Ep 205 - Upside of Overwhelm

Hello, hello, hello and welcome back to another fantastic Wednesday in another episode, episode 205 of Electric Pinner Secrets, the Electricians podcast, where me, your host Clay Neumeier, and my esteemed co-host, joseph the Salesspot, luke Canny, jump on here with you to get behind the wheel of the van, behind the windshield, to help you master your sales, simplify your pricing and deliver premium-level electrical service. Today, joe, we've got a continuation of everything we opened up at Can of Worms on yesterday and what I'm going to pose this as the title of this episode Upside of Overwhelm. Oh, I like that Little pie in the sky, right, we started the week off with really the upside of low-call volume too, so we're really good at turning things around and building the mindset off it. Man, silver lining for the win, silver lining for the win, taking the silver linings and living on the lighter side of things. I've actually got a joke for you, really, all right, yes, dare, I say let's introduce an electrical joke segment. What do you say? Go for it. Sure, what's up what you got for me? Okay? What's the difference between God and an electrician?

Sounds like heresy, but let's see. What is the difference between God and an electrician in a fictional sense? I don't know.

What God doesn't think. He's an electrician.

Oh, I got it there.

Okay, okay, man, we dove into this topic yesterday and I want to just get right started with that. By the way, if you like the joke, please say. Please say, I'll keep them coming. I got one for every day. If there's anything we want to do, it's also explore the lighter side of life. Have a little bit of fun while we're at it. The upside of overwhelm we were talking about the excitement that we even have in our program, in this podcast, in the growth and development of getting greater strategies to you. Our listeners, our engagers in the Facebook group live with us now and, or otherwise, listen to the replay wherever you heard it first. The upside of overwhelm is as simple as this. Overwhelm is kind of a place where you're in the valley right, you're in the valley of despair, you're kind of stuck in this rut and you're feeling everything. You had some really good ways of describing this yesterday. If you wouldn't mind hashing through it again, sure.

For me, overwhelm felt more like putting blinders on. A lot of times people say I'm clear thinking in this moment. A visual perspective would be imagine you're standing in a field and you're clear thinking, meaning you could see from one end to the other no fog, no darkness, bright blue skies as anxiety, depression and overwhelm kick in. It's not that you change your location and it's not that you change the physical space around you. It's simply that it becomes fogged. When overwhelm happens, it's you pretty much taking a basket and putting it over your head and you now assume that the world exists within this basket. You're still just as opportunity seeking as you were previously, but your lens and your viewpoint is so far diminished. You'll often make decisions that when you look back at it you're like yeah, that wasn't smart. I have one very good example of this in a real life scenario. That happened in my business. You mind if I touch on it.

Sure yeah, let's hit it.

Okay, previously, I remember there was one point where we were running everything out of an ice cream shop. We had a parking spot, an ice cream shop, but we came to a point where we needed physical location and we took the bike and we bought this big location. We had a rented space and had like a warehouse attached to it and had a training room facility, like everything. And immediately after we did it, we poured tons of money into the building and I don't remember exactly what happened, but I remember there was a time where sales just went down, our expenses were way up and we said I don't know what we're going to do. I know, in overwhelm we said we're going to sublet out our training room. We're going to block that room off. We'll sublet it out, no problem. We didn't need all this space anyway. But naturally sales went up. I took the process, we became this consistent again and the money poured in, except now we were 900 square foot less and the problem with that was the entire time we were thinking about it. It was man, I wish we didn't sublet that space out. I wish we could have had it Now. We need another facility that we need to invest in Now. We need to go even further in order to have another room. We could have had that space in place, but we didn't because we felt overwhelmed and trapped.

And again just to explore that, then why sublet it out? Root cause here.

Root cause was scarcity. It was a scarcity mindset. It was like imagine your expenses are here and then you buy a shop which requires thousands per month in rent, or then you're like I'm going to pour $20,000, $30,000 in savings into the development of this and then we're going to take less jobs so that we can build the location and then we're going to do less things. So we dedicated so much time, so much resource, so much money into it. Right around when we were unexpectedly hit with the slow season, and because my mindset was built into development, I wasn't as sharp on my sales process. Good salespeople to have one individual so focused and they developed that to be like a spearhead, and the more you make them do other non-sales related tasks, you're dulling the edge, and that's what I was doing. I was dulling my own edge, focusing on other things. The moment that I was able to step out of that operational development and focus on sales, it came back in and we didn't need the money anymore. But we had already committed to subletting it out and therefore we are hands are tied.

Huge important thing so what this might look like for electricians listening to this right now. Electric pernurs, rather, is hey, I've got to run all these sales calls. Hey, I've got all these calls coming in that I'm still answering the phone. Hey, I've now got sales calls and I've got to oversee or do installations. Oh my gosh, I've got so many installations and so many calls coming in. I've got no more room on the calendar. Now we're booked a month out Six, eight weeks out, two months out right. This actually happens now, what do we do? Everything is in a reactive state and, as I mentioned yesterday, one of our listeners and good friends literally had this happening to him and even those signs of growth we're showing in his business. He ended up taking a job for three weeks for just the cool and calm, like just a place to show up eight to five, put my time in and shut my brain off when it's done because, he was desperate for that switch so badly and couldn't find it in his own business. What a tragedy.

It really is, and the thing that throws me is that there was one clear lever that could have been implemented and A lot of people don't realize that when you're in that place, it's not a curse, it's actually a blessing but only because you now have time on your side. It's not that we want to be booked out two months personally, I think we shouldn't be booked out more than two weeks but with that time you can now develop your club membership offer, and in that we really have our strength to find.

Right, so causes some focus. The other upside of this is guess what most people like. Here's the the irony of this situation that I find we're kind of trapped in the prison. We don't know we're in Mm-hmm. Most people were stuck in this box that we've just allowed our RAS, a reticular activating system, meaning what we've programmed in our life. All the inputs to this point are now Dictating the outputs that we have, and the output is now Stuck in that box. It's literally limited, with nowhere to go. I can't get more than 24 hours, so I start stealing time from my family, I start stealing time from my health, and how long before? That's just a complete of fire, right Like smoking out the ears. Oh my god, I want to quit my own business.

Mm-hmm.

That's really the problem here. However, we're actually in control of that Right, and this is what we're talking about. We're exercising this currently as we realize our own limitations. How do we add value and make better use of our time? And what your schedule is telling you, what that's telling you, is actually to build your team up. There's only three things we can do with a task. Remember right, with the law of open cycles that we mentioned this week, we've got to be able to either a get it done this is something, a task on my list that I myself am going to do. B I'm going to delegate it this is something, albeit maybe a pain in the ass. I'm going to train it to someone and build a process around it for someone to take off of my plate, so that I can just check in on that list, on that SOP, and know that it's getting taken care of. And, by the way, let's take a hard pause here and think back to our first hire secrets and all the chats we had around that it's going to suck at first. Can we just be realistic and say, hey, when we train new people, they're not going to be as good as us, but that's the point, because you, overwhelmed, aren't as good as you think you are. Anyway, no one is, and it's only a matter of time before we start dropping this ball. So get it into someone else's ball their, their field, their court so that they can Elevate it to a level that you never could. Or number three, getting back to the law of open cycles, is we're going to eat crow. In other words, we're recognizing that this doesn't need to be done. Why are we doing it? It's just other people like displacing their shit onto our schedule, or we're over committing ourselves, or having cross commitments across our team. All of those are absolute evil. For your sanity. Am I making sense, joe?

Yeah, I keep it up, what you're putting down, and it's not enough to just say that it's a lack of sanity. At times it's a lack of sanity. At times it's a lack of focused sanity and intentional sanity, like you can have all the right pieces in place, but when you're in a place of overwhelm it doesn't feel like it's there. It feels like you're missing something, and because you feel like you're missing something, you're often grasping at things that don't need to be grasped at.

I wanna share a secret, why it's electric printer secrets. That's what we do. We give them away. I wanna give you guys the keys to this little cell that you might be feeling you're in right now. It's actually quite simple how to break out of this, and what it requires is a moment of clarity. See, most people don't actually know, they're not focused on what they personally want. I think we've touched on this a couple of times on this podcast. It can be extremely difficult to get to the core root of what brings life to some people and what they need in their life to feel that positive energy, feel more vitality for their work and their workplace and the work they do and the passion of serving at the highest level. The solution to overwhelm is not do more, knock more off the list, necessarily if there's not enough time to do it all. If you've already gone through the three of the law of cycles and determined, okay, I'm gonna eat crow, I'm gonna cross this off the list, this one I'm gonna do, this one, I'm gonna delegate the next thing you can do is actually take some time away from work, leave the list. The more people try to steal, more time to put to the list, but that's actually defeating you. So, at the highest level of consultancy and performance and coaching, we actually get people to do more of what they love, which is probably a hobby, and not actually happening in their workplace. Does that make sense, joe?

It really does. And in addition to that, I feel like when people are doing the jobs that they're most passionate about, it relates in less burnout. Like, as an example, I love teaching process, I love developing process, I love being in a place of process. So I could do that 60 hours, 70, 80 hours a week and still feel fulfilled. But if you were now saying, give me half that time instead of 80 hours a week, give me 40 hours a week in data entry, suddenly it's exhausting and after 20 hours I don't have any gas left in the tank. So another thing that focuses on when it comes to burnout is are your teams doing the things that they're most inclined to do, 100%?

And since you mentioned like data entry, a data entry sucks, yeah, but like one person on our team, mr T in the background, mr Data Analyst and Manipulator, the guy responsible for the KPI charts and all of our sales dashboards and everything we have in our business absolutely incredible strength and he loves it. So just knowing too, that just because you don't like to do a task doesn't mean there isn't someone who loves it that you can delegate that to, and that's the whole entire point. Exactly, if you ask a guy like, maybe the best person I could I could use as a reference is like Dr Oz. You know, here are this guy on TV. He's got a TV show, he's an acting heart surgeon, he's written multiple books, he's a father of a few children, devout Christian, like the list goes on. The guy squeezes so much in the week and people have to ask how do you do all that and be the main host of your own TV show? Where's the time for it all? And the answer is he only does about a half dozen things. In each of those he's sorted out to find the most impactful things that he needs to do that no one else can do. And that's all he does. And he builds a team around everything else. Example heart surgery. Does he need to open up someone's chest himself? No, no, general surgeon medical school, I'm sure, teaches that I couldn't vouch and say for sure, for sure. I haven't done that schooling, but I'm pretty sure you can build a team around people that open and clean up afterwards and stitch up close up. So what he needs to do is come in for those dedicated moments where it's like everything's prepared for you. Dr Oz, please come in, do your magic work with your magic hands. That might take him half an hour, hour, hour and a half, I don't know, but that's all he does. Then he cleans up and goes and does a TV show and guess what? He doesn't have to run the camera, he doesn't have to run the sound, he doesn't have to do editing or production or the network and the team handle all of that. All he's gotta do is go out on the set and read the teleprompter and go off script when he feels like it. It's your show right so you kind of get the idea, even as a parent, you could really chart this out. What are the most impactful things I do as a parent? Maybe you decide, well, that's having dinner with my family. So guess what? My phone does not belong at the dinner table because this is devout family time. I need to give them my 110% right now. Maybe it's I need to help my kids with the homework, depending what age they are, and maybe it's I need to put them to bed at night and in the morning. I need to get them to bed at night and in the mornings. I need to see them off before school, if that's an option for you. And then any sports or plays or dance recitals or doctor appointments right, you come up with six things pretty quick that just become non-negotiables for that part of your life. That making sense, joe.

I'm loving what you're saying here, man, because I'm thinking about Dr Oz and obviously you see the face on the tabloids and all that, but knowing that there's so much more behind the scenes really inspires me to say well, what more can we do, like, if there is something where I could sit in an office all day and do process work for 60 hours, but maybe we could tweak it ever so slightly and now it could be even more impactful with less energy. Like the thought is, it's an insane concept, but it really does have strong bones.

You know what man In this business Albeit maybe a little bit cha-chi. Are you familiar with the term cha-chi?

Yes, I'm familiar with the term cha-chi. I was gonna say I think almost every Italian knows that term because their grandmother has cha-chis on the wall.

There you go, there you go. I'll be it perhaps a bit cha-chi like, like my queen bee role here and with you on this podcast, is to influence. It's to influence electricians to seek a higher level of service Because they can and because they the other day, your clients, homeowners, who we happen to also be and have family and friends who are need that level of service or at least the choice to have it. Because currently, at least when we started this, it didn't seem present, and even at the highest level of other sales organizations I don't throw sand. Very often there's just some salesy shit going on. Mm-hmm and we don't fucking do that. Here we actually present value hard on the sleeve. I'm here to serve you at the highest level. How would you like to proceed? It's your choice, and every choice is a great choice, so long as you choose us to help you with this project, this task, this job, this service, and I feel great about that. So our cha-chi first thing to do is really to influence electricians, but after that, for me it's well to find new ways to market and influence electricians, and then it's, ironically, to find the best way to communicate value through a process that people call a sales process, which you would relate with sales pressure, but it's actually, again, hard on the sleeve. Here's how we help people. Do you think this would help you too, in the best, most conducive possible way to get people in and winning as fast as possible? That's like my half list of you know what's like my queen bee, my top three things that I need to do. That breaks out into about a dozen things, but really it comes down to a few things. So anything outside of that is Actually a distraction.

You know, I love that you're saying that because it brings back to something we started with. Remember how I mentioned a salesperson is a spearpoint. I feel like any position in your organization becomes more effective when they're targeted, effective and focus. Because right now, clay I'm gonna say this publicly I think you're an absolutely brilliant individual. Like I have my respect. You've got my love, you've got my loyalty. I'm very, very proud to be your partner and I think one of the things that really defines you and sets you out is how determined you are to succeed at overcoming any obstacle. Now, if we took that focus and we aimed it towards something else, you're still gonna succeed Because you're you, but at the same time, I think that we would succeed as a whole, less With you doing too many things and how many of you business owners are in the background. In the same thing. We're equally as skilled as clay and I, but the difference is is that we're focused with our mission, whereas you are not. What could change if you were able to have a little more focus and intention? What you do every day.

It's incredibly powerful and I appreciate those words. I mean one of the exciting things is we get to come here and be so transparent. One of the things our clients enjoy about us is we're literally building a business that started January 1st together. Service Super electrical took new form with you when you join this mission, joe, and they get to watch us use these very Same things that we teach to build our business Serve at the highest level. And when you see the inside culture that exists within our group chats, within our clients, within our team, rather, I mean the client doesn't feel like the right word for them, does it.

No, it's not, it's. I mean the words partners come up, but really it's. We're friends. We're trusted partners and allies. You know, when we work with people, yeah, we can be friends, but we'll push them harder than a friend ever would. We're allies, but we're so emotionally invested in what they do that it comes back to one of the be a friend again. We're something unique and I love it. I love the uniqueness that we are.

And, in that first year, to go to about 40 clients with almost four million dollars in reported wins so far. It's an incredible, credible honor. At the same time, it's so nice to be able to demonstrate this as we go and share these wins, challenges, victories, overcoming and to speak to what you said about me and and my kind of relentless Approach to overcoming these obstacles and these challenges and finding our next direction. I Put it this way there's something I learned from my coach that I actually did a post on this week, called the doom loop, and it's as simple as this. We all every single person needs growth, and so, at the very least, what I can say we all do is we all set a goal at some point for something. In fact, most of us set goals all the time. The problem is that very few of us actually Realize these goals because we don't have a strong method, allogy, a strong strategy to take us through the entire journey to realize it, or at least to a decision point that's based from a place of accountability accountability and metrics, not blame, excuses and denial. So, to boil that down, the doom loop is really this I set my sights on something, I take my first steps towards it. I Notice a negative impact, a conflict, something that requires my resilience, and I'm beat down by it and I quit. I create blame, excuses, denial, and Then I ride the bottom for a little bit again. Then I set another goal. This happens with smokers. It happens with drinkers. It happens with people that don't want to watch Netflix every night. It happens with you're not reading your book, it. It happens in so many capacities not going to the gym, not doing exercise, not eating Right in your business. We set the next goal, we do it again. We set the next goal, we do it again, and what we see is little mini launch, fall down. Little mini launch, fall down. Little mini launch, fall down. And some people are following that doom loop for years, joe, years and years, maybe decades of your life, instead of recognizing that that first challenge is actually the first place that we have to decide to push on and, even though it's hard, that's the point at which we're really going to launch, even though it might look like a jagged up and down at first. Is that making any sense, brother?

You know the thing that that stuck out the most there was. I was visualizing it and trying to apply my life, that situation being like where, where have I been there? And I Mean I don't mean to change the conversation, but like I'm thinking about it and being like, well, how how does someone get out? And Personally, for me, I found that riding that bottom Was the best launch pad ever, because you unless you're gonna be thrown a shovel and say, dig through rock bottom, a Ball has to hit the ground before it can bounce. I Hit the ground hard, but I'm bouncing really fucking high.

I love that man. The medicine at the bottom is the mirror. Mm-hmm as soon as you shift from blame, excuses, denial to I'm taking accountability for this. What am I doing? That is a pattern, that is a doom loop. What am I doing or not doing that could get me out of this. And the moment you change you, everything starts to change for you.

Mm-hmm.

That's the secret, brother, and that's the upside of overwhelm, is you're gonna pull out this mirror. You're going to stop everything you're doing. You're gonna seek your moment of clarity, which could take a couple of days, by the way. Sometimes it might be two to four days for someone to really find it, but it even happened to me in a place of overwhelm Sunday night, when I wrote three pages of notes at 9 30 pm, full brain dump. That I've continued for a couple of days now, and these are the moments that completely shift your trajectory and get you back to landing in a place that you aimed for. You heard it here first from the pleasant peasant what action items can we give? Joe, we got to wrap this one up.

So let's start with. Really, it really depends on where you want to start. If you want acting basic, I take it. All star, do you have a preference?

Sure, I'll hit the basic then. Yeah, sure, I'm gonna go to the important to recognize if you're in the doom loop or overwhelm. I'm gonna give you both of these as kind of a side-by-side. I want to recognize am I in a pattern that is repeating itself? Do I keep finding myself short of my goals, or finding myself short of a result even towards my goals and my blame excuse? Denying what's happening? Is there a mirror to pull out? You hear us talk about the mirror often, so that's so so, so, so important. And then I want you to also think about the law of open cycles and think if my calendar is full, what am I having to do? What are my main tasks? What do I need to delegate and what do I need to cut? And you can go through your calendar in any app and just color those events, color what it is and make sure to label those and sort it out and start setting some time aside for this moment of clarity that you clearly need. That was huge for baseman, maybe.

I was gonna say I was accepting the standard, but I think I got something that can run. I can back and run with that add to it All right. So for me, I'm trying to figure out what can I do from my experience to communicate what this doom loop feels like, not just what it is. So I want to give an expression and almost like a visual story that I think would convey the action. That's okay, all right, all right. So you taught me something which is known as halt, and I use that in so many different aspects of my life. Halt is you're most likely to relapse into something when you're hungry, angry, lonely or tired right now, depending on whatever it is that you're facing you need to overcome. I Knew that I needed to stop things when I was in those spaces. Drinking was one of those examples. So what I want you to do when you're in this place is to first recognize, before I poured this glass, before I make this action, before I do anything, can I check the mindset I'm in when I'm in it? When you can reflect on your own mindset, you'll find that the action following it has more clarity and gravity. But when you blindly follow the action based on the emotion attached to it. That emotion can be skewed by you being overwhelmed. So the action, the all-star action, is simply a monitoring exercise. Before you take any step that you feel you're doing, impulsively, ask yourself Am I hungry, am I angry, am I lonely or am I tired? And More times than not and I found this myself it's usually one of those four and when you look at that you're like okay, I know, I'm doing the wrong thing, I need to focus on something else.

Big man. That that's huge, great share, joe, we got to wrap this up. This been episode 205 of electricpreneurs secrets, the electricians Podcast brought to you, of course, by our business service loop. Electrical for electricians, by electricians. And we're here five days a week to help you master sales, simplify pricing and deliver premium level service, even when overwhelms getting in the way, even when low-call volume is getting in way, even when you think you can't get over the email at over objection. We're here for you, as we have been this week, so keep joining us. In fact, we got some big, big stuff coming to you for the rest of the week, so we'll see you again tomorrow.

Be, I'll be well.