Episode 122 - Entrepreneurs Will Save the World with Michael Hyatt
Today’s guest is one that needs no introduction, but here’s one anyway. Michael Hyatt is the former Chairman & CEO of Thomas Nelson Publishers and the current Founder & CEO of a fast-growing, Inc. 5000 leadership-development company.
He is also a New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and USA Today bestselling author of multiple books. With a top-rated podcast called Lead to Win, bestselling physical products, and an executive group coaching program, his business reaches over 1 million people a month.
He is an influential voice on leadership, business growth, goal-setting, and productivity. And today, we’re going to talk about his newest book, The Vision Driven Leader, and how the content applies to you, the Faith Driven Entrepreneur.
Episode Transcript
*Some listeners have found it helpful to have a transcription of the podcast. Transcription is done by an AI software. While technology is an incredible tool to automate this process, there will be misspellings and typos that might accompany it. Please keep that in mind as you work through it. The FDE movement is a volunteer-led movement, and if you’d like to contribute by editing future transcripts, please email us.
Henry Kaestner: Welcome back to the Faith Driven Entrepreneur podcast Rusty. Awesome to see you.
Rusty Rueff: Same to you, as always. As always, hope you had a good week.
Henry Kaestner: I had an awesome week. This is a week of expectation. We're going to go out with the family on vacation next week to North Carolina. North Carolina is starting to open up. And we've had an annual vacation for the last 16 years with some families. And we take the same picture of our kids in front of the same white House. And it's fun for us to see how they grow. And that's what happens next week. Looking forward to it. When are you going to head out back east? Soon, right?
Rusty Rueff: Yes, soon. Soon. Probably late in June. But I can't wait to see the picture with the kids masks on. That will mark the year that 2020 year.
Henry Kaestner: Well, you probably won't see a picture of the masks, but you will see a picture nonetheless.
OK, we've got Michael Hyatt with us in the house. And Michael, I'm very sad to have you on the show. Thank you for joining us.
Michael Hyatt: Hey, thanks for having me on. Good to be with you guys.
Henry Kaestner: We want jump right in. So let's go for it. You're talking to an audience of Faith driven entrepreneurs business leaders driven by their faith, an audience. I know that you're familiar with how I started, though, by letting you introduce yourself, maybe let them know a little bit about who you are and then starts off maybe a piece of advice about leadership or coaching and business or personal. And I just get it started, please.
Michael Hyatt: OK. So I spent most of my career in the world of book publishing because I love the world of ideas and books and all of that. But I was the CEO, Thomas Nelson Publishers at the time. It was the seventh largest publisher in the US. We sold to HarperCollins in 2012 and I used that as an opportunity to make my exit and do what I wanted to do for a long time, which was to write and to speak and to coach. So since that time, I've gathered a small team. We've got 40 Full-Time employees. Now we do leadership training and development and we work with about 450 entrepreneurs and business owners in a coaching kind of relationship, which is the joy of my life. I love meeting with those guys, encouraging them and helping them in their entrepreneurial exploits are not all faith driven, but certainly our perspective from my company is a faith world view. So we try to filter everything that we do, a Christian world view perspective. So I guess to kick off an idea, the thing that that I've come to believe and believe more strongly the older I get is the self leadership is everything that if you can't lead yourself, then you really don't have the right to be leading anybody else. And as it turns out, leading myself, I'm the hardest person there is to lead because I resist my leadership and sometimes I don't do what I know is best, you know? But yeah, that's the challenge of leadership, I think. I think it's so important because we replicate ourselves in the lives of the people that we lead for good or for bad. And so, you know, the law of replication says that other people become who you are. And so it's critically important that we continue to work on our own character, continue to hone that and fine tune that so that it shows up in good ways in the lives of the people that were leading.
Rusty Rueff: That's a good thought. I mean, there's an elevator pitch right there for leadership of the future. If you were to expand on that a little bit. But the replication of a leader and I sometimes call it a shadow of a leader. Right. We sort of fall into that. What are some of those positive traits that you think a leader should be putting out there that others will not only admire but want to replicate?
Michael Hyatt: Well, I think certainly our attitudes, you know, the way that we kind of approach the world. You know, we've been through this whole Covid 19 thing. And one of the things I've said to my business coaching clients, and I think it's so important for leaders, is that they show up as the best version of himself every day. That's why I believe in a morning ritual, a morning routine. You know, it's critically important, you know, to spend time for me in the words, spend time in prayer, exercising whatever it takes for me to win the day and really show up to be a calm, confident leadership and particularly in crisis. I think. What people need is that sense of calm and confidence if you're running around with your hair on fire. Overreacting to everything that's contagious is more contagious than the virus. But at the same time, if you're calm, if you're optimistic at the same time is being realistic. And both of those are important to maintain. That's also infectious. And your people will catch that from you as well.
So for us, as we've gone through this time of the pandemic, I mean, I hate to say it, but it's really been a good time for our business. We didn't have to lay off anybody or furlough anybody. I know not everybody's in that situation, so no shame if you had to do that. But for us, you know, it's allowed us to kind of reevaluate everything we're doing. And ask yourself the question, how can we make it better? How can we make it more impactful? But I start by leading with my attitude. And one of the great questions that I've learned as a leader to ask in adversity in particular, and this is a question that helps lead other people, is instead of resenting the situation, what does it make possible? And I love James admonition in Chapter one of his epistle, where he says, and this is the film's translation. He says, When all kinds of troubles crowd into your lives, my brothers don't resent them as intruders, but welcome them as friends. And so for me to get up in the morning and ask myself the question, am I resenting this adversity? Do I feel entitled to something else? Or do I see life as kind of a gym in which God is training me so that my character is developing and I'm going from glory to glory as I go through this life? And I think that being an entrepreneur and being in the arena as we are is a wonderful place to learn that.
Henry Kaestner: So when I think about you and teaching leaders you and coaching, I think about two things. There's a practical aspect of it. And then also the visionary aspect. You've written a book division driven leader. I want to get to that in a second, but I want to camp out just a little bit more on this concept of leading yourself. And that's kind of on one hand, you kind of get it. But it's also intimidating because it makes me think about the blindspots, the things that I don't even know. What are the kind of blind spots you see in a leader that you challenged to lead them selves, knowing that they all had some level of handicap? What's some practical things that a leader might do to lead themselves?
Michael Hyatt: Well, I think one of the biggest challenges for most leaders is self-awareness. You know, all of us leave a wake as we go through life. You know, I can think back when I was at Thomas Nelson and we had some guys that were our private equity partners and not to write on them too much, because I know you guys were investors and all that, but, you know, they would come in oftentimes and sit at our quarterly meetings with my executive team. And I remember one in particular where we had this phenomenal quarter. I mean, even in the midst of the recession, we had this great quarter. And so we were talking about what was going right. And everybody's kind of queued up to give their presentation and feeling really good. But these guys basically cut us off at the knees about probably 10 minutes into the presentation and said, yeah, yeah, we get what's going right. We want to talk about the stuff that's going wrong. I mean, you could just hear the air go out of the room because these guys fundamentally lacked self-awareness.
Henry Kaestner: They did not have a spiritual gift of encouragement.
Michael Hyatt: They did not have a spiritual gift of encouragement. Fact they had the spiritual gift of discouragement. So, you know, I spend time doing damage control with my team in that kind of situation. But I think that self-awareness helps you to be aware how you're being perceived, how the words you say, even down to your facial expressions. Here's another example I remember back. This probably was about 2006, 2007. I had an executive coach who was in with me for a day and I was meeting with each of my divisional managers. And we did this once a month and we reviewed the operating results for the prior month. So everybody had to show up. Given account, you know, these are people that had P&L responsibility, give an account for their results for the prior month. So our first break, she came up to me and she said, I just got to know. She said, are you ticked off today? And I said, no.
She said, really, you're sure there's nothing wrong? And I said, no, I'm feeling fine. She said, Well, you might want to tell your face because she said you're sit in that meeting with this scowl on your face, as she said. It's intimidating. And she said, Can you perceive that people are intimidated, that they're not able to relax and give you the best of themselves? Because just by your facial expressions, you're intimidated. And she said, I don't encourage you to work on smiling. And so, I mean, it seems like a little thing. But when you're in leadership, people infer the biggest things from the smallest gestures. You know, the casual throwaway comment that you don't really think about, you know, that gets a big deal you might even be thinking was just in jest. And people can turn that into, you know, an entire narrative. And so I just think I don't want to certainly walk around like I'm walking on eggshells, but I do want to be self-aware as a leader.
I think it's critically important. It's kind of a super power. And that's why I really believe in assessments. I don't care if it's Myers Briggs or Strength Finders or the Enneagram or any of that stuff, but I think it's all helpful for a couple of reasons. Number one, it helps us appreciate the way that we're wired. And it also helps us realize that there are other people that are wired differently.
And that's a good thing, you know, and we have that kind of diversity of gifts and talents and skills. That's a really good thing. And in the past, they used to say to myself that if I could just find somebody else like myself, I could just clone myself. That's like the worst leadership idea ever. You don't need more of you. One of you is sufficient. What you need is diversity around you. You need people that see life from a different set of presuppositions, from a different perspective so that they can help you get kind of a 360 view of the world that's more congruent with reality as it exists.
Rusty Rueff: It absolutely makes sense. And I think those are great insights for those who need to be self-aware. But because they're not a self-aware. They can't be self-aware. So I think it's a little bit like the old joke, you know, hey, enough talking about me talking. So what do you think about me? You know, and so those are really good hints on how to do that. But you also talked about the power of a coach, right? You had a coach go into that a little bit because, you know, sometimes we just need that mirror in front of us who is honest to tell us what we're not aware of ourselves, right?
Michael Hyatt: Well, that's exactly right. And I'm a huge, huge believer in coaching. I believe in anything you want to do in life. There is the easy way and there is a hard way to illustrate for the world of fly-Fishing, because this is something I love to do.
If I were left to my own devices to try to fly fish and actually catch fish, I could do it. But it takes a lot longer. And so from the very beginning, I've always hired guides because these are guys that are out of the water, out of the river every day. They know what bugs the fish reading. They know, you know, where the fish will tend to be in the river and they can get me into the fish faster. So I apply that to every area of my life. I've had a business coach since the year 2000 when I realized that I just turned a division around at Thomas Nelson and I kind of realized I was out of tricks, you know, and I thought, golly, now expected to grow this division. I had taken that division from being number 14 in the company in terms of revenue growth and profit margin to where it was first in revenue growth and first in profit margin. And I thought, now what? I don't know what to do. So I said, I've got to hire a coach. So I asked my friend John Maxwell. I said, I need a recommendation. So he recommended the guy who's now become a good friend of mine with whom I wrote a book on life planning. Daniel Harkavy of Building Champions.
And Daniel said of the first things he said to me was he said, look, we're gonna put together a life plan because he said, you're going to visualize the end from the beginning. But it was hugely helpful to me because all of a sudden I realized I had somebody, you know, that was there to help me, that didn't really have, you know, what we'd say in Tennessee, a dog in the hunt. You know, it wasn't like a boss who's trying to drive an agenda or, you know, maybe a peer who has an agenda, but somebody who is just in it to see me succeed and to have that sort of objective third party person who is knowledgeable, who is experienced, who could guide me and get me into the fish, you know, to use the metaphor was hugely, hugely helpful. And I really think a lot of the reason I've been successful to the extent that I have has been because I've had a series of amazing coaches.
Henry Kaestner: I want to take you back to the book that you wrote, The Vision Driven Leader. So we've come out of the aspect of leadership in terms of being self-aware and some of the tactical things you do and how to do that with. Coaching. But when you lead, you have to have a vision or the people will perish, right? That's right. Scripture help us to understand a vision driven leader.
Michael Hyatt: Vision is really about starting with the end in mind, Stephen Covey 101. It's beginning with clarity about the destination. Vision answers the question, where are we going? It's a fundamental presupposition of leadership that the leader has a destination in mind because he expects people to follow him or her. But without a destination in mind, you just kind of go in on a walk. You know, there's no destination. And so it's imperative. I don't care if you're leading from the top or if you're running a division in a company or even a department within a division. You've got to have clarity about the destination where you're taking that organization. Now, that's different for mission. Mission is really about what? And it's about why. What do we do? Why do we do it? Vision is what we're trying to build toward. Core values are important, too. That's about who we're becoming on the journey. Who we are and who will becoming on the journey. Strategy is also an interesting distinction because it's really about how in people confuses a lot. Everybody wants to know what your strategy is, what your strategy is. That's like the second question I ask. The first question I want to know is where are you taking this organization? What's your vision? What does this look like? When it's done? And then the second question is how? Now people get really confused, like during the pandemic because of this, they're thinking, oh, gosh, the whole world's changed. I've got to give it my vision. Not so fast. I think we should hold tenaciously to our vision, but our strategy should be flexible. That changes as condition conditions on the ground change. So you're talking about go into North Carolina on vacation every fall. My family, we go to Rosebury Beach in the panhandle of Florida. And that's the destination. And we have a clear vision of that because our family has done it for years. We love it. We can visualize those emerald waters, those white beaches, the sunshine, all the rest down there. That's the vision. The strategy typically is that we caravan in cars driving south on I. Sixty five from Nashville to Birmingham. And we take some state roads southeast into Florida. Sometimes though, one of us or a family of us may fly. That's a different strategy for getting to the same destination. Sometimes there's roadwork or there's a big wreck and we have to take a detour. So strategy can change as often as necessary, but we really ought to be holding to that vision tenaciously.
Rusty Rueff: That's good stuff. You know, you and I sat on a board long time ago together bookshop. So, you know, I'm not the smartest tool in the shed. So I'm an ass. Probably an easy question for you, but I think sometimes a hard one, at least for myself and for probably some other faith driven entrepreneurs is how do you take those principles and how do we align those to our faith? I mean, seems easy, but it just ain't that easy, is it?
Michael Hyatt: It's not. But I seem I think sometimes we make it more difficult than we need to. So let's just assume that, you know, you're operating in prayer, you're walking with God, you're trying to be obedient. You know, you're doing all the things right. You're part of the faith community. All that kind of stuff. I find it fascinating that most of the time what God requires of us is that we get clear about what we want three times in the Gospels. Jesus asked people, What do you want?
Now, what's fascinating to me about that is he's the son of God. He absolutely knows what they want. I mean, he's asking a blind man. What do you want me to do? Well, what do you think I want?
But evidently, it's important for them to get clarity about what they want before they're going to get healing. I think it's important for us to get clear about what we want as well. Now, this part may be controversial, but I love this. I learned this from John Eldridge and that is that desire is like a map that God places into our heart, into a regenerate heart in terms of what his will is, because I've got involved when I was young as a Christian, I thought, well, if it's something I want to do, that couldn't possibly be something God wants me to do. So I'll just do the opposite of what I want to do. So the last thing I want to do is go to Africa and be a missionary. If I'm honest. But I guess that's probably what I should do because that's what God wanted to do. Now, I don't think that's the way it is at all.
I think that the desire that God has put in my heart is to help young entrepreneurs be successful because I really believe that entrepreneurs are the driving force of culture. It's not a real passion and a heart for this. And so as a result of that, I think that's how I get clarity. You know, getting alone, being prayerful, being thoughtful, writing things down. That's how I get clarity about God's will for my life or for my business. So in a vision driven leader, I talk about it. By the way, it's not a Christian book written from a Christian perspective, but there would be nothing in it that would probably tip you off unless you were looking for it. But one of the things I say the division is I talk about a vision script, so not a vision statement. You know, the short, pithy, like, really clever slogan or model that you could put on a coffee mug or on a t shirt. No, it was something more robust that can give me operational guidance as I'm trying to build this thing that I'm a steward of. And so when I say a vision script, I'm talking about something that's a document that's three to five pages in length. It outlines a clear, inspiring, practical, attractive picture of your organization's future. It's reality, as you see it, three to five years from now, and it's written in the present tense as though it were already happening. So that kind of document that's robust like that can be really powerful. Kind of contrary to the story. Kind of give is OK. So when I first stumbled upon this, I told you about this. I was given responsibility for this division back in the year 2000 at Thomas Nelsa. It was my first kind of divisional PNL responsibility assignment and I didn't know how about that division was already recounted that it was dead last in every significant metric, but revenue and profit in particular. So the CEO said to me, how long is it gonna take you to turn this division around? And I totally pulled a number out of the air. I had no idea. But I said I think about three years and he said, OK. He said that's that's pretty much what I was thinking. So the first thing I did was I got the profit loss statements from my division. I got the organizational chart because this was a book publishing company. I got a book publication schedule. I wanted to know what was in the pipeline. I went off on a private retreat for a day and I started to write down as a series of bullets stated at the present tense when I wanted to be true of that division three years from that point. So I said things really practical. Like I said, we publish five New York Times best sellers per year. So again, it was in the present tense. It also was a huge improvement over the current reality because at that time we were publishing no bestsellers. I said we're the most profitable division at Thomas Nelson Publishers. I said every year our employees max out their bonus plans because I knew if they were engaged and they were benefiting from it, that they would be motivated to help me turn this around. So I had about 10 bullets. And then I went back to my leadership team, my small leadership team, and I said, look, guys, I've been thinking about the future. I'm not Moses. And these aren't the Ten Commandments. But I'm a guy that's been thinking about the future. And I've written some things down that there's probably some things I'm missing, probably some things that need tweet products and things I just flat out got wrong. But I want to have a conversation. So in that conversation, it was a series of conversations. I began to transfer ownership. And begin to engage the team in this process. So then we cascaded it down to the next level leadership and then we finally rolled it out to the entire team. Everybody was absolutely clear about the destination. We had defined the win in advance. But the thing was, it only took us a year and a half to turn that division around. And it really convinced me that when you have clarity around vision, it accelerates your progress like nothing else can.
Henry Kaestner: So I want to shift gears as you are leading the team. It feels like it's so important to be able to help your team to understand what it looks like, case like, feels like to be there. And by putting it in the context of present day, present tense, I think he gets that. I think that's really powerful. I want to talk about this management of the team, and I want to say that delegation. I remember from the conference we had together. Jim, your assistant and I want you to refine a little bit about the mistakes you see and delegation you got, I think, a ten eighty 10 principle. Help us understand how to delegate and get the most out of our employees.
Michael Hyatt: Yeah, I think this is the secret to scaling the business. You know the reason most businesses don't scale or stagnate is because they reach a ceiling. John Maxwell calls it the law of the lid. But it's because the entrepreneur or the person who starts the business just gets exhausted. You know, they exceed their capacity.
And there's nowhere for it left to go. And they don't know how to delegate. So basically, what I think you have to do as a leader is that you have to get hyper focused on what you and only you can do where you add the most value. I love this quote from Dassin Trotman, who founded the navigator's wonderful Christian organization that I was a part of for many years. But he said never do anything that others can or will do when there is so much of importance to be done that others cannot or will not do. So what are the things that only you can do? Everything else needs to either be eliminated, automated or delegated. But why is it so hard to delegate? And I think there's at least three mistakes that entrepreneurs make when it comes to delegation. First, they simply hesitate. They refuse to delegate and they refuse to delegate because they have these limiting beliefs. And the way I hear them express, there's like three of these. One of them is, you know, if I want it done right, I've got to do it. What myself? Right. Or they think it takes longer to explain how to do it. I might as well do it myself, self, or I can't afford to hire somebody else right now. For now, we're just gonna have to do it myself. And as long as myself ends each of those thoughts, you're stuck.
Because the truth is there are people that can not only do it to your standards, but can exceed your standards as long as you're willing to express your expectations. People cannot read your mind. Not your spouse. Not your best friend. Certainly not to people that work for you. You've got to be explicit in your communication. So you just you've got to do that in order to get people to deliver more than you think. And yes, it's going to take you longer to explain it the first time how to do it. But after you do that, then it's off your plate. And it's kind of crazy to think about continuing to do something that you could hire to get done at 20 dollars an hour. If it cost you one hundred dollars an hour, because that's what your time is worth or two dollars an hour to keep doing it.
That's just not good math. So hesitate. That's number one. The second mistake that entrepreneurs make when it comes to delegation is they essentially abdicate. I call this the dump and run. You know, they're busy. They're harried, they're overwhelmed. So they kind of loosely explain it to a colleague or to a teammate. They say this is what I want done. And then they're shocked when it comes back and it doesn't live up to their expectations. So we have a tool called the Project Vision Kastor that we use with our coaching clients. And it's also in my book, No Fail Communication, but it explains exactly how to delegate a project.
So it's explicit. So to take on a project fifteen to twenty minutes and actually put pen to paper and express, you know, to find the winner in advance is huge. So that's where the mistake they make, they just abdicate. But another mistake they make. This is like the opposite is they suffocate. And this is micromanagement. And I remember having a job like I got when my first dream jobs in publishing. I moved into the editorial side of the business. I'd been in marketing. I moved into editorial. I was so excited until my boss came in at the end of the first day and he said, hey, what did you do today? So I kind of gave him a rundown of what I did. He said, no, I mean, like in more detail. I said, well, that's kind of it. He said, okay, here's the deal. I want you to start keeping a journal of your time. Fifteen minutes of time. I want you to write that down every day in order to discuss it. At the end of the day. After about two weeks, I was going crazy. I ended up leaving that job, which is my dream job. I adore this guy. He was just a horrible manager, is a micromanager. I left that job after six months. It's what got me to Thomas Nelson because I just couldn't abide by that kind of micromanagement.
So delegation is none of those things, delegation is being clear and explicit on the front end, dipping into the project occasionally to check progress, but giving people the opportunity to express their strengths. And if you've built your team right, they're going to have the capabilities and the capacity to do what they can do better than you can do so that you can focus on what you and all that you can do.
Rusty Rueff: Yeah, that's good. That's good stuff. You know, I learned long time ago, too, and delegation is that, you know, one reason I didn't want to delegates because I didn't think somebody else would want to do what I was doing. Right. And I sat there and I go, yeah, but why would they want to do it? And then finally somebody said, hey, you know, if you give me a chance, I think I would love to do that. I'm sitting there going, wow, why didn't I think of that before? So very good practical advice you give. It's one of your hallmarks. You know, I think you probably know that about yourself. But, you know, people talk about, hey, Michael can take the big visionary and make it very practical. And I think you just demonstrated that for us. And I want to go even more into one of those practical things. You know, you talk about this concept called email jail and how to get out an e-mail jail. And I'm going to complicate this for you, because now the world we're in, it's not just email. I'm literally in three projects now. One on slack, one on Microsoft teams. And the other one on Monday dot.com Right. And email. Give us some practical advice on how to get out of e-mail jail. And now these new, you know, work tool jails.
Michael Hyatt: Well, first of all, you're not alone, Rusty. This is a fairly common predicament. Inboxes have multiplied. The amount of messages and conversations or were expected to maintain is unbelievable. And really, if we wanted to, we could spend all day, every day doing nothing but trying to get to inbox zero. You know, it's kind of a fool's errand because just as soon as you hit it, it's right back where you were. OK. So a couple of things that I would say. So one of the things I talk about in my book, Free to Focus, which is all about productivity. The subtitle is about, you know, a proven strategy for achieving more by doing less. So one of the keys to that is I really believe in daily rituals and I advise entrepreneurs, business owners, any kind of leader to have at least four daily rituals, a morning ritual that set you up for the day, a workday startup ritual, the kind of segments, some of those activities that could suck the life out of us, like e-mail or slack or teams or any of those things to have a time when you check that and then get out of those inboxes to do the real work that constitute your job.
Now, if you're in customer service or something, which probably I'll be listening to this podcast is, you know, limited in your inbox is probably what you do. But for the rest of us, we know that deep work, that focused work that we do, that really moves the needle in our business. So workday start up ritual, then a workday shutdown ritual. Right. Revisit my inboxes. Just the maintenance kind of things get caught up.
And then an evening ritual that sets me up, you know, to have a great night's sleep so that I can show up in the best way possible the next day. So that's like number one. So daily rituals. Second thing I would say is this is like the biggest argument for having an executive assistant. I really believe in executive assistants. Now, there was a time in my career when I thought, I don't need no executive assistant. You know, I can handle this all myself. Why do I need somebody else? Well, you mentioned Jim. My executive assistant, Jim loves the things I hate. And he probably hates the things I love. You know, we're perfectly matched for each other. We're completely different. We have a whole framework called the Freedom Compass, which we talk about that. But we're on the opposite sides of the Freedom Compass, which is great.
So what I do is I actually have two email inboxes so you'd have to extrapolate this for slack or for teams. But Jim has credentials to all my important stuff. And so the e-mail inbox that I give out to the public is the one that Jim checks. I never checked that one. So Jim tags me, we use that e-mail tool called Spark. And he can delegate that to me if it requires my response.
But we also work this kind of a third tool. Is that not only to inboxes, but the third tool would be that we have a whole battery, a collection of e-mail templates, because I realized years ago that I was continuing to get the same kinds of requests over and over again so that if somebody would ask me to serve on a board. Somebody had asked me for a donation to something. Somebody would ask for time to have coffee and pick my brain. But there was a finite number of requests that I got. And so I noticed that sometimes when I was feeling generous, I would give a pretty thorough response. And sometimes, you know, I just didn't have time and it would languish in my inbox. And sometimes I'd give a short curt answer. I said, OK, here's something to do, because I know there's only about forty to forty five different requests that I get. Not to do this all at once. I don't have time, but every time I respond to one of these requests, I'm going to respond in a thoughtful way so that that can become a template that I can just use in the future. You know, give it a personalized beginning, personalized ending, but it will take all the thought process out of it. And this is like hugely important if you have difficulty saying no. So I'm a recovering people pleaser and still have a lot of work to do that area. It's hard for me to say no, but if I have a template, it makes it that much easier. So one of the little hacks that I have on say no is here's what I say. I use this and this isn't free to focus. I have this. Yes, no. Yes. Formula. OK. And so I try to affirm the person for making the requests. Like maybe somebody says to me because I knew I was said book publishing. They said, hey, would you review my book proposal, which is asking me for basically two hours of my time. So here's what I'd say. So that's it. Well, first of all, congratulations on writing a book proposal. You know, so many aspiring authors never get to that stage. You've accomplished something that a very small percentage of people ever do. Congratulations. Then I'm gonna say no and I'm gonna say it unambiguously when I'm not going to say, as you know, it's really a busy time. Could you check back with me in a couple of weeks? That's a boomerang waiting to come back. Right.
So instead, what I want to say is something like this, unfortunately, and this is unequivocal. Unfortunately, I have to say no to your request. And this is the magic language. In order to be faithful to my other commitments. I have to say no. So everybody understands that I've got other commitments, you know, and I want to keep those commitments because I wanna be a person of integrity. And that means keeping my word. And so I have to say no. And then the yes, part of that is, you know, just some well wish, some other source resource I can point into if I have one. But would you put those in email templates? You can really be thoughtful and think, OK, if I was really trying to help this person, what would I send them to? Are there links on my blog? Are there programs that they could subscribe to? Is there something else that would give them help?
Henry Kaestner: That's great practical advice for all of us entrepreneurs that are just feeling overwhelmed. And yet we've got the conflict. We don't want to blow somebody off. We want to love on them. We want to serve them. But how do you do it? Well, and I think that I've got some gym envy and some. I want to open it up a little bit. Ours is a podcast and it's a program for Faith driven entrepreneurs. And you've worked with a lot of them. And we've got a whole bunch of different questions that we can ask you. And we're going to close with one about what you're hearing from God and his word. But before we go there. Is there any other thing that you see Faith driven entrepreneurs struggle with that you think you offer out as an encouragement or a challenge or an admonishment or is fill in the blanks? What's a grab bag for you to go to encourage a Faith Driven Entrepreneur?
Michael Hyatt: I would say that your role in the world today is more important than ever. You know, I'm actually writing a book right now. This is gonna be a provocative title, but I'm writing a book right now called Entrepreneurs Will Save the World. And the subtitle is Why You're the Secret to Economic Recovery. You know, it's not going to be the government starting to be some other institution. It's going to be entrepreneurs because what entrepreneurs do.
The essence of who we are is that we solve problems and we solve problems at a profit. And in doing that, you know, people could say, well, but it's all self-interested. It is self-interested on the back end. But it never works until I get active solving somebody else's problems. And so, you know, I've said to the people that I coach, I've said the good thing about the pandemic and there are a lot of bad things. And I know I hurt for the people that have lost their jobs, lost their businesses. Some of them are my coaching clients. And, you know, I get that. But the thing I said to him is that in the middle of a crisis, there are gazillions of opportunities. And if our role as entrepreneurs is to solve problems, do we have more problems today than we did ten or twelve weeks ago?
Absolutely, what that means is there are more opportunities. We just got to ask the question, what is this problem make possible? How can we turn this around? Use it to our advantage so never waste a great crisis. And this is an opportunity to accelerate the decisions you probably should've made before now. But this gives you the excuse or the motivation to make those decisions. And I think the thing that I would say to everybody listening to this, take a stand for how you want to come out the other end of this crisis. Don't let that be an accident, because as an entrepreneur, as a Christian, you have a choice. You can either design the future, you know, with God's help or you can drift into the future and kind of take what ever comes with. The problem with drifting is this. No one ever drifted to a destination they would have chosen. That only happens by design.
Rusty Rueff: It's good. Unfortunately, we've got to come to a close because we only have so much time. But we are going to probably want to invite you back at some point. And I hope we get the email template he addresses. We'd like to close every one of our episodes.
And if our co-host William was here, he would be doing it because it's his favorite question. So I get to do it today. What is God saying to you in this moment? Through his were maybe this morning or whenever. But what does God have on his heart right now for Michael Hyatt?
Michael Hyatt: You know, I've been reading through First Samuel, and it's probably my favorite book in the Bible. Certainly one of my favorites, because it's a story of David and particularly David in the early days.
And the thing that struck me over and over again is how he doesn't move without hearing from God. You know, things that are seemingly obvious that God would want him to do. But he waits on the Lord and he is steadfastly obedient. And that's really challenged me because I think, you know, one of the things that happens to you as a entrepreneur, as a leader, you become more successful. You know, things become intuitively obvious what you should do. And it's just been a challenge to me to just say, wait a second. What if it's not? What if God wants me to do something different? That's not the obvious thing. In the midst of this. So it's just been, you know, something I've been journaling about as I'm reading through First Samuel, and something that's been a great challenge, too, because I really want to be a man like David who is after God's own heart. And at the end of the day, that's what I wanna be known for as a man that saw God and obeyed him.
Henry Kaestner: Amen. Michael, thank you so much. It has just been a pleasure having you.
Michael Hyatt: Thank you guys much. Thank God for what you do.