Patrick McAndrew
Appearances
The Action Catalyst
Master the Game Within, with Patrick McAndrew (Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Self-Improvement, Focus)
So much of business is about your own internal game. The actual dynamics of business are not that difficult. There are problems which need to be solved. But what's the challenge there? Well, the inherent challenge is capacity to sustain change and the capacity to be malleable and adaptive. That's what our unique capacity as human beings are, is this capacity to mutate.
The Action Catalyst
Master the Game Within, with Patrick McAndrew (Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Self-Improvement, Focus)
Not how little time you spend on them, but how much time you spend on them, how much information flows through them. But I don't think it's enough to just place the blame on the product and the tool. There's something deeper that's happening here. And it's actually much more related to a sense of social security.
The Action Catalyst
Master the Game Within, with Patrick McAndrew (Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Self-Improvement, Focus)
And I've been watching this and it's only become clear to me very much so in the last five or six months. If we just look at distributed teams, for example, where you've got, let's just say, a couple of people in Omaha, Nebraska. There's a company that I work with that have a few people there.
The Action Catalyst
Master the Game Within, with Patrick McAndrew (Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Self-Improvement, Focus)
And then you have others which are dotted around the country, but their boss and their direct report is there in Omaha. And they get to meet up with each other two or three, maybe four times a year at conferences. Sometimes they get 15, 20 minutes. If it's 20 minutes, 25 minutes is a one-on-one chat that feels like it's enormous. But most of the time it's in a group setting.
The Action Catalyst
Master the Game Within, with Patrick McAndrew (Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Self-Improvement, Focus)
So the conversation is more about the collective. Like, what are we all talking about? The person that I'm reporting to doesn't really know me, doesn't really know my true character. They see the analytics of what I do based on the metrics of what comes in. But as a person, who I am as a human being, they don't know me because they haven't had much time with me.
The Action Catalyst
Master the Game Within, with Patrick McAndrew (Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Self-Improvement, Focus)
I've given leadership teams this challenge to spend 45 minutes with their direct reports just on one call. And I've given them questions to ask, which are much more deep. about like who they really are as human beings. And they learn so much about them and realize that their assumptions of what motivated and drove them is so different to what it was.
The Action Catalyst
Master the Game Within, with Patrick McAndrew (Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Self-Improvement, Focus)
So that's a norm that people are not really getting to see each other. Now, if I'm in New Mexico and my direct report is in Omaha, Nebraska, I see him or her three or four times a year. My promotion, how much more I'm going to earn next year or maintain my job is dependent on their view of me, how they see me. So how can I prove myself? I make sure I do, I succeed as much as I can in the
The Action Catalyst
Master the Game Within, with Patrick McAndrew (Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Self-Improvement, Focus)
Well, I always was very taken by the US and this New York in particular, where I lived for five years, and it was sort of hung over my head that if you do well enough on these exams, Patrick, my mom would say, I'll take you on a trip to New York. But that trip to New York never manifested.
The Action Catalyst
Master the Game Within, with Patrick McAndrew (Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Self-Improvement, Focus)
And I also make sure that I am as responsive as possible in my emails and my communication and showing that I'm on. Because by showing that I'm on and that I'm hyper responsive, it's a display in the best way possible that I'm committed and that I'm a worthy human being. And that's what's happening more and more is that we're not engaging deeply with each other.
The Action Catalyst
Master the Game Within, with Patrick McAndrew (Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Self-Improvement, Focus)
So the context of how much we understand of each other is very low. So we invest a lot more of our energy into those low context transmissions of communication, which creates...
The Action Catalyst
Master the Game Within, with Patrick McAndrew (Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Self-Improvement, Focus)
this very fragmented and distracted state, because to be not distracted and fragmented is to choose for yourself, is to choose where you're going to direct your energy, where you see that there's things happening outside, but you downgrade their importance because you upgrade the importance of what you want to do and what you see as important.
The Action Catalyst
Master the Game Within, with Patrick McAndrew (Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Self-Improvement, Focus)
But for the vast majority of people I meet, they have completely downgraded to level zero their importance of what they want and how they want to direct their lives or their business or their day. And they completely upgrade the importance of everything that's happening around them that's coming in because they don't want to miss a thing. Because if they do, it might threaten their job.
The Action Catalyst
Master the Game Within, with Patrick McAndrew (Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Self-Improvement, Focus)
It might threaten their sense of how they're perceived by their boss. And if that's not met and if that's not worked on, I can offer as much content and information about how the brain works and how to organize yourself, but it won't make a difference because the human beings are in a very survivalistic state.
The Action Catalyst
Master the Game Within, with Patrick McAndrew (Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Self-Improvement, Focus)
And that's driving the show, not the rational mind, but a very, very emotional, unsure, unsecure internal state.
The Action Catalyst
Master the Game Within, with Patrick McAndrew (Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Self-Improvement, Focus)
Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Because I think we've been given these incredible tools, which are there to support us, but they're there to support what we have to actually develop us so that we can develop internally. Whereas I think on many circumstances, there's a regression taking place.
The Action Catalyst
Master the Game Within, with Patrick McAndrew (Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Self-Improvement, Focus)
The first time I came to the States, I think I was maybe 19 and we came on a family trip and we went to Keirwater Beach for Christmas. And as you can imagine, The United States was New York in my mind. Like that was the country that there was no sense or curiosity about the others. And I remember driving from Tampa to Clearwater and I had never seen things like strip malls.
The Action Catalyst
Master the Game Within, with Patrick McAndrew (Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Self-Improvement, Focus)
we're completely divorcing ourselves or neglecting how we need to develop internally to meet the demands of what's being presented to us externally. And we're just sort of playing the victim to how life is playing out around us. And through HARA, the work that I'm doing is I'm fundamentally trying to show people you have a huge amount of agency here, but
The Action Catalyst
Master the Game Within, with Patrick McAndrew (Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Self-Improvement, Focus)
The way that you live your life is what's shaping this. If you feel like there's no space or time for that, you'll continue to suffer. And that's the truth because you'll find that your attention is constantly going out. It's constantly about what's happening outside of you. Whereas what we give people are practices and ways to develop themselves internally because we need that.
The Action Catalyst
Master the Game Within, with Patrick McAndrew (Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Self-Improvement, Focus)
Every time, our whole range of evolution as we develop as a human species is dependent on changes to the external environment. Changes to temperature, changes to food, changes to threats, changes towards opportunities. We're being given an immense amount of comfort and so much of the products that are being designed around this are more primal and primitive aspects of us.
The Action Catalyst
Master the Game Within, with Patrick McAndrew (Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Self-Improvement, Focus)
So yeah, there's definitely a lot that's happening here in recognizing that the world is changing around us. So how are we changing internally to rise from top as opposed to rising to the top? Thinking and recognizing that we have so many of these qualities in us that are incredible.
The Action Catalyst
Master the Game Within, with Patrick McAndrew (Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Self-Improvement, Focus)
Well, are there places that your attention is often getting brought to that you know is not serving you yet? It keeps happening. But then there's a reflective tendency, right, to observe and say, wow, that was not where I needed to spend my time, that that was not useful to me. So there is different states of mind that arise.
The Action Catalyst
Master the Game Within, with Patrick McAndrew (Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Self-Improvement, Focus)
So what's the observation or the thing that you notice in yourself afterwards, the things that are sort of you keep going towards and you spend a lot of time? So if we take a bit more of an objective perspective, so you're looking at yourself from an outside body because you're in it at the moment and you're sort of like, you're analyzing and reasoning at the same time.
The Action Catalyst
Master the Game Within, with Patrick McAndrew (Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Self-Improvement, Focus)
So if we can be just more objective, so the analysis and the reasoning is separate, where is your attention going where it's being wasteful? If we just look at it hard and fast, because once again, I'm not of the opinion that you need to be This sense of being productive, which is bringing utility to every moment. You're building a business and you're running a business.
The Action Catalyst
Master the Game Within, with Patrick McAndrew (Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Self-Improvement, Focus)
You need clarity of mind, thinking. I chatted with a guy a couple of months ago. He was joining Hara and he was saying to me, you know, I want to map out a five year plan if I could only find four hours. to just sit down and map out a five-year plan. I know how crazy that sounds.
The Action Catalyst
Master the Game Within, with Patrick McAndrew (Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Self-Improvement, Focus)
And I said, is it crazy that you're mapping out a five-year plan or is it crazy that you think that you need four hours to map out a five-year plan? He said, it's crazy that I think I need four hours. I should be able to do it in less. So there's this constant sense that I should be able to condense and do things very quickly
The Action Catalyst
Master the Game Within, with Patrick McAndrew (Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Self-Improvement, Focus)
When the reality is my days, if you're going to think about a five-year plan, which I personally feel is maybe it's a five-year vision, but it's hard to implement a plan. You need more than four hours for that, I think. It should take a lot of time and self-reflection. So from an objective view, where is your attention going that feels as though it's wasteful?
The Action Catalyst
Master the Game Within, with Patrick McAndrew (Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Self-Improvement, Focus)
And the loop of distraction is the constant pattern of the mind. It's just the constant state, you know, in the evening watching TV, but also being on our phone and then at dinner table, then at the dinner table watching something or there, but your mind is being taken elsewhere.
The Action Catalyst
Master the Game Within, with Patrick McAndrew (Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Self-Improvement, Focus)
So whether we appreciate it or not, we might consider that we're training or we're working out when we go to the gym and we do specific things on our body. But when it comes to our character and our state of mind, we're constantly developing and shaping ourselves to better or worse.
The Action Catalyst
Master the Game Within, with Patrick McAndrew (Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Self-Improvement, Focus)
If you're running a business and if you're doing something for yourself, it's your clarity and your vision that shapes everything. Because I think you know as well as I do, when the value system of the business or as a way to generate interest starts going through the lens of social media and posts and engagement,
The Action Catalyst
Master the Game Within, with Patrick McAndrew (Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Self-Improvement, Focus)
And they're the most foreign alien looking thing ever, like seeing Dunkin Donuts and Wendy's and Burger King, but all in these streets. just sort of these parallel units alongside a road. I don't really think this doesn't look like the impression that I had of this country at all.
The Action Catalyst
Master the Game Within, with Patrick McAndrew (Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Self-Improvement, Focus)
Suddenly it can sort of start to get warped that the opportunity comes from the degree of engagement. The opportunity comes from responding to what's happening in that space. But, you know, I have a friend who will share the dark truth, which is he runs a business around productivity. He wanted to build more leads.
The Action Catalyst
Master the Game Within, with Patrick McAndrew (Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Self-Improvement, Focus)
He spent a day, a year posting and had a team of freelancers helping him build up his Instagram to 360,000 followers. The Instagram page is solely about this topic of productivity, running a digital marketing agency. 0.06%. of his followers converted to actually purchasing his product. Wow.
The Action Catalyst
Master the Game Within, with Patrick McAndrew (Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Self-Improvement, Focus)
So it can become a trap in and of itself, where now I've lost, the direction and the vision has become skewed. I just saw that there was a lot of engagement on the post, so maybe we need to double down in more of those posts. And now we're getting more followers, and now we're growing the engagement. But is that tethered to the ultimate vision of the business?
The Action Catalyst
Master the Game Within, with Patrick McAndrew (Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Self-Improvement, Focus)
I for that I need it's not unless your vision is to become a content creator. You know, when you're a small business owner, you can get caught in that loop.
The Action Catalyst
Master the Game Within, with Patrick McAndrew (Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Self-Improvement, Focus)
Well, a practice which has changed a lot of things is I think I used to place too much emphasis on the market. So a lot of the businesses that I built in the past or even the talks that I gave was my observation of what the market needed. In that process, you can feel like you lose yourself because you start just completely adjusting to the needs and the expectations of the market.
The Action Catalyst
Master the Game Within, with Patrick McAndrew (Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Self-Improvement, Focus)
And inherently, you end up losing. That's a fast track to lose your own sense of value and worth. In the last year or year and a half, I've changed that where it's a dance between the two. It's what is alive in me and what I'm seeing and what I want to pursue and what are the needs in the market and how can I find a way to connect the two together.
The Action Catalyst
Master the Game Within, with Patrick McAndrew (Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Self-Improvement, Focus)
So there will be people in that space who will not be ready to receive it. And there will be moments where what I articulate is not clear enough for what the market is looking for. And that creates this constant observation loop of myself and the market. So then becomes the practice of my own observation that I have to engage with.
The Action Catalyst
Master the Game Within, with Patrick McAndrew (Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Self-Improvement, Focus)
So I had to start to come to terms to realize that there are different parts of this country and they all hold different characters.
The Action Catalyst
Master the Game Within, with Patrick McAndrew (Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Self-Improvement, Focus)
I think it would be to acknowledge uniqueness, not to be afraid of that. And then don't just try and explore that as a little thing on the side. Go right after it. Go right after your appetite. That's what I've done as an adult. And I didn't do that much. I did it as a kid, but I also had this fear of the group and wanting to fit in with everybody else.
The Action Catalyst
Master the Game Within, with Patrick McAndrew (Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Self-Improvement, Focus)
And I think as a kid, I would have, or if I was to meet that guy, I would have told him, you see things a little bit differently. And sometimes it feels like you don't want to because you want to see it the way everybody else does because it can feel threatening to feel that difference. But go there, just go there and let go of that judgment.
The Action Catalyst
Master the Game Within, with Patrick McAndrew (Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Self-Improvement, Focus)
Thank you, Adam. It's really been a joy to speak with you. You're a great, great host. Great questions. All the best.
The Action Catalyst
Master the Game Within, with Patrick McAndrew (Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Self-Improvement, Focus)
Indeed. Yeah.
The Action Catalyst
Master the Game Within, with Patrick McAndrew (Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Self-Improvement, Focus)
I think there's always just been a tendency just to follow curiosities. So when I was in college, I studied law, but I had a radio show. I also worked in a regional radio station as a sound engineer. So I would be there during the live shows and I would be turning on the ads and fading in the music and all that stuff and meeting the guests and There was something there.
The Action Catalyst
Master the Game Within, with Patrick McAndrew (Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Self-Improvement, Focus)
There was something about conversing and meeting people. I grew up in a home where there was constantly people coming through, whether it was people traveling from around the world coming to stay with us or eccentric characters. And my mom had come across or she had an employment agency for a large number of years.
The Action Catalyst
Master the Game Within, with Patrick McAndrew (Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Self-Improvement, Focus)
The nurses that would be coming into Ireland, they would stay with us for a few days before they would go to the nursing home or the hospital where they were going to work. So We would sort of like take care of them because they would be homesick and get them settled. She also had a jewelry business where she made bespoke engagement rings for couples.
The Action Catalyst
Master the Game Within, with Patrick McAndrew (Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Self-Improvement, Focus)
So there was a room in the house where they would come in and they would be presented. They would come in to design the engagement ring they wanted. And then my mom would take the design and go to Antwerp and get it made. And then they would come back and she would have a bottle of champagne and we would see the joy and we would... maybe have a meal with them and talk with them.
The Action Catalyst
Master the Game Within, with Patrick McAndrew (Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Self-Improvement, Focus)
You know, that sort of nature, that very convivial nature was very normal in my household growing up. So there was always different cultures, different characters. And growing up as a young kid, I grew up in London before I moved to Ireland and For a number of years and during that time in London, I actually lived in a gallery.
The Action Catalyst
Master the Game Within, with Patrick McAndrew (Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Self-Improvement, Focus)
So my parents had rented the flat that they had in London and then took out a lease on this gallery to manage the expenses of it all. They built drywall and they built rooms within the gallery, which were never there. It was just a big open space and they built like a little apartment and a home at the back. And when I would leave my bedroom, I would walk out onto the gallery.
The Action Catalyst
Master the Game Within, with Patrick McAndrew (Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Self-Improvement, Focus)
So when I would come home from school, I would enter in through a gallery to get to my room. And when I was there and my mom was, she didn't really have many staff.
The Action Catalyst
Master the Game Within, with Patrick McAndrew (Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Self-Improvement, Focus)
So if there was a lot of people coming through as a five-year-old or a six-year-old, it was my role to guide them around and show them the pieces of glass and the pieces of art and keep them entertained for a few minutes until my mom could speak to them. All of that, I think, the way of observing and engaging with people has sort of been inherent to my lived experience.
The Action Catalyst
Master the Game Within, with Patrick McAndrew (Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Self-Improvement, Focus)
We also had the most traveled man in the world stay with us for a few days. I don't know if he still holds that title, but he did at that time. He had been traveling for 24 years, and Ireland was the last country on his world tour. So I came home from school one day and my mum was at the kitchen table chatting with this guy and she said, this is Mike Patrick. I think I was telling you about him.
The Action Catalyst
Master the Game Within, with Patrick McAndrew (Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Self-Improvement, Focus)
He's the most travelled man in the world. I heard him on the radio three days ago. I sent a text into the station and said, if you're coming to Galway and you need somewhere to stay, just let me know. And he called her up on the phone. He said, hey, is this Julia? And she said, yeah. He said, it's Mike. I've just arrived into Galway bus station.
The Action Catalyst
Master the Game Within, with Patrick McAndrew (Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Self-Improvement, Focus)
Is that offer still standing to stay with you for a few days? And she said, absolutely. So we got to hang out with him for three or four days and He had been in Somalia. He had been in Mogadishu. He was one of the first tourists there in a very long time. He was in the town across, not very far away from, in Iraq, where Osama bin Laden had been captured. He traveled through Afghanistan.
The Action Catalyst
Master the Game Within, with Patrick McAndrew (Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Self-Improvement, Focus)
He had been all over, you know, places that you rarely hear about. He was a quirky character for sure, but it was interesting conversations with him.
The Action Catalyst
Master the Game Within, with Patrick McAndrew (Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Self-Improvement, Focus)
Well, it started out with speed reading. So I was teaching speed reading memorization workshops online. Around the country, I was going into schools and colleges and companies like Bessemer Trust, Northern Trust, quite a few hedge funds and investment banks, helping these people improve how they processed and retained information.
The Action Catalyst
Master the Game Within, with Patrick McAndrew (Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Self-Improvement, Focus)
And that was a very interesting experience because I realized, you know, if you want to pay, I don't know, what is it? It's somewhere in the region, like 160 or 180,000 for an MBA at Columbia University. I got to go in and see those people in that room. Amazing networking, amazing conceptual frameworks and models and ways of thinking about business.
The Action Catalyst
Master the Game Within, with Patrick McAndrew (Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Self-Improvement, Focus)
But so much of business is about your own internal game. You know, the actual dynamics of business are not that difficult. There are problems which need to be solved. Absolutely. And problems keep arising. But what's the challenge there? Well, the inherent challenge is the capacity to sustain change and the capacity to be malleable and adaptive. I think that's what our unique concept
The Action Catalyst
Master the Game Within, with Patrick McAndrew (Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Self-Improvement, Focus)
capacity as human beings are, is this capacity to mutate, to be one way and then to recognize that the environment has changed. I must mutate into another way. But yet I can retain my true essence. I don't lose myself under the conditions of the environment. I maintain myself, but I'm not bound to this identity. I'm good at this or I like this.
The Action Catalyst
Master the Game Within, with Patrick McAndrew (Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Self-Improvement, Focus)
So therefore I'm only going to try and find a business that operates on the fundamentals of me being very good at doing stuff on a computer, but I don't want to interact with people in person. Well, I've just cut off so much opportunity to myself. So maybe if I can develop certain qualities of how I engage with others, much more will show for me.
The Action Catalyst
Master the Game Within, with Patrick McAndrew (Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Self-Improvement, Focus)
So I saw in all of these environments that I went into that these people are learning a lot of information, but it's not taking them so far because they're not learning about themselves. In fact, they're neglecting themselves. They're only trying to develop this 10% area, which it feels like it's directly relevant to business.
The Action Catalyst
Master the Game Within, with Patrick McAndrew (Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Self-Improvement, Focus)
But there's this other 90% which determines your clarity, your conviction, your essence, your value, your sense of self-worth. And if you're clear in all of that, you can achieve a whole lot more and you can feel content and you can feel like your whole life is... is in alignment. It doesn't feel like it's so fragmented.
The Action Catalyst
Master the Game Within, with Patrick McAndrew (Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Self-Improvement, Focus)
So I began in that journey by teaching people about focus because that was the thing through my exposure to different environments of teaching speed reading. I realized, wow, okay, these people that I'm meeting, they're very driven. They're not lacking motivation yet. Companies are spending, you know, thousands, tens of thousands, every conference for a motivational speaker.
The Action Catalyst
Master the Game Within, with Patrick McAndrew (Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Self-Improvement, Focus)
The people don't need motivation. They've plenty, they've plenty drive. What they lack is a pragmatic sense of how to organize themselves. They're missing internal structure. It's pretty chaotic in there. So the first place that I approached was focus because I thought that people needed help with focus, which they did.
The Action Catalyst
Master the Game Within, with Patrick McAndrew (Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Self-Improvement, Focus)
But then over years and years of doing that, working with Pacific Life, Lincoln Financial, Morgan Stanley, all these companies, I realized, okay, I can teach you how to focus and I can make you very good at doing the tasks efficiently, but there's a deeper problem there. There's a much deeper problem and it's your capacity to regulate yourself.
The Action Catalyst
Master the Game Within, with Patrick McAndrew (Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Self-Improvement, Focus)
It's your capacity to actually regulate and relate to yourself. And that's actually more of the foundational layer that causes a lot of the problems that leadership problems, strategic problems. There's a company I got called in to work with last November. They had 26 primary initiatives. The word primary and 26. And initiative and 26. Yeah, it's not all aligning. But where is that coming from?
The Action Catalyst
Master the Game Within, with Patrick McAndrew (Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Self-Improvement, Focus)
That's not coming from the fact that these people aren't intelligent enough. It's actually coming from more of a place that their whole emotional state is so scattered and so fragmented because they don't feel safe and secure in their work. They're unsure about this industry. It's going through such rapid change like many are.
The Action Catalyst
Master the Game Within, with Patrick McAndrew (Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Self-Improvement, Focus)
So a lot of the problems that are appearing across the company as a totality and the individuals within it, much more about an internal thing that's happening. And a lot of my work previously was building fundamental qualities in people so that they could improve their reading and their memory and their focus so that they could actually start to take action.
The Action Catalyst
Master the Game Within, with Patrick McAndrew (Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Self-Improvement, Focus)
But now I'm sort of interested in working with people who have no issue taking action, who have no issue getting things done. but yet there is a barrier. There's some sort of an internal block that's confusing.
The Action Catalyst
Master the Game Within, with Patrick McAndrew (Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Self-Improvement, Focus)
Either they have developed far beyond the business and the business is not catching up to them, so it feels like it's out of alignment, or the business has developed far beyond them and they've been pouring so much into the business, but as an individual, they're still quite underdeveloped in comparison to the demands of the business. So how do we calibrate these two?
The Action Catalyst
Master the Game Within, with Patrick McAndrew (Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Self-Improvement, Focus)
And if we do, it means that things move a lot more smoothly and they progress much more in the right direction.
The Action Catalyst
Master the Game Within, with Patrick McAndrew (Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Self-Improvement, Focus)
I don't see a lot of self-confidence. I see a huge amount of fear. I see a lot of people who where their fuel source is coming from growing up in poverty and they never want to be in that environment again or feeling maybe once again poverty but feeling trapped, feeling like they didn't have choice. So what they want is they want money that's going to give them the freedom to choose.
The Action Catalyst
Master the Game Within, with Patrick McAndrew (Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Self-Improvement, Focus)
There was a gentleman that I spoke with not so long ago and I asked him, if you were to kind of look outside of yourself, what do you orbit? And for this gentleman, it was money and power. He was able to say it very quickly that that's what it was. He was very accomplished, but he was extremely exhausted. But he couldn't seem to stop his relentless pursuit of whatever he seemed to be pursuing.
The Action Catalyst
Master the Game Within, with Patrick McAndrew (Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Self-Improvement, Focus)
And it was more money and more power. Now, as our conversation progressed, at the root of it, he just wanted some love and self-acceptance. This is not bad. This is fine. It's part of the development of the human being and of the psyche. We come from a place of pain and we try to transmute that pain into something that will take us forward because we don't want it to hold us back.
The Action Catalyst
Master the Game Within, with Patrick McAndrew (Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Self-Improvement, Focus)
So maybe we develop another character. We develop this man or this woman who's able to amass money or power And now people are drawn to us because of the money and the power or the knowledge or the capacity to get things done or to help things in the community. And now people value you and see you for these qualities and these capacities.
The Action Catalyst
Master the Game Within, with Patrick McAndrew (Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Self-Improvement, Focus)
But underneath that, as soon as that is taken away, the business or taking action every day, there's a huge amount of insecurity. There's a huge amount of insecurity and that causes a huge amount of pain and limitation on the business that ends up getting created.
The Action Catalyst
Master the Game Within, with Patrick McAndrew (Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Self-Improvement, Focus)
Because the ego and the identity of the person who founded it is so interwoven with the actions or what that business reflects about them that... They're trying to keep it in a way that keeps their identity the way they want it to be. So what ends up happening is that our identity gets reduced to our biography. You know, you got a biography on me.
The Action Catalyst
Master the Game Within, with Patrick McAndrew (Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Self-Improvement, Focus)
People at the beginning of the show heard about me. I'm not that. I'm not that. If I were to describe myself as that, it would feel like it's another person. But yet we need certain terms and containers.
The Action Catalyst
Master the Game Within, with Patrick McAndrew (Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Self-Improvement, Focus)
to explain it so you're a coach okay great now i get a sense of who you are but you're so much more than that you're bringing your whole lived experience into it so it's fine to have these sort of monikers of who we are as people because we need that to make allow people to have a reference point of who we are and what we do but my days it's very dangerous if you think that you are that if you allow your identity become wrapped up on that you become very weak
The Action Catalyst
Master the Game Within, with Patrick McAndrew (Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Self-Improvement, Focus)
I think at that point it was, it depends. If it was like a beginning of secondary school, I think I wanted to be an actor. If it was the middle of the time in secondary school, I wanted to be, I wanted to have a talk show. I wanted to host a talk show.
The Action Catalyst
Master the Game Within, with Patrick McAndrew (Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Self-Improvement, Focus)
And from what I see, there's very little self-confidence. There's a lot of survival, no matter how many millions you have in the bank. And it doesn't have to be that way.
The Action Catalyst
Master the Game Within, with Patrick McAndrew (Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Self-Improvement, Focus)
And I would say, from my observation, I would say confidence is a sort of emergent thing. You don't craft confidence. Confidence sort of emerges, and it merges through your view of yourself and the evidence that this view of yourself is being reinforced. So you can also be very confident that you can't do something.
The Action Catalyst
Master the Game Within, with Patrick McAndrew (Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Self-Improvement, Focus)
you know you it's it's a certainty it's a certainty of something it's a certainty of your capabilities and your powers which can be that it's a certainty that you can move towards something or it's equally a certainty that you cannot because it's been evidenced so many times before so my interest more so is because there's many environments that i go into with very little confidence that i can do it but i have confidence that i can find a way i have confidence that i'll be able to
The Action Catalyst
Master the Game Within, with Patrick McAndrew (Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Self-Improvement, Focus)
be in the uncertainty or the discomfort of it. And I'll move through it because that's something that I have evidence of. I'm much more interested in, I suppose, expanding people's sense of value and worth beyond just their actions.
The Action Catalyst
Master the Game Within, with Patrick McAndrew (Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Self-Improvement, Focus)
So for example, something that we're going to be launching relatively soon with Hara, which I now realize is so needed and so important, is so many of the companies that I speak to, whether it's the CEO or it's an intern, are feeling immensely overwhelmed.
The Action Catalyst
Master the Game Within, with Patrick McAndrew (Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Self-Improvement, Focus)
Now, this overwhelm is coming because of the amount of information and the amount of things that we feel that we should know, the amount of communication. There was one gentleman that I spoke with in Dallas at a conference a couple of weeks ago, and he told me he gets about 480 emails a day. Like, that's such an insane quantity. That's beyond a full-time job, just filtering through that every day.
The Action Catalyst
Master the Game Within, with Patrick McAndrew (Entrepreneurship, Leadership, Self-Improvement, Focus)
But why does this happen? Why are these tools that were meant to liberate us and free us to do the work that was most important, why are they becoming the things that are holding everybody back? Because it's a total distraction. Now, you could say it's in the design, and there's a truth to that. There's a design of a desire for engagement. That's how these products measure their value.