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Welcome to Leading With Force β a podcast where seasoned entrepreneur Brian Force shares the invaluable lessons he's learned on his journey through this crazy, wonderful life. Having built several multimillion-dollar companies, Brian dives into the nuts and bolts of building successful teams, scaling businesses, and leading with passion and purpose.
Each episode offers practical tools to effectively cast your vision, build your team, boost productivity, and become the leader you were meant to be. Brian's mission is to inspire you to unlock the incredible power within yourself, achieve your goals, and make a meaningful impact on the world. Join us as we explore how to find your inner leader, empower others, and embrace your journey.
βAnd I want that to sink in for a second because I think it can be kind of complex to tie those ideas together. But the reality is there is a direct correlation to you being frustrated with your team for not performing at the level π that you want them to perform at and you not having your camera on during the morning call.
I know that a lot of leaders will think that those two things are not correlated, but they absolutely are. When you're not willing to do the little things right that you expect of your team, you cannot expect your team to do the little things right either. Hey everyone. Welcome back to the show. I really appreciate you joining me for another episode. Before we dive in, if you are getting value from this podcast, please be sure to share it with somebody who could use this message and follow and subscribe on the channel. It really helps me with my mission to reach as many people as possible.
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Go over and sign up for the newsletter@brianforest.com. That's enough for the PSAs. Let's get back to the π episode.
Perhaps the most powerful characteristic for your business is the one that I think I see leaders lack on a regular basis the most, and that is consistency. Consistency in the way you show up, consistency in the actions that you take. The consistency in how you lead your team.
Consistency over time is the number one indicator of a success or failure for any goal, not just your business, but your entire life. The number one indicator as to whether or not you'll succeed in any venture is the consistency with which you take action and the type of action that you consistently take.
And nowhere is this more true than when you're leading a business. Consistency in how you lead your business is the number one indicator of your outcomes. The number one indicator of whether or not your business will achieve its goals.
And really the number one indicator as to the overall health of the business is the consistency with which you operate. And so often I see business leaders frustrated with their teams, frustrated with their performance, feeling like their business. Is stuck in the mud, feeling like they're just in a rut.
They can't unlock that next level of growth. Their business feels chaotic. They feel like they're incredibly spread thin. They feel like they're all over the place all the time, and they're really banging up against the ceiling. They're frustrated about it, and they're frustrated that the business isn't itself just running more smoothly. They're frustrated at their team, their people, how they show up. But then I look at the habits of the leader, him or herself, and they're usually wildly inconsistent.
They're taking on so much in their business that they're very inconsistent with the way that they show up every day, mostly because they feel like they're at capacity all of the time. And when you feel like you're at capacity all the time, you generally wake up with a sense of survival mode already in your mind.
And it's very difficult to be consistent in your activities and consistent in the way you show up when you feel like you're already treading water. From the second the day starts, and so it becomes this kind of never ending feedback loop of just always being spread thin and then frustrated that things aren't going the way you'd like them to go, but you don't have the time, energy, capacity to get them back on the right track.
what I just described is like how 90% of small businesses in America operate. They're bumping up against a ceiling. They're very well aware of what needs to be done to get the business to where they want it to go. The leaders just feel like they don't have the capacity to do it, and they're very frustrated that it isn't happening because they're working so hard, but they're also massively inconsistent with how they're showing up in the business.
We're gonna talk about consistency today and why it's such a powerful thing for your business and life, and how to use consistent habits to fundamentally change the way that your business operates for the better.
But before we dive into specifics, let's talk about why consistency is so important as a leader.
Our brains are hardwired to respond well to predictability every day. Our brains are trying to optimize as much of the decision making in our worlds as it possibly can to free up capacity to do more productive things. It's the idea of being on autopilot. Your brain makes a lot of decisions on autopilot when you just ingrain consistent habits.
For example, you've probably driven to work at some point and you've had a lot on your mind, and you've caught yourself sort of daydreaming or thinking about other things and not even realize like, wow, I just.
Pulled up to my office. I don't consciously really remember making the seven turns in between my house and my office. My brain just knew to do it because that is a predictable pattern I've been doing every Monday through Friday for however many years. Our brain optimize. Our brain uses all of the information that we use.
Our brain uses all of the information that we throw at it every day and tends to optimize as much as possible as a way to free up its capacity to do thi as a way our brain digests all of the information that we throw at it every day, and then optimizes as much as possible in an attempt to stay healthy and fresh and productive.
When we do things over and over, we create mental maps that take way less brain power to execute on every single time we take that action or have that thought process.
This is important because when you're consistent in the way that you lead your people, you create an environment of stability and predictability, and that in and of itself.
Tends to free up your people's mental capacity to make better decisions throughout the day, to do more productive work throughout the day when the leader is inconsistent, when your team's days are unpredictable, when it feels sloppy, when it doesn't feel like there is an established rhythm and level of predictability, your team is needing to expand more of its mental capacity, just to keep up with the inconsistency of the leader and by proxy. You're going to get less productivity out of them when you create mental maps for your team by getting them any consistent rhythm that they follow day in and day out.
They start to optimize. They create mental maps. They start to become better and faster because you've created predictability.
And what happens is you free up their mental capacity to be more strategic, to be more creative, to think more deeply about better solutions to the problems in your business that when erased or solved. We'll get the business to the next level. When your team is inconsistent because the leader is inconsistent, it takes more effort to get the same work done day in and day out, and that's how the business gets stuck.
So consistency is wildly important because when you add up each consistent day over time, the amount of time, energy, and resources that can go towards more productive things than just staying afloat. It becomes exponential, and that's how your business ends up in a totally different place than the frustrating, stuck place that you might be at. Now,
a great example of this is from a study that a neuroscientist named Daniel Siegel did and he had a really great way of articulating what his research found, and that is when your team has a consistent, predictable environment in which to operate, it allows their prefrontal cortex of their brains, which is their stress response area of the brain to relax. And what that does is that allows your team to start thinking with their upstairs brain, as Dr. Siegel calls it. That means their creative brain, their strategic brain, their higher level brain, rather than always operating with their downstairs brain, which is their survival mode brain, which is their, we are treading water brain, which is the, we've just gotta get through the day brain.
When you have an inconsistent environment and it takes more effort to get the same things done, your people are always operating with their downstairs brain and they're using all of their mental bandwidth just to get today's work done.
When you operate in a consistent environment, today's work becomes easier and easier because it's the same repetitions through the machine day in and day out. And what that does is it increasingly uses less and less of your team's mental capacity, which frees up more for them to be creative, strategic, and more productive on other things.
So we can take the business to the next level. So I really love the way that Dr. Siegel articulates the upstairs brain versus the downstairs brain. Because I think that's just such an easy way to picture that.
And I think a really great question to ask yourself when you're in times of frustration with your team is are they operating with their upstairs brain or their downstairs brain? And if they're operating with their downstairs brain, why? Have you as the leader, put them in a mode of inconsistency, so they're always coming from a place of just trying to get through today, and if so, what would the business look like if we got consistent and started thinking with our upstairs brains?
Another aspect of this that we don't really talk about a lot, but is very important, is the amount of trust that consistency builds between you and your team. Trust is not built off grand gestures. Trust is built one consistent day at a time when you as a leader, show up the same way every single day with the same cadence, the same consistency, and you expect everyone else to show up in the same.
Consistent way each day you have a level playing field. Your team understands what's expected of them. Your team understands what they can expect of you and what they can expect of the environment in which they work. When you do that, you give them a sense of safety.
And what I mean by a sense of safety is they know what to expect when they show up for work every day. And so the accountability is there. The predictability is there. When you're inconsistent as a leader and you don't have a set pace and tone and expectations and schedule,
your team is going to lack trust and their environment. And when you have a, and when you have an environment that lacks trust, you have an environment that lacks. And when you have an environment that lacks trust, you have a. And when you have an environment that lacks trust, you have an environment that lacks pro.
And when you have an environment that lacks, and when you have an environment that lacks trust, you have an environment that lacks productivity.
And so that consistency starts with you as the leader there's no other way around it. The consistency that you have in your personal habits will be the consistency that you show up with in your business.
I know very few leaders that have great consistent personal habits in the way that they operate in their daily lives that don't have great. Consistency in the way that they lead their business. How you show up anywhere tends to be how you show up everywhere over time. And so if your team is lacking consistency, if you're frustrated around how you are operating, you need to look at your, I would advise that you start by looking.
I would advise that you start by looking at the, oh, I would advise that you start by looking at the consistency of your own habits in your own world. Do you operate on a set consistent cadence every day in the way that you wake up, how you take care of your body, how you take care of your mind, how you show up to work, what time you get things done, Or do you wake up and every day is different and you're taking the day as it gets thrown at you? If that is the case, then your business is going to reflect that as a whole.
And so the most beneficial thing that you can do as a leader for your business is build consistent habits in your own life.
So let's talk about what those habits look like as a leader.
We'll start here. As a leader, your morning routine is the most important part of the day for your entire business, and here is why. The way that you show up in the morning for your team sets the emotional and mental foundation for the entire day.
The kind of energy that you bring to your first interaction with your team of the day will set the baseline for every subsequent interaction throughout the day. So your job as a leader is to set the tone properly, the first thing in the morning with your team, in order to set that tone properly, you as the leader need a consistent morning routine that optimizes the way that you show up, so you get the maximum benefit for your entire team in that first interaction. Let's just look at two quick scenarios to illustrate this leader a. Hits the snooze button three times, wakes up, lays in bed, checking emails is in a rush to get to the office.
Eats a really, really poor, unhealthy breakfast, is already frazzled. Fighting traffic, taking calls because they're running behind. When they show up to the office or wherever their team is meeting at, they're clearly frazzled. They're already stressed out, and they're feeling behind. Leader B. Wakes up on time, spends time reflecting, prioritizing their day, making sure they have their big rocks in order, shows up with clear intentions on time, ready to go, and they do that every single day like clockwork.
Which leader's team would you rather be on, and which leader do you think is going to get better results out of their people? Now, by the way, both leaders are gonna feel just as busy in this scenario. Leader a, probably already feels like they're at capacity first thing in the morning.
That's because they didn't set themselves up for success. So they're spending a lot of mental energy just. Keeping their head above water, whereas leader B is going to feel very busy as well. They're gonna feel very busy on productive things that are moving the business forward rather than just keeping it standing still.
Now the key here is not to have the perfect morning routine. It's just to have a consistent morning routine. Don't want to go down a rabbit hole and try to convince you that the only way to show up as a leader is to be up at five o'clock in the morning, do your cold plunge, like all the crazy things that people would make you believe are optimal for your health and for leadership.
What I really care about is that you just have a consistent way of doing things
that means waking up consistently at the same time, preparing yourself for the day, and preparing yourself to show up and lead the same way every time. Over time, you build mental maps and it takes you far less mental capacity to get ready for the day and show up ready to lead when you do it the same way each and every time.
I would encourage you to have some staples. I would encourage you to have a morning routine where you wake up at a time where you have plenty of time to ease yourself into the day. Meaning you're not waking up 20 minutes before you're expected to meet with your team or be at the office, right?
Give yourself the time to come from a place of clarity to do some reflection, if that's what you'd like to eat healthy and fuel yourself for the day and to not feel. Like you're already running to get caught up on the day. By the time you even leave your house, make sure that you are able to put yourself in an optimized mental state of some sort by not feeling like you're already rushed the second you get going.
I will say that is something that every routine should have is the benefit of time. So whether you work out in the morning, you journal, you do gratitude, you do asana, I don't care. Just give yourself the time to go into the day with a clear head and prepared to lead your team with positive energy.
When you think about your morning routine, I'd like you to think about it in this framework. Your morning routine should answer three questions. How do I want to feel today? What energy do I want to bring to my team? And what is the most important thing for me to accomplish today? When your morning routine speaks to those three areas, you'll see.
Massively improved results in a very short period of time. Asking yourself those three questions and then taking the actions you need to take around the answers is going to have a massive impact on the way that you show up and by proxy how your team begins to show up.
So when you design a morning routine, design it to answer those three questions.
Now that you have a consistent way of showing up every day because of your morning routine, consistency in the way your team communicates is the next key. at every one of our organizations, we have a very similar cadence of communication.
We have a power up call every single morning. We have regular coaching sessions with each one of our team members. We have a very basic process for feedback loops, meaning issues that are brought to leadership's attention should go no more than 24 hours without being addressed.
We have a weekly leadership meeting at the exact same time every single week. We review the financials on the same day, same time every single month. We have very simple guiding principles that we operate on that set the communication tone for our organizations, and it is massively valuable for our team.
If you don't have a regular way of communicating with your team you're going to meet with them at this time. Each day you're gonna do your coaching sessions or one-on-ones this time, each week, each month, whatever it is. Get a standardized communication plan in place for your team when your team knows this is how and when we communicate, information tends to flow much more freely.
Things don't get bottled up, they don't get lost. People don't build up resentment over time with things that they're not able to give feedback on because they feel like it's going unheard. You just have a much more seamless flow of information throughout your business, and when you have that seamless flow of information, you are able to see the business much more clearly and make much more effective decisions and delegate more decision making power to your team.
The next place where consistency is wildly important in your business is in your decision making. Not just the decisions that you make, but the transparency around the process of how you make decisions When your team feels like you are making decisions randomly or emotionally based on your current mood, with no real framework, they tend to lose trust in you as a leader.
And having the trust of your team is incredibly important for the performance of the entire organization. So if you haven't already, you need to develop a framework for how you make decisions that affect your business
and when you use that framework consistently, it empowers you to delegate more decision making to your team because you'll give them the same framework and empower them to make more of their own decisions.
We have a very simple set of questions that we ask ourselves in our organizations when we're trying to make a decision. Does this align with our values? What are the potential consequences? Whom does this affect?
Does this serve our long-term goals? asking ourselves these questions helps us make like 99% of decisions way simpler.
One of our organizations was recently considering taking on a different type of client than we're normally used to serving. We would've made quite a bit of money serving this client, but it really wasn't in our wheelhouse. We would've had to adjust a whole lot of our processes to serve this one client, and ultimately, through asking these questions, what are the potential consequences?
Who will be effective? Does this serve our long-term goals? Serve in that client. Certainly still aligned with our values,
but the potential consequences that our service for our other clients might suffer because we're expanding a lot of energy working outside of our normal operating procedures to serve this one client.
And it didn't serve our long-term goals because serving this type of client wasn't really in our business plan, and we didn't plan on serving more like that. And so if anything, it became a bit of a distraction that made us some money, but long term probably would've lost us way more money because we would've had a split focus.
And so when we went through that framework of question asking, we had a transparent conversation with our team and they understood why we chose not to do business with that client, but refer them to a different company that was more in their wheelhouse as far as their services go.
What that does is show every single member of our team how we make decisions. So when we entrust them to make decisions in their day to day, they can use that same framework and nine outta 10 times, they're gonna come to the conclusion that us as leaders would've come to.
And now we've empowered them to do that and leveraged a whole lot of decision making power to our team.
So now that we've established the importance of consistency and the ways in which you can be consistent in your business, how you show up, how you have that first interaction, how you make decisions, these are going to directly impact the performance of your team.
There are some key things to consider when we think about consistency in our business and why it's so important for us as leaders to be consistent before we can expect our team to be. The first is modeling verse mandating. If you mandate that your team shows up a certain way every single day, does things by the book every single day, but their leadership, you don't show up the same way every single day.
You are highly unlikely to get your team to follow suit. Mandating something that you're not willing to be accountable to yourself is about the fastest way to lose your team's trust. It creates a culture of non seriousness when you're asking people to do things in a way that you're not willing to do them yourself,
they're going to stop taking your business seriously. This is how you end up with a team full of people that are just doing the bare minimum to get by and not get fired. 'cause they know that you as a leader are probably never going to fire them because you are already at capacity all the time and you can't afford to lose anybody because your team is wildly inconsistent.
That's a very difficult culture on which to scale a business when you have inconsistent leadership
you have a team of people who know that they can show up and perform at a mediocre level and collect a paycheck, and you are not going to do anything about it. Your business is going to struggle mightily on the other hand, when you show up consistently as a leader every single day.
You don't really even need to mandate that other people do as well. They either will or you're likely to go find new people who will. Your energy is the most contagious drug in the universe and when you show up consistently, your team will tend to follow suit. So it starts with you.
What modeling rather than mandating does is show authenticity to your team. It shows them how much you care about the success of the business and the success of every single person on your team.
And it gives you the ability to be much more genuine, moment to moment with. Your team members, when you go into your coaching sessions or your one-on-ones with the people that report directly to you, they know that you've shown up consistently as a leader ever since they've been with you. When your people are underperforming and you're having those conversations and they see you being consistent every single day, it's much easier for you to share honestly about the things that you struggle with, the things that you have to overcome as well, and to relate to them and the things that they're struggling with in being consistent themselves.
It creates a much greater bond between the two of you because you are leading by example and also being relatable and forming a much deeper understanding of the struggles that each individual team member has while also not allowing those struggles to become excuses.
When you show up consistently as a leader, through it all, you. Remove the ability of your team members to make excuses for not doing the same.
I'm gonna take time to share a little story here about how this looks in the real world. I require every one of our team members to have their cameras on, on our morning power up calls.
We do them over Zoom. I require everyone to have their camera on no matter what. Even if they're in the car, they don't have to look at the camera. They just have to have it on. The reason being is when you have your camera on, I know that you're more likely to be listening and absorbing whatever it is that we are talking about.
When your camera is off, for all intents and purposes, you could be staring off into space doing stuff on other browser tabs. I have zero idea if you're actually paying attention, and when you're not paying attention, that's how balls get dropped. And so I require everyone to have their camera on on our morning calls.
But I've also had to have serious conversations with one of our managing partners because they were almost always the main offender. Other people would have their cameras on and our leader would not have their camera on, on our morning call. This is the exact type of thing that loses trust from your team when you expect something of them that you're not willing to do yourself because maybe you were running late or you were under prepared, or whatever it is.
Your team now thinks that you have higher expectations of them than you have for yourself, and they're not gonna show up with their full potential if they feel that way.
So those little types of things tend to add up over time. When your team develops a deep sense of trust, they perform a much higher level. If they feel like the leader is operating off a different standard than the standard that's set for the team, the team is very unlikely to hit that standard that's been set.
And I want that to sink in for a second because I think it can be kind of complex to tie those ideas together. But the reality is there is a direct correlation to you being frustrated with your team for not performing at the level that you want them to perform at and you not having your camera on during the morning call.
I know that a lot of leaders will think that those two things are not correlated, but they absolutely are. When you're not willing to do the little things right that you expect of your team, you cannot expect your team to do the little things right either.
So let's tie all this together and put some action steps in place. Consistency is the number one indicator of success or failure on any journey. Most importantly, the journey of your business that you're building, the career that you want to have, the vision that you have for where you want to go.
The way that you consistently show up is gonna be the number one indicator of your results. Do you show up consistently, chaotic, consistently different every single day? It's gonna be very tough hill to climb. Do you show up consistently?
With intentionality, with energy, and with decisiveness, you're going to go a lot further and your team is going to be a heck of a lot more productive if their leadership shows up that way. So ask yourself this. How do you show up in your world every single day?
Do you wake up at the same time? Do you have the same morning routine? Do you have a consistent cadence of communication with your team? Do you have a consistent way of making decisions in your business? If the answer is no to any of those, or God forbid to all of those, you know exactly where your frustrations stem from and you know exactly what you need to do.
You need to develop a consistent routine. For yourself and for your team, and you need to implement it as quickly as possible. The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time to start being consistent is today.
So if you're not running your morning power up calls, you need to get that on the calendar for tomorrow. If you're waking up at a different time every single day, and sometimes you're rushing to work and you're already frazzled through the day, you need to consistently show up.
You need to, you need to change your routine and put yourself in a position where you can consistently show up with energy and make The first interaction with your team of the day sets the tone for every subsequent interaction.
So that first conversation is wildly important. Set yourself up for success in that first interaction by having a consistently productive morning routine, whether that is waking up earlier, eating a great breakfast, working out, meditating, journaling, doing whatever it is. Put yourself in the best possible position energy wise, to have the best first interaction of the day that you possibly can.
If you have a lot of fires to put out and they're gonna hit you all at one time, right there in the morning, you'd better show up in the right mindset with the right energy, because if you start having a freak out first thing in the morning, you're giving permission to your team to carry that energy.
All with them throughout the day, and then that's gonna be a very chaotic day. And if you do that the next day and the next day, you're gonna have a very, very, very frustrating business that's stuck in the mud and always feels like it's falling apart.
So take some time to consider this as an entrepreneur, as a leader, as a business person, as a human being. How consistent are you in your habits? And what would your world look like if you showed up with consistent intention, positive energy, and decisiveness every single day? And what do you need to do right now to get from where you are?
To there from A to B. What steps can you put in place π today that will start paying dividends tomorrow? Hope you enjoyed this episode. I hope it's given you something to think about and something to implement. I would love to hear your thoughts, drop a comment, send me an email, get in touch with me.
I appreciate you hanging out for another episode and I'll see you next time.