Activating your potential with Adam Knapp

0:02Hi, and welcome to this week's episode of the Epic Entrepreneurs podcast where we are all about helping business owners just like you achieve success. So we don't do fancy smancy. We don't do flashing lights. We don't do a lot of things that a lot of podcasts will do. These are just real stories about real people and their entrepreneurial and business experiences. We go into their wins, their challenges, and their learnings. So we hope you enjoy it. Hey there, welcome to this week's episode of Epic Entrepreneurs, brought to you by Action Coach Growth Partners. I'm your host, Bill Gilliland, and in this podcast, you'll find three things.

0:47You're going to hear real stories from real entrepreneurs that will help you along your entrepreneurial journey. You're also going to get business tips to help you scale up faster, and you're going to get actual coaching to help you get better real world results to be the best entrepreneur you can be. Hey, and if you like the podcast, remember to subscribe. And now, enjoy the show. Yeah, go ahead and introduce yourself. Hello, I'm Adam Knapp from Knapp Creative Coaching, transformational work, five elements of transformation. I work with communication, accountability, clarity, awareness, and action.

1:28It's kind of a mandala of result. I call it the mandala of meaning. And, you know, I've been kind of working in this zone for a while, working with the ideas of creating a whole potential for people. It's a passion for me to be a part of assisting people in growing to their best potential. And, you know, I discovered that kind of what I do in a really concentrated institutional way as a school teacher. After graduating from college, I went into education and my research and all my work was surrounded around developing curriculum and developing systems that were holistic in nature. And so the root of my work has all been in, you know, developmental strategies, emotional strategies, even spiritual strategies, obviously intellectual, you know, working with kindergarten, first grade, second and third grade, and then high school and then teachers.

2:37and then after 24 years kind of realized that hey maybe there's something else out there I can do and that's when I got into coaching individuals in small groups outside of the classroom model but over the last you know five six years I've noticed as most things there's a lot of similarities of what I was doing as a school teacher, as what I do as a coach. And it's been a lot of fun, a lot of insights, been experiencing some profound developmental insights that have encouraged me further. So it's been a fun ride. It's been a fun ride for sure. Thanks for having me here. I appreciate it. Yeah, thanks, Adam.

3:25Um, so tell us a little bit about, I want to delve into the five areas, um, and you ran through them real quick, so we'll, we'll take them one by one, but, but tell us a little bit about what's the prompt? Like what, when, where, where, where do you work best with people or is it just everybody needs you? Well, you know, what I've been noticing is I resonate well with folks who are pretty engaged in developing their next best steps for their lives. They're active. They have a lot going on. They're seeking ways to kind of get themselves out of the way. And they recognize, my best client recognizes that they need help getting to the next layer of their potential.

4:13And oftentimes that help is discovered through the communication and through the dialogue and through interactivity. And as you know, a lot of times with projects and with activating, we have to have accountable measures. We have to have either calendar dates or check-ins, phone calls, whatever. And so people who are wanting to step up to themselves differently is usually the way I say it. And oftentimes they're not in mud. They're not clamoring around in the darkness. they're oftentimes pretty clear on what they want to do but they also are very clear that they want help or they need help or help is an ally rather than a an impediment you know people don't often easily ask for help and you know people who do see that getting a coach or getting someone to walk beside them.

5:19And so that, so that model, the walking model, I enjoy having walk-in talks, going out and being on a trail or going on a nature hike with clients and just having conversations and getting to kind of the root of the next thing that they have to do or the next thought that they want to unpack. Got it. So they're kind of plateaued where they are. They may have a clear idea of what they want, but they need to kind of work it out. They need help. I I want to delve into this thing you just said there. Why do you think it is that people have a hard time asking for help? There's several things that come about.

5:57I'll use myself as an example. You know, I'm a pretty, I feel like I'm a pretty capable person. I feel like I have, you know, a lot of tools at my disposal. And I think I'm also stubborn. And, you know, I think I get in my own way. And in a sense, I believe there's a lot of people like that. You know, I can do this. I have the skills. I have the ability. I've done these kind of things before. I don't think it's pride too much, but it can be. I think it's sometimes even in some cases, it can even just being somewhat having blinders on. Like they're so entrenched in their own lane of activation that it's hard to see right next to them.

6:47Either north, south, east, west is the next step. You know, I think we often get blinded by our own progress. Yeah, I just think we're taught that in school to do your own work and to be an individual. And yeah, this is a country. This is a country of individual say unless you get, you know, in sports and in. band and, you know, choir and some things like that drama, you get, you get the team thing, but. Well, good point. Yeah, good point. And, you know, it's interesting about that. And that's what's so cool about my, you know, decades in the classroom is I developed classroom instructional practices and in curriculum protocols that aren't new.

7:34And it's not like I created something out of thin air. But what I did is I activated a constructivist classroom model to the fullest degree using Howard Gardner's stuff with the multiple intelligences of learning and different frames of learning from audio, from visual to audio to linguistic. And I enjoyed watching disparate and different learners come together and share their insight about a problem or an idea and collectively come to a solution. And the more I was working around inside of a curriculum, you know, like when I was teaching high school, you know, I was teaching high school English.

8:16And if we had to read a Shakespeare play or we were doing this or that in the literature, I would always set it up in group protocol, always had a, you know, a timekeeper, a vocabulary. You know, I always had, everyone had a task and everyone had to come to the group with their task completed. so everyone could be contributive to the goal. And in that framework, I noticed that people who were really wanting to be directly taught and told what to do had the hardest times, you know, because people squirm when they have to go and find the answer for themselves. Yeah, it's super interesting. It is.

8:55It is. Yeah. Yeah. So tell us about the transition from education to working, you know, becoming an entrepreneur, working for yourself, becoming a coach. How'd that go? Well, it's been kind of iterative. You know, I started off thinking I was going to be a content writer and support people in their project management and stuff, similar to kind of being a school teacher. And then once I started getting deeper and deeper into my value statements and understanding my mission and vision and learning what entrepreneurial world is all about, I became much more attuned to what I had been doing all the years as an educator and activating people's potential.

9:35Once I started digging into that and I started formulating my idea around what I've been doing around the five elements, my scholarship and my research around the five elements started when I began my master's program in 2003. and my master's program was centered around mindfulness and compassionate education. I got my master's degree from Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado. And the premise for the program is that you had to have an active, you had to be an active teacher. You had to have your own classroom and your own research, you know, kind of, I guess, habitat, you know, you had to be able to use all this stuff in your classroom and see and do problems and have, you know, process-based learning.

10:26And that kind of stuff is a whole heck of a lot of fun for me. I love the process of figuring out a question and figuring out a problem and getting to a solution. And as a school teacher, you know, teachers are, they have to come up with questions and answers at a rapid rate all day long. You know, it's an endless sea of problem solving. And so the fine-tuned tool of education and being an educator and a facilitator of people, I got to a point where I felt like I had, there was a time in my teaching where every semester I could say at the closing of the door and go on to the next semester, go on to the summer break, I could say, wow, that was the best semester I've ever had.

11:14And there were years there where every single semester became the best semester, the best semester. And it's like, wow, this is a lot of fun. And so I was, I was activated to the, my fullest potential. And it got to a point when I started, you know, when I, my principal came to me one time and he asked me if I wanted to go and get my, my master's in administration and become an administrator. And I said, no way, I don't want to be an administrator. I have my, I'm a fifth generation teacher. My great grandfather was a teacher. Great, great grandfather was a teacher. My aunts and uncles, my brother, my dad, my mom.

11:48So everybody in my family are pretty much teachers. And so I watched what administrations had to do. I was very carefully aware of that. And when I turned down that idea, he said, well, how about this? Why don't you go and get your coaching license and we'll pay for it? So the school pay for the school district pay for my my licensure and I was lit on fire. It was so much fun. I got to operate it at a whole nother level of, of my skillset in facilitating adult learning. And I got a job with the state of North Carolina, teaching teachers at the retreat center called North Carolina Center for Advancement of Teaching and CAT.

12:33They have a campus in Western North Carolina and they have a campus on Ocracoke. And my mentor there, he took me under his wings. This was back in 2014, I believe. And he's 15, maybe. And he just, he turned me on to what it was like to be a facilitator of adult learning. And it was at that point when I started seeing education from a different perspective, really, as a professional. And I started looking for other ways to activate those skill sets. And I, you know, researching what was it like to work in the entrepreneurial world? What was it like to be a coach outside of outside of education?

13:13And I got excited by the idea. And admittedly, too, I was also kind of worn down being a high school English teacher, you know, teaching 100 to 150 kids a semester. that's a lot of grading a lot of essays and a lot of humans to manage and energies and spirits and you know ups and downs just the i'm sure you're very aware of what it means to to facilitate you know 30 people at a time hour and a half every day you know eight hours a day so it's it was a confluence of my intellect needed to have and desire to have more stimulation at a different level. I was intrigued by adult learning and I was looking for opportunities to get out of the institutional framework of public school teaching.

14:03Let's talk about activating potential a little bit. I mean, it's everybody wants, not everybody, a lot of people would like to be better and a bunch of people would like to reach their potential. It seems like that. And I know we don't have enough time here to to to get the the full picture but you know give us the top sort of three things let's let's talk about what holds people back first like what why what what what is holding people back let's what's your top couple or three of those and then we'll talk about how to fix it sure well something i've noticed over and over again is i think one of the number one things that keeps people holding back, held back from their potential is them recognizing how they've reached their potential in the past.

14:50So many times people forget the milestones they've reached and how they've reached those milestones. I mean, academically, professionally in their careers, or even relationally with their spouses or their, or their community, with their church groups, with whomever, however people relate and succeed at what they do. So many times they forget the steps that they took to have those levels of success. So one of the things I love to do is I like to get some lampposts kind of sequentially, you know, scripted out. What are, you know, like for instance, I like to ask clients, you know, what are three things that you've done well in your past that you really find joy or you feel that resonate or demonstrate your greatness as a person.

15:38And then we explore those kinds of things. So people forget about how good they are, what they do, let's say, or what they used to be able to do. And then sometimes I notice oftentimes what gets in people's way are hangups, negative self-talk, believing the external conversation from other people's perspectives. And then thirdly, and I think it's all wrapped in together, is there has to be some sort of belief system, some sort of faith in like something bigger than the self, whether it be, you know, belief in human potential, whether it believe having faith in a higher power, whether it be even like in the Asheville area and places around that believe in some more of a cosmological kind of perspective.

16:29there's usually some sort of disconnect that's pretty cool so what you're seeing is like what i heard was number one i call it past experience amnesia they don't remember the things that they did in the past and how they got there yep the second thing would be some sort of negative self talk or buying into what other people's stories about things in general or the world or themselves or anything and the third would be like not having not having faith really not having a belief system that of some sort to allow a bigger purpose behind it. Yeah, that's cool. So my guess is in business, I know that if I can get the business owner out of the way, a lot of times the business will take off.

17:16So my guess is once you get these things dealt with, probably a lot of times there's a gain just by eliminating the negative things. Would that be right? Absolutely. It's, I mean, that's, and that's, as you know, that's the biggest work is getting the negative out of the way. Yeah. So tell us about your, like your process, I guess. And, you know, give us the cliff notes version. You know, we've only got a few more minutes. So yeah, my process ultimately is, you know, got to build a relationship. So there's got to be sort of a level of trust developed in whatever length of time it takes for that to happen.

17:55Usually it's pretty quick. pretty clear, pretty quick. I'm a pretty personal fella. You know, I have my, I think number one is I have to do my work in the relationship of a client. And that means I really have to have the jumble out of my head and the jumble out of my heart. And that really helps develop, you know, trust more quickly and, you know, establish sort of a foundation. So once the foundation is established, then the conversations begin. And as quickly as we can get to establishing what positives have occurred and what steps and protocols and processes were established to get those highlight points in life, and then start talking about those habits, how those habits were developed to get to those milestones.

18:43And then the next kind of the third layer of the process is getting those kind of a Venn diagram of past and present and start looking at the correlating details in the middle of the Venn diagram that we can activate in the present moment. Once we can get those, the middle of the Venn diagram to become active towards what they're seeking, let's say a small goal, a big goal, then those become action items. And that's when the accountability measures start coming in play yeah hang yeah hang on a minute i'm trying to understand that you know venn diagrams got three circles in it what are in the three circles uh well you said relationships is one yeah relationships the goals and then the goal okay i'm missing the goals got it yeah okay so you're you got the relationships then you've got the goals and then you've got like the sort of past success yeah personal vision personal mission yeah um because mission vision is generally i find uh always picking piggybacking on what other past success has already occurred it's very infrequent that someone will create a vision or a mission that doesn't somehow connect to their successes in the past yeah right i mean got it people people don't change their skin yeah i worked with a guy one time he said zebras don't change their stripes but yeah yeah it's pretty same thing same thing all right so so basically you build a relationship with trust you you look at the positive so you you do a deep dive into those steps that made them successful and wherever they've been successful and they're alive before and whatever those habits were and then you overlay that on the goals personal vision mission kind of stuff and then you're looking for that middle so that you can activate it all and and and help them continue to grow all three areas.

20:38Is that right? Yeah. And typically, and everyone's different, but typically the smallest of steps are the best steps to take at first. You know, I don't find that people are easily persuaded in themselves if they're trying to reach massive goals. I think it's better stated that they reach towards something very close, very close, and then just build from that. And, you know, people's commitment, of course, is, you know, if they're super committed, and they're working on a day to day to day to day, then heck, yeah, that's awesome. But I find most often people are usually squirming around, you know, trying to identify their next steps.

21:21Just strange. Got it. Got it. All right. Well, the name of our podcast here is Epic Entrepreneurs, and EPIC is an acronym, I'm going to get you to do it. We'll do a sort of a rapid fire round and just maybe one or two sentences about each letter on your thoughts, just real quick. So on the importance of each one of these, just to, you know, it's sort of rapid fire just to sort of wrap it up. Sure. So the E stands for education. Your thoughts on education. Education goes straight to the heart. Oh, I love that. straight to the heart. I'm going to write that down. Perfect. Planning. Thoughts on planning.

22:00Stand tall. Look towards the horizon. Make a decision on what you want to be. Wow. Yeah, I love that. How about inspiration? Turn immediately to your left or your right or your front and your back and look for heroes. Look for mentors and examine how they do it. That's good. This is good stuff. And the last, the C stands for commitment. Put your name on the dotted line and hand over dollars. Invest in yourself. I love that. Yeah. I mean, we got to invest if we're going to make any strides. I love that. I love that. So I'm going to throw in a bonus one here. The B, because the tagline is B Epic.

22:45So the B stands for bring the energy. So let's get your thoughts on bringing energy. You know, one of the things that I find super useful, and this is why I do my walk and talks, is move the body. Got to get the body moving. Got to get, you know, blood circulating. Got to get away from the problem and get away from the consternation and the stuck thing and just go connect to nature. Yeah, it's very powerful. It's very powerful. So you have any advice or any thoughts to other folks in, I mean, you're working with people, but you're also an entrepreneur, for other folks about entrepreneurship? Yeah, I think the biggest thing that I've learned and I've watched this working with founders and as I interview people for a book I'm writing on entrepreneurship, ask questions and ask questions.

23:40Be humble and also be inquisitive, be curious and really let go of the idea that you know it all. Yeah, yeah. You got to get the ego out of the way. for sure yeah i mean yes i mean that that's the basic bottom line just get out of the way and and be curious i love that i love that well this has been fantastic this has been great it's been good having you it's been good having you adam so um if people want to get a hold of you what's the best way napcreative.org is my website and that's that's k-n-a-p-p creative yes sir yes sir just to let everybody know we'll put it in the show notes but just making sure everybody gets it so that's your website and you know i have an instagram page and i have facebook business and all that but i think just going to my website will get you to all that stuff anyway yeah that's right that's right well that's super fun we'll get out there check out adam's website check his stuff out it's really good he's doing some great work here in western north carolina and right now we know that you need to reach for your potential.

24:47So thanks for being here, Adam. Yeah, thank you. I always enjoy spending time with you. I'm always inspired when I hear, oh, well, you reflect back what someone says. Yeah, thank you. Thanks for that. Hey, and until next time, all the best. Hey, thanks for listening to the Epic Entrepreneurs Podcast. Here's three things that you can do. Number one, remember to subscribe to the podcast. It takes very little effort on your part. It's going to help you and your fellow entrepreneurs. Plus, you guys know how it works. The more subscribers we get, the more cool things we can offer to you. Second, to learn more about growing your business, just download my book, The Coach Approach.

25:31It's free for you at giftfrombill.com. That's giftfrombill.com. Hey, and if you'd like more info about growing your business and what we can do to help you grow your business, send me an email directly. Just send it to williamgilliland at actioncoach.com. That's my personal email that I read. No one else reads it first. It's not screened. It's my real email. Just send it to me. I can't wait to talk to you. Hey, and until then, all the best. hey thanks for listening to the epic entrepreneurs podcast here's three things that you can do number one remember to subscribe to the podcast it takes very little effort on your part it's going to help you and your fellow entrepreneurs plus you you guys know how it works the more subscribers we get, the more cool things we can offer to you.

26:30Second, to learn more about growing your business, just download my book, The Coach Approach. It's free for you at giftfrombill.com. That's giftfrombill.com. Hey, and if you'd like more info about growing your business and what we can do to help you grow your business, send me an email directly. Just send it to williamgilliland at actioncoach.com. That's my personal email that I read. No one else reads it first. It's not screened. It's my real email. Just send it to me. I can't wait to talk to you. Hey, and until then, all the best.