what exactly does that mean tracking objective measurables? Well, in a recent coaching call for our smart practice program, I shared the story of a friend of mine who, about a year ago, decided that he wanted to get into bodybuilding. And he's a generally fit guy. He's middle aged, 47 going on, 48 years old right now. And like I said, about 18 months ago, he had this wild idea that he wanted to participate in a full on bodybuilding competition. You know the ones where the guys get all lathered up in oil and spray tan, and they wear little tiny Speedos, and they parade around on the stage. Well, this is what he wanted to do. He wanted to do. He wanted to see how far he could push his body and where he could take it. Now, as a guy who's six one and weighing in at approximately 190 pounds, he wasn't a fly weight, and he actually looked reasonably fit. He had, he has a very athletic build and the kind of body that most middle aged guys would really like to have to start off with, but as he began putting on weight under the mentorship and tutelage of his personal trainer, who was a Russian immigrant who used to compete professionally as a bodybuilder, sounds like a perfect mix, he began to discover something very interesting. He said, the bigger I got, the smaller I felt. And he said that this confused him for a while. He didn't understand, how could he be growing his muscles larger? How could he be getting more massive and yet feel smaller? And what he realized, and that I've realized about myself as well, is that when we put something into our awareness, in other words, when we start to notice something, when we start to put our focus on something, then we start to notice things about it that we didn't see before. Psychologists talk about something in our brain called the reticular activating system, and this is a part of our brain that has evolved over time to help us avoid danger and to also save processing time so we're not constantly having to evaluate our surroundings, to be able to make important decisions, and even non conscious decisions. So the reticular activating system in our brain is responsible for helping us prioritize where we should put our focus and our attention. An example of how this plays out in real life is, let's say that you've been wanting a new car, and maybe you're shopping for a car right now, and there's a particular make and model that you're looking at, and all of a sudden you're noticing it everywhere, saying, Wow, I didn't realize there's that many of these cars on the road. Or perhaps you like a particular color of car, maybe red, and you're like, wow, I didn't realize there's so many red cars. Now, it's not that the kinds or makes of model of cars on the road changed, but your awareness of those cars changed. So this is what the reticular activating system does. So ultimately, although my friend was gaining in mass, although he was getting larger physically, he felt like he was smaller because now he was Ultra aware of the inadequacies of. His body compared to what he want his body to look like, which brings up an important distinction when it comes to your journey as a free architect, the distinction between feelings and facts, feelings and facts. So one of the frameworks that we teach in smart practice is comprised of these four individual components, your feelings, your facts, your focus and your fruit. And we call this reverse engineered production. In other words, let's say that you want to get a result in life. You want to increase your income, or perhaps you're not exactly satisfied with the kind of products that you're working on, and you really feel like you could be doing better. Well, we use and teach reverse engineered production to be able to as this, as the particular phrase goes to reverse engineer, how to get that result. And when we look at reverse engineered production, we break it down into these four key areas, feelings, facts, focus and fruit, or we could say facts, feelings, focus and fruit. And ultimately, we look at the fruit being the results, the focus being where you put your attention and focus. The feelings, of course, are the emotions or bodily sensations that we have around these things, including the stories, the interpretations. And then at the very beginning, we have the facts. Now, one of the challenges as business owners that we have is that oftentimes we make decisions and we react based upon how we're feeling, as opposed to using objective measurables. So for instance, a feeling is a very subjective experience. And in a recent coaching call, I talked about this with some of our clients, where we made the distinction that sometimes we can feel like our business is doing really well, and yet, when we look at the objective measurables, we can see that our business actually has a lot of signs of unhealthy metrics or measurables, and then On the flip side, we can also be discouraged feeling overwhelmed about where our business is at, where your architectural practice is at, when, in reality, the financials might be pretty healthy. But then what happens if you're making decisions based upon scarcity of feeling of overwhelm, and yet your financials are actually healthy? What could happen? The danger here is that you're putting your focus on the wrong place. You're acting reactively, which means that you're putting yourself up as a victim of life, as someone to which life happens to, as opposed to someone who life happens for. So that's why one of the foundational pillars of smart practice is making sure that you understand what are your objective measurables? How do you track them? How do you know where you're at today compared to where your business was six months ago? Without having to run a bunch of reports and without having to do a lot of digging, where do you have a handy dashboard where you can just pull it up and within 15 seconds get an overview of where you're at right now, and in another 15 seconds, look at your past data and compare that to where you were six months ago. When you start using an objective measurable in your business and in your architectural practice, what you'll discover is that your feelings start to align with the data, which is great, because when your feelings align with the facts of what's actually happening in your business, you are then empowered to make powerful decisions. So with this podcast episode and that preamble, we're going to do something a little bit different. I recently took a coaching call with that I held with some of our smart practice members. And this coaching call is called our Rainmaker flow call, and it's where we focus on strategies for not only winning better projects and putting those in place, but strategies for getting a more consistent pipeline and making sure that that incoming work part of your business is systematized and working very well in a predictable manner. Now, on this particular coaching call, one of the topics that came up was this idea of feelings or subjective experience versus our objective measurables. Now I can't share the contents of this coaching call because there are architects who are part of this call, and there's private and sensitive information that was discussed. But what I did is I put this coaching call into a program that generated an AI Artificial Intelligence summary of the content of that particular coaching call, which I thought was great, because that way you can get the information of what we discussed without compromising the privacy of the members of that particular call. So what you're going to hear here in a minute is about 13 minutes of two AI generated people, and it's just amazing what AI can do now, and they're going to talk about the contents. With this coach and call the key takeaways. And I hope that you get a lot out of this conversation. Now, before we jump into it, let me state that oftentimes we can look at AI or artificial intelligence and perhaps even feel threatened by this new technology and how fast it's going. Fred said something to me pretty powerfully recently. He said Enoch, in the future, there will be two kinds of people, those who embrace AI and learn how to use it, and those who stick their heads in the sand and hope that it will just go away. So with that, here at Business of Architecture, we're looking at how we can use AI Artificial Intelligence and this podcast episode as part of that to deliver more value to you more effectively and more succinctly. And at the same time, I'd encourage you to think and ponder on the question of how you can utilize AI Artificial Intelligence as your friend in your practice on your journey to being a free architect. So with that, here is the summary of the recent coaching call. Welcome