“Your life isn’t in silos. If your health or home life isn’t optimized, it will bleed into your leadership. Period.”— Rachel Leigh
Brief Summary/Overview:
In this episode, we take you behind the scenes to uncover the unfiltered truth about what executives reveal to their coaches. From health and nutrition struggles to home life challenges, Rachel and Darren share how these personal dynamics directly impact leadership and professional performance. You’ll learn why prioritizing health, setting boundaries, and making intentional choices are non-negotiable for thriving as a leader in all areas of life.
Key Takeaways:
- Why health and nutrition are foundational to effective leadership.
- The critical connection between home life and professional success.
- How setting and maintaining boundaries can alleviate long-term stress.
- The importance of consistency: what works for your health and leadership requires sustained effort.
- Actionable strategies to “choose your hard” and maximize your impact.
Timestamps:
- 0:00 – Welcome and what’s in store for today.
- 1:10 – Darren’s signature dad joke: A glue stick mishap!
- 3:00 – Rachel introduces the importance of optimizing health and life.
- 7:00 – The reality of New Year’s resolutions: why most fail and how to succeed.
- 12:00 – Health’s ripple effect: How poor choices impact brain function and mood.
- 20:00 – Home life struggles: Why they’re inseparable from leadership success.
- 30:00 – The importance of being vulnerable with your coach.
- 35:00 – Choosing your hard: Short-term discomfort vs. long-term ease.
- 40:00 – How to 10X your life by raising your standards.
- 45:00 – Parting thoughts: Optimize everything for holistic success.
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Transcript:
Rachel
All right, welcome everyone. This is RaDar Love Live, our first show of 2025. Oh, I like how that sounds, that little rhyme there. Today we’re going to be talking about what executives really tell their coaches. So it’s the behind-the-scenes, kind of like we’re peeping Toms. Can I say that? Is that PC? I’m going to say it anyway; we’re not PC.
But we’re going to be dishing on what our clients and those within our leadership circle come to us and talk to us about, and the top priorities that they’re working on for 2025.
For those of you who do not know us, I am Rachel Leigh. I’m the Chief Operating Officer of the Kanthal Group. I’m an executive coach for women.
I say I keep powerful women in power by optimizing all facets of their lives. That includes home life, personal life, professional life, and longevity. So I’m a health and wellness specialist as well as an executive leadership coach. And Darren Kanthal is our fearless founder. He helps executives get their shit together. He’s our CEO and executive coach, with a long history in HR, and we are all about candor and no bullshit. So before we kick it off, we always start with a bad dad joke. My God, slacker.
Darren
Yeah, I have notes for that one. No, I got it; it’s on my calendar.
Rachel
All right, let’s go. What’s our bad dad joke before we dive in?
Darren
I accidentally gave my girlfriend a glue stick instead of chapstick. She’s still not talking to me.
Rachel
That’s a good one. I haven’t heard that one yet. All right, our take five today—we’re going to be discussing health and nutrition, home life, being vulnerable with your coach, how we’re making our lives harder, and how to 10X your life. So let’s kick it off with health and nutrition, its impact on performance as a leader, and how we advocate keeping it simple but, more importantly, staying consistent.
Darren
Well, Rachel and I met because I “hired” her as my nutritionist. The only reason I say hired is because I never got a bill. But you never sent a bill.
Rachel
You never paid. Well, you know. Okay, anyway, go ahead.
Darren
So starting back in, I want to say it was 2000 and maybe even 2013, I started realizing that I was having some health challenges, primarily with food. Over the last 10 years plus, Rachel and I met in 2016. I’m dairy-free, I’m gluten-free. I have all these little nuance-y things that are a pain in the ass, literally and figuratively. The challenge Rachel’s talking about is yesterday, Monday, January 6th, I started 75 Hard. It’s a program where, for 75 days, I need to work out twice a day for 45 minutes each. One workout has to be outside. I have to follow a diet—no cheat days, no drinking. I have to read 10 pages of a nonfiction book, drink a gallon of water, and take progress pictures every day. Those are the five main elements. I started that yesterday.
In addition to what I am struggling with or have consistently struggled with: consistency. I have a structure of a diet that I eat. I’m gluten-free and dairy-free, as I said, but I crave carbs. If I don’t have enough food at the office, I come home and eat everything in the cupboard. And so I get annoyed because my weight doesn’t change. My body composition doesn’t seem to change. I live with a nutritionist, and she will point out that, of course, my body’s not changing because I’m inconsistent. I don’t do the things that I know work. And this is where I’ll toss it back to you, Rachel. You coach people with business, career, and health. So you hear all the excuses. Mine is, “I just want the whole package of double-stuffed Oreos. I just want a salt craving.” And so what I do is I allow my want to drive, then I succumb to the want, and then I complain that my body hasn’t changed.
Rachel
Yeah. And I have talked about this. It’s a lot easier to drink the thing, eat the thing, consume the thing. It’s a lot easier just to have the double-stuffed Oreos, to drink the bottle of wine, than it is in the short term, than it is to make the change for the long term. Like being sober, at least still for now, I think is harder than just consuming the thing. One of the things that my clients talk about is, “My life is hard enough the way it is. I can’t imagine changing my diet to repair my health or optimize my health because it’s… when am I going to do that? It’s too hard.” And so I don’t want to stack hard on top of hard, which we’ll get to when we talk about “You’re making life too hard.” If your life is that hard that you can’t prioritize your health, which is the thing that actually drives your success and keeps you alive on Earth, then you’re probably doing life wrong. Let’s be candid here, right? We’re focusing on the wrong things and not prioritizing the thing that generates the asset that generates success.
January comes, and people want these extreme changes. “This is it. This is the year. I’m going to figure it out.” And they do something like 75 Hard, which I fully support you, right? Or they’ll do a Whole30 or a juice cleanse. They’ll do something that’s quote-unquote extreme or even challenging when they haven’t even mastered the basics. You’re setting yourself up for failure because you’re raising the bar too high when you haven’t even taken that first step up. So we’ve got to make it simple. You’ve got to be able to master the basics. What are the basics? Drink water. Move your body. Sleep a minimum of eight hours. Consistently take your supplements. Learn how to de-stress. Don’t expect yourself to succeed at these New Year’s goals unless you can master the basics first. That’s the foundation.
The research we did shows that 9% of people will actually follow through and accomplish their New Year’s health and nutrition resolutions. They’re too hard. Chill out. Go to the basics. Now, you’ve already done the basics, so 75 Hard for you is your next-level challenge. Here’s what I want to say: when you go to extremes and make things really difficult, you’re setting yourself up for failure. You’ll most likely fail and then use that failure against you. And I hear clients say, “I just can’t figure it out. Nothing works. It doesn’t matter what I do.” That’s because you’re always moving the finish line. Stop doing that. Stay consistent. Master the basics. Add on when that becomes easy, habitual, and you don’t even have to think about it. What do you think about that?
Darren
I want to fight you. No, what was going through my head was a couple of things. One is some of the reading I’ve done. People like me will do a 75 Hard, a Whole30, whatever it is, and after it’s over, we have no transition plan. We go from eating clean for 30 days or doing the 75 Hard, and then on day 31 or day 76, we go back to pre-programmed norms. That’s something I’ll be real focused on for myself. The other is when we find things that work, it’s like once they start working, we abandon them. I know you hear a lot about this with your clients. We know, or I know, or your clients know, that a certain dietary protocol or a certain supplement lineup is working to produce the results we seek. Once we see the result, we’re like, “Okay, we reached the pinnacle. We can go back.” It’s absurd. Why would we think that what worked is done, then go back to what we did prior and expect the same results as when we were following the protocol? Hopefully, I made sense. It seemed like a lot of words.
Rachel
Yeah, if it’s working, don’t change it unless it changes. Consistency—the hardest part about changing your nutrition or your health, like exercise consistency, is staying consistent. It’s obeying what you said you were going to do, obeying what works, obeying the protocol. That’s the work. Anybody can actually eat fairly nutritious foods and whole foods. That is actually not the hard part. It’s doing it consistently to maintain the results. That’s the mind work that must go with the protocol. I promise you, I’ve done this. I’ve been doing this for 14 years, plus all of my education since college. What I want to talk about—I’m not shifting gears—is your health and nutrition and its impact on your performance at work. And it’s not just at work. It’s also at home.
It has a profound impact on how you show up, what you can produce, your level of creativity, your patience with your team, your patience with your spouse or partner or family. It drives everything. What have you experienced when your health has been, quite frankly, kind of shitty?
Darren
I notice it more now than when it was crappy, in your words. I’m not dialed in, but I think I’m more dialed in. I start noticing little nuances. If I eat things that inflame me internally, I don’t think as sharply. I can’t find my words as easily. I default to impatience. I get annoyed super quickly about the stupidest things. When I get impatient, I get barky, aggressive, in-your-face. That’s the energy behind me. It’s not good, very simply put. I’m not operating at my best, period.
I noticed that—we talked about this back in December as we pigged out at Woody’s Pizza in Golden. The next day, I noticed an impact not just on my gut and GI, but also my mood and brain fog. The cleaner I eat, the better I eat, the better I treat myself, the more I exercise, the better I feel. Period. I’m more optimal in the way I operate in all aspects.
Rachel
What’s unfortunate is most of us don’t even know what “well” feels like. Once you do know, the slightest deviance from that is exponentially noticeable and has a greater impact than when you’re unwell. When you’re unwell, your baseline is low. You can keep putting stuff in, and it doesn’t have that much of an impact. For anybody listening, at least experience being well. Then decide: Do I want to stay there? Is it worth staying there? Is it worth the effort? At least give yourself that fighting chance because it feels so good. It’s good for everything else in your life. Everything else is optimized. It’s pretty profound. Like you said, I’ve ruined you with health.
You can’t go out and eat Woody’s every single weekend, or the burgers, or go to a show and party like you used to. You have a narrow lane now, but staying in that lane is worth it to you. Then you choose when you want to go outside of that.
I would say this. For leaders, executives, and entrepreneurs: if you want to be a better leader—and that’s not just in your profession but also at home and in your community—work on your health. Period. It will have a trickle effect on every aspect of your life. I can guarantee you that.
Darren
All right, two more things on this topic.
Rachel
Do it. We always get sucked into this topic and then have very little time for the rest.
Darren
All right, two things. I hear what you’re saying about getting well. For people listening: get well and use that as your baseline. That’s a big jump for some people. As the non-nutritionist of the two of us, a couple of experiments I’ve run more recently—last couple of years—number one, coffee.
I noticed for a few months, literally two or three, four months, I was waking up every morning with a headache. Something intuitively came to my brain: was it coffee-related? So I ran an experiment and started drinking two of these a day, if not more. One is caffeinated, one is decaffeinated. That little experiment resulted in me not waking up with headaches every day. So that’s one way that maybe is a stepping stone for somebody. Maybe your thing is not coffee, but maybe it’s… fill in the blank. A bag of chips or you drink seven glasses of wine, so now you’re going to choose six glasses of wine, whatever it is.
Rachel
Before you go off of that, I want to just remind you the melatonin was a huge piece of that too. A lot of clients take melatonin to sleep because they don’t sleep well.
Darren
So I would say…
Darren
What was that one? I was getting fatigued in the afternoon. I was getting fatigued.
Rachel
You were like… you were what? Yeah, you were lethargic, waking up with a daily headache…
Darren
Now, the melatonin thing was around three, four o’clock in the afternoon and into the evening. I was exhausted. My legs were heavy. I felt fatigued. I was lethargic. The headache was coffee. I’d been taking melatonin for years. Rachel did some research and found that a side effect of melatonin is the heavy legs, the fatigue, the tiredness, the exhaustion. So I weaned myself off melatonin. Yes, it impacted my sleep a little bit but not terribly. That kind of cured the lethargy in the afternoon. Another little experiment. The other one I was going to say is… I don’t know, three or four years ago, I cut out any sort of French fry or tater tot from restaurants. That had a positive effect on my GI. My whole point in sharing some of those is: Yes, “be well” may be too much of a jump for some people. So maybe there are stepping stones, like the coffee, the melatonin, and the fried foods.
Rachel
Yeah, I mean, again, think of your health as a ladder. What I’m saying is “be well” is at the top of the ladder. I’m encouraging people: go back to some basic things. First rung on the ladder: are you drinking at least three liters of water a day? Great, master that. Second rung on the ladder: are you eating one to two cups of vegetables at every meal? Once you master that, great, go up. The problem is we are an immediate gratification society. We don’t want to take an entire year—or, in some of my clients’ cases, we’re talking two, three, four, five years to completely heal depending on how compromised their system is. You’ve been working on your digestion since you met me, right? And that’s been eight years. Most people are unwilling to stick with it that long to get to the top rung of the ladder to understand what wellness looks like. Even if you’re halfway up the ladder, it’s going to profoundly impact how you feel and how you show up. If that’s as far as you want to go, great. But get off the ground floor. Take one step and keep it super simple. Basics. Everybody knows the basics. If you don’t, that’s where you find us. Don’t go to the internet; find a nutritionist to help you with the basics. But we all know the basics. It’s everything you say you “should” do and you don’t do. Start there.
Darren
All right, we just spent 20 minutes on nutrition. You have one minute. Talk about Fullscript for one minute.
Rachel
Every time. Fullscript. Here’s the thing. If you’re taking supplements, the supplement industry is a billion-dollar industry, and a lot of supplements, quite frankly, are shit. They don’t have efficacy reports and they don’t have third-party testing. When I work with my clients, just so you know, you will be recommended professional, medical-grade supplements that work. They’re proven to work to do what they say they’re going to do. We use a platform called Fullscript. For anybody out there that’s going to Costco and buying Kirkland CoQ10, please stop. You are literally flushing your money down the toilet. At least check out and experience some professional-grade supplements. It’s not just supplements, too. If you’re interested in a non-toxic life, you can get facial products, products for your pets, house products to clean up the toxins in your world. It’s super simple. Here’s the link where you can log into our account. That’s where you and I live. We spend hundreds of dollars there each month because we’re unwilling to put… if you’re trying to clean up your health and your diet, why would you put crap back in? Don’t do that.
Darren
Nicely done. Just over a minute. Close.
Rachel
Two minutes, done. Damn it. I can’t help it. Okay, so we are moving off of that topic because we talk about it all the time, but that’s because it’s a core value of mine with our clients to optimize everything. So let’s talk about behind-the-scenes clients, executive leaders, and home life.
Darren
Mmm.
Darren
You want me to go? All right, so one of the things I talk to my clients quite a bit about is I am not a believer in the old adage of “check your emotions at the door.” I think it’s dated, I don’t think it’s effective, period. What I often say to my clients is you play multiple roles all day long. So I’m looking at you, babe, right? You are a mom, you are my partner, you are a business owner, you are a biker, you are a runner.
Rachel
Let’s go.
Darren
You are a friend, you’re a daughter. So at any given time, you play seven roles, just off of what I just shared. And to act or believe or pretend like you can’t be one of those roles when you come to work or vice versa is nonsense. Now, with that being said, what I also tell a lot of my clients is if you and I are having an argument, I don’t check that at the door. Like, it’s always in my brain. My brain is occupied with a low buzz or a high buzz of, like, we’re fighting. Why are we fighting? What’s going on? What was my role? What was your role? What stories am I telling myself? Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
When coaches, consultants, professionals, whoever act as though we will not and cannot talk about your home life because we’re here focused on your executive life—again, that’s nonsense. When you talk about “optimize your everything,” I’m not going to steal your thunder on it. Part of what that means to me is, is your home life as ideal as it can be? Are you having open conversations with your family? Are you leaning into explicit agreements and discussions where we talk about the things, or are we leaning into the mind reading of implicit agreements? So, home life affects work. If your home life is not as optimal as possible, it is gonna bleed into your executive presence. So, in order to be the best professional possible, the best human possible, the best parent, spouse, etc., yes, your health needs to be ideal and your home life has to be as ideal as possible.
Rachel
Yeah, 100%. And I think we’re going to just automatically combine number two and number three of the take five together: home life and vulnerability with your coach. Because you and I, right, we’re in the same team of “our lives are not lived in silos, therefore your coaching shouldn’t be either.” And so I’ve heard, you know, on my runs with my girls, they’re like, “I would never talk to my executive coach about my marriage or my problems with my kids.” And I’m like, why not? That probably is impacting you more than you can even imagine. And a coach is there to coach you through all the struggles, obstacles, barriers, blocks, whatever there is. So it doesn’t have to be isolated to coaching leaders.
When I work with my clients, honestly, we talk about the other stuff almost more than we talk about their leadership. I have a client who overworks because she doesn’t want to go home. I have a client who is just exhausted all the time because her marriage is crumbling. And I will say emotional exhaustion, emotional stress is way more debilitating than physical stress. You go run a marathon and you’re gonna recover from that—like, give yourself a week and you’re good to go. You are in a stressful marriage, and that is 24-7 emotional stress. It just takes you out. There’s no recovery period unless you repair the problem. So we encourage you to go to your executive coach or go to any coach, but you can’t separate that out. And so start looking at what we have used. We’ve used different tools that we use for ourselves and we use with our clients. We use the emotional jug, we use explicit agreements, we use the concept of “same team.” Look, we’re trying to get to the same finish line here. We’re on the same team. It’s an automatic diffusing of if something starts to get heightened.
Like we know, we can go back and look at LinkedIn lives when we’ve been fighting. And man, I look pissed. I don’t want to talk to you. I just want to fight. And then I can’t do anything else. It really affects how you show up as a leader.
Darren
You made a good point that I want to come back to, and that is, if leadership was as easy as following any how-to book, every leader would be the best in the world. But it’s not that easy.
And to your point, oftentimes the things that are holding our clients back is not so much their leadership effectiveness per se. It is all the other stuff that occupies their brain. It’s the insecurities, it’s the conversations they’re having, it’s the crumbling marriage, it’s all the other stressors outside of work that seem to impact their leadership. And if you ignore those things or you’re not willing to bring them to your coach or you’re not even willing to look at them, then you are in essence stunting your own growth at that ceiling that you’ve created for yourself.
Rachel
What you just said there reminded me of when I was training high-level athletes. And the one thing that you always do when you’re training an athlete is you have to know and take into consideration their total stress load. So if you’re my athlete and I come in and I’m being myopic and only coaching you to the physical stress load of your training program, I’m gonna overtrain you, you’re gonna get sick, you’re not gonna perform, you’re not gonna repair, you’re not gonna recover, you’re not gonna perform well, period. But when we open that up and say, “What’s the global, the overall stress load?” we factor that into the training program to ensure that we’re not overstressing you, which then leads to burnout.
And I know you don’t like that word, but it truly is. So whatever you want to call it on your end, you have to take into consideration the global picture of your life when you’re looking at your leadership and when you’re working with your executive coach. If you’re not, well, I’m not going to tell you what happens. You’re probably experiencing it for yourself.
Darren
Why don’t you tell me about some of the athletes that you coached? I mean, these are people that did Ironmans, and one of your initial questions was, “Do you have the support of your spouse?”
Rachel
Yeah. Yeah, because if you don’t, that impacts everything.
Darren
I mean, think about my own training. I did a half Ironman a couple of years ago, and you were instrumental in making sure I had enough food on the ride. And when I returned, you would help me map out the route so I could refill water, for instance, or, you know, from doing bricks, right? Doing the bike ride to the run, making sure my socks and my shoes were ready. You know, and so it wasn’t like you were the admin, but you were supporting me. You wanted me to be successful. So you had my back, as opposed to being resentful of the fact that I was doing this thing and then making it even more challenging. So not even—it’s multiplied or compounded by not only are you not supporting me, but you’re pissed about me doing it. So then the global stress load is that much greater.
Rachel
Yeah, then you’re out on the bike ride equivalent to going to work, right? Your bike ride of training or you’re being an athlete at work, right? Then you’re constantly thinking about that. On top of that, your cortisol levels—so let’s get a little sciencey here, right? You need cortisol to make adrenaline to go. So number one, you’re physically activating and outputting cortisol to make adrenaline. So that’s high. And then in your head, you’re thinking about, “Oh, Rachel’s pissed at me,” or “Now I’m going to have to make up for… Oh my God, that was my marriage. I have to make up for going for a run and overcompensate and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” And it’s going to be a fight when I get home. Cortisol is going to be pushed up high again. Stress is stress. Stress releases cortisol. Cortisol then has a profound impact on inflammation, immune function, your blood sugar—so insulin regulation, blood sugar—which can lead to weight gain. Like, it’s a disaster if all areas are not optimized. And so all that to say is use your coach, be vulnerable, take a chance, and use your coach for more than just “teach me how to be a leader.” Teach me how to be a leader in my life, in my marriage, as a parent, as a community member, and at work.
Darren
I was saying this—it was a meme, and it said, “It takes courage to be the leader you always knew you could be.” And I like that, and I think you could replace “leader” with human, parent, spouse, athlete, etc. Like, it takes courage to step into those things. And you talked earlier about it’s harder to be sober than it is just to drink. And I think that’s more applied to the social setting, where you go to the Christmas party or the New Year’s party or a concert or whatever we choose to do. And usually, at least in our world, a lot of people around us are drinking at the bare minimum. And it’s very easy then to grab that drink and be part of the crew, part of the experience, as opposed to the outsider that’s not. That takes more energy. That’s harder.
Rachel
Yes, yes. I think so, at least. Maybe not for other people, but I think it is. So hard—that’s harder. Let’s go into number four, take five. Choose your hard. And quite frankly, what I see a lot of my clients do is making their life harder than it needs to be. And I’m gonna say it as directly as possible: by doing trivial stuff that does not move their life forward or doesn’t hold weight in relation to their top priorities in life.
Rachel
What do you think about that?
Darren
Hi, Chelsea. Our friend Chelsea said hello, gave us a clap. Yeah, the hard—choose hard. Everyone’s got to choose their own hard. I was thinking about that driving to work today. Sometimes life chooses it for us. You know, I think about the hard it took to mourn my father’s passing, to come to grips with the reality that he was gone. Like, I didn’t choose that hard. Well, I didn’t choose his death. So…
Yes, there’s nuance, but what’s hard for me right now is staying consistent with diet. That’s my hard. There’s some hard at work. There’s some hard in our relationship. So it’s like choosing those things and not being lazy or complacent. Theo’s got this line which is…he was saying it more pointed to me, but he said, “You are complacent with mediocrity.” I was like, “Fuck you, man.”
It was legit. It was legit because I was being lazy. I wasn’t putting forth the effort. I was complaining, taking the easy road, etc. The other thing that I heard recently—I’m going to butcher the saying—but it was something like, “If we choose hard for the short term, it becomes easier in the long term. But we gotta get over that hump of the hard at the beginning. When we choose simple in the short term, it becomes harder in the long term.” If I can figure out how not to come home and eat every snack at our house, it’s gonna be hard in the immediacy, but…or and, when I do figure it out in the long term, maybe I reach my fitness goals.
And I always come back to the health, because that’s the thing that I really grapple with. That’s like the top of my list, but people’s hard is all over the place, right? It’s whether they speak up or not at work. It’s how they are the contrarian or not. It is choosing not to believe the nonsense we make up in our head. It is…I don’t know. Maybe you’ve got some too of the hard people don’t choose.
Rachel
Well, you know, a lot of my clients do. The hard is not setting boundaries. And then they’re overtaxed in the long term. And then they’re…right, here’s the cycle. The hard is to establish, communicate, and hold boundaries at work, at home, whatever. And so what happens is that’s hard. So they don’t do it. But then they’re exponentially increasing their hard because they’re overtaxed, they’re overwhelmed, they’re overdoing. I like the term, they’re invisibly managing, micromanaging everything. They’re overworking. They’re getting up at four o’clock, three o’clock sometimes in the morning to reply to the emails, to, I don’t know, jump on a call if they’re working internationally or different time zones because they didn’t set the boundary.
So go to the root cause—the root cause of the boundary. Okay, well, that’s gonna be hard, or you have a long-term hard. Pick your hard. Also, be more discerning. I love that word, right? If you’re reloading the dishwasher, if you’re attending every single meeting that you’re invited to, you are adding hard to an already hard life. So be discerning about what gets your time and attention. I talk about this all the time: pick your battles, and life is gonna be hard on either end.
So choose the hard that’s gonna net you something positive, net you what you want. Who gives a shit if the dishwasher is not loaded correctly? Who cares if the kids go out the door with mismatched socks, or they don’t have a perfectly curated, organic, gluten-free, dairy-free, nut-free, something-something lunch, or whatever it is, right? We’re making it hard. Strip it down to what hard is gonna maximize my priorities and give me the best life.
Have a little look at…you know, it’s kind of like a hard talk. We have a friend who runs her own business, and we were talking to her over Christmas—overwhelmed, stressed out, very difficult to scale and to grow, and she’s spending time on a task that doesn’t net her anything, like legitimately, and she avoids it.
Darren
And she avoids it.
Rachel
So not only is it a task that is beyond menial and actually there’s a solution for it that is as simple as pushing a button, but then she avoids it. So then when you avoid it, you ruminate on it. And then you ruminate on it, and then you’re stressed out, and your rumination distracts you from doing something that’s actually gonna grow the business, scale the business, take you out of being the doing and into the leadership. Like, it’s a mess. So, choose your hard.
Rachel
Did I pretty much summarize that? Okay. Okay. Five minutes. Are we hard stop at 10? Damn it. Okay. All right. Last one is 10Xing your life. Okay. What does that mean? So as entrepreneurs, Darren and I, of course, read a lot of information about how to be an entrepreneur. Just like, so then we can take some of the, what we’re…okay, let me back up. There is a book.
Darren
That’s it. Let’s do the last one.
Rachel
Yes.
Rachel
By Ben Hardy and Dan Sullivan. It’s called “10X is Easier Than 2X.” Darren and I both read it, and we’re like, wow, like game changer, we are on board, sign us up. And then I got to thinking of like, why is this reserved for entrepreneurs? Because our leaders are our entrepreneurs. They’re running their own business and their own, their microcosm within the organization as a whole.
And it also applies to you’re the CEO of your house, of your life, of your health, of your nutrition. And so we take this in depending on the client and apply aspects of this book and philosophy into our leaders’ and companies’ lives to help 10X by not doing, again, choose your hard, 2X tasks that distract you from a 10X living, from the best life, the best business, the best leadership, whatever it is you’re going for. So there’s like, I don’t even know how many philosophies are in there. Like we could totally spend an entire month breaking this down.
What for you was the most impactful tool baked into that book that you think applies to not just yourself, but your clients, our clients?
Darren
So real quick, going back to the example of our friend that owns a business, the thing that she’s ruminating on that she’s not taking action on is a 2X problem that is literally saving maybe pennies on the dollar, but it’s causing her the invisible load of thinking about, “I need to do this thing, but it’s a pain in the ass,” and yada, yada, yada. And then when she actually does it, if she were to do the math of her hourly rate compared to how much she’s saving on this task, it is not even remotely worth the time. 2X.
Rachel
Thank you.
Rachel
To 2X.
Darren
Now, to your question, one of the biggest things that I thought or the biggest takeaways from that book was this concept of who not how.
Rachel
Which is a whole book that Ben Hardy has written as well. Okay.
Darren
Yes. Irrespective of seniority at organizations—CEO, C-suite, senior leaders, even mid-level leaders—the act of delegation is lost on many leaders. Those who don’t delegate effectively focus on how things are getting done or ask, “What is my involvement?” This leads to micromanagement, overload, and ultimately, they choose to overload themselves.
The concept is, when something needs to get done, who is going to do it? Once I assign it—if I’m the leader and I’m assigning it to Rachel to handle—then being as clear as possible about the desired outcome is most important. Once Rachel and I agree and understand the outcome, I do not care how she does it.
Now, of course, within reason—integrity, morals, and so on, which I trust her to uphold—but it’s not about how she does it. It’s about who is doing it and whether they understand the outcome. Too many leaders aren’t focused on the “who” or the outcome; they’re focused on making sure Rachel does it their way. And if she doesn’t, they correct her because they think she did it wrong.
So, long-winded way to say: “Who, not how” is one of the biggest takeaways from that book for me.
Rachel
That’s a concept we’re implementing in our business right now with an outside sales team. We don’t have the bandwidth to do it ourselves or the reach to manage it with just two people. So, we asked, “Who’s going to do this for us?” We’ve invested in that, and it’s been super cool.
With my minute, I’m going to request that you block your calendar so that if we need to extend future LinkedIn Lives, we can do that.
Darren
I’m going to request we stick to the 45 minutes we agreed to.
Rachel
Fair. My greatest takeaway has actually shifted depending on the aspect of my business, but the most recent one is about raising your standards. So, number one: What are your standards?
When we talk about leadership—and we’re going to dive into this in two weeks on our LinkedIn Live—the question is: What is your standard of leadership? What does that even mean? Where is it coming from? And then, how do you communicate it, hold it, and model it?
Raising your standard is essential, whether it’s personal, professional, physical, or financial growth. If you want to grow in any of those areas, you need to raise your own standards and start living up there to achieve that 10x growth.
As a leader, too often, we point outward and say, “My team needs to raise its standards.” But I’m going to challenge you: Have you raised your standards first? Then, you can teach your team how to do the same.
That was my biggest takeaway. We’re going to break down more about the leadership crisis and how to lead, as well as address the insecurities or unknowns of being a leader, in two weeks. I think that’s the 21st.
Every second Tuesday of the month, we take off. And before you go, remember: We’re recording this, and it’ll be available in our newsletter. If you don’t have access to it, reach out so we can add you and keep you up to date.
Everyone, hang with me. Darren needs to leave, but check back on our website next week. We’re launching a brand-new, flashy website representing the new TKG brand. It’s awesome, and we’ll make sure you all get to see it too.
All right, any parting wisdom?
Darren
Go.
Rachel
Manage your own stress. All right, I’ll see you next Tuesday.
