Ep. 026: Success by Design: Why Success Happens Before the Moment

Welcome back Bridge Builders to Bread to Lead, podcast transforming leadership across industries. I'm your host, Dr. Jake Taylor Jacobs, and I'm thrilled that you're here. We're currently ranked as the 30th top business and leadership podcast nationwide, and it's all thanks to listeners like you. Bridge Builders, if you haven't already grabbed a copy of my book, Bread to Lead on Amazon, it's packed with strategies to elevate your leadership game. Got questions or ideas for the show? Visit us at breadtolid.com. And if you're finding value here, please take a moment to rate and review us on Apple Podcast. Your support helps us reach more leaders. Now let's dive in and continue breeding excellence in leadership. Today's episode awaits, Bridge Builders. Welcome back, welcome back, welcome back. Welcome back, welcome back, welcome back. Hey, hey. Bridge Builders, listen, I'm excited to be back from the holidays. I took a little bit of hiatus even a week before I went away. Now what I will tell you to be very transparent with you, this nine days, which was a little hard for me, simply because last time I took a vacation, like a real vacation where we were there to not work, was maybe eight years ago. So I was literally bugging at almost like a fiend needing to be productive and needing to do something that could definitely be impactful. So listen, I had nothing but time to think and nothing but time to be appreciative of how far this community has come, how far this podcast has come. Y'all listen, during our three week hiatus, we end up getting to top 20 at one point, which is extremely exciting looking at the rankings to see that on the business category, we are still ranked, you guys are still sharing the content and things are absolutely amazing. So I'm not going to be before you long, just sharing, I just wanna share with you how much I missed you, I hope that you missed this content too, and I hope that you're actually listening to it and you're getting something from it. I feel like I hope it's not one of those podcasts that you end up getting tired of, but you look forward to the messages from week to week that you can use to continue to get better. And listen, I'm gonna tell you this, if anybody knew my content prior to starting Bread to Lead, I'm a very, very, very big advocate for entrepreneurship. And I at one point used to tell people often that I believe that everybody should think about entrepreneurship in some form or fashion. And I wanna kind of retract that on this podcast. I don't think that everyone should be an entrepreneur. I think that everyone should have entrepreneurial skillsets and drive, I think that everyone should be an owner of something, whether you have a piece of ownership in someone else's business, piece of ownership in the stock, piece of asset ownership in a cash flowing property, piece of, some ownership everyone needs, but to be an entrepreneur is not the path that I would recommend for a lot of people, especially being the fact that, you know, I've taught business leaders in over 22 countries, more than 20,000 of them now at this point, and thousands of people have come through our education programs and coaching programs, and some people just don't have it, but everybody can be a leader, and everyone can add value. And if your leadership skills get so great that they bubble over to where there's no more value you can bring someone else's organization, then considering stepping out into your own is important, then you have some people that were introduced to entrepreneurship at a very, very young age, like myself, that when you grow up in entrepreneurship, you know, from eight years old and up, that's the only thing that you hear as a viable option, that's the only examples that you see as success, you end up becoming that. So if you're newer to the space, listen, let me just tell you something. Yes, we're talking about leadership, yes, we talk about little healthcare, yes, we talk about different industries, but the most important thing that I want to tell you is never make a decision solely based on money because money will be the only thing that you're chasing and money is the biggest evaders of all things chasing it. And this is coming from somebody that has had all the cool stuff that people aspire to have, the Rolls Royces, the S550s, the Rolexes, the Omega watches, the renting out private islands and the DR, jet rides, some of these things I still have and I still do, but if you get lost in the sauce of that, you'll never find your own drip. And you don't want to get lost in the sauce of chasing money that you never find your own drip, the thing that God has created you for to be truly impactful that you feel seated in, like something that you believe in doing so much, it doesn't matter how much money you make, the core view won't change. And if you find yourself in opportunities that the core view changes, depending on how much you make or how much you don't make, then odds are you're probably in the wrong situation or the wrong space. Okay, listen, I'm off my preaching horse right now. I just really want people to really focus on mastery or skill set and mastery of appreciating every moment of your journey in this space that we're in and slowing it down a bit to see what life is. The last 10 years and chasing my entrepreneurial journeys and goals, I probably can only remember maybe 20 people's names in 10 years out of everyone I met. Maybe 10 people were extremely memorable to me where like I can see them and it sucks because there were a lot of other great moments, highs and lows that I just tried to rush through that I didn't get a chance to embrace. And so these next 70 years of my life, I want to take the time and smell the roses and really, really be observant of everything around me and not become so numb to it chasing something. I want what God has for me to come to me, which is Wilderness, Bread to Lead, Podcasts. I truly, truly, truly hope that you're understanding the importance of cultivating your craft and being ready for the opportunity, which is what we're talking about today. So Bridge Builders, we're diving into something that separates true achievers from the dreamers. And the understanding, and it's the understanding that success happens before the moment of opportunity arrives. Remember I talked to you all the time and I said that my mentor told me, Dr. Jake, you're not a millionaire until you create a millionaire. And you don't become a millionaire until you're worth a million dollars. So I said, how can you become a million, be worth a million dollars before you become a millionaire? He said, because you can only have what you are. Uh-oh. And because you can only have what you are, if you're a court, if you make a million dollars, but the core view is only worth 100,000, the million dollars will end up, you end up burning it, losing it, tearing opportunities up, and your real value will come back down to what your real, what the real value of who you are, your asset of you. What you are, it will become back there, back down to that. This is why you typically always see people make a bunch of money, have a bunch of success and bust. When they bust, they can never get it back. It's because they never took the time to develop to becoming worth that, becoming worth whatever the amount of monetary value that they received in the moment. So it's very important that we understand that success happens before the moment of opportunity, before that moment arrives. You don't just dream success, you visualize it, you simulate it, and you practice it until it becomes real. Let me share something I've observed working with leaders across industries. Everyone wants success, but most people are just hoping for it. They're waiting for their moment, thinking they'll rise to the occasion when it comes, but here's the truth. Bridge builders, listen, life doesn't give you what you wish for, it gives you what you've prepared and trained for. Think about any significant achievement in your life. Was it really spontaneous, or was it the result of preparation meeting opportunity? Whether you realize it or not, your success came from some form of preparation, mental, physical, and or both. I worked with a leader who was stressed into a crisis situation. Her organization faced a sudden major challenge that threatened its survival. And let me pause here. Usually when clients, customers, businesses, facilities, hospitals are calling us, they've tried everything else. It's kinda like when you try to self-remedy, to do self-remedy for sickness or whatever you have, and you can't break it, then you go to the doctor, versus coming to the doctor first, and we don't even have to go there. And so I believe in myself as somebody that you should come to prior to hitting stops. When you're in momentum, the best time to come to us is when you're in momentum, because that's when you'll begin to truly start seeing that we can navigate hitting those bottlenecks. And this is what we typically deal with hospitals all the time. They continue to come to us when there is a problem, versus when there isn't one that they see coming to us to make sure that they never have to run into a problem. A lot of us is historically, by nature, our reactionary. The people that are proactive, their lives are completely different than those that are reactive, 1000%. And this goes back to training. So in this situation, she was dealing with, her straightness survival of the organization, everyone praised her natural leadership ability in handling the crisis. But when we talked about it later, she revealed something very crucial to me. She had been mentally preparing for various crisis scenarios for years. She run through different scenarios in her mind, considered various responses and even practiced critical conversations. And when I was, and when I was coming up as an entrepreneur, especially the first portion, you have to master people in sales. If you don't master people in sales, you're never gonna have a business. So I would visualize all of the worst things happening to me. I would visualize every, at the kitchen table and someone just spits in my face, and how can I still close? The husband comes in mad and thinks that I'm trying to push up on his wife or the wife comes in mad and think that we're trying to set, all the type of things that we could do, from the kitchen table to organizations, to dealing with a business partner who wants to work with me and another business partner that hates my guss and is trying to push the other business partner. Everything that you can imagine. I wanted to focus on ensuring that we didn't have to go through that. Like, I mean, that when they came up, it wasn't a surprise to me, I was prepared for it. And this is exactly what she ran through. She said, Dr. Jack, I ran through so many different situations in my mind. And in practice, in varied responses, that when this came up, it wasn't even one of the worst situations I created. It was actually one of the easiest. In my mind, I made things harder. And this is why I tell people all the time, if you don't practice, if you don't practice and put yourself in simulations, when you're running your organization, when you're trying to become a leader, when you're dealing with difficult people, if you don't simulate the worst things happening, how you can navigate that to both parties or agreeing in your mind, if you don't create those simulations in practice, the real world will be hard. But if you create hard scenarios or situations in your mind, in your body, in your language, and all those other things, and you find ways to overcome those, and processes to overcome those difficult times, guess what will happen? I promise you one thing, when the hard time actually comes, you're prepared for. Why? Because you are proactively thinking of all the exit scenarios that you needed. In order to be great, imagine getting on a cruise and then nobody that's on the cruise, not the guy driving the cruise, whatever you call him, I can't even think of his name right now, not the pilot, but the captain, nobody, none of the boat crew know what to do, and you guys are stuck in the middle of the road. I mean, stuck in the middle of the ocean. You hit something. There were no exit protocol trainings, there's nothing. So everyone, including the people who you're supposed to have your life, your life's supposed to be safe with, aren't even prepared. What do you think happens on that cruise ship, pandemonium? With those who have practice for the tough moments, when everyone is going crazy, they step up in those moments, happen, and are successful only to those that prepare it. So listen, Bridge Builders, success doesn't happen by accident, get my book. Bread to Lead. Get my book, Bread to Lead on Amazon today, and learn how to design your success through deliberate preparation. And if you really wanna know how to really be a great executive, get your Not a CEO yet. If you can master, get this book, you're not a CEO yet, along with Bread to Lead, this book, these two books are truly the only books that you need, if you truly want to actually master, not only being a leader in an organization, but preparing your mind to be an executive or a CEO, to get out there founders mindset, and actually start thinking like a CEO, running a multi-million dollar organization with more than 100, 200 employees. That's something that you wanna make sure that you go and get in both of those are on Amazon. They both are. Under Dr. Jake Taylor-Jake's Bread to Lead, and you're not a CEO yet. Now let's get back to understanding why success happens before the moment. I'm gonna share something powerful about visualization and practice. It's not enough to just picture success. You have to train your mind and your body to operate in that successful state before the moment arrives. I want you to think about elite athletes. They don't just visualize winning. They visualize every move, every decision, every potential scenario, but here's the key. The combination of visualization and physical practice, they train their bodies to execute what their minds have already experienced. So in sports, my coach used to have us when we came to shooting, right? He used to have us actually visualize shooting in the ball going in the rim. Where's the rim? Where's the ball? Where's the rim? Where's the ball? Where's your pocket? How do you shoot your form? How do you release? And we will have our minds, our eyes closed, laying flat on the ground, and just visualizing that ball in pocket. You'll say freeze, where's the ball? Is it in the right spot? No. Okay, boom, where's the goal? Okay, I see it. Visualize the ball going in a hole, but visualize the ball going in a hole. And then he would take us out to the court and then we'll do the same exact thing. Same exact thing. Visualize the ball going in a hole. Visualize the ball going in a hole. And then guess what? Then we open our eyes, we shoot. Visualize the ball going in a hole. And our shooting percentages increased. Just by visualization. This is why in sports, coaches say the best athletes watch film. Why? Because there is something that goes on in your mind when you're watching the film and you're seeing mistakes of your competitors, of your competition. You're seeing the mistakes of your own demise and the things that you made a mistake on it, how you can fix it and what happened in your mind. So when the game comes, it slows down. The same principle applies for leadership. I was working with an executive who was preparing for a major organizational transformation. Instead of just hoping it will work out, we spent months preparing. I made her visualize different scenarios. I made her practice crucial conversations and run simulations with her team. When challenges arose during the actual transformation, nothing felt new because she'd already been there in her mind and practice. See, when you can actually prepare your mind to be ready, think about it, because a lot of people have good muscle memory under perfect environments. But can you perform when everything looks like it's about to bust? Can you perform? These are the questions that we have to visualize and focus on in our mind. So here's the framework I use for preparing leaders for success. And it's built around three key elements, mental stimulation, physical practice and integration. Mental stimulation isn't just positive thinking. It's about running detailed scenarios in your mind. What could go wrong? How would you respond? What would success look like? You're not just visualizing the victory. You're visualizing the process, the challenges and the solutions. Physical practice is where most people fall short. They think about what they should do, but they don't actually practice doing it. Whether it's a crucial conversation, a presentation, or a crisis response, you need to physically practice the skills you need when the moment arises. My team gets mad at me when we do this, but every time they crush it when the moment gets hot, they thank me. If we have a demo, want to talk to a client, we're talking through a tough time. If someone stands us up on a meeting, we still run the demo. If we're dealing with difficult staff, before we actually talk to that staff, we run through all the options. All the conversations. We practice someone coming in hot, being mad, pointing fingers, cussing you out, and that person has to psychologically and mentally program and reprocess themselves to actually being ready for that opposition at the time. My grandfather used to always say, hey son, I said, yes, pop. He said, never get caught slipping. Never get caught slipping. This is what that means. If I'm recording a training I've done, I'm watching the video over again. Before I do a virtual training, how am I engaging everybody? I'm practicing all the time. So now that when things come up, it seems like it's easy for me. And it's only easy because practice. And then the third thing, integration. It's about bringing mental and physical preparation together. It's about creating muscle memory, not just for actions, but for decisions, responses, and leadership presence. Let me share a powerful truth about mental simulation. When you run scenarios in your mind, you're not just daydreaming. You're creating a neural pathways that your brain will use in real-world situations. But here's the key. Your simulations need to be specific and detailed. So when I was working with a leader who was preparing an organization for a major market shift, instead of just hoping that they'd adapt, we ran weekly simulations, sessions, simulation sessions with a team. They'd create a scenario. What if our biggest competitor lunches this product? What if our main supplier fails? What if the market demands shift dramatically? Those weren't just theoretical discussions. They developed actual response plans, assigned roles, practiced their execution. And when real challenges hit, they weren't reacting, they were implementing plans that they already rehearsed. A lot of problems that are happening with the police force and other government agencies in our life is that a lot of them don't actually practice all of the hard simulations all the time. You may have an original training. They may do a training once a year, but how often are they going through simulations? How often do they have goggles on and they're actually going through and trying to talk down situations and looking at hand movements and hand gestures to ensure that they can protect both the person that they're checking and themselves? How often? How often are you as a leader putting your simulations of things that you can, what you can anticipate could happen? How often? How often are you preparing yourself when you do get that raise, when you do get that promotion, when you do get that money that hits that account, when you do close that major client, when you do get that major deal, when you do get everything that you want, get that money that you want, when you do get everything that you want, what simulations are you putting into place that can protect you? What habits that you have will you protect yourself from? Hey man, I got a bad habit of doing this, so what I'm gonna do is that when this ever happened, I'm immediately gonna set a mechanism in place to make sure that I protect myself from myself and I don't self-sabotage. This is knowing thyself, this is knowing who you are. Now let's talk about physical practice. We talked about visualization. You cannot visualize and be generic with visualization. You have to be specific. So let me go back to visualization for a second. People are like, man, I'm gonna be a billionaire when I go, no, no, no, no, no, that affirmation is dumb. You're never gonna be a billionaire because you're just saying I'm gonna be a billionaire, it's not visualization. There's nothing that you can simulate and nothing that you can actually physically practice on that will prepare you for that when it's generic. But when you say, hey, listen, I'm starting from here, I'm gonna run a million dollar organization. When I'm running this million dollar organization, I see it being in this industry. I'm seeing based on this, I'm gonna need to have this much in revenue or this much in operational gap, blah, blah, blah, whatever that is, you have to be specific, so specific that it seems real. See, scripture says to write it down and make it plain so that those who see it can run with it. How can you run with it if you're not playing? You are the architect of your life. You are what you create in this world. God gave you the full range to create whatever world that you want and it's all based on what you have written down and exactly that. And what is it? What do you have? What simulations are you processing in your mind? Are you only memorizing the lyrics to songs and who made you mad last? Because your world will become what you visualize and what you practice in the visualization. What habits are you practicing? God, Dr. Jack, I wanna be a millionaire. What visualize, how would you talk when you're a millionaire? Who would you associate with yourself, associate with if you're a millionaire? Would you keep the same friends? Yeah, Dr. Jack, I'll keep the same friends. Well, if you change your habits and your friends don't change their habits, how can you keep the same friends when you've been disciplined in changing who you are? See, these are all conversations that you must have with you. So you said, Dr. Jack, I don't plan to be a millionaire. All I plan is to grow in my career and I'm fine taking care of my family. What does that look like? What does taking care of your family look like? Have you already picked out the prep school or the school they're gonna go to? Have you picked out the gymnastics coach that they want? You got to already have this preplanned. So when it happens, you're not shocked, you ready for it. Now let's talk about physical practice. This isn't just about repetition. It's about deliberate practice with purpose. Every practice session should have a specific focus, a clear objective, and immediate feedback. Here's how one organization matters. Here's how one organization matters to this. They created what they called leadership labs. Controlled environments where leaders can practice crucial skills. Difficult conversations, crisis management, strategic decision-making, team alignment. And this is something I've taken with us since that was developed there. I want to put my leaders in all of the worst situations and figure out if they have the wherewithal to think their way out. The best example of that is when they lock you in those rooms, panic room, I forgot what they call it. It's like a panic room. You got all these other puzzles and stuff you got to figure out with a team to get out the door, escape, escape room. That's what the environment needs to look like if we're developing, truly developing leaders, helping them process their thought process and then watching the film on how they reacted to certain things. These are all ways and all things that we must be able to develop to ensure that the people or you yourself are growing as a leader and that the people in your organization are growing as a leader. You gotta practice difficult conversations. You have to visualize and practice crisis management. You have to have strategic decision-making skills. You have to understand team alignment. And you and a partner can go at it. One can be the difficult one, the other can be the one and you truly make it hard for each other in practice to ensure that that person is getting what they need. But here's what made our leadership labs effective. We recorded these sessions, analyzed them and provided specific feedback. They weren't just going through the motions. They were building muscle memory for success. Then after we go from visualization to physical practice, integration is where the world paralyzed. It's about making preparation a daily practice, not just something you do before big moments. Let me share how successful leaders build this into their routines. Every morning, we spend time visualizing our day, not just our schedule, but how we'll handle different situations. We see ourselves in crucial meetings, having important conversations, making key decisions. Then throughout the day, we create micro-practice moments. Like somebody flares up, it's not that big of a deal, but you're processing using some of the tools and skills that you use. And a lot of you need to be doing this with the skills that you're learning with this pie class. The CEO who I help transform his effectiveness using this approach. Before every significant interaction, he takes 60 seconds, run through the mental simulation before difficult conversations. He practiced his opening lines before strategic decisions. He reviewed his scenario plan. A lot of us just plan to fail. We don't plan so we fail. A lot of our failing is because we lack a plan. You're prepared, winging through life because you're able to wing a couple of moments you think that you can wing life. This is where the issue comes in. And if you're ready to transform your leadership through deliberate practice, you need to visit breadtolid.com. For exclusive resources, and join our community of leaders who design their success. Go to breadtolid, B-R-E-D, tulid.com. You can click on that thing. I think it says something like, watch our last master class. And then once you watch the last little master class, let me pull it up here. Once it says get access to the leadership summit, if you just click access replay, you can actually gain access to our free community. Our executive edge community that you can join to participate in. Okay. Now let's talk about organizational muscle memory because this isn't just about individual preparation. It's about creating an organization that's prepared for success. The best organizations create what I call success laboratories. Environments where teams can practice handling difficult scenarios. Leadership laboratories, success laboratories. We create this. And when we go inside of hospitals or within organizations, when we develop that leadership core, we're building this in. Handling situations like market changes. How do we navigate if we lose a million dollars tomorrow? What's the move? That needs to be in place. And I always tell people, build your career on the worst happening, not the best, and build your company on the worst happening and not the best. Because if I can build the company on the worst happening, the best will be icing on the cake. But if the worst happens, I'm still fine. If your foundation to your home that you live in was only built on the best scenario, it wouldn't be prepared for water. It wouldn't be prepared for shifts and the foundation. It wouldn't be prepared for any of that. It would literally crumble. Second thing, customer challenges. When we're talking to our instrumental departments and central state processing that support the OR insurgents by preparing their surgical equipment, we tell them all the time, listen, the surgeon is your customer. So why not practice what they're gonna challenge you on? Someone's coming new into your organization. You should be putting them in your success labs quick. Get trained on what they could say, how they can move and how they need to react. The biggest reason why people overreact when things happen to them is because they never practice reacting in the first place. If I never practice reacting to somebody acting heinously against me or somebody giving me praise or celebration, I don't know how to react. I don't know how to move because your body would naturally go to what you practice to. And if you haven't practiced anything, it would literally revert back to the last time you dealt with a situation like this, whatever that reaction was, whether it was right or wrong, that's gonna come back up. So you must instill new habits in order to revert back to those habits when things do come up because they will, y'all. How to deal with internal conflicts, strategic opportunity. These are the things that you have to master within your success and leadership lab, okay? And we ran these regular simulations. These are not tabletop exercises. Or we create a real pressure, real stakes, real feedback. Why? Because when real challenges come, they want their teams operating from experience, not theory. That's even when it comes to our certification within central store processing, we have our own certification that we built. It's a three phase certification in order to get your final designation, your scope. Which, matter of fact, every phase, there are these leadership labs or success labs that's a portion of their assessment. So not only do they take the physical assessment, we actually have to either fly to the hospital or they fly to our facility for them to actually pass their laboratory, their lab. Can you handle the pressure? And if you can, now we know we have a leader that's in practice and experienced not just theory. Because success happens by design, not by choice. That's why y'all need to go get this Brad Tilly book. It's the first start of learning what you got to learn, understanding the psychology that you need to have in order to ensure that you're okay and you can navigate these situations. And I wanna share with you something critical about maintaining this practice over time. Most people in organizations start strong but fade when immediate pressure is present. Real preparation isn't about preparing them for one moment. It's about staying ready for the moment, at any time. We build what we call readiness rhythms into the culture. Every week included, we have a scenario planning session, skill practice opportunities, performance feedback loops and mental preparation exercises. The key is making it systemic, systematic rather than sporadic. They weren't just preparing for specific events. They're building a perpetual state of readiness. So with every phase, every module, there's a phase of readiness that they may show, they must show. And here's something crucial about success preparation. It's not just about big moments, every small interaction, every minor decision, every daily challenge is an opportunity to practice excellence. The most successful leaders I work with understand this. They treat every meeting as a chance to practice presence. Every conversation becomes an opportunity to practice influence. Every challenge becomes a simulation for bigger moments. And remember, bridge builders, hope is in a strategy. Wishing won't make it happen. Real success comes from deliberate preparation, mental and physical, long before the beginning of the day. Mental and physical, long before the moment arrives. This is Dr. Jake Taylor, Jacob Siningoff. Thank you so much for tuning in to another episode of Bread to Lead. Until next time, keep preparing, keep practicing and keep breeding excellence in everything that you do. Remember, bridge builders, success isn't discovered, it's designed. Make your preparation count. Talk to you all later, peace.