Hello everybody, and welcome to The Upstream Leader. I am excited for today’s conversation. This is one that’s been quite a while, I think, in the planning. I think we actually started having conversations—my guest today and I—about a year ago, and have just kind of gone back and forth. We’ve had lots of great conversations in the year. We just haven’t ever recorded any of them. So today we’re going to do that. I’ve got with me today, Blake Stratton. Blake, it is great to have you on the show.
Thanks for having me. Glad the calendars finally aligned and we got on the actual recording platform this time around. We’ve had a lot of good conversations, so I’m looking forward to this one.
Yeah, I think it’ll be great. And Blake is one of the guests that I didn’t necessarily have a specific topic in mind, I just knew I wanted to talk to him and have him on the show, and that led to a lot of great conversations that simply reiterated that. But the direction we’re going to go today is quite in line with Blake’s background and what he is doing now, which is a little bit around productivity, and I know somebody’s immediately going to go, “not productivity again,” but I can assure you it’s not about the calendar and the time hacks that we’re going to go deeper on that, and how do you actually find yourself with the ability to scale what you’re doing and not go crazy in the process. So that’ll be the basis for today’s conversation. But Blake, I’m going to start us off the way that I do every show: How did you become the leader that you are today?
What a question. Well, a lot of coffee.
Always critical.
How did I become the leader I am today? You know, I was thinking a lot about—I’ll get into this later—but I do a decent amount of my own mindset work, and I end up unraveling a lot of stuff when I do it. But one thing that I’ve realized is that so many of the things that I believed were setbacks, or delays, disappointments, things that should have been easy, but were for some reason very difficult, things that made me go, why the heck am I here? Those were the things that were probably the greatest teachers, which I suppose might be cliché. I’m sure you’ve had more profound answers than that. But what made me the leader I am today is probably all of the hardships that knocked me down, and then the reflection, the collaborative help and support of people around me, and the lessons learned from that. Because those things—is it a Michael Jordan quote where he said, “I’ve failed time and time again, and that’s why I succeed?”
Yeah, I think that is.
I’m literally rewatching The Last Dance right now. I’ve been rewatching it just to get—
Yeah, I’m pretty sure that’s Jordan.
If it’s not Jordan, it’s a Blake Stratton quote. You can put that in the show notes. But I would say that’s been the biggest thing, Jeremy, is so much of leadership, and you and I are similar in dad mode here, but when I think about teaching or leading my family, which is when I think about leadership, that’s like number one, is beyond self-leadership, leadership in my family. My kids are still pretty young, but I’ve already figured out that I’m not sure it super matters what I actually say or teach with words, but who I am is imparted whether I want it to be or not. And the lessons learned in hardship helped shape me, which therefore is the primary leadership mechanism for my family.
Yeah. Well, and you mentioned reflection on those hardships. And it’s easy to say, well, I got knocked down and I got back up, and that’s great. How did you learn to reflect in a way that led to growth rather than just anger or frustration or apathy to keep going in that same direction?
Yeah, I’d say over the 38 years of my life, it’s been an evolutionary relationship with emotions to where when I was young, emotions were everything, I was just effect to my emotions. So go through something, “Ah, I’m mad.” And part of that’s just brain development. Like kids are just naturally, it’s like you just affect those emotions and then a reaction to that, which was to sort of suppress emotion. Well, emotion’s going to slow me down. Emotions are the enemy, you know, if I can just not be emotional, then I’ll be more productive, or I’ll get stuff done, or I’ll do whatever, you know? And that was a while. And then it became more of a realization that I could actually learn from emotions, that emotions could actually be signals or teachers.
And so, when I think about reflection, how did I learn how to reflect? Part of it was before I could learn how to reflect, it was learning to engage with emotion differently to where it wasn’t something that was getting in my way, it was actually something that could signal me that there was something to be gained or learned. And so from there, that set the stage to learn about, okay, how can I. Not avoid the emotion, but actually feel it and then listen for what’s underneath the surface. And I don’t mean to be vague when I say “listen for what’s underneath the surface,” there’s specific forms of, I guess you could call it self-inquiry, that I’ve learned that I would consider sort of tools in the tool belt that have allowed me to go from, “Hey, that was a hard thing, but doggone it, I’m going to keep going”, to “Hey, that thing was a neutral experience, and I’ve made certain meaning of it, and that meaning may or may not be serving me, and so let me look at it or do some inquiry through it to see what I might discover about life, about my myself, about other people.” That process, you know, learning that process is something I’m, I don’t know, decades long into that journey. I don’t know if that answers your question. We could dive deep probably in any one of those areas I mentioned, but that’s the thrust of it.
It does. Okay. One of the things that you said that’s really kind of jumps out at me there is, “I just had an experience and it’s neutral, but I’m giving meaning to it.” And the ability to reflect in that way just strikes me as really freaking hard. Well, let’s just call it what it is. That’s not easy because every time—it feels to me anyway, and I see it in myself, I see it in people I work with, I see it in my kids, obviously—something happens and we immediately assume the meaning rather than being willing to step back and say, “Nope. Quite literally it just happened. The meaning is something we give it.” That’s an important mindset shift—the ability to step back, because I would imagine the same thing holds true in business, that you have an interaction with somebody, maybe they don’t use your company, they use somebody else, and it’s so easy just to immediately assign meaning to it, not realize that you’re doing it. But does it work for you in that way as well, to be able to step back and say, “Okay, that happened. Now I get to choose the meaning of that,” versus, it has to just have this default meaning.
Absolutely. And it’s applicable to everything. One of the nice things about business is that the scoreboard or the measurement system for, “Am I making meaning that’s serving me or not,” is pretty obvious in business, right? You know, are we creating more profit? Is my time becoming more valuable? You know, we mentioned the word “productivity.” In a business sense, productivity is essentially just profit per hour, if you want to think about it like that. What’s my input versus my output that I’m getting out of it? So you could be quote unquote, “really productive and really busy,” but if your business is, if the business isn’t creating more profit, you know, it’s like, “Hey, I’m an amazing auto mechanic. I’ve got the paint job, I’ve got all these things. It’s all tricked out.” “Great! Let’s get in and drive somewhere.” “Oh yeah, sorry that the engine doesn’t super work, but you know, I’ve been really productive fixing…” It’s like, no.
Anyway, not to go off on a tangent, but it absolutely applies to business and for me, and probably for a lot of the listeners, so much of their life in their head space is connected to their business because it’s like the piece of art that never gets finished Or it’s just the canvas on which my creativity gets to be expressed. It’s the main channel, you know, in terms of where my time and energy is going. And so, yeah, it shows up all the time. This “bad things,” quote unquote happening, and then having to do some reflection. For example, I can remember when I was learning this thing, and I’ll take you back to where this is before I had my own business, but I was literally working for a productivity company called Full Focus.
Yeah. You were like the productivity guy. I listened to your podcast. That’s exactly right!
Yeah! And I remember one time specifically—I wore a lot of hats, and one of those hats was in sales. So the biggest lever I could pull to increase my own income from that job was to sell more of our various levels of coaching and corporate training and things of that nature. And so I set pretty aggressive goals for myself. And I can remember one month in particular, I had gone, you know, like, “Oh wow, I did this, new record, next month, new record, next month, way worse.” And my thought was, “I’m frustrated, I’m scared, I’m anxious.” And I remember thinking like, “Oh no, like I really do suck actually, because why is this happening?” And that’s a visceral thing. And if you’re listening, you’re close to the sales side of your business or the numbers of your business, you know—maybe it’s just me, Jeremy, but few things can sort of trigger that sort of response like a dip in your revenue. And for me, I can remember reacting to that and being so like, “argh!”
And this is why reflection is so important. When we think about productivity, we can think of, okay, how do I manage my tasks better? How do I manage my time? If we ascend upstream—no pun intended—a little bit more, we could ask a simple question, well, how productive would you be if you had no anxiety? How productive would you be if you felt fully at ease and confident and on purpose? How productive would you be if you viewed your calendar and your time as an ally, rather than this enemy that you’ve got to defeat and conquer? The answer, at least for me is, it makes a massive difference. When I’m on a sales call or in a conversation with a prospect, and I’m like, “Oh gosh, ugh! I’m behind! I’m behind! I’m behind!” That’s a certain energy.
When you’ve got to have it, it’s way different, right? You feel that need. It’s almost like you’re approaching it out of fear and scarcity rather than abundance, which completely changes the anxiety level. And I could see some people listening into this. I mean, they’re probably thinking, how productive would I be if my calendar didn’t cause anxiety and thinking, that’s a great question, Blake. I’ve never been there. So I don’t even know how to think about that. So how do you help somebody—let’s just get to that part of the mindset. If the idea is to move upstream and think about how, how they would react, how they’d be working, what it would be like to be in that place with the no anxiety, they’re calm, they’re at ease, all those things that you shared, but they have never been there, or at least they can’t remember it. Because I find for a lot of high achievers, this starts like in middle school, high school, this anxiety of always having to perform more. So now you fast forward, they’re in their 40s and it’s like, what would it be like if you had no anxiety? And they’re like, I don’t know, I’d be seven maybe? If I can even go back that far. So how do you help somebody figure out what would that even look like so they can start down that path?
Yeah. To be clear, I’m not someone that’s free of stress and anxiety all the time. It’s, I know what to do.
Sure. But you can envision it.
Well, sure, because I do experience it, and I know what to do in response. So when you are effect to stress, you simply aren’t going to perform at your best. Your decisions are compromised. It’s like you are mentally drunk—that’s what my coach has called it before. You don’t make your best decision. You avoid, you procrastinate, you pick stupid problems to work on rather than the big scary one that might expose you as a bad leader. You know, that’s what you do when you’re feeling those things. You’re affect to those emotions.
And so taking back to this story, I have this bad sales month. Well, at the time I had a protocol that I would do at least once a week. Nowadays, I do it probably three or four times a week, but I got out my journal, which is a digital journal, and I just ask some questions in a specific sequence. And so if you’re listening and you’re like, “Hey, I had a bad month last month, let’s go Blake.” It literally was, “Okay, what do I feel?” And I think I, my feeling was, “I feel stressed or anxious,” something like that. Sure, and I would give myself permission to actually feel that emotion. And this is not, most of what I do is not anywhere near sort of a, a woo-woo type of, pump yourself up type of thing. But something that I’ve learned, and I’ve learned this from my wife and from a lot of studies, that your body really has a hard time when you try to bottle up any feeling and it can turn sour really quick. I personally got shingles when I was 32, which is very young if you don’t have an autoimmune disorder to get shingles. But I got it ’cause I was chronically stressed and it was all in here.
So I give myself two minutes. I’ve learned about child brain development and there’s a study that, hey, if you could just give your kid like a minute, two minutes to let them feel the feeling, they can usually move on. So I give myself a minute: Feel anxious. Okay, that feels okay. I feel it. It’s instantly, I’m less effect to it. Then I ask myself a question, really basic, why do I feel anxious, or my favorite style is to finish this sentence with my first gut reaction: “I feel anxious because,” first thing that comes to mind. And the first thing that came to my mind in that moment, Jeremy, was not, well, the first thing that came to mind was I had a crappy sales month.
Sure.
So I said I had a crappy sales month. And then I went one step further and I said, and it’s not okay to have a crappy sales month because, first gut reaction, it was “Because that means I’m a failure.” I was surprised that it came up, and so I’m like, okay, next question: “Is that really true? Does that even make sense that I’m a failure if I had a bad sales month?” And I thought to myself, I was like, “It actually feels true, but. I literally just was on Instagram and my friend Austin, who’s way richer and more successful than me, made a post about how he also had a bad sales month three months ago, and then worked out some systems to figure out what was going on, and now they’ve been trending in the right direction. So it doesn’t make sense, and in fact, the opposite might be true. Having a bad sales month could just as well, like if I was Austin, that would just indicate that there’s a system issue. It’s a neutral thing, right?”
Yeah.
I had made unconsciously, I didn’t know that my bad sales month meant, I’m a failure. I’m a failure. I’m a failure, but that’s the meaning I was making of it. So then everything, I was mentally drunk with that thought or that belief, but when I brought it into the light and I go, okay, well what’s the opposite of that? Okay, having a bad sales month means I’m successful? Why would that be true? Well, it could be true because how I view it, if I view it as “I’m successful or I’m becoming successful,” that’s what Austin viewed it as. In fact, wouldn’t it be true that actually I can’t be really financially successful or really successful in sales unless I have these bad months? I literally can’t—the way of success is literally paved with failure. That’s what people who are smarter, richer, and better at basketball say, right? And so then all of a sudden it’s like, oh, okay, interesting. So, and I, that’s just, I don’t want to go into too depth. There’s other tools that I have that kind of are more targeted per a specific emotion, for instance. But that’s sort of like the starter kit version of practicing just a little bit of inquiry, creating a little bit of reflective space to get out of being effect to the emotion, and effect to your lens, how you’re seeing your quote unquote “failure,” or your quote unquote “bad situation.” And then you can rise above it and see a perspective. And this is really important, Jeremy. This is very different than quote unquote “thinking positively.”
Oh, absolutely.
Like, yeah, thinking positive is like painting over some moldy drywall, you know, like it is actually just as dangerous to be thinking positive, thinking positive—there’s some, you know, accounting pros listening, you know? People are like, “Hey, let’s not look at the numbers. Let’s just think positive.” Well, that’s a bad idea, right?
Yeah. That doesn’t work.
But you’re not thinking positive or thinking negative, you’re actually just rising above the meaning making for a second and realizing that you’re the one that’s making meaning, therefore you’re the one that’s driving the emotion. And you could decide, hey, is this in service to me? Is this belief serving me? Or is there another belief that would serve me that’s just as true or more true? Does that make sense?
It does. And I know it makes sense for a fact because you have shared. In one of our many conversations over the past year had shared that, and I’ve actually taken those prompts and put them in day one. Because I also do the digital thing. And I found myself just, every now and then you’re feeling something, something’s off. And now I will readily admit I’m not great at reflecting and journaling. As simple as everybody claims it to be, I still feel woefully inadequate at the ability to just write on a blank piece of paper. Probably why I went into accounting and not literally anything else. But it’s incredibly impactful when you can do that because it does allow you to start to reframe things. And now all of a sudden it’s not like “This is bad,” but instead it’s “Why do I believe it’s bad? Oh, well I don’t know.” But you can dive into that and realize, okay. Don’t get me wrong, it might have still been a bad month. It still may suck from a metric standpoint, but it doesn’t mean the other 18 things that were taking you down the spiral of the rabbit hole of why it’s so bad. It’s like, no, it’s one month. Three record months before, how does that one month completely change? And I would say the same is true for a lot of accountants and a lot of the metrics that we manage that firms look at and leaders look at, they tend to be, I would call, lagging indicators, or they’re more input based, sometimes not output based. See, it’s easy to get fixated on that, and it’s like, well, because of this then this, this, this, this, and this, and what you’re advocating is you just stop for a second and say, okay, but what if all of that wasn’t true and you just came up with it? It’s like, oh, yeah. So very helpful.
So you mentioned it and I said it as well, you were the productivity guy or one of the productivity guys. You had a podcast on productivity, and you mentioned that when you were 32 you had shingles, and I’ve read your story on that several times. You were in the—I don’t remember your exact words, but—the height of productivity. Like you’d literally optimized everything to be the, the prototypical model of productivity, right?
Too many things.
And still, yet, despite maximizing and optimizing and all the -izing that you could do for productivity, you still had chronic stress and ended up sick as a result of that. From that experience, what did you learn about really creating what I’ll call scalable productivity, maybe is a way that, I’m going to put it—scalable productivity from a mindset standpoint, and how does all of that factor in beyond just optimizing stuff?
Hmm. Bring that one to me again, Jeremy. This is a great question. So when I was in that place…
Yep. You’d optimize.
How did it get out of that cycle?
Yeah! How, what did you ultimately realize? Because one of the things that I know you’ve shared is, it clearly wasn’t time blocking and tracking your time and time awareness that led to that feeling of success and productivity, because you still had the chronic stress and everything was bottled up inside. So how do you—maybe a different way to put it, how do you relate the mindset to productivity and how do you create a more scalable level of productivity, leveraging the mindset side?
Yeah. You know, for so long I was chasing the tactics, because the way that a lot of people will teach is from what is visible. So we change things in our business, in our life, by doing or not doing things physically, right? “Oh, I started writing down stuff in my calendar and I stopped forgetting it.” So if someone were to ask me, “Hey, how do you, you know, not forget stuff in your calendar,” I’d say, “Well, do what I did,” right? Do what I did. And so it’s really common advice. And to be sold a course or to be sold a book, or to be on the level of tactics. And I think of it almost like a, if you want to think of it like an iceberg. In tactics, that’s what we see up top, above the surface, but just like an iceberg, you know? That’s like the 5 or 10% of productivity.
What I’m not here to say is that if you have no skills in time or task management, that you will also be the most productive person in the world. Probably not. What I will say is I’ve had—I’m thinking through my last “normal jobs”—each one of my bosses has been much more successful than me. If we were just purely looking at like the financial metrics of their life. Each one would go to me and be like, “Wow, Blake, how do you, can you show me how to set up my phone like this? Can you show me how to set up name the to-do app that I had figured out? Can you show me how to do X, Y, and Z thing? Like, how do I, how do I da da da da?” Like, they were objectively not good and even felt bad about being productive, you know? Like, “Oh, I forget to, and…” and I’m like, yeah, but you get something. So there’s something beneath the surface here. Beneath the surface is some strategy.
And that’s where there’s some other books about it, like Michael Hyatt, my old boss, would talk about strategy. He has a book called Free to Focus, which is really a bit more about the strategy part of productivity, where it’s, that’s where he gets to the level of like, hey, what’s in my, he would call it a desire zone. What’s that thing that I’m good at, that I like to do that produces a result in my business, how can I double down on that? This is where you get things like the 80/20 principle or you know, the Eisenhower Matrix. These are strategic ways to think about doing tactics better, and that’s below the surface, ’cause you can’t really necessarily see the strategy that someone’s operating in.
And I would say, I felt like as much as I could try to operate at that level too, but beneath that is the subconscious. It’s the thinking that you’re doing that you don’t realize you’re doing. It’s like I have a relatively new iPhone and if I had that iPhone, this is amazing hardware, there’s these three huge clunky cameras on the back of it that are amazing, right? And it can do all this stuff. But if I had iPhone 1 software on there? Ooh, speaking of work-life balance, here’s my daughter joining us.
How are you?
I’m doing a recording right now, my darling. Do you want to say hi? You could be on a podcast. (giggling)
She’s like “Nope, I’m too shy.”
Alright, I’ll see you later. I’ll see you soon. Bye, Bunny.
I love you! Byeeeee!
Alright! And that, my friends is the secret.
That’s right.
So beneath the strategy level is the subconscious level, the things that we’re thinking without thinking, I use the analogy of an iPhone. So I have a new iPhone and has all the bells and whistles on the hardware side, but if it had the iPhone 1.0 or iOS 1 or 2 in it, how well is that hardware going to function? It’s going to be crap. And what we don’t realize, particularly as we ascend in our career, is that sometimes we’ve got old software, old like, unseen code operating in our mind—things that we’ve learned. Maybe we learned it from our parents. Sure. Maybe we learned it from a bad experience we had with a boss that we had once. And so all of our leadership is purely in reaction to this one “bad” quote unquote, experience we had.
I recently was going through a MI one of my mindset tools because my coach, my own coach called me out, he’s like, you’re too nice. You’re not leading your clients. Like you’re being too nice. And I was like, well, of course I’m being nice. And he’s like, no, no, no, no. You’re being too nice. What’s with that? And I realized I’d been judged when I was in grade school for being a mean kid, making fun of other kids, right? And so I had sort of just made this thing of like, “Okay, it’s bad to be mean. It’s bad to make people upset,” any of those things. And so I’m like tiptoeing around my clients when they’re desperate to just have a leader to call them out on their “Blake Stratton,” if you will, their BS. And so that’s a subconscious pattern.
So when we talk about, you say, well, what’s the transition? How do you make scalable productivity? The answer is not to continue—I mean, you can of course, search for better tactics. Great. You can search for, you know, better strategy, great. Your emotional state will be telling you whether what you’re doing is going to really solve it, your emotional state, and also just the results that you’re getting. Am I happy with the results I’m getting? Am I happy with how I am with me? Can I sit down at dinner and just engage with my family and my mind’s not running a mile a minute? I couldn’t for a long time. Can I go to bed and just fall asleep, or is my mind just going tomorrow, tomorrow, tomorrow. You know? Those are some markers.
So that’s the reflection side of it then. We’ve got to listen to that so that we can then adapt our strategy and our tactics to improve those, because…
Yeah, your strategy and tactics might actually be just fine, is the thing.
Hmm.
Like my bosses that were more successful than me, they were worse at the tactics, maybe even had worse strategy, but they believed they were worthy of making a lot of money and I didn’t. And not even that—that’s a bad, even that’s kind of a cliché thing. ’cause it’s not like you just say it in the mirror, “I believe I can make a lot of money.” It’s not that, it’s, they literally have a sense, like their subconscious programming is like one of them. He didn’t grow up with the same, I grew up in my background, there’s a little bit of shame around having a lot of money.
Yeah. Same.
So guess what? I can have a strategy to make more money and do all the tactics and dah, dah, dah, dah, dah, dah. There’s going to be an upper limit that I hit, Jeremy, if I don’t deal with this subconscious program, that is some shame to sort of dismantle that, this is where we get to the reflection thing is, if I’m using the iPhone. And like you try to open an app and it just closes right away, you know? That’s the thing. It’s like, wait a second, Jeremy does this strategy. Jeremy’s doing this thing. I’m trying to do the same thing. I just can’t freaking do it, or I am doing it and I’m getting nowhere near the result for some reason, and I feel like I’m just going around and around on a hamster wheel with this issue—maybe it’s hiring, maybe it’s people management, maybe it’s, you know, the financial side. That’s a trigger. That’s a bug to where you go, okay, great, what is this triggering? Am I frustrated? Am I angry? Am I, do I feel guilty? Do I feel not good enough? Do I feel self-doubt? That’s that little bug where again, to use the Apple analogy, you can sort of like send the bug to Apple, like, hey, report this. You’ve got to have a reporting system to go, hey, it’s time to descend to this subconscious level to patch this.
And here’s the beautiful thing, man. Here’s the beautiful thing. Because this may sound like therapy and hard work to someone, it’s really not. If you can answer questions, if you can answer questions in sequence, you can “patch the bugs,” so to speak. Not even bugs, but your subconscious mind’s just out of alignment with your goals. You can realign it if you can answer questions in sequence. You really can. Now, when you do that, this is the beautiful part, Jeremy, is once you do that, the strategy, it’s like sobering up. I mean, the strategy and the tactics become less effort. Like I don’t think at all about my to-do list at all—I’m just going to be real. I used to be so like, okay, this, and I categorize my to-do with this, and it connects to this, and I have this automation that leads to this, ’cause that’ll save me five seconds here. It’s not that I don’t think about what I have to, I just go, yeah, I’m lighter. I just go.
Huh. And you still get stuff done?
Yeah. I’m probably less organized even—I’ve probably, honestly, I’ve probably gotten less organized, but from the time I got shingles to now, I’ve started my own business. I’ve built it around a lifestyle that I love. I’ve got a long way to go, but I make far more than I used to, and I have more time than I used to, practically. The effort—if you’re listening—the effort, the force that you feel trying to be more productive can be lessened. It can be. I think that’s the scalability part to your thing, is the force, like, okay, if I do this and I do this, I do this. We started with a Michael Jordan quote. Michael Jordan’s not thinking on the court. He’s just seeing. And that’s the thing I think when you start to work on the subconscious plane is that yes, you still need good strategy, you still learn—I was looking up a new software today. I’m like, “Hey, maybe that’ll help.” But I was like, “Yeah, maybe. But is the new CRM really like, is it really going to move the needles or just a distraction? Right now I think I’m just avoiding sending some messages I got to send. Let’s go send them.”
Well, and that’s where the taking the time to do that is so important. And in my experience right now, I would imagine it’s not just the accounting profession, but there’s so much busyness that I think people are just flat out ignoring the emotion side. Or they’ve maybe, you know, like you said on the, on the shame of you know, calling people out and holding them to account, there’s something to be said that, you know, hey, if you’re a high performer, you don’t take time for emotions. They’re not necessary, you bottle them up, you keep them hidden, you know, you do all the things and being willing to step back and say, all right, got the tactics. I’ve got the strategy. I’m time blocking. I’m doing all the things, but I still feel stressed. Why is that? Well, because the badge of honor is I’m busy, so if I don’t feel busy, I’m not going to feel like I’m performing. And you can get deeper into that. I don’t know anybody taking the time to do it, but it’d be critically important.
And what you mentioned there from a leadership standpoint, so critical from a self leadership—you’ve got to have the belief that you have the right to accomplish what you want to accomplish, that you are worthy of it, and you deserve to be able to do that rather than the opposite, right? I’m not good enough, I’ve never been good enough, all the things that could go there. And that probably does become more therapy than it is just reflection at times. And each person’s going to have to figure out what level is that? Because there are way different depths in that. But that’s such an important mindset and I’m wondering for listeners out there, you know, how many of you are sitting there thinking, “I’m doing all the things, but I’ve just been taught that if I’m not busy then I’m not being productive and it’s not good enough,” and it’s almost a self perpetuating type of mindset that well, the generation before said we’ve got to be that way.
Oh sure, yeah. An interesting question is to just ask like with whatever issue you’re facing that you’re like, oh, this is so annoying, oh, this is so frustrating, is to be asking yourself like, “What is having this problem doing for me? Or what is it protecting me from?” Like, I’ve had clients that struggle with, “Oh, I just procrastinated. I just, I haven’t gotten around to it.” Like, okay, what’s that procrastination protecting you from? It’s serving you in some way.
I had a client named Brian who kind of a seasonal business, but he really wanted to take a lot of time off in the summer. He’s got young kids. He’s like, I want to go on these trips and I really want to be present, but you know, there’s this thing that happens and this, and he is always putting out all these fires. And like, okay, well Brian, you’re a smart guy. What do you think the key is? Well, I just need to hire somebody to do this and then equip them with the processes to do the things. Well great, why haven’t you done it? He’s like, oh, well there’s this and this and this, right? When you know what you should do and you’re still not doing it, and the reality is there’s no excuse to not know. Ask ChatGPT. Yeah. Or if you know an expert. Call up Jeremy. “Hey Jeremy, what should I do with my business?” You can know what to do. You’re not doing it. And so, you know, you asked how do you take the time to do it? Well, he paid someone like me to basically coach him through it. And I was like, alright, man.
So many of us do that.
What is this again, just answering a series of questions and we got to the software bug, so to speak, was he’s like, “Well, if I’m not busy, I’m not valuable. Specifically, if I’m not working on these things, then I’m not valuable to the business.” And when we unpacked that, I was like, “Wait a second. We just made an actual logical list and not just feeling good or saying affirmation or meditating for five minutes or something, but like, let’s use our brains and go, does that even make sense?” No! The opposite is far more true because if you actually made a machine that could produce value then you guys could actually exponentially increase the profit of this company. But right now you’re justifying being a bottleneck because in your software system being a bottleneck means I’m really valuable.
So no amount of tactics. He’s like, what strategy should I use? What task management software? I’m like, dude, I’m done talking about task management software. Because as long as this thought is an operation, we can’t task manage our way out of that. We can’t. Well guess what? We flipped the belief and I couldn’t get the guy to book a call with me for two months ’cause he was just like off enjoying his summer. He’s like, “Blake, I probably worked, I mean, less than five hours a week in June and July. I hired the person, I equipped him with the thing. They were fine. I checked in a couple times.” And guess what? When he was off, instead of feeling guilty for “ah, I should be working and I should be doing more,” he was just like making memories with his daughter. And those are going to fly by. Those are going to fly by those seasons of life. So it seems small—why would I take time to pull out day one and answer some questions, but when you magnify it out? The profitability of my business is suffering. The quality relationship with my daughter is suffering. Now we’ve got time for a little reflection exercise there.
Well, yeah, and I’m so glad that you shared that example because it’s not just productivity. And it’s so easy to kind of, I mean, productivity was the proxy to get us into the conversation, I guess, perhaps because that’s, you know, what we started connecting on, but the mindset—that reflection, that work and that willingness to say, does it have to be true, does this even make sense to really work on that and to say, “Okay, well then how do we fix it?” That impacts so many things. I think about, I had a conversation earlier today with someone on succession planning. I see that a lot with, “Ah, we just don’t know that the next generation’s got it.” Alright, well, does that even make sense? I mean, the previous generation thought that about us. How’d that go? We’ve crushed it. We’ve 3x’d the business, we’ve 5x’d the business, we’ve 10x’d the business. We’ve done all these things. Great. What about the next gen? “Well, they’re just different.” Okay. Are they?
Like, can we go a little bit deeper here and just get to the mindset: There’s a limiting belief. It has nothing to do with people. It has nothing to do with systems. It has nothing to do with, like you said, the tactics. Everything is there, but until we can figure out why we’re buying into this false narrative that we’re telling ourselves, which, we’re great storytellers. And I realize many of our audience, you’re accountants, and you’re thinking creativity is not our thing. When it comes to telling yourself stories, you’re a master and they’re typically dramatic and they probably don’t end in your favor. ’Cause that’s human nature. And I find it, I don’t know, maybe you see this differently, I see it more so with high performers, like they’re the ones that want to assign even more meaning to things that have less meaning because they just, they’ve got to have an answer for it. They’ve got to know why, and if it isn’t readily [knowable], well, it’s got, clearly it’s this, and it becomes an unnecessary barrier, similar to your client, right? It becomes an unnecessary barrier. It’s not the other people, it’s not the money, it’s not the time, it’s not the tactics, it’s not the strategy. It’s purely the belief.
Similar to what you said about, you know, growing up where somebody making a lot of money that’s viewed negatively. And it’s amazing the mindset and the lasting mindset that that has. I grew up in a similar situation to where it’s like, I mean, any of the family members that were successful, it was just like, oh, well you know them and you don’t realize it at the time. Then you become an adult and you start realizing, huh, that’s actually not a bad thing. But you’ve got to shift that and that’s hard to do so. Well, Blake, we could probably talk for hours, but we probably ought to wrap up this episode anyway.
Yeah.
If somebody’s listening in, I know your area of specialty are high performers: Consultants, business owners with kids. I would say that a lot of accounting firm, you know, managers, senior managers, partners function in a similar vein, consultants kind of looking to become more successful. Many of them starting families, and some not, but would still. Probably be in a similar situation, but if somebody’s, you know, looking for help, they think you might be the guy, how can they find out more about you and get connected?
Yeah, probably the simplest way is just to look me up on Instagram. My handle is @BlakeStrat. As a bonus, you could probably see me rant about football or see a picture of some coffee I’m drinking. Or you could just go to my website if that’s more your style. It’s just my name, BlakeStratton.com and there’s some information and some free stuff if they’re interested on like the topic we talked about today, I have some resources around that.
Very good. There’s also an entertaining story about an encounter with an Amish man that I would highly encourage if people are looking for a good story on vulnerability out there as well. You’ve mentioned coffee though. I’ve got to ask. I’m a Lavazza guy. What’s your brand?
Oh boy. Well, I’m in Nashville, Tennessee. I’ve been here about 20 years. And the coffee scene has just exploded. So I’m still discovering coffee brands and places here, so, okay. But if you want some Nashville coffee, anyone out there, you got to get some coffee from Crema Coffee Roasters. You got to take a visit to Barista Parlor, if you’re flying into the Nashville Airport, they actually have a spot there, very yummy. But yeah man, I’m just, you know, sometime when you visit Nashville, there’s just, we can spend all day just getting jittery on the caffeine availability here.
Sounds like a coffee tour is on the near term horizon.
Yeah!
Well, Blake, I appreciate you taking the t ime to chat with us, man. It was a great conversation. I look forward to talking to you again soon.
Absolutely. Thanks for having me, Jeremy.
