(255) Aidan McCullen: Undisruptable - The Mastery of Reinvention, Transformation & Innovation

(255) Aidan McCullen: Undisruptable - The Mastery of Reinvention, Transformation & Innovation 

Aidan McCullen is a change consultant, who thrives and deep dives into change, innovation and transformation. Some of the magic we covered:  

• Undisruptable: Mindset of permanent reinvention – how would you define such a mindset?  
• Risk of over – reinventing? How do you find the balance?  
• What are some of the core principles of innovation?  
• Why do we struggle with change and uncertainty? What can we do about it?  
• Change in business models comes from change in mental models – tell me more.  
• Take the stairs: stretch, flexibility, momentum 

And so much more!  

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RELEVANT LINKS:  

📘 Website: https://aidanmccullen.com/ 

🧐 Episode on Success: https://youtu.be/eyAZ2iNB-ZI 

 
WATCH NEXT:  

🎬 The Three Pillars of Your Transformational Journey: https://youtu.be/dgq07hBSsbo  

🎬 Design Think Your Life and Business with Adam Perlis: https://youtu.be/Ig1ZtWLOygw  

🎬 Are You Meant To Be Successful?: https://youtu.be/eyAZ2iNB-ZI   

EXCLUSIVE:  

🔥If you want to access exclusive VIP High Performance Coaching – contact me here: https://katiestoddart.com/contact/ 

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ABOUT AIDAN MCCULLEN 

Aidan is the host and founder of the Innovation Show, broadcast globally and on national radio stations in Ireland and Finland. 

He is the author of the bestselling book "Undisruptable: A Mindset of Permanent Reinvention for Individuals, Organisations and Life."  

He is a Change Consultant, College Professor, Board Director and Executive Coach. He works with organisational teams to improve how they engage and innovate. 

He developed the digital eco-system for Communicorp Media Group, served briefly as Head of Innovation for RTE and worked as an innovation consultant for Global company Katawave. 

Today he sits on the board of National Broadband Ireland 

He developed and delivers a module on Emerging Technology Trends and change in Trinity College Business School, ranked 1st in Ireland and the top 100 globally. 

CONNECT WITH AIDAN MCCULLEN 

🎤 PODCAST: https://theinnovationshow.io/about/ 

🌟 LINKEDIN: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aidanmccullen  

🎬 YOUTUBE: https://www.youtube.com/@TheInnovationShow  

Transcript

[00:00] Katie: Welcome back to the Focus B show. This is Katie Stoddart here, aka the focus b. And on this show, I interview high performers and leaders around the world to discover their secrets on peak performance, productivity, mindfulness and leadership. So if you want to take your performance and your leadership to the next level, then you're in the right place. Listen up and connect with the magic.

[00:37] Katie: Really excited to have Aidan McKillen on the show today. Aidan is the author of the best selling book undisruptible, a mindset of permanent reinvention for individuals, organizations and life. He's a change consultant, college professor, host and founder of the innovation show. Hello, Aidan. Welcome to the show. Amazing to have you here today.

[00:59] Aidan: It's great to be with you, Katie. Looking forward to our conversation.

[01:03] Katie: It's fantastic to finally catch up after we met at the conference in 15 seconds. And I so remember your talk. And with the caterpillar all around innovation, I thought it was fantastic. I think a great place to start is I know that you launched your book undisputable. Is that correct?

[01:22] Aidan: It's undisruptible.

[01:23] Katie: Undisruptible. Undisruptible. And you talk about this mindset of positive and constant sort of reinvention. What does that look like for you? How would you describe this mindset?

[01:35] Aidan: So, firstly, the term doesn't really exist. The term undisruptible, which is why Auburn catches people out. But I was trying to do that. I was trying to not coin a new word because we have enough words. But more part of that is that innovation or new thinking actually needs new language, because language is the operating system for the human being. So I was trying to do something with that. I was trying to disrupt a title. So that was the idea of undisruptible. And then the subtitle, which is really the core of the book and the core of all my work, is a mindset and permanent reinvention for individuals, organizations and life. So it's a mouthful. But what that means is that with the rate of change as fast as is today, that there's no safe harbor for, oh, I've got a competitive advantage now. It's time to milk that for 510, 20 years. Like in the past, that's what organizations could do. Now I have to be constantly in this, moving fast, be very clear on my vision and where I'm going, but very flexible about how I get there. So that's the organization. And then the reason I say individuals in life is because you can't change an organization without changing the people within us. And what I say is that you can change business models till you change mental models. And that's why I kind of go down and I toggle between reinvention on an organizational scale, reinvention at a personal scale, and then the life piece is that all these changes and all these patterns happen in nature. Hence the idea of the caterpillar that you mentioned.

[03:12] Katie: Yes, I can see how they're all correlated from the organization to the individual and also life. I think that's a really nice added touch. Why is it that you think that so many of us have this innate dislike or discomfort when it comes to change or innovation?

[03:30] Aidan: The reason really is that it's baked into us that we create this map of the world, our mental model, our worldview, and we are programmed as humans to be able to create that map as soon as possible in order to survive. So as children, our brainwave states are really, really slow, and we learn by observation, and we create these initial maps of how the world works so that we can operate in that world. And then as we grow older, we get socialized through education, through parenting, through any kind of mentor, then our first bosses. Maybe it's sport, whatever it might be, that trains us about the way things are done around here. And then around your mid 20s, depending on how agile your brain is, you might decide, this is it. This is what I've done. I've got to the top of the ladder. And then what happens is you realize the ladder is against the wrong wall, and all of a sudden you have to change. And that's really, really difficult because it means a rewiring of the way you've operated up to now. And if you take that at an organizational level, most ceos in existing positions, no matter how successful the company, have got there based on the way things used to be. So if you're a change agent within an organization trying to drive change, you're a threat to those people, because you're going to ultimately upset the apple cart, and they're not going to like that, even if they espouse the values of innovation and change. And let's be agile mindset, flexible, open to change. It's very difficult when the change becomes real. That's why you see so much incremental innovation in the world, where people are making small tweaks. Maybe it's productivity tweaks, and they label that as innovation, but it's not real transformational innovation, and that's why it's so difficult.

[05:26] Katie: I often think it's a fine balance between innovating so that we're not constantly staying at the same pace. But then on the other hand, not over reinventing ourselves too often, because then you lose consistency of branding, for example. A lot of time and energy and resources are then spent. So how do you find this balance of let's continue to innovate regularly, but if we're changing tools, for example, we were talking about the tools we use for our podcast. If we're changing it every month or two, then we're constantly just learning and disrupting and changing and not really mastering that new tool. So how do you find that balance?

[06:03] Aidan: So take for example, your business. You have probably a portfolio of different elements to your business. And most organizations have that. They have a portfolio of products. Maybe they have one product, but they have different variations of that product. So this is what got you to where you are today. So you don't want to mess with that, particularly if it's a successful formula. So you keep that solid, you change how you think about that. You move into a mindset of exploiting that as much as possible, which means maximizing your margins, cutting costs without affecting the product or maximizing productivity. This is why tools like AI are so useful to us today. So you have this kind of mode over here. So call that the exploit mode. And then you have the explore mode, which is a very different way of operating. And this is experimenting but low level experiments to prove hypotheses. And hypotheses, by their very nature, are not solid. They're based on assumptions. So you have this set of assumptions that you put up and you track these assumptions before you even make any moves. You go, here's the assumptions. We think what will happen if I say, for example, as a consultant, I'm going to test this new product that I have. I go out to the market at the least expense possible, with the least waste of resource or investment of resource possible. And I keep that well away from my standard product, my exploit product. So I explore with very, very small increments, step by step, these kind of milestones that I've predicted. I think this will happen. And if it does happen, I keep going. This is the whole stop, start, go. I actually keep going. Maybe I tweak it, maybe I learn from why it didn't work, et cetera, and I keep going that way. So the way I kind of remember this and the way I would teach it in my workshops is the roman God. Janus is this God with two faces, and it was. Janus is the root of the word. January which is he was the God of new beginnings or portals or doorways, and often seen above doorways or gateways in ancient Rome. And the whole idea is as the root of word January is this idea that it's a new beginning. And Janice has one set of eyes facing to the future, this explorer set of eyes, and one set of eyes future looked in backwards to the past, the exploit eyes. And that's a nice way to think about it. I think of this a Janus innovation that you got to keep exploring while simultaneously taking advantage of your current advantage and optimizing that as much as possible, improving it, et cetera, et cetera. So that's a very simple way, and that can be done at an operational level for large organizationals. And obviously, the bigger the budget an organization has, the more exploring they can do. But that has to be intrinsically linked to the core business, because if you create some type of chocolate teapot that nobody wants and it's not useful, and then you kind of go back and go Tada. Back to the core organization, they're going to reject that because they're like, what are we supposed to do with this? And unfortunately, that's what happened a lot with innovation theater. It's called where organizationals just explore with innovation labs that have no direct connection to the mothership. That's why they fail.

[09:28] Katie: So what I'm hearing is that two of the biggest failures, but maybe we can add to this, one of them is just doing too many sort of small incremental changes and steps, but aren't actually making a radical difference and change. And the other mistake would then be to maybe launch a new product or service, but something that doesn't take into account the progress so far or the success so far, or what the company is known for. And therefore, like you said, if they bring out a chocolate teapot and it's totally not linked or relevant to what they currently have been doing, that is sort of maybe fake innovation or like it looks good on paper, it's something totally different and transformative, but it won't actually be successful. So if I understand correctly, what you're saying is innovation is maybe trying something new, launching a new project, launching a new service. But like you said, with that, Janice, God, keeping into account the past and remembering what has helped you to be successful till now, or the company to be successful.

[10:25] Aidan: And the premise of that is, well, if I've got here based on what I've done in the past, I have a certain set of capabilities or skill sets. And if I go and create a product that's totally alien to those skill sets. It's never going to scale because then I'm going to have to either hire in a load of new people with totally different set of skill sets or train the organization. So one of the common things I see that goes wrong, and I've made this mistake myself as a corporate innovator, is that you create something that you think the organization needs and you back that and you go and get funding and you've done a great job, you've built this thing and then you come back and you go, Tada. Now this thing is brilliant. It's going to help us massively in the future. Who's going to run it for us? And they go, these people have already got, they're already at maximum capacity. Many of your clients, Katie, already at maximum capacity. And you go and introduce this thing that takes, as you mentioned, trying to learn a new tool involves switching costs, which is a huge tax on the human brain. You have learning curves and you, as the person who's built this, often don't have the skill sets to then teach them how to use it. So you create this problem for them and through you going deciding what the solution is, you create a problem for the organization. Now the flip side is way more productive, way more successful, which is I might go throughout the organization and I might find out who has a problem that they need a solution for. I then build trust. I make them the hero, which is a hard piece because as a corporate change maker, you have to be a credit maker, not a credit taker, which is hard because often means you don't get any of the credit for the hard work you've done. And in fact, some of the people that you end up making heroes are the very people who are the obstacles to your change in the first place, which is really difficult for a change maker. So I would go to around the organization, interview people who have budget or resources, including people that they could give to a potential solution. Kind of go, what's the big bugbear for you that's happened at the moment? Somebody might go, for example, in digital, say, I have this workflow and the workflow entails hell, a lot of work I have to outsource to this person. If we could just build x, this missing link, we could actually not only create a huge solution for the organization, but we create a product that we could sell and license to other clients. And that's a much more clever way to do it because that could be an easy thing for you. To do. And it could be the thing you don't want to do as a corporate change maker, running the innovation lab. But by doing it, you gain credibility, you have a success. And then when you go back to the organization and you go, you're not trying to sell ideas anymore. You're selling these small victories. You have already based yourself. You've proven yourself. You've proven that you can do this under budget, ahead of time. That's really important. And then you also make people into heroes that will be socialized throughout the organization. They'll tell other people, then other people will come with their problems. Now, the problem becomes, for you eventually, is that you have this overload of too many things, and then you have to kind of become selective, and you kind of go, yeah, I can build that, but I don't have time right now. Then they kind of go, that's not fair. Why is she the head of the queue? And you're like, kind of going, oh, God, I've created a new problem. But that's the way to get started versus you deciding what you think is important and you going and building it, which many of us have done to great detriment and to our own personal failure.

[14:05] Katie: It's a difference between looking at what the problems are that really need solving and the people in the company are interested in solving or having solved or changed versus us from the outside thinking, well, that would be just a better way of doing it because we prefer it this way. But that might not speak to them as.

[14:24] Aidan: And you know, there's a refrain in business where leaders will go, don't bring me problems, bring me solutions. You know, that real Gordon gecko macho kind of talk with inside organizations, but actually what you want is the opposite. You're like, don't bring me solutions, bring me problems as this head of innovation person, because if you can solve or crack those problems that people are struggling with, same thing, you go and you create this trust within the organization. And trust builds innovation. It's the foundation. As you know, Amy Edmondson, her famous, she made it popular, this phrase, psychological safety is the bedrock of innovation. People need to feel that they can share those problems to begin with. Secondly, that if they suggest them or they don't work, that they're not going to be reprimanded or lose their job in some cases. So all that is such an important part. It's the often forgotten part of innovation, is that human side, because that's where most of this falls down. It's never the ideas. The ideas are always there. We're humans. We have ideas all the time. It's people feeling secure to suggest those ideas and then carving out the time to work on them.

[15:37] Katie: Yes, I love psychological safety. And it's like you said, once the trust is there, people feel they can explore, they can brainstorm, they can trial and error. They won't be blamed if it doesn't work out. They can open up, and then from that space, it is greater innovation. And there are lots of examples to that. But I'd like to come back to something you said a bit earlier around mental models and on an individual level, how we can change our mental model. So, for instance, if an individual in a company or organization realizes that maybe they're a bit stuck in their way of thinking or working, or they seem to have an inefficient way of doing things, and they personally sort of want to change that or innovate it, obviously, I'm also thinking about the entrepreneurs who are listening to this, very much like me or you, who manage their own business. How can they see their own blind spots, and how can they recreate some mental models to help them move forward?

[16:32] Aidan: Well, the easiest thing to do is, for example, like you did, go to an event or read outside your realm of expertise, because oftentimes if you read or study stuff that you already know, you'll constantly kind of be affirmed. So you'll fall into the confirmation trap, bias trap that you're just constantly kind of going. And research shows that when you read something or hear something that you already know, the piece of your brain responsible for reward, the equivalent of taking a line of cocaine, lights up in the same way. It's like, oh, yeah, I knew that. And you get this kind of loop that you're kind of on top of your game. But that's because you're only in that sliver of the world which you occupy, which you may be an expert at. So this is the expert trap. You get stuck in there, and you become blind to other ways of doing things, et cetera. And then a newcomer to the field comes in, does things differently, who has never been trained in the way you've been trained, and they disrupt it. Now, at the start, they get quashed, and they get reviled and attacked, usually. And people kind of go, that'll never work. But that'll never work is usually the source of so much disruption when an organization, from their position of authority or a person, looks down on this newcomer and kind of go, nah, there's nothing in that. Same thing happens to an expert. So if you're very good at your job, oftentimes you will be the person people come to to validate their ideas all the time. Now, one of the ways to see if you're falling into this confirmation bias loop is to see are you rejecting a lot of those ideas that are different to your beliefs, or are you willing to give them a listen or say somebody tells you something you already know to listen to it because they could describe it in a different way. And if you listen actively where you're not trying to think about your next question, like, so I have this, like you with the podcast, I'm constantly interviewing brilliant people, very eclectic fields. So for example, psychologists, neuroscientists, people like that, experts in biases. So it's not just deep innovation or frameworks and innovation, because they'll say something that you'll kind of go, I never thought about that before. And if you're genuinely actually listening and you've done the research before the interview, you'll be brought in a totally different way. So you're literally going to think differently. So go back to what I said about the whole idea of when you're a child, your brainwave states slow. And it's kind of, I talk about in my book that it's like these lenses that get put in place, and those early ones are very, very hard to change. But this is a way to give yourself new lenses. And if you give yourself a wide range of lenses way outside your swim lane of expertise, you then literally see the world differently. And seeing the world differently has huge advantage. So to bring that to life for our entrepreneurs, for example, listening to this show consultants as well, is that you usually learn a framework or create a framework, and then you use that framework over and over and over versus, I'll build a framework, yes. But then I'll read stuff that might go against that framework or suggest that it might be outdated, and then I'll listen to it and go, huh, yeah, maybe I'll just tweak this little piece. And that's where the incremental explorer part of the Janus eyes is useful, because you'll go, I don't want to totally throw the baby out of Bathwater here because there's value in this framework. But I'm going to introduce maybe a few new slides and go. Latest research has shown perhaps this might be more effective if x, and then you go in that direction. So there's ways to do it. So the first thing is new information leads to new insights, leads to new thinking, leads to new mental models if you put it into practice. And one of the keys to this, and this is the same for me, I have a teenage boy now who's gone through learning himself. He's gone into secondary school here in Ireland, and he's struggling with study. And I'm trying to teach him the idea. I'm trying to teach him how to study, not what to study. So the idea of the learning curves, HEbbs law, which is that you have these small, incremental repeating of the same idea in many different ways. Oftentimes you might be a tactile reader or learner, you might be a verbal learner or an aural learner. All that stuff plays a role. So that's just a way to constantly just kind of question yourself and subtly, like by doing an interview, by having a podcast, by reading something differently, by looking at something outside your field, because you will spot something in it regardless of what field you read, that you'll go, that's interesting. And then, just to conclude, for myself, I write for that reason. So I write a weekly article because that constantly helps me really consolidate the learnings that I've had. So my week goes, read a book, prepare for an interview, do the interview, edit the podcast myself. So I get another bite at the cherry of learning, and then finally write an article to consolidate what I've learned and put it out there to the world and move on and repeat the next week and the next week, et cetera. And then each of those weeks is like a new lens. And over time, they not only consolidate, but they are like compound interest. They interact with each other, and then you have this really unique way of seeing the world. And then your writing becomes even more unique, which is a great benefit of doing things like this.

[22:20] Katie: Yes, I can see how that would all add up. And it's true that I said of my podcast that it was like my personal MBA, like I felt that's so much from having a podcast interviewing wonderful people like yourself. And it's true that every time you get a sort of new insight or new learning or a new way of looking at things, for instance, from what you were just sharing, I was thinking, yeah, I really need to read something other than psychology, personal development, and business over and over again. And I would think, I'll read a few marketing books and Seth Godin and other books like this. Soon I'll go and dive into, I don't know, the six pillars of self esteem, for example, that I love, that I'm reading at the moment. And it's super deep and psychological, et cetera. And I still learn a lot, of course, with each of these. But it's true that it's still all in a very similar field. And I do get that confirmation bias. Things do repeat themselves. I do get that dopamine hit. Yes, I knew this. When you read something that's still, like, within the field of having your own business, that's what's so wonderful. There's so many different skills and different books that you can read that can complement your business and help you to grow and learn. But if you go in a slightly different direction, like I went to this conference on AI in November, for example, I spoke at it, but also I was there. That's not my field per se. I'm all about self leadership, high performance. So I wouldn't call AI of marketing my field of expertise. And that was very interesting. You do get a lot of like, whoa, I never thought of it this way. And I thought a marketing was like that. But now they're using AI here and they gave a list of about 50 different tools and going through that and it does spark a lot of new thoughts. So I really like that piece of it.

[24:04] Aidan: And to your point about, so say they mentioned a list of AI tools. A lot of people would go to conference and take those down and then never do anything with them. The only way you can learn is by actually getting your hands dirty, even using one tool. Like one of the things people go to me all the time, oh, it must be great reading all those books and you kind of go, well, it only is if you do something with. So that's why I write. Because when I write, at least if I grasp onto one study or one kind of main point from a book and I write about it, it stays in there. And then I'll be running a workshop or I'll be giving a keynote or somebody will ask in the Q-A-A question, and that thing might come to mind and you surprise yourself by your recall of those things, but it's because you've done the work and you've actually nailed down that pathway, that neural pathway of thinking about that and that repetition. Again, the repetition, read, take notes, interview the person, edit it, then write about it, and then maybe talk about it at a later date. And for me, lecturing as well. So I lecture. And that's further recall, because as you know, one of the best ways to learn something is to teach it, because then you're seeing, can I articulate this right? Can I do it well? And I loved what you say? I say the same thing about the MBA. This is like an MBA for life. It's nonstop MBA. I would be more committed to this than I would be to an MBA because you're selecting the subjects. You're only going after things that you're truly interested in. And sometimes I go with stuff, Katie, that I find uncomfortable where I'm not fully okay with it or I'm not fully aware of it. But there is so much learning in that because it challenges you in different ways. And in those cases, I'll often take a few weeks over a book because it might be only able to read a chapter a week because it's so deep. So there's times that that happens as well. The way I put it with this show I have is it's learning with witnesses. I'm just learning from the guest with a microphone on and a camera turned on. And again, that just puts a different type of pressure on you. And you have to perform better and you have to be good listener. You have to be able to articulate your thinking and it trains those skills. Because I don't know about you, but at the start, I don't direct anybody back to those early podcasts because I don't want to hear myself, let alone put it out there that I'm going to go, don't worry about the first hundred or so episodes. You don't want to be hearing those because they're full of O's and Oz and kind of mistakes and badly articulated questions. But that's life. That's how you learn.

[26:46] Katie: Yes. It's sad, really, how much we want to be perfect the first time around, that sort of image or illusion of as soon as I, whatever, write this first article or do that first podcast, it'll be a huge success. And then it's accepting that it won't be. And maybe the second time it won't be, and maybe not the 10th or even what you said the 100 time, because it's trial and error and it does improve and then it improves in ways you don't necessarily expect. And then maybe you struggle with other things, like the tool you're using, et cetera, et cetera. So I think it's good to have that mindset of not failure, but experimenting. I think I try not to use the word failure. Yeah, you're right. Failure is learning. Even if you say that it doesn't sound good energetically as a, and, you.

[27:37] Aidan: Know, it's just because of the human emotion connected to it. And this is from eclectic reading there's a book behind me there a guy from South Africa called Mark Sulm's brilliant book called the Hidden Spring. And he talks about the brain, talks about consciousness, but from reading that book, which was probably one of the most challenging books I've read in a while, I learned about this thing where the brain literally learns from failure. So it has this kind of expectation of what will happen. So the brain makes this hypothesis, this will happen. Then if it doesn't, it updates the hypothesis, and then it tries it again and it goes, oh, it worked. Now I'll do that from now on. So this is where I say that that's baked into humans, that idea of, I'll try it. It's like, for me, my mental model is training in the gym is, of course I'm going to go a little bit heavier next week because that's actually where the growth comes from. Or the stretch. The stretch goal, but not too much, because if I go too far, I'll fail. So I'll go a tiny bit more, or I'll go the same weight but slower, or the same weight but faster. Whatever. It might be some type of tweak. So I'm kind of getting a different hypothesis for the brain to test and it'll work, or it doesn't. The same goes for any kind of learning, is that you will get things wrong. But it's about, like the gym, it's about going every time. It's about showing up and doing the work. That's actually the benefit. And over time you do so many. I think I just passed episode 501 with the show, and it's been eight years or whatever, and I had passed 501 and somebody goes to me, hey, did you do something to celebrate 500? I was like, kind of going, nah, nah. And they're like, you put some out on LinkedIn. So I put a post on LinkedIn and it felt great. And I was like, kind of going because I didn't stop to smell the roses and go, yeah, well, that's great. That's like 500 weeks of doing this nonstop. I never missed a week. And that, to me, is the same as lots of things that I learned in my life as a pro rugby player. I wasn't a talented player, really. People think I'm being humble. I just was highly disciplined. I just showed up, did the work. Loads of talented players disappeared over the years, and you're left there with, you're less talented, but the discipline makes up for that lack of talent to an extent. And the higher levels, you go up, then that you kind of get exposed a little bit, but you've still absolutely stretched your talent as far as it would go. And that's just a good way to live, I think, is no regrets.

[30:19] Katie: It's interesting that you say no regrets. And I absolutely love discipline, and I love what you said about showing up, because I think when I look back to the first years where I started my business, I didn't really know what I was doing at all. I had an engineering background, not business background, didn't know marketing, didn't know sales, had just learned coaching. So it was really learning it all from scratch. And the only thing I can say is, I showed up. I showed up day after day after day, sometimes month, with no income. And I was laying around, tried to do a LinkedIn post. Then I was writing blog articles. Then I created my own website. Then I was interviewing someone, and I was going to meet someone for potential sales call. Then I did the old coaching, and I just showed up. Showed up mostly out of passion, discipline showed up later on. It became an element after a couple of years, but the first couple of years, it was just out of passion and interest. And I think, yes, just show up, show up, show up, show up, show up. And it's the same in the gym, and it's the same with everything. I feel that if we show up and, yes, and what you just said about no regrets, I was actually, before falling asleep, wondering, thinking about Steve Bartlett always talks on diary of CEO, are you being pulled or are you being dragged? And what drives people? And I was thinking, what's my core core drive? Like, why do I do what I do? What makes me show up? And I thought, it's exactly what you just said is, I don't want to have regrets. I don't want to be ten years from now, 20 years from now, before dying whenever, and think, oh, I could have written a book, I hate that feeling. So I write the book, right? Or I could have participated and contributed to lots of conferences and spoken on stages, and I didn't do it. I hate that. And I have that the same in my hobies. That's what makes me take up new hobbies and learning and drawing and instruments and singing. And I have a lot of interest, but it's just because I prefer to have these interests and to know that I'm doing what I can with my time, my energy and my resources to optimize the time we have. And it's precious. So no regrets.

[32:20] Aidan: Absolutely. Amen. Because I have two children and they're very late starters with sport. They both said they didn't like sport. They were more maths and science. Now they're two of the best in their separate sports, in their teams. And it's purely the same thing because I never ever, when they started playing, one of them play soccer, the other, unfortunately, I think, I'm not sure yet, is mma, the mixed martial arts and jiu jitsu. And I'm like, I'm not sure about this. But he went, that kid, he's 14 now. He only started doing that like a year and a half ago, and now he's the best in his class. And he wasn't at the start. He was far from the best. And now he's the guy that the coaches call over and go, hey, we're going to show everybody how to do this. You will demonstrate with you and the other, same for the other guy. He was only a year and a half ago start playing soccer. But the thing was, anytime I say to them, the only thing you can control about this is the input. So that's going training, that's going to bed early, that's thinking about it, like actually playing the moves in your mind. Your brain doesn't know the difference between what's real and what's imagined. So you rehearse those moves ahead of using them and you'll have got in an extra training session, even for a specific move. So the younger guy watches YouTube videos, which are amazing for teaching them skills, et cetera. And then he goes out on the pitch and practices them. And not just in training, he does them in matches now because I'm kind of going, you seem to have that skill optimized now. Now it's time to try it in a game and he'll do it. And then I go, I saw it. I saw it in the game and I won't go, it's brilliant that you did that. I'll go, it's brilliant that you trained so hard over all those years to do that work. See what happens when you do the work? So you're constantly praising the input, not the output, because the output will either happen or it won't. And that can be luck. It can be like you take a shot on goal. In soccer, sometimes the keeper is going to be asleep, the goalkeeper. Sometimes he might be just a poor goalkeeper, other times he might be brilliant and he'll save it. But it's the same shot. So taking the shot on goal, but that comes from practicing how to take a shot on goal. So the same thing. Think of that as a model for any endeavor. You got to show up, got to do the work, you've got to look after the inputs, and after that, the outputs will look after themselves. Like a book, Katie, like, you know, is a huge endeavor. And whether it becomes a bestseller or not is not necessarily because it's not a good book. If it's a good book, sometimes it's not even a good book that becomes a bestseller. It may be the title, it may be the timing, maybe the publisher. There's many, many amazing books on the shelves there behind me that were never, ever recognized, and they are brilliant. They're better than bestsellers. And that's all because of the output is variable. You can't control that output. You can do as much as you can. You can manifest, you can do your work, you can do the input, you can do your research, you can try and find a good agent, all those things, but after that, that's all you can do.

[35:37] Katie: I think of the times I got discouraged in my business and it's when I focus too much on the output. And I remember when I had just started and I was evaluating how well I was doing based on my income. And then later on, like later on, several years later, I looked back at that period and I realized that that was such a flawed way of looking at it because I wasn't even looking at the amount of coaching sessions I was doing. I was doing more then, but when I had more money because obviously of the difference in price. But that meant I was coaching a lot more and learning a lot through the coaching sessions and then the sales call and all the marketing I was learning. And I think for a year or so I published every single week an article, but I didn't know anything about SEO, so I got zero views. Nothing at all. At all. Zero. And when I later on worked with an SEO consultant, he was like, you've got all these blog articles on your SEO. I get zero. I was like, yes, and see how that happened? But I thought, wow, I was so hard on myself. I was just purely looking at what came into the bank and thinking I failed or I succeeded. Mostly I just thought I failed continuously and I just continued anyway, instead of thinking I did so many coaching sessions, this person was totally transformed after our work together and so happy. I wrote an article, I read all this book, I did an extra training on NLP. But I mean the list. I did more things back then than now. The list is long. Yes. I think if we always remember to evaluate our own work. Same again, like you said at the gym, same in a hobby. Just by how much input we're putting in, how much are we practicing, are we showing up, are we taking the courses? Do we have a mentor? Are we reading, et cetera? And let the know, the outputs know. Tony Robbins always says, you get rewarded in public for what you practice in private. And where my business finally took off, I was just hearing this sentence in my mind over and over again. I was like, he's right. But that can take a while, and they might still be things on the outside or an output that doesn't work for whatever reason, and that's fine, and the next one will, or the one after. But yes, I think all the times I've come back to, what am I actually putting in? Am I doing the calls, am I doing the writing, am I doing the reading? And putting all our focus and energy on the inputs, we feel so much better.

[38:00] Aidan: Absolutely. And it's such a crutch, I think for humans to we compare ourselves to others and you can't compare yourself. None of us are the same. And you may have a neighbor beside you. They might be driving a better car. You may not drive a better car, but you may decide to do that. You may decide to. For me, I cycle on purpose. My wife drives, I cycle. And outwardly that may look like, oh, he can't afford a second car. But for me, inwardly, because I feel secure and confident, I'm like, I don't care what anybody thinks about that. I cycle because part of my values are sustainability for my business, et cetera. So I'm like, on this is a small thing I can do, which also means I don't have that car sitting in the driveway for 90% of its life or more in some cases. But apart from that, it's this idea that when we compare, we're always going to be upset. There's always somebody higher up the hierarchy. Like, if you think about, like, oh, did you get invited to the vip party? I know, I'm like, yeah, I got invited to vip party. And you're going to go, no, but there was a vip, vip party. And there's always a vip, vip party. There's always somebody higher up the threshold. There's always somebody earning more. There's always somebody who has the outward appearance of having a better life. But you have no idea what happens behind those closed doors. And if you think about you as an entrepreneur, if you're somebody who is struggling to go out on your own, perhaps do this idea of Janice, try small incremental changes while you're in a core job. Don't go and jump all of a sudden and jump off the deep end. Build capability before you need that capability. Build it slowly while you're in this solid ground. Then over time, you kind of cross fade like a DJ changing track from one to the other to the other way of being. But this whole idea of comparing yourself will always lead to sadness. But you've got to realize then, like you will have experienced, Katie, you don't have to go to mind numbing meetings in political organization. The way organizations are so political. That's one of the happiest things about my to, I don't have to go to those meetings. And even if I have those meetings with clients, they're only small amount of people and they always have a very clear agenda. I run those meetings the way I would like to have had meetings back in the day, but now I have a bit more control of the input, so I do that input and then you're just going to be happier. And that relieves some types of stresses that you would have had in other organizations where you're maybe gossiping or people are moaning about other people in the organization, backstabbing, all that kind of stuff. You don't have that because if you have that, it's your fault because you're the boss. So the whole idea of this, I think, is that the measurements are always different and it depends on what you measure and also your values, even if you're a one man or one woman band, really decide what your values are and measure against how much you're living those values. And I think when your job becomes more outwardly focused servicing people, so helping people and a feeling, a genuine feeling that you're making a difference somewhere the money will come like it does come. It's amazing how it comes, and it will come from the left field. You're going to get a job out of nowhere that goes, wow, I did not see that coming. And it's beautiful when that happens because you feel, because you've got your graphic equalizer sorted, you've got it in the right place, and as a result, the universe delivers to you.

[41:49] Katie: Beautifully said. Amazing. I can't believe it's just absolutely flown by. I feel we could speak all day. It's such a fascinating topic and it covers so many different areas from mindset. But also we spoke about living without regret, so now we talk about being aligned with our values. I think all of these things are so fundamental and always revising, always revising. I'm constantly rethinking about my values, for instance, checking I'm aligned, checking if they make sense for me and if my business is aligned with the values. I think they're all wonderful, wonderful topics. What would you leave the audience with? What would be the last thing you'd like to say to finish today's interview on innovation and transformation? Change?

[42:30] Aidan: Well, I think that the hardest thing about change or resistance or innovation, or even, like we talked about, if you're an entrepreneur and if you're successful, is letting go of the comfort and that idea of slowly walking into that future step by step, not these big leaps. Because the idea of letting go of that person you used to be or the comfort you used to have, or the job that you used to have is very, very difficult for us. And it is only through letting go of that past that you can enjoy the future. And I think that's probably one of the biggest things I've learned. And that only comes from all the stuff we talked about. New information, to giving you insights, to giving you mental models, to giving you business models. And it starts with there, and they are all inputs, so you have more control than you think. And after that, the outputs will look after themselves.

[43:27] Katie: Amazing. Thank you so much. Aidan, thank you so much for being on the show today.

[43:32] Aidan: Pleasure.

[43:37] Katie: Thank you so much for tuning in today to the focus bees show. I would absolutely love to hear your feedback back. So let me know in an Apple review or YouTube comment what was most valuable for you. And feel free to share this episode with a friend or a family member wishing you a wonderful, magical and focused day ahead.