Passion Struck with John R. Miles - Stop Being A Visionary Arsonist and Self-Sabotaging Your Dreams w/John R. Miles EP 9

Episode Date: March 12, 2021

In today’s momentum Friday show, John unpacks the “visionary arsonist” concept. So often in our lives, you aim to reach the stars but often you end up burning down your own dreams and preventing yourself from achieving your main goal. As entrepreneurs, we love to innovate. And, we are constantly enamored by every shiny new object that crosses our path. We hate the status quo. And exploring the new and the unknown gives us an adrenaline rush that we find irresistible. However, more often than not, these “shiny new objects” send us on a wild goose chase that only results in loss of time & productivity, and even failure. John shares his many experiences from corporate America to better explain his “visionary arsonist” concept. So, if this is something that resonates with you, and you find yourself lacking conviction and prioritization, tuning in today will particularly help you out. Enjoy!   What You Will Learn in This Show What does it mean to be a visionary arsonist? How to keep your focus and avoid being swayed by every shiny, new object How to build conviction and prioritize wisely And so much more… Follow John R. Miles Here: Website - https://passionstruck.com/ ​Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/passion_struck_life ​ Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/Johnrmiles.c0m ​ Twitter: https://twitter.com/Milesjohnr ​ Medium: https://medium.com/@JohnRMiles John's Website: https://johnrmiles.com/ - John's New eBook - The Passion Struck Framework https://passionstruck.com/coaching/

We get so caught up in wanting to build a bigger or better mouse trap, and we end up miscommunicating it, then we want to change it, then we want to change it again. That by the time we're building that mouse trap, the whole problem that we were trying to solve has shifted completely to something else when we should have remained focused on the problem from beginning to end.

And that's what being a visionary arsonist does. We let all these things around us and inside of us get in the way of us making the progress that we need to make. Welcome to the PassionStruck podcast. My name is John Miles, a former combat veteran and multi-industry CEO, turned entrepreneur and human performance expert. Each week we showcase an inspirational person and message that helps you unlock your hidden potential

and unleash your creativity and leadership abilities. Thank you for spending time with me today and let's get igniting! Welcome to Momentum Friday! Carl Jung was a famous psychiatrist, cycle analyst, and the founder of Analytical Psychology. And he said, your visions become clear only when you can look into your own heart. Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens. And the core idea of the Analytical And the core idea of the analytical psychology movement that he founded was for a better understanding of an individual psyche, one needs to take into consideration the personality type and the power of unconsciousness. And this is a great quote today, the lead us into our episode, where I will talk to you about what it

means to be a visionary arsonist. Before I go into it, I want to just discuss the path that has led us to this point of this podcast season. I started this season off with my origin episode where I discussed how the comfort zone and apathy and showmanship are becoming the same agents that are keeping so many people today away from unlocking and unleashing their passion journeys. And I went into how I want to help the broken, the battered, the bored of the world who regained and reignite that passion. And then in my next episode, I went into how you enthase the brutal reality of your current situation. And I discussed Admiral James Stockdale,

of your current situation. And I discussed Admiral James Stockdale, Medal of Honor winner, and some of his circumstances and related it to what you can learn from him in your own life, and then how to apply it. And then I went into an episode about showing up and how many of us today are not showing up and are daily lives and what that can impact when you don't do it.

And the last episode was on the mosquito principle and why we need to conduct mosquito audits in our life. In today's episode, I want to talk to you about what it means to be a visionary arsonist, how you can recognize it, and the steps you can take to overcome it. Now, let's get igniting. How many of us come up with these great ideas, these futuristic dreams, these momentum journeys that we start only to see that they get stopped in midstream, were redirected, or halted altogether. And why does that continually happen? To so many of us. Well, let me talk about this through the lens of a story. I once worked for a company called

Candelina Marketing. And Catalina at one time was one of the fastest growing companies in the world. And they provided personalized digital advertising in the form of an advertisement or coupon that you would get at the register. And for years, their product stood out in the CPG, consumer package world more than anyone else's because of the readership and results that it derived. But along the way, the company failed to reinvent itself and instead relied on internal manual processes and antiquated systems to get things done

in a world that was becoming more and more digital. And then a competitor emerged of viewpons' ink. And that competitor took a whole concept that Catalina had and started to take it into the digital world. Well during that time, we had a CEO who was brought on board to help revive the company. And he had a great resume. He came from Procter & Gamble, one of the top CPG companies, one of the places many many many leaders have started their career because of the way it ingrained leadership and taught its

employees had to be visionaries and he was responsible for some of the biggest product launches in Procter & Gamble's history. So I was very excited when he joined the company because I thought we had a champion who was going to take us to the next level. And we came up with a roadmap that would get us out of the accidental architecture that had been built over the past 15 to 20 years, that was powering the company. And create a new platform, we were calling Catalina one, that would give us the power to not only make our promotions digital,

but even have more underlying worth from the data we were extracting. But after a while, he started to become known as the elevator CEO. What do I mean by that? Well, as we would come up with new initiatives, suddenly these initiatives would get stopped or redirected or changed, restarted again or we were told

one thing is the next number one priority then 40 hours later it shifted to this is the next priority and then shifted back to why haven't you been working on that other initiative to the healthcare team needs your time, why aren't you focusing there to shifting it here and there. And what I discovered was that the last person who caught his ear on the way up or down that elevator would influence his mindset and he would come in and arson the very ideas that we were trying to implement to take us from point A to point Z on the roadmap. And it had such a disastrous impact because it cost time, it cost energy, it cost motivation, it cost, you know, the confidence that not only the employees had with them but the board had with them and more importantly, the confidence that our

customers, CPG companies, pharmacies, big box retailers, grocery retailers, had in us an our ability to not only catch up but beat this new competitor who had arisen. And how many times that we've seen something like that happen? I can count so many times in my career that I've seen a similar pattern emerge. It happened at lows when I worked there. We had 300 or more different projects that were underway. And I've told this story before, but I just remember one day when I took over the software development organization and I asked one of my peers in the business What he thought was the biggest issue that was facing the success of not only the technology organization

But the success of the company and he said, you know, John. We are absolutely Awesome at building solutions that by the time they hit production are absolutely obsolete. And it was a huge awakening call for me. And so when I went in to do the deep analysis of what was going on, I found that we were being visionary parsiness to our own success. We would take these projects and programs,

multi-million dollar initiatives that started out as having such a positive and profound impact, not only on lows, but on the way we served our customers and even more so in cases, how are we gonna change the entire retail industry as a whole? Only to find that we would go into the monthly or by monthly executive steering committees or go up in front of the CEO and the

senior executive team and have these projects and programs changed repeatedly and exhaustively to their detriment. Scope would be added. Scope would be taken out. Things would change in direction because of a trend that people would see in the marketplace. We would swap vendors mid-screen who were providing the solution. We would change underlying platform solutions.

And ultimately, things that should have been taking us a year or less to develop were taking at times two to three years to get out the door. In essence, we ourselves were visionary, person-ess, to our own success. And how often do we and our personal lives do the same thing? Yet it's so easy for us to look outside of ourselves and blame other things. Blame our bosses, blame our loved ones, blame our kids, blame our friends, blame our situation, blame our schooling,

blame how we grew up, instead of taking accountability for our lives and the actions that we taken them. You see we put so much focus on those external things that we fail to focus on the internal aspects, the philosophical aspects, the core values that we have. And I'm not just talking about actions we're taking to get better. I am also talking about the actions we fail to take. These are behaviors, patterns, vices, obstructions, fears, whatever you want to call them that exist in our lives today. And when we know that they're there, because all of us know when the things

that are there that are bothering us, maybe it's our thoughts when we look in the mirror about our own body image, about how we appear and how disappointed we are in ourselves. Or maybe it's that we feel we're drinking too much, yet we don't do anything about it. We're taking too much weed or whatever it is and we're not dealing with that fact. Or maybe like the last episode, it was those mosquitoes that keep working around us, but we don't do anything about it. Or maybe it's the fact that brutal reality is sitting right there in front of your face, and yet you're failing to act on it. All of those are example of being a visionary arsonist in your own life. And the other side of it is when you do start to take actions,

the way that you blow up that vision mid-stream. You do that by trying to change direction without giving the direction you're taking a chance to work out. You do that by shifting focus. You do that by trying to multitask on too many different things that you lose focus on the main thing. You do that by focusing on what is urgent versus what is important. An episode I covered around the idea of showing up and how we aren't showing up today

because we are so focused on what is urgent, we forget what is important. And this is something I covered in a recent episode where I discussed how Matthew McConaughey showed up. You haven't listened to it, it's a great one. And I go into this point in much more detail. But the bottom line is we are destroying the very credibility in our own passion journey that we are trying to take action on. And it happens all the time. And so I'm going to give you some tips on how you can recognize it. of use and tips on how you can recognize it. So I find that the first way I recognize it in myself is when I set a goal for myself, and then I find at the end of the day, I have

only gotten maybe one thing I wanted to done, but I've completed six or seven other tasks. That weren't necessarily important, but at the time they seemed urgent. And if you keep catching yourself in that pattern, you'll realize that you're being a visionary arsonist to keeping the main thing, the main thing in your life, and that you need to make a more conscious effort to focus on those daily inputs that are getting you closer to your passion journey goal. Are you ready to overcome your fears and start committing yourself to mastery and growth in your life and career? If you are, we're ready to help you.

Go to passionstruck.com slash coaching right now, and you'll be able to download the passionstruck framework and connect with a member of our coaching team. Another way that you could become a visionary arsonist is by recognizing when you are making negative thoughts become your reality about where you are and where you want to go. Now, sometimes negativity can be a good thing, and we need it in our lives. But generally, when we keep consuming our lives with negative thoughts, when we don't give a flip about ourselves, others, relationships, etc. And we let that negativity permeate our lives.

We are becoming a visionary arsonist to it. Another way you can recognize this, and I cover it in the PassionStruct framework, which you can download off the website, is we fail to reach the zone of optimal anxiety. And what we end up doing is we arse in ourselves because we either don't allow enough anxiety into our lives, which doesn't create the burning desire to do more, or we allow ourselves to have so much anxiety that it starts causing us to lose our hair, to lose our focus, to not be able to sleep, to not be the best

person we can be. So one of the most important things that you can achieve, and I'm going to cover this in a future podcast, in detail, is achieving the state of optimal anxiety. And when you find yourself on either side of those curves, you realize that you are becoming a visionary arsonist. And lastly, I would say it's when you keep doing a task and have this goal set out, and then you see something shining on the outside

and you change directions. Or you talk to a friend who doesn't really understand where you're trying to go with your passion journey, and they give you a bit of advice. And instead of just like processing it through, you change directions and try something new. Or you go to a seminar where you hear someone give advice and without playing that through your model,

you change on the dime and take your momentum in a different direction. Now, I'm not saying that every one of those circumstances is wrong, but generally we hear something and we are act instead of really looking at it, measuring it against where we're trying to go and acting upon it accordingly instead of losing direction. And that is another way you can recognize you're being a visionary arsonist. On this journey, we crave speed.

We crave to want to do something great. And we are so excited about being on the journey. But you have to watch so carefully that you're not arsoning that journey along the way and putting speed bumps and roadblocks along its path. And although there are external elements like I brought up, the bigger issue that we face is ourselves. We can become a visionary arsonist in our own lives, and fold what those external forces do.

And the issue is we don't even recognize it half the time. And when we do, it's often too late. So it is so important to you find if you're doing it in your life, recognize it and put a stop to it. We get so caught up in wanting to build a bigger or better mouse trap, then we end up miscommunicating it,

then we wanna change it, then we wanna change it again, that by the time we're building that mouse trap, the whole problem that we were trying to solve has shifted completely to something else when we should have remained focused on the problem from beginning to end. And that's what being a visionary arsonist does. We let all these things around us and inside of us get in the way of us making the progress that we need to make.

Now, if I'm being truly honest, not only have I seen the burn of being around other visionary arsonists, I have honestly been a visionary arsonist in my own life and career. There are habits, influences, people, activities, and other things that I have done along the way, that when I look back, I realize how much I have arsoned my own career and missed life-changing opportunities as a result. And so I'm not trying to stand here on my high

voice or on this pedal looking down on you because I have been where every listener on this podcast has been. And I've made these mistakes myself. And I've made them in my own life. And I've made them in businesses I've run or in teams that I've led. The importance is to recognize when they're happening and to do something about it before it becomes too late. A lifetime of leadership and entrepreneurial experience

has taught me a large number of things. It's taught me many successes, but it has also taught me many failures and much adversity along the path to becoming who I am today. And I know that the role of visionary leadership is a double-edged sword. And let me give you an example of this. It is so easy to see how middle managers in any company can make or break that entity. How often have we seen something passed down in a company, a directive, an initiative that starts with the CEO and that executive team gets passed down from that direct report

down to the next level and then down to the team that actually needs to accomplish it. And so often what I have seen is that that leader who's in that spot, instead of taking that initiative and being it with gusto, purpose, passion and getting it done, freets it as their own personal idea or personal vendetta or personal project instead of greeting it in the way it should be and the intent it should be. And when they do that, they sabotage that initiative because they're inflicting their own self-ego instead of being selfish in their actions that they're taking

around it. A great example of this is a customer support center. So, in my mind, the customer support agent is one of the most important positions that you can possibly have because they touch the customer every single day. And I can tell you, it's not the headquarters building that changes how we as customers view a company. It's by going into the store, going into the storefront or talking to someone in the form of this customer call center. So if that customer agent realizes that the impact that they're making has a direct impact

and result on customer satisfaction, on repeat sales, and on their own prosperity, they're gonna do so much better a job because they realize that they are making a difference. I've always called it line of sight leadership. However, if their middle manager, let's just use that term for it, fails to give them the instructions and that alignment, fails to be that gardener leader who really is there to empower them, to boost them up and to make them realize how their job matters. I guarantee you they're going to have a different interaction with the customer in the entire company.

It's hurt by that one action. The same thing happens to you in your own personal life. When you lose direction, when you don't take care of stopping the things that are hindering your passion journey, when you let these outside influences continue instead of putting them down, you are a visionary arsonist in your own life. When we don't keep the main thing, the main thing in our lives,

we become visionary arsonists. But through this podcast today, I hope that I have explained it well enough that you can now recognize it and know what to do about it. Take control of your life. Drive your passion journey. Execute on it and don't allow yourself to fall

into the trap of being a visionary personist. Thank you so much for spending time with me today on the PassionStruck podcast. And I hope that my message on being a visionary arsonist resonated with you and that you can apply these lessons to your life. I have two great episodes coming up. One, in the near future, is going to be a personal message like I did today on the importance

of a mentor or guide in your life and why that can have such a profound impact on expediting your passion journey. And I have an important interview I do with Canadian Iron Man and ultra-distance runner Cindy Hoover who talks about her abilities, passion, and courage that face paintcreatic cancer dead on, survive it, implores from it eight years later. You are absolutely not going to want to miss that podcast. I can guarantee it. Thank you for spending time with me today and let's get igniting. Thank you so much for joining us. A purpose of our show is to make Passion Go viral.

By sharing the knowledge and insights you can use to unlock your hidden potential. To hear more, please subscribe to the show in iTunes Spotify Stitcher or wherever you listen to podcasts. If you'd love this episode, we'd appreciate a five-star rating on iTunes, where if you simply tell free of your most driven and motivated friends about the show and post to your social accounts, that would help us grow our PassionStruct community too. If you want more tools to unlock your potential, please make sure to also visit our website, passionstruct.com, sign up to our email list, as well as check out all the links and

resources in the show notes. Be sure to tune in on Tuesdays and Fridays for our next episode, and remember, make a choice, work hard, and step into your sharp edges. Thanks again, and I'll see you next time. you