Michael Hyatt: Hi, I’m Michael Hyatt.

Megan Hyatt Miller: And I’m Megan Hyatt Miller.

Michael: And this is Lead to Win, our weekly podcast to help you win at work and succeed at life. Today we’re going to be talking about a topic that’s going to connect two things you might not think naturally go together, but they do: the relationship of your personal development, or your personal growth, with your company’s growth and development. If you’re not growing, you can’t lead a growing team. We’re going to make that abundantly clear as we do a deep dive on that topic. So, Megan, welcome. What do you think about this topic?

Megan: Well, I love this topic. You and I are both very passionate about our own growth, the growth of our team members, the growth of our company, so this is near and dear to our hearts. One of the things we hear a lot from clients and prospective clients is that they want to see accelerated growth in their business. They want the results to be bigger and better and faster and all the things.

It’s funny, because usually, what they go to is they need better business strategies. That’s what they think at first blush, but actually, usually there’s something in their own leadership that needs to grow that is going to be the accelerator in the future of their company. That’s one of the things we spend a lot of time on with our clients to help them discover. I think this is kind of like getting another lever or another tool in your toolbox that enables you to move the needle, so I’m excited about it.

Michael: Well, this is congruent with our presupposition that everything starts with the leader. That’s the first place to look: your own leadership. The company is never going to rise above or beyond your own capacity to lead. That’s why this is important.

Megan: It’s kind of good news, bad news.

Michael: Exactly.

Megan: The bad news is you’re the problem. The good news is you’re the solution.

Michael: That’s right. You can fix it.

Megan: I know people listening are thinking, “Okay. I’m excited about this. I’m pumped about growth too,” and you’re probably wondering what are some resources you can tap into, which we’ll talk in detail about more later. We actually have a free resource we want to tell you guys about, because you don’t want to miss this.

Michael: We decided to put together a webinar. It’s called Take Back the Future. We were very deliberate with that language. I think for most of us, we feel like our future, especially with the pandemic, somehow got outside of our control. Maybe we felt a sense of agency, and then we were blindsided by this big, bad, ugly thing we didn’t have any control over, and for most of us, it felt like we lost our agency. We suddenly started drifting. We didn’t really know how we could predict or control or influence the outcomes of our business and our personal lives.

What we’re saying is it’s time for that to stop. If 2021 is going to be different than 2020, it’s going to be because we take back control, we take initiative, we begin to design the future. It’s imperative that we do that, and this free webinar… I’m going to do a deep dive into that topic and help you do exactly that: to take back the future where you feel more in control, where you begin to become hopeful, and where you begin to dream again about what the future could be.

I don’t know about you, Megan, but I think for us, for a lot of our clients, that was one of the casualties of 2020. Suddenly, those dreams evaporated. They just went into the ether, and people were just kind of watching TV and waiting for the next thing to happen. We want to get on the other side of that, and we want to help people do that. It begins with a shift in our thinking, which we’re going to cover in the webinar.

Megan: Dad, I totally agree with that. One of the things that happens when we’re in survival mode is we’re very much in the present. We’re hypervigilant to the present. It’s very difficult to be in the future. It’s funny. For a lot of us, the future became scary and not exciting, and what we’re trying to remind people of and reenergize people about is the future is actually good news.

That’s where all the possibility is. That’s where all your potential lies, and really, that’s where your agency and control lie. You don’t have to be in control of everything to be in control of the most important things in your life. So, that’s what this free training Take Back the Future is all about. If you’d like to join that, you can go to leadto.win/takeback.

Michael: There will also be a link in the show notes, so if you just want to go to that and click on it, you can register. Again, it’s free. It’s going to be about an hour and 15 minutes long, and I think it will really give you a sense of control and hope as you move into 2021.

So, I want to start with a story on this topic of personal growth. Several years ago, we sponsored a conference. We were at the Broadmoor hotel in Colorado Springs, and we had about 1,000 people in our audience there. It was a great conference. One of the speakers, who’s a close friend of mine… We were talking about the year we had had. This was in December. We were looking back over the past year. She said she had had an incredible year, her best year ever. I said we kind of had had the same thing.

But then she said, “You know, I’m beginning to wonder… Do I need to grow this next year? Is it important for me to grow this next year?” She said, “I’m asking myself the question, ‘When is enough enough?’” I sat there for a minute and thought about it, and I said, “You know, I hope that enough is never enough. Not because I need more stuff. I don’t need more money, I don’t need more toys, but I want to grow, and I think it’s essential for my own personal development, for my team’s dreams, for what I’m trying to accomplish in the world that I continue to grow.”

It became very clear to me at that moment why growth was not just desirable but why it was an imperative if you’re going to stay healthy, if your team is going to stay healthy, and if you’re going to have that impact you want to have in the world. That’s what we want to unpack in today’s episode.

Megan: Dad, one of the most helpful perspectives on this comes from our friend John Maxwell, who has kind of coined this idea of the law of the lid, which says leadership ability is the lid that determines a person’s level of effectiveness. In other words, your potential to achieve success is capped according to your ability to lead. Kind of like what I said at the beginning of the show. This is kind of a good news, bad news thing. The good news is if we are intentional about our personal growth, then the growth of our businesses is limitless to some degree.

Michael: Yeah, it totally is. The business can never rise above our level of leadership. The best way to hold your business back… If you want to put a lid on the business growth, if you don’t want to scale, just stop growing personally. That’s really what that whole idea is about. I think it’s incredibly relevant to this discussion.

Megan: I think it is too. You and I had lunch yesterday, and we were talking about a certain change initiative I’m working on in the company that I’m trying to get people excited about and roll out. Of course, inevitably, anytime you roll out any change in an organization, there are challenges. There are practical challenges, there are mindset challenges…all kinds of things. You really challenged me. I was expressing my frustration with, like, “I just want people excited about this. I want to be successful at it.”

You said to me something like, “Well, I think you have some leadership work to do.” I was kind of like, “Oh man! In this moment, I kind of want to blame it on somebody else,” but the truth is you were right. In this case, I had not communicated my vision for the project not only explicitly enough but frequently enough to enough people, answered enough questions… I hadn’t done the visionary work at the level I needed to. I was focused on execution, but I had kind of missed completing the vision piece; therefore, I didn’t have the alignment I needed to ultimately successfully execute.

I think that’s a good example. For me to be successful and take the company somewhere we haven’t been before, I have to grow in my own leadership. I have to become a better visionary leader, a better and more compelling communicator, better at answering people’s objections and challenges, folding those in…all that kind of stuff. At this point, I have a decision to make. Am I going to take a stand for the change I want to see in our company around this issue or am I just going to say, “Well, I guess it’s not going to happen,” and, therefore, I’m choosing not to grow and the company won’t grow as a result?

Michael: Exactly. Part of the reason I was able to identify that yesterday with you is because I had just had this conversation… I didn’t share this with you yesterday, but I had just had this conversation with a leader last week in a one-on-one coaching session, where he was complaining about the fact he wasn’t getting buy-in from his team for something he really wanted to make happen. It was a major, major change initiative.

He said, “I don’t know if I need new people. I don’t know if they’re up to the task.” I said, “Well, let me just give you another opinion.” I said, “The question is: Are you up to the task? Because it sounds to me like you have to grow in your ability to sell that vision.” I said, “I don’t think this takes any special power, but, honestly, I don’t even think you’ve tried.” I’m not directing this to you, Megan. I was directing it to him.

I said, “I don’t even think you’ve tried. You haven’t expressed, for example, your why. You haven’t done the work to come up with a compelling presentation, including slides, that would make this a no-brainer and would make it irresistible so that they automatically signed on. This is a selling thing, and you have to grow in your ability to sell.”

Leaders, increasingly, as they take on new things, have to be able to sell it to other stakeholders if it’s going to happen. In every business, you come to that point where you transition from you being able to make a decision and then it just happens… Maybe you’re a solopreneur or maybe you have a very, very small company. But once you get a team, you can’t use the old-fashioned, old-school command and control, because everybody on your team, at some level, is a volunteer.

Megan: It’s so true. It’s actually frustratingly true. The good old days when you could just wiggle your nose and make things happen sounds so great. It’s much harder work. I really feel like, as leaders, we have this fork in the road of whether we are going to rise to the challenge and develop those skills of influence and persuasion and visioneering, which is hard work.

It’s funny. Young leaders often think, “Man! If I could just do what the CEO is doing or what my direct supervisor is doing, that would be amazing. It’s all strategy and vision,” and whatever. As it turns out, that’s pretty tough work. It’s not what you think when you’re looking from the outside in. But that’s a decision to make. Are we going to grow and, therefore, the company can go to the next level or are we just going to be limited by the skills we have today? It’s sort of like, “This is what I’ve got. It’s fixed, and it’s not going anywhere.”

Michael: Before we get too much further, let’s talk about the reasons for growth. We’ve talked about it in general terms, but what are some of the reasons to continue to grow? Like, I was telling my friend after that conference several years ago why I felt like it was important to grow, but let’s talk about that and unpack it just a little bit. What are some of the reasons you see?

Megan: Well, to me, the most compelling reason I want our business to grow, like you were talking about in that conversation with our friend, is not just about the financial results. That’s great. Certainly, there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s a lot to be excited about, but what gets me excited is who we’re becoming along the way. For example, I’ve set a really big stretch goal for this year for the company, a financial goal. The truth is we don’t need the extra money. It’s not really mission critical that we have that.

However, the reason I ended up setting that goal was I knew the people who started to work on that goal back in April (we actually set it in April) would not be the same people who accomplished that goal on December 31, that by virtue of setting a goal that big, we would have to grow into it. We would have to become different people. We would have to innovate. We would have to reach for our potential and grow in areas that otherwise would be unattended, and that’s what got me excited.

The thing I love more than anything about leading our team is discovering new and bigger levels of potential and helping people uncover those in themselves. There’s nothing like a really aggressive growth goal to call things out of you that otherwise you would have no reason to do. It’s kind of like you’re just not going to get out of your comfort zone unless you have to, and that’s what we kind of artificially create with a big goal or growth.

Michael: That’s exactly right. I think that’s why we’ve talked about so many times the value of setting your goals in the discomfort zone. All the really good stuff in life happens in the discomfort zone, when you move outside of your current capacity, your current ability, and you have to encounter new problems. You have to think differently. You have to achieve a breakthrough in some way, but you become a different person. Every time that happens, every time there’s that breakthrough personally, the organization benefits.

So, yeah, I totally agree with that reason. I think another reason, too, is that your team members have goals. They have financial goals. They have goals in terms of what they want to be able to achieve in the world. Maybe they want to move more into their desire zone and do more of what they love. All that requires your company to grow. Your company has to grow so there are new opportunities for people to move into, and I love creating opportunity for people. So, that’s another reason growth is imperative.

Then I would say also, finally, just your impact in the world. If you’re doing something significant that you believe in, you really want to have an impact in the world. For most people today, and I know this is true for Millennials and those who are younger, it’s not just enough to get a paycheck. They want to make a difference. They want to have a purpose that transcends that. Certainly, they want to make a paycheck, and as you said, there’s nothing wrong with that, but I think it’s not enough. So, to be able to expand the impact your company is having in the community means you have to be growing.

Megan: Okay. Let’s talk about some of the biggest areas of growth we’ve seen over the years, maybe for the company, for ourselves. I think that would be helpful in illustrating what some of these areas look like. So, what do you think for you? What are some of the biggest areas you’ve grown?

Michael: Well, one of the biggest areas, frankly, is self-awareness. I was blissfully un-self-aware for most of my career, and then I had five daughters.

Megan: Parenting is so humbling.

Michael: It really is. What I realized was I wasn’t always aware of how I was coming off, and I didn’t always have a lot of people around me who would tell me. One of the biggest benefits of hiring a coach, as I did 20 years ago, was that it was somebody who was willing to tell me the hard truths about how I come across, how I communicate, what I create just by my leadership style, and all of that. I’ve told the story on this podcast before, but a simple thing of just not smiling led people to be fearful of encounters with me, because they assumed I was always angry or always frustrated, and it made people uncomfortable. I was completely unaware of it. By the way, learning how to smile is not as easy as it sounds.

Megan: No, it’s not.

Michael: I had to have repeated reminders of that very thing. Or here was another one: cutting people off in conversations. Honestly, I’m still working at that. I would say that if our family has one cultural issue… We get really excited when we’re together. We love being together, but we tend to talk over the top of each other.

Megan: We do sometimes.

Michael: And we don’t let conversation happen like it should. But I think, again, our leadership goes to a next level when we become self-aware. I am totally a work in process. I still have so far to go. One of the reasons you and I both like assessments is because it gives us that sort of reflective gaze to see ourselves from the outside in and see how we’re being perceived by other people.

Megan: I think that’s so true, and I love a good assessment. Okay. So, something for me on this is mindset. This is something I’ve really been working on in the last several years. It’s one of the things that I think most of us are also unconscious of. This would go into that big bucket of things we don’t think about very much: our thinking.

What I’ve discovered is that when you’re thinking about optimizing your performance, when you want to grow and show up as a leader in a different way, going to work on your thinking is one of the most powerful things you can do, because as we shared in one of our recent episodes, your thinking is what sets you up to take certain kinds of actions, which ultimately leads to predictable results based on those actions.

So, if you really want to have access to better solutions and more powerful or empowering actions, you have to get more empowering thinking. If you haven’t had much exposure to this topic, you probably think your thinking is the same thing as the facts, that it’s a fixed thing, that what you think about a situation is the same thing as the situation. Actually, it’s not. It’s the story you’re telling yourself about a situation.

What I’ve found over the years is that there are ways of talking in our own head that are really empowering and lead to great actions that lead to great results, and there are really disempowering ways we can think that cause us to take actions that lead to results we don’t like at all. If you’re someone who, like most of us, has found yourself kind of scratching your head about “Ugh, I really don’t like those results very much,” the access point that can be the most powerful is in your thinking. So, that has been a huge area of growth for me over the last few years.

Michael: Okay. Another area of growth for me… And this sounds obvious. I probably should have learned this as a kid, but most kids don’t learn this, and that is taking responsibility for my outcomes or my results. There’s sort of this cultural tendency (and I certainly had this tendency individually) to find something or someone else to blame.

When I wasn’t getting the results… It might be as general and as ambiguous as “Well, it’s the economy.” The reason my company is not growing or the reason we’re not as profitable or the reason we didn’t hit the budget was because of the economy or trends in our industry or something outside of my own control, instead of taking responsibility for myself and saying, “But wait a second. The environment is always going to be challenging. That’s why leaders get paid: to navigate that and deliver results in spite of it.”

So, learning to always start with myself and taking responsibility for the results and sort of do that inner work before I start pointing fingers or trying to solve problems outside of myself has been a huge learning for me, and it’s a continual learning. I’ll occasionally find myself even now where I’ll be pointing to something outside of myself. The problem with that is when I point to something outside myself, all my power evaporates.

Megan: Right. It’s not that there isn’t responsibility outside of yourself. There is. It’s not that we’re doing some kind of masochistic, you know, “I’m always wrong, and everything is my fault” kind of perspective. It’s not that at all. It’s just that there’s nothing you can do about other people, necessarily. You don’t have direct control. You might have influence, but you don’t have control.

Michael: That’s right. If you start with yourself, that’s one thing we pretty much have total control over. We can change our thinking. We can change our words. We can change our behaviors and get a different outcome as a result.

Megan: Another area for me that is more hard skills than soft skills is financial management. I don’t have a financial background at all. In fact, I think my high school math teachers would be floored to know what I’m doing now, that I spend a lot of time in spreadsheets and math and all the things, but I really had to learn that. I jokingly say I have an MBA that was homeschooled. I’ve just kind of learned in real time on the job. It has been an awesome learning experience.

I have loved, loved, loved learning the financial part of our business. I really enjoy that part of my work, surprisingly, if you would have asked me 10 years ago if I would have loved it, but that’s an area where it was really critical for me to grow if I was going to lead our business into the future. I had to become conversant financially. I had to be able to understand all of the financial aspects so I could lead our CFO and other members of our finance team. Anyway, I think that has been a really neat part of the growth I’ve had over the last 10 or so years, and I hope to continue to develop in that area.

Michael: It just goes to show you that you can learn almost anything. You can figure it out. Okay. So, what do you think are the greatest obstacles to a leader’s growth?

Megan: This is such a good question. I think the biggest obstacle is our own mindset.

Michael: Ooh, that’s good.

Megan: Our thinking gets in the way of our growth all the time. What we think is possible to learn or what we think is necessary to learn, which is based on our assumptions about the world, can help us or hurt us. For example, if you assume you can’t learn something because you don’t have a degree in it or you don’t have formal education or you weren’t good at it previously, like in my situation with the financial management…

I don’t have a financial background. I was not good at math in school. If I just thought, “Well, I could never be CEO of a company because I’m not good at math…” As it turns out, I’m actually pretty darn good at math. It just needs to be in a spreadsheet. That was the missing piece for me growing up. What you think is possible can really help you or hurt you.

Michael: Another obstacle is… This is kind of a mindset issue, but a lot of leaders feel like they don’t have time.

Megan: Oh yeah. That’s a good one.

Michael: “I’m so busy running the business there’s no time for personal or professional development.” Well, as Daniel Harkavy and I say in the book Living Forward, what gets scheduled gets done. You’re never going to suddenly one afternoon say, “Hey, I have an hour’s free time, so I think I’ll engage in some personal or professional development.” It doesn’t work that way.

But when you put it on your calendar, when you highly value it and treat that commitment like you would treat any other commitment and really make time for it, then all of a sudden, all kinds of things can become possible. It doesn’t mean you have to stop everything, leave for a one-week seminar, and engage in personal and professional development, though I’ve done that in the past, you’ve done that in the past, and that’s a great way to do it, but it can be incremental.

It could be as simple as… Like right now, I’m taking about 45 minutes every morning as part of my morning routine to read. This is a new thing I just… I’ve done this in the past before, but I just reengaged with this, reading a book, and I’m moving steadily through the book I’m reading right now. So, it can be done incrementally, but just an hour here, an hour there… Those things stack up and really add up.

Megan: Okay. I have to tell you about my experience with coaching, because this is exactly why I have hired a coach, I’m a part of a coaching program, and it has been super valuable for me. My day-to-day work in Michael Hyatt & Company has a lot of operational focus. It’s very busy. I’m in meetings all the time. I’m not sitting around in a reflective place very often. That’s not the nature of my work. In other words, personal and professional development is not going to fit easily into my workday or the normal flow of what I’m doing in a given week.

What I have found, though, is that if I schedule it… To your point of if you schedule it, it gets done. By being in a coaching program where I have at least quarterly, if not monthly, commitments or workshops or intensives I’m a part of, that’s like a date with myself. Because I’ve invested significantly… The coaching program I’m a part of is about $35,000 a year, so it’s a big, big investment. Because of that, I’m not missing those meetings. We schedule around those so there’s no way I’m going to miss it. I’m there. I’m fully present. I’m attentive. It has been virtual, of course, for quite a while now, but I clear my calendar when I do that.

Every single time, when I show up to those meetings, I have some kind of amazing breakthrough. I have some area of my leadership that I discover I have the opportunity to grow in or some other kind of opportunity. It is so valuable, but if it wasn’t on my calendar, if I just said, “Well, I’ll just do that in an independent study sort of way,” it would be so much harder to do that in the midst of my busy life. I’ve kind of automated it, though, by joining a program. It just shows up on my calendar, and I know I have to be there. My assistant has already blocked the time, and I go.

Michael: The benefit is the company continues to grow, because you’re bringing back from those sessions solutions, insights, breakthrough ideas that make a tangible difference in this business.

Megan: We’re on track to have our best year ever in the middle of a pandemic with many pivots we’ve had to make. It has not been an easy year. It has been a very challenging year, but we’re on track for our best year ever. I think that is a direct result of my commitment to grow and set that time aside and then come back and have new resources to pour into the team.

We didn’t really talk about this in terms of what the benefits of growth are, but the challenges we’re facing as leaders today are different and bigger than they were two years ago or five years ago or ten years ago. The solutions we need are different. If we’re not growing, we don’t have anything to bring back that’s fresh to meet those challenges.

That’s one of the things I feel like is so valuable about making this commitment to your growth and, especially, coaching as a solution for that. I can guarantee that at least four times a year I’m going to come back with a fresh haul from the store. I’m going to have fresh things to bring to the team, fresh perspective, a fresh way of looking at the problems and opportunities we’re facing, so that I have something to contribute. I think that’s really valuable.

Michael: Yeah. And if your business is growing (I’ve said this to our entire team before), you have to grow as well. You can’t be the same person next year that you are this year, because if your business is growing, there are going to be new problems, new challenges, new obstacles you have to overcome. You can’t afford to just tread water or get comfortable with the status quo. You might be able to do that in some jobs, but if you want to be part of a growing company and you want growth for your company, you have to do the work of getting in the discomfort zone first if you’re going to bring your company along.

Megan: We’re at the part of the year where we’re all… If you’re on a traditional calendar fiscal year, you’re probably finishing up your budget. Maybe it’s already done for next year. You have some idea of the revenue you’re going to project in 2021. If you think about what that is compared to this year, what the growth percentage is, and then you ask yourself, “What kind of leader is going to make that 2021 number possible?” and then you ask yourself, “How is that different from the person who’s sitting in my seat today?” that’s a good way to think about what your growth trajectory needs to look like.

When I think about that for our company, we’re projecting some significant growth next year. There are some specific ways I’m going to need to grow in order to meet those challenges, especially as we continue in a primarily remote work environment, that I have to attend to or we’re not going to get there.

Michael: This, I think, is a fitting metaphor. I was doing a project recently. It was a home project, and it was in the garage. It was involving tools I didn’t have, and I had to go to Home Depot and buy some tools I didn’t have for this particular electrical job I wanted to do. That’s kind of the same thing here. You have a project where you want to build 2021 to be a different year than 2020. It may require that you get different tools. You have to have a different tool belt altogether.

I think this is an appropriate segue to talk about an action plan. Where do you get started for growth? You and I have identified three steps here. They’re really simple but just kind of a takeaway for this episode. So, let’s go through those one at a time.

Megan: The first is to identify where you need to grow. When I was just talking about that idea of looking ahead to 2021 and what you want to accomplish and what that leader looks like and how that is different from the leader you are now… That’s a good “back of the napkin” diagnostic to understand what some of your growth edges need to be, where you need to be focused.

Michael: That’s best understood in view of a goal or in view of a future you’re trying to create.

Megan: Exactly. Which kind of sets us up for the second takeaway, which is to set goals. Do you want to talk about that?

Michael: Yeah. Setting goals is how we create the future. That’s why we harp on it over and over again. It’s why I have a course called Your Best Year Ever. It’s why I’ve done a book on that topic, and that’s why, by the way, we’re doing that free webinar Take Back Your Future. Goal setting is a way we begin to imagine and make what is kind of not concrete concrete and visible so we can tackle it.

Setting goals is not just some productivity geek thing, some high-achiever thing. No. It’s how anybody creates the future. Whether you’re the president of a country or you’re the president of an organization or you’re leading a department or you’re just trying to lead your family better, setting some goals is a way to get clear about the future you want to create.

Megan: Just a reminder, if you want to join that webinar, again, it’s free. You can just go to leadto.win/takeback.

Michael: Okay. Let’s go to the third one. What’s the third and final step here?

Megan: The third and final step is to fast-track your growth with a coach. This is kind of my favorite one, because I think this is where, personally, I’ve seen the greatest gains. The biggest ROI, so to speak, has been in hiring a coach. I’ve had a coach for quite a while now…different coaches, actually, over the years. I think a coach is the best way to go farther faster. If you’re trying to accelerate your growth…you don’t want to go through the school of hard knocks and trial and error and all that kind of stuff…the best thing you can do is to find somebody who has been where you want to go and have them advising and coaching you.

That’s exactly why we developed our BusinessAccelerator coaching program, for that exact reason, because we thought, “Man, we have learned so much about scaling high-growth businesses, and we want to help our clients get to where we’ve gotten to and beyond without the mistakes and the pain along the way.” They can circumvent a lot of that through the coaching process.

Michael: Yes. I think sometimes people feel like they can’t afford a coach, and I just want to speak to that for a moment. I probably spent two years before I hired a coach 20 years ago thinking, “I can’t afford that. I can’t afford it.” But here’s what I didn’t realize and what I understand fully now: there’s a cost to not having a coach. In fact, it’s very expensive. Here’s what it means. It means it’s going to take longer to get the results you want. You’re going to have to go down more blind alleys, cul-de-sacs, dead ends, and sort of trial-and-error figure it out. That’s very expensive.

So, there’s a cost to not getting a coach. And a coach can be simple. It doesn’t even have to be becoming part of a coaching program. Whether it’s a podcast or going to YouTube… Oh my gosh! The things you can learn on YouTube today. There’s almost nothing you can’t figure out on YouTube. Ultimately, I think the in-person coaching is the best thing, but if you can’t afford that, don’t just hold coaching at arm’s length and think you can’t do it. There are all kinds of levels of coaching you could engage if you want to go farther faster.

Megan: Yeah. The big idea is that somewhere someone knows how to do the thing you don’t know how to do today but you need to learn, and that’s really where coaching comes in, whether it’s formal coaching, executive coaching, group coaching, one-on-one coaching, those kinds of things, like what we offer with BusinessAccelerator for business owners and senior executives, or something that’s maybe less traditional if that’s not where you are in your life right now. There are so many options. In fact, it has never been a better time to find a coach and accelerate your results and your growth than it is right now.

Michael: Again, just to summarize, when leaders grow, companies grow, and you can take three steps to get there to really grow. First, identify where you need to go; secondly, set goals; and thirdly, fast-track it with a coach. Megan, any final thoughts?

Megan: The thing I love about this topic and highlighting the idea of growth is that growth is its own reward. I mean, sure, bigger results in our businesses and in our work are awesome, but making meaningful progress toward a goal or something you care about is where happiness comes from. It’s not actually achieving the goal. It’s what happens on the way to the goal, and that’s what we’re advocating for here. The steps we’ve given hopefully break this down and make it really practical. I would just encourage you guys to jump on it and do it. Make friends with growth. It’s awesome.

Michael: Excellent. Megan, thanks for joining me in this conversation. Thank you, guys, for listening. I hope it was helpful. Until next time, lead to win.