. Okay. So the answer is you can actually, you, I could actually tell your audience exactly what they should be setting aside if I got, if I figured out how much money they’re making, how much money they’re spending, and then we could model out their situation. And not to depress anybody, but most people, 95% of people that model that are there, it doesn’t work. And so that it, it makes them realize like, oh, I either need to save more or spend less. So that’s just something that like, we can scientifically show what that in doing, hundreds and thousands of those models shows around 20 to 30%. That might sound extreme. Oh yeah. I, I I’m telling you, I’m not necessarily your biggest fan by saying like, you should save 20 to 30%, but I’m telling you, majority of people need to save 20 to 30% if they want to maintain their lifestyle.
CG (38:55):
And so a lot of times you, you can’t just strive harder. A lot of times people try to like, I need to just try harder. And that doesn’t work in most cases. And you, you, that’s where, again, not to, to pitch our business, but that’s where working with somebody that can be unemotional about your situation and help you free up cash and then also help you create a, a roadmap to say, okay, what does the next five to 10 years look like? And as we’re starting to make more money, let’s not spend dollar for dollar of what we make. Like, shocker. But there’s like anyone that’s listening or watching, and you are a value creator, there’s so much hope for you. You just wanna make sure that you could be your greatest asset, but you could also be your greatest liability. Most of the time it goes hand in hand. And so if you can get out of your own way 20, 20 to 30%, it should be the target. And it’s very doable if if you can get some of those pieces all working together.
AJV (39:45):
Yeah, and it’s interesting if you just sit here and do some, you know, personal calculations it’s like, let’s just say it’s like, yeah, the target is like, you really do need to be setting aside 30% of every dollar that comes in. And let’s just hypothetically say that tithing is something that you commit to. And even if you know, you’re not, you know, you know, doing that to the church, but maybe it’s like, Hey, I wanna give it to charitable causes or, you know, things I believe in, let’s just call it 30% savings, 10% tithing or charitable givings. Right? That’s 40% right there. And then assuming you are making over a hundred thousand, regardless if you’re an entrepreneur or in an, an employee job where you’ve got a salary, right? Let’s just call it’s a good healthy amount would be 30% in taxes. That means you’ve got to live on 30% of what you have coming in the door just there.
CG (40:38):
And yeah, it’s a, it’s, yeah, it’s a good, it’s a good framework to start at. And I, I don’t want that to be depressing for people to hear. And 30%, while it could be the target doesn’t mean you have to do that overnight, right? But it, it ideally for the people that are financially free, they are saving and investing in their unique ability. And, and it’s one of those things where they’re able to crush and it’s usually people that are able to save at least more than 20% of what they make are the people that can get on that road. And we’ve just seen a lot of success in that.
AJV (41:14):
Yeah. And I think that’s good. And it’s like as, and I don’t think it’s depressing as much as it should be a reflection moment of I wonder what I’m actually doing. Right? If you’re not sitting there thinking, huh, I wonder if I’m spending more than 30%. And I would assume that most people
CG (41:45):
Yeah. And, and just so you know, like that would just be a friction area. You don’t need to remove all the friction overnight. But the beautiful thing is if most people that come to us have friction all over the place, and what we try to do is, like, for example, taxes is a good example. If you’re overpaying on taxes and we free up some of that money, you’re already used to that lifestyle of paying the government. Why can’t we just pay you the difference? So it’s those kind of things that are like I, I don’t wanna make sound saving 30% sound easy. It’s not, but it’s not as painful as it might sound because you might be way over efficient. And this is where I’ll give Dave Ramsey his flowers. A lot of people are enabling themselves with that to buy things that they shouldn’t buy.
CG (42:27):
And sometimes the conversation needs to be, I should not be driving a hundred thousand dollars car, or I should not be living in this type of house. And oh, by the way, debt was an enabler. And that’s where, in a way, I 100% agree with what Dave Ramsey and the Ramsey court company teaches. Because majority of people, if you look at statistics, are over consuming. And that is made possible because of credit cards, because of debt. And so it’s not a cut and dry, black and white, but a lot of times we just need to wake up and say, especially if you’re listening to this or watching this and have something that God’s put on your heart to like go out and do and you have a mission that’s bigger than yourself. You, you have to realize that you could be the greatest liability to get that gets in your way. And that liability could be your lifestyle. So I don’t wanna sound like rice and beans, but sometimes math will just tell us like, what you’re doing is not gonna compound. Well, yeah.
AJV (43:22):
But I think that’s wise, and I think like for so many things in life, awareness is the first step, right? Awareness is the first step. Now I do have, I have a another quick personal question for you kind of on this, you know, concept of saving investing. Now this is this does not have to be formal, but since so many people are talking about it, I am curious to hear what’s your take on cryptocurrency, bitcoin? What’s your stance on that?
CG (43:54):
I, I ha have 5% of my investment portfolio, majority of my portfolios in, in our businesses and other businesses that I’m acquiring. I think crypto is not something that I am going like head over heels for, but I think there’s interesting, there’s, there’s interesting arguments to be made about it. And I, I think of it as a hedge to the American dollar and the hedge to maybe, maybe the stock market. I say that it’s a lot more volatile, but there’s some pe sometimes I talk to people that are like, the American dollar’s going away and we’re going all crypto. And, and, and my caution is this is how I, I think through things, if we did something like that, there’s gonna be a t it’s talk about a major shakeup. And so the thing that I always do is like, okay, if that happens, if over 90% of people in the population are gonna be like on their heels, there’s a really good chance that, like, I don’t ever wanna make like a decision based on fear.
CG (44:59):
And I find that a lot of people are going to crypto because of a fomo, like a fear of missing out. And I would not do that. But I do believe that that technology of blockchain is going to be something that is gonna continue to be more valuable. And so I’m giving you like a very political answer. I am keeping my eyes on it, but I’m not, I have less than 5% of my portfolio in it. And I would heavily caution you not to go all in on any one thing maybe other than your value yourself, making yourself more valuable. But I’ve, I’ve seen a lot of people lose a ton of money on, on crypto, and they’re, they’re, it’s really greed that clouded their judgment.
AJV (45:42):
No, I think that the good wise discerning statement around crypto, and I ask because I do think that, you know, in, as we have, you know, kind of just come out of an election season, there’s lots of talks of, you know the economy and market and the value of the dollar and exchange of presidents, which will be coming next year. So I think it’s always good to have some, you know,
AJV (46:33):
And so we’ve spent me personally a lot of time reading and listening, trying to understand the foundation of it, where it came from, how it was created, the future of it, the trends of it, the history of it. And you know what, that’s a commitment, right? That’s a learning commitment. And that, that’s our personal stance is I cannot give my money to something that I do not have my head wrapped around. And so we took a, a long sweet time to go, okay, now we have a little bit more of a better understanding, so we feel more comfortable doing it. But I will tell you, like back to investing in yourself, it’s like that was like, that was like, I was like, I gotta invest in myself and my own awareness and my own knowledge of what I’m investing in before I give my money to it. That’s
CG (47:20):
Right. That’s right. And yeah, and, and you also mentioned it’s like there gets, you get to a place where your dollar reinvesting in your business is not the right answer. And profit margin is what you look at. And so at the end of the day, there, there will get to a point where you’re crushing it in business and you don’t necessarily, you might not even need more money to make more like, so you’re getting to a place where your business is mature and then there’s so much wisdom in diversifying and, but you just wanna make sure that di you’re not diversifying your ability to make an impact and, and make money. And a lot of people AJ, are doing investing too early. Yeah. Like they, if you’re, if you’re asking me like, where you should put $5,000 a year, you’re probably investing too early. Mm.
CG (48:04):
Like, you’re probably need to go back to the drawing board and say, how, how can I have $50,000 a year to invest? And again, I say that outta love, but like that is the number one hack if I could give you anything, is like majority of people are, have the ability to create so much more value than what, what they’re showing up on paper right now. And so look as yourself as that asset and figure out ways that you can generate more value and like literally everything else, your ability to give, your ability to live your dream life, your ability to save 30% or more, all will get a lot easier when you, when you are optimizing and maximizing your ability to show up.
AJV (48:41):
That’s so good. And there’s so much wisdom in this conversation. And there’s honestly, there’s just so many like good reminders of not even just some of the, the more tactical frameworks and understanding of money, but also just how we view money in comparison to ourselves and why we’re spending money. Are you tracking money? Do we even know, right? And I think those are some of the things that, you know, as we approach kind of the end of year when this podcast is being released and as many of us are, you know, emotionally and mentally preparing for a new year it’s just a such a great time to have these conversations of going whatever you’ve done, you don’t have to do moving forward. Right? You can make a change at any, any time to reevaluate how you look at money, how you spend money, how you save money, how you invest money.
AJV (49:30):
And this is just kind of like a kickstart conversation that I would encourage everyone to lean into. And I would also encourage you to take him up, take Caleb up on getting those checklists. Like, if you’re like, I have no idea, well, great. That’s why we have interviews like this. This is why you come to podcasts like this. So take him up on grabbing those checklists, DM him, send him an email, both of which I will put in the show notes and make some, you know, minor changes to change the way that, you know, you’re reacting and you know, your relationship to money as we approach the new year. Caleb, such a great interview. So much wisdom. So many good golden nuggets. Love this so much. One last quick question for you, and then I will let you go. For everyone who is listening, if there was one thing that you would say, out of all the research, all the books, all the time, time in the bank, time, working with people, time in my own, you know, finances, if there was one thing, if you could look over, look back over everything that you’ve learned, what would you say is the number one most significant thing that you have learned about money?
CG (50:49):
I, I think the more I learned about money, the more I realize that it, it, it’s all, it’s all meaningless. And to really, I lean into what does your one life look like? I have a sign behind me that says one life. And it’s like a constant reminder that our life is, it’s, we’re a walking miracle. If you start realizing the odds of just being born and then like being, like listening to this, if you’re listening to this, you’re one of the world’s already wealthiest people. And so like really identifying that and realizing it would be a shame to spend your entire life chasing something that doesn’t have any meaning and money in itself. If you look at just paper currency, there’s no meaning in paper currency unless you give it. And so the big takeaway is like, live a life that gives meaning and then everything else will, will follow. And hopefully I didn’t just kill credibility of the entire, but I just like, I love this stuff, but I, I, the more I, the more I learn, it’s, I realize that we elevate all of these money conversations maybe more than the real conversation, which is how should I live my one life and living it with zero regrets and living it for a greater purpose?
AJV (52:02):
Hmm. No, and I think that’s actually the perfect answer. And I hope what everyone hears in that is from someone who has spent his entire professional career learning and teaching money, that at the end of the day, money is not what it’s all about. And it shouldn’t be what we’re all about, right? But back to where you started, money is a tool to learn how to use the tool. All right. Don’t let the tool use you, Caleb. So good. Y’all, thank you for sticking around. And don’t forget the recap episode will be coming up next. Thank you guys so much. We will see you next time on the Influential Personal Brand. I’ll see you later.
Ep 565: My Favorite Books from Last Year That You Need to Read This Year | AJ Vaden Episode Recap
AJV (00:01):
Hello and Happy New Year. We are in 2025. I don’t know exactly when you are listening to this, but this is being recorded in Q1 of 2025. And a part of what I wanted to do to help start the new year is share my top personal five most influential books that I read in 2024. And I did a full bulk recap episode, if you wanna go listen to this on the influential personal Brand podcast. But this is gonna be like a five minute Cliff notes version of what was the book, who was the author, and what was my favorite quote from the book, right? I did like a full 40 minute solo episode on why these books and why they were selected as the most influential books that I read in 2024. But today, what we’re gonna do to help start the new year, is to give you five of what I think are some of the most powerful books that you can read this year.
AJV (01:06):
And I’m gonna share the book, the author, and the most significant and impactful quote that I pulled out of the book after finishing it. So this will be short and sweet, but if you’re looking for a good new read or a good old read to put on your queue for 2025, then this is a very awesome list of five. I feel like life changing, business changing books that should be on every person’s read list. And if you’ve read them before, like I had for some of these, they need to be on your reread list. So here we go. First one, what got you Here won’t get You There by Marshall Goldsmith. And here was the pullout quote that I picked. No one changes by learning things they change by doing the things they’ve learned. And I feel like if we just take it up a level this entire book is about how to be better, how to be better as a person how to be better as a communicator as a leader.
AJV (02:11):
But it’s how to be better. And realizing that many of us find success by accident
AJV (03:12):
So that was pick number one. Pick number two was Take the Stairs by Rory Vaden. I know it’s a bias pick, but I had not read this book in 10 years, and I was so reminded of why this is a timeless should read every few years book for me and for you, right? So take the Terrace by Rory Vaden. This is not one of his pullout quotes that he would ever share, but this is what I took from this book. And this particular read, frustration happens in the absence of perspective, frustration happens in the absence of perspective. Now, this entire book is learning what makes you successful in life, right? It’s, it’s all about the things that you can do to be successful in life. And one of the things that I find is that perspective is one of the most important things that you need to be successful in life.
AJV (04:07):
It’s a perspective of do I have enough or is it never enough? Is it a perspective of my glass is half full or my glass is half empty, right? This is, this is a great reread for me about remembering that I get frustrated when I forget to look at how far I’ve come. I forget to be grateful for the people around me and for the gifts in my life. And if I can focus on the good, then the frustration seems to dissipate. And so that was why it was my pick is this, it’s an overall mindset. Reshift re not that re reset book a reshift of making sure that I start this new year. That you start this new year with a glass half full mentality because there is so much good. Yes, there’s hard, but there’s so much good. So that was a perspective shift book of why I recommended this one.
AJV (05:04):
The third one was a personal pick. It’s a Sacred Marriage by Gary Thomas. And my pullout quote from this book was, A good Marriage is not something you find, but something you work for, right? A lot of the books that I read are business or professional. But every so often, probably every couple months, I pick a really deeply personal one. And sacred Marriage is single handedly the best book on marriage I’ve ever read. I think every single person who is married or who’s about to be married, it should be a prerequisite for your relationship. But this was just a great reminder. To me it’s like great marriages, good marriages don’t just happen. They happen to have two people who are willing to work for it. And yes, it is work, and that’s okay. We don’t have to be afraid of hard work in any area of our life.
AJV (05:55):
Great rewards come from hard work. Like, think about it, it’s like, do you feel the best after you just had like a, I think about this all the time. Like, I feel so good after like a really hard workout, right? And it’s like, it’s like this hurt. So good feeling of like, man, like I could do that. Like, my goodness. Like look what I accomplished. The same thing happens in, in any victory, right? The harder it is, the sweeter it becomes. And I think marriage is a lot like that. Fourth book is the Go-Giver by Bob Berg, and here was my pullout quote, greatness is tied to service and anyone can be great because anyone can serve. And I love the Go-Giver because it is a book about the heart of service. It’s about how many people can you help versus how much money can you make.
AJV (06:49):
And the more people you can help, the more people you can impact, the more income you will have. But it’s a byproduct of loving people, well, serving people well and focusing on people not dollars, right? And so that was my, I guess, business motivation. I love it because it’s in that very story like setting. And I just, I think those are simple, easy reads that illustrate really important parts. And this particular book is a very easy audio read, 90 minutes. But one of those that it’s a complete shift of are you focused on people or are you focused on yourself? And highly recommend it. It’s one of those two that it is so short and it is so good. It could be a every year read. And then my last pick for 2024, these were, these were my five highlights of 2024 I’m recommending to you was Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guera.
AJV (07:46):
And my pullout quote from him is one that I have said probably 1000 times since I read this book, which is, nobody knows what they’re doing until they do it, right? I hear so often in personal and professional settings like, well, I’ve just never done that before. Well, great, go learn how to do it. I actually had this conversation this morning with a team member and they’re like, well, you’re just gonna have to walk me through it. I’ve never done it before. And I’m like, well, guess what? I’ve never done it either. So we’re just gonna have to figure it out. And that’s the truth about so many things in business. Nobody knows what they’re doing until they do it right. It’s the first time for so many people that are successful. It’s like, you know, it’s like you’ve never been a seven figure entrepreneur before until you’ve done it. It’s like you don’t know what to do. Or like, you know, it’s like nobody knows what they’re doing until they’ve done it. And that’s okay. That’s called learning. That’s called growth. But this whole idea of like, you have to know what you’re doing to go and do it. Like, if you really think about it, it’s like, how would you know what you’re doing until you actually did it? Like it, it actually doesn’t even make sense if you just sit there and have like a
AJV (08:54):
Very philosophical conversation of, of course you don’t know how to do it. You’ve never done it before and you won’t know how to do it until you go do it. You can only read so much and watch so much and shadow so much and listen so much. There’s only so much of that that you can actually learn. The best and fastest way to learn anything is to go and do it. It’s to stop the studying and just go do the thing. Now that’s different if you know, like you’re a brain surgeon, and I’m not saying that for everything, but in general business, it’s like, just go do it. You learn by doing it. Don’t be afraid to just put it out there and learn as you go. And I think that was, oh my gosh, probably the most repeated thing that I’ve said this year is like, well, nobody knows what they’re doing until they do it.
AJV (09:34):
Of course, you don’t know what you’re doing. That doesn’t mean you don’t do it. Right? And then I’m also gonna share a bonus quote from Will from this book, unreasonable Hospitality, because I think it’s gonna be like, one of my personal mantras in my family is make it cool to care. It’s cool to care like that should be on a t-shirt will you need bumper stickers and t-shirts. Make it cool to care, care about people, care about your team, care about your colleagues, care about your clients. Care about the stranger on the street. Care about the person who’s having a hard day care about the person who can’t pay for their coffee in front of you. Like care about people. Like if we just did that, like if it was our job to make caring, cool, think about how things would be different. Like think about how your business would be different.
AJV (10:22):
Like what if you said every single day, it’s like, how can I care for someone today? How many people can I care for today? And how can I make it the cool thing to do so that everyone that comes after me does it too? Right? Coolness is contagious. And if we can make caring, cool, then that makes caring contagious, right? So make it cool to care. Those are my five books, five authors, five pullout quotes from my favorite books that I read in 2024. Grab these, check them out and put ’em on your list for 2025.
Ep 564: My Most Influential Books from 2024 with AJ Vaden
AJV (00:01):
So for the last three years, one of the personal goals or commitments that I have made to myself was to read two books every month of the year. And I initially made that goal so that I had some accountability and deadlines. I’m a a highly deadline oriented person but one of the things that I really wanted to do is go, Hey, if I have extra time, I wanna be filling my mind with things that challenge me, grow me, make me think, make me better, versus potentially getting sucked into watching tv. I’m not saying that’s bad, I’m just saying it’s good to limit it. But I really wanted to kind of set these things of going like, Hey, if I have the time, this is what I wanna be doing. So 2024 was my third year doing this the first year I said, let’s, let’s just commit to reading one book a month.
AJV (00:54):
And then in 2023, I did two books a month. And then 2024, I did two books a month. And one of the things that I have found is at the end of the year, I do a reflection of, of all the books, 24 books that I read last year plus the Bible. So technically 25 what were the most influential books that had the biggest impact on me, the ones that I have found that I have put into daily practice the most, and ultimately the ones that become my evergreen recommendation. So when someone says, Hey, what’s a good book that you’ve read here lately? I pull up the note on my phone, I literally keep it right here, and I keep the list of all the books that I’ve read and why I think they’re so significant. And I go, okay, well, let me tell you the five most influential books that I read last year, and here’s why.
AJV (01:40):
So that’s what I’m gonna do for you today on this particular episode. So these were all books that I read in 2024. And these are gonna be my top picks. I think I, I think I’ve highlighted six. But these are my top books and why, and this is a great thing to be doing as we enter in a new year, as we’re kind of like in Q1 of 2025. So I know if this, that you’re listening to this sometime in the future, this is when we’re recording this for context, right, Q1 of 2025. But it would be good for you to go, man, what’s my reading goal this year? Like, what challenge do I wanna set out for myself? And what are the books that are out there that I wanna read? And I’ll tell you one other quick thing before we get started is that there are tens of thousands of books that are printed every single year, new books.
AJV (02:29):
There is so many opportunities to read amazing books and not so amazing books. And one of the policies that I have put in place is I only read a book once I have rather heard the author speak, I’ve listened to several of their podcasts, and I’m like, man, like that is someone I wanna learn from. Or they have just been so consistently referred to me that I’m like, okay, at this point how have I not read this book? And so I would would just say, for whatever it’s worth, not only do I recommend these books, but these are books that had been repeatedly recommended to me at the point of like, well, I have to put it on the list. I have heard these authors speak in person. I have read other pieces of their work. I have listened to countless interviews with them.
AJV (03:18):
But these were not first time introductions where I just went through Amazon or walked through Barnes and Noble and was like, you know, any mey mighty move that one. That is not how this happened. So these were already pretty pre-vetted before I put them on my queue. Right? So with all of that said let me get through this so that I don’t keep you here for the next three hours. The first one is Unreasonable Hospitality by Will Guera. And we were fortunate enough to have Will Guera on our podcast, the Influential Personal Brand podcast. And so if you have not yet listened to that particular episode, Rory interviewed Will about a year ago and a phenomenal, phenomenal episode. And I, let me just kind of tell you why I picked Unreasonable Hospitality. And although Will comes from the hospitality industry, this is not a book for the hospitality industry.
AJV (04:15):
This is a book about how to bring hospitality into your industry no matter what you do. And I love it because it approaches hospitality on an individual level, like a personal level, as a leader, as a business owner, as a, a frontline employee, as someone who interacts with customers on a customer service, a sales, a a experiential level. But more importantly, what I love about this particular book is it is back to the roots of what does it mean to serve people well, whatever your job may be. And I love that it took the approach of the hospitality industry in this particular case a restaurant. ’cause It’s like, it does not matter if you’re the one busting tables taking phone calls and seeding people. You’re the one serving the food, cooking the food washing the dishes. Like there is a very interconnected, intertwined element of every restaurant, thus every business, thus every relationship where every role matters and one is not above the other.
AJV (05:22):
And they all connect into what is the client experience? What is the customer experience, and what is the employee experience? Right? I think on average, most adults are gonna spend 60% of their waking hours at work. Think about that for a second. Post school in your adult life, 60% of your time in going to be at your job with your colleagues, with your boss, you better pick something that you love and enjoy and do it with people that are more like friends and family than, you know, coworkers and colleagues. And I think that’s about the heart of this is, and how do you bring service into every element of what you do? How do you take pride and excellence in your role regardless of what your role is? It’s like it, you are the one taking out the trash. How can you be the best trash taker outer on the planet?
AJV (06:21):
I often get to play the role as trash taker outer at Brand Builders Group. We have a lot of live events, and it’s all hands on deck. And one of the things that I love about our team, it’s like, no one’s above taking out the trash. We’re gonna do it with a smile on our face. We’re gonna make sure it’s swift, we’re gonna make sure it’s clean, we’re gonna make sure it’s quiet. And it’s, and I think that is back to the heart of service. It’s like, how do we welcome people so that they feel invited and cared for? And this is an experiential book with so many tactical takeaways of how to do that as a leader, as a business owner as a, as a frontline employee of how do you go above and beyond? How do you just pay attention to your customers and your employees to do things that make them feel welcome, unreasonably welcome, right?
AJV (07:12):
And so that is why that was my first pick of 2024. In fact, we loved this book so much that we made it our mandatory book of the quarter in Q2 for our entire company to read. One of the things that we do at BBG is we have a Book of the Quarter Club. And out of all the books that Rory and I have read, we go through and say, which ones do we think are so important? They need to be, you know, more cemented into the cultural language that we talk about. And Unreasonable Hospitality was one of those books for us in 2024. So that was my first put my first pick and my first recap for you Will Gera Unreasonable Hospitality. It’s the art of bringing service back to your work. And it’s so, so good. I would also say, if you are are an audio listener, this is a great audio book, will has an amazing voice.
AJV (08:00):
But he’s got so much personality and charisma in his storytelling. It’s like, I found it very hard to want to hit pause because it was, it was one of those books where it’s like what’s gonna happen? Like, what’s, what’s next? Like, don’t leave me hanging. I wanna know what you did for that customer. I, I wanna know what they said. So it is also one of those books that I would just say, if you love audios, this is a great audio. Not all of my books are, I think great on audio, but this particular one was great. My second pick is a personal pick. I have read a lot of books on relationships and marriage. Rory and I are about to celebrate 15 years of marriage this year in 2025, which is so awesome. And I love him more today than I did the day we got married, which I think is the biggest win.
AJV (08:48):
But this by far was the best book on marriage that I have ever read. And it’s rare that Rory gets on the bandwagon and reads a book with me. But I was talking about this book so incessantly that he was like, okay, okay, I think I’m gonna read this too. Now he also read Unreasonable Hospitality, but this is one of those personal pics that he was like, man, like I need to read that. So here it is, sacred Marriage by Gary Thomas. And here is why I think this book is really important now. Yes. Is it about the, the, the marriage covenant? Is it about husband and wife? Yes. but I would just say for anyone who is married, who is engaged to be married, who wants to be married one day this, this is a great book for the context of what is marriage?
AJV (09:40):
What does it mean to be a good partner in marriage? What are ways to uphold the relationship in a way that, you know, similar to unusable hospitality in a way that serves your spouse? And I think this was a really good book an inner look at what is the point of marriage. Now, for those of you listening to me that know me, like, you know, my background is very faith heavy. I am a, a strong believer. And I do believe that like marriage is like the marriage covenant under God. And one of the things that I found was really amazing is that what I loved about this book that was different than every other book was this is not a communication book. This is not a, men are from Mars, women are from Venus. Let’s talk about our differences.
AJV (10:26):
Even though clearly there are lots of personality, inherent traits, differences biological, cultural, all the things, right? Clearly men and women are extremely different. But what I loved about this book is the whole point is like, marriage is not meant to make you happy. Marriage is meant to make you holy. And through the lens of that, it’s like how do you look at the context of your marriage as this relationship with another human being? Right? My husband of going, this isn’t like about me de my happiness depending on what he does for the marriage or what even I do. It’s like, how is this relationship making me a better human being in light of God? Right? So it is a faith heavy book. I’ll put that up there for all of you who, who are like, no, that’s not for me. Totally right. Fine. Just want to let you know upfront.
AJV (11:19):
But in terms of where, I think this was one of the strongest marriage books I’ve ever read, was the inherent focus on what is the goal and purpose of marriage. And I think that, at least for me and my upbringing of how, like even how I went through premarital counseling and getting married, being married, I have never ever heard anyone talk about it this way of like, the challenges are not meant to separate you. It’s to grow. You and I, I’ve heard this a million times and I do believe it to be inherently true. It’s like growth happens in the challenges and that’s no different in marriage. I’ve heard people say to me before, man, it’s just not supposed to be this hard. Says who?
AJV (12:09):
Parenting is hard. Being in business is hard. Sales is hard. Like there are hard things, but we can do hard things. I think it’s the attitude and the commitment and the loyalty and the pro we take to doing hard things. And marriage is a, it’s a, an act of obedience and discipline. And I had never looked at it that way before. And it was a very good thing to go like, how do I keep myself in check of not putting my happiness on Roy’s to-do list? But it’s like, no, like this, this is, this is more of a test of my own endurance of like, can I run the race that’s been given to me with who I chose to run the race, which was my husband? And that doesn’t mean every day is perfect most certainly is not. But at the end of every day, it’s like I can genuinely through a new lens, look at my marriage and look at my husband and go, man, I’m so grateful that you are mine and that I am yours.
AJV (13:07):
And I think a lot of that self-talk and that appreciation came through the lens of this book. And that by itself has strengthened our marriage and my per my personal take on marriage and the way I approach disagreements or household tasks or anything like that really shifted through the pages of this book. So that, that was my second pick, A personal pick for the year, but Sacred Ga Sacred Marriage by Gary Thomas. All right. Next one, I have I have my little list here of all the ones that I picked out. The next one I picked, sorry, I’m looking through all of these this is an oldie but a goodie, which was the Go-Giver by Bob Berg. Again, super great audio read, you can knock it out and probably a daily commute. It’s about a 90 minute read.
AJV (14:02):
It is extremely short, and it is very what I would say anecdotal in its nature. It’s very like chocked for chocked full of a story. And here’s what I love about this book, and it’s actually one of the books that we’ve picked to be one of our books of the Quarter for 2025 for our team at Brand Builders Group is the Go Giver is all about the lessons you learn through relationships and removing perceptions removing what I would say would be expectations that you have on other people. And there are five laws that you learn in this book, and I’m gonna give them to you in a quick recap. It’s the law of value, which is what you give versus what you take. It’s the law of compensation, which is all about how well can you serve.
AJV (14:52):
It’s about the law of influence with putting others above you and ahead of you. It’s about the law of authenticity being true, being true, honest to yourself. And it’s the law of receptivity. How open are you to accepting what people have to give to you? And it was through these five laws, and they each come with a different encounter and a different individual and a different anecdotal story all through, like the same main character. And I loved this book so much for two main reasons. One, if you’re listening to this, have you ever had the thought, what’s in it for me? And let’s just be honest. We’ve all had that thought. Likely by the time that you listen to this today, you have already had that thought. I have already actually even said those words, I think to my husband. He was telling me about something he was gonna do, and I was like, well, what’s in it for you?
AJV (15:48):
And I literally like, had to bite my tongue and catch myself and be like, oh my gosh. Like, it doesn’t have to be, there doesn’t have to be anything in it for you to do it, right? And I think that’s the, the heart of this book. It’s like, are you doing it to be of service? Are you doing it to get something in return? And that approach to relationships and to business is absolutely vital. And at some point, it’s the, the truth of it sneaks through, right? And I think it’s a really important book and approach of how people do business and how they build business relationships, right? And I I love what the book talks about. I said, the three fundamentals of why you work are to survive, to save and to serve, right? Those are the three fundamentals of work, right?
AJV (16:37):
Survival, right? You gotta pay your bills, buy food, pay for shelter, right? But then it’s to save so that you have some surplus for retirement or for vacations, or whatever you’re gonna use it for. But then it’s to serve like we work to serve people. That is a part of what we do, regardless if we view it that way or not. And I think this was a really great book on each one of those elements. And one of the things that I love is this entire book back to the, the Law of Compensation is your income is directly tied to how many people that you can touch, how many people you can impact, right? And if you look at it through the lens of that, it’s like, if you go, how many people can I serve today? How many people can I help?
AJV (17:21):
How many people can I impact? Not how much money can I make, right? Not as well. What can I, you know, make in a salary or a bonus or a commission, or how do I make more money? It’s how do I serve more people? How can I impact more people? How can I help more people? And if you just went through every single day of like, all right, here’s my goal of helping this many people today. If you just shifted from, man, I need to make this much money to, I need to help this many people, how much money, how much more money would you make in 2025? And that is why it’s one of my recommendations for 2025, is it’s a perspective shift of not how much money can I make or how much money can I save? It’s how many people can you help?
AJV (18:07):
And if you focus on helping people, I have no doubt you will make more money. But if you always focus on making more money and not helping people, it, at some point, it’s just going to burn you out. It’s exhausting. And you’ll likely not hit those goals at the speed that you would like, but if you focus on helping people, you’ll likely hit them faster and you’ll hit, you’ll exceed them faster as well. So Go-Giver by Bob Berg. That is my third recommendation from books that I read last year. Alright, the fourth one. And listen yes, I’m aware that this might be biased, but this was also one of our books of the quarter in 2024. And it, again, it’s an oldie, but it’s a goodie. This particular book has been out for more than 10 years. And it’s Take the Stairs and it was written by the one and only Rory Vaden.
AJV (19:04):
But here’s why it made my list. You know, I’m just gonna be honest, it’s been about 10 years since I read this book, right? I read it, helped edit it clearly read it again when the book came out, and my husband wrote it. But it also has been a decade. And we picked this book to read because we are embarking on our new book that Rory and I have written together that we are launching later this year, this, this summer. And one of the things that we wanted our team to do is go back and read the very first book that Rory wrote in preparation to be like, okay, what’s it gonna be like for this entire team to do a new book launch this year? And I reread it, and I was reminded of how good this book is and how timeless the principles are, and how evergreen the truths are.
AJV (19:57):
And I actually listened to most of this book with my kids in the backseat. So they could listen to their daddy talk about discipline and success and time and faith and action. And it’s, it was fascinating for my kids to pick up on these little things. And it just was such a great reminder to me that not only is this a great book, it it’s a book for all ages. Like, there is nothing about this book that did not apply to my 5-year-old and 7-year-old, that what doesn’t also apply to me in my life. It’s do I have faith? Do I believe that things will eventually work out for my good, right? Regardless of how hard today is do I believe that discipline is important and necessary for my success and my personal and professional life? And what does discipline mean?
AJV (20:53):
Do I believe that there is a there’s an onus on me to take action and not wait around for other people to do things for me, not wait around for it to show up on my doorstep on a silver platter before I go and do something, right? Am I willing to take action and do something before I’m ready to do it? And is there reward in the action versus being perfectly ready? Right? Those are, those are some of the things. But also what my kids really latched onto was this story that my husband talked about called Mr. M, which is a little guy who sits on your shoulder and m stands for mediocrity mediocrity. And this, this little guy who sits on your shoulder, Mr. M is the one who whispers in your ear. You can’t do that.
AJV (21:38):
You’re not smart enough for that. You, you don’t have enough experience. You’re too young, you’re too old. You’ve never done that before. It’s that little mediocrity monger who whispers in your wi your ear. You can’t, you’re not enough. This isn’t for you. This is for somebody better than you. And that’s what my kids latched onto. And quite honestly, it’s what I latched onto. And it was the power of do you have a management system over your words and your thoughts? And this is where I spent most of my time reminiscing about the book and talking about this book with my kids. I ended up also talking a lot about this with our team of how often do we hear it’s like, well, I just don’t have time for that. I just can’t take that on. Like, there’s not enough hours in the day to do that.
AJV (22:29):
Like, that’s too much for me. And here’s what I keep telling my kids, and here’s what I tell our team, and here’s what I’m gonna tell you. Whatever you believe is true, and whatever you tell yourself the most is what you believe. I’m gonna say that again. Whatever you tell yourself the most is what you believe. And whatever you believe is true, if you believe that you can’t because you’ve been telling yourself I can’t for the last 10 years, then magically you can’t. Right? For some reason, other people can, but you can’t. That that is not because that’s true. No one else has more minutes in the hour or hours in the day than you do. We all have the same, some of us have just said, I can do it anyway. Right? We all have things vying for our tension and more than we can manage in most cases, between the different social platforms and family commitments and work commitments and technology distracting us from our, like distracting us and taking our attention. Like we could all sit here and go, there’s just too much to be done in a day. Or there, there’s a difference saying, which is, I choose where I spend my time.
AJV (23:59):
I mean, that’s it, right? It’s, it’s, it is a difference in going, this is where I choose to spend my time, versus, oh, I just can’t fit it all in, right? It, it, it’s the exact same thing. It’s like, no, that just means you have to say no to some things because you have chosen that other things are of more significance at this time, at this season of your life. And those are all mental choices that we get to make. That’s a discipline, that’s an obedience. That that’s also a faith element of going, I believe that this thing is right for me. But I just thought it was just so important in this particular book to go back and, and re harness the power of our thoughts and our words and what we say to ourself, and how that becomes our actions and our beliefs and ultimately our reality.
AJV (24:45):
And now, that’s not the whole essence of take the stairs, but it’s why it made the list. And my favorite quote that I don’t even remember reading in this book, I don’t even recall Rory ever mentioning this in a keynote, which I have heard hundreds of times over the years, but this was the number one quote that stuck out in this particular time, reading the book, right? Different season of life, different season of business. But this was the quote that stuck out to me that I’m gonna share with you. Frustration only happens in the absence of perspective. Frustration only happens in the absence of perspective. Now, perhaps this stuck out to me at the season of life because I say the words, I’m so frustrated on a daily basis with everything going on or perhaps that that was just the message that I needed to hear in this particular book.
AJV (25:40):
But that was something that I thought was really powerful because I think I hear a lot of people say, I’m just frustrated that I’m not where I thought I would be. I’m, I’m frustrated. Things aren’t going faster. I’m frustrating. This isn’t working the way that I want to, or it didn’t happen this way. I’m just frustrated and I hear those words so often. And I think that that also ties into that is Mr. M, Mr. Mediocrity, Mr. Mediocrity, that sits on your shoulder telling you the untruths, right? Being frustrated is a, a choice. When we don’t have perspective, it’s the other option to going. No. Like, there’s perspective here of like, and, and maybe it’s not going as fast as you want, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t progressed. And it’s a choice of going, am I, am I happy with progress?
AJV (26:30):
Am or am I dissatisfied with the lack of speed? And those are just, those are perspective shifts. And I think it was a really good review for me at least to go. It’s like, where am I missing perspective? Like, where am I not paying attention to all the progress and all the good, and I’m only focused on all the lack of progress and all the bad, right? So all of those things combined was really that internal mindset general inspiration book that made my number four pick for 2024, which was Take the Stairs by Rory Vaden. And then not well, I mean, gosh, if I’m going through these, there’s, there’s like five more that I probably could pick. But this is, this is the last one that I’m gonna pick and I’m gonna share with you. I forgot I had highlighted so many as I’m reading back here,
AJV (27:32):
I think this is one of those timeless reads that I will probably make a habit to go back and read if not every year, every couple of years. I think that this is a, a really important read for anyone who has gotten to a point where they’re like, okay, I know what got me here won’t get me there. And that could be a personal or professional endeavors. But I think that at some point, whether it’s one year, three year, five year, 10 years doing something, the things that you started with eventually have to change and evolve and elevate. That includes systems, processes, people business models, prices. At some point, things have to change for you to keep growing, right? And I, I think it’s a really, really important book as people are stepping into what I would say a level up kind of mentality.
AJV (28:29):
Like they’re ready to up level, they’re ready to take it to the next level, whatever, you know, phrase you wanna use there. But this was a, this was a book that I thought was really, really important because it focuses on the things that you can do that are super simple. And I, and I loved so much of that. Like, I thought it was so important, just the importance of listening and, and, and gratitude and, and some of those best practices. And I think it was also really important to talk so much as I think in business we talk so much about what we should do, and we don’t talk enough about what we shouldn’t do, right? And I, I love this in this book, is that we have to talk about what we have to stop doing as much as we have to talk about what we need to start doing.
AJV (29:20):
And I think that as an organization and, and being, you know, my previous life, a consultant to a lot of organizations, there’s a lot of talk around, well, this is what we’re going to do. There’s not a lot of talk about, this is what we’re not going to do. This is what we need to stop doing as an organization or as an individual. But that’s a really important part of this, right? If we’re only talking about all the things that we’re gonna start doing or all the things that we are doing, then we’re leaving out a huge category of things. And hey, there’s also some things that organizationally speaking, categorically speaking, we don’t do. And I feel like that is a missing part of the puzzle. That if you are listening to this and you’re going, man, I wonder if we have a culture problem or a communication problem or a collaboration part problem, or if you’ve ever said, it feels like the right hand and the left hand don’t know what they’re doing, it’s probably because you’ve been focusing on just one part of that.
AJV (30:15):
Maybe you’re a part of a, a team that only talks about what we’re not gonna do, and you need to spend more time talking about what you are gonna do. But I find more often, specifically in the newer parts of the year and the early parts of the year, it’s a lot more conversation around, these are all the things we’re gonna do this year, and there’s not a lot of talk about, and this is what we’re not gonna do this year. Both are equally important for clarity, communication, collaboration, and culture, the four C’s, right? Clarity, communication, collaboration and culture. And you need to both know what you’re going to do and what you’re not going to do as an individual, a team, a company, you know, whatever it is that you wanna be. But I think that’s a, a really, really, really important thing.
AJV (31:02):
So there’s a feedback matrix that they share and that Marshall shares in the book, and it’s like, what do you stop doing? What do you start doing? What do you need to do less of? And what do you need to do more of? Right? So high level, that would be a very quick thing that you can just go back is a feedback perspective on, man, what are we doing as an organization? It’s like, what do you need to stop doing? What do you need to start doing? What do you need to do less of? And what do you need to do more of very simple components to help you take like a holistic perspective. I mentioned earlier that I loved that there was such a huge part of this book about listening. One of the things that I discovered about myself in this book is that I need to be a better listener.
AJV (31:47):
If you would’ve asked me before this book, aj, are you a are you a good listener? I would’ve said, yeah, I’m a great listener. I listen all the time. After reading this book, I’d be like, Ooh, that might be an area of weakness for me. And he goes through this entire checklist of, are you constantly thinking in your mind what you’re gonna say as the other person is talking? If so, you’re not such a great listener. Are you constantly interrupting to get your thought in? If so, you’re not such a great listener. Are you constantly counteracting like, well, that’s not true in your mind. You’re not such a great listener, and then this is the one that hit me. Are you constantly finishing other people’s sentences? And if so, maybe you’re not the great listener that you thought you were. And I caught myself going, man, I, I think I do interrupt too often.
AJV (32:37):
I, I think I do try to finish sentences too much. And I went through and I shared this with Rory, and he just laughed out loud. And I was like, okay, well, that was probably the confirmation that I needed there. Like, this is, this is an actual goal of mine this year. This is a commitment to myself as I’m going to be a better listener. And again, we’ve probably all been taught this before, but I thought this was a really important skillset to get back to, which is simply think before you speak. Like, and so, like one of the goals that I’ve had for myself, as soon as someone’s done talking, I’m gonna let there be a nice pause before I speak. And I practiced this yesterday in a conversation, and after this individual was done sharing their thoughts I just paused and I said, is there anything else? And they said, no. And I said, okay.
AJV (33:33):
And then I said, okay, let, let me share my response. That is not typically my mo in that, but it was so helpful to them to be like, wait, is there anything else? No, I’m not that. I had a little pause because I needed to, to get my thoughts. Then I proceeded. And I have found that that’s so easy. It’s easier for me to do in, in-person conversations, but I’m trying to do the exact same thing in written communication. And if I don’t have a good clear response during some written communication, I’m just saying, Hey, I, I’ve seen this and I’ll get back to you. This was actually some feedback that was given to me because I didn’t do that. I saw the message. I knew I wasn’t ready to respond to it, so I just didn’t respond. And the feedback I got was, Hey, that was, felt really inconsiderate.
AJV (34:24):
That was like a really important message I sent. And then you just didn’t respond. And I was like, yeah, I was gathering my thoughts. They said, well, that would’ve been just good to know. And I said, oh, good, good feedback there. So now I’m just saying, Hey, I have received your message. I’ll be back to a response in the next couple of days. And it’s because I actually need the time to sit and listen. And even though they weren’t talking, it was in writing, I was still listening. And I think that these are just little things that make communication and collaboration and culture so much better because you have more clarity. So if you have never read this book, I highly recommend what got you here won’t get you there. Again, doesn’t matter if you are in any position in a company leader frontline, employee, owner, it doesn’t matter.
AJV (35:15):
It is for you. And I also think that this is one of those books where it hits some of the most practical things, like listening and saying thank you and giving feedback and receiving feedback but then also brings it up on a higher level as well. So it’s, it’s very into the weeds with like, here are things you can do, here are checklists, here are reminders, here are best practices, as well as some of the higher overview stuff that I think is really, really, really important. Here’s, and here’s again, I’m trying to like do some pull out quotes from each of these. And here’s what I would say this is one of my favorite quotes from this book. No one, and this is not a direct quote, this is my interpretation of the quote, so don’t cite me. No one changes by learning things.
AJV (36:07):
They only change by doing the things they’ve learned. And I think that’s also a great quote to end my book recap for 2024. Because here’s what I have found about people who do read and go to a lot of classes and seminars and sign up for courses and programs. And I think all of those things are good. The question is, but are you doing anything with what you’ve learned? It’s one thing to say, Hey, I read 24 books last year. It’s another thing to go in. Here’s what I learned and I’ve implemented from every single book that I’ve read now, I’m not gonna be able to implement every single thing that I jotted down in my notes from every single book. What my goal has been in this process in the last few years is what’s the one thing that I need to take from this particular book and put into action in my life?
AJV (37:00):
What is the one thing? And so for this book, right, what got you here won’t get you there. It was listening. Like, I took that to heart and said like, I have had an aha moment. I need to improve my listening skills in a, in a very important way to be a better communicator, a better leader, a better friend, a better spouse. But that was like my one thing I took away. And one of the things that I find is that if, if you as a reader can just take a moment of reflection at the end of every book and go out of everything that I’ve read, all the quotes, all the things, what’s the one thing that I’m gonna put into practice? And really try to make it one, that doesn’t mean you can’t do more, just highlight one. Then you’re not just learning things, you’re actually doing things. And that’s what creates change. Learning things does not create change. Doing the things that you’ve learned is what creates change. So regardless, if you go and read any of these books that I read last year I would say whatever books or whatever podcasts that you listen to or read this year or whatever coaching programs or courses that you participate in, ask yourself, what’s the one thing that I can actually start doing to create real change in my life?
Ep 561: Choose Your Hard | Chris Janssen Episode Recap
AJV (00:02):
Choose your hard. That’s the conversation that I would like to have today. I just got off of an amazing conversation with author and coach Chris Janssen. She’s the author of a new book called Grace Yourself, how to Show Up for the Sober Life You Want. And our conversation was about choose your hard and whatever, whatever we choose in life can be hard. Like I heard somebody say the other day, it’s like, life is hard. It’s, it’s just hard. And so it’s up to us to choose our hard. And in this conversation that I had with Chris Jansen, we were talking about very specifically choosing a sober life versus a, a life where something has a stronghold over you. Not necessarily just alcohol, but in this quote I saw the other day, it was like, you know, choose to be fit. That’s hard.
AJV (00:55):
Choose to be fat. That’s hard. Choose to save your money. That’s hard. Choose to go in debt. That’s hard, right? Choose to focus and work on your marriage. That’s hard. Choose not to and get a divorce that’s hard. Choose to prioritize your time and spending time with your kids while you’re young. That, that can be hard. Choose not to do that and miss out on knowing your kids while they’re young. That’s hard. It’s like, regardless of what we choose, there is going to be hard parts to it. It’s just what hard are you going to choose? Right? And it doesn’t matter if it’s a health journey or a money journey or a relationship journey, or it’s a sobriety journey, right? Either way you go, it can be hard and there’s going to be hard parts of whatever it is that you choose.
AJV (01:49):
The differences is, do you want to, you know, choose the salad and be healthy or, you know, choose the dessert and have a temporary indulgence. And I’m not saying having a dessert is bad and having salad every meal is good. I’m not saying that. I’m just saying the repetitive nature of those choices lead to rewards and consequences. Not all that different than, you know, spending money or investing in relationships or anything else. Our choices are what lead to the rewards or the consequences. And there’s going to be hard parts about either there’s gonna be hard long days lots of extra work. There’s going to be discipline and obedience. There’s going to be missing out on some things to get something else later. Like they’re, they’re just hard things. But we each get to choose our hard, and this conversation with Chris was about, you know, you, you could choose right? To, you know, have that quick fix and have that drink in the moment, or you can choose to make a better, healthy choice for your life and
AJV (02:58):
Not do that. And again, not saying having a drink is bad. I’m not saying that. But for some of us, it is for some people it is. And it’s for each of us. We just gotta choose our hard ’cause it’s gonna be hard either way. And so as you’re, as you’re sitting here and listening to this, I just wanted to pose a couple of quick questions. One, what’s the hard that you need to choose in 2025? And it could be, it’s like, I’m gonna choose the hard of getting up at 5:00 AM to get in early morning reading time or time with the Lord, or going on a walk or going to the gym, right? Could it be that it’s like I’m gonna choose the heart of missing out on seemingly a lot of fun stuff because I’m committing to getting in bed by, you know, 9:00 PM it, I don’t know what your heart is.
AJV (03:49):
I’m just saying what is the hard that you need to choose for 2025? Because they can go both ways. There’s the good hard and the bad. Hard, but there’s hard either way. So that’s my first question is, you know, what is the hard that you need to choose for 2025? My second question to you is, what are gonna be the rewards of choosing that hard and the consequences of not choosing that hard in 2025? Because with any choice, right? There comes an opportunity for reward or for consequence. And if you know that there is a hard that you need to choose, and I can just tell you personally for me almost two years ago, it was, I had to give up alcohol. I knew that it had created a default mechanism in my life and my choices. It had a strong hold on the way that I was decompressing.
AJV (04:45):
And I had to give it up. And it was hard. And then it wasn’t
Ep 560: Grace Yourself with Chris Janssen
AJV (00:00):
Hey, y’all. Welcome to the Influential Personal Brand podcast, AJ Vaden here today. And I am so, so excited for today’s guest for so many reasons. One, I love her personally. And as I get to introduce Chris, Jan since you guys formally in just a second, I have had the privilege of getting to know Chris over the last year in a variety of different ways. But she’s one of the sweetest, hardest working
AJV (00:51):
And how do you know if this episode is for you? So I invited Chris on the show today for two reasons. One, she’s in the middle of a book launch, right? So when I talk about hardworking
AJV (01:38):
Secondarily, though, we’re gonna actually talk about the contents of her book, which I think is just a really important topic. And Chris’s upcoming book is called Grace Yourself. And without getting too much into the contents of the book right now, let’s just say that it’s a great reflection of a lot of people are talking about dry January as we are in January, 2025 at the recording of this episode. And so we’re gonna talk about what it means to be sober, curious, and Chris’s journey on that path. So that is, that is who this episode is for. Now, let me formally introduce you to Chris so we can get to our interview, which is the best part. Chris Janssen is a leading results coach in performance and mindset. She’s a bestselling author who’s worked with hundreds of sought after creators entrepreneurs soldiers, small business o owners. She has been taught by and has worked with Tony Robbins on his team of results coaches. She’s a board certified coach with a master’s in counseling psychology with more than 20 years of experience. Chris, welcome to the show.
CJ (02:42):
Thanks, aj. I have the biggest smile on my face ’cause it’s so fun to be here with you. Yes.
AJV (02:48):
This is going to be an amazing episode for so many reasons. But I know that I just get asked all the time, like, what is it like, what do you have to do to have a bestselling book and what, what does that even mean? And since you’re in the middle of a book launch right now, and this is not your first book, what I would love for you to share with the audience is one, what’s been your journey of writing and publishing books up to this one? And how has this one similar or different than what you’ve done in the past?
CJ (03:20):
Mm. That’s such a good question. Yeah, because people ask a lot, you know, what, what do I have to do to write a book? And there’s so much to know, and I am a good person to ask because the first book I self-published and no regrets. I did learn a lot of what I wanted to do differently the second time, though. And so I kind of thought, like a lot of authors, I hear this a lot, that I would write a great book. I had a great editor. I had, I had help. I knew what I was doing. I’m really proud of it. It’s a really good book. It’s a coaching book. But I thought, you know, let’s, let’s self-publish. We’ll put it out there so people can start reading it. I didn’t, none of the, you know, the prep, right? I didn’t, I didn’t have the audience ahead of time. I didn’t think about lists. I just thought all that came after that. If you write a book, you then people start calling you
AJV (04:13):
CJ (04:15):
They, it was, they did not like, I thought though,
CJ (05:07):
I am still doing it a little bit backwards where I am writing this second book, and I don’t have a huge audience. I have a thriving coaching business. So I have kind of doubled up on the PR side where I’m using the bestseller bestseller launch plan strategy. And then I’m also using a little bit of PR to get me on more stages, right? Because I didn’t have that element. And that’s been phenomenal. I mean, that, it just, it’s like the butterfly effect. It just, people tell, people tell people, and then the message gets to get in the hands of the people. ’cause Not everyone wants to read a coaching book or a book on sobriety. And then when you have these specific audiences, though, those are the people who are looking for that material and they tell the other people looking for that material. Yeah. So it’s been great this time
AJV (06:03):
Around. Well, you know, I, I love that you’ve done it both ways, right? Mm-Hmm
CJ (07:07):
Right?
AJV (07:08):
I don’t have to go Right. Tell people to buy it. I don’t need to pick up the phone. I don’t need to like do a launch. I already have a huge following. If I write a book, they’ll just buy it. And we’ve literally heard people tell us that. And you know what? Nobody bought the book.
CJ (07:24):
Right? Yeah. We’ll sit on a black, in a black hole on Amazon,
AJV (07:33):
And so sometimes it’s not always about how big is the audience, it’s mm-hmm
CJ (08:09):
Get in front of targeted audiences. And you’re, before you even pick up the pin, know who your audience is, know who you’re writing to, and then those are the people that will, you’ll want to get in front of, to start talking about your book months before the launch and months after the launch. So the, those, those specific people, like if you have a following on Facebook or Instagram, a lot of those people might be your friends now. Like, let’s use me, for example, I have lot of friends and they follow me on my socials and they wanna hear what my kids are up to and this type of thing. They don’t all wanna hear about my book, and this book might not be for them. So I, it was the, the most helpful thing was getting help, getting in front of the people who want and need this.
CJ (09:00):
And then also not getting tripped up in the numbers, just staying focused on impact. You are a, a steward of your message. If God put it on your heart to write a book, especially if it’s a vulnerable book that was uncomfortable to write, then you, then your mission is to steward that message after launch for the rest of your life, really. And so if God put it on your heart, he’s going to help you do that. So the people will, the people that need to hear the message will show up. The reason for wanting to make bestseller lists though isn’t fame or numbers. It is the impact, right. It is being a steward of your message. And if it does make lists, your message, you’ll being a better steward of your message because it’s, it’s going to reach more people.
AJV (09:51):
Mm. I love that. I think that’s such a great clarifying distinction of hitting a bestseller list is not for ego or vanity or any of that. It’s, it’s, it’s a sign that you are doing what you are supposed to do and reaching the people that you wrote it for. Mm-Hmm
CJ (10:09):
Exactly.
AJV (10:10):
That’s really, really good. I would be, I would be so curious to go, so you said you’ve had some luck with pr,
CJ (10:17):
Right?
AJV (10:17):
Mm-Hmm
CJ (10:45):
So what’s, well, I, I’m a lucky one. My daughter, she’s 25, she runs a pr, an LA based PR company. She runs the UK division in London. So I had the advantage of one, the publisher, you guys sent me a, like a list of maybe 15 vetted PR places that they know love and work with. So that’s great. Have a rep get it from somebody you trust in anything, in anything to do with the publishing world. Trust is a big thing, right? People are out to make money on your dream. So no, these hybrid publishers, you know, you wanna have a reputable vetted people that you’re working with. So we, my daughter helped me take those, say 15 PR companies and reach out to the top five that, that I thought were really in line with my mission. So of the book like that. So, so not my mission as a coach, not my mission as a person, the mission of the book. And so those people I reached out to, and then, you know, there was one, I just had a gut feeling that stood out above them all. And, and I, it, it was a really good match. She’s been wonderful. And so the audiences I’m getting in front of are very in line with the mission of the book.
AJV (12:07):
So I think this is a great question because I think a lot of people hear about pr, but they don’t really know what it means. Mm-Hmm
CJ (12:18):
Exactly. Right. That’s why I’m trying to like, teach what I know from her.
AJV (12:23):
But I think it’s really like, so like for those who are listening, it’s like, okay, great, but what did they do for you? Like, give us some insights.
CJ (12:29):
Mm-Hmm
CJ (13:21):
So I’m writing some articles for different publications, and then you get to talk about the book and it tells you where to buy the book. So that’s all good. So that’s what this, but not all PR companies are gonna do that exact thing. Some are just more tv. Some are just virtual things. Some are more social media. Some do all of it. Some do a lot of in-person events. One of the ones I interviewed is here in LA and was going to get me in front. That was like my, I was trying to decide between this one and the other one. They were gonna get me in front of a lot of in my community in la a lot of like book signings or the, at the local bookstore, that type of thing, which is also really good. So that was, it was a tough decision because they’re all good. So there’s not one size fits all for sure. Like anything.
AJV (14:16):
Yeah. Well, I love that. ’cause I think what I hear you saying, it’s like, like with anything, before you go searching out a PR firm or like with anything else that you’re gonna spend money on, do your research and know what are you actually trying to get out of this mm-hmm
CJ (14:55):
Right? And like as a coach, we’re always very hyper-focused on the outcome. So what have a crystal clear outcome. So I came to the these inter these vetting these people with the outcome. The outcome for me was to make a bestseller list, right? Like I said, for the reasons I said. So somebody’s outcome might be to get well known or famous. Those are two different outcomes. So know your outcome before you start looking for who to work with.
AJV (15:23):
Yeah. And so I know that you did this too, looking for publishers, so mm-hmm
CJ (16:17):
It’s, well, and they take the rights to your book
AJV (16:18):
And they own it, right? Mm-Hmm. And I think mm-hmm. For people who are going, well, if you listen to that, you just have to like, pick up the nuance of the creator at some point is always paying for it.
CJ (16:29):
Mm-Hmm
AJV (16:29):
CJ (17:02):
Right. So a few distinctions. One I’ll say even traditional publishing, you’re gonna spend money because you’re gonna have an editor help you make it look fantastic before you send the proposal in. So there’s always an investment on the author’s part. Especially with the, the first one to three books, let’s say. And, and technically hybrid publishing is self-publishing. We have, you’re, you’re technically called an indie author, like when I go into my books in book contests and stuff, because I’ve done hybrid the second time in self, the first time. They’re both in the self-publishing category as opposed to traditional publishing. So the greatest thing is you get to keep your rights. Now self-publishing can be done really well. Like I did self-publishing. The first time I hired a developmental editor, she helped me hire the copy editor, and I hired a cover designer and interior designer.
CJ (18:04):
And there’s websites in places that can help you. And I, it, I will just say this, all of me wanted to do hybrid because I didn’t want to be the one out there hiring these people. I couldn’t trust anybody. Mm. People need to know there’s not, every hybrid publisher is trustworthy, right? There’s Vanity Pub publishers, some of them will even take the rights if you can believe it and, and take a lot of royalties too. And so that is why I kept coming back to the self-publishing with the first one. And then when I met brand builders, I thought, okay, well I’m working with them. I already know and trust them. So that took care of the trust part. And then I heard you all were having a mission driven press, and I just thought, well, let’s get
AJV (19:39):
Yeah. And I, I, I think that’s such an important conversation on the trust part, because I think it’s all important at, at the end of the day, what’s most important in my opinion, is like the creator gets to keep what they create. Mm-Hmm
AJV (20:28):
And that is a big trust jump. Mm-Hmm
CJ (21:06):
That’s right. And it’s a really vulnerable process. Right. There’s I don’t get hit with a ton of rejection and, and criticism. It is vulnerable though. So you wanna be around people that, that make your nervous system calm. Mm-Hmm
AJV (22:00):
You know? I love too that you brought this up because I have also never heard anyone else bring up this part of, Hey, don’t forget, like, this is also an emotional ride for the author
AJV (22:47):
Mm-Hmm
CJ (23:46):
Right. That’s right.
AJV (23:48):
But I think that’s a good thing of like, the writing process is vulnerable, the editing process is vulnerable, the sales processes too. And it’s like, right there is a lot of people who are like, yeah, I love what you’re doing. Not gonna buy any. It’s like, great, thanks. Great welcome. You know, welcome to to business and to sales. Mm-Hmm
CJ (24:15):
It really is. I’m so fortunate I have my husband around me because he’s so great at business and he works from home, so he, you know, and he sees me working from home. So he’s been a constant sounding board for me to keep going. Don’t take it personally, to really believe in the impact and the message and have, have confidence selling, right? Yeah. So,
AJV (24:42):
Yeah. I mean, I think that’s a huge thing for everyone to realize. Mm-Hmm. It’s like launching a book is like launching a business.
CJ (24:47):
Yes.
AJV (24:48):
Genuinely speaking. Now let’s talk about the book for a second. ’cause Okay. I wanna make sure that as we talk about the process of writing and, you know, publishing and launching a book, but you have a book coming out mm-hmm
CJ (25:03):
February, February
AJV (25:04):
18. Oh, is it February? February 18th? Yes. Okay. Yes. So we’re just a few weeks away. Mm-Hmm
CJ (25:14):
Grace Yourself, the subtitles, how to show Up for the Sober Life You Want. And I love the subtitle. So the subtitle of my first book is The First Book’s, living All In How to Show Up for the Life You Want. And I love Show up and for the Life you want because in coaching, we need to know what we want, right? That’s always my first question. What do you want? And we need to show up for the strategy to get what we want. Showing up iss easy when it’s easy, and we need to show up when it’s not easy. So for this book particularly, because it does share my story of sobriety to me showing up is for life is the opposite of numbing out when things get uncomfortable or checking out, and we can check out or numb in small ways and big ways.
CJ (26:06):
And it doesn’t need to be alcohol. It can be all kinds of things. We all can think of ways. I mean, it could even be biting our nails, right? There’s just things that we do to check out or not show up. And I’m writing this to let people know, here’s my story, but I’m using this story to couple it with my coaching tools to show you, you don’t need to be afraid. You can show up for life. And here’s all these tools to help you do that. So someone doesn’t need to be even in an act of addiction, and it doesn’t even need to be alcohol for this book to be beneficial, because you’re gonna take whatever that thing is, and these tools will help, they’ll help take the shame off, get it out of the darkness. Let let you know you’re not alone. Let you know there’s millions of people struggling with the same thing. We’re not unique. We don’t, you know, we’re not special. We are special just like everybody else.
AJV (27:24):
I love that. What, what does the title Grace Yourself, like, where did that come from?
CJ (27:32):
So I love this title. The, to me, since I am a Person of Faith, to me it’s God’s grace, and that’s unmerited favor. And I explain in the book how, to me, what I’ve seen with people that fall into negative patterns and addictions. A lot of us have control issues. We, because in essence, we’re controlling our state. We’re, we’re, we’re looking to control the way we feel or control not feeling the way we don’t wanna feel. And we do that, like I said, in with lots of different ways. And so grace, since grace from God is unmerited favor, it means I don’t get to control whether I receive it or not. And so as a person, as a young woman who struggled with perfectionism and rigid thinking, and really, you know, high achiever, I have to control everything. I did not understand grace as a young person because I thought I had to control everything I earned.
CJ (28:36):
I’ll tell you what I’m worth. I’ll tell you if I deserve it or not. The concept that something’s free, even if I don’t deserve it, just didn’t compute with me. So I go through that in the book and, and what I really want people to know is they’re worthy no matter what, you’re worthy and you get grace, even though we don’t deserve it. Mm-Hmm
AJV (29:23):
Mm. I love that. And I think it’s so applicable too to the story of sobriety. Mm-Hmm
CJ (30:11):
All these, right. We have the mm-hmm
AJV (30:12):
CJ (30:27):
No.
AJV (30:27):
Like, it, this is a, a very big growing trend. And I’m just one, so this book is like right on par with a lot of the things mm-hmm
CJ (31:12):
Well, I think it’s like cigarettes, right? We all
CJ (32:09):
I do identify as an alcoholic. I do go into detail in that, in the book and explain that there’s no la regarding labels use what label works for you. It energizes me because to me it was a solution to something that I was trying to quit on my own. Like, I walked into a meeting, heard, there’s this thing called alcoholism, and there’s all these beautiful women in the meeting that just beautiful humans that like, yeah, we’re alcoholic too, and there’s a solution and it’s not your fault. It’s like an allergy and you never have to have another drink again. That for me, took all the shame off my shoulders. It changed the narrative from I’m a monster because I can’t stop drinking to, I’m worthy of sobriety and recovery because I can’t stop drinking. So it, it’s so much easier now for people. I do think, I do touch on this in the book.
CJ (33:05):
I think that it’s important if you’re like me, where you kind of re because alcohol is a progressive condition, which means the more you drink, you don’t, you don’t build up a tolerance and get better at it. You get worse at it. And if you quit drinking for a certain amount of years and then pick it up again, you’re going to be worse off than when you started Just age. Does that, so it is, that’s a medical fact. It’s a progressive condition. So some people we, like we say, in recovery, you can’t you’ve been pickled, so you can’t go back to being a cucumber. Hmm. Even if you quit drinking 30 years and then decide to try it again, you can’t go back to being a cucumber. So the book is really for people like me who got pickled. Mm-Hmm. And we can’t go back.
CJ (33:53):
And we do have a stigma. Like it really messed with us. It messed with our self-worth. We dealt with shame and guilt. And I am all for all for any recovery movement. I love that people are sober curious that we have mocktails, that people are going alcohol free. And for these people, I, a lot of my friends and clients are doing this. And it’s wonderful. I don’t think those people all need a support community or recovery community, if that makes sense. People like me, and there’s a chapter or section in the book called Alcoholic Like Me. We, we have to be in community because the world is changing, but it still is the way it is. And so we have to be sharing stories. We can’t do it alone. And we need to stay in community. So we don’t, our forgetter doesn’t forget and start thinking that we are like these other people that can just quit for health reasons.
CJ (34:48):
Some of us just can’t. And so do make that distinction in the book. And I also say in the book, look, don’t, don’t diss anybody. If they wanna call themselves an alcoholic, if they wanna go to AA or don’t wanna go to aa, let’s not get hung up on these things. Recovery, sobriety, health, it’s all a win. We all have, we’d have different churches for people. We have different therapists for people. Mm-Hmm
AJV (35:32):
I think that’s really important. ’cause I think that that’s a great distinction. It’s some people do it for health reasons, some people do it. Because it’s a necessity, right? It’s a lifesaving choice. They have to make, there’s a lot of different reasons why people are making these choices. For the person who’s out there, who’s going, what does it even mean to be sober? Curious? Like what, what, what is the first step? What would you say?
CJ (36:00):
I think it’s probably yeah, they starting to ask yourself those questions. Could I live without this thing in my life? And it might not be alcohol. Like I said, it could be something else that’s a stronghold. And so I think that the important thing to ask is really get leverage on yourself and ask and write it down, what is the cost of giving this thing up? And be honest about it. Because there will be a cost, it will require some grit. It will require the neuroplasticity in your brain to change. It will require, you know, when you pick up a new workout routine, it’s gonna require going to the gym and doing that. We don’t just get biceps one time at the gym, so it’s gonna, there’s gonna be some cost, unfortunately. Unfortunately. I know. So be honest with yourself about that and write down what, what is the cost of removing this thing from my life?
CJ (36:53):
And then write down what is the cost of not removing it from my life? And really be honest and look at that. And that’s how you get leverage on yourself. And so if the cost of not removing it is greater, then you’re gonna need to find some grit, read some self-help books like mine and then, and get in community. Right. But I’ll say if someone’s trying to do this at dry January, I really want people to take the shame off of it. If they start my friend across the street, oh, I did dry January and I already messed up. Well, we don’t need, you didn’t mess up. You’re just, it’s all there. It’s, it’s not a straight line. Mm-Hmm
AJV (37:46):
Why do, that’s a great point. So why, why do you think that for the person who, who does resonate with this, and they go, well, I’m, I’m curious. And then some, like, I know I need to make a change. I know that there, I do have a stronghold in my life and I need to get rid of it. Why is it that’s that we, some people can just be like, cold Turkey, I quit. I’m, I’m never doing it again. And there’s others of us who it’s like, man, it’s like, well, I did fall off. Mm-Hmm
CJ (38:25):
Hmm. Oh, well we’re human really. I mean, and the reason for falling off is ’cause it’s hard. Mm-Hmm
AJV (39:05):
CJ (39:06):
Right. There’s always a cost. So so just, yeah, I think it’s because it’s hard. And so I think, and that’s what we talk about in recovery is hitting bottom. And I think people, it’s, I’ve heard so many stories over the last 18 years. Everybody’s, when you say enough is enough is looks different for everybody. Mm-Hmm
AJV (40:06):
Well, I love that honesty and that it’s like, why do people follow up? ’cause It’s hard
CJ (40:52):
Right. Well start with those questions I just talked about and ask what, write it down too. What, what did January give me? If you made it all the way through January dry, get honest about that and write it down. What did it cost and what did it give me? My guess is if alcohol is a stronghold in your life, that you’re gonna have more benefits that you got out of it. But write it down so you know. Right. And then ask yourself, well, why wouldn’t I wanna carry this on to February? Why wouldn’t I wanna keep doing it? And and knowing that any habit we, the best way to approach it is one day at a time. And so we say that in recovery all the time. And we don’t, we, if we come in and think, I need to be sober like the next guy for the next 20 years, we’ll we’ll panic and run out of the room because who can sink like that? So you just have to be sober right now for today. And maybe it’s not one day at a time, maybe it’s one minute at a time. And so just keep doing that and then do it the next minute and the next minute.
AJV (41:59):
Yeah. I think it’s good. It’s like we used to tease, it’s, it’s no different than getting healthy or losing weight. It’s like if you told someone you’re only going to get to eat fo you know, foliage for the rest of your life, people would be like, I’m never doing this. But if you can just be, just focus on eating salad today. Just get a salad for lunch. Just get a salad for dinner and wake up and just do the same thing. It’s like, it’s the difference of like the magnitude of, wait, am I never gonna get to have a cookie again? What do you mean Versus Nope, just pick a salad today. Pick a salad at the meal that you’re at. And it’s, it’s, it’s a lot like that is what I hear you saying. It’s like, just make the choice in the moment and then in the next moment and then in the next moment.
AJV (42:40):
And I think this is a, a great conversation. I I wanted you to have a time to talk about the book. ’cause I, one of the reasons that we wanted to partner with you in publishing the book is because Rory and I personally resonate with the message of both of us would not identify as someone who had a, a problem with alcohol, but we both identify that it, that it had a strong hold and the way that we were living our daily life both of us were fortunate enough to be able to go, we’re just not doing this anymore. Like, we’re done. But both of us recognized a pattern that we were no longer comfortable with. And it’s like we, yeah, I can only speak for myself, but you know, for those of you who are listening of going like, well, I don’t, I don’t really know if that’s me.
AJV (43:24):
It’s like, I would maybe have a glass of wine every couple of days, but here, here was the pattern that I noticed. I would always default to a glass of wine on a hard day. And I would also default to a glass of wine on a good day. So if it was a really good day, I wanted to celebrate glass of wine. Mm-Hmm
AJV (44:19):
It is, it is a negative trend that I can see in my life where as I started giving it up, I noticed it’s like, oh my gosh, they serve mimosas at breakfast, margaritas at lunch, you know, aifs for pre dinner. I was like, oh my gosh, it’s everywhere. And it’s, it was never so recognizable of like, oh man, the access, the accessibility is right. What had created some of the problem of it was there when you celebrate, it’s there and it’s a hard day. It’s there at the sporting event. It’s there, it’s at the adults’ table, at the kids’ party. And it was like, it wasn’t until I just said I can’t have it. It’s a hard no. Right. that I could actually even set limits for myself.
CJ (45:00):
Right? Yes. I mean, happy, sad matter, glad that’s how we drank. That’s, that’s a saying too. You know, it it, when you start thinking of it as, ’cause you had mentioned it’s hard to give it up, right? And when we start changing our language to what am I gonna gain? Like, we’re gaining all this other stuff, we’re gaining sobriety, and yes, we’re giving something up, but like you just said, it’s, if we think of it that we’re giving something up, we’ll, even subconsciously, we’ll feel sorry for ourselves. We’ll have a little pity party and then that’s really unfair to us because you’re right, it’s everywhere. It’s at the kids’ birthday party, it’s at breakfast. And if we have that mindset, it makes us feel like we’re not disciplined because we can’t partake or like we really don’t wanna have it, but it’s, we feel like we should almost, because it’s everywhere, which is the good news why it’s starting to not be everywhere. Right. But we, we wanna flip that mindset to, yeah, maybe I’m gonna miss out for 20 minutes or an hour or that first hit feeling, but what I’m gaining is so much more and really focus on what we’re gaining not on what is not on what we’re giving up.
AJV (46:19):
Yeah. I love that. I can’t repeat this enough. It’s like, it’s gonna be hard either way. Choose your heart. Yeah. Yeah. I love, I love that. Y’all I could talk to Chris about this for much longer, but our time is up and I want you guys to know where you can go pick up a copy of this book. So if you go to grace yourself book.com, you can get your pre-ordered copy right now. At the time of the release, there’s just a few weeks left, but very soon, February 18th, you can get your real copy in the mail immediately. Chris, what would you tell to the person who’s like, yep, I’m going to pick up your book. What, what would you wanna tell them and why they need to go do that?
CJ (47:04):
Well, first thank you and yeah, it, it’s, you are going to gain tools for that will just make you happier, really. Right. It, like I said, it’s, it’s really a book about what you’re gaining not on how to give up one thing. You know, you’re giving up one thing to gain everything and if you, you know, on the flip side, you could lose everything to hang onto that one thing and that’s not what we want. So this book will really reframe your mind to all the way, all the things that you’re gaining and all the things that you want for your life.
AJV (47:38):
I love that. Again, y’all go check it out, grace yourself book.com, coming to bookstores everywhere, February 18th. Get your copy now. Chris, thank you so much. It was so awesome to have you on. And everyone else who’s listening, stick around the recap episode will be coming up next. We’ll see you next time on the influential Personal brand.
CJ (48:00):
Thank you.
Ep 557: Create an Environment You Thrive In | Dr. Cody Golman Episode Recap
AJV (00:00):
Here are a few things that I just pulled out that were phenomenally important to me that just hit me in a certain way, so hopefully they hit you the same way. So the first thing is we started the whole conversation of just remember that you have a choice. And I think that’s just a good reminder for anyone, no matter where you are in life, it’s, you have a choice of how you feel. You have a choice of your attitude. You have a choice of whether or not you’re happy today or you’re stressed today. And I’m not saying that we don’t have days where we’re stressed and overwhelmed. I have those days often, but those are also choices I make. And it’s, I think it, the difference is am I choosing to focus on the things that aren’t going well? Or am I choosing to focus on the things that are, and it’s not that you ignore the things that aren’t they need fixing, but it’s choosing to put your, your, your hope and your aspirations in the things that are working and not get bogged down by the things that aren’t.
AJV (00:59):
It’s, are you choosing little things that make you feel good versus choosing things that don’t make you feel good? I know for me it’s like, am I choosing to go on a walk or am I choosing a glass of wine? I need to choose a to go on a walk, right? And it’s like, you have a choice. You have a choice about are you gonna be disciplined and do the things you know you’re supposed to do, or are you not? Are you going to do it? Even if you think it doesn’t make a difference, even though it does or not. It’s like you have a choice and all the things, you have a choice. And I think that is just a good place, a good foundation to start for the rest of this conversation is we all have choices to make. How we spend our time, our attitudes, how we feel, how we treat people.
AJV (01:46):
Those are choices that we get to make. And we do have influence and control over those things so you have a choice. So that was the first thing I think that was really good. Second thing is similar to that is you have a choice in your environment. Now, sometimes we are temporarily stuck in an environment, but that doesn’t mean we can’t create counter environment. So maybe you are temporarily in a, a job per se that isn’t healthy for you and you can’t just up and leave. You have bills to pay, you have a family to take care of. You have responsibilities, but there can be other environments that you surround yourself with IE community outside of work that help counter negative environments. So environment, your environment is a really important part of your ability to make progress. And I love what Lori said, and I’m totally just stealing this right outta her mouth.
AJV (02:39):
Your environment has a mental, emotional and physical impact on you. And if you are not consciously making decisions, choices to improve your environment, then your mental, emotional and physical wellbeing will suffer. So let’s all just take a a second, take a step back and go, what environments am I in that are healthy and good and, you know, moving me in the right direction? And what environments may I be in that are not those things? And how do I have more of the good and, and less of the not so good? Right? And I think, again, it’s like environments can be places. They can be groups of people, they can be communities, they can be all different sorts of things. But I know for me, and I love what she said when she talks about her childhood and an environment she was used to seeing versus a new environment when she went to go stay with a family a a a set of friends.
AJV (03:38):
And she was like, whoa, whoa, whoa. What is this? I, I didn’t even know this existed. If we don’t create new environments, then we convince ourselves that things are just the way that they are. We don’t even know things are possible ’cause we’ve never seen them be possible for anyone in our environment. So it’s, I think it’s just so incredibly important to have different and varying environments so that you see new patterns and new habits and new ways of living or thinking or acting or doing that create new possibilities for you. I don’t remember who said this first, but it’s like, you know, it’s like you are who you hang out with. Well, I think that’s probably true for most of us. It’s like we are the, you know, culmination of where we spend our time, energy, thinking resources, right? That begins to create who we are.
AJV (04:27):
So what environments are you in and what environments do you need to be in? I love this quote. This is so good. And she said that your environments are often stronger than your willpower. So if you know that you have a temptation to do things that you don’t want to do, then remove yourself from those environments, right? If you’re trying to eat healthy, then do not put yourself in environments where it’s, you know, chips and dips and nachos and hamburgers and hot dogs, right? Remove yourself from those environments. If you hang out with a group of people who aren’t healthy and you’re trying to be healthy, remove yourself from those sorts of temptations, not from the people, from the environments, right? See them on a hike, see them doing something else. But you’ve got to know that if you’ve got struggles in the willpower discipline arena, then you’ve got to change the environment.
AJV (05:24):
So, so good. Oh my gosh, this isn’t like brand new, but such a new fresh context of looking at this really does hit it in a different way. And just remembering, it’s like your environment is often stronger than your willpower. So good. Love this. Okay, moving right along here. This next one is like same kind of quote where I’m like, this should just be all over lord’s social media. I don’t know why this isn’t everywhere she goes, but there is always a gift in what you just did. And if you have ever said to yourself, I just wasted so much time, or I just wasted so much money, or what a bunch of waste of time, resources, emotions, I would just encourage you to rephrase that and go, you wasted nothing. You learned a ton, a ton about what you should do and what you shouldn’t do, what you want and what you don’t want.
AJV (06:25):
But there is a gift in what you just did. And a lot of times that gift comes in experience and it comes in knowledge, and it come, it comes in clarification. But there isn’t a, there is a gift in what you just did, whether it was a success or it was a temporary failure, whether it worked out or it didn’t. There was a gift in what you just did. You just have to make the choice to look for it. And that is so powerful because often we look at things that don’t work out as failures, and we look at failures as a waste of time. And I’m currently reading a book right now called, called to Create by Jordan Rayner. And in this book he talks about something in Silicon Valley where they talk about the fail faster rule. And that’s just my syn my, my synopsis of what he’s talking about.
AJV (07:19):
I don’t know if that’s really what he said in the book, but this is how I remember it anyways. But the fail, the fail faster rule is like in Silicon Valley, it’s like, if your startup fails fast, that means that you’re learning just as fast. So it’s like if you haven’t failed, then you haven’t tried hard enough, risked enough that there hasn’t been something that happened enough. And I think that’s both healthy and potentially not as long as we’re willing to express that. You know, failure does not, failures do not mean we are a failure. That means we did things that didn’t work. Welcome to life,
AJV (08:10):
And so creating different ways of looking at this of like, what are the lessons learned? What are the gifts I received from what I just did? Because nothing was a waste of time. There was something that was received, there was something that was learned. There was something that came out of it that is going to make you a better person, but you gotta make the choice to find it. So just, I thought that was such a good reminder of everything that we do, whether it was a, an investment loss or it was a business loss, a relationship loss. Whereas in the what is the gift and what you just did also in, in the wins, right? There’s clearly gifts in the wins. I think it’s easier for us to find those, but it’s, it’s a mental, a discipline to find the gifts and the things that we don’t consider wins.
AJV (08:58):
But there is always a gift in what you just did, I just thought was so good. Now, tactically speaking there were a few other things that I’m gonna share that I thought were equally as powerful here. So with courses we talked about the concept of less is more. The whole idea of this, it’s like you want to save, like this is what we say at brand builders all the time, is you wanna save the best for first. Because if you give, if you serve up the best first, if you give your audience the best first, they feel accomplished faster, they feel more empowered faster, they feel more educated, more knowledgeable they feel like they can do things right up front. And so you wanna give them as much as you can as early as you can because that shows a very quick return on their investment.
AJV (09:44):
They don’t need to spend six hours and 66 pages to feel like they got their money’s worth. You want ’em to feel like they got their money, their money’s worth in the first hour. So how can you do less is more and help ’em feel accomplished way upfront? Love that. Second thing about courses is just don’t forget that fundamentals never get old. We think we have to create some new twist and make new shiny objects and, you know, talk about a brand new way of doing something. And sometimes people don’t need a brand new way of doing something. They just need to hear it in a new way. They need to hear the solid, basic fundamentals in a way that hits them, right? The whole concept of there’s always a gift in what you just did. You could say that a hundred different ways, but the way that Lori said that hit me, right?
AJV (10:32):
The fact that she said that, you know, your environments often are stronger than your willpower. It’s not like that has never been said before. It’s just never been said that way. And so sometimes it’s not that you’re saying brand new stuff, you’re just saying it away that your audience can relate to in a way that they don’t relate to the way someone else says it. So just don’t forget, like fundamentals don’t get old. Just make sure to share it in your lens and your perspective and provide as much value as possible right up front. Now, when it comes to podcasts, Lori’s podcast now has more than 47 million downloads. So how do you go from a new podcast or a podcast that maybe has a few thousand downloads to millions of downloads? I thought this was really good. Keep it simple. It’s fundamentals, but talk about it everywhere you go.
AJV (11:21):
It’s be consistent. Don’t give up. It takes time. But talk about it everywhere you go. Ask people to share it. Ask people to rate it. Ask people to give reviews on it. But talk about it and then ask people to do what you want them to do. We talked about how it’s like if you never ask, the answer is always no. So you’ve got to ask, remind people, tell people this is how you can help talk about it everywhere you go and tell people what to do. That’s how you grow your podcast and you to do those two things consistently right? Now, last but not least, we also talked about stepping into the world of physical products, right? So that could be anything from t-shirts, shoes to water bottles, wine, food, snacks, nutritional supplements, the list goes on and on and on.
AJV (12:13):
Could be any sort of physical product, but going from an an educational and information product world to a physical product world. And what are some of the things that we need to know and what should we be looking for if we are considering making this transition or adding a physical product line to our business offering? So first, find some help
AJV (13:08):
That’s the first thing. Second is make sure that you’re just filling a need that you see in the market. Don’t think don’t, don’t create a product as you think there’s a need. Find a need and then create a product to fulfill that need, right? And if you’ve got a trusted audience, you can start by asking them, but fill a need that you already see in the marketplace. ’cause There is there, focus on why your product is different than competing products, right? So focus on what differentiate your products. How are you gonna market it differently? How does it help differently? How does it serve your audience differently? How is it made for your audience specifically? So focus on your differentiator. I loved this one that this was so pa impactful. Avoid any sort of products as your first product that have lots of legal tape, right?
AJV (13:58):
So anything that would require like FDA regulatory issues, anything that, you know, like beauty products, food, beverage nutritional lines, anything that has lots and lots of legal take. What’s gonna happen is most of your investment money or your own money is going to be going to the lawyers versus product development, research and development marketing. Most of it’s actually just gonna go to the pockets of attorneys versus actually helping develop your product. So as your first product entry to market, avoid anything that has lots of legal red tape almost to the end of my list here, focus on one thing. In other words, don’t create a product line that has lots of skews first. So if you’re gonna create a makeup line start with one thing, right? Is it a lip gloss? Then stick to that.
AJV (14:50):
Is it a mascara? Stick to that. Don’t go, here’s an entire makeup on, we’re gonna have this and this and this and this. It’s like, no, start with one thing. So you have centralized focus on what works. You do all of your checks and balances, all your trial and error, all of your market testing with one product. So you get the marketing right, you get the audience right, you get the pricing right? You get the packaging and the shipping and all the things right on one product, and then you expand from there. So start with one sku, one product,and that will save you lots of time, lots of money, and actually help you generate revenue. So y’all, there’s so many things I could talk for another 20 minutes on this. Ubut I’m looking at my timer and my time is up. So,go check out this full interview.
AJV (15:35):
Catch us next time on the influential personal brand. And if this has been helpful to you, please go and like this episode, share this episode, comment on it, leave us a review, rate it. If this is helpful to you and you think it would be helpful to someone else, please share it with them. You get to be the conduit of sharing good information out into the world. So I’m asking for your help. If you like our podcast, the influential personal brand, please like it, share it, leave a review and get it out into the world and share it with a friend. So thank you so much. We’ll see you next time on the influential Personal brand.
Ep 556: Take Back Your Health with Radical Accountability with Dr. Cody Golman
AJV (00:00:02):
All right, everybody. Welcome to the Influential Personal Brand podcast. This is AJ Vaden here, and y’all all right. If you follow me on social
AJV (00:01:00):
And I credit so much of that to the transformation that happened in Dr. Cody’s program. And so when I say that this is a life changing, life transforming program, I mean it, I also can tell you that and why, and this is why I’m telling you guys this before I introduce Cody. There are some things that we talk about at Brand Builders Group that resonate in some areas. And there’s just some things that are just universal truth. And one of the things that we say a lot at Brand Builders Group is that the best form of marketing in the world is a changed life, right? And the reason that I promote and refer
AJV (00:02:01):
And really, that’s what today’s episode is gonna be about. And we’re gonna talk a lot about the physical side and the health and nutrition side but also the mechanics of how to create a program that can actually be life changing. And that is why I wanted to have Dr. Cody on, not just to talk about his content, which we will, but also talk about the actual structure of how to create a life changing program that can help you grow your business by changing lives. So, with that said, let me also professionally introduce Dr. Cody Goldman. Dr. Cody has been a dedicated healthcare professional for the last 20 years. And uniquely he has a unique avatar of empowering women, age 35 to 55, who struggle with stubborn weight loss that will not go away regardless of how many things you track. And a huge part of what he has created is a hormone reset waste weight loss program that helps women specifically change and better their lives. And so, I am formally inviting or formally introducing Cody to the show. Thank you for accepting my invitation. We’re so glad you’re here.
CG (00:03:14):
Wow, what a, I, I be honest with you, I am I have tears with that introduction because I can feel how much your life has changed. And this is, I was put in this planet to change and inspire and, and help people. So I feel I can feel a mission just hearing that from you. So thank you for those loving words.
AJV (00:03:32):
Well, enjoy those. ’cause I’m gonna use not as friendly words later, so
CG (00:04:07):
Yeah, I’ll, I’ll do brief briefly. So I was in the military at, I joined at 17. I was still in high school back in the day you could do that. And I became a tank commander at 19. And these, we were throwing these bullets. The bullets are a hundred pounds a piece, and the bullet hole was about a foot over your head, and you could do three a minute. And over the course of time, I started having problems with my neck and shoulders and went to doctors, went to medical doctors, went through the whole gamut, got medications with, and I started questioning like, why, you know, they really didn’t have a diagnosis, but it got medications. And so it truly led me towards natural healthcare. And I finally went to a chiropractor who said, Hey man, you got a pinched nerve in your neck.
CG (00:04:47):
And I said, that’s, that can’t be true. I’ve been to a neurologist, I’ve been to a cardiologist. And he did one adjustment and I had a numb hand for about three months. I had asthma’s analogies and all kinds of stuff. In, in three seconds, the energy came back into my hand and I could have feeling again. Mm-Hmm. And at that moment, I knew it was universe. It was the God saying, listen, like this is your role in this planet, is to help other people. And so I set off to go into chiropractic school, and one of my thoughts at that time was, how many people have gone through? I’ve gone through, gone to doctors, gave me medications, and never actually found the cause of their problem. And that’s an important part of the story because that is my passion, is helping people truly understand their body, our healthcare system, our medical system, our school system does not teach you about your body.
CG (00:05:37):
And I think that’s like literally what I’m creating now is literally a school for how does our body work. So, so I had a, a healthcare center for 17 years. We saw 325 patients a week. I’ve had everything from asthmas, allergies, aids, sickle cell anemia, breast cancer, digestive cancer. I’ve seen every single one of these things heal multiple sclerosis, fibromyalgia. So I won’t go into too much more of that. But, so I learned a lot in that time. And it wasn’t, most of it wasn’t from just physical treatments. I started understanding the, how the mind is wired, how your mind and body are connected. And so I sold IT office, and I, I, I opened up a, a physical product business on Amazon. And over time I wasn’t working with any people. And I got, I started getting like, really antsy. I’m like, I forgot my purpose.
CG (00:06:23):
I’m like, I’m here to work with people. I’m here to ignite and inspire people to their highest potential. That’s it. And so, interesting enough, people started calling me, my patients after I sold the office, they called me and said, Hey, remember that weight loss program you had? I had a weight loss program just because we were attracting people in the office. I was, I, that’s, that’s why we did it. And people started calling me and they said, okay, I’ll figure out how to do this. I don’t have an office anymore. So we, we just figured how to do it virtually, and it worked well. And so that literally is what happened. And with, with the Fast 40, it wasn’t something I was looking to do. Most of the businesses that I’ve created, they’ve been things that have come to me. I didn’t choose to do it. And at this stage of my life I think those, some of the best things that we, that we do, that we think we create are the things that are, are being created for us. So that, that’s, that’s how I got to this point here. So
AJV (00:07:14):
I love that. And, you know, and here’s one of the things that I would, I would say, ’cause I’ve been through the program and everything, it’s, it’s so interesting in such a awesome way to reflect back on, ’cause ’cause what you just said is like, nobody explains how the body works, or it’s like the amounts that I learned in the, the course itself of, you know, just the, even of like what my bo my body responds to, but unique things that are specific to a woman’s body. Like when you’re on your menstrual cycle, like you will never lose weight. And the amount of water that I was definitely not taking and what you think is healthy, which really isn’t healthy, and mm-hmm.
AJV (00:08:06):
And then on top of that, I kept having all my labs checked and like, no, your hormones are great. And then I realized, oh, your hormones change daily as a woman. And so it’s like, unless you’re having them checked pre like every day, it’s like, how would you ever, and it was, there’s so many things that we just don’t know, right? And what I love is that, and we say this all the time at Brand Builders Group, it’s like, your content should be your conclusion, never your hypothesis. And what I love about you and your program is like, no, this started from a, a personal need to then a dedication and expertise of doing the thing, right? 300 times a week for a very long time Yeah. To get to the place of conviction, right? And I think that’s one of the most powerful things that I have seen in your program, is that you, the leader of the program, are so convicted that what the program offers works.
AJV (00:09:02):
That if it’s not working, it’s my fault. Right?
AJV (00:09:54):
But it’s like when you believe in the program so much and you have time tested it so many times that you can go Uhuh, you are wrong. The program is not wrong. You are wrong. Like, it does increase the level of one accountability and expectations that you have from your clients and realizing, Hey, I can’t do this for you. You have to do it. I’m gonna give you the information. At the end of the day, you have to take it and do something with it. And it creates the partnership versus everyone who buys something and was like, oh, that didn’t work. And it’s like, oh no, it didn’t work ’cause you didn’t do it. Right? Mm-Hmm.
CG (00:10:58):
Mm-Hmm.
CG (00:11:39):
So when you do something enough, you start building a skillset. But you know what, I noticed this probably, almost probably two years into the fast 40, I started realizing like that I knew what I was doing. I was like, oh my God, this is really good. When you’ve put your hands in enough people and watch them heal. This happened in the chiropractic office. It’s a very important thing for people to hear in terms of programs or courses or even your doctor. Without that certainty, your level of results goes down quite a bit. And so that’s why it’s an important question. When people came to my office many times they had literally untreatable diseases that weren’t gonna get better. And when you sit in front of a doctor that says, I’ve got you. I’m gonna work with you. We’ve got this. The reason I have so much certainty is because I know that it’s not me doing the healing Mm-Hmm.
CG (00:12:32):
Because there’s a power inside you that I know how to work with. And I’m wanna get you acquainted with the universe is inside you. I already know that your natural state is health, homeostatic health. I know your natural state is inspiration. I know your natural state is to be able to be energized and also to be able to be asleep and need to sleep. It allows yourself to go back and forth. I’m not doing a thing except tapping into the things you already have. So when you have certainty in the universe, is there anything else you need? Hmm.
AJV (00:13:05):
Yeah. I think that’s really good. And I love what you said too, and this is how I interpret it anyway. It’s like without certainty, your level of skill diminishes
CG (00:13:14):
Mm-Hmm.
AJV (00:13:14):
AJV (00:14:05):
One of them is the mechanics of how you’ve built your program. And then I actually wanna talk about the content of your program. And so I think by talking about the content, it’ll naturally, we can talk about the mechanics. And I would just be so curious to know, because I think there’s a lot of people who are, or who will be in some sort of career transition of, I had the thing, I did the thing, I was the thing, and now I’m moving into the new thing. And you did that, right? And so why fast Forward? Like, why this program? Why a course, why the coaching element? There was lots of things you could have done, and I heard you say a lot of people was coming to you, but you could have done it in a lot of different ways. Why did you decide to go this route?
CG (00:14:54):
Yeah. I have so many, so many things that come to my mind. So, okay, so I’ve done this three times when you talked about the thing where you’ve got the thing and you move to something else. So I went from a very successful, we were the top chiropractic office in Denver, sold it for the top 10% of all chiro offices. And people ask me why I sold it. I was an incredible chiropractor, not from an ego standpoint, but I was, I I literally one of the best ones. I know, I’m, I’m serious when I say that, why the hell would I sell? I’ve learned to listen to my inner guidance. There’s no other answer. There is no other thing. I heard that it was time to sell. Mm-Hmm. I resisted it for five years. Those five years were painful. When you resist what the universe is asking you to do, I thought that I got, I thought that being a chiropractor was like, like literally you have people heal from this stuff. I was like, what else could you do? And it’s like, this is my, my skillset, right? Well, I learned something really powerful. The universe gives you more than one amazing talent.
CG (00:15:55):
When you have completed a cycle of action, our reality is, is constructed in cycles. Everything has a beginning, a middle, and an end all. We just don’t want to acknowledge it. All relationships, beginning, middle, end, your body, beginning, middle, end, everything. If you sit in that, you can feel the beginning, middle, and end that the universe or God or whatever the life is telling you. So it told me the end. And it, it may sound crazy, but I literally listened to it. And when I, again, five years of pain of resisting it, you start going, let me figure out how to listen to life a little more. So the, I moved from, you know, chiropractic to building a product business on Amazon. And there was a beginning, middle, and end. And it was interesting because as people started calling me and saying, Hey, could you do the weight loss thing?
CG (00:16:40):
I sensed something’s beginning. Because I think the, the, the challenge is like, as a, as an entrepreneur, we think that we are cr we are, we are creating and driving and building. That’s the push. I’d rather follow the pull. Mm-Hmm.
CG (00:17:38):
Now I did learn in the chiropractic office that I love my freedom. So when you see 325 patients, I was only open 12 and a half hours a week, but I still had to be somewhere. So I had a thought of like, I’ve accomplished that. Could I do the same thing and, and try to have freedom? So I had this interesting, so I had money, but no freedom. Then with the Amazon business, I had I had money and freedom, and I was totally uninspired because I, because I wasn’t fulfilling my purpose. So I’ve realized the money and freedom are really kind of boring, to be honest with you,
CG (00:18:28):
And so I, I realized I gotta work with people. I love people. And I wanna say this, this is kind of a, a segue from our last question to this question. I spent 10 years teaching metaphysical seminars. There was a, a brilliant man named Dr. Thurman Fleet who connected together how the subconscious mind works in the body. And in my twenties, I was studying this. Okay. And I just wanna say this ’cause this is important. When you’re working with people, your, we talked about clarity and certainty and conviction. He taught me that the more you focus on and you can concentrate on the things that you want, the mor will amplify it. So, for example, as a doctor, most doctors are so busy, their mind is scattered with all kinds of stuff. What insurance should I bill? Is this person gonna pay blah, blah, blah, that diminishes the patient’s healing result because you’re not present in the moment.
CG (00:19:24):
So one of the things I learned was that when I say something, I’m saying with full brain power, full brain cell activation. So when I say, Diane, when I make this adjustment, your stomach is going to heal. It’s not the words, it’s the power. So 90% of communication, 90% or more of all communication is subconscious, subconscious. 10% is our words and our gestures. It’s the energy behind things. So what I realized was, and that’s why we got such great healings, I started realizing in the fast 40, now I’m not working with people in person. So now I’ve got freedom, I’ve got money, and I’ve got inspiration
CG (00:20:19):
I don’t actually physically need to be with someone to help them heal. The Christian scientists have known that for a long time. They do remote healings. The Egyptians knew this. They were doing remote healings. So I’m dropping some, some heavier stuff because there’s a lot more behind just assert of what’s happening in the unconscious mind. And understand, when you activate someone’s subconscious mind, that is a direct connection to their body. So you have a direct connection to be able to access their body and their life. So when you say your stomach’s going to heal and you’re gonna notice your relationship improving, that’s what will happen in their life with that level of certainty.
AJV (00:20:56):
Hmm. That is good. You know, it’s so interesting. We’re writing our next book right now, Rory, my husband and I, and I just finished up writing our chapter on identity. And it’s so interesting to hear you say that. And it’s really resonating because one of the, you know, kind of, you know, claims that I’m making, at least for me, is that the definition of identity is simply what you choose to believe about yourself. Hmm. Right? And it’s so much about, it’s like what you think about, you bring about like all these little phrases that we’ve heard over the years. And but it, but it’s true, right? It’s like if you believe, like, not you say you believe, but if you actually believe, then there is like this, you know, spiritual thing that starts to happen where it’s like, I tell people all the time, it’s like your reticular activator kicks in, right?
AJV (00:21:49):
And it’s like the moment that, you know, I started really honing in on my health. It’s like I started noticing things that I didn’t notice before. And once I believed that this was, this was possible, it’s like I was more motivated and I was more disciplined. And, you know, I finished the program, what, in April. And this, at the time of this recording, we’re in mid-November. And it’s like, I have not gained not one pound back, not one. Wow. So cool. And so, but a lot of that was from that, that deep inner belief of like, this is my healthiest state and alcohol is not good for me. I’m not saying it’s bad. I’m saying it’s not good for me. Oils are not good for me. Not saying they’re bad, they’re just not good for me. Going to bed at 9:00 PM is good for me, right? It’s like
CG (00:23:02):
Mm-Hmm,
AJV (00:23:03):
Much of what you were saying. That’s so beautiful. So that, that’s a good transition to the program itself. And so I would love to talk about some of the, the phenomenons that I call them anyways, because I considered myself a fairly healthy person all my whole life, right? I’ve been a pretty healthy individual. And then I was just completely dumbfounded and played with, you know, this stubborn weight that wouldn’t leave that which was then diagnosed to a gallbladder issue that I had, had it removed. Long story short, there was lots of things in place, but I remember being on my sales call with you. I have bunny fingers with the sales call, right? Because, you know, all free calls are, you know, a sales call. And that’s okay. ’cause We do free calls too. But it was interesting ’cause I remember you said, it’s like, do you eat a lot of sugar?
AJV (00:23:51):
And I said, no, I’m not a sweets person. And you were like, let me ask that again. Do you eat a lot of sugar? And I said, no. And he, you were like, okay, let me rephrase that. You eat a lot of sugar
AJV (00:24:38):
And I remember sitting in my pantry for like an hour pulling up every single thing. And I was like, oh, what? Like, I was like, in every spice like my favorite garlic salt, I’m like, why is there sugar in garlic salt? It was in the craziest, like, what? Like what do you mean? And it was one of those convicting moments that I was like, okay, maybe I, maybe I’m missing something here. Maybe I don’t
CG (00:25:54):
Well, okay, a few things. I’m not in the business of telling someone to do something that they don’t want to do. So I’m a big fan of letting people find their own pain. That’s what my sales calls are. So my entire process is if someone’s calling and they would lose 10, 20 pounds, they haven’t and, and they haven’t yet. What I want someone to be able to truly see is how that 10 or 20 pounds is robbing them of the things they value the most. And what’s happened in our country, over 33 33 million people are obese. Over 99 million more in the third of our country is overweight. So if we have enough people walking with a limp and you got a limp, you’re pretty normal.
CG (00:26:43):
And that’s the problem. You look around and 10, 10 pounds of weight, no big deal. My cousin’s 60 pounds of weight. My family’s from Louisiana. Louisiana is some of the best food in the planet and some of the worst food in the planet. 60 pounds of weight is healthy in Louisiana. And so, you know it, it’s very wild to look at this. It’s all comparison. Our brain has comparison. We are the fattest country on the planet. And I wanna say this in, in the most direct way to people. You should look up the life expectancy versus a per capita spent on healthcare. It will make you vomit. We have so many countries that are spending 2, 3, 4, $5,000 a year on, on healthcare for someone and their life expectancy. Sweden, Italy is over over the eighties. Our average life expectancy is in the, is low seventies.
CG (00:27:32):
And we spend over $10,000. There’s no one even close. Sweden is spends $4,000. And that is they most spent the, all the countries in the world per capita per person. We spend over $10,000 per capita on person. And we have a almost 10 year less life expectancy. Why? So, so when you look at why there’s two big things. One, our food has been riddled with preservatives and sugars. Now something just happened re recently we saw the elections and there’s, there’s a man named RFK Jr. Whether or not you like him or not is not the question. I’ve watched him for years. He’s tapped in. He is set out to hold our companies accountable. When you look at Cheerios, when you look at fruit loops, there are 13 more ingredients in our cereals than other countries allow. Those ingredients are things like dyes, actual toxic dyes made from petroleum.
CG (00:28:30):
If you go to Australia, Cheerios are dyed with beet juice and carrot juice for the color. This is the sadness of what our FDA has allowed. Your government has allowed this in your food. And I’m saying this in a way that I hope it gets whoever’s listening to this upset. So when you start understanding this, it’s not a conspiracy. It’s actually happening. Our foods are riddled with stuff. Why it’s cheaper to use dye, then use beet juice. There’s no reason other than profit. And I won’t go into too many details about this, but the FDA they’ve allowed it because the biggest lobbyist right? Can, can, and the companies have the biggest money for them to allow that to happen in your food and sugar. There’s a book called Sugar Blues that I recommend everyone read it is fantastic. But it tracks, it’s very interesting ’cause it tracks the rise and fall of almost every major civilization since like the 16 hundreds.
CG (00:29:23):
The countries that owned sugar became wealthy. They became wealthy, but their people were eating it. So in 100 to 300 years, another country took them over. ’cause They’re a two week to fight. This has happened for thousands of years. This is nothing new. This is what’s happening with America right now. So, so I love to empower people, number one about what’s put what they’re putting in their food. And you know, like you did in, in my program, we eat real food. So many weight loss programs are using powders and pills. Nutrition doesn’t come from a bottle. It’s never come from a bottle. Nutrients don’t come from a bottle, comes from the food that God put in the earth. So that’s number one. And number two is because of the excess sugars. One of the things that’s important to understand is a process called du lipogenesis.
CG (00:30:11):
Your body will convert. It’s magical. You gotta listen to this. You body takes sugar and it converts it into fat on you. Why is that magical fat is the most amazing fuel source for the human being. You are a genius. When you burn fat, you are a rockstar marathon runner. When you burn fat, you’re an amazing bodybuilder. You’re an amazing mother. When you burn fat, fat has nine calories per gram where a protein and carbohydrate has four. So fat is literally jet fuel. Okay? But so your body geniusly takes sugar in and it converts it to fat. Why? It’s because it goes, Hey, I’d rather lay down fat because you’re gonna have a better fuel source for, for you it’s doing it out of love. But when you have too much sugar coming in than you start loading up the fat, okay? So that, it’s almost as if you put a low octane fuel in your car and your car could change it to a higher octane fuel.
CG (00:31:03):
That’d be magical. That’s what your body’s doing. So when you start seeing how much sugar is being put in, yes we are, we’re we’re generating more fat, we’re becoming bigger. But why is that an issue? Why not just be fat? Why not just, just like you said, just 10 pounds, 10 pounds, no big deal. It has been proven that if you reduce your weight just by five to 10%, five to 10% of your fat, you decrease your risk of disease by 50%. And the true reason is when you are not utilizing fat, there’s a, there’s hormones in your body that use fat. When you load your body full of sugar, your hormones go, Hey, let’s start using this thing. It stops using fat. That’s the moment where disease process sets in. Your joints become arthritic, your mind becomes slow. Digestive issues, a chronic diseases, cancers matter of fact, can many cancers use sugar to metastasize to get bigger inside your body? So those are the main reasons I’ve seen and that’s truly what the fast 40 targets is clearing those up. Not just clearing ’em up, but getting people educated so they understand what’s happening with both our nutrition in our, in our, in our environment.
AJV (00:32:14):
Yeah. And that, that was truly like to what you said, and I think a lot of people hear that a lot about the sugars and don’t do anything about it. ’cause I don’t think you understand for the most part that it’s in everything. Like I, I was thinking about, I don’t, I don’t really eat sweetss. Like I don’t, and then I realized, oh my gosh, I eat sugar all day. What is happening?
CG (00:33:39):
Yeah, that’d be good. Yeah. This is by the way, the, the, the, it’s fun. What’s fun for me is I’ve always been the guy, especially as a chiropractor, that I, I literally am doing something completely different than what mainstream media and medical system tells you. That’s why I get such good results. And to fast forward is no different. I’m willing to be the guy that’s like, listen, what you’ve been told is completely false. I’m okay. I’m okay telling you that. And that’s why we have such great results. So the truth is so the fat reserves, you have different types of fat reserves. You have, you have structural fat, which is a necessary fat inside your cells and tissues. You have normal fat. Normal fat is a res, is a reserve that you need. And then you have abnormal fat. Abnormal fat is when you’ve tapped out your normal reserves and your body goes, okay, well I gotta put this somewhere.
CG (00:34:28):
Where does it put it? Your belly, your thighs, your legs, your hips, your butt, all these different areas. And the reason it does it is because of survival. And there’s so many things behind this. But when, when during our hormone reset number one, understand that your hypothalamus, the part of the brain that is very, very primitive is naturally used to looking for fat. It already knows I’m gonna do great with that. Okay? And so over time, like I said, your body becomes efficient in what you give it. So you give it the sugar, it starts switching over sugar. So what we do during our 40 day reset is we remove all oils and fats because listen to it this way. Your brain and body have no reason to use its own fat reserves if you put fat in your mouth. And it’s very confusing to people because they’re still thinking, well, aren’t fats good?
CG (00:35:20):
Yes. But you already have 20 pounds of good fat on you. It’s not about fats being good and bad. I want to get your body to use the good fat on you. It’s the best fat. So that’s why people feel so amazing is your body made this fat Mm-Hmm,
CG (00:36:09):
What you said is exactly it. My mom and I went out to eat, we loaded our food and our fat content was just, it was skyrocketed. And I’m like, oh my God. It’s because when you go to a restaurant, you’re gonna get a fatty burger because if they don’t put a fatty burger in there, you’re gonna complain. ’cause It doesn’t taste good. Mm-Hmm.
CG (00:36:52):
And, and that was a shocker to me. So none of the stuff I’ve really, you’ve, you’ve seen, I figured this out on my own. It wasn’t that I learned it in the, in school. It was like me and Tubi going, oh my God, look at my body. I used to be, I used to have extra fat on my body. I couldn’t get it off. I was a bodybuilder. And I literally went through and figured this process out and I was like, oh my God, this is so different. I had the same cognitions you did about sugar. I was eating sandwiches, the white bread was sugar
AJV (00:37:33):
Yeah. And I love that because I think one of the things that is so helpful not just with like the, the health components of this, but you know, it’s, it’s also understanding the, the choices that we make, right? And it’s like, it’s one thing, right? And I think that’s one of like the, the ahas that I love in any program. It’s like, it’s one thing if I’m making choices out of ignorance, right? And, but it’s another, if I’m going, Hey, I know if I do this, this is gonna happen and then if I do this, then this will happen. And I think that’s, that’s a huge part of the success of any program, is giving people the information, the awareness and the cognition to be able to make good choices, right? And that’s part of what I loved about this program is like even if I choose not to like, you know, follow it very strictly in a day, it’s like I also understand the consequences of my choices.
AJV (00:38:34):
And what I also love is I also now know how to reset. I didn’t know how to reset before. And so I’d love for you to talk about that next. And then I have two other things and then I wanna talk about the mechanics of your program. Yeah. Because go on and on. Yeah. But like, just as a quick example, it’s like I know that if I choose to go out to eat, and I think a part of this is I still weigh myself every single day. Not because I’m obsessed about my weight. I’m not, I am truly monitoring how my body reacts to the food that I put in it. Good or bad. This is not a weight obsession. And people go get rid of the scales. No, don’t do that. It’s like, it’s like, it’s like me trying to run analytics on my funnels with no data.
CG (00:39:17):
Bingo. Like
AJV (00:39:18):
What? No, I have to have data. I have to know what works and what doesn’t. I have to be able to monitor that, the output. So I know the input. And that is like, so back to what I was gonna say is the thing that’s amazing is I literally know if I choose to, you know, splurge, which looks different for me now, but if I do, then I know the very next day, here are the three things that I need to do and I will completely reset and I will be fine. Mm-Hmm.
CG (00:40:17):
Well first of all, yo-yo dieting is damaging your health. That’s the first thing. Yo-Yo diet is absolutely damaging. Matter of fact, you look at people who are yo-yo dieting, they end up fatter in the long run. Hmm. Every time you reduce your calories and, and deprive yourself of what you need, you will temporarily lose weight. Both muscle, water and fat. And those aren’t the type you wanna lose fat, you don’t wanna lose muscle. But that’s what happens with calorie deprivation diets. That’s Jenny Craig, that’s Weight Watchers, that’s paleo keto, that’s all of them. So we don’t create calorie deprivation, we create caloric balance. That’s a very specific thing. That’s one of our, one of our pillars in bbg, right? Is we, we literally cr create caloric balance and reset your metabolism. The yo-yo dieting is a screwing your metabolism and making you malnourished. And what happens is you’ll lose weight the moment you put food back in because your brain and body love you, it will lay down more fat.
CG (00:41:10):
Why? Because there’s a 25,000 plus year old mechanism that says, this person’s starving, we must add fat for the next time they starve themselves. Mm-Hmm. So that’s a big clue if someone hears that. Okay. So, so that’s the first thing. The other thing is that you said something, it’s funny ’cause ro I hear Rory in a lot of the videos say the thing that I’ve been saying in a different way. But it’s about pain. It’s about you get two types of pain in this world. Some, some of my patients think I’m a positive person. And I keep kinda reminding people that I’m not positive. I’m an equilibrium. Positive thinking is. Absolute. The most sad people on the planet, the ones that are striving for happiness, the most sick people in the planet are the ones that are striving for health.
CG (00:41:59):
Why? Because we live in a world of polarity. We have two types of pain in this world. The pain of discipline or the pain of regret. And so what I’ve noticed, I’m kind of going back to what you were saying here, is you either decide the discipline of weighing yourself, of looking at the scale. I wanna just mention this. So many women have been told you shouldn’t weigh yourself because you can create some emotional obsession. Absolute. All you’re doing is avoiding pain. There’s nothing else. There’s no other thing. Now I, the primitive brain is wired to avoid pain. So just check this out. We have primitive brain centers, the amygdala and hippocampus, and then you have advanced brain centers. Okay? Your primitive brain, when you are avoiding pain, you are in your animalistic brain center. When you weigh yourself and you face the pain, you are in the advanced frontal lobe.
CG (00:42:51):
So understand this in the, in the, in the animalistic, avoid pain, chase pleasure. You are gonna go back and forth. Yo-Yo diet. You are gonna go back and forth in your relationship. You’re gonna be on a, on a, on a massive pendulum swing of incredibly happy and incredibly sad. That’s what the majority of our, our reality and most of our people are going through. So you have the pain of discipline and the pain of regret. You can decide to avoid the scale each day, and you’ll pay the price of regret, which is sitting in a hospital bed with a, you know, a heart attack trying to get your heart worked, done. That’s a bigger pain. So one of the things that, you know, you’ve seen this is I really push people to actually feel pain. The emotional pain specifically it, you cannot avoid the little pains.
CG (00:43:36):
And I, I thought the same thing when you were talking about that. It was like, that’s like saying I should just stop checking my bank account or checking my analytics. You cannot manage what you don’t measure. So people are worried about creating some kind of emotional trauma to themselves. I would rather you learn to sit in your pain because I know the pathway to your most greatest change is through your pain. If you think about the things that have probably with you two aj, the things that have truly been the most amazing things in our lives, it’s when the hits the fan and you deal with pain, it’s not been from being coddled and supported. Right? So, so anyway that’s a few things about that of, of why, you know, the, the, the whole up and down, the yo-yo dieting, most of it is just truly voting pain.
CG (00:44:20):
So difference of, with us, we create caloric balance. I don’t want you hungry in this program. I don’t want you starving. I already know it’s not gonna work. It hasn’t worked for most people. For third of our country is fat. If dieting was gonna work, it would’ve already worked, right? Secondly, we actually reset your hormones. So we reset your hormones away from sugar and we switch to flip the switch back to fat. That does not happen with any program. And literally there’s not one program, including the recent injections that are completely damaging people’s gallbladder and intestines called ozempic and wegovy. There’s 50 to 60 lawsuits per day for these injections. It doesn’t reset your hormones. It actually screws your hormones up. And, and I’m very passionate just about the hormone reset for both men and women, of course work with both, but men seem to not take care of the health as much as women do.
CG (00:45:11):
So a focus for women. But o one of the things that I think is powerful is if you go into menopause, if you’re 35 to 55, you start having menopausal changes and you are a sugar burner. You’re in for a hellish like condition and hellish like symptoms. If you go through menopause as a fat burner, here’s my experience with thousands of people. Dr. Goldman, this isn’t so bad, right? The medical community would like you to think that you need to load yourself full of chemicals because you’re now 40. That is where I’m standing up for women and for people. Your body has everything it needs. If you get to reset it and put the right fuels in, you’ll create health. And your second half will be healthier than your first half.
AJV (00:46:01):
Well, I mean y’all, I I don’t get affiliate fees for Dr. Cody. I wish he did send me affiliate fees. I do not get them. I am not like
AJV (00:46:56):
But it’s like, I’m not tooting Dr. Cody’s horn. It’s like this has been a life transformative change where I feel like so many of us have ignored the pain ’cause we didn’t wanna see it or we’ve been told you don’t need to. But at the same time, we’re being shoved a bunch of powders and pills and programs that ultimately don’t work. I was never hungry and I’m never hungry. People look at the amount of food I eat and they’re like, there’s no way you’re gonna eat all that. And I’m like, I’m gonna eat all you some more. Like I eat so much food, it’s admirable. And it’s all because it’s like my body has reset. It has reset. And I cannot say enough about this program and the way that it has changed my physical and mental health over the last years.
AJV (00:47:44):
But I do wanna talk about two things in transition before I run outta time because you’ve talked about this a lot. The last five minutes is women and specifically women, 35 to 55. And I think a lot of people struggle with, you know, breaking through what we call she hands wall. They struggle with really dialing it in because their audience is too broad. And I feel like you, even though you’ve said, Hey, we can work with men too, but but I love that you, you have actually really defined a very niche audience that you can just crush with. And because of that, it makes it easy for people like me to go, oh, I know who I refer you to. Anyone who talks about hormones, menopause, post children can’t lose this weight. And I’m like, I know someone, I know someone
AJV (00:48:32):
And, and it’s because it’s so clear, right? And so I just wanna recap this. This is even in Dr. Cody’s bio, y’all. So when you’re thinking about how clear should you be, this was in his intro that I said, Hey, send me the bio that you want me to read about you. This is what it says. Dr. Goldman empowers women age 35 to 55 who struggle with stubborn weight that won’t budge despite diet or exercise. Right? And it’s like you have found like the, the demographic and psychographic elements of these are women in this age range who struggle with this, right? And we talk a lot about this at brand builders. I help who do what? I help women age 35 to 55 lose weight that won’t go away. And so how did you pick that audience? And that’s, I wanna talk about that and then I wanna talk about how you decided some of, some of the accountability measures of your program. Yeah.
CG (00:49:28):
Yeah. I can’t wait to chat about that
CG (00:50:06):
I’m like, okay. But over time what I realized was, this is what I realized. And, and I’m a man so I know this. I can say this, women take action on their health long before men do. So I realized if I could get the women in my office, I eventually would get the man. ’cause I wanna work with men too, but I didn’t have to focus on them. ’cause The men follow the women. Doesn’t, doesn’t that work everywhere? Yes. That’s what, that’s what the bars do. The bars say listen, it’s, it’s happy hour women, women come in free ’cause they know the men are gonna come in. Right? So I’m just using maybe the, maybe it’s the bar strategy. Sure. But that’s what I figured out. And so truly that’s, that’s just what came through is like, my God, I love working with women ’cause they take care of themselves in general.
CG (00:50:46):
Women will tap into feel pain longer before men do. And I’m a man that I feel more feelings than most women. I feel people when I talk to ’em that just start, that happened to me. Just, just whatever it is, whatever my makeup is. So men truly sometimes don’t even understand what I’m even saying. But women understand when I say, would you stop for a second and just drop it and feel what your body’s telling you right now? Like, women can hear that, right? And eventually there maybe, maybe we’ll have a big advancement. Evolution and men will, we will, we’ll follow our women and we’ll catch up to you guys. Right? So that’s truly why I ended up working with that, that, that set of you know of people. And, and I love the age range because it’s, it is the age range that our healthcare system in to, in my, to me, has disempowered.
CG (00:51:36):
The and, and by the way, this has been happening from the time you’re born, our healthcare system. This happened in, in back in the 1930s and forties. They realized that they can teach people that your body doesn’t have what it needs to be healthy. You can become a customer of a lifelong medicine system. I’m not against medicines. Thank God we have emergency care. Freaking love it. Amazing. But emergency care started lapsing over into healthcare, and that’s where we went wrong. And so my message that I’ve known the universe has showed me is the universe is inside you. It’s called innate intelligence. You have everything you need. The universe didn’t build you, or God didn’t make you to turn 40 and forget what chemicals to make. What kind of story are we trying to, like, what the, you know, I’m not gonna curse here as much, but, so anyway, I love empowering and, and disempowering those old beliefs and putting new ones in.
CG (00:52:35):
And you’re such a good model of that. As I get 41, that’s what I experienced. I’m 46. I have more energy now than 26. My, a lot of my people around me are 46. They look like they’re 66. It’s like sad. I want to lo, I want people to truly be healthy. And I’m a very spiritual person. I found that the number one thing to lead people to God is create a healthy body. Mm. When you are sick, you’re not seeking spirituality. When you’re sick, you’re barely, you’re seeking survival. So there’s a much deeper meaning behind, for me, for health. It’s truly getting you connected with your source. This is our ultimate gift from the universe. Mm-Hmm.
AJV (00:53:44):
I mean, I would let you go on and on and on. This would easily be a three hour episode for me because I think it’s fascinating and I think it’s true. And I think it’s, there has been a disempowering amount of ignorance that we have allowed. And that can’t blame just the government. We have allowed it. And there needs to be more voices who go uhuh. Right? And part of why I wanted to have you on the show is because I believe in the program so much. And also because the dead gum thing works, right? And so I want to help share this. Now, I believe that a huge part of the why the program works is the mechanics of the accountability and the touch points, right? Because there’s a course component which is very informative. And I will tell you, it’s the only course that I’ve ever completed.
AJV (00:54:30):
I am not a course learner. I’m an in-person learner. I’m tactical hands-on, gotta shut it down. It took a lot of self discipline to get through this course. It is not my jam. It’s not how I learned. It’s not how I function, but I did it. It’s probably the only one I’ve ever finished. But that is not what now the information was transformative and just going like, how am I this old and never knew this, but what really moved the needle is your ability to stalk me every day,
CG (00:55:56):
Yeah. I’ve had many versions of trying you know, of trying to figure out how to do this. Just FYI, I’d landed on this, right? I figured it out. But, so I tried in my chiropractic office when we did the, was this weight loss program. I met with people once a week and we, we measured them. But what I found was seven days was way too long. In seven days, you could have completely screwed it up. So I was like, well, how do I do this daily? I am someone that freedom is just as important to me as money. ’cause I’ve experienced money without freedom and it sucks. It, it’s not worth it. So how do I make money? How do I have freedom and be inspired in helping people? That was the blend of all this. Mm-Hmm.
Ep 549: Simple Steps to Set Your Next Big Goal | Caroline Miller Episode Recap
AJV (00:06):
Welcome to the Influential Personal Brand podcast. This is the place where we help mission-driven messengers, just like you learn how to build and monetize your personal brand. My name is Rory Vaden, and I’m the co-founder of Brand Builders Group, a hall of fame speaker, and New York Times bestselling author. And this show is to help experts learn how to become more wealthy and well known. I know you’re gonna love it. Thanks for being here. Let’s get started.
AJV (00:34):
Do you have a dream that feels just slightly out of reach? Like you’ve got this thing that you really wanna do, and maybe you haven’t even told anyone, but it just feels a little impossible. Well, we’re gonna talk about how do you set big goals today and how to actually reach ’em. And I think first of all, we should talk about what are big goals. And big goals are things that stretch you. Big goals that are, are things that take you out of your comfort zone. These are things that are not necessarily attainable or reachable. They’re not realistic. They’re big. They’re they’re big. They’re gonna force you to be different, learn different things, try new things, fail
AJV (01:32):
These are big goals, and there are, they are goals that change you in the process of trying to reach them. Do you don’t even have to reach them. It’s the process that happens in you trying to reach them. Now, why I think this is a huge part of this. It’s like, why should you set big goals? One because it forces you to become a new and better version of yourself. It forces you to grow. And growth is good. Challenge being challenged is good. Hard work is good. It produces discipline and resilience and work ethic that cannot be, cannot be learned any other pla any other way or in any other place. But there has to be a, a why behind this. That’s internal, that’s intrinsic. It cannot be extrinsic or external. It cannot just be about, oh, I wanna make more money or I wanna beat this other person.
AJV (02:31):
There has to be a, a profound why behind this, that even if you have setbacks, even if you experience moments of failure, even if you have moments of doubt that you proceed because it’s significant enough to keep trying in the midst of it not working. Right? That is really important. The why has to be bigger than the why not, right? And when you’re setting big goals, these are dreams, these are life goals. They have to really have a fundamental why that is significant. Beyond worldly stuff, beyond titles or ego or money or pride or ambition or success. It has to be beyond that. Okay? Now, next thing we’ve gotta break it down. Like what do you actually have to learn in order to do the thing? I just had a, an amazing podcast interview with Caroline Miller who wrote the new book Bake Goals.
AJV (03:28):
And a huge part of it is you have to just determine using goal setting theory GST. Is this a learning goal? In other words, is this something that you’ve never done before? Or is it a performance goal, which is, you’ve done this before, but the goal is to do more of it or do it better, right? So first and foremost, you have to determine in this big goal, what what am I gonna have to learn? Because in order to do it better, you first have to learn it, right? In order to have performance goals, you have to have done it before. So if it’s a big goal, then ask yourself, is this truly a learning goal or is it a performance goal? And if it’s brand new and you’ve never done it before, it’s a learning goal. So what do you need to learn? Who do you need to learn from?
AJV (04:16):
How quickly can you learn it? What resources do you need to learn it? Do you have the money to invest into learning this? These are all things that are a part of reaching really big goals. And the first thing you have to ask is, is it a learning goal or is it a performance goal? And if it’s a learning goal, then we need to give ourselves grace in the process. IE patience, right? Because there are things that you have to learn before you can get results, okay? And so that’s kind of getting into the specifics. Is it a learning goal or is it a performance goal? Right? Then we gotta have our, our, our group our positivity group, our accountability group, our mentorship group, our coaching group, whatever we wanna call it. But we have to have our group, IE our people. We have to have systems and groups of accountability, but not just accountability, but also of support, right?
AJV (05:10):
I think one of the most important things that I actually talked about with Caroline Miller on this podcast is how important it is for us to be around people who believe that we can do it, but also who believe in doing big things in general, right? It, it’s, you have to discern and decide who gets to come along on this big goal journey with you, and who doesn’t
AJV (06:09):
That, and that could include mentor groups, coaching programs masterminds. These could also be friends and family. But you really have to discern, it’s like, Hey, I know I’m gonna need positive influences in my life. I know I’m gonna need people who believe in me, believe in what I’m doing, and also who just believe bigger in general. So, right. So those are your, that’s your group, right? Systems and people of accountability. But not just accountability but support, right? But this also includes a, a peer group of learning from people who’ve done what you’ve done in a way that you can also do it, right? So that’s looking for mentors, coaches, role models who have achieved what you want to achieve in a way that you can do it, right? So I think about myself all the time when I’m looking for a different coach or a, a mastermind to join.
AJV (06:57):
And it’s like, it’s one thing to go, I know they’ve done it, but I also have to discern, did they do it in a way that I think would work for me?
AJV (07:40):
Or if I’m gonna have to slow it down and pace it out. But this is giving myself grace to do something that is big that I haven’t ever done before. But also the time to do it with people who believe in me, who will support me, but then also discerning who I need to learn from. And it’s not anyone. It’s a specific type of person. So that I can follow in those footsteps and, and learn in a way that I can digest and do it in my unique way, right? So those are all systems of accountability and your people group, right? Next is we’re gonna have to build some resilience to do big things. We’re gonna, and that includes discipline. That includes perseverance. That in that includes some grit, right? We’re gonna have to mentally note in advance if we’re gonna do something big what could go wrong and what am I gonna do when, probably not if, but when bad thing happens. Prepare in advance for setbacks. Don’t get caught off guard. Fully expect them so that when they come, they don’t shut you down. They are, they may be naysayers. What are you gonna do if they come your way? There may be setbacks. It may go slower than you want. So what are you gonna do if that happens? Things may break, things may fail, things may not launch. Well, it may not go the way you want. What are you going to do if that happens?
AJV (09:15):
Know in advance so that when it comes, you have a plan in place to keep moving forward. ’cause If you don’t, these are the things that knock us off the horse. These are the things that throw us off. Throw us off the rails. And if we’re not prepared, we lose so much time that we give up. We give up hope. We give up that this even is something we wanted to do. And so we stop. And the only failing that happens is when we quit, not quit. The things that we decide are no longer good for us, but we quit the things because they got too hard for us. There’s a difference between quitting because it’s no longer good for me and quitting because it just got too hard for me. Don’t quit. ’cause It gets hard. That’s where character is built. That’s where you are built. Don’t quit because it gets hard. You quit when it’s no longer good for you. But just remember, hard things are good for you.
AJV (10:11):
Hard things create character that cannot be built anywhere else. But that is up, up to you to discern what those things are, but prepare in advance, prepare in advance for them. Next, take consistent action. Co consistency, right? It’s not the first time you’ve ever heard. This won’t be the last time you’ve ever heard this. And that’s because it’s true.
AJV (11:15):
This is all about taking action. And that, that requires a plan. You have to know what direction you’re going to take the first or the hundredth step. So know your direction and have it well mapped out so that you can benchmark. Is this a daily, a weekly, a monthly, quarterly thing? And also, where do I need to be at these different benchmarks? Where do I need to be? 90 days in the journey, six months in the journey, 12 months in the journey. If we’re gonna set out to do big things, we need a big detailed plan, right? And that is about how do you set out those daily consistent things that you’re gonna do? And again, they, they’re not all daily. Some are daily. But what are the things that need to happen to create consistency to hitting this big goal? And last, but most certainly not least, is what are your points of reflection? And I think this is one of the things that is most important in my life, is on a very, I would say, consistent basis, for lack of another word, since I just talked about consistency. You have to remember not just why you’re doing this, but more importantly who you’re doing it for. And I have to tell you right now, it shouldn’t be you. Big goals should not just be centered on you.
AJV (12:31):
That is one of the first ways that you won’t achieve them. It’s because it was too isolated to just you, and that’s just not big enough. Doing it just for yourself isn’t big enough. So when I talk about have reflection on the who, I mean, who is this goal really for? Is it for your kids? Is it for your family? Is it for your spouse? Is it for your clients? Is it for your future clients? Is it for the next generation? But who is this for? And remember that when you’re doing this, it’s not just a goal for a thing. There is impact for a person when you achieve your goals. And that, that that goes beyond you. And if you do it well, and if you do it right, if it’s really big, it goes beyond just your friends and family too.
AJV (13:21):
It has the opportunity to impact your community. It has the impact to, you know, potentially impact your nation or even the world. Like that is a big goal. And big goals require a big focus on who, who is this for? Like, who am I building this business for? Who am I making this content for? Who am I writing this book for? Who am I doing this, you know, sporting event for who, whatever it is, it’s like, who is this for? Is it to prove that it can be done for everyone who comes after me? Is it to put a stop to the chaos that’s happening in and around, you know, my community? Who is it for? And if you re remind yourself and remember that there are people at stake here, then it, that is what gives you some endurance, that gives you some ammunition to push through on the dark nights when you’re like, what am I doing?
AJV (14:18):
What was I thinking? Well, what you were thinking is that people are worth it because they are. So don’t forget in the midst of numbers and metrics and things and steps and lessons, that there is a who at the center that will benefit from you accomplishing this goal. And it’s beyond you and it’s beyond your family potentially beyond your community. But there is a who, a group of people, a person that you have the opportunity to have life-changing impact on if you do this. And that is what should keep you moving. It’s the who at the center of those big goals.
Ep 548: The Power of Setting Big Goals with Caroline Miller
AJV (00:02):
Hey everybody, welcome to another episode on the Influential Personal Brand podcast, a j Vaden here. Super excited to introduce you guys to a new friend of mine. And also super excited to get to have this conversation literally on the eve, right this as this podcast is reaching your ears. This is the eve of her book launch her new book called Big Goals. We’re gonna be talking to Caroline Miller today who is an eight times, let me say that again. An eight times bestselling author, an international speaker, and a globally renowned expert and positive psychology. And let me just say, we all need a little bit more positivity right now.
AJV (00:56):
Looking forward to next year, we should all be in the mindset on what are the goals that we have for the next year. Or some of us are thinking three, five years, 10 years, but oh yeah. One of the things that we wanna challenge is, but are we setting the right goals and are we setting big goals? And so this is a conversation today about what’s the science and the power behind big goals. And Caroline, how, how, how long have you been actually writing this book? Like, not just the physical words, but the, the, the research and the, the data. Like how long has this book been in progress?
CM (01:38):
I would love to say my whole life I’ve been obsessed with goals, but really ever since the science of goal setting lock and latham’s goal setting theory was introduced to me in 2005. That’s when my life changed. And this book is the result of squeezing the tube of toothpaste earlier this year to get out a brand new streamlined guide to this science. ’cause Most people don’t know it. And it’s extraordinary to me that most people don’t know it.
AJV (02:04):
Yeah. Like, I just wanted to hear, it’s like, that’s like, we’re talking about almost 20 years of data and research and just experience and all of the things in that’s gonna go into the next hour. So Yeah, when we think about the amount of time and expertise and just dedication spent on this subject matter, subject matter, I would just highly encourage, like, think about this for a second and then we’re gonna jump into the interview. What if in the next hour you could get the consolidated data and findings from 20 years of research that can empower you to set bigger and better goals for your life, would it be worth it? And I bet the answer is yes. So stick around, stay for the whole episode and we’re gonna start that now. So, Caroline, welcome to the show.
CM (02:52):
Well, that’s galvanizing. I’d stick around
AJV (03:04):
Well, I, I wanna know. So I mean, a part of why I wanted to have you on this show is like, you know, the first question I had for you, and we had talked just a little bit about this before I hit record, is like, what do you think separates big goals from all of the other goals that are being set? ’cause If, just for context for, if you’re listening, as you’re reflecting on the goals that you had for this year, as, as I did kind of prepping for this interview, and as you look forward to the goals that you’re setting next year, it’s like, are these big like
CM (03:53):
Well, I think it’s baked into the word big. I think big girl goals are the ones that have some of our passion and the things that we’re most excited about baked into them. So, big goals change our lives. They do change the world. They change our world. Sometimes they change the entire world. And because they’re so big, they require a different set of skills and talents and focus and grit that regular local goals don’t have. And we know from the science, I’m gonna share with you the big secret goal setting theory. We know the best outcomes across the board come from setting challenging and specific goals. And those are big goals. And most people set no goals or low goals that they’re pretty sure they’re gonna accomplish. And what happens is the world, the world rewards people who set big goals because of what goes into achieving them and how much awe they can inspire in you and others. So we all need to have big goals, and we all need to find out what we’re made up in the process of going after our own big goals.
AJV (05:02):
As someone who does typically set goals, how, how could I even define for myself what’s a big goal?
CM (05:11):
A big goal should be if you stretch your hand out and your fingertips are at the end, a big goal is past your fingertips. Mm-Hmm.
AJV (06:11):
Hmm. That’s so good. And I love, I literally like wrote this down, it’s like big goals change you in the process.
CM (06:19):
Yeah. They change you. They, yeah. That’s so Yeah. Well, they change you because it’s, it says that you have audacity, that you’re willingness to push all your chips in the middle of the table. You’re willing to find out what you made of, you’re willing to find out who has your back. In the process of doing this, you often find out who really has your back. Not people who say they do, but who’s there. And there’s a, a trick I can share with you from psychology where you, you know, who has your back by one thing that they do. I’ll get back to that. But it does change you because you begin to ladder up to more and more things that you’re passionate about that are important to you when you play a little bit bigger. Now, let me just say, asterisk has to be your goal. It can’t be your parents’ goal, your spouse’s goal, your culture’s goal, your religion’s goal. It has to be something that lights you up. Mm-Hmm.
AJV (07:37):
You know what I, what I love about what you just said is like, what I heard is that
CM (07:46):
Oh, what a concept.
AJV (07:52):
You know, and it’s, I think a lot of people want big things, but they don’t wanna have to do a lot of work.
CM (08:00):
And that has really changed in, in the last few generations. That’s a piece of what drove me towards this book because I raised three wonderful adult children, and I happened to be raising them during the self-esteem movement when we were told as parents, tell your kids they’re winners. Give them trophies even if they don’t make the team valedictorians, were taken out of school. Playgrounds were dumbed down so that nobody could get hurt, comfort animals for all. I mean, I gotta tell you, the whole world became a dumbed down bubble wrapping of this generation. And so for many of them, the first time that they get any real honest feedback about who they are, this grades are so inflated that’s been proven is when they get a real performance review in the workplace. And for some, it’s like, what do you mean I didn’t exceed expectations by showing up?
CM (08:57):
I mean, whatcha whatcha saying? So yeah. So I think this concept of doing hard things was filtered out of society and not just in the United States. Really everywhere. It was a movement that swept the world. And there’s always pockets of exceptions there, there athletes, they’re Eagle Scouts. There are people who pursue, you know, passions. They start companies. They have, you know, instruments that they play. However, there was a zeitgeist, there was a cultural revolution against doing hard things because you’re not supposed to be stressed. And in the process of removing stress from our children’s lives, we didn’t make them resilient. They didn’t develop grit. So I wrote a book called Getting Grit that came out in 2017 because I really wanted to talk about the fact that I cultivated grit when I set the biggest goal of my life in my early twenties to, to save my own life.
CM (09:50):
I had bulimia. And it was a time when there was no cure, no hope you were gonna be bulimia for the rest of your life. If you made it that long, you’d probably lose your teeth. You probably wouldn’t be able to have children. I mean, it came with all kinds of side effects, but it was hopeless. And I decided I wanted to live more than I wanted to die, more than I wanted to chase an image of what my body could possibly look like if I got good enough at this bulimia thing. But I lost everything. I lost, I lost my sport. I, I lost piano. I limped through Harvard. I’m not sure how I got through it, but I did. And I hit my left bottom at 21 and decided I wanted to recover. My parents who didn’t know about it, nobody.
CM (10:33):
It was my goal. And because of that, I cultivated grit One day at a time. I failed. I failed, I made mistakes. But you know what? I kept getting up and I had this big passionate goal. I wanna live and I wanna survive ’cause I must have more to give to this world than my swimming times and my SAT sports and I survive. And I wrote a book called, my Name is Caroline. That really set me on a course of sharing how you have a big dream like recovery or going to the moon or living in a foreign country and, you know, pursuing a dream job there, how do you do it? And I decided that in order to cultivate grit, you have to have certain qualities that are not inborn, but you have to decide. You wanna work hard and have passion, and have persistence, and have patience and have humility and all the qualities that go into it. That’s what it takes to achieve big goals. And we all should have them, but we should all know, going back to your point, work is involved and it’s gonna be hard. And that’s just the way it is.
AJV (11:42):
So I wanna talk about that for just a second in this, you know, concept of setting pit goals. Because inherently that means you’re doing something you’ve never done before, which is, is gonna require you to learn things you don’t know, try things you haven’t tried, work with people you haven’t met. There’s a lot of that Right. Associated with that. Yeah. So a question that I have is, I would imagine, and I’m pretty certain many people struggle staying motivated when tur when working towards big goals like this. And so, mm-hmm. I would be curious to hear from you, like what are the, some of the strategies that you’ve uncovered or even some of the science and the data of how do you drive and resilience when you’re trying to achieve something that’s real hard?
CM (12:29):
Well, this goes back to the secret I promised I’d share with your listeners. Okay. It’s all about goal setting theory. So I was introduced to goal setting theory when I went back to school. I went to the University of Pennsylvania to get a master’s degree in applied positive psychology. So it was the first 33 people in the world to get this degree in the science of happiness. And in assignment that fall 2005 was goal setting theory and Lockman latham’s goal setting theory is ranked number one of 73 management theories. Number one, never a replication crisis. None of these challenges that exist for so many theories. And it divides goals into learning goals and performance goals. And it’s simple and elegant, but if you get it wrong, you can really screw up businesses. I mean, it can cause businesses to fail. It can cause you to disengage from your goals.
CM (13:18):
My recovery from bulimia was a learning goal. And so whenever you’re doing something for the first time, maybe the world’s doing it for the first time, you have to give yourself the grace of learning the skills, finding the right people, learning how to make the best decisions learning how to have resilience and grit as you fail and get up and have hope. And so you have to set those metrics in the process of having a learning goal to tell you, I’m going in the right direction. Because goal setting theory says you have to have feedback. You have to have the kind of feedback that tells you that you’re on the right track, you’re doing the right thing, this is going well, or it’s not going well. And then you pivot. And you always have to have the humility to be teachable by the process of pursuing goals. But also because you have the humility to have people around you who are your board of advisors, and you listen to them and you trust them and you seek their advice. And ca counsel, because something called stupid grit is when you don’t have any of that and you’re sure you know how to do it, and you’re just gonna bulldoze your way to whatever the outcome is that you think is the right way to go with the strategy, you’re sure it’s gonna help you.
AJV (14:30):
Mm. And I, and I, and I love that it’s like the difference between a learning goal and a performance goal and learning is realizing, Hey, I’m doing this for the first time. Yes. Or be some trial and error. There’s likely gonna be successes and failures. It’s gonna be one of those, like I take two steps forward, take five steps back. Right?
CM (14:51):
Right. Like
AJV (14:51):
That. I think that’s a really good and helpful kind of this way of even going like, Hey, am I, as I’m setting goals, are these learning goals IE first time things? Or are these performance goals which are right improvement? Is that a a good assumption?
CM (15:07):
Yes. So I, in the book, in big goals, I call them checklist goals because these are things like recipes. You’ve done them before and there might be a way to fine tune the recipe. Maybe another teaspoon of sugar is gonna make the banana bread taste better. But performance goals are things where you can reliably say, if I follow these steps and I do it in this order in which I’ve gotten the best outcomes before I can expect this outcome by this date. So there are lots of things that we do that we’ve done before. And what we need to do when we set out to, you know, pursue learning goals or performance goals, is first ask ourselves what’s new? If it’s a performance goal, a checklist goal, what’s new? What’s come out in artificial intelligence, or what’s new in the world in technology that I can use to actually use this checklist goal, this performance goal to get faster, better, stronger.
CM (15:58):
I’ll give you an example from the Paris Olympics. There were nine swimmers from the United States in the Paris Olympics who were training with something called digital twins at the University of Virginia. And so the fast suits are gone and poach have really expanded as much knowledge as they can have at the moment to train these elite athletes. But they found that you could create a digital twin of yourself doing the perfect stroke, perfect streamlining coming off the walls with no friction or drag with your head. And what they found was they compared the current swimmer with the perfect digital twin, and they would use the digital twin to make little tweaks in their strokes. I’ll just give you an example. Kate Douglas set a world record and won the 200 meter brushstroke with the digital twin training. And so for a year and a half, she worked on moving her head just like half an inch because the computer model said, you do that, you’re gonna set, you’re gonna set lots of records.
CM (16:58):
So it’s work. So that’s a performance goal. She knew how to swim, she knew how to train. She, she had to coach, she had the teammates. But this digital twin was new. Learning goals. The first thing you have to do is flatten your learning curve as fast as possible. Not, oh, I’ll just do my best. And I’ll see how it goes. It’s where am I gonna get the knowledge? Who do I need to meet? Is this knowledge on YouTube? Is it in Wikipedia? Is it in a book? Is it in a documentary? Who’s doing it really well in the world? And I can study them by reading a biography or whatever it is. And that’s how you eventually turn learning goals into performance goals. And this is the biggest mistake being made in the workplace right now. And I’ve been all over the world. I’ve worked with lots of companies, everyone’s setting goals. Nobody is using goal setting theory, but they all have fancy productivity dashboards and they’re paying a fortune for ’em. And I am mystified that the number one theory, the number one theory with decades of rigorous scholarship behind it is still unknown by most of the world. And most of the world is setting goals. And I’m gonna, I’m fixing that with the book. Big Goals, goals. I had to, we’re in a dire situation right now, partly because of Covid, but that’s another point I can make.
AJV (18:14):
Yeah, I know. It’s interesting. In my prior life for prior to Brain Builders Group, you know, I was a sales consultant and I did that for 14 years and all, all I did was monitoring performance metrics and word performance metrics. Right? Never once or did I come across what would be considered a learning goal. These were all,
CM (18:36):
Wow,
AJV (18:37):
All performance goals. Mm-Hmm.
CM (18:43):
You don’t know how to do it,
AJV (18:44):
Right. It was, I never heard that, ever. Right. Never saw it. Think about dashboards. And so can you just give the audience like a tangible example of like, what, what would it look like on paper to have a learning goal versus a performance goal? Like what, what would that sound like in like real world?
CM (19:04):
I have so many examples I could give you. I’ll just give you one of my, one of my clients who was a superstar working in a big department store system. She had risen as high as she could and she knew how to do her job and she always did it well. She got lots of awards, bonuses, you know, stars on the wall, et cetera. And she had a dream of being an entrepreneur. And there was this very specific kind of company she wanted to start. So she got money from family and friends. She used all her bonus money and she launched this company. And by the time she found me, she was about to throw in the towel on her big bowl, her big dream. And here’s what she said to me, Caroline, every Monday morning I dial into a mastermind group and we all announce our goals for the week. And, and mine are always aggressive because that’s the way I’ve always operated. It’s always worked for me. Big goals. And then by Friday we’re, we call back and, you know, we talk about our progress. And every Friday I’ve failed at all my goals. And I asked her one simple question, I’ll, I’ll make up a name. Natalie. Natalie, how many of the goals that you’re announcing on Monday for this new business, this entrepreneurial business, are things that you’ve done before?
CM (20:12):
Yeah. And she thought about it and she went, none of ’em. I’ve never opened, done Shopify. I’ve never put booths together. I’ve never gone to trade shows to sell things. I’ve never walked into pet stores to try to sell this. I’ve never done any of these things, but that doesn’t matter ’cause I just work very hard and I should be able to do all these things. And I said, eventually you can. But what you did was you assumed that you could perform and have outcomes that you wanted by Friday or the next Friday or whatever, without giving yourself the grace of learning these things. You haven’t gotten a mentor. She was very proud. She hadn’t gotten a mentor, she hadn’t worked with a small business administration. She hadn’t taken on the time and the willingness to learn all the things that were the fundamentals. So on paper, what does it look like?
CM (20:58):
You know, she had to learn Excel, she had to get a mentor, she had to build a budget, she had to find an internet consultant who actually put Shopify on a website. She was trying to make her own website. I got, I could go on and on and on. But whenever you are superstar, you’re doing really well in one department of life and you try to go to another department, but you’ve never, you’ve never done those things before. You’re just thinking, I’m a high achiever, I can do it. You’re setting yourself up for failure, disengagement, depression, feeling overwhelmed, and then coding yourself as someone who just can’t do those things. And we live in a quick fix society, and this is common. We want instant results. And we think that we can just transfer hard work from one area to hard work in another area. It doesn’t work like that. Goal setting theory breaks it out beautifully.
AJV (21:45):
I love that so much. And you know, what I love about that so often is that so resonates with so many of the conversations that we hear at our company, brand builders group about people come in and they, they have big, big dreams of, yeah, I want to rock and launch a New York Times bestselling book. I want to build this coaching program. I want to impact a million people speaking on stages. I wanna do these big things. And when all of those haven’t happened in a year, they’re like, I failed.
CM (22:15):
I’m just, you failed. Blame it on you then
AJV (22:19):
No that those things take time, right? There’s, you know, there’s a process, there’s a, there’s a system of, back to what you said, it’s like we expect all these results and we don’t Yeah. Actually give credit to what you have to learn and the process to get the results. And those are
CM (22:39):
Right. And how do you learn? Those are perfect examples. And sometimes what we do is we deputize, we hire a company or we go to some guru and we think, well, that person’s gonna give us all the secrets and if we just work with them, it’ll all just magically happen. There’s always work involved. And what I’m sure you’re describing is the process of learning the steps on the way to being able to accomplish these things. And what do you do? You study exemplars of success in whatever that area is. And let’s say it’s a woman who wants to make a, you know, make it, make it big on a stage. And all she’s studying are men who’ve been able to do the same thing. That doesn’t transfer either. And we’re just now realizing that age agentic women have to operate differently from men because women get penalized for displaying that kind of behavior.
CM (23:30):
So you have to make sure that the role models, role models you’re studying look like you, sound like you, maybe they’re from your culture and that what worked for them will work for you. So often what we see is somebody on YouTube or on Instagram or whatever, saying, well, this is how I lost weight, or this is how I built my business, or this, this, this, this, this. And we think, ’cause it worked for them, it’ll work for us. Stop and ask yourself this question. Will it work for me, my learning style, the kind of money that I can invest in this? Mm-Hmm.
CM (24:18):
And it’s the how, how are you gonna accomplish these goals? And my acronym is bridge. You start with brainstorming a certain kind of brainstorming. You go to the relationships. Who are the people? Who are the people who have to be with me on this journey? And who shouldn’t be with me on this journey? Who’s gonna be negatively contagious? People don’t ask themselves that question. What kind of investments do I have to make up time, energy, money, character, strengths, whatever. Here’s a big one. Decision making. People don’t understand their own decision making processes. They’ve never done, for example, a noise audit on the noise that has entered into the decision making. And that’s Danny Kahneman’s work on. And it’s bigger than bias. What kinds of decisions are we making when we’re impacted by the north in our lives? And then grit. Good. Grit is the G.
CM (25:06):
How do we cultivate grit if we’re gonna need it? It’s a big goal. We’re gonna need it. And then excellence. What are we shooting for? Not, which cannot be measured, cannot be achieved, and vice versa. And you can’t hit a target. You can’t see, you have to set a standard of excellence for your big goal. And I’m gonna go back to lock and Latham. The best results for both learning goals and performance goals are what’s called challenging and specific past my fingertips. Stretch your arm out. That’s challenging and specific. So that’s what we’re shooting for. So you always have to go through that, that rigorous strategy building before you get going. You skip a step, you’re gonna have to go back anyway, so you might as well do all the work at, at the very beginning.
AJV (25:46):
You know, it’s the, so in parallel to what we teach at Brain Builders Group, ’cause we’re a strategy firm and we go strategies like the architectural blueprint where you wouldn’t start building a house until you had a solid detailed, you know, well-defined plan. And you don’t start building up until you go down. Right? Yeah, yeah. And
CM (26:07):
It’s gotta lay the cornerstone.
AJV (26:09):
People like to skip through strategy, they like to hurry through it ’cause it’s not the fun stuff. Yeah. it’s, it, it’s the hard stuff, right? It’s the stuff that feels like no progress is being made. However, when you do it right, everything else allows to go faster. Now, you have said something a couple of times, and I’ve jotted this down. You mentioned the swimmer with her team and her coach. You’ve mentioned mentors and coaches and role models. I am assuming that the people component of this plays a role. So I’m just curious, like when, when you’re looking at big goals, like what is the people component and, and probably specifically accountability, right? How much does that really play in? And I love what you said, it’s like you gotta pay, pay attention on who should come along for the journey and who shouldn’t. Like who’s positive, who’s negative. So how do you decide like who should come along and what people I need and what accountability support that’s required?
CM (27:10):
Yeah. Big question. Important question. So Shelly Gable at the University of California, Santa Barbara did research that found that when you share a big goal or dream with somebody, there is one way to respond that tells you that that person has your back and wants you to succeed. And that research finding is this, if they respond with curiosity and enthusiasm called active, constructive responding, that person just signaled to you that they’re gonna be with you to celebrate, to pick you up. When things aren’t going well, they’re gonna check in on you. Those are the people you wanna surround yourself with. There are three other ways to respond, but they’re all negative. But that’s what you’re looking for. So you’re looking for accountability. That’s one. You’re looking for people who support you. You are looking to isolate yourself from the negative contagion. And I wanna say something very special about women.
CM (28:02):
Women make massive mistakes in this area. What women do is they surround themselves with frenemies friends who are enemies. Because the research shows that 84% of women do this because they don’t want anyone to think they’re not nice. And so women endure a lot of what I call incoming fire. A lot of microaggressions, a lot of comments about passive, passive aggressive. Oh, why do you want a goal that big? Are you gonna see your children enough? I mean, I could go on and on and on, but there’s a robust set of studies at, its kind of sickening when you look at them showing that the number one detractors of age agentic women are other women. It comes from men too. And a recent meta-analysis found that the one area where women have made zero progress since 1940 in other people’s eyes in the workplace is in being goal directed.
CM (28:58):
And nagen, we’ve gone up in terms of being seen as competent and warm and communal. But when it comes to being ambitious, this is where we pay a social penalty because we’ve violated stereotype norms. And this is the hidden hand, I believe that’s holding women back. I truly believe it’s holding women back. So the answer to that is every woman should be in a mastermind group, a self formed mastermind group that is full of people who have proven through active, constructive responding and other methods along the way that tell you, this person is really here for me and I wanna support this person as well who meet monthly. Maybe it’s virtual, maybe it’s in person, doesn’t matter. But you must be around a team of people who believe in you because then we have more hope. It’s, it becomes bidirectional and we develop this upward spiral of wellbeing.
CM (29:53):
We become more creative, we take more risks. We’re, we’re happier. I could go on and on and on. And men are more transactional. It’s just a fact. Men, men develop the kinds of relationships where you get a piece of pie that means I get a piece of pie. Let’s all have pie. You know, unfortunately women have been socialized and wired to think you got pie. That means I don’t get pie, so I’m gonna take your pie. Or I’m gonna tell everyone that your pie is terrible. Or some version of that. And I’m not being general, I I, I vowed not to speak about this part unless I knew the research called because everyone has an N of one. Everybody has their own experience. I have all the research to back what I’m saying. And that makes a difference. So you must know who has your back, who’s who do you need to learn from? Who’s gonna be your accountability partner? Who’s gonna be your coach? Who’s gonna be the people that you pay, who have the knowledge or the training or the skills to teach you how to be on stage to teach you how to do social media, et cetera, et cetera. Or you delegate Mm-Hmm
AJV (31:02):
Yeah. I think that’s so good. And I think so much of that kind of comes back to even some of the other interconnected parts of, you know, all of your expertise and experience just around positive psychology, right? Yeah. It’s like doing big things requires you to be around people who believe you can do big things, right? Right.
CM (31:21):
Yeah. Because it gives you hope. And I have to say this too. So my, my fifth book, creating Your Best Life was the first book for the mass market that brought this brand new at the time, Meta-Analysis out that showed that all success with all goal is proceeded by being happy first. So we’re talking about all goal, professional goals, personal goals, relationship goals, religious goals, whatever the goal is. You must be flourishing first. You don’t have to be happy Dappy, but you do have to be content serene, joyful, you know, flourishing because it sets you up with all of the chemicals and all of the mindset and the outlook to actually attract other people to you. So you build relationships, you take in more information from the environment, you’re more optimistic. I mean every good thing happens when you’re flourishing. When you’re cynical and pessimistic.
CM (32:17):
It’s the absolute opposite. But the first step in any strategy session is, are you flourishing and do you know how to flourish? And when was the last time that you were a seven or an eight on a scale of nine, you know, one to 10. And what did it take to get you there? ’cause We know from positive psychology, there’s several positive interventions that work for everybody. Hmm. And we might as well know what they are. But then we all have some of our own that might be hybrids of some of those music, you know, being with the right people, gratitude practices, prayer, yoga, meditation, journal writing practice of forgiveness. I mean, there are a few things that work for everybody and we better know what ours is and boot ourselves up every day. ’cause It’s our job to do this. The Happy Fairy is not gonna fly through the window every day and make you happy.
CM (33:04):
It’s work too. This is all work. And guess what? Work is not a bad word. Work is something that’ll make you proud at the end of the day. In fact, lock and Latham found when they studied the Pope Wood Association in this, I think it was the 1970s, they found that loggers who knew how to cut down trees the minute they said, go cut down like 10 more trees than you’ve ever cut down with this logging crew that you’re familiar with. And you all have the right tools. So you know how to, there’s nothing left to learn, but go cut down more trees than you’ve ever cut down. Suddenly there was a sense of pride. Mm-Hmm.
CM (33:50):
But I could really go on a rant about this, but this is the way we all need to live. Because as we come out of the Coronavirus Pandemic, which is a black swan event, just like what preceded the Renaissance, which was also when things became more evidence-based art, science, music, education, all of it became more evidence-based. That’s where we are. And we ought to embrace evidence-based goal setting theory because we are in a renaissance right now and the train has left the station and you better have a guidebook for all the evidence-based practices that we know make a difference in success.
AJV (34:24):
Hmm. And you know, I think that one of the most significant things of just like that was like an aha in my head is this idea. It’s like in order for you to set and achieve big goals, you have to be in a good place.
CM (34:36):
Yeah.
AJV (34:37):
You know, you gotta be in a healthy, happy state of mind of Yeah. You know, otherwise, you know, you know, and it’s like, it’s like before you even begin that venture, it’s like, Hey, do I have the right would? You said the seven, what did you call ’em? Positive,
CM (34:55):
Positive interventions. Interven.
AJV (34:57):
Yeah. Yeah.
CM (34:58):
And they’re, they, they tend to work for almost everybody depending on whether you’re an introvert or an extrovert or wherever you’re located. Some might work better for some people than others. Sometimes your first interaction with something like mindfulness or meditation, whether or not you fall in love with it and it has an impact on you predicts whether or not you’re gonna kind of continue to do it. But I have zest, that’s one of my top character strengths and I’m a master swimmer and I get up at 4 35, whatever it is, and I go swim with people. I like them. We work hard. And so by six 30 the hardest part of my day is over. Yeah. We know that rigorous exercise is positive intervention. And if you start your day with that, the rest of the day is a domino effect. It’s just easier. Everything’s easier. But you’ve booted up your chemicals, you’ve booted up all of the testosterone and all of the emotions and the oxytocin, everything you need for the day to be better, be better. The exercise, I think is the best way to start the day. Maybe meditation rivals it, but I haven’t done anything better than exercise.
AJV (36:02):
Yeah. I love that this came up because I literally, this morning at like 6:45 AM I was talking to my husband ’cause my business partner and he’s traveling, so I’m just, me and the kids are home. And I got up extra early to do like my devotional some reading. And and I had, that’s one thing that’s really important to me is my morning routine. And I always get up, I do my devotional, read the Bible I do some sort of like book that I’m reading and then I go on a very fast paced, rigorous walk and it’s about five minute I wear my weighted vest and it’s just kinda like, ah. And he’s been traveling a ton the last few weeks. And so I haven’t had the opportunity to get in my walk and I him this morning, literally this morning, I’m like, I’m in a funk because I’m not getting my morning walk. Yeah. And he would, it’s so funny you said that. I literally had the same thought and I was like, you thought wow funk because I’m not. He goes, yeah, I guess he goes, because I have noticed you’ve been a little off schedule. And I’m like, yes. I put two and two together literally this morning that I am off schedule with my walks and I am in it. Yeah,
CM (37:13):
Yeah. No, it’s true. And I’m so impressed with your routine. I just got waited best myself so I know what you’re doing and that’s impressive. But you found your routine and you intuitively, I’m telling you now, the research is matching what you’re doing. You’re booting up your wellbeing probably to the highest level of the level that you were born with. We all have a set point, so we have a range. So you’re probably getting about as high as you can get or at least close to it. And that wellbeing is the rocket fuel of success with goals. Yeah. And so to start the day that way and to feel better and to just have everything pumping in the right direction is the way I think most people should consider making at least one change to their lives. Because if you wanna succeed at your goals, start here. Yeah. Start with upping your flourishing. It’s like what are the ways to do it? It’s
AJV (38:02):
The pre-work, right? You gotta do the pre-work. Yeah. To be in the right place, to do the right things, to hit big goals.
CM (38:10):
I think so. I mean, at least that’s what the research shows. I, I am completely evidence-based. I really do believe that there’s so many opinions out there and I’m trying to kill off zombie goal approaches ’cause I can’t stand anymore. These, these approaches that won’t die like smart goals. That’s not science. In fact, it’s detrimental to have smart goals. ’cause When people use r for realistic, that’s a violation of goal setting theory. You don’t set realistic goals. Those are what’s called low goals. But there’s also something called jargon, mishmash syndrome. And smart goals falls prey to that because S-M-A-R-T means a lot of different things depending on where you are. The M and the R and the A can all mean slightly different things. So smart goals is in science, law of attraction definitely isn’t science. I’m sorry. But if you want it and you write it in lipstick, uhuh, it doesn’t work.
CM (39:08):
Now maybe a vision board is gonna prime you. That’s real science. A a vision board can make you think goal directed thoughts and everything that matches that thought can be sticky and could stick to you. But you got, you know what, we have one life, one life to go pursue our dreams and to make a really positive impact on the world with what we do and how we do it. Use goal setting theory and then add my bridge methodology on top because I’ve been testing it for 20 years. The only thing I have found that includes all of the science that really makes a difference on grit and resilience and mindset and motivation every in relationships and character, strengths and happiness. The only thing I’ve ever found and work it, learn it, work it. I have so many worksheets in this book so that people can practice.
CM (39:55):
But I think this is the most important book I’ve ever read. And I’ll say one more thing as a mother, because I I know you’re a mother. My children have all lost friends to suicide. And my husband and I didn’t lose any friends to suicide growing up. And I know that there’s suicide clusters and suicide contagion and we live in an anxious, depressed world. And it’s become harder for this generation to survive difficult times because they want things to pass so quickly. Now this is a real simplification, not all suicide, it’s because of this. But I really do believe that many of the people we’re familiar with who’ve taken their own lives. They had big dreams and they were hitting stumbling blocks. One young man, we know it was online gambling and he had lost money and he was hiding it from his family. And, and there’s shame. But if you have a big dream and you want to accomplish goals, there is a way to make those goals happen without just wishing for it and hoping for it and thinking you’re gonna have some quick get rich scheme come at you from YouTube, do the work because it pays off.
AJV (41:09):
You know, I personally cannot relate more to this message because it’s a testament of hard work actually makes you feel better.
CM (41:21):
Yeah. It does.
AJV (41:23):
It like a gen like when you know that you just laid it on the line regardless if you win or lose. Yeah. It’s like, man, I just laid and I it feels good. And part of what feels good is the amount of practice and preparation and learning. And that came through the process of regardless of what happened and you started this interview with this. And then I know we’ll wrap it up, but I thought it was so interesting because I was right before this like self-esteem generation and we didn’t get trophies for showing up. Like my, my dad’s an entrepreneur of alum, a lumber company and it was just very, to earn it right. It was like his dad was a genuine lumberjack and it was just a very hard work work culture and I’m so grateful for it. Yeah. But my kids are in this soccer league and this is so funny that this is coming up. So at this last Saturday, it was their final game of the season. Right. And he’s like, I have five and seven year olds, they’re littles. But at the end it’s all up to the coach’s discretion of like, does he hand out a little trophy or a little rib or anything? And on my five-year-Old’s team, the coach didn’t hand anything out.
CM (42:37):
Oh wow. And my Oh wow.
AJV (42:40):
My five-year-old said, mom, where’s our trophy? And I, he, he was looking at the other ones and I looked at my husband, I was like, they didn’t hand out it like a ribbon or a trophy. And we literally looked at each other and they’re like, well, did he win anything
CM (42:55):
AJV (42:57):
It was like, we literally had, and my husband was like, you think we should like buy one off of Amazon? And I was like,
CM (43:01):
No. Oh my gosh, no.
AJV (43:03):
And it was like, we literally had this debate and we both had to like gut check ourselves of going, yeah, what does he need a Ruben for? What’s he gonna do with the trophy? And it, but it was like this like instinctual thing of like, what? And then we both like came to our senses and we’re like, no, he didn’t win anything. He played a five-year-old soccer league. No, we’re not, he usually
CM (43:23):
Has a mercy rule. They stop keeping score ’cause they don’t wanna hurt anyone’s feelings.
AJV (43:28):
That’s not the case with our kids. Our kids make us the scorekeeper. So we have to tell every ah,
CM (43:34):
Interesting
AJV (43:35):
12 to one
CM (43:37):
Yeah.
AJV (43:37):
They, it was a really interesting thing. And we told our 5-year-old, I was like, Hey bud you know, they don’t technically keep score here. There is no champion. There is like no, like championship. And he goes, but we won. And I said, we did technically win, but
CM (43:55):
Conversation
AJV (43:56):
To have with him. Interesting. And after at the three minute, like, well, you know, technically da da da da. And he was like, okay. And off he goes,
CM (44:05):
Ah. And it was like this, that’s a great story.
AJV (44:08):
And it was an aha moment to me and my, I’m like, the only reason it even came up to him is he saw it and as soon as he realized, oh, like there’s a process to how you win these. He has now asked us since Saturday, what do I have to do to win one of those trophies?
CM (44:24):
No way.
AJV (44:26):
Multiple times. And so now he’s got a goal. He wants a soccer trophy and we’re, we’re, we’re practicing out in our backyard. And, but it was an amazing revelation of if we had just given it to him, yeah. It would’ve destroyed this inner competition, this inner drive
CM (44:45):
Incentive incentive to work or something. And now
AJV (44:48):
What do I have to do to win one? I’m like, well, you have to be in a league that keeps score and you have to like try out. And he’s like, now he’s like, okay, okay, okay.
CM (44:57):
Wow. You know, it’s interesting because the research finds that even children who are given an award or a reward that they haven’t earned, they know and they devalue what they’re being given to. They know there was nothing that really went into it. And that’s what’s so fascinating to me. I have a a, a story very similar to yours where we joined a swim league and the team had gotten rid of the record board even though three Olympians had swam there in the seventies, eighties and nineties, and had gone on to win world championships in the Olympics. Seventh in the Olympics. One of them too. And we, we were like, what did you do with the record board? Well, we hit it. We hit it because the kids would be so discouraged if they saw how fast they’d been before. Well I, they made me the, a rep and I had the biggest record board ever made for summer swim teams made in Austin, Texas.
CM (45:52):
And it was sent to us in Bethesda, Maryland. And the, we invited these three very scary men back and we had this big party Breakfast of champions. And that record board is still the talk of the entire swim league, which has produced lots of Olympians. First thing kids do when they arrive at a swim meet is they go stand in front of the record board. ’cause Like your son, people long to know what does it take to be elite? Mm-Hmm
AJV (46:38):
I mean, genuinely like just even having this conversation at the same timing of this like little soccer league wrap up has been also I think a really big testament. Not just to us who have teams and employees or just even us as an individual setting goals, but I would say specifically as a parent, it’s like, don’t rob your kids of hard work.
CM (47:01):
Yeah. No, it’s true
AJV (47:03):
Of hard work. Don’t try to make it easy for them. It’s like there is power and the grit and the perseverance and the resilience. How else do we learn that stuff,
CM (47:13):
Right? Well, you don’t, you can’t, you can’t buy it. You can’t chant it. It only comes this way. And the other thing is we have to show them that we are resilient when bad things happen to us, when we don’t get the job we want, when we’re fired, when you don’t get a book contract, when you get bad speech reviews, whatever it is, kids need to see that you too are resilient and that there’s mom and dad and they survived it. My gosh. You know, I bet I could survive not making the travel soccer team or whatever, not being the lead in the play or not getting an A on everything. That’s our responsibility as parents, even though you might as well take a knife and just plunge it right into my heart. Because watching your children not succeed or get what they want is heartbreaking. But to this day, my three adult children, the absolute best things that ever happened to them in life, in life that had the best outcomes were the worst things that happened to them. And you know what they survived and boy, what a lesson. Not even just to us, to them it made them all better. Men and women.
AJV (48:16):
Yeah. This is so good. Thank you so much for coming on. This has been so insightful and just chock full of day backed reasoning on importance of setting big goals. Big goals comes out November 27th. Yeah. Grab a copy at anywhere where you buy books check it out. But then also if you go to big goals book.com, if you pre-order the book, then you also receive a 20 a page PDF workbook to help you through this process. Yeah. So go to big goals book.com, get your copy. Comes out officially November 27th. Caroline, thank you so much for being on the show today. And y’all, thank you. You guys wanna connect with Caroline? Where should they follow you online? What’s the best platform?
CM (49:05):
I, I think LinkedIn. Linkedin, Caroline Adams, Miller. But I’m on Instagram and Facebook, you know, I have a social media team that keeps me active, but you know, and then my website, caroline miller.com.
AJV (49:18):
So I would just encourage go to your platform of choice. Go to caroline miller.com, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram pick your platform of choice, but grab a copy of big goals to help you have a life changing year next year. Thank you for being on the show. Everyone else, stay tuned for the recap episode and we will see you next time on the Influential Personal Brand.
CM (49:40):
Thank you.