Today on the Book More Show, we're talking with Rachel Lebowitz, EOS Implementor and COO coach, about the challenges leaders face and the ideas she brings together in her new book, The Empowered COO.
Rachel brings a wealth of experience to her work. From helping scale her family's business to working with a wide range of organizations as an EOS Implementor to her training in relationship and codependency management, she shares her expertise in aligning big thinkers and their COOs. We explore the paradox of a visionary "addiction" to ideas and a COO's need to assert boundaries.
This episode is a treasure trove of practical strategies, especially for those in COO or Integrator roles. Rachel's belief in COOs communicating their value beyond executing details is a key takeaway. We also delve into strategies for empowerment through delegation and questioning skills, providing some actionable insights.
Her approach is pretty unique, addressing both the strategies and the underlying issues of working across personality types. Her personal experience helps to illustrate the challenges felt by many, if not all, in a COO role.
We wrapping up delving into some of the benefits of using a conversation-starting book to introduce an idea into a conversation going on in the minds of the people you can best help.
SHOW HIGHLIGHTS
- Stuart Bell and Rachel Lebowitz discuss the synergy between visionaries and COOs, focusing on how to create a balance between innovation and execution.
- We explore Rachel's background in a family business, her experience with the Entrepreneurial Operating System (EOS), and how it aids in establishing clarity and a healthy culture in companies.
- Rachel draws parallels between the personalities of entrepreneurs and addicts, suggesting that visionaries have a relentless pursuit for ideas similar to an addict's behavior.
- We discuss the importance of COOs asserting themselves to avoid being overshadowed by visionaries and the role emotional intelligence plays in their collaboration.
- Stuart emphasizes the need for COOs to communicate assertively, establish boundaries, and delegate effectively to maximize their potential.
- Challenges that COOs face in their roles are examined, including the scarcity of specialized coaching and the benefits of coaching tailored to their unique needs.
- Stuart shares his experience with the transformation of a personal project into a business growth catalyst, highlighting the strategic use of books for lead generation.
- We touch on the difficulty integrators may have in being seen as negative and how they can use strategic questioning to guide visionaries.
- Rachel and Stuart discuss the power of thought leadership and authorship for COOs, emphasizing the need for self-awareness and courage to initiate change.
- The conversation also covers Rachel's personal journey and strategies for COOs and visionaries to work together effectively, leveraging the traits of both roles.
Show notes & video: 90minutebooks.com/podcast/166
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Rachel Lebowitz Contact Information:
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TRANSCRIPT
(AI transcript provided as supporting material and may contain errors)
Rachel: You know the world is all into coaching CEOs right now. There's masterminds, like you know Dan Sullivan, Strategic Coach, Genius Network, Vistage, EO. I mean unending right. But How many masterminds do you know for COOs? The other thing is we you know a great CEO visionary will say, yeah, sure, get yourself coaching now.
The problem is that 90% of the coaches that are out there are executive coaches that cater to visionary thinking.
Stuart: Hey everyone, welcome back to the Bookmore Show. It's Stuart Bell here, and today I have a great guest with us, Rachel Lebowitz. Rachel, how are you doing?
Rachel: Hi Stuart, thank you so much for having me. I know this is going to be fun.
Stuart: Yeah, I'm looking forward to it too. It's always interesting. The last week's show that I recorded was with a guy called David DePula who I know pretty well. We've had lots of conversations outside of just the book, but you and I haven't had a chance to catch up yet. So it's always interesting to kind of do the discovery at the same time that people are hearing about on the show. So I'm interested to dive a little bit deeper. Why don't you start by giving a bit of background on you and what you do and kind of set the scene for the audience?
Rachel: Sure. So I grew up in a family business and a big family. My parents owned a business and I think I started working from the age of 10. I was punching a time card and I think by 12 or 13, I asked for a raise because you've got to ask for a raise. But the most important part of working in a family business was observing how employees acted very differently when the boss was around versus not. And then I decided to go for a degree in business behavioral science.
Fast forward many years. My husband and I bought a company called Polycraft Industries. We print on flexible packaging and we grew our business very fast. But then we felt like the wheels were falling off the bus and I complained to anybody that would listen. That's when a friend told us about the EOS. So that's the entrepreneurial operating system that you implement in your business and it helps you get clarity around your vision, accountability and a healthy culture. So we implemented EOS.
I really wanted to be the implementer, but then we were like you can't be a dentist on your own teeth, right? Because that's really behavioral science. So about three years in, we hired somebody else to do it for us. Three years in, my husband comes out and he's like you know, my life got to a point where we actually have more time, we're enjoying life, we're not feeling overwhelmed by the business why don't you go and become an implementer? And so I took him seriously and I went and I did it.
I've learned since then that you never take visionaries very seriously, but that process I discovered that I'm a visionary too. But when I looked at all my clients, I saw all these similarities and I was like gosh, this feels like they all have compulsive personalities. In some of the stuff that I've been doing over the years was coaching spouses of addicts in codependence recovery. So I was like this is interesting. Those entrepreneurs seem very similar to the addicts and then their COOs seem to be having all the traits of the spouses. Like what's going on here? Right, I dug in there, did some research. Huge fan of Dr Douglas Brackman's book Driven have you read book Driven?
Stuart: no, but I'm adding it to the list now you better add it to the list.
Rachel: So Dr Douglas writes in his introduction and he expounds in his book about people that are driven have a genetic mutation. It's the d2d4 alias that's mutated, which means that their brain doesn't register dopamine hits. So they're constantly looking for more and more because they're not getting the message that they've had enough does that that like make sense for you with driven people yeah, and without sending this into a therapy session.
Stuart: Then there's a number of things. So I've got two hats. I'm kind of the I see myself as the visionary implementer on 90 minute books because the the initial idea we were delivering to dean's clients as part of new information, which is Dean's business. But I wanted to spin it out into a separate company because I saw the potential and the scope. So for 90 Minute Books I kind of see myself as that visionary implementer side. But my natural background and tendency is as an implementer and on the new information side. So the kind of other hat that I wear is running the operations for Dean on the new information side and the way you've described that relationship and those tendencies is almost identical. So, yeah, that definitely resonates.
Rachel: Yeah, the thing with the visionaries is like they have a moving goalpost. So it's like if they wanted 10 million, they want 20. And then when they reach about 17, they're like, what 20? We want 50. You know, enough is never enough. They live in what's called a narcissistic fantasy, which is this fantasy of when I will get that, I will be happy, I will be content. And then they get close to that, and then they realize contentment is not there and they push it. It's not a bad thing if it's managed well.
That's what the great innovators in our world are, like Elon Musk and all those great driven entrepreneurs right, but what happens is they leave these big trails of smoke behind them because they view anybody that's coming in the way of their goal as a threat. And they have big personalities. They have strong personalities and they mow them down. So suddenly we see COOs that have been so strong and confident losing their confidence and shrinking in their seats. They start being yes, people. They start not being able to challenge a visionary, pushing back. They start losing their sense of self, forgetting what their passions are. They start becoming resentful and lonely, and I'm seeing this again and again. It's like an epidemic that nobody's talking about.
So then I said, what if I took all those tools of healing and confidence from codependence and I brought it into the business world and I helped COOs level up, because you know, at the end of the day, anybody that's in a relationship doesn't want to be in a relationship with somebody that is needy, doubting themselves and burned out right.
You want somebody that's assertive, decisive and discerning, and I always tell COOs that they have to get a little bit of ADD, and it's not the visionary type of ADD, it's assertiveness, decision and discernment. So this leads to I am a eos implementer right now. I am the founder of empower too, so I help coos get out of that rut. And I also opened something called the driven spouse forum and that's a forum for spouses of driven entrepreneurs. Because it's really all and the same, at the end we're dealing with the same, what I call relationship math, and this is the relationship math of having a driven visionary and anybody that they attract falling into that codependence trap it's interesting that bridge between, regardless of what the relationship is, but the relationships are, to varying degrees, suffering from the same psychological challenges.
Stuart: Do you know anyone else who has made that connection? I mean, geez, I'm 48, I've been in this world for like 15 years and it's the first time I've ever heard anyone make those connections in that way. Do you know of anyone else teaching things in a similar way, or is this a pretty unique and novel approach?
Rachel: in the business world. I have not seen anybody address codependent in the business workplace. I have. So I have a great friend, christy clayton, and she's the founder of the fem community, female integrated mastermind, and she's coming out with her own book. But and we talk a lot and we have a lot of similarities her experience is coming from pure experience, mine is coming from the background of codependence so I made that psychological connection.
Stuart: But I don't know anybody else that actually made that psychological connection yeah, I think the experience that you bring to it, having traveled through journeys and seeing those, those real-life examples in lots of different situations.
Again, it just helps you fill in the gaps between the kind of academic work that you've done and the experience that other people see and the your personal experience real, interesting way of bringing it together, the trying not to make this too much of a personal conversation because lots of questions are jumping to mind, but it's all about our particular situation, coming to it from an EOS perspective, the idea that that relationship between visionaries and implementers and the dynamic, the EOS model we don't have EOS in the business, but I'm pretty familiar with it.
We've got a number of friends and clients who are in that world that relationship is relatively structured and framework-based. Does that allow for bringing in this personal dynamic into that framework? Is there a very close correlation with the people who naturally gravitate towards EOS and those who would also recognize the psychological challenges and then there's a an appetite for those people to address them, or is it, is it more that those people who are looking for frameworks and the answers are still a little bit type a, focused in that structural and this is drifting across into an area that they're either not willing to or not yet able to address? What's your experience with people's receptiveness to?
Rachel: so I want to create some clarity. So there's visionaries. Then there is integrators. It's not implementers are the people like me, like I'm a coach that comes in sometimes. Integrators are self-implementing, so you can go and implement alone eos in your business and that's usually the integrator. Because the integrator? Because the integrator.
So here's what a visionary is. Visionary is founder usually. Okay, ceo drives the company vision. They have the big ideas. They have 20 ideas. 15 are almost probably really bad, okay, really good. They are low on follow-through. They're high on quick start. Like if your audience knows about Colby, you know visionaries're high on quick start. Like if your audience knows about Colby, you know visionaries are high on quick start. They just start projects but they never finish.
Integrators are usually high on follow-through. They don't have that need to constantly do something different and move. You know worlds and all that. They're very good, they're very logical. So what happens is I would say like there is a plenty of the world that have integrators, some of integrator capabilities. What happens is what I realized is you get in the room as an implementer and you're like who wants to be integrator? And there's this one person that raises their hand. That person usually has some kind of history of enablement and codependence, because nobody willingly wants to put themselves in a position to just like be the one to bring another vision into reality and run and it's chaotic. So what happens is there are healthy integrators but there's. I think research is like only 2.5% of the world's integrators are actually healthy enough to qualify as integrators. Why is that? Because of all the people that have high follow-through, only 2.5 percent are assertive, decisive and discerning. So what that means is integrators often get crushed by visionaries. The visionary is like I'm telling you the sky is purple today. And they're like no, it's not purple. And they're like I'm telling you it's purple, you, it's purple. And then the integrator is like fine, it's purple, right, that is not a strong integrator. A strong integrator would go and say you think the sky is purple, show me evidence, let's go outside together, right? And then like oh, that looks purple to you, that's's interesting, to me it looks blue.
What happens so to be able to take a visionary's idea and bring self-awareness back to the visionary? Because somebody that is in that narcissistic fantasy they're running after a goal has very little self-awareness. They don't see themselves, they don't see the words. They talk so fast, things come so fast they don't remember what they say, they don't even like it doesn't mean that much to them. But if you put it back in their plate, they now have to think.
So when I sit with teams and a visionary is like, yeah, we can double our company by next year, integrator says it's not possible. I said I teach integrator. That is not the way to bring logic to the visionary. You got to talk to the visionary and the visionary's language. So you talk to the visionary, you say help me understand, how do we double? And he's going to say well, if we do X, y, z, then if we open up a whole new division and we buy 10 new trucks, then we should be able to double. So then'm like okay, so how long does it take to get to 10 new trucks? Well, last time took us about five months. How many people do we need per track? How long does it take to hire each person? And then suddenly they're like, oh, this doesn't make sense, right? And then they're like I don't think we can double, but we can definitely grow 20. And then everybody's like yeah, well, you can grow 20 percent.
Stuart: We get on board yeah, yeah, you circle around the edges of the debate to land on something that's a bit more realistic without coming across as negative. I remember that from rocket fuel talking about integrate, integrators, to put it my words, integrators being often seen as the negative person because always bringing the logic to the situation which comes across to people who are fast moving as bringing up challenges and objections. That element is that part of the relationship dynamic, of getting to the next level, deeper in their relationship and getting past it. Does that come into the yeah.
Rachel: So, going back to your original question, what happens is, I think, in in companies that are not running in eos, there is so much mercury that they don't even have clear definitions of what a visionary is and what an integrator is. Once you create that clarity around visionary integrator, then the integrator can suddenly fall into this codependence trap because they still don't have clarity on what the real healthy looks like. As EOS implementers, we help our clients get three things vision, traction and healthy. Healthy is literally emotional intelligence, right. So what happens is what you're talking about.
Integrators are seen as negative. That's because they're not exercising the ability to become the visionary's best friend, to show them how they are not an obstacle but they are there to help them and bring their visions into reality. If you as an integrator are constantly saying no, you are seen as a threat. If you say yes and or help me understand I say in my book I'm writing about that I say no is a cop out. No is when your child says can I have a lolly? And you say no. Yes, and is your child says I want a lolly, you say I wish I can give you a lolly, but it's 12 o'clock at night and you don't want holes in your teeth Right and then the child's like, no, that's a bad idea.
Stuart: That connection of the work that you do and the overlap with EOS. How much of it is a requirement for them, for your ideal client, to have a founding understanding of that model, because it's a baseline of understanding for you to then develop and help people get even more healthy, is it? I mean it is, but I have a particular visit to non-EOS people. Obviously it is, but are they just not aware of, do they not have enough understanding to appreciate the benefits?
Rachel: It's not a requirement at all. I have many clients that are CEOs and they don't run an EOS. They've never heard of EOS.
I keep it totally separate. The problem is deeper in the companies that don't have EOS, but the remedy is still the same. The issue is still the same. If you have EOS, it helps you. You're halfway there on the structure, on the company, on getting accountability, but as a relationship it's like marriage counseling. This is like it has nothing to do with EOS.
Eos uses the term visionary integrator, but in a company not running an eos, it's first and second in command ceo, ceo, right. So ceos often feel crushed. They feel like I don't have what it takes to stand back, what? Or they become so enmeshed that they have no life outside of their business, of the business, and the business is not even theirs. And then the sales and they're left without a job, no payout, and this person made millions.
I've spoken to so many people around that and that's because those coos are forgetting about themselves, creating a vision for themselves. What do they want? So when I work with co, what I do is I help them learn effective communication skills. So that's assertiveness. So, again, nothing to do with EOS. You can use assertiveness no matter where you are right. Assertiveness is helping them understand what they want, establish boundaries. Boundaries is a big deal in a CEO-CO relationship, being able to understand that you cannot change the other person and that having boundaries is a healthy thing and will help you grow the business not taking on other people's work. So I'm seeing a lot of COOs saying yes to their leadership team and then suddenly they're piled with a bunch of work on their desk that is beyond beneath their unique ability, right. So I help COOs find out what their unique ability is so they understand where their strengths are, so they can delegate everything else.
I help them figure out what's their leadership style like. What type of leader do you want to be? I help them figure out how they can mitigate resentment by creating a self-care plan. Many COOs neglect themselves, their self-care. They want visionaries taking time off, going on vacations. And they're looking and they say why can't I do that? When will I get that? Secretly, I know all the COOs listening on this will not admit that to their visionaries. But I know secretly you are thinking you're saying when will I experience that? And the answer is who said you can't?
The problem is, if you believe that you need to control everything and do everything yourself and you don't delegate, you will never be able to take a day off. But I'm telling you, the best COOs take as much time off as CEOs. They just know how to do it well. They delegate, they have a sense of self. They're not threatened or afraid they'll lose their job because they know how much their value is, because they know what their unique ability is right. So help them level up in that way and then, when you have that, you can tap back into your gift of intuition. That's discernment. That is what an integrator has, that a visionary does not have. That's the logic. That's being able to take all these ideas, separate the truth and the facts from the feelings. What's emotional? What do we really need to do? Look at the data, match it up and the facts from the feelings. What's emotional? What do we really need to do? Look at the data, match it up and make great decisions.
Stuart: Those elements, do you find that there's one that stands out more than the others? Is there a commonality of people really struggling with the decisiveness around what they want, or the assertiveness element and being able to communicate it? Does it skew majority to one way and then there's a long tail of the other elements, or is each case really?
Rachel: I see two things that I see a lot is co's falling into being passive aggressive. So there are four types of communication. There's being passive, which is like letting the world, you know, do its thing and you're not interjecting, right, you're just sitting there. Passive aggressive is saying I have no needs, denying your own needs and acknowledging the other person's needs, which creates resentment. When a CEO sits in a meeting and says, whatever you guys want, I don't care, and like I guess it's me again, I guess I have to fire him, all these passive, aggressive remarks are resentment that's festering and it's a way of saying I have no needs, you have all the needs.
Now what happens is when a girl gets extremely resentful, they become aggressive. And aggressive is saying you have needs, only I have needs. And that's when they say well, I'm the CEO and I'm going to tell you what to do. And they say to the visionary and sometimes I see where businesses you can't tell who's the visionary because the CEO became so controlling, because they're like I'm the CEO and they feel like the weight of the world is on their shoulder and they have to keep this train train running and the pressure is too much for them. Or, on the other hand, I see COOs turning passive and then they become like just an executive assistant. So they lose their solid sense of self and they just do whatever their visionary wants. They have no discernment, they make no decisions.
Sure, you want to take out all the money today, we'll take it out. You want to invest in somebody else? Sure. You want to hire? Sure, you want to fire? Sure. And suddenly this business is going on this train and everybody else is getting very confused and you start losing morale. Everything gets bottlenecked in the COO because we're waiting for the COO to make a move and they become very slow at making moves because they're doubting themselves.
The best form of communication is assertiveness. Assertiveness is acknowledging the other person's need and your own need and then staying centered and doing what's best for the situation. The situation is the greater good of the company. Now, if you're not running an EOS, you don't know what the greater good of the company. Now, if you're not running an EOS, you don't know what the greater good of the company is. Maybe you've never sat down and created a VTO, right, but you can still have that conversation. So when your visionary says I want to take out X amount of money because I want to do that. You look at them and you say I hear you and that's probably very important to you, but where we're standing right now, that's probably very important to you, but where we're standing right now, if you take out that money, we won't have payroll. Do you still want to do that?
And I'm concerned about that. I'm concerned about my people, I'm concerned about my own paycheck. Now that visionary can make a better decision because it's depersonalized, it's acknowledging most people are looking for validation. That's the only thing they are looking for, right? The problem with COOs is, by the way and I'm going off tangent here is that COOs are looking for external validations. Well, why are that way? Why, because you know, when COOs tell me this all the time, they only feel that they had a good day or they're doing a good job well done, if the visionary tells them so. They depend. Their validation and their self-assurance depends on what their visionary communicates. So if the visionary gave them a compliment that day, they're high. If the visionary was angry because their wife yelled at them and they came into work, then now the CEO isn't a bad man.
And what I teach those CEOs is you can't let the visionary be your puppeteer. That's how I complete the book and I say who's your puppeteer? Because you need to know your self-worth. You need to know that you're doing a good job, no matter on which wavelength the visionary is today. And if you have the right systems in place, then you can have data to back up and know that you're doing a great job, right. We have a scorecard. If you have accountability, if your rocks are being met and your goals, then you shouldn't be doubting yourself, right?
So that's the number one thing that I see that CEOs fall into. Do this passive, aggressive or passive trap? The second thing is that I see them trying to pre-empt situations, trying to solve people's problems before they even have a problem. They feel that they must anticipate people's needs and that they have to solve other people's problems. And the truth is a real COO teaches a person how to fish instead of giving them a fish. They're great.
So they never solve their people's problems, they just ask the right questions. So what I do with my clients, I sometimes put them on a word diet, I call it, and that is, I give them a challenge that they can offer the next X amount of time and they pick one person to practice with, or maybe we decide on what the framework is. They can only ask questions and they cannot give answers. They cannot give solutions, and that's when they really have to get good at asking good questions, because you got to get the other person to come up with an answer themselves, and when somebody comes out up with their own solution. You create buy-in right.
Stuart: Right.
Rachel: It's not the integrator telling you what to do. You came up with this, so you're more than happy to do that. You know, my son's principal has this policy that when kids fight or anybody gets into trouble, he calls them into their office and he asks them what do you think your punishment should be? So if a child chooses attention, he's not going to protest against it because he chose his punishment right, like you said he's buying to the outcome exactly.
Well, my kid says well, I think I shouldn't get a punishment. So then the person says well, how am I supposed to let you go back to the class? Or what am I supposed to say to the other child?
Stuart: now that feels very hurt right so then he says well, and I guess I need to say I'm sorry right, yeah he got from him what he needed yeah because he stood on asking questions right, that kind of drilling down to the real, the real meaningful difference, the outcome of the solution that really makes a difference and it's not just a surface level punishment or a quick answer to a problem and then move on to the next thing. That's getting down to the real difference, which comes from asking questions, is a pretty big difference maker. How am I trying to ask the idea that COOs have this discerning element that makes them good for the job in the first place? But a lot of that discernment, as you said, only 2.5% of them are effective or healthy, as they could be. So a lot of that discernment maybe comes from discerning the answer to a problem rather than discerning the questions to get to an answer. So I think there is, as you said, a tendency to fix yourself and not delegate as much as you could do.
Rachel: It's misplaced discernment and what happens is when COOs learn how to recalibrate that they are less stressed out and used up and burned out, because it takes much more effort to come up with ideas than to ask great questions. And COOs are so burnt out because they're doing everybody's work, so you're doing less of the heavy lifting because you don't have to follow through, because you're not the one that came up with the idea yeah, and going back to the example of the kids and the kids fighting, the people are bought into the solution because it's their idea.
Stuart: It is such a short-term, short-termism thinking. It's the quicker route to just give the idea and fix the problem and move on. But it's interesting you're taking like that. It's a. It's just a different skill the skill of answering the questions and the skill of asking the right questions. Someone with a tendency to discernment could do both. It's just the default. The path that's kind of built into our brains is to do their answering rather than asking could do both. It's just the default. The path that's kind of built into our brains is to do the answering rather than asking.
As I say, it's always a risk of this turning into a therapy session rather than sharing the sharing the ideas with the rest of the audience. But this is fascinating, in part, I think, because it's just hitting home and resonating personally as we're talking about it. But also this idea that there's small tweaks to the way that you work can lead to such greater outcomes and that kind of pivot point and ending up in a much better situation. Many of the COOs that you work with. So, as you mentioned, not all of them, or even a small part of them.
At EOS, where the visionary is brought in as well, for the COOs that you're working with, is there any conflict with the visionary in that relationship? Are they there? Is there a concern that the CEOs are trying to do something that's at odds if the visionary is comfortable with how it is in the moment because they're ticking along and doing work in the way that they've worked? Is there a barrier to get started with the CEOs who work with because of the environment that they're in? Do they need to put on their big boy, big girl pants and decide that this is something that they need?
Rachel: to address before they actually get started. So sometimes it's a two-part sale. Sometimes it's the COO comes and they're strong enough and they have a healthy enough relationship to that the CEO acknowledges that the CEO could use coaching. You know the world is all into coaching CEOs right now. There's masterminds, like you know Dan Sullivan, strategic Coach, genius Network, vistage, eo. I mean unending right. How many masterminds do you know for COOs? The other thing is we you know a great CEO visionary will say, yeah, sure, get yourself coaching now.
The problem is that 90 of the coaches that are out there are executive coaches that cater to visionary thinking. They've not cracked the code of how do you? The wiring of a coo is very different now when you take a coo and I've spoken to many COOs that went to the wrong coaches it's like when spouses of addicts went to addiction specialists and they sat and they're like you don't get me, this is not my problem, I don't want to be amped up more. I am just like looking for a boost of self-confidence. Most visionaries don't need a boost of self-confidence in that way right.
And most visionaries didn't lose their sense of self because they've built huge businesses around their sense of self. They take their mission statement and they hire 500 people around it, right? Coos lose their sense of self and to be able to coach a COO, you need to understand their wiring. So I don't know really how many COO coaches are out there that are actually specialists in this and understand the wiring and are qualified to do this coaching. So when a COO reaches out to me, they've usually already had the conversation. If not, I offer to get on a conversation with a visionary and I use the tools that I use, that I teach my CEO clients, which is talking to visionaries in their language, showing them the win, showing them how threatened by their COO leveling up. I just look at the COO and I tell them now you know Right. They're like what do you want to do?
Stuart: There's no avoidance of what the situation is. The choice is, then, stark and in front of you Either continue, but it's not going to change, right.
Rachel: It's like staying in a marriage where one spouse doesn't want to go for therapy. So you ask your spouse to go for therapy. Your spouse says no. What are your choices? Either you tolerate it or you leave. And I'm like now you know? Now the good thing is, if you work with me, I can help you find your unique ability and strengthen your confidence so that you feel confident enough to leave and go somewhere else, because you know what you're worth yeah, yeah, which?
Stuart: that is a resolution as well. I mean getting past whatever elements are keeping you in a bad situation, whether it's in the marriage sense or in the business sense. It's still an awareness and if the only thing that you've got control over is you making those changes, whatever the outcome is, it still changes for the better. Sometimes, when we're talking to people about the idea of creating a book as a lead generation tool, as a business building tool, it's that there isn't unique ideas. People get a bit hung up on this idea of needing to create something absolutely unique to put out there, but oftentimes a financial advisor, for example there's not too many completely unique schemes that can be set up. It's a relatively fixed framework.
You're at the opposite end of the spectrum, bringing together this relatively unique idea in the way that you're bringing it together as the jumping off point for the conversation is that this information doesn't exist out there in the world in this way. That you're bringing it together as the jumping off point for the conversation is that this information doesn't exist out there in the world in this way. So that's obviously the purpose for bringing it together, but the idea of using the book as to introduce the idea to more people? Did you come to the book project knowing that you wanted to use it in a particular way, or was it a case of here's the ideas that are in different places? In the way that I work, I wanted to bring them together and then see how to use it. Was it a tap to the ideas first or a definite way of using it first?
Rachel: Yeah, oh, that's a good question. So I wanted to write this book for a while and because I'm a visionary at heart, my follow through is not very high, so I just kept on starting, stopping. And then I read Diane Sullivan's book, the Four Seas, and he mentioned the book and I was like, oh shoot, I don't have to do it myself. That's awesome. I ended up doing this transcript and then rewriting the whole book, but it gave me a framework. It gave me a really good for it was that start.
I always like my website. I told my website designer when you give me a word document that has words on it, I can't see what this is going to be. I said cut anything up, publish it, I'll look at it and I'll tell you how I want to change it. So the idea of this book was literally to do like a tell all and put this information out there in the world. Working with 90 minute book gave me this idea of like hey, this is lead generation, create outcomes, create three. What do you call it? Call action yeah, yeah.
I wasn't. That wasn't originally my plan to create the call to action. I figured like I'll put that book out there, I'll talk about it to people that I know on, you know, social media, and people will buy the book. But I didn't connect it to lead generation. So then the book got stalled a little longer because I had to go set up a website and get everything in place so that when the book publishes it does lead to somewhere.
Stuart: So now I'm super excited.
Rachel: I set up a website. I'm working on a course, a self-paced course that you take online workshops, one-on-one coaching, which is really exciting. So I really appreciate that you guys pushed for that angle, you know.
Stuart: Right, it does give it. We talk a lot about the idea of traditional books versus conversation starting books and they have 90% of benefits crossover in terms of authority and credibility and putting the idea out there. But the downside to traditional books is that model is the book is the product, and the whole world is around book sales and the book being the thing, whereas for the rest of us, real business owners, where the conversation is the outcome, the conversation is the thing that we're trying to get to and the book is just a mechanism, a very effective mechanism, for starting that conversation. So it's just those little switches that change 5% maybe of the content, but at least it leads people in a path to help them get to that next step which ultimately leads to jumping on a call or whatever the discovery step is.
Rachel: Yeah, it totally changed for me, because I'm not planning to make any money off the book, I think, because what I'm going to do is print a bunch of copies, put them into pretty boxes and ship them to people. And it's a good gift to give to people, it's a good thing to bring to shows. It's the business card.
Stuart: Yeah, exactly, and those models if you've got. We talk sometimes about invisible audiences versus visible audiences, so invisible audiences, it's difficult to buy a list of people with knee pain because that list just doesn't exist in that way. But it is possible to get a list of COOs. So the book exists. Now you can change the format of it, do hardcover versions, put those in a box If you were trying to target, like line fish, some individual, specific people. The opportunity to do that now that it exists, changing the format, changing the context in which you use it. There's a lot more opportunity now that it exists.
One question I know that we're running up on time. It's turning into a standing joke at the end of all these podcasts I'd say how quick time goes, but it always catches me out. One question, and again probably from a personal perspective the implement, the integrator personality type of the element of kind of fact-based discernment, however good that is, and the visionary personality type of really driving something forwards almost to the exclusion of logic or sense, at the extremes of both of them. What's the? Do you have any advice for someone who is naturally in that integrator space, that's the, the thought process, but is also responsible for the visionary side of driving an idea forward and is very on board with the idea, has the vision, but what's the? You were talking about the having a different definition of add, but what are the elements of the visionary that are useful for a integrated based organization more than a visionary based organization?
Rachel: okay, so why do you think you need to change anything?
Stuart: Well, okay, so our organization? So okay, the example is me, so our organization is the product that we've got, I think, is very good because it sits in the nice sweet spot of very effective and not getting too carried away in the best seller BS of something that's not really effective. We've been doing this for 13 years now. There are a number of competitors around that external view first and internal view second. I think my natural head is the other way around internal first and external second, which is great from an operational point of view. But I mean that has its limit. There still needs to be more push on the outside. So very selfishly, I'm saying what? How many times I have to tap myself on this part of my head to get into switching into more of that external, that visionary forget about the operational side and into the driven side?
Rachel: is it that the business is not going fast enough?
Stuart: yeah, I think there's, yeah, two elements one it's the generally the growth and two, it's almost a little bit of the. When we started this, we were the only game in town at this end, this part of the spectrum. But now there's lots of people doing it in a more external way now, operationally, I don't know what they're, whether it is better or not, but still, whether or not there is a problem externally, I think that the I feel that there is a problem internally, that my natural tendency. If I get to the end of the day and didn't have the reminder to do something external, I would have focused all internally. So there, there seems to be a visionary trait that I'm missing that would be good to pick up on. I'm guessing that I'm not alone in that.
Rachel: I know, okay, I get it, I hear you so. So this is what I sometimes see that people that have more integrated traits, their businesses, don't grow that fast. Because you want an insurance policy for every step you're going to take. You're more free, you're more risk averse. And then when I sit with these teams, what happens is something I observed is visionary goes and says I want to make 10 million the next two years. Integrator says that's not possible because they're looking from where they go today. The visionary looks where I want to be and then they work their way back. So being more visionary is saying you know, when I sit with teams and I want to set their goals, they're like why don't we set 90 day goals before a 10 year goal? Because then I said, because that's when you want to go to Florida, you might end up in Canada.
Right, if you sit down, I say what's that ultimate goal? What do I want? And don't get distracted by what others should ands like what other people want for you. It sounds like you're stuck in that typical coo space where you're worried about what other people want for you instead of what you really want for yourself, and maybe you are perfectly okay with a type, a kind of business. You're just feeling, you know I don't know what the word is, but you're feeling like, oh, I should be doing x because everybody is doing x, right. So asking yourself, what do I truly want? What does that look like in 10 years? And then saying what do I need to do today to get there? Gets you more of that external view. If you're saying, I want 1 million viewers in 10 years, great, what do you have to do today? So you're going to have to start talking to different types of people and doing different types of activities, because it changes your trajectory.
And that's the difference between COOs and visionaries. And now a COO asked me how do visionaries take so much risk? And the answer is by the time they take that risk, they've mitigated all the other risk. So visionaries make calculations and decisions so fast that when they decide that they're going to jump in, what looks like a risk for you is already a mitigated risk for them Because they've calculated all the possible outcomes. They've decided that they are okay with taking that leap. Like, if they take a 10 million dollar risk, they've calculated how they're going to lose it, how they're going to make it back, what's going to happen if they lose the 10 million? They're sitting with it. They're okay to lose the 10 million, versus a ceo thinks of taking a 10 million dollar risk.
Stuart: They think they're gonna die right yeah so maybe yeah, that's an interesting thought, that idea of there's so many ideas and on the next, that the mitigation is almost that the next idea has popped in and is already crowding for space. Yeah, that's interesting way of looking at it. This has been fantastic really. Personally, and I think the people who are on the list that we send the email notification out to there's a big crossover between this cohort of people. So I think this unique idea and way of thinking about it no matter which side of the visionary integrated fence they are, or even if those words don't mean anything, but still the setup in the organization, whether they're a real estate agent who's responsible for their own book, or in a larger organization, there's still elements of this I think are really going to resonate. I want to make sure that people can find out more about you and the book, and what's a good place for people to head over to to find out more?
Rachel: So they can go to www.empoweredcoo.com and all the information is on there. They can find me on LinkedIn.
Stuart: Fantastic. Make sure to report all the links to the places in the show notes so as people are listening on, they'll be in the podcast player or if people are on the website, there'll be a link there. It'd be great to circle back in a few months and see how the books go in the reception. Once it kind of comes to that, join together and finalize what the reception is out there, because I think it's going to be really kind of game changing for a lot of people. So if you're up for it, it'd be really great to get back later in the year yeah, I created an online free assessment that will show you on a scale of being empowered.
Rachel: You know, visionaries on the positive side, integrators on the negative side. The assessment is for integrators. It's from negative five to negative zero, so negative five is very enmeshed, very codependent. Negative zero, center focus self. You know, situation focused. I've been talking about it a little bit. I've got a lot of people that have already taken the assessment, so people are waiting for the book to come out.
I'm just a stickler and I wanted it to be perfect. So I'm putting the last finishing touches and hopefully it'll be out in the next few weeks yeah, and that's the thing I mean.
Stuart: that's the other good thing about this model is guaranteed. In two months time you'll see something else that you want to change and from the feedback that you get, there might be some deeper diving and elaboration that you want to put in there based on that feedback. But at least that's an option here and you can make all those changes at any point in the future. But I know what you mean about wanting to get that first one out of the gate as good as possible. Rachel, really appreciate the time Everyone listening. I'll put the links in the show notes to the website and Rachel's LinkedIn page, so definitely follow across there and then, yeah, we'll circle back in a few months and see where it's landing for people.
Rachel: Thank you so much, Stuart, for having me. This was a blast.
Stuart: Fantastic. Thanks, rachel. Thanks everyone for listening. We'll catch you in the next one.