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.