This Is Woman's Work with Nicole Kalil - 7 Keys To Unlock Your Dynamic Drive with Molly Fletcher | 229

Episode Date: September 2, 2024

We live in a world where success is often experienced or witnessed in a matter of moments, but what we don’t see are the behind the scenes choices and experiences that got them there. We aren’t learning about what our guest calls “dynamic drive” that leads to sustainable success. It’s not just about setting and achieving goals, there’s so much more to it than that. Hailed as the “female Jerry Maguire” by CNN, Molly Fletcher has made a name for herself as one of the first female sports agents. During her almost two-decade career, and as President of CSE, Molly negotiated over $500 million in contracts and represented over 300 of sports’ biggest names. A World’s Top 50 Keynote Speaker, the host of the Game Changers with Molly Fletcher podcast, and the founder of The Molly Fletcher Company, she helps leaders transform workplace complacency with her Game Changer Negotiation Training and The Energized Leader programs. Her new book, Dynamic Drive: The Purpose Fueled Formula for Sustainable Success just hit the shelves, and you’re gonna want to get your hands on it. Being driven isn’t just about mowing your way through life and barreling over anyone who gets in your way. It’s just not that simple and it doesn’t require you to be an asshole. Drive is a mindset, and energy, a discipline, and includes curiosity, resilience, connection and my favorite of them all, confidence. Connect with Molly: Website:  https://mollyfletcher.com/  Book: https://www.amazon.com/Dynamic-Drive-Purpose-Fueled-Formula-Sustainable/dp/0306834197  Podcast: https://mollyfletcher.com/podcasts/ Game Changer Performance Group: https://gamechangerperformancegroup.com/  Like what you heard? Please rate and review  Thanks to our This Is Woman’s Work Sponsor: Bamboo fabric that is perfectly soft, temperature regulating, machine washable and committed to ethical production, Cozy Earth checks all the boxes, and is now on every bed in my house. Get your sheets (and more) by visiting cozyearth.com and use my code NICOLEKALIL to get 40% off!

I am Nicole Kalil, and if you're a regular listener of the This Is Woman's Work podcast, you know that I like to challenge, or at the very least question, conventional thinking, and that my pet peeves include one-size-fits-all solutions and catchwords and phrases that have been hijacked, manipulated, misused, and misrepresented so much that we don't even know what we're talking about anymore. Some examples are phrases like hard work and self-care and words like confidence and success. I mean, people throw these terms around and I worry that they've lost all meaning or that any useful purpose has been entirely obliterated. Another pet peeve is when people oversimplify or conflate concepts and ideas, meaning that they take two separate things that may be interconnected and they mesh them together as if they're the same or required or necessary for the other. So let me give you an

example there, success and happiness. One may influence the other, and not always in the order that you would think, but they are not the same. You can be happy and not achieve success, and you can be successful and not at all happy. And today, we're gonna talk about a word that I think is often misrepresented and also often oversimplified

and meshed together with success and achievement. And the word is drive. I'm guessing many of us have a belief that goes something like this. The most driven people are also the most successful. Or if I haven't achieved my goal yet, it's because I'm not driven enough. And there could be some truth in those statements, but I don't think it's quite as simple as it sounds. We live in a world where

success is often experienced or witnessed in moments. But what we don't see, what we don't get to experience is the behind the scenes that got them there. We aren't learning about what our guest calls dynamic drive that leads to sustainable success. It's not just about setting and achieving goals. There's so much more to it than that. So here today to talk about drive is not just a means to an end, but as a purposeful, joyful, and aligned pursuit of a better you is Molly Fletcher. Hailed as the female Jerry Maguire by CNN, Molly has made a name for herself as one of the first female sports agents. During her almost two decades career and as president of CSE, Molly negotiated over 500 million in contracts and represented over 300 of sports' biggest names. A world's top 50 keynote

speaker, she delivers an inspiring message, which I can attest to as I've actually been at an event where she spoke, and I still think about it to this day. She is the author of five books, the host of The Game Changers with Molly Fletcher podcast, and the founder of the Molly Fletcher Company. She helps leaders transform workplace complacency with her Game Changer negotiation training and the Energized Leader programs. Her new book, Dynamic Drive, the purpose-fueled formula for sustainable success, just hit the shelves and you're going to want to get your hands on it. Molly, thank you for being our guest. And I thought I'd kick us off by asking

what you mean by dynamic drive. We hear so much about drive and being driven in the world today. So what's the difference between that and dynamic drive? Well, to me, drive and Nicole, it's such a treat to be on with you and have this conversation. And I love all the things you said to tee this up. But to me, drive in the traditional sense is a linear pursuit of an outcome, of an achievement, of a goal. It's this sort of pursuit of one final point. You want to run a marathon, you finish it, and then you hang up your sneakers, right? Like, what do you do next?

Dynamic adds the force that stimulates progress relative to consistent change, this pursuit of better at some level every single day. Yes, people with dynamic drive have goals, but they also recognize 20 years. And I saw, as the world does, these moments, these contracts, the accolades, the outcomes, the achievements. But what I also saw is all the things that ladder up to that moment. And more importantly, the behaviors that allow somebody to stay at the quote unquote top, whatever that is for them, for an extended period of time, which requires something more than drive, which has a finite end to it. Dynamic drive has the same urgency, but it's also threaded, Nicole, with purpose, which to me is an important component relative to pursuing better every day is aligning that with our deepest values. You'd said that drive, often people think of more linear.

What you're describing feels almost more circular, sort of a we keep going back to the things that create the achievement, irrespective of where we are in the journey to achievement. You've literally had the opportunity to interact with the most high performing people on the planet, right? What do you see that we're not seeing? What are your biggest learnings from getting to work with and observe these people? Well, there's so many. And to your point, it is a process. And I don't know that it's a perfect circle, but at some level, what it is, is there's seven keys that I identify in the book that everybody finds themselves at different points in their own lives. And who am I to say, you need more energy, or you need to shift your mindset, or the gap is resilience or discipline.

Everybody enters in with different gaps. And the truth is we all find ourselves in moments where maybe we're crushing it in one area of our lives, but struggling in another. What I saw are these seven key behaviors that the best of the best have. And here's what I think is really important, particularly as I think about your audience, Nicole, and your listeners, not in lieu of compromising what matters most. In other words, I'm a wife. I have three daughters. I love the work that I do. And I want to pursue better in all areas of those in alignment with my core values and alignment with my purpose and not

in service of finding myself at a point at 90 years old or at the end of my life where maybe I've achieved a lot of things, but at some level, I can't answer the question, what am I chasing and what was at risk? What was compromised because of that chase? And was that an intentional decision? I think what breaks my heart is when you ask people who are really busy, who are grinding it, who are getting after it, who are doing all these things, and you say, what are you chasing? What's it all for? And they don't know the answer and that to me is a recipe for a lack of fulfillment a lack of joy regret all of those things and and to answer part of your question I saw that Nicole and that was in part why I wrote this book I want people to to achieve their wildest dreams to live with joy and fulfillment, and to be the best version

of themselves, but not at risk of a lack of intentionality and at risk of a misalignment to the things in their lives that matter most. Because I think accidentally sometimes we pursue and achieve without the intentionality of what we lose along the way. And that makes me really sad. I don't want people to find themselves in that place because we can't get so many of those things back. I can't raise my daughters again. I can't fix a dysfunctional relationship, et cetera. I'm so glad that you said that. I think even of the word sacrifice, it's sort of, I don't know, again, one of those words that gets thrown out a lot. And I think sometimes we need to think about what we mean by that. Like, yes, we may need to,

we probably will need to sacrifice comfort, right? We're going to need to sacrifice maybe some time or doing things that feel good, but we probably shouldn't be sacrificing any of those things, as you said, that matter most, the relationships, the people that at the end of the day is what we're going to care about the most. And yet that can be really hard to do, especially as a working woman, right? Like you feel like you're being pulled in a million different directions. So is there anything you do or say that helps you in those moments where you feel like you're supposed to be in seven different places and you're supposed to serve 700 different people

that helps you sort of narrow in on what is most important. Yeah. Yeah. Nicole, for sure. You know, it's a, it's an exercise that I came upon through mistakes I was making in my life where I felt misaligned and I was exhausted. I was drained. I felt like I was compromising my relationship with my young daughters at the time, six, six, and seven. Truly, we had three kids in 12 months. That's another story. And so, yes, it's called an alignment audit.

And I break this down in detail in the book. But essentially, what I challenge people to do is to consider the five most important things in their lives. Maybe it's the 10 most important things. But we break this down in detail. But let's sort of play with the number five. What are the five most important things in your life? And I write about an experience in the book that I had with a gentleman at a keynote event that I was giving. And it was really pretty remarkable relative to the eye-opening nature of it and the impact that it has had

now on his life relative to personally and professionally. But essentially, you identify these things and then you pull back and consider how much time, attention, and energy am I giving these things that I've identified really matter to me? And at the fundamental level, what it allows us to do is to recognize where's the gap. So for example, Nicole, for this particular gentleman, if he said that his son, this gentleman was divorced, that time with his son was really important to him. It was a 10 on a one to 10 scale. But what happened when he went through this process was his son, relative to the amount of time and attention and energy he was giving, was about a five. So he had a gap of a five, essentially, if you will. And I break down,

how do we close that gap? And what it caused was him to sort of open his eyes and pull back and say, man, I say that my son really matters to me, but guess what? I go hunting on the weekends. I miss his baseball games. I sometimes don't opt in for the weekends in which he's actually sort of mine, if you will. I have a problem and I need to fix it. And so then we pull back and say, okay, well, let's go through at some level these seven keys relative to understanding what are the behavior changes that we need to ladder up to so that we can create the alignment that we want. And so, Nicole, this came as a result and part of I had been saying yes, yes, yes to multiple keynotes and they were back to back

to back to back. And then I found myself, it was like a Thursday of a week where I had gone and been traveling. And I literally, Nicole, sat down on the airplane to head to another event. And I started crying in the seat of the airplane because I was exhausted. I felt disconnected from my family. And that was then when I said, okay, we've got to create a system at some level by which I can create the clarity I need and then have the courage to live into it. I think balance is BS. It is this nebulous chase that sadly I was on, so many women are on. And to think that in the world we live in today, Nicole, that between work and health and fitness and faith and family and kids and employees and clients, that at the end of the day, that teeter-totter of all those demands is

just going to level out perfectly, perfectly in balance. Heck no, no way. Never. Never. So it's about alignment. It's saying, what are the things that matter most? And then having the courage to say, no, now I'm not saying this is easy at all. So I'll give you an example. I was reading to my daughter a story and my phone rings and it was a ball player and he was on his way home from the ballpark and he had gotten called up to the big leagues. And that is a really big deal for a player who hasn't ever gotten called up. And so the following day, he was going to be pitching in a new market for a new team in a new city. It was his first big league outing. Well, the following day, I had already had committed that I was going to be at my daughter's really cool play that she was going to be in. She was super young, but I had always

committed to be the mom that I wanted my girls to look out and see me there. And I found myself in a spot where I could go to my alignment, if you will, go to my core values, go to what I had previously gotten clear on at some level mattered most in that moment and ask myself some tough questions in service of making a decision. Do I miss the play and go to the ball game? Or have I poured into that athlete enough? He's not going to fire me if I don't go. He's going to understand the circumstances and I can be there in four days for his next one. And so when we gain the clarity we need, to me, tactically, that allows us and gives us

the lens at some level by which we can make decisions about what to say yes and no to and create the alignment. That's why, which is incredibly important, obviously. As you know, I have a tendency to become excited, possibly obsessed when I find something that I love. From cheese to hotels, women I admire to my favorite topic of confidence, I just can't shut up about it. And I love sleep. My favorite place in the world is my bed. So when I tell you that I've found the best sheets ever,

you need to know that I've tested an abundant amount. I've spent top dollar. I've tested thread counts and various materials and my search has ended with Cozy Earth. Bamboo fabric that is perfectly soft, temperature regulating, machine washable, and committed to ethical production. Cozy Earth checks all the boxes and is now on every bed in my house. And if you use my promo code, Nicole Khalil, you can get 40% off. You heard that right? 40% off when you use the code NicoleKILLE at CozyEarth.com. Enjoy a long, deep sleep.

Be great in bed because as we've been told, that is woman's work. And now let's get back to more of woman's work. Yeah, what I love about it, there's that expression, it's hard to read the label from inside the bottle. And what I often think is like, you're in it, you're swimming in it, you're feeling it, you're all the things. And an exercise like that sort of pulls us out and

gives us the opportunity for, as you said, clarity and alignment, but also some accountability, like accountability with self, right? I say this is important, but are my actions and choices lining up? Am I measuring up to my words? You know, there's that expression where it's like, if you really want to know what matters to somebody, look at their time and their money, right? Like where are they spending their time and their money? And that's where the rubber really meets the road. So I like this sort of accountability component. Now, I cannot let you go without talking about those seven keys to unlocking your dynamic drive, and I know you go over them in the book, but could you give us a little bit of a overview of those seven

things? Because I think it does what I hoped you would do, which is take something that is a word and make it more robust and more experiential and something that we can actually wrap our heads around. So all that to say, can you walk us through the seven keys to unlocking our dynamic drive? Absolutely. Yeah, for sure. And the way that I break it down in the book is at the highest level, there's three stages to this, right? When we think about engaging our dynamic drive, sort of tapping into this way of life, this new lens. And that's where I talk about mindset and energy. And then how do we keep it? How do we sustain it? Once we've shifted our mindset, once we've aligned

our energy, as you just shared relative to the things and the behaviors that we're pouring into, how do we sustain it? We need discipline and curiosity and resilience to do that. And then how do we then amp it up a notch, if you will, which is connection and confidence. So to break it down though, it starts with mindset relative to shifting our lens of an attitude that allows us to see obstacles as opportunities. And I break down some really cool tools, something called TMR, which is how do we have a total mindset reset in moments where we need it, which is often throughout the day. When we find ourselves, maybe we hang up from a tough call with a client and then we walk into our house with our miracles, as I call my daughters,

or we walk into another meeting in the office, as I call my daughters, or we walk into another meeting in the office. How do we shift our mindset quickly? And so breaking that down into a way that's, as you said at the intro, simple and easy to deploy in a way that is practical. The good news, Nicole, for me is I'm not smart enough to overcomplicate a lot of these things that to me fundamentally aren't very complicated. And then energy, right?

Energy is key to high performance. It's key to it's hard to shift our mindset if we don't have any energy. It's hard to as a business person to navigate change in the world that we live in today if we don't have any energy. So to engage our dynamic drive starts if we don't have any energy. So to engage our dynamic drive starts with mindset. It starts with energy. And energy to me is a remarkably important thing for us to spend time thinking about because I think if we don't decide where energy goes, Nicole, the world and everybody else in it is going to decide for us. And so we have to choose with a remarkable amount of intention, who and what we give our energy to. And then,

you know, discipline, I found this and I talked about this a bit in my TED talk, Nicole, but, you know, discipline is integral to dynamic Drive from the perspective that I saw a ton of athletes and coaches who overestimated talent, essentially, and underestimated discipline. They had an unbelievable level of talent, but if you don't ladder that up with discipline consistently every day, you're going to get to the big leagues for a cup of coffee. You're going to get the promotion, and then it's not going to last. You're going to sign the client or secure the deal. But if we're not disciplined in servicing that relationship, we're going to lose it. So discipline is key. And I talk about the discipline bridge inside of the book and keys to being able to unlock that. And then curiosity, you know, curiosity is something that creates chances for

us. It creates choices for us. Resilience is at some level, to me, the difference between good and great. When we're pushing ourselves, when we're getting uncomfortable and we're challenging the ability to become a better version of ourselves, it's not always going to work. There's a thousand examples where I've tried to step into change, to challenges, to new, to better, and we're going to have some hiccups. But dynamic drive is anchored in purpose. And when we know why we do what we do, it changes what we do. It drives the ability to recover because we know why we're recovering. And then connection and confidence are really important components as we begin to really master dynamic drive in the sense that we live in a world that's moving quickly. It gets

easy to get transactional. And so connection is about how do we stay relational and not get transactional in this busy world? It's easy to do. It's easy to do personally and professionally. And then confidence, you know, it's funny when I had my three daughters, my husband and I, I said to my mom, who's just an unbelievable role model to me, I said, Mom, if you could think of the one most important thing I could instill in our girls, and they were probably, you know, one, one, and, you know, two at the time, what would it be? And she said, confidence. She said, Molly, if they're confident, you know, they, they can navigate change, they can make tough decisions, they can ask tough questions, they can all of these things. And so confidence is this place that I think so many of us want to get to. And that is one of the keys as well and sort

of an important key relative to dynamic drive, of course, as well, but all threaded through that purpose lens because achievement is not going to bring fulfillment. As you said on the onset, purpose does. I couldn't agree more. Love your mom. Confidence is my life's work. I mean, that's what my book is about because exactly as you said, it gives us all of our options and opportunities. It allows us to practice all of the other things that you said. And one thing is you were talking about mindset. It popped into my head. And then as you were going through everything else, it kind of felt like a little bit of a theme. All of these things are easy or easier when things are going well. But when the you know what hits the fan, when you're feeling challenged, when you're losing, again, I go back to your experience with athletes. I'm always so

wildly impressed at what athletes choose to do when something didn't go according to your experience with athletes, I'm always so wildly impressed at what athletes choose to do when something didn't go according to plan, when they didn't make the shot, when they lost. And so, you know, when you think about our mindset, our energy, discipline, curiosity, resilience, connection, confidence, all of those things are harder to choose when things are tough, but also more impactful when you choose them during those times. So any observations or from your own personal experience tips about how to reframe or adjust or choose during those really tough moments when the feeling isn't there yet. Yeah, no, yeah, love it. And what you're speaking to at some level is this next play mentality, which great athletes have. It's, you can't, it's this next play mentality. And the other component,

I would say, is control the controllables, right? Great athletes are gonna miss shots. They're gonna have bad calls. And so it's about pulling back and saying in these moments for us as business people, controlling what we can control and letting go of what we can't. I remember I asked an incredible golf teacher once, I said, what do you think is the difference between the best in the world in golf, if you will, at that moment? But I think it transcends that and everybody else. And they recover fast. And so how do we do that? I have something I talk about called a total mindset reset. So I think we have to, in this moment, to give you something

tactical, we have to recognize the negative self-talk. And what is the limiting belief that we are telling ourselves about a particular circumstance, right? So recognize that self-talk that is saying maybe I can't, I won't, why me, that is at some level negative and isn't taking us where we want to go. I mean, if an athlete has a bad call and they spend the next two minutes arguing with, thinking about it, they're missing other opportunities. And so we have to say, what is that? And then how do I replace it, that negative self-talk with something that would be of a supportive friend, of a great coach? How would a great coach or a supportive friend talk

to me right now that I can and I will? Think about a young 11-month-old baby that's standing up to start to walk and they fall. What would you say to that 11-month-old baby? Sometimes, sadly, we, and I think women to your audience, we're really good at this, not in a good way, beating ourselves up. Yeah. So we have to say, what would that mom, if you will, or that woman or man say to that 11 month old kid? That's how we got to talk about ourselves when we're trying to get that 11 month old back up walking again. And then we've got to reinforce that new script. We've got to reinforce that new script. Maybe it's through visual reminders. Maybe it's through mantras. Maybe it's through others that can help us say it to us. Maybe it's through having

something visual that we can look at. I have something on my computer. I call it my smile file and I just drag and drop great notes, great nuggets into that. So a total mindset reset, recognize, replace, and then reinforce is a powerful way to shift. Yeah. I have my feel good folder. So I'm with you on that. And I often think, you know, in those tough moments where I am beating myself up or I have what I call head trash is what would I say to someone I love? What would I say to my daughter in this situation? But I love the 11 month old analogy because yes, so much of what we're doing, especially when we're up to something big is something we've never done before. It's new or new to us. So we have to give ourselves that grace and some patience as we're learning.

So I want to hone in on the word sustainability. I think sometimes when we talk about being driven or having drive, and I don't know that this is a woman thing, but I think a lot of women, we sort of interchange busyness with being driven, or we think we have to be going all the time, no breaks, right? So where does rest or recovery play in to drive or does it? Yeah. Oh my gosh. I'm so glad you brought this up. What a great question, Nicole. It absolutely plays into it. I always say the work, if you will, isn't what will leave us exhausted, drained, burned out, fried. It's the lack of rest. It's the lack of rest that will get us there. I mean, think about the analogy. If I

decided, man, I am going to get in tip top shape and I went and locked myself into a gym for two weeks. It doesn't work. You got to come out, you got to eat, you got to sleep, you got to drink water, you got to rest. And it's interesting, Nicole, I grew up and was a student athlete at Michigan State, played tennis and really kind of grew up in an environment where you found a way. You just found a way and you grind it and you could always do more. There was always more. There was another rep. There was just always another little bit of a lever you could grab and pull.

And I grew up that way. And so I always really thought that was the right approach. But the truth is what I've learned as I've gotten older is how important rest and recovery is. And the truth is it is otherwise not sustainable. And I used to think it was weak. I used to think I was soft if I needed to take 20 minutes and step outside and go for a walk, or if I just wanted to shut it down and watch a show. Or if I used to think that wasn't the right approach.

But the truth is, and the data supports it, and I talk about this at length in the book, the data supports it very deeply, that our need and ability to rest and recover is paramount to our ability to continue to sustain high performance. It's imperative. And it took me a long time to figure that out. And I had a lot of crashes and burns along the way to kind of get to that place. But it's important for us as women particularly to be gentle on ourselves. Give ourselves the time and the space to recognize the power in rest and recovery and what that does to allow us to show up better as a wife, as a mom, as an employee,

as a colleague, as a leader, whatever it might be. We show up better as a wife, as a mom, as an employee, as a colleague, as a leader, whatever it might be. We show up better. And I would just argue that try it, try it. And what you'll see is, man, it's powerful. And what I would, again, tactically, I would encourage people to do is pull back and say, what are the things that I can do in a minute to recover, to take a break? What are the five minutes behaviors that I love? What are the 15 minutes? What are the one hour? What are the four hour? Because we can't wait till spring break in four months with our kids or Christmas or Thanksgiving. We can't wait. So we have to pull back and say, what are the micro breaks that we can lean into that help us reset? One minute, five, write them all down, make a list, and then lean into those when we need to reset. That makes so much sense because I think so often we wait until we're so burnt out

that we need, you know, a week off or the retreat or whatever. And it's like, you know, how about we, and I like the idea of writing them down ahead of time. Cause when you need them, you're often kind of frazzled and not thinking very clearly anyway. So having that game plan ahead of time makes perfect sense to me. Molly, thank you for your wisdom, for writing this book. I know our listeners are going to want it. So the book again is Dynamic Drive. Get it for you and your teams. You can also go to mollyfletcher.com to learn more about Molly and her incredible work. And if you haven't heard her speak, either get her booked or go somewhere where she's speaking. It is well worth it. Molly, thank you so much. Nicole, thank you. All right. There you have it, friend. Fulfillment doesn't

come from goal achievement alone. And if you focused on it as a means to an end, you're probably on the fast road to burnout. Being driven isn't just about mowing your way through life and people and barreling over anyone who gets in your way. It's just not as simple as that. And it doesn't require you to be an asshole anyway. So drive is a mindset and energy, a discipline, and it includes curiosity, resilience, connection, and my favorite of them all, confidence. You may achieve some things along the way. In fact, I hope that you do. But even more, this is about who you can and will become along the way.

Dynamic drive to be a better you. That is woman's work.