Why Growth Demands Change: Breaking Through Entrepreneurial Plateaus

0:01 Welcome to The Coaching Equation, brought to you by Empire Partners and hosted by Ryan Lang and Brooke Bishop. Our mission is to help you build a profitable and impactful coaching business by cutting through the noise and all the expert advice to deliver tried and true actionable insights that you can deploy in your business today. Each week, we bring on expert guests, unveil cutting edge tactics and strategies, and share the secrets and stories that we've gathered from working with the most successful coaching companies on earth. Welcome back to the Coaching Equation podcast.

0:42 I'm your host, Ryan Lang, CEO and co-founder of Empire Partners. And man, I've got a good guest today. If you are somebody who identifies as a high performer, and if you're listening to this podcast, you damn well better be. You are going to love this conversation because we're going to remove blockages. We're going to find the sneaky saboteurs. We're going to figure out what's stalling you, what's holding you back from your next level of growth. And I'm so excited about the guests that we've got to help me unpack this. Aaron Velke is on with me today. He's a visionary coach, speaker, founder, founder. He helps elite entrepreneurs redefine what success feels like by redesigning their leadership and their strategy for growth.

1:29 As the founder of Get Out of Your Own Way and creator of Living Vision Program, Aaron and his team have become trusted coaches to founders, executives and creators who've already, quote unquote, made it. but feel the quiet pull towards something deeper, larger, and more impactful. His clients learn to build companies that serve their life rather than the other way around and to lead from the front with courage, communication, and community in mind. A top 2% global podcast host... Author of Let Her Play, Aaron blends heart neuroscience and lived experience from coaching professional athletes, executives, and teams for over a decade.

2:13 His teachings unite the world of business, leadership, and human potential into a single pursuit, helping people live with vision, not reaction. This guy is absolutely incredible, this conversation. I think you're going to find to be extraordinary. Yeah. So let's get into it. This is Aaron Velke on the Coaching Equation Podcast. Welcome back to the Coaching Equation Podcast. I'm your host, Ryan Lang, CEO and co-founder of Empire Partners. And in studio with me today, Aaron Velke. What's up, brother? Dude, happy Tuesday. I'm so excited to be here. Happy Tuesday to you, man. Bro, I feel like this has been a long time coming.

2:53 And I'm so excited that you're here because... We've got so much that we're going to dive into and unpack today. And I want to kind of start. How would you let me ask you a question. I don't know that I've ever asked you this, you know, this directly. How would you describe what you do? I help men and women, but mostly men. that are in some sort of transition. Transition can mean a lot of things can mean stuck, can mean they've outgrown their business. They've sold their business. They're moving cities. They're ready for something big, but have been playing small answer. Yeah. The question, what now?

3:34 What next? And in that, there's often a desire for them to make some sort of quantum leap. They want to grow and they want to grow big, but it has to look completely different because more of the same would destroy them. That's what stuck feels like. If I stay here, I'm going to die. And my job is to help them build a very powerful, clear vision of what their future looks like and use that to redesign their strategy to get there. help them change and grow to become that person and that leader and that visionary. I love this, dude. I want to dive way deep on that. Before I do, what was it for you that... Did you have a personal story that kind of comes along with making that quantum leap?

4:22 Did you experience that personally? Or was it something that you kind of developed over time working with other people? How did you end up in that seat? Some of both. I went through my own changes and I find that... The challenge in finding help is that a lot of help exists at the top, not in the middle. So what do you mean by that? Like when you were there, quote unquote, there's all kinds of people that are like, oh, I'll coach you. I'll coach you. I'll help you. I'll help you. I'll guide you. I'll mentor you. But when you're in the messy middle, when you're actually going through the transition from point A to point B, that's where you want help. And I couldn't find it. So I've been called to sit in those moments with people and I've got no fear of going into the dark with somebody because I've been there myself.

5:10 And I think as I've evolved over time, the problem that I get called to gets bigger and bigger and bigger, which I'm grateful for. But it has this interesting mirror where the problem that I just go through myself and figure out how to get out of becomes the framework and the tool that I use to guide someone else. And I just happen to get phone calls from guys who are at the junction that I just happen to leave and find my way out from. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I've, Brooke and I find the same thing all the time, brother. It's so interesting because I think that when you have the ability and the opportunity to reframe a challenge and to truly, truly learn from it, Um, you can't help, but want to go, whoa, someone else has got the same challenge.

6:00 Somebody else is going through something similar. And it's interesting because I think it becomes a bit of a never ending process. How do you, how do you personally keep yourself sort of growing and expanding in, in the frameworks that you're using to help people as opposed to just going, well, you know, this is what I do and you know, it's good enough. My world demands a lot of growth from me in some capacities. So putting myself in the right environment around the right people is one part of that strategy. And that is a billion dollar strategy in a lot of ways, right? Get around the right people and you don't have a choice. Yep.

6:40 The second is I constantly am assessing whether or not the person I am can get their kind of results that I want. And so I'm always in this path of like, okay, I want growth, but do I want change? That's a question that I ask myself. It's a question I have to ask clients. Third part of that is I regularly look at... the world around me and take an introspective look at how can I show up different. And I think being introspective is both a gift and a curse. It has been for me. For many.

7:20 I want to think it is that way for many. To have awareness can be heavy and can extract a big toll. But with those things in place, I almost can't stay still. And in nature, the law of nature is either you're growing or decaying. And there's a very thin line between... those two states in business and in the pursuit of more and entrepreneurship and family and friendship. And to be aware of which one you're on is, I think, a skill in itself, but a honed skill that takes a lot of time.

8:01 Am I growing or am I decaying? And if you think of it that way, it becomes very simple to isolate yourself weather changes needed. Cause if you're on the decay slope, it might not feel like decay, right? Like when you, if you sell your business, it doesn't feel like decay. Sure. The next day when you don't know who you are anymore, it might, or if you're stuck for a week, no big deal. But if you're stuck for three months, that's going to hurt. And decay usually doesn't kick in. The feeling of decay doesn't kick in right away. It's a deferred feeling. We find vices and find ways around it rather than deal with it directly. So I'm hyper mindful of that. And I try to watch that in myself.

8:42 What is like, I'm sure there are multiple, but what would you say is one of the tools that you like the most that you use internally and with your clients to help figure out, am I growing or am I decaying? To kind of check yourself on that. Great question. The simplest way to identify where someone is on that path is to look at what their future looks like. Because here's the game that we play. We play a game of time. So we say, well, I've got to check off marker A before I can consider taking on triangle. So I'll give you a concrete of that, right? I've got to get my net worth to this number, or I've got to make this much money per year, or I've got to get this much money in the bank.

9:28 And then I'll consider... impact work, volunteering, learning to dance, building a podcast, writing a book, right? So we create what I call conditional avoidance. Conditional avoidance is the intersection of a meaningful goal by some arbitrary condition that we create, some arbitrary metric. And if we look at that meaningful goal, that's where we can figure out if you're decaying or you're growing. Because if you tell me that you want to be a good parent, if you tell me that you want to be in shape, if you tell me that you want to write a book, that's growth. Growing towards that is what we use as the marker.

10:08 And we play with time. I play with time. But we as entrepreneurs love to play with time. We're like, no, no, no, I'll get to it later. I'll get to it later. And we push it down the timeline rather than look at it as something I can weave into the strategy that I built. Yeah. I love that. I've got a phrase for that too. I call it when then syndrome. When then, yeah. When blank, then I can blank. Yeah, it's so true. That's such a big one too, man, because when we get stuck in that paradigm... So to use your point, I mean, it kind of becomes... Don't you think it's a little bit death by a thousand cuts? You were kind of talking about decay and how it might not be some big cataclysmic, catastrophic moment that we experience, but more so just making those decisions over and over again.

11:00 Oh, I can't this yet because of that thing. You do that multiple times over. And before you know it, that's your life. Yeah. Yeah. We are notorious for human beings. When I say we, we are notorious for noticing the delta of something, the amount that something changes, not whether it changes. So I'll give you a prime example of that. Fitness is a great herald for this. Successful people want to get fit tomorrow. Yep. So if I go to the gym, I get nothing. That's right. There's no person that can go to the gym today and get anything.

11:41 You get zero. And really, we could say, okay, you get 0.0001. That's right. Yep. So I need a lot of points on the data to register any kind of meaningful move. Mm-hmm. Also, if you don't go to the gym, you get minus .0005. 100%. So the downhill goes way faster than the uphill. And for something like fitness, we want the fast solution. We want a big delta. We don't like small delta. Hey, what's going to move... the meter the most. And we do this with business, right? Hey, how can I make a quantum leap? Well, the quantum leaps happen in change of process, not in making some crazy risky bet.

12:27 And a lot of entrepreneurs make crazy risky bets. And then they get clipped. More reserved, more seasoned, more experienced entrepreneurs have learned that when you change a process, you change those incremental pieces and eventually the long game clicks. But you can't hack health but so much. You can hack it, but you're still tracking really slow. And for those of us that say, okay, I'll get my health better when... What we've essentially said is, I don't have time. I don't have priority. I don't have the resources to make fitness a part of my process. And my job is to say, hey, wait a minute, wait a minute. If you wait 10 years, the cost of that is so much higher.

13:10 Yep. And that long game, short game twist is where many of us get bound up. Me included. I get stuck in the team. Oh, yeah, me too. Yeah. 100%. It kind of, to me, it's like the old analogy about like, you know, if you take a plane that's in flight and you adjust its course literally like one or two degrees, it's going to end up in a completely different place when it lands. I love that. If it was on just the same direct, you know, trajectory, right? Yeah. How do we... For those that want to go fast, in the entrepreneurial world, there are a lot of us that fall into that category.

13:54 For those of us that want to go fast, how do we truly come to a point where we embrace the journey... as opposed to the immediate outcome. Because I feel like that's what we're talking about at the end of the day. It's the willingness to say, look, I'm going to show up at the gym today, even though I know when I come home and I got to do shit. But if I keep doing it, five, six days a week for six months, I'm going to have a radical change. How do we embrace that? Yeah. Let's look at the physical definition of speed, distance over time. Yep. So I can do two things to play with that equation. I can play with the time, or I can play with the distance.

14:34 Most entrepreneurs, and I would say this was an earlier phase of me, I was primarily focused on distance. So I'm like, okay, I can go really far, but I wasn't paying attention to the time that I was putting in or the cost, right? We can think of time like cost. Yeah. Yeah. So time might be in entrepreneur land, time is like how many hours did you put in? Yeah. How many people? How much money did you put in? I think there's a really good way to look at that. And then we can say, okay, distance versus resource. And we can start to play with this equation. If we make the denominator bigger, well, we have a problem, right? We want to spend less. And that makes the whole speed equation way, way better.

15:18 I think speed and wanting to go fast is also part of the problem in entrepreneurship for the ADHD satisfaction. We want the dopamine hit of speed, but the answer comes in stillness. The strategy comes in stillness and fast when you're starting gets you lift. But this is one of the transitions. Eventually, you have to learn how not to operate under speed as the primary driver of your business. Because you will mess it up. I made more mistakes going fast, trying to cover it up with speed than slowing down. And slowing down has been my hardest challenge. But all my answers are found slow. And eventually, right, again, a more seasoned entrepreneur knows that if speed is distance over time, I can keep the time the same.

16:05 But if I can make bigger distance happen with less resources, right? people, leverage, money, strategy, then I'm able to move way faster. It looks like I'm moving way faster, but my moves are more strategic because they're a bit more accurate. Yeah. It reminds me of one of my favorite sayings, the Navy SEAL saying that slow is smooth, smooth is fast, right? Yeah. That's it. Love that, dude. You said something a little bit earlier You said, I can want growth, but I have to want change.

16:47 What did you mean by that? The common language in all of business, all of entrepreneurship, all of the lifestyle dialogue that we're having in the entrepreneur community is, I want to grow. I want my business to grow. I want to grow personally. I want my team to grow. And... When we say something like that, what we are inevitably asking for is change. I want change. I want it to be different. And here's the sort of comedy of it all. That's what scares people the most. It will be different. When you have a team of two, you don't need to worry about culture the way you need to do with a team of 11 or 21 or 51.

17:33 When you... are the salesperson in your business and you're the CEO and you're the finance director and you're the and, and, ands, right? You've got 95 hats. Well, you get to call the shots all the time. You don't have to trust anybody. You don't have to deal with your insecurities. And when you have a team of 11, you have to act and operate differently. You have to trust people and You have to build and delegate structures. You also have to allow someone and empower someone to move without you. Otherwise, you'll micromanage yourself to death. The pathway to growth for everyone is change.

18:15 We have to change the way we talk, what we think, the way maybe we leverage speed. We have to change our vibration. We have to change our frequency. We have to change who we hang out with, what problems we go and tackle, the way we use our resources. All of it has to change. So it's going to look different. And I think we often say things. I remember saying this. I like this. I don't know that I want our culture to change. Your culture will change. Oh, man, I really like our team. I don't want our team to change. No, your team will change. You know, I like my day to day. I don't want my schedule to change. It's going to change. My relationships change. My articulation, my product, it all changes.

18:55 And change is really scary because you cannot know the end before you go into the change. It is impossible. We can pretend, but we can't. Is that the thing that you think scares us most about change? It's just the unknowing about what am I going to have to experience? Or what is the end result? Is that what it is, you think? I do. I believe that human beings, especially creatives and entrepreneurs, are most delightful in their service, their product, and their business when they can be creative. But eventually, we get to a place where our creative process is stifled by our distrust of the unknown, by risk.

19:41 And we want to de-risk it as much as possible. No, no, no. I want it to be just a little different. Well, you just told me you want a 10x. Bro, nothing's going to be the same. Nothing is going to be the same. Here's my theorem for how growth happens. Take how much you want to grow. Let's say you want a 10x in every category of your life. Well, throw a 1 on the top. draw a denominator and put your growth multiple in the denominator. So now you have one over 10. That is how much of your life will remain after the change. So you've got to give up 90% of it. That math equation is really hard for people to swallow.

20:22 Where you live, how you talk, who you hang with, the way you navigate money, the things you know about money are about to change. You don't have to worry about some of these things early on. But when 90% of your life changes and only a 10th of it is left, that's when you know you're doing something big. This is, you know, I love you talking about this. I recently was deep in thought about this when I was reading Ben Hardy's new book, The Science of Scaling. I don't know if you've had a chance to get exposed to it yet, but he really makes the point that like, look... If you want to double something, okay, you can do that. And still actually hang on to a lot of the stuff that you got.

21:04 But when you want to 10x, 20x, 100x something, do something that... When you want to achieve a goal that most people would perceive to be impossible, you have no choice but to strip... your life and your business down to the 10% that is most valuable and, and build the 90% that is going to be required to get you to that somewhat impossible goal. I love this. What do you think? I'm curious. Do you, do you experience people coming in? I mean, when somebody comes to work with you, Do you experience people who come to work with you and they tell you all the right things out of the gates, all the big goals that they have, all the ways that they want to grow, blah, blah, blah.

21:55 And then they get inside of your program or they start working with you. And you can see clearly that they're actually resistant to change. They'll tell you all the things, but they're internally resistant to the change. I'd say it's six out of 10. Wow. And we often have to detour, and we plan for this. We have to detour around those hurdles. The story that we tell ourself is that, again, it'll be different. Like this person can help me or this person will guide me or I'll have like an answer. And what people typically want to invest in, in any kind of program, any kind of service or product is get me to certainty.

22:35 Take me to certainty. Yeah. Yep. Right. That's when we buy. We're like certainty. We've developed a method. I love our method. I know it works. It also takes someone being willing to leave their current position to get to their new one. That's the irony. You can't stay here and go there at the same time. Correct. And the walls are going to hit you. The insecurity, the fear, the relationship with the And I make no mistakes about it. You're going to go, this is difficult. This is not going to be easy. It is going to be simple. Just follow the instructions and tell me when you get stuck.

23:17 But if there's resistance, what we are looking for is why? And we dig into that really aggressively. The piece that I would want someone to hear is that for any program, mine, yours, somebody else's, If that person tells you that it's going to be easy, they're lying to you. And that's okay. Thank you. Some of us want that lie. Thank you. Some of us want that lie, right? I'll give you an example. If you went to a trainer, a personal trainer, you're like, hey, man, give me abs by the summer. It's November when we're recording. If you said, give me abs by summer, and he was like, cool, man, all you got to do is come in here every day and I'll take care of the rest.

23:57 Okay. You just bought the lie. You're not going to come in there every day because if he told you and said, listen, you're going to be in pain. For 35 minutes a day, for the next six months, you'd be like, oh, dude, I'm out. I don't want this. But we want the lie. We love the lie. The transformation and the change that we want comes at a certain cost. And there's two kinds of pain. There's the pain you pay today that makes the future better. Or there's the pain you don't pay today because you choose comfort. You choose the familiar. And then you got to pay the cost down the road. Yep. Yep. It's just deferred. Yeah. It's just deferred. And when it defers, it multiplies, right? It's like credit card interest.

24:38 So the interest on that loan is high. That's fact. So when we're in this moment where we are... we want the growth and maybe we're not self-aware enough yet to realize that we're actually resistant to the change. How do you help people come to the realization that that's actually what's going on? And I'm curious about this, like, you know, one coach to another here. How do you get someone to that realization?

25:21 without them going, well, fuck you, Aaron. Yeah, I do want that. I mean, how do you have that conversation? How do you bring them around to that? It is the hardest conversation. It is always the hardest. And I don't always win those battles. And I'm okay with that. Yeah. I choose to step into those with three considerations. One is that this person is scared or doesn't know the way. Two is that I'm the object that is most likely to get targeted because I'm an easy target. So I just have to be prepared for the laser beam to be fired at me, even though it isn't about me.

26:05 If I was guiding someone out of a burning building, no problem. They'd be like, hey, dude, you say anything, I'm going to do what you want because I want to get out of here. But often the pain isn't high enough for us to make that move. So if we have to go through a burning building, someone's going to be like, oh, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, dude, hold on. I'm not in a burning building and you want me to walk through the, you want me to walk into the burning building? Like, yeah, man. But on the other side of it is everything that you want. Well, ho, ho, ho, you're crazy. I don't need this. There's no reason for me to do this. I think I'm good. And all of a sudden, all of our excuses and all of our fears come up.

26:45 So I know that I'm getting the laser beam from that, but it can be a projection. And I have to know that. The third consideration is that someone has to be willing to choose. And they have to jump. You cannot fly and stand. Yeah. And I can't make that shoot the choice for someone. So my job is to sort of be a delicate mirror and ask questions. And I am delicate about that. I've learned to be delicate. Sometimes that doesn't work. So sometimes I have to go direct to the source and say, Hey, look, yeah, there, there's a fear of change here. Like, yeah, we're, we're not, we're not moving because this thing isn't happening.

27:28 And yeah. I've been in it. So I know this feeling when we discount the council that we have, we discount the mentor. And every single time I have done that, I have come face to face with that somewhere else. It's like, I don't know. I think life is sort of like a game of candy land. And it's like, you got to go, you have to go around this corner. Like there's no shortcut. You have I want someone, anyone listening, I want you to consider that when you conquer this thing, this wall, that's the other, that's, that's what the change, that's what growth looks like.

28:15 Yeah. We think it's, don't like that you, that the next level, you don't have walls. The next level happens because you get past the wall. And I'll give you a concrete example. We have, this happens often where guys that have done really, really well, million, two million, three million, $4 million revenue kind of companies, but it's all based on their back. Yep. They don't know how to lead a team. So we have to walk them through delegation. And what comes up is not, oh, no, no, that's a bad idea. That's a great idea. I love that idea. But, but, but, but, but. And those buts are usually trust. Those buts are usually, I don't know how to delegate. Or I have to do it all myself. They're belief systems about the business and why customers come to them.

28:57 They're beliefs about... the viability, the talent of someone else and their disbelief in a team, that a team can get more done than an individual. And what happens in that is the identity has to break from being the rainmaker to the visionary. You have to go for it, otherwise you're just a manager. Yes. And that process is a grueling one. It is very, very difficult. And if you don't beat that level, It's like a Mario game or Candyland. If you don't beat that level, if you don't get around that wall, you'll be stuck there. You're limited. There's a glass ceiling. And someone from up above can be like, hey, dude, there is another level up here.

29:39 But you have to operate different. Yeah, that and you just I mean, you just hit on the heart on the identity piece of the puzzle, which is huge, because I, you know, I mean, I think it's I think it's fact that one of the biggest reasons that we don't become the person that we want to become, whatever that next version of us is that we see, is that we're way too attached with the person that we brought to the party. Right. And you can't you can't become someone different when you're still toting the old version of you around. When you think about making when you think about making an identity shift, I look at that.

30:21 I mean, there are lots of different components, I think, that make up an identity shift and actually bring it to fruition. But to me, one of the things sort of circles back to what we were talking about earlier, which is which is action. I think so often we go, well, I'm going to... Going back to our when then discussion, right? Well, I'm going to go do this when I'm that person. Well, if you started doing the thing, it's kind of like I used to tell people when I was in my journey as a health and fitness professional. It's like, look, if you don't go to the gym right now, you don't identify with someone who is fit.

31:04 Yes. If I could tell you to go lift weights, you know, with compound exercises five times a week, and you'd be in shape pretty fast. But what I'd rather tell you is go for a walk for 20 minutes a day. In three weeks, you're going to be running around telling people, oh, yeah, I walk. I'm a walker. It's what I do. Then you're going to go actually, you know, we're going to go to A month later, oh, yeah, I lift. I'm in the gym a couple times a week. But that becomes, it's the action to me that informs the subconscious that we are who we say we are at the end of the day.

31:52 Do you agree with that? Is there something more to it? It's that simple. And I think you articulated it really well. The challenge for most people is they're looking for a condition to take an action. And what creates the change is I'm going to take the action and then I get the condition. This is the unknown cycle. We are introduced to the unknown. All we can do is take a first step. And once we take a first step, if we're truly marching into something new, we're back in the unknown. So all we're doing is if you're really in a growth path, every first step you take is back in the unknown. And every step that you take is a first step. I've never done this before. I don't know what I'm doing.

32:32 I don't know how to do this. I'm going to learn how to do this. The success of hanging with older individuals. And I use that term specifically. When you hang in my 20s, I hung with mostly people in their 70s and 80s. I got a lot of wisdom from that experience. I bet you did. Oh, man. And what they have is hindsight. Yes. We call hindsight experience. The problem is that people want experience before they get it. And they don't always connect the dots. You can only get experience backwards. Yeah. So if I'm moving through something that is completely different, if I've never run a team or I've never hired somebody, never fired somebody, or I've never been an online personality or I've never run a podcast or written a book, there's no amount of possibilities that allow me to get experience before doing that.

33:28 That's the silliest thing in the world. It'd be like trying to teach my son how to walk before he walks. Like, no, no, the only way to learn how to walk is to try walking. Do it. Yeah. And we talk about this with kids. With entrepreneurs, our language is different. But if a kid, right, if my son is trying to learn something, I know that there are a couple truths. He's probably going to fail a lot, probably going to get it wrong, needs a guide, and needs some examples to be set. And needs a lot of positive reinforcement to complete the change. Yeah. So when a kid starts to walk, we're not like, you're never going to walk, man. No, you ain't going to make it. You didn't do it today. No, we know that the end goal is there. And we know that the transformation will be complete.

34:09 when he successfully gets enough experience, but that's hindsight. With entrepreneurs, we're like, well, I wanna insulate the risk, I wanna prevent the failure, I wanna short seed the transformation timeline, I want it to go faster, I wanna accelerate this. And we often fail to put ourselves in the right environment where a lot of reinforcement exists so that we can get to the other side. But the other side happens when we put in enough repetitions. People want abs? Okay, well, you can't get abs later. You have to get abs in today's choice to go back to our fitness metaphor from earlier. So I think you described it really well. And the idea of getting experience forward is remarkably silly.

34:53 But I get caught up in that a lot because... I don't want to go through the change. It's all that. I just don't want to deal with the change because the change is sloppy, messy, heartbreaking, confusing, breaks our ego, and emotionally extolling. And we just want to avoid that. We want to avoid pain. Pay it now, and you'll be free. Or let this thing linger in your journal for the next five years, and I promise you, you'll live with the most expensive cost, which is regret. There's something in this that I want to kind of hit on here. When you think about this resistance to change, it shows up in so many different ways.

35:40 One of the ways that I see it a lot, we see this often with people that we've worked with over the last couple decades, is basically going, well... Okay. Yeah. I'm super excited. I'm going to say all the right things. And I'm going to come in and I'm going to start. And I'm going to start with all this rigor and energy and I'm all in it. And then right before I'm about to complete something... I'm going to get fucking shiny object syndrome and make a hard left turn and go start doing something else. And then six months, nine months later, I'm going to come to Aaron and I'm going to go, hey, Aaron, you know, I'm sorry, but I'm just not really getting the progress here that I thought I would get.

36:30 I'm a little disappointed with the outcome at this point. And it's such self-sabotage. What, how do we get people, how do we get folks on track and to understand that the completion of each step of the journey is important. It's not just seeing the journey and skipping all over the damn board, but actually completing each step in the journey, to get where you wanna go. My definition of shiny object syndrome is a fear of commitment. Ooh.

37:12 Yep. The reason that we are afraid to commit is that it would require a totally new set of parameters to live our life. You know, if you go from having no money in your bank account, right? A lot of entrepreneurs start with nothing. Right. truly bootstrapped, not by themselves, right? Life is a team game. So nobody's self-made. I don't believe that. But we start with very little. And then you get to a place where you have 100 grand in the bank or 200 grand or half a million in the bank. You have to operate differently. Your choices are made differently. And making a quantum leap, making a big change in what your lifestyle, your business looks like, can trigger all of the fears you have about whether you're enough, whether you're worthy, or whether you're going to be loved after you make the change.

38:09 And, and there's a, there's a lot that that's said very simple, but, but there's a lot in that. And anytime you exit one level and get to the next level, life changes. And I don't think we talk about the, the hardship that goes into that. The self-sabotage comes in for me when I start to imagine that this is not going to last. I distrust it. And the way this often shows up is I make an excuse as to why something's a better long-term track. Now, what has changed for me is now I look at, okay, five years, three years from now.

38:55 All of our work is based in three-year horizons. But let's say I look at five. I love that. So I say, okay, in five years, who am I? How do I act and operate? What do I do? What challenges do I have? How do I navigate problems? How do I show up for triggers? How do I lead my people and give them something to aspire to? Well, it takes a lot of pressure off the moment. I don't have to get it all today. And when we're right at the cusp of some kind of jump, the likelihood of self-sabotage goes up, right? Because now I'm like, it's happening. Yeah. A lot of self-sabotage, it builds up like, okay, I'm good, I want this, I want this, I want this.

39:35 And then we're like, oh my God, it's like happening. Do I have enough? Am I good enough? Am I a fraud? I've worked for years to become this, but now on the precipice of it, I'm having all these doubts. Maybe I'm not good enough. Maybe I don't have what it takes. Well, the only way to know that is to go through the door. But that moment requires this deep connection to where you're going. And I find that the only way that I have the courage to do it is if I connect it to something longer term. I extend out and say, this moment isn't about this moment. I could totally flop. That's a possibility. But if I look at five years from now, I've mastered moments like these. And the way that I show up in these moments in the future is X.

40:16 And I want to act like X. Yeah. And there is a wisdom, I think, in acting as if, not as a portrayal, as an experiment. It's well said, brother. And I love what you're saying because it's the realization that neither success nor failure happen in a vacuum ever. They're on a continuum. They're always on a continuum. And I, that is so wise because I think at that moment, I agree with you. I think it does ultimately come down to a fear of failure. And also we, we put, you know, what exactly, what, what exact, what meaning have we put on failure and what constitutes failure?

41:06 You know, there have been plenty of times where the average human being would look at something that I did or that we did as a company and went, wow, you guys really shit the bed on that one. You know, yeah, maybe, but, I don't know. Yeah, but I think I look at it as like, I agree with you. I think, I don't know about you, but one of the things that I see a lot in entrepreneurs is when they hit that point where there's all this gusto and we're going to go do the thing. And then, you know, whether it's a new strategy or a new product or whatever it is, and then they hit that fear of failure, And they start thinking about, oh my God, what happens if this doesn't go the way that I think it should or the way I think others think it should?

41:59 Or what happens if I quote unquote fail? And then we self-sabotage and make that hard left turn. Whereas if you just said, you know what, Chip, I'm just going to follow this through because I think one of the biggest things, Aaron, that holds us back... is our resistance to these moments that could provide us data if we would just keep going. I think we lose all the data when we stop and don't just complete the process. Man, I love that. Yeah, we base a future on a moment. Yes.

42:40 That's a really unfortunate thing. Circumstance to be in. Yep. Right. I'm not a good speaker. Well, you've only spoken once. So maybe there's need for more data. I love I love this approach. In the world of growth and change. having more data makes you more power. I mean, dude, we're living in an age where whoever possesses the most data wins. Yes. A hundred percent. Yep. I completely agree. I completely agree, man. Um, just to kind of, just to kind of wrap this up, I would love to hear this from you.

43:23 You and I have had plenty of discussions about the entrepreneurial journey and good times, bad times, everything in between. Um, I know so many people right now. I always know people because we play in this game of entrepreneurship that are in this spot. But especially right now, I can think of several people who are just in a spot where it seems untenable, where it seems like the latest thing that just didn't go the way that they thought it was going to go, you know, is starting to tip them towards, oh, my God, I don't know if I can do this. I don't know if I can keep hanging on. What would you, through your own experience, through working with clients at the level that you do, what would you tell somebody who's in a moment like that right now?

44:14 I will say to you listening and to you, Ryan, what I will tell myself. I have these conversations often. I think that that's the illusion is we don't have these conversations. Right. That's right. Maybe that's the first thing to dispel. So I often say, Aaron, look, this is a hard moment. So I try to look at this as future Aaron talking to me. Yes. And so I'm like, Aaron, you know, this, this is a hard moment. I know that. And I need you to know that this, this does work out.

44:54 But if you turn back now, we don't get to meet. We don't get to sit in the same space and acknowledge all the progress. I know that you're full of fear and I know there's this insurmountable object. I can only tell you that from up here, it's not insurmountable. And what you have to learn in this moment is how to move the rock. You have to learn that. And I know you don't want to have to learn it. Dude, I say this to myself way too fucking much where I'm like, you have to learn how to get through this moment. Because the you in the future, me sitting here, what makes me me is that I know how to navigate moments like this.

45:40 I don't panic anymore. I don't doubt anymore. I don't fret anymore. I just move. And what you're really learning to do is you're learning to trust. You're learning to trust yourself. You're learning to trust the ups as much as the downs. And in a way, this moment is a recording of a very big lesson for you. And I have these journal reflections often because I can't see the context. I'm too in it. I'm in the forest. I can't feel it. I can't see it. It just looks like doom. And I've had, man, I've had really difficult circumstances personally, professionally that The only way I could get through was to look at something really big and say, if I choose out right now, I never get that.

46:34 And I promise you, I'll tell everybody here, that had everything to do with my son. So I have two futures. I can look at him at 18 and think about that moment and say, in that conversation... that as I'm talking to him at 18, he says, dad, I'm really proud of you for what you've been through so that you could be here. Or the other option is he says, dad, where the fuck were you? Those are my options. And I get incredibly emotional because then the choice is easy. Right? Now it doesn't make it less painful, but it makes it easy.

47:15 If I say, okay, that's the future I want, where he's like, dude, I know what you had to go through. I understand it now. Thank you. then the choice today is simple. And the ripple effect of your choices is so big. And you don't know who's watching. I will say that to anybody, man, if you're in it, like you don't know who's watching. It could be your kid. It could be your friend. But in your moment of despair, you might deny someone a model to follow. Hmm. we're just going to stop right there.

47:58 That is a mic drop moment. That's so well said, brother. Aaron, thank you. First of all, thank you for being here. And I want to just truly honor you, brother. You are... In the short time that we've known each other, you are one of the most genuine human beings I've ever known. You're such a great model of somebody who doesn't display perfection. But... that drives on towards the goal and the outcome, even, you know, no matter what. I love the way that you serve others with such heart the way that you do. And I love what you're doing in the world, dude. If people want to... Let's start here.

48:41 First of all, people want to connect with you. What's the easiest place or the best place for them to go connect with you? Okay. Instagram, LinkedIn, Facebook, easiest place to search my name. All my accounts are the same. Thanks for a name that's a bit unique. So Aaron, A-A-R-O-N, V is Envision, E-L-K-Y. Really easy to find me there. If this conversation moved you, if you feel stuck in transition, if you feel unclear on what's ahead, we've got... an array of different ways to help from retreats to one-on-one days to larger coaching packages to, uh, to team experiences.

49:26 And you can find all that at our website, www.living.vision. You can check it all out there. Amazing. Dude, thank you. I'm excited to do this again. I feel like there will be more of these. But thank you again for coming, for being a part of this, for inspiring somebody who's listening right now. Thank you for being your brother. Love you. Thanks, Ryan. Thanks for having me. And I appreciate you all tuning in. Thanks for listening to this episode of the Coaching Equation Podcast. Until next time, take care. Thank you for listening to this episode of The Coaching Equation. Please hit subscribe wherever you listen to your podcasts.

50:08 And if you got value out of this episode, we would be so grateful if you would share it out with a friend and leave us a review on iTunes or your favorite platform. To learn more about Empire Partners or to inquire about working with Ryan and Brooke, please visit www.empirepartners.io forward slash go. .