2324 -A Three-Step Approach to Achieve High Performance and Avoid Burnout with Apollo Strategy Group Inc's Apollo Emeka

0:04Well, hey, Thoughtful Leader. Welcome to the Thoughtful Entrepreneur. On this show, I interview purpose-driven founders, experts, and change makers who are making a real impact in the world. Want to be a guest? Simple. Go to upmyinfluence.com and click podcast. I'd love to promote your story to our audience of over 100 ,000 and across over 2 ,300 daily episodes and counting. Want to get booked on other great shows like this? Simple. Go to podverified.com and get your free guest authority score. Thousands of hosts are looking for high quality guests and Podverified connects you the right way. Now let's dive into today's episode.

0:58With us right now is Dr. Apollo Emeka. Dr. Emeka, you are the managing director and founder of Apollo Strategy Group. You are a Army National Guard superstar, 20 plus years fellow veteran. You've worked with the FBI as an intelligence analyst. What a cool background. Apollo, it's great to have you. Oh, Josh, man, I'm pumped to be here. You know, before we get into your superpower and your story and your impact in the world today, I always love just kind of breaking the ice with folks. And I would love kind of learning what high-level leaders are kind of geeking out on lately in their personal lives.

1:40What have you been into lately? All right. Well, if you're asking what I'm geeking out on, I'm going to go full geek mode on you. And when I was growing up, I was a Legos kid. But I was also a very broke kid. And so it was, and you know, in the eighties and nineties, I don't, I don't know, you know, if you all out there were into Legos, but for some reason we were getting these Lego catalogs sent to our house. And so I would get to see all the pirate ships and all the cool stuff. And I wouldn't get to get any of it. And it was heartbreaking. So I was more, you know, like, you know, bricks, Lego bricks.

2:19And, but I took those really far. And then I just looked up like two years ago and I was like, wait a minute, I'm an adult and I have my own money. I can get the fancy Lego stuff now. So, uh, it's a cool thing, you know, like, uh, the, the, going to the Lego store. I love to go with my son and my, and, and we'll get something for my daughter who's four. So she's still on the Duplo stuff, but like, I'm also a, I grew up a huge X-Men fan so uh so i've been uh treating myself to these uh you know fancy legos now that i can that i can afford with my own money that's right yeah the only difference between men and boys the price of their toys so yeah i'm with you yeah it's uh and why not right who's gonna judge you i'm a i'm a grown-ass adult i can exactly buy as many toys as i want and trust me i do my wife and I geek out on like, we play Super Mario or we play Mario party together.

3:19I talk about, you know, playing Nintendo games together. Like, like I can, you know, and I feel like, you know, it's like when we stop playing, when, when we think, Oh, well, I'm a grownup, so I'm not supposed to do that. You know, like locally in Orlando, we moved to Orlando very specifically because there's a lot of theme parks here. And for me, you know, as someone who's work, work, work, work, work, work. I need to get off the berm. I have to be immersed in the Disney bubble or whatever bubble, right? Just to kind of leave it behind and just play. And here we're talking with someone who's, you've done some pretty serious stuff in your life.

3:57Do you mind Dr. Apollo just kind of talking about your background and then we'll kind of get into the work that you do? Well, first of all, you know, please call me Apollo. You know, I got the doctorate so that way I could just get that intro, you know, and then I go, Oh, pish posh. Come on now, Josh, please just call me Apollo. Yeah. But if you skip the doctor, then you, then you get in trouble. You're like, Hey, hold up, put some respect on my name. Um, but, uh, yeah, my background, um, is pretty wild. I actually, I had parents who were, I guess, uh, very kind of follow your heart kind of folks.

4:34And I was born about 11 years after a cluster of three boys were born. So my parents raised three kids, thought they were done. And here I come along as a surprise. And so my parents kind of were just like, go with the flow by that point. And they gave me the power to decide when I would be enrolled in school, starting when I was around eight or nine, when I was in fourth grade. And most of the time I was like, no, I don't think I want to be in school. So what that led to is me quitting and failing almost everything in my adolescence. So school, baseball, soccer, basketball. And then I had these dreams though, of either being in the FBI or being on Saturday Night Live.

5:17And those are two very hard things to do. And so I was 17 and I realized I was not going to graduate high school. I mean, I was going to be like 19 by the time I graduated if I got it in gear. And so I was like, well, how do I, what's my fastest path to getting into the FBI or on Saturday Night Live? And I realized I lacked the pedigree, didn't graduate from elementary, middle, or high school. I lacked the discipline and the skills. So, you know, I decided to go into the Army National Guard. My dad signed for me to go in. I was 17 years old. And I spent the next kind of 20 years in the Army National Guard and doing other stuff.

6:00So I was able to go back to school, go to community college, transfer to the University of Southern California, go Trojans, and got into the FBI. And kind of that, things just really took off for me from there. I got into grad school, into my doctoral program, switched over from military intelligence in the army to try it out for special forces. And I got that. So I spent the back half of my career as a Green Beret doing special forces stuff all over the world, plus whatever I was doing back home. And then got into entrepreneurship. My wife and I built up a franchise business and sold it. And I had people like, yo, how'd you do that so fast?

6:43And I was like this. And they said, I will pay you to keep having these conversations with me. And so that's what I've been doing for the past eight or nine years is helping teams grow and scale. Share just a little bit about what that engagement looks like. So I'm on your website right now. It's apollostrategy.com, business consulting that actually works, shift your company culture to consistently achieve high performance results without people burning out or burning people out, which boy, the boy, can that happen? Can you, would you mind just addressing that topic of maintaining that balance of achievement and not burning out?

7:26Cause most people who listen to this show expect a lot of themselves and, you know, expect a lot of what they want to create in the world along with their teams and their companies. But heavens, I don't want my team to be exhausted to the point where they're starting to resent the work or the impact that we have. Absolutely. Well, I have boiled it down to three steps, to three simple and powerful steps that can be used to tackle your grocery shopping list, to build a strategic plan for the year, or to frame out a specific initiative in your company. and the three steps go like this. Step one is deciding with heart.

8:15And this is, if you can't get this part right, then the rest of it is bound to fall apart. So deciding with heart means, is the decision that you're making, the direction that you wanna go in, is it gonna light you up? Is it gonna get you excited? And for a team, is the whole team gonna look at this decision and be like, oof, that is a reason to get out of bed. I would be super pumped if I looked up a year from now and that decision became a reality. And where people make the mistake is they let the feasibility monster come in and tell them what they're going to be doing a year from now. And they say, well, we can do this or what's realistic is that.

8:53But the thing is those types of things, they're not compelling enough to be standout. It's hard to build specificity when you're so concerned with feasibility and what's possible and what did we do last year? Maybe we can do a little bit more of that. So what you wanna do on the front end is just use your heart. Don't think about your head. Use your heart to make the big decision about where you wanna go. Step two, we do the opposite. So we flip it from our heart to our head. We flip it from our limbic lizard brain to our prefrontal cortex, and we say, what are the requirements? So we've got this big, amazing, light you up decision, and now we go feasible.

9:32Now we say, okay, what is actually required in order to get there. And then step three is to bet on some game changers. And so this is like, what are some big swings that you can take that will dang near guarantee that your decision becomes a reality? And so when people make, when things are falling apart, they're probably falling down in one of those three areas, either deciding with heart, finding what's required, or betting on some game changers? I would imagine this year you've probably, I mean, there's a lot of, say, disruptions, one way to say it. Yeah. You know, some confusion maybe in, you know, generally in the marketplace.

10:20I see this a lot in B2B. You know, maybe, you know, some folks not certain about some of the big decisions because again, you know, AI has been very disruptive. I'd say that there's maybe some larger macroeconomic things that have been kind of unsettling, I think, depending on your sector, your industry. What are the trends that you have been seeing now that we're definitely kind of winding down here in 2025? And you and your clients, like you're looking ahead on behalf of the folks that you advocate for. What are some, I say, rules of the road or advice that you would give them? And listen, if you haven't been focused on this, I would probably start getting pretty serious about this.

11:01Anything come to mind? Well, I mean, this is going to sound overly simplistic, but strengthening your decision making muscles. Because efficiency used to be the bottleneck in growing an organization. But it is becoming a lot easier to build systems and processes and to create efficiencies. You know, you can hire, regardless of what size company you are, you can hire global talent, right? As a solopreneur, if you're a solopreneur out there, you can hire global talent and, you know, highly skilled folks all over the world. You can leverage technology, automation, and AI. And so the efficiency used to be a bottleneck, but now the bottleneck is how clear and fast can your decisions be made?

11:46uh and so you talk about uncertainty and there's a there's this misconception that i notice people have is that i'll make a decision when i get more certain when i get more certain so i'm right now a certainty of 20 when i'm 100 certain then i'll decide and everything will be right with the world and we'll build our systems on the other side but the thing is that like you said there's so much change happening, that it's so easy while you're waiting in uncertainty for some other thing to pop up, whether it's economic, like tariffs or interest rates or whatever, or it's technological or it's social or it's political.

12:26So really what people need to get in the habit of is not waiting for certainty and then deciding, it's creating certainty through decision. So big example, I was looking at all of these, you know, kind of macro factors. And that's what I've been trained to do as an intelligence analyst on the military side, on the FBI side, is to like, look at things and try to predict what's going to happen. And in January of this year, we were the fires in Los Angeles came up to our doorstep. So we had to evacuate. My mother-in-law lost her home, my wife's childhood home. And we, at that point, used it as kind of a wake-up call to say, hey, should we go somewhere?

13:15Should we make a big decision? And I talked to a friend about it, and she said, have you ever been to Panama? I was just there, and it's amazing. And I got off the phone with her, tried to Google reasons not to move to Panama, couldn't find any, and went into my wife, and I said, hey, are we supposed to move to Panama? And she said, maybe. And 30 days later, we were here in Panama. So we sold our house, we have a four-year-old and a seven-year-old, and we just picked up and moved down the world. And so I think that in order to be successful today, you have to be able to, there's tons of uncertainty going on.

13:55Rather than waiting for things to play out while more things are popping up, you make a decision that creates certainty. You make a decision that tells you and the people around you exactly what needs to happen in order for things to become a reality. And so I think it's getting out of this. I'm going to wait for more certainty. I'm going to wait for things to play out. Rather, I'm going to make a decision. And that decision is going to create certainty that then I can build off of. Apollo, you have a really great, I just want to call this out. You have a fantastic LinkedIn. Like your content on LinkedIn is really, really great.

14:32And I know you've got other resources too. Your website is apollostrategy.com. Let's share for a friend that's been listening to our conversation, maybe some action steps that might mean, you know, being able to take advantage of what you've been creating. Yeah. So when you say action steps, you mean, how do you mean action steps? Our friend that's listening to our listeners is like, hey, I like what Apollo's saying. I want more. And let's give them more. Yeah. I mean, you pointed to LinkedIn. That is my, LinkedIn is basically like, I'm like a 14 year old on TikTok on LinkedIn, basically. I love the folks.

15:16I've made relationships on LinkedIn where I've never met them in real life, but like they are my homies. And I call them when I'm thinking through something or excited about something. So that's really the best place to find me. Like if you engage with me on LinkedIn, it's me. And that's the best thing. And I'll say that right now, I have, in the last six months, I have realized my purpose in life is to help people make decisions that are so bold and so clear that the path forward becomes obvious. And I think I am so pumped about being a beacon for decisions in a world that is so obsessed with actions, with habits, with discipline, and saying the reason why you're not successful, or the reason why you're burnt out, or the reason why you're miserable is because you're not doing enough.

16:17And most people are actually doing way too much, but their efforts are scattered. And so I'm in this space right now of really trying to build an ecosystem that helps people make better decisions. So there's going to be, I'm in the middle of a pivot right now, actually, and there's going to be more coming from me, but you'll get a front row seat and you can join my conversations with me on LinkedIn. There is a huge opportunity as of when we're recording this for leaders to stand up, stand for what they believe in, stand for you know, you know, I'd say the good in the world and, you know, in supporting each other, you know, when other voices or even platforms might encourage a different, a different message.

17:05And I just want to say thank you so much for, for your bravery and what you stand for. So next step. So somebody goes to your website and let's say that they are actually looking for engagement. Just briefly, do you mind sharing what consulting looks like? And if someone wants to know, oh, I wonder if Apollo could help us in our organization, what that ends up looking like? Yeah, absolutely. So if you're an individual, I coach individuals. So I work one-on-one coaching individuals. And if you're looking at how do we get some of this decision, how do we level up our decision-making skills as an organization?

17:50I take a modular kind of approach to that. And so we can do these three-day decision-making intensives, and we can do those as a one-off. And for some folks, that's good enough. They say, oh man, this is awesome. We've never had this much clarity as an executive team. we're going to go forth and conquer. And so it's decision-making intensives, it's decision-making training, and it's decision-making coaching. And we can stack those things as much as you'd like to build custom engagements for organizations. So again, we can kind of, like Lego blocks, callback, we can stack in executive coaching on top of decision-making intensives, and then provide the entire organization for smaller entrepreneurial organizations with decision making training for, you know, three, six, 12 months or whatever you like.

18:45I love it. And with that, with that Lego callback, we know we're winding down. Well played. Dr. Apollo Emeka, your website again is apollostrategy.com. Apollo, it's been a great conversation. Thank you so much, both for your service. And thank you so much for joining us today. Likewise, Josh. Josh, right back at you, man.

19:10If you've enjoyed this conversation, I'd love to invite you to share your message with the world at podverified.com, where thousands of podcast hosts and thoughtful guests are connecting the right way. Podverified helps match you with the right stages for your level of authority. No more wasting time on brand new shows that just aren't a fit. Your guest authority score is free. And so are your first two podcast matches. Come hang out with me there. I'd love to learn more about your business, support your mission, and help promote you far and wide. Just head to www.podverified.com to get started.

19:53And of course, if you'd like to be a guest right here on The Thoughtful Entrepreneur, just go to upmyinfluence.com and click on podcast. Thanks for being a part of this movement. We rise by lifting others.