How To Have The Right Mindset
Byron Morrison
Devin Miller
The Inventive Journey Podcast for Entrepreneurs
5/6/2021
How To Have The Right Mindset
The Inventive Journey
Starting and growing a business is a journey. On The Inventive Journey, your host, Devin Miller walks with startups along their different journeys startups take to success (or failure). You also get to hear from featured guests, such as venture firms and angel investors, that provide insight on the paths to a successful inventive journey.
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in my experience this is why the bottleneck for so many businesses is actually the ceo it's because they're not making decisions opportunities are being lost everything else is being falling behind because they within themselves aren't showing up as the ceo in their business and that's why i'm such a firm believer that your business's growth can't outgrow your inner growth and if you really want to not just perform at that level but break through to the next you really have to evolve within yourself because you need that level of thinking the ability to control the stress and pressure and all of the mindset shifts in order to really actually sustain your success [Music] hey everyone this is devin miller here with another episode of the inventive journey i'm your host devin miller the serial entrepreneur that's grown several startups in the seven and eight figure businesses as well as the ceo and founder of miller ip law where you help startups and small businesses with their patents and trademarks if you ever need help with yours just go to strategymeeting.com and grab some time with us to chat now today we have another great expert episode that uh we're gonna and it's with uh brian uh morrison and uh brian's gonna talk a little bit about uh on a few different areas but i think a little bit about i interrupt you it's byron not brian byron oh now now i owe you i think a free cookie or a free candy bar or something i always try and do i'm horrible name just as a complete aside for everybody listening i always worry that i'm going to mess up days and usually i get them right but i always have that fear so byron morrison not brian so appreciate the correction um so byron is um we're going to talk a little bit about mindset mindsets and a bit of emotional shift things will be an interesting uh topic that is relevant to a lot of people kind of that journey that you take from becoming a founder to becoming a ceo which isn't always the same thing and they also kind of um you know how to deal with you know product and ideas getting them to the marketplace um entry level to success and you know how that leads to new problems from going you know as you kind of build and get become more successful new issues that come up kind of dealing with the pressures of of success because you always hear about the pressures of failure but there is also that of success how to delegate and build a team and dealing with a bit of imposter syndrome or getting confidence and we'll have a great discussion and i'm excited to have you on so with that much in the introduction welcome on the podcast buyer and not brian hey i'm i'm so used to that i think it's yeah people always see the name like they call brian constantly so yeah well i definitely i definitely don't want to be followed to that group so i appreciate the the correction so with that maybe before we dive into a bit of the conversation just take a two or one or two minutes just introduce everybody a little bit about to you and why you're an expert on this episode and why they should listen to you and uh and trust what you have to say so get maybe give a bit of an introduction sure so my name's byron morrison not brian and i'm a author of the book the effective ceo as well as being a speaker and a mindset and high performance coach and essentially what i do is help ceos take control of their role by evolving them into a more confident grounded and effective decision-making leader who can really handle the pressures of growing a business so that's very much focused around taking their mindset their emotional control and their performance to the next level so that they can grow within themselves to really change and impact the world as for why i'm an expert in this field to be honest life wasn't always this way um this all started a few years ago after my dad got cancer during his treatment he had most of his bowel surgically removed and he spent 25 days in icu mostly on life support and breeding through a tracheostomy and that for me was the wake-up call i had to change my own life so i went out on this journey of transformation i lost over 50 pounds i turned my life around i became a qualified nutritionist and personal trainer and eventually i took everything i learned and it went on to be the foundation of my best-selling book become a better you so i started my business of wanting to change the world and i actually found myself in a situation where instead i was spending my days putting out fires solving other people's problems dealing with never-ending demands to the point that i was just dreading getting up in the morning and looking at my calendar and what i had to face that day and eventually i reached a point where i didn't know if i could carry on doing it and i saw so many other business owners feeling like i was so i knew there had to be something going on so i really dedicated myself to learning everything i could about mindset psychology managing stress high performance and everything else in between to figure out what it takes to go from being stressed and overwhelmed to confident and in control and that's very much brought me to what i'm doing today once i got my own life under control and got that shift with in myself now helping other ceos and business leaders do the same well cool no i think then first of all it's a great introduction definitely makes sense and so now we'll dive into a little bit of the topic in hand and one of the ones i thought interesting is we chatted a bit before the podcast was the idea of you know the kind of the journey from being a founder to a ceo and you know sometimes that's a bit counter-intuitive because most founders are ceos or at least they give them themselves the title ceo right they're the executive officer but there is a bit of a shift from you know you kind of have an idea you you yourself or maybe you and a partner or somebody else but you have a small group and you start to build a company versus now as you as it grows and actually becomes their founded and you know and starts to take on a life of his own so to speak transitioning to that you know that ceo role where you're actually running the business rather than founding it so maybe share a little bit about kind of how that is with that mindset and that emotional shift what people should be aware of yeah 100 this is something i see all the time and clients i work with is i work with a lot of people who essentially start a business with a product or a service or an idea and because they're amazing what they do they've grown it but the problem with them is they're very much of that founder level mentality whereas when things take off they're unprepared for what it really takes to be a ceo especially when on top of focusing on growth they have to lead a managed team they have to keep stakeholders happy they have to overlook day-to-day operations it's a huge amount to stack on top which for i find for a lot of people leaves them feeling in over their head where they're stretched then they're overwhelmed and really don't know what they should be doing and in my experience this is why the bottleneck for so many businesses is actually the ceo it's because they're not making decisions opportunities are being lost everything else has been falling behind because they within themselves aren't showing up as the ceo in their business and that's why i'm such a firm believer that your business's growth can't outgrow your inner growth and if you really want to not just perform at that level but break through to the next you really have to evolve within yourself because you need that level of thinking the ability to control the stress and pressure and all of the mindset shifts in order to really actually sustain your success no and i like that because one of the things and i had to go through that same you know i didn't have use a coach so i had to try and figure it out on my own and i'm still learning every day but it was you know the idea was is you know i started i've done several different startups but take you know miller ip laws an example is one where you know i had a lot of expertise and experience in doing intellectual property patents and trademarks and yet now as i brought on more people's i brought on some additional attorneys brought on paralegals brought on marketing and other support staff yet you know even with all those people and i'm bringing them on i still had that wanting to control it because you know i knew i could do it you know how i did it that it would be done right that'd be done on time and yet allowing you know so i became a bit of a bottleneck and i had to start there's figure out where to step back and how to step back on some of the areas just because if not i everybody still had to come to me had to get approvals had to do everything had to review everything and they didn't allow the business to grow beyond a certain point because i only have so many hours in the day and i can only do so much and i'm now getting pulled away on things that i can't focus that i that other people can do to and that i'm doing versus the areas that i really have that expertise that specialty that other people can fill in the gaps and so i think that that's i like that i think it's important thing is to make that that mind shift but i'll follow up with one question kind of we talked about it's easier said than done in the sense that you did get most founders and at least my experience and all based on that is you know a lot of them are type a personalities they want things done a certain way they want to make sure it's done right they want to you know they're putting a lot of times their name and their stamp of quality on things and so how do you help people to make that shift or make that mental mental lead there's a few factors involved in it and the first one is really and i dive into this in the first section of my book the effect of ceo figuring out their zone of genius because the reality is like you said there's only only so many hours in the day and you really need to figure out where is your time best spent because while when you founded your business you could get away with doing everything eventually you're either going to get to a point where you can do a few things really well or many things mediocre or badly and this is where you really need to figure out okay where is the best use of your time where are you going to pull the key levers that are going to allow your business to grow and that really takes sitting down and auditing what you need to do what are you currently focusing on and where are you actually have the biggest impact in the business everything else needs to be delegated outsourced or even better removed altogether because for so many ceos i find that days are filled with tasks that really don't matter that may seem like a good idea but actually have a negative roi time-wise so that'll be my first piece of advice is figure out where you actually need media in the business the second is really figuring out who do you then pass it on to and the third step is just pulling the band-aid off because so many ceos have this fear that if they don't do it it's all going to fall apart and this is why i would really challenge them to think that if you're so worried that your team's going to drop the ball then you probably haven't done a very good job in surrounding yourself with the right people because at the end of the day you've brought them in for that reason so it's really being honest with yourself of do you actually need to do it do you need to do a better job getting the right people in or do you just need to face that fear and give it to them and just see that actually it's not going to fall apart and will be okay no and i like that and you know and i'll give my kind of personal role that where at least works for me that i found that hey if i can bring someone on they can do it 80 as well as i at least think i can sometimes i do it much better but at least if they can do it 80 as well as i think i can it's time to hand that off because you know they may not be able to do it exactly how i would do it or exactly what i think it always should be done but they're getting it done to uh 80 of the time or 80 of the degree that i would then it's something that i should be focusing on something that's they can't do the 80 and i think that making that jump you know it is hard one of the other things i think that always makes sense is you kind of you start to by giving them a bit of rope or you know a bit of a leash or whatever you want to call it let them start to prove themselves and as they earn more trust you should be giving them more and more responsibilities and delegating it out more and if by the other hand to your point if they're not doing a good job they're not doing what they're supposed to and they're not doing it then you should be hiring someone else that you can have that trust in them yeah to take it a step further i'd also challenge anyone listening to really figure out what is that time realistically worth an hour um i'll give you an example a few weeks ago i had a session with one of my clients and when we started the call he was really stressed and i was asking him what was going on and he said he had a big pitch coming up later that week but all he could think about was he had to book his travel because he had a flight to a conference next week and there was a few other things going on and he needed to book his hotel and these were again responsibilities that when he was a founder he needed to take care of because he didn't have anyone else whereas now as a ceo he'd hired an assistant to take over tasks like this he just hadn't delegated and thought of it which if you for simplicity's sake said that his times were a thousand dollars an hour he should not be doing tasks that he can pay his assistant 25 hours 25 an hour to do because sure it might only take 45 minutes but the amount of hours he was losing feeling stressed and overwhelmed and thinking about it was actually having a huge effect on the business because that was time he could put into preparing for the pitch doing revenue generating activities or whatever his superpower is that he was then losing out on so if you're worried about letting go or delegating think of the bigger picture of what is it costing you to still be doing it yourself no and i think that you know i've heard that kind of different er different ways but that analogy of you know to take about how much would you be paying if you were pay yourself your hourly rate or whatever your value is you know would you pay someone a thousand dollars to book a flight probably not because it's going to be more than it's more expensive than the flight in your example and yet how often do you do it yourself and again it's it's easier said than done because i think that people are saying to your point you're used to doing it when you got started you're wanting to make sure it's done right you have things a particular way and yet now you're it's it's bottlenecking or otherwise not allowing you to grow in the areas that make the most sense now as we transition or shift to kind of along those same lines but one of the other things we talked about a bit was um you know kind of as you grow and it kind of builds right on top of this you get as you reach new levels of success you also hit new problems so maybe talk a little bit about kind of what those problems are and what should people expect because you always hear you know it's always easy if when you're a failure you hear well then we don't have enough money we can't make payroll we're wondering if we keep the lights on nobody's buying our product those are always ones that you hear a lot of but you don't hear as much about some of the issues that come up with as you hit success so give us a little bit insight there yeah sure well one of the biggest misconceptions i come across especially in new founders is they have this idea in their mind that once their business takes off it's going to be this life filled with parties and private planes and just endless wealth whereas anyone who's actually reached that level knows it's a very different reality because your life essentially becomes putting out fires solving other people's problems and dealing with never-ending demands i'll speak to a lot of people who every single day it's just firefighting constantly where they'll have this huge to-do list of things they need to get done but then they have to solve someone else's problem and they'll get pulled into a crisis constantly being barraged by all of these different issues which is why it's such a roller coaster ride of ups and downs and i find probably the most difficult part of it is often they'll go to bed feeling like no matter what they did they disappointed somebody because there's only so many hours in a day there's only so much that they can get done and people are never happy and people also don't really realize how stressful it truly is to be a ceo and i find a lot of founders as well don't recognize that that's the life that they're entering this is why i'm such a firm believer in really focusing on your inner growth right now and really grounding yourself getting the right routines in place focusing on how you're going to deal with the setbacks and the stress and the overwhelming having those practices in place because if you suddenly land up in a situation where your business explodes this is where so many people get imposter syndrome or spiral out of control and yeah i speak to founders and ceos all the time who want to burn their business down it's got to the point where it's no longer fun they're just like why am i doing this because they're just completely stressed whereas if you really focus on getting those habits and behaviors in place now it'll be far easier to deal with it if and when it does get to that point no and i there's a lot of things to hit on there one of the things i always think is interesting and i can at least for me and i always speak from me because it's what works for me i i had to come to the conclusion they're always going to be more fires to put out than they're going to be trying to put out the fires in the sense that every day there's going to be more things i probably need want to get done or need to get done then i'm going to have to and so i always came to conclusion hey when time comes to or go home to the family have dinner spend some time off i'll put out as many fires as i can while i'm at work and then they'll be there the next day and i'll be fine if they're if they sit there for unless it's a major fire the whole building's burning down which is a much more the exception the rest of them i'll deal with them the next day because there's always going to be something more but the other one that you hit on that i thought was interesting was the idea that you know that you know i guess it circles back to you know as you hit success you're going to have new problems and kind of how you have to deal with it anticipating and building those up such that as things grow you know one of the things that was interesting and i can't remember which book it is i like to read a lot of books and listen to a lot of podcasts and they all started to get jobbled up in my head but they talked about you'll kind of go through things to where okay i get so busy i need to hire some more people on and then i hire some more people on and it starts to grow and then i start to not enjoy the business and i want to just go back to when it was just me because i enjoyed it and it was fun it was exciting and so you'll go fire everybody and you go back to where it's you and then you start to and then you start to get busy again and you say well i probably need to hire some and you kind of have this up and down as this when you when you stay small because you get to a point where you're saying this isn't fun anymore and i'm too busy or too stressed and i want to go back to the good old days you go back to the old days and because you're you're good at what you're doing are successful then you keep building it so you kind of have that up and down unless you can break through that ceiling you're always going to fluctuate yeah i couldn't agree more it's such a vicious cycle and i think this is why it's so important to really audit what you're doing and really think about why what's the kind of bigger why behind it because i find a lot of people and ceos and entrepreneurs in particular land up in the cycle where they put their happiness in the future they keep saying to themselves once i hit this goal this milestone or the threshold then i'll be happy then i'll take time off then i'll spend more time with my family but then when they hit that goal we i call this the curse of the high achiever it's never enough it's then always on to the next one and this is why a lot of people become unfulfilled where they have all of this money in the bank but they're miserable and hate their life and this is why i'm such a firm believer that we need to focus on enjoying the journey we really need to start at the baseline level of who we are what we want in life and what matters most and really build our life around that and also keep it in alignment if your role evolves to the point where you're not enjoying what you're doing you're never gonna well what's the point really because you're just gonna be miserable so you might need to make some shifts in your responsibilities and what you let go of already figure out how you can divide your time between those key tasks but also doing things that you enjoy that's what i find is sustainable no i definitely agree with you there and you know fighting that sustainability you need to figure out what what excites you about your business what makes you passionate and then keep that as a focus you know that was the other thing in is shifting you're not shifting gears but going down just a side or a rabbit hole one of the other things i think is hard is as the business grows it's easy to have people push you in as a ceos or leader in directions you don't want to go but because that you bring new people and they have different perspectives and then you lose that fun and excitement of where you want the business to go and why you're passionate about it because you're trying to always please other people trying to take their input trying to go in the directions they're recommending and yet it goes in a direction you're like man i don't really like the culture i don't really like what i'm doing and it's not the fun and excitement so i think that having that kind of core of hey this is our purpose this is what i love this is what i'm passionate about this is where i'm good at and then keeping that even as you bring new people on such that you can make sure that you don't get pulled off to the side to where you're no longer being you're no longer doing the job that you want to do yeah completely and this also may mean scheduling in tasks that you enjoy i'll give you a perfect example a few months ago one of my clients was really starting to dread going to work his days like we spoke how was just firefighting he was dealing with all these demands and he was miserable and we found that he was no longer focusing on the things that excited him so the way that we solved it is he set aside two hours a week where he would just go and spend time in the lab business technicians were working on new products they were developing new ideas and because he came from an engineering background that was what he loved doing it was where he really thrived and even though it may not have been the best use of his time as a on a ceo level those couple of hours a week reignited that fire and reminded him why i was getting up in the morning why i wanted to build the business in the first place and it was a fun and creative outlet he did that a couple of hours a week and it's completely changed his focus on the business he's enjoying going to work again he's got that passion back all by making a simple shift and doing what i said about before really focusing on a foundational level of what you actually enjoy and ultimately what makes you happy no i definitely agree and i think that you know taking that time and i've done it in various fashions but i've found almost exactly what you said it i block out time that either i do i block out two different times one is if i know that these are tasks that i have to do each week that stress me out then i block out time then in my calendar this is when i'll do those and i'm not going to worry about those tasks until i hit that time i'll get them done during that time nobody else bothers me i don't schedule anything else on top of it and so then i don't have to stress out about it but i also like you know similar to that as i'll take some time and i'll block it out where i'll just have kind of fun or hey i want to dream a little bit again about the business where it's going to go what are the fun and exciting things where it's going to end up and those type of things because if i can give myself the ability to dream it tends to keep me a bit more centered as opposed to if i'm always stuck with the data you know not stuck in a bad way but always focus on the day-to-day tasks then i lose that center well as we start to write and there are so many more things i think would be fun to talk about the podcast and we always have we never have enough time to go down those and we're starting to hit towards the end of the podcast but as we were to do i always have one question the end of each expert episode so i want to hit on that now which is you know we've talked about a lot of different things everything from to a journey from going from a founder to ceo going from you know dealing with the issues that are come up success how to keep centered how to delegate we've hit on a lot of fun issues you know all of those things are great now if you're talking somebody that's in a startup or a small business that's just trying to figure out one thing that they can do today one thing that they can start to implement what would that one thing be the biggest advice i give to anyone listening right now is to get into the mindset of learning to focus on controlling the controllable because i find so many ceos and founders get derailed because they get pulled into problems focusing on things that they can't control so they'll beat themselves up they'll dwell on it they'll let mistakes get them into this high stress state the reality is though you're never going to be in complete control of what's going on around you but when you start really focusing on what you're going to do about it it'll completely change the game for you and this also applies to problems and mistakes because i find a lot of people let's say there's a setback in your business they land up in a cycle where then they'll start dwelling on the past they'll start beating themselves up second guessing themselves or whatever it may be the reality is though you can't change the past what's done is done and this is why one belief i try and instill in all of my clients is it's only a mistake if you don't learn the lessons from it and this is why when you're in those situations where there's a problem the problem's gonna exist either way so you can either choose to focus on what you can't control or you can ask yourself my favorite question which is what am i going to do about it which seems really simple but it's incredibly powerful because it shifts your focus from the past to the future and it gets you start really building momentum to figure out what are the actions and steps you need to take that's going to put you back in control so that'll be my advice to anyone listening figure out how can you always focus on controlling the controllable and don't let yourself be thrown off course by what you can't control no i love that and i think that you know too often we get stressed out about things we can't control we can't control what other people are doing what they what the world is what politics are doing what the economy is doing but you certainly can control your business the things that you're doing and those things within your control if you're trying to control the uncontrollable you're always going to be frustrated yet finding out those things that you can control and focusing on those are the ones that i think will give you a sense of power and a sense of confidence that you're actually going to do it well as we wrap up if people want to reach out to they want to find out more they want to reach out to you with some questions they want to be a client a customer they want to be an employee they want to be your next best friend any or all of the above what's the best way to reach out to you find out more so the best way to contact me is either go to byronmorrison.com or search for me on linkedin under byron morrison where i put out daily videos and guides and posts and everything else so yeah any questions or anything else you want to know feel free to get in touch awesome well i definitely encourage everybody to go to byron not brian byronmorrison.com or check out on linkedin connect up there reach out see if everything from becoming a client a customer or your next best friend you never know and i'm always waiting to see if somebody actually meets or mates there meets her nest best friend from the podcast so if it ever happens let me know but otherwise i've definitely encouraged people to reach out now for all of you that are listeners if you have your own expertise to share or your own journey to share um feel free to go to inventiveguest.com and apply to be on the podcast a couple more things as listeners one click subscribe to your podcast players so you know when all of our awesome episodes come out and to leave us a review so new people can find out about us last but not least if you ever need help with patents trademarks or anything else just uh go to strategymeeting.com grab some time with us we're always happy to chat thank you again byron it's been fun it's been a pleasure and i wish the next leg of your journey even better than the [Music] last you
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