No More Excuses - It's Time to Find Your Way Forward with Brett K. Oubre: An EOFire Classic from 2022

0:01John Lee Dumas:Boom! Shake the room, Fire Nation. JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire, brought to you by High Level, the all-in-one sales and marketing platform. On today's classic episode, we're breaking down no more excuses. It's time to find your way forward. To drop these value bombs, I brought Brett Oubre and EO Fire Studios. Brett survived a brain tumor, plane crash, and debt to become a CEO, owner-operator of six top-performing dealerships and creator of 300 jobs. And today we talk about how your biggest failure can be just before your biggest success, how you will learn a lot by evaluating your failure.

0:32John Lee Dumas:And no matter how bad your situation is, there's always a way forward and oh, so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Brett and our sponsors. Fire Nation, 50 days will fly right on by. The only question is, will you have something to show for it? I created a free YouTube series called 50 days to something. A step-by-step path to build a real product, service, or offer in just 50 focused days. Start today for free at eofire.com slash YouTube. Stop duct taping your business together. High Level runs your website, your funnels, email, automation, scheduling, payments, and memberships all in one place.

1:10John Lee Dumas:And when you sign up at highlevelfire.com, you get a 30-day free trial plus my exclusive bonus stack that includes weekly office hours with me and much more. Visit highlevelfire.com, highlevelfire.com. Brett, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with.

1:34Brett K. Oubre:Well, good afternoon, Fire Nation. Probably the biggest thing that I would say that the thing that comes to being successful that most people disagree with is that just when you think your biggest failure is about to take you out, success is right around the corner. The difference between people who achieve success, and I don't mean, you know, people look at success and they say they got to be well known for it, they have to be popular for it. I mean, there's people in the smallest areas, in the smallest towns, in the smallest type of situations that are achieving success. But right when they get to the end and they're almost there, they get discouraged.

2:15They lose their hope and they give up.

2:19Brett K. Oubre:And if they were to walk two more feet, there was their mountain.

2:23John Lee Dumas:Is there any self-sabotage happening there? I mean, when people are so close to success or even when they finally achieve success, I've seen this before, self-sabotage happens. Do you have any opinions about that?

2:36Brett K. Oubre:Yeah, my personal belief on self-sabotage, it's all how you start the conversation in your mind. What I mean by that is in order to be successful, you have to first fix the mind because most people, when they wake up in the morning, they know what they're capable of. When they go to bed in the evening, they know what they did. And the opportunity gap is in between. the difference between successful people and people that are not experiencing success is successful people will review that in their mind and go okay i missed here here here and here but i'm not going to internalize it i'm going to sit down and write there's an opportunity for tomorrow for people that are self-sabotaging to use your language they make excuses as to why that those things happen to them rather than the stuff that they just get off so brett the title

3:31John Lee Dumas:for today's episode is no more excuses. It's time to find your way forward. So I want to start by talking about the detriments of excuses as we go along our path to success. And specifically, what can we do about it?

3:48Brett K. Oubre:Well, I think the detriment to excuses is number one, it gives life to them. So it's easier to give myself a pass and say, well, tomorrow, I'm going to do that. Next week, I'm going to do that. Next month, I'm going to do that. Well, you just don't understand. I walked in today and I got busy and my boss wanted me to do this or my boss wanted to do that. Or maybe it's a house project that you're trying to accomplish and you're saying, well, you just didn't understand. The phone rang and then I saw this mess over here and I had to take care of that. Before you get to the end of the day, what you set out to do was not completed.

4:27Brett K. Oubre:And so that is the detriment of excuses to me. It's the detriment of excuses to anything you want to accomplish, whether it's health, spiritual, mental, physical, financial, or social.

4:40John Lee Dumas:Can you give us a specific example of something you've seen in that with maybe yourself, somebody that you've worked with, something along your journey in life, like a real world example? We don't need names. We don't need real specifics that would give away the whole kit and caboodle. But let's get real here.

5:00Brett K. Oubre:Well, I mean, you know, rather than bring somebody else up, the best way for me would do is just to tell you my own life. I mean, I had a successful sales career and then I've morphed that into a successful leadership career and now a president of a company career. but it could all ended in this one respect is I went through several sales jobs, even though I had the training, I had the background and I knew the sales presentation. I knew what to say and I knew what to do when the customer talked back, so to speak, and I had to overcome the objections. I knew how to technically, so to speak, I knew how to answer the close.

5:44Brett K. Oubre:However, the self-confidence was so thin that what I would do, do is I would give up by not making any. I would sit down and I'd do what's called get ready to get ready. I would sit at my desk. I'd make lists. I'd make target lists. And then I'd start reasoning out in my mind how Joe, Sally, Sue, Mary, Billy, Bobby was never going to do what I was going to ask him to do. And I had failure after failure after failure after failure. You see, success has never taught me anything. Success just makes us to become arrogant because it makes us think we're better than we are. But failure, if you evaluate it, is the best teacher.

6:33Brett K. Oubre:And for me personally, I just got to the point where I knew I was better than that. At this point, I had obligations with family. I had obligations with personal and people that were relying on me. And I said, I'm not going to do this anymore. I'm going to give it one last chance. And I went in and I started doing what I knew how to do. And the man wasn't fixed yet, but the confidence was built the first time I made that call. And I didn't close that customer that day, but I got a little further down the road. And before you know it, by the end of that experience, I was one of the top salespeople.

7:09John Lee Dumas:So Fire Nation, I hope you really resonate with that specific personal experience. And you can kind of look at how your life has maybe mashed up that way at some point. Because let's be honest, Brett, we've all gone through difficult times. So let's get real about how we can disempower the reliance on excuses in these specific moments. Go there.

7:31Brett K. Oubre:The way to disempower the reliance on excuses is to, number one, believe in yourself. But to believe in yourself is kind of a generic situation. You have to do a 360 walk around inside and figure out what your talents are, what your hopes, what your dreams are, your aspirations. Because, number one, a lot of people lose confidence and lose hope because they're not in their area of strength. when I'm not in my area of strength, when I try to execute and actuate on something, I experience mediocre results. And maybe every now and then I do well, like for me personally, I'll give you a story. Okay.

8:11Brett K. Oubre:I was not very good in sports as I was growing up. I can do it. Okay. But I was not very good at sports. So every time I went out and they had great people that were better than me, it became a low self-esteem event every time I went out there because I was miss-slotted into something that wasn't my talent. And so the first thing you have to do is you got to figure out what it is that you were uniquely designed for. The test I always use is when I'm talking to folks is sit down with a piece of paper, spend some time thinking and think about the last time that you worked on something that at the end of the day, even though you put together a full day's work, you had more energy, even though you were tired, you had more energy at the end of the day than you did at the beginning of the day.

9:00Brett K. Oubre:And that's a talent. Then think about the last time that at the end of the day, even though you got the job done, you were literally worn out, couldn't keep your eyes open, didn't want to talk to anybody anymore. And that's the difference between a talent and a non-talent. If you stay in a non-talented role long enough, you will literally start making excuses as to why you can't be successful. Does that make sense, Steve?

9:24John Lee Dumas:It makes sense. And I love that last phrase that Brett just used. If you stay in a non-talented role long enough, you will start making those excuses, Fire Nation. That's got to be a slap in the face for some people that have been there for a long time. And we have a lot of value on this topic coming up when we get back from thanking our sponsors. Fire Nation, if you're growing fast, your backend can't be stuck in slow motion, bills flying in, approvals getting bottlenecked, vendors chasing updates, that kind of busy work drains your energy and steals your focus. That's where Intuit QuickBooks BillPay steps in.

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12:31John Lee Dumas:Stop piecing tools together. Start building momentum. Visit highlevelfire.com and start building your something today. Hey, Brett, we're back. And we've been talking a lot about the excuses in this world and how it's time to find our way forward as humans, as entrepreneurs, because it's really easy. It's really comfortable to rely on excuses. It's just like, that's just easy. How do we stop accepting this action and do the hard work to actually get results in our life?

13:05Brett K. Oubre:For me personally, I think the only way to stop accepting excuses is to hit the wall long enough. Number one is you have to have a identified thing that you want to accomplish. Number one, we talked about it before the break is you have to find your talent. You have to have enough passion to say that I want to go after that. And then you have to review that on a weekly, monthly, yearly basis and see where you're trying to go. What are you trying to accomplish? Who are you trying to bring along with you? And you got to see what kind of accomplishment you're having. Because if at any point there, you get off of the visualization and the focus of what you're trying to accomplish, you're going to fall into those excuses.

13:53Brett K. Oubre:Number two is, you have to be prepared to be ridiculed. You have to be prepared to be trying to be pulled down because most of the people that are going to be around you are going to try to be mediocre when they see you trying to accomplish more than them. They're not going to give you encouragement. They're not going to give you the pat on the back that you're looking for. In fact, if you need the encouragement, the pat on back for others, it's probably going to take you a long time if you're ever going to get there.

14:23John Lee Dumas:So one thing that I've been looking forward to this entire interview is the fact that you have some proven and very practical, by the way, steps that are going to allow us to conquer our excuses and actually act. Break down these steps now. My step for doing everything, number one, it starts with the person, right?

14:44Brett K. Oubre:So if I have the person, I've got to figure out because I think everybody was designed and created for greatness. But when you start out as a kid, we have this tremendous amount of hope. And then as we go through life and people say, don't stop, quit it, don't do that, watch this, watch that over time. And then just, I think kids are naturally developed low self-esteem because they're seeing people around them accomplish and nobody's given them the coaching and the guidance that, hey, I need to find the area of my strengths. Does that make sense to you? It makes sense. And so what happens over time is that if that continues to happen, they get into a role down the road and the self-doubt grows so great.

15:36Brett K. Oubre:It's almost like they become paralyzed. So I think most folks, and that was including me, I felt like I had tremendous talent. I felt like I had tremendous things that I could offer, tremendous talent sets that I could apply. But deep down, I had this birdie in my head saying, you're not good enough. You're not great enough. People like you don't do what those kind of people do. You don't understand. You don't have the pedigree that they have. And so the first thing you have to do is you have to do a 360 walk around of yourself. You got to figure out what your goals, your talents, your aspirations are.

16:13Brett K. Oubre:You have to write those things down. And again, what I said last segment is you got to go back and think about the times where you experienced as mean as it was some kind of energy. Although you've given a full day's work, and then you have to go back and figure out where it zapped your energy. And then you have to start lining that up to what you see yourself being and doing and growing and trying to match those particular career goals into those things that are talents. Now, that being said is, I can't tell everybody on this podcast specifically what they should do because I don't know their individual situations or what they want to do.

16:57Brett K. Oubre:But if you take that generically and apply it to your situation, it's practical steps to try to figure it out.

17:02John Lee Dumas:Now, Brett, before we close with a bang, is there anything else you want to talk about these proven and practical steps that you've created that's going to allow us to conquer these excuses all time?

17:14Brett K. Oubre:Well, for me, it's just been a lifetime of lessons. I mean, I've I've been, you know, my goal behind speaking and training and, you know, having a book come out at the end of this year is to find people like me that felt stuck in the middle. Because, you know, it's easy to it's easy to idolize big names. It's easy to go find the folks that are on TV, that are on the that have the big splash on the Internet and say, well, I'd like to be like them. And then immediately the self-doubt comes in and says, wow, I can't do that because I'm not that person. I'm not as good as this person. I'm not as famous as that person.

17:56Brett K. Oubre:I don't have the talent set because we all fall into this comparison trap as we compare ourselves to others. If you don't believe me, sit down with a group of people that are neighbors and one one person will get a job. They all sit there and talk about the job that that person got. And then they, you know, the whispers behind the walls are, oh, he's not so great. And she's not so great. And that's not really trying to ridicule that person. What they're really doing is having this self conversation with themselves is I don't feel adequate. So I'm going to try to pull them down. So for that being said is me personally, is I had to take responsibility for every single thing that happened, even if it was out of my control.

18:39Brett K. Oubre:Does that make sense to you?

18:40John Lee Dumas:It makes a lot of sense. And I feel like that leads us perfectly into the grand finale. So take a step back. Think about everything we talked about here today about the no more excuses about finding our way forward. What is the one thing that you really want to make sure Fire Nation gets from our entire conversation today? Well, the one thing that I would that I want Fire Nation to understand is no matter how dire your situation is.

19:07Brett K. Oubre:No matter how desolate you feel, no matter how lonely you feel, no matter how unsuccessfully you feel, there's always a way to go forward. And you have to sit down and start thinking about the people that are less fortunate than you, that have less resources than you. that have less opportunities than you do, that are creating more, that are going further, because they refuse to accept those handicaps and they go anyway. There's many times through I had a brain tumor, I had business failures, I had sales failures that I could have said, oh woe is me I'm so terrible I didn't get the talents that he did or she did or they did and what I did was I stopped and reversed and said okay now that I fixed the person from a self-esteem standpoint now they got to fix the person I can say okay well here's where I missed here here's where I missed there here's where I missed here now how do I find that information I may not be able to get on the phone and talk to you as a person that's on this podcast.

20:20Brett K. Oubre:I may not be able to, you know, I've always heard find a mentor. But if you want a great mentor, I mean, how good, how easy is that going to do unless you have some kind of accomplishment at a national level? And you can go sit down with a John McClure. You could go sit down with some other big name. The reality is, is for 20 bucks, you can go online to any bookstore in the country and you can start selecting mentors that are some of the top in the country and spend time in your living room and mentor yourself for an hour a day. When I started having the biggest failures in my life, a guy challenged me to start educating myself.

20:58Brett K. Oubre:And he said, if you read five years in one subject, you'll become an expert of it. And so I sat down in the four areas as I did my 360 walk around, what I wanted to accomplish in my life. And I started purchasing those books and no matter rain or shine, one hour every day, mine specifically in the morning. And some of that information that I have gathered is the information that I'm using today that I read seven or eight years ago and I wasn't even ready for today, but I was equipped for today because I equipped myself with that information.