Episode Transcript

What’s up everybody? Welcome back to THEa a.m guys. Welcome back to five minute rants.

Well, guys, today I actually want to talk about letting go of decisions and other things people are doing in your life that you can’t control. And everybody talks about this at some point. I think if you’re just in the normal journey of human life, you’re going to come across this and if you are into self improvement, you’re going to come across this concept.

However, I do want to talk about a particular aspect of it. I want to talk about what Andrew and I call running your offense. And this is what I mean by that. There are hundreds of 1000s of things in life that you cannot control. They’re not under your authority or your decision making power to decide to do, for instance, anything that has to do with another human being, right? So if you’re in leadership, you have a team member. You’re not in control of whether they stay with you or not. Okay, you’re not in control of whether they become a good team member. You’re not in control of whether they listen to you or not. Those are all things under their control.

If you’re in sales, you’re not in control of somebody signing a contract. You’re not in control of somebody signing a deal and closing. There are things you can do which make it easier for people to partner with you and finding the right people and doing things right, but none of that stuff’s in your control. And I’m saying all of this because we tend to focus on trying to control the things we cant, we tend to focus on, well, how can I get them to make the decision? You can’t get them to make the decision that is immovable object equals whatever it is direct force, whatever that saying is where you have the most perfect force in the world, and it meets the immovable object, right? Nobody is winning. There’s just stalemate in that equation.

And so you have this problem that can’t be solved, and then, as a result, what happens when you can’t solve this problem? You get stuck, and you don’t go anywhere. And the best thing to do instead is this. You focus on your offense. You focus on the things that you can do better. You focus on becoming a better partner. If you’re in sales, you focus on becoming a better partner. You focus becoming a better communicator. You focus on actually providing value to the people that you want to do business with, and then that they’ll want to do business with you.

You’re selling a product you don’t believe in cool. Focus on finding something that you do believe in and that you do think makes a difference. If you’re team leading cool you can’t focus on people who actually are going to listen or whether they’re going to leave the team or not, but what you can do is focus on being empathetic leader. What you can do is focus on serving and removing yourself to do what’s best for the people that you’re in charge of. What you can do is focus on instilling the principles and the culture that matter within the company. And what you can do is, when you’re part of the hiring process, you actually go through thoroughly to find the right people for the position, and those are all things that are within your control.

And so I’m saying all of this because this applies everywhere I’m married, okay, I have another person in my life that I chose to do life with. Everything under her life is under her control, right? And so what can I do? I can choose to be a good partner. I can choose to grow. I can choose to be loving and work on that. I can choose to allow her to speak into my life and to say, hey, here’s your faults, here’s things that I think are broken, and then we make a plan on how to move forward and vice versa. I can choose to be compassionate and kind. I can choose all these things and choose to focus on me rather than the other person.

It breaks every time you focus on the other person. Life breaks every time you focus on something that is outside of your ability. And again, I’m not the first person to talk about this, and I am not stating a very like highly intellectual thing. It’s interesting because most times in life, it’s the simple things that we run away from, because the simple things are what expose us and show us where we’re failing. And we tend to run away from failure a lot.

So I’m saying this because when Andrew and I started business, well, we didn’t focus on the things we could control. We focused on everything else. Like, man, we want this many contracts. We need this. We need that. And it’s like, man, that’s not what actually allows that to happen. If you look at how companies grow, if you look at how people grow and change. If you look at how life is really built, it’s all based around focusing on the things that are that are under their authority, or under the authority of that entity, and bettering that to become somebody that is worthwhile doing business with worthwhile doing life with worthwhile being in a relationship with.

Essentially put what I’m saying is you take responsibility for you, and you be responsible for the things that you should be responsible for, and have ownership of it.

Anyways, guys, I’m out of time, so I’ll catch you later. Peace.