How to Become a More Effective Visionary

"723 - How to Become a More Effective Visionary.mp3

Speaker 1 [00:00:01] This is the Momentum podcast. Visionaries are entrepreneurs, but I think often we talk about how do I become a better entrepreneur and we don't actually ask the question, how do I become a better visionary? How do we get better at the part of entrepreneurship that is visionary? As entrepreneurs, we are that small percentage of the population that gets up every morning, goes into the future, creates a new reality, comes back to the present and demands it becomes real. That is what it's all about to be a visionary and now being a better entrepreneur. That's about time management.

That's about understanding the how to make yourself better at what you're doing, how to communicate better with your team. And a lot of the things we do to become a better entrepreneur also make us a better visionary. But today, I want to talk specifically about being the person in your organization, in your company that is leading the future, that's creating the future, that is creating that vision, that is bringing the vision to the table and making it happen. I'm Alex Charfen. And this is the momentum podcast made for empire builders, game changers, trailblazers, shop takers, record breakers, world makers and creators of all kinds, those among us who can't turn it off and don't know why anyone would want to. We challenge complacency, destroy apathy, and we are obsessed with creating momentum so we can roll over bureaucracy and make our greatest contribution. Sure, we pay attention to their rules, but only so that we can bend them, break them, then rewrite them around our own will. We don't accept our destiny.

We define it. We don't understand defeat because you only lose if you stop. And we don't know how. While the rest of the world strives for average and clings desperately to the status quo, we are the minority, the few who are willing to hallucinate. There could be a better future. And instead of just daydreaming of what could be, we endure the vulnerability and exposure it takes to make it real. We are the evolutionary hunters, clearly the most important people in the world, because entrepreneurs are the only source of consistent, positive human evolution and we always will be. I want to share, like, why I obsess over this, so in my 20s, I built a pretty significant company and I had massive opportunity and I didn't understand what it took to be a visionary. I didn't understand what I should be doing for myself to be a visionary. And here's what happened. I grew so when I was in my early 20s, I had this crazy opportunity. I was only twenty one. I think I was almost twenty two. And I signed a contract with Fuji Media. I had a actually I signed a contract with another company. I had a contract with Fuji Media, and I opened up a consultancy in South Florida where I had a manufacturer's rep firm where Fuji Media was one of my first clients. Then I had SanDisk the Flash Memory Company, then I had Fuji digital cameras, and all of a sudden I had this company where I was working with multinational organizations. They were acquiring a ton of attention from me.

I was like buried and I did everything I could to be a better entrepreneur. The way that the world talks about being a better entrepreneur. Here's what I did. I hustled. I got up earlier. I had a morning routine. I stayed up late. I worked weekends. I put more time and I put more effort in. I did all of the things that most people would have you believe would make you a better entrepreneur. And I was relatively successful, but I really wasn't like, let me tell you why I built this business in my 20s, that by the time I was in my late 20s when it was doing as well as it ever done, when I was at its highest level, at its most profitable, when we had the most business was when I wanted to get out of it the fastest. I wanted to get away from it more then than at any other point in time. And the reason is I didn't become a better visionary. I just stayed in that entrepreneurial place of hustling and doing everything and trying everything. And I didn't actually say, how do I elevate, how do I get to the place where I'm contributing at a higher level? How do I become that person who's building a better vision for this company? And here's what happened as the company grew and as I built my team, I had offices here in the US and Latin America. I kept doing everything. I got buried in it. I did the hustling thing. I did the working hard thing. I actually this is this was my belief in my 20s. The harder I worked and the more I did, the more successful my company would be. And here's what happened. The harder I worked and the more I did, the more I created a glass ceiling for my company and the more I created paying for myself.

I want to let that sink in because I think in the entrepreneurial world, there's this belief. The harder I work and the more I do, the more successful I'm going to be that has diminishing returns. Now, let's get real. When you first start your business, you have to hustle. When you first get out of the gate, you're doing everything. I mean, I often tell people that when more as entrepreneurs, when we start our business, we do everything. And then if we experience success, starting a successful business conditions us to do everything. And that's what I did in my 20s. I kept doing everything right up until I met my wife Cadey. I decided I didn't want to be in the business anymore. I was traveling way too much. It was taking way too much of my time. I wanted to spend more time with her and I sold it, but like not for what I could have gotten for it. It was kind of a fire sale because I wanted out and I hadn't elevated to the status of visionary. I hadn't elevated to the status of just creating the future for the company. The reason I had to fire sale was I was so involved that when I was pulled out of the business, it took a ton to keep it going. And basically I just ended up selling contracts to other companies that were already doing what I was doing and transitioning business to other people. And yes, there was an exit and yes, I made some money, but I could have done so much better.

I just didn't have the perspective of how to protect myself as a visionary. And let me tell you what I mean. I actually took some notes because this is really important to me. So when you look at what does it really take to be a visionary? What are visionaries do to be a visionary? You need creativity, vulnerability. You have to have to have a vision of what's possible. And when pressure and noise in our lives goes up, when there is noise in the tactical, when we get overwhelmed, here's what we know. I mean, this is fact. When there is more noise, when noise goes up, creativity goes down, vulnerability goes down, our view of what's possible actually goes down. This is scientific. And let me share with you the science behind this. When we get overwhelmed, when there's pressure and noise, we get triggered in the fight, fight or freeze system. This is an evolutionary system that that just happens. Now, if we're in that fight flight or freeze, here's what literally happens. The options we see in the world become fewer.

The future we see in the world becomes closer. We start getting into that temporary, like in the moment panic mode, even if we're not feeling it, because as entrepreneurs, oftentimes we don't know we're there, but we're in that place where we are literally doing everything we can to turn off our visionary abilities. As I say that to you, I realize like as I'm saying, I kind of got chills and I got some weird goose bumps on my arm because I realize in my twenties I did everything I could for me for what I thought was going to grow a business. But in retrospect, I did everything I could to stop myself from being a visionary, to stay in the tactical, to stay buried. That's why I got rid of that company like I did. And thankfully, I learned from that experience that I didn't want to put myself in a position again where I built a business right around me, because here's what I realized it takes to be a visionary. It takes space. It takes time. It takes movement. It takes doing things that inspire you. Here's what I mean by it takes space.

As a visionary, we need to create the space so that we are not tactically overwhelmed. Now, this is once you have a team, once you start building the company, once you're in that place where you have a team, where there's an organization around you, space is critically important. And by space, I mean time on your calendar, white space where you can go for a walk, get inspired, spend time with other people, do whatever you need to do where you're not tactically overwhelming yourself to be an effective visionary who takes time. It takes time to give yourself time to think, give yourself time to read, to absorb information, to talk to people, to have inspiring conversations. That is how visionaries create the future and it takes movement. When I say movement, I mean actual physical movement. If you're a visionary and you're stuck, get up and walk around, go for a walk outside, go lift some weights, go ride a bike, go jump in the pool, whatever it is for you. You know, oftentimes when I'm stuck these days, when I was stuck in my 20s, I would just sit at my desk and power through. And I can tell you now that even remembering some of the times where I did that, that there was a massive diminishing return. The more I powered through, the more challenging my ideas were. The more I power through, the less innovation there was, the more I powered through, the more work I ended up doing. And so to become a more effective visionary and the key is lowering the pressure and noise in your life as much as you can when you lower the pressure and the noise in your life. When you get out of tactical pressure, here's what happens.

Creativity goes up. Vulnerability goes up. Our ability to build trust and connection with the people around us goes up. When we're not in that tactical overwhelm, we build trust, we build connections. We have the right conversations. We seem more possible. We see more of what's possible and when we have one, when we're in this place of. Lowering the pressure noise and creating some movement and having some space and having some time, here's what happens. We create trust and connection with the people around us. We create trust in connection with our team, the people who are helping us grow our future, who are helping us grow the business. We're helping us make the impact and the income that we want to make in the world. We grow more connection with our family. You know, I always tell entrepreneurs, if you want your business to grow, focus on process with your family, focus on connection with your family, focus on trust with your family, your business will do better because it's not distracting you from what you need to do. That will lower the pressure and noise. And when we create connection and we create the space and the trust with our clients, with our members, with our market, that's where our business just absolutely takes off. And so. When we as entrepreneurs, when we reduce pressure and noise in our lives, everything changes.

And here's how you reduce pressure and noise in your business. There are three things required for your business, for yourself, for your members or for your team to be in momentum. If everyone on your team, including you, has clear outcomes, you know where you're headed, you know where you're headed at a company level, you know where you're headed a departmental level, and you know where each person's outcomes are for the week, for the month, for the quarter, when you have that information. It lowers the noise like crazy. Everyone on the team knows exactly where they're going to be successful. When you add to the clear outcomes, transparency and transparency for me is scoreboards. Well, I want to create a transparent company where everybody knows what's going on. So when each one each person has a scoreboard, when each department has a scoreboard, when the company overall has a scoreboard, you get into even more momentum. And then the third part, lowering pressure, noise in the business, lowering tactical, tactical, overwhelmed. It's giving people free, giving each person clear outcomes, clear scoreboards and clear accountability. If each person on your team knows their role and what's going on, it will be infinitely easier for you as the entrepreneur running the business to become a better visionary, to see a bigger future. And, you know, there's there's two types of strategies in business growth. There's linear growth strategies like I'm going to put a new funnel out and I'm going to get more business or I'm going to get another salesperson and they're going to sell more for me. And then there's exponential growth strategies that don't just go up like this. They actually kind of swing up and hockey stick straight up.

And exponential growth strategies are things like making yourself a better leader or supporting yourself in a better way, getting some personal help to offload pressure, anois one of the biggest exponential growth strategies that there is, is becoming a better visionary in your company, creating the conditions in your company where you will be a better visionary. Here's why. You know, as an entrepreneur, you have changed your life and your world in a day, you know, you've made decisions before that have completely shifted the trajectory of your life for the positive and put you into a place where you wanted to be. And as entrepreneurs, the decisions that we make the day to day decision making that we have, the day to day inspiration that causes us to go in a direction is what is going to create our future. And so when you put the conditions in your business where you become a better visionary, where you have more clarity, where you see the future, where you see the possibility of what can really happen, that is how you put your business on a growth curve that is exponential, not linear. This is one of the most exponential or one of the most effective exponential growth strategies I know. We teach every one of our members how to put these these systems, this, this, this how to put the conditions in place so that they lower the noise in their business and they become a better visionary.

For me, this has been life changing in my 20s, I used to drive most of what I did in business through fear or anger, they're almost the same emotion I would get frustrated with somebody or irritated with somebody. And then that was what would drive me doing what I needed to do. I lived my life Intacta tactical overwhelm. And even though in my early 20s I was in really good shape by the time I was 30, I was three hundred pounds on five different medications, cortisol that like crazy. And I had a hard time even paying attention. Sometimes I had so much brain fog from all of the stress and the frustration and the pain I'd put myself through. And I want to make it clear the pain I put myself through that was me doing that, because that's what I thought. That's what I need to do to be an effective entrepreneur. I contrast that with how I run businesses today. I've had a spacious day to day. I had some time to go pick up my daughter. I had a couple of moments of inspiration that were really exciting. I shared those with my team. Today I run my business not from a place of muscling through and pushing through it, but from a place of creating exactly what I told you space time, movement, inspiration so that I can lead my team with the fifty thousand to one hundred thousand foot level decisions that are the right decisions that put us on the right trajectory so that we go out and we make the impact that we want and let's get real. I've said it before, the income that we want as well. And so one of the fastest ways to move in this direction is to create a strategic plan for your team.

When you have a strategic plan that details all the projects you're going to accomplish in a month, all the processes you're going to document or improve, all the policies you're going to put in place, the people you're going to hire or promote or shift their positions. When you have a strategic plan that spells out everything you're going to do as a company in a month, you create massive clarity in your business. That first thing that I said, everyone needs a clear outcome. That clear outcome is created all at once for the entire business, for the entire team. And next week, on Thursday, I'm going to be doing a webinar again that we just did a couple last week that was incredibly well received. In fact, it was the first two times we did the webinar and we had conversion rates that indicate we had people who joined at the end of the webinar. They indicate that it was a very well received and I want you to see it now. You can just attend the webinar and I'm going to give you a tremendous amount of information on how you can create clear outcomes in your business through a strategic plan, because here's what happens when everyone on your team knows where the business is going. When everyone on your team understands the outcomes and understands the destination, it lowers the noise like crazy for you. You get out of being the biggest bottleneck.

You get your team out in front of you instead of having them behind you, tapping on the shoulder, asking, where are we going? You can move into running your business from a passenger seat where you are not doing any of the tactics. You're only in the strategy. And someone else is setting everything up and running everything and doing the things for you so that you can exclusively move into the divisionary seat, move into being a more effective visionary. Now, this is impossible if your team doesn't understand the clear outcomes that you have, if your team doesn't know where you're going, it's near impossible to do this. So next week on Thursday, join me on this webinar. The euro is Charfen dot com forward slash grow. And I'm going to spend about 90 minutes explaining why you need a strategic plan, what it's going to do in your business, what is required to have an effective strategic plan. And by the end of this webinar, you are going to understand how to become a more effective visionary, which will completely shift the trajectory of your business. So I want to thank you for being here with me today. I appreciate it. It means the world to me. I appreciate you being here. And so take a minute, go to Charfen dot com forward, slash gro register for the webinar. I can't wait to see you there.