Balancing work, life, relationships (my first AMA)

Summary

• I've realized that being overly collaborative can sometimes hinder my decisiveness; I used to seek too much input, which delayed decisions. Now, I make sure to value input but ultimately rely on my own informed judgment.
• It's important for women juggling family and business to recognize that you'll often have to choose one over the other in the short term. However, over time, it may balance out. Do not conflate the time spent on work as an indication of its priority over family.
• My drive for success may come from various sources, like reinforcement from quick success or the joy in hard work and seeing its positive impact. It's crucial to focus on activities you enjoy and that bring rewards.
• In balancing "masculine" and "feminine" roles in business, do not label these as gendered traits but view them as necessary skills for leadership that should be applied as needed, based on the situation.
• For embedding structure into a successful yet chaotic business, start by establishing clear routines, meeting cadences, and KPI dashboards. However, the primary challenge will be managing the behavioral change in the team.
• Balancing energies between partners comes down to shedding work personas at home and reinforcing behaviors we appreciate in each other, rather than holding on to labels of masculine and feminine.
• Building a sales team from scratch, initially the founder should make sales. As the team grows, add a player-coach until there are enough reps to require a sales manager who can organize and scale the team.
• Pursuing the long-term worth of a project should be a mix of personal interest and market viability. Ensure there's a balance between enjoying the work and having a real demand for it.
• To gain respect as an employee, exhibit behaviors you associate with respect, such as making decisions and holding boundaries decisively. Self-respect translates into how others perceive and treat you.
• An operator should have a strong understanding of marketing and sales, as these are critical departments. It's okay if your strengths grow over time, and it's important to recognize where your interests lie.
• When things are falling apart, leveraging negative emotions like frustration or desperation can be powerful motivators. Remember, motivation often comes from adversity.
• To stay present despite distractions, avoid indulging in them. By not giving into distractions, you naturally enter a state of flow, which is essential for focused and effective work.
• As a company grows, fostering better communication and stronger leadership skills are essential. As you scale from 15 to 30 employees, align your messaging with the evolving needs of the organization.
• The cat we were supposed to receive was not the one delivered. My assistant ended up keeping the cat she took in after the shipping mix-up, while I realized owning a cat wasn't suitable for me at the moment.

Video

How To Take Action

I would suggest starting with small changes to become more decisive. Trust your gut feeling more and don't wait for everyone's opinion before making a decision. It's okay to listen, but in the end, rely on your own judgment.

When balancing family and business, accept that sometimes you'll choose one over the other, but it evens out over time. Remember, spending more time on work doesn't mean it's more important than family.

Focus on doing things you enjoy and that give you rewards. Success often comes from activities that make you happy and have a positive impact on others.

For leadership, use both "hard" and "soft" skills as needed. Don't think about them as masculine or feminine – they're just tools for good business.

If your business is growing and needs structure, start with clear routines, meeting schedules, and kpi dashboards. The tough part is changing the team's habits, but communication is key.

At home, leave work behind. Show appreciation for the behaviors you like in your partner. Reinforce those behaviors with kindness and thanks.

If you're building a sales team, make sales yourself first. Then, hire one rep and be their coach. As you grow, add a player-coach, and eventually bring in a sales manager to organize and scale up.

Pursue projects that balance personal interest with market demand. You'll stick with something you like, even when it gets tough.

To gain respect at work, act with confidence. Make decisions and stick to them. Show self-respect to earn respect from others.

If you operate a business, understand marketing and sales. These skills are critical and can be developed over time.

Use negative emotions like frustration to motivate yourself when things get tough. Work hardest when you need to turn things around.

Stay present by avoiding distractions and entering a state of flow. This will help you focus and do good work.

As your company grows, improve communication and find strong leaders. This will align your team as you add more people.

Lastly, sometimes unexpected things, like a cat mix-up, can teach you about responsibility. Don't rush into big decisions, think about what's right for you.

Quotes by Leila Hormozi

"I tend to question myself and like what I feel in my gut is the right decision to make in the business"

– Leila Hormozi

"In the long term, you are not going to choose one over the other, but in the short term day to day you will always be choosing one over another"

– Leila Hormozi

"I personally make more progress with negative emotions than I think I do with positive ones"

– Leila Hormozi

"You have to understand how to operate a company. Marketing and sales are like arguably two of the most important departments"

– Leila Hormozi

"You get what you tolerate"

– Leila Hormozi

Full Transcript

a few weeks ago I made a post on Instagram where I talked about how I wanted to get your top questions whether it's pertaining to you and your personal situation or me and something you want to know I've answered a crap ton of them and that is today's video and most importantly I am answering at the very end the top question by far let everyone know which is what happened to your cat what do you still struggle with to this day even though you are so far in your business I tend to be overly collaborative um meaning like I feel like I can hire people as much people in the room but I've never like identified myself as that person and so sometimes that prevents me from being as decisive as I could be in the moment and so if there's like a big decision to be made I always try to get like all the different levels and organizations of input I tend to make it more democrative than it is like me making the decision now that I've been informed by everybody I actually think that when I do make the decision once I've been informed by everyone like I feel very confident in my decision making skills my strength like I am very thoughtful of others opinions and I tend to try and like pull out a pen opinions from everybody else and make them feel included I tend to question myself and like what I feel in my gut is the right decision to make in the business sometimes I go back to like this old habit of thinking like if more of the team is against my decision than for it then they're probably all right well like consensus says that this is a decision we should make therefore my gut is wrong and we should make that decision and now I do the opposite which is like even if everyone feels like this is the right decision I in my gut no it's not I'm going to make the decision that I think is right because I have more data than everybody here if I'm wrong then I'm wrong do you have any advice for women who are wives mothers domestic goddesses and want to run a business but also don't want to feel like they're choosing one over the other a lot of people say I feel like it's like I have my family and I feel like I have my work especially women I get that and they feel like they have to choose between the two and this is my opinion is that if you want to do both then in the long term you are not going to choose one over the other but in the short term day to day you will always be choosing one over another and I think that that is also because people conflate time with priorities just because you're at work all day if your kid you get a call that he's sick and throwing up and has a fever and needs to go to the hospital does work take priority just because you spend more time working does that mean your kid's not fired you're not going to go dip out write that and go pick them up and take him to the hospital of course you are like well if you work all day that means that that's your priority not your family it's like no but if my husband passed out I had to go get him and take him to the hospital of course that's my priority the second thing is I think that in order to to succeed in the long term of having both of these things that you value in your life you have to be willing in all the short-term little micro moments to sacrifice one or the other because there's no way that you can constantly accommodate both so it's like okay the question is do I work late you know my boss asked me to take this meeting at 5 PM but my kid has his like soccer tournament at 5 30. which one do I do well Tuesday you might go to the soccer tournament but then on Thursday when you have another meeting in another soccer tournament you might stay at work and say Hey you know Dad's going to FaceTime me and show me in the micro you might not be balancing but like in the short decisions you're going to choose one over the other over the long term it evens out where do you think your drive comes from to be successful I don't like this question because I don't know I feel like I can make a lot of guesses as to like if it comes from here and like if it comes from your childhood and all these things or maybe it comes from the fact that like you've been reinforced with like a lot of success very quickly I've had the ability just to like not stop and enough to see success and then more and more and it compounds over like I like working hard and I like doing things because I'm rewarded for it I'm rewarded for it with like seeing people whose lives have changed because they've been inspired by it I think a lot of people overthink this [ __ ] what makes you do what you do like I don't know I'm just doing it and I'm happy about it so it's like do more the things you like doing do less things you don't like doing and then it just happens to be the things that I like doing have made me successful like by society's measures I get a ton of reward for what I do I get to watch people in our company like gain skills and like love where they work and like actually like having a job here I get to watch these portfolio companies you know the CEOs like level up build companies that they want to build their whole lives have success they've never had make more money than they've ever made like the stuff that happens on a daily basis and like the what I call like [ __ ] shoveling you know that sucks but at the same time like I get a lot more than I don't get how do you balance the feminine and masculine roles of being in business masculine feminine means something different in every culture what is feminine in this culture might be masculine otherwise masculine one might be fun in another it's like you're looking at masculine and feminine in business I think what people mean is usually like the soft skills of business and then like the hard skills of business and I think that typically people tend to associate like hard conversations like making Fast decisions being like very powerful and outspoken to be masculine whereas they associate like caring and introspective and thoughtful and cautious to be feminine I don't think that either one of those is going to win a business I think it's like the two of those balanced and knowing when each skill set is appropriate just comes with experience and time I think that oftentimes what happens is the reason like business like women show up super masculine in the workplace is because they're afraid and won't be seen as legitimate or they won't be seen as powerful and so they try to suppress the sides of themselves they actually make them really good leader and managers and I think that actually there's a lot of power in being someone who cares about people who's thoughtful of other people who's able to accommodate and whereas on the other side I think like being decisive and you know being outspoken are also really important skills in terms of leading a company how do you balance the two I think that you stop labeling them as masculine and feminine you start looking at them as just skills that are required to be good at running a business if you started a company and it became successful without much structure but now you want to implement structure due to inefficiencies where would you start I think most companies start and are successful without much structure you know professionalization of management I think occurs like most people start to realize they need around three million dollars implementing a Cadence and getting like meetings in place and getting a kpi dashboard all that like tactical like putting it in places not hard like what's hard is the behavioral change in the team the team goes from an environment where it's like very free-flowing and like it's people like take pride and it's like creative we don't have all the structure so now we have more structure because in order to scale we have to know how efficient we are we need to know our utilization we need to understand these metrics and so from my perspective I always look at it like I have to give them the knowledge in my head which is I need to voice my concerns I need to explain to them that this is a change for me I need to explain them what kind of changes and I need to explain to them what the new focus is which is like you will be rewarded for following these systems that allow us to measure efficiency and then here's how I'm going to reward you for it here's what I expect from you how do you balance your masculine and feminine energy and what is your natural tendency as as well as Alex's and has that caused conflict and if so how did you work through it for me at least like when I am scared I probably act less feminine so if I'm nervous at work if I'm insecure at work I'm scared at work I'm probably gonna act less feminine than if I were feeling comfortable and so naturally if I'm comfortable in my relationship then typically that's what comes out is like a side of me that is more soft more caring more loving more thoughtful versus I think if somebody's insecure in a relationship and that like masculine side would come out you know in terms of like how do you balance the two in your relationship I think it's more of like being able to identify your audience as a human who you're talking to which is like at work what traits am I going to exhibit talking to my employees a vendor a client versus like I'm at home now how am I going to speak to my husband who loves me and is my partner a lot of times I think it's that we have our work hat on and we get off work and the workout's still on and I'm talking to my husband like I'm talking to an employee and that's why people like contention grows in marriages as people speak to each other in a way that you know undermines them and I think a lot of that is just like not contextualizing like the audience that you're speaking to at that point in time you know for me like I'm very aware of when I stop working and the moment I stop working the hat comes off and I am completely different it doesn't even matter what happened at work that day I think I've gotten way better at that over time it's going to be hard at first it gets easier over time I think the best way to improve how you communicate with your spouse and what kind of traits you exhibit when you talk to them is by talking your spouse about it holding each other accountable not even holding each other accountable but rewarding your spouse when they do those things so for example like when I'm super cute and thoughtful with Alex like he clearly makes it known that he's happy I'm doing them he's like I love it when you act this way I love it when you do this I love it when you do that and the same goes for analysts like when he does something really nice for me or says something really nice or complims me I'm like thank you so much for that I love it when you do that I love when you do that and I think most people don't reinforce their spouse's Behavior at all and then we reinforce each other when we take action like overly reinforce each other hug high five kiss like celebrate and that has made huge difference in our relationship what does ideal org chart look like when building a sales team from scratch and how does it evolve as it grows you're building a sales team from scratch first I would assume you're the sales person like as a CEO of the business like that's typically what you do in the beginning and then you bring in one person to be you know the rep that probably reports to you as the founder and then once you get to three reps that's when you need like a player coach so I think up until three reps I've always had them like roll into say like a Founder because typically they're the one that's best at sales so if you're not good at sales disregard but then once you get to three that's the point where you need like I would say a sales lead slash manager depending on your business a lead is going to be really good at like the combat the handicand combat the obstacle overcomes like understanding the art of sales they're usually somebody who's still selling and then they're helping the guys or the girls or the team you know get better at their skill set in terms of like what they're saying on the phone or what they're saying during their presentation versus a manager is somebody who also can can do that but also can hire people can build out the team can put some meeting cadences in place and some organization to it how do you know when something is long-term worth pursuing you know I don't think I'm really all are one way or the other uh one I don't know what passion is let me know when you find out um I think that we like the things that we're good at and so if you're really good at something you tend to like it more and if you get rewarded from something over and over again then you tend to put more effort into it because you're getting a reward from it and then you get better you get reward and it just becomes this very positive experience that people label as passion in terms of do you do that or do you like base it on like is this a growing market and all like Logistics I think that it has to be both I would prefer to do something I enjoy doing obviously it's like is it a growing Market is the economy in your favor do you have Tailwinds that are blowing you forward like at the same time I would sacrifice some of that you have like market and then you have desire to do the thing and it's like I would sacrifice a little bit of this to make sure that I actually liked it because I think that in the long term a lot of the reason business doesn't work is because you quit it's not even the market I mean like there's still people selling [ __ ] newspapers but like they love newspapers so they're still doing it and like is that a success or a failure like I don't know he's still doing it and he likes it so like I guess it's success and so I think it's the same in anything with business which is if you have engineered it so that you are going to not like what you're doing if you don't get reinforced for what you're doing you're not getting a reward from it then you're probably going to end up quitting so you don't even get to see out the long term on the other end of the spectrum if you go all towards like something you like you're probably actually going to start getting negative reinforcement from it like see this a lot with people like fully pursue like I'm an artist so I'm gonna like sell my art but it's like okay well there's no market for your art and nobody wants your art so you know what happens over time is you start to not like your art you start to resent your art because every time you try to sell it somebody says oh I don't think it's worth that then over time that reinforcement you used to get that was really positive starts to become more negative because there's no market for it nobody wants to buy it and then you start to actually resent part and so if you go too far in one end of either of the spectrum then you're going to fall into the Zone where you're not going to like what you're doing you have practical tips on gaining respect specifically if you are an employee not a manager if you want to gain respect you have to ask yourself who is somebody who is respectable what kind of actions do they exhibit like what Behavior do that they exhibit I would think somebody is respectable makes decisions quickly holds their boundaries they treat themselves with respect and I think a lot of the times the reason that women tend to get less respect than men is they treat themselves with less respect than men this is not based on science it's just like my personal experience and observation which is I think a lot of women tend to be more insecure especially in the workplace and so maybe they act in a way that is insecure which doesn't gain them respect and I can say this because like I used to be like that I didn't respect myself as much because I was inexperienced and so less people respected me and over time as I have elevated my respect myself and right now I can tell you I have immense self-respect I get that back from people if someone were to talk to me in a certain way they know that I would not continue the relationship you get what you tolerate do you as the operator build the systems for the entire agency or does Alex play a heavier role in his Department I think that there's this common misconception that operators like don't do Marketing sales I don't think that's the case at all I think that you should understand how to operate a company Marketing sales are like arguably to the most important department if you want to be a dangerous operator you [ __ ] get marketing and sales I will say that my skill set has grown over time like sales has always been a string now compared to Alex Amaya is like am I good at the art of sales like he is no I couldn't tell you like here's the obstacle overcome in the snap but I can tell you when I hear a good one I can tell you when I hear a bad one and can I build a sales department absolutely could I build a marketing department absolutely do I have like the artistic skill of either I don't really have the interest so I think you have to understand like where your interests lie what are you good at and then you guys have to mold that into a custom relationship that the two of you have in the business there is no right or wrong there are some operators who build the department but they have no knowledge of the actual like artistic side behind either or I would say creative versus there's operators who understand all of it so you know I think that's a decision between the two of you what do you do when you feel like everything you've worked so hard for is falling apart how do you motivate yourself I think you've got to use what you're given which is like motivation can come from inspiration it can also come from desperation so like the hardest I've ever worked in my life has come from places where I have had nothing I've lost everything I was fat I was arrested multiple times I had nothing to show I'd ruined everything I'd worked for and then I built it all from scrap you have to use whatever emotion is available to you at the time I personally make more progress with negative emotions than I think I do with positive ones now on an ongoing basis like is that going to deter my quality of life yes eventually if I'm constantly using negative emotions like obviously I'm not like excited about that all the time but you're like how do I find motivation but the thing is is that you are lacking success therefore you would assume that you have the desire to attain success and what is where do you find motivation when there's a gap motivation is the gap between the two so I would imagine right now that you feel frustrated angry upset desperate use that what would motivate you more than Rock Bottom how to stay present as a highly ambitious person you know I actually used to be fairly distracted I think a lot of people use these excuses and they label themselves and say that they get easily distracted for certain reasons and I remember one of my friends said something to me once and he said if you do not allow yourself to indulge in the distraction long enough you will get into flow or you will become present I was like and so I realized that with work like I'll get into a meeting and maybe I'm distracted with like something someone said in the last meeting if I don't allow myself to get unslacked and allow myself to check my phone to allow myself to check my email or to like not be paying attention to what they're saying eventually I forget about that other thing and I'm fully immersed in the moment that's actually probably why I like running the business is I feel like all of it is a state of flow because I'm constantly able to have the discipline to resist distraction and allow myself that time that it takes to get into flow where I'm truly present I'm truly enjoying what I'm doing I'm truly engaged in a conversation I've just seen the cost of not doing that which is you know when I first started there were many times where I'd get on a meeting and I was so distracted that I would make a bad decision and a lot of my bad decisions actually stemmed from being distracted while I was making the decision and thinking about something else and just being like yeah yeah that that and like later it came to bite me in the ass and so now I understand The Importance of Being fully engaged in the moment and all the calls I'm in the meetings I'm in the work I'm doing because I understand that that saves you all the redos you have to do later what advice do you have for challenges blind spots and opportunities for being at 16 W-2 employees and eight contractors and scaling to 25 to 30 by year end I think there's two things which is like if the leaders above those people are weak that will show through more so in the future when you have 30 people when it doesn't get 15. the second piece is that you have to become a better Communicator at 30 people than you at 15. so I'll tell you like for acquisition.com like when we had 10 people versus now we have like almost 25 the way I communicate is much less casual I have to think through okay now we have like decently like fleshed out departments and functions what's their perspective if I'm messaging this like if we hire someone if we let someone go if we're making a change in Direction like I have to now think through all the filters of all the people on the team in terms like what are their fears what are their desires and aspirations like how do I message to all of those people versus like having such a close relationship with everybody that I I don't need to think about my messaging so much and so I think that like the skill set of the CEO has to increase in terms of their capacity to communicate and your ability to recruit leaders that can lead on your behalf that you don't have to intercept with has to also continue to go up that's probably what perhaps at that point is you start to realize like you know someone gets a few more people underneath them and you're like oh [ __ ] like you probably shouldn't have people underneath you because now I'm starting to see like you're actually kind of a micromanager and like you kind of suppress people like you got a bit of an ego or like on the other hand maybe it's like there's no structure in place they're not holding people accountable I'm like those start things start to break and then your communication at the same time has to level up whatever happened with the cat you were going to get was it a scam did you ever end up getting a cat did not get the cap because what happened was the cat arrived it was not our cat um and so my assistant was like I will take the cat posture home and I will take care of the cat posture and return it on Monday when hopefully these scammers get back to us so Monday comes around she's like they got back to us they apologized profusely um but I had seen on her Instagram how like her kids really love the cat and they were playing with it the whole weekend and so Monday came and I was like do you want to keep the cat like I just had a feeling and she was like I didn't know that was an option but if it is an option and so she kept the cat posture I said don't send the new cat because then I thought about it and I was like you know cat is a responsibility [Music] also covered in [ __ ] and in that moment I was like I've only got one like clean up the [ __ ] off this random cat in me I don't think I can do it again but this cat's probably gonna do this again and in that moment I knew I didn't want a cat anymore