Start With A Win - Create HIGH PERFORMANCE in Your Personal Life and Business | Patrick McAndrew, CEO of HARA

Starting point is 00:00:00 How do you create high performance in your business and personal life? Today, we find out with a high performance coach on Start With A Win. Welcome to Start With A Win, where we unpack franchising, leadership, and business growth. Let's go. And coming to you from Start With A Win headquarters at Area 15 Ventures, it's Adam Kantos with Start With A Win. On today's episode of Start With A Win, we have a remarkable guest joining us. Meet Patrick McAndrew, the founder and CEO of Hara, a visionary leader who understands

Starting point is 00:00:31 that true high performance isn't just about how you work, but also about how you live. With a background in corporate law and a successful foray into sales, Patrick's journey led to training leaders and high-performing teams, enhancing their focus, energy, productivity, mental resilience, and get this, life balance. He's even ventured into the world of audio marketing, launching Spotify's first global audio marketing campaign. Join us as we delve into Patrick's incredible insights on personal and professional growth. Welcome, Patrick.

Starting point is 00:01:07 It's a pleasure to be here. Thank you for having me. You bet. Hey, this is fun because you and I both talk about this a lot and we both live this a lot. We both live a high-performance life. We live focused in energy and enthusiasm both in our business and in our personal life. We're going to dig really deep into that. And as a high performance coach yourself, I really want to find some key

Starting point is 00:01:32 golden nuggets for us to give to our listeners. So as we start, I wanted to begin with talking about today's hyper-connected world. I mean, we're really overwhelmed now. We have a lot of resistance to these things that I just talked about, you know, high performance and focus and things like that. How should we personally navigate this challenge and maintain our focus on truly what matters? Because that's what we're going to get into here is what matters. So let's, let's peel away this veil of, of, you know, mediocrity of, of, you know, distraction and things like that first. How do we, how do we get past that to begin with and start being successful? So I think there's many layers that we can go down on this, right? And maybe if we start at the top of the first, the first element that needs to be met. I was in Philly yesterday

Starting point is 00:02:26 with a team from Morgan Stanley and we had to just begin at a conference, we had to begin at kind of the basic entry point, which is to create more space. And the way that we create more space is by cleaning up our digital environment. It's far too cluttered. And there's a few ways that we can do that. One is such a simple practice that we would never even consider it, which is to get an alarm clock, to get rid of using your phone as an alarm clock, to get an analog alarm clock. I have the same alarm clock that I saw my dad using when I was a child that I saw in his bedroom. And 25 years later, I went and bought it for myself, an old simple Casio alarm clock, nothing fancy. And I take that with me when I travel.

Starting point is 00:03:06 Why do I do that? Because if I have an alarm clock, I don't wake up depending on my phone. There's so many things that my phone has that are connected to how I communicate and provide value in the world. But ultimately the initial step of creating value begins with me. The phone is just an accessory.

Starting point is 00:03:22 The ultimate gadget is this body. So I need to make sure that this is clear and in the right place first. And for a lot of people having the phone on the bedside locker, although they don't realize it, it's a moment of convenience that leads to second, third, fourth, fifth consequences of disorder. So for especially people in their younger generation, they never even had an analog alarm clock. So this is an introduction for the first time to have one. So that's one. Then after that, where do we look to? We look to cleaning up your phone, removing apps, newsletters, subscriptions. All of these are simply taxes on your attention because they're things which you've brought into your life to say, I need to remain

Starting point is 00:04:01 aware of this. So that's one thing to review that. The third thing is to look at your virtual selves. So we have many virtual personas. I have one on LinkedIn. I have one on three email addresses. I got rid of my virtual self on Instagram and on Facebook and nothing happened to me. Nothing happened to my physical body. I'm still as alive as I was previously. But when I had it, I had to check it many times a day to make sure that that virtual self was alive and that he was communicating with the other virtual selves out there. So we often give too much credence to the virtual personas and their well-being, and we disregard our own well-being. So there are kind of three areas. Get a digital alarm clock, start to learn how to create a little

Starting point is 00:04:40 bit more space in the evening by putting your phone, charging it somewhere away from the bedroom, then don't go straight to it in the morning. There might be a lot of anxiety around that. I've met a lot of people who have run our programs that they find there's immense anxiety if they're away from their phone. That's something to explore. Great. That shows that it's something to work on. Remove those taxes on your attention and see if you can trim down how much you've spread yourself across the virtual planes, because that means that you're more available to yourself. Wow. And so I had just on a recent past episode, I had Laura Morton, who's like a 40-time New York

Starting point is 00:05:18 Times bestseller. And she has a film out called Anxious Nation and talks about the anxiety. And you see a lot of this digital dependence coming into that anxiety. Talk to me a little bit more about that. You know, you're trying to immediately start the day with removing ourselves from some of these things that we get, you know, an addiction or sucked into. What do you, what recommendations do you have for people who, you know, kind of depend on these things for their business or what have you? Like let's say a real estate agent or a mortgage broker, somebody in sales, who's like running to their phone to see what kind of business they have

Starting point is 00:05:54 first thing in the morning. What, how, how can you, you separate those things? Is that easy to do or difficult or is there a way? Well, so I've worked, I work with many people in the financial insurance industry. So financial advisors and their whole role is based on the quality of their client relationship, right? And they often give so much weighting

Starting point is 00:06:16 to the speed of responsiveness. So that's so important. And they determine their own sense of value and they believe that their value of what they offer their client and the basis of their business is based on their responsiveness. But I've seen many financial advisors who I've worked with who start to readjust that. And they realize that if they have a practice, if they have a business, actually the quality of their value is being aware of the business.

Starting point is 00:06:40 How is the business operating? How are we running the business? What's the operation? Yes, are we giving incredible service to our clients? But are there also repeatable questions which are coming up? How can we kind of automate and streamline some of those processes? But if you're so caught in the minute-to-minute reactive mode of, I need to respond and I need to get back to you, you never get the chance to step back from that and see how your business truly operates. So really, at the heart of this is we

Starting point is 00:07:06 create these narratives that I must respond to all of the time. And what it does is it creates this binding mechanism where my own sense of comfort is found when I'm constantly aware of what's going on. And this, Adam, is a very interesting thing because this changes the structure and the makeup of our brains. So we're no longer multitasking today. That's long gone. Multitasking is if I'm chatting to you and at the same time an idea of something I need to do later came and I start writing it down. I'm separating two lines of inquiry and I'm working on them both at the same time. The truth is we're rarely doing that today.

Starting point is 00:07:44 What we're doing is we're on far more planes at the same time. It's called continuous partial attention. So we're continuously partially attending to everything, but nothing at the same time. So I'm checking everything all the time, but I'm constantly skimming the surface, which is why we feel like the day gets longer and longer and we put more and more effort in, but there's less and less that comes out of it. And a very senior individual at a firm that I worked with, it described to me, he said, I have all of the intention, but no attention. I know what I want to do. I have the drive and people feel like they need more willpower, more discipline, more kind of strong mindedness, but it's not. They have an abundance of that.

Starting point is 00:08:25 It's just that they've created a very fragmented internal state, which is why as soon as I move towards something I want to do, my brain pulls me off somewhere else. Nobody's ever taught us how to focus. It's something we expect of ourselves and expect of each other all the time.

Starting point is 00:08:38 And that's what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to give people a journey of exploring how the brain actually focuses so that they can choose to focus on command. It's not that they're focused all of the time, but it's that they have the reins. They are running the show. And if they want to focus on something, they can trust themselves that they'll show up and be able to do it. That's interesting. I've heard you say, and I've done a ton of research and looked at a lot of your material. It's incredibly valuable. So I

Starting point is 00:09:05 encourage everybody to seek out Patrick and look and see what he's doing here. But some of the information that I've seen you put out is you've, and you had this quote and it's stuck in my head, and that's that we're spending hours to get minutes because of the distraction. And it takes us so long to get our day back. And as a result, our productivity time is going to practically nothing. Can you talk to us about that momentarily? Yeah, for sure. So let's just explore this. It builds on what I was just speaking about previously with continuous partial attention. So at the heart of all of this, actually, if we break it down to its core element, is how we deal with agitation. That's at the heart of all of this. So this is something which has been, since the Buddhist texts, life is suffering.

Starting point is 00:09:52 How do we deal with the suffering? The suffering is going to be there no matter what, but it's just whether you choose to confront it now or delay it. So the thing in today's world is that we're given so many easy points of temptation. So as soon as I'm working on something and it becomes a little bit challenging or I don't know the next step, it requires me to think about it, to engage in it. And what's happening now is as soon as I feel that little tinge of agitation, I say, ah, and my default is to go and check something. So I go and I check my inbox. I go and I check the news. I check my inbox. I go and I check the news. I check Instagram. And then I think that I'm just going there for a minute or two or three. But what has been found through

Starting point is 00:10:31 Gloria Mark's research at the University of California, Irvine, is that it takes on average 23 minutes and 15 seconds to come back to the original point of focus. And that's because you're not just going there and coming back if I'm going and I'm reading a story or I'm looking at somebody's Instagram profile or whatever it might be I'm also stretching my attention into those spaces I'm becoming curious about what's going on there it's opening up things that I what I'm going to consider it's going to occupy space in my mind and now I have to come back to the original point of focus I need to suppress all of those things which I was thinking about previously and come back to narrowing it on one thing.

Starting point is 00:11:07 So this is why, yes, you're right, we do spend hours but we only get minutes because we're on this constant jumping mechanism where as soon as I work towards something but I feel that agitation, I switch my attention. And then I feel that agitation again, I switch my attention. And we're not training the capacity. We think that if we have tools that allow us to communicate quicker with more speed, that that allows productivity to increase. But if it's human work that's being done, this is what's producing the work. These are just supplementary tools. And at the corporate level, the rep comes in from Slack or Teams or whoever it is, and they have all the data to say, if you get this platform, it's going to increase speed of communication by

Starting point is 00:11:49 X percent. It's all about speed. But all that speed is coming up against the ultimate bottleneck, which we will struggle to ever overcome because it's an evolutionary adaptation, which is our attention. We only have a certain amount that we can hold in our conscious awareness. There's only a certain amount that we do. And now it can be trained and developed, but nobody's training us to develop that. We're just expecting that you have it. And then if we don't have it, we're turning to caffeine or pharmaceutical products or whatever it is. But we need to begin by developing the actual skill itself. And that's what I'm so passionate about because I've seen how it's transformed me. I had that feeling where I wanted to do things. I had my own business. I wanted to show up, but I felt like I was my own greatest barrier. I was my own greatest obstacle. And at

Starting point is 00:12:32 the time, I was teaching speed reading workshops around the country, helping people to improve their reading skill, their reading processing, helping people overcome dyslexia. I saw how the brain is such a malleable thing. Your intelligence is not fixed. Your capabilities are not fixed. They're very malleable, but we need pragmatic steps to get there. And that's what I'm trying to offer to people. Wow. So really we're talking about almost speed of distraction here and how quickly these distractions are being thrown in front of us and that we're just, we can't handle them. I mean, as functionally as human beings, how many things can we pay attention to at one time effectively? I mean, it's like,

Starting point is 00:13:11 you know, ask yourself driving, you can drive, that's it. So you see only, only if the road is familiar, as soon as you, as soon as you're brought into a new city where it's unfamiliar and you actually must engage in the directions on the map, you're not listening to the podcast. You're not listening to the music. So yeah, you can do it if it's a very familiar road, but if there's traffic or you're driving somewhere where, you know, but the rain is, I don't know, have you ever been in a car where it's such heavy rain, you have to turn down the music because I have to be so focused on the road in front of me. So, you know, this is why we can spend all day switching our context all the time because we're never fully engaged in anything.

Starting point is 00:13:46 And it creates this sense of frustration, like, where is all this time going? I'm committing to something. Even for people that have their own businesses, they're so driven to create something, they have to put food on the table. Yet, the greatest barrier is, how can I get my mind to actually attend to one thing? And yeah, we leave so much on the table if we don't develop the skill. So let me ask you this. Is there a simple or a quick way? I mean, nothing's quick or simple in this world anymore. But we've seen different ideas like put a timer on your desk or turn off your computer for this much period of time or whatever that solution is. Let's give our listeners a starting point to work on gathering this

Starting point is 00:14:27 attention back. What recommendation do you have for that? So the place to begin is the evening practice, because for a lot of people, they're very tired. They're not resting well. So this is impacting their cognitive performance the next day. So the quality of today began last night. So the quality of your rest is determining how you're going to show up today. So the quality of today began last night. So the quality of your rest is determining how you're going to show up today. So rather than thinking that I'm going to try and squeeze more out of the day, try and pour more into it by getting more rest. And that's one place to really begin because I see people neglecting that immensely. So, and it's not just about giving more time to sleep, but it's about giving yourself an opportunity to get better rest. If anybody has a child, you don't let them just play with the Lego and then say,

Starting point is 00:15:08 go to bed. You bring them through a process. So what's the process? You're down-regulating their system. You're giving them a shower. You're putting them in pajamas. You're sitting with them. You're reading them a bedtime story. Maybe you're playing some lullabies or some music. What's that doing? It's calming down the nervous system so that the brain is moving into a calmer and calmer and calmer state. But we rarely do that for ourselves. What we do is we turn on Netflix, we watch the TV, we let our mind literally just collapse into nothingness. And then when we feel the fatigue, we go to bed. So a recommendation is give yourself more space to sleep, but also give yourself a practice and try not to do it in front of the screen.

Starting point is 00:15:47 You spend so much time in front of the screen, try and find another outlet. When did we choose that Netflix would become what we would relax in front of? Probably didn't. It was just the path of least convenience. So that's a place to begin is a little bit more rest. And then I explained using your alarm clock.

Starting point is 00:16:02 So that will help a lot if you just do those two things, removing the apps, the notifications. But the really important thing, which will sustain you in the long term, is by reframing how you feel. So for example, question everything about your impulses. So you feel this sense of fatigue. I need a coffee.

Starting point is 00:16:24 Do I need a coffee? Or I usually need a coffee. Do I need a coffee? Or I usually get a muffin. Do I need the muffin? Or how do I start my day? I used to start by checking Sky Sports, The Guardian, Instagram, all of these things. And I would spend 25 minutes checking everything and then I would start my work. See if you can reduce that checking at the beginning of the day. Check it later on in the afternoon. You don't deprive yourself of keeping up with these things, but delay it. Because what it does is it spreads and fragments your attention. So those few acts of the act of better rest, getting an alarm clock, trying to remove this beginning of the day by checking everything going out in the outside world, begin by putting

Starting point is 00:17:00 your energy into what you want to do and then check it later. And then the fourth thing is just to start becoming more aware of where your impulses take you. Drop the moral judgment, drop the berating of yourself. Just look at yourself as an outside character. Ah, this is interesting. Every time I feel that discomfort, I think I need a coffee. Do I need a coffee? Maybe I just need to go up and take a walk. Or can I see if I can push through this a little bit further? It's just like exercising. I feel that fatigue, but I can actually go 20%, 30% further. So those four steps will take you a long, long way. They will really change your inner makeup. both myself personally and my wife, as well as a mastermind group I'm in, we heavily focus on how restful you can be every night because it 100% changes how you feel in the morning and your focus and energy levels. So some key points here, and thank you for sharing those. Let's get into some business outcomes here. You have experience in consulting with major organizations, with a lot of different

Starting point is 00:18:07 business leaders. How do you change the outcomes of this constant distraction and this lack of productivity or lack of engagement that we're seeing in businesses as a result of these things? So one place to begin is the well-being of the people. You know, there's a lot of companies that we work with now where they're getting feedback from their staff saying, this is too burdensome, this is too much, I can't handle it. And the truth is that maybe they can. Maybe they just don't have the mechanisms to handle it. So that's one place where we begin.

Starting point is 00:18:40 We go in and we give the individual these tools to manage their energy, to manage their attention, because a lot of people create their own chaos. So we try and give them the tools to reduce that chaos that they're creating. So that has a big impact on the way that people manage their own stress at the level of the individuals. Then we review and we reflect on how much communication is being spread around the company. And we try and reduce it because for a lot of these organizations, there is, like I said, especially in the financial industry,

Starting point is 00:19:11 there's such a high weighting on responsiveness that that's seen as the most important thing. So even though they're talking about outcomes, the truth is that on the day-to-day, people are valuing and base their performance on how active they are. That if I can show how active I am and if I can be as active as possible, I'm being a good employee. But that's creating this negative cycle. It's creating this fragmented cycle where

Starting point is 00:19:34 the individuals are in a state of chaos and they're not very focused on what's important. The third thing is that we've seen is that the vast majority of people actually don't structure their day. So they wake up and they begin in their inbox and this creates a huge loss in productivity, a huge loss in performance. So we give them the practice and the tools to actually structure their day. But of course, Adam, you can't structure your workday unless you've structured your life. So that's why we begin with the structuring of your lifestyle habits and practices. And that's why really it's about how you live completely shapes how you work.

Starting point is 00:20:09 Because the quality of that rest manage the intensity of the environments and then reducing the amount of noise that's happening amongst the teams. Because there's too much communication that's happening. There's too much of an expectation that you should always be available. And that's fragmenting people's ability to do good work, where the mornings are often spent responding to emails, being on meetings, and the afternoons are where they try and squeeze in the important work that actually drives an impact. We're trying to reverse that. We're trying to say, wake up, have some clarity. There should be three days a week of two hours of

Starting point is 00:20:52 deep work. So those are the maker days where you actually go and you drive an impact on what you do. The rest of the day can be collaborative. And then two other days of the week can be primarily collaborative, where you're responding to the needs and the demands of what's happening amongst the team. But there should be at least a minimum of six hours per week, typically in the morning, where you're doing deep and focused work. And that should be accepted across the team. So do you think that that actually is more productivity time than what most are spending right now? The six hours a week versus what on average are people spending right now for productivity?

Starting point is 00:21:29 Yeah, 100%. Because the truth of how they're doing it, even if they're dedicating two hours to the work, they're doing it in such a way that just like we spoke about, they're in and out, in and out, in and out. And if you can give these kind of habits of the mind, which we've just discussed, and you can create the container where deep work can be done, that's a beautiful marriage. But if you just create space to do deep work, but people have the habits of mind that we're talking about, which hold them back, those two hours are still going to be wasted. So it's a marriage of the creating the right environment externally and the right environment internally. And that's how, you know, we can actually get a lot more done in a lot less time and feel a lot calmer about it all.

Starting point is 00:22:12 I love that. And for leaders out there, and pretty much all my listeners on this show are leaders in either their businesses, everybody's a leader in their life and their family and themselves. But the reality is that, and I completely agree with what you're saying here. And I actually structured when I was the CEO of Remax, I would structure my days this way. And it drove a whole bunch of people crazy because I said, no meetings in the mornings on these days because these are productivity times. And everybody said, but that's when I have my meetings. We've fallen into this trap in business

Starting point is 00:22:40 and we think that we need to pack our mornings with meetings and everybody's sending meeting requests on your schedule and we think that we need to pack our mornings with meetings and everybody's sending meeting requests on your schedule and things like that. And if you'd start declining all those things, it's going to get their attention. And you say, this is when my willpower is the greatest. So why wouldn't I utilize this to make the highest level of outcomes for the business and myself? So I mean, how do we address that with our managers and leaders in business? How do we, what do we say to them for them to understand this is valuable time that's being wasted? You, well, so first of all, at the level of the leader, it's, it's about

Starting point is 00:23:17 recognizing like, what are you encouraging in an implicit way? So there's a lot of encouragements at an implicit way of just running the gamut, being highly responsive, being on the meetings. And you've got to question that, you know, but you also got to give the freedom for people to make their own choice and their own decisions in how they're going to organize themselves. Now, really at the core of all of this, what we're talking about is alignment, that the concepts that we're discussing need to have alignment because there are companies who I work with as well, where one team gets this, but then the IT team who are deploying the software don't get it. So

Starting point is 00:23:52 suddenly, there's a lot of conflict in the IT products that are being deployed to use, and how they're being recommended to be used, and the way the team is trying to operate. So this sense of the human capital, putting it first and foremost, is the place to begin. And what is driving the performance of the human capital? Their attention. So there needs to be a broad understanding across an organization of this. And our aim is to try and get to that level to be able to communicate it broadly to people. Because this is what's driving us. This is something, I don't know what Neuralink is going to be able to do, but maybe it'll get to it at some point. But truly, it's going to be extremely hard to overcome the bottleneck of human attention. And we spoke about six hours of deep work a week. Of course,

Starting point is 00:24:34 if you go and say that to people, they're like, I should be doing more than that of the week. But that's the problem. They're not looking at themselves honestly. They're not truly, honestly reflecting on how performing, how productive are we actually being? The truth is, is that there's way less than that. And the deep work that's being done is being done at 6, 7, 8 p.m. at night when people are exhausted, once the messages and the emails have cut down. So let's be honest. Let's be sincere. Let's recognize that not all, not each hour is created equal. There are short windows in the day where we have this cognitive peak performance. And let's give space to that

Starting point is 00:25:06 so that people can actually solve the hard problems and do the deep work. But to get there, there needs to be alignment that everybody understands this and is on the same page. Awesome, some great information here. Patrick, where can we find you online to learn more about what you're teaching us right now? So LinkedIn, if you want to connect to me,

Starting point is 00:25:22 if you want to send me a message, I'm there, Patrick McAndrew. My business is Hara. So hara.co. We run our programs there. We're now starting to do some programs with individuals for the last three years. It's only been at a corporate level. So if you want to get in touch, we can discuss some of the programs that we have, which might be of interest to you. We're doing some programs with high level of executives, longer term group sessions with executives, longer term group sessions with executives, which is going amazing, amazing. And then we have the Momentum Mind program, which is really just about creating the structures and patterns in your day so that you can perform

Starting point is 00:25:54 consistently. And then my personal website, patrickmcandrew.co, where I do a reasonable amount of keynote speaking to corporates as well. Wow. Patrick McAndrew, founder and CEO of Hara. It's so nice to have you on here today. I mean, we've dug deep into distraction and how to really realign that attention that we should be paying and creating some productivity out of that for ourselves personally and our business. Because as we know, if you're having trouble at work, it's probably because the trouble started at home and how you take care of yourself. Personal health leads to business health.

Starting point is 00:26:28 Patrick, I have a question I ask all of our amazing guests on the show, and that's how do you start your day with a win? Well, I have different practices at different times. So the practice at the moment, I follow everything I preach. So I have the alarm clock. I don't sleep with my phone. All those elements, those are very important. At the moment, I am practicing I preach. So I have the alarm clock. I don't sleep with my phone. All those elements, those are very important. At the moment, I am practicing body scans. So I do that for about 20 minutes in the morning.

Starting point is 00:26:52 And then I have a practice of about 15 minutes of different breathing patterns. And I've been finding that really, really interesting. I'm trying to explore the dynamic between how the range of movement in our body, how that starts to reshape our cognitive performance. So the more complex movements we can do, the better our cognitive performance is. So I find that a very grounding practice. Gets me very calm. And if I have that in place, it sets me up very well. So there was meditation practices

Starting point is 00:27:25 that were stretching, swimming in the sea in the past, but at the moment it's these body scans and slowing down my breath. So when I say a breathing practice, I'm not doing the Wim Hof method, but I'm actually slowing down my breath to try and get it to one or two breaths per minute. And if I get that, my body is in good place. My head is in a good place. And I feel like I've earned the start of my day. So good. So good. Thank you, Patrick, for realigning our philosophy, our look, and our ability to hold up the mirror and see ourselves and the distractions and unhealthy habits we're creating for ourselves. So thanks for all that for ourselves. So thanks for

Starting point is 00:28:05 all that you do. And thanks for being on Start With A Win. Thank you, Adam. You have an amazing podcast, incredibly well produced. So it's been a privilege to come here to speak with you.

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Start With A Win - Create HIGH PERFORMANCE in Your Personal Life and Business | Patrick McAndrew, CEO of HARA

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