The Remote Work Blueprint: 10 Proven Productivity Techniques Ep49

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Episode Overview:
In this insightful episode of Transform Your Future, host Eddie Isin sits down with Jeremy Doran, an expert in bridging communication gaps for STEM professionals transitioning into leadership roles. Together, they unpack the challenges of managing remote teams, mastering productivity, and creating effective communication strategies tailored to diverse personalities. Jeremy shares actionable advice drawn from his own journey—from growing up as the youngest of ten kids to coaching technical professionals worldwide.

Key Takeaways:

1. The Art of Communication:
   • Jeremy explains why technical professionals often struggle when moving into managerial roles and offers strategies to bridge the gap between detail-oriented and big-picture thinkers.
   • Tools like the MBTI help identify different communication styles, fostering better collaboration.
2. Building Momentum and Discipline:
   • Eddie and Jeremy discuss how starting with small wins can build momentum for larger tasks.
   • Time-blocking, eliminating distractions, and creating daily routines are key to staying focused.
3. Delegation and Systematization:
   • Learn why delegating tasks is not just about saving time but also about training teams for long-term success.
   • Jeremy shares tips on how to overcome the "I’ll just do it myself" mindset.
4. Mindset and Meditation:
   • The duo dives into mindfulness practices, such as meditation and deep breathing, to manage stress and maintain clarity during challenging situations.
   • Jeremy emphasizes the importance of movement—whether running, biking, or taking short breaks—to reset and recharge.
5. Overcoming Remote Work Challenges:
   • With remote work becoming the norm, Jeremy highlights the discipline needed to stay productive without the structure of an office.
   • Hybrid models and creating a balance between in-person and remote collaboration are explored.

Memorable Moments:

• "How I Learned to Find My Niche at the Dinner Table": Jeremy's humorous story about leveraging his love for lima beans to illustrate the importance of niche building.
• Eddie’s Sales Analogy: A motivational deep dive into how salespeople can get out of slumps by focusing on building momentum and maintaining a full pipeline.
• The Wagon Wheel of Life: A visual framework to balance roles in work, family, and health, ensuring none of life’s "spokes" go flat.

Resources Mentioned:

• Tools for Focus and Productivity: MBTI, Google Calendar, Forest App
• Jeremy’s Book: The Little Kids – Life lessons and personal stories about growing up as one of ten siblings. https://amzn.to/4g2m0Fh

Connect with Jeremy Doran:

• Website: Jeremy Doran Speaks https://www.jeremydoranspeaks.com/
• Podcast: Neuro Conversant Leadership -  https://www.neuroconversantleadership.com/

Subscribe to Transform Your Future Newsletter Where Eddie writes about personal development, reinvent & identity: http://transformyourfuture.com

Transcript

0:01

Jeremy, how are you my friend? Welcome to the Transform Your Future Podcast. How's it going today? It is great. I'm really happy to be here. Thanks for having me on. Yes, thank you for coming. I'm looking forward to our conversation. Let's dive right in and just start talking about how you ended up being an expert at communicating for technical people. Well, expert is a little bit of a strong term, but I grew up, I'm the youngest to 10 kids, and when I was growing up, math and science always made sense, but people rarely did. People said one thing, but in my mind they didn't mean exactly what they said. So I spent a lot of time really paying attention to what people mean by what they say and understanding and not making assumptions. So that's what got me on the journey originally of really paying attention to communication and then going through engineering school with a minor in psychology, I started really seeing the differences between people. And as I've been doing coaching, I coach people, give them the tools as they go from being excellent producers to being managers so that they can be excellent managers and leaders, and a lot of those people have been engineers, and for them it was even more difficult than it is for most people because the way they communicate is so different from the way most people like to be communicated with. So I dug even more into what are some issues with communication between everybody, but I focus a lot on people in the STEM fields because it's a little more exaggerated there. Yeah, I could see that. I could see that obviously all of us can improve our communication skills and it's an important part of our life and functions, whether we're a leader or a team member. But I do know that people that are in technical fields, sometimes the jargon, the way that they express their ideas is rather limiting. So tell me a little bit about some of the challenges that an engineer or computer science major, somebody who writes code all day, what are some of the challenges in communication for them. Generally between themselves? There's very little challenge. They all understand their own acronyms and they are coming from a commonplace. The issue really becomes, like I said, when an engineer becomes a manager, all of a sudden they need to use a lot of different people related skills that they weren't necessarily taught, and then they start needing to deal with people in other parts of the company. So a very technical engineer, talking to a very creative marketing person, the way they communicate is just so different. And a big issue that we all have is we assume other people communicate the way we do. And once that assumption, two people may be looking at one topic and they think that they're talking about the same thing, but they're really not. How do you help them then with that, what are some of the points that we could focus on to help improve that communication? A lot of it is understanding what your assumptions are and the way you work, and understanding just how different other people can be. So what really started me got me interested in psychology was I took a Myers-Briggs, the MBTI assessment and had a three day long class on it. There people are so different and that really highlights the differences in the way people think. And if you aren't fully aware of the differences, it feels like other people are doing things to be annoying. It feels like they're doing it on purpose just being so difficult. But when you really go through the process of understanding how it is that their brains work, you're like, oh, they're not being difficult. They just really are that different from you that you need to find a way to come in the middle to communicate. Yeah, absolutely. And I know you have your podcasts that focuses on this and these topics all the time. Tell us a little bit about the podcast and why you started it. Well, it was originally called How to Talk to Weirdos, and it started, as I said, I was working with a lot of engineers on communication, and then there were other people in the room who weren't engineers. For example, there were realtors and the realtors said, we need this help as well. Communication between everyone is challenging and one reason why is because when someone else is different from you, they seem weird. It just seems like almost everyone's a weirdo, and the further you are out on any of the spectrums, the more challenging it is for people, but we're all weirdos. So a lot of it was trying to normalize the fact of the differences. So now it's changed the name, it's now Neuro Conversant leadership because there's such a wide range of neurodiversity and people should get an understanding of that so that they can relate to people all across the board. I think I like how to talk to weirdos a lot, but can you explain the term? Yeah. One problem is that it's such a vague term. Neurotypical is what you would think of as a a standard person, and then anything is something that strays from what would be considered typical. Very common examples are people with a DHD, people who have dyslexia. There's a number of other very common ones that people associate with it, but to me it's much broader than that. If you are a very, very detailed person and you're talking to someone who's a very big picture person, that to me feels like neurodiversity because the way you're looking at something is so different that it makes communication a challenge. Or if you're talking to somebody that they're thinking is more logical based and your thinking is more emotional based. So you're talking to move emotion and they're talking about logic and you're working at two different ends. Right. Perfect example. Absolutely. Yeah. I'm sorry, go ahead. Even a common one that people talk about is introversion and extroversion and the way people communicate if they're very tending towards introversion versus the way people who tend towards extroversion, the way they communicate is just very different and it can cause problems. I was just having this conversation yesterday, people who are shy or introverted but also confident come across as being very standoffish and people won't reach out to them because they seem like they're being standoffish, but they're shy, so they're not going to reach out either. And just the misconception of the way people think and portray themselves can cause problems. Interesting. What other kind of challenges between different thinking and different personalities? How can we talk about. One thing I end up dealing with a lot with engineers is the level of detail. And what I will always tell them is they will go to their manager or one higher up in the company wanting help with an issue. And I'll always tell them, ask for what you want and then explain how you got there. If they, if they don't ask, you don't have to explain all of the steps, but engineers in particular, anyone in the maths, you're trained in college to show every step of the way to prove it because you can get a math problem and if you didn't show you got there the right way, you're going to lose credit. So they've been trained to start with all the details and then eventually ask for what they want. And it drives the executives crazy because they don't have time to hear that whole story. They want to know what is the thing you need, and I'll ask questions if I need that. So you're doing the podcast giving information out, and is it an interview podcast or is it just. One week? It is, and then the next week it's just me. So the interviews are about half an hour, and then on alternating weeks I will dig into a topic. A lot of times it's something that happened to me within I'll just talk about it for 10 minutes and do some research and then talk about that. And then on the other weeks it'll be interviews. Sometimes the interviews give me ideas for what the next individual one will be. That's good. That's good. So you're releasing this information, you're having interviews, and then you're going in depth on some of the topics overall. You're then reaching out and people are reaching out to you and you're helping them in the leadership roles, these engineers and technical people. What the podcast is a great way to just get a sense of who I am and what I do. And then a lot of times the next step is just having me do a talk somewhere. If someone's having a quarterly meeting, a bunch of engineers and they want someone to come in and get people thinking about the way they communicate with others, then after that, then sometimes it'll be a three month training program to help people really delve into all the aspects of what it takes to be a good manager and good leader. So what's some of the difficult conversations that you help them to have? The difficult conversation is negative feedback to employees, especially for newer managers. And we've got a framework for how to do it rather than accusing someone. For instance, if someone's been late three times, rather than saying, you're always late, what are you going to do about it? If you just can have a framework where you state the actual data like this day, this day, and this day you are late by five, 15 and 20 minutes. And then just stop and let them talk. But it's so hard to let the other person talk and not jump in with an accusation to say, tell me about that. And sometimes the answer they come up with is, whatever. My grandmother is incredibly sick and I keep having to help her. And once you both come to an understanding of what's really going on, then you can come to a solution together as a manager, you can then say, that's really hard, but because we're a team here, we need you to get here on time every day. How can we work through this so that you can get here every day, but you can also be able to take care of your grandmother. So having a structured conversation that pulls the emotion out of it and then gets the other person coming up with a solution for themselves is a great way to have that kind of conversation. Yes, yes. I see that. I identify with that greatly. Just recently, I had a deal with somebody and they made a mistake and this caused problems and I wanted to yell at them, I wanted to blame them, I wanted to ride them, and I decided not to do any of that. And I just said, so here's the issue. What can we do so we can work together to solve this issue as quickly as possible? Nice. And I let it go. And all those negative emotions I was feeling, I just let it go and I just focused because I felt like in this situation, it was just going to cause more problems if I did that and just delay whatever actions. Yeah. So that's important. Yes. So out of curiosity, how did you catch yourself and get yourself to pause and approach it that way? Well, I have a habit where generally during the day as I'm focused, I am observing myself. So I'm observing my thinking, observing my feelings, I'm observing my body how it feels, and I'm kind of like being an observer, looking like I'm 10 feet above looking down saying, what am I doing? What am I thinking? How am I acting? What am I saying? And in that moment when he started talking, I had this, I could feel it rising up. I wanted to let it out on him. And I said, okay, relax, breathe. And that's how I get past it. Yeah. Breathing is so important and it does a couple of things. When you are triggered or when you are emotional in that way, breathing deeply gives you some time to just step back from it for a second to think about it. But it also tricks your body into relaxing because your body, if you breathe deeply, that's what your body does when it's relaxed. And so it tricks your body into relaxing, kind of like the way smiling triggers a bunch of things that actually make you happy. So it works in both directions. Breathing does the same. Absolutely. And it's all about the body and it's about breathing and getting into the body and getting out of the mind in a lot of ways. For me, I have thoughts, they're repetitive. Some people talk about changing thoughts and thought patterns and whatnot, and while I agree there's work to be done, if you have repetitive negative thoughts, I don't really agree that they are eliminated. I don't think you could stop thinking, I think you're going to have this, and then I don't think you're going to stop feeling right. You're going to feel things all the time, all day, every five minutes, whatever, another feeling is going to rise for whatever situation. So I think it's much more functional to just realize that my thoughts and feelings are not the thing that I need to focus on. That's not really what I need to focus on, what I need to focus on, what is the goal? What is the task? What am I trying to accomplish? And aligning that rather than focusing on my thoughts and feelings all the time. So for me, the breathing and getting back to relaxing myself is a mechanism to allow my intuition, my reason, my conscious, my consciousness to actually make good decisions rather than making impulsive emotional. So that's a lot of what meditation is, the understanding that you're not going to stop the flow of thoughts. The goal is to just not let them stick, not. Hold. Onto 'em and let 'em go, except that they're valid, but you have to let 'em go. Yeah, a lot of people talk about meditation, and I've been doing it for 36 years and I have a standard practice that I do in the mornings, in the evenings, but throughout the day I'm meditating. Meditation is so simple and people talk about it as if it's very complicated. You could be sitting, standing at the sink washing your dishes, and you could be meditating by focusing on this is the plate, I'm putting the soap on the plate, I'm wiping the sponge on the plate, and just focus on your attention to exactly what you're doing. And this is a form of meditation. So I do it out throughout the day, but interestingly enough, now the best definition that I've ever heard about meditation is that your thoughts are waves at the top of the ocean crashing. And what we want to do with meditation is not stop the waves from crashing, but it's to go down 10 feet below where the water is calm. Nice. And I think that's the best definition I ever heard of it. That's a good one. I like it. Yeah, absolutely. So I guess meditation mindset, these are things that help us to be better communicators, to be an energized person in the right emotional state so that we can achieve a successful day and successful goals. I think meditation can look very different for different people. I know for me, I'm not very good at sitting meditation, but I like to run and bike, and if I haven't been running or biking for a long time, I can feel all the junk in my brain. It is just constantly flowing. But if I've been running and biking on a fairly regular basis, my brain just flows a lot cleaner. So I know that that is a way that I am helping my brain clear itself. And again, it goes to breathing and your body, so you're moving your body, you're moving your body, whether you're walking, running, riding, and you're breathing and you're focusing on your breathing and your movement, and that's a great form of meditation. It's absolutely fantastic. There's a lot. I feel also that there's a lot psychologically in movement. I find when I have been stuck, when I've been facing obstacles, that the key for me is to just start moving, just start moving. Just keep moving. Just start that process and build that movement into some kind of momentum in your day. And the next thing I know, I'm working 14, 16 hours a day at a really high level, going hard and staying focused and reaching goals, and then that feels great. And so it just perpetuates more energy and more focus. It's pretty awesome. It's pretty awesome. And you're talking about physical movement, but sometimes I know I'll be stuck on a project and I'm stuck in some way, and so I just feel bogged down and I don't feel like working. And what I will do similar to that type of movement is I will find a very small task that I know I can get done in a couple of minutes and I get that one thing done and that feels good, and then I'm like, well, if I did that, I can do another thing. And then the momentum builds and then I'm able to get back to the big project. Now you're right, it's not just physical action, but it's also mental actions and building that momentum through achieving. So you're at a big thing and you're having trouble. You're stuck for some reason. So you retreat and then you do something else. You say, okay, let me go back to that now with this new information, it's quite important. Winning. I like to call it winning. And so basically you did something so that you can win, and then now, okay, so now I'm winning and now what can I do next to build on that win, to build a momentum of wins. So psychologically I get that. That's highly important because when we get, part of the reason why I do a lot on sales, sales is my life. I sell all day. I am about sales and influence. I eat sleep and drink it. I read it every day. I role play every day. A basketball player wants to be a great basketball player. He goes out and practices and shoots 300, 400 baskets a day so he could be the best. I do the same thing in my position, and this is what I believe and this is what I teach. But interestingly enough, when you may have heard this term, salespeople feel like they're in a rut or they're in a down pattern. For some reason they can't win for some reason, and really 99% of the time why that's happening is because they have lost momentum and they're focusing on right here, right now, I can't get anybody to buy. I can't build any momentum to get a good appointment or whatever. What they are not looking at is the fact that somewhere in the past they stopped building that momentum and really where they're at is they have an empty pipeline and now they have to work three times as hard to build that pipeline back again. So if you could just focus on what can I do right now to start building that pipeline? How can I change my activities to build that pipeline and understand that you have just lost momentum? It's not you. It's not some woo woo magic that you are in some bad mojo. It's really just that you got to go back and build that momentum up again, which is why we try to have daily tasks to keep that going. If you're not prospecting every day to bring in new people into your pipeline, then you're going to lose momentum. You have to keep doing that. That's the lifeblood of a pipeline. Another thing I changed in order to feel more positive is the goal wasn't to get someone to buy from me. The goal was to get someone to have a good solution. And if I had conversations where they've already got a very good solution in my mind, I would count that as a win. I'm like, great. I help that person get to the point where they have a good solution and that's a win. And then eventually some of them are going to be that they're buying from me. But if I can keep the positive momentum by shifting what I call a win, that helped me mentally. I could see that. I could see that. Again, you want to have good conversations, you want to have valuable conversations. The whole idea of sales is not about me, it's about me serving other people and helping other people to solve their problems. That's what the whole focus is, right? It should be, yes. So as long as I'm having good conversations, it really doesn't matter whether they buy or not. I'm just saying that oftentimes salespeople get like they're no good. There's something wrong with them. I'm no good. I'm in some bad situation. I can't get some good convos going or whatever, and they're in a slump. This is like the guy goes to bat. He keeps swinging out and striking out and he says, I'm in a slump. This is what they equate it to, but the truth is a little bit more simpler and that we just need to understand that when we have a pipeline full of people to talk to, when we have prospects to talk to all the time, that's how we win. When you don't have any of them, then you've got to understand, you've got to build that momentum to do it. And that takes a little time. Maybe it's going to take you a month. I don't know. It depends on you and how much work you're going to do. Are you willing to put in 200 calls a day to start building that momentum again, or what. Discipline goes such a long way? If you can have a set of time when you do a certain thing every day, no matter what, you're going to get that done, then that goes a long way towards having a fuller pipeline. Yeah, I would say that that's absolutely true. And I've always done chunking, like I've said. So this first two hours of my day is going to be for this. The next two hours are going to be for that email. I only take care of it the end of the day customer problems at the end of the day, administrative stuff at the end of the day. And then the first six hours I have broken out into two hour increments to focus on prospecting and bringing people in and setting appointments and having good conversations. I love that People look at their email way too often, and that's one thing that I coach them on is just removing distractions. Stop looking at your phone, stop reading your email. And if you can get it to where you only read email every two hours, the amount of time it actually saves you because the transition from doing your project to even reading one email, the email may take one minute, but it's five more minutes to get back to where your brain was before. So the more. You can, it's worse than that. It's worse than that because then you go in there and then there's other emails, and then you start looking at all this other stuff, and it definitely is a drainer of time and energy. So I always recommend turn off your alerts because you can be working on something and you see that little light flash down at the bottom corner and it's like a squirrel running by. You can't stop looking at it and you're like, oh. And then boom, your train of thought's done. And you mentioned discipline. So I mean, that's the main thing is if you could master this, what's between your ears? If you could master your mind and you could stay in the right emotional state and you could be highly focused and focused on the tasks that you're trying to do to get to the goals that you're trying to reach, and you could be disciplined about that, that's fantastic. Again, again, in the sales environment, it's amazing how much time is wasted Building sales teams and working with other individuals, they tell me what their goals are, and then I'm like, well, how are you going to do that? What are you actually going to do to reach that every day? What is your commitment to what you're going to do in your work schedule when you're here working, doing the job? The difference between the guys that are the high earners that are the top of the board and the top 2% is because they're highly focused and disciplined and the guys that are at the bottom and the average guys, it's because they're not. Yep. I refer to time as people's garages. People have a two car garage and they can only park one car in it because it's so filled with junk, and I've seen them then get three car garages and then two of the slots are filled with junk and they can still only fit one car in it. And that's the way time works. Time will fill up and you can either fill it up with junk or you can very disciplined, keep out the junk so that you can fit two cars in the garage or you can get the important things done. Absolutely, and speaking about that, for some reason, I'm also just thinking because I'm going through some stuff right now that I'm trying to manage and there are functions in my profession and in my job and responsibilities that I need to work for me, not against me. So for example, sometimes CRMs and what your expectations are that you're supposed to do with them actually slow me down from being able to reach the goals I want and waste time and really trying to figure out how to make that work for me. The CRM is there to serve me, not for me to be the slave to the CRM. Man. I'm going through some stuff with this new CRM right now trying to make it work for me to serve me instead of me being stuck now, it wants me to deal with this one thing that I don't want to deal with right now. It's not the time for that. So it's interesting how we got to look at all of those little processes that we're in the day and how they affect us and take us out of things where we waste our time. And then of course, there's my famous thing, which all the things that I don't like I write down and I get somebody else to do it or just eliminate it from my life. So elimination, delegation, and systematization, I think I pronounced that wrong, but spending time, no, we got you. They all take time. Fixing a system takes time, but it's such a great investment if you can get the system working for you, you're investing the time upfront so that you're not wasting time later on. And it's the same with delegation. People resist delegating, and I'll talk to them about delegating and they'll roll their eyes and they say, I tried delegating once. It doesn't work. It's faster to just do it myself. I'm like, well, if you do it correctly, it's going to be a great saver of your time, but you have to invest the time upfront to do it correctly. Yeah, exactly. And I've been there for 30 years of my life, maybe 27, produced, directed, wrote, film, video, television, and oftentimes there would be some situation and I would be like, geez, I could just solve this and re-edit that and fix it quicker. Then I can explain it to somebody else. But if I never take the time to explain that to somebody else and have a standard operating procedure of how this is going to be handled and take the time to write that out and give it to somebody, then I'll just be a slave to always taking care of it. You have to train other people to be able to handle these things so you can successfully delegate. I get that. That is important to put the time in to set that up. And I love what you said in there because people initially think of delegation as just saving time by having other people do things, and if they're resisting, I will explain to them, delegation is the best way to train your people. Your job as a manager is to get your people to be the best they can be. The fastest, easiest and best way to do that is through delegating well, and then they're going to a take that thing off of your plate so that you have time to then spend more time focusing on your people in other ways and getting them better and better. So delegation is a great time saver, but it's also such a great training tool. When we talk about all these things. Jeremy, one thing that comes to mind is I don't want use these. I got to just think a second because I don't want to just use these flowery terms to explain something. I want to be a little bit more specific. Oftentimes, I work with people and I ask them what their goals are, and you would be surprised how many people have a money goal and that the money goal is what their goal is. And I often challenge them, okay, well that's great, but why is that the goal? What is it that you're trying to accomplish that you? We need to delve deeper because when we delve a little bit deeper and find out you are trying to put your daughter through a private institution that's very expensive every year, and that's why you have this money goal that changes the mindset completely to what we're doing. And you can then being disciplined, being focused and doing the task, this makes sense completely. You're going to do it because you're focusing on making sure that you're going to come up with the 50, $60,000 a year to put the kid through school or whatever it might be. If it was you want plastic surgery and it costs$20,000, whatever it is, it needs to be rooted in what it is that you want to accomplish. And then sometimes it's like they want to buy a new house, they want to buy a new car. And I'm like, okay, well that's great, but there's no urgency in that. You could buy a new car next year if you don't buy it this year, right? You can get a new house two years from now, but what are the things really that you want to accomplish for yourself and for your life to take care of yourself and your family and your responsibilities? What are those things? And let's tie those things to my functions in my job. And I find that way it's easy to talk about discipline and mindset and getting tasks done. If I don't do that and take that time, then it becomes a situation where people just don't reach their goals. Then you feel stupid. You feel stupid if you say, my goal is $20,000 a month, but I only did 10 and then next month, what's your goal? 20,000 a month? And then I did 10. It's like, so we need to figure this out. We need to hack that. So somehow for me, I find that what we're talking about is a lot easier to implement in my life when I'm connecting it to some real thing that I really want to accomplish within a specific time. It's so interesting how few people actually dig deeper and at any level, and when I'm working with managers, I will actually have them come up with a mission statement for their life. Your company has a mission statement. Why don't you have one? And they really struggle with it, but over time and many iterations, they get to what the end goal of their life is. This is the way I want to be and what I want to do in my life and accomplish, and it's my mission. And then from there, I'll break it down to what do you want in the next five years? What do you want in the next one year? What do you want this quarter? What do you want this week? And make it more not just about the job, it's your life in your family and relationships. Do you have goals in your relationships with your loved ones, with your friends? Let's talk about that. Do you have your health? How about your health? Do you have a good relationship with your health? Do you think your health is good? Do you have goals there for that? So incorporating all those things into a vision. I love that idea. I love that. That's really good. That's very good. And much like you were saying, I'll have people for planning out their week. I do mine on Monday morning, and I have the different roles in my life. So one of them's family, one of them is work, one of them is the house, and they all work together. And the way we talk about it is it's a wheel. There are six folks in this wheel that are your different roles in life, and if you ignore one of the spokes, then your wheel's going to go flat. If you're spending all your time on work and you're not spending any time with your kids, then the wheel's going to be flat and it's going to affect all of the other spokes. Absolutely. Absolutely. The wagon wheel is a great visual representation of being lopsided and hobbling along instead of having that smooth edge to just keep building that traction. Yeah, I love it. You can feel the bump. Yeah. Jeremy, I'm just curious, a lot of the people that you're working with that are in these technical fields that are going into leadership roles, is there a lot of them that are working remotely? Yeah, it depends. And I've found that a lot of companies are now hybrid. Hybrid seems to work well. I remember before the pandemic number of conversations where people said, I'd really like to work from home a couple of days a week. And the answer was always no, everyone needs to be together. It's vital. And then during the pandemic, no one worked together and it was okay. And so now most places have gotten to a hybrid where there's definitely value in being in the same room, but there's also value in getting time, not being distracted and just being able to focus most often it's a hybrid. Working remotely is a different kind of discipline that a person needs when they're working. So many times I think individuals get caught in these patterns where if somebody doesn't say, you need to be there at 9:00 AM and if you're five minutes late, we're going to write you up. They need that sometimes because that's how they show up every day to their thing and they need somebody maybe telling'em, Hey, are you doing this thing? Are you doing that task? And then we have them working remotely now, and it's like they are the ones that have to do that. They. Have to say, okay, it's time for me to go to work and I'm going to be prepared and I'm going to do those things. It's very interesting. It's very interesting. I like it though. And again, if you think about the wheel of life, I have really worked hard in my life to be a remote person, to be a remote lifestyle because I like to travel, have we love to go and spend time in our place in Mexico. We like to travel to other countries, and I don't want to be a prisoner. I feel like a prisoner. If I have a job where I have to show up at a physical location every day I feel like I'm a prisoner, I feel like I'm handcuffed to the desk. And so I think it's great. I feel like a positive thing that happened out of Covid was the fact that all of a sudden now the idea of working remotely became a common thing that everybody is in their mind. And these tools like Zoom that boomed during that time, everybody's kind of been trained now to have virtual meetings all the time instead of face-to-face meetings. So it's like a perfect storm for somebody who wants to live a remote lifestyle. And here's just another funny thing. My son, for example, he's a computer engineer and he works remotely. And I'm like, why don't you go stay in some other country? Why don't you go visit some other places and do that while you're working remotely? And he hasn't done it yet, but I'm encouraging him to do that because this is a wonderful way for you to have a wonderful life that you really truly enjoy when you can incorporate those things into your life. It's so hard to snap out of the rut that our brain gets into. You're so used to one way, and then even when you're given the opportunity to do a new thing, just like you were saying, it's really hard to wrap your brain around that. And it takes a lot of stepping back. I was just talking to someone the other day about a midlife crisis. I'm like, I think midlife crisis is great. It just happens too late. You should have them often because all you're really doing is just stepping back and really evaluating and saying, I've been doing it this way my whole life. I don't want to do it this way anymore. I'm like, great. Do that when you're 25. Do it when you're 30. Do it when you're 40. Don't wait. Yeah, do it many times. Absolutely. Yeah, No, I used the terms earlier about retreat and I find in life it's so vital. This has been a real tool that I've used for the last, I dunno, 36 years to retreat and then take my time, regroup, understand what I'm doing, where's my weaknesses, Let me refocus. What am I getting? Do I like this part? That part, and then attacking after the retreat and moving the needle. You know what I'm saying? So yeah, I think that's really important because when you're in it and you're thinking about it and your brain is stuck in it and you're pushing it, you don't see all that other stuff. So you've got to take a step back and retreat and give yourself a break. Yeah. Something else that inherently, we talked about actually, we kind of breezed over it, is the fact that most people are just too damn hard on themselves. They just beat themselves up and they hold themselves to some kind of ideal that no human being could ever do. If I let myself run wild, I would create a day that I would not be able to reach all the tasks. You know what I'm saying? I would just start writing down all these things that I want to accomplish that it's not possible for me to accomplish in a 24 hour period. So that then sets you up for negative. So trying to understand that we need a different kind of gauge to look at myself of what I'm doing and not be so damn hard about myself and not beat myself up when I make a mistake or there's some failure, something goes wrong in sales, especially, you'll have a interchange with somebody and it doesn't go well for some reason. And then afterwards you'll think, I screwed it up. I can't believe I did that, blah, blah, blah. And this guy that, and he, then he said that, and this happened, and you start playing this tape in your head of this negative thing that happened When I share, it's just next. It's over. It's done. It's gone. Bye-Bye next. Don't keep focusing on that. Right. And another thing that we kind of talked about earlier really was the idea of focusing on the things that I can do something about instead of wasting my time focusing on things that I can't do anything about. I mean, I can't control other people, so why am I going to try to focus my attention to trying to make somebody to do something when I can't control them? I need to focus my attention to things that I can do that I can put the action in and get a result. I like to show a picture of a very large circle, and that's basically the universe and then a smaller circle within it. And that small circle are the things that you can control. And the more time you spend focused out there, the smaller your circle gets, the more time you spend focusing on your circle, the bigger it gets. The more time you spend focusing on what you can control, the more things you can control. I like that. I like, it's hard for people not to worry about the things outside of their control, but it's pretty important kind of getting back to the whole meditation thing. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Good stuff. Really good stuff. So I was just curious, let's talk a little bit about your book. So it's called The Little Kids because I am the youngest of 10 and one through five have always been referred to as the big kids, and six through 10 have always been the little kids. So my sister and I, who are the littlest of the little kids, got together and put these stories together. And what I found was these are stories that I tell very often and it's really interesting when I am coaching people on how to be better managers, I use stories very often and most often they're actually personal stories. So they're stories from my life, childhood growing up, things I learned from my parents, my siblings. So we put these stories together and tell the story and then each of us would put our perspective and what that story means to us today. So it kind of life lessons from what it was like growing up as youngest to 10. Kids. That's very interesting. And so now obviously you're going to have to tell me one of these stories that you would use to teach somebody. Well, because there were 10 of us, we had this great big dinner table with benches on both sides because often amazingly, we also had other kids come over for dinner. So there were a whole bunch of us and there was always enough food, but there wasn't always enough food for you to get as much of what you liked. So you're never going to go hungry, but you may not be getting the things that you want to get. So everyone had their own strategy. My brother, Tim was always the first one at the table because food always went to my father. And then Tim always sat down to the left of him the way the food went. So he always got first, and you could take one pork chop and since he got it first, he could start eating so that he could reach in for seconds before anyone else. And he also always got to pick the biggest pork chop and other people could eat faster and they had longer arms, so when they were done, they would grab the seconds or if they weren't quite done, they would lick their finger and slap a pork chop. And then that didn't stop anyone from taking it anyway. But it was a good attempt. But I was little, I couldn't eat as fast. I couldn't reach as far, and I never got to the table first because they were all trickier than I was. But what I did was mom would always make two vegetables. She would always make corn because everyone ate corn and one other vegetable. I would always request lima beans because I love lima beans. And guess who else loved lima beans? Nobody. No one else liked lima beans. So I always requested them, and that meant whenever she had them, I got as much of the thing that I really liked as I wanted. And I use that to talk about finding a niche in your business because if you can find a thing that you like and are good at that other people either don't like or aren't going to be good at, then you can really capitalize on that one small niche. So I learned how to find a niche from getting dinner as much food as I wanted at the dinner table growing up. That's awesome. That's a good story. I like that. And unfortunately, I don't like lamb beans either. So you're You're still winning. You're still winning. It's great. That's fantastic. Listen, Jeremy, we've talked about a lot of stuff. We've had a great conversation. I really enjoyed your time, grateful for you. Is there anything that we haven't spoken about that you want to talk about before we wrap up? No, I think we've hit most of the things people can reach out to me. One thing that would benefit me and hopefully benefit other people if you can to the podcast and send me a note on what other topics you would like because I have my own experience of what communication issues there are. But if you can reach out and say, here's a issue I'm having with communication, and then we can talk about it some more. Maybe I can have that person on the show to really dig into it, but I'm looking for more topics and people can help me with that. I'd be very appreciative. Absolutely. I will drop the links in the show note for your website and for your podcast. Great. Thank you. Brother. Listen, I appreciate you. I'll be in touch and I'm sure we'll do this again. Wonderful. I look forward to it.