Is Your Fly Open? | The Power of Self-Awareness – A Knowledge Bomb

Show Notes

All successful people have extreme self-awareness and very few blind spots. Most people that struggle to achieve, are usually unaware of what is holding them back and have little to no self-awareness. Clay breaks down how self-awareness can hinder or help your marketing, sales, customer experiences, leadership, and every aspect of your business.

NOTABLE QUOTABLE – “If your emotional abilities aren’t in hand, if you don’t have self-awareness, if you are not able to manage your distressing emotions, if you can’t have empathy and have effective relationships, then no matter how smart you are, you are not going to get very far.’ – Daniel Goleman (Best-selling author of Emotional Intelligence)

NOTABLE QUOTABLE – “If you give someone a present, and you give it to them in a Tiffany box, it’s likely that they’ll believe that the gift has higher perceived value than if you gave it to them in no box or a box of less prestige. That’s not because the receiver of the gift is a fool. But instead, because we live in a culture in which we gift wrap everything– our politicians, our corporate heads, our movie and TV stars, and even our toilet paper.” – Michael Levine (PR consultant of choice for Nike, Pizza Hut, Prince, Michael Jackson, etc.

Business Coach | Ask Clay & Z Anything

Audio Transcription

Two men, 13 multimillion dollar businesses, eight kids, one business coach radio show. It’s the thrive time business coach radio show. Get ready to enter the thrive time show. All right, thrive nation. Welcome back to another knowledge bomb edition of the thrive time. Show a taking place inside my hummer of love, my, my vehicular that gets approximately eight miles per gallon and I’m in a rain storm so there should be a lot of background noise. We’re talking about today is a subject that I am passionate about and that is self awareness. Today’s show is titled, is my fly open? Have you ever been somewhere where somebody is going to give a toast or a speech or something where all eyes will be on them and when the all eyes are on them, everybody is aware that there fly is down except for them. Have you ever been out to dinner with somebody and they have ketchup on their face or you know, the green, the green, the greenness in the teeth, you know, it’s like a lead us in the teeth like Kales and the teeth or something in the teeth.

And, and everybody knows that there definitely is something in their teeth except for them. They’re flies down, everyone knows except for them here and somebody whose hair is just a crazy. It looks at the, just woke up and it seems like everybody around them knows the, it looks like they just woke up except for them have. Have you ever. Have you ever seen these situations happen? Of course you have. We all have. But what about in the world of business? Where are some of the most glaring examples of self awareness that people are business owners are blind of? Where are the areas we’re in our business where we are so close to the action that we don’t, uh, see what everybody else see? So I’m going to, I’m going to start on the exterior of the business. I’m gonna Start on the Epidermis of the business. And then as a business coach, I’ve worked with thousands of clients.

I will work in closer to the source and if you’re self employed or want to be that sources you. So start with the Epidermis, then we’ll kind of move into the Miro portion. So on the exterior, when people look at your website, I encourage you to look at mine. Go to go to elephant in the room. That’s e I t r lounge.com. It’s e I t R lounge.com. I stuck a little pirate talk their e I t e R lounge.com. You can check it out or a thrive time show.com. Thrive time show.com. That would be two sites to businesses I owned. Why don’t we also do make your life epic.com. Make your life epic.com. All right. So on those sites, let’s put our attention right now on eitr lounge.com. When you go to the site, what about the site? Could be better. What about the site?

Looks good. I have a little hit list of things that I’m wanting to work on right now to make the site just a little bit better. But does it, does the EITR LOUNGE DOT com? It’s elephant in the room. Does that website, um, for our men’s grooming lounge because that inspire confidence or does it, does it beg a question of like who built that? You start with the website. They’ll look at your own website today, look at your website and ask yourself on a scale of one to 10, if 10 is the best in your industry and one is the worst, how high would I rank my website on a scale of one to 10, 10 being the best. Now after you look at the website, that’s people. People see the website on the outside and under the website. We can put business cards there.

I’d encourage you to rate your business cards on a scale of one to 10. When you pass out a card, what does that say about you, your auto wraps. What does that say about you on a scale of one to 10, the way you wrap your automobile, the way you personally present yourself? Well, you dress on a scale of one to 10, what does that say about you? Ten years you dress sharp. One, not so much apartment. Maybe on a scale of one to 10 you say, I, I do dress a 10, my website isn’t 10 my business cards or attend all the external things. Those are attend. Okay, so let’s move in to the next layer. When the phone rings with Your Business, rate yourself on a scale of one to 10, how? How a 10. If 10 is you are very confident that the person who answers your phone answers your phone following a logical script.

That makes sense. Put a 10. If a one is terrible, rate yourself. On a scale of one to 10, your, your, your inbound business coach phone, first and appearance and the phone is answered. On a scale of one to 10, how would you rate that call recording. On a scale of one to 10, how confident are you that your calls are being recorded for quality assurance, that somebody’s listening to them? It’s not good enough just to have the calls recorded, but you gotta listen to them and a lot of people have never recorded calls before and that would be like hub. Being a basketball player at the pro level who never looks at game film, that would be like being a professional baseball player who never watched his game film. That would be like being a banker who never looks at account balances. I mean if you have people to answer the phone, you’ve got to record the calls and now it’s moving into the next layer.

Let’s move into the next layer. The next, and these are broad strokes as we moved from marketing into the inbound phone calls, but only move inside the business itself. When you walk into your lobby, what does it say about you on a scale of one to 10? If 10 is that your lobby is awesome and one is that your lobby is a disaster. On a scale of one to 10, if 10 is that your decor, your imagery and your office is just awesome. The decor of the imagery inside your, your, your nonprofit inside your dentist’s office, inside your, your, your company. On a scale of one to 10, how highly would you rank the interior of your business? The way it looks, the way the presentation officers, like 10 being the best, one being the worst rate, great. Then now we move into some more.

We get into the visual, the actual presentations where they in interpersonal, a customer interactions, your, your employees, your team, maybe even you interacting with the actual consumers, your constituents, the people that patronize your business on a scale of one to 10. If 10 is you have that thing scripted. You’re like Disney world. You know you have really, if you haven’t listened to the podcasts with Lee Cockerel, he used to be the former executive vice president. He used to be. He is the former executive vice president of Walt Disney world resorts, but he used to be the executive vice president of Walt Disney world resorts who wants manage 40,000 people. I mean Disney scripts, everything. Everything is a script. Every interaction has been thought of every single thing. There hasn’t been nothing left to entropy to randomness. Everything has been methodically thought of and putting it in place there.

That customer interaction. Now that next layer behind the business coach customer interaction is on a scale of one to 10, how highly would you rate your sales conversion process? If 10 is like, man, you’re just awesome and you close every deal that comes in here, the best one is not so good, not so good. Rate that though. On a scale of one to 10 right there. Let’s good the one into the signage inside the building, right? That on a scale of one to 10, the signage inside of business, the menus of your business, I know you go into another another layer. Oh man, another layer. How would you rate the training behind your team? Are you just trying to hire great people and then just let them have at it or are you actually training them? On a scale of one to 10, how would you rate your company’s training?

Are you having weekly proactive training or you having only training when there’s a. are you only having trailers a blowout? How highly would you rank your training on a scale of one to 10? Now behind the training layer, there’s. There’s yet more. How would you rate the management layer? Maybe have really well trained people, but nobody’s managing them. On a scale of one to 10, how highly would you rank your team’s ability to manage the people, people knowing their hours, people clearly knowing their pay people, knowing what’s expected of them. Now another layer is your organizational chart. On a scale of one to 10, how highly would you rate rake my rank, the organizational chart for the company? Do people know where they stand in the company? Does everyone thinks they’re the boss? Does somebody pretend to be the boss, but they’re not the boss?

This is somebody who this is there somebody in your company who is the boss, but they’re not empowered to act like the boss because people don’t respect the org chart or you as the leader from time to time hopping outside of the org chart just to see what happens. Is it a clearly a written down? Is there a defined. Is there actually a visual organizational chart hung up where people can see it? Now, the next layer, the next layer, what’s the next layer? The next layer is you. You. Yes, yes. Let’s take an intimate look. Let’s let’s have some intimacy here into me. I see intimacy. Let’s look into you and let’s look introspectively and say on a scale of one to 10, how good of a leader Am I? If 10 is like, I’m always on time, I do what I say I’m going to do.

I write, I write things down. Whenever I tell people I’m gonna do something, I write it down and at one is I don’t write it down. On a scale of one to 10, how wise are you? This is an interesting fact. If you had a chance to look up the statistics of why people take a job, like why people actually choose to work somewhere. I’ll put it on the show notes as far as why employees come to work somewhere. Gallup shows that 70 percent of people hate their jobs and when you get into why people just will not work for somebody who they don’t respect as being a source of wisdom, right? What people won’t work for people that they don’t view as a source of wisdom. So you might be a really good dude, a great lady, but if you aren’t seen as a source of wisdom, nobody’s going to stick around.

Rate yourself on a scale of one to 10, 10 being you’re the most wisdom. You have the most business coach wisdom ever. You’re like, uh, uh, the Solomon of your, of your office. I mean, you’re like the Gandhi of your office. You’re like Steve Jobs and a one is like, you just, nobody cares what you have to say. On a scale of one to 10 rank your public speaking skills. If a 10 is like Martin Luther King Jr, I mean, man, just unbelievable. That might’ve spoke with fire the EPA on a scale of one to 10, rate yourself. If a 10 is like, uh, the best of the 10 is President Obama. Wow, great speaker. And a one is, oh, uh, if you’re saying, oh, when, when people, when people hear you speak, if they immediately say, Oh, do I have to come? On a scale of one to 10, how highly would you rate it, your speaking abilities as a leader?

On a scale of one to 10, how highly would you rank your organizational skills? What your organizational skills, your ability to organize and stay organized as a leader? 10 being the best, one being the worst. On a scale of one to two, 10, how highly would you rank your ability to follow up? What your ability to not only cast the big vision, but to actually follow up with your team to make sure that it gets done? On a scale of one to 10, how highly would you rank your ability, your ability? What? My ability to want your ability to retool, recruit top talent, your ability to recruit top talent. I’m not talking about, uh, your, your, your, your hr directors. I’m talking about you as the leader, your ability to recruit and inspire top talent as leader. On a scale of one to 10, how highly would you rank your workflow?

If your workflow is, if a 10 means man, have you got a linear step by step process for everything, checklists, processes, workflows. The whole thing is mapped out. I mean it is so a business is so good. Oh, the business is so good that an idiot could run it. In fact, you know Warren Buffett actually wants road. He says, I buy businesses that are so good that even an idiot could run them because someday one will. My friends. How highly would you rank your, your processes, your systems, your workflows, and I say all this to say because if you don’t reflect on these kinds of things on a weekly basis, you are not going to ever really dominate as a business owner, but if you ranked yourself today as like a six in one area and a seven in one area, maybe one and another area, that’s a good starting place because you have to have self awareness.

Yep. How good are you at something or how good aren’t we at something? But self awareness is the key. Without self awareness, there is no ability to improve his self. Awareness creates the approachability that leads to the coachability. When you know that you’re not awesome in one area of business, it makes you open to feedback in that area of business, business from people that know the proven path, but when you’re not self aware and you think that your mullet is new and cutting edge and trendy and uh, and you’re confident about it and everybody else doesn’t feel that way.

Maybe let’s say you’re a purple cow, unless you’re an enigma, it’s probably not helping you. If your website is just awful and unless you’re an enigma like Paul Graham.com, the guy behind a reddit, airbnb and dropbox who famously refuses to update his website, you’re not going to do very well. You’ve got to be self aware when you’re, when you sweat. When you say as leader, I pride myself on being self aware that shows you care, but when you engage in a form of Minty mental laziness, when you engage in a form of mental laziness that I call buisiness, that’s a bad place to be in business is where you’re just going from meeting to meeting, place to place, doing a bunch of stuff. When you’re not really getting ahead, you’re not moving the organization forward, but you’re busy and there’s a lot of people who will tell you, man, you’re doing a good job and you’re so busy.

Oh, you’re so busy. It’s like in America and other countries and people we. We pride our pride ourselves. How busy we are. All I, when I traveled here, I spoke there. I’m working on this and working on that. I view people that aren’t busy as successful people I know who are worth billions and millions, they actually have found a way to define and draw clear boundaries and their organization as a result of being self aware that it allowed the company to simplify and to scale simplicity scales, but complexity fails. So as a capstone thoughts that would ask you this question, are you self aware, rake rank yourself awareness on a scale of one to 10, if 10 is you are so aware of how you’re, how you are perceived and the various aspects of the business we’ve been over earlier than you give yourself a 10 and you’re probably already super successful.

But if you’d rank your self awareness as you know, pretty low right now, don’t beat yourself up. You just probably need some mentorship. And so I’d encourage you to go to thrive time show.com and book your tickets for our next in person workshop. Now, here’s the deal. If you want to get free tickets and, uh, I know you do, all you gotta do is leave us an objective review on itunes. I just just subscribe to the thrive time show podcast, subscribe to the thrive time show podcast on itunes and leave us an objective review. And email is proof that you did it to info at thrive time. Show.com. My name is Clay Clark. I’m a business coach. This has been another knowledge bomb from right here. And the Hummer of love on my trip home from work, thrive nation. I appreciate your questions. Hope with that. To answer them without any further ado, three, two, one. Boom.

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