Hi, welcome to the Builders Business Success Podcast!

Why do we have this podcast? Well, from talking to so many builders, they are so busy doing their business. There’s so much to do in a building business. How are you meant to go out and mine all of the dirt that’s out there to get to the gold that will make a difference to your building business. It’s a whole job on its own. It’s a full time job mining the dirt to get to the gold.

So what we wanna do with this podcast is help you just get to the gold without mining the dirt. So we go out there, we’ll mine the dirt, we’ll listen to the webinars and read the books and so forth and bring you back the principles that we think will work in a building business, hopefully polish it and mold it into a form that can be easily implemented for your business and you can just go ahead and implement it. That’s the purpose of this podcast. I hope you enjoy it.

The Agenda

Super excited about the lineup that we’ve got on this show.
So first up, we’re going to be talking to a really great friend of mine, Emma Purcell, she’s absolutely a lovely lady, and she’s going to help us understand about how we deal with these challenging times, how we can protect ourselves from any sort of negative thinking and those sorts of things that can really create a ineffectiveness and create unnecessary problems in our building business.
We also got our regular segment. What’d I Say?

Which is an excerpt from a conversation with our blackbelt members. Hopefully it will be interesting. Hopefully it will be valuable. And we’re also going to do a tech review and I’m actually wearing what I’m going to be talking about.

Let’s Hear from The Conversation with Emma!

So let’s now listen into our conversation with Emma Purcell. She’s a great friend. She is a very caring person and she’s got a tremendous depth of knowledge about how we manage our emotions and everybody could well do with this information because there are plenty of times that we run into things where we feel a way that we wish we didn’t.

We’re acting in ways that we wish we didn’t. And there are things that we can do to understand why we do that, how to take personal responsibility in situations and manage our emotions.

Let’s now listen into that fantastic conversation with this lovely lady, Emma Purcell.

Mick – When I speak to people, builders, whoever, and I’m generally trying to help, but we’re trying to overcome a problem a lot of the time, I’d say nine times out of 10, it’s the perception it’s how they’re looking at the problem and kind of pointing finger and blaming out there, the circumstances or other people or the economy or COVID or whatever it is for my circumstances. And yeah, that is relevant sometimes, but not as often as what you’ll see with most people, you know.

So what are your thoughts around that? Because it’s, we can say that till we’re blue in the face, you know, we’ve got to take personal responsibility. How do you help people do that? How do you help people get to that realization that, you know, if I really want things to change, I’ve got to look at how I’m perceiving what’s going on, and I suppose my power my ability to change and manage things.

Emma – So I think that there’s a big confusion between the external and the internal worlds that we live in.
So what do I mean by that? A lot of people, especially men and especially in that trade industry are very practical/
So when we ask them or invite them to, you know, sit down and talk about your feelings, feels like what!

You know, there’s this real provider thing going on of like, no, I just need to figure out where I’m gonna get the next job from or where I’m gonna make money from or how I’m gonna pay that bill or how I’m gonna have a result for this, right?

It’s a really difficult conversation when people are trying to make sense of that. And it feels quite fluffy and almost like a waste of time to then just sit down and talk about how we’re feeling. And this is where it goes both ways, because I think a lot of the time in a lot of these industries is the opposite is happening.

So you’ve got all these people that are saying that they can help others, by doing this inner work. And so many people see it and read it and done a what the hell it’s supposed to mean, because it doesn’t make sense, right? But they’re doing it on the opposite way.

On one hand, people can be so kind of loaded on the one side of all the external stuff and so they ignore the internal. And then on the other side, you’ve got people so on the internal of let’s just talk about it and let’s just, you know, manifest or think about being successful and then we will weigh, and they’re not dealing with the actual practical reality steps, right?

All we need to realise is there needs to be an integration of the two where we understand that, for example, if we’re sick, both physically feeling sick, and yet we keep getting up and going to work every day and not allowing space for the body to heal or to recover or to move through the fever or whatever it may be.

Then we know practically that’s a disservice to ourselves, right? And that we need to just go have a day-off, have a rest, get yourself over that piece. Then you can come back.

Mick – What do you say to the tradesman? Who says I can’t afford to have a day-off. I mean, it, to me, it’s like somebody yelling at you out the window as they drive past in their car, I’m too busy driving this car to stop for petrol. And then I just figure, well, you probably stop at some stage because the car won’t run without the petrol unless we don’t apply that same logic to the emotional stuff that we’re talking about now.

But also the physical one, like you said, if you are real, and this is something that I’ve done forever, you know, probably the last 30 years, if I start, I know most people just call me a worse, but if I get the remotest little arm getting a little bit of sinus pine or a bit of a dribble or something like that, cancel everything, I cancel all the appointments and I’ll just lie on the lounge, watch movies, go to bed, whatever.

And if it happens and it happens quite rarely, 12 hours, and I’m kinda back into it a hundred percent, but I just see people trying to operate at 75% of, you know, 55% for weeks, sometimes months not giving themselves the opportunity to repair. So like, I guess what you’re saying is this is really important, both physically and emotionally,

Emma – And it’s about educating yourself. So if you’re, if you haven’t gotten if you’ve created your business, right? So the people that, that you’re working with especially are often builders that have their own businesses, right? And so it’s about if they stay in the way that it’s always been done and when we know better, we do better.

So the reason that we have helped, the reason that we go to someone else for anything, right. Even if we break our leg and we’re laying on the side of the road with the bone sticking out, we don’t go, you know what? I could probably just could be they don’t know it, go home and it’ll be fine.

But instead you find the most efficient way to get better, right? So you would probably call an ambulance or get yourself to the hospital. A surgeon might have to work on it, and then you’ve got that recovery period or whatever of how that shift has to then coming to place, right? ‘Cause you can’t just get up and go back to work.

The same way that you did tomorrow or that same afternoon. So it really comes down to education that if you’re not satisfied, so if your body and mind is giving you messages that something not working. So if you’re going to work every day, because you have to pay the bills and you’ve got to make money, but on the other side of that, you know that you’re not happy.

You know that your health isn’t in a hundred percent, you know that perhaps you’re fighting with your wife or you’re having other issues in other relationships, be it with people that you’re living with or with even the guys that you’re working with, you know, any of that stuff, it’s all affecting you, whether you ignore it or not, right? And it slowly beats us down. And so the reason that we educate ourselves is because we only know what we know and we can’t do better until we know better.

So if we stay stuck in that loop all the time of, well, that’d be nice. So we stay on that one loaded side of the external of, well, that’d be nice, if I could have a day-off or go on holidays, like all made up the road, but I don’t make as much as him. So I’ve got to keep going to work.

Well, what if, instead of thinking that you started to think, how can I begin to learn what all made up the road knows so that I can maybe do better And what if I could find people that I could actually learn from who have these skills, who know these things, where I can educate myself and up-skill, and therefore learn new ways, do better ways, rather than trying to do, doing the same thing, like expecting to do the same thing, but getting a different result. We all know that’s–

Mick – Definition of insanity.

Emma – Exactly, and people going insane.

What’d I Say?

Okay, now comes a time where I’m gonna play you something that I might’ve said this week, that made sense to somebody. It’s pretty hard to find, but when we do find it, we like to share.

In this case, now I need to look down, found out what I meant to be bloody told him about dreading, trusting bond with your clients. So now it’s time to talk about, What’d I say? And that’s a little excerpt from the discussion we’ve had with our blackbelt members.

We’ve got a scour, the conversations we’ve had to find something that made sense. They’re pretty hard to find, but when we do find them, we like to share them with you. In this little excerpt, we’re talking about, how do you make a trusting connection with your clients?

Because that is the power and value and importance of a building business is that relationships building those relationships.

So let’s listen to what’d I say.

“I go through waves of that, like waves, where I think I’ve got my shit together. And then something happens and a problem, you know, in the program or in the group or whatever happens.

And you’ve got to change things. And then you’re trying to learn new things and implement new processes and whatever to the business and it ends up, you know, getting up, getting up early and staying up late, as well as getting everything else done. It just comes down to constantly refining your skill on the application of priorities.

So I think there’s a couple of ways you, or a couple of things you need to think about it. One is grouping activities is really important. So obviously if you’ve got things you need to do on site, you do them all at site. But something that I would just think about is, are there working on the businesses or office type activities that are more critical than some of the things that you do on site?

Because I think you can fall into the trap of saying site stuff is the priority, but that might not be the true. It might be certain activities on site are the priority rather than anything to do with just being on site.

The Review

Okay, now time for the tech review, when I say tech review, it could be something techie. It could be something, when I won’t lift that up or break it, but it’s not really about technology with lots of electronics and so forth.
It’s something very, very simple. And it’s what I’ve got on my face. And it just made sense to talk about this after what we’re listening to Emma, talk about looking after ourselves.

So we can look after ourselves mentally and emotionally, but we also need to look after ourselves physically. And I think that with builders, one thing that doesn’t get a looking is how do we improve the quality of our rest?
How do we improve the quality of our sleep? And it was something that really was bugging me in the not too distant past. And I just couldn’t sleep properly.

I’d wake up a lot, the quality of my sleep wasn’t great. And so I started to look into it and I got a couple of things. One of the things I got was this ring, which I’ll talk about another time. And the second thing I got was a pair of these glasses.

Now I couple a lot of crap for these glasses. I’ve got a couple of pairs. These ones are actually the ones that helped me see what’s going on now. So they, their prescription and I got these from Swannies. So these particular glasses are Swannies.

I do have another set that aren’t prescription and I use them at night time for just watching TV. And so the key with these glasses is that it blocks out blue light and blue light is emanating from the lights inside our house.
It emanates from our screens, our computer screens, our iPads, our phones, all of those sorts of things, and obviously the TV. And if you’ve ever thought about when you’ve away been camping.

If you’re sitting around the camp fire and there’s no unnatural light, so there’s no manmade light in the place, we’re just sitting around the camp fire. Have you ever experienced that, you know, eight, eight 30, you’re starting to get a little bit weary. You’re starting to get a little bit tired.

And it’s because there is no blue light, like the yellow light from the fire or from candle light. It creates melatonin production in your body. And that’s the biochemistry of now starting to wind down and go to sleep. But the white light or the blue light that comes in what we see as white light, that creates biochemistry that gets us up, gets us going.
So when the sun comes out, our biochemistry is getting us up and getting us going.

Now, the man made force light that comes from our screens, our computers, our iPads, all of that. And even your TV, if you’re sitting in front of your TV to wind down and relax, you’re getting a big blast of this blue and green light. And that’s continuing to create the biochemistry of let’s get on, let’s go.

And then you get up and you try to go to bed and you wonder why we’re sort of tossing and turning and not being able to sleep properly. So by putting on these glasses these particular ones I wear through the day, if I’m in front of a computer a lot, and it protects me from the massive amount of blue light and it’s significantly reduced my eyestrain.
So, you know, I love the Swannies glasses. I quite often do two and three day.

What we call intensives either I participate in them, or I run them for our members. And we’re in front of a computer for six to eight hours a day, like many people and for two or three days in a row. And I noticed, as soon as I got these babies, I just didn’t get the eyestrain.

These save the eyestrain, but also wearing them at night when you’re relaxing in front of the TV, or even looking at your phone or what have you, it protects you from that blue light. It gets you in the right biochemistry.

By the time you’re ready to hit the sec, you are relaxed and you’re ready to have a good quality night sleep. So I highly recommend them. A mate of mine, John, James, it could make, I remember he’s not James Swanick. He told me all about these when I met him at a conference not long ago. And I grabbed a pair and I haven’t looked back. So jump on the website, it’s Swanwick sleep. So just Google Swanwick or Swannies, and you’ll find these on the interwebs, get yourself a pair. You’ll never look back. So I hope that’s been useful.

Here more from Emma

Okay, it’s time to get back to our conversation with Emma.

Mick – But I’m a big believer in the prevention is than the cure. But if you already have these feelings and are already, you know, don’t feel as good as you’d like to, there’s a problem there, and there needs to be a solution to it. But I think at the same time, it’s really important to have a process of prevention for the future as well.
What are your thoughts on that? And what sort of things do you suggest to people to prevent being in a situation where you start to feel bad about things and get distressed and perhaps even experienced depression?

Emma – So, firstly, I wanna say that when we have found things that are helpful, be that groups like masterminds, that we’ve been in, where we’ve met in the past is one example.

But whenever we find these groups, I think people need to get much better at sharing and at referring and at talking about it, right, rather than trying to keep all the cookies to themselves, you know, it could be as simple as, if people are finding it really difficult to start the conversations or to find the communities, then it becomes even more of our responsibility when we found them to tell other people about them.

You know, it’s because even if that podcast or that group, or whatever, may not be something that you personally are gonna use or invest in or whatever, or become a part of, like, for example, with Taki’s group, it’s business coaching.

So if somebody doesn’t need a business coach for saying, in that respect, then they might suit better to somebody else that you know, for example, you know I’m a friend to you, that might be better referred to you or to me or something like that. So I think that’s the really first step of we all know people. And I think it’s a cop out to kinda say, well, we don’t know anyone.

We’re not going to talk about anything. I think it’s really just having the courage to talk about it and to really overcome this thing of people don’t talk about it because, you know, I know a lot of men who have been trained in the past that are now doing different work and they’re just starting the conversation.

And so it’s still the same group. It’s still the football club, or it’s still at the, you know, on the camping trip with the mates over a couple of beers or whatever, it’s still the same thing. But suddenly somebody just has the courage to start talking about it. And the people that have always done that the best are women.

You know, it’s really learning from that I think as well in the way of one having the courage, just to start the conversation and to kind of put your pride away and talk to your mates because they do care about you. Everybody does care about you.

And so simply voicing how you feel. Because I know from my experience, you know, I used to run a program on parenting and with entrepreneurial parents that all had trade businesses. And the biggest thing is that they thought they were alone in their feeling.

They thought they were the only one who was thinking these things. And, you know, with the coaches that I work with now, one of the biggest things that we talk about the most are what are they thinking and feeling that they don’t want people to know they’re thinking and feeling.

And this is the piece where people think that no one else is thinking and feeling the same things and yet they are. And when you have the courage to call it out, right I do it in my posts all the time. And that’s where my clients come from. It’s because I have the courage because I’ve worked through it and I’ve moved through it and I’ve got the tools and the skills for it, but I couldn’t speak to it. And I couldn’t have the knowledge of it unless I’d experienced it.

I think that builds a level of trust where the prevention piece comes down to, you need to start talking about it now, not when your business is about to go Boston bankrupt and there’s nothing anybody can do because it’s so far gone, it’s ridiculous, right? And that could be a time to, if you haven’t spoken up before, then you got to do it, then do.

But it’s when you’re starting to lose the sleep over problems, or when you’re starting to maybe have too many beers because you’re trying to make that go away, you know, or you know that you’re starting to kinda bypass what’s really going on or issues that you know, that you have, that you simply don’t know how to deal with or to change.

That’s the empowering piece is like the moment that you feel stuck when you feel like your orange light or your red lights coming on, and then you’re starting to think, Oh no, now I’m starting to stress. Now I’m starting to worry. Now I’m thinking, how do I do this?

And it could even be something as simple as you’re on top of your bills, but then something happened like COVID or whatever other people stopped paying. And now this new problem occurs where possibly cashflow is shifted or something like that, right?

That’s going to create a new problem and a new stress rather than just ignoring it and hoping it goes away by putting it under the rug and bypassing the whole thing, putting your blinker on and trying to drive around it. It’s not going anywhere. And this is where we as individuals need to start to listen to ourselves.

This is the internal work that I was talking about. It’s one thing to say, well, if I just go and make more money, but you’ve never made more money than you’ve made for the past five years, right. You’ve had that same sort of average income, or you can only build so many houses a year. Well, then not dealing with the internal thing of our own. I’m starting to get behind on cashflow.

This is going to create bank a much larger problem in the future, which I can see, but I need to just go make more money. And so the bypassing then could look like I’m just gonna put more hours in, but yet putting more hours into the same five houses is still and not taking the holiday because now you’re so concerned about, well, I can’t, I feel guilty for going on holidays because now I’ve got a cashflow problem, you’re still only building five houses a year.

So nothing’s changed. Nothing will be different just because you’re working physically showing up more. Isn’t gonna allow you to make more money and it’s not gonna solve the issue, right. So that’s when you’ve got to sort of get to that orange light and start to put your hand up and say, we could have a problem in this case rolling this way. And I’m who can help me with that.

Mick – Yeah, good question for advice
One question that I often pose in our Facebook group in a business, which party, which human part of the business is the most important. Is it the business owner? Is that the team? Is it the customer?

In fact, I can’t remember anyone ever saying the business owner, the smarter people will say, Oh, it’s the team. It’s definitely the team. Most people say, it’s the customer.

You don’t have a business without a customer. Well, I get that. But I think what we’re talking about here is that the most pivotal person, the most high leverage person in relation to the success of any business is the business owner.

Because if you can show up with great energy, if you look after yourself, both physically and mentally and emotionally, you’re a great example.

You can encourage others to look after themselves as well. If they feel looked after, if they feel appreciated, they then appreciate and look after the customer. So the customers have a great experience, but to me, it’s the business owner is number one. And I believe you’ve got a schedule budget both time and potentially money to look after yourself.

Number one, it’s kind of like the insurance policy, no one will drive their car uninsured. You shouldn’t be driving your business an insured either. You should be looking after yourself here and here and have a time and a money budget for so really super important.

So I super appreciate you putting the time aside to be on the podcast, I’m sure we’ll be talking again. And I’m sure that there are people that want to stalk you and, you know, get some more information from you. And you’ve said some amazing things. How do we find you and sort of follow your messages and get more information from you.

Emma – So also probably the easiest place at the moment is just my Facebook page, which is just Emma Purcell, P, U, R, C, E, double L . Yeah, It’s probably the easiest place, but I also wanted to add to that as well, that, you know, we, if were a business owner and we’re responsible for others and were leaving and employing others. We can only recognize in them what we’re aware of within ourselves.

So if we’re not dealing with our own, either lack of information and education and know how and all of that stuff, as well as how that affects us personally, be it emotionally, physically within our relationships, all of that stuff. We can’t be recognize that in our employees or the people that we’re leading either. And we don’t have the compassion and empathy to be able to see that in them, if we haven’t examined that within ourselves either.

So I think that all business owners should almost be given like these checklist of how they need to take care of themselves first and foremost and in order to truly earn the right to really lead others and to take care of them and be responsible for them in so many ways.

Mick – Yeah, excellent advice. So again, thank you so much for being generous with your time and your knowledge. I hope we get to talk to you again on the podcast again and go out and jump on Emma’s Facebook page we’ll definitely put the name and is there a website at all or not?

So people can come visit you and you know, learn more from your amazing message.

Summary & Takeaway

I hope you enjoyed this episode of Builders Business Success Podcast.

At the end of these always liked to make sure that you’ve got some form of actionable takeaway something you can do that will make a difference. And I think that looking after yourself mentally and emotionally is super, super important. And one of the things that I think that is the best way of helping yourself, and looking at looking after yourself mentally and emotionally is hanging around with the right people.

So you can create your own mastermind groups. That’s one way you can sort of have lunch every second week or whatever, with some people and discussion share your ideas. Another opportunity is that we’ve already created a group for you. If you’re not already in it, just like the Builders Business Success Podcast, we’ve got the Builders Business Success Forum, and that’s a closed Facebook group just for builders, where we help you overcome all of the very common challenges that everyone experiences in a building business.

So we’d love to come and see you just look on Facebook, search on Facebook for Builders Business Success Forum, click the button, answer a couple of questions. You’ll be on the inside. And you can consume all of the content and ask as many questions as you like, but it’s really important that you hang around with the right people. So you can create your own mastermind group or group where you share and discuss, or you can come and join something like the Builders Business Success Forum.

But I hope you really enjoyed this episode. And if you’ve got any questions at all, as I said, all what I’ve said in many previous episodes is we endeavour to answer a lot of questions, but quite often through the process of answering questions, we create more questions.

So if anything, in this episode has created questions for you thought, it’s a great idea. I’m just not quite sure how to do it. And you need a hand with implementation. We’re here to help. So all you need to do is you can press the button underneath this video, depending on where you’re watching it. If you’re watching it on our website, you can just press the button. You can schedule a call. I can answer your questions.

If you’re listening to it on iTunes or Spotify or somewhere else, all I need to do is jump on buildersbusinessblackbelt.com.au.
You’ll come to a page here. The top of the page book, a call. All you need to do is press the button, fill out a little form. We jump on a call and start answering your questions and help you out.
So I hope that’s been helpful. Look forward to having you back to another episode of Builders Business Success Podcast.

I’m Mick Hawes builders business blackbelt. Bye for now.