How to Rewire Your Mindset and Lead with Full Permission, with Tricia Stover Part 2

🎧 Ep. 202  How to Rewire Your Mindset and Lead with Full Permission, with Tricia Stover Part 2

In Part 2 of this candid and practical conversation, leadership and mindset expert Tricia Stover moves from inspiration to execution.

We unpack what really separates managers from leaders… why business growth will always mirror personal growth… and how ego quietly erodes trust, culture, and retention.

This is not surface-level motivation. This is the deep work.

If you’ve ever wondered why your business feels chaotic… why your team isn’t fully bought in… or why success still feels heavy instead of freeing… this episode will challenge you to look inward first.

Because as Tricia says, if you want to grow your business, you first need to work on yourself. 

We explore:

• Why business stages are predictable… and so are the failures
• The misconception of overnight success
• How personal growth and professional growth run in parallel
• Why leaders struggle to slow down long enough to examine how they’re thinking
• The difference between leadership and management
• Why mindset is not just positive thinking… it’s ownership
• Confidence vs. clarity… and where ego sneaks in
• Subtle signs you’re leading from ego or fear
• Why “directive” leadership erodes trust
• How clarity removes chaos and creates momentum
• Breaking destructive patterns before they cost you your team
• Why defining your values is the ultimate starting point

🔑 Key Takeaways:

• Your business will only grow as much as you do
• Chaos often signals misalignment, not incompetence
• Ego blocks trust… and trust drives performance
• Leadership requires empathy without depletion
• Most retention problems are leadership problems
• Clarity reduces overwhelm and accelerates execution
• Values are the foundation of fulfillment and succession

💡 Quotes to Remember:

“In the failure is where I found I have refined myself… and I embrace it.” 

“When your business is failing, it’s probably because you have not been working on yourself.” 

“You have to go in there with big ears.” 

“Your personal growth goes right alongside your professional growth.” 

📚 Resources Mentioned:

✨ Learn more about Tricia and Performance Masters:

https://performance-masters.com/

📲 Connect with Tricia:

 LinkedIn https://www.linkedin.com/in/tricia-stover-bfa/

A rising tide raises all ships, and I invite you along on this journey to Evoke Greatness!

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Transcript

Failure As A Forge

SPEAKER_01 0:00

In the failure is where I found I have refined myself and I embrace it. I just don't like it because it really holds up that mirror and it's the definition of insanity until you look at yourself and say, okay, I need to change myself. There's no limitation in my life right now. And it is the most freeing feeling I could ever have.

Why Strategy Isn’t First

SPEAKER_00 0:30

Welcome to Evoke Greatness, the podcast for bold leaders and big dreamers who refuse to settle. I'm your host, Sonny. I started in Scrubs over 20 years ago, doing the gritty, unseen work and climbed my way to CEO. Every rung of that ladder taught me something worth passing on. Lessons in leadership, resilience, and what it really takes to rise. You'll hear raw conversations, unfiltered truths, and the kind of wisdom that ignites something deeper in you. Your courage, your conviction, your calling. This show will help you think bigger, lead better, and show up bolder in every part of your life. This is your place to grow. Let's rise together. If your business feels chaotic, if your team isn't fully bought in, and if you're exhausted from carrying it all, this episode might be uncomfortable because we're not talking about strategy first. We're talking about you. Part two is about the self-work behind sustainable leadership, the difference between confidence and ego, and why your business will only grow as much as you do. Lean in, buckle up.

Growth Paths And Common Pitfalls

The Mantra: Work On Yourself

Leadership Vs Management

SPEAKER_01 1:57

Let's hop into part two. You know, we can go into business any way we want. And if we have our rose petaled glasses on, you know, and there is a percentage of businesses who just, you know, take rate off and they're successful, they also grow too quick and they they have to then end up coming back into the journey and reversing, you know, hey, let me take a step back and look what I did four years ago that put me in this crunch today. And those are the things that I like to say, okay, here's where you're at, and here are the things you're going to experience. This is your choice, how you deal with this. Because when you do this for so long and when you help others grow their businesses, there is a framework in several frameworks that work for businesses. People have to know what that line is going to look like. Hey, at the four-year mark, you should be here. And if you're here, you're probably gonna have to come back here at some point. But if you're here, you probably need to step it up a hot minute, or maybe we need to reverse and take a look at the foundation again and determine where we can shift in order to bring you back on the right path. But there is the misconception from someone just starting their business. What am I going to expect? And the question isn't asked enough. What am I going to expect? Where's the failure line going to come in? And once you know those strategies and those pieces, you sit back and say, okay, you know, I'm I'm gonna get on this roller coaster and I am deathly afraid of heights, but I know at the end it's all gonna be okay and everything's gonna work out smoothly. I just have to follow, I just have to follow the curriculum, basically, right? It's a reassurance, but I have this mantra that if you want to grow your business, you first need to work on yourself. Because when your business is failing, it's probably because you have not been working on yourself. And when I see business owners in that position, you can almost hear it in their voice, you can see it in their face. They're stressed, they're overwhelmed. You know, they're dealing with their families and life on top of it. So come back to yourself and say, okay, I might need a 30-day gratitude, or maybe I need one hour a day where I exercise and just, you know, clear your brain. But working on yourself, it's one of the keys. I have two keys. It's the number one key to growing your business. The more you work internally, how you're going to navigate criticism and everything in business, how you're going to respond to people. But overall, it comes down to ownership of yourself. So once you own yourself and you're totally confident with who you are and what you're willing to give, what you're willing to accept, we teach people how to treat us. So that all wraps all up in the self-work. And it's one of my biggest recommendations. Go work on yourself. Take a year, don't give your business up by any means, but take a step back. Instead of taking that course at school, you might want to take a course on yourself because that's gonna pay off so much more in the future. And once you learn how to do it the first time, you're gonna recognize it over and over and over. Oh, I'm here again at that same place in my business. Maybe I should go back to working on myself again. And that's the definition of growth. And I I believe that your personal growth goes right alongside your professional growth in parallel at the same time. You just have to keep going. And you have to know what you value and what's important to you.

SPEAKER_00 6:12

Why do you think so many leaders struggle to slow down long enough to examine how they're thinking, to to examine that self-reflection, not just what they're doing?

Resilience And Owning Mistakes

SPEAKER_01 6:22

I think it creeps up on you. You don't see it coming. Yeah. I mean, this is just me speaking from my own experience. I've never seen it coming. I can see it coming in the future, but I never saw it coming in the in the past. And I think the one thing that leaders are challenged with, well, is really, first of all, the definition of leadership and knowing the difference between being a leader, being a manager, what your role is, whether you're a W-2 working for an executive, or maybe you're an executive that's a W-2, versus having your own business because they're really in the same seats as business owners. So it's it's a it's a wild ride in that perspective, but they really need to know what leadership means to them. They need to know how to listen and be compassionate, how to respond to people and be empathetic without it being soul-sucking, if you will, because a lot of empaths, you know, they they don't see these things coming. And before before you know it, they're depleted and then they are a disservice to who they're working with. The whole, what does leadership mean to you? What do you want to get out of it? What kind of leader do you want to be? And even being educated in the psychology realms and the true focus and frameworks of leadership are really important. Many people are put in a leadership role because they've been promoted into leadership and then they struggle with their team, but no one has ever taught them how to be a leader. They've they only know how to be a manager. So that's that's a big pocket that I work in with leaders across the country is making sure that that you're leading from your heart and from a framework. But it's so different than just being a manager. Yes, you are focused on performance and growth, but the way to grow your team is to be a good leader and to set great examples, infuse, integrate culture in what you're doing, because it's important in it matters for retention. Because when you lose people from being a manager and not a leader, it's real costly. So I talk about that a lot in the businesses that I work with.

SPEAKER_00 9:07

You've said that mindset isn't just about positive thinking. Can you unpack for the leaders who are they're tired of that surface level motivation? They don't feel like that's lasting. Can you help them dig a little deeper and kind of walk them through what else is mindset made of?

SPEAKER_01 9:26

Yeah, I think you nailed it at the beginning of our conversation, we were talking about resilience, right? Because leadership is not for the polished. They need to know that going into leadership and being in leadership, that's you have to forge through the fire in order to become this leader. And it's like anything else in life, even going to college, you have to know and understand that it takes time and years. The best leaders I know have failed over and over and over and have learned on their own how to become a really great leader, but it has not come without a lot of sacrifice, a lot of costly mistakes. But you also have to forgive yourself for those mistakes. You cannot sit there, you know, it can it can be in your brain, but it can't live there. You just you just need to let it pass through your brain. You need to admit it and be responsible and own it. And once you do that, you're able to let that go. So that's the mindset of that portion. Where I focus a lot with leaders is really how you want to be perceived as a leader and what's your perception of leadership. How do you want this to work? Because if you go in with, you know, the gavel or the hammer, that's exactly what you're going to get in return from the people that you're working with. So you just have to, I don't know. I just think being human is a big deal. And when people see you as being human, they kind of say, you know, she's not perfect or whatever it is. And and I'm full disclosure up front, when I'm working with someone, hey, there's going to be bumps along the road. And I work collaboratively with you to help you through these pieces because I don't know them, you know, deep down inside. It's a discovery the entire time we're working together until you actually fuse their relationship. But yeah, it's uh knowing the difference between leadership and management is is a big key here.

Confidence, Ego, And Clarity

SPEAKER_00 11:54

What do you think is the difference between confidence and clarity? And why do so many leaders confuse the two of those things?

SPEAKER_01 12:01

Well, I think it's great to be confident, right? There's also the fine line of confidence versus ego. And ego is a big thing in business, and you can typically recognize it right away. Confidence is more along the lines of recognizing what you've been through to get where you're at, and you know where you're highly skilled, and you leverage that skill. And that's confidence. And you have to have that in business because if you don't, you're never going to close a deal, right? So you have to have that confidence, and then there's ego on the other side of that. But clarity, clarity is taking that chaos and out of someone else's business and saying, okay, let's take your chaos. We'll structure it properly, follow these guidelines, we'll work through it. It's going to take 18 months, it might take a year, it might take four months, who knows? Depends on how fast you want to work at it. And that goes back to your internal working on yourself. How fast you want to get to your goals, because we can drag it out for 10 years if that's your cadence. But if you want it in six months, you're gonna have to step on the gas pretty, pretty hard, right? But you just take all of the chaos and you just throw it out there and you start assessing the chaos and start prioritizing. And once you start doing that and you look at the entire business, where are they in the stages of their business? Are they at the beginning? Are they in the middle? Are they ready to retire? Where are they? And when you know the stages of business, you're able to identify that chaos because it's just like everything else, it's patterned. So you take that chaos out of there for them and say, here's what you need to do going forward. And it provides that clarity. And when that clarity happens, it's almost like their shoulders just go, huh, right? That's it, you know, and not that that's it, but here's the pathway to get there. And you just need to remove the minutiae. You need to get rid of, you know, the things in your life that are not serving you and the people who are draining you, and you really need to focus on this piece for clarity, and it will start to happen over time. And it's it's pretty much plug and play. Once you learn it, it's plug and play. But that's how I define the difference between confidence and clarity. Yeah.

Trust Equation And Self-Orientation

SPEAKER_00 14:48

And ego and chaos. Yes. Yeah. I I think we talked a bit about the trust equation at this leadership conference that we had this week, and kind of the lower portion of that is self-orientation. And I don't think people understand what self-orientation really is. And it's and and part of this trust equation, you know, outside of reliability and connectedness and is how our self-orientation is who we're showing up as. When we have a really high self-orientation, that's where ego can be our worst enemy. And the higher the ego, the less the trust is actually going to be solidified. So that's something I try to talk to leaders about a lot, is, and I'm I'm certain that at some point in my career, I have had far too high of a self-orientation. And I recognize that the way you get things done, the way that you're successful, especially in a team environment, is by recognizing that lower self-orientation of can lock arms, we can get this across the line. And I think when you're able to establish that type of trust by tempering down that ego piece that sometimes, you know, can get a raging ugly head. And that's when, that's when people will go to the ends of the earth for you. You know, that's when trust is established and they feel like, okay, this person really has my back. They don't think it's it's all about them. They recognize the value of those around them.

Subtle Signs Of Ego-Driven Leadership

SPEAKER_01 16:12

Yeah, when you lead with ego, and typically people who are leading with ego really don't know that they're leading with ego in the moment, right? It comes off as crass, I think the word is. It can come off as being desperate. And when you lead a team with ego versus confidence, the team knows it. They see it. They know that it's not personal when you're leading with ego. And no one really wants to listen to someone who's leading with ego either. So you're you're losing it and you're missing that piece in a team dynamic if that's how, if that's how you're showing up. And when you show up in a place of feedback, listening and valuing others, hearing what they have to say, whether, whether it's valid or not, they still deserve to be heard. And usually, once they're heard, if it's not a performance issue, they get excited about what they're doing and why they're doing it, regardless of their role. It could be a team person or it can be a business owner. And many business owners go into business without realizing that eventually, if they want to grow, they're going to have to become a leader. And if they don't become a leader, they're going to cycle through team members, staff, and wonder, what are they doing? Why, why do I keep losing people? The excuse is it wasn't the right fit. They're not the right fit. It wasn't good enough, right? But coming back to yourself, you're the leader. So you are also responsible for all these people. And how you lead determines your outcome, your revenue outcome, your culture outcome. It comes back to who you are as a leader because you can hire people who are experts, which is great, because we don't want to micromanage in that direction. But leading them through a career path, getting them from point A to B, you can't go in there with a big ego. You have to go in there with big ears. And a lot of times, not even talking is effective.

SPEAKER_00 18:47

There's some subtle signs. We're talking so much about ego here. This is a perfect segue into this question. What are some subtle signs that a leader is operating from ego or fear rather than alignment or intention? Directive.

Purpose, Values, And Alignment

SPEAKER_01 19:01

I will say directive because that's typically my first cue is when I see a leader or I'm working with a leader who's working with a team, they come in and they say, This is what needs to happen. And they just don't care about. I mean, I mean, I've worked with leaders who truly do not care about their people, right? And that's why they hire me to take care of their people for them. And you know what? That's fine. Because if you don't have the capacity and you don't have the skill set, then that's what you should absolutely be doing is hiring a leader to take your place, to be able to take your team to the next level. Because most leaders, most business owners, they don't have the time, the capacity to even get through that leadership phase because of the growth of their business. And then they have their clients they're focused on, and the team comes, ends up coming in last, right? So it's like the shoemakers' kids, none of them have shoes. So that's how I look at the team is you know, you want high function, but they have no direction. And then you're coming in and and you're just saying, do this, do this, and do this. They need to know why they're doing it. They need to know the impact that they're making on others. And it doesn't matter if it's the janitor, the maid, the COO, we are human beings and we all want to be acknowledged. We don't show up for work or we do show up for work for the paycheck. But when there's a purpose-driven meaning behind it, you show up differently. And you have to be able to give the team or the leader or the business owner the tools to be able to make that shift in their business. And once they have the tools, then there's this integration piece. And they have to know it's a journey. You cannot get there overnight. Everyone wants instant gratification, but you have to put the work in and you have to make sure that everyone is bought in. So some of the key things that I see in that ego-driven leadership is telling versus listening, not caring about someone else's career path or not showing that care. And it really comes, it all circles back to relationship and how how you speak to others, how you listen to them, and making sure that they know that they matter.

SPEAKER_00 21:43

Everyone wants to know that they matter. Leaders break patterns that they didn't even realize were shaping their decisions and relationships. Well, that usually comes with some type of destruction.

SPEAKER_01 21:56

It could be that they lose a few people at the same time. Time on their team and you know, placing blame on others versus rearranging how they lead themselves. And it comes the hard way. And I think we've all learned it the hard way. And you can tell who's going to learn the hard way and who's going to take your advice, right? It just depends on how open they are. And it always comes the hard way. I don't think there is an easy way to learn that lesson. But once you learn it, then you're like, I'm not going to repeat that again, right?

SPEAKER_00 22:34

And for someone who's listening today who feels successful, but not fully fulfilled, what's the first mindset shift you'd invite them to explore?

Parting Wisdom And Where To Connect

SPEAKER_01 22:44

That is a beautiful question. My very first piece that I love to work with on other people or with other people is defining their values. You have to know what's important to you. There's an exercise that I use with my clients and others. There's an organization called Think2Perform, and they have a values card exercise. And it used to be in the Nicar deck, but now they have it online where you can go and you can complete this exercise for yourself. You can complete it as a team. You can complete it however you want, partnerships, whatever. But when you all come together and you recognize what your values are together, your pathway to growth and succession are so much easier because you're all playing from the same sheet of music. And then when conflict happens or maybe decision, you go back to your values and you say, okay, the we defined that this is what is priority in ourselves and in our business. And they can be two sets of values, but they typically mesh together your personal life and your business values, integrity and purpose and meaningful work. And then you go one step further and you have the discussion of yes, I can say integrity and purpose and meaningful work and community, these are all my values. But what it what does that actually mean to me? Because that definition of community or purpose could mean something wildly different to somebody else. And taking that next step to saying, let's define what this really means and how we're going to serve other people, it's really, it's the clarifier. It is the clarifier.

SPEAKER_00 24:48

Well, as we wrap up, there's always a question I love to ask at the end of the podcast. And that is of all the things that you have gone through in life, of all the wisdom that you've acquired. And if it were your last day on earth and you could only impart one piece of guidance or wisdom to the world, what would it be?

SPEAKER_01 25:05

It would be to reflect on what you've done, to recognize why we're here, why you're here, what is your purpose here on earth? It doesn't even have to be grandiose. It could be, it could be simple, it could be basic. How are you impacting others? Or are you waiting for others to impact you? Right. And it's a choice. And when we make that choice, it's it's life-altering. And if this were my very last day on earth, well, I would be celebrating, first of all. And I would sit in reflection for a very long time. And I would be grateful for the things that have happened because had none of this happened, I don't know where I'd be right now. But I have the ability to impact others. And I think that's the true question we should be asking ourselves. Do we want to be an impactful leader or do we want to be impacted? And there's no right or wrong answer there. It's just knowing where you sit with yourself and with life in general. I'd be popping bottles of champagne all over the place.

SPEAKER_00 26:22

Absolutely. Well, thank you so much for your time and for sharing your story and a lot of what you do and the deep work that you do with readers. For those, I'll we'll have all this in the show notes, but where can people find you and learn more about you if they want to work with you? Where can they find all that information?

SPEAKER_01 26:39

Yeah, they can find me online on my website, performance.com. They can find me on LinkedIn under my name, Trisha Stover. That's a big avenue for me.

SPEAKER_00 26:53

Perfect. Well, thank you so much for your time today and for showing up real and authentic and giving so many takeaways to those who listened. Thank you so much, Sunny.

SPEAKER_01 27:03

It was such a pleasure.

SPEAKER_00 27:08

If today's episode challenged you, moved you, or lit a fire in your soul, don't keep it to yourself. Share it with somebody who's ready to rise. Can I ask you to take 30 seconds to leave a review? It's the best way to say thank you and help this show reach more bold leaders like you. Because this isn't just a podcast, it's a movement. We're not here to play small. We're here to lead loud, one bold and unapologetic step at a time. Until next time, stay bold, stay grounded, and make moves that make mediocre uncomfortable.