Episode Transcript

What’s up? What’s up? What’s up, everybody? Welcome back to THE a.m guys, welcome back to five minute rants. I’m your host, Michael Abernathy. And welcome back to the show predicated on the journey of life and business. So everybody today, I want to talk about, you’re only in charge of yours. And What I mean by that a lot of people say this is control your controllables. But I want to talk about What that means more specifically.

So when Andrew and I first started business, we set goals of, hey, we want to sign this many contracts this year, we want this many new customers and these things. And there’s nothing wrong with setting goals like that. But the problem starts. And oftentimes, many times companies actually have problems because they’re focusing on how many contracts they want to get signed, but they don’t actually focus on themselves. And most problems in life, then most problems, whether in business or outside of business, they involve two people minimum, right.

They involve two people think about a car wreck, all car wrecks involve two people, even if the car ran off the road and hit somebody else’s property and damaged it, another person it’s involved somewhere. And that being said, is you can only control your car, and you’re only in charge of controlling your car. And it’s the same thing in business. We are not in control of making the decision whether people signed the contracts or not whether people hired us, but What we were in control of is building the customer experience setting expectations, listening and discovery, we were in charge of the offerings and creating the offerings and bettering the offerings, making sure that we actually provided value. And we were actually serving people and giving them something they wanted. And that gets lost, like all the time, it gets lost. Because we get focused, and I’ve done this, we get focused on the money, we get focused on the deal, we get focused on all of those things. And then we normally find ourselves pressuring people to sign or doing the old used car salesman deal. And nobody likes used car salesman. Nobody likes that a lot of people when they walk onto the dealership, they don’t like the car dealership. And it feels really bad. Because the problem is, is the emphasis is put on the contract.

Now I’m not saying there isn’t an art to negotiating in, there isn’t an art to talking with people or clients, or things like that. But if you take that if you take the salesman side on a on a car lot, and I’m not trying to offend anybody on a car lot, but seriously, take it like, Hey, we’ve got this new Ford, it has all these things, you take that and then you apply that anywhere else. And it breaks every time along the way. And so I think that part of our job, as people and as individuals is to really be in charge of ourselves, you’re only in charge of yours, What belongs to you what’s under your authority, you’re only in charge of What you can actually control. And especially when you’re doing business and building business, you’re only in charge of What you can

My wife’s an attorney. And this is so true, it is so easy to see it her job as an attorney. And even the ethics for how she practices she’s not allowed to ethically make a promise of an outcome for a client because she’s not in charge of that outcome. The judges, the judge is the final decider of the outcome for all the work she’s put in and for the client. And so she’s not in charge of that. But What she is in charge of is listening to her client taking care of them picking up the phone, actually working for them and doing the best that she can in the best that she knows how to be as a lawyer, it’s the same thing in sports, you see this, no football team can say I’m going to win the Super Bowl, right? and that’s their goal, I’m not saying you can’t have that as a dream. But it’s not actually realistic because you have another person or another party involved, that has to actually perform or perform badly in order for you to win the Super Bowl or perform less good than you. But What you can focus on is, hey, most football teams when they fumble the ball, they don’t win the Super Bowl, like teams that fumble more often than not, do not win the Super Bowl teams that fumble the ball 25% less than most win the Super Bowl And so you can look at that, and then focus on not fumbling it in that’s how it is in life.

Okay, cool. I seem to have this problem in business. And then the finger gets pointed, the finger gets pointed at somebody else and be like, Oh, well, you’re causing this problem. Okay. And I’ve heard this too, like, cool. You have bad employees? Well, you’re the one who hired them. That guy told me years and years ago, if you have bad employees, remember, you’re the person that hired them. And then it turns out the most time it’s not that the employee is bad. They’re lost along the way. Like there’s difference. There’s a difference if you hiring somebody toxic, right? But most of the time when you sit down have a real conversation, you take care of What you can control which is lead. Those people don’t turn out to be as bad as you think they are. And so again, I’m going to say this you’re only in charge of yours.

That’s it guys. I’m out of time. I’ll catch you later peace