Brutal Truths all leaders MUST hear before 2025

Summary

• I have over 1,000 employees generating $250 million a year. Leadership is the key skill that has allowed me to achieve this. It multiplies the abilities of others, and if you can lead, you can grow people and companies.

• The price of leadership is loneliness. You often work ahead, without immediate peers, which can feel isolating. The key is becoming a good company to yourself and managing internal dialogue positively to navigate this loneliness.

• Great leaders surround themselves with supportive people. Align your personal and professional environments with your goals to facilitate your success, and avoid those who hinder your growth.

• To earn respect as a leader, you must first be trustworthy. You show respect and trust to receive it back. Demanding respect without earning it can lead to losing valuable team members.

• Leaders focus on solutions rather than problems. Acknowledge problems, assess their impact, and direct most of your energy towards finding solutions.

• Your personal life impacts your professional perception. How you act outside of work affects how you are perceived within it. Integrity in both areas is crucial.

• A true test of leadership is building a team that is loyal and mirrors your integrity. Always ensure your actions align with your values to maintain trust within your team.

• Leadership involves acting on your values, not emotions. Your feelings should not dictate your behavior at work; staying neutral helps maintain stability and consistency.

• Companies thrive when leaders have tough conversations. Avoiding these can lead to stagnant growth. Addressing issues directly and promptly can significantly propel a business forward.

• The speed of leadership sets the pace for the team. Foster a culture of fast, decisive actions to maintain competitive advantage, ensuring that processes and responses are quick and efficient.

• Leaders create other leaders, not just followers. Encourage independence and empower others to make decisions, fostering a culture where leadership proliferates.

• Allow your team space to step up. Giving them autonomy can reveal their hidden potentials, helping them grow and preparing them for future challenges.

• Success as a leader often means making tough tradeoffs. Focus on prioritizing big goals over short-term gains to maintain strategic direction and long-term success.

• Hire people smarter than you and trust them with authority. This not only brings growth to your business but also helps you learn and evolve from their expertise.

• Picking the right people is more valuable than doing everything yourself. Your ability to select and empower the right team is crucial for scaling and sustaining a successful business.

• Adaptability is crucial in leadership. Accept changes in the business environment and leverage them as opportunities for growth rather than resisting them.

• Fear should not hinder your leadership potential. Embrace the challenges and possible failures as part of the growth process, focusing on long-term success and personal respect.

Video

How To Take Action

I would suggest starting by focusing on yourself as a leader. Being your own best friend can make you a better leader since leadership can often feel lonely. Talk to yourself kindly and supportively, as you would to a good friend. This helps you manage those lonely feelings better.

A good way of ensuring growth is by surrounding yourself with the right people. Choose colleagues, friends, and even family members who support your goals and align with your values. This will create an environment that favors success.

Remember, earning respect begins with trustworthiness. Be honest with your team and demonstrate respect to receive it in return. Solve problems by giving more focus to solutions rather than the problems themselves. This will drive your team toward completing tasks efficiently.

Also, your personal life matters, so keep it in check. The way you act outside work reflects on your leadership. Staying consistent in life can help in creating a positive image within your team.

Encourage independence among your team members. By backing off slightly, you give them room to step up and demonstrate potential. Trust your team by assigning them tasks with clear instructions, and observe how they handle them.

Lastly, think about making strategic choices. Prioritize long-term goals by saying no to distractions, helping you maintain focus. Also, learn to adapt quickly to changes in the environment to stay ahead. Your adaptability encourages your team to embrace change positively. These strategies are fundamental for fostering a thriving business or personal growth.

Quotes by Leila Hormozi

> #### "The price of leadership is loneliness"
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> *- Leila Hormozi*



> #### "A great leader surrounds themselves with people who make it easier to achieve their goals, not harder"
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> *- Leila Hormozi*



> #### "Trust lubricates business; the more trust you have, the faster you can go"
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> *- Leila Hormozi*



> #### "The best leaders do not complain, they solve"
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> *- Leila Hormozi*



> #### "Speed creates progress; progress creates momentum; momentum creates success"
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> *- Leila Hormozi*

Full Transcript

I have over 1,000 employees across all of my companies that generate $250 million per year and this is the one skill that has allowed me to achieve this leadership is the single most important skill because if you know how to do it you can lead people who do everything else and every other skill all skills are additional whereas leadership is the only skill that multiplies if you can lead a department you can grow it if you can lead a company you can grow it if you can lead people you can grow them hiring the right employees can make you Millions but most entrepreneurs get it wrong the first point everyone wants to lead the way but nobody wants to be alone the first time I promoted one of my sales coaches into a sales manager I remember I got a call from him about 3 weeks later and I had texted him and I said like how's the new role feeling like you really wanted it I'm just curious like how are you feeling this far in and he said to me it's actually really tough and I knew he was going to say that to be honest with you I said why is it tough he's like I just feel really really lonely and I wasn't expecting that I was like well let's take a look about this you are no longer on a team you lead a team therefore the things you do every day are not the things they do every day you do different things therefore you do things alone you also do things before other people so you're not doing things in lock step with people you're doing things to lead the way so that they can do them next you also have less peers now before you had 15 peers on the team now you have five peers on the team what I told him is is that the price of leadership is loneliness you can't lead the way unless you're a few steps ahead of people and that's the thing is that when we leading the way people aren't beside you anymore they're behind you even though it's just a few steps you feel those steps when I was first building a business the main emotion I felt through most of that time was loneliness and I used to look at it like it was a problem and it wasn't until I honestly recognized what am I trading right now I'm trading loneliness for being a leader so I get all this good stuff that comes with being a leader but on the other side that also comes with the fact that sometimes I feel alone which makes sense there are less leaders therefore you feel more alone and so that is why loneliness is the price of leadership I felt this myself so many times in my career and I will tell you that it doesn't get better you just get better at leading you get better at being alone and you become better company to yourself what I recognized is what made it feel so much worse when I was first starting out is that I wasn't good company to myself when I was alone and in the things that I had to go through by myself I wasn't being my own best friend and if I actually think about the way that I used to speak to myself versus the way I speak to myself now when I was alone I was constantly beating myself up I was constantly worried I was questioning things I wasn't cheering myself on and once I recognized that that was why loneliness was so painful I said well how would I speak to myself if I were my own best friend and that sounds so freaking lame but I swear to God it has made the entire process so much less painful for me this is a game where the last man standing wins in terms of leadership it's not about achieving this goal it's about staying in the game it's about being the type of person who can endure hard things and stand tall when you do and for me if I'm constantly feeding into negativity feeding into worry feeding into self-doubt there's no way I want to be alone and there's no way that I could make it as a leader and I had to completely change that frame of mind for myself there's nothing wrong with feeling lonely but it feels really shitty if you're in Bad Company with yourself so if you're watching this video I would ask myself two things which is one are you willing to make the trade if you want to truly be a leader it will definitely be lonelier than being a follower if the answer is yes I'm willing to pay the price the second question is are you going to choose pain or suffering along the way loneliness will happen and it will occur no matter what but suffering through the loneliness is compounded by how you speak to yourself do you want to grit your way way through this journey or do you want to make it easy on yourself and do you want to actually even make it something that you might enjoy and if you want to enjoy the way they are then you change the way that you speak to yourself and you change the thoughts you allow yourself to focus on and listen if this is something that you struggle with and this is something that you're like how do I change my internal dialogue like let me know in the comments because I'm curious of these topics that I'm talking about which ones you guys want to hear more about the next point is that a great leader surrounds themselves with people who make it easier to achieve their goals not harder here's the thing a great leader is only as great as the company they keep I saw this to be true when I had a leader on my team who had really big goals for themselves and she was vocalizing how much she wanted these things out of the job it was weird because she said like I have all these big goals of moving up and doing these things but then like when I gave her opportunities of like all right we're going to do this thing or like can you jump in here or like hey we've got this thing that's going on this weekend can you help here she would always say no and I was like why are you saying no to these opportunities if you want to move up I only present them you because of what you told me you wanted and what ended up coming out was that she had a very unsupportive spouse at home and I said well how is this person unsupportive she'd watched some of my content and was like I feel like this is me and she's like well they constantly complain when I'm at work if I'm at work and they're not at work they're constantly telling me how much they miss me and they wish I was home if I have to work on a weekend they're constantly complaining about how I'm working on a weekend if I talk too much about work they punish me essentially for talking too much about work and overall they don't have anything good to say about the job and I was like all right listen this is not about the job this is about your goals is this aligned with your goals and what you want to do with your life and they were like yes I was like all right let's give them feedback then about the fact that this person is constantly punishing you for the process that it takes to achieve your goals cuz that's really what they're doing and so that person had the discussion and the person on the other end it didn't end up working out and they actually ended up breaking up and they broke up because that person their spouse made it harder to achieve their goals not easier and I tell you like the moment that these people broke up that person just completely propelled forward towards their goals and in their career and listen I'm not saying that you should like sacrifice your family for your career that's not what I'm saying at all it's about something bigger than that it's about having people in your life that support your life's Mission your personal goals what's important to you it's about engineering an environment that makes it easier to succeed not harder and that starts with the people that are in your environment and the people who are closest to you in that environment you know when I was younger I got out of relationships because I had the same thing I had people telling me you're working too much I had one guy tell me I wish you wouldn't work so much and you could just be a pretty girl that would come to these events with me this guy had a lot of events for his work I was like what the we're not aligned we're not the same that ain't me I'm always going to be like this cuz this is what I want out of my life I get to choose how I show up in this world I get to choose what I do with my life and listen homie like that's all fun in games but like that's not for me and so what I've seen is that a leader is only as good as the people they surround themselves with both in and outside the business I can almost always correlate the highest performers in my businesses to people who have the highest amount of support outside of the business and one of the easiest ways to rid yourself of self-doubt of limiting beliefs of conflict is to ensure that the people that are surrounding you outside of work don't create any of that and the sad thing is that often times we let people who have given up on their dreams interfere with us achieving ours and that's the thing is that the more that you give yourself permission to live life in accordance with your goals and your values and your desires the more you will be criticized by people around you you just want to make sure that the people around you are not the closest the next point is that as a leader you don't demand respect you earn respect by being trustworthy I had an acquaintance who had a business that was worth almost a billion dollars and this was about 5 years ago and I thought it was so interesting this business was worth so much money because the way that she ran her business is that if somebody did not respect her if somebody disobeyed her if somebody had a different opinion she would just fire them and it's funny because I remember seeing that and I told Alex I was like man sometimes I'm just like how does that even occur how do you get a business to be that big while treating people like so poorly and why by acting in such a way where you just have no trust from anybody on the team and it's funny because that business was worth a billion 5 years ago that business today is worth 150 million it lost so much value that it can't even sell why did that happen because there was a mass Exodus from that conversation I have that person to when it was like Peak I talked with people in the company and they were all saying like oh we're getting the out it's a mess in here you know they fire everybody for no reason like if you just don't agree they don't tell you anything they give you no feedback they Des fire you like it's basically like a complete lack of trust from the employee BAS B to the leadership and a lot of the employees came to me because I had been edified by their leadership and they trusted me ironic right what happened was that all of their best people just left all the top talent all the people who really helped build whatever good culture there was they all just left and a great mentor of mine told me this which is companies die from the inside out they implode more than they explode and it made so much sense because what happened there was that it wasn't an issue with the market it was an issue internally if you can't get your team internally to operate in the best way possible if you don't have great people if you don't have great operations if you don't have great marketing if you don't have great sales what does it matter that you're in a great Market it doesn't and So eventually what happened was in the beginning that company was like first to Market and so it didn't matter that they didn't have the best people and the best culture and the best way of doing things people stay at the company cuz there was nowhere else to go that was better and they were better than all the competition and it just hadn't been long enough for them to say I'm sick of this well eventually what happens is competing companies prop up their best talent says well they're going to take over faster and they have a better culture they have more trustworthy leader and so they left is that the way that they had operate the company was one in that they demanded respect without having earned the trust of their people the irony of leadership is that everyone says oh I will act respectable once they respect me I will act trustworthy once they trust me they expect more from their teams than they give to their teams and I have always played the opposite which is you must give before you get you're the leader meaning you lead the way you show them how to treat you so how can you expect people to trust you to respect you to do all these things because of what you're title it doesn't matter that's not how humans work you have to give it before you can expect it from people bad leaders say you need to be respected not liked why do people say that to give themselves permission to act like people do not care how much you know until they know how much you care leaders who don't have skills to lead well use Force as a default and so if you're somebody that's watching this and you're thinking to yourself like man like I do kind of demand people to respect me I do do all these things you have a skill deficit you're not a bad person you just don't need skills so here's the question that I ask myself when I am seeing something from my team when I see them act in a way that is not in accordance with the values of my company when I see them act in a way that I wouldn't want them acting I ask myself in what ways have I exemplified this and I'm like there's got to be a in my Armor because there's no way if I was the epitome of everything I wanted to see in my team they would know that that wasn't even close to acceptable I constantly tying it back to myself if somebody isn't acting respectful of me I'm asking myself have I ever had an interaction with them when I where I've gotten to show them how much I respect them respect is earned it's not demanded and all of these things are given first by the leader not by the team so the people for example on my team that trust me the most are the ones who know that I tell them when it's bad and I tell them when it's good it's not that I do one or the other I have both and so they say I'll be like you know that you can trust me that I will tell you they're oh I know you'll tell me I know you will tell me and it's not that I'm mean I am never mean I am just honest I will always tell them where they stand I will always tell them what I really think and I will not withhold information from them partially because that is part of my values and partially because I know in the long term it is for the best that I always am upfront honest because what does that do it keeps small problems small it helps people develop faster and itat predictability and here's the thing trust lubricates business the more trust you have the faster you can go for example you know people look at myself and Alex and how fast we've been able to do things within building all the businesses we have people always saying how have you accomplished what you've accomplished in this decade I trust him with my life I would take a bullet for him and I know he would take a bullet for me and that trust not ever having to wonder if we've really got each other's back and we really have each other interests has allowed me to go so fast because I don't have this mental drama I know he will tell me when something's up and he knows I will tell him when something's up and we will handle it right then I trust him innately and because of that we can go so fast together and I just take that relationship and I look at how I can replicate that in people on my team how do I create that trust of them knowing like I've got your back we're in this together and I will tell you when something's up and I will tell you when something's not up because of that we can move fast in areas that are slow and with people who move slow typically there's not enough trust and most of the time that comes from shortcuts and communication the next point is that true leaders don't complain they solve I hired somebody to be an operator in one of my companies and I thought that there was a lot of value in the fact that this person was constantly pointing out the problems and constantly talking to me about the problems there's value of course in bringing up problems and bringing up things that are not going well this person was overly fixated on it and what was really interesting saying is that I looked at where this person's time went they talked about problems more than they talked about Solutions why is it that leaders don't talk about problems as much as they talk about Solutions why is it that leaders are optimistic it's not because they're delusional it's because it's skill being optimistic is a skill when you are in a company where bad shit's happening all day every day it is a very necessary skill because here's the thing if you're focused only on the problems how do you grow your business if you're focused on the negativity how do you grow the team what I recognized is that if you allow the problems to steal your attention then you take that attention from finding a solution the best leaders do not complain they solve they acknowledge the problem they acknowledge the impact of the problem and then they get busy solving the problem so the best leaders I've recognized on a call when they bring me a problem they spend about 10% of the time on the problem and 90% of the time on the possible solutions to solve it something that I observed early on for myself was I used to talk about problems more than I talked about Solutions why is that because I didn't know how to solve because I was new I was in experience and I didn't have the tools in my tool B that I have now so I recognize that some of this comes with experience of knowing how to solve problems but some of it also comes with restraining yourself from complaining and talking about problems because if you indulge in that you're never going to have time to find Solutions and so now I'm very cognizant of the fact that I think as 9010 10% of the time we spend on talking about the problems that we understand the scope 90% of the time we're going to talk about the solution all right it happened what do we do now all I want to think about is what am I going to do moving forward it's a matter of where you're putting your energy and if your energy is only going towards how bad these problems are and all the worst case scenarios you're missing out on all the things that you could learn from the problem of all the things that you could gain from it and all the things that could happen on the other side those who cannot solve problems complain about them I love this quot is by John Maxwell the pessimist complains about the wind The Optimist expects it to change and the leader adjusts the sales the leader gets to solving the problem something I actually do quite often to audit I ask myself I look back at that and I ask how much time did I spend talking about the problem versus focused on the solution and in the moment when I'm dealing with the problem I asked myself am I focusing in my thoughts on the problem or on what I need to do next and businesses moov move at the speed of the boss and if the boss is fixated on the problem and on the solution they're probably going to move a lot slower and so it benefits you in all ways to focus on what you're going to do next what you've got to do to solve the problem rather than indulging in how the problem has affected people how bad it is all of that the next point is that leaders have their personal lives under control because business is personal I had a company in the portfolio and it was one of our best companies in the beginning it was doing really well I think in the first year we 11x the results were crazy I was like wow this company is doing really well I didn't really like double click into the CEO's personal life or their personal choices and along the way the company's still growing but the person started making you know not so great choices employees start messaging me and telling me like I don't know if you know but this person's like off doing drugs and not in our meeting and then I don't know if you know but like this person's like showing up to the meeting like really disheveled and looking like they just like partied all night and like I don't know if you know but like this person like talked to our customers about this like raave they were at and like I don't know if you know but like it's been a week and they haven't been in the office and they've actually been voting the whole week and I was like all right I'm partnered with this company but like I'm not this this dude's boss and so like what what can I do dict's life the company still performing definitely not line with my values definitely not line with I want but I'm kind of in this so like I have to use some soft influence to see what's going to happen the company kept growing it was doing well and then it all started to crumble started to crumble because I started getting phone calls from leaders on the team telling me me that they didn't want to work for this person why didn't they want to work for this person I mean like these are grown adults calling me telling me like it's really tough to work for this person it wasn't how this person showed up in the business setting good business person it was the person this person was outside of work and it was what he did in his free time that created the perception of who he was at work you cannot compartmentalize life whether people like it or not and I get some for this what you do in your personal life absolutely affects how people see you at work and I think that people lot when they say otherwise I don't want to take advice from somebody who doesn't have their together even if somebody's like oh I can tell you how I grew my business to 10 billion but they're out there cheating on their wife doing drugs all day drunk half the time I'm good dude I don't need to find out from you because business is personal and I'm not going to believe that you were able to achieve those things in a way of integrity and in a way that I would want to achieve them if this is what the rest of your life looks like what do I not know about the business you don't just become a different person when you come to work this is something I talked to my team about I'm like you bring your whole self to work whether you like it or not and trying to compartmentalize and be a different person at work and a different person at home is why a lot of people don't become leaders because they say oh I want to be respected in the workplace I want to be admired in the workplace I want people to think I'm a leader in the workplace you think they don't know what you do in your free time there is social media nowadays there are so many ways you can find out what somebody does and not to mention people can tell they can tell by little things you say they can like tell by the way that you show up they can tell by like little nuances of stuff by the way that guy went from having a business that was worth like $45 million to a business that was worth nothing and it was because every single leader on the team left that's why when we start acquisition. comom one of the core values is unimpeachable character which is who am I proud to associate with on and off the field why is that because I know that nobody can become a great leader if the way that they act outside of work is completely opposite to how they show up inside of work and the values you live your personal life by whether you like it or not become the Val Val at which you operate your company and it's funny because people say like values like values are what you do not what you say and it's very hard to just do completely different things outside of work than you do inside of work for anybody the issue is when there's a discrepancy and you hide it for those of you who are thinking when I prompt you with this question oh man there's a discrepancy there's different ways to close that Gap the question is what's the discrepancy between who I am inside the workplace and who I am outside of the workplace what's the Gap two ways to fill it one you can be honest about who you are inside of the workplace you can tell them what you actually do outside of work you can be honest about you can own it shame only exists in the dark or you can change your behavior I will tell you for myself when I first started gym launch I was like okay I really take this seriously who I am outside of work and inside of work I want all those things and I just felt like a responsibility of like I have all these people that report to me like I want to be a good example for them and I genuinely want to be a person who makes the world better I start with making myself better I looked at my life and I was like well I like to drink a lot outside of work and this was like when we had just started the business and you know we'd been like sleeping in motels drinking a fifth of Jack splitting Subway and I still had a little bit of the like fifth the Jack like coming through like the weekends I likeed to get a little shitty I was like either I can be honest and tell my team or I can change my behavior and then I decided I'm changing my behavior and I didn't drink for 3 and a half years I didn't touch it because I was like it's not worth it to me I don't want to set the example that I'm like getting shitty on the weekends cuz now they're going to be oh I'm going to get shitty on the weekends being a leader is not a onetime event it's a constant practice that you practice every day the next point is that you can lead without Integrity but having Integrity is what makes you a leader I think there's a big difference between being somebody's boss and being somebody's leader it was about 6 months ago when I was speaking with a female CEO and she has a very large well-known company and I was talking to her about just like my philosophy around people and I was like why do you like doing what you do you know like I love leading a team I love helping people grow I love communicating well I love watching people develop like that's really like my favorite thing she was like wow I actually don't like any of that I hate talking to my team very different but I'm interested like tell me why and I remember she said something along the lines of the fact that she thinks that she could do every person's job in six minutes a day and it's interesting because I think as a leader there's definitely times where you see what people are doing and of course you're like I have 15 years of experience I could probably do this in 2 minutes but that's not the point because you can't do everything what I've recognized is that over time you don't know what other things are on people's plates you don't know why something takes longer and actually the less that you know about something the more likely you are to say that it takes a little amount of time she went on to tell me her pay philosophy and how basically she pays as little as possible and she has like the highest expectations in terms of how people show up at work and she talked about how she was firing about 20 people that week and that was like something she was really excited to do and I was like interesting okay except for the fact that your public brand is one that you love people and have a great team and do all these great things for them I just don't see how this is going to play out for her there's no way they can't tell that she's full of and I swear it was not even 2 weeks later bang lawsuit from her employees I was like dude it always comes back around if you lead people without Integrity you can maybe have people work for you but it's not the same as being a leader that people want to follow and I think that a lot of times people get into the business of having a business and they forget about if you are in business and you want to go big then you're in the business of people and that's what it becomes at some point it's all about people you have people building the product you have people doing the marketing you have people doing the sales and so all that you can do is be such a person of character and such a great leader that you attract other people that are so good and so capable they can do all those things for you and that's what she didn't understand and now her company's crumbling and it really just I think cements that for me because every time I've met somebody who has a company who lacks Integrity who doesn't really want the best for their people but who maybe portrays thems as such that person has gotten bitten in the ass whether it be in a month 6 months 12 months so what is integrity Integrity is the quality of being honest having a strong moral compass and so for example if you want to be a leader who has integrity and you have a business it would mean that you are aligned with the values that you preach and it would mean that what you think what you say and what you do are all aligned what that does is that creates trust with your team when what you say you are and what you say you value are what you show that you are and what you show you value Integrity is what drives leadership not the title that somebody holds and so the question is at the end of the day if you don't have a team that is loyal to you have you been making decisions whether behind closed doors or not that create an environment where it makes it easy to be loyal to you the true test of a leader is not how much they can achieve but what kind of person what kind of character they build along the way and I don't know about you but for me people say what's your goal and of course there's a monetary goal and there is a size of business I would like to have and there's Milestones I want to achieve but none of it matters if I'm a worse person for IT none of it matters if my team is worse for it none of it matters if my companies and customers are worse for it leave everybody better than you found them and for me that's my true moral compass around how I know that I am a person of Integrity is with every decision I make I literally think to myself is this going to make people's lives better or worse every person who touches this decision now for some of it it might mean in the short term it's worse but if in the long term it's better eventually they'll see that play out if you want to be a person of Integrity ask yourself do my actions align with my words are the values that you preach to your team actions that you uphold on a daily basis because I think that the root of a lot of lost trust in organization is between what people say the organization is about what they say the values of the organization are and then what they see the leader do on a daily basis because if you can't show up as a person of Integrity everything crumbles the next Point your mindset does not lead to success as a leader but your ability to act despite how you feel does when I was first leading my company I had no idea what the I was doing because I was like 23 and I'd never done any of this stuff before one of the hardest things for me was understanding how to show up for my team when I wasn't feeling 100% I used to be the type of person that wore my heart on my sleeve if I would be in a meeting and something wasn't going right people would be like are you okay is everything okay is something wrong and so what I noticed is that people were constantly asking me if I was okay and the reality is it's the first time I've ever had a business it's the first time I've ever been doing this like no I didn't feel okay I felt stressed I was scared I was nervous like there was so much going through my head all the time I didn't feel that way but I recognized that it was selfish to allow my feelings to dictate how I showed up and therefore how they felt when they were around me and talking to me I was like I need a constant reminder to regulate and manage my emotions now this doesn't mean suppress my emotions but this means not allow them to dictate my behavior I got a little sticky note and I put it on my computer and I just said two words just said be neutral my goal with that was that I wanted to be levelheaded I wanted to be steady because think about like the best people you've ever had in your life that you like absolutely can rely on that you take their advice like they're not like this they're like this like they're a rock for you there's so much more to gain in regulating your emotional response than there is in emotionally dumping on your team and I think there's a difference between a lot of people say well isn't that suppressing your emotions I would say no because what I will do is acknowledge I will say hey if I seem a little bit off I just want you guys to know I didn't sleep really much last night because of X Y and Z or I might say hey if I seem a little bit off I want you know I'm just dealing with an HR situation it's just kind of upsetting and so if it comes off that way comes off that way hey if I seem a little bit off I want you know like I had a stomach ache all morning and so if I don't seem like myself like that's why I'm not avoiding the fact that I'm not showing up exactly as myself so they know but now at least they know it's not about them because also if they can sense that something's off but I don't tell them that it's something else that I've experienced they assume it's because of them and so I recognized there's two things that are selfish to do one to show up like this for my team because then that puts them like this and they're constantly wondering how's she going to be is she in a good moon or a bad moon like I don't know what to expect the second one is that there's so much power in telling people what's going on because then they don't have to worry that it's about them what I recognize is that I have never regretted acting in accordance with my values rather than my emotions I can acknowledge that I have emotions and I can still act in accordance with my values and goals despite how I'm feeling it might be hard it might be hard at first might be hard the whole time but you can still do it Success is Not based on how you feel success is based on what you do in fact it's based on what you do regardless of how you feel there are so many days where I don't want to do the thing that's required for me to succeed but what I do want is to get to the end of my life and to know that I did everything possible to achieve my goals and become the person I want to become you don't lead based on how you feel in the moment you lead based on the values that you have set for yourself I know that sometimes you are doing stuff and you feel like I always just joke that because people always seem to think like oh I'm guessing because you've been doing this for a decade like you feel better than I feel and I'm like oh no no no I feel the same I'm just good at feeling bad it never goes away you don't feel better you just get better at feeling bad and so if I want to have any chance of getting out of the terrible feel feels then I know that I want to act in accordance with my values not with my momentary fleeting emotions 99% of the success that I have experienced in my life has been correlated with my ability to act despite how I feel here's the question that I would ask myself if I were watching this video and I were trying to learn from it which is how many of your days are dictated by your values versus your feelings I think a lot of people don't reach their goals because Tuesday comes and they they feel like and they allow that feeling like to dictate what Tuesday looks like I promise you that you will also feel less like if you do not do that and you stick with the plan I think a good frame to take is 5 years from now 10 years from now even just like 6 months from now like What story do you want to tell about this moment right now what do you want to train yourself into with every action we take we reinforce doing that action again so it's like with every action we take every day we really build our future self and so the next point is that the company that you want is on the other side of a few conversations that you have been dreading there have been so many times in my career when because our brains don't want to confront the hard things where I have not even purposely avoided a hard conversation because in some way subconsciously I didn't want to confront how hard it was going to be there was a time it was about 2 years ago when I was trying to figure out why one of our companies wasn't growing I just like could not see what was going on a lot of times times the reason this is difficult is because you know the people in the company so well that the fact that somebody in the company might actually be the reason it's not growing it's not an option in your mind these are the chess pieces that we use to play the game and I remember I woke up in the middle of the night and I was like oh my gosh it's this person they're not in the right role we need to completely move them into a different role which is not as involved in the company immediately I was like that is what it is I completely understand that and I know it and then I was like oh my God how am I going to have this conversation and that was when I was like how are they going to take this they're going to think that it means they suck they're going to think all these things but I knew in order to grow the company that's the conversation I had to have is I had to basically tell one of the founders I think you'd be better as a board member I don't actually think that you are somebody that should be operating in the company and I was so nervous about this conversation because we hadn't like had a big conversation yet as partners as soon as I knew we need to have it I was like I'm going to have it right away cuz I I know this is going to move everything forward but I was dreading it and I scheduled the conversation got on the call and it's so funny because in my mind I'd made it up to be like this big thing that was like going to come to fruition and like the first thing was like wow I think that's a great idea and I was like what the all this like drama that my brain had made up about what was going to happen for the situation only for this person to be like completely aligned with what I was saying making that change is what propelled that business to 13x since we invested in it and I was like holy if I hadn't had that conversation what would have happened and that really gave me perspective how much growth is on the other side of the these hard conversations I acted in accordance with my values I knew I did the hard but right thing because they so often are the same thing which is like it's always the right thing is the hard thing and the hard thing is the right thing it's the people who are above the strategy above the product above the service that are not having hard conversations or it's the fact that you haven't gotten rid of the person who you have had conversations with but isn't the right person anymore I can't tell you how often people say to me they're like Lea like you know like I get all the people stuff that tell me I'm like it's not like I talk about this I'm afraid of Strat like strategy Marketing sales strategies all these other things like acquiring customers like I know how to do all that but who does those things is people and so if you don't have hard conversations with the people that are above very important places in the company doesn't move I say it because it's such an important lesson to me it rocked me realizing early on in my career how detrimental avoiding these conversations is to a company it is everything because if somebody isn't performing and nobody speaks to them about it what happens they keep not performing if you don't have the courage to have a hard conversation then you better have the courage to deal with a very difficult situation you're not getting rid of problems you are trading them so here's the question I would ask if I were you and the question that I ask myself what conversations am I avoiding what people am I avoiding what conversations have I continued to shove off and not have out of inconvenience and those are what I need to tackle first and a lot of times what I do is I just get into a a groove of addressing them it's like when I know I'm going to have to have one I'm like all right what else have I been putting off is there anything up in there I'm really digging through because that's going to move the company forward more than any initiative that you could ever do the next point is that the speed of the leader is the speed of the team back when I was building my first business I hired somebody who I really liked just like a fantastic person overall but they were new they'd never done the job before and so I hired this person to oversee a very large very important department in the company we're going to call this person Gary and Gary was awesome but when Gary came in and took for the Department very quickly things that took one day started to take like 7 days and I was like what is going on processes that took like a week started taking a month and then things that took one person to do took like four people to do and I was like all right what's going on here I said you know what I'm going to do is I'm I'm just going to come in I want to Shadow what's going on I want to Shad out how you're doing things I want to Shad out the meetings of the team I want to look at all the processes and the systems and see what's happening and what happened was he said one thing on a meeting with me that was so interesting he said well I think things could move faster if I didn't have to like review and check on people like that just gets in the way of me doing my job and it was so funny because in that moment I was like dude you have a team of 20 that is your job your job is to make all of their jobs easier you are the multiplier you are supposed to multiply their efforts by making them go faster and I looked in there and I I sat down with him and what we identified was that he was slowing everybody down he wasn't reviewing anything quickly he wasn't getting back to people quickly he wasn't messaging people quickly he wasn't communicating quickly he wasn't disseminating information quickly everything he did was so delayed compared to what I had been doing prior the job of a leader is to increase the output of everybody that reports to them so if you put a leader in place and output goes down effectively they are not a good leader if you put a leader in place and output goes up they're a great leader why this is so important is because in business the big ones don't eat the small ones the fast ones eat the slow ones it's not about needing to be big right now but you do need to be fast when I was building my first business when we came into Market I knew that speed had to be our competitive Advantage because there were big players waiting to steal everything that we were building and Implement into their business and I knew that if we couldn't do it fast enough they would be able to capitalize on that I remember I went to an entrepreneurial Meetup and this guy pulled me to the side after I told him what kind of business I had and he said listen when it gets easy is when you hit the gas if you don't these guys who are bigger than you are going to come they're going to steal all your and they're going to put you out of business and I have never relaxed since that day 9 years ago the same way that I did before because it was true immediately what I started seeing within about 3 months of us building our business is everyone started trying to figure out ways to copy us all the big players are saying oh we see what they're doing it's really working let's try and copy it the only Advantage we had was speed and so I know that now when I'm building a business is that speed is a comp competitive advantage and that doesn't mean moving fast with shitty stuff it means moving fast with good stuff success is not just about having ideas success is about acting on those ideas faster than your competition and faster than other people in the market and that is why when I hire for people I'm looking for people who are fast the number one indicator for me is how fast does somebody get back to me if I ping you how fast do you respond how fast somebody responds to daily communication tells me how fast they move their Department I can almost always correlate it the spe of the boss is the speed of the team Mentor that once told me something and I think it it really helped me put this into practice which he said if something comes onto your plate and it takes 5 minutes to do and you have 5 minutes just do it you don't need to add it to a to-do list do it now and that was so powerful to me because I think so many people procrastinate they put things off and they don't understand the importance of speed in business I used to send these surveys to my team and I would say you've got a week to complete this survey I would notice that nobody did it until the last minute why do they not do it till the last minute cuz survey takes 5 minutes to do why am I giving people a week so I said it I give it to them they give them the day and also I think it's a really good test of how fast people on the team are I'm like the survey takes 5 minutes to fill out so now what do I do is I give people a day because it takes a day here's the thing speed creates progress progress creates momentum momentum creates success but it all starts with speed so here's what I'm asking myself constantly if I have somebody in a leadership position I look at what is held under them and I ask myself is it moving faster or slower than before they were here if the answer is slower I need to coach that person if it's faster that's great let's pour gasly on the fire let's also coach them because we want to invest in a players either way it is good information for you to have and ask yourself this if you put yourself over a department in your business or over a person do they get better or worse do they go faster or slower that can tell you your Effectiveness as a leader the next point is that the true measure of a leader is not about them leading but if they can create other leaders I had somebody that I hired when I first started acquisition. comom and that person was really good at doing the job they were charismatic they were funny they worked well with others but once we got to a point where I needed that person to build out their team what I saw was not what I envisioned for that team for that team specifically I had envisioned a team of leaders a team of people who could build teams I remember getting on one of their meetings and I was like oh no we have a dictatorship here that person did not lead in a way that created leaders they LED in a way that created followers they were constantly telling people what to do and then demeaning them if they didn't do it correctly rather than giving them more authority to dictate what they should be doing and then giving them feedback based on what occurred and so what ended up happening is that I actually ended up swapping that person for a different leader not because that person was not proficient at their job but because I knew knew with how important that department was and how they were leading it it would create a team of followers not a team of leaders and like my vision for acquisition. comom is that we become a leadership Factory and that's really means that it's important the leaders I put into divisions I swapped that person out and I knew that the person I put in was so passionate about growing others about mentorship about creating other leaders in the company they were aligned with my vision and the moment that I put that person in even though there was like a bunch of that had to get worked through and obviously in the short term it's difficult especially when replace a big person in the company the team just completely shined like people who had not talked on meetings stepped up people who had been like late turning in their work and doing all these things like were the first to do anything they were being proactive they were like grabbing from people and what I recognized is that that person had only been a level two leader whereas a level five leader is somebody who creates other leaders and in order to do that you have to be able to let go of control that's the hardest part is that you cannot create other leaders unless you let go of control you can have growth you can have control but you cannot have both at the same time you have to figure out how to lead in such a way that you inspire people to be leaders themselves and not even Inspire them just to be leaders but Inspire them to create other leaders so when I look at the output of a leader the functional output of a leader is if they can create more leaders the best leaders create more leaders they don't create followers who just nod their heads the next point is that great leaders step back so that their team has an opportunity to step up back when when I was running my first company gym launch I had a point in time where I was going to be out for 2 weeks and that's because I had like a medical thing going on and I was going to have to be out I was going to have to get surgery and I was like not going to be able to do anything for 2 weeks I was so anxious about it I was like there is no way anyone's going be able to keep this together like what are they going to do all this stuff you know at that point I'd not even taken like a full vacation i' taken like a day I was really nervous about what was going to happen I was like you know what I hear people say you got to let go in order to grow and so I'm going to do that I'm going to give autonomy to people they're going to solve the problems when I'm out and I'm going to see what happens 4 days after I had my surgery and I'm checking in everyone's like everything's going really well don't worry about it we've got this blah blah blah everything's fine and then 6 days after same thing 10 days later I'm like all right I'm good to get on calls and I get on a call and they're like oh so here's what happened Facebook shut us down these two people quit this over and I was like oh my God what what's and they're like Leela don't worry we we handled it it's all done and I was like what and I was like wow really and they were like yeah here's what we and in that moment I was like I have not stepped back enough to see who would step up I have not been doing it I haven't been giving my team room to see their potential I haven't been giving them opportunities to step up I've been robbing them of the opportunities by taking all the challenges on myself and that lesson has stuck with me like till the end of time so now every time I want to take a few days off I'm going on a trip I'm sick something unexpected happens I literally am always asking myself how is this an opportunity for me to see somebody else's potential it's funny because every time a gap is created in your business whether it's you stepping back or someone else stepping out that Gap is an opportunity to see someone else's hidden potential I know it feels awful people come to me every week they message me they come to my workshops they're in my portfolio and they say Lea you don't understand nobody can do this like me and I'm like I hear you they won't do it exactly like you but they could do it better than you that's a possibility they could do it differently than you and still get the same outcome and you don't know until you try there's this limiting belief because we've not seen someone else do it but us that nobody else will be able to and I have been proved wrong in every business that I have by somebody somebody can always do the same thing that I've done I am not special I am not a unicorn and so treating myself as one doesn't do my business any good or my team and so I challenge you to do this think of the things that you're like nobody else could do this and I want you to just take it and break it into maybe like three tasks and give those tasks to somebody else give them Clarity explain what you want explain the outcome you're looking for see if they can do it prove yourself wrong because you are if you're watching this YouTube video and you are telling me that nobody else can do the same marketing the same way that you do the sales the same way that you do you've proven yourself wrong right there because there's somebody else watching the video it's already thinking that and you could probably swap with each other so like maybe you have some in your team that can already do it you just don't know because you haven't given them a chance the next point is that a great leader knows how to make tradeoffs it is so much easier to be a yes person than it is to be a no person because to be a no person you have to say no to people you have to say no to things you have to say no to exciting stuff you have to say no to possibility and so you have to be really certain of what you're saying no to I learned this building my first business if you've watch my content up until now or any of my content I am ruthlessly focused I am able to say no to a lot of things and I'm able to do that because I've learned what happens when you don't when I had my business gym launch I learned this the hard way when we were running the business it got to a point where you know you're succeeding and you have so much success that you're like wow you essentially think that you can take on more than you can choose and you don't know because you're still kind of an experience it's the first time you're having success you haven't gotten slapped in the face yet and so you have like a a sense of Pride and a sense of certainty that just hasn't clashed with reality yet in building the business we said you know what would be really more valuables if we built this into a software business we're like we need to build software to make this business work what end up happening is that we didn't even just build software we said all right we're going to build this software that's going to help gym owners make more money it was going to be a gym CRM and then as we were building the gym CRM because we started building the software we were like oh man we can build software we should build something else too and so we built this other tool named Allen that nurtured leads for gyms and then we said wow I don't think we can do both of these things we probably have to pick one and so we picked the one that made the least sense for the business but made the most sense in the short term we picked Allen which is his lead nurture tool that we had built the gym CRM would have very clearly fit with our strategy but it would have been much harder and cost more money and taken more time the lead nurture tool took less time less money it was easier to get out quickly but it aligned much less with our business what ended up happening that tool didn't actually work best for gym owners it worked best for agency owners and it actually didn't even work best for agency owners it worked best for all brick and mortar locations and so we essentially accidentally built another business and that was a bad tradeoff what I traded was another 18 months of growing my business linearly essentially making no progress on my core business and building a new business that didn't even end up reaching the level of success that it could have because we had two and so the tradeoff was you can have two businesses one might not grow and one may grow slowly it was a bad tradeoff and I recognize now looking back on it I didn't understand the value of trade-offs and the value of staying focused and staying committed to my decisions I didn't understand that strategy is not about saying yes it's about saying no it's easy to say yes yes makes people happy in the short term yes makes you happy in the short term means that we never miss out on opportunities if you don't ever say no then you miss out on all opportunities because you take on too many and what I recognized and I learned from that experience which was very painful is that the root of strategy is knowing what to say no to it's knowing what the big yes is so that you can say no to literally everything else and I will say I'm pretty rigid about that because I do believe that that is what matters more than anything in a company and I will protect the focus with all that I can and I am very very maniacally focused on that one thing and I will shoot away any other thing that I don't think contributes to that main one big thing even if it means a big win in the short term if it doesn't in the long term I'm going to say I'm not going to do it and that's the thing is that what I've just recognized over time is when I first started off in business I thought that success ful people said yes to everything I think that you have to say yes to get started but once you get started in order to keep going you have to say no and once you keep going what you recognize is that the best people say no to almost everything except the one thing that's a sure win here's a question I ask myself that you can ask yourself to see where you sit here where am I negotiating with Myself by saying yes it's constantly what I ask myself which is like where am I negotiating with the one big thing I want by saying yes to these other things and I think that I've Gotten Good at not doing it in the macro like I'm not saying yes to second third fifth businesses but I do sometimes even in the micro for example if I'm in a season where I know the most important thing is that I focus on this part of my business something happens over here something happens over here something happens over here I get a call about this event I get a call about this speaking opportunity I get all these things any one thing to say yes to in the micro isn't harmful but out of principle I say no because it's the principle of remaining focused that's most important to me the next point is that a great leader hires people smarter than them they see them as a blessing not a threat I was hosting a workshop recently where a guy he was doing about $30 million per year and he was asking how to get to 100 million per year he said who do I need to hire so I said all right well what's your SE Suite look like one of the big pieces to get to from 30 to 100 is you need more High Lev experienced people that you bring in because then they become mentors for everyone who's not I said you know who's the highest paid employee and he was like well the highest I pay anybody in the company is about $100,000 and I was like do you have any sea Lev people in the company he was like no and I was like well where do you spend your time and so he spent his time across operations marketing and finance and based on nature of the company being manufacturing that makes sense there's a lot in finance and so I said well gosh like I would think at this point we would want to bring in I would say to start a COO and a CFO and then you can focus on the marketing and then we'll eventually Outsource that but there probably law founder magic there that's going to be harder to get out and he was like yeah I would do that but I can't trust anybody close to the money and I was like okay why he's like well they could screw me if anybody knows how much we make if they have access to seeing the money if they have access to controlling it you know cuz like right now I control all of our expenses nobody has a credit card all these things and it's funny because the next question I asked him was what do you think is a greater threat to your business oneoff random chance that the person that you hire is a thief and steals all of your money cuz somehow they bypass all the banking systems too or that you don't hire the right talent to grow your business which one has a higher likelihood of occurring one is a Sure Fire way to destroy your business don't hire smart people to grow it the other is like a very like oneoff Edge case scenario that maybe could destroy your business yes that is always a possibility and the question that I posed after that was what does your business look like in 5 years if you don't hire these people if you do nothing he's like well that's a good that's a good point right who knows what he did with that information but I say that to impress upon you the point there's always the edge case scenario that somebody could you completely they could steal all your money and some somehow get away with it and somehow your business would burn down and go to zero yes that could happen to all of us co could also happen but on the more likely case scenario it's that you hire smart people and you don't give them any Authority and they leave and your business ever grows because that is what happens to business owners day in and day out even if they hire the smart people they don't want to give them Authority because they're scared of their capability and so they withhold and they control everything and for that they don't get anything out of them and they don't get to capitalize on the growth that those people could actually bring into their business and here's the thing it's not just that those people can bring growth into your business it's that those people can help grow you it's funny cuz I had somebody ask me one of my friends one time she said who have you learned the most about business from and at that point I told her I was like the people that I've actually learned the most about business from right now are these two people that I just hired that are Executives it wasn't an outside Mentor it wasn't a book it wasn't a master it wasn't a course I got to hire these people and I get to I look as like rent their brains like I get to use their brains for this many hours a week as these people who are smarter than meet in these areas like what a blessing that is that I don't have to go learn everything for myself that would take forever I get to shortcut my way to success by using other people's brains just like you shortcut your way to making more money in investing by using other people's money you can shortcut your way to success in business by using other people's brains it's the same concept it's leverage and if you don't hire people who are smarter than you you never get that leverage and here's the thing great leaders do not hire to maintain status quo they hire to move up status quo the goal is to hire people who beat you at what you were doing who are better than you at what you were doing if somebody can't be better at you at one thing that you were doing with one tenth of your time you are not hiring smart enough people think about it does this person raise the bar of the team and of the company or do they keep it the same or do they lower it the next point is that being able to pick the right person is far more valuable than being the right person when I was growing my first business I wore all of that hats to start head of sales head of Cs head of Finance head of Ops head of customer billing of product everything and I was constantly focused on how I could get better at those things like how do I learn more about product how I learn more about sales how do I learn more about marketing how do I learn more about Cs and I had a mentor say this to me and it really stuck he said Lea you don't need to get better at any of those things you need to get better at picking people and I was like huh why he said it's the one job you will never grow out of and that stuck with me from that day on because I was like holy what I recognize is it's more important to be able to pick the right people than to be the right person for the job because my job's going to change all the time but I have to pick the people to take it after me my business is going to change all the time but I have to pick the people that are going to do business with me you don't build the business you pick the people investing the people and they build the business and that's the thing no matter how brilliant your strategy if you are playing the game solo you will always lose to somebody who's playing it with a team and that starts with knowing how to pick people so the reason that I got so passionate about recruiting and the reason I'm so passionate about HR is because I've recognized that is something that I should never not know how to do that is something I should always hold close because the one thing that builds the business is the people that are here and so I should be good at picking those people and teaching others how to pick those people I will yes be head of Finance at some point head of Cs at some point product and marketing I have played all of the roles and I will always my job is always changing but the one job that never changes is picking people to help build the business and the best leaders that I know focus on this more than any other thing they all say the same thing we all sit there and everyone's like you guys are where you are because of marketing and brand and sale all these things right we all sit in the back room and we're like we all know it's because of the people everybody knows and I think it's where perception is reality which is like you see people on social media like myself and like other people and you think they are successful because of who they are and what they're doing but the likelihood of that being true is very low the reason that they're likely succeeding is because they're so good at picking everybody else that works for them your business gets to a point where it's so big it is impossible for you to do any one job instead you have to be the person to find the people to do all the jobs and I just found that to be true which is if I pick the right people and I put them on hard problems or big opportunities my business grows it's not when I myself go on every problem on every opportunity because at some point that's not scalable if you're the one solving every problem and taking advantage of every opportunity then that limits your business and so the only skill that will forever endure is being able to pick people and so I'll ask you this which is like how much time have you put in to learning how to pick people how many interviews do you take how many screenings do you watch how many interviews do you watch how much of a structure do you have in place you know the reason that I invested so much into recruiting and human resources in the beginning is because I wanted to safeguard against picking the wrong people and I think I've been able to scale businesses so quickly because I just pick a lot of the right people from the beginning I don't have to waste all that time replacing people hiring new people turning people in and out I don't have to worry about churn so much because when you have to constantly worry about churn because you're constantly losing and gaining new people that distracts you from accomplishing any of your business objectives picking people is the one skill that you will always need the next point is that the best leaders are also the most adaptable business changes all the time whether you want it to or not the environment changes the market changes the platforms change things inevitably change and you cannot control that the only thing that you can control is how you react when it happens I witnessed this in my last business we used to rely heavily on Facebook ads and what happened was that over time the platform matured and so it got harder to advertise on the platform eventually one day the platform did a Facebook slap where they basically changed their whole algorithm overnight and overnight so much of what we did that was so effective completely vanished what happened next was fascinating because I brought to my team what had happened and I said listen we have to adapt here we have to figure out something different half my team was like let's do it let's move forward YouTube LinkedIn outbound all these things and the other half of my team resisted it they said we don't want to do that let's just figure out how to make this work I'm sure it's going to come back tomorrow they tried to negotiate with reality meaning they argued with it and what I saw is that those leaders that were arguing with reality they were fighting the fact that change was occurring couldn't move forward so we were spending all this time in the problem and no time in the solution because we were resisting what was real we were resisting what had happened and we were arguing with reality the best leaders don't argue with reality they adapt to it the best leaders don't avoid failure or change they use it as an opportunity to get stronger they say how can we use this this negative experience or challenge to become better and the best leaders that you will hire will make your job easier not harder and a lot of that starts with accepting change and adapting to it adapting means a change in the environment occurs so you change your behavior as well not adapting is when a change in the environment occurs and you refuse to change your behavior out of fear because you're scared what if I fail What if I can't figure something out what if what if what if what if what if the best leaders learn to adapt to that change and they come out stronger on the other end what I have found is that if you have a leader who argues with reality they create so much uncertainty in their teams because think about it right I'll give you an example when Co hit my entire team looks to me the government just said that none of our customers can do business and those are the people who feed us and pay the bills what are you g to do I didn't try to fight it I didn't try to argue with reality you know what I said I was like all right guys our customers have their doors closed so here's what we're going to do we are going to completely pivot and we might only pivot for 6 months cuz we don't know how long this is going to happen it's going to be hard it's going to suck and it's going to make us stronger I didn't try to fight it I didn't try to say you know what maybe it's going to go back and in that time it was so fascinating because I actually watched my customers who argued with that reality fail we had gyms as customers the gyms that went out of business didn't go out of business because of the environment they went out out of business because of their response to the environment it was the ones who said well what if they change everything back in a week or in two weeks I don't want to change anything they were so scared of failing and they were so scared of what was going to happen if they made the wrong move that they refused to change and because they refused to change they ended up dying because what happens if you don't adapt to the environment is the environment eventually overtakes you and you become a victim of the environment rather than using it to your advantage and that is what happened to so many of them the one who got stronger were the ones who said screw it we're going to change the whole business maybe it's for 6 months maybe it's for 12 months but we're going to get through this and we're going to be stronger for it and that experience taught me how much our ability to adapt and respond during times of chaos during change and during hard situations dictates our success if you want to be the best leader and if you want to have the best leaders you have to be adaptable here's a question to ask yourself do I argue with reality or do I respond to reality I ask myself this I'm like am I arguing with reality right now because I'm scared I'm going to fail because I'm scared of what happens next because I'm scared of the change and if you just let go of all that fear and all that angst all the anxiety around change and you just leaned into the change how much more would you grow from that and what could you capitalize on that maybe you're not right now what stops people from being great leaders is not fear of success it's their fear of being betrayed of losing of failing of Judgment of change it's not the fear of what happens if I succeed it's the fear of what happens if I fail in everyone sees here's the thing I'm sure you've watched this video and now you're like I get it it's important but all this fear comes up it's like what if people betray me what if they think I suck what if I fail what if I lose money what if all these things but the other question is what if you don't try what does your life look like 5 years from now if you don't really try to be the best leader that you know you could be what does your business look like what does your life look like and how much do you respect yourself would you respect yourself more or less for trying here's the thing you don't need to pick all of these at once pick one of these points that resonated with you the most and just focus there leadership is the compilation of so many skills into one give yourself some great tackle one thing first and stay focused on it until you feel like you've really nailed it guys I hope you enjoyed this video and here's the thing if there's any one point that you want to know more about you want to dive more into let me know in the comments what point that is and I will make sure to queue it up for a YouTube video