Start With You

How Badass Executives Are Transforming Their Lives (And Business) In Just 12 Quarters

Peter Fuller

• Publisher: Page Publishing, Inc.
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781642987843
• eBook ISBN: 9781642987850
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Personal Success

Start with You is a serious strategic planning guide for your life, career and business. Learn to identify limiting beliefs, biases and judgments that are subconsciously holding you back from creating the life you want. Eliminate victim mentality. Discover the creative, freeing and expansive power you can generate by bending your business or professional objectives around the life you want to manifest, and not the other way around. This book helps put you back in control, so you can achieve g

Start with You

Curt Vander Meer is the CEO of Endangered Species Chocolate, a category leader in the organic chocolate industry. His brand is sold globally in Whole Foods, Kroger, and many others stores.

Curt had two dreams: (1) to take the month of July off without interruption; and (2) for his company—which gives 10 percent of its net profits back to charities that protect endangered species—to give three times more money away in a single year than the company gave the previous year. Curt viewed these two goals as both hard to achieve and completely disassociated from each other.

I believe that there are millions of people around the world just like Curt whose hearts, minds, and guts look much like the figure to the right. They have a passion for doing something, but the requirements of their business or job combine with financial and other pressures to create a negative tamping force on the aspirations and life goals that are trying to surface.

These opposing forces create tremendous tension that can manifest outwardly in anxiety, depression, irritability, apathy, resignation, and even physical conditions like heart disease. Not surprisingly, heart disease is the number one killer in the world’s capital of capitalism—the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s website.

The Western Pendulum

This tension is caused in part by what I call the Western Pendulum. The term Western is widely used to distinguish between capitalistic societies and their noncapitalistic counterparts around the world. While the term’s etymology points to the geographic origination of modern capitalism in the United States, the term Western in this context no longer has geographic boundaries. It’s merely used as an association with the work ethic and ideals that influence capitalistic cultures around the world.

In these societies, work is considered the pivot point of life. Nonwork related activities—what we call our “personal life”—take second priority to the work we feel we must do to provide an income to support a “nice life.”

Many business owners and entrepreneurs stepped out on their own to balance and control the personal side of living. After just a short time, they found themselves on the wrong end of the pendulum, controlled by the very business that was supposed to give them more time and freedom to chase their passions. In some cases, where the business is the passion, the same still occurs.

Our personal life is swung back and forth, minute after minute, day after day, month after month, and year after year in a seemingly directionless, random sway that almost insures against us achieving our dreams. One minute we’re scheduled to be at our child’s soccer game, or school play, and the next minute we’re called back into the office for an “emergency” that takes us away from the life events we consider most important. Vacations are planned and then canceled. Even savings are drained to cover the salaries of employees we don’t want to lose during a downturn.

It starts to feel like we are working for the business rather than the business working for us; that we are working in the business and not on it. The dreams we had when we started the business or career—like taking vacations or spending more time with family—often melt away into nothing but an impossible mirage. As the business swings us back and forth, the time we have on earth continues to wane.

Soon, we may feel like victims held hostage by a monster we created. We aren’t victims, however, and likely didn’t always have that mentality. We do have power, choices, and a free will capable of changing our trajectory.

It’s important to realize that one of the reasons our minds begin to frame the business activities we do (work) as things that must be done is rooted in the survival instinct that drives us to earn money to buy food, shelter, and other items we need to live. Activities that don’t immediately seem to impact survival are held in tension and incongruence with those that do. When this happens, our mind is creating an imbalance that may generate anxieties, frustrations, and a false sense of being a victim.

In reality, there is nothing you must do, and you can become a victim of your perception in the way your situation occurs. Don’t judge yourself, though. Most, if not all, humans embody this stress and viewpoint of their world and their power (or lack thereof) to change it.

If you don’t design your life plan, there are chances that you’ll fall into someone else’s plan. And guess what they have scheduled for you? Not Much.

—Jim Rohn, entrepreneur

and motivational speaker

Changing Your Position

This book can help you break free and reverse your position on the Western Pendulum to put you back in control of your life through a process that also grows your business at the same time. Yes, both are possible to achieve.

The concepts presented in this book and twelve-quarter process are proven to work, simple to execute and do not add to your workload. While the process is simple, the initial concept of fusing personal life and business may initially occur as counterintuitive to achieving success in either of those areas.

Curt, like many I coach, struggled at first to see how balance can grow the business.

Me. What is it you want in twelve quarters?

Curt. In my business?

Me. In your life; they are the same. What is it you want?

Curt. I’ve always wanted to take the month of July off with my family. But, I can’t do that.

Me. Okay. Let’s open your outcome statement with that: “The year is 2019, and I am spending the month of July with my family without interruption from the business.”

Curt. I still don’t see what vacation has to do with my business plan.

Me. What’s stopping you from taking four weeks off now?

At this point, Curt paused and looked around the room at his peer board members and then back at me.

Curt. Okay. I think I get it. I can’t take them now because I haven’t developed my executive team to the level where I can leave the...

Table of contents

• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Chapter 8
• Chapter 9