Avoiding the 7 Traps When Seeking Success, with David Covey

Welcome to the Athletics of Business, a podcast about how the traits and behaviors of elite athletes and remarkable business leaders frequently intersect. The real stories and hard lessons to help you level up your leadership and performance. Now, your host, Ed Molitor.

Welcome to this episode of the Athletics of Business podcast. And our guest today is none other than David Covey, co founder and CEO of smcub. Smcub works with the best intellectual property content experts in the world and helps distribute their content globally through licensees. David loves working with impactful IP and setting up distribution systems around the globe. Prior to launching his own company, David served as COO of Franklin Covey, which was founded by his father, Steve. Even our Covey, David is a co author, along with his business partner, Stephane Mardiques, of the book Trap Outsmarting the seven Hidden Obstacles to Success. We will dive into the most common traps that we fall into, how we can recognize those traps as well as innovative ways to get out of them. I cannot be more excited to welcome David Covey to the show.

David, welcome to the Athletics of Business podcast. It is an absolute honor to have you join us today. How are you doing?

I'm doing great. Thank you for having me.

Absolutely. I'd like to just jump in right now. Your journey has been pretty amazing. You've done some great things. You've worked with some phenomenal organizations, you've lived in some fabulous places. Can you sort of talk to us about your journey and how that has brought you to where you are today?

Yeah, absolutely. So I grew up as the third son of Stephen and Sandra Covey, and a lot of people know my father through the Seven Habits of Highly Effective People book. So I didn't have a normal childhood, Ed. I mean, can you imagine? I had to be proactive at age four. I had to think, win at age five, and I had to listen empathically at age six. Even to say the word empathically is, you know, is a big deal. And to be able to do that.

At age 6 had to be amazing.

Yeah, so. And a lot of people know the book, you know, Seven Heavens book, but one of the stories in there is the Green and Clean story. That's actually not me, that's my brother, but he was 7. So we didn't have a normal childhood growing up, you know, growing up because we had, you know, we had to obviously love all these great principles. I joke about that just because, in a way, it was awesome growing up with that. In fact, when I was at Franklin Covey for a long time, we Had a lot of participants go through the program, and some of them were older, and they would be in their 60s or 70s, and they would say, wow, I wish I had this when I was in my 20s, because it really would have impacted my life in a much different way.

It was great growing up with these principles. Seven Habits, for me, was never a book. It was always just a philosophy growing up. It's just what I grew up with. So anyways, I grew up in a large family, and I think that's really good because you have to learn to share and give and take and get along with other people, different personalities, especially when you have weird siblings. But then my father's advice coming out of college is, hey, if you want to work for my company, that's great, but you ought to get some different experience. And so go out and get some different experience and then you'll be more valuable to the company. And I thought that was really good advice.

So I ended up working for Procter and Gamble, and I ended up in the sales and marketing department, and I lived in Phoenix, Arizona. And that was great. So I had a great experience. Then I decided to go to business school. And that was awesome, to get that experience. And then I joined Covey Leadership center at that time, which later then became Franklin Covey. And I had a fabulous career there. I spent half my time in the US and half the time internationally. And the international. I kind of caught the international bug, and I hear a lot of people talk about that, but for me, it was really real. I went to live in Australia with my family for two and a half years. I was the managing director for the Franklin Covey office in Australia. And after that experience, I was hooked.

And suddenly over time, I became the Asia guy, and then I became the international guy for Franklin Covey. I wasn't expecting that at all, that kind of career. In fact, one time I had a international marketing class at business school, and I thought, do I take that class? I'm not going to really do anything internationally. But I really like the teacher. I hear the teacher's really good. So I ended up taking the class mainly because of the teacher. But I thought, I'm never going to have a career in the international. Ever since Australia, basically, For the last 21 years, my career has really been in the international arena.

Anyway, after Franklin Covey and after my father retired and passed a couple years after that, I decided that it was really time for me to break out on my own and do what I always wanted to do, which was my dream, which is to be an entrepreneur and do my own thing. I've done that with my business partner, Stephan Mardiques. Stephan is originally from France, but he's living in Texas. So he says, bonjour, y'.

All.

You know, the French, they never lose their accent, but he's a wonderful guy. But we've been building this business together for the last seven years. It's been a great ride.

How has that journey been building the business? I know. I know firsthand the entrepreneurial world can be a little bit interesting. It can be a bit of a grind. Was it everything you thought it would be in terms of challenging, or was it more?

It was more challenging by a factor of four. So much harder. And it has been an absolute bear, you know, so I'm not a kind of guy that minces with words or whitewashes anything. It has really been hard. And you can read about it. A lot of people read about being an entrepreneur, but when you actually live it and do it's a big deal. So, actually, I have one of my favorite articles. One of my favorite entrepreneurs is a woman by the name of Sally Krawcheck, and she used to run Merrill lynch, and she now runs Elevate Network. And anyway, so she has an article. I just want to read you a couple things about it. She said a couple of her statements. She says, the truth is that being an entrepreneur is harder than running Merrill Lynch. And I'm not just saying that.

I actually ran Merrill Lynch. It's the hardest thing I've ever done. She talks about when you're trying to raise money. She says, none of us like being told our baby is ugly again and again. But, hey, keep in touch around cash flow. She says something I never thought about in my big company job is cash flow. When your business has billions and billions of dollars in revenue, you can make a lot of mistakes and still have a viable business. But in a startup, make a few hiring mistakes, and it takes several months to find the right person, a couple months to figure out that they're not the right person. A couple more months when you're trying to coach them and you give them an opportunity to become the right person. Then another couple of months after you part ways to find the next person.

She says, being an entrepreneur is the only time in my career that I've lost sleep. And I was on Wall street during the financial crisis. One last thing, she says, you can't coast. She says, you know those days at the office when you used to come in and didn't really do much. You don't have those days as an entrepreneur. If you don't do much, then not much happens. And remember what I said about cash flow?

Yeah, that.

So it's comforting to read stories and learn about Sally Krawczyk's experience as an entrepreneur, because it's been really hard.

If you knew then when you launched what, you know now, would you still do it?

Absolutely, I would. And here's why. For me, I found my voice in being an entrepreneur. I used to not get along with my bosses very much. I used to kind of argue with them a lot. And I hated being the kind of guy where it was like, well, I'm your boss, and this is what I want you to do. I didn't think what they were asking me to do was very effective. I would say, no, I'm not gonna do that. Not very effective. But a lot of times, unfortunately, still, even in corporate America, there's this. There's still the mentality of, I'm your boss and, you know, you need to do what I'm asking you to do. And that's just. Doesn't play well by me.

Right, right. You know, and I'm looking at my notes here from a podcast you've done previously. I'm not sure if the date, but you had. In terms of entrepreneur, you talked about the landscaping mentality. Do you remember that? You said, combine all three bids. Oh, yeah, yeah.

So it was actually someone who had shared that with me and saying, okay, so how do you know. You know how being an entrepreneur is like. And it's like doing landscaping. So let's say you have a home and you need to do landscaping. So what you do is that you get three bits and you add them together, and that's how much it's going to cost ultimately. And then whatever time frame that they set, you can just double it, at least.

Yeah, it is funny. And then when you're caught up right in the middle of it, one of the things, David, I like to do at night, my little ones are 6 and 4. People get a kick on that when you're looking. But I like to sit in my chair in the dark when everyone's actually. It's actually quiet, even the daughters. Okay. And one morning, it was a while ago, about a year ago, my wife asked me, she goes, what are you thinking about? I go, well, I had an epiphany last night.

I said, I realized one of the differences between being a partner and helping run an organization, which I was doing in the creating industry and having your own, you know, I don't want to call it a day, but having your own organization, your own journey is at the end of the day, when you.

Put your head in the pillow, there's.

Only one person that's really losing sleep and that really cares about what's going on. I call it the X's and O's, and that's me. That's the big difference. And it's something that's a little bit of a. Of a challenge. Has it gotten easier for you over time?

It's got. It's not. It's not a if I will survive anymore. And it was, you know, in the early days and a lot of times people kind of think, oh, well, you know, David's got, you know, safety nets. I didn't. I didn't have a safety net. I mean, if this thing fell apart, it would have fallen apart, you know, and the business would have failed and I would have had to, you know, learn from that and pick myself back up.

So.

So, yes, it has gotten better in that it's not an if I will succeed anymore. It's just when and the timing of when things are going to happen. I actually have two businesses. I have SM Cobb, which is a global IP licensing business, and I have a consulting business called Thomas Leland that helps companies align their culture with their values. A lot of companies say we value this, but yet the culture is very different. So between those two businesses now, those two businesses are definitely going to succeed. They're doing well, and it's kind of like this. The revenues were like, here, and the costs were like that. And then I was slowly raising up, so revenues are now exceeding the cost. The way I describe it's like being in the ocean and having a long pole that you can breathe through.

And when you're underwater, you literally are underwater, and you're breathing through this long, like a bamboo pipe, you know, and the ocean is kind of rough around you. Water's getting in there. And then after a while you kind of get up and, oh, my gosh, now, okay, now I can see. And now your body's out. So I think now I'm in a raft. I may even be in a boat.

That boat will just keep getting nicer, too. Yeah. And I want to get back to the culture and values. I want to ask you a question I always find interesting talking to individuals like yourself. People always thought you had a safety net. You know, people always thought that things were just going to happen for you. Because of who your father was. And we both know that's not true. Who were some of your mentors or a mentor that really helped you along the way in your journey to get to where you are now?

Yeah, you know, honestly, I mean, you had that one of those questions is possible question that you ask. And I didn't really have any good mentors. I actually had, like, bad mentors, not mentors. I had some bad leader role models that I didn't want to follow. And I don't know what God was trying to teach me there, but he was just saying, okay, well, don't be like those guys. But I was kind of like, can you give me something that I want to be like? So I would say my mentor was definitely my father. I really respected him for what he did. He was 50 years old. He was a professor for 25 years, and he broke out and set up his own business, Covey Leadership center, when he was 50 and nine kids. And I was one of nine kids.

So I was like, you know, in hindsight, so impressed with that and inspired by that. And I remember times, you know, he had the whole company on his back and all of the financing, you know, he had on his back. And at one time, he had everything mortgaged to the Hill, you know, so if the thing would. If the business would have gone under, he would have lost everything. So he risked everything. And so that, for me, was a real inspiration, you know, that I can do it. So I left Franklin Covey when I was 44, and I had seven kids, so that was six years younger and two kids less than my father. So I thought, if my father can do it at age 50 and 9 kids, I can do it at age 44 and 7 kids.

But unfortunately, I didn't really have a mentor. Now I had a great business partner. Stefan is my business partner. It's really great having somebody that you can talk with and commiserate together and share your vision together and your struggles and your disappointments. And having somebody as a partner, I think that's really important. I hear a lot of entrepreneurs, some of them are by themselves. Man, that's really lonely and not being able to have somebody to share. So maybe people have family and friends or a mentor that they can share, which is great. But for me, I think that Stefan has been great for me in that way. And then just my father and kind of the memory of what, you know, what he did with his business was really inspiring. We also had. I had a great grandfather. His name was Stephen Mac Covey.

In fact, he was the first Stephen Covey. So his son was Stephen Glenn Covey, and then his son was Stephen R. Covey, which was my father. But Stephen Mac Covey was a great entrepreneur. And there's a story he was a sheep herder in the late 1890s, and he was caught in this dreary section of Wyoming and It was like minus 40 degrees and he was stuck there. And he vowed that if he ever got out of there that night, he wasn't, you know, didn't know if he was going to survive. He would build a house, a place of refuge. So if you're ever in Salt Lake City area and you want to go on I80 east going eastbound, you can drive there.

And about three hours outside of Salt Lake, going east in Wyoming, in the middle of nowhere, there's this hotel and it's called Little America. And it's a hotel and it's also gas. It's a big trucker shop now, and it's in the middle of nowhere. And that was where he built the place of refuge 30 years later after his harrowing experience.

So in the 1920s?

Yep, it came out in the 1930s. So about 35 years later he actually built that hotel. So I have a picture of him and I have a book on him because he was a great entrepreneur. But I love that story of him being stuck in that storm and in the -40 degree weather and surviving and coming out on top and eventually building that hotel.

Yeah, that's an unbelievable story. I never knew that. And I kind of feel bad that I didn't know because it's such a phenomenal story. Let me ask you this. We're going to get to Trap Tales. I really want to talk about that book. Outstanding book. One of the things in your journey to get to where you are, and we talked about the bamboo rod. Was there ever a tipping point for you or is it one of those things, wake up one day, you realize that things are going okay, or did you have this aha moment where holy cow, we made it, even though we think we never really believed we made it. But was there a tipping point?

Yeah, there was. You know, so my SM cup business, we license intellectual property. And when were able to sign on as one of our IP owners that we're going to take his content globally. David Allen, getting things done gtd. A lot of people have heard of David Allen. He's a pretty popular guy. But when we signed him on and we started to find licensees for him, we now have 28 licensees that we found for him that represent his getting things done content in 60 countries. And when we started, he would, you know, he had two countries that he was in outside the United States. So when we did, when that started to happen and we started to have a lot of people call in and say, I want to represent David Allen. You know, it was like, yes, okay, yes, we are.

You know, we haven't arrived, but, you know, we're going to survive and we're going to get through this. And that was definitely the tipping point, you know, for us and our business.

Right. So all the work, all the struggle, all the grind to get to where you are now is growing, is scaling, is moving forward. Which one's gonna be a bigger challenge to have gotten to where you are now or to grow the business in an effective way?

I think the bigger challenge was just to have the vision and the tenacity and the perseverance to just kind of keep at it. Even though things didn't seem like they were getting better, you got to remember there's leading measures and lagging indicators. Leading indicators. Lagging indicators. Lagging indicators is what your revenues are like and what your cash flow's like, but the leading indicators are the things that you're doing that are going to impact that. And unfortunately, it just seems like it takes a lot of work and a lot of activities that you need to do before you start to see some of the fruits.

And so I think the tougher thing was just continuing to believe in yourself, believe in your dream, not give up, and know that, yeah, even though things didn't look right at the moment, you were doing the right kind of activities that were going to lead to some really good things happening. And that's what a lot of people don't see, is that they don't see the struggle of you being under the ocean, breathing through the bamboo pipe, the bamboo pole, probably not a pipe, but they don't see that. And all they see is like, hey, wow, cool. You got your own boat and you got a new book. And it's like, wow, this is great. They think that just happened, and it's not. So you have to just really have faith and confidence in yourself. I'm a big fan of Steve Jobs.

I think he was a great entrepreneur and a great visionary. He wasn't necessarily a really good manager or boss, but like all of us, everybody has their strengths and weaknesses. But one of the things he said about entrepreneurs, I have a little quote here. He says, I'm convinced about half of what separates successful entrepreneurs from the non successful ones is pure perseverance. And I totally agree with that. I think that you really have to just be scrappy, you have to be resilient, and you have to persevere. And if you do that and continue to believe in yourself, I think you can overcome anything.

Yeah. Now, it is a great quote, and this is a great segue because I want to go back, I want to circle back to the culture and values. One of the things I work with my clients, whether it be corporate clients or executive coaching clients, and I talk about them in my speaking. That building that unshakable foundation of what are your core values and how does that align with that? How does it align with your vision, how does it align with your goals, and how does that drive the culture? Can you talk into a little bit about how that has helped you build your two companies?

Yeah, absolutely. So, I mean, I grew up with a father that would talk about principles and about how the world is governed by principles. And they're not just natural law principles, like the law of gravity, but there's principles that operate in life and in business. So I'm a big believer in that. I mean, I think the principles are. They're natural laws that play out and they're not unique to any country or religion or society or culture. They just exist. And so I think the principle of having a vision for where you want to go, you know, and if you have. And a lot of times your vision that you have may be good, but it needs a lot of course correction. You know, it needs a lot of changes and adaptations and modifications.

And that's really what, you know, a successful entrepreneur does, is that they're not just stuck and saying, oh, okay, well, I want to do this. Okay, yeah, but the market's telling you that's not that cool of an idea, or there's not really people that are interested in that. So you have to learn to adjust, adapt. So for me, Ed, I knew all these principles existed in terms of how they operated. And if I would continue to have a vision. Habit two of the seven habits begin with the end in mind, is really about vision. And I can hear the words from my father like it was just yesterday. And he said, your head create your world. Whatever's in your head is going to create the world that you have.

And a lot of people would ask them and say, out of all the seven habits, which one is the most important? He would say, habit two. And habit two is begin with the end in mind is the idea of vision. And vision is greater than baggage. Vision is greater than the past. The Bible teaches without vision, the people perish. Vision is absolutely, I think, probably a critical principle that I tried to follow and believe in. And you need that vision when you're in the midst of it, right? You're in the midst of the storm. You need to be able to see that there's some kind of shining light and some kind of clear pathway where you're headed.

And then the big trick with that, and I can't wait to hear what you say about this, the big trick with that is we need to keep looking at that vision. We need to keep that forefront of our mind, but we also need to be where our feet are, so to speak, and have those feedback loops so we know what type of success we're having or what are we learning from failure or how are we growing adversity? I like to work in two week feedback loops. Can you talk a little bit about how you've been able to do that as you scale your business and create this compelling vision, but yet be so conscious and have such a presence of mind what's going on today and how that's, you know, how that's working into the lagging goals?

Yeah, absolutely. So in our business, you know, we have a business that IP owners outsource their international expansion to us and that's great. And there's some good brands like the one I mentioned, David Allen, getting things done, and other good brands that we represent. But what we realized is that was not a solution for everybody. And so we thought, okay, well, we have to be more flexible and adaptable. Let's think about what other ways in which people can work with this. So we actually created a consulting business, advisory business, where we can actually go to companies and say, hey, if you don't want to outsource to us your expansion, why don't we just teach you how to fish? We'll teach you about all the ins and outs of how to build an international business.

What are the characteristics you need to look for in the licensees? What are the seven mistakes that you're going to make going global that you should avoid making? We ended up having an advisory business. Then we had some clients come to us and say, well, I don't want to outsource to you and I don't want the advisory business. I just want your help in finding partners in these certain areas. We thought, okay, yeah, we can do that. So we now have kind of basically a fee based Business that will help IP owners find partners in certain countries and so forth. So what happened is, and also with our licensees, we used to only have exclusive master licensees.

We had a lot of licensees saying, I don't want to sign a five year agreement and I don't want to be stuck with all these financial obligations and a revenue forecast and minimum royalty payments. Don't you have anything else that we can do? So we actually created a whole new system. We call it a non exclusive distributor. This is somebody who can kind of test the waters with the program. A product in their home market without the financial obligations and without the commitments. But that came about from our experience in talking with licensees and realizing that there isn't one size fit all kind of model. You have to be more flexible. So absolutely, I think that we had to do it at a necessity for our business to be able to stay on track and to be profitable.

But I think the lesson I'm learning there is you can have a vision, but you have to, like you said, you have to have your feet on the ground. You have to be practical, you have to be realistic and you have to go where the energy is as well. And a lot of times your original vision, I would say, when I say a lot of times, I would say actually all of the time. I don't think that anybody starts off and says this is it and then doesn't make any adaptations or change. It doesn't happen. Yeah. That's why the joke of people doing five year business plans and all that is just like, are you kidding? How about five month business plans? Our world is changing so rapidly that you have to be flexible and adaptable or you're really going to get stuck.

Well, and practically speaking, there's a lot of traps to avoid. Okay, so let's talk about Trap Tales and Outsmarting the seven Hidden obstacles to Success. Because I look at my prep work, I look at my notes and my questions, we talk about this. It's going to answer everything. And I'm excited about that. So go ahead and just fill us in on the concept behind the book and the way you delivered it.

Yeah, so Stephan and I are like content junkies. That means that we live in this world of content material. Training programs. We've seen 200 training programs in the last 20 years. One of the things that we observed that did not exist is this whole concept of people are trying to achieve the success, but they're falling into traps, they're having obstacles. The things that are preventing them from Achieving what they want to achieve. It's like the force field analysis by Kurt Lewin. It's the model of driving forces and restraining forces. Right. You have the current state and you have the desired state. And most of the time, people always are giving themselves more driving forces and that's okay. But a lot of the time the answer is not another driving force, it's another removing the restraining force.

So using the metaphor, like driving a car, if you have your foot on the accelerator and that's your only strategy and initiative, it's putting your foot on the accelerator. Okay, well that's great. That's one strategy. But if you have the other foot on the brake, you're not going to go anywhere. And so a lot of times the way to be able to be successful is to take your foot off the brake, you know, so the whole metaphor around traptails and becoming a trapologist is somebody who's an expert at spotting and staying out of traps, is let's avoid the workplace traps that exist in our work life so that we can get out of those traps and free ourselves and achieve the results or the vision or the, you know, the end goal that we want to achieve. So we had to start.

So we did a lot of study and research and originally we came up with like 30 traps, you know, and of course you can't be a covey and write a book and have like 30 traps, you know, you got to whittle it down to the magic number of seven, right?

Yep, absolutely.

We came up with the seven traps that exist in the workplace. So would you like me to elaborate.

More on that which are number one?

Sure.

Yep.

So the first trap is the trap of busyness. We call it the focus trap. And it's drowning in the thicket things. And when you think about it, we are busier than ever. But half the stuff a lot of studies show is completely non essential and worthless. And we're just, we're mired in the thick of things. We're drowning in it and it's crazy. We need to learn. We need, we need to learn from Steve Jobs and other good people that learn how to focus. We have to say no to even good ideas. It's not about saying no to the bad stuff, but it's saying no to even good ideas so that we can focus on the very few, most important things that we can execute on. It's a huge problem and a huge trap that a lot of people find themselves in.

Then there's the procrastination trap. Oh, you want to talk about that?

Yeah.

I'm sorry.

In the focus trap, you said something I heard you say once that was awesome. We're mired in the thick of things.

Correct?

Yeah. Can you explain that a little bit?

So things are things that are not that important. Okay. Things that are not really essential to our job or to our role or to our life, you know, if you want to extend it outside of the work. And so you think about, like, social media. Okay. And I, you know, I have social media, and I use it occasionally, but there's some people that are completely addicted, and their life is centered, you know, around social media. There's nothing wrong. I'm not saying anything wrong with social media, but I think that when we carry it to the excess, to where it just dominates so much of our time in our life, then it becomes a problem. And I think that people have that with email. Think about email. Email's gotten out of control. It's crazy.

There's no way that the current level of emails that we have, you can't keep up with it. So we have to find a different path. We have to find a different way. The conventional approach is to say, hey, become a better juggler. Just juggle everything that you have. And the reality is that if you do that, you're going to have a lot of balls drop. That's exactly what's going to happen. So the epiphany, a breakthrough, which is what we have in each one of these traps, is you got to learn to say no. You got to learn to say no. You got to say no to good ideas. You got to say no even to great ideas, so you can focus on the few great things that you can do.

And I think that's the challenge that the trap for a lot of us is we just get mired in that thick of things, and we end up being very busy, but we're not really accomplishing the critical things that.

We should be doing right now. Let's talk about another trip. Yeah, Another trap. Second trip.

Okay. Procrastination, that's what we all do. We procrastinate things. But what happens is that we procrastinate things until we don't have a lot of options. In my presentation, I talk about the Fortune 500 companies, and I look at how from 1955 to 1995, more than two thirds of those companies fell off, and it's because they procrastinate, reinventing themselves as a company and reinventing their products and their adapting to the marketplace. And it's the same thing with us. All of us know things that we are procrastinating that we're putting off. And when we put off those things, we're not able to grow and transform in the ways that we need to do. So it's a challenge. And then we have these perfectionists among us. There's some people that don't even want to try to do anything.

They become completely immobilized because they want to be able to be perfect at whatever they do, which is never intended for how we should operate as humans.

One of the things I found with procrastination is people, and you just said it, they push back on change. And one of the things I really embrace is the fact that people, majority of people, will change when the pain of failure becomes greater than the pain of change.

That's right.

What have you found to be the biggest blocks why people? You just said they know what they need to change. They know what they're putting off. They know what they need to do, but yet they refuse to do it.

Yeah, and when you think about it, change is happening. So change, you can kind of think more of an external thing. It's always happening around us. What we are putting off is changing us changing. Right. We don't want to have to change the way we're doing things. The reason for that is that we like to be in this comfort zone. And this is what's so hard about being an entrepreneur, at least in the early stages, is that you're thrown completely out of your comfort zone. And all the things that you used to know and love and felt comfortable about, they don't exist anymore. You know, I remember when we had, like, some computer problems. It's like selling stuff on. As soon as you call somebody from it, you know, it's like, wait a minute, we're it.

We don't have an IT department, you know, and so humans love to be in a comfort zone. They don't want to push themselves out of that comfort zone because it's just human nature. You know, it's just to kind of settle in and relax and survive. There's no growth. There's no growth. When that happens, you stagnant, you become stagnant, and you regress. But if you really want to grow and it's not exciting because a lot of people don't want to do it, you got to get out of your comfort zone. And so the reality is that it's just human nature. I don't know how else to Say it, why people do it. I just think it's just part of our nature to stick with what's safe and what's easy. And we avoid things that are hard and challenging.

And if we're a perfectionist, of course we're never going to want to do hard and challenging things because that's going to make us look bad. And if we look bad, that's horrible.

So I'm listening to one of your wonderful keynote speeches, and you talk about getting outside your comfort zone, and I come up to you afterwards and say, Mr. Covey, that was awesome, but how do I get outside my comfort zone? How do you answer that?

You try something new, try something different, try learning a language, try learning a new instrument, try starting a business. Do something that you've always wanted to do, that you've put off because you've been scared of failure, you've been scared that you're not going to succeed. I mean, how many people put off stuff because they're scared and they're afraid? So that really parlays really good into the next trap, which is the learning trap, which is about letting mistakes define you. And the whole concept that we have around mistakes is wrong. It's incorrect. And I think that the way we look at mistakes is when we make a mistake, instinctively, what we want to do is protect ourselves, cover up, hide it, spin it, make it look not so bad.

And yet when you look at any of the great stuff that's created, like Edison and the light bulb, it took a thousand iterations to get it right. You look at Pixar and Ed Catmull is the CEO of Pixar, and he says that early on our movies suck. He says, I'm not just saying that. He says they're really not good. And our job is to take him from suck to non suck. This is quote, most people would be amazed by that. I mean, I see Pixar movies and I'm amazed at how many times it's like, oh, my gosh, you nailed it again. You nailed it again. But he's saying it's the iterative process. You have to iterate, you have to iterate and rework, rework. We work, and that's what life is about.

But somehow we think that maybe when you're 10, you know, you can't make mistakes anymore or it's not socially acceptable. So we kind of retreat into this more mode of not trying things, not experimenting with things. That's the biggest tragedy of it all, because we're not going to learn and grow unless we try things and experiment and make mistakes and learn from those mistakes. Now, I'm not talking about making the same mistakes again and never learning from them. I'm talking more about this idea of experimentation and trial and error and having a culture in a company that encourages people to take risks as opposed to encouraging them to play it safe, don't rock the boat, don't challenge the status quo. And that's the culture of a lot of companies that we have in America today.

So how important is it, in your opinion, how important is it for a leader to model that behavior and to create a culture or an environment where it's safe, not only soft, I mean safe to make mistakes and to fail? And okay, let's sit down and figure out what happened. How important is that for leader to do?

Absolutely critical. Because what will happen is that you can have a company give this rhetoric. They can put it in their mission statement or their values or whatever, but at the end of the day, if it's fed, but if somebody actually does it and they get punished or beat up for it, then it doesn't really mean anything. It's just platitudes on the wall. So if the leader can say, look, I want a culture of experimentation, trying things, of risking things, and I'm going to lead the way, and they go out and they try things and they fail, and they say, wow, look at that, what a massive failure that was. Okay, that's fine. Let's think about what we can learn from. So I'm sure there's a lot of learning that we can take from that.

If they model that behavior by their own experimentation and making mistakes and trying new things, that will send a message to the culture more than whatever you have on your mission statement or your values of, you know what. We actually value this. And the key thing is this. At the time that a mistake is made, what's going to be the reaction? If the reaction of the boss is why did you do that? You know, and they get punished and they get beat up for that. And again, if it was just an honest mistake, you know, not something that was, you know, malicious or, you know, or unethical or something, then you just set.

You've just told everybody what the culture is, which is don't take risks, don't walk the boat, don't experiment, because you know what, you're going to get shot down and beat up and you're going to get criticized for that. So what happens? People kind of revert back into their shells like a turtle. They just put their head back in and say, you know what? I'm not going to try anything, because I know what trying things means right.

Right now. So we have the learning trap. We had the procrastination trust and the focus trap. How about a fourth trap?

So the Zen trap is about triggers. So we're talking about Zen, not, you know, just kind of being in a peaceful state of mind and being in the zone. You know, a lot of people talk about that in sports, but it's triggers, and it's allowing emotions to taint your perspective. So all of us have certain triggers that really set us off. And we have to learn to not allow our emotions to get the best of us. And a lot of times people respond to triggers in two ways. Either they aggressively confront it, either people or situations, or they actively avoid it. So it's more of just this avoidance thing. And what we need to do is we need to have a broader perspective.

One of the stories that my people like best from my father's book, 7 Habits, is the story about him being on the subway, the New York subway. And there was this father that was on the subway with his kids. And the father had his head down in his hands, and meanwhile his kids were running around and causing all kinds of havoc and knocking newspapers from people's hands. And my father was watching all this, and I'm sure he was looking at it and saying, wow, this looks a lot like my house. But eventually he said to this guy and just said, hey, sir, I wonder if you can, you know, watch out a little bit more for your kids, because they're kind of a lot of disruption. And the guy said, oh, I just come from a funeral where they're.

Sorry, from the hospital where their mother died. And I just don't know how to handle that. I don't think the kids know either. So suddenly you think about the perspective. It's like, oh, my gosh. So now the whole perspective, rather than judge and say, you know, being annoyed, it was like, oh, how can I help? How can I support you and help you in this trial, this crisis that you've just experienced? And that's what we need to think about in terms of the triggers, is we need to broaden our perspective and we need to say, you know, give people the benefit of the doubt. They must have had a really bad moral, or they must be going through something that's really hard, and that's why they're acting that way.

And when we actually Start to broaden our perspective and even ask questions and find out more about the people or the situations that trigger us, we're able to see it from a whole different perspective. But unfortunately, we're not like that. Most of the time. We have something happen and we immediately just kind of respond and overreact. And so we're suggesting in this training program to step back and get a broader perspective of what's happening.

That really speaks into one of my favorite quotes, and I bring this up all the time, Dr. Wayne Weyer, when he says, when I changed the way I looked at things I looked at began to change. Just if you develop that ability to pause a little bit, it's not easy to do. You know, it's not easy to do, but yet it's such a simple solution, so to speak.

That's right. But especially if you know what triggers you, what are the things that set you off, and if you're even aware of that going in, then you can kind of say, okay, wait, this was one of my triggers. Okay, so what am I going to do? Am I going to do what I normally do or I'm going to do something different this time?

So how critical? I think it's a competitive advantage, to be honest with you. But how critical is the ability to develop your self awareness with triggers and other things?

Well, you remember my father talked about the four human endowments that are unique to humans. Self, awareness, imagination, independent will, and conscience. Well, self awareness is critical because we are not animals. We are not subject to our conditioning. We don't have to absolutely respond to something. We can breathe. We have a space between stimulus and response. There's a space, and we just need to be aware of our triggers, of maybe some of our weaknesses. And we got to come up with strategies on how we're going to do it differently. If we don't think about it in advance, it won't happen. We'll just immediately go to the normal reaction, usually, which is a negative reaction, which is not going to solve the issue. But if we can think about it in advance and say, you know what, here's my strategy.

I watch a lot of sports like you do. When I was first married, my team, my basketball team lost. And I was just married like three months. And I took my fist and I threw it through the wall, literally. My wife was like, thought I married a bad man. Who is this guy? And then I stormed off for like two hours, you know, and my wife was like saying, wow, she had never seen anything like that. Right. I realized that. Oh, man. I can get really angry when things don't go my way with. For my team. I gotta have to learn to have to manage that in a very different way than what I do now.

Dare I ask you who your team was?

So it was BYU in basketball playing against Utah. Wow.

Okay. Now I'm understanding that a little bit more, though.

Yeah, it was a big rival game. Funny thing now is that I have three nephews that are on the Utah football team. So I am a Utah football fan.

Yes, well, you get a hall pass on that one. Yeah. Yeah. So trap number five.

Yeah. So trap number five is silos. And it's the idea that we operate as an independent on a team. And it's. You know, the whole concept is that we need to work together on a team. I use the analogy of how many have ever done jigsaw puzzles before? People raise their hand on the scale of 1 to 10. How important is it? Just see the end scene in mind. The jigsaw puzzle that you're creating. Of course it's a 10. You got to see it. But what happens is that we have people who are all working on the jigsaw puzzle, but they're all operating from a different end scene in mind. Somebody has seen the Eiffel Tower and someone else has seen Ares Rock down in Australia, and someone else has seen the Empire State Building.

And that's what we have on teams, is we operate way too independently and we don't make the shift from me as an individual to a team. And it's a huge problem. We're not operating on the same page.

Yeah. An analogy you used before, I believe, is a married single.

Yes.

And that's something that's very prevalent, obviously, in the entrepreneur world. Can you talk into that a little bit?

Okay. The marriage single is taking that same trap at home. Okay. Or in your marriage. And that's where we believe that our way of doing things is superior to our spouses. And we don't shift our mindset from, it's not about me anymore. It's about us. It's about we. You know, it's about our team. And they were unwilling to change. You know, it's the concept of, well, you change first and then I'll change. And of course, if you wait for your spouse or your co worker to change, it's not going to happen. You have to be the one that's proactive, that takes the steps to make those changes happen first. It's like habit five. You got to seek first to understand then. To be understood. You got it.

You got it.

You got to be the willing party to do that. So you can have this on a marriage and you can have this on a team. The same kind of concept. The concept is that we don't make that transition to a we. I've hired a lot of salespeople that were really good that I hired as the sales managers. And it was like, you're going to be great as a sales manager because you're so good with clients now you can help other people. And a lot of them didn't make it. And the reason why they didn't make it is that it was all still about them. It was about them being the hero and them making the big sell and them closing the big deal. And it's like, oh, God, it's not about you anymore.

It's about the team.

You got to focus on it now. It's about your team. It's not about you. It's about your team. But they could never make that shift. They just wanted to keep focused on themselves, and they couldn't make that shift from me to we team. And that's what happens with a lot of people, is they're on teams, but they're still operating independently.

No, absolutely. Number six.

So six is the career trap, and it's the settling, and that's losing your passion and inspiration in your professional work. A lot of people don't like their work. If you look at engagement figures, we've been doing this training and other things for 20 years. The engagement figures haven't changed. They look the same like they did 20 years ago. They're no better. And the reason is that too many of us settle in our job. And there's really four parts of our job that we need to care about. There's the economic or the financial side. Are we paid fairly? There is the mental side of it. Are we creatively utilized at work? There's the passion side of it. The heart side of it is like, do we love what we do? Do we love our job?

And then there's the spirit side of it or the contribution side of it. Is, are we making a difference? Are we making a contribution? And if you only have one of those things operating. So let's just say that you're paid fairly what you do, but you hate what you do. You never use your mind and you don't feel like you're making a difference. You would go crazy. Now, a lot of people, and I think there's been some extra studies on this, it's like, okay, I'm going to pay you a half a million dollars a year, and your job is to dig a hole six feet deep and then fill it back in. And that's what your job is for a whole year. And guess what?

I think a lot of people would do that for a year because if I didn't make that kind of money, but after a while, guess what would happen? They would go crazy, right? Because it's like, why am I doing this? And what purpose is this serving? And it's just. It's just a job, you know, and great, I'm making money. But there's more to me as an individual than just somebody who's making money. So my father used to use the metaphor is, you know, the stomach is really the economic. The mind is, you know, is the mental, and the heart is the passion, right? And the spirit is the contribution. And we have four parts to us, and there needs to be four parts of that in our career. And there's no reason why we have to settle.

There's too many good companies out there that are taking care of all four of those needs. And as an employee, you can also impact those things by many of the things that you do. But too many of us are settling. So the trap is we settle and we stay in our job that we hate, and we stay there for 30 years. And that's the stupidest thing I've ever heard. We should never do that.

I could not agree more with you. And then the seventh trap. And we'll get to a couple more things as we wind this down. What's the seventh trap?

So the seventh trap is this whole idea of myopia, which is pursuing financials at the expense of everything else. And this is that the organization. So this is kind of seen as an organizational trap. It also could be seen as the idea, personally, accumulation. We think that the whole world is about accumulating and acquiring things. And we discover that at the end of our lives that it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. No one at the office is going to ask you or care. Maybe your kids will care. They're going to inherit some money. But what matters most, if you look at the deathbed literature, what matters most is deathbed literature of people who are dying and what they say are important, okay? And what they talk about is relationships and experiences.

We have a model in our family that says we value experiences over possessions. So you need to think about it. You buy something, it's great. It gives you a little bit of joy. And then guess what happens? It breaks down. It becomes outmoded. You know, you got to get the new model. It brings some happiness, but things bring long term happiness. What brings long term happiness is our relationships, our family, our experiences and service. Serving other people. Those things bring long term happiness. And I think that we sometimes just get it all wrong. We think we're in this world of our job is just to accumulate more than our neighbor. Doesn't make sense.

And one of the things that I would think a listener, our listeners sitting here now saying, okay, like I get all these are awesome. These are the. But how do I know if they are a trap? And there's four characteristics, I believe, of the traps and each trap has in common.

Yeah, absolutely. So the way you can know is whether you're stuck in it. Look, not everybody is stuck in some of these things. I have a lot of people that manage their money really well. They don't have debt, so they don't have a debt trap. So it's not to say that everybody's stuck in these. You may be stuck in some more than others, and that's fine. But what we find is that it's seductive. Okay, so the four words are seductive, deceptive, sticky and limiting. And so I think it's a little bit deceptive when a credit card company sends my 11 year old son a credit card application, you know, to fill out. Hey, let's see how early we can hook these guys. We're gonna wait till high school or college, for crying out loud. Let's get them when they're 11.

Yeah, yeah, let's go.

And it's so we kind of get sucked into it. It's this didn't turn out kind of how we thought, you know, what we thought were going to get. It just didn't turn out right. And then sticky and limiting. Sticky means we just find ourselves stuck. We just find ourselves immobilized. We find ourselves not progressing or we find ourselves stagnant. We're not growing and we're not moving towards our goals in a significant way. And it's limping because this is not, you know, we all have this opportunity to be our best selves. We all should be our best selves. There's no reason why we can't all be our best selves. Many of us are not our best selves because we're stuck in these traps.

Right? And I want to. It's unbelievably limiting. And the sticky one you had mentioned before, it's a Little bit like quicksand. And it's easy to get. It's easy to fall in, it's easy to step in it. And people sometimes think there's a difference between getting outside your comfort zone and being reckless. And it's easy to get yourself in a situation that is a trap. But hey, man, that doesn't mean it's easy to get out of.

Yeah, right, totally. I'll share an example. That is a trap that I've been stuck in and my family's been stuck in. We, we are terrible budgeters and we spend way too much than what we make and it doesn't seem to ever change. And we keep. So we are the family that pays all this interest on debt. And if I were in my 20s and I were in my 30s and I was just starting off in my career and my life, what are you going to be? Are you going to be the kind of person that earns interest or are you going to be the kind of person that pays interest? For me, the first 30 years of my professional life, I've been a person that has paid interest and I can't stand it. And I keep falling in that trap.

And I've done some strategies that I share in the book on how to get out that's to create a debt snake and create a scoreboard on. On how to get out of that. But I find myself keep following back in that trap. It's pretty sticky, limiting. I don't know what. We got to come up with some strategies that I do differently to help me with that because I can't stand that. And I hate, hate. And I think that's like what you said. I think the pain for me, after 30 years of pain, so much interest for so long has finally reached its threshold to where I said enough. That's it. Yeah, but that's. And I think that, you know, the better to learn vicarious from someone else's experience or from a book so you don't have to get to that threshold.

But it's tough, it's hard. And these are things that many of us will struggle with our whole lives. I know I have now.

And you're talking about exercises, you're talking about practice processes. I think that's a great segue into talking about your workshop Trappologist at work. Can you tell us a little bit about that, how we can find out about it, where we can find out about it?

Yeah, you bet, Ed. So we have a website. It's not live. It's kind of called Trap Ologists at work where there's an opportunity and that will be, you know, that'll be live in a month, probably by the time you release the this podcast. But what it is that we've taken the Trapped Tales book and we've taken four of those traps which are really kind of work career related and we've adapted the three that are more personal and we've made them more work related. We provide this. It's a one day training and it's the training of becoming a trapologist at work, looking at the traps that are stopping us, that are preventing us, the obstacles that are getting in the way that are preventing us from being our best self at work and to being successful and reaching our goals.

And it talks about the seven traps that we've just covered. Busyness, procrastination, ego triggers, silos, settling and myopia. Those are all kind of the negative words, one word descriptors. But that's what the course is about, is really kind of getting into depth around that. And the people will leave with anybody going through the workshop will leave with very concrete action plans to be able to get out of those traps and do things differently than what they've done in the past, which is often the hardest thing for people to do, is actually take action and do things differently.

That's awesome. And it goes back to what were talking about in terms of change. You lay it all out there and leave no excuses for folks not to take action. In addition to all the work you do, you also do keynote speaking. How can folks find out about that? Where can they go get information about hiring you?

Yes, sir. So they can go to David. Mr. Covey. I don't know why my parents gave me two middle names, but I have two other brothers that also have the emr.davidmrcovey.com and there's information there that you can look at and some videos and other things and some podcasts so you can kind of get a sense for what a keynote speech may look like for you.

David, it's been an absolute honor. Is there anything, as we wrap it up here, is there anything that you would like to add? Oh, by the way, you knucklehead, you forgot to ask me about this or mention this.

Yeah, I'd just say the last thing is I just want to leave. The trapologist message is a message of hope and it's the message that we can change the trajectory of our life at any point in our life. So it doesn't matter if you're 50 like my dad, you can start your business or you can be 44 like I did. And it doesn't matter how deep you're into the trap. That doesn't define you. That's not who you are. This baggage is history and vision baggage. So I just, I want to leave your audience with this message of hope. And we can change and we can adapt. We are human beings. We have four unique human endowments. We don't have to live our life in the same way that we've lived in the past. Happy changes.

We have to be productive, and we have to get out of our comfort zone. And it is going to be painful to change some of these habits. But I think the benefit that we're going to get from it is going to far outweigh the negative effects of it.

That's awesome. To take it one last step further, the hope, changing the trajectory. Can you get a little bit, a couple words of inspiration from things? You begin to make that effort. And we always talk about creating sustained success, but how about creating that persistence and sustained effort when things aren't going so well?

I think that for me, what worked well is other people who have been through the same things and how they came out on top. So for me and my business and some of the struggles that we've had in setting up our business, I've looked at my father and said, wow, okay, well, he did this. Or I look at my great grandfather, you know, that was stuck in Wyoming, negative 40 degree weather, and it's like, wow, he overcame this. So I think that you can take a lot of inspiration from or Sally Krawczyk, which I cited, you know, talking about being an entrepreneur, it's harder than, you know, running Merrill lynch. And it's like, yes, that's how I feel. I mean, because it's harder than running Franklin Covey. You know, the roles that I had at Franklin Covey, it was a lot harder.

So you got to find some inspiration and people that have gone down that path and have succeeded so that when you have your hard times and your struggles, you can look and say, you know what? They did it, they did it and I can do it.

That's fabulous. David. Thank you so much. I cannot thank you enough. I appreciate it. And to listen to this podcast and previous podcasts, go to the athletics and business podcast.com check out our website, the molitor group.com follow us on Twitter at the Model Group. We also have our Facebook business page, the Molitor group and always. I love connecting with folks on LinkedIn. It's a phenomenal platform. I'm Ed Molitor in David. Thank you and I appreciate it and I would love to connect with you again soon.

Sounds great. Thanks for having me on.

All right, thank you.

Take care.

Thank you for listening to the athletics of business. Be sure to give us a rating and review so we know how we're doing. For more information about the show, visit theathleticsofbusiness.com now get out there. Think, act and execute at the highest level to unleash your greatness.