Game Changer 04 [25:09]
Alright, let’s do this. We’re going live in 5, 4, 3. There’s the status quo and then there are the game changers. They write books and make films about game changers, people who put a dent in the universe. Are you one of them? This series explains everything you need to know to be a game changer and how to win at the game of business and life. Today’s episode is made possible by Think Next, Act Now, a movement that trains and mentors tomorrow’s entrepreneur today. And now, here are your hosts, Bill Wooditch and Todd Schnick.
Todd: Alright, welcome back to the show about how to become a game changer. Understanding that business and life is a game and we have to learn how to play it well and play to win. Welcome to episode 4 where we’re going to discuss becoming the CEO of your life. I’m joined today by my friend and colleague, Bill Wooditch. Good morning my friend, this is going to be a fun conversation.
Bill: We’re going to have a blast Todd, let’s rock.
Todd: Before we get into becoming the CEO of your life, however, take a few quick seconds, what does it actually mean to be a game changer? And why do we even have to have these series of conversations?
Bill: Well, to be a game changer means you want responsibility and accountability; a point in life where you can make a difference and I think that point has to be every day in every way. You have to look to make a difference and you have to be that difference, you have to become that difference. People talk about ‘I want to make a difference’. To be a game changer means that you are influencing in some way, you are dictating the terms and influencing the result in this game of life because you’re showing up prepared, ready to play and understanding that wins and losses are subject only to definition. They’re not going to be fatal, they’re not going to be final; we have to move forward.
Todd: So what do you actually mean by becoming the CEO of your life?
Bill: Well, you know the ultimate responsibility; the primary responsibility of a CEO is to create shareholder value. As the CEO of your life, think about it this way, if you’re not in control of your life then who is? If you’re not going to take responsibility for your life then who are you giving it to? You are responsible, you are the CEO of your life; it’s time to call a board meeting. Get your staff together and find out how you create better value if you’re not for yourself. And value comes in different ways, value is the nutrition you feed your body, that body that has to be able to cash the checks that your mind writes. Your mind has to be on that quest. You have to continually look for new ways to grow. You have to be able to deal with your allies and your adversaries. You have to be able to think and do. You have to be able to have a spiritual overarching belief that there is something greater than you. There has to be something that has value to you beyond the monetary. And you also have to be able to take care of the emotional part, the ability to extend empathy which is the key in life. The key is to be able to feel and have empathy for others before you can feel for yourself. I think you have to be able to take care of yourself as the CEO of your life by building those pillars of value: the physical, spiritual, the intellectual, the emotional and how is what’s most important. And that’s that passion, that is the purpose, that is the chemistry that ensues from being engaged in the game of life.
Todd: Now, if I had to guess, and I’m thinking where the people that I’ve observed over my time in business, most people would think, ‘hey, you have to be the CEO of your life’, they would say, ‘yeah, obviously I am. I wake up in the morning, I get dressed, I eat some breakfast, I put on clothes, I go to work, I do my job, I come home and I have dinner, I pay some bills. Am I not in charge of my life?’ What you just said is I think the most [03:39] opposite of that.
Bill: Well, what’s your personal mission statement? What do you have as a personal mission state? Because to me it sounds like you’re giving up or abrogating duties in life, you’re just kind of trying to exist and that’s not living. So I draw a big line in the middle of existing and living. There are people who are employed; there are people that are employers. I think the people that are employers are the ones that are CEOs of their life. And you could be employed and be the CEO of your life or you could just give up responsibility to think. You don’t have to think, someone’s going to always tell you what to do. Are you the CEO of your life? I don’t think so. Someone’s going to tell you to do this, do that, show up, not do this or you’re going to decide just not to show up in life. If you’re probably a CEO he’s going to be fired. So, that’s what I think.
Todd: Well, look, thinking about the series so far, in my view hearing what you just said, you can embrace the always-forward philosophy, you can’t decide how you’re going to become, how you’re going to define being a game changer and figuring what that is, you’re certainly not going to be a good thinker and doer if you’re not operating out of this context, right?
Bill: You have to operate from that context, that’s a mindset. Because the mindset has to start with this: no excuses. And there’s that bullshit meter inside of us that we want to kid ourselves, we want to live in denial, delusions, say we’re in charge of our life. You got to lose excuses first of all and you want to be accountable. And those are things that I think people fear. It’s always someone else to blame for something someone else has done this to us, they put us in this condition, we can’t overcome the condition, we won’t be able to overcome this condition, it’s too far, it’s too great. That’s not being the CEO of our life.
CEO of your life is going to find a way or make a way to get rid of those conditions. Break through those invisible barriers, take ownership, take responsibility and make things happen in life because you’re creating value for yourself; not only for yourself, for your loved ones, for others; that’s perpetuation. The other job of a CEO is to perpetuate the company. How are you perpetuating yourself in the best form of you possible to be able to enjoy life? How? Ask yourself those questions, ‘how?’ And if you’re not, why not?
Todd: Well, you sure as heck can’t create value for an organization if you’re not creating value for yourself. First, [05:35] that’s a big weakness for a lot of people is that we don’t think about we take care of ourselves first because only then can we serve others.
Bill: I was at a horse track one day. It was quite a while ago and I was with a client and the client’s wife looked over and said, ‘you know what you have to do?’ she said, ‘just spend all your time with clients doing all these things, all these dinners, all these different events. You have to take time for your best client.’ And I said, ‘well, that would be you, right? She said, ‘no, yourself’.
You have to find and make it. You’re not always going to find it, and I understand that the demands of life and all those children and there’s different things, there’s always something we have to get to next. You know, we have to show up at some place to do something. But we have to actually try to carve out the time. We actually have to make a time where we could just be with ourselves, with our thoughts. Put down those damn phones and sit down and just be, be; think and create. It works, it works.
Todd: You’re thinking about this idea becoming the CEO of your life. I’ve heard you say this, ‘you can accept or reject this idea, but you cannot escape the truism.’
Bill: You can’t get away from the truism of it because you’re going to be in charge of your life. You might be a crappy CEO or you might be a great one but you can’t escape it. You might want to reject the idea that you are and you might want to say, ‘no, there’s something else in charge of me, I’m not in charge of me.’ But at the end of the day, the bottom line is, it’s up to you what you take into your body, what you take into your mind, will feed what you become and what you are.
Todd: So you have the power, you have the responsibility. I have a dozen thoughts on that, just that phrase right there. I think people are afraid of that power. I think they know that they have the ability to take charge and make things happen but they’re afraid of that power. And I think some people are scared of that responsibility. Any comments?
Bill: I could just underline yours because that was perfect, I think that was beautiful. I was about ready to say that, you we’re just taken off of that. And let’s just play a game. Why do you think they’re afraid of the power? I think, in my estimation time, I think they’re afraid of the power because they are afraid of the mistakes that could come with the power. And then they’re going to have to live with the mistakes, and then they have to have to whip themselves and beat themselves up because they made mistakes. And then naysayers are jumping on top of them. So what’s happened in the instinct part of our mind, in our brain, is that we don’t like to be ridiculed. You know, people fear two things, loss, and they fear change. Mention the word ‘change’ to someone in your group and see people look, shut down and close off. Game changers light up on that one. And we fear loss and loss of self-esteem. We don’t want to be exposed out there as something less than. So we’re afraid to have that power because the power means that we’re responsible; and if we’re responsible, that means it’s up to us and ‘oh no. What if it fails? That was us.’ And we can’t take the hit. That’s where we have to develop that ability to be resilient and understand ‘yeah, we want that ball for the last shot.’ You know, not everyone does. But the game changers want the ball, like Michael Jordan did on that last shot. There’s the difference right there.
Todd: There’s a good example of a game changer and embracing all the things we’ve been talking about in this series. Another common theme that we’ve talked about through the duration of the series is this idea of constant learning and continual growth. And the CEO of your life is going to ensure that you’re going that.
Bill: Well, I look at life this way. We can be very colloquial, parochial and very limited in our thought and that would limit our ability to enjoy and experience the world. If we always stay in the same thought pattern as the CEO, we’re always going to make the same decisions; we’re looking from the same box of decisions. And sometimes that arsenal of decision making possibility, is not the best arsenal to solve today’s problems. Today’s problems are unique, they’re complex, they’re different and they’re always coming at us at the force of light. So I think we need to be able to expand our awareness of what’s actually happening – awareness, what’s happening; and then build a toolkit to be able to respond and to be able to maybe get out in front of where we can, get out in front of some things before they ever become a problem.
But it all comes from expanding that box of thought and that comes from the big L word and that is Learning.
Todd: Alright, Bill and I will return after this short break. We’ll be right back.
[09:20-10:17 Advertisement]Todd: Alright, Todd Schnitt back with Bill Wooditch. So thinking about the learnings [10:22] during the break there, curious if you have an example of how that’s impacted you?
Bill: Well, I think a curious mind is a mind that’s always learning so I think a learning disposition is the product of a curious mind. And a curious mind is one that asks why and then finds a way. You know, they found in studies that if you ask ‘how can I do this?’ instead of all the mantra and all the rah-rah stuff of motivational speaking, ‘how can I find this?’ your brain will actually find a way and go back to other things that you’ve done like that to find a way to do something. To me, when I was at Purdue University, I had to learn how to learn and I didn’t know any words that were over three letters, I really couldn’t pronounce them. But as I start to expand my learning, I started to go on different areas, history. I started to learn things about science that I always became a curious learner and very disciplined for the rest of my life. It enabled me to connect with interest with more people, so I would meet a person who had an interest in something and maybe I had read something about it, I can bring up the conversation and let them talk about what they were passionate about. So I was able to connect in my activity which ruled my success in more numbers, more people with people of varied interests because my interests were always growing thru constant learning.
Todd: Yeah, that’s powerful stuff. But it’s not learning and then moving on, its continual growth, right? This process never ends. A responsible CEO of your life understands that that is a never ending process. Right now, be one that we celebrate too.
Bill: Let’s go deep on this one. Socrates, who was the wisest man in the land at the time, they said you know everything; he said, ‘you know, I know that I don’t know’ and I think that’s liberating because when I say that we are in a box, we think we know certain things. And we do have a different opinion on certain things and we are more informed maybe than others in certain ways. But I think that if we stop and we don’t learn from others and we don’t think about the possibilities that could expand beyond what we think we know. We’re always going to be limited by what we think we know.
Todd: Game changers appreciate when they discover something they don’t know and then they take action to actually figure it out and learn, right? I mean, that’s the difference.
Bill: The joy is in both the discovery and its successful application. Absolutely.
Todd: Yup, yup. Let’s shift now. You talked about empathy in the top half of this segment, I mean, that’s so important. But I think the service mindset here being in the service of others that that’s a critical piece of this too, yes?
Bill: That’s abundance. And I think we can look at life in one or two ways. Abundance, there’s enough for everybody, we can all grow, we can all grow and share; or scarcity, I got to have this and you can’t have that thought. So I think the abundance life, for me, is a wholesome way of living. It gets rid of that [13:01] side that has to you know, you have to conquer someone, you have to annihilate someone else to win. Now, I think there’s enough for all of us. And I’ve always been someone who’s shared; it’s come from my days in the playing fields of Western Pennsylvania playing football. I always wanted people to do as well as they could and if their best was better than mine, I never wanted them to pull a hamstring or pop or tear an Achilles; it just wasn’t me. So I think that’s part of a mindset of a game changer; there’s enough for all of us. And you know, we’re not going to be for everyone. Not everyone’s going to buy from us, not everyone’s going to be moved from us, not everyone’s going to go out with us. Is there a tendency to take that personal? Yes. But we have to understand that it’s not personal to a certain degree because these people are doing things for their reasons, not ours.
Todd: Well, rising tides lift all boats. I mean, we’ve talked about game changers, your talk about your abundance versus scarcity idea. I mean, game changers believe in the abundance. We can all win. And we talked about it at the top of the series. This doesn’t have to be winners versus losers thing; this can be we can all win, we could all advance, we can all – talking about learning. A good CEO of an organization is helping his people learn and help them understand and empower them and then give them the freedom to do that.
Now they also want them to take action too and so that’s where the think and do comes into play. That’s so hard for people to understand because they think they have to focus on what’s mine. And then thinking it also about learning is there people are afraid to admit I don’t know something and then they either fake it or they just bury their head in the sand. And I think it’s sad that in our business culture that it’s frowned upon to be someone who doesn’t know everything. I think it ought to be celebrated when someone says ‘I don’t know that. I want to learn, help me learn’, right?
Bill: I think it’s some of the most powerful words there are, is ‘I don’t know’. And I think sometimes we tend to prevaricate or maybe say some untruths or stretch truths because we think we have an answer or we just make up an answer, we’re just pulling a swag; it’s just a stupid wild ass guess. I think that’s where we lose credibility when we’re wrong. So I think it’s empowering to say ‘I don’t know’ and to learn from being able to say ‘I don’t know’. And you know, what you talked about is it’s sad because people look at ‘what’s in it for me’ first. And that’s the only way as humans, it’s human nature to say that we’re looking at life through the lens of ourselves. We can’t look at it through anyone else’s lens. So it always is about us first, no matter how apathetic we are, no matter how much we think we’re sharing, how much we’re contributing; we have to do it through our own vested self-interest; there is an interest in us sharing, there’s an interest we have and we get a bounce from that or we wouldn’t do it.
So everything has to come from that nature. We have to understand our nature and understand that as we share, as we share we all grow, we collaborate, we grow, we flourish together. No man, John Dunn said, I know this because it was on a test for an Ivy League school that I didn’t get into, ‘no man is an island’. And at the end of the test you had to write out what he meant; I didn’t know about that. But he said ‘no man is an island’, we need to cooperate, we need to collaborate, there’s none of us that go through this life alone.
Todd: So, yeah, the saying ‘I don’t know’ is important. But what a game changer does is say ‘comma but show me where I can learn’.
Bill: Yes.
Todd: And most of us aren’t saying that so I don’t know. And then we’re off the hook, I don’t have any responsibility.
Bill: Yes, keyword ‘show’. Show me and then let me because showing someone is a powerful way of learning; but the most powerful way is to actually have them do it. So when they ask to be shown, don’t tell them what to do, show them, work with them and then let them do it. And as an effective CEO, you’re going to get some blood on the carpet. You got to understand that there’s going to be some collateral damage from encouraging people to take some risk and you got to be able to accept those errors that are errors of omission; they forgot, they didn’t know. They didn’t know rather than co-mission, there was an intent. So there’s a difference there and you’re going to deal with that; that’s how you build a game changer.
Todd: Yup absolutely. You’ve said you have to beware of the ego. What do you mean by that?
Bill: Well, I think ego can be our biggest champion and adversary. Ego is neutral so people think of ego they think ‘hey, I’m always looking in the mirror’ and that could be true, that’s really a narcissist. But our ego can be that champions our cause or can be something that works against us. Here is ego at work. What you represent to others, that’s what you want them to believe you are. Here‘s my card, here’s my title, here’s my bank account, here’s my car… all the ‘I’s’ Every time you hear an ‘I’, it’s about ego. So the ego is protecting what’s inside the self, the true self is not the ego but it’s what we represent to society. So I think ego can be a huge advantage for us when we have a certain level of pride in our work, a certain level of pride in our performance. Manageable pride; a certain level of self-respect that we keep and we want society to know who we are and what we represent when it is closely aligned to who we really are inside.
Ego can be the pitfall, it can be the absolute fabric changing culture shifting dynamic that a fearful CEO brings in to a company. That’s where ego becomes a problem.
Todd: What are the four I’s?
Bill: Well, the four I’s are as CEO, let’s picture this. Let’s picture a CEO in a glass office and employees not co-workers because a fearful CEO, one that is driven by four I’s is one that has employees who work form him; he doesn’t work for them. The enlightened CEO, the more servant CEO is the one that understands there are co-workers and he works for them. But that’s another topic. But that CEO believes that he or she is the individual that’s responsible for the success of the enterprise. So they’re an individual; that’s one ‘I’.
And then if someone questions their authority or even questions them on any decision, they become very intractable, unable to move. So that’s the second ‘I’. They’re intractable; they’re entrenched in their thinking. They can’t because that would show as an individual, they were less than. So then they become intransigent. They’ll actually start to fight, so they’ll start to argue so then people are afraid to come to them with ideas because here’s an individual who thinks that the reason of the exercise, they’re very unable to be moved and tractable, then they even fight they’re intransigent, because they think of what? They think they’re invaluable. That’s the fourth ‘I’.
Todd: So when a CEO spreads fear by acting as an individual, that’s intransigent, that’s intractable, that is the individual and they believe they’re invincible.
Bill: Do you have a company that has lost hearts and minds, the bodies are inconsequential at that point because you’ve already lost the heart of your company.
Todd: Well, that makes all the sense in the world when you understand how a CEO manages an organization. Can you apply the four I’s to yourself?
Bill: Oh yeah. But I can tell you I’ve made one of those mistakes. Because when you have to be right right now, you usually make a lot of mistakes so people are kind of [19:32] ask me something and I want to be the individual responsible for the success. And I had to have an answer right now and I lost a lot of money having me right, right now. So I knew that was one way not to do it. The other way was this, I had a lot of people that would tell me yes and I thought that man, I’m a lot better looking and a lot faster than I ever though I was. And no not really it was just because I had sycophants telling me what I wanted to hear. ‘You know Bill that’s a great idea, that’s a great idea.’ So I knew that what we talked about in the previous series, I knew there were naysayers, some perspective. You don’t want contrarians to it to the point where they’re just always going to say no when something’s really – when a yes is involved. But you want people that give you perspective. So you have to be able to encourage expression and thought.
Todd: So thinking about ego, what the difference between confidence and arrogance? We talked about confidence and how important it is but shed some light in that for me.
Bill: Well I think ego with talent is confidence and I think that ego without talent is arrogance. And I think arrogance, the Greek word is hubris, and is usually accompanied by a fall because nemesis shows up when you’re arrogant. So the boisterous, the arrogant they’re usually going to get their comeuppance out there somewhere. And I think that the people will feel confidence and competence when you have an ego that can support and can bring substance to the style behind it. I think that’s the key.
You know the arrogant person is the person with an empty ship; they got nothing they got nothing, man. All they’re doing is they’re going out there saying they’re something; they’re building up all their insecurities. Usually the bigger the insecurity, the bigger the ego; because you don’t want to be seen as the emperor or empress with no clothes. And that’s what these people are who are in fear; who live as an individual; who live and think they have to be invincible; who are very intransigent and will fight because they want to spread that fear, they want to limit their ability or the ability for others to see that they really have no substance, no clothes.
Todd: Yeah, that the arrogant ego is definitely the four I’s, no doubt about that. So some are listening to this who now realizes, ‘alright, maybe I thought I was in control of my destiny, I realize now that I’m not. And I need to become the CEO of my life, where in the heck do I start? How do I begin to, apart from listening to the series and understanding the always-forward mindset and all that; how do I begin to become that CEO in my life? I guess that’s a never ending process too right?
Bill: Aristotle is quoted as saying ‘the first and foremost obstacle is victory over the self’. The hardest victory is over the self. We have to be able to look in the mirror, this is the hardest part, we have to actually be able to look in the mirror and as much as we can as human, as much as we can to actually gain some kind of perspective on our denials and our delusions. Is this what we’re doing or is this what we’re doing? Is this the outcome? Am I kidding myself? Am I actually making forward progress in life? Am I doing the work? What is the work? Do I have to do more? Am I doing the right kind of work? Is there something else to be more effective? Do I really want this? Am I saying I want it? Does somebody else want this for me? Or is this how I move forward in life? That I think what reflects back in that mirror and what reflects back in the dark. In your thoughts, that’s the key to follow first before you ever take on the mantle of CEO of your life. And remember the scary thing. CEO of your life, you’re in charge, you’re in charge. And some people, and I love it, I wouldn’t have it any other way, if it’s to be, it’s up to me. If I fail, man, I fail; but I’ll get back up again swinging.
Todd: I love that stuff.
Bill: Some people scares the hell out of them.
Todd: Is your daily exercise usually go through them, you just ask a series of questions. I mean, we talk about self-awareness it being such an important part of success and victory over self as you’re just alluding to. I mean, there ought to be a daily reflection on some of these things, right? You talked a lot in the other episode about the ‘ow to think deliberately’ and that’s the whole part of this right?
Bill: Now, there’s two times when thoughts come to me, they coalesce, they start popping around in my head that’s something I must do. One’s in the shower, I can’t take a tape recorder in there [23:20] that’s kind of nasty. The other thing is when I’m driving. So I think the time for us to get some time to reflect is either when we’re driving, if we’re not always disconnected by listening to certain things, we actually have some quiet time. We can actually feel this and I’m very reluctant to give an all-encompassing bubble, kind of one-size fits-all panaceas to anything. But I will say this, I think most if not all of us can feel this gnawing in our gut when we’re on the wrong direction on something. When we’re kidding ourselves, now, I think we feel that gnaw. I think it’s the ones that are able to actually pay attention to that and do something about it that had the resolve, that’s part of your exercise.
When you’re driving, when you’re alone, when you have some time alone, can you be alone first of all, without any noise? Without any clutter, do you feel something in your gut? Where is it taking you? Follow that voice. I think that is the exercise is just I’m constantly aware when I’m kidding myself, when I’m not. And it’s a constant struggle. It’s a constant struggle.
Todd: Now, we talked about instinct and how others don’t listen to it. So that’s what you’re talking about here. All these stuff, all is interconnected. Alright, well good stuff. But we’re out of time for today, Bill. Before I let you go, how can people contact you should they have any questions on how to become a game changer.
Bill: Bill Wooditch, W-O-O-D-I-T-C-H.com. Billwooditch.com
Todd: Alright, tune in next week for the next episode where we’re going to talk about owning the present. When I figured how to do this, it changed everything for me. So in behalf of my colleague Bill Wooditch, I am Todd Schnick. We’ll see you next week on Be A Game Changer. So until then, remember always forward.