1826 – Unlocking Potential with Performance Mindset with Aaron Trahan

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0:58with us right now Aaron Trahan Aaron you are the founder performance coach and professional speaker with performance mindset coaching your website is performance mindset coaching.co Aaron thank you so much for joining us hey Josh thanks for having me looking forward to a great session. Yeah. Well, give us an overview of your impact in the world, who you serve and what you do. Yeah. Yeah. You know, the origin story for me starts being in the seat of a senior level executive leader. My leadership journey began at the early age of 23 years old. I was dropped into a leadership role and quickly had to figure out how to swim in a very much sink or swim environment.

1:45To make a long story short, I was able to continue to work my way up the proverbial corporate ladder only to realize what got me here won't get me there, as the famous quote says. And, you know, with a lot of success and a lot of achievement at an early age, something interesting happens. We tend to think that we have it all figured out. We somewhere along the way stop being coachable. Our ego becomes a bit outsized and I needed to go out and find some external help in the form of a coach to help me see what I couldn't see, really helped me shine a light on my blind spots. And that completely changed the trajectory of my career.

2:32I fell in love with the process of coaching and seeing my own results and the benefits. It helped me realize that I needed to strengthen my ability to lead people, to lead teams, to help get people to the next level. And over the course of the next eight years, that's what started for me a gravitational pull that eventually led me to launching my own performance coaching firm and not looking back. jumping on the other side of the table and helping out those high-performing executives that looked a lot like I looked, really needing that support system to help get them to a whole new level. Yeah.

3:14Aaron, it's an interesting dynamic when we think about this delicate balance that we have as leaders where I think many of us feel woefully incompetent. I think the imposter syndrome, you know, can really impact us greatly. And then you have the other side, right? Where it's like, you know, I know it all, or I'm incredibly incompetent. You know, I can't help but think about Dunning-Kruger in this case. And I'm, I'm wondering what your observations are of that, you know, kind of that matrix of feeling, oh, I'm not a leader. I suck at everything I do versus, you know, someone's like, oh, I know everything.

3:52Like talk about that road and, and where people find themselves on and what your observations are of people who might be one side or the other a bit much. Yeah. Yeah. Josh, I think what you just explained is the spectrum that I think we all find ourselves on one side of or the other throughout our careers. And I think I'm going to state the obvious here, so much easier said than done, but with so many other things in life, being able to stay balanced, be in the middle, instead of finding yourselves on either one of those extremes, kind of reminds me of a great brand that I love to follow called Loci.

4:33And their message is very simple, is when you're on top, stay humble. When you're kind of going through a rough patch, stay hopeful. And so it's not let either extreme become a new lens at which you view the world and taking it from personal experience, the very moment that you think you've got it all figured out, that you think you're the smartest one in the room is the exact instant that you're on the other side of that growth climb and you start declining. And so I think the big message here is regardless of where you may find yourself on either end of the spectrum, imposter syndrome, thinking I'm out of my element over my skis or on the ego side of thinking you're superior.

5:24I think being a lifelong learner is really the key medicine there. I think I preach to clients all the time. Being a lifelong learner is a guaranteed competitive advantage that you can give to yourself for the rest of your life. Don't think you have it all figured out. Show up every single day looking for that 1 % improvement. Really staying in a beginner and learner's mindset and don't focus too much on the rear view mirror. Sure, a lot of people listening to this probably have some great achievements, has a great track record, but the interesting part is to not lean on that. Don't look backwards in the rear view mirror.

6:08Always stay looking outside the front windshield on what's the full potential? What am I truly capable of? And I think when we can stay in learning mode to figure that out, it tends to keep us kind of right there in that balanced sweet spot, not allowing us to have mission drift to either end of that spectrum. You know, I'm really excited about this topic and modeling being a voracious learner, a lifelong learner, there's a couple of things I'm thinking about immediately. Number one, I can't help but think about one of the most impactful chapters or podcasts I've ever listened to from the Freakonomics guys.

6:48But they talked about, you know, what is it that inspires kids to become readers and learners? And they looked at like all of these different things. I mean, it was so comprehensive, like how much data they looked at. And then what they found was the one commonality that seemed to, that these over-performing kids seemed to share, it's not the number of books they had in their school. It's not even the school that they went to necessarily. The one guy wasn't like, you know, how strict the parents were. It was this one thing. It was parents modeling reading in front of their kids. It's showing their kids that they never give up and that there's value to the effort of continuing to learn.

7:33So this has implications not just for parenting, but this exact same thing happens when we think about the cultures that we have within our organizations. It starts at the top. What are you modeling? Are you modeling that we listen to our fellow team members? Are you modeling that as leaders, the CEO, that yes, we're pretty competent at the things that are pretty important, but that we're also receptive. We're coachable. We're always learning and growing. I think that I can't think of anything better, I think, as a leader that we would want to instill within our organizations. There's so many different ways.

8:15Yeah, good luck. The time is now yours, sir. We could talk hours. Take that ball and run with it. Yeah, I think we could talk hours about what you just set up there. And you're so right. And I think I work with a lot of leaders who, unfortunately, kind of approach things almost in a do as I say, not as I do type of philosophy. And, you know, I hate to be the bearer of bad news or the burster of the bubble. But, you know, for a business leader, we have to sit back and realize it does not matter what we paint on the walls. It doesn't matter the little tag phrase that we have in our email signatures.

8:55It doesn't matter what you say once a year or once a quarter behind a podium in a town hall meeting. Those are all supplemental. what's going to drive the type of culture that you have over the long term boils down to two things what you tolerate and what you don't and so if you claim to have a learning culture a growth kind of mindset culture how are you fostering that how are you stopping the behavior that's not aligned with that because if you tolerate too many behaviors from too many stakeholders that go against this value or operating principle, it doesn't matter what's painted on the wall.

9:40People are going to look to the leader to see what's the leader doing? What are they rewarding? What are they praising? What are they not tolerating? Those are the things that have a by far and away outsized imprint on the behavior that shapes your culture more than anything else, more than a layer of paint, more than a speech in a town hall, more than something printed in an email. That doesn't matter. To your point, it's what is the leader doing? Because we're herd animals, right? Like our species is. And there's only so long that we can go to act, operate and behave differently than kind of the leader of our organization.

10:26It does flow downhill. And so make sure whatever messages, whatever signs, whatever smoke signals that you're wanting to flow downhill are mirroring the behavior that you want your organization to incorporate that drives future performance. Man, brilliant. I hope to our friend that's listening to our conversation right now, go back and rewind this last little bit here, because I think that the impact on this is so potentially significant within your organization. And even, like I said, there's application in our personal lives for this as well about the folks that we have influence over. I want to ask you about, because you'd shared something, Aaron, pretty valuable on your LinkedIn profile.

11:11It was about failure. And I'm hoping I could get you to explain this a little bit. You make the statement that failure comes from the failure to imagine failure. Can you share just a bit about that? Yeah. Yeah. Thanks for asking because I think it's so important, right? I think failure, kind of think back to growing up, right? We're in such an outcome-driven society. It's either winning or losing, whether it's youth sports, whatever it is. We want to be on the winning side. We're so focused on the outcome. And as a result, we develop over the years, this mythical association with failure from a negative standpoint.

11:55It's almost this ghost we have to stay away from, this fire that we can't touch. And I think the big perspective shift that I want to encourage more and more leaders to think about is that failure is not the opposite of success. Failure is part of the journey. It always has been. It always will be. And so the sooner that we can grasp that understanding, the better. And the big mistake that I see with too many strategies, I mean, you think about the early stages of building a strategy, whether it's a startup or a small business, you know, we're very aspirational. We're thinking about all the possible visions and great outcomes.

12:40it's not a point in time where we want to embrace failure. And so what happens to the strategy that we put in place? It largely mimics what we expect to happen in the future. And so when that inevitable setback, when that micro or macro failure happens, we're so unprepared that oftentimes it could be the thing that kills the business or kills the strategy. So my perspective is embrace failure. Make sure you clearly understand the risk. Make sure you have a deep appreciation and respect for the failures that could potentially happen. Because the more that you incorporate that in the strategy building stage, you make yourself more flexible and adaptable to pivot when the failure shows up.

13:28So not imagining failure, not planning for the failure could actually be the very seed that grows into the tree that kills your strategy. So yeah, I just think more people should think about what could failure look like and how are we properly incorporating and associating the necessary mechanisms in the strategy day one up front to minimize the impact of said risk. Yeah. Aaron, we could talk about this for hours. I want to, you know, for a friend that's listening to us that wants to know, hmm, I wonder if Aaron can help me. Would you mind sharing like how you engage with your clients, what that looks like, how you structure that?

14:13Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think you kind of think about it showing up in two different ways, working directly with the professionals. And this could be the entrepreneur, the C-suite executive, the business owner. For that, there's two different ways that I can work directly with them to help accelerate personal and professional performance. I always have a limited number of one-on-one engagements that I'm able to engage with, as well as group engagements. So bringing them in, putting them in kind of a mastermind type of executive roundtable setup where we kind of walk through my methodology with three or four other business leaders from around the country that can share their unique perspectives.

14:58and we all benefit from the collective wisdom. Separately, for leaders that are looking to bring this message and approach to their teams, there's obviously speaking opportunities as well as leadership workshops that they could plug me in this approach into to really helping increase the performance of a team and or organization. So those are the two direct and indirect ways that I can work with with business leaders. Yeah. And also too, Aaron, I'm looking at your website and I like that you've, I want to say productized, right? But there's just a lot of clarity over, you know, kind of how you structure your program, which I really love because it's, I know exactly what I'm going to get and you even share your pricing on there, which is nice.

15:44So people kind of know kind of where they fit with that. I don't know if you want to touch on that and then, you know, kind of, you know, again, And I want to make sure that people know, like if let's say that they've done some searching for you and they found this podcast and we've had this conversation, they've been listening, they're already in that contemplation phase or, you know, kind of awareness phase. You know, where do they go from here? Yeah. Yeah. I would highly encourage for more information, definitely go to my website. You get a lot more understanding of kind of the proprietary methodology that I built that's largely based from all of the missteps, all of the failures, all of the wrong turns that I took.

16:23I wanted to build a program or what I refer to as an operating system that I wished I would have had back when I was on the operating side. And so I think every single professional that I've ever come across has an innate desire to see better results, to drive improvement, to deliver better performance, but it's always the how that becomes a bit tricky. And so what I try to do is provide them an operating system that creates a path forward that provides clarity on the how. So that's where you're going to understand the different levels of the methodology. And either from my website or from LinkedIn, I highly encourage you to reach out.

17:06If nothing else, let's have a conversation. And my promise, even with a 30 minute conversation is I want to make that a valuable ROI on your time spent. So there's zero downside to do that. And yeah, I'll give you a little tip on how to value what it is that I do. Depending on how much and how fast you want to accelerate your personal and professional performance is exactly how you value an engagement like this. If you have zero desire to accelerate that, which if you're listening to this, I find that hard to believe, but I think we're all looking to maximize our time. Spend more of our time in an optimized state, generating the best possible performance we can and tapping into our full potential.

17:51I just help show up with a springboard that can get you there faster. So if that's a value to you, I think there's a lot of value that we could unlock together. All right. Stay coachable, my friends. Aaron, your website is performancemindsetcoaching.co. Again, when you go to the website, you're going to see some great resources. Certainly, you'll find how to engage with you. But very clean. I like your website. Very nice. Thank you. I appreciate it. Yeah. Aaron Tran, again, your performance coach. And again, the founder, your professional speaker. Again, your website, one last time, performancemindsetcoaching.co.

18:32So Aaron, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks, Josh.

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