Building a Business Culture That Increases Life Through a Simple Mindset Shift

So there's a Latin phrase that I came across a few years ago, which translates to a healthy mind in a healthy body.

And now the phrase has been used in various contexts, but the idea is to express the theory that you know the physical exercise is important, just as well as the mental and psychological exercise and wellbeing for our bodies.

Join me on this episode of the virtual entrepreneur. If you're new to this podcast. A very warm welcome. I am your host, Herbert innocent and today we are talking about the concept of habits that allows us, as entrepreneurs, to really master, our mind, as well as our body because it is in doing that, do we really understand how we go about, you know, using the best skills, And our strengths and our weakness and putting them into best practices, putting them into work, to get us the results we want.

Now, on our last episode we listened to an interview with Laura DiBenedetto, that's an Italian name, I learned on that podcast. After making a few blunders, which I won't call blunders anymore because now we know they're called a the happy accidents, or they are called teachable moments because I didn't know that was an Italian name.

Now I know something that I didn't know.

So it's a teachable moment I learned something new.

Okay, so now that I have said, you know, I've introduced Laura and Laura talked about the six habits she wrote a very nice book she's a TEDx speaker, an author and a business owner retired business owner. And if you haven't listened to that talk about the six habits. I want you to go and listen to that interview and then come back and continue, and then we'll move on from there.

Now, there are two things that I've come to learn about.

I've come to learn about this thing in business, and one of the biggest things is you try and you try, and if you fail, you learn from failures, and you try and keep trying. And if you succeed, you start learning from your successes. Right. And so making mistakes is going to be part of building a business, it is part of every business, you find out what sells and what doesn't sell, you find out what message works and what doesn't work. Right. And so making mistakes on this podcast is going to be part of the show, so welcome. Enjoy and tune in and we want to call them mistakes, we'll call them teachable moments. Now that I've said that side note of whether I want to jump into today's topic, which is one of the key takeaways from the interview with Laura DiBenedetto.

So Laura talked about the six habits and one of this one of the things that she highlighted was, you know, when you really are conscious of your actions, when you're really conscious of what's valuable to you what matters to you, you show up differently. And it so happens that knowing these six habits the habits that, you know, happy people have these habits, allows you to show up different different in your business, you shop different for family you shop different for friends, and you show up different for the kids, or the people you help, whether you're working in a pro in the health profession, or you're working in a, you know, a hospitality professional, You show up different and we all know that this very big difference in showing up difference, creates a very big difference, right, a simple smile could earn you an extra tip if you're in a hospitality professional profession, and a simple smile could put your patient at ease if you're a doctor, you know, it may be something big, but it shows them, you know, I've reached a place where I can get the help I saw need. Now, I won't go too much into that we know the power of habit and I'm gonna explain a little bit more there but today I really want to explore the mindset, right, how we use these mindset in not just the single transaction that single transaction is very important. It's really nice. It's lovely.

But there's more to that. Using that simple habit and mindset, how we can use that to build and shape our business culture, because that is what this is all about. It's not about the one time transaction. It's about the long goal. And if we can do that if we can cultivate that, then what we are really doing is we are building a community within the business, and around the business. Right. And so, I'm going to tell you a very quick story there. Now that we've cleared it up. So, you know, a few years ago, I had this wonderful opportunity to go and live and work in Canada now, before going there. i Oh, what really drove me to taking and leaping and taking that opportunity with Both My Hands was, I had been studying biomedical engineering and I really love working with people, I wanted to work with people with disabilities.

I saw engineering, as the tool that will allow me to help people who feel limited by life, who feel like they're missing a part of them, because of something. One misfortune event in life. A lot of things happens in life, but I believe we live in society today that can give us the tools, that was my biggest belief, that was my strongest drive. And I remember I've had that drive since I was very young when I was 10 years old.

When I first took a little tiny mortal and connected it to a battery, and then I saw it spin, I was like, you can do stuff with this. I was very young I was about, 1011 would be younger. And I remember I saw in the thought, you can do stuff with this. And I started attaching a little laser black blade at the end of the motor and trying to cut grass. It was a tiny motor it couldn't hurt me, but that became my learns through seeing a way of empowering people, through technology, it became my drive for the longest time and it still is. And so, once I've got to college, this drive, led me to the next step, which was finding the people who I wanted to help, learning about them. I wanted to understand them, I wanted to understand what it is that I can do to serve them. And so the opportunity came into my hands and the opportunity was to travel to go and work in a special needs camp for for a few months.

And at first I wasn't very sure, I was, you know, there's all these fears. But what happened next was you know, it was really a wake up moment, right. So that was what I want I wanted to learn all this so that I could be able to build technology, right, because I was stuck. It's hard to build for someone if you don't know. And, as a business owner you already know it's hard to serve a customer. If you don't know who the customer is, you need to have a customer profile you need to know about them. So, I didn't know all this stuff back then so I went and we got there and the strangest thing happened on the very first week on the very first week, it was, we did all these exercises now, I was no stranger to these exercise I think they were designed to break the ice in our team building, because we were going to work in teams. And so I was no stranger to that concept. So I embraced it. But what struck me was the type of exercises that we did during that team building.

So, just to recall two of the exercises.

One of them was, we were told in teams. Right. We had to build a bike and make it float across a pond. now this point had water that was, you know, muddy in there was grass and does all these things.

So we had float a bicycle and person on the bike. Right.

But the idea that was that, you know, we had someone riding a bicycle and they had to float across this pond. Now, my engineering skills jump into action and we started building it and we assembled it, and we could get the bicycle to float, and we could get the present float sideways and I was excited, but the challenge came when they were trying to cross, and then they began sinking slowly, and the water wasn't very deep, but they began sinking slowly and I didn't know that the water wasn't very deep.

Later on, as the challenge study they told us you know the water is about shoulders to neck deep, so that was okay, but when began sinking, it became clear that they couldn't cross the pond by themselves so they need the help from the team, help was allowed. And so, first one of the teammates, you know, they started pushing it and then the goal was to allow them to cross without getting dirty, right, because you know you're wearing clothes they're gonna get dirty and all this mud, and this is not something that you want every day. But something strange happened. That was all my teammates, except the one sitting on the bike, who believes wasn't going to get dirty because the bike is already floating, we had this mindset of being clean in society as opposed to be clean all the time. And so as the backs are floating realize it wasn't going to work, and so we needed to help.

And as we tried to help all the team seem to be paralysed by something, not so much a fear, but uncertainty.

Something new that we have been taught not to do with society, it was standing in our way and that was getting dirty, and I saw them, and I saw my team. And we, we know and the pressure is building up because the other team might win if we don't help our teammate cross the river. So across the pond. And so I jumped in there.

And I had been wearing my nice lovely shorts, which I bought just two days prior, does a beautiful life. I really liked that short to say it briefly.

And that is an understatement because I really love those shorts. And so when it got in there, something happened which was, I realised the moment I got in there that those shorts were never gonna be claimed as there were when I bought them.

And so we cross the river. But what I learned what I noticed was. It was a very strange type of exercise right bonding exercise that you wouldn't do in a business setting. The next exercise that we did that also stuck in my mind was, we had to put spaghetti that had a lot of sauce on it. Somewhere on our bodies.

After briefly discussing and really getting stuck on who is going to do it what they're going to do. I took it the spaghetti right on my head.

Now, there is no I'm telling you this was these were team building exercises, and I didn't understand what they were there for at the beginning.

But I noticed that this became a pattern, right, for example, when the campers arrived where, you know, the people coming during that camp. Special Needs camp. When the campers arrived, we greeted them, we would greet them with very loud music will be yelling every time a bus would turn in would yell and scream cheering for them. And I still didn't understand fully what was that concept. What was happening there. And it happened throughout the summer, each time. Right, we would hit a little bit of a team building exercise refresher, before the week began, and was to be, and was the week began, we would work with the campers and then they'd leave. And so, this created a very specific culture that at the time I didn't understand but I noticed something very unique. It was the happiest environment I had ever seen. It was the happiest environment I had ever seen. If you ask anyone who has ever been to a special needs camp, or a place designed to create this kind of happiness. One thing they'll tell you is, you know, the campers looked up to, you know, the counsellors who is what we were right, because we were there looking after them and helping them. It was a place full of enablement, the idea that someone couldn't do something was simply eliminated very very quickly because we showed them how they could do it. Right. And so all these things became possibilities because

in the creating of that environment. For those campers, something else seems to happen. It allows the people volunteering and working in the environment, to bring themselves into a level where they can express themselves as a three year old, but have a logic of an adult. Right. And so they're able to do things with out worrying about mistakes without worrying about perfectionism without worrying about what society is going to think about them. Right. I mean we painted our faces, and I don't mean paint us, our faces in any flattering way, like a single colour because it was a challenge. And, you know, getting dirty was one of the challenge getting dirty in a mud.

Which if you think about it it's crazy to ask a person in your local society to go and do it in your local community to go and do, but this was what the community wanted people to be able to do the counsellors were able to do. And what this did was it created an environment where mistakes were seems, they just didn't exist. And the idea of fears didn't exist. And the only thing that existed was complete, was happiness and self expression. Right. And so, they're built to express yourself and just do what it is you want to try and do became that.

the norm.

And so this was the community that was built around for, for the for the campers to express. And so, after coming back, you know remember I had gone there to learn about you know, an engineering I wanted to learn about design for user experience to build things for people with disabilities, but when I came back, I hadn't learned any of that. I hadn't learned anything about user experience, but I kept wondering how can I build a device, how can I build designed devices that will help the users feel and experience that kind of happiness because that is what they wanted. How can I do that. And so it became a question where I would wonder and think and wonder, and consider and research, and through can find an answer until it hit me.

It wasn't a single device yes there were a lot of medical devices and I did try it, and I did study them to see how they worked. And they were very simple in their nature, they, they all blended in so well in the background. Right, they blended in so well in the background. But one thing that really stood out was the environment, the environment had been engineered in a way that it was a complete product. Each week, was a same week, filled with so much energy for you, and it created so much happiness for the campers. It was the complete product, the culture, the community, the staff, everyone who was the, the a the wanted to be there. And if they were afraid to be there. Everything was done to make sure they fit right in.

I mean the console scared at first, they felt like they didn't fit in, we're terrified. And we know, we talked to confident each other, and worked through it. And I think the think back, you know, after I've come back and wanted to build a product I realised I couldn't build a product anymore. I had to build, you know, it wasn't about the product. Anyway, it was about the people, right, that was the person. So, my idea there became my big plan they became, then how do I build a product that includes the people.

Right. How do I build a product that includes the people. And so it comes down to not just the user experience, but also to, you know, encouraging certain things, empowering, but also removing things that aren't necessary.

I think my key learning here was, it's not about building products for people.

It's about connecting people with people connecting people with themselves and connecting people with what they want to do, allowing them to do that, giving them hope, and all these things have nothing to do with the product, and more to do with the fact that it's a human right, more to do with a human. And so we're habits fits into where habits fit into this is the idea that we created an environment that forced a very specific type of habit.

The first habit was. Everyone was introduced, and, you know, given a team building exercise.

And then every week they were reminded of what to do. They were not told with words, but they were reminded by, there was a little bit of use of words to be told, but they were also reminded by how they greet new campers, you know, when that bus showed in it, almost like those cheerleading and how being and screaming and playing loud music created this barrier where anything that was negative, was left outside of the camp. And during that time, it was just a time of happiness, and a time of enjoying life. And so, as business owners we want to create cultures, and we want to shape the mindset to build a business in a specific way. It starts with us.

It starts with a simple mindset. Right. Are we going to allow ourselves to be able to do the things that we expect our employees to be able to do, because if we can't do it.

You bet the employees will not be able to do it, they will not want to try and do it right, it has to be something that we are willing to do we want to do.

And I say that with what I mean is, it's not about creating something for someone else. It's about creating something that connects people, right, it's about creating something. Essentially, that that brings and makes the expression between two people, much simpler and much more full of life. Now, without repeating too much of myself. The key takeaway from this year was how powerful mindset was the ins, no they instil this mindset of being a three year old with an adult with a fully grown adult mindset, so that we could help the campers, even if they were three years old.

They were few younger ones like five year olds, we will still help them, but with a mindset of both a three year old and an adult. Right. So, understanding, our customers, falls into this into this. And so, this is what allows us to show up differently. It's the mindset. Right, we create an environment that allows us to show us to show up differently, whether it's in the family, whether it's at schools, whether it's in the businesses, The process is the same. The environment is different we create a different environment, by allowing certain things to stay and removing what doesn't stay, and it starts with mindset. That's what I want to share with you today is all starts with mindset.

And it's the mindset of how you are thinking today, not tomorrow, it's now, how you're thinking right now. And by changing that mindset right now, you start doing things differently. In the book, a myth, by Michael Gerber. One of the things that he says was the big businesses were built too big and small businesses are built small, right. McDonald's is a very very small business, but it's a small business that can be franchised, it is built to be small.

Right, but it can be multiplied it's a product. Right. It is built as a product. And so businesses can be built as a product culture can be built within the business. And so mindset. The habits of employees can be built, it can be re energised, they can be reignited, even their passion can be reignited, so I wanted to share this with you, right, the power of the habits and mindset and the beautiful things about habits, is it just takes practice, once a week, and then repeat, and then repeat. Then repeat, and they develop.

So I wanted to thank you for joining me on this episode of the virtual entrepreneur entrepreneur.

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Or you can go to Herbert's marketing help.com Herbertmarketinghelp.com. Aside from that, thank you so much for tuning in, and I will talk to you on our next episode of the virtual entrepreneur.