So how do you help people see that gap between their intention and their impact? Because I think a lot of people don't see that.

Yeah.

First, I point the gap out this way.

I say your gap between intention and execution, which, by the way, I think is the largest, most toxic, corrosive gap a leader can experience, the gap between intention and outcome, intention and execution.

The first thing I say is this.

People do not operate at the level of their intention.

They operate at the level of their behavior.

Yeah.

Then he actually convinces himself and others around him sometimes of the bullshit.

And when somebody gives really clear evidence to the contrary in the boardroom, This person is so good at being able to construct and speak a reality that does not exist.

Wow.

Except in about 10%.

So it's about a 10% sliver that is like, that's true.

But all the rest of it.

Not so true.

What about you, Mike? Have you ever looked at your own life and realized, I'm performing Mike Starver right now rather than actually being the real Mike?

You go to college, you learn a little bit about money, and then life was wonderful?

Yeah.

Well, keep in mind, I was in a college that I had not originally planned to go to.

It turned out that it worked out.

I got a great degree and all of that.

But I was really in this business of figuring out what's it all about.

As you know, young men's brains aren't fully developed at 18, 19 years old.

Yeah,

So how do we live sanely in the insane world that we're in right now and be efficient with that in our time and our desires and our passions?

I think the first thing that we do is we acknowledge that the crazy is not going away.

and that all of us have some version of it.

We either have it in our families, we have it in our work, we have it in our health, we have it in our communities, we have it in our Wherever it is, we all have a version of crazy.

And I define crazy as chaos, noise, confusion.

There is not a lot of nuance in our world.

You're either here or you're here.

Is that a process that you use and have helped your clients with?

So maybe we could start with a little bit about your background and your main message, and then we'll go from there.

Great.

Well, first, thanks for having me.

Really excited to share this time with you and your listeners.

Yeah, so I was born in Charleston, South Carolina, moved to Florida.

All I wanted to be since I was five years old was a fighter pilot.

I just wanted to fly jets in the Navy.

I'd love you to talk a little bit about what makes a good leader in that sense.

Uh, what makes your firm different?

Thank you for that question.

You know, if you Google executive coaching online- It, just about anybody can hang up a shingle and call themselves an executive coach.

Just about anybody with experience or no experience can call themselves a coach.

It's a messy industry, and I mean that respectfully because there's so much noise and so much smoke and so much cloud.

We do a, um, survey every year of our clients and we ask them, uh, "Could you please give us the three words that most describe what it's like to work for Mike or work with Mike and the Staver Group?" And then we load it into Google and the frequency of the words that are used and create a word cloud.

And there's one here in my studio.

And y- you say that you can't narrow a gap that you won't put a name to which is why the work opens with this question that we dodge, "What are you pretending not to know?" So, uh, can you unpack that, uh, what are you pretending not to know, uh, for us?

I want you to tell me where you think that began and why that is.

I think, first of all, we're in a transaction-based environment.

We're all in the sales environment.

So all of us carry with us some level of transaction anxiety.

We're only as good as our next deal, our next listing appointment, our next sign in a yard.

What's gonna happen next? So I think, first of all, there's this deprivation, transactional fear that I am one step away from not having a deal, right? And if I'm one step away from not having a deal, that means I'm one step away from financial stress.

I actually think that the crazy happens on both ends of the t- continuum.

So what do we do about it? I mean, what happens when our decision-making is operating out of the fear and the scarcity of not being in control? What can we do to make better decisions and show up in a better way amidst crazy?

But can you unpack that distinction for our listeners?

Yeah, a lot of people... just put different paint on the barn and they think they built a new barn.

And I'm saying maybe we don't need a barn at all.

Like what really distinguishes you in the marketplace? I was a part of a focus group.

I sat behind two-way mirrors and watched a bunch of buyers and sellers and they put a bunch of real estate signs in the room that didn't have the name of the brand.

And nobody in the focus group could tell us who it was that belonged to those signs.

And why? Because in a black and white, largely gray marketplace with as many agents and companies, how are you the colorful dot? And you're the colorful dot because you say, I'm going to do something nobody else is doing.

again.