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Growing Your Financial Planning Business Through Mental Fitness · Financial Planner Life Podcast

0:00
SPEAKER_01: And today's guest on the Financial Planet Life podcast is Mike Jones from We Are Better Happy.
0:04
SPEAKER_01: Mike firmly believes that businesses are the solution to the mental health and well-being problems in the UK.
0:11
SPEAKER_01: I talk about my career journey and what part wellbeing and mental health has played in that.
0:16
SPEAKER_01: And we talk about what leaders, business owners can do to improve the cultures of their business and attract the right talent.
0:22
SPEAKER_01: An excellent episode for anybody who's looking to improve their overall well-being.
0:27
SPEAKER_01: I hope you enjoy Mike, thank you for joining me today on the Financial Planner Life podcast.
0:38
SPEAKER_01: How are you?
0:39
SPEAKER_01: I'm great, thanks, Sam.
0:40
SPEAKER_01: Thank you for having me.
0:41
SPEAKER_01: That's all right.
0:42
SPEAKER_01: I'll tell you what, how are you out of 10?
0:45
SPEAKER_00: Oh, good question.
0:46
SPEAKER_00: Uh, probably about, I'd say about seven.
0:49
SPEAKER_00: I've just come back from two weeks of holiday.
0:51
SPEAKER_00: So I have the kind of holiday blues after where it's kind of like try to get back into normal life and growing your business and doing all the good stuff you want to do.
0:59
SPEAKER_00: So I'm just finding my feet six, seven.
1:02
SPEAKER_00: About six or a seven.
1:03
SPEAKER_01: And what are you doing this week to work on that mental fitness to get those numbers up?
1:07
SPEAKER_00: So, really, for me, this week is a big focus on my getting reorientated with my big picture.
1:13
SPEAKER_00: So I know how my mind works and I've got to be working off the plan.
1:16
SPEAKER_00: I get a bit kind of um demotivated when I don't feel like I'm working off a roadmap.
1:22
SPEAKER_00: So I've got to reorientate myself with my big picture goals.
1:25
SPEAKER_00: And the the second thing I'm doing, my partner and I is just trying to get ourselves back into our baseline routines.
1:32
SPEAKER_00: So we have a baseline routine that we know is keep keeps our health and our productivity at a good level.
1:38
SPEAKER_00: Um, and when we're off that, things start to go the wrong way, sleep starts to get messed up, exercise drops, then productivity drops, then we start spending more time on our phones.
1:47
SPEAKER_00: So lots of little things drop out.
1:49
SPEAKER_00: So we're just trying to put big focus into holding each other accountable and getting back into that uh that routine that we know is our baseline.
1:56
SPEAKER_00: I love that.
1:57
SPEAKER_01: And what are you grateful for, Mike?
1:58
SPEAKER_01: What's the what's the things you're grateful in life right now?
2:03
SPEAKER_00: So I think about this every day.
2:06
SPEAKER_00: Um, one, I'll tell you a funny one that I think about very regularly.
2:10
SPEAKER_00: Um, when it rains outside, I used to serve in the military.
2:14
SPEAKER_00: So whenever it's raining outside, as it was last night, and I'm lying in my nice warm bed, I'm always so thankful that I'm just lucky enough to live in a life where I've got a roof over my head and a warm duvet, and I'm not having to wake up in the rain like I did on military exercises.
2:28
SPEAKER_00: So that's one thing.
2:29
SPEAKER_00: And I was writing a piece yesterday, actually, um, about health and well-being, uh which is a topic we're going to talk about today.
2:36
SPEAKER_00: And I was writing in the piece that, you know, if if if you're sat reading this on a computer, you you're one of the privileged minority that lives in a wealthy part of the world, that has the opportunity to do the things that you want to do, choose the career or business that you want to go after, you know, these are all privileges.
2:53
SPEAKER_00: So I think we're all lucky just to live in the in the part of the world that we do.
2:57
SPEAKER_00: Uh so I regularly remind myself of that because our minds are negative, aren't they?
3:01
SPEAKER_00: So we need to do this, we need to train this um gratitude piece.
3:06
SPEAKER_01: Thank you very much for sharing that.
3:08
SPEAKER_01: You know, I got up this morning, I was a four out of ten, and leaning into what you just said there about routine, routine plays such a massive part in my life in respect of my health and happiness.
3:19
SPEAKER_01: So when I have a good, solid routine in place, I'm I'm all I crave it.
3:24
SPEAKER_01: I absolutely crave it.
3:25
SPEAKER_01: Last week I was in London, I had so many good things going on.
3:28
SPEAKER_01: I was meeting loads of really cool people, I was up for an award, um, I was networking, I launched my academy.
3:34
SPEAKER_01: There was all these massive highs that came along.
3:37
SPEAKER_01: It was my birthday, so it was all these massive highs that came along, things that you're not really sometimes used to happening in such a short period of time.
3:44
SPEAKER_01: Plus, I was away from home, I was away from my my daughter, my wife, my little new doggy, you know, my routine, the gym, going for a run.
3:53
SPEAKER_01: And I find that when that is broken, cook, the week after, it can have a knock-on effect with me.
3:58
SPEAKER_01: You know, it can make me feel quite low.
3:59
SPEAKER_01: And as I said to you before, this cool having that space where I can ask myself the question of how I'm feeling today out of 10.
4:06
SPEAKER_01: And if I do score low, I allow myself to sit and reflect on why I'm feeling low.
4:11
SPEAKER_01: And then I've got some really great friends, and you know, I just text and I just hey, you know, my friend James Stammers, he runs a um gym, and I just said, Okay, I'm a four out of ten today, and it is the reasons why I think I'm a four out of ten.
4:22
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it was just that safety zone to be able to express it, see it, explore it, sit with it, and understand that it's absolutely okay to be in that space and to allow it, and that we're only human, and sometimes we can't operate all the time on an eight out of ten.
4:39
SPEAKER_01: However, I have trained myself so well around my routine that when I'm in flow, I I no word of a lie, I am in an eight out of ten for months.
4:51
SPEAKER_01: I just go at it eight out of ten for months, months, months, months, months.
4:55
SPEAKER_01: However, break that routine, and it I have to be very careful because I can get really panicky.
5:02
SPEAKER_01: I can get really worried that, oh no, you know, and in the past I'd have seen that as a real like, oh, the whole world I catastrophize, the whole world's collapsing around me.
5:10
SPEAKER_01: But it's not, it's just that my routine's a bit broken, and I like to get back on track.
5:15
SPEAKER_01: So I love that you're experiencing that.
5:17
SPEAKER_01: I love the way that you didn't you said mentioned your partner there.
5:19
SPEAKER_01: Is that your wife, girlfriend, partner?
5:22
SPEAKER_00: Long-term partner, we show house together, we're not married, yeah, yeah.
5:27
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, but we uh we yeah, we're a married couple in all normal sense of the term.
5:32
SPEAKER_01: It's lovely, isn't it, when you also both are on the same page and respectful of each other's routines and you give space for each other to have the space to work on your routines and you don't make it all about you, you try to also make it about the other person as well.
5:46
SPEAKER_01: And that always helps me get back on track as well.
5:49
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, definitely.
5:50
SPEAKER_00: And I and I think a good concept to bear in mind for anybody, regardless of where you are in your life or career, um, is this concept of being sensibly selfish.
6:00
SPEAKER_00: And this is that you, you know, you you've got to take time for you to do your routine, to do the things that get you into your A game so that you can be of most use to the people around you.
6:11
SPEAKER_00: So it's seeing it that way.
6:13
SPEAKER_00: And if we don't see it that way, I think we end up, especially business owners, right?
6:17
SPEAKER_00: And senior people, people that are in management leadership positions, we we see it, we prioritize the business or the leadership or the management role.
6:26
SPEAKER_00: Rightly so or wrongly so, neither here nor there.
6:28
SPEAKER_00: But that's the top priority to us.
6:30
SPEAKER_00: And then we end up seeing our own routines as something that's maybe getting in the way of doing the things that we need to do for that.
6:36
SPEAKER_00: Uh, so we stop looking after ourselves and we stop doing the things that we want to do.
6:40
SPEAKER_00: Um, and it is a vicious circle because then we get moody, we get unhealthy, we we become suboptimal, um, which then leads to us not being the best version of ourselves.
6:51
SPEAKER_01: Ambition's a good thing, isn't it?
6:54
SPEAKER_01: You know, ambition drives us forward to do the things that we feel we're capable of doing and to achieve certain goals.
7:01
SPEAKER_01: Um, but ambition can also be toxic.
7:05
SPEAKER_01: You can have toxic ambition.
7:07
SPEAKER_01: Or what's your views around ambition?
7:11
SPEAKER_01: Because you talk to a lot of business owners, people in leadership roles, managers within those businesses, and they often can be very ambitious individuals.
7:22
SPEAKER_01: What's your take on ambition?
7:23
SPEAKER_01: Do you think it's a good thing, bad thing?
7:25
SPEAKER_01: How do we manage that and keep that in check?
7:26
SPEAKER_01: Do you think?
7:28
SPEAKER_00: I it I think ambition is really interesting, and I should probably start with my personal experience.
7:33
SPEAKER_00: And my personal experience is that I never suffered serious stress or depression until I got ambitious.
7:41
SPEAKER_00: So before that, before I was ambitious, I was unhappy, but not particularly stressed.
7:47
SPEAKER_00: I just had this kind of deep underlying sense of unfulfillment that maybe I didn't even know about, which I made up for by drinking, partying, going on holidays, doing all the things that, you know, kind of um medicate that deeper sense of something's missing.
8:02
SPEAKER_00: But the reality is that until I got ambitious, my life was less stressful.
8:06
SPEAKER_00: And I think that's where a lot of people sit.
8:08
SPEAKER_00: I think they they that they've got this potential inside them, and this maybe some conscious voice telling them, go and do your own business, go and do change your career, go to this place, do that thing, write that book, whatever it might be.
8:20
SPEAKER_00: But they know that's going to be hard work.
8:23
SPEAKER_00: So they just stay put.
8:24
SPEAKER_00: And I think it's a slow burn.
8:26
SPEAKER_00: I think if you don't have, if you don't pursue your ambition, I think it's less stressful in the short term, but I think in the long term it really grinds you down.
8:33
SPEAKER_00: So then obviously the the thing that we're taught, and rightly so, is to get ambitious, right?
8:38
SPEAKER_00: It's to it's to get clear on what you want to achieve, it's to go after the big goals, to, to, to make your life meaningful.
8:43
SPEAKER_00: And most of the old literature that you read, whether it's religious or philosophical, says that, you know, it's pursuing your goals that's going to give meaning to your life.
8:50
SPEAKER_00: And it's going to be hard.
8:52
SPEAKER_00: And I think that's the bit that's probably played down, that it is going to be hard, not just, you know, hard to achieve the thing, but it's going to be mentally challenging.
9:00
SPEAKER_00: It becomes my dog to make sure that we're authentic.
9:03
SPEAKER_00: It's going to be mentally challenging and draining and more demanding than anything you've ever tried to do in your life.
9:08
SPEAKER_00: And if you don't handle that in the right way, it can very quickly um become a severe negative in your life.
9:14
SPEAKER_00: So I think ambition is important, but we've got to understand that you can have too much of a good thing.
9:20
SPEAKER_00: And most people probably make that mistake from what I see, myself included, and I think you have as well.
9:25
SPEAKER_01: No, 100%.
9:26
SPEAKER_01: It's interesting.
9:27
SPEAKER_01: You say that I always had that burning sort of ambition inside of me to want to be in a better position than I was.
9:40
SPEAKER_01: One of those things was like knowing that I was more capable, that I was more capable of achieving bigger things than I was doing in my life.
9:48
SPEAKER_01: So if I went back five years to probably the peak of my unhappiness, I was running a company for nine years, you know, not really feeling like the company was progressing very uh forward very well.
10:03
SPEAKER_01: I was heavy drinking, um, not daily, but definitely binge drinking, which on a weekly basis once is damaging massively to your motivation and energy levels and your self-respect and the feelings of who you are.
10:22
SPEAKER_01: You know, am I really reaching my full potential when three or four days a week I'm coming, I'm I'm having to fight the toxicity that I've created in my body around drinking too much alcohol and sniffing cocaine or whatever else I was up to those times.
10:34
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
10:35
SPEAKER_01: Um and there came a point where it had to stop, and that that ambition inside of me was almost saying, like, it was it was turning into negative.
10:45
SPEAKER_01: It was kind of sending me the wrong way.
10:46
SPEAKER_01: If you don't stop this, then your ambition is to pretty much exit out of this life.
10:51
SPEAKER_01: So that sounds really horrible and really kind of dark.
10:55
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
10:56
SPEAKER_01: And it and it was this battle, it was this constant battle between I was hugely ambitious even when I was in my lowest state.
11:04
SPEAKER_01: Does that make sense?
11:05
SPEAKER_01: I was like, and it was just really, really frustrating.
11:08
SPEAKER_01: And it was interesting because I was, you know, it things have to change when you're in that place, and you need to start looking at the things that are starting to create toxicity in your life, and you need to look at them and reflect on them, and you need to be accountable for them and start removing them.
11:21
SPEAKER_01: For me, one of them was my drinking.
11:23
SPEAKER_01: I genuinely was like over-drinking, I was abusing my body, I was stuck in a really bad habit around that.
11:30
SPEAKER_01: And it was also as I learned when I went through like a 12-step process, it was um, it was medication for me.
11:39
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it was it was dampening down those voices inside of me.
11:43
SPEAKER_01: It was it was it was trying to mask the trauma and the pain that I'd been feeling from a really young age around other subject matters.
11:52
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
11:52
SPEAKER_01: Um, and that was a really interesting time of my life.
11:56
SPEAKER_01: But yeah, it's just weird because I just want to get onto the subject around ambition, because you've got people who are running businesses, they're employing people, they often present on the outside, don't they, that everything's okay and they kind of keep running forward because they know they've got to keep running forward, but inside they're dying, you know, they're really stressed.
12:14
SPEAKER_01: Um, they're maybe not living, they're not maybe not living to the standard that you think they should be living around their health and well-being.
12:21
SPEAKER_01: Um, and it's having a negative effect on themselves, their families, but they quite can't quite know how to pull away from it and make a change.
12:31
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I think it's such an important topic.
12:33
SPEAKER_00: And I think what we do in the Western world is we glorify um super high achievers that might potentially be quite unhealthy.
12:45
SPEAKER_00: Um, so there's many high achievers that the very reason that they're high achievers is because they live quite an unhealthy lifestyle and they and they drive themselves, maybe not through the right reasons.
12:56
SPEAKER_00: I mean, Alex Ormose is quite open about this.
12:58
SPEAKER_00: He's like, you know, super famous now through social media and he's he's a very wealthy, successful businessman.
13:04
SPEAKER_00: But one of the things that he talks about is actually, you know, one of the commonality, one of the common themes of people that achieve what he achieves is they've just got this ongoing sense of inadequacy that they're not good enough.
13:14
SPEAKER_00: So a lot of what they're doing that's driving them to achieve what they're achieving is they don't feel like they're good enough.
13:20
SPEAKER_00: And I think no matter what you achieve in life, no matter how many yachts you can buy, if you're getting there because you don't feel like you're good enough, you're never going to feel happy because you're never gonna get to a point where, right, my business has made this much now.
13:32
SPEAKER_00: So now I feel like I'm good enough.
13:33
SPEAKER_00: It'll you just keep moving the goalposts.
13:36
SPEAKER_00: So I think I I wrote a piece quite a while ago um to discussing this actually, and it was trying to help people understand their goals.
13:45
SPEAKER_00: Because I go through this same thought process with myself, you know, and I I use an analogy of when you're pursuing a goal, imagine that it's this you're on a journey, you're climbing a mountain, right?
13:56
SPEAKER_00: And the goal is to get to the top of the mountain.
13:58
SPEAKER_00: And what you've got to think about is what's driving you on that journey.
14:01
SPEAKER_00: So ideally, it's the desire to get to the top, because for whatever reason, a genuine, intrinsic desire to get to the top because it's aligned to your values and your purpose in life.
14:09
SPEAKER_00: That's that's good.
14:10
SPEAKER_00: But what a lot of people are is they're they're running away from a tiger up the mountain.
14:14
SPEAKER_00: And that is you don't feel like you're good enough.
14:16
SPEAKER_00: You feel like you've got to prove yourself to somebody, you feel like you've got to do this thing to make your parents happy or whatever it might be.
14:22
SPEAKER_00: So if you're doing it to run away from something, I don't think it will ever make you happy.
14:28
SPEAKER_00: Um, or if you're not doing it because you're scared of failure, then you're kind of being held back by a donkey.
14:33
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
14:34
SPEAKER_00: So you've got this donkey that you're trying to pull up the mountain towards this goal that's important to you, but the donkey's going, well, you don't really need to go up there.
14:40
SPEAKER_00: Life's all right as it is.
14:42
SPEAKER_00: Um, you know, is it worth the stress?
14:45
SPEAKER_00: Because it's going to be stressful getting up there.
14:47
SPEAKER_00: You know, we kind of know how things are.
14:48
SPEAKER_00: And I think that's probably where you were at with your first business.
14:51
SPEAKER_00: It was kind of a you knew you had ambition to do more, um, and you knew you have more potential, but your donkey was saying, well, just kind of stay here.
14:59
SPEAKER_00: And and in the short term, it's easy to justify that to yourself.
15:02
SPEAKER_00: It's kind of like, well, yeah, actually, things are all right the way they are, and um life's not too bad.
15:08
SPEAKER_00: But if you don't listen to your kind of genuine subconscious, which I think is what you do now, and I think that shines through very clearly, there's a deep sense of unhappiness that builds up over time, which is going to manifest itself in self-medication through drinking, alcohol, drugs, whatever it might be.
15:24
SPEAKER_00: So yeah, I think you I think you've got to be really careful to think about what's driving you.
15:30
SPEAKER_00: Is it a genuine desire to get to this new place, to achieve this thing for genuine reasons, or is it a fear of not being good enough or trying to please people?
15:40
SPEAKER_00: Because if it's the if it's the latter, I don't think it's gonna make you happy and it's gonna probably lead to you working in in an unhealthy way.
15:46
SPEAKER_00: And then if you're stuck somewhere, you've got to ask yourself, well, is it because actually I am happy where I am?
15:52
SPEAKER_00: I just want to make peace of that, or is it because I'm scared of the challenges that will come with trying to pursue my true goals?
15:59
SPEAKER_00: So yeah, I think I think it's uh I think that's something you've got to do.
16:02
SPEAKER_00: You've got to dig into your whys and get really clear on them.
16:07
SPEAKER_01: It was interesting what you're saying about the subconscious side of it there, because I didn't really truly understand what my subconscious was and how it was directing my life until until I gave myself space to be able to communicate with it.
16:23
SPEAKER_01: And that was really interesting.
16:25
SPEAKER_01: And I I wonder how many people have sat in a business running it that have yet to explore the real inner depth of who they actually are and what is driving them and for what reasons.
16:38
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
16:39
SPEAKER_01: I mean avoidance of fear, avoidance of pain, seeking pleasure being pretty much one of the two of the major things that as humans, substance amoebas have have evolved, is is what we're all about.
16:53
SPEAKER_01: Avoid, avoid pain, seek, seek pleasure.
16:56
SPEAKER_01: Yep.
16:56
SPEAKER_01: Um I when I gave myself that space, so like for example, I'm gonna go back to like the not drinking side of it, because there was ambition there, but it was in the wall in the wrong places, and I couldn't quite put my finger on how to do things and how to focus and how to drive forward.
17:11
SPEAKER_01: You can imagine, right?
17:12
SPEAKER_01: One week you feel fantastic, you go out and get drunk because you feel fantastic, and then you start the week next week thinking, oh my god, all those things that I've built up, all those things that I said I was gonna do, now I feel like shit, how am I gonna do them?
17:25
SPEAKER_01: So when there's something toxic in your life that's impacting you negatively, you have to remove those toxic things to be able to give yourself that space to even be able to can then communicate with your higher state of consciousness, you know, that part of you that is communicating with you and driving you forward on autopilot.
17:42
SPEAKER_01: One of the interesting things that happened to me is that when I stopped drinking and I removed anything which was medication, if you like, that was cannabis, that was everything, right?
17:52
SPEAKER_01: So I removed it all from my life.
17:54
SPEAKER_01: What I found really interesting was I had an emotional age of like 15.
18:01
SPEAKER_01: It was like I was still a kid, but in my head, all my thinking was like childlike.
18:07
SPEAKER_01: It was like my emotional age was not that of a 35-year-old or 36-year-old that I was at the time.
18:13
SPEAKER_01: And when I started to explore that part of my thinking and started to actually recognise what it was, and I think some psychiatrists, psychologists, etc., call it like the shadow self, this thing that drives it.
18:24
SPEAKER_01: So if you're a a really fat man, for instance, and you lose a load of weight, do you all of a sudden become happy?
18:30
SPEAKER_01: Does the voice inside your head change, or is that voice inside your head still that fat person?
18:35
SPEAKER_01: You know, do you still think like a fat person, even though physically on the outside you might be in peak top condition?
18:40
SPEAKER_01: And it was when I went back and started communicating with that sense of who I was inside and gave it a name and gave it a face and gave it an identity, it was like I recognized it was like a scared version of myself.
18:59
SPEAKER_01: It was like a young scared version of myself.
19:02
SPEAKER_01: And the first picture I gave myself when I looked at it was it almost looked like Gollum from Lord of the Rings.
19:09
SPEAKER_01: And then when I developed this relationship with that part of me, I started to show it compassion and love and kindness.
19:16
SPEAKER_01: I started to listen to it a bit more and to hear and to understand what its pain points were and what its fears and what its worries were.
19:24
SPEAKER_01: And then through that kind and loving relationship with myself, that age of my inner self, my inner child, if you like, became older and older and older.
19:32
SPEAKER_01: And I do feel like where I am now, I've caught up, like emotionally, my age is caught up to where I actually am.
19:38
SPEAKER_01: I feel 42 years old, I feel like a dad, I feel like a business owner, I feel exactly where I should be in life when I built that relationship with myself.
19:47
SPEAKER_01: Do you do you often come across that in in when you're working with business owners?
19:54
SPEAKER_01: Do you feel like some business owners can be so obsessed and addicted and driven towards trying to make their businesses a success that they're not actually looking at themselves, they're subconscious, they're in a child.
20:09
SPEAKER_01: Are they not actually fully connected to who they actually are?
20:15
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, there's two really important kinds of things to pick up from what you've just said.
20:20
SPEAKER_00: So the the first is, and I'll return to this, is what you've done with yourself and what you've explained there through the Gollum analogy, is um a very effective psychological method called labeling.
20:33
SPEAKER_00: Um, I'm sure there's lots of different ways to lay to name it, but that's there's there's a process that I that's helped me immensely called um acceptance commitment training, which I learned from a really good psychologist called Ross McIntosh and was made famous in the book The Happiness Trap.
20:48
SPEAKER_00: So I'll come back and discuss that very shortly.
20:51
SPEAKER_00: But that's a very powerful technique that I work with business owners and managers and leaders on because this self-awareness piece, which you've just kind of um explained in detail, is vital, right?
21:02
SPEAKER_00: It's vital to happiness and performance in life.
21:04
SPEAKER_00: And it's the second point I'd go into is it's something that we really neglect in the Western world.
21:10
SPEAKER_00: Um, when I left the military, I went and lived on monasteries in Thailand and Nepal, and I taught kids English in Nepal, got to live on the monastery, teach the kids as a volunteer, and I got to live on a monastery and study Buddhism and learn that way of life.
21:24
SPEAKER_00: And something that really fascinated me was Nepal's a very poor country.
21:28
SPEAKER_00: Um, it I think it was one of the poorest countries in the world at the time.
21:31
SPEAKER_00: I don't know if it is now, but it's a very poor country.
21:34
SPEAKER_00: Kids live on monasteries uh essentially as um what you call it when uh when when they're away from home.
21:42
SPEAKER_00: I can't remember, it's like a boarding school, but it's kind of also like um many of them are adopted by the monastery because their families have passed away or whatever it might be.
21:50
SPEAKER_00: So the the the school acts as a kind of um foster care slash boarding school.
21:56
SPEAKER_00: So there is kids there that have got money, but a lot of them haven't got money.
21:59
SPEAKER_00: So It's poor country, and what I realized was maybe the quality of uh logical education, if you want to call it that they're getting, isn't what we get over here, nowhere near.
22:09
SPEAKER_00: But they every day they start their school with meditation and mindfulness, and they work on the mind and learn about the mind and learn about different thoughts and how to recognize thoughts and positive thoughts and negative thoughts, and how their thoughts affect your feelings and your feelings affect your emotions and your actions.
22:25
SPEAKER_00: And I remember thinking to myself, you know, I'm in I'm in I'm in a poor country with many of these children that have got no money, and this education they're getting is that blows out, blows the socks off out.
22:37
SPEAKER_00: So maybe not in regards to maths and and and the sciences, but in regards to emotional intelligence and the skills that are going to help you thrive internally in life, they're really kind of miles ahead of us.
22:52
SPEAKER_00: So I think it's something that we really neglect in the Western world.
22:55
SPEAKER_00: And I think that creates a lot of challenges.
22:58
SPEAKER_00: Probably the reason we, one of the reasons we have so much poor mental health and and depression, because we live in this time where you've got choice and freedom to do whatever you choose with your days and with your life.
23:08
SPEAKER_00: And I know there's still people suffering and and struggling with financial issues, but generally, you know, you and I were talking about this before the podcast, the quality of life today is just so much better than it's ever been before.
23:20
SPEAKER_00: And the choices we have are unlike ever before.
23:22
SPEAKER_00: And the freedom we have is like unlike ever before.
23:25
SPEAKER_00: So we've got this choice and freedom in our lives.
23:28
SPEAKER_00: But if we're not aware of who we are and what's going on in our own minds, we can't grab those opportunities, we can't make those choices, and we end up just feeling stuck and unhappy when we know we've got this opportunity.
23:41
SPEAKER_00: And I think that makes us even more unhappy.
23:43
SPEAKER_00: If we didn't have the choices and the opportunity, you know, I read I read uh Road to Wig and Peer by George Orwell, which I is maybe in the 60s or a bit earlier, and it's like mass, maybe the 20s, uh, and there's mass unemployment.
23:55
SPEAKER_00: And so many people in the UK just he something that really struck me was they knew they would never have a job.
24:02
SPEAKER_00: They knew they had never had the prospect of being able to work and provide for their families.
24:05
SPEAKER_00: And this, you know, and and and it was mentally mentally upsetting for them because they just knew life was limited, they didn't have the choice.
24:13
SPEAKER_00: But I think with that, you know, I would definitely wouldn't want to go back to that.
24:16
SPEAKER_00: But with that comes a level of peace because it's kind of like, well, there's nothing I can do, so I'll just go back my days.
24:21
SPEAKER_00: Whereas I think today most of us know we we can make these choices, we can make things better, we can go for the promotion, we can do the course, we can learn that thing on YouTube, you know.
24:31
SPEAKER_00: So we know we've got these options available to us, but we but we don't choose to pursue them because we've got a golem in our head telling us we're not good enough.
24:39
SPEAKER_00: And when, and even though we know that's not us completely, it's just a part of our psyche, the shadow self, whatever you want to call it, when it when we let that win, I think it makes us really unhappy over time and creates a lot of stress in our life.
24:51
SPEAKER_00: Something that I see commonly with business owners and managers and leaders is the avoidance of conflict.
24:58
SPEAKER_00: And uh, you know, and I and I'm guilty of this as well.
25:01
SPEAKER_00: In um even if it's just little conflicts, if it's a big values clash with you, so if it's a member of staff not not behaving in line with the values that you uphold in the company, or even I had a big conflict with an old business partner where our values are just out of work.
25:16
SPEAKER_00: And I knew I had to address it, but I was putting it off because the golem in my head was saying if you have this conflict, it's gonna turn into a fight, it's gonna get aggressive, there's gonna be danger, you know, all of these silly things that are irrational.
25:28
SPEAKER_00: But that's what childhood Mike had learned that you know, conflict was bad through a variety of situations when I was younger.
25:35
SPEAKER_00: So I was listening to, even though I was a grown man, or I'm a grown man, I'm listening to the to the four-year-old Mike or the seven-year-old Mike that's going, oh, don't have an argument with somebody.
25:43
SPEAKER_00: Don't don't say if you're unhappy with a thing, because that's going to result in bad.
25:48
SPEAKER_00: So I think we don't do that because we don't go through this basic process of emotional intelligence.
25:53
SPEAKER_00: And when we do, like you have, it's transformational.
25:57
SPEAKER_00: We start to realize that much of the stress in our lives is created by these seven-year-old versions of ourselves or these ulterior versions of ourselves that we're letting dictate.
26:07
SPEAKER_00: And they're actually the thing that's holding us back, they're the thing that's making us stress, they're the thing that's making us unhappy or not make progress in areas that we should.
26:14
SPEAKER_00: And if we can recognize them, which most people don't, you know, you took the time to step back and actually recognize it.
26:19
SPEAKER_00: If we can first of all recognize it and then work with with work with it to stop it from dictating our lives, we unlock this whole level of potential in our lives that um we maybe didn't know was there before we did know, but didn't pursue.
26:33
SPEAKER_01: I love the analogy false evidence appearing real, that fear.
26:37
SPEAKER_01: So fear, false evidence appearing, appearing real.
26:41
SPEAKER_00: Like Forget everything can run.
26:43
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
26:44
unknown: Yeah.
26:45
SPEAKER_01: Ian Ian Brang, wasn't it?
26:46
SPEAKER_01: I'm not sure.
26:47
SPEAKER_00: I'm terrible at remembering.
26:49
SPEAKER_00: I've got the quotes, I just can't reference them.
26:52
SPEAKER_01: Ian Brang from the Stone Roses wrote the song F-E-A-R, which is fear.
26:56
SPEAKER_01: Then he goes through all these different acronyms for fear, and I think it's just a really, really good song.
27:00
SPEAKER_01: But that false evidence appearing real, that monkey part of the brain or the shadow self, that primal instinctive side that's telling you to run away from what you've experienced in the past has been pain.
27:11
SPEAKER_01: I grew up with an alcoholic dad who was just constantly on your case and shouting at you, or you know, if you put a plate in the wrong place, then you know you were in trouble.
27:19
SPEAKER_01: So you're always looking over your shoulder, really.
27:21
SPEAKER_01: You'd hear a car pull up down the driveway, and instantly you think, what have I done wrong?
27:25
SPEAKER_02: Yeah.
27:25
SPEAKER_01: And I think um that kind of disciplinarian working, you know, living with somebody when you were younger, when you were developing, that's how I then went on in my life.
27:35
SPEAKER_01: And that, you know, you don't realize that the environments that you grow up in, or the environments, even in your uh when you're when you're older, you know, during your 20s, where are you working?
27:45
SPEAKER_01: What's the environment like?
27:46
SPEAKER_01: Because those environments can really change the way that you think, the the patterns of thinking throughout your life.
27:53
SPEAKER_01: And when I recognize that, you know, oh wow, like these are things that I learned from a really, really young age, and they're still with me today.
28:01
SPEAKER_01: So when you said about the conflict side, you know, we all don't particularly like conflict, I guess, because it's human beings, a conflict really from a primal perspective, is like, do I engage or do I do I fight or do I do I run?
28:14
SPEAKER_01: You know, and and up comes the blood pressure, up comes the dilation of the eyes, the cortisol is released, and it's engaging and it's uncomfortable, and people don't particularly like it.
28:23
SPEAKER_01: But often now I I see it as this well, what's it telling me?
28:27
SPEAKER_01: What's it telling me?
28:28
SPEAKER_01: What's the lesson I can learn from this?
28:30
SPEAKER_01: And what resolution can come from this conflict where we don't have to feel that again?
28:36
SPEAKER_01: Because conflict for yourself is uncomfortable, and especially as a business owner, you know, you've got a team of people, and we have this idea that we want to make this place that we've built, this office, this company so perfect that everybody joins.
28:49
SPEAKER_01: And but there is always conflict, there's never perfection, there is always going to be conflict, and you we want to create an environment where conflict is recognized as not as a negative thing, but an opportunity to change and develop and build a better business or a better environment for us all to live in.
29:08
SPEAKER_01: But it's complex, isn't it?
29:09
SPEAKER_01: Because we're all different and we've all got our different experiences in life and how we've grown up.
29:13
SPEAKER_00: And but we live in a society that's demonizing any form of conflict, which is terrible for mental health.
29:19
SPEAKER_00: So anybody says anything that anybody doesn't like and the media jumps all over it and you know pulls people's careers from underneath them and chastises them, and and that's creating this undertone in society where people are scared to say what they think because they might be demonized.
29:34
SPEAKER_00: And that's terrible for mental health and terrible for culture, because if you can't say what you think and you're not allowed to offend people, you know, not consciously to upset people, but to share your opinion that will always differ to some other people's opinions, you create a culture where people are scared to talk, are scared to have conflict, are scared to be open about what they're thinking, which just creates a toxic, toxic environment in the end because everybody's unhappy and not talking about what's really important to them.
29:59
SPEAKER_01: And also we as individuals, because it's you know, it's an individual thing at the end of the day.
30:04
SPEAKER_01: If we're minimizing those things and we're not dealing with them, therefore we're carrying those rocks in our backpack constantly, aren't we?
30:10
SPEAKER_01: And are we really ever dealing with those with those issues?
30:13
SPEAKER_01: And once we look at it, this is what I always like to do.
30:16
SPEAKER_01: I always like to reflect.
30:18
SPEAKER_01: So if I have a fear or if I have a resentment, I like to write it down and I like to look at it and I like to materialize it on paper because it's no longer in my head, it's no longer on my thinking, on those neurological pathways that I've created over the years.
30:31
SPEAKER_01: It's it's outside of myself and I'm looking at it objectively.
30:35
SPEAKER_01: And I like to take a good hard look at the fear and I think to myself, false evidence appearing real.
30:40
SPEAKER_01: Is this real?
30:42
SPEAKER_01: You know, is this fear justified?
30:44
SPEAKER_01: And if it if it is, what part of myself is being affected?
30:47
SPEAKER_01: Is it affecting my security instincts?
30:49
SPEAKER_01: Is it affecting my pocketbook?
30:51
SPEAKER_01: Am I gonna is it affecting how much I earn?
30:53
SPEAKER_01: Is it affecting how I am perceived by others?
30:56
SPEAKER_01: And when I take a good hard look at it and I recognise and I identify it, then it's like, right, okay, so it's real in the sense that it's affecting your primal instincts, but is it as painful and as worrisome as it should actually be?
31:10
SPEAKER_01: What can you do to get over this right now?
31:13
SPEAKER_01: How could you resolve this?
31:15
SPEAKER_01: And whenever I do that and I look at it and I resolve the situation and I I look at it head on, the feeling actually of something leaving me is amazing.
31:25
SPEAKER_01: It's like someone's taken a backpack out, a rock out of my backpack, and I can move on.
31:29
SPEAKER_01: And when you look into things like neuroplasticity and the ability for the brain to rebuild new neurological pathways and to evolve as a human being and and to change, you know, a leopard never changes its spots.
31:42
SPEAKER_01: These are the types of things that people actually say, isn't it?
31:44
SPEAKER_01: But actually, when you do those typical types of things and you do that self-reflection work and you work through it and you get help at certain times as well, if you can't work through a certain subject matter, you do evolve as a human being and you do change.
31:57
SPEAKER_01: And I think um, God, you know, if I go back five years to who I was running this recruit UK business to where I am now, and also how self-reflection what in a a deep dive into my personal well-being is now permanated across my business.
32:18
SPEAKER_01: You know, uh I had to make those changes.
32:21
SPEAKER_01: If I didn't make those changes, my business would have remained a toxic environment.
32:27
SPEAKER_01: And it was a toxic environment.
32:29
SPEAKER_01: And I took responsibility of the fact that the toxicity, whether I like it or not, as a business owner, it did come from me.
32:38
SPEAKER_01: You know, it really did come from me.
32:40
SPEAKER_01: And I think when we do these things as business owners, it really massively impacts the business, the culture, the well-being, and where we're actually heading.
32:50
SPEAKER_01: And it also helped those within the business recognize that look, it's not shameful or guilty to have conflict, it's not shameful or guilty to um to have problems.
32:59
SPEAKER_01: What's you know, what's difficult for you is that if you hold on to it, you're not ever going to evolve, you're never going to be the best version of yourself, that higher version of yourself that you want to be.
33:09
SPEAKER_01: Have you come across that when you're talking to companies?
33:11
SPEAKER_01: I know that you advise a lot of businesses, business owners, leaders, um, managers.
33:16
SPEAKER_01: When they start to work on themselves and they start to reflect a little bit and make changes personally within themselves, are you seeing changes and transformation happening within their businesses?
33:26
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, 100%.
33:27
SPEAKER_00: So um, whether it's a team and it's the manager or it's a business and it's the owner, the the culture that is created is created by the psyche of the person that's in the leadership position.
33:38
SPEAKER_00: And some people don't want to agree with that, but it but it's absolutely true.
33:43
SPEAKER_00: And people are the reality is that if things are not going the way we want them to, or it's uh our culture's getting a bit toxic, or people have got a fixed mindset and they don't want to grow, whatever it might be, our initial reaction is to try and blame others and the external.
33:58
SPEAKER_00: But it's always it's always the person in the leadership position.
34:02
SPEAKER_00: So it's like, and and and and a thing that I like to teach myself and others is it's radical ownership.
34:07
SPEAKER_00: So before you start blaming everybody else and and and um and labeling the problems externally to you, ask yourself, what role have you played in this issue?
34:16
SPEAKER_00: And normally by the time they've really honestly done that, they realize actually it's this is completely me.
34:21
SPEAKER_00: So let's say it's an example where we've got a team member who's toxic and they're they're negative and um they're they're they're bringing the other people down.
34:29
SPEAKER_00: Like, well, what role did you play in that?
34:30
SPEAKER_00: And we'll normally find well, I'm I I employed that person.
34:34
SPEAKER_00: So I put them on, okay.
34:35
SPEAKER_00: I haven't fired that person, so I'm enabling to stay here.
34:38
SPEAKER_00: I've let their behavior be the way it is for months and it's just become normalized.
34:44
SPEAKER_00: Um, and then I'll ask, okay, well, what could have prevented that?
34:48
SPEAKER_00: Um, how how can you create a culture that doesn't happen?
34:50
SPEAKER_00: What we can have a really clear set of values that are upheld and talked about weekly.
34:54
SPEAKER_00: Do you do that?
34:54
SPEAKER_00: No.
34:55
SPEAKER_00: Okay, so there's another thing that you haven't done that's enabled this thing to happen.
34:59
SPEAKER_00: So the the reality is that for for Sam to create the culture that he wants in his business, he's gonna have to go through conflict.
35:09
SPEAKER_00: Because to make a thing, to be in line with your values and to make a thing happen, people are gonna fight it and you're gonna have to fight back in a positive way.
35:17
SPEAKER_00: Um, but most of us don't want to do that.
35:19
SPEAKER_00: And before we get to management or business ownership or leadership positions, we can get through life quite successfully without having really to have too much conflict.
35:28
SPEAKER_00: Because if we're not in a management or leadership position, as long as we can do a good job, um, we can do pretty well for ourselves.
35:34
SPEAKER_00: We can get promoted, we can earn good money, we can do a good job.
35:38
SPEAKER_00: But as soon as people step, and this is a big thing that I see that, and I saw it in myself, the men, the unique mental health challenge of jumping into management leadership or business ownership, which is both of those things combined.
35:51
SPEAKER_00: Because if you're good at your job and you know you're good, or other people recognize you as being good, the natural stepping stone is to go to doing your own thing, doing your own business or being a manager within the business or being a leader within the business.
36:03
SPEAKER_00: And what we think is, well, I'm good at my job.
36:06
SPEAKER_00: So that's gonna come really naturally to me because I'll just keep being good at my job and get other people to come and do it with me.
36:12
SPEAKER_00: That's what we think.
36:13
SPEAKER_00: But the reality is, is we're gonna have to take risks, we're gonna have to make decisions, we're gonna have to have conflict with people that we've never had before.
36:19
SPEAKER_00: We've got we've done quite well in the past just by getting on with everybody and avoiding the issues.
36:23
SPEAKER_00: Whereas once you're in that management and leadership position or business ownership position, if you avoid the conflict, it's just gonna create toxicity.
36:29
SPEAKER_00: You know, most of the teams, businesses that have got a toxic culture, not always, but most of the time, it's not through anybody, it's not through anybody's malice.
36:37
SPEAKER_00: It's through one person that's just scared of addressing the issues that need to be addressed to make it the way it needs to be.
36:43
SPEAKER_00: So even if you don't have a team, for example, and you and you and you start your own business, say as a financial planner, you're gonna have a vision of the unique way in which you want to do it.
36:55
SPEAKER_00: And it's gonna be different from the way other people do it.
36:57
SPEAKER_00: Right.
36:57
SPEAKER_00: And that's what that's what your kind of psyche telling you and your values are saying, right, I'm gonna do it this way, it's gonna be incredible.
37:04
SPEAKER_00: And then you're gonna get into it and the world's gonna fight you, it's gonna try and push you back to doing it the way everybody else does it.
37:09
SPEAKER_00: And trying to do things in a new way, as you're gonna know with the what with the things that you've done, it's gonna take risk.
37:13
SPEAKER_00: And not everything's gonna work, and you're one certainly gonna have failures when you try and make this new thing a reality.
37:19
SPEAKER_00: And all of that brings new mental health challenges, it brings internal conflict, it brings risk.
37:24
SPEAKER_00: So if we don't learn about our own psyche and learn to recognize this part of our brain, which or our minds, which are trying to hold us back from taking risk, which are trying to hold us back from taking conflict.
37:36
SPEAKER_00: Um, if we don't recognize that, we're gonna set ourselves up for a lot of heartache and stress and um pain.
37:42
SPEAKER_00: Whereas if we can create a healthy relationship with that, you can achieve incredible and wonderful things.
37:47
SPEAKER_00: But I really think that you know, not just business, but management and leadership is just extreme personal development in disguise.
37:55
SPEAKER_00: Like it's not business, it's can you learn about yourself and win the battle?
38:02
SPEAKER_00: That's what it is, really.
38:03
SPEAKER_00: It's you know, the business is or the management position is actually second to that because if you can win that battle, you'll do well.
38:10
SPEAKER_00: If you can't, you'll suffer.
38:12
SPEAKER_01: It's interesting what you said there.
38:14
SPEAKER_01: And we've made this mistake as a business.
38:15
SPEAKER_01: And I think a lot of small businesses make the mistake that when somebody is performing well within your business, you just think, well, I'll put them into a leadership position or I'll make them, I'll make them a manager.
38:27
SPEAKER_01: And we've we've been held back from the growth we could have experienced as a business.
38:33
SPEAKER_01: If I look back on my 15-year career, we could have progressed so much quicker if we uh didn't put some of those top performers into management positions away from what they were really, really good at and where they actually lived.
38:49
SPEAKER_01: Because there's that idea that ambition and success and prestige is wrapped up in what like a manager or a leadership role is.
38:58
SPEAKER_01: Well, that's what we should that's what we aspire to be.
39:00
SPEAKER_01: Because if I'm a business owner or if I'm a leader, or if I'm a manager, the prestige of it shows that I've made it and I'm respected.
39:08
SPEAKER_01: And I don't know whether or not it's for everybody.
39:12
SPEAKER_01: Well, I'm pretty damn confident that managing people is not for everybody.
39:16
SPEAKER_01: And I think we look at the wrong things, like someone writes the most amount of business, therefore we make them a manager.
39:21
SPEAKER_01: And actually, I've I've damaged people in my business by doing that because all of a sudden, then you put this undue pressure on stress upon them without any training, they don't have any experience of doing it, and all they've really ever done is built a system of how to be a success as an individual, not as a leader and as a manager.
39:41
SPEAKER_01: Yep.
39:42
SPEAKER_01: And it's hugely damaging.
39:43
SPEAKER_01: And I think a lot of small businesses make that mistake, I think.
39:46
SPEAKER_01: And I've spoken to a lot of people.
39:48
SPEAKER_00: Not just small businesses, Sam, big big businesses too, big, massive, well-established corporates, including our government, make that exact mistake all all year round.
39:56
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and I call it the um, I've got an analogy for that.
40:00
SPEAKER_00: So it's it's you've either got a policy of a revolving door or you've got a policy of an escalator.
40:05
SPEAKER_00: So the revolving door policy is people come into your business or your organization, they um are standout good performers, potentially good leaders, to get recognized, get promoted to leadership positions with no training or development, personal development, and find themselves in that management leadership role, struggle, hate it, and then leave.
40:26
SPEAKER_00: So that's the revolving door policy.
40:27
SPEAKER_00: And you've got basically what you're doing is and most businesses do this, it's incredible, right?
40:31
SPEAKER_00: Most most businesses guide their best people into management positions, leadership positions, don't train them in the right way, and then they leave.
40:39
SPEAKER_00: Normally within three to five years, they leave.
40:40
SPEAKER_00: And the reason they leave is because they're not thriving in that position, and these people that like to thrive in their professional careers, that's why they go there.
40:46
SPEAKER_00: Same with, and I think it's the same with business owners.
40:48
SPEAKER_00: An escalator is more of right, okay, we've recognized these people.
40:52
SPEAKER_00: They're good performers, they're core, they're pretty good with people, potentially good leaders, managers, whatever it might be.
40:58
SPEAKER_00: So instead of just putting them into that position and guiding them back out of the company, let's help them develop into that role.
41:03
SPEAKER_00: Because I mean, your testament to this, if you if you develop somebody into that role, whether it's business ownership or leadership, they can thrive even more, can be even better than before if we develop them into that position or you develop yourself in that position.
41:18
SPEAKER_00: It can be better.
41:18
SPEAKER_00: And this is where everybody sees they see the best of business, they see the decent somebody's making got a good name for themselves, they're in demand, they've got um good work-life balance in theory, making good money.
41:28
SPEAKER_00: So we see that, and and that's definitely a potential.
41:32
SPEAKER_00: And even outside of business ownership, management, and leadership, if you're a good manager, you can actually have better work-life balance than before.
41:39
SPEAKER_00: And you get paid more money to work less because you're effectively leading a team.
41:42
SPEAKER_00: And that's not that's not a secret, it's not a conspiracy.
41:44
SPEAKER_00: It's just if you're a good manager, that's the payoff.
41:47
SPEAKER_00: You'll get better results by working less through leverage.
41:50
SPEAKER_00: But somebody needs to train you to do that and support you in that process.
41:53
SPEAKER_00: And a lot of it is this personal development piece, and it's very similar.
41:57
SPEAKER_00: The journey from employee to manager to as employee to business owner is actually very similar.
42:03
SPEAKER_00: I'd say the business owner piece is more challenging because there's more pies you've got to have your fingers in and more plates you've got to spin.
42:10
SPEAKER_00: But it the personal development piece is pretty similar.
42:13
SPEAKER_00: It's like you've got to move away from you being the person that does everything, you've got to move away from being scared of conflict, you've got to move towards being visionary and strategic, you've got to move towards leveraging people and not just yourself.
42:24
SPEAKER_00: So there's all of this kind of stuff that comes in.
42:26
SPEAKER_01: Um there's a really interesting, I'm in a really interesting place at the moment because I don't I get to advise my recruitment business.
42:36
SPEAKER_01: I don't have to work in it.
42:38
SPEAKER_01: So I've developed the financial plan of life, which is separate from recruit UK, which is my recruitment business.
42:44
SPEAKER_01: So I get to sit on the board of you know the board, I get to sit in director level meetings, and I get to look at what's going on and make suggestions.
42:54
SPEAKER_01: And that's like where I that's where I'm best suited.
42:58
SPEAKER_01: That's my you know, top-level type thinking.
43:02
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's where I'm best suited.
43:04
SPEAKER_01: And I'm I'm I'm really happy about that.
43:07
SPEAKER_01: One of the things that we've developed over the years, and it's always a kind of tweaking, and I think we're ready for another tweak.
43:13
SPEAKER_01: And that is where you've got that frame, that career development framework.
43:18
SPEAKER_01: A career development framework is often based on the competencies that you are evidencing that suggests that you can do your job and the results that each stage of that career development ladder actually gives.
43:33
SPEAKER_01: So, say, for example, you're a recruitment consultant and you start out as a resourcer, that means all you're ever doing is really finding candidates for jobs.
43:40
SPEAKER_01: You're not going out and winning the jobs.
43:42
SPEAKER_01: So it's not like a 360 recruitment role.
43:44
SPEAKER_01: Now, within that, you can deem your success being how many candidates you've generated that have then been placed into a job, which creates a certain amount of fees.
43:53
SPEAKER_01: And then you could look at well, what skills have I learned during that and am I doing them on a regular basis?
44:00
SPEAKER_01: And then I kind of the competencies of the role.
44:02
SPEAKER_01: But what I want to run alongside it is this personal development plan.
44:06
SPEAKER_01: So that's different, isn't it?
44:08
SPEAKER_01: It's different from the competencies of doing the job and the results that the job actually give.
44:12
SPEAKER_01: But it's also look, what are you doing to manage your personal development at each stage?
44:17
SPEAKER_01: Because at some point, naturally, as human beings, we will want to evolve.
44:21
SPEAKER_01: And we probably 80% of the people always want to push up to the next level and push up to the next level.
44:26
SPEAKER_01: But we need something in place that supports them to push up to the next level.
44:31
SPEAKER_01: Now, as a business, we do care about well-being.
44:34
SPEAKER_01: So we're a B Corp, people planet purpose, big deal.
44:37
SPEAKER_01: Mental health is a really big thing.
44:38
SPEAKER_01: We've got, you know, counseling for eight counseling sessions, and they're experiencing anything but counseling sessions.
44:45
SPEAKER_01: Quite recently, I sent a girl off to what's called the red tent in New Key, like a woman's group, like a really spiritual woman's group.
44:53
SPEAKER_01: I sent her there because she opened up and explained to me some things about her past that my wife is also experienced.
44:58
SPEAKER_01: So my wife took her along.
45:00
SPEAKER_01: And that was to me like going above and beyond for an employee to help their personal development.
45:04
SPEAKER_01: And she was also in the wrong place on the career ladder for her skill set, which was actually, when I reflect on it, our fault for pushing her through the process far too quickly.
45:16
SPEAKER_01: So I want that runs so I want something that runs alongside our competency and career framework that actually also covers personal development for each of those people as well.
45:26
SPEAKER_01: You're a firm believer that well-being and mental health, whether that's anxiety, depression, all the things that are very prominent, you hear about all the time in the newspapers, social media, that there is an epidemic, there's a problem, right?
45:44
SPEAKER_01: And there is, there is a problem.
45:46
SPEAKER_01: You're a firm believer that business owners, businesses are probably one of the main places within our society that could actually alter and change the well-being of our country, our people.
46:02
SPEAKER_01: Would you say that that's true?
46:04
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, 100%.
46:05
SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
46:05
SPEAKER_00: I think it's I think that's exactly right.
46:08
SPEAKER_00: And I think it's a win-win, and it's just a new way that we need to look at it and think about it.
46:13
SPEAKER_00: So if we if we think about why why is well-being such an ongoing issue?
46:22
SPEAKER_00: And I certainly think it's made worse by the fact that the media likes to label it, and once it's labelled, we can we can talk about it all day, every day.
46:28
SPEAKER_00: And I'm sure there's a lot of people that are sat there going, my well-being is absolutely fine.
46:31
SPEAKER_00: I'm sick of the internet telling me it's not.
46:33
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
46:33
SPEAKER_00: So uh be realistic about that.
46:35
SPEAKER_00: Um, but I do think we have, especially with the younger generations that are coming through, we're gonna, we've got increasing levels of poor mental health.
46:43
SPEAKER_00: Um, and there's lots of statistics that prove this.
46:46
SPEAKER_00: You know, the suicide rates among amongst men under 40, well, amongst any men is too much, but men under 40 in the UK it is terrible, terri, terrible mental health statistics around um the youth of today.
46:57
SPEAKER_00: So we know we know there's an issue, and we've got other data such as increasing levels of obesity, um, the you know, the leading causes of death being preventable, heart diseases, strokes, things like this, which are which are you know significantly contributed to by lifestyle.
47:12
SPEAKER_00: So we know something's going wrong, and we know it's a societal problem, not an individual issue, which is really important to understand because I think when you are if you are struggling with your health and you realize that okay, it's quite normal in our society, you can take that blame off yourself.
47:26
SPEAKER_00: Even though you do have a level of responsibility, it's certainly not all you as an individual.
47:29
SPEAKER_00: We didn't just, you know, the depression and obesity have gone up significantly since World War II, since the introduction of mass processed foods and um mobile devices and the internet and mass media.
47:42
SPEAKER_00: So we, you know, we know there's correlations between those things.
47:45
SPEAKER_00: So if we really look at it and step back and go, well, what's going on?
47:48
SPEAKER_00: Why is this happening?
47:49
SPEAKER_00: I like to look at it and think, well, what's what's changed?
47:52
SPEAKER_00: And what do humans need?
47:54
SPEAKER_00: So I do a combination of looking at history and also looking at the world's longest-lived, healthiest community.
47:59
SPEAKER_00: So there's some good literature with um Blue Zone Solutions, which has now just had um a documentary come out on Netflix, which is really cool.
48:06
SPEAKER_00: But he's written a book as well, Dan Butener and Healthier 100.
48:09
SPEAKER_00: Um, John Robbins, all about like these cultures around the world where people live for a long time.
48:15
SPEAKER_00: And what's the commonalities that we see in those cultures?
48:18
SPEAKER_00: Not just that people live long, but healthy, happy lives.
48:21
SPEAKER_00: And then compare that to what's going on in the UK.
48:24
SPEAKER_00: So, sounds complex, but essentially the world's longest lived, healthiest communities, some of the commonalities across them is they eat a whole diet, they sleep naturally, they are very closely connected to their community.
48:36
SPEAKER_00: Most of them, in fact, with the Blue Zone Solutions as bar one of all these communities around the world where people regularly live to over 100, um, subscribe to some form of religion or spirituality.
48:48
SPEAKER_00: And um a nice fact as well is they most of them drink red wine with dinner.
48:52
SPEAKER_00: So it's certainly not just you can't have alcohol.
48:54
SPEAKER_00: I don't really drink, and I know you don't really touch it either, but um but they do.
48:58
SPEAKER_00: So it's not a case of oh, that's black and white.
49:01
SPEAKER_00: So I think one of the biggest problems, what in regards to our physical health, we know that the world in which we live now actively encourages poor physical health.
49:09
SPEAKER_00: It encourages us to eat crappy foods because that makes money.
49:12
SPEAKER_00: Um, it encourages us to drink coke and all these other fizzy drinks because that makes money.
49:16
SPEAKER_00: Um, encourages us to sit at home and be lazy and go on our phones and watch films and all that because that makes money.
49:22
SPEAKER_00: So there's a lot of money in poor health, and then there's money in the drugs that people need once they're unhealthy.
49:26
SPEAKER_00: So it's not there's no conspiracy theory here.
49:28
SPEAKER_00: It's that poor health is profitable.
49:30
SPEAKER_00: And if it's profitable, it's going to be marketed to you.
49:32
SPEAKER_00: So you're up against that.
49:33
SPEAKER_00: So you've been encouraged to be healthy by the marketing machine.
49:36
SPEAKER_00: So you live in an environment that encourages bad health.
49:39
SPEAKER_00: Lifestyles have changed to be more mentally demanding and less physically demanding.
49:42
SPEAKER_00: So we've got more, all of us, right?
49:44
SPEAKER_00: We've got more to think about and more to process in our minds, and the world's changing quickly in our jobs.
49:48
SPEAKER_00: And we generally speaking move less as a general necessity of life.
49:52
SPEAKER_00: So it's not providing the basic level of health anymore.
49:55
SPEAKER_00: And then this big piece, and this is where I really think that the businesses play such a vital role, is religion's become less popular, especially in the UK since the introduction of the internet and science in general.
50:09
SPEAKER_00: People are less subscribed to religion.
50:12
SPEAKER_00: Now, whether that's right or wrong is neither here nor there.
50:15
SPEAKER_00: Um, but I think all humans are spiritual beings, and we all crave some higher level of purpose in our lives.
50:22
SPEAKER_00: It's not just us, you know, when we we crave to work towards something that's more meaningful than us.
50:27
SPEAKER_00: And I think we used to get that through our religion and our local community.
50:30
SPEAKER_00: We used to get kind of that religious piece, which gave us this higher thing to work towards, and we had a local community of people that were probably involved in the same thing.
50:38
SPEAKER_00: So we have that connection, that counseling through talking to people, and a group of people focused on the same thing.
50:44
SPEAKER_00: And I think that's the actual linchpin of good health.
50:47
SPEAKER_00: You know, we can talk about what you should do in the gym and what food you should eat all day long, but I think if you haven't got a reason to be that's higher than you, you're not going to do that stuff because you're not going to be very motivated.
50:58
SPEAKER_00: So obviously, there's tactics and tips that we can use for how physical health and mental health, and we can go through those.
51:04
SPEAKER_00: But there's a piece that comes before that.
51:06
SPEAKER_00: And that is does a person have meaning and purpose in their life?
51:10
SPEAKER_00: Do they feel connected to a community?
51:12
SPEAKER_00: Do they have a thing that um that is bigger than themselves that makes them feel good about themselves?
51:17
SPEAKER_00: And I really start to get insight into this when I have my transformation, which is after the army, probably not too dissimilar to yours.
51:24
SPEAKER_00: And I started reading a lot of Buddhist literature and I read a book by the art by the Dalai Lama called The Art of Happiness.
51:29
SPEAKER_00: And there was something he said in that book that basically his philosophy is the meaning of life is to be happy, and that we are happy when we are being useful to and helping others for our own unique strengths and talents.
51:40
SPEAKER_00: And I was like, well, yeah, that's pretty much it to me.
51:42
SPEAKER_00: Before that, I thought, well, to be happy, I have to be hedonistic and drink, travel, chase, chase the opposite sex, do all those things, but that's just hedonistic.
51:50
SPEAKER_00: That's never gonna, it's short-term pleasure, not happiness.
51:53
SPEAKER_00: So then this reframing is like, okay, well, that's what happiness is.
51:56
SPEAKER_00: When we help others, we feel good about ourselves.
51:59
SPEAKER_00: And if we can profit from doing that, we get to make our own lifestyles, feel good about ourselves, and help more people, which is why I think business is fantastic.
52:06
SPEAKER_00: Um, but not everybody wants to own a business, so that's fine.
52:09
SPEAKER_00: So back to that.
52:11
SPEAKER_00: So to be happy, we need to be helping others, um, making a difference to other people's lives and doing something bigger than us.
52:16
SPEAKER_00: Um, we used to find a lot of that spiritual fulfillment through our religion, okay, and community work that religion brings about.
52:22
SPEAKER_00: Not as popular anymore.
52:23
SPEAKER_00: So I think people have got this massive spiritual gap in their souls, and they're searching to fulfill that through their work, hence the reason there's so much more interest in company vision, company values, corporate responsibility, B core, that's that's all of this stuff's going up.
52:39
SPEAKER_00: And that's because people are looking for meaning and purpose through their job, not just a paycheck.
52:44
SPEAKER_00: So that's really important.
52:46
SPEAKER_00: Number one, it helps you recruit people.
52:48
SPEAKER_00: But number two, when you'll give somebody a job and you show them how the job that they do is making a difference, whether you're a financial planner or you work for Oxfam or you're an ice cream man or person, um, you know, you're making a difference.
53:00
SPEAKER_00: It doesn't have to be world-changing, but if you're making a difference, then you need to communicate that to your people and it gives them a reason for being.
53:08
SPEAKER_00: I do a lot of work with Travel Lodge, and and and people might just say, well, they're just a budget hotel, but they're giving people travel of you know, affordable travel.
53:17
SPEAKER_00: So that's making a difference to people's lives.
53:19
SPEAKER_00: That can make a difference to somebody's work, to somebody's holiday that they have with their family.
53:22
SPEAKER_00: It's a it's a big thing.
53:24
SPEAKER_00: There's the story with the guy at NASA who JFK did a tour of NASA and that late in the evening and saw a guy mopping the floor.
53:30
SPEAKER_00: He's like, Why are you mopping the floor at 10 p.m.?
53:32
SPEAKER_00: And he said, I'm not mopping the floor, I'm I'm helping put a man on the moon.
53:36
SPEAKER_00: And that's what, you know, that's what the company would do.
53:38
SPEAKER_00: They were working towards this bigger purpose.
53:40
SPEAKER_00: So I think people are lacking this spiritual component in their lives.
53:44
SPEAKER_00: I think the youth of today can just sit at home and work on their computers and they just don't feel like they've got meaning or purpose.
53:51
SPEAKER_00: And the workplace, if it's communicated in the right way, can can perfectly address that.
53:56
SPEAKER_00: It can it can get clear on what its mission is and what its vision is, communicate that to the right people in the right way, attract the right people, and then show people through their work how they're making a difference and how they can do more of that, which gives people meaning and purpose.
54:09
SPEAKER_00: And then when they've got meaning and purpose, what we can also do on top of that is create our own environment that supports physical and mental health.
54:16
SPEAKER_00: But you've got to do the you've got to do the the purpose piece first because that gives people the reason for being it charges their battery.
54:22
SPEAKER_00: Um, look at you.
54:23
SPEAKER_00: Like, look when you see a business owner or a manager or a leader that's really aligned and they're really on it, it's like they've got this unstoppable battery.
54:31
SPEAKER_00: People envy them.
54:32
SPEAKER_00: They're like, look at what Sam achieves, and they'll be like, How does he do that?
54:35
SPEAKER_00: And it's because you know what your purpose is and you know you're moving towards it.
54:38
SPEAKER_00: So you've got this energy force that's kind of like Iron Man's thing, and you know, people just envy it.
54:44
SPEAKER_00: But it's not that you're a superhuman, it's just that you're super in line with your purpose.
54:47
SPEAKER_00: So your spiritual need to um make a difference in a world that's bigger than you, you're achieving through your business.
54:54
SPEAKER_00: And it makes you healthy, it makes you happy, it gives you energy that people will envy, which means that you then have the time and the focus to go and look after yourself.
55:02
SPEAKER_00: And it also means I'd be willing to bet that the reason or part of the reason that you look after yourself so well is because you know it's going to help you perform better in your job.
55:11
SPEAKER_00: So actually, the reason that you're being healthy is because you know that's what helps you move towards this meaningful and peaceful and purposeful thing.
55:19
SPEAKER_00: So I think if businesses can communicate their meaning and their purpose and attract the right people, and on top of that, create an environment that normalizes being healthy and helps people with their physical and mental health because the general environment of the country is unhealthy.
55:32
SPEAKER_00: So you need to create your own micro one.
55:34
SPEAKER_00: You're giving people energy and purpose, and you're guiding them to be healthy and you're giving them a community.
55:38
SPEAKER_00: It's like tick, tick, tick.
55:40
SPEAKER_00: And then the business gets better attention, better recruitment, better levels of productivity, less levels of sickness, better levels of innovation.
55:47
SPEAKER_00: So it's a win-win for everybody.
55:49
SPEAKER_01: Very interesting.
55:50
SPEAKER_01: So many good things to dissect there.
55:52
SPEAKER_01: You covered so much that it's like that's exactly the journey that I've been on.
55:56
SPEAKER_01: Purpose-led work for me has been transformational in who I am and how I feel about life, how I feel about people, how I feel about employees, and how I feel about the clients I work with, how I feel about the listeners to this podcast.
56:13
SPEAKER_01: I created the Financial Planner Life podcast to give back because there were so many people that wanted to understand how to get into the financial planning profession, but didn't really understand what the job actually was or how to do it.
56:26
SPEAKER_01: So by bringing people on at varying stages of their career, it's sharing their experiences, their experiences, the ups, the downs, the reality of the job that they do, then inspires my listeners to then go, do you know what?
56:36
SPEAKER_01: I'm going to move forward.
56:38
SPEAKER_01: This is for me, or even helps them make a decision that it's not right for them.
56:42
SPEAKER_01: So for me, it was like there was a bigger purpose at play.
56:45
SPEAKER_01: And I spent two years building the podcast and just interviewing people at a cost to myself.
56:50
SPEAKER_01: A byproduct of doing things for purpose is you can make money out of it.
56:56
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and this is essential, and this is it's another subject, but uh, I think a lot of business owners, so you've got this is something you've got to be careful of, right?
57:05
SPEAKER_00: So you can listen to that massive monologue that I've just given, and then and it's gonna excite people and they're gonna be like, right, that's this is what I'm gonna do.
57:10
SPEAKER_00: You know, I'm gonna go and do my financial plan of business, it's what my purpose is.
57:14
SPEAKER_00: Um, and I made this mistake in my first business right.
57:16
SPEAKER_00: We can get so focused on that purpose, which is absolutely the right thing to do, but we neglect this other thing, which is called profit.
57:25
SPEAKER_00: And you tend to have two people in business.
57:27
SPEAKER_00: You tend to have, generally speaking, you tend to have the very good business person, business minded, that's just good at profit, right?
57:33
SPEAKER_00: And they're that and they, even if they're not passionate and purpose-driven, they can make a thing successful, although it probably won't stand the test of time if it hasn't got uh passion behind it.
57:41
SPEAKER_00: And you've got the purpose-driven business owner who, like I did with my first business, is so focused on the purpose that we neglect the profit piece.
57:49
SPEAKER_00: We're like, I don't need to worry about that because I just want to help as many people as possible and and uh everything else will take care of itself.
57:54
SPEAKER_00: And then you get lots of business owners that are burnt out because for for your purpose to grow, as you know, and for you to reach as many people as possible, at some point you need to start making money because the the money fulfills the purpose and enables it to reach more people.
58:07
SPEAKER_00: And for most business owners that are well, I'd say purpose-driven business owners at the expense of profit.
58:14
SPEAKER_00: What you have to do mentally is work on yourself and go, well, how will the profit support the purpose and link the two?
58:21
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, absolutely.
58:23
SPEAKER_01: Mine was like, because I already had an income stream coming in from Recruit UK.
58:27
SPEAKER_01: You know, I'm an owner of a recruitment company, it's turning over a level of income.
58:30
SPEAKER_01: There was a budget there for marketing.
58:33
SPEAKER_01: So it made total sense to me to create something that was that I felt was purpose-driven and I had a passion for that I felt that I was helping others.
58:42
SPEAKER_01: I then had that as my driver, but then knowing that I had a budget to use for marketing and then using the financial plan of life as the marketing wheel for Recruit UK.
58:54
SPEAKER_01: So one hand washes the other.
58:55
SPEAKER_01: The more people that listen to my podcast, the more content I create that I can use on my LinkedIn to raise awareness of the great things that I'm doing in respect of the profession, of which I am passionate and I want to do because I know that a knock-on effect of attracting more people into the profession, moving people around into better jobs, for instance, is going to have a profound effect not only on themselves, but their families and also the clients.
59:18
SPEAKER_01: There's a big advice gap.
59:19
SPEAKER_01: People aren't accessing financial well-being products, they can't afford it.
59:23
SPEAKER_01: So through my sort of marketing wheel, I was able to promote that knowing that I was doing good, knowing that I was helping people in their careers.
59:30
SPEAKER_01: And I get message after message saying, You've really, really helped me.
59:32
SPEAKER_01: Thank you so much for the content.
59:34
SPEAKER_01: But also tying that with the fact that it's the marketing wheel for Recruit UK elevated Recruit UK as a brand.
59:40
SPEAKER_01: So that's what happened when I set up the Financial Planner Life podcast.
59:44
SPEAKER_01: For me, it was about creating a business for purpose.
59:47
SPEAKER_01: And the purpose for that was being able to help people develop their careers within financial planning.
59:52
SPEAKER_01: And the knock-on effect of that is that A, they're happier, B, they understand what the profession is actually like.
59:58
SPEAKER_01: So maybe they're coming in at the right time in the right way and they're not wasting any time.
1:00:03
SPEAKER_01: When people are happier and they're finding good, meaningful work, then that has a really positive knock-on effect to their families, to their social environments.
1:00:11
SPEAKER_01: Maybe they live a happier life because they're in a profession that fulfills them.
1:00:14
SPEAKER_01: But there's also a deeper, deeper sort of purpose as well.
1:00:17
SPEAKER_01: And one that is my vision, really, if I'm completely honest with you, is there is an advice gap.
1:00:22
SPEAKER_01: There's a 95% of the population out there that just can't afford the financial advice.
1:00:27
SPEAKER_01: And to me, I feel like the mission that I'm on with Financial Planner Life, the biggest vision I see in my purpose is to reduce that advice gap and to be able to A, bring more people into a profession that can solve the advice gap.
1:00:42
SPEAKER_01: And I hope those individuals that are coming in are going to be innovative enough to develop new products and um new charging structures that gets them in front of 95% of the population that can't afford advice and making it more affordable to them, whether that's through technology or whatever.
1:00:57
SPEAKER_01: I actually met up with a guy from Monzo, one of the co-founders of Monzo last week, and pitched to him an idea around a business within financial planning.
1:01:04
SPEAKER_01: And he really liked it because, you know, my vision and my purpose was about helping people.
1:01:09
SPEAKER_01: And it wasn't just about profit.
1:01:11
SPEAKER_01: There will be profit off the back of it.
1:01:13
SPEAKER_01: It's a byproduct, but you can have a force for good in a business that does pay you a really lovely income as well.
1:01:22
SPEAKER_01: I think if I focused too heavily on money, and that I come in the world, I live in the I I've always worked in recruitment, right?
1:01:28
SPEAKER_01: And you used to hire people and say, How much money do you want to earn?
1:01:31
SPEAKER_01: What kind of car do you want to buy?
1:01:33
SPEAKER_01: You know, what do you want to spend your money on?
1:01:35
SPEAKER_01: And every question was really about someone's drive and enthusiasm to earn money.
1:01:40
SPEAKER_01: And that is important.
1:01:41
SPEAKER_01: We work in a sales-based environment.
1:01:45
SPEAKER_01: But these days we're looking for high levels of trust.
1:01:48
SPEAKER_01: We're looking for individuals that have got more than just the need to want to earn money.
1:01:54
SPEAKER_01: And we question and ask them about purpose.
1:01:57
SPEAKER_01: Like what in your life are you really passionate about?
1:02:00
SPEAKER_01: What would you like to change?
1:02:02
SPEAKER_01: Because the role of a recruiter, for instance, isn't just about knocking somebody into a job and saying see you later.
1:02:08
SPEAKER_01: The knock-on effect is huge if you do it the right way for both the business and the individual that you're supporting and helping them get into a new job.
1:02:16
SPEAKER_01: And I just love that positive impact that work can have.
1:02:21
SPEAKER_01: And financial planning recruitment to me is full to the brim of purpose.
1:02:27
SPEAKER_01: And when you're aligned to that purpose, you feel happy.
1:02:30
SPEAKER_01: And my staff feel comfortable and confident.
1:02:33
SPEAKER_01: I think they are very happy in my environment.
1:02:35
SPEAKER_01: You know, this this company that we've built, this they buy into my vision and they love the financial plan of life and the impact it's having.
1:02:44
SPEAKER_01: So those types of things I'm really, I think are you're spot on there.
1:02:48
SPEAKER_01: When you align purpose, profit can flow, but you can spend too much time trying to fix everybody or trying to fix everything.
1:02:57
SPEAKER_01: It's like, you know, you get those people, they spend their whole time being charitable.
1:03:01
SPEAKER_01: It's a great way to live your life, but are you giving too much?
1:03:05
SPEAKER_01: Are you giving, giving, giving way too much?
1:03:07
SPEAKER_01: And is your cup itself being filled up?
1:03:09
SPEAKER_01: And I think there is a level of energy that you have that you can give, but needs to be replenished through reward.
1:03:15
SPEAKER_01: Um, and I think that's something that we need to consider.
1:03:18
SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and I I think it and I might be wrong, but I think if we zoomed out and looked at your life from a big kind of picture perspective, I think you'd see that, you know, at that time, you've obviously always been aligned to some form of purpose because you've you stayed in the same space, just in a different regard.
1:03:36
SPEAKER_00: So you certainly were in line with your purpose, but maybe in that time when you were struggling, that that self-awareness piece wasn't there, and that purpose piece was being held back because yourself was getting in the way.
1:03:48
SPEAKER_00: And then you've kind of like gone through that period of self-discovery and self-reflection, and what you've done is got Gollum out of the way so that you can be more in line with your purpose, and then all that's happened is you've got happier and you've achieved more.
1:03:59
SPEAKER_00: And I think what happens with most business owners is and managers is they've got this vision, this purpose piece that's bigger, but the golem inside of them is saying, Oh, it's our work, that, and and and they get pushed into being a commodity.
1:04:16
SPEAKER_00: You know, most business, if you look at financial, what you do, it's it's different, right?
1:04:19
SPEAKER_00: It dares to be different, which brings new opportunity, but also brings risk for you, and you have to be you have to push to make that happen.
1:04:26
SPEAKER_00: You have to create a kind of innovative growth mind mindset uh environment.
1:04:30
SPEAKER_00: But that's not easy, and that's why you need that purpose and that vision, because if you've got that big vision pulling you, you won't settle for anything other than being different.
1:04:39
SPEAKER_00: But it takes confidence and it takes self-awareness, and and you and you've explained in detail that personal journey you've had to go through to realize your own mental um kind of barriers that you've had and how overpowering they were, and you've had to do a lot of work, the 12-step process to get away from the alcohol and to to which is really the alcohol was probably mainly just there to deal with this voice that you that you weren't dealing with very well.
1:05:02
SPEAKER_00: So it's get away from the alcohol, but really what you're doing was creating a healthier relationship with your golem.
1:05:07
SPEAKER_00: I think most business owners don't go through that, and that's what what ends up is their businesses get fit into a commodity bracket, they just look like all the other businesses, even though they know they could be better, but the golem stops them from trying to be better, they end up in a commodity, they can't really charge what they need to charge, don't get the opportunities they want, then they're just stuck in the business, and then they kind of like they they resent their passion because I listened to this passion of mine that once again start this business.
1:05:34
SPEAKER_00: I made the jump, but now I'm stuck in this thing that I don't really like and I know could be better, but it feels too scary to go past it.
1:05:42
SPEAKER_00: So I'm just gonna stay here and then drink and work just as hard as I did in a job and get paid less.
1:05:49
SPEAKER_01: I think I do know one of the things I I do reflect back on like what were the most what were the most impactful things in my life in respect of how it's had a positive effect on my business.
1:05:59
SPEAKER_01: Um I would 100% say that altruism, being able to go out and help somebody else without any financial reward reprogrammed my brain.
1:06:13
SPEAKER_01: It massively, massively helped me.
1:06:15
SPEAKER_01: And I did that through, like, for example, so I did a 12-step process, right?
1:06:18
SPEAKER_01: So part of the 12-step process is you have to go and help somebody else through the 12-step process.
1:06:23
SPEAKER_01: You know, one of the most amazing things that I had happened to me was a guy who spent 25 years on the streets of London injecting heroin, cracker cane, drinking ridiculous amounts of alcohol.
1:06:34
SPEAKER_01: He lived for 25 years on the streets of London, but yet he was the man who took his time to heal me and to help me.
1:06:43
SPEAKER_01: And that blew my mind.
1:06:45
SPEAKER_01: The guy that I would have walked past on the street, right, and not even thought about and thought, well, he's there for his own problems, his own reasons.
1:06:51
SPEAKER_01: I won't ever get that bad, or that won't happen to me.
1:06:55
SPEAKER_01: But he was like clean and sober, and he was dedicating his time and energy to fixing me and helping me get over this problem that I had with my thinking and drinking, right?
1:07:04
SPEAKER_01: And that to me was like, wow, that was an eye-opener.
1:07:08
SPEAKER_01: So I was driven to go through these steps because the final steps are helping somebody else.
1:07:14
SPEAKER_01: How can you help somebody else if you haven't helped yourself?
1:07:16
SPEAKER_01: But what happens when you help somebody else if you go through this again, this whole transformational change, because everything you've learned from listening, all of a sudden you're then and you know, in implementing, you're then doing it for somebody else at the beginning of their journey.
1:07:29
SPEAKER_01: And that's when the true learning happened for me and the true transformational change happened.
1:07:35
SPEAKER_01: And none of that I made a penny a penny out of.
1:07:37
SPEAKER_01: And trust me, when you're in that place, you're thinking, oh my God, I've just stumbled across something that could make me loads of money.
1:07:44
SPEAKER_01: I'm gonna go out and set up a an alcohol-free business that isn't 12 steps, that isn't like some secret society that people don't want to join called AA because it sounds awful at Alcoholics Anonymous.
1:07:54
SPEAKER_01: So I was like, I'm gonna do this and I'm gonna do that.
1:07:56
SPEAKER_01: And actually, as time progressed on, it was just like, why am I trying to help like a thousand people when I can help one person and be the best and really be that coach to that individual and really help that person?
1:08:08
SPEAKER_01: And the transformational change that happened with those that I helped, two guys, right?
1:08:13
SPEAKER_01: Two guys I helped.
1:08:15
SPEAKER_01: But the transformational change that I've seen in their lives is so amazing.
1:08:19
SPEAKER_01: It's incredible.
1:08:20
SPEAKER_01: And I just think to myself, none of that cost me anything but my time.
1:08:24
SPEAKER_01: But the journey and what I learned during that journey was life-changing for me.
1:08:28
SPEAKER_01: And then that was the thing that drove me forward to create financial planner life and push forward with it in that way and have that purpose-led approach to business.
1:08:36
SPEAKER_01: And then a byproduct of that is that there is an income that you can receive from having purpose, and then it's in putting that into the business, which I went on on a B Corp journey.
1:08:44
SPEAKER_01: So people in my office have got a certain amount of time per month to go and um give their time to charity and be altruistic.
1:08:51
SPEAKER_01: We we we say go and do it, we raise money for charities.
1:08:55
SPEAKER_01: We, you know, we work in partnership with Talk Club, the men's mental fitness charity.
1:08:59
SPEAKER_01: That's a really important one for us to work with.
1:09:01
SPEAKER_01: So as a business, we altruism, I think, is something that will make you that will drive your business forward.
1:09:07
SPEAKER_01: Find something where you can give up your time and help somebody else better themselves and do it because you genuinely want to.
1:09:16
SPEAKER_01: And perhaps you have a skill set that can help that person progress forward in life.
1:09:20
SPEAKER_01: And that was what I guess drove me with financial plan in life.
1:09:23
SPEAKER_01: So I I know a lot about financial planning and recruitment and careers.
1:09:28
SPEAKER_01: Some people don't.
1:09:29
SPEAKER_01: How can I help these people?
1:09:30
SPEAKER_01: And that's what I did.
1:09:31
SPEAKER_01: I created that, and there was born this this product, this service, and it's going great guns now.
1:09:37
SPEAKER_01: And I'm really, really happy about it.
1:09:39
SPEAKER_01: But that was a life-changing moment when you stop thinking about yourself and you start thinking about somebody else, it's like it's immense.
1:09:46
SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
1:09:47
SPEAKER_00: And it's the best way to learn, right, is is to actually help somebody else.
1:09:51
SPEAKER_00: Like you did the teacher learns through teaching.
1:09:55
SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it was powerful, and I think um it's a great thing to put into business.
1:10:01
SPEAKER_00: It comes back to that Dalai Lama piece that I said that ultimately, you know, uh the aim of our life is to be happy, and we are happy by helping others.
1:10:08
SPEAKER_00: So, you know, however, if you can do that personally and through your business, then win-win.
1:10:14
SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
1:10:18
SPEAKER_01: We're going to end it there because we've had a good conversation and we've got a good overview of like well-being within the workplace.
1:10:25
SPEAKER_01: Like, you this is what you do, this is your bread and butter.
1:10:28
SPEAKER_01: You know, you help employers, leaders, managers within business look at themselves, their reasons why, and get companies to recognize how their businesses can improve if they invested in the well-being of those leaders, managers, employees.
1:10:47
SPEAKER_01: And that's what you're doing.
1:10:48
SPEAKER_01: So if anyone's listening to this and wants to reach out to Mike, and perhaps you can introduce them to your uh boss or the owners of the business to say, look, you know, you we need to work on our well-being.
1:11:00
SPEAKER_01: Here's a chap who can come in and start to do that with us, and they can reach out directly to you.
1:11:04
SPEAKER_01: Where can they find you, Mike?
1:11:06
SPEAKER_00: So LinkedIn, Mike Jones.
1:11:08
SPEAKER_00: I think it's Mike Jones3, actually, because there's lots of Mike Joneses.
1:11:11
SPEAKER_00: My parents bless me with a very common name.
1:11:13
SPEAKER_00: Um, and also betterhappy.co.uk.
1:11:16
SPEAKER_00: So that's the the base, that's uh base website, which has got quite a lot of information on and uh the ability to contact us through the site.
1:11:23
SPEAKER_01: Fantastic.
1:11:23
SPEAKER_01: Mike, we're gonna record also some extra content specifically for our academy.
1:11:28
SPEAKER_01: So if you are interested in hearing that extra content and you are considering um the qualifications and the skills-based training required to become a financial planner, administrator, power planner, or mortgage and protection advisor, you can do that within the Financial Planner Life Academy.
1:11:43
SPEAKER_01: And we're gonna start recording some extra content with our guests on the Financial Planner Life podcast for our Academy community.
1:11:49
SPEAKER_01: So go and check that out if you're interested in a career within financial planning.
1:11:53
SPEAKER_01: Cheers, Mike.
1:11:54
SPEAKER_01: My pleasure.
1:11:55
SPEAKER_01: Thank you for having me.