Ultimately we get better results when we feel better about ourselves. Hello architect nation, and welcome to this episode of The Business of Architecture podcast today. The topic is this one simple shift for higher performance in yourself and in your team. Now, before we jump into today's episode, first a message from our sponsor of this particular episode A while ago, I began to hear reports of a company that was helping some of our clients build remote teams. We looked into it more closely and discovered the company world teams that was helping small architectural practitioners build remote teams that were both capable and qualified. I was intrigued by another business that are addressing one of the critical pain points for small architectural practices, which is the ability to grow and shrink a team effectively, to be able to handle higher workflow without having to staff up significantly, and also being very sensitive about labor costs. World teams is built to address these issues. World teams is a small but mighty company that helps architectural practices build high performing remote teams quickly and efficiently, saving you the headache of sorting resumes and interviewing under qualified candidates. World teams operates in your time zone and prioritizes near native English speakers, ensuring clear and efficient communication with your remote team members. They have flexible contracts so you can adjust your team size as your needs evolve. Additionally, you're connected directly with your skilled professionals, which fosters trust and collaboration and world teams helps you reduce your operating costs without compromising the quality that is so important to a practice. To download a free guide for building a remote team for a small architectural practice. Go to Business of architecture.com. Forward slash world teams. That's one word, Business of architecture.com. Forward slash world teams, as a reminder, sponsorship is not an endorsement, and you must do your own due diligence before entering into any business relationship. Go to Business of architecture.com. Forward slash world teams.
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So today's topic is one critical shift for higher performance in yourself and your team. This topic came up today on the call that we held with a group of 10 firm owners that are part of our Design Council here at Business of Architecture, these are high level firm owners that we consult with and help them with team management issues. Help them do a web of the overwhelm, help them build a self managed, self directed team. And on the call today, we were taking a look at everyone's individual targets for the year that they had for revenue. So as everyone began going down and listing up their targets, how many, how many dollars that they wanted to that they had set as a target to achieve this year in 2024 we then had them look at, okay, and where are you right now? What is the revenue number that you've achieved year to date, and then what is the date and what is the gap between those two? So now they had, they had a couple of numbers here. Number one, they had the number that they said it lat at the end of last year, about the target that they wanted to hit. They had a number of their current status, of where they're at right now. And then they had the gap of where they are now to where they actually wanted to be, and some of these gaps were quite large, understandably, oftentimes, setting targets is unpredictable, and we have things that happen in business that get in the way of smooth sailing, shall we say. Now, as we were going through this exercise, I had these heroic firm owners asked themselves a number of questions, and the basic question was this, we took a look at what was missing for them to be on track or to be closer to hitting that particular revenue target, and initial responses, or the kind of responses you'd expect to hear in a situation like this. Well, we lost a couple people during the year, I took a vacation, and because that vacation, our revenue dropped down a lot more than I would have expected. We had uncertainty in the economy. So we had a couple of projects to a lot of clients that we thought were going ahead, a lot of reasons like this. And so then we asked another question. I said, Okay, well, let's dive a little bit deeper. Let's figure out what was. Missing that caused or allowed these things to happen? And then they came up with an answer. And I said, Okay, well, let's dive even deeper, and let's figure out what was missing that allowed that to happen. And then we'd ask that question again and again and again and again until we got to final answer. What was interesting is then we started to get to some what we like to call here Business of Architecture root causes. Things like, I have difficulty letting go. Things like, I probably don't trust my team the way I should. Things like, I've realized that I haven't hired the team that I need to be able to manage the projects effectively. Thus I get pulled in. And the reason why I do that is because I have an element of fear about paying the large salaries that I need to pay to be able to bring in experienced team members. So as we begin to dive down, and we begin to get these really authentic, really raw, really vulnerable responses, something happened that I expected to happen, which is this, we discovered that the answers, the root causes as to why something was missing the gap had to do with Well, before I jump into that, let me first ask you a question as a listener. Have you ever had the chance or the or had the experience in life when you've set a goal for something? Maybe you wanted to lose some weight, maybe you wanted to establish new relationships, maybe you wanted to increase your income, and then month after month passes and you find yourself not actually doing that thing. Maybe you wanted to get up and run in the morning, but you find that every morning you end up sleeping in and and you don't actually do the running. And so this, this feeling of being frustrated can arise, being annoyed with ourselves, feeling perhaps a bit of guilt and shame about why am I not good enough to be able to just do what I say that I want to do? Well, I want you to consider that. One of the reasons why is because, as human beings, we're taught to focus on the doing and the having, in other words, to be able to achieve something. We typically think, well, to achieve something, I just need to do something. And to have something, I need to do something. And so the focus is on the actions that we do. And then yet, when we try to do these actions, and we come up unsuccessful again and again and again, it can get very, very frustrating. Way back in 2014 I was talking with a successful businessman that I had admired, and someone older than me with more wisdom than I had, and I asked him, what has been one of the most powerful things that you've experienced as a businessman that has helped you grow, that has helped you achieve the financial reward that you're achieving, that's helped you achieve the freedom that you have. He thought for a minute, and then he said, well, very on when I started my business. This was his response. Someone recommended that I listen to a series of tapes, and these tapes were by a man named Tony Robbins. It's called personal power. And he said, and I would listen to these tapes, and the tapes were all about unlocking this idea of what it is to have personal power. And he said I would listen to those tapes again and again and again, and eventually begin to shift my mindset, about who I was, about what I wanted in life, and I can trace back my business success to those particular tapes. So when I heard that, of course, I went, I said, I'm going to look this up. You know, I kind of heard, heard of Tony Robbins before, and, you know, some people, some people don't like the idea of Tony Robbins. There's a small number of people who don't know about him. They say, Oh, he's just this hyper motivational speaker. And then there's others that absolutely love his work, and he's done so many incredible things and coached a lot of high, high level athletes. He's a he's a top performance coach. So I thought, hey, look, I have nothing to lose. Let's, uh, let's invest in this. Let's find out what this all about. And I started to listen to personal power. And as I started to listen to this, at the time, it was a CD series. That's how, that's how, you know, CDs were still around back then. I still have it in my closet. What I began to discover, like I started my my I started discovering that there was these things about success in a performance that I hadn't realized before, and my mind was starting to be blown. I was like, wow, they didn't teach me this in school. My parents didn't teach me this. What I started to learn about was the invisible side of performance. If you listen to Tony Robbins, or knows what he teaches, he talks about the idea that something called state is at the very basis of human performance, and he defines this by something called the triad. What does the triad mean? It means there's three things, if you can imagine a triangle, there's three things that drive your performance at any time. Thing number one would be your physiology. Thing number two is your language, and thing number three is your focus. So these three things, your physiology, your language and your focus. So when we look at physiology, what's physiology? Physiology is how your body feels, how you hold your posture, the position you're in, how you're holding your eyes. Everything dealing with this physical body that we have that's that would be fall into the bucket of your physiology. Include. Having any sensations that you have. Let's say you're feeling sick. If you feel like you have the flu, you have a headache, or perhaps you're very energized. All of these are different aspects of your physiology. The second thing that you talked about is your focus. And by focusing means, what am I actually focused on with my mind, with my mental capacity? And so we can think about, am I focused on the potential that I might fail doing something, or am I focused on the on the fact that I might succeed? Am I focused on the idea that something is a cost, or am I focused on the idea that something's an investment? So you see, depending on how we focus on something, it has a massive impact on what we do and how we perceive. And then, of course, that goes into our results and how we show up in life. The third part of Tony's triad, as he calls it, that determines your state, is something called language. And by language, he means the thought patterns, typically the self talk, the way we talk to ourselves. As a matter of fact, I was just sent a Instagram reel recently by a friend who messaged me something. And in the video, this guy was talking about how oftentimes we tell ourselves negative self, we say negative things about ourselves and our minds. You can't do this. You're not good enough that a person's better than you. How come you messed up this time? Why can't you ever get things right like this is the little voice in the back of our head that's always talking to us. So Tony says that this is important in terms of our results as well, and it's important part of the triad. Typically, people who are successful, they're going to have more positive self talk. They have more positive things that that little thing is saying to them in the back of their head, and at the same time, they have less negative things telling them they can't do things. So when you combine these things together, you talk about your physiology, which is your emotions, your sensations. You talk about your focus, what you're focused on, and your language, the things that both you're saying as well as the thoughts you're having, these things then combine to create something very powerful called your state. Now, going back to I talked about, you know, the beginning of this podcast, we talked about, we were going to talk about one critical shift to get more performance out of yourself and out of your team members. And this shift could be called, it could be called state, but the way that I was referring to it in the call today with our firm owners was this very elusive idea of being. Now if you speak Spanish, I love the way that being, this word in English, being comes across in Spanish. And in Spanish, the word being is ser, S, E, R, and it simply means to be. So in Spanish, you might say, Yo, soy. That basically means I am. Now the power and the idea of this being is what that the being, and forgive me, because it's, going to be difficult, perhaps, to convey this idea adequately here on the podcast. But being is something that we don't normally think about, not taught about. We don't have a lot of language to describe what being is.
But going back to these conversations that we were having with these firm owners earlier today, as they begin to dig down and they begin to see what was missing. The gap. We begin to see that it was very clear that their actions, or their lack of actions, had sprung out of and as a result of who they were being. And let me give you some examples of what it means to be. An example of being is you are being optimistic. You are being hopeful, you are being excited, right? So all these things are a state. They're the same thing as Tony Robbins state that he talks about, for instance, excitement. If you have excitement, you probably have some language in your head that says, hey, this is going to be really fun, or hey, this is going to be interesting, or hey, this is going to be new. And you might have a focus of seeing yourself going down a roller coaster or eating that ice cream cone or whatever it is that's getting you excited, and then your physiology is going to be more energetic. It's going to be more upright. Your eyes are going to be open, your ears are going to be more attuned, because you have this energy of excitement running through your body. You see, one of the challenges that we as human beings have is we've been sold the myth and the lie that your circumstances dictate your feelings, your emotions and ultimately, your being. Now, certainly, if things happen to you, if you fall on your knee and you crack your knee and you scrape your knee, you get a car accident, yes, that's going to impact your emotions, right? But being is something that even goes deeper than your emotions. The Beatles have that great song when they say, Can't Buy Me Love, this is what they're pointing at. You can't buy love. You can't buy being you can have as many homes as you want. You could be a rich billionaire. You could have an amazing yacht. You could have all the material possessions your heart could ever desire. And that has nothing to do with you actually feeling fulfilled and satisfied inside of your body, inside of your heart, inside of your in your very being. So when we looked at these architects, and I'm using them as examples, but I can throw myself into that camp as well when and going back to the original story that I started talking about as I was talking about Tony Robbins and this business to. Colleague of mine who recommended that I listen to personal power. Through that process, I ended up investing in myself, and I hired a coach through the Tony Robbins organization, and as as I begin working with this coach, we began getting very, very scientific about keeping goals. So every single time we'd meet, we'd review my goals. We at that time, he had me setting goals on a quarterly basis. So I'd set quarterly goals, and then we'd break those down to monthly goals, and then we'd break those down to weekly targets and weekly actions. And there were several years where I would I would set these targets, and I would set these goals, and I would fail again and again and again and again. I would have fall short of it. And part of me just got exasperated with during this process of thinking, why am I even setting goals when I'm not hitting them, when I'm feeling again and again and again. And what I discovered since that time is the topic of this podcast. And if there's one powerful business lesson that I've learned as a businessman, and if there's one powerful thing that you could do to shift your results and the results of your team, I would submit to you that this is it. And what is this? What is the thing? It comes down to using the power of being and focusing on your being first, and then you're doing and you're having, you see, again, we have it wrong in modern society today, all of us, it's like, it's almost like we are trying to push the horse with our cart. We have the cart before the horse, right? What we need to do, of course, is we need to have the horse pulling the cart. The horse is the being, the beingness of us. Now let me give you another example to make this a little bit clear. Imagine a mother, right, and imagine what a mother does to provide for her child. Imagine what the mother may do to protect a child or to feed a child in the middle of the night, right? So imagine that a a young child, six months old, is crying in bed, and it's the father's turn, or maybe it's the mother's turn to get up and to feed this child. The parents going to do that? Why is the parent going to do that? Because the parent is coming from a place larger than how they're feeling in the moment. They have a context larger than what they're currently experiencing in their bodies. I mean, I remember this when my kids were young, and the kid would cry at night. My wife was wonderful about getting up with them, but oftentimes I would get out of bed because I wanted to help out. My wife just was unraveled at both ends. So we get the little bottle, and we'd heat it up in the microwave enough so that it didn't burn my finger, and I'd feed the baby. But let me tell you, when I was waking up to that crying baby, did I want to get up? Did I want to get out of bed? No, I wanted to stay there. I just wanted to let them just let the baby cry. But I couldn't, because something was pulling me to be able to minister to the needs of that of that young child that I had helped bring into the world. So what we can see here is this is the idea of being, that there was a beingness that I had, there was a commitment, there was a love, there was something larger than how I was feeling in the moment that caused me to take action that was uncomfortable in the moment. You see. So we go back to our business results and my failing again and again and again with these goals. The reason why I didn't take the actions that led me to the goals that I set wasn't because the goals were too high, although sometimes they were. It was because oftentimes I wasn't doing the right actions to be able to get the results that I wanted to get. And the reason why I wasn't doing the right actions is because I was just living my life based upon how I was feeling in the moment. My being was set at a certain level. If you imagine sort of a thermostat setting like my being was set, imagine a thermostat on an air conditioning unit, and that thermostat is set at like 75 degrees, right? And that 75 degrees allows the allows the house to heat up to maybe 78 and then it kicks off, and it might cool back down to 72 and then it kicks back on again, and it keeps the house in this range. So our being, your being, my being, we all have different settings for our being, for things like our hope, things like our optimism, things like our discouragement, things like our fear, things like our courage. So as we wrap up this conversation, want to ask you a question. Let's say that you're currently dealing with business challenges, or there's a time in your life when you're dealing with business challenges. Are you going to deal with those business challenges in a more powerful way? If you're feeling emotionally powerful, or if you're feeling emotionally down. Well, it's a silly question when I ask it, because, of course, you can think of times in your life when you felt on fire, you felt excited, you felt like you could go do anything, you felt empowered, and you had setbacks, but you rose to the challenge because you knew you were going to get through them, just like me feeding my young child at night, I had a vision for a prosperous and glorious future with this beautiful child that I brought in the world. In addition to that, I had love for this child and I had a commitment. All of these things were part of the context, part of the being for the way that. Was showing up for my child. So the question I'd ask you as we finish up this episode today is, how are you being as it comes to your business? Because here's the thing, a parent is not going to let their child suffer a parent who is not mentally ill, let's put it that way. Now, what? What does it look like? What happens if we have the same the same passion, the same commitment for our business. What if we look at our business as a literal child that we've birthed into the world? How does that change our relationship with it? How does that change our desire to help it prosper? How does that change our desire to do what's necessary to be able to get the results that we want? So see one of the beautiful things about this amazing game of being a human being,
and you notice it's a human being, not a human doing or a human having, is that ultimately we get better results when we feel better about ourselves. And so this is one of the things that is essential to one of the four pillars in smart practice, which is pillar number one, what we call our power operating system. This is an this is a personal operating system to allow you, as a person, to be able to access deeper, deeper levels of being, so that in that being, you're feeling good about yourself regardless of these difficult challenges or problems that may they occur all the time in business. Let's face it. And as such, then guess what happens? Your doing improves. You get better results, and then you're having improves. And it is a beautiful virtuous cycle. Einstein once said, doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results is the definition of insanity, and we can apply this to the idea of being we can try to smash those goals. We can try to make those changes. We can hope. We can listen to a lot of podcast episodes. We can watch YouTube. We can read all the books. All the books, and yet, if there's not a fundamental critical shift in our being, the results that we get will be similar to or exactly the same as the results we've gotten in the past. So the beautiful part about this, the good news from this particular podcast episode, is that your ability to feel fulfilled and successful as a firm owner is not dependent upon what's happening in your business. As a matter of fact, we're talking to one of our most successful firm owners, and he says, You know what I've been achieving, I've been achieving. I've been achieving all my life. I built this amazing practice. He's taken home an enormous income. He could pretty much buy anything he wants, and then he's like, at the end of the day, somehow I still feel like I need to achieve more. This is what's been baked into us as human beings, is that we need to keep on achieving. And someday, if we just work hard enough, if we just sacrifice enough, if we just put ourselves out there, enough, eventually, then we'll feel good well, as Byron Katie says, why don't we just cut out the middle man, cut out the doing and the having. Why don't we just be happy? Why don't we just be powerful? Why don't we just be optimistic? And then watch the results happen as always. If you enjoyed this podcast episode, if you get value out of the content we share here at Business of Architecture, head on over to the Apple podcast, leave a review for us, and we would love to read and read your name out here on the episode and acknowledge you for the powerful work you're doing. Being an architect today, and especially running a practice is not easy, but what I will tell you is that it's one of the most beautiful and powerful things you can do to grow yourself as a person, to invest in yourself and to become, to become the kind of person that you truly know that you can be. This is Enoch reminding you Carpe Diem and goodbye for now, and that's a wrap. And now a word from today's sponsor. A while ago, I began to hear reports of a company that was helping some of our clients build remote teams. We looked into it more closely and discovered the company world teams, that was helping small architectural practitioners build remote teams that were both capable and qualified. I was intrigued by another business that addressing one of the critical pain points for small architectural practices, which is the ability to grow and shrink a team effectively, to be able to handle higher workflow without having to staff up significantly, and also being very sensitive about labor costs. World teams is built to address these issues. World teams is a small but mighty company that helps architectural practices build high performing remote teams quickly and efficiently, saving you the headache of sorting resumes and interviewing under qualified candidates. World teams operates in your time zone and prioritizes near native English speakers, ensuring clear and efficient communication with your remote team members, they have flexible contracts so you can adjust your team size as your needs evolve. Additionally, you're connected directly with your skilled professionals, which fosters trust and collaboration and world teams helps you reduce your operating costs without compromising the quality that is so important to a practice. To download a free guide for building a remote team for a small architectural practice. Go to Business of architecture.com. Forward slash world teams. That's one word. Business of architecture.com. Forward slash world teams, as a reminder, sponsorship is not an endorsement, and you must do your own due diligence before entering into any business relationship. Go to. Business of architecture.com, forward slash world teams.
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the views expressed on the show by my guests do not represent those of the hosts and I make no representation. Promise, guarantee, pledge, warranty, contract, bond or commitment, except to help you conquer the world. Carpe, Diem, you.
