How to Master the Inner Game of Leadership and Build a Business That Thrives Because of It with Barrett Brooks

0:28Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation. Barrett unpacks for Fire Nation how mastering the inner game of leadership drives clarity, performance, and growth. And today, Fire Nation will talk about the psychology of entrepreneurship, the patterns of self-sabotage, the inner journey of success, breaking through burnouts, and oh, so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Barrett and our sponsors. Are you ready for the ultimate all-in-one platform for entrepreneurs, marketers, coaches, and agencies? Build funnels, automate follow-ups, manage clients, and even white-label your own software, say hello to our featured partner, High Level, and visit highlevelfire.com to start your free trial today.

1:10Fire Nation, it's time to stop guessing and start winning with a proven playbook. Inside the Freedom Circle, you'll have access to my step-by-step systems for creating offers, building processes, and driving traffic, all in just 90 days. Ready for freedom? them. Visit freedom-circle.com to learn more. Barrett, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with. Love it. Well, what's up Fire Nation and John, great to be back with you. Yes. I felt long and hard about this one. And what I realized is it's something I say all the time that catches people off guard, which is that most entrepreneurs already know what to do, despite all of their seeking out of courses and how-tos and everything else.

1:59And what they actually struggle with is not the knowing what to do, it's the emotional cost of doing it. Barrett, you've been there, you've done that. You have the postcards, my friend. And today we're talking about how to master the inner game of leadership and build a business that thrives because of it, Fire Nation. And I want to start, Barrett, by talking about the psychology of entrepreneurship. I mean, most founders, they literally obsess over strategy and scale, but very few talk about the psychology behind entrepreneurship. What are the invisible inner dynamics that can make or break, let's be honest, a business leader?

2:33I think there's so many here and the most common things I see show up are all of the ways that we interact in our relationships outside of work usually show up at work in some way as well. And there's this theory in psychology called the attachment theory, which is about how we relate essentially to our parents when we're younger or whoever our caregivers are. And it's the idea of forming secure and insecure attachments. And one of the theories I have is that a business as an entrepreneur is like an attachment relationship in our life, where it's one of the most important things we do. We care about it like it's a true human being, except for it's an entity.

3:13And so all of the ways that we show up in our most vital relationships is also how we show up in our businesses. and that often leads to patterns of conflict, patterns of avoidance, patterns of aggression, ways that we treat our teams and our customers and the people that we relate to every day in our work that can really trip us up along the way. And so one of the biggest things that I help people with is recognizing these patterns when they're showing up. Hey, do you notice that you're getting really frustrated with that person who works with you, but in the three years that they've been on your team, never once have you given them a piece of critical feedback?

3:47Jack, what's up there? And there are so many little habits and patterns that play out this way that are deeply rooted in psychology, honestly, that goes all the way back to childhood for most people. And we just don't see it in the moment. And we typically blame it on other people or simply avoid it altogether. And it usually holds us back along the way. Fire Nation, we don't want to be held back. This world is moving so fast. We don't need to be putting other things in front of us that don't need to be there. So I want to talk really about these patterns of self-sabotage, because this kind of dives deeper into this, where you've actually coached some of the most recognized creators and entrepreneurs in this space.

4:24So what patterns do you see in how these high performers, they're actually sabotaging their own success? And when they're doing that, and then they work with you, how do they break through? There's a few key patterns that I see here. So we'll talk about the content treadmill that has been famous forever. We'll talk about burnout and then we'll talk about growing teams and the changing role of a creator as a team grows. So the first one is the treadmill and the treadmill is a beautiful thing because it's how so many of us have built businesses. You, John, are like the perfect example of this. I was going to say, I feel like I'm the treadmill.

5:05And I think it's really easy once you get successful to think like, well, this should get easier at some point, right? Like I shouldn't have to keep doing this in order to sustain what I built. But in fact, that is the name of the game. If you've built a large YouTube audience, if you've built a large podcast audience, newsletter audience, you never get to stop. Like that is the core of the work that you've signed up for. And I think one of the ways that we sabotage ourselves is early on when maybe we're running away from something or we're trying to solve a money problem, we'll do almost anything to fix that.

5:39and so we get on the grind and we start making our content and we do it over and over and over until we solve that problem and then one day we wake up and we realize oh my gosh I built myself a thing that I have to keep doing for the rest of forever or at least that's the way it feels and so much of what I help people do is figuring out what version of that commitment that they can fall in love with instead of trying to avoid how can they sign up for a version of making YouTube videos that they can actually sustain rather than it feeling like this grind that they never want to do again. And this is surprising to a lot of people because you think, well, they have a million followers on Instagram.

6:19Like surely they enjoy the process. And a lot of times people don't. They've built a version of it that they hate, but they feel beholden to it because it's how they earn their living. So this is one category of things is how do you build a version of the content treadmill that you can actually fall in love with and sign up for actively rather than fighting against over time. The second thing I see, and it's somewhat related to the content thing, but it's bigger than that, is just the burnout that comes from playing all of the different roles, wearing all of the different hats that you have to wear as an entrepreneur every day.

6:54And it's really easy to continue operating at this like 15 out of 10 energy after the point at which that's what's required of you. like I'm not going to lie to anyone if you're starting a business there is an amount of extra energy that's required to get it over the hump to make it possible for you to earn a living from it and there's also a point at which you do have momentum like you don't always have to work at a 15 out of 10 to sustain what you've built and so a lot of times when I start working with people who have had huge success online they come to me and they say I want to quit I want to sell my business I want to get out of it maybe I'll just quit it all together I think I've got enough money in the bank that I don't have to work for a while.

7:36And a huge part of helping them unpack that is realizing all the ways that they're continuing to work that no longer reflect their current reality. So if you were working 70 hours a week before you had a kid, when you were making no money, and you had just gotten laid off, and that's why you started your business, well, that's one thing. But if you wake up one day, and you're still doing that, and maybe half of that time is spent on things that probably don't move the needle that much. But your psychology is causing you to feel like if you stop, your business is going to fail. Like that's a thing worth unpacking and saying, okay, what's actually true now?

8:10How big is your audience? How much money do you have in the bank? What is your present reality? And what does that require of you? Because it's usually a different set of things than whatever you've been doing the whole time. And so that's almost like the flip side of the content treadmill thing is yes, you may have to keep doing that forever and you need to find a version you can do for a long time. There's a lot of other things you no longer have to do, but that you once did in order to get where you are. So that's the second thing. And then the third thing is there's this shift that I see creators have to go through.

8:42I call them creators, people who are online, building audiences, doing creative work of some kind and building a business based on it. You have to at some point make the shift from just being a creator to being a CEO as well. And this is really disheartening for people who are creative because what they want to do is just go in their lab and make stuff and have people love it and they don't have to do anything else and they can just magically earn a living from their brilliant creativity. Or at least that's how it feels for me sometimes. And the reality is I need help. Like my little, my little saying for this is that three person companies don't build jet engines.

9:16And sure, most of us aren't trying to build jet engines, but the idea is that anything of enough complexity and enough impact requires additional people. And if you can learn the skills of being a great CEO or even a decent CEO beyond just being a great creative, then you can get so much more leverage and make so much more impact on many more people as a result of that because of your ability to lead a team. Man, I love those three. And there's no doubts. I can raise my hand about the treadmill one for sure. And the reality is that's why I think it's so important that when you're starting something, you need to continue, continuously kind of put your finger on your pulse and say like, am I really enjoying this?

9:53Am I really digging this? Like, is this filling me up? And for me, like, honestly, I love getting on calls with inspiring, successful, motivating entrepreneurs and just having conversations like this. I don't, I don't want to stop doing this. And so for me, it's like, this is a treadmill I'm happily on, but still we need to talk about the inner journey of success because Barry, you often say that entrepreneurship is an inner journey of outward success, which is really interesting. So what does that look like in real life for a business owner who's feeling the pressure every single day. Yeah. One of the most concrete ways I see this show up is for my clients who are really big on Instagram.

10:30Uh, not that this is like the whole thing, but it's just a point in example of this principle. You know, you see a creator who's got, let's say 1.5 million followers on Instagram. And what you see is consistent content output. You see them getting thousands of likes, maybe hundreds of thousands of views on every reel they put out. and it looks like everything's going great. Like you might look at them and say, well, I'd like to be where they are one day. And what I see sitting in coaching sessions with them is how it feels on the inside of them and the way that they have gone from creating stuff from an inspired place, from a place that's aligned to what they want to see in the world, to what their creative urges are, to something that starts to get shaped around what the algorithm responds to, what might go viral, that on a day when they post something that doesn't get a couple hundred thousand views, that their inner world can crumble in response to that.

11:29And they start to question their own self-worth or their own creative instincts along the way. And so what to the outside can look like this huge success can look like this huge rollercoaster of emotion just from one platform, which is only one piece of a much broader business that a person might be running. and I'm so fascinated by the difference between these things. Like why is it that from the outside looking in, we can say, wow, they built the thing I always hoped for. And from the inside looking out, it can feel like a prison. And all of this just comes back to how much of our experience is shaped by that inner world experience of things, not the outer perception of it, not even the money that it's putting in the bank.

12:13Like sometimes our inner experience is completely detached from the results that we're getting. And so, so much of what I do with clients is begin to help them create the skills of acknowledging what's actually going on internally. Like, oh, I'm feeling really irritable today. I'm being short with my partner and my kids. I'm unfocused. What's going on there? Oh, well, yesterday I posted a reel I thought was going to do really well and it got almost no reaction. And I've been checking my stats all day nonstop. Huh? That's interesting. Are those things connected? How are they connected? And there's this kind of three-step process.

12:52It's very simple. It's not like I'm breaking ground here, but it's if you can start to notice in the moment what's happening, that's step one. And this is a huge step for most people because usually we're on automatic mode. And then once you start to notice consistently, then the second step is just to take a beat before you go back and you check the Instagram metrics again. Is that going of solve for the actual thing that I'm feeling right now, which is maybe like uncertainty about my intuition and my creative instincts. And in that pause, the second step, it creates the possibility for the third step, which is, well, maybe I could do something different right now.

13:30Maybe rather than going and checking the stats and the last thing I made, maybe I can embrace that content online is kind of like playing the lottery. and as long as you're batting 300 like a great baseball player three out of every 10 posts is doing pretty well you're actually winning the game and so 70 of the time you should expect you're going to do not as well as your great stuff your hits that are going to take off and reach many new people and so what would be better than checking your metrics going and making something else that gets you back in the game and so this three-step process of notice what's going on, pause, and then make a new choice is life-changing for a lot of people, mostly because it acknowledges what's really going on internally.

14:13It doesn't just keep the ball moving and moving onto the next thing before you can really acknowledge, oh, I'm feeling pretty off because I made a thing I was proud of and no one liked it. I like that mindset shift in Fire Nation, like that baseball analogy of if you fail like seven times out of 10, you're probably going to the hall of fame. And if you fail six times out of 10, you might be the most elite baseball player to ever walk on this earth. Like if you think about that, like give yourself some space, give yourself a breather. And we are going to talk about breaking through burnout, building that inner game and more when we get back from taking our sponsors.

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17:09High level, join the revolution. Barrett, we're back, and I want to talk about breaking through burnout. Because when leaders hit that wall of burnout, what is the first internal shift they need to make to regain their clarity, their direction, their drive? Most of the time, burnout, like we, I think most people think of burnout as being overworked. But I think of burnout more as an emotional problem where you have underutilized your agency. so the first shift is going from thinking of burnout as overwork to realizing that usually it's an underutilization of agency okay so what do i mean by that as entrepreneurs like the reason we got into this thing for a lot of us is we want the freedom of controlling how we work we want to choose what we work on we want to choose when we work on it we want to choose who we work on it with and then over time somehow we end up feeling trapped by the very thing that was supposed to give us freedom.

18:10And it's like, we are the prisoner and it is the cage and we have no choice. And a huge piece of that is of recovering from burnout is taking back the agency of, I have choice actually over every single element of what I do. Now, all of my choices have costs. And this goes back to the first thing that I shared as we started the conversation, which is that many times I noticed people know what they would need to do to come back from burnout, but they're not yet committed to the emotional cost that it's going to come with. So for example, if you have a very successful business, let's say you have hundreds of thousands of followers online and you're doing over a million dollars a year.

18:54And one of the things you notice is so that you don't have to hire anyone. You keep doing every single job in your business and you're carrying, let's say 27 open threads of work at any given moment in time, it's not a money constraint because you're making enough money. You could hire people. It's not a time constraint because you have the time you're spending it on other things that you could hire people. Maybe it feels like a time constraint. Usually it's that you think if you hire people, that will be the thing that makes you a prisoner to your business. It's like, oh, oh, well, now I'm accountable to people and I'm responsible for their livelihood.

19:34And one of the questions I ask in that kind of situation is, well, what is the cost you're already paying? Because it looks a lot like you're a prisoner right now and all in the name of what? Not having an employee? And so, so much of the process is beginning to acknowledge, okay, what exactly do you think is causing the burnout? And usually there's some surface level stuff. Oh, it's this and it's that and it's that. I have too much going on. I've been working too hard. And it's like, okay, maybe that's the case, but maybe also there's something more going on here. And then you dig in and you start to realize, oh, there's actually these other motivations behind it.

20:09I'm scared of being poor. I don't want to have to hire people. I had a really, you know, three really bad managers earlier in my career. And I'm really scared of being a horrible manager. I think that if I hire people, I'll never get to take a vacation again. Or if I slow down that people will think I'm irrelevant, that they'll no longer pay attention to me and I'll lose all of my audience. There are all these stories that are underneath why we keep plowing ahead just as we have been, even though it's not working for us. And so a big, big thread that we pull on is what are the stories underneath and how can we play with those actual stories rather than the surface level symptoms that are up top.

20:48And once we get down to that story level, it becomes a lot easier to unwind burnout and start to build new habits, new process, new ways of relating to your work that allow you to work more sustainably and get out of that burnout cycle that you've been in. Bear, this is a lot for people to take it at once. I mean, it's a lot of great stuff, but it's still a lot at the same time. So I really want to end by talking about building something. Let's talk about building the inner game. I mean, for somebody who's listening, who wants to strengthen that inner game, give us one practical habits they can start today that delivers the biggest long-term payoff in your opinion?

21:26I think the number one habit you can build as an entrepreneur is noticing when you get triggered by things in your business. So what do I mean by triggered? When you have an emotional reaction or a body reaction, especially, so you might notice it as tight shoulders, tight neck, or tight chest, short breath, or maybe you get a queasiness in your gut. And in response to that trigger, you react in some hasty way. And so there are many things that can do this to us. It could be getting an email back from someone we sent a pitch to. That's like a thing that triggers me a lot of times is before I've read the email, but I've gotten the response, I get triggered by that because I don't know what's going to happen.

22:09Or you get pinged on Slack by a teammate and they say there's a problem. Or you have a key client cancel their subscription. All of these things are the types of things that I see trigger entrepreneurs regularly. And usually they put into motion these automatic cycles of behavior that can often be quite damaging. So if I were going to encourage everyone to do one practical thing, it's just to keep a little notepad next to your computer where you work every day on your desk and, or have it in your bag if you do it, if you're on the road, write down every time you notice yourself getting triggered and what the trigger was.

22:51And I think if every person in your very large audience, John started doing that, I think it would begin to reveal solutions to problems that have felt like stuckness for a very long time in a lot of their businesses. Barrett, if Fire Nation is really connecting with what you're saying today and they want to connect with you and they want to learn more. What is your call to action for our listeners today? If you are interested in growing your inner journey of outward success and getting to know your own psychology as an entrepreneur better, I write a weekly newsletter that comes out every Monday called Little Leadership Lessons.

23:24It's five minutes or less. I take a practical lesson from a coaching session from the past few weeks and turn it into something universal every entrepreneur can relate to. and you can subscribe to that at barrettbrooks.com right at the top of the homepage. Barrettbrooks.com. Fire Nation, you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. You've been hanging out with BB and JLD today, so keep up that heat. For links to everything we talked about, visit eofire.com. Just type Barrett, that's two R's, two T's, in the search bar and the show notes page will pop right up. And Barrett, thank you for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation today.

24:02For that, we salute you and we'll catch you on the flip side. Hey, Fire Nation, a huge thank you to our sponsors and Barrett for sponsoring today's episode and Fire Nation, don't let another 90 days slip by. Inside my community, the Freedom Circle, entrepreneurs are building real freedom with proven playbooks and community support. Claim your spot now at freedom-circle.com or we'll catch you on the flip side. Are you ready for the ultimate all-in-one platform for entrepreneurs, marketers, coaches, and agencies. Build funnels, automate follow-ups, manage clients, and even white label your own software.

24:41Say hello to our featured partner, High Level, and visit highlevelfire.com to start your free trial today. Fire Nation, it's time to stop guessing and start winning with a proven playbook. Inside the Freedom Circle, you'll have access to my step-by-step systems for creating offers, building processes, and driving traffic, all in just 90 days. Ready for freedom? Visit freedom-circle.com to learn more.