MICHAEL HYATT & MEGAN HYATT MILLER: Mind Your Mindset

those of us who are high Achievers we want to just take better action or work harder those kinds of things but sometimes we're just kind of throwing good money after bad so to speak because the story that's informing those actions is never going to give us access to the solutions we need if you're not happy with the results or you want bigger better results the natural place to go as Megan said is action you know if we just work smarter or work harder or apply more Brute Force we can impact the results and we can to a certain extent but if you really want to get breakthrough results you have to go even further Upstream than that to your thinking because the it's the story that that really leads to the behavior that leads to the results here's one thing I really respect about about what you guys have built here is that the overall experience that you have built through your company was handed off to your daughter in a way that seemed to be extremely streamlined like this from from an outsider's perspective anyway and now this is your second book out I swear I just interviewed you for your last like six months it does feel like that right I think it was like actually a couple years ago when your publicist reached out I was like really again wow you guys are just like you're really doing it yeah we had the same reaction how do you how do you maintain and I'll kind of direct this one too to Michael how do you maintain the the wheel of work here where now you're kind of Shifting control over to Megan but also still completely involved in everything and helping write more books and pushing the vision and stuff like that how do you maintain that uh that work ethic well I think that I've been able to focus more on my sweet spot we call it the desire Zone you know where your passion your proficiency come together so kind of like you you were we were talking before we started you know that uh that there's some things that you like in your business that are the things that you don't like well I get to focus on 100 of the time on the things that I really like so 95 of my time is given to those things and I have enormous confidence in Megan because um we just have there's so much overlap in our values and we've been literally working professionally together since she was what 17. it's like we share half of the same DNA almost let me forget I'm adopted no um yeah and so it's it's it's been really seamless and easy you know she has a thousand percent of my confidence and I I literally feel like now I'm working for her so she's the CEO of the company and so I don't dare do anything that I don't run by her um and you know we talk as partners and all the rest but but it's been pretty seamless I mean your perception of it is pretty much out when yeah yeah how was it from your perspective coming through like starting working at 17. yeah because obviously everything looked different at the company at that point right well this company didn't exist back then so um in fact the first experience I had with you professionally was when I was eight years old I went to a trade show with him and he took me I'm like thinking Thomas Nelson I'm thinking about as a mom of five kids taking one of my kids at eight years old to do this but like I went to all the meetings with him I'd like my little dress and my little fancy shoes and probably a little bag of some kind and I just got to sit at the table at all those conversations which I think was great training and that continued then in high school I ran merch for a tour you were a literary agent and I ran merch for that tour that we went on together she got thrown in the deep end yep we were living on a tour bus and so that was kind of our first real experience together and then this business we began in 2011 and so I joined in 2012 and did not with the idea that I would eventually become the CEO I don't think either of us had that in mind um and what were you doing at the time I was doing well at the at the exact time I had decided to stay home with my kids for a period I had just adopted two boys from Uganda and I'd quit my job which was in Communications and decided I'm going to be a stay-at-home mom and that lasted for about nine months and I decided nope you know how to use a copywriter at first no um I was but I was doing marketing yeah so I think I probably did some copywriting in there yeah yeah so it really though as time has gone on it's been awesome you know one of the questions we get all the time is is it really as good as it looks and I was telling somebody yesterday in fact this relationship professionally and personally is is easy and that is not true with all experiences of working with family I think it's almost never true it's almost never true and it really is as simple as it looks you know I think we both just have a ton of respect for each other and we communicate well I think I think one of the things that informed the transition too was that I had gone through some really bad transitions where I succeeded somebody that had a hard time letting go and made a mess of things and I just thought to myself I don't want to be that guy I don't want to be that guy yeah well my husband's my own daughter my my home is saying the other night we were talking about it and he said I just I have never seen a Founder who was able to step back and hand over control to somebody else and do it with as much um confidence but sense of completion you know like there's never been a moment where he's kind of tried to step back in and take some of what he gave me to be in charge of at all and it's just it's an amazing privilege on my part to have the benefit of that but he's still very involved he's still a resource to me and at this point you know we're partners and I can't imagine a better partner so real quick I want to table that discussion because we kind of glossed over something and I want to make sure that we talk about it we'll move on with you Megan um you said that you want to be a stay-at-home mom and you and then nine months you were like never mind I want to do something else do you this is a question for you as a working mother because my wife is a working mother as well and she gets this kind of stuff a lot from you know culture at large yeah how do you deal with people trying to tell you that maybe you're being less of a mom because you were the CEO of this company that requires your time and attention or like do you feel guilt on that kind of stuff like how do you deal with that I think at this point I don't really feel guilt but I've also been parenting for a long time and I think when my kids were younger I can remember one time my husband and I kind of had a deal of I was going to drop off the kids in the morning at school and he was going to pick up and we had a kindergartner at the time and I remember one day I ended up doing we swapped for some reason I was picking up and the kindergarten teacher looked at me and she goes oh it's so good to see you it's been such a long time you know like you're never around and oh it just felt like a knife to the heart you know because I'm like I'm here every morning you're just it's the other guy that's out here in the you know it's a different person but one of the things that we've been so intentional about at full focus is this idea of the double win you know which is what our last book was about winning at work and succeeding at life and so part of what I said to my dad when um at the as my career was kind of progressing and the business was growing and he said I want you to become the CEO I said that would be great I'd love to do that but the only way I can do that is if I'm done every day at three so I can pick my kids up from school you know and at that point there's a little further down the road I decided that that was the constraint that I wanted to put and I tell a little bit of the story in mind your mindset but we had adopted two boys from Uganda in 2011 they had a really hard history and they needed a lot of my attention in order to thrive and heal from those early traumatic experiences and I wasn't willing to compromise that and I really believed in what we were doing and I wanted to do it and I think this is a great example of what we get into in the book really you had a very flexible mindset which was hey if you can produce the results in 30 hours a week knock yourself out and that was so empowering for me because that gave me a story that then I could start solving for okay how could I do that how could I do that and I came up with a lot of ways to do that that didn't cause me to have to violate my priorities outside of work or the opportunities within the business Michael coming from your background being that you've been in these businesses you know essentially publishing content uh you know putting out ideas to the world that's basically the business you've been in since you started your career um but when you started you know things like flexible work hours and working virtually and things like that were not even a part of the conversation uh why do you think that when she brought that up your immediate reaction wasn't like well I I slaved work in this business and I built this from the right and you're not even willing to work past three o'clock well no you can't you know what I mean why why did you immediately just go like you know what if you can you can produce um it doesn't matter to me do what you want I think I've always been kind of a rebel and I hated the corporate mentality even when I was the CEO of Thomas Nelson publishers publicly held company 750 employees I hated all the corporate stuff and I would uh Buck the system which was a system you would think as the CEO I could have changed but sometimes cultures take on a life of their own yeah and uh I wanted to experiment with remote working and virtual executive assistance and all that kind of stuff and then I had my lawyers our HR people like oh we can't do that I mean just imagine you know people working on their own how do we know if they're goofing off and all this stuff and I felt like you know if you're not hiring right maybe that's a concern but if you hire responsible people and you focus on results not process better for them better for you and I literally always had the mentality of I don't care how long your butt's in the seat yeah to me what's important is are you producing the results and it never even occurs to me to think well did you do that in two hours or did you do that in 60 hours right right you know and and in fact kind of my value system is that honestly if it took you 60 hours maybe you need to go in the slow class what are we doing here yeah right yeah what are we doing here right yeah like you you are I think it's a fundamental like buckling yourself into the scarcity mindset and yes yes like well I'm paying you for 40 hours so if you did your job in 25 hours then that means that you owe me time or money back because I'm paying for it and it's like I don't know we're not you're not paying me for hours you're paying me for a result yeah if I accomplish the results and we're both happy with the results that was what the price was that you said you'd be willing to pay for the results so why does it matter if I did it in 20 hours or 40 hours that's so true hours or three hours like yeah exactly it doesn't matter there's not necessarily a correlation between the time spent and the value of the thing you create correct you know somebody could make an employee could make a phone call that has enormous positive consequences and it took him two minutes somebody could spend 60 hours or four weeks working on a project that basically is a waste of time yeah you know so I think you've you've got to create a culture inside of an organization where the focus is on results of matter and when you do that it becomes possible uh to shorten your work day you know to really achieve more by doing less I wrote an entire book on that topic called free to focus but it's it's really important I think to get very clear on what your high leverage work and what's the work that matters so you can say no to all that low leverage work that sucks up your time and keeps you from having a life yeah well said well said so I I really liked I really liked you guys coming out with this book because um I love your style of writing and I've thank you there's there's I'm not a big reader just to be honest with you if you would have asked anybody from growing up um if Travis would ever read a book every one of them would laugh in your face so uh the fact that I read any books at this point in my life is is a big accomplishment and this year I have a bigger goal and where I'm I'm on track for six books this month and trying to continue wow that's interesting that's great so mostly audio like I'm doing for foreign audio to physical is the goal Perma it counts either way information gets in yeah that's right um and and frankly I like listening to the book so I listen to Vision driven leader recently and uh and then picked up a physical copy and went back through it and just kind of highlighted all this stuff that's what I do as I was listening yeah so um took a bunch of notes on that so I love your writing style I don't my point in saying that was to say I don't often read author's work like multiple of their of their books and I've read multiple of your books I like your writing style it's very practical thank you gives me things that I can actually do today and and tactically Implement into my business into my life um this one I felt was like the precursor to all of your other books right is that you're not the only person that said that yeah no I in fact I started referred to it like I did this in an interview yesterday I said this is like the prequel it's the prequel right exactly because everything starts here yeah if you don't if you don't mind your mindset if you don't have this one thing mastered then everything else that you do is seemingly impossible like just you saying that you know get rid of low leverage work only focus on there's somebody listening to this going like but I can't you know like sure I have all these things to do how do I get them done there's nothing that I can do about that like you're speaking from this place of having an organization of people that can do work for you I've never like immediately start feeding their mind with like I can't here's why I can't here's all the reasons that this won't work for me and now you've written a book that's like hey actually it's just in your mind everything is comes down to your mind did you have any inkling of of that being the case when you're writing this book of like this being the prequel or like this setting all your other books up uh that way or was this some was this just a message that you felt needed to get out and it was an appropriate time to start writing it like we didn't have a sense of that it's one of those things that I'm very clear in retrospect I think for us though for different reasons but this topic of mindset this idea that we're always telling stories it's what our brain does and uh those stories ultimately can either be very helpful for us and lead to us taking the kind of actions that's going to lead to the results that we want or not we've both had very personal experiences with that and we tell these stories in the book and I think what we want for the people who are going to read this book is that they would be able to experience a whole new lever in their life with regard to success that would lead to breakthroughs and freedom that they may have been looking for their whole lives in some cases but just it despite their best efforts they haven't been able to get a breakthrough there you know our culture's so action biased and we talk about this in the book you know those of us who are high Achievers we want to just take better action or work harder those kinds of things but sometimes we're just kind of throwing good money after bad so to speak because the story that's informing those actions is never going to give us access to the solutions we need that's really powerful that one last piece you said there the story informing the actions that's everything sorry no I was just gonna say I never used to think about my thinking I I assume that my story was some version of the truth in fact I wouldn't say some version I would say that however I explained the facts of my existence and what's happened in my life the story that I'd constructed was the truth and it wasn't until I hired an executive assistant by the name of Eileen I dedicate executive coach yeah sorry executive coach who um who basically challenged my thinking and the whole premise for her coaching was that if you're not happy with the results or you want bigger better results the natural place to go as Megan said is action you know if we just work smarter or work harder or apply more Brute Force we can impact the results and we can to a certain extent but if you really want to get breakthrough results you have to go even further Upstream than that to your thinking because the the it's the story that that really leads to the behavior that leads to the results and so the most consequential thing you can do in terms of getting bigger better results is to examine your story and we talk about this in the book about you know identifying your story and that takes enormous self-awareness to think about your thinking and then interrogate the story and say is this really true you know the the different components of our stories are almost like Lego blocks and they could be assembled into anything I was at Disney World recently and I saw an entire Millennium Falcon spacecraft full size full size full size created out of Legos wow okay so people construct pretty often but that might get me to Disney right there but people construct all kinds of things out of the the elements and stories but but interrogating that story is necessary for imagining a better story and realizing that you know that story's not really serving me yeah I think I could have another story I don't know if you want to tell your or if you wanted to tell but the story of public speaking which then please opens the book well it's funny to think about it now because I feel like about 50 of what I do is speaking in some form or another you know whether it's a conversation like this or I'm on stage or in front of my computer doing some kind of live stream but I grew up with a debilitating fear of public speaking and it was a fear that nobody knew about except later fast forward my husband knew I didn't even know he didn't know uh our team didn't know and it all began when I was in high school and I had a friend who was delivering a presentation in front of a big class you know it's kind of one of those year-end presentations and she had a panic attack and she ran out of the room crying I don't know and found her in the bathroom kind of you know hunched over sobbing and unconsciously you know in retrospect I can see this but I developed this story that speaking is dangerous it can lead to Absolute humiliation and the loss of control of your body and that was like my worst nightmare and so as time went on I avoided any any experience that would involve me speaking in front of other people it got to the point so absurd in my 20s that when I would be like a small group gathering with church and you know you go around you read a little bit of a book or a passage of the Bible or something I couldn't even do that in front of six or eight people I would pass to the next person because I would start to feel my throat constrict and all those physical sensations of anxiety and so professionally I would just shut down opportunity after opportunity after opportunity that would come along and finally it got to the point you know now I'm working in this company and we weren't part Partners yet but you know we're I'm in the company and the team says you know we wanted this big event probably gonna be like 800 people there and we're so excited about it and you know you've never keynoted and we think the people would love to hear from you we want you to Keynote and in my head I'm like oh my gosh oh my gosh oh my gosh what did you say though yeah but I said yeah you know nervous laugh sure that would be great and I think the next day or next couple days I got on a trip to go on a business trip and found myself sitting in the gate in Chicago at the American Airlines gate solving myself texting a friend my friend Michelle saying I have to finally face this demon I cannot let it control my life anymore if it kills me I have to find a way to get a breakthrough and that began my most profound experience of confronting a story that had been so limiting for me and so constricting and I went through a six-week process of preparing for that event I literally wrote a new story for myself of how I wanted to experience being on stage I worked with an anxiety coach a speech coach I had medicine for my doctor which I didn't end up using but you know I just wanted in my back pocket in case and what was amazing as difficult as that was and it was very hard to to prepare for that I had a panic attack the night before the event when I got on stage it played out exactly like the story that I had written it was fun I felt confident I enjoyed it I connected with the audience and she killed it I'm just going to tell you I was in the audience I could have never I was never more proud yeah it was amazing and it was such a profound experience of realizing I'm trapped in this old story for 20 plus years of my life and then by changing the story I have access to a whole new experience of life and impact the most powerful things thing to me about any anytime you experience something like that is whenever I've had any sort of similar experiences the my next immediate thought is wonder what else what else we're not doing exactly what else I'm thinking I can't do that I probably can do it's like if I made that happen I never thought that was going to be possible no right you know but it went okay it did pretty well with it it seemed like it was received well you know what other things what other stories am I telling myself that is limiting me from stepping into this ultimate version of you know who like really can be and everybody has something may not be that dramatic you know I hope if you're listening that it's not that dramatic but but if it is there's even There's Hope for that I have people all the time reach out to me who are terrified of public speaking it happened just the other day somebody sent us a video about it you know that they had heard that story and it made them think just maybe and this is an example of interrogating the story just maybe that story they'd been telling about they couldn't speak because they were too anxious about it might not be true yeah yeah isn't it I mean isn't it the number one fear yes like it is for adults yes what is that Jerry Seinfeld yeah Jerry Seinfeld says that you know the number one fear that Americans say they have as a fear of public speaking he said which means that if you're at a funeral you'd rather be in the coffin than giving the obituary yeah it's pretty wild it's pretty wild but it it all comes back down to the stories that you're doing yourself and I love that idea of interrogating the story um and trying to really figure out where did this come from why do I think this way right and what evidence points to it potentially not being true yes um and uh there was there was another book I was reading uh recently uh I can't remember Limitless by Jim quick and he was talking about something similar um uh in in said to you know look at your look at your story and look for for those types of things and then to control the state that you're in as you're continuing to Envision what the next story might look like and I thought that was another interesting Insight because it is I I I feel that a lot of times it's like the the time where you want to re-examine things typically is the time that you probably shouldn't be because it's a time where you're against a wall of fear you're feeling anxiety you're crippled by this this you're you're in the midst of the pain like the pain point is the highest that it could possibly be and in that moment you're making the decision to I'm not going to public speak you know what I mean like you you are completely closed off to all opportunity of the potential positive future and you're only able to imagine the potential negative future which is just continues to breathe anxiety inside of you um and so I I again go back to Vision driven leader too I like the idea of just like go change your state get out of your normalcy whatever that means for you your office your your room your living room wherever you you know do your typical daily routine and go somewhere else and get out and get in nature or something or look at the ocean or or you know do watch a watch a funny show like put yourself in a positive mood so that you can start to Envision the potential and the possibility that because the future is nothing but possibility and you either make it negative or you make it positive it's not like it's not destined to be one way or the other it's only your desire or action that's going to make it that way and if you're only ever picturing this or envisioning with with this like just Vivid you know Vision that it's going to be negative of course you're going to try to avoid that and just I'm gonna I'm gonna just go ahead and stay in this smaller version of myself because that's way too terrifying yeah but I had an experience uh this last fall that that is kind of illustrative of that um I went through I had a heart attack in September and like I'm really healthy I worked with a nutritionist for years I worked with a fitness trainer for years and so it was like out of the blue I knew I had a high calcium score but on a walk back from the park my daily morning exercise routine um I started throwing up and I called my wife she picked me up long story short ended up in the in the hospital they did a angiogram and said you've got some blockages and we need to do bypass surgery wow well I was stunned shocked but I thought okay good I'm alive so that's good uh and so I went through that but but then I had to go into cardiac rehab this this by the way would be a great mockumentary movie cardiac rehab because it's hilarious what happens here but so so I mean cardiac rehab was seven of their people all happen to be guys and uh so they monitor your exercise that's like the whole thing we do it a couple times a week but then there's always an education lesson that comes at the end of that that first day on Tuesdays and so they talk about nutrition or exercise or stress or whatever so the very first one the nurse that's leading this says what does your heart attack mean to you now she perceives something very important there's the fact and then there's the meaning that you ascribe to it and I think that this is the thing we sometimes forget particularly in adversity is there are the facts but then we can talk to a story based on those facts and sometimes it serves serves us and sometimes it doesn't so the first guy to speak was sitting directly across the table from me and he's answering the question again of what does his heart attack mean to him and he says for me it means the beginning of the end you know now it's going to be a slow decline until I die I've peaked basically my life is over now if that's your story I mean bring on the cheeseburgers the fried chicken because it doesn't matter absolutely right you know no sense exercising it's all over that's like a totally different perspective he's honest that was good literal disempowerment disempowerment and when you think about the acts said that he's going to take from that place yes not going to be helpful yeah so so I had uh I was blessed in that I have a doctor in Los Angeles who I've worked with it for a couple years he he looks at my blood work he knows how healthy I am and all that stuff but he calls me when I'm still in ICU now I was still in ICU because they didn't have a bed in the main hospital but I was nonetheless an ICU he calls me and he says look nobody knows how healthy you are like I know how healthy you are because I've been reviewing your blood work and I've been talking to you every month and so I know but he said regardless he said I know it's tempting to second guess yourself to think about what you should have done or could have done and to kind of get in that Loop in the past he said I want you to forget all that he said you can't impact any of that that's history but he said here's the thing your entire life is in front of you he said you've you've basically rebooted your life you've got blood flow to your brain like you haven't had in longer that we know and he said this is going to make a big difference for you and so he said I fully expect that these next few decades however long you're going to live are going to be your most productive and your Best Is Yet To Come and he said I just want you to have that kind of positive outlook so I didn't go through any of the negative things that people sometimes go through when they're recovering from a cardiac surgery because of that positive outlook that story that I got from my doctor two different stories two different outcomes and I'm thinking to myself I better eat healthy yeah right I better exercise same event same event two different meanings ascribe to them yeah um man I I love this conversation for so many reasons and one of them is you guys know I talk a lot about you know networking Making Friends building high quality relationships and I find so often I pay a lot of money to go to Mastermind groups and sometimes I question myself and go why am I paying this much money to be in these groups it doesn't make any sense but then I go to them and I'm like oh yeah that's why I go that's why I pay this much money to be here because um I I've I have personally found and I would love for both of you to speak into this starting with Megan that in my life my mindset and how empowering or disempowering it is is fully at least mostly anyway dependent on the types of people that I allow into my life and the types of people that I allow to speak those stories into my mind um how how important is your environment and the people that you allow in when it comes to when it comes to your mindset online yeah it's critically important and we talk about this in mind your mindset that one of the the best hacks that you can use if you feel like ah I just can't quite Envision a better story you know maybe you've had some tough stuff in your past or it's you've got a story that's particularly entrenched this is where other people can be so helpful or detrimental the converse yeah absolutely but on the positive side they can be so helpful like in your masterminds you know where maybe you're you're encountering a business problem and it just seems impossible to you but then you hear somebody else share oh yeah I had that problem too and here's what I did and you know now it's in the rear view mirror well all of a sudden that shifts what you think is impossible that is is a way of interrogating the story and kind of using somebody else's story to get to something better for yourself and I think that is a powerful thing and similarly it works in the reverse you know I had a conversation yesterday what we about did actually that you know was with a consultant talking about you know some things we were working on in the business and there were like lots of good things but there were a couple of negative things that he just honed in on and and I I it really kind of threw me off you know like I I went home and I was like oh honey I had a hard day and I'm talking to my husband I had a hard day and I had this conversation and I just I thought this was going really well but then this guy said this and uh and he was like huh that's interesting you know he knows he knows this game he's like but what about this this you know he's helping me interrogate yeah and so then this morning we were talking about it and I thought you know what here are the facts and I kind of made a list for him and then here was the story that this guy was telling which wasn't completely wrong and some of it was was absolutely helpful but being able to have the objectivity to say I can listen to that negative input and then there's a moment of choice you know is am I going to accept that as the truth or am I going to say I'm going to take what was useful from that and just disregard the rest you know that's part of what happens when you get good at identifying the difference between the the facts which we're talking about things that could be on a police report or a financial statement or just I mean they're not that exciting you know it's just it's it's kind of basic and then there's the story and that's where all the energy and the emotion is you know when we can separate those two things then we have the opportunity to choose and so even though there are there are probably for all of us there are people in our lives that maybe are less positive than we'd like and some of those people You Can't Always Get rid of you know completely anyway yeah you're not completely you know what we can do is we can exercise our agency and we can be intentional about saying am I going to take that on as the truth am I going to make that my story or am I just going to let that stay their story yeah yeah that's so good um Mike I'd love to hear your perspective too on on the friendships that you've allowed into your life some of maybe the more empowering friendships I mean I look again you look through some of your books and I know I think if this is the same one as the one that I got there's all these ones at the beginning yeah so you have all these like you know past praise for books or whatever and it's like there's nobody in here that no anybody would recognize like Tony Robbins or Dave Ramsey or Dan Miller or Henry cloud or yeah there's not really not really anybody of note in these books but um we did the best we could yeah you know you got to do what you can with what you got right that's right um I'd love to hear your perspective on what friendships like these have done for you in in in terms of the things you've actually accomplished materially but then also in your mindset yeah I think it's um it's important to intentionally surround yourself with the right kind of people and sometimes those will be friendships sometimes people are in a disempowering family situation where the people are just negative or they want to play the victim or that's kind of how they explain their life sometimes you have to hire these people to help you tell a better story and I mentioned Eileen before but I can remember one of the conversations that I had with this executive coach Eileen this was back in the recession so I'm the CEO Thomas Nelson publishers it was August of 2009 and we had just missed the budget big Miss for July so she flies in she's going to spend the entire day with me as she always did every month and it was about 75 Psychotherapy and about 25 business coaching but she said she said hey how did last month turn out and I said not so good she said what she said what happened I said well we missed on the top line by you know 10 which was millions and millions of dollars hugs you're a big company and she's and I said on the bottom line we lost money and she said wow she said I'm surprised she said last month we sat in the same room and you assured me that you were not only going to hit the budget but you had a good shot at exceeding it so what happened and I said well the economy we're in this recession uh foot traffic at retail has really decreased and consumer confidence is at an all-time low and I said in addition to that where in the publishing industry we're going through this enormous transition from physical books to digital books and we don't know what how that's going to shake out and that's creating a lot of uncertainty and then in addition to that there's social media which we haven't quite learned how to harness but we know that traditional Market isn't working like we used to so that's why we missed she thought for a moment she said okay what was it about your leadership that led to that result and I was kind of offended you know I said my leadership I just got it done explaining to you what happened and she said well let me ask a question a different way if you could go back 30 or 45 days would you have done anything differently and I said yeah she said like what I said well I probably would have met with the sales team every day in a stand-up meeting just to make sure that we were pacing toward the result that we wanted to get okay what else I probably would have got on that that Walmart sales call because I you know pretty good at sales and I think I could have got more product into their stores than we ended up getting what else I gave her like three to five different things then she kind of smiled and she said so what you're telling me is it is about your leadership and and what she was teaching me was that the problem was in here now that came through somebody who ended up becoming a dear friend but somebody that was my executive coach that could see for me what I couldn't see for myself that I was playing I had a story in which I was the victim now the good news about being a victim not your fault you know I could tell my board I could tell everybody else that it was all out there and nothing I could do nothing I could do I did my best right I tried right but I didn't get the results but once I accepted her version of the story which is that I had agency and I could lead in a different way then all of a sudden yes it's my fault but all the power came back yeah yeah you you literally have the ability to do something at that that's right and the other way just well how do you what do you do what do you how do you improve yeah you do to make things better then if it's nothing that you can do about it and so many people have friends like that that reinforce you know victimhood or some other negative story and and it's a way of thinking and you got to be I think very deliberate about the people you let into your life to like the Jim Rohn quote you know you're you're the average of the people five people that you surround yourself with I don't know if it's 5 or 10 or 20 or whatever it is but but it does make a difference and the science shows that yeah absolutely absolutely well listen guys I I wish we wish we had more time as usual I love these conversations and can talk to you guys for a really long time but I want to be respectful let's get out of here to your next interview uh mind your mindset uh is there a specific URL that you won't be able to go to purchase this book yeah it's mind your mindset book .com perfect and at that URL there's all kinds of fun bonuses when you you go ahead and grab this book we've got a course that we just recorded together get the audiobook for free and then you get this neat self coacher tool that's really fun that kind of walks you through the steps that we outline in the in the book and it's sort of like a paint by numbers way of just doing this process on yourself it's an awesome thing to have in your back pocket perfect awesome thanks guys as usual if you're watching or listening to the show right now stop whatever you're doing go to mind your mindsetbook.com pick up a copy of the book I promise you will not regret spending any time with Michael and Megan go give them a follow on social media tell them you heard about him here on the show thanks for joining us we'll catch you guys next time