Leadership Gold: Follow Your Passion [E067]

Hey, good morning, everybody. I hope you're crushing life today. And if you're not, then I challenge you to get up, get out, rise and grind and get it done. coach Chris cotton here from AutoFix auto shop coaching, where we work hard to support you in both your auto repair shop success and your personal success.

As you get into today's episode. I know, you know, someone in your network who can benefit from today's topic, please take time to share it personally with them or share it through your social network. And if you truly think something, those in the circle of your influence can benefit from reaching out and touching someone.

Right. And as always, if you have an idea for a show topic, or just wanna talk, feel free to get with me, at chris@autofixsos.com. Let's get started with episode 67 from leadership gold. Follow your passion, and never work a day in your life. it's been a hot minute since we last talked about leadership. Um, we've done some other stuff in between.

How did your application exercises go? Hopefully, they went well. Did you try the mentoring moment? Did you actually reach out and try to work with some of your, your fellow employees, people, you know, people that work for you? If so, I'd love to hear about it. Let me know how it went. It's always awkward in the beginning, but the more you do it, the better you get at it, feel free to drop me an email.

Let me know how it's going. Okay. chapter five and leadership goal has never worked a day in your life. and we're talking about passion and things we're passionate about. following your passion is key to finding your potential. Uh, some say that you'll never achieve the latter without pursuing the former, um, for me, my personal passion.

Is the auto shop coaching. I love working with great shop owners in the industry. I love working with new shop owners in the industry. I love getting people from a to X and all the steps in between. I love that so much that, stepped aside from our shop. Moved on, and was actually doing coaching, but absolutely love it.

Like people. This is why I get up in the morning. This is why I get up at, you know, when I travel out to the Pacific, time zone, I'm up at three 30 in the morning talking to people out on the east coast. I mean, you can't do that if you don't have passion. when a person doesn't have passion, life becomes pretty monotonous, right? Everything is a have to, and nothing is want to, and then in the margin of the book, when I first read it and was, first working on this, it says I gotta make the donuts.

And if you remember, a lot of you probably have never seen it. So, what I want you to do is I want you to Google. If you don't know what I'm talking about and Google, I got to make the donuts and you'll see the old dunking donuts commercial from, gosh, I don't even know the seventies, eighties, whenever that was guy gets up in the morning and he's a gotta make the donuts.

That's all he is doing in life is he's just making the donuts and there's no passion in it at all. If not he'd pop up outta bed like me at three 30 in the morning, be like I gotta get set up for this phone call so I can, get going and, and move this forward for this, great shop owner that I'm working with.

passion is an incredible asset for any person to have, but if you're a leader and you're passionate about what you're doing, it keeps you going when others quit. oftentimes you can go into, a room full of people where life's been sucked out of them and your passion becomes contagious and influences others to move on and follow you.

it pushes people through the toughest of times. It gives you, and those around you, energy, you didn't know you possessed and it fuels you in ways that follow assets. Can't I'm gonna give you a couple here and there are just so many things that you can push forward. talent is never enough to enable you to reach your potential.

There are many people in the world with great natural talent who have never achieved personal or professional success, to be a successful leader, to be a successful person. You need more than just talent. You have to have talent and passion. Talent will not always get you through to the finish line or seldom will get you through to the finish.

Next is opportunity. Opportunity will never get you to the top by itself. opportunities may open the door, but the success journey is often long and difficult without the passion that sustains the journey. When times get tough people don't make the most of their opportunities and then never reach their full potential.

there's a person named Howard Hendricks that says don't put live eggs under dead chickens. That's what opportunities are to people without passion, live eggs under dead chickens. That's so great. knowledge can be a great asset, but it won't make us all. We can be smart. Doesn't make someone a leader.

Neither does possess credentials or college degrees. Some of America's worst presidents. Are some that were reputed to be the smart A great team can fall short. it's true that leaders can't be successful without a good team, but having a good team does not guarantee success. A team with no heart and fuzzy leadership won't succeed.

if a team starts out strong but has a weak passionless leader, the team's eventually gonna become weak and passionless just like it's a leader. , In another one of, John Maxwell's books, the 21 irrefutable laws of leadership. He has one called the law of magnetism. we attract who we are, not who we want.

I want you to think about that again. We attract who we are, not who we want. What does a leader need to succeed? Passion. Passion is a real difference-maker. Um, it separates the extraordinary from the. there's a huge thing going around right now called the great migration or whatever you wanna call it.

Where thousands of people. Have decided to forget the money and follow their passion. But for some of them it's really paid off, right? Like following their passion, the world technologically is advanced and ready. I mean, if your passion is to stop photos or stop animation, photographs of Legos and Lego building, you can make millions doing.

If you follow your passion and let it through, it's just insane. The number of things that people are doing and the types of things that people are doing and making money at it. But the reason why they're making money at it is they're passionate about it. when people pursue what they're truly passionate about, it makes all the difference in the world.

Passion fills them with energy and desire. It gives them the will to win. a bro says, if you have the will to win, you have achieved half of your success. If you don't, you have achieved half of your failure. If you wanna reach your potential, find your passion. to most people, there's a big difference between work and play work is what they have to do to earn a living so that someday they can go out and do what they want to do.

I'm telling you people don't live your life that way. Find a way to live your life and love your life. choose to do what you love and make the necessary adjustments to make it work in your life. That's what we do. Like, Most of you know, that I'm a remote coach and I work from wherever we're at, at the time.

how that all got started is, that we had a house. We had so many things that were insane. we're driving down the road from Thanksgiving, coming back from my in-laws, and Kimberly's watching all these RVs go by. And she's like, what if we did that? What if we just sold? everything we had and then just hopped in a motor for home and traveled with Piper until she graduates and goes to college.

And it took me about five minutes to figure it out in my mind. And then I was like, yeah, we can do that. And it was because I was following my passion that we were able to do that. And we were able to do it for over five years. Piper's in college now. And, Kimberly and I have kind of pivoted to something else that we wanted to do.

we wanted to have a steady in one place for Piper to come home from college too. She's with us now for the summer. And it's amazing. you know, she's still a teenager, she's still off in her room doing, but she's here with us and we're able to do that because of the passion that we have for what we do, which is helping great shop owners across the country.

if you choose to do what you love and make the necessary adjustments like I did, and make that work in your life, you can move mountains. Confucius said, choose work. You love, and you'll never have to work a day in your life. it doesn't get much better than that. The greatest job is one where you're not sure where the line is between work and play.

And I would tell you this. And you're gonna say, Chris, there's no way in hell. I can do that. If you're in a job and you don't like it and it sucks and you want out and you hate going there every day, figure it out, find what you love, find what you do. again, if it's playing video games and sharing the videos, people are just crazy.

Like anything you can think of, you can gimme a topic and I can pretty much, I bet I could tell you how to make money doing that. If that was your passion. So if you're out there now and you're in a job you hate and you have no passion for it, it's time to make a change. let's propel you forward to make a change. So here are the application exercises for this chapter. This is a really short chapter. I hope everybody, gets a lot out of this though.

Number one, what's your true passion? What do you love doing so much that you would do and if you've never thought about it before brainstorming a list? I had a technician who wanted to be on the professional bass fishing tour. that's what his passion was. He never made it, but we were able to make out his work arrangements so that if he really cranked out some hours, Monday through Thursday, then he could take Friday off and spend Friday, Saturday, and Sunday pursuing his dream of being a professional bass.

Be able to do that for others, and help others around you find their passion. That's probably in the mentor we'll get to that in a minute. Number two, how much passion do you have for your current work? Does your job feel more like work or play? Every job has its negative characteristics, right? And no job is fun all the time, but the right job should not feel like a chore all the time.

If you don't wanna wake up in the morning and go to work every morning. Then you may not be in the right job, the right job should not feel like a chore all the time. What percentage of the time would you consider your job to be enjoyable? And then I'm gonna give you a scale here in just a minute to judge the fit of what you're currently doing.

you ask yourself that question and you've written down the percentage, if you're 90% or above, you're in your sweet spot, it's time to celebrate. If it's 75 to 89%, it's time to make minor adjustments to align with your passion. And if it's 50 to 74%, you need to make major adjustments. And if it's 49% or less, you need a job or career change.

So if you look at the next 20 days going to work, and in 10 of those days, you don't want to be there and you hate it. It makes you miserable. Then you need a job or a career. And it could be a pivot inside the same thing that you're doing now. but again, what's your passion. Find your passion, reignite your fire for what you're doing.

Number three, how can you follow your passion? If you're not in the 90% plus category, you need to try to assess what kinds of adjustments to make. sometimes taking a different job within the same organization, sets a person on the right track. Like I just talked. other times an organization change helps if you're in the 50% or less category, consider trying to transition from your current career track to an activity you thought about when answering the first question above what is your true passion and no matter which category you fall into think through and write out in detail, the steps that we would be required for you to make a transition, make a plan.

Execute the plan. and then finally, in the mentoring moment, most people in the workplace are used to working for bosses who care only about the work they get done, not about them as individual human beings. Most have never had a leader who desired to help them find their passion and unique purpose in life.

You can be the one to change that, sit down and talk to the people you're mentoring, asking them questions about what's most important to them. Share your own observations with them as well. Be open to the possibility of helping them transition to another position department or organization. If there isn't a good fit where they are currently don't ever come to me and talk about, oh, well I would help somebody else find another job, except I really need them here.

What you really need is for that person to be happy. In their life. and if it's with passion in your company, then great. If it's not with passion in your company, help them find another company, put them in the right seat on the right bus, and wish them well. This has been coach Chris cotton from AutoFix auto shop coaching.

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