Mike - When I'm working with a Nice Guy business owner (or leader), we don't focus on his business.
We'll look at HIS business - him.
We'll look at how his patterns show up in his business. In his relationships.
We’ll explore his insecurities, how his hidden fears and pain show up and infect and impact his business.
We examine the costs these create in his business: financially, mentally, emotionally, and relationally.
We look at the impact and costs these have in his life and relationships.
What might look like a business problem is usually a you problem.
Maybe you don't run a business but the same applies to your job or role.
What might look like a work issue is often a you issue dressed up in your work clothes.
It's easy to get distracted trying to solve the next issue in the business, maximising productivity, time, and income
It might seem like a client is the issue, say, when you're missing that it's how you communicate, where you hold back, how you assume, hope, or hold back honesty and clarity.
Your fear of rejection and the need to be liked by everyone.
Treating conflict as if it’s going to kill you.
Overcommitting because you struggle to say no. Underdelivering because you’re stretched.
It’s putting everyone else’s needs first. It’s hiding the truth only to suffer the consequences later.
Of course, this could be your relationship with your gf, partner, or wife, too.
Same shit, different playing field.
Your shit becomes your business’s shit.
Your unaddressed pain will infect your business - or your relationship. You’ll see it as a business issue, but it’s just you bringing your personal baggage to the situation, but calling it by a different name.
When you tie your sense of self-worth to how busy you are, to what you can get done and what results you can produce, you have entered into a co-dependent relationship with your business.
By definition, these men are bringing their insecurities to the business and hoping it will meet their unmet needs.
They might have ‘success’ in certain business metrics. But if you are still insecure, you’ll continue to infect the business and call the issue that arises by a different name, missing its origin - you.
Or you’ll keep striving for a success that has no personal meaning to you. You’ll rinse it for an external validation that can never hit the mark, thereby always needing more.
Busyness becomes a common thread; "Time poor", "busy", stretched in all areas - when in reality it tends to come down to two things:
A shitty relationship with time.
A shitty relationship with yourself.
If you have never truly valued yourself - if you didn't learn to value and respect yourself, if you didn't feel loved unconditionally for who you are - then you are going to wander through life, love, and business with a self-respect-sized hole in your soul.
And you will try to fill that hole with the love, respect, and approval of others - either via their direct recognition, or the status, power and money that comes from your accomplishments.
Every relationship you have in life, to women, to money, to your body, with your business and all the relationships in it - are downstream from the relationship you have with yourself.
That's where the work is.
I have seen it time and time again; we go to work on the man, and everything flows from there.
Ease in business.
Ease in relationships.
Ease in life.
Peace in himself. Confidence. Security. Groundedness.
That doesn't mean challenges don't happen, that you don't have to navigate tricky shit - you do.
But how you do it levels up. Drastically.
You can handle challenges that ask more of you, that have greater reward, that invite you to play at a new level.
This is where personal leadership becomes the source of and generator for all other leadership.
If it’s your business or your work, if it’s your relationship with your partner, maybe it’s your health and fitness or ‘discipline’ and motivation, the work is less about where the issues are arising and more so about digging into how you cause them.
Everything in your life is downstream from the relationship you have with yourself, with your self-worth, and what you think you deserve.
To make meaningful change anywhere else, we must pull up our big boy pants and get to work there.
Explore. Excavate. Understand. Reframe. Become stronger than the shit
This is the work we do.
If you feel the call to more, this might be for you. Business owner or not.
The call to become more, to shake the shit that you have been dragging around and into the important areas of your life from business and work to relationships.
The call to your potential.
If you feel that pull gently nudging your shoulder, telling you to change the status quo and step into who you’ve always known you can be - then this is that nudge.
It’s almost impossible to do alone. Left in isolation with your limitations and blind spots, they win. In the company of those who can see and guide, they become a thing of the past.
If this resonates with you, despite possibly not feeling ‘ready’, I invite you to respond and ask how we might guide you in transforming into your potential.
We’ll be doing it with some men anyway. You can be part of that. Or you can sit here in 12 months' time and wish you had.
How loudly does opportunity have to knock for you to stop listening to your fears?
Maybe today is that day you make a bold and different choice.
Mike
