Archive 1 of Momentum for the Entrepreneurial Personality Type (EPT)

When we travel we get to see new places, have new experiences, and meet people who don't live near us. Travel has provided our family with some of our most incredible adventures ever. My daughters have been traveling since before they were six months old and they love it.

Traveling can also be exhausting, trying, and let's be honest it can break you down. Most people are overstressed when they are traveling, on a hair trigger, and preloaded ready to explode. I can feel this when I get to any major airport, the energy is always tense and accelerated.

Here are some of the ways we travel with momentum, get to our destination safely, and have an incredible time even when we are on the road.

Every one of us has made a mistake. If you are like me you have made many, public, avoidable, gruesomely embarrassing mistakes in your life. We all know how it feels, the second you recognize that you did something wrong and it is going to cause a problem…

Your heart jumps into your throat.
You instantly feel accelerated.
And pressure annoys goes up immediately.

This is how you feel, and you are in charge. Imagine what it feels like for a team member when they make a mistake. They feel all those same things, and then the pressure of having someone that holds them accountable.

When someone on my team makes a mistake, or a mistake appears to have happened, I do everything I can to protect my team member from that mistake.

This is one of the most valuable leadership strategies I have ever learned.

The reason that you should hire true believers is that empires are always taken down from the inside. You can do everything to guard your culture and put the right people in your organization but sooner or later a non-believer will sneak in. At first, they are tough to see, they might act and talk like everyone else. They did enough to get onto your team and now that they are there, they are ready to cause disruption.

I have never understood why some people just like to be disruptive. They are the first to object, gossip, they're not transparent with those around them, and they can rob the momentum of an entire team.

They don't actively want to be on your team, they are putting up with it. They're not excited about moving your organization forward, they're with you for a paycheck. They lack excitement for the work and do the absolute minimum they can get by.

I call these people mutineers.

There is a reason that when there was a mutiny on a ship, mutineers had to walk the plank…

Getting a business to $1 million is easier than it ever has been in the past. There is more leverage available to individual entrepreneurs today than any other time in human history. There is more leverage available to individual entrepreneurs then there ever has been. The marketing automation platforms available today cost millions of dollars a year to maintain just a few years ago.

Growing a business to sustainable multimillion-dollar revenue is just as difficult as it ever has been. There is a reason, every entrepreneur hits the point where it is no longer about them, it is about what their team can do.

This requires a complete shift in behavior that most entrepreneurs don't make.

Very few entrepreneurs actually set out to be punishing leaders. We want to grow successful teams, deliver amazing client results, and help the people around escrow.

We are driven to do more, be more, and create amazing outcomes in the world. We push ourselves harder than most and the people around us as hard as we push ourselves.

We help people break barriers and create new belief systems and achieve what they previously thought was impossible.

When we are in the flow of momentum, and everything is exciting and we can't help but want more. However, when there is a challenge or an issue in the business, it can almost immediately put us into full constraint. We get to the place where we feel like we can't move forward and for people like us that is the worst feeling in the world.

When this happens, it is critical that you use these strategies so that you don't end up inadvertently punishing your team, even when they've done nothing wrong.

For most of my career, I have worked with a disproportionate number of women in executive in leadership positions. This probably has a lot to do with the way I was raised and the fact that I relate very well to women.

The relationships I've had with incredible female entrepreneurs throughout my career has shown me that men and women feel the guilt of working with kids very differently. For men it is challenging but for women, it is consuming.

The guilt of being torn between doing the work you want to do and raising the children you love can become unbearable. Many professional women come to feel like they are being torn apart and have to ignore part of their lives in order to create the space to focus on the other. When you are at work, you can't help but think about your kids. When you are with your kids, you're distracted by work.

This is a cycle that can be damaging and destructive unless you admit it's there, and start working towards dealing with it in a proactive and productive way.

The only reason your company is growing is because you have been able to attract a market or a group of clients. It is their belief in you an investment in your products that are allowing your company to exist at all.

A company that does not have a market to serve does not have a reason to exist. As the leader of your organization, you should be passionately in love with your market and ready to make their lives better.

You should defend your market against the people who are trying to serve them in a way that it is not as effective as yours. You should advocate for your market, who they are and what they do in the world.

There is one thing you can never do with your clients, customers or the market user. In fact, if anyone on your team member does this, it should because for immediate termination.

It is horrifying how often one of my client comes to me after they've been given terrible advice from their accountant or bookkeeper. While there are some good finance and accounting people out there, there must be a class somewhere in the accounting curriculum called “dumb advice to give entrepreneurs.”

The problem with this is that accountants are seen as business professionals who should be giving advice and most of the time it gets followed. I have worked with enough entrepreneurs that I can sum up the worst accounting advice in one podcast.

If you have an accountant who has told you one of these things, send them a link to this episode.

NOTE: In this podcast I mention the name of a service firm that we used to work with for our outsourced finance and accounting. We no longer work with that firm so rather than eliminate this episode where there is a tremendous amount of value, instead we decided to just remove the name of the firm from the audio.

There was a point in time in my life where I would not have listened to a podcast with this title, much less recorded one. If someone told me that gratitude was a gateway to success I would've laughed at them.

I was all about results and didn't have time for fluff or woo-woo strategies. If it didn't move me forward towards my goals I wasn't interested in talking about it, and if it didn't do it fast I wasn't going to give you my time.

I had to learn the hard way that some strategies are more indirect than others. Over time I started realizing that some of the most powerful keystone habits only work indirectly. At first, it was difficult to see but then it became clear that there are some things we do that improve everything in our lives.

The practice of gratitude is a game changer for any of us, if you want more success this is a keystone habit you shouldn't ignore like I did for far too long.