Thomas Green here with Ethical Marketing Service. On the podcast today we have James Pyle. James, welcome.
Hello. Thanks for having me.
It is my pleasure. Would you like to take a moment and tell the audience a bit about yourself and what you do?
Yeah, sure. So I am a kingdom entrepreneur and kingdom coach. What we do is we helped to equip kingdom entrepreneurs and kingdom coaches to be capable of transcending their limitations and thriving in their vocation. So a lot of the work that we do is around self-awareness and self-improvement to be able to maximise one’s potential. And the core of our message is actually about spirituality. We believe that in order to build a solid foundation in life and in business, we must first be aligned spiritually with the supernatural. it’s usually a subject that raises some eyebrows, you know? However, we do believe in the fact that you know, however a person connects with our creator, whatever they call it, is up to them. we’re not the type of people that like to prescribe a certain name or belief set.
We have what we believe and we’re happy to share that with others. However, we just encourage people in connecting with what we all have inside of us. So many people in this world are looking for everything outside themselves and when we can turn internally and activate our potential from within, that’s where we can receive all the answers because everything we need is actually already within us.
Well, the first question on my list is actually a definition question and it’s what is a kingdom entrepreneur, but is that what you just touched upon?
A little bit. To go into that question of what is a kingdom entrepreneur. First and foremost, it’s a servant leader in this world, you know? And throughout history, oftentimes we get inundated with wanting to pursue things of the flesh, things of the carnal world. And a lot of people think that a leader is there to be served when in fact it is our belief that a leader is here to serve everyone else as the CEO of a company or a manager in leadership.
Our role is to equip our people in our team with everything that they need to excel in their role and actually be better than us. You know, it’s actually my goal in life to be the dumbest, slowest guy in the room because I’m pretty smart and I say that humbly and I’m pretty quick and I know that if I’m surrounded by people much smarter and quicker than I am, then that’s going to elevate everyone and allow us to accomplish our goals. So it’s somebody who has a heart for servant leadership, somebody who has a spiritual base as the foundation of their life and their business. And if somebody who is constantly looking to add value and create a win, win in every business situation, you know, it doesn’t have to be the type of thing where Thomas, you and I are doing business together, that one of us has to win and one of us has to lose, we can both win. And it’s more of a collaboration mindset than it is a competition mindset. So that’s a pretty good description of kingdom entrepreneurship.
Okay, and where did that phrase come from? What’s the inspiration there?
Yeah, so, the inspiration came from a revelation I received just during a meditation and prayer session a while back and it was something where I was really conflicted by it when I had received this revelation, I thought, well I don’t know if I want to step into that territory.
It’s highly controversial as we’re all aware and it was something that I vacillated on for quite some time after I received the revelation. And then one day I just decided, you know what, I’m just going to go all in on this and see what happens. And ever since that point it’s just been like the most amazing thing ever. It’s just like door after door continues to open, momentum continues to accelerate and we’re able to help more and more people and it’s incredibly fulfilling. Thanks for clarity there. Before we started recording, I mentioned the neon light in the background and you said it was it was from Brendan Bashar. I noticed a couple of – is it right you went to Experts Academy? I looked on the socials and saw maybe a picture there or is that a different one?
Well I have Experts Academy. Is that one of his programs? Yeah, so I don’t know that I’ve done that one, but I’ve been following Brendan for about a decade. I’ve read a bunch of his books and done a bunch of his online training programs and I just went to the HPX live event that he had a year ago in San Diego.
And I just really love his message in regard to habits, to focusing in on our habits. And in fact, for me this year, 2021 is the year of the good habits. It’s been where my sole focus has been each and every day because it is our habits that are going to not only lead us to success but will sustain us at the successful level we get to, and oftentimes people, they want to hurry up and get to the top, and if we don’t have the habits in place that are going to help us to maintain that momentum when we get there, it’s all going to come crumbling down. And that’s one of things I really love about his message is that high performance is not about getting their high performance is about staying there. You know, there’s a saying of like, the worst thing in life is not ever having it, the worst thing in life is having it and then losing it. And so that’s what we’re highly focused in is helping build, helping people build sustainable lifestyles so that when they reach those levels of achievement, they sustain them and what’s that look like for you. Yeah, so for me it’s my habits has to do with, you know, basically every single day I have 12 sacred choices.
They’re called that I track and I press into them each and every day. They have to do with some different mindful practices, gratitude practices, exercise, nutrition, those sorts of things. And it’s also about continuing to build and develop relationships along the way to be able to thrive as we continue to ascend. And it also has to do with happiness in my world. When I was younger, I pursued a lot of monetary status, worldly possession type things and it led me to a really dark and unhappy place and through, you know, basically hitting my rock bottom about four years ago and having to start all over in my life after I took a really hard exit from a real estate investment venture I was building and I just had to start over and it really brought me into this place where I realised that the most important thing to me in my life is my faith and my relationships and my happiness and because of that, those are the things that I prioritise each and every day.
Well, I did notice that you’ve got some relationship management stuff in your profile, but it’s like a slight comedic question based on the socials, are dead lifts part of your habits?
Yeah, totally. So actually, I hadn’t lifted weights like that in over a year and I had actually been just doing a lot of different bio hacking practices and actually that was with one of my best friends he’s an up and coming musician And yeah, I just, I hadn’t done it in forever. So we threw like 345 pounds on, so I think, you know, whatever about 150 kg and I just went ahead and gave it a pole and yeah, so exercise is part of my habits. I do believe that in order to master our mind, we must master our body and through the mastery of body and mind, we can actually master our soul as well.
Cool. So what have you got to share on relationship management because you said it was one of the most important things for you?
Yeah, so relationship management, the thing that I like to always encourage people in is be very intentional and to be focused in again. What I mentioned about kingdom entrepreneurship earlier is be focused on adding value, you know, it’s kind of like you could call it fortunate or unfortunate. One of the realities is that human beings prioritise self-interest, you know, oftentimes we’re looking at what we can get out of the situation or from people or things and when we can actually flip that model and we can actually just focus on adding value to other people’s lives and we can become that person. That’s that dot connector, you know, that’s one of my daily mantra is is that I’m a dock connector and I connect just for the sake of connection. I connect people and resources for the sake of connection regardless of what’s in it for me. And when we become that giver and we become that value adding person, everybody wants to bring things to us, you know, and it’s also not doing it with like the underhanded manipulative mindset of like I’m going to do this for this person and then they’re going to owe me no, it’s just about going out and doing things for people each and every day and cultivating relationships because I’m sure as you’re well aware of your listeners are well aware that by the time we actually need to call in a favour, it’s already too late. If the relationship is not cultivated and a lot of people hit people up as though they’re interested to build a relationship when really they just want to get something from them.
So what we find is that in regard to relationship management, when we can just focus on adding value to each and every relationship that we’re in, that things will be available and we will manifest things that we need and people will be actually reaching out to us asking us how they could help us make our dreams reality. And do you apply that to your personal relationships as well? Yeah, most definitely. That’s where I’m actually, I applied the most I applied to most of my personal relationships, as I mentioned before, I had this big breakthrough a few years back when I had hit rock bottom and I real ised that, you know, we’ve all heard the saying that we’re the some of the five people we interact with most, and I just really, really became very intentional and very specific with the people that I wanted to be in my life. The five people I wanted to interact with most, and just the people that I’m able to hang out and have fun with, because at the end of the day, you know, we can build businesses, we can make money, we can generate revenue, we can do all these things, but if there’s not a greater purpose behind it and it’s not leading us to happiness and being around the people we want to be around, what’s the point?
You know, I mean, there’s a lot of people in this world who have achieved incredible achievements in their lifetime, They’ve made tons of money, they’ve done all these things and they can’t stand themselves, you know, they can hardly look at themselves in the mirror, they can’t sleep at night. And for me, I don’t know about you, but you know, to shave just earlier this morning, I had to look in the mirror to shave my face, you know, and I enjoy looking in the mirror and being happy with what I see and practicing integrity each and every day, being integral with my word, with myself and with others and those dead lifts help, right? Yes, sir, they do.
There was a phrase – I think it’s your profile and I mean, I think we could probably spend the episode on this particular sentence, but it depends on what you’re context is, I suppose. So the phrases that you have done or do transformational turnarounds, business wise and rapidly scaled exits. So you know, I tend to enjoy those kind of stories the most when I speak to people because it’s just so much that you can learn from those types of stories, if there’s anything spring to mind there that you think would be worthwhile sharing?
Sure. So in regard to transformational turnarounds, you know, the biggest thing to look at and one of the first things that we address is corporate culture. You know, the culture of a company determines so much of what’s even possible for that company to accomplish. And then the other big piece of that is the team within the culture. And often times, you know, when we come into a situation where we’re doing a turnaround, you know, we have to do a complete culture reset and as part of that, we need to help people get on to the next best thing for them in their life because oftentimes they are an anchor to the company and the company is an anchor to them. And so first and foremost it has to do with people that ties into the next thing I was going to share in regard to a rapidly scaled exit. You know, first and foremost, we have to have a solid team around us. It’s, there’s a saying, I’m not sure who said it, I think it’s attributed to people like John Maxwell and such, It’s that focus in building the people and the people will build your business. And I think oftentimes we get, you know, as a founder CEO leader in an entrepreneurial environment, we’re thinking more so about what we can do, how we can impact things more and grow the business when in fact we need to do, like what I was talking about earlier, we need to actually build the culture that’s going to attract the a players that’s going to allow us to not only achieve that high level of success but continue to grow it and scale it.
And oftentimes when venture capitalists and angel investors and such are looking at investing in an idea, they will invest more in a crappy idea with a solid team, right then the other way around then the most phenomenal idea with a crappy team because they know that, that that great team, that strong team could take a mediocre idea and really execute on it, but there’s nothing that’s going to help the great idea with the crummy team. Yeah, I really like that one I’d heard before from an individual perspective, you kind of have to be the person in order to get the thing and you know, you’re not trying to get the thing before you become that person, it’s like cart before the horse stuff, but I hadn’t heard it applied to the team and I think that’s quite, can be quite valuable for someone who is looking for a particular outcome, where if they just work on developing their team, then again, your team will be the thing which will help you get that outcome.
So very much totally, yeah, that’s in line with the saying be do have right, A lot of people think the world operates as have to be like if I had this, I could do that, I could be this, when in fact it’s not that, it’s what you just said, that we must be what we’re supposed to be and then we will do what we’re supposed to do and then we will have what we’re supposed to have. Yeah, I like to, I’ve used it before, but I like to use the earl nightingale example where he says thinking any other way is like the man who sits in front of the fire and says, first you give me heat and then I’ll add the wood, right?
I love that. So, you mentioned the real estate painful exit. I only ask because I think that we tend to learn more by losing than we do by winning. And I also think that if you can share something which would save someone some pain, I think that that tends to be highly beneficial. So would you like to share anything around that?
Yes, most definitely. And in fact this is actually what I love to talk about the most. You know, it’s great to talk about accolades and achievements and successes. However, just like you mentioned, we learned so much more from our failures than from our successes. And I was very fortunate to study under a legendary gentleman named Dr Fred Kisner at Loyola Marymount and he actually programmed us with the saying that failure is success and you know, in regard to life experiences and things that we go through. I don’t know that there’s anything that I could say that would save people from pain, but there are things that I could help share with people to help encourage resilience and pressing forward in the face of failure. You know, one of my favourite quotes is from Thomas Edison. He says, you know, I didn’t fail 10,000 times to invent the light bulb, I’ve just found 10,000 ways that wouldn’t work, right? And at the same time, you know, just being totally frank and honest here, you know, after I took that bad beat, it took me a little while to come back from it.
You know, when you get really beat down and you lose everything, I mean it can be sometimes tough to come back and come back from that, you know, there there’s negative self-talk that can be in there, there’s questioning and doubting ourselves that can be in there and it’s just really a good opportunity for us to press within and get answers within as I was talking about earlier and you know, again failure is success. And when we can see it is that that’s when we can win. And a lot of this has to do with what we just talked about a moment ago of the types of people that we have around us, right? Because when we have a circle that understands that failure is success, then they’re going to be very encouraging to us as we encounter that failure. You know, whether it’s a mentor, whether it’s somebody on your board of advisors, whether it’s a friend or family member, it’s very important to have a circle of people that have this common belief because if not, you know, if let’s say we’re hanging out with our friends and we’re talking about our failure and they just want to ridicule us and make fun of us well, you know, okay, that’s fine.
You know, we could all have a laugh here and there and joke around, but at the end of the day, if we’re leaving those interactions and we’re really questioning what happened and the things that led us to our failure, it’s actually can be detrimental to encouraging us to continue to persevere and move forward. So, you know, in regard to failure, I always encourage people fail fast, fail often. It was back around the end of 2011, I was living in Brisbane Australia and my business partner and I were incubating several concepts and basically what we figured out was that, you know, we would take like weeks and months to come up with a business plan and then we would actually like go to do the plan and then like day one hour one plans out the window, like nothing worked. It was a complete failure and it’s like, okay, now let’s really figure out what the plan is. So basically we came up with this concept of like, all right, cool. Whenever we want to try a new business model or new business idea, we’re just going to rush it and we’re just gonna go ahead and execute on the idea right now and just mess it up completely right out of the gate and just get that failure out of the way and then we’ll sit down and make the plan based on our initial failures.
So you know, just want to encourage your listeners and you know, no matter what is happening to fail, fast fail often and to learn from your failures, there is a difference of failing and repeating the same mistake over and over versus failing and actually being self-aware in analysing what’s going on and what are the things that led to that failure and how we can use that to get to success.
Great answer. It does make me think I might be reading into it with your example, but it does make me think about generally speaking, I 100% agree with the failure is feedback or failure as success type of thinking, but I think that there are very few exceptions where actually it can be harmful. And if I take an absolutely extreme example, apply that to a brain surgeon. You really don’t want him to fail often before he gets to success. Or the monetary example of that is like a big property deal. Let’s say you only do so many every year and you risk loads and you just look at it as feedback. Well, that can financially ruin you. So does that apply to you or what do you think about that?
Yeah, you bring up a great point in there and this is, you know, what I refer to as the dichotomy of life. You know, anything taken to the extreme, you know, could be harmful or not beneficial. I have a funny saying that I live by and that’s, you know, excess is okay. Even excess is okay, in moderation, right? And, you know, in regard to the brain surgeon, more than likely they fail the whole bunch throughout their education and their practicing to get to that place where they are that expert and they can succeed and you’re exactly right. You know, you’re not gonna want them to fail and have to learn the hard way that way, you know, in regard to a real estate deal. Same thing there. You know, you would hope that one would hope that they’ve had several failures throughout their life that led them to the place where they are aware of the fact that, okay, I really don’t want to fail at this. This could be detrimental if I do fail at it, and so then we’ll take the necessary precautions ahead of time. You know, also in the investment realm, it has to do with risk tolerance.
And again, this could be potentially a controversial statement to make. However, you know, let’s say a person did do a real estate deal and they did lose a bunch of money out of it, you know, they could actually potentially learn more from that experience than a four year university degree. So, you know, if you look at it like that, and you say, you know, what’s the average cost of, of a four year degree versus, you know, how much you potentially could lose it in a real estate deal. You know, here in the US, it’s up in, you know, several $100,000 to get a college degree nowadays from pretty much anywhere. And not to say that it’s a good idea to hurry up and rush into a deal, lose your money. That’s not what I’m saying at all. What I am suggesting though, is that to be able to have the positive perspective and no matter how dark things get to know that this too shall pass. And one of the things that I’ve always found exciting is that, you know, at least in a, you know, Western cultures is that you can lose it all and you can still come back from it. And I think a lot of people, they’re so afraid of the fact to even try to begin with that they prevent themselves from even getting there.
There was a phrase I picked up from an Australian guy a while back, you know, when I was down there and you gotta risk it to get the biscuit right, and so we have to be willing to go ahead and take that risk if we want to be able to eat. So, another great answer you mentioned about the college degree, maybe not being as profitable as, or best lesson in terms of relative to a bad property deal. And I was going to say that I find myself to be, um, I think it’s wise to learn from other people’s mistakes, but typically I learn best from my own mistakes. So, um, essentially, if you, if you go through that, it’s the best lesson in terms of, you know, I’m not gonna do that again, type thing. Yeah, totally it does. And in fact, I was listening to John Maxwell at a conference I was at last week and he was talking about this and he basically made the comment of that, you know, and like you said, it’s better to learn from other people’s mistakes because we’ll never live long enough to make all of them ourselves.
Right. However, I do agree with what you’re saying that when there is that emotional connection to the experience and the mistake, the failure that we personally had it actually, I believe that deep seats into our grey matter in our brains and it actually can have a stronger impact. So, um, I do agree with you there that, you know, when we go through it ourselves, we’re going to remember, we’re going to learn, you know, like one of the great examples I like to share with people is most people don’t remember what it was like to learn to walk. And this goes into the failure example we talked about earlier, you know, most people don’t remember how many times they fell down and had to get back up in order for their body to learn the coordination and their nervous system to work properly in order to navigate a three D. Environment, right? However if, if when we were learning to walk, our parents made fun of us, oh you suck, you’re never gonna walk, you’re a terrible kid and you’re never gonna get this, Guess what? We probably would have given up, right? But you know, the parents are like, hey, you got it, you know, try again, buddy. Here we go, you did two steps that time, try once more, you know?
And so that goes into the example, we were talking about learning from failure and what you just talked about actually experiencing it yourself, you know, you can’t learn to walk by, just watching somebody else learn how to walk. You actually have to go through it and fall on your face yourself in order for your body to learn how to navigate. Was it on your socials that I saw? You can’t do push ups by reading books. Is that one of yours maybe? I don’t know. I’m not sure. I’m very familiar with that phrase though, you know, and it has to do with exercise and fitness and habits, right? You know, you could read books like for instance, we talked about Brendan Bashar a while ago. You could read his high performance habits book and you can understand the HP six, the six habits that all high performance practice. But if you don’t actually do them, you’re not really gonna get anywhere. So what are your thoughts on work ethic? Yeah. Work ethic. This is probably one of the most important things that will determine what a person accomplishes in their life. And for me, I was very, very lucky and fortunate I grew up wrestling from the age of five years old And then at the age of 14 I got a job working for some local farmers in this small little farming community that I grew up in.
So I really developed early on this ability to understand that work, like when the sun is up, you work and you work until the job is done, it doesn’t matter if the sun goes down, you keep on working. And so I really, really have prided myself and having a tenacious work ethic and I encourage people to really press into this and to develop this because it has to do with effort. And the only way that a person can know how much effort they’re giving. You were talking about the uh social post about me dead lifting from the other day. You know, I made this comment about effort is between you and you only you can know how hard you’re actually going and only you can know actually how much more you can give. And the key in here is to be aware of as well, that the human mind actually, it tries to trick us. It wants to find the path of least resistance and frankly, it has the tactical advantage over us because it knows all of our weaknesses. You know, and the body will try to try to tell us it wants to quit as well. And so strength comes in being able to build our endurance and build our discipline to be able to impart our will on our machine, here are human machine to get the job done.
Something that, you know, it was a challenge for me in the beginning when I was in my early twenties, building my first few businesses that I just didn’t quite understand why the people didn’t want to give as much or work as hard. And of course if you’re the founder or you’re the owner of a company, nobody’s going to give as much as you do, nobody’s going to care as much as you do it. It’s your baby, You know. But in terms of work ethic, I was just shocked at the amount of people that they were like, Hey, it’s 5:00, it’s time to go home. And I’m like, well like this project is due to the client today. If it’s not done, we don’t eat, you know, and, and there’s a saying here in America, you know, it rolls downhill right, you know, And so like as the founder of the company, if my butt is on the line, but getting this project done on time and then a person works in the company and it’s their responsibility to complete it. I don’t really care if it’s five o’clock or not. And I mean that ended like an encouraging way. I’m not trying to sound like a crazy, you know, like, the person that wants people to work all these insane hours, but what I’m talking about is having the work ethic to get the job done to completion.
You know, like people would come to me in the beginning, they’d be like, oh well I couldn’t do it or I’m sorry. They would say the job isn’t done. And I say, well, I mean what’s going on here? And it’s not that the job isn’t done is that you didn’t complete it right? So work ethic is mindset and work ethic is one of the best practices and I will say habits not skills but habits that we can practice on a daily basis to lead us to success. Have you got any inspirations around work ethic at all? Yeah. So uh one of my great, here we go, one of my favourite inspirations right here, get after it by none other than the man. Mr Jacko willing, right, don’t wait forever. Don’t plan forever bust that door, go get some. I love Jack, oh I love all of his messaging. Uh I listened to a lot of his stuff, his podcast I have for years. Another guy that I like to listen to is David Goggins who’s going to carry the boats in the long, which probably people are familiar with now, those people are not for everyone, they are definitely a specific branding and type of messaging.
However, I found them to be very, very helpful in building work ethic and understanding what’s important about building work ethic. And actually there was this really cool thing that I discovered about a year and a half ago, there’s this DJ named Akira the Don. And if you search Akira the Don Jacko or Akira the Don Goggins, you’ll find these really cool mix tapes that this guy made where he took audio clips of their interviews and then he put like beats behind him. And so then literally I would just play these audios like all day throughout my day and it’s just like, you know, Jack was preaching on, you know, discipline equals freedom and dragons is you know, preaching on, you know, being your true self and being able to push your body further than you ever thought you could go. And actually those are like two of my favourite things to listen to. you can find them I think on YouTube and Spotify and Apple music and such, but um, those are some hacks in terms of building a positive work ethic mindset and really, you know, it also goes deeper than that.
It goes down into someone’s core fundamental beliefs and what someone sees as the path to their life. you know, if a person is like, oh, I don’t need work ethic, well then they’re never going to see value in it and they’re never going to want to expand and explore that. If a person can understand that the habit of work ethic is something that will lead them to their goals, then they’re going to be very interested in that and want to press into that and one other person that I really have enjoyed over the years, and I really love listening to is Dr Eric Thomas, pain is temporary. It may last for a minute or an hour or day or even a year, but eventually it will subside. He’s known as et de hip hop preacher, he’s like the number one motivational speaker in the world and he is somebody who is constantly inspired me to up my work ethic. He always talks about, you know, like, you will not work harder than me talks about. You know, there’s one clip where he’s like, you know, your parents might have more money, you might have gone to a better school, you might have had a better start in life, but you will not outwork me.
And one final person in this regard, who I love to talk about is Dwayne Johnson, I love this guy, you know, he’s one of the heart. He claims to be the hardest worker in the room. I always loved him, I loved him when I was a kid, I would watch him, You know, I was never that into WWF wrestling, but I just loved the rock because of the sayings he had, and one of my favourite sayings still to this day that he used to always tell people is know your role and shut your mouth, know your damn role and shut your damn mouth. You know, and I think a lot more people could get a lot further in life if we just understood our role. We’ve just got to work on our work ethic and shut our mouth.
So well, thanks for that. I was doing my best not to lead you because David Goggins and Jacko have been a recurring theme in relation to when I talk to people. And I picked up with your profile where the phrase came up where it’s uncommon amongst uncommon totally and I thought there might be a good separation here and they have to ask James.
Totally, Jacko has written some kids books. He’s written three kids books I think. And I’ve got them, I read those to my little one. Yeah, My brother does that with his children as well. You know, being able to impart those messages into a Children of a young age and help them develop a work ethic and discipline. And one quick thought to share on Goggins, you know, one of the things that resonated the most for me with Goggins was I had a very similar childhood that he did. I actually grew up in a home where my father was extremely physically abusive to myself and my siblings and at the time as a child, I didn’t really understand that. And again, here’s another great controversial statement I’m going to make. I didn’t really get it when I was younger, but now as an adult, I’m actually really glad for every single beatdown that I took as a child because it built me into this resilient person that’s not afraid to go anywhere and try anything. You know, I basically, you know, when I was a kid, I was five years old, I was whatever, four, five maybe. And, you know, my father was like a 6 foot tall man, you know, and so it was like, I was, this monster would attack me throughout my week.
So then when I would go to wrestling tournaments on Saturdays, it was like, oh, you’re cool bro, I’m about to destroy you, like you’re my size. I got this, you know, I really, that’s one of things that are really connected within Goggins story and I enjoyed about his book can’t hurt me because when we can build this resilience and build as he talks about the callous in our mind, that way we can build ourselves to be unstoppable. And by no means am I encouraging physical abuse by no means am I saying like that it’s OK or any of that, you know, if somebody’s experiencing childhood trauma, it’s very, very challenging to come back from and it’s something that I still work on to this day, you know, something that never goes away from us, however, has a lot to do with our perception and the way that we view things in mind set and a lot of my life, unfortunately I lived in a victim mindset where you know, hey this thing happened to me and so because of that now I’m that and it really became a powerful experience to me when I stepped into the place of accepting responsibility for my life and saying okay, you know that thing happened to me in the past but I don’t need to carry that with me and that does not have to determine what happens in my life.
Now I can actually go to work on myself and resolve these things and actually become a better part of myself. And I can actually press into the fact that most likely those things happened because I’m actually meant to help encourage other people to come through those types of experiences. Well I’m sorry that you had to go through that. I think it’s great that you can turn a and what is a negative into a positive. And I’ve mentioned this frequently. I mean, I, like, I think you’re saying as well you wouldn’t advocate for that kind of behaviour. But in some form of adversity at a young age can be beneficial in terms of, if you can use those lessons going forward. Totally, I guess just not too much. Yeah, I mean that’s kind of like the joke I’ve heard of, you know, being a parent is like, how do you mess your kids up just enough, but not too much, right? And briefly, you mentioned the mixes on YouTube. I actually used to run to one of those, I think there’s a 45 minute one Goggins one, which has a beat as is one of his speeches and I actually used to listen to that one so many times.
So I think we probably listened to the same stuff. Yes. Probably one of the reasons we’ve connected as you know, we’re in that same similar vibration pattern. And it’s funny you mention that because that’s what I would do to, I would listen to him a lot when I’d be working out. So when he broke the pull-out record, however many thousands of pull ups, I think it was like 17,000 pull ups in order to break a pull-out record. He listened the whole time he listened to Rocky. Yeah, on repeat. Yeah, Yeah. I had heard that and you know, that has to do a lot with anchors and psychological triggers and activating peak state, right? Because he talks about God, talks a lot about how, you know, he was able to get himself jacked in these situations where it was the worst situation and he actually thrived on the fact that everybody else was miserable. And he talks about, you know, by him being the person that just went a little bit more and kept going a little bit further. Other people would look at and say, wow, that guy is still going and then that would inspire them. Did you enjoy – does too much guardians mean anything to you?
Um, no. In in his book, where is that? I think it’s his third go round of buds training or something and they get some of them to do this horrible task. And like Goggins is like ready psyching himself up for it. And they say you enjoy this too much, you’re not allowed to get. So he’s like, he, I think it’s like taking souls or whatever you are .Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean he’s incredible. And you know, again, what you had talked about earlier about going too far like with failure in terms of, you know, the surgeon and real estate investment deal. We have to be aware too, you know, like not everybody is Goggins and there’s only one Goggins and the type of people who are capable of actually doing what he’s done is very, very small fraction of the population of the world. So it’s being able to distil, you know, what is the healthy message in there and how to push ourselves Without destroying ourselves. And the reason I’m saying this is I actually did the Goggles challenge in March of this year. You know, the four miles every four hours for 48 hours. And I have several injuries from you know, athletics and sports as well as I had an injury that was exacerbated uh in January of 2020 from the judiciary tournament I competed in And uh I was just like, you know what I need to just prove to myself.
I knew I could do it but I was like I need to prove myself, I could do this. And so I was able to run the first four rounds so 16 miles and after 16 miles, my left knee was so swollen, I could hardly bend my leg. So I said Okay, I don’t need to just destroy myself and cause a permanent injury here. And I walked the other 32 miles and here we are. It’s almost July and I’m still doing recovery work to try to repair my uh so as and my hip flexors and my quad and my knee and you know, I say that stuff to just be aware of that, it’s great to press into these messages and to push ourselves further than we’ve ever gone and build that resilience of work ethic. However, also being aware of not putting ourselves in a position that’s going to jeopardise our health permanently. You know, he talks about, he loves pain, he loves being in pain. Um, and there’s a guy named campaign, so I’m pretty sure you’re familiar with, you know, knowing Goggins where he says if Cameron Hanes, okay, he’s an ultra-marathoner and like Bow Hunter guy, him and Goggins are buddies, but he says if, if you never want to be lonely then just become friends with pain and then you’ll never be lonely.
So it’s being aware of what is a healthy amount of pain to get us to upgrade while not being so much pain that we can’t get out of bed in the morning and it’s detrimental to our health. A bit of balance. Good point. I think you might be in a kind of a minority position of people who have experience around incubating start-ups. I don’t think that I get to speak to many people who have that experience. So have you got any, I don’t know, advice around that particular area. Sure. So, you know, the first thing I’d like to share is, is what I mentioned earlier that uh my Australian partner and I have discovered and that is just go ahead and fail. Like give your concept to try and fail at it and see what went well and what didn’t and what you can improve. The other thing is, is to be focused on adding value and value creation in order to generate cash flow and to be revenue positive. A lot of people have a lot of great ideas for start-up. They want to get going in a service or a product that they want to provide and they get inundated and lost in the fold of doing the things that they think are fun doing the things that they think that they like to do and they don’t have.
The focus in cash is king. If you don’t have any cash flow. I mean cash flow is some people say it’s like a blood infusion, like an IV injection, right? I say it’s actually more like air, you know, you can’t go without air, you can go without food and you can last for a while without water. But if you don’t have air, we’re talking a matter of minutes here. And so cash flow is to a business as air is to the body and you know, something else that I just like to share is that, you know, go ahead and just try something and fail. So many people are afraid to take that chance, I mentioned earlier, you gotta risk it to get the biscuit and there’s a really cool book named psycho cybernetics that you and your listeners may be aware of by a guy named Dr Maxwell malts. It was written many years ago and I think like the thirties or forties, and it’s where a lot of the modern day, like mental visualisation practices and such come from and it has to do with how the brain functions as a survival mechanism. And one of the things he talks about in there is that when you’re going to take a risk, let’s say you were going to play roulette, which I don’t encourage that all of that is the worst game of the world and I don’t encourage gambling, but let’s just say you were going to play roulette, okay, when you do your worrying, you should do your worrying before you place your bet, do all of your worrying and considering before you place the bet and then once you put the bed on the table and the ball goes on the wheel, you don’t need to worry anymore because there’s nothing you can do at that point that’s going to change the outcome, right?
So when people are talking about incubating a start-up or getting an idea going on, you know, do your worrying in your risk evaluation beforehand and then once you get in the saddle and you start writing, just ride, just keep your head down and keep writing. And in terms of incubating ideas and businesses actually, there’s something I’m working on that I’m gonna be pushing out later this year, it’s basically going to be working title is like free idea Friday and I’m basically gonna start this YouTube series where I literally just go online and just start sharing business ideas with people and I like its whoever wants to take it and run, but they can’t take it run with it and I just encourage people to think outside the box, you know, if you have a day job currently and you have an income stream, you don’t have to quit your income stream in order to start your business. I always encourage people to go ahead and trial and error while you are okay and you still can, you know, you got your, your essentials covered with your daily income. You know, there’s plenty of time in the day to get off of social media and to invest that time in starting a business. You know, Brendan talks a lot about how, I think he says something to the effect of like 20 minutes a day on social media adds up to an entire month of work week productivity.
So 40 hour weeks throughout the year will actually be taken from our life just with 20 minutes a day on social media. Now, you start to multiply that out. If you’re doing an hour a day on social media, we’re talking three months stuck in an entire quarter of the year of being able to achieve our goals is taken off the table. So I just encourage people if you want to try something, go for it, you know, the other, the most, one of the most important things you can do is align yourself with a mentor, align yourself with an advisor. If you have the ability to hire a coach, hire a coach. Obviously I’m biased because I’m a coach, but that’s not why I say that. I say that because anybody who’s achieved anything great has had a coach, you know, Michael Jordan, he won all the championships with Phil Jackson, who by the way, also is the person that coach Kobe Bryant to win all those championships. So there’s definitely a correlation and having a coach to be able to bring the best out in us and push us to achieve our best. It’s not very often I get to speak to someone who has also done psycho cybernetics. Yeah. I have a theory which is, I don’t know this to be true, but I think that NLP was essentially inspired by Maxwell Maltz’s work.
Have you listened to the Dan Kennedy version of psycho cybernetics? No, I listened to a version. I’m sorry, I read a version of that. It was like psycho cybernetics and sales. It was like a, so I did the original version and there was like an application of IT, foreign sales, I think it’s like a, a six hour YouTube video or something, but it’s um, it’s like, it was modern ised at the time. But yeah, it’s great and I can see where the inspirational speaker stuff would, can see, you’d be great at that. Have you got anything to share around your speaker status?
Yeah. It’s something that I’ve actually felt called to do my entire life growing up throughout my life in my early entrepreneurial career, I would encounter people whether it was, you know, at the airport on an airplane, somewhere in public, just anywhere at a networking event and people would always ask, what are you, some kind of motivational speaker and that’s it. Well, I mean, not really, but I mean I, I aspired to be and um, so for myself right now, this is an area in an arena where I’m really pressing into with a lot of effort and focus this year.
It’s actually my dream to have that be the main thing that I’m doing and it’s actually one of the reasons why I love doing podcasts, interviews so much because it’s sort of a form of that. And I just encourage that if there is anyone out there that feels like that they’re called to do this type of work to, to press into this, to look into it, to go and study the people who are the masters, you know, the less browns and um, you know, Tony Robbins and Brandenburg Chords and these people who are large speakers, right? And study them. And also I would encourage people that, you know, the world is changing. It used to be whatever 20 years ago, a person could make a life and a business Justin speaking nowadays, it’s not really how it works nowadays is that you need to be a guru in something and then you are the speaker in that subject matter, right? So that’s why I’ve been so focused in building my coaching business because quite frankly, if I had the option, I would just speak, I wouldn’t coach. however, that’s not the path that’s going to lead me to the widest audience and give me the most momentum.
Being a coach is actually the way that can, can be the pathway to building the speaking. And it’s also a way to add more value and to maxim ise our opportunities. You know, if you’re a platform speaker and you just stand up and speak, you might make whatever a few 1000 upwards of 10 2030 K for a keynote speech if you’re really, really good. Okay. However, if you’re a coach and you have programs and you’re an author and you have books to sell, you have all these other opportunities to generate revenue, then now speaking becomes more of a marketing mechanism than it is an actual revenue stream. Right? And I just encourage people, you know, you talked about NLP, we talked about psycho cybernetics. It’s pretty cool that we have a lot of things in common and it’s definitely an indicator to me that we’re in a similar vibration pattern, similar frequency and which is why we’ve encountered each other and especially in regard to your list centres people that are listening to this, they also share a similar vibration pattern and frequency. And I just encourage people are looking into this. There’s plenty of programs available. I actually went through last year the Eric Thomas game changer certification program to become ETA certified speaker. And that was just so awesome and so surreal because even still to this day like twice a month I get to get on a phone call with ET. And his business partner and every Tuesday morning I can get on a phone call with his business partner, CJ who’s like the mastermind behind his brand and the person they call like the Phil Jackson of speakers. Like he’s basically the like the Phil Jackson of speaker coaches. So it’s pretty cool to be able to have access to these guys and to have penetrated their inner circle and to be getting these downloads directly from them. Every principle is a promise Eric Thomas. I’m not sure. But I really wanted to say when you were talking about Les Brown, it’s possible young man. It’s possible. Yeah. Yeah, totally. I mean I love less. He’s got such an amazing thing. He’s one of things that he talks about lessons is that, you know, you don’t get out of life what you want, you get out of life who you are and this goes back way back to what we were talking about the you know when we’re a good person and we provide value and we are making the world a better place, That’s the lifestyle we’re going to live and that’s the level we’re going to live like that.
What are your goals, James.
Oh so for me, my goal is – this is probably gonna sound crazy. My big lifetime goal is that I want to help to rewrite the way that business is done around the world. I want to encourage people to understand what kingdom entrepreneurship and kingdom leadership and kingdom business is and I want to encourage more people to actually create healthy sustainable businesses that do good in the world. One of the points that I had left out earlier when talking about what is the kingdom entrepreneur and is at the core of our messages that actually contributing to a greater cause. at least it’s been my experience here in America. Oftentimes in business conversations in boardrooms and these sorts of things. It’s kind of taboo to talk about spiritual beliefs or spirituality or supernatural things and I want to actually be able to rewrite the way that the world does business and I don’t know that this will happen in my lifetime, but I’m definitely committed to giving everything I have each and every day that I’m blessed with the be alive on this Earth to continue to move this ball forward and get the word out to more people.
So that’s my big goal. My other big goal is to encourage and raise up the next generation of entrepreneurs, you know, that’s part of rewriting the way business is done and the way that I intend to do that is through being a positive example of being a positive role model. You know, the best way to influence and impact people is just do it and be like to just be it and do it right, because then when we’re that lead by example person that’s very attractive, you know, we’ve talked about Jacko, we’ve talked about God, it’s these are not guys that are just getting on a microphone and talking about doing stuff. You know, they’ve been doing it for decades, and then they get the microphone and they talk about it and people like, oh, wow, this is good stuff and I believe you because I can see you’ve been doing it. You know, one of the things that I love about Jacko as he posts the watch picture every morning on his social media, you know, and it’s like this this isn’t a guy who at 42 years old, decided to wake up at 4:30 in the morning, you know, he’s been waking up at 4:30 in the morning for decades, and then now we’re finding out about it, you know, and I think that a lot of people have it backwards. They want to try to create this image online with social media and stuff, but they’re not actually being that person.
And if a person could just be that person, and then the camera comes on you, well then it’s easy to show up and have the best content because you’re just being that person. So one of my goals is to just be a positive role model and this may sound a little bit different than most people’s goals. One of my other big goals is to actually be able to teach people how to sell and build businesses based on truth. That was one of my big revelations that I experienced when I came when I had my rock bottom moment for years back, was that basically I had been telling white lies and stretching the truth and manipulating people to get sales done my entire life. And then I got lied to cheated and manipulated and I got all of my medicine saved up and compacted and, and, you know, to the n degree in one experience. And I realised, wow, I never want to feel this again. And I never want to be a part of having somebody else feel like this again. So I just, you know, it’s one of my goals is to be integral with my word to myself and others and to be able to sell by only telling the truth. And I’m sure as you and your listeners know that stuff, you know, if you’ve got 50 of these products left over and you’re trying to sell when you, hey, we only have three left, you know, you want to get that deal done, create that scarcity.
It’s a lot more difficult to just be totally honest. However, that’s when we’ll be able to operate in our flow and that’s what we’ll be able to operate what I call with the grain in life. Oftentimes we, as individuals, we pretend to be something, we’re not to get what we think we want. And then it’s constantly in conflict with who we are because we’re not that thing. So those are a few of my goals, Earl calls that the boomerang. So how, how long will it take before the boomerang comes around and hits you in the face? Have you heard that one? I haven’t, but it’s exactly what we’re talking about here, you know, and it’s almost like it’s a sigh. It’s a side blade boomerang, You know, it just come back and I’ll chop your head clean off. Well, you mentioned the first part around having a cause. Do you have any philanthropy side of your business? Yeah, totally. So, um, we actually contribute a significant portion of our revenues to an organization called the Missionary Support Network. And this is a non-profit that was founded to be able to help missionaries recover from their mission trip.
You know, there’s a lot of transition that needs to happen and healing that needs to take place when these warriors and soldiers have been out there on the front line battling and it has to do a lot with battling in the spiritual realm and also battling in the human realm. And there is a big need for people to be able to actually come back and have a facility and have a place that they can actually go to and just relax and chill out and receive prayer and healing and just have time with our creator and be able to reset themselves before they get injected back into the First World living. So we’re a big proponents of missionary Support Network. Um, and there’s another organization that’s on our radar that we are planning to begin contributing to this year. It’s an organization called the deliver Fund. And the deliver fund is actually founded by a gentleman who is, his name is evading me at the moment. He’s like a former Green Beret and former CIA operative. And the purpose of this non-profit is actually to go after and they are targeting the actual human traffickers. So there’s a lot of organisations that exist to help people that have been trafficked and help them recover from that.
And his whole mission is like, hey, you know, that’s all good and well to help people who have been harmed. But we don’t want to focus there. We want to actually cut the snake’s head off, right? And so this company, he’s a very exciting guy. They’re actually, they have a lot of Things at their disposal that they’re actually being able to hunt down and eliminate these human traffickers. And uh, I forget what year it is by 2025 or whatever it is. They’re basically making a statement. They’re going to have eliminated 80% of the human traffickers in the world. So that’s a cause that I’m very passionate about and that we are working within our team internally to get everyone on board with and get aligned with and be able to begin contributing to that. And I just want to say here too quickly, it’s not just about monetary contributions. You know, there’s a lot of other things other than money that we can contribute to give back. And as an entrepreneur and as a person in general, the most expensive thing we can share with anyone is our time because that’s the one finite resource that’s totally limited. So I just want to encourage people that, you know, you can go and volunteer because of Covid in the lockdown situation that happened.
We came away from a lot of the things that we were doing. Um, but we’re getting ready to actually be able to go back out. One of things we used to do and one of my former companies was we would go like, um, it was like once a week or once every other week and we would just stuff bags of cookies to give out to homeless people, you know, and these types of things. So just being able to give back to people and just even share a moment, you know, oftentimes with the downtrodden and people who are sick and hurting, Just speaking a positive word over them could have so much more impact than handing them a $20 bill, you know, so I just wanna encourage listeners to find ways to give back you know, focusing gratitude and things that we’ve been blessed with and how we can actually share those with other people.
Well, congratulations on all that work. I think that’s all great stuff and I certainly think the second goal that you mentioned about being a positive example, I think you’ve already got that. So thank you’re done there, appreciate it, James. Where’s the best place for people to find you?
Yeah, so one of the best places for people to find us is on our website awareness elevation.com. If your listeners want to go to awarenesselevation.com/time T I M. E. We have a really cool little exercise available as a free download. It’s something to help increase self-awareness and efficiency and it helps to address the top two excuses that everybody has shared in life and they are that I don’t have enough time or I don’t have enough money, right? And you know, we’re all guilty of this and oftentimes it’s not even the real reason why we give that excuse, but we give it. So there’s a really cool little template in there that listeners can go and download for free and it’s basically just a schedule to write down what we’re doing every 30 minutes throughout the day. And we encourage people to do this for about 3-5 days and then after you’ve done that self-assessment, do some self-discovery. And the reason why we talk about that is because one of the best ways, in fact, in our experience, the best way to increase self-awareness is self-assessment and self-discovery – because you could ask me to tell you some things about you, Thomas, but you know yourself better than anyone else ever could and if I try to share things that I observe about you as humans, we have an ego and we have pride and so oftentimes we can get defensive when other people try to tell us or share things about ourselves.
So through doing an exercise like this and then actually just evaluating ourselves, we can remove that defensive mechanism and be able to upgrade the other places. They can find us is on Instagram social media as you mentioned, awareness_elevation and we’ve got a YouTube channel that’s just budding under the same name awareness elevation that people connect with us on there. And finally on LinkedIn, you can find me at linkedin.com/in four/James F as in foxtrot pile P Y L E.
James, thank you very much.
Yeah. My pleasure. Thank you for having me.