Notes
Most owners were never taught how to lead a business. They got good at the work, the work became a company, and now every decision is theirs. Eric opens with ten fundamentals he believes almost any business coach would agree on, then makes the case that knowing them isn’t enough. You have to come back to them daily, the same way you eat and sleep every day.
He covers all ten: see the big picture, have accountability (even as a solopreneur), acknowledge and accommodate your weaknesses, dream big, address your ego, avoid foolish mistakes, show gratitude, awareness, and leadership to others, go slow to go fast, beware of a fixed mindset, and keep a mantra. Along the way he gives the questions he asks himself each morning. Where am I working without feedback from my team? Who haven’t I thanked lately? Which client should I reach out to? He also explains why no decision in his business has to be made in 60 seconds (“I’m not a brain surgeon”), why he parks new ideas on a waitlist, and how a counselor helped him reframe a mindset that lies to him as one that isn’t serving him well.
The leadership tip of the week is “more is caught than is taught.” If you tell your team clients matter and then complain about clients behind their backs, your actions erase the value. Your behavior is a language that speaks louder than your words.
Key Highlights
- You can’t avoid every mistake, but you can avoid foolish ones, and foolish mistakes come from going fast without feedback.
- There’s no decision in your business you have to make in 60 seconds, so give it a day before you commit.
- Go slow to go fast.
- Ask which mindsets aren’t serving you well, because that keeps the authority with you instead of the belief.
- More is caught than is taught: your behavior is a language that speaks louder than your words.
Key Takeaways
So in this episode, you’re going to learn what I believe is the single most important thing you should be doing to ensure you’re doing business the right way. This activity is going to save you a lot of money. It’s going to save you a lot of time, and it is absolutely going to bring you more clarity to your decision making.
Now, what I’m about to share, some of you are actually going to find maybe offensive. Some of you are going to hear it, and as soon as you hear it, you’re going to immediately just want to turn the podcast off, because you’re going to want to write me off as some type of Looney Tune crackpot. But others of you are going to hear it and you’re going to applaud, and you’re going to say, I love the fact that somebody is willing to say this in the marketplace.
But let me challenge you for just a second. Let me challenge you not to hit stop. Let me challenge you not to leave and give up on what I have to say. Because I believe this. I believe that even if you don’t agree with my approach, even if you don’t believe what I believe as far as how I implement this in my business and in my world, I don’t think you’re going to be able to argue with me about the ten points I want to make. And so I challenge you to listen through, listen with an open mind. And if you want to challenge me on any of these ten points, then please reach out and let me know. Always happy to hear from you and have a conversation with you.
Welcome to the podcast, everyone. My name is Eric. I’m a full time digital nomad traveling around the world with my wife and our four kids, and we have been busy. We have been in a very busy season of fast travel, and I will come back to that at the end, because I know a lot of people listen and the travel isn’t their thing. And so I put the travel update, I should say, at the very end of the podcast.
So what do I have planned for you? I’ve got three things for today. Number one, I’ve got the content. These are the ten keys to sustainable business success. I want to unpack those with you. And then I’ve got a leadership tip of the week for you. And then I’ll wrap it up with a travel update for those of you that are interested in the travel.
So what I want to do is, I’ve thought long and hard about how I want to unpack this with you, how I want to share these ten things, and the one way that I remind myself of these ten things every single day. I’ve thought about just giving the list of ten and then the way I approach it. I’ve thought about sharing the approach and then walking through the ten. I’ve thought about sharing the ten and skipping the approach, but I think that skipping it would be a mistake, because it’s the approach I use for these ten things that make all the difference.
And so what I’ve decided to do is, real quickly, I’m going to read these ten things. These are ten things that I think you could hear echoed by pretty much any business coach, business leader, business guru, thought leader, leadership person. These are ten kind of core truths. And then I want to unpack them a little bit, each one. But before I unpack them, I’m going to share with you how I approach these ten things every day. And I think you’ve got to approach these every single day. I think you have to remind yourself of these. I think you have to work from these. I think these are critical for you to live in every single day.
It’s like eating. You got to eat every day. Like drinking. You got to drink every day. You know, it’s like getting up out of bed, getting a good night’s sleep. There’s some foundational things that we have to do for ourselves to have a healthy life. And there are some foundational things that we have to do to be healthy business leaders. Now, these aren’t business frameworks. This isn’t, you know, I love a good framework. You’ve been a podcast listener for a long time. I’ve got OP3. I talk about Core Five. Those are business systems, and healthy businesses need frameworks and systems. These are ten core, healthy business owner attributes, if you will.
So real quickly, let me just unpack them. And then I’m going to get into the part that I think is going to be where some of you are going to be tempted to stop listening.
Number one, you got to see the big picture. I mean, if you don’t see the big picture, you’re gonna have blinders on. You’re going to miss things. Big mistake. You got to see the big picture.
Number two, you have to have accountability. Even if you’re a business owner, even if you’re a solopreneur, even if it’s just you, you have to have accountability.
Number three, you have to acknowledge and make accommodations for your weaknesses.
Number four, you might as well dream big. If you’re going to dream, if you’re going to try to create something, make something, have a business, dream big.
Number five, everyone needs to address their ego. Everybody. Pride is something that, now, some of us wrestle with it and struggle with it more than others. I am really someone that struggles with pride and ego, and I have to be very mindful of it. But everybody needs to address their ego.
Number six, you can avoid foolish mistakes. Now, you can’t avoid making mistakes. You’re going to make mistakes. But you can work to avoid making foolish mistakes.
As a business owner, as a leader, you need to show gratitude, awareness, and leadership to and for others. That’s number seven. You’re never going to have people with you very long if you don’t show gratitude and awareness of them and provide leadership.
Number eight, you got to go slow to go fast. You got to go slow to go fast. I’m going to unpack some of these. If you’re like, wait, what does that mean? What do you mean by that? How do I use that? I’m going to unpack these here in a second. I just want to get through the list of ten first.
Number nine. Beware of having a fixed mindset. You know, we have to be careful with that. We can have thought patterns and mindsets that don’t serve us well. And so we have to make sure that we’re addressing those.
And number ten, I think it’s important to have a mantra, to have a thing you can come back to day in and day out throughout the day. And these can change from time to time. But I think having a mantra is key.
So these are the ten things. And I’m like, you can’t argue with any of those. These are ten legitimate things.
So how do I do this? What do I mean by my approach that may be offensive? Well, here’s the truth. Every single day I start my day out pretty much the same way. I get up, and I don’t set an alarm unless we have to catch a train or a plane. I just wake up about seven hours after I fall asleep. And so if I know I’m going to get up early, I go to bed a little earlier, and seven hours later I’m awake. And now if I toss and turn and I struggle falling asleep, then whenever I fall asleep, seven hours from then I’m going to wake up. So I just don’t set an alarm. I sleep for seven hours and then I get up.
And 99% of the time I’m the first one up. And so I go down and I make myself a cup of decaf coffee. I like to get the coffee, but I start with decaf because I just have the habit. I want that hotness, and you shouldn’t drink a cup of coffee first thing out of getting out of bed. Your stress hormone, your cortisol level, is naturally high, and you don’t want to elevate that anymore or shock it with caffeine. You want to let that cortisol level have about an hour in your body to calm down, and then have your first cup of coffee an hour, hour and a half later. Everybody’s a little bit different.
So I just start with a cup of coffee, and then, I’m a person of faith, and so I’ll sit down and read my Bible and have a devotion time and a time of prayer. And about that time, you know, the kids are starting to come down, or my wife. Generally it’s my wife first, and then our 12 year old, and then the other three. And the other three only get up because they have alarm clocks that go off, or they’re three typical teenagers and they would just keep sleeping. And then we hang out a little bit as a family, and we might do breakfast together or things like that.
And then it’s time for me to go to work. And when I go to work, I sit down, and the first thing I do is I ground myself in these ten things. I ground myself in seeing the big picture, and having accountability, and acknowledging and accommodating my weaknesses, and dreaming big, and understanding and addressing my ego, of setting myself up to avoid foolish mistakes, to show gratitude, awareness and leadership for others, to remind myself to go slow to go fast, to beware of fixed, broken mindsets, and remind myself of my mantra.
And how I do it is by doing the single greatest thing I can do for my team. There is nothing for my business, there is nothing for my team, there is nothing for my clients that I can do that’s more important than the very first thing I do when I start my workday. And that is, I pray. I pray for my business. I pray for my team, I pray for my clients. I pray for my leadership. And the prayer I’ve developed over time are these ten things, and I’m going to share it with you.
Now, I know some of you right now, this is the point where you want to stop, because you don’t have time for faith. You don’t have time for the church thing. You don’t believe what I believe about Jesus. But here’s the thing. I just want you to keep listening. I want to challenge you to stretch yourself for a moment. Because even if you don’t believe what I believe about Jesus, even if you don’t believe what I believe about the Bible, those ten things are true. And I want to unpack these ten for you because I think they’re going to help you out.
And for those of you that are maybe wondering about, you know, Christianity and the Bible and Jesus and what it’s like, this is what it’s like. What does it look like to be a follower of Christ and a business owner? This. You pray for your business. You just can’t get up in the morning and do your five minutes of prayer and be good for the day. That’s not being a Christ follower. That’s having religion. That’s going through a ritual. That’s having just this checklist, you know. And a life of being a follower of Christ isn’t a checklist of things we do. It’s an ongoing relationship throughout the entire day.
In fact, what I like to do is I like to pray, because that’s me talking to God. And then I like to read Scripture. That’s me listening for God to speak to me. And then I like to keep a journal, because that’s a record of the conversation. And so I pray to talk to God, I read Scripture to hear what he has to say for me, and I journal to have a record of the conversation and to have enlightenment and interpretation of Scripture brought to me through the Holy Spirit.
So what does this praying for my business look like with these ten things? Well, number one, the first thing on the list, is I got to see the big picture. And so the first thing I pray is, I pray, you know, Heavenly Father, you are a good, great and generous God. And I pray those three things every time. You are a good, great and generous God. And I take a moment to thank him for recent wins, provision, or lessons. Because the big picture is, the creator of the universe knows my business better than I do. He knew I was going to have it before I had it. He knows what’s happening next month, next year, next quarter. He is bigger than tariffs. He is bigger than fluctuations in the marketplace. He already knows that they’re coming. He knew that I was going to be like this. This is God. And I want to be aware of the big picture. And that is, it’s not on my shoulders to carry the business.
And let me tell you something, that brings some peace to me right there. I remind myself, going into the day, that God is in this with me, and I can lean on him. He is my strong tower I can run to, and I can just start right out acknowledging that. And I take a moment to thank him, like I said, for recent wins, because it’s not on me. We’re not this good. I’m not this good. I’m blessed and highly favored. And so I thank him for that. I thank him for provisions, you know, a sale that came in yesterday, a lead that came in. I thank him for these things, lessons that I’ve learned.
And then I just pray that, you are the owner I work for. I submit to your authority not just for advice, but for total leadership. You see, there’s a really big difference between going to God for decisions versus accountability. Now, God doesn’t want to punish us. This isn’t how God relates to us in today’s day and age. And we’re not going to get into all of that, but I want to submit to God’s authority. Jesus taught us to pray, your kingdom come and your will be done. So I don’t want to just, throughout the day, which I will throughout the day, pray to God. But I don’t want to just go to him for a big decision. I want to submit to his authority. And so I might ask myself here, what should I be asking you today, God? Like, what’s the question you think I should be asking? What have I forgotten to ask you about? Is there anything I should start doing? Is there anything I should stop doing? Father God, what should I keep doing? So that’s the second thing I pray for.
And then the third is to acknowledge and accommodate your weaknesses. And here’s how it sounds in prayer for me. It’s that I say, bless me today with focus. Help me eliminate distractions and help me work with clarity. Because I can jump from one thing to the next like nobody else out there. I get distracted so easily. I need help being focused. And so I pray for that.
The fourth thing, dreaming big, I ask God, I say, bless us with favor and increase our influence. Increase our capacity, increase our impact for our clients, increase our revenues and increase our profits. Because, you see, here’s the thing. I don’t just want to find more work. I want huge opportunities. And our greatest opportunities are always found on the other side of prayer. Now, this right here actually begins, and this used to be where my prayer just began, because this is based on a prayer called the Prayer of Jabez. And Jabez prayed that God would bless him and increase his territory. Well, for me, in today’s landscape, it’s not land that I’m looking for. It’s not territory. It’s influence. It’s revenue. It’s more clients. It’s leads. And so I dream big by praying that God would expand us, that he would give us a blessing of that.
Number five, everyone needs to address their ego. So I just pray very simply, help me see that this is about you and not about me. And then I ask this, I have this question in parentheses after this part of the prayer, and it says this: what have I allowed to become a source of personal pride that I need to give God glory for? It is so easy for me to have something happen and think, man, that worked. Oh, that lead magnet, that worked. Oh, that idea worked. Oh, that offer, that promo, whatever it is, oh, that worked, man, I’m getting good at this. I’m getting this figured out. And I have to address my ego. I have to stop, and I have to go, whoa, help me see that this is about you, not about me. It’s your kingdom. It’s your will. Everything I’ve got is coming from you. So what have I allowed to become a source of personal pride? Because, you see, our success can become an idol. We got to be so careful with that. Idolatry, not adultery. Adultery is, you know, sleeping with somebody that’s married to somebody else. Idolatry is having an idol, having something that you place in your life above, before, between you and God, something you worship to the same level or more than you worship God. And our success, our businesses, our work can become idols, and so we have to protect ourselves from that.
Number six, you can avoid foolish mistakes. And so this one, there’s no hiding it, I’m just right at it. Number six, please keep me from making foolish mistakes. God, protect me from evil. And so then I might look at my calendar. At this point I might think to myself, I wonder what’s on my calendar today. Then I need wisdom for where might I be tempted today to exaggerate or lie. What decision am I trying to make that I haven’t got enough wise counsel from others on? Where am I working independently and not getting feedback from my team? Where do I need to take a thought, a question, a challenge to one of my mentors? Because I’m telling you, when we go fast without getting feedback, that’s when we make foolish mistakes. And so every morning I want to remind myself of that. And I’m going to look at that and think about, where am I headed toward a foolish mistake?
Number seven, showing gratitude, awareness and leadership for and to others. I pray this: I want to do good for you toward others and not cause pain. I want to do good for you, Father, toward others. I don’t want to cause pain. Help me see, who is it on my team, or which client should I be praying for? Who on my team, or which client, do I need to reach out to? Who on my team is maybe feeling a little abandoned? Who haven’t I said thank you to lately? These are all ways that I work through this, and I write down things as they come to my mind. I want to do good for you toward others and not cause pain. I want to show gratitude. I want to be a good leader.
And then the eighth thing that I talked about is, we got to go slow to go fast. And so here I pray, I commit to trust and obey you today. Yahweh, where am I trying to get ahead of God? This is the question I ask myself. I’m telling you something, I do it. You would think after doing this for several years, I would get to the point I wouldn’t have an answer to this. No. But that’s my ego and my pride. I am regularly trying to get ahead of God in places, and I have to commit to trust and obey. You see, Jesus asks us to obey. He doesn’t ask us to understand. He doesn’t even ask us to agree with him. He asks us to trust, obey, and love. And so I want to commit to doing that. That’s how I remind myself to go slow to go fast.
Because here’s the thing. Anytime I try to get ahead of God, anytime I get out over my skis, we inevitably trip and stumble. But when I wait and I’m patient on the Lord, when I wait and work in God’s timing, I always get bigger, better results. And I know it, because so many times, over and over, I did it in my own timing, my own way, and we got results. And then inevitably, three months, six months, a year later, something would happen and I would go, oh my gosh, if I would have just waited, wow, our results would have been multiplied a hundred times. If I would have waited, instead I go for the short, quick win.
One way to think about this is, we often are living life looking at our wristwatch, and God’s wanting us to look at a big wall calendar. He wants us to see not the next hour, not the week, not even the quarter, but the years and the years and the years. He wants us to understand that. Now, this doesn’t mean we don’t do the things we need to do. This doesn’t mean we don’t send the emails we need to send. This isn’t an excuse to get out of work. This is related specifically, for me, to strategy.
There is no decision. I was talking to a buddy the other day, and I said, I’m not a brain surgeon. I’m not a brain surgeon. I don’t know if you know this about me, but I’m not. There is nothing in my business that requires me to act within 60 seconds. There is no decision I have to make within 60 seconds for my business. I’ve thought about it, I’ve asked my team, I’ve reflected. There is not a single decision I have to make within 60 seconds, which means I can always give something a minute of thought. And normally I can always give something a full day. In fact, I can give it six days. A lot of times I’ve developed a new habit of, when I catch myself getting ready to start a new thing or jump into a strategy, I put it on a waitlist and I come back to it. And I’m telling you, over half the time I reread the idea 24 hours later and I think, man, I can’t believe I thought that was a good idea yesterday. That was such a stupid idea. So I go slow to go fast.
Number nine, beware of fixed mindsets. Here I pray, Father, break the chains of broken mindsets within me and my team today. And I ask myself, what mindsets aren’t serving me well? You know, I might believe that I’m not good enough for something, or I might believe the opposite. I might believe that we are ready for something. I may have a mindset. You have mindsets that aren’t serving you well. I used to say that these were thoughts, you know, what mindsets do I have that are lying to myself, or lying to me about reality? And I had a counselor. I said this to him, and he’s like, Eric, I think you should reframe that. You see, when you say that it’s a mindset that’s lying to you, you give it power. And he said, you don’t want to do that. He said, what if you thought of it this way? What if you thought, what mindsets do I have that aren’t serving me well? Because now you have the power. You have the authority. You can step over to it. And I was like, oh, Paul, that’s good. Paul, that’s good. And so I use that every single day now.
And then the last thing I pray, the tenth thing, my mantra. This is the first time I generally say it for the day, and I say it multiple times to myself through the rest of the day. It’s, your way, Yahweh. It’s your way, your way. And I just commit myself to not my plans, but your plans. It’s not on me, it’s on you. You are the God of my provision. You are my strong tower. We’re going to do this.
Now, here’s the thing. If you don’t believe in the God I believe in, if you don’t believe in Jesus, well, okay, that’s a topic you and I can talk about. We can’t address it through a podcast. But here’s the thing. These ten are still true. However you want to tackle them for you and your business, you need to see the big picture. You need accountability. You need to acknowledge and accommodate your weaknesses. You got to dream big. You have to address your ego. You can avoid foolish mistakes. You have to show gratitude, awareness, and leadership to and for others. You got to go slow to go fast. You got to beware of fixed, broken mindsets, and you need a mantra. Okay, maybe the last one you can push back a little bit. Maybe you don’t need a mantra. I’ll give you that one. I’m going to give you that one. But the other nine, come on, you got to have it. You got to have it.
So here’s the thing. I want to share this with you just one last time, what this prayer sounds like. And then I want to give you this week’s leadership tip of the week and a travel update.
So what does this prayer sound like, kind of uninterrupted? It’s simply this, and I have this written down. If you want a copy of this, let me know. Just, on LinkedIn is the best way, that’s going to take you straight to my LinkedIn profile. You can go to the website DNEPodcast.com, you can go over there, connect with me through LinkedIn, but just connect with me on LinkedIn. Send me a DM that you want a copy of the three day Bible reading plan. Just say, hey, can I have that Bible reading plan on praying for your business? Because I took this and I created it. I mean, you’re not gonna give me, this isn’t an email magnet or anything like that. It’s just, I’ve got it, and I’ll be happy to send it to you in a LinkedIn DM, or just, you know, if you want to email me directly, email me directly. But I’ve taken this and I’ve created a three day Bible reading plan that unpacks some of the passages that are found throughout this prayer. And you get the text of the prayer, and you can print it out and use it. And so if you want that, reach out and let me know.
But here’s what it sounds like for me, pretty much on a daily basis, when I sit down to start my workday. Father God, you are a good, great and generous God. You’re the owner I work for. I submit to your authority not just for advice, but for total leadership. Father, bless me today with focus. Help me eliminate distractions and work with clarity. Bless us with favor and increase our influence, our capacity, our impact for our clients, our revenue, our profits. Father God, increase our territory. Help me see that this is about you and not about me. Please, Father God, please keep me from making foolish mistakes. Keep me from evil. I want to do good for you toward others. I don’t want to cause pain to anyone. I commit to trust and obey you today. Yahweh, break the chains of broken mindsets within me and my team today. It’s your way, Yahweh. Today, in every way. Amen.
Now, I generally don’t pray quite that fast, but that’s the written prayer. And I start and I stop at some of those places, and I’ve got some Scripture verses I read and I think and I consider and I journal, because I want this to be a conversation between me and God. This is generally a 15, 20, 30 minute thing. There’s been times it’s gone to an hour, but generally it’s in the 15 to 20 minute range. And it refocuses me, it settles me, and there is nothing, like I said, nothing that I can do that’s going to serve my clients, my team, better than praying for them every single day.
So if you want a copy of that, hit me up. Eric, that’s going to forward you right over to my LinkedIn, and I’m going to send you off a copy of this.
All right. So what is this week’s leadership tip of the week? This week’s leadership tip of the week is, more is caught than is taught. More is caught than is taught. Here’s what I mean by this. If you tell your team that clear communication is essential, but you communicate to them without being clear, you’re actually showing them that clarity doesn’t matter. If you tell your team that your clients are important, that you’re going to do your best for clients, that you’re going to honor your clients, that your clients are valuable to you, and then you make fun of clients behind their backs, you complain about clients, you make disparaging remarks about clients, it doesn’t matter the value you’ve said. Your actions betray it.
You see, in a lot of ways, your behavior is a language that speaks louder than your words. So you need to make sure that you’re constantly remembering, more is caught than is taught. Your team is watching you. And this is a leadership lesson I love, because this works in the business place, it works for your family, it works everywhere. I can tell my wife I love her, but if I don’t pursue the things that make her happy, if I don’t show her that I love her by listening, by planning dates, by doing the things that she wants of me, it doesn’t matter what I say, my words will ring hollow. More is caught than is taught. And if you want to tell your team that you’re a business of principle, that you’re a business that prioritizes making decisions based upon your values, but they never see you live it, then more is caught than is taught. Your words will ring hollow. So remember, your behavior is a language that speaks louder than your words. More is caught than is taught.
Well, for those of you that want a travel update, I am recording this looking out the bedroom window of, well, we’re not in an Airbnb, I take that back. We’re in a Sykes holiday rental cottage in Ireland. This is our third one. I think the last podcast I recorded, I’m pretty sure, was in Liverpool. It was in Liverpool. But we’ve now been back on the island of Ireland for going on three weeks. We’ve got a couple more weeks here left, two weeks left. Two more times we’ll be moving, and then we’ll be heading on to Rome. We’re having our first Eurocamp experience. I’m really excited about this. And then from there, we’re going to Budapest. So we’re headed up to Budapest, going to Hungary next. That will be very cool. We love that part of the world.
If you’ve not had a chance to get to Ireland, you need to. Okay? It is gorgeous. And twice now we have moved, and we’ve literally moved from one side of the country to the other. We’ve moved coast to coast. We started on the east coast, we went to the west, now we’re back on the east coast. It took us four hours to drive. Well, technically it should have only taken us four, 4.5 hours, but we took like 6 or 7 hours, because we drove country roads. We avoided the motorway as much as we could and just meandered through the beautiful country of Ireland. And so renting a car has been great.
And we were going to be in an Airbnb in Dublin. But like the Wednesday before we came over, we were scheduled to leave, I think that Saturday. We were bringing a train from Liverpool down to Holyhead in Wales, where we took a ferry to Ireland. The Wednesday before that Saturday, we lost our Airbnb. Lost it. Gone. They had to cancel us, and we had booked it for six weeks. Imagine, six weeks. Oh, what are we going to do? And at that point, what was available left was super, super expensive. And my wife, my amazing, wonderful wife, did some research, found this website, Sykes Holiday Rentals, and boom, she said, hey, I think we should do this. And so these places are so much cheaper than anything on Airbnb. And so for the six weeks that we’re here, we have five different cottages, and we rented a vehicle, and that cost us what it was going to cost us to be in an Airbnb in Dublin for the six weeks. So we’re absolutely enjoying this experience.
Like I said, we spent a full week in this house. So that’s three weeks. We’re in the middle of week four. We’ve got week five and week six left. We’re moving two more times for that. And then we’re going to Rome for just a little over a week, and then we’re going to Budapest for two weeks, I think. And then we’re going to begin slowly traveling via train back west toward Paris. But it’s going to take us a while. We’re going to slowly do some train traveling. So that’s what’s coming up for us over the next several weeks. And if you want to know any more about that, you can find out more about the travel side of stuff over at Family of Dashes.
Well, until the next podcast episode, I look forward to reading your reviews and comments. I really do appreciate those. Any emails you send me, I love getting those and responding to them. And until next time, make sure you chase the big dream, lead with courage, and safe travels.
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