Unlocking Visionary Potential

This is the Momentum podcast. One of the most challenging places to be as a visionary entrepreneur is the feeling that you have to do everything yourself. And right behind that is the feeling that you have to see everything, check everything, double check everything. Be on top of everything for what you want to get done to actually get done. That's why I'm recording this podcast because man, if there's anyone who understands that feeling, who has lived in that feeling, who has struggled with that feeling, I guarantee you that it's me. And it's part of the reason that I do the work that I do. And it's part of the reason that I want to share this with you. On Unlocking Visionary Potential. I'm Alex Charfen and this is the Momentum podcast made for Empire Builders Game Changers, trailblazers, shot 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, should 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. Let's just take it as a fact that as visionaries, visionary entrepreneurs who see a better future, who see the solutions in the world, who see opportunity in the world, we need help. Let's just be real. You can try and do it all yourself. You can try and do it all on your own. But the stories of legendary entrepreneurs that did everything on their own with no help either don't exist or they are mythical. The reality is, every single one of us has had helped along help along the way. And in order to truly change the world, in order to truly create the outcomes that you want to see in the world, you are going to need help. And one of the biggest challenges for us as visionary entrepreneurs is when we get in this loop where we feel like we've set expectations for the people around us, and then we allow them to go off and execute. And then we start seeing mistakes and we start seeing challenges and we start seeing issues. And it feels like we are always the person who finds the mistake, the challenge or the issue. And then we get into this place where we feel like we have to do everything ourselves or check everything and be hyper vigilant. And then we go back and try and set expectations again, and then we find the mistakes again. And then we have that hyper vigilance and this loop of expectation setting and feeling let down and feeling like we have to do everything over and over again creates this circular space of massive anxiety for us as entrepreneurs. In fact, this circular loop of not having our expectations met by the people around us, of not having the communication that we've made actually be heard and executed. I've seen that better future sharing it with people and then not having them do what we feel like we needed them to do. This creates a massive amount of entrepreneurial anxiety. It creates a massive amount of pressure and noise in our lives. And if there's anyone who understands this, it's me. You know, I've run businesses my whole life. I always share with people. The reason I ran businesses is that I had trouble following anybody else's rules. So I figured out that I realized I had to make my own rules. I had to run my own businesses. And in my early business days, this was a loop that I lived in. In fact, it was a loop that I lived in that I didn't even realize I was in until years later. I remember being so confident and so almost self-righteous that I had communicated to my team what I wanted them to do, and then constantly finding their mistakes. And it was like this self-fulfilling prophecy. I felt like I communicated what I needed them to do. Then within a few days or a week or, you know, a couple of weeks, I would find the mistakes, I would find the issues, I would find the challenges. I would see where they had missed. And then I would feel like I had to do everything myself. And then I would become hyper vigilant. And then I would start letting go again and start trying to get them to do it again. And then I would find the mistakes and I would just stay stuck. And this affected not just my business, but my life. It affected everything. It affected how I was eating. It affected how I was sleeping. It affected my health. It affected everything. You know, I don't share this often. I think it's been a long time since I've shared this on the podcast. But, you know, in my twenties I ran a very successful multimillion dollar company. It was a manufacturers rep firm called Sales Out. And we worked with some of the largest organizations in the world at the time. We worked with Fuji Media and Memorex and Target's and TDK, and through one of our events companies, we worked with companies like Microsoft and Bose. And, you know, these these are huge organizations that we did really important work for and and helped do some amazing things in the world. That's the bio that gets shared when I'm speaking on a podcast or that's that's a that's a paraphrasing of the bio shared on when I'm speaking on a podcast or when I'm introducing an event. But the other side of that coin is that business almost killed me. I was in this place of feeling like I had told people what I needed them to do, then always feeling let down because I found the mistakes. I found the issues feeling like I had to be on top of everything. And as a result, I ran a business where I was the keystone. I was the person who, if I didn't show up every day, very little happened in that company and it just almost destroyed me. By the end of my twenties, when I was in my early thirties, I was almost £300. I was on five prescription drugs. I had massive anxiety back then. They called it a bleeding also. Now we have other names for it. But I had gut issues. I had challenges all across the board and it was because I was stuck in this loop. And, you know, if you've been there, you know how it feels. You feels like it feels like you're finding the mistakes. It feels like your team's not taking initiative. It feels like you're getting deteriorating performance around the people around you. It feels like if you're not doing it, it just isn't going to get done. And that is one of the biggest levels of constraint you can feel as a visionary, because as visionaries, we create that greater vision. We see the outcome, we travel into the future, we create a new reality. We come back to the present and we do what it takes to make it become real. And if we can't complete that. Cycle of actually seen the progress in the real world. It causes us all kinds of issues. And, you know, I don't want to downplay the types of issues that it causes. You know, I've said this before, physiologically, you will feel the issues of not being able to complete that loop, of not being able to move forward and not being in momentum. You know, you might be like me where you gained weight and had eye twitches and got unhealthy and had heart issues and breathing issues and all kinds of other stuff. You know, I meet other people that have audio immune issues, that have things like that. They have chronic fatigue, that things show up, that they can't even be diagnosed. And the the key and the route out of this the road out of this is. Unlocking visionary potential through setting clear expectations. You know, I share with entrepreneurs often that unclear expectations are rarely met. Like, if we have expectations and we haven't clear, we haven't clarified with the people around us. A website just knocked over a trophy. If we have unclear expectations that we haven't, I just knocked it over twice. If we have it, if we have clear expectations around us that we haven't shared in a way of the people around us that we haven't shared in a way where they hear us in a way where they understand it in a way that it is easy to understand and impossible to misunderstand. Then oftentimes the expectations we have are not going to be met. And here's how I know I did it when I was younger. I saw the future so clearly that I just assumed everybody around me signed to and I would share part of the plan or I would share part of the vision, or I would share what I thought should happen. And outside of a system, outside of a structure, outside of a lot of organization and I would be so confident, like I said, even self-righteous. And when I'm self-righteous, I know I'm in trouble. I know I'm probably stepping out of line. I know I need to take a minute and really get introspective and see what my part in what's going on is. I didn't know it back then, but now I know. And what I know with perspective now is that when I was younger, I didn't communicate in a way that I could be heard. I didn't communicate in a structure, and I didn't have a clear plan. In the past couple of months, I've met with dozens of entrepreneurs, a lot of them one on one. I've been taking some of the sales calls for our organization. I've wanted to talk to the people who are coming towards us, and I see this exact problem, this exact challenge over and over again. You know, there is not a Fortune 500 company in the world that doesn't have a roadmap and a plan for the entire organization. Companies like Apple and Tesla and Google and Facebook have ten year plus roadmaps and plans that the entire team understands. And they understand where they're going and they know what they're doing. And in the average entrepreneurial organization, there does not exist a document called a strategic plan. And I'm not talking about the strategic plan that some of you might remember from business school or business plan writing software. Those don't really is not what I'm talking about, not that they don't have their place. What I'm talking about is a clear written plan of everything the company will be doing on a monthly basis and within each line item of what the company is doing, a document that clarifies each one of those line items. So anyone in the organization can look at it and say, Here's what we're doing and here's how we're doing it. And each person in the organization knows three things which part of the plan they're accountable for? So what are they going to be doing? What is the clear outcome of each part of that plan and how are you measuring success? I did those out of order. We typically share is okay so outcome what is the clear outcome then key is transparency like what is what is the measurement of success for that part of the plan and then accountability? What is my part of that plan? And if you have an organization where you can't confidently state that the people in your company have those things, then you don't have clear expectations of your team. I know you want to think that you do. Believe me. I wanted to think that I did. But if you don't have those things, you don't have clear expectations. The team doesn't have what they need to actually take initiative and get things done. And as a result, you will feel like you're in that loop of setting expectations, feeling letdown, and feeling like you have to do everything over and over again. And you know what it creates? It creates equity in fantasy. I call it the quitting fantasy because quitting is a fantasy for people like us. You know, you're going to get up tomorrow and do something. You know, you need to be in momentum. You know, you want to move forward. You're never going to just quit and but not end. But but what happens is when we are in this loop, we start having thoughts like, what if I go back to doing it all myself? Or Wouldn't it be easier if I just made everything smaller? Or it would just be so much easier if I stopped trying to do all of this? And we had these fantasies about stepping away, these fantasies about quitting, these fantasies about not doing what we were put on this planet to do. And that is demoralizing. And it robs us of momentum like crazy. And so the solution, the key to unlocking visionary potential is to understand how to get together with your team and create a clear written plan. Now, a lot of organizations teach to show how to do this on a 90 day basis. But our company I know entrepreneurs, I know visionaries. I've worked with so many of them. 90 days is a long time. We show you how to drive down to a 30 day plan that everyone on the team has in front of them on a daily basis. They can see exactly what the organization's doing. When you get into a cycle where you have a clear plan every 30 days or so and we have a five step process for this, we analyze where the company is every 30 days. You analyze, you look at everything that you could potentially do. Then you prioritize the things that you should do, by the way. Hard core prioritization is missing from most entrepreneurial companies priorities or shiny objects. And then priorities become what somebody else is doing. Priorities become the idea that we had that morning. Hard core prioritization shows you and your team a system of how to select the things that you should be doing every 30 days. Then you commit to that priority, prioritize, plan you commit for 30 days. You do everything you can not to change it, not to change it every three days, but to change it every 30 days. Give your team a time for that commitment period where it actually has a chance to execute, which is the fourth step. So you analyze, you prioritize, you commit to that plan, then you execute for 30 days. Now an emergency comes up. Or if something dramatic happens and you have to shift, you shift, but you do. That is the exception, not the rule. And if you allow your team to analyze them, prioritize, commit to that outcome, commit to that plan, execute that plan. And then at the end of the 30 days, you look at where you are and you renew that plan by going right back into another analysis. This plan, this this process of analyze, prioritize, commit, execute and renew will unlock your potential as a visionary. Because seeing so many of us are confused, that visionary skill set means that we can turn on a dime, we can change things, we can make things different. We can rehab, reprioritize every Monday. But really visionary, the most important visionary skill set is creating that vision and having it become reality in the world. And when you create a clear written plan through analysis, prioritization, a commitment period and execution period, and then you renew that plan with your team and you do that every 30 days, you will see your company start to grow. You will see your contribution in the world start to grow. You will see the impact you are making start to grow. And of course, your income, your profitability will go up because what you want starts actually being executed. And here's why this is so important for us as visionaries. We need momentum like the rest of the world needs oxygen. And the momentum of seeing our vision become reality is one of the most important aspects of momentum in our lives. When we see that vision becoming reality, it makes us want to do more. It makes us want to be more. It gives us the confidence to actually step up and do more and be more. And we see opportunity completely differently. The vision that you have today without having a process for clear execution is a fraction of the vision you will have tomorrow. When you have confidence in the process for execution, it will unlock your visionary potential and an entire new, entirely new level. And I'm sharing this for a reason. When I look at the world and if you listen to me, you've heard me say this before. It doesn't matter what crisis, what issue, what challenge we have. Entrepreneurs, just like you and me, are going to create the solution to get there. And I know if you're a visionary, you will create that solution and get there so much faster when you unlock your potential through setting clear expectations and everyone knows exactly what they need to do. If this is something that you're struggling with, you're not alone. So many entrepreneurs have this same issue. So many entrepreneurs have grown their business to a place that it is today through force of personality, and then you feel stuck because you simply can't do all of it. And if you have that loop of setting expectations, finding the mistakes, and then feeling like you have to do it all, it makes you feel like you're stuck. It makes you feel like you can't go forward. It's incredibly challenging and we want to help you. So if this is a place where you've been, if this is a place where you are, I want you to know two things. You're not alone and there's help. You can go to simple operations dot com. Answer a few questions for my team. Jump on a call with us and let us show you how we've helped hundreds of entrepreneurs unlock their visionary potential, grow their businesses like crazy, make a massive impact in the world, and stop feeling like they have to do it all themselves. Simple operations dot com. We look forward to hearing from you.