Adopting an Owner's Mentality in Your Own Life

If you've spent any time in entrepreneurial or startup culture circles, the concept of "adopting an owner's mentality" is likely not new to you. Plenty of founders and C-suite folks in those spaces often will talk to their employees about the importance of approaching their work with an owner's mindset.

⚡ Go Deeper: What Does It Mean to Truly Forgive Ourselves?

In some cases, it's a good thing, as it can help employees contextualize their actions in a way that helps everyone move forward, instead of thinking of themselves as autonomous contributors. In other cases, it's a more toxic way to set the conditions for folks to overwork themselves, in the name of "thinking like an owner."

What's interesting, however, is that this idea of "owner's mindset" is completely absent from discussions about our personal lives. Sure, there's plenty of conversation around avoiding a "victim mentality," but what does it mean to adopt an owner's mentality — the proactive, positive flip side of that coin — in one's own life?

And, in doing so, what opportunities, resources, and possibilities can suddenly become available to us? This is exactly what George and I explore in this episode. Because living a life beyond your own current default state only becomes possible when you are willing to take the steering wheel of your own life.

Questions We Discuss

• What does it mean to adopt an owner’s mentality in ones own personal life?
• Why do we think this idea is so prevalent in the professional spaces but not personal?
• What are catalyst moments in our lives where we challenged ourselves to adopt an owner's mentality?
• What does having an owner’s mentality in one’s own life look like in practice? 
• What is the difference between owning, renting, and borrowing in our lives?
• How can someone determine if this is an area where they need a little extra TLC?

Creators and Guests

Host

George B. Thomas

A catalyst for growth!

Host

Liz Moorehead

Content therapist and speaker.

What is Beyond Your Default?

What Is Beyond Your Default? "Everyone keeps telling me I should be happy, but I'm not." “I feel stuck.” “I have a calling, but where do I start?"

Right now, you have a choice. You can continue living within your default norms, playing it safe, clocking in and out every day, and scraping by to achieve what's supposed to make you happy hopefully. Or you can choose to accept the challenge of living beyond your default. Stop wishing to live your "best life” and start living your best life. Success leaves clues. And they're waiting for you to discover them.

George B. Thomas: 00:03

I can show you my life before it, and I can show you my life after it. And the pattern that happened after picking up ownership mentality, and how I believed in myself, and how I started to think about time and accountability and responsibility and respect. It all changed based on this like owning it and being a good steward of it. Whatever that it was. And so, again, Liz, what I would challenge folks who right now are listening this and they're in the just garbage pit of life.

George B. Thomas: 00:45

Now is the best time to invest in creating an ownership mentality to get yourself out of it.

Liz Moorehead: 00:55

Welcome back to Beyond Your Default. I'm your host, Liz Morehead. And as always, I am joined by George b Thomas. How are you this morning?

George B. Thomas: 01:03

I am doing absolutely wonderful, Liz. I am, as always, super excited. My brain is always and is already going in multiple directions with the conversation that we're going to have, and I hope people really understand the importance of this conversation to help unlock other things that we've talked about and things that we will talk about in the future.

Liz Moorehead: 01:26

Yeah. Absolutely. Because in many ways, this topic is fascinating. It is the culmination of many of the conversations that we've had so far, cultivating relationships with ourselves and with others, forgiving of ourselves and of others, fear, all of these little different pieces feed into this broader topic of adopting an owner's mentality within your own life. But at the same time, it's also setting the stage for where we're gonna go from here.

Liz Moorehead: 01:55

This is a core tenant of beyond your default and what it means. Not just what it means though, but also how to make it possible. How to set the conditions to even be able to do that. So I wanna start this conversation though with something fascinating that you and I both noticed doing the research for this episode, which is owner's mentality and us throwing that language out there. If you've been in an entrepreneurial circle, in start up spaces, or any sort of business space, adopting an owner's mentality is not exactly a new concept to you.

Liz Moorehead: 02:30

It's something that founders will talk to their employees about a lot to empower them to be more strategic in their decision making, yada yada yada. But nobody talks about it from the perspective of adopting an owner's mentality within your personal life. It's completely segmented to the business spaces. I'd be curious to get your thoughts on that and why you think that is.

George B. Thomas: 02:52

You know, as far as why that is, I think listen. And I'm speaking from experience when I say some of this stuff. For a lot of my life, it was I didn't wanna own my ish because my ish was ugly. So why would I even, like, search for or think about this idea of ownership mentality in my own life? However, I love that you called it a core tenant because this is something that when the lights came on, when the switch was flipped, became a very important piece to that, and I called back to something that happened in my life.

George B. Thomas: 03:25

We'll talk about that in a couple minutes. But, Liz, back to your question of why do I think it's so business saturated. First of all, if I'm being completely honest, it's because business professionals have realized if they can get their employees to have owner mentality, they're gonna work more like an owner, and many owners work like dogs. Many owners don't take care of themselves. Many owners don't have a healthy hustle.

George B. Thomas: 03:52

Many owners are all about the bottom line. And if I can create these drones, then I can be more productive in my business, and I can generate more revenue. And so some of this, honestly, I believe comes from a selfish place where what's interesting when I talk about it in the, like, individual personal ownership mentality, I am so far away from what that conversation usually means and where that conversation usually goes to, like, it's just listen. There are so many traps that we can fall into and when you have this ownership mentality, you are far less likely to find yourself, like, in an Indiana Jones movie in the bottom of the pit with the snakes.

Liz Moorehead: 04:39

Wow. I'm having a lot of feelings arise just from that answer.

George B. Thomas: 04:44

Okay. I'm super interested in that.

Liz Moorehead: 04:46

Well, because you and I come from the same industry background. And for some of our listeners, they know what that is. Right? We come from the inbound marketing agency background. I also had a lot of startup experience prior to that.

Liz Moorehead: 04:58

I worked at LivingSocial back in the big boom when it was LivingSocial versus Groupon and yada yada yada. Yeah. And so I had a lot of feelings arise when you were talking about the owner's mentality because it it is a double edged sword. And it's a double edged sword in our personal lives as well, which we are gonna be talking about later. Because in some cases, there were instances where somebody was espousing the virtues of the owner's mentality just to get me to think beyond myself.

Liz Moorehead: 05:24

To think about the collective and the fact that when you take this action, think about organizationally what kind of impact that will have. Positive, net neutral, negative. In other cases, though, there's that toxicity to it. There's that drone enablement piece of it. Right?

Liz Moorehead: 05:42

But there is a level of toxicity when it comes to our personal lives as well. But before we go too deep down this rabbit hole, I want you to talk to me about what it means in the positive way, in the beyond your default way to adopt an owner's mentality in one's own life. What does that look like?

George B. Thomas: 06:01

Yeah. So first of all, let me just tie this back to a realization that I had to have, and I hope that most of the listeners have had. But if they haven't, then today might be the, the seed of this realization. At some point in my life, I had to realize that nobody was coming to save me. Nobody.

George B. Thomas: 06:24

Nobody was coming to save me. I had gotten myself into a place that was toxic, corrosive, not positive, not giving back, not adding value. It was a terrible place to be in life, and I had to realize nobody is coming to save me.

Liz Moorehead: 06:43

Was there a particular moment when you realized that?

George B. Thomas: 06:46

Oh, yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. I was at a party, sitting on a couch, watching a half broken TV where, like, everything was shorter than it should have been because the TV didn't work right. I had been drinking.

George B. Thomas: 07:01

I had, smoked some weed, and I had popped, some sort of, like, pill that I probably shouldn't have popped. And, Liz, I sat there, and I remember hearing myself say and by the way, this is a way younger George than who we're talking about today. But I remember saying to myself, oh, man. This place could burn down, and I just watched the flames. And I woke up the next morning, and I thought, what the crap are you doing with your life?

George B. Thomas: 07:31

Who have you become? And I doubt if it was actually me speaking to myself, but it was probably my spirit speaking to me. Like, dude, this is not what you're made for. This is not why you're on the planet. And so I had to realize, like, I gotta do something because nobody else is coming to save me.

George B. Thomas: 07:50

And there's a great quote. No one saves us but ourselves. No one can and no one may. We ourselves must walk the path, and I love this quote. It's by Buddha, by the way.

George B. Thomas: 07:59

I love this quote because it's our path. It's our job to save ourselves, and the only way that we're gonna be able to save ourselves is this idea of owning our life, designing our life, owning ourselves, owning our action. There's some words that we're gonna talk about later on, like accountability, responsibility, proactivity, like respect, upkeep, things like that. But, Liz, like, a flood of information came back to my brain when I had this realization of, like, you gotta save yourself. It's kind of the funniest thing because it feels like it doesn't have anything directly to do with the fact that I had found myself in that place, but I was transported back to when I was a child.

George B. Thomas: 08:43

And I remember my dad, stepdad, but dad I always hate that I have to, like, explain which one of my fathers or which one of my mothers, and there's no good way to do that without using the word step, and I hate the word step. But, anyway, I remember my dad. And this conversation was we moved a lot when I was younger. And this conversation happened where there was a gentleman who we had been renting a house from. We were getting ready to move out, and he said to my father, he said, man, this place looks better than when you moved in.

George B. Thomas: 09:18

And I remember my dad saying treat it like it's yours. We had a conversation, like, after the gentleman was gone about, like, listen, no matter what you do, always treat it like it's yours. And what's funny is he was talking about a house, a building, but he wasn't. Like, you could tell fundamentally he was talking about more than just a house. And so this kind of stuck with me, and it just became part of my life as this moment.

George B. Thomas: 09:45

I'm, like, almost a mantra. Treat it like it's yours. Well, my life is mine. Treat it like it's yours. Well, the house I live in is mine even though, like, maybe I don't own it.

George B. Thomas: 09:55

And what's funny is as I got older, where I live right now, we rent. And what's funny is we were actually at a social committee meeting 1 evening, and they started to have this conversation at the table. And they were berating renters about how renters don't take care of their houses and how renters don't do this and how renters blah blah blah. And I just spoke up, and I said, do any of you know that we rent our house? And there was pure shock amongst the people that were in that room because they didn't realize that I wasn't a homeowner, but I was a home renter.

George B. Thomas: 10:35

Now why am I telling a story? Because, listen, there have been a ton of times where people thought I was the owner of the sales line, which is a historical agency I worked for. There were even more times that people thought I was the owner of Impulse Creative, which is an agency that I worked for, and I wasn't even an owner. I did own the house. I didn't own the companies, but people's mentality or perception was, well, he must be the owner.

George B. Thomas: 11:02

Why? Because I was treating it like it was mine. You should be treating it like it's yours because the side of this, by the way, is that when you treat it like it's yours, you treat it different. Now I'm gonna pause there. I have more that I wanna talk about, like, owning, borrowing, renting, and in this special word that's very important when you flip this ownership mentality mindset, but let's see what you wanna unpack with where we're at right now.

Liz Moorehead: 11:32

What I find fascinating about this conversation right off the bat is that I think sometimes and I've had moments in my life, including as recently as this summer, where I was angry at the world. I was projecting everything outward. How did I end up here? Girl, you walked there. You put one foot in front of me.

George B. Thomas: 11:53

Maybe you ran, actually.

Liz Moorehead: 11:55

Maybe you ran. I'm having a strange reaction to it. Because very recently, within the past 30 days, I woke up one morning. Nothing had changed plot wise in my life. Everything has been, you know, plotting along exactly the same.

Liz Moorehead: 12:11

And I woke up one morning and went, okay. I'm done with this sad girl stuff now. The cup that contained my tolerance for my own bullish has runneth dry. Like, I just got to that point where I said to myself, I'm done doing this. I'm tired of the sads and the victimization, and it's not that bad things hadn't happened genuinely to me.

Liz Moorehead: 12:38

But at some point, you make the decision as to whether or not life is happening to you or you are an active participant and active architect of your own life. But here's where I think people get really tripped up with it. I think about things like therapy, 12 step programs, all of these different things. The first step is admitting you have a problem. Taking ownership, all these things.

Liz Moorehead: 13:02

But once you walk through that door, while you can have to continue to be the momentum behind your own ownership, it opens up a world of resources and help to you. I think sometimes what happens is that when we say things like no one's gonna save you except yourself, that's true. And you also don't have to do it alone. But there is a certain level of ownership required in order to gain access to the people, the opportunities, the things that will help lift you up and out of where you are.

George B. Thomas: 13:39

Yeah. With without a doubt. And by the way, as I hear you talk, I'm transporting myself to a future episode that we should have, which is victim versus victor mentality and diving a little bit deeper into that. So I can't wait for us to have that episode in the future. But, Liz, can I break down kinda some things for you and for the listeners that I think are important to this idea of owning your own personal life, owning your own path, owning this journey that hopefully you're setting on to live a life beyond the default?

Liz Moorehead: 14:16

Yes. Absolutely. Okay. And by the way, I'm sitting here prepared to take notes.

George B. Thomas: 14:20

Yes. Good. Okay. And ask questions because I can't wait to, like, unpack. I feel like we're at the beginning of, like, a multi episode thing that we'll talk about over time, not back to back, but, you know, we'll come back to this.

George B. Thomas: 14:34

So if I really start to break down this conversation, there are a couple keywords, and then there's one that is like a magnifier and one that I would hope that people would pay attention to and unlock in their life. So, obviously, if we're talking about ownership mentality, we gotta talk about the word owning. Right? Owning the act, state, or right of possessing something. Okay.

George B. Thomas: 14:56

It it makes sense. We have purchased a computer. We own it. We have purchased a car. We own it.

George B. Thomas: 15:04

We can do whatever we want with it as we move forward because it's our thing. We have purchased things. Have you purchased yourself? Mentally, have you purchased yourself? Have you invested in yourself?

George B. Thomas: 15:20

Have you taken money, time, and everything it is to say I am mine? By the way, I could totally go into pastor mode and tell you that your life is already bought through the blood of Jesus, but we're gonna keep moving forward. We're gonna keep moving forward. And the other word that I think is important is this word of borrow. Most people when they think about renting, it's like, oh, I'm borrowing it, or I borrowed a hammer.

George B. Thomas: 15:47

So, potentially so borrow, take, and use something that belongs to someone else with the interest of returning it. Okay. So this probably isn't renting, but it could be renting. Like, we could go rent a rototiller. We're borrowing it from, like, Home Depot or Lowe's or whatever.

George B. Thomas: 16:01

Now we can borrow a cup of sugar from our friends. Although, how many times have we really got a cup of sugar back? Not very often. Like, yeah, just have it. Like, that's not even really a borrow, but there's a difference between owning something and borrowing something.

George B. Thomas: 16:14

When you think about borrowing and yourself, your mind might go in 10,000 different ways, but what chunks are you allowing people to borrow from you that are actually taking from what you should be inputting into the world? Now the other word I want to think about, if you're not owning, if you're not borrowing, you're probably renting. Renting, pay someone for the use. Something, typically property, land, a car. You're you're renting it.

George B. Thomas: 16:40

You don't own it. You're just kinda throwing money away because eventually, it's gotta go back. Right? I've been throwing money away for years because I just, a, didn't know if I wanted to buy a home at first and then got comfortable where where I live. But moving forward, we're gonna purchase a home because then it'll be ours versus renting.

George B. Thomas: 16:59

But the whole time that we've been renting, we've treated it like it's ours. Now here's the thing. When you think about owing, borrowing, renting, here's where for me the magic connection of no matter if you're renting, no matter if you're borrowing, no matter if you own this thing, this word is, I think, when I say ownership mentality, a piece that I draw so close to, and that is the word stewardship. It doesn't matter if you rent it, if you're borrowing it, or if you're owning it. If you have a mindset of stewardship or the understanding of stewardship, the job of supervising or taking care of something such as an organization or property.

George B. Thomas: 17:46

I'll even add in people. Now when I think about this, I go into my brain where it's like renting, borrowing, potentially even owning if you're just, like, not paying attention to the stewardship of the things you have, many times equal leaving things in a worse place versus a better one. And, Liz, I think when I talk about ownership mentality and I talk about stewardship, what I'm talking about directly aligns to this catalyst word that we talk about. Meaning, it all aligns with if you can own your stuff, if you can own your life, if you can be a great steward of the things that you mentally and physically own, then you can use those resources. You can use yourself to be a great steward of the humans that actually come your way.

George B. Thomas: 18:39

Whether that's your wife, your husband, your kids, your friends, your community, whatever it is. Now all of a sudden, we're looking at this in a different way because we are to be stewards of ourselves, stewards of those around us, stewards of the things that we own. There should be this mental thing as an owner. I'm always trying to get it to the next best place. Now I'm gonna pause there.

George B. Thomas: 19:04

I have some words that I wanna talk about as far as around this idea of borrowing and different things like that, but I'm gonna pause there because I wanna see where your brain goes. I saw a visceral response when I said the word stewardship.

Liz Moorehead: 19:19

Well, I love the idea of stewardship. It's a word that I use a lot in my professional life actually because there's a pattern I've noticed with the organizations and people that I tend to work with the best. They consider themselves stewards of a broader idea, a greater purpose that lives outside of themselves that is manifested transactionally either through the products or services that they sell. But there tends to be some sort of greater calling or purpose. And when I think about the word stewardship and stewardship over one's own life, whether we're talking about the owning, the renting, the borrowing, it doesn't really matter.

Liz Moorehead: 19:53

The other word that comes to mind is that there's a reverence. There is a respect. There is an understanding that no matter where you are currently in your life, even in the darkest of hours, there is a gift there. There is something worth preserving, something worth stewarding, something worth preserving or taking care of or making sure that it moves through to the next space. That to me really resonates with me personally, particularly, you know, with what I just shared earlier in this podcast.

Liz Moorehead: 20:23

I woke up between 2 weeks 30 days ago. I can't quite remember. I went, okay. We're done here. We're done with the sad sack parade.

Liz Moorehead: 20:32

This is now coming to a swift conclusion. You know what I mean? And that's really where my brain goes with this. But my here's where my curiosity is piqued, George. I could sit here and put myself in the position of some of our listeners and say, these words all sound great, man.

Liz Moorehead: 20:48

It sounds great. But when you're in the middle of the ish, it's kinda hard to find any sort of desire to be a steward of anything.

George B. Thomas: 20:57

So I would battle against that, though, because when you have an owner mentality, I think a couple of things happen. 1, it's harder to find yourself in the ish. The other thing is if you are taking ownership mentality, one of your default things is gonna be coming up with a a plan or a method to remove yourself out of the ish. I think for me, what it has shown as quicker than when I wasn't, when I didn't have this mentality. Because I let myself brew in the slop, if you will, of life for a real long time before I was able to, like, leverage this and harness this thing.

George B. Thomas: 21:40

And since I have listen. I can show you my life before it, and I can show you my life after it. And the pattern that happened after picking up ownership mentality, and how I believed in myself, and how I started to think about time and accountability and responsibility and respect, it all changed based on this, like, owning it and being a good steward of it, whatever the it was. And so, again, Liz, what I would challenge folks who right now are listening this and they're in the just garbage pit of life, now is the best time to invest in creating an ownership mentality to get yourself out of it.

Liz Moorehead: 22:32

What are some small ways that you can do that, though? What does that practically look like in those micro moments of doom and gloom?

George B. Thomas: 22:41

Yeah. So I'll give you some things that, for me, have been important and, for me, helped. And you may not have all of these as you're listening to this, but there might be something that you can tie in closely to this. So I want everybody to realize this is maybe a dart board that I'm throwing darts at, and I might get close to your numbers, but you might pick a different number. If you're not a dart player, then you have no clue what I'm talking about.

George B. Thomas: 23:06

Live life, have a beer, and go play some darts tonight. Okay. So the first thing that really has helped me with this ownership mentality is the understanding, and I will use the word that used reverence for something that I am borrowing that we just don't think about it as borrowing. But every single one of us, the minute we are born, is on borrowed time. And to realize and understand on a daily basis how short our life is.

George B. Thomas: 23:36

I'll ask you as listeners, I want you to think when you think of all the numbers in the world, 1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, that sounds like a very small number. But 75 to 80 summers is all we get. 75 to 80 winners is all we get. And some of us are sitting here like, oh, I just can't wait till I grow up, high school, college kids.

Liz Moorehead: 24:12

You sure about that?

George B. Thomas: 24:13

Mm-mm. 75 to 80 summers, winters, springs, falls. 75 to 80 birthdays. That's all we get. It's a very finite number.

George B. Thomas: 24:25

Very small. And so this realization, I'm on borrowed time. This, by the way, happened to me at, you know, 18 and a half years old, 19 years old, when I was 13 hours away from being alive on this planet and not being alive on this planet in the United States Navy. We've told the story. Go listen to historical episodes.

George B. Thomas: 24:44

We'll try to put a link in the show notes for you. But listen, when you realize you're on borrowed time, then your stuff, your garbage pail of life, your ish, it just gets a little bit smaller and a little bit easier to climb through because it's just a it's a fraction of a moment. It's a fraction of a moment even it feels like it's eternal. The other thing is I have to tie back to that. Leave it better than you found it.

George B. Thomas: 25:06

When you start investing in property, people, platforms, when you start leaving things better than they were, you start focusing on others and start focusing less on you. And what's fun about that is the reason that we feel like we're in our ish so deep is because we're in an internal cycle in our brain of, like, how bad our ish is versus when you get out and you start helping other folks, you realize, oh, everybody's got a little bit of ish over here and there. Maybe mine isn't as bad. And now you get a true perspective of, like, what people are dealing with versus what you're dealing with. Because the fact that you can't afford movie tickets on Friday night when you're helping somebody who's homeless.

George B. Thomas: 25:45

Oh, it's real small. It's real small perspective. The other thing that I start to think about too is this idea of accountability. Now sometimes we just like to play the blame game. Oh, well, it's our government.

George B. Thomas: 26:00

Oh, well, it's our boss. Oh my gosh. I could do so much better if my wife, my husband, my kids take accountability for yourself, for your actions, understand the reactions to their actions, cause their next actions. And if you would have actually just stopped what you did, stopped what you said, you have the power to own yourself, to own your words, to own the direction that you're helping things go in, but only if you can take accountability for yourself. And there's a great Simon Sinek video we'll make sure we put in the show notes about take accountability for your actions.

George B. Thomas: 26:38

And just please stop playing this blame game. The other word that comes to mind for me is responsibility, and I had to just start taking responsibility. Listen. There's a lot of things in my life that weren't my fault. It's not my fault my parents got divorced.

George B. Thomas: 26:54

It's not my fault that, like, I ended up being in a a, you know, certain place at a certain time when I had no decisions to be there, meaning starting life, air quotes, small in a one room log cabin. It's not my fault necessarily that I started breaking out in hives. It's like there's just a lot of things that not my fault, but I have to take responsibility to the fact that they happened, and that's where I was, and that's part of my story and just moving forward from there. And there's 2 videos that I think additional resources that the listeners can dig into. 1 is and I've said this before, Liz.

George B. Thomas: 27:27

I love Oprah. 1 is a video by Oprah, and it's just taking responsibility for your life. And then one is fault versus responsibility. It's Will Smith. And my goodness.

George B. Thomas: 27:38

They're both very powerful. Right? So the idea of accountability, responsibility, proactivity, quit sitting around and waiting and go out and take it. Take the day. Seize the day.

George B. Thomas: 27:49

Carpe diem. Like, I don't sit around and wait. Liz jokes because she's like, oh, since the last time we talked, did you start another business?

Liz Moorehead: 27:57

That's a valid concern. That is a valid concern, and I will restate my concern of if I get a Slack over the weekend, you never know what's gonna happen.

George B. Thomas: 28:07

You never know. But you gotta be proactive in life. And, again, it kinda ties back to, like, nobody's coming to save you. Nobody's coming to do your work. Get out there.

George B. Thomas: 28:15

Get after it. Get it in a healthy way, of course. Check out the Healthy Hustle episode. But in a healthy way, get after it. And then here's the other 2, and I think these go real nice together and especially when we're talking about stewardship.

George B. Thomas: 28:27

Then I'm gonna pause. Listen. We'll we'll dig in a little bit deeper. But this idea of respect and upkeep, respect for yourself, respect for others, respect for the things that have come in your life, respect for the things that might be in your life no more, but we're a key part of that. Like, respecting the moments in time and giving them the importance that they deserve.

George B. Thomas: 28:49

Just this idea of living a life where you respect the things that need to be respected and upkeep the things. Now in my case, in the story, it was upkeep of the house. Man, this looks better than when you got it, but think about upkeep. Are you focused on upkeep when it comes to the valuable relationships in your life? Are you paying attention to upkeep when it's, how do I keep my engine running for the next 75, 80, 85 years?

George B. Thomas: 29:16

Are you thinking about upkeep when you're downloading the latest software upgrade to your brain so that you can actually live a life beyond your default? Like, do you respect yourself and respect those around you to upkeep the things that need to be kept up, or are you like, nope. Just time to do some Netflix and chill. I'm just gonna take time to do nothing. Just do nothing.

George B. Thomas: 29:40

You can pause. You can take a break. I'm going to that deeper, like, this is gonna, like, potentially ruin your possibilities in life type take a break. It's like when you take a break and you never come back from the break type thing. You got to be kinda paying attention.

George B. Thomas: 29:55

So listen, borrowed time, accountability, responsibility, proactivity, respect, and upkeep. These are the words that I feel like are this spider web of information around this stewardship and ownership mentality in your personal life conversation?

Liz Moorehead: 30:11

When I think about this conversation, one of the places where my brain goes to quote your favorite saying is that leaving aside the philosophical benefits of accountability and owning your ish, it's also just more practical. Like, if you are living in a space right now where you're not happy with how things are and there are a lot of things that need to change, the faster you are completely honest with yourself about why you are where you are, the quicker you will be able to actually solve the problem. Because the more you deflect and displace blame and ownership for why you are where you are, the longer it will take you to get where you wanna go because you will forever be solving the wrong problem. Or what I have noticed is moments where I think when we adopt more of a victim mentality, there's a part of us that knows that on the inside. So what we do is we end up doubling down and talking about it more.

Liz Moorehead: 31:10

There's a lot more verbal scaffolding that happens in our lives. There's a lot more talking about what's happening in our lives as opposed to actually living and designing our lives. And so when I think about it, again, if you're a practical lazy gal like me, where it's like, I would like things to hurt less faster, that would be fantastic. The quickest pathway forward is to be honest with yourself. You're going to exert less energy.

Liz Moorehead: 31:38

Again, the laziness piece here. Right?

George B. Thomas: 31:41

That's funny.

Liz Moorehead: 31:42

But it's true. If you would like to feel less tired in your own life, think about how much more energy you would have if you were not trying to figure out who to blame. If you were not having to basically act like a politician giving a stump speech during campaign season about why something isn't your fault. And what if that energy was instead focused toward, okay. So how do I fix this?

Liz Moorehead: 32:03

How do I find people who can actually help me? How do I actually do this thing? And then it goes away. And so trying to convince the world and most of all yourself that something isn't your fault.

George B. Thomas: 32:13

It's funny because I kinda said that's funny, like, you know, when you were talking about that. But they're actually it's funny because my brain just works in unique and interesting ways, and it surprises me on a daily basis. But when you're saying that, I wanted to be like, oh, that's funny, like, lazy, but then all of a sudden, I got punched in the center of my brain, I was like, oh, actually, there's nothing wrong with trying to get maximum results with minimum effort. The problem is that most people don't measure what the heck's going on to understand what the minimum effort is for the maximum result they're gonna get. Like, I go back to you know, a couple of years ago, I was walking 7 to 9 miles a day, 3 different 1 hour walks, and I went from, like, £79 down in 7 months.

George B. Thomas: 33:01

Now I'm getting ready to go back on this journey, and the thing that's interesting in is in my brain is I don't have 3 hours in a day, and I'll use the word waste. And, gosh, don't send me hate email. I don't mean to waste, but I have to streamline this effort. So now in this new journey, I'm actually gonna measure what's the minimal amount of time I can walk and distance I can walk to get the same effect of losing the weight over time. Does it have to be 7 months?

George B. Thomas: 33:28

No. Can it be 9? Sure. Can it be 12? Yes.

George B. Thomas: 33:31

But what's the minimal so I can take care of myself and take care of work and take care of family? So there's nothing wrong with that, and I wouldn't call that laziness. I'd call that strategy. Like, have a freaking strategy in your

Liz Moorehead: 33:44

Called efficiency.

George B. Thomas: 33:45

Yeah. Exactly. The other thing too, I gotta give the listeners the punchline. You said the phrase, if you're sitting there and you're wondering where you're at because, listen, you are where you are because of one thing, you. That's it.

George B. Thomas: 34:00

When you can embrace that mentality, now you can start to fix stuff. It's hard to fix others. Impossible to fix others. And if you're blaming others, it'll never get fixed, But if you realize you are where you are because of you, that's one of the first great steps.

Liz Moorehead: 34:16

We've been talking a lot about the owner's mentality in terms of the reactive posture. You are in a den of sad and gloom. Use the owner's mentality to get out. But you and I have started touching upon the what's possible piece. Right?

Liz Moorehead: 34:33

And there's something that we talk about quite a bit that I really love, which is that your life is yours to design, so do it. This is the other side of that piece. Right? Like, I think when we talk about accountability, responsibility, everybody's like, oh, my god. This feels it sounds like homework.

Liz Moorehead: 34:49

And I'm just gonna have to walk around being like shame, shame, shame to myself. And that's not what this is all about, is it?

George B. Thomas: 34:57

No. Not at all. And when you get on the other side of kind of what we've been talking about in this episode, you get in a side of, gratitude and positivity and, like, positive intent. When you get into this world of positive intent, gratitude, positivity, now all of a sudden you start to design your life in a different way because you start to believe in different things. You start to understand the capabilities of the journey that you've taken and where it's gotten you thus far.

George B. Thomas: 35:28

A prime example of what we're talking about is this podcast, is the newsletters that we're putting out, is the community that we're growing. Like, if you ask the dude sitting on the couch looking at the broke ass TV, hey. Are you ready to impact the world? Yo, bro. I'm ready to take a nap, dude.

George B. Thomas: 35:50

But that's because I wasn't owning it. I wasn't owning my history. I wasn't owning my future. I wasn't owning my present decisions. So did I have to use ownership mentality to get myself out of the garbage pit or armpit of life?

George B. Thomas: 36:08

Absolutely. When this switch flipped, I had a wife and some new kids that were coming along the way over the next couple years. I did not know how many and at what frequency they were coming, but I knew one was there, and I knew another one was being baked in the oven. And I was like, oh my god. If I don't own this, where do we end up?

George B. Thomas: 36:31

What life do they end up living? I have to own my ish right now, and this is the moment when I started going to a job that I shouldn't have even gotten and watching linda.com tutorials at night so I could do the work in the day, which led me to then an agency that led me to inbound, that led me to HubSpot, that led me to this decade of educating myself and educating others and a owning who I'm going to be, owning how I'm going to show up, owning and designing what I wanted my future and the potential future of my wife, children. And what's funny when you start on this track, you start picking things up along the way. And as this ownership mentality, even before I owned my business, I came to the realization of, I'm out here hustling for my last name, not my first.

Liz Moorehead: 37:30

Oh, explain that.

George B. Thomas: 37:33

It's all about legacy. It's all about significance. It's all about understanding that the time that I have and by this time, it by the way, it could be tomorrow, but it could be 10 years, 20 years. If God is good, I might have another 30 years. The next 30 years for me is all about setting up the people who I love and the people that I don't even know that don't exist yet for the possibilities of things that I never had, the opportunities that I wish were there.

George B. Thomas: 38:10

I want to be the guy that when looking back, my grandchildren's grandchildren go, whoo. Great great great great great grandpa George, boy. Whoo. That dude right there. And then when they do that, they're like, why was he like that?

George B. Thomas: 38:28

And then they stumble upon this thing that no longer exists called a podcast, and they start listening to Beyond Your Default, and they start realizing how powerful it is to own their own life and to create their own legacy and to become their own master of the things that they wanna do in life. That's what I'm doing here.

Liz Moorehead: 38:51

I wanna wrap up today's conversation with a self reflection opportunity for our listeners Because I think even with the best of intentions or maybe we're looking at ourselves through the worst lens possible, it could be very hard to evaluate with clarity whether or not one has an owner's mentality. And let me give you an example of that. You might have someone listening who is exceptionally hard on themselves, who is potentially placing way too much burden on themselves and actually just begin to lighten up. Yeah. But then you could also have other folks who are like, I have an owner's mentality.

Liz Moorehead: 39:24

I own all my ish. I'm totally accountable for it, but they're not.

George B. Thomas: 39:27

If it comes that easy, hit your forehead against the wall and try again. No. I'm just kidding. Don't hit your forehead against the wall.

Liz Moorehead: 39:34

Yeah. We need you to know math, so don't do that. But what are some questions people can ask themselves as we leave them on this conversation to help them understand where they are?

George B. Thomas: 39:45

Yeah. Listen. Again, I say these things in the understanding of that I'll for always and ever be working on them myself. I would say journal because you're gonna have to look back. Right?

George B. Thomas: 39:55

I literally mentioned the thing of measuring it earlier. The only way you're gonna measure it if you write it down or have a way that you're tracking these things. But when you have ownership mentality, you have to start to think a couple things. 1, what percentage am I being reactive versus proactive? And I literally have a thing where I'm like, okay, today.

George B. Thomas: 40:18

Like, proactive, reactive. Many of my days are very proactive at this point. Sometimes it has to be reactive to, like, client work and stuff like that, but pretty much proactive. The other thing that I think that you ask yourself is what percentage of today was spent in gratitude? The other thing that I would ask yourself is how much of a percentage of today was it me taking care of myself?

George B. Thomas: 40:42

Did I meditate? Did I go for a walk? If I'm spiritual, did I watch a sermon or read the Bible or whatever it is for you? Right? Just whatever it is for you.

George B. Thomas: 40:52

Here's where I'll go with this. If there's a holistic matrix that you could create for yourself, how much time did I spend investing in relationships? How much time did I spend in my spirituality? How much time did I spend in my health? When you can start to say that there are a larger percentage of days that you're spending a larger percentage amount of time in the matrix that is important to you, you have reached this idea of designing your life.

George B. Thomas: 41:19

You've reached this idea of owning your stuff. You are literally measuring and programming and moving and adjusting and pivoting so that you can win those metrics. We're literally bouncing around this idea of habits and goals in the matrix conversation that I'm having right now, but these are the things that I would set up and the questions that I would be asking myself. Because, again, if we go back to your relationship with time, your relationship with accountability, your relationship with responsibility, right, respect and upkeep, like, what does that framework look like for you? What are those answers to those questions around that framework look like to you?

George B. Thomas: 42:02

And then I will say this because there's another quote that I love, but I gotta give context to this quote. First of all, I love this quote just because who said it? And I'm like, really? Willie Nelson, by the way. I love Oprah, and I love Willie.

George B. Thomas: 42:18

Willie's kind of the man on a couple different levels for me, but Willie Nelson has a quote that says freedom is control in your own life. When I say this, and I love this quote, not in a control freak way, but in a design your own life way, and the reason I'm bringing up this quote is one of the questions that you have to ask yourself, that I ask myself is, how much of today did I own? How much of today was because of freedom? Because, see, freedom to do those things that we wanna do, freedom to do those things that we love, freedom to spend time with people that we love and enjoy, All of these things lead to happiness and joy and the punchline to this entire episode is the reason I wanted to have the conversation around ownership mentality is because I realized that it could be the streamlined process to get you to happiness and joy. That's really what's important in one's life.