SPI 784: Find Your Champions

SPI 784: Find Your Champions

Announcer: You’re listening to the Smart Passive Income Podcast, a proud member of the Entrepreneur Podcast Network, a show that’s all about working hard now, so you can sit back and reap the benefits later. And now your host, he believes 2024 will be the year he receives a gold YouTube play button for one million subs, Pat Flynn.

Pat Flynn: Today, we’re going to talk about support. Getting support. And I’m not talking about support like pillars on a building or a jockstrap or anything like that. I’m talking about support as in from people, because you’ve heard me say before, we can’t go through this alone. But I think it would be helpful to define the different kinds of help, the different kinds of support that we can get help from when we need it, because there are different levels of support that we could obtain in our entrepreneurial journey. And it’s, again, really important to seek these out, and you might already have access to some of these, and these are going to be really important, especially when you’re just starting out.

You want people sort of championing for you and you want them to be there for you when you launch your thing or just at least give you some emotional support when the times get tough. But they’re also going to be there when you have specific advice. I mean, there’s so much power in knowing somebody who knows somebody, right?

It’s very, very important to understand the diverse, positive outcomes that can come with a diverse set of friends and relationships in the industry that you’re in. This is exactly why I love the podcast so much. It offers an opportunity on the Wednesday episodes to interview somebody, to get to know them, but you don’t just unlock that friendship when you get to know somebody.

You, you unlock potential friendships from them as a node of other friends and so on and so forth. So this is, this is sort of the beauty of what we have an opportunity to create a web of amazing people. Some who might be more on the outside, some who might be very close to you and we’re going to break it down.

I’m inspired to do this cause I remember a conference that I went to once and the first exercise we did, I mean, I love conferences, where it’s not just a person on stage talking, but they’re actually having people in the audience do work. And I got to give credit to Pete Vargas, Advance Your Reach was the name of this conference.

And it was primarily put on to help people speak on stage, tell their signature story, learn how to sell their message on, on a stage, not necessarily for money, but to get people behind them with the story that you tell on a stage. And the very first exercise we did was about finding your champions. He meant support people who will be there to champion you as you progress, as you experiment, as you get up on stage, or as you start your business.

And if you remember your start, when you began your business journey, you might’ve had some champions, but you’ve also might’ve had anti champions, which we’re more likely to run into earlier in the journey before we find champion champions, and this is why community is so important here at SPI as well.

I mean, we are building an arena for you to come into to find other people who are going through the same journey as you, who will be there to champion you. I was gonna call this champanions but it almost sounds like chimpanzees, like champ companions and champions, champanions probably not gonna work out.

I’ll save that one for the dust bin. But here are the four different levels of support or champions that you could have. And again, by intentionally seeking out and cultivating these relationships, not only can they support you, but they can challenge you. They can inspire you. They can be an example and so forth.

So first is actually friends and family. know you best. They’ve known you longest likely. They know what you look like at your best and they know what you look like at your worst. So when you are building your team of champions, you know, don’t overlook the power of these. close relationships that you likely already have, right?

Now, I know that it might be unfortunate that you might not have close friends and family who would support you with your goals. You might have run up against some roadblocks there, but it’s important that if you do have them to connect with them, get them interested in the kinds of things you’re doing and also get interested in what they’re doing.

This is going to be a theme throughout each of these different categories is that you are able to help support them just as much as they are able to support you and together you can grow to both something bigger. It’s important to know you’re not alone. I think that’s the biggest thing. When it comes to business stuff or in the market or industry that you’re in, you want to now move on to your peers.

Right? Not move on, but also add on your peers, your peer champions, your fellow colleagues, your fellow creators in the space that you’re in, your professional friends who are there doing the things with you. The community that you can build around the topics that you are all kind of talking about together, leading together, the ability to share ideas and to spot things for each other is just so profound.

My favorite type of peer group in this category is is a mastermind group, right? It’s a little bit more formalized. It’s not just a group of people in a community online. It’s four to six people who connect with each other every single week. Very formalized. Like I said, very structured. We have been doing this for over a decade in two different groups that I’m in.

And these people are some of the most important people in the world to me. They have seen me just like my friends and family in my highs and in my lows, and sometimes more than my friends and family, because they understand the language and the landscape that I am trudging through in the worlds that I’m in and I the same with them.

And so we could be there for each other in this way. I do have a YouTube video about building mastermind groups and how to formalize that and what the structure is and all that kind of stuff. Might be good to check it out. You can find it on the Pat Flynn YouTube channel in the archive. But what’s nice about this is, you know, you can have a higher level of discussion about something versus what you could with just family and friends.

And if I ever talk business with my wife, she’s just like, no, I just don’t know what you’re talking about. Don’t. Just stop. Which I don’t blame her. So going into these, not just mastermind groups, but networking events, conferences, local events, workshops. I mean, it’s just so powerful when you think of, for example, a CrossFit gym, what are they doing there?

They’re all working out together, but they’re all supporting each other. They’re inspiring each other. They’re helping each other out. They’re spotting each other. They’re helping each other avoid injury. They’re helping newbies train on some of the equipment. It’s just such a, an amazing thing to help inspire camaraderie and to help bring the community closer together.

So, the mastermind groups, this sort of community peer groups within the spaces that I’m in have been absolutely vital. The next group are virtual mentors, virtual mentors. You know, we have the ability to get access to, just like you’re getting access to right now, different kinds of people online and the different kinds of advice and experiences and stories.

and guidance they have to share, you could take that even further and gain insights through books and courses, podcasts, videos. There’s so much potential out there for you to find somebody who you really resonate with. And even if you might never even have the ability to meet them or talk to them or even connect with them because they’re so busy, you can still gain inspiration.

You can still gain value from considering them a virtual mentor. And I think the big strategy here is we don’t want to have too many of them, I think a few select virtual mentors that allow you to really focus on one lane per mentor, right? So you don’t want to necessarily have five mentors about email marketing.

For example, there’s just going to be too much conflicting advice and you’re not going to ever take action fully on any one person’s strategy. And remember, the purpose of this is a virtual mentor has gone through and has gone down the road that you are going down right now. They have gone through the mistakes.

They’ve made those mistakes and they are sharing how to avoid them. They’re on the front lines and they understand what’s coming and they see the space that you’re in a little bit differently because they have more time in it. They’re also trying new things and experimenting and passing that forward.

And you can get a lot of knowledge and skills from simply just following along on a mentor’s journey virtually. I had several when I started, I still have several across different aspects of my life from athletic and fitness to nutritional to business. Of course, in the beginning, it was very much, the guys over at Internet Business Mastery, Jeremy and Jason, they were my virtual mentors, had never met them until one day I finally did.

And then Jeremy became a personal mentor, which we’ll talk about in just a second to wrap up. Tim Ferriss was a virtual mentor when I was crafting my business, really wanting to make sure that it was built in a way that was as automated as possible, that it was leverage, that it wasn’t just me trading time for dollars.

Then it was Gary Vaynerchuk when I got into the world of social media. So, I did a lot to learn and absorb from him. He also taught me that I didn’t need to swear. I didn’t want to be like that to to just get people’s attention. So, I mean, I love Gary, but he does have a mouth on him. He also taught me what it was like, or has trained me to understand how to stay the path when your sports team sucks so bad.

Sorry, Gary. I hope the Jets turn it around. Felt bad for Aaron Rodgers, I gotta say, last season. And then for a while, Michael Hyatt, around the 2013 era of my life, a little over a decade ago, really inspired me. He had written a book called Platform, and I went to the Platform conference, and Michael inspired me in a lot of ways, even though we were just getting connected at that point.

He wasn’t my personal mentor. But he was a virtual mentor from afar, and what was really inspiring was the way that he was able to build his businesses up to get them to a point that were just so successful and still remain an incredible father, an incredible husband, and those family values were still a priority for him.

So I admired that despite him being able to grow a multi million dollar business, he was still able to do all those things that are important to me as well. So I look to him for inspiration, I look to him for guidance, and I’ve continued to follow his lead. The best thing that he created was his product, Best Year Ever, because that really helped me, through his system, virtually, understand how to craft goals around different aspects of my life.

That’s what I really love about what he’s now converted to from the Best Year Ever information to what he now is the Full Focus Planner. I don’t use the Full Focus Planner anymore. I once did. I have my own way of doing goal setting at the end of the year. Now that is very largely based off of what I learned from Michael in a virtual manner.

And then you have your personal mentors, right? Not just the people who you are reading from and listening to and watching online, but those who actually, you know, want you to succeed personally. They have an interest in your success, right? And I don’t mean interest necessarily in terms of a share of it.

They are there to help you, right? Tailored guidance, immediate feedback, support with your unique challenges and opportunities. Again, based on a lot of the experiences that they’ve had, but they take a personal interest in your growth and success, and they are more willing to spend. You know, a more significant amount of time and energy helping you reach your full potential, right now you can meet a lot of these mentors in the same kind of way that you can meet a lot of your peers at these events, or even an online communities.

The best way to meet a mentor is through a relationship that you already have. So if you have. Somebody that you know, that knows somebody who you’d love to learn from, that would be a great place to start to try to get an introduction. Oftentimes mentors do charge sometimes cause they know how valuable their time is and they should charge in many cases, not always, but many, and that can be extremely valuable, especially for the skin in the game aspect of this, the investment that you make.

That you want to get a return on, you’re going to do the work and hopefully your guide, your mentor will help you along the way. The most important thing I’ve learned when working with a personal mentor, and I’ve worked with several and I still work with some now, I work with a personal trainer, Jeff McMahon, shout out my friend.

And I also work with a coach. And this business coach, James has been vital with kind of seeing things that I’m not seeing and just being honest with me. You know, he’s, he is a friend, but he’s a coach and a mentor first. So he’s able to tell me things straight up, which is what I need to hear.

Right. And this is why I hired him. The cool thing about a mentor is that you can help them just as much as they can help you. And I love this approach because it almost makes it feel like, especially if you come from a place of service, and you’re maybe not so used to getting help from people in a more direct manner like this, especially about business, it actually turns the story around and says, you know what, by you being a student of this person, you can help them. If you create a success story for yourself, right? You want to listen and implement the things that they’re doing because you are then able to help them. You’re able to help them not just generate more revenue, be happier, but like hone in on their skills even more, which then in turn comes back to you.

So there’s this amazing positive feedback loop that comes in that regard. So at the end of this episode, I would invite you to consider who your champions are in your life, your friends and family. Who do you got in mind and do they know what you’re up to? Are you giving them a chance to champion for you, your colleagues in your communities, any mastermind groups, or people that you kind of keep in close touch with who are in the industry that you’re in?

Might you be able to form an alliance and a mastermind to dig deeper and go further with your efforts together? And then of course your virtual mentors, the people that you listen to, I might be one to you. I don’t know. But a lot of people have told me that they listen and they believe I’m their coach, which I am.

And I’m here for you. And I’m here for that. And I also do personally coach a few people as well. So your personal coaches, these are all champions in your life. And these are the kinds of people who you could surround yourself with and who want to be surrounded by you too. And together you can grow into something quite amazing.

But it’s really up to you to take action. And if you’re looking for people and you want to make it easy for yourself, why don’t you consider joining SPI or SPI Pro? Head on over to smartpassiveincome.com/community and you can see the kinds of people that we attract, just like you. You can connect with, collaborate with, learn from, teach.

All the good things we look forward to seeing in there, smartpassiveincome.com/community. It’s what we do. Cheers. Take care. Thank you so much.

Thank you so much for listening to the Smart Passive Income podcast at SmartPassiveIncome.com. I’m your host, Pat Flynn. Sound editing by Duncan Brown. Our senior producer is David Grabowski, and our executive producer is Matt Gartland. The Smart Passive Income Podcast is a production of SPI Media, and a proud member of the Entrepreneur Podcast Network. Catch you next week!