America’s Leadership Expert : Wealth Wellness
Clay Staires: This is Clay Staires America’s Leadership Expert with Tulsa Business Leadership with Podcast Number 36. We’re talking about the 15 Wells of Wealth. This is going to be Session Number 1 talking about the first five wells of wealth. With Clay Staires Tulsa Business Leadership, I’ve had the opportunity to speak with many entrepreneurs and business owners who are kind of trapped in a place with their finances. They are building a business, they’re managing a business, and they have only one revenue stream coming into their home. And this one revenue stream, for one reason or another, is just not enough to get them where they want to go.
I get to spend a lot of time in talking with college age and 20-year-olds, in their 20s, in their 30s, just people that are starting out in their financial career trying to get to a point where they can begin to gain wealth. I want to spend some time here with Tulsa Business Leadership talking about 15 things that I’ve discovered over the last 25 years that are very important for you to master and to acquire or to learn how to do well. There are 15 things that we need to learn how to do well.
With Clay Staires America’s Leadership Expert Tulsa Business Leadership, it has been my honor and my privilege to spend time speaking to groups and also working with entrepreneurs and managers in helping them learn what these 15 steps are. We’re going to dive right into these with Tulsa Business Leadership.
Number one, we know that the first Well of Wealth is we need to know how to represent an organization well. America’s Leadership Expert Now, this is really key. Because so often we come out of our teens into our 20s and the main focus is, “How do I embrace my self expression?” I dress a certain way. My hair’s a certain way. Maybe I’ve got tattoos. Maybe I have earrings. Maybe I don’t have any of that, but I’ve got a certain look or a certain image that I am wanting to project, that I am wanting to express. That image becomes very important to me in my personal life.
However, so often, if we’re not careful, we’ll carry that same importance into our business life, and our self expression becomes very important to us. We want to go to work and be able to have and maintain our self expression. Being a business owner myself of multiple different companies and working with other business owners through Tulsa Business Leadership, I’ve discovered that, as an owner, I’m not really interested in your self expression. I want you, as my employee, to be able to express the personality and to be able to express my company, the core values of my company.
What I’ve found with working with many different employees that are in that 20 to early 30s age group is their self expression is much more important to them than my business expression. So immediately, we have a business conflict. And again, as Clay Staires America’s Leadership Expert with Tulsa Business Leadership, I have found that there are many other business owners and entrepreneurs that find themselves in this same boat, where their employees don’t carry the same principles. They don’t carry the same expression.
As an employee, the very first thing that we want to do to begin to be noticed, to begin to stand out from the crowd, to get recognition, to be promoted is it’s going to be important that we learn how to represent the organization well. These are the first steps to beginning to think outside yourself. Can you represent something that is bigger than just you? Because in your future, as you begin to step into greater and greater measures of success, I promise you that you are going to have to expand your expression from just being a self expression to being able to express what others need you to express. Again, it’s not just representing yourself and your own individuality.
Henry Ford talks about, “Quality means doing it right when no one else is looking.” Today, our culture puts so much emphasis on being yourself and being true to yourself. I think that’s a great idea until you go to work and someone is paying you to be what they need you to be.
One of the main characteristics that managers use to define millennials is they’re entitled. They want to maintain their own self expression, their own individuality. In Tulsa Business Leadership, we encourage people to beware of falling prey to this cultural mindset of, “I deserve.” As long as you are working for someone else, you need to be willing to be who they need you to be. If you’re not interested in that, if you want to keep being yourself and having your own self expression, then you probably want to get a job at a neighborhood coffee shop and be a barista so that you can hold on to that self expression.
This is number one of our Wells of Wealth.
Number two is know how to care for and nurture other humans well. Once again, as you begin to move forward, as you begin to grow and expand in your skills, knowledge, and character, for you to be able to step into and position yourself to be able to gain wealth, one of the skills, one of the pieces of knowledge that you’re going to need to have is how to care for and nurture other humans. You’re not going to be able to get there by being the mean guy. It doesn’t mean you won’t be able to be successful, but you won’t be able to step into that measure of wealth that you are truly looking for.
This is all about inspiring people versus just motivating people. Inspire comes from the Latin word spirare that means actually breath of God. There’s actually a spiritual piece to this thing called inspiration. Inspiring a person is accomplished by reaching the spirit inside of them. To motivate them simply means to give them a motive or an outside force or pressure that causes a person to act. So how you see these people will determine how you lead them.
For us to be able to care and nurture, there’s a direct connection to how we see the people. We want to make sure that we see them as people of value, we see them as people that have a measure of personhood that we can actually develop and train. Again, without the ability to nurture and care, it can be really difficult for us to lead people.
As I’ve talked with people and different groups as Tulsa Business Leadership and traveling around the country as Clay Staires America’s Leadership Expert, I’m finding that there are a lot of people in the crowd that are just natural caregivers. When I talk about the importance of being able to care and nurture, they say to themselves, “Doesn’t everybody? Isn’t everybody able to do that?” Well, I just want you to know, the answer to that question is, no. Not everybody is able to do that so easily. For some people, it’s a skill that we don’t have. We don’t naturally think of caring and nurturing, because our primary thought is, “Get the job done.”
Just want to encourage you that if you are not a natural caregiver, a natural nurturer, this is a skill that you’re going to have to be aware of, that you’re going to need to grow in so that you can position yourself for greater and greater measures of wealth.
As Clay Staires America’s Leadership Expert Tulsa Business Leadership, the third Well of Wealth is to know how to produce a desired outcome well. This is so key. There is so many, so much of the workplace population right now is just going to work disengaged. From different resources, whether that be the Gallup polls or Forbes Magazine, anywhere from 71 to 78% of our American workplace right now is disengaged at work. They’re just going to work and getting a paycheck. Not focused on producing, but just focused on going to work and working, being busy.
We know from Napoleon Hill that you want to be careful not to mistake busyness for production. You want to earn your PHD, or pig-headed determination, in production. John Maxwell talks about the five levels of leadership, and one of the upper levels, I believe it’s the third level of leadership, is leading through production. People follow you because of what you have produced for the company.
If you can’t produce, you will not be able to lead well. Or maybe I should say it this way. Your leadership will be limited if you are not able to produce. If you can’t produce, you’ll never be able to create wealth. You must produce results.
Well of Wealth number four is know how to supervise an event or a project well. We have to oversee, like an owner. Not just like a participant or a consumer. We have to get to that place where we’re actually able to see multiple tasks, multiple activities going on all at the same time and not just being trapped in a mindset of just one characteristic.
Owners know how to think ahead. Owners do what it takes to solve the problem. America’s Leadership Expert Owners don’t have a Plan B. They make Plan A work. Owners make it happen. They figure it out. So this is a key thing for us to learn how to do. How do we manage, how do we supervise, how do we organize an event or a project? We have to learn how to do this well to position ourself for ever growing amounts of wealth.
And then, finally, Well of Wealth number five in our list of 15 at Tulsa Business Leadership is we have to learn how to live within your boundaries well. Oh. This is a difficult one. Discipline. The discipline and character that it takes to maintain a budget, to maintain a diet, to maintain an exercise regimen, to just stick with your own personal growth. Oh. The boundaries that you have to have in your life to keep moving forward are key. So many people want to lose weight, but they struggle with finding the time or finding the energy to keep doing the diet or keep doing the exercise.
Or, man, we wish we had money, but we do not. We do not have the discipline. We don’t have the boundaries in our life to maintain a budget. For us to be able to position ourself for more and more wealth, we have to get to a place where we learn how to live within our boundaries well.
This is Clay Staires America’s Leadership Expert with Podcast Number 36, The 15 Wells of Wealth, Session Number One.
