And by protecting him so much, I kind of feel like we did him a disservice.

I love this topic.

I 100% agree.

Nobody's excited about adversity when they're in the middle of it.

Nobody's excited about the tough upbringing or the childhood that wasn't perfect or whatever challenges we all face, but we have to face them at some point, and adversity is often the best teacher and where we grow the most.

I don't wake up in the morning and pray and say, God, give me adversity so I can grow.

That's not a prayer that I pray.

Realizing where you're at and pivoting is also another way of dealing with the challenge.

So you should look at yourself first and overcome your own challenges before trying to get your team on board and request very, you know, high KPIs from them.

Yeah, you just said it right there.

That's exactly it.

So I was going to go with look in the mirror, but I figured that advice coming from the blind guy probably wouldn't hit exactly right.

So own the mirror is the idea that we can – and I often make the comparison between the window and the mirror.

So you can look out the window at the surrounding world and point at something down below you or outside that window and say that right there, the economy – You know, who the leader is of our country, the current state in my local community, how things are in terms of the resources I have within my company.

Marketing isn't good.

And what is the relationship between two? So how would you describe the importance of the inner circle and then how that can help expanding to the larger one?

What qualities consistently distinguish leaders people willingly follow?

Yeah, I think that the biggest one on that leadership, what I found with companies that bring me in to do leadership training or individuals who are in a leadership position that I'm working with, one-on-one or like I said, in a group, I find that whether it's an executive team that I'm coaching or it's just one person, the thing that I, the common thread that I found that runs through people who are not even necessarily in a leadership position, but do the things that a leader does and other people want to follow them.

The first thing they do is they lead by example.

I think most people don't want to be a They want to be led or they will willingly follow a leader, but they won't follow you just because you have a title that says general manager or manager of this or supervisor of that.

And there's a big difference.

You can get people to do just enough to keep their job or just enough to feel like they satisfied a number or hit a quota, but they're not going to go run through a brick wall for you unless they want to follow you and they make a conscious decision that this is a person who – who I want to be around more and who I want to learn from and who I want to be a mentor for me.

And so I think the biggest one is you're not just telling them what to do.

What do you wish organizations better understood about creating truly inclusive workspaces?

So how can they use your thinking here about visualization? Can we jump to visualization right away? Or are there some steps that you help your clients with as a coach before they can come to visualize it?

Well, I think it depends.

It's a great question, by the way.

Thank you for asking.

I think it depends on the situation.

So if somebody has an actual tragedy that just happened yesterday, they lost a family member, a spouse, whoever that is, a close friend, that's not something that you're going to the next day be like, hey, this is adversity and i'm going to extract something positive from this obviously there's a grieving period and there's a period of time where it's okay it's normal it's a normal human reaction to be caught up in some really negative emotions the key is to not stay there right and first all of us it's going to take different a little bit different periods of time depending on what that situation is that event that happened um and how we deal with it So definitely, the key is to work through it.

It's okay to grieve.

And when I'm looking back at that, it's indeed one of our greatest uh support now where i can help others patrick so thank you for sharing how you help others and if we go back to how you started then before you became a successful author top coach speaker and so on you're also working in the corporate world can you share with us the adversity that you had to go through then

Walk us through those kind of those two thoughts.

Yeah, so it's a great point that you make because I love that quote, by the way, but I wrote that one down.

But it's something that that I think most people, they're thinking about, they think strategy is what's gonna change their business.

And look, part of that is true, but as you just said, it's momentum from really moving forward taking action and then learning from that action or the results from that as as fast as you can right so that you can you can learn what doesn't work so that you can start implementing the things that work and then creating a repeatable process so when people go to and when Business owners, entrepreneurs, sales professionals go to talkwithpatrick.com.

They set up a strategy session with me.

A lot of times the first thing they think we're going to talk about is sales strategy or marketing strategy or business strategy.

But a lot of times it's having that mindset, starting with the attitude of what does... a million dollar producer? What does a seven figure entrepreneur who's scaling or looking to scale, where do we have to start in terms of the mindset? So a lot of times the mindset is where the miss happens and where they're off the mark.

How do you get a sense for what it is at this point that they should be focusing on?

I want to kind of talk about, I mean, what point, what point in your life growing up and What point in your life where you didn't make the excuse and said, you know what, I'm going to let this hold me back? What, in your mind, you push past and you say, you know what, I can do it?

Yeah, that's a great question.

I think that it really was in the sales industry.

Sales, usually for a lot of people who haven't been in it before, and I had no previous prior sales experience.

Yeah.

Done some collections work, which I really didn't like, but it really built some thick skin that I needed to get into the outside sales world, especially in an industry, in the insurance industry, straight commission, outside sales, where you're essentially self-employed, working for yourself.

There was a parent company and a brand, but... you're still working essentially for yourself.

yeah yeah

And how do you, have you ever been mad at God?

Absolutely.

Yeah, especially when I was younger, but I won't say that I don't sometimes still get very frustrated and say, why are you letting this happen or why is this happening to me? I'd like to think I'm a lot more mature in my faith than I was before.

when I was a lot younger, but when I was in my teenage years going to high school being, you know, now as an entrepreneur, it's, it's, I don't say it's cool to be different, but for me at this point, I think that a lot of people realize that my unique ability or my, my, what makes me different also is, makes me strong and is really my superpower.

People want to talk to me about how I've overcome challenges being blind in the business world.

So it's kind of become my superpower.

And some of that is because that's how I frame the story on purpose, because I see it that way as an asset, not a liability.

How do you network with purpose?

Um, so you know, early on, you know, what did you have to believe about yourself that maybe others didn't believe in you yet?

Yeah, it's a great question 'cause early on in my career in sales, I, I probably didn't believe my blindness was an asset.

I really probably believed it was a liability rather than something that I could leverage, um, to get to, you know, to kinda build relationships with people, that my story was something that people would want to get to know and that would make an impact on people.

So that was something that I had to really-- I had to flip that narrative on its head and really, um, change that paradigm in my own mind first.

It's one of the things I work with people...

You mentioned me being a coach.

I work with people in coaching, whether in leadership positions or sales or entrepreneurs.

What would you say, you know, um, that makes you uniquely qualified, uh, or, or makes your coaching, uh, with, with sales professionals and entrepreneurs sort of special and different?

when does that message empower people versus when does it unintentionally minimize the complexity of someone else's struggle, right? I think there's some tension there.

There is, and it's kind of a balance.

I'm glad you brought that up, 'cause there is really a balance to that, that it's a fine line to walk.

Um, because I think, I'm really try my best to be, um, c- you know, as careful as possible or as, as to walk that line the best the way I can.

I can't be perfect at it, of course.

But I understand and I, I try to acknowledge this whenever I'm giving a talk-Especially when I'm talking about overcoming challenges.

Because I talk about 100% responsibility, like taking 100% responsibility, even though I understand there is some things in your life that may have happened, 'cause I don't know who I'm speaking to, so I, I want to acknowledge there might be something in your life that had nothing to do with you.

Do you think that most people generally just lack confidence or that they lack the clarity about what they're actually capable of and how far they can push themselves?