Latest / WTF to Unstuck™ with Clint Williams / Insights on Growth and Joy with Tarik Ali
Transcript
- speaker-0: Are we keeping it clean or do we swear? speaker-1: You can swear as much as you want. Okay. ⁓ yeah. No, I actually like personally, I kind of think that there is a little bit of a you develop a rapport real quick and you kind of know who your audience is if you can do that and nobody like runs. ⁓ 'cause if you're working with me one on one, I'm definitely gonna swear. So if you know up front and you're like, I can't do that, yeah. Maybe we're not the right fit. ⁓ speaker-0: Cool. All right. Cool. Sounds good. ⁓ Cool let's do it. ⁓ speaker-1: I have the pleasure of chatting with my friend Tariq Ali. He is an executive coach for owners and senior leaders. His opening line on LinkedIn is actually one of my faves. Your favorite NDA protected meeting of the week. He is up in beautiful Toronto at the moment, and I am excited to be able to chat for a few minutes. So Tariq, welcome to the coffee chat. speaker-0: Yeah, it's great to be here. Rapid fire, I love it. speaker-1: Yeah. I I figured that if it's not rapid fire, I'm not gonna post them. So it's just a short format and we're gonna do it. ⁓ yeah, so so nice to see you. Thanks for hopping on today. I ⁓ it's been a while since we've spoken, but I sent over some questions earlier this week and I'm just gonna dive right into those. I'm gonna I'm gonna fire the first one. Are you ready? All right. So I'm curious, what has been the driving factor that has kept you going through the hard parts of business and I guess also life? speaker-0: Let's do I'm gonna freewheel this a bit because I I think my answer changed 20 minutes ago. ⁓ cool. So I just we we just recorded a 90 minute session with another coach ⁓ on my podcast. And we were joking about how this this idea of like sometimes I wonder, hey, you know, you're a coach. Does that mean that you feel like zero fear, zero doubt, zero anything? And I'm like, fuck no, like that is not that is not how how this works. And ⁓ I I think One of my favorite things to think about is this idea of like, I never really want the fear feeling or the feeling of like problems in life to be down to zero. Like if it's down to a one or a two, like that's like where I kind of want that to be, where I feel like I'm growing and like continuing to push things and not just getting like bored with like absolutely no fears at all. And I think of this idea of like, I don't want to get it to zero. I just want tomorrow's fears to be better than yesterday's were, right? That's a sign for me that we're like going in the right direction. Like I think back to how scary it was to even consider jumping into entrepreneurship. Like I grew up in a household that celebrated my Accenture promotions. They were like, ⁓ yeah, paycheck. Like that's so safe. And so so much of the hard part for me starting this thing was before it even started. Like I was So risk averse. I would put so much pressure on myself ⁓ growing up. I was a perfectionist. ⁓ my relationship with money was one of like, hey, save as much as you can. Like I had a bl I had a black pouch when I was growing up that like every birthday I'd put the fifty bucks in and I'd want to spend it on a video game. My parents would be like, ⁓ like you should save it. And so those are all things that aren't very conducive to being an entrepreneur. Like if you're I felt like I was gonna be on my back foot. So a lot of the hard part early on was was like working through that stuff ⁓ and understanding like, okay, what is underneath these fears? Like, where is this coming from? And that was my work with my coach before I even started posting on LinkedIn. And the the number one thing that came out of that was a document on my iPad, which is actually the iPads here, the documents on this iPad. And I called it my ⁓ safety charter. And basically what it was was we had found based on the nature of what the fears and the pressures were in my mind, I drew out like, what's the way of building this that would make me feel safe? Based on my mind, what I care about, my risk aversion, my, you know, things I'm working on. Like if I do it this way, this feels like the Taric way of doing it. This feels like how I can run it. And that is what freed me up initially to like go after the thing. speaker-1: Amazing. speaker-0: The like four minutes and already, I apologize. I think the not at all. And a few months after I left corporate, we were on our honeymoon, and on the flight back from the honeymoon from Rome, nine hour flight, I am typing out a eight-page document on Apple Notes because there's something pulling at me which is like, Hey, we've like fucking landed the plane like we we did it like we we built the thing but I'm like kinda had to grind the whole way to like get it to that point and so this whole idea of like the relationship with joy and the relationship with how do we build this in a way that feels like fun and not just like we got it there. Right. And I think one of the hardest parts for me coming out the transition was understanding like digging into that that that joy piece. And in that document Clint I s I found in my own mind like This link between ⁓ I think I've always felt that joy and progress go in different directions. That if you are having a ton of fun doing something, you're leaving something on the table. And so therefore struggling is like a sign that you're gonna succeed. And the minute that I right, the minute I saw that on the document, I'm like, once I see something, I'm like, fuck, I I can, I can, I can unwire it, but the first step is so I'll pause here. There's two examples that come to mind where where look, there's gonna be when I think about where we want things to go next year, like there are things that scare me today. And I think it's this idea of like being able to separate, okay, what is reality versus what is kind of in my mind. And I'm a nerd for this stuff because it's my job every day. Like just go out, put the AirPods in and coach myself on okay, hey, like this fear, this doubt, like what is underneath it? What's happening in my mind? And like yeah, that's how I self correct and Fine monologue, I apologize, but yeah that happened to my my method for it, yeah. speaker-1: That's amazing. I love it. And this idea that, you know, we have this idea that everything I I'm I'm in a similar situation. Everything has to be a struggle. It's gotta be a struggle. And my coach, even this week, said, I want you to start documenting everything that feels easy, even if it's like little things, because everything doesn't have to be hard to be beneficial or to be in your life. And I it c was kind of an unlock for me in a moment that I was like, ⁓ my gosh, okay, I'm gonna start doing that. So that's awesome. Man. We're gonna do this again because we need like we need like 30 minutes. Thank you so much for your time today. I really appreciate it. ⁓ yeah, we'll talk to you soon. Cheers. All right.