Unfazed Under Fire Podcast
Welcome to Unfazed Under Fire, a podcast designed to help senior executives lead with greater impact, resilience, and well-being. Each episode is rooted in proven, systemic frameworks that empower leaders to achieve extraordinary results, foster high-performing cultures, and thrive in today’s complex and unpredictable business environment.
I created this podcast for two key reasons:
First, to provide executives with leadership principles and culture-enhancing frameworks that support them in turning their visions into reality and achieving their goals.
Second, to challenge and inspire the leadership development and executive coaching fields to adopt new approaches—particularly breakthroughs in neuroscience—that accelerate growth and enhance leadership effectiveness.
In a time of global crisis and unprecedented challenges, business leaders are uniquely positioned to drive change that unites rather than divides. By embodying enlightened leadership, executives can create environments that unlock the full potential of their teams and generate innovative solutions for a better future.
If you're an executive committed to this kind of leadership, this podcast is for you. Let’s shape the future of leadership together.
Unfazed Under Fire Podcast
Secrets for Supercharging Your Confidence, Success, and Fulfillment with Dre Baldwin
Ever wonder how a high school benchwarmer could pivot to become a professional basketball player and then a successful entrepreneur? Dre Baldwin, the dynamic CEO and founder of Work On Your Game, Inc., shares his extraordinary life journey, revealing the grit and passion that propelled him from the sidelines to playing ball overseas for nine years. Struggling against skepticism and embracing a late start in basketball, Dre’s story is a powerful testament to the relentless pursuit of one’s dreams despite the odds. His experience is not just about sports—it’s about the mindset and determination required to transform aspirations into reality.
Dre’s transition from the basketball court to the entrepreneurial world has been nothing short of inspiring. By developing the Work on Your Game framework, he empowers executives and entrepreneurs to achieve peak performance through consistent practice. His insights into leveraging discipline for confidence and how mindset principles transcend sports provide invaluable lessons for personal and professional growth. Dre’s foray into YouTube, initially a hobby to preserve VHS footage, evolved into a platform that united a community around shared learning, showing how digital spaces can amplify one’s influence and reach.
In a world where leadership often hinges on authority, Dre emphasizes the human element—connecting with people and understanding their unique motivations. Leadership, he argues, should inspire voluntary followership, not enforce compliance. Through his story, listeners gain fresh perspectives on the importance of team dynamics, the value of soft skills, and the art of motivating individuals. Tune in to explore how these insights can help leaders not only achieve their goals but also foster communities of meaningful engagement and shared success.
To connect with Dre, follow any of these links:
Unfazed Under Fire Podcast - Host: David Craig Utts, Leadership Alchemist
Welcome to Unfazed Under Fire, a podcast designed to elevate your leadership and amplify your impact. Each episode offers valuable insights to help you transform your vision into reality, cultivate high-performing cultures that attract top talents, and navigate the complexities of today's uncertain, chaotic world with confidence and clarity. Now tuning into your needs, here's your host and moderator, seasoned executive coach and leadership alchemist, david Craig-Utz.
Speaker 2:Welcome back tophased Under Fire. I'm David Craig Utz, the leadership alchemist, your host and moderator for this show. Now, this show is dedicated to helping executives amplify their leadership impact, gain fresh insights and build the resilience needed to thrive in today's unpredictable, crazy world. And we feature two types of guests on the show First, thought leaders in leadership development, organizational culture and team dynamics who can share strategies tailored to meet your challenges as an executive. And we also feature seasoned executives who have embraced their own leadership development journey fully and who recognize that people and culture are the keys to maximizing organizational value, because they are At its core.
Speaker 2:This shows about pioneering breakthroughs in leadership and culture, ensuring you provide rewarding work experiences while also inspiring excellence in others towards the greater good and fulfilling your vision. And culture is created and sustained through leadership. Thus, leadership is the core of your succession. And culture is created and sustained through leadership. Thus, leadership is the core of your success. And we believe that effective leadership begins from within. The true impact comes from first igniting the human spirit that lies in weight in each of us and then following a path of self-mastery, which is the foundation for leading others with clarity and confidence. And in these disruptive times, self-mastery isn't just beneficial, it has become essential to your success. When executives harness their inner resources and lead from the inside out, they unlock the full potential of collaboration, the most powerful unifying force any organization can wield. So today we're joined by special guest Dre Baldwin Dre, welcome to the show, glad to have you.
Speaker 3:David, I'm excited to be here. Thank you for having me on.
Speaker 2:Well, now I want the audience to get a sense of why I'm so excited about having you on the show, so let me share a little bit of your remarkable journey. Dre Baldwin is a CEO and founder of Work On your Game, incorporated is a CEO and founder of Work On your Game, incorporated. He's delivered four TEDx talks on discipline, confidence, mental toughness and personal initiative, and has authored an impressive 35 books. He's worked with national brands like Nike, gatorade, buick and Wilson Sports, just to name a few. And Dre, his impact has been undeniable. He's published over 30,000 pieces of content, reaching an audience of over 105 million worldwide. His daily work on your game podcast Masterclasses class has surpassed over 3,000 episodes and boasts more than 7.5 million downloads, which is another incredible achievement.
Speaker 2:Now Dre's personal journey is inspiring, from sitting on the end of his high school basketball team's bench to launching a nine-year professional basketball career that took him to eight countries, including Lithuania, germany, montenegro, and he exemplifies what it means to rise from passion, grit and determination. Now what's truly remarkable is how Dre has taken the lessons of his athletic career and created the Work on your Game framework, which helps entrepreneurs, professionals and now business executives master their performance, consistency and, of course, their results. Now, I'll admit I wasn't familiar with your work, dre, until you reached out to me with that video asking to join Unfazed Under Fire, and after learning about your incredible journey, I knew right away you're exactly the kind of leader I want to have on to have these deep, impactful conversations that we have with other leaders. So thank you again for reaching out. I appreciate it, you know on a personal note yeah, it did work.
Speaker 2:I appreciate it, and I know you also are a native of Philadelphia. You now call Miami your home and you live with your wife and son. Is that right? Do I have that right? Yes, yeah, great. So I'm excited to have this conversation and let's dive in and let's get started. Like I do with all my first time guests, I'd like to just to kind of share your story in your own words. Now I'd like you to start with. You know that little kid that dreamed of playing basketball. Where did that all get started? I know you weren't exactly built for the game at first, but you had this passion, and so maybe start there when, if you remember back then, and talk a little bit about that and then take us up to present day.
Speaker 3:Where it started, david, and I'll give the, let's say, the three minute version of that. From then to now is uh it's always in the sports.
Speaker 3:You know had athletic genes in me so I was always into playing. You know, backyard sports, kickball, some. I had a portable basketball court. We play on that, the ones where you can adjust, you can dunk on it, uh, two, two hand touch football in the driveways and that kind of stuff. So it's was always into different types of sports.
Speaker 3:Tried out a few sports, you know, officially I think my mom put me in a tennis camp once. Didn't really play, never really played tennis, not seriously. Played some baseball for a few years. Tried out for tackle football, but I never seriously played that. I never actually put the equipment on and actually hit in football and in baseball I did play, but I could see that my ceiling in baseball was probably mediocrity. I wasn't really that good at it.
Speaker 3:Got around to basketball around age 14, which I was aware of the game of basketball, but I had never really played it to where I was just doing basketball all the time. So 14 is pretty late to choose a sport if you want to go somewhere in that sport, such as playing in college, let alone playing at the professional level. So I barely made my high school team. Only played one, my senior season and that one season I had a front row seat to the games, right there on the bench watching all my teammates play because I wasn't playing.
Speaker 3:And then my going to college. I walked on that at Division III college, which is for those who don't know the sports world that's the third tier of college sports. That's not the level that you see the pros coming out of. They usually come out of the Division I schools, the stuff you see on TV. So getting out of college, no one was checking for me to play at the pro level. Nobody was calling me or asking me to come play. So my first year after graduation I worked a couple of quote-unquote regular jobs worked at footlocker selling sneakers as an assistant manager. Worked at a gym called bally total fitness selling gym memberships. Bally's out of business now, david, but not because of me.
Speaker 3:I sold a lot of memberships for them while they were, while they were still around, and then one year removed from graduation, and we give everyone a time frame. I graduated from college in 2004, so in 2005, summer 2005, I went to this event called an exposure camp, and exposure camp is like a job fair for athletes. So it was a place that everyone who wants a job but doesn't have one in the basketball space shows up with the the idea of being able to prove ourselves as good enough to get one of those available jobs playing a professional sport. And there may be 200 guys who show up to a camp like this and we're all trying to show that we're good enough to play it at the pro level and not everybody's going to get it. Not everybody's going to get that opportunity. So this is kind of like a meat market. There's like a casting call and I went to one of these events. It's only two days long Saturday and Sunday Played pretty well there. So from there I got a scouting report written by a third party who was saying, hey, this guy, dre Baldwin, can actually play. That was very valuable because up to that point, the only thing I had on me was what I said, and we know that what someone else says about us is more valuable than what we say, at least in that sense, in a marketing sense. So this is some social proof.
Speaker 3:And then I had the footage from the event and this footage was very important for me because my collegiate career was only playing against division three players, and most of these guys had no professional aspirations, nor did they have professional talent. But playing at this exposure camp I was playing against guys who were pro level guys. So this footage was more important than anything I had done on a collegiate level and I leveraged that and I'll tell the story of how I leveraged it because it's very relevant to the story. When I got back I'm from Philadelphia, pa. This exposure camp was in Orlando, florida, by the way. So me and a couple of college teammates who had similar pro aspirations we drove to Orlando. This is about a 19-hour drive from Philly to Orlando. Then we had to drive back because I had to be back at work on Monday. So I had to negotiate with my boss to get the weekend off and I had to be back at work on Monday?
Speaker 2:Is that at Bally? You were working at Bally at that time.
Speaker 3:We were working at Bally. At that time it was Bally Total Fitness. Yes, so this is retail. Bally Total Fitness is retail sales, and anyone who's ever worked in retail knows that getting off Friday, saturday, sunday is unheard of. Everybody has to work.
Speaker 3:So I had to negotiate with him yeah. So he said, yeah, as long as you can make it up. And he didn't care about the days. What he cared about was the volume, the sales. I was the top salesperson at the gym at that time, so he didn't want his top guy not at work. So I told him I'd make up for it, which I did, and I started cold calling basketball agents when I got back home to Philadelphia. Because again, in the sports world, as well as the literary world sometimes and also the entertainment world, when you're a known talent, the agents call you because they see you have an opportunity to get a job, they hook you up with a job, they make some money by being a middleman. But no agent was calling me because nobody knew who I was, at least in the pro basketball space. So I had to call them. So this is not normally what happens. So I'm calling agents.
Speaker 3:I called about 60 of these guys. If I found a phone number on Google. I called them this is 2005 again and I called about 60 of them. I got in touch with about 20. I got the messages, sent emails, but I got in touch with 20. And I said I told them who I was, what I had. I got this video, I got this exposure camp scouting report. They said, okay, send me what you have. And I sent my material to 20 of these agents. Now, that sounds generally pretty simple, david, until people realized that YouTube was not out yet, so this was not a link that I was sending them. This was a thing called a VHS tape.
Speaker 2:Yeah, you remember the VHS tapes, david. I remember that, I remember that.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so I was mailing copies. I had the master tape and I had a double-decker VCR at home. So I don't know if you have a big audience of people under the age of 30. But if you have a big audience of people under the age of 30, but if you are, ask your parents, you can Google it VCR, vhs. I was making copies of these tapes physically, mailing them out in bubble mails. That's crazy.
Speaker 2:That's crazy.
Speaker 3:Yeah, so that's how I started sending my material to agents. Out of the 20 I sent it to, one of those agents got back in touch with me, or I was able to get back in touch with him, and he said, ok, hey, I will represent you. He became my agent. He helped me get my first job. That was in Kaunas, lithuania, in the fall of 2000 or late summer of 2005. So that's where my basketball career started. So should I keep going from here? Oh, absolutely.
Speaker 2:That's good, that's good, that's good. Well, in that you were getting a lot of, there's a determination in you that was part of what made Dre tick. I would imagine it's always kind of been with you because there was a lot of no's that life was giving you like nope, nope, nope on. And how does that inform you today in the work that you do? What is it that kept you hearing that what has appeared to be a no, but you didn't take it as a no. You made me take it as a side. I got to do work harder, do more or whatever. How did you remember how you were related to that and what kept you going?
Speaker 3:Competition. It's just the competition of going against the situation and then just the kind of like the boogeyman you set up. So it wasn't any individual person I was going against.
Speaker 3:It was the situation was? I started playing when I was 14. So most of the kids in my neighborhood said, well, dre's not going to go anywhere in basketball. So I was competing is that to make the high school team, which I did, but I didn't really play. Then nobody was probably thinking I was going to play in college. So I competed against that to play in college and then in college it's not like I set the world on fire at the division three school I played, but it's not like I was some superstar. So I was competing against that.
Speaker 3:And again, these might be stories that I made up in my own mind and people saying, well, dre's not going to go any further than he went that far, he's not going any further than that. So it was just looking to find those situations to compete against and prove to myself from my own vanity that this effort that I had put into playing basketball was actually worth it. And then every time I could see myself kind of sniffing the opportunity of it possibly happening. It gave me more motivation, if you will, to keep trying because, hey, maybe this is actually going to work out.
Speaker 3:So even once I started playing at the pro level, david, I would see other players who were also pro and I say, well, these guys are not even that good. I mean, maybe they just got a lucky break to get their shot. I had to kind of get lucky to get my shot and so I figured, ok, I don't want to be just someone who got one shot. So now I got to ahead of those guys. Now I see more people. I say, well, let me try to play another year. And then I said, okay, well, what else am I? Basketball is the best job I could possibly have, which is still verified to this day, even as an entrepreneur. It's a better job than being an entrepreneur.
Speaker 2:And I said, well, I'm going to just stick here stay in this as long as I can, which is exactly what I did, and you right, is it nine years?
Speaker 3:Nine years yes.
Speaker 2:That's awesome. That's awesome. Okay, there's got to have been something. So it was like you kind of. It was kind of like them saying no and you wanting to do it was your motivation, like I know, I know. So there's a knowing in you that you could do it. There was at some level you had this sense of knowing that you could do it. Or there's some picture you held what. What was that? Because I think it informs your work today, when you talk to clients like what is it that keeps you, kept you going, and what I know the competition was. But what is it about?
Speaker 3:yes, you know, yeah, so yeah a couple specific situations that I'll tell you a couple specific things. That happened was, first of all, when I uh, chronologically, when I was in college, my coach who recruited me to my school that I finished, I played at one school my freshman year and I got recruited after my freshman year to go play at another school. So this coach who recruited me to play at the school that I graduated from, he only coached me for one season and he got fired after that one season and he got fired after that one season. So anyone who knows the collegiate sports world knows that when coaching changes occur, a lot of times many of the incumbent players who were from the previous coach they kind of get lost in the mix because the new coach wants to bring in their own people. Same way that when a CEO comes into a company, it's not that the people who get fired were bad at their jobs, it's just that the CEO wants to bring in his own people. So it was a similar situation.
Speaker 3:I ended up out of the basketball program in the middle of my collegiate career. So I wanted to prove one thing that I had as a drive was for posterity's sake, because a lot of those players who were still on the team. I didn't transfer, I stayed at school and didn't play. My senior guys is not on the basketball team and some of the players who were on the team are friends of mine still to this day. But I wanted to prove for posterity's sake yes, these guys are my friends, but the best player was me and I wanted to prove that again by making it to the pro level, whereas my teammates who didn't make it to the pro level. That was one thing, so that's one. I think that's what you're asking here.
Speaker 3:And the other thing, david, was when I got out of school and graduated. I finally get back home to Philadelphia and I'm a college graduate, so I have no money and I go back to my parents' home. My parents asked me well, what are you going to do now? And I said I'm going to become a professional basketball player. So just giving a little bit of story I've told you so far, david, you can guess how that conversation went because I didn't have much of my life's resume. That said, this guy is a professional level player. He played in high school, started playing at 14, played in college, but at a Division three school, didn't even play your senior year. But now you're going to become a professional athlete and my parents don't know anything about professional sports world on that level. They know what they see on TV, but they don't know anything about how this world works.
Speaker 3:But they just started asking logical questions that anyone would ask of a person who tells you that they're going to get into a certain profession. Well, do you have a plan on how you're going to get in? Do you have no other certain qualifications you have to have? Do you have anyone who is looking at you or considering you, are offering you a job right now? And if the answers to those questions are not, which they were, what are you going to do? And my answer was I don't know, but I knew I wanted to play pro basketball.
Speaker 3:So this is concerning for my parents because, again, I have a college degree. So their whole thing had been growing up go to school, get a degree, go get yourself a good job, et cetera All the stuff that they weren't able to do when they had kids they wanted their kids to be able to do. So now I'm telling them I'm basically going to throw that all in the garbage, to chase this, what appeared to be a pipe dream of being a professional athlete. Now, nothing that they said was wrong, nothing they said was illogical or inaccurate. However, I still took what they said as something to push back against. I wanted to prove my point against what they had said. So it wasn't that I was mad at my parents, I was mad at the basically the mirror they had held up to me. That showed me, logically, that it didn't look like this was actually going to happen. So proving that point by making it as a pro was also part of my drive to do it All right.
Speaker 2:Well, take me back to the day you signed your first professional contract. Now, I would imagine that was a pretty rewarding day. And then do you remember the experience? Or was it a checkbox Okay, now I move on or did you kind of, do you remember that day when you inked that deal?
Speaker 3:Yeah, I do remember that day and I didn't actually. Well, the first thing that happened was I actually flew over there first before I signed the contract. So what happened is the agent who I did have I was still working at Bally Total Fitness at this time and the way it works, the agent will text you once a week say, hey, just stay in shape, keep working out. No, I'm putting things out for you, you just got to stay ready. And it's like this waiting game. And finally, one time he sends me a text and says hey, I have a team in Lithuania who is interested in you, and he told me a little bit about what they were saying and a little bit about what he was saying and he says just sit tight. You know, I'll keep you updated as the conversation goes. Now, again, I'm still going back and forth to work at Valley Total Fitness while this whole thing is playing out. So this takes about a week. It was about a week of negotiation. I guess he's doing all the negotiation. I don't know. He's just telling me what's happening and I'm just hoping he gets anything to happen.
Speaker 3:I really didn't even care what the offer was. As long as he got an offer, I was taking it. He didn't know that, but I knew it. So finally he tells me like yeah, it's all done, they're going to Kaunas. And I didn't even know not Kaunas, but Vilnius is the capital city of Lithuania. And I didn't even know. I probably couldn't have even pointed out Lithuania on a map at that time. I heard of it, but I didn't know where it was. And now he's telling me all this and when he tells me it's finally done. Now the thing is when with overseas basketball, often you get a call and you need to be in the place ready to play within like 48 hours. So it is not like they're telling you months in advance and you get ready for it. This is like it's.
Speaker 3:Monday by Wednesday you're going to be over there playing. Yeah, exactly. So now I just have to tie up all the loose ends. So first of all, I had to go to ballet total fitness and quit. I had to do that first.
Speaker 3:I had to basically tell my parents what was happening. They were happy, not so much that I had quote unquote made it as a pro athlete, because my parents don't know anything about overseas basketball, that they don't know anything about how it works. What's happening, they don't know anything. I think they were just happy that their 23-year-old child was moving out of the house. I think that's what they were excited about. And I have a sister she's older than me, my sister's older than me. She was already gone, so they were about to have an empty nest, which I think they were excited for because I'm in there eating up the food, using the electricity, et cetera. So I think that's what they were excited about. And then just telling my friends like hey, I went and I actually made this happen, posted it on Facebook. This is 2005. So just letting people know I did actually do this, I did actually make it happen.
Speaker 3:So that maybe 48-hour period was really exciting for me. Now, once I got over there. Mind you, this is a little bit before social media is really a thing, david, so it's not like I'm giving people a blow-by-blow, I'm just experiencing it myself, and we barely even had the camera phones back then. So a lot of things that I experienced I don't even have footage or pictures of because we didn't have the camera phones, so it was just me experiencing it for again about a 48-hour whirlwind, but it was really exciting. And by the time I got over there, it was just surreal. You're walking around Europe with Euros in your pocket and this is all through basketball. So that was a really exciting probably that week, that first week.
Speaker 2:That's awesome. I can't even imagine what that was like. Plus, you're going into Lithuania. Have you ever been to Europe before, or have you been out of the country before? So that was all new. And you had to adjust. I would imagine it would have been a little bit. Your nervousness was a little bit freaked out, getting to know what, everything, how to move around, how to get to practice, all that stuff. But you figured it out, you did it, you know it out.
Speaker 3:You did it. That's great. That was the easy part. I wasn't nervous at all about the travel experience and getting out of there. I'd barely been out of the state of Pennsylvania. I'm from Philadelphia. I went to school at Penn State a couple of different branch campuses at Penn State so I barely left the state up to that point. I've been out of the state a couple of times, but not that much.
Speaker 2:But out of the country absolutely never, but I wasn't nervous or anything about it, I just figured I'd find my way. Yeah, so take it to the profession you're in now, which is really helping entrepreneurs. First it was helping athletes, then it was entrepreneurs, now you're moving in, kind of working with executives and organizations. What inspired you to make that transition now? Obviously, at the end of nine years, you've figured out it was time for you to hang up your sneakers, at least professionally, for whatever reason. But what had you transitioned that? What brought you into the field you're at now, which is about helping people achieve their dreams and their aspirations? What led you there?
Speaker 3:Sure. So to tell you how that happened, I'll give you a little bit of context from my backstory. So I'm playing pro basketball starting in 2005. And that same year YouTube does come out. And I find out about YouTube because I had this footage on this VHS tape and anybody who remembers VHS knows that you only have one copy. So something happens to that one tape that is gone. So I knew I needed that footage because it was the most valuable. It was the best footage of me that I had as proof of me being good.
Speaker 2:So I figured.
Speaker 3:You know, when I'm 80 years old, I want to show my kids. All right, that's the only one I had at the time. We didn't know that those smartphones were coming, so I said, what if this is all I get? So I heard about YouTube that said you can upload as much footage as you want. Well, first of all, first thing I realized was that I couldn't get it from the VHS to the computer. So I took it to an audio visual store and they put it on a CD, a data CD, and the CD I could put in a computer and I could upload that to YouTube. So I put that footage on YouTube, not because I was trying to get myself known or to build a brand, and when I did that, though people Just to maintain the footage, yeah, yeah, just to maintain the footage.
Speaker 3:So about six months later I'll just go check the website just to make sure YouTube still exists, make sure it didn't go out of business. And people have left comments on the video and they were just asking things like who are you, where do you play, et cetera. So that's when I I didn't immediately realize it, but over the years what I started doing was, sporadically, I would put workout footage on myself, because now I had this cheap little hundred dollar digital camera. I would take that with me to the gym, because I went to the gym every day to work out anyway I'm talking even in the offseason and I would just film myself working out and I would just take little pieces of the workout and put it on this YouTube site. Because it seemed like there were some basketball players who were entertained by watching me play or watching me practice players who were entertained by watching me play or watching me practice and what it turned out was they were actually learning from me, because they were looking for basketball help and the internet was the place they could now go to get information, whereas in my era and probably yours as well, david I don't know if you're older than me, but in that era you had to yeah, maybe a little bit, maybe a year or two, and you had to either know somebody or maybe a book or a magazine. But now, in this area, you can go to the internet and you can get that information. So that's how they were finding my stuff. They weren't looking for Dre Baldwin.
Speaker 3:So, anyway, sporadically, every six months, every three months, whenever I got around to it, I would put a little piece of footage on YouTube and slowly I was starting to build what we now call an audience of people who are watching me there and around 2009, finally, get to the answer of your question the players who have been following me and learning the basketball skills stuff from me started asking me questions about the mentality, because every now and then I would get questions about my background in the comments and I would always read and reply to the comments and I would tell them oh, they asked me where I played. I said I played this division three college, or what kind of player were you in high school? I barely played. I sat on the bench because they saw that I was a good player. Then, by the time they watched the video, I was very good because they could see me practicing and dunking and doing all this stuff, and they said, oh, this guy must've been very good his whole life.
Speaker 3:But when they realized that I had not been no-transcript, so when I started responding to those things, I started making these videos. Finally, just talking, this is the first time I started doing these commentary videos and I called them the weekly motivation and it was just a little two to five minute video, david, where I would just talk about some mindset thing, not necessarily for basketball, but just mindset period, because mindset is kind of universal, you can apply it anyway. And when I started doing that, there are a couple of things that happened, david. Number one is the basketball players who were following me started saying to me Dre, hey, this stuff that you're explaining. First of all, I never heard anybody explain mindset this way. Secondly, you may be better at explaining mindset than you are at explaining basketball. And third, this stuff surprised. And third, they were saying, hey, you sound like a college professor, you sound like some kind of philosopher when you're breaking this stuff down. And they said I can use this stuff even off the court. I can use this at school, I can use this at work, because a lot of players who are following me they're not pro players. Maybe they wanted to be, but they were not. And the fourth thing that happened, david, was people who did not play basketball started finding me through those mindset videos and they would say to me Dre, I'm not even a basketball player, but I subscribe to your YouTube channel because the way you break down mindset in that video once a week is useful for me. So what this did was this is the light bulb moment for me, david, because what I realized Well, first of all, what I already knew, which I didn't talk about earlier, is that I knew that when I was done as a player in basketball, I didn't want to stay in sports.
Speaker 3:I did not want to become a coach, trainer, analyst. I didn't want to work in the front office. I didn't want to become a coach, trainer, analyst. I didn't want to work in the front office. I didn't want to do any of that stuff. I wanted to go into business outside of sports and it didn't matter if my sports career had any connection to what I was going to do next. It didn't matter to me. So when these people who didn't play sports started telling me that the mindset stuff was useful for them. This is when the light bulb went off in my mind that, oh, maybe I can just give this mindset stuff to people who don't play ball, and that might be my business right?
Speaker 3:Yes, exactly that's what became the business, and when I stopped playing in 2015, I'd already been doing that for years, I'd already been talking about this stuff, I'd already started writing books and I'd already started coming up with this whole framework that we call work on your game now. So when I stopped playing, I was not starting from zero.
Speaker 2:Well, not starting from zero. Well, again, I think this is like. I don't want to get overly philosophical here, but I think there's this mix that you're really speaking to, that I speak to my clients about, which is you got to know who you are, what you care about most, and kind of follow your nose, and then you also have to be attentive to life, because life gives you hints. If you're aware of what you care about and what your drive is, then it's almost like there's these billboards that show up, and for you it was the big. I just want to get this clip online, so I save it. Now people will comment on that, so I'm going to put some out there because it's interesting, this interaction I'm getting.
Speaker 2:And then, from there, people started extrapolating something you weren't even aware of that you were giving on a mindset level. You were aware of it, but you weren't aware of the impact it was having. That impact gave you feedback and your aspiration to go in business came together with that, and then you kind of claimed it. Is that fair to say? Is that a good summary?
Speaker 3:Yes, that's fair.
Speaker 2:Yeah, good, good. So you kind of discovered this unique talent to articulate what you had to be and how you had to operate and how you had to discipline yourself to succeed in life, and you had a way of describing it that had a general. There was a general appreciation beyond athletes, right, yeah, there's a general appreciation beyond athletes, Right? So, yeah, so in one of the things, you in one of the things that it kind of relates to that which I really like, what you say about confidence. You said you know, leverage your dis. We're going to now get into your work, though leverage your discipline to build confidence. So I have you know you probably work with executives and you other people that this is an issue. Even people that make it high up in the executive ranks still have challenges with their confidence, and so I'd love you to share a little bit about that principle and how you see it applies. It applies generally and then in the business world. That whole principle of discipline is what you leverage to build your confidence.
Speaker 3:Sure. So everyone wants confidence, everyone wants to feel more confident and have a healthier self-image and more self-esteem. The challenge is, many people go about acquiring it or trying to acquire it the wrong way, using inaccurate formulas such as faking it till you make it or trying to force confidence upon themselves. So what I explain to people is, first of all, you don't want to fake it till you make it, because when you tell, your subconscious mind takes everything whatever. So when you tell your subconscious mind that you're faking something or pretending to be something that you're not, eventually just like the story of Cinderella the clock strikes 12 and that beautiful ball ground turns back into the racks. So you don't want to fake it because eventually it must end. That's the whole point of faking. So instead, you want to become a certain type of person. And in order to become a certain type of person, one thing you can do is leverage the thing that everyone knows they need more of, but most people don't go seeking out like they do confidence, which is discipline. And the thing is, we need to understand what confidence is.
Speaker 3:Confidence is about our history. Confidence is defined as belief in your ability to do something. So where does that come from that comes from the fact that you have actually done it. So discipline is about doing our homework, basically doing the work ahead of time. So in the sports world, the way we build discipline is by practicing every day, and more often you practice shooting the free throws.
Speaker 3:When you get in the game, you have confidence you can make the free throw. So that's how the discipline leads to the confidence, and it's the same thing in life for all of us is that the discipline is us doing the homework of telling ourselves what type of person we need to be and what type of person we are focused on becoming. And the more often we tell ourselves that, we start to accept it, because the subconscious mind will accept anything if it hears it often enough. That's the repetition part of it and that's one of the ways that the subconscious mind is programmed, so that discipline leads to the confidence and that self-belief of confidence then leads to performance, performance to results, and results lead to rewards.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and then that leads to more confidence. So it's kind of a cycle that builds on itself, exactly.
Speaker 2:That's right, got it. I love that. You're talking about the subconscious mind now, which really runs the show, doesn't it? It's the thing that runs everything. We're not aware of it and it runs everything. So talk to me about the importance of that and how you discovered that. You know, is that something you discovered by going and looking back at what you did and realized that you did? Obviously, if you weren't at 14, you weren't studying the subconscious mind. When did you uncover the power of the subconscious mind, and how do you bring that into your work with people?
Speaker 3:you bring that into your work with people. Well, I'll tell you how I first found out about it was. I got dragged to a meeting at a hotel that turned out to be a network marketing meeting when I was in college. And when I went to that meeting the speaker on the stage he said a couple of things. Well, first of all, he was talking about money making in ways that I never heard anybody talk about it, and I have a four year business degree from a university. They weren't saying the stuff that he was saying on that stage.
Speaker 3:Number one and number two he said because you know, half the people are already had. People in the room are already doing the business and half the people are guests. So he says to the people who are already doing the business hey, if you're going to build a business, you have to build yourself at the same time, because your business can't grow any more than you grow. And that made perfect sense to me, even though I wasn't in the business, I was a guest. But it made perfect sense when he said that. And he said to that end, when you walk, because those are the books you need to read so you can build yourself up, because if you don't build you, you can never build a business. And I said that makes sense. And then he would name drop a couple of the authors. He said names like Jim Rohn and Brian Tracy and Zig Ziglar and Tony Robbins.
Speaker 3:I never heard of any of these people and I went and looked at the books. But again, I'm a college student, I cannot afford the books, but I remember the books. So when I got back to school I went to this website called eBay I think people still know eBay. This is before. Amazon was the place to buy books and I looked up a couple of these books and I found a couple of them there. These are pirated copies of the books. These are not official books. These are basically Word documents, what I bought from some random person.
Speaker 3:I bought two of them. I bought Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill for 99 cents and I bought Rich Dad, poor Dad by Robert Kiyotaki for 99 cents Word documents. And when I read Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill, that's the first time I heard the phrase the subconscious mind. That's where I first heard about it and how he talked about that. The subconscious mind is controlling most of your behaviors and there's a way that you can intentionally and consciously program your subconscious thought patterns to get you into the right, become the right type of person, so you can, as the book says, grow rich. So that's where I first heard about the subconscious mind, so that's where it started.
Speaker 2:Yeah, have you read Psycho-Cybernetics as well? I would imagine you're familiar with that. Absolutely, that's one of my favorite books on it as well, too. Yeah, yeah, it's a very powerful thing that people don't realize that. You know, we could consciously tell ourselves something, but if it's not bought into by the subconscious, you could forget about it, right. But when the subconscious buys into it, there's a thing called synchronicity that starts happening, not because it wasn't happening before, but because now you're picking it up, right, and things that are connected to what you want to do. So you kind of get help, not in a lucky way, necessarily, if it feels like luck, but because your system is looking for those opportunities. It's really very powerful what you're sharing. That's right.
Speaker 2:This is related to what we're talking about, which is all about motivation, and you have a quote in your book, the Third Day, that I really like and I'm going to read it now. Now, and then an athlete asked me to provide them motivation. They suffered a setback or three, things are not looking good and they want my words of encouraging to keep going. I don't do motivation. And then you also have a distinction you talk about and I know they're different, but I want you to talk about the distinction where you talk about the finding motivation and having the things, something that keeps you going, and there's a powerful distinction that, remember, you have to have something that keeps you going. So help me rectify those two comments that you don't do motivation. Maybe it's you don't externally motivate people, or or what is it that? What is it about motivation? How do you talk about that and rectify that? Does that make sense when I'm asking Motivation is for amateurs.
Speaker 3:Motivation is not necessarily a negative thing. The challenge with motivation is that it is fleeting and it's unpredictable, and those are the antithesis of being a professional. See, the definition of a professional is someone who does something as their main paid occupation. And if you're going to do something as your main paid occupation, that means you must show up and deliver consistently, which includes the days and times that you don't feel like doing the job, because every professional out there, there are days we don't feel like working. It doesn't matter what the job is. You could be a podcaster, you could be a CEO, you could be a basketball player. There are days you don't feel like being at work and there's no one who is an exception to that. Therefore, if your performance in your career as a professional is based on motivation, you have a problem, because some days you will not be motivated. This is why I say motivation is for amateurs, because an amateur can afford to depend on motivation, because when they don't have it, they can simply not show up and there's no penalty because nobody's paying. But when you're a professional, you don't have that luxury. You have to show up every time and deliver every time, otherwise you lose the job. So you need something that's more dependable than motivation, which is discipline. Discipline shows up consistently, and one of the key hallmarks of being a professional is that discipline is that preparation, it's the fact that you show up and deliver every single time, regardless of how you're feeling. That's what a professional really is that a person delivers every time to where.
Speaker 3:If you are watching from the outside, looking in a professional, there are, there will be days when they didn't feel like being at work, but if you're observing them, you can't tell me what today it was they didn't feel like being there versus what today they did feel like being there, because their performance is consistent and their energy is consistent throughout. You can't tell which days they felt good, which days they felt terrible, because it's pretty much the same every single time their output, the result that they produce, and that's why discipline matters a whole lot more than motivation. Again, it's not that motivation, david, is a bad thing. Motivation is great If you happen to have some motivation in addition to the discipline, great. But just in case the motivation doesn't show up, you still have to show up. So what's going to get you into the door? What's going to get you out of bed?
Speaker 2:Yeah, yeah, yeah, and just the sake of difference. I could get that, and sometimes we do have times we just have to do it, just do it right. You know, just the cranky old, cranky thing. The same thing. There's something internal that gets you to engage. The discipline don't isn't there. I mean, there are days when maybe you just have to do it. What is the? There is something internal that drives that, that it's something. For the sake of something. I'm stepping out of bed to get to the gym by 4 am. Maybe it's now a habit. Now, habit takes over habits. A huge thing, right? So that becomes, it's not?
Speaker 2:like you know, it's like the flywheel it starts moving very slowly and then, as soon as the flywheel starts having its own momentum, the habit keeps you going. And at the same time, isn't there also things that are deep and within us that, for the sake of better word, I'll call it motivation. But it could be something more along the lines of answering that kind of primordial questions of who am I, what's my identity, what do I deeply care about and is it, am I willing to give that up in this moment or am I going to let that go in this moment? There's also do you speak to that? Does that resonate for you? And, if so, how do you speak about those things, those deeper senses of things that move us into discipline even when we don't feel like it?
Speaker 3:So we don't achieve our goals in life, david. What we achieve are an actualization of our self identities. So that's really where the discipline comes from, right, right. And the discipline for me is a reflection of my self identity, so something for for myself. For example, I tell my audience this all the time that, even though I haven't I stopped playing professional basketball almost a decade ago all the time that, even though I haven't, I stopped playing professional basketball almost a decade ago I have a self-identity that I'm always going to be in professional athlete shape to where, if I met someone in the gym and they said, what do you do for a living, I say I play a professional sport, they will believe me. All right, that's my self-identity. I'm going to stay in that shape and I'm going to work out every single day and because of that, the discipline is a byproduct of me reaching that me, having that identity. So the way we do things in life is the being, then the doing, then the having. So the being is the identity, the doing is the action that reflects that identity and the having is a result of the action. So my self-identity is another thing.
Speaker 3:I was telling you about YouTube. So around 2009,. This is when we found out you can make money from posting more and more content to YouTube. So I decided what could I do to be different? I'm going to put out content every single day. So I started putting out content every single day, and that's still a self-identity to this day. I still put out content every single day and because of that identity, I put out content every day. And now people know me as this guy who puts out a ton of content and you read it in the bio at the beginning of this episode?
Speaker 2:Absolutely. The proof is in the pudding. Absolutely.
Speaker 3:Exactly so. We do things to reflect how we see ourselves. So when it comes to that discipline for me, I realized early on, even as an athlete, that there were a few things that most of the people in my neighborhood the other kids were not doing. Even though they were better than me at basketball, seemed like they didn't practice that much. So I thought to myself, what if I just practice more often and then maybe I'll catch up? And I noticed over the years that actually started to work.
Speaker 3:So that's what gave me the idea that if and this is something that another one of those personal development guys named Earl Nightingale he said this and it's taped here, I call it lead the field. He said anytime you step into a space and you want to be wildly successful, just look around at what everybody else is doing and do the opposite of that. And I noticed that most people are not disciplined. Most people want discipline, but they don't have any. And most people want confidence, but they don't have any. But discipline produces confidence. So you got to have discipline to get the confidence Most people don't have discipline. So I realized that if I can just be really disciplined it'll separate me from most people, especially over the long term, and that has proven to be true.
Speaker 2:That's beautifully well said Again as I see it.
Speaker 2:You know, in the field of psychology there is a particular modality called internal family systems that has located, particular modality called internal family systems that has located, that recognizes that within all of us we have this core self that is always confident, competent, clear, powerful, etc. Now, because of what we've been told in our life and because of how we have had to survive at different levels as kids growing up, we didn't know that was the true case and in a certain way you have to kind of back up, back into it. But what you're saying is what you're providing is a way and for me, for helping people do that. But at first it starts by sparking something about how you think about yourself and looking at are you thinking about yourself in a way that is going to generate a kind of forward motion, even when you don't feel like it, to produce consistently with that highest expression of identity? And when I talked to leaders about it, I said it's about your leadership brand.
Speaker 2:Are you really believing that's who you want to be?
Speaker 2:Or are you just taking leadership courses or just doing leadership, reading leadership books, trying to find some nuggets of wisdom to do your job more effectively? And there's a difference between claiming yourself as a kind of leader that you are leadership books, trying to find some nuggets of wisdom to do your job more effectively and there's a difference between claiming yourself as a kind of leader that you are and believing that in yourself and then working towards the better version of that and you've also expressed that as an athlete. There's always a better version of yourself you're driving towards to meet that identity. So I really like you know, that to me is really you hit on the nugget right there and then that leads to discipline and the confidence, et cetera. Now, when you work with business leaders, I know you bring a clear philosophy about what a leader is, so I've got to go into this now. What do you believe leaders, business leaders, have to primarily focus on to succeed as business leaders, and can you share a little bit about your philosophy of leadership?
Speaker 3:Well, number one thing is they have to focus on people, because if you're a leader in business, that means other people are involved, and leadership is about getting other people to voluntarily follow you, even if you have the tangible authority to make them follow you, because there's a difference between a leader and a boss. Now, a boss is someone who you do what they say, because they tell you to, because they can penalize you. A leader is someone who you do what they want you to do because you actually want to, voluntarily you want to get behind this person.
Speaker 3:So that's the key thing for leadership. And the key piece to understand about that, Dave, is that people are different. Every leader is a different, unique individual, and the people behind each leader are different people as well. So our jobs as leaders is to you got to figure out who your people are. You need to know what motivates and drives them, what they care about, what they want to achieve, and then you lead them based on helping them understand that following you will help them achieve their goals.
Speaker 3:So there's no one way to lead, and I don't even think there's a right or wrong way to lead. You just need to adjust your leadership style based on who you're leading and where you're trying to lead them. And one of the things that I learned I remember when I was first getting out of sports and getting into business. One of the first things I wanted to do was get into the speaking world, and I met someone who was already in the game and she was telling me Dre, the professional world, the business, professional world they love athletes because, especially team sport athletes, because you all have a lot of experience in team dynamics and you've dealt with a lot of leaders. You've dealt with good leaders and bad leaders.
Speaker 2:Good coaches and bad coaches. Bad coaches absolutely.
Speaker 3:Yeah, exactly, and teammates as well. Right? So you know what a good leader looks like. You just think of your favorite coaches. You look at a bad leader it looks like. Look at them.
Speaker 3:And I remember having some coaches in sports who their style of chastising a player would be just to yell at you in front of everybody. And there are certain players who can take that. They can take the yell and they can keep playing, even play better. There are other players if you did that, you destroyed them and they'd be no good for two weeks. So you can't use the same style on every single person. And there are other coaches who will call you into their office and just tell you one on one hey, here's what you're not doing. They would just tell you just a conversation. The other ones who would just call you out in front of everybody and that player would be embarrassed. And again, now that player is useless to everybody because you just did that to them in front of everyone. So you have to.
Speaker 3:A leader has to have very good soft skills. It's not about your resume anymore. Once you get into the leadership position. The soft skills are stuff that can't be replaced by computers or artificial intelligence. It's your ability to read the room, so to speak, understand who you're dealing with and how they tick, and responding to them in such a way that you get them to buy into what you're doing.
Speaker 3:Because, again, if you're leading, that means people are following you because they want to. And in order to get people to want to follow you, you have to show them something that gives them a reason to do so. And that's not an easy thing to do, especially when you're in business and there's money involved. It becomes even harder when you introduce the money. But in the end, I will say this is why leadership is such a valuable thing and why good leaders are so valued and why a good leader can go from industry to industry to industry and be successful, because it's their people skills that actually make the difference. It's not necessarily the yes, the technical abilities matter, but the people skills matter a whole lot more.
Speaker 2:Yeah well, and in corporations we move up the ladder right and at a certain point you have to move from individual contributor to manager, then to leader, and those are difficult transitions for people to make because they've been so acknowledged for their achievements as an individual contributor. Now they're a director, you know, in an organization director level, and they're in between those two, and then they go to VP level and that whole game changes. And so you know, I think I love the principles of your work on your game. You know the discipline, the confidence, the mental toughness and personal initiative. So, based on your experience, you know what do you think those individuals that are having to step into the more of a leadership mindset, how do those apply to helping somebody step into a leadership mindset?
Speaker 3:Well, the first thing is understanding that when you get into a leadership position is not so much about your resume anymore, it's more about those soft skills, as we just said.
Speaker 3:So, yes, your resume, your resume, is what gets you promoted to that level. But there are a lot of people I'm sure you have plenty of experience, david of people who got promoted to leadership positions because of their performance but then they failed in a leadership position because they have no people skills. So they were just good performers, so they could be a good, maybe the number one salesperson, but they are not equipped to be a leader because they don't know how to relate to and motivate and inspire others. And those are two different skill sets and this is how sometimes someone who doesn't even have the technical skill can be a really good leader for a group, even though they were never amazing at that particular job. But they can lead people who do the job, and sometimes you have someone who is a combination of both, and that's the biggest thing when it comes to a leadership position. I forgot what your question was.
Speaker 2:Make sure I'm answering it, but you're answering the question. But I say like now, but when you now have to apply the work on your game principles to that. So you have to get disciplined in practicing and learning the soft skills right? That's what you're saying you have to to me, like at that level you're paid to have really good conversations with people. That's what you're paid for, ultimately.
Speaker 2:You're not paid for your technical skills anymore You're paid for. How do you engage people in conversations that align, build mutual understanding, mutual motivation and alignment and direction? Right, and that's what you're paid for. So you're making that transition. How do those skills anything you talk about how the work on your game framework helps with that transition? Yeah, so when it comes to the framework.
Speaker 3:Our framework is based around mindset, strategy systems and accountability, and the mindset piece is the most important part. That's the discipline, confidence, as we talked about mental toughness, and then taking the initiative. And what I tell any professional in any business, any field, is that there are three levels of how you are valued in business. The first level is getting your compensation based on what you do, so you can work at McDonald's and get paid for what you do. The first level is getting your compensation based on what you do, so you can work at McDonald's, get paid for what you do. The next level is getting paid for what you know. You can be a really good salesperson. What you know allows you to make a bunch of sales here at this level. And the highest level is getting paid for who you are, and that's what the leader is. The leader is paid based on who they are, because who you are is why people follow you.
Speaker 3:People don't follow you because of what you do. They follow you because of who you are and how you're doing the things that you do, and the discipline in that is, first of all, understanding that your resume doesn't matter that much anymore. What matters is, again, how you relate to people, or how they connect to you or don't connect to you. And then it's the confidence. That, of course, the confidence you have to exude as a leader. Because you have to show that confidence even when things are looking terrible and you don't know how you're going to solve the problem in front of you and everybody else is having the same issue. They're all anxious, but you can't show them that you're anxious, because then everything's going to fall apart. So that's the confidence part. And then the confidence you can get other people to feel, because confidence is contagious. When you are highly confident, other people feel confident, and when you have no confidence, other people can feel that too, and they're going to follow that as well. And the mental toughness is your willingness to remain disciplined and remain confident, even when things may not be going the way that you want them to go.
Speaker 3:Again, keeping in mind that when you're a leader, the energy of the team is going to be a reflection of your energy. So if the team is down, that's because the leader is down. If the leader's up, the team's going to feel like, okay, maybe they're going to figure this out. This guy seems like he knows where we're going. I don't know where we're going, but I'm going to follow this guy. And then it's the personal initiative, that's just being willing to step forward, because the what really makes someone a leader is your willingness to go first, and that's why it's personal initiative. Initiative is about the word initial. Initial means the first, the first letter. Whoever initiates is the person who steps forward first, and that's what makes you a leader. And leaders have to be willing to step forward even when they don't know what they're stepping into, because, again, nobody else is going to step forward if you don't step forward first. And that's what makes someone a leader being at the head of the pack.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and also your point goes back to the point you made when you went to those multi-level marketing seminars and they said your job is to work on you so that you can succeed in your business. And I think this is the transition. And sometimes organizations can make this very hard because they expect you to be a leader. They might even provide some training, but they may not value the reflective time and the time you have to do your personal work. It's going to ultimately, you know you go slow to go fast. You're going to have to do that discipline of that personal work and that personal discipline to understand the skill, new skill sets. You need to learn to apply those skill sets, to step back and see how you can improve those skill sets, because you know, having a question, you might have a conversation with a direct report that didn't go the way you wanted it to go.
Speaker 2:Are you taking the time to step back and look at what you did, like you did on the court? My left hand was going this way, I got to keep it straight or whatever. You have to figure out because you're seeing the film. You got to watch film in yourself, don't you? And you have to be willing to do that extra work. But what you're pointing to, and your story is so beautifully pointing to, is, if you really want to be a leader, there's nothing that can hold you back except for yourself. You have to be willing to do that personal work to attain some kind of self-leadership mastery over yourself, in order for you to learn the skills to be a better leader. Is that fair to say? Is that fair?
Speaker 3:to say yes, because who you are as a person is the most important aspect of leadership. Not necessarily what you've done in the past or even what you are capable of doing. It's who you are, because that's what makes people follow you.
Speaker 2:Yeah. Well, when you go into organizations, what do you see that executives have the biggest challenge of developing in their leadership, and how do you tend to assist those executives? Can you give me some examples of some work you do in developing leaders?
Speaker 3:if you do, that work Biggest, and this may be just because of who I am and how I put my message out there, but the biggest challenge that I run into yes, the biggest challenge that I run into or that I get brought to me is the leader wants everyone on the team to have the same drive and desire and motivation as they either do or that they had, because often I'm dealing with leaders who have actually been the rank and file in the past, but they've worked their way up to a leadership position and they want everyone else to be like them. And just the fact is, not everybody is like that, not everyone is wired that way. So they are exasperated because they're looking at their team wondering why is this person not seeing what I'm seeing? Why are they not as driven as I am? Why are they not showing up early like me or staying late like me, when they aren't even performing at the level that I'm performing at? So it's a frustration that they have and they're trying to either either a usually this is the main thing they come in with.
Speaker 3:Dre, can you help me to get these people to be more like me and that sometimes that works, but not always. And then the other one is when they finally understand that maybe that's not going to happen because it's just not in the cards. People just don't have that wiring. It's okay. How do I communicate with these people to get them to be the best that they can be, because they can't be me? Usually we finally get to that part and then I can. I can help them more usually with that one than getting people to be more like the leader because that's a typical way.
Speaker 2:But what are some of the suggestions you give to leaders? Okay, now they get it. They have to start understanding what makes their people tick. What is to get it? They have to start understanding what makes their people tick. What are some of the first things you suggest that executives do to kind of develop that different kind of relationship?
Speaker 3:with the team.
Speaker 3:Yeah, what you just said. So the first thing is returning to relationship is, if you want to lead other people, the first thing you have to figure out is what do they care about? What is bringing them to work every day? What's getting them out of bed every day? And it might not be the same thing as what gets the leader out of bed.
Speaker 3:Leader is often a highly ambitious person and the fact of the matter is, david, only about 2% of people are ambitious. Most people are not ambitious and a lot of times, people throw out this ambition as if everyone has it, and it's just not true. Everybody has ambition. Most people just want to be okay, and we need to understand that. Accept it, because you can't build a whole. You can't build a hundred person sales team of ambitious people. There are not enough of them for you to find them all, so you're going to have a bunch of non-ambitious people on your team.
Speaker 3:You had to figure out what they do care about and then you move them to action based on what they care about, not what you want them to care about or what you want them to have, or even what you want them to do, because when you get into that frame. Now you're being more of a boss than a leader and, again, being a boss works if you want to crack the whip. But if you want to lead, then you have to figure out what they care about and that requires you getting on the same side of the table as them, which means having a conversation with them, finding out. You know, why are you here? What do you want to get? Maybe they don't have these big career aspirations, but they have life aspirations. Maybe there's things they want to do outside of work and they're using work to fuel the things they want to do in their lives.
Speaker 3:So this work life balance thing I was talking to a sales executive, as a matter of fact, just today doing the sales training for his team, and he said one of the challenges we have here is that all these people, a lot of these people, want work, life balance and it's just the fact that most people, again, are not ambitious and he is a little bit, a little bit frustrated with that because he's a hard driving and business guy and that's how he got to the leadership position that he's in. He doesn't care about work life balance. He wants work, work, work, work balance. And when he has people on the team who don't have that. He's trying to figure out how do I get them, how do I drill that out of them? And the fact of the matter is you can't, because that very mindset will have.
Speaker 2:You lose good people too. If you're doing that, you're going to end up. That's one of the number one reasons why talent leads an organization is because of their boss, right, so you? But the number one people stay a lot of times is because they feel they have a place to go that's meaningful and allows them to get what they need and what you're saying. You have to spend time getting to understand what that is.
Speaker 2:I mean, this is so obvious to you and I, and to a lot of good, a lot of good leaders. You already always know, when leadership gives birth in somebody and I say it is a birthing process of becoming a leader that they start caring about their people and what they're trying to gain from coming to work every day, and they see the potential in people that they don't see in themselves and they begin to enroll them in that greater potential. And when that happens, then you have somebody that they weren't a great salesperson before, but now they're middle of the road or better, and that's bringing in sales, which is a good thing, right? Exactly?
Speaker 3:That's right. So what you just touched on there is if you want to move someone up to a high level, the first thing you had to do is not just show them the ball and say, hey, reach this ball and they're on the way down here. It's not going to happen. That's going to demotivate them because, again, most people don't have the ambition to try to reach a bar they're so far away from. But if you come and meet them where they're at and now they see that you see them for who they are and where they are now, you can maybe say, can you go a little bit like this? Now they can come up there. How about this? Now can come up there. How about this? Now they can come up. How about this? Now they can come up. And then you can slowly get them up to that level. But if you set the bar right here and say, get here again, only about two out of a hundred people are going to be inspired and motivated by this. Everybody else is going to quit.
Speaker 2:Well, you have to remember that. You know there's a ceiling and a floor. Because of that, right. Right, it's not going to work as that Now, and I think what you're speaking to also and I also see this too that athletes and senior executives. There's a similar quality of aspiration, a different way, but you're almost people that sometimes call the corporate executives the corporate athlete. Right Now, one of the things that corporate athletes don't get that athletes do is you need a day off to corporate athlete right Now. One of the things that corporate athletes don't get that athletes do is you need a day off to recuperate, right, you need a day off to let your muscles reset. I see one of the and I don't know if you see this too that corporate because it's more intellectually driven. Maybe you know, and that keeps our attention what do you talk to senior executives about? About avoiding burnout and how do you help people, help senior executives, with that issue because of what you learned as an athlete.
Speaker 3:It's an interesting one. This is one that I hadn't even thought about as an athlete and didn't really consider deeply until after my sport career. I heard it from this guy named Dan Sullivan. I'm sure you're familiar with him. He has a company called Strategic Coach and he talked about it and it was the first time I heard anyone explain it this way, but it made perfect sense as soon as he said it. He said athletes and entertainers, they have performance periods, they have rest periods and they have practice periods.
Speaker 3:And, like an athlete, there's a day when you have a game and you don't do anything else but the game. You just get ready, you prepare, get ready for the game, you play the game. Then you have days when you're practicing, maybe once or twice or three times in a day. Then you have days when you do absolutely nothing. It's kind of like a singer, taylor Swift on tour. She has to take a whole day and not talk, basically, and drink coffee and tea so that her voice can recover, so she can sing the next at a packed stadium. And I said man, how did I never think of this? And I actually played a sport. I had never even considered that, and it makes perfect sense.
Speaker 3:So it's segmenting your work and in the work world we're all familiar with the concept of batching. So if you need to do 30 of these, let's do all 30 right now, instead of doing five per day over the course of six days. It's easier to just batch it, knock it all out at once. And then there's times when you're preparing, so that's like the back end stuff. You need to do the book, so you got to do the maintenance stuff. You got to go through all the emails, or all the emails you need to respond to because your assistant sent them to you and they need your attention. And then you have the times when you are resting and when you're not doing anything.
Speaker 3:So in the sports world, athletes have an off season where they're doing absolutely nothing. Many executives will get a four-week vacation when you can't reach them. No matter what happens, don't call me. And that's the same thing that we all need to be able to segment our worlds into. Maybe you can't do it so easily today, but you can start saying okay, these are going to be the days that I do my performance stuff. If I need to record, let me do all my recordings. I remember I was on this guy's podcast once and he does these like 20, 30 minute episodes and I got on with him. He said, dre, you're number four out of 15 today and he was going to do 15 back to back interviews, 30 minutes a piece. And he does that like once, twice a month and that's his whole month of recording. He doesn't have to do anymore. He had a daily show, no-transcript, and we can do the same thing.
Speaker 2:That's very well said. Very well said. Well, it's been a really robust show today. I want to give you a chance if there's anything else you'd like to emphasize as we close out the show.
Speaker 3:from our conversation or things you've had that you haven't been able to articulate, anything you wanted out in general to close out today, One thing that I would say to all the executives out there and I think I may be preaching to the choir and saying this, but I'll put it out there anyway is that stress and pressure and anxiety are actually good things. They're not bad things. They're good things because when you put pressure on a rusty pipe, it's going to burst. No matter how long it takes, it's going to burst. And if you put pressure on a piece of coal and there's a diamond inside of it, you're going to reveal the diamond. So all the pressure does reveal you. It doesn't change you.
Speaker 3:And stress is actually a good thing. And stress is a good thing because you can frame stress however you want. There is distress. That's the kind of stress we all know about, the kind of stuff that gives you heart attacks and makes you want to go to sleep and make you feel older than you actually are. But then there's the good kind of stress called eustress.
Speaker 3:A lot of people don't even know that's a real word E-U-S-T-R-E-S-S. That's the kind of stress that we voluntarily put ourselves under because we believe is going to make us better, such as running a marathon or lifting weights. Those are used charges. We know it's going to be hard, but we do it anyway because we believe it's going to make us better. So the way that we frame these things and this goes back to mindset plays a huge difference in how we handle each situation and people in leadership positions, especially those listeners who are seasoned. You may subconsciously understand this. Maybe you never consciously thought about it, so I'll put that out there just to give you a different way of reframing the challenges that you're facing, probably right now, at this moment.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I mean that's really well said because you know you stress is kind of feeling alive and engaged and passionate and you might be a little tired but you do it because there's something driving you that is positive. If you spend yourself too much time in distress, that's not good for you and you've got to get rest in general, but that's really really well said. I mean that's part of living, absolutely. So thank you for that. Well, I want to thank you so much, dre, for sharing your insights with us today on your work and sharing your story and what it takes to live your dream and achieve top level success. It's been really an enlightening conversation and I'm sure our listeners got a lot of value from hearing about your expertise. So thank you very much.
Speaker 3:Well, David, I appreciate you sharing your platform and I appreciate the opportunity. Looking forward to hearing from your listeners what they got from this.
Speaker 2:Great, and I'll make sure your contact information is listed in all the descriptions below the podcast, so if people do want to reach out to Dre, they can do that. And to all you tuning in, I want to thank you for being a part of this journey with us. Your time and attention mean the world to me, really. If you found today's discussion valuable, please spread the word by letting your colleagues, friends and anyone else you know who could benefit from Unphased Under Fire to know about the podcast. And remember you can catch this and all other episodes in video format on YouTube and in audio on Apple Podcasts, spotify, amazon Music and many other podcast platforms. Until next time, keep leading with purpose and making an impact. Have a great rest of your day. This is David Craig-Otts, leadership Alchemist, signing off for now.