The Driven Podcast
The Driven is a podcast hosted by Colt Charlebois. Sitting down with business owners, founders, and high-capacity leaders, he uncovers the real stories behind their success — the lows, the turning points, and the faith woven through it all. Every episode follows the same arc: where it all started, what nearly broke them, the moment things shifted, and where they are now. Raw testimony from leaders who built something meaningful while carrying real weight — in business, in life, and in faith.
The Driven Podcast
EP 006 | 92% of Entrepreneurs Can't Answer This One Question | Feat. Stephen Courson
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You're making good money. Your calendar is packed. But if you had to say out loud what you actually want, would you have an answer?
In this conversation, Colt sits down with Stephen Courson to unpack the clarity problem hiding underneath most driven entrepreneurs' stuck moments. Stephen tracks it: 92% of the people he works with cannot answer the one question that would change everything, what do you want?
You'll hear why ambition is God-given and not the same as pride, what the "God slot" is and why leaders quietly hand it to themselves, how good distractions sabotage a calling faster than bad ones, why "vagueness is fear dressed up as humility," and how the TEAMS framework (time, energy, attention, money, soul) exposes where your life is actually going.
If you have been staying busy so you don't have to face the question, this one is for you.
ABOUT THE GUEST
Stephen Courson is the founder of Lifebuilder and author of What Do You Want? He spent over a decade in enterprise sales at Gartner and Salesforce, earning 11 top sales awards in 12 years, before stepping out to help high performers align their time, energy, attention, money, and soul. Through his Clarity Machine, a 7-step system to eliminate distraction and turn goals into daily execution, Stephen coaches founders and leaders to reclaim 10 plus hours a week, build new income streams, and get more done by doing less, better.
One of the things that I talk about in the book is how a GPS works. But when you get in your car and it goes where to, okay, in the GPS, you can't be like the northwest side of town. It's not going to be able to route you. It doesn't work like that. So why do we treat our lives like that? But if you put in, yeah, I'm going to this restaurant on this street on this block, bam, here's the fastest way to go. By the way, traffic's bad, so take a detour this way. Great. Same thing works in our lives. So this is where the real magic happens.
SPEAKER_00Welcome to the Driven Podcast. I'm your host, Colt Charlebois. And on today's episode, we have a phenomenal guest. I'm excited because our guest is not only a fellow coach, but a fellow entrepreneur with his company, Life Builder. And his history before this, his claim to fame in leading up to helping other entrepreneurs was that he worked for large companies like Gardner, Salesforce, and he won 11 top awards, top sales awards for 11 out of 12 years. I just want to welcome my dear friend Steven to the show.
SPEAKER_01Good to be here, Cole. My old youth group, way back in the day, was called Driven. So there we go. It's uh it's a little bit of a full circle moment there.
SPEAKER_00Hey, let's jump in with a problem you see, because I know that you've got a very similar vantage point that I do. You're working with entrepreneurs all the time. You see behind the mask and why they're doing what they're doing. What's the problem that you see out there with driven entrepreneurs?
SPEAKER_01One of the things that's been really interesting, especially when it comes to kingdom-driven entrepreneurs, is that I see this interesting sense of what is a healthy level of ambition versus what is kind of just arrogance and pride and ego and this internal struggle with that. How much money is too much money is another way that that kind of probably like an adjoining issue, I would say. So those have been the two, but I really kind of see them as one in the same. And I think it's good that entrepreneurs are paying attention to that, but at the same time, I think the natural reaction sometimes is that they just shirk away from it. And it's like, no, I think it's something we need to lean into a little more because ambition is good. Ambition is God given. And it's something that God gives to some of his greatest people in the Bible, even. I think that's one of the things that I've seen just recently is a lot of people sitting here going, especially in our culture, and we're not, it's it's weird to say this, you know, because especially, you know, with Canada and with the United States, like Western fundamentals of our countries were built on merit and exceptionalism. And we're seeing this weird reversion culturally now to where it's no equity for everybody, equity, equitable outcomes. You hear a lot of stuff about that. People, you know, we kind of want to eat the rich right now. It's not being viewed as like a popular thing. And you see it even in the states. We see it in certain school systems to where they continue to lower the bar for what is an A. I think California just passed it to where an A can be as low as an 84. And Harvard, our premier institution, just came out with their own subject saying, hey, we have a grade inflation problem. Over 70% of their grades were A's at Harvard. So there should be some bell curving to this. So I think it's an interesting time for entrepreneurs, especially as Christians, this thing that used to be very American of ambition and getting out here and building something for the kingdom, you know, following a dream, being proud of, it's actually becoming kind of unpopular. But I think that we have a God-given responsibility that if we feel something is on our heart to go and do, that we go and do it. And as long as we follow the example of Jesus and as long as we, you know, maintain the certain guardrails to make sure we're not letting greed get into it, pride, arrogance, things like that, then I say go for it. So that's been one of the most interesting ones I think I've seen, to where it's like something that was so such a a pro culture, and you know, it kind of lined up with the Bible really well. It's like now we're kind of starting to see a shift where it's becoming countercultural. So that's been interesting.
SPEAKER_00To your point, I've experienced this in my own coaching calls with Christian entrepreneurs. Where's the line between that God-given ambition, which we know is intuitive to us, or something in us that just has a desire to see something grow, something build, and then that ego-driven pride where we've made it about us. Yeah. I mean, where's the line?
SPEAKER_01I've had this question asked, and I've had to ask it of myself a couple of times because the reality is you're gonna cross it. If you're an ambitious person, first off, I think you have to give yourself a little grace here and understand that you are probably going to cross that line into an unhealthy area. For me, what I think that if I had to draw a line in the sand, I think of everything that we do should be for the glory of God. Okay. If you were called to stop doing it right now and you had to give up that and follow him, if God came to you and said, You've been doing a great job on this, and you had all the confirmation in the world that was what it's supposed to be, could you give it up? Could you drop it? And if the answer is no, now you kind of know. That's one area, I think. There's other simpler ways we can do the level of vocality, I guess, that people can say whenever they're building businesses and to their faith. I don't think that everybody is required to constantly be out there on the public mics and on their social media saying, hey, building this business for the glory of God. I think there's an element of depending on who you are as a person there. And Jesus didn't, he didn't necessarily say that, hey, this is how you're supposed to live, loud and proud. Like, no, that wasn't it. So I do think that there's levels to that based off of how you feel that God has given it to you. But in general, in your life, the way that you feel you should be, are you giving credit to God on a regular basis, privately and publicly, where appropriate? So I think there's a lot of different checks and balances along the way that we can have. Accountability is another great one. Do you have spiritual accountability with your pastor, men and women that know you, you know, to where they could say that? But the ultimate line in the sand to me is that could you walk away from it all right now if God told you to? Because if you can't, then you're not doing it for him.
SPEAKER_00That's a real identity test. And I remember moments in my career where I thought, hey, you know what? I'm following God. I'm a servant of the most high God. I'm serving in church, and I'm not tied to my business. And then this external factor comes in. I remember I was at a real estate brokerage and they had this emergency meeting. And we were a Keller Williams at the time, and they had this emergency meeting and everybody's meeting, and they were handing out name tags. There was about 300 agents. This was just maybe the 20, 30 people that were either influencers, shareholders, or you know, such. So they had us at this meeting and start handing up name tags. I was like, we all know each other. What's this about? And they said, we're just gonna launch into it. We've sold our company and we've sold it to Remax. And so, hey, you know, in terms of business, not a bad thing, but you got to understand, all of my passion was learned and experienced through Gary Keller, the founder, and I was Keller Williams through and through. And so being a Keller Williams agent was so important to me. And in that moment, I remember one of the other coaches in the office came over to me and she just looked me in the eye and she said, Are you okay? I'm like, Yeah, of course I'm okay. And then, brother, I literally went to the bathroom and I just paused for a second and I started tearing up. And I was like, Well man, and it was all of it, it was just to show me how deep my identity was entrenched in a brand, right? And so here I am in my early 30s, and this thing happens, and I don't want to be a remax agent, but these are all the people that I've walked with and grown with. And yeah, so yes, it's so hard to identify. We think that I'm apart from this, but until that question you pose, if you had to give this up tomorrow, in that case it was a brand, but in other cases for me, it has been a business, it has been a relationship, and they've rocked me each time, even though I thought I was so above God moving in my life, right?
SPEAKER_01And I think there's another thing, it's like you might be successful at something, and I'm not saying that it's easy, you know, or anything like that, but I truly believe that when you're outside of God's will, there's gonna be a level of misery. So, not suffering. I believe suffering is good. Jesus talks about that, the passion that we have for something like suffering is part of a journey. You can't be an entrepreneur and not suffer. It's like right. You're signing up for it, okay? I think that's why the entrepreneurial journey and that goes so well together. Because we're talking to my son, he's nine, and talking to him a more serious conversation about becoming a Christian. And I've been leaning into the people will not like you. You will suffer if you do this. And it's been some hard conversations with a nine-year-old, but he's starting to grasp it. I'm like, dude, I'm not gonna paint rainbows and all this other stuff for him of what this is gonna be like, you know. But it's the same thing with entrepreneurship. I tell people all the time, I'm like, you should not be one. Okay, you should have a nine of five job. And there's nothing wrong with that. Suffering, yes, suffering is part of all of this. You will suffer. Anything in my mind worth having will have some element to that. But misery is different because misery to me is just pure angst, it's just pure negativity. At least when you're suffering for something that was worth it, it's like there's a silver lining to be found. Misery doesn't have that. So the reason I want to distinguish those two is because it's like when you are outside of God's will, it doesn't mean you're not gonna suffer, right? We know that you can be inside and outside of God's will, you're gonna suffer. But there will not be misery.
SPEAKER_00To me, what I'm hearing is this word you mentioned earlier is accountability. So it's accountability to walking with God. And that I believe, yes, it does make sense. There is this element where we can look back and say, I'm not content here. And so when we're talking about the line between ambition and pride, it's like, where's the line? One of the reflective tools for me is is there joy? Am I content in this?
SPEAKER_01One of the most powerful stories I think I've ever heard in my life in joy is the story of Corey Tenboom. She was the Jewish woman that was put into the Holocaust, or in the Holocaust, she was put into a concentration camp. And one of the most powerful stories from her book is talking about giving thanks for the fleas. So when they segmented off all the women into their side, she had, I can't remember if it was her sister or her cousin, one of them, they were in the barrack, basically, where they had to go. And as they got put in this barrack, it was a flea-infested barrack. And she's like, Oh my gosh, like this is the worst. And it was, I can't remember if it was her cousin or her sister, but she turned to her and she just said, Hey, give thanks and everything, even for the fleas. And she just flipped on her. She's like, What are you talking about? Life could not get any worse. Everything is terrible. I'm not giving thanks for the fleas. What are you talking about? And eventually she got around to it. And what they found out was this the fleas, because it infested their barracks, the Nazis did not come in and sexually assault them because they didn't want to deal with the fleas, but they did with all the other ones. And it was just this thing of she found a way to be joyful and to give thanks for the fleas. And so, dude, I cannot imagine. I will, God willing, I can't think of a scenario where I will ever be even close to that kind of a scenario in my life. It's like, if I do, I hope he gives me the grace to deal with something like that in that kind of way. It's just I can't even imagine it. But that's something that I think is a story that's just so powerful of joy in the midst of suffering.
SPEAKER_00Now, take me back in your story because there must have been a point where you've had to find the line or you felt like you crossed it. Any quick examples or even client examples that speak to this a little bit?
SPEAKER_01I have this thing that I call the God slot. And this is just something that I don't even remember where it came from, but I think it might actually be a borderline original thought. But the God slot is what we put all of our trust in ultimately. So whether you're a Christian, whether you're an atheist, Jew, whatever. It's like the God slot is ultimately where that is. I think it's easy for us as Christians to go, yes, my trust is in God. And it probably is sometimes. But we know the struggle of going through life is that we can constantly take off our eyes, even though we believe in God, even though we believe in the promise of Jesus and all these other things, we can very easily take that off our eyes off of him and put them back on us and be like, I did this. The story of Peter walking on the water. What did he do? He's walking, everything's going fine. He's got his eyes on Jesus, and then, oh, hey, look at me. Look what I'm doing. Looks down, starts sinking immediately. He was actually in alignment with what God told him to do. He said, Get out of the boat and come to me. The whole nothing changed with God's order, with the mission that he had for Peter in that moment. He was still in alignment with that. The difference was what he put in the God slot. And for me, in my life, I've got so many examples to where I was doing things that I truly believe, and God has even confirmed that yes, this is what I was supposed to be doing. And I just messed it up by either not giving the glory to him personally, professionally, publicly, or just sometimes outright boistering it and feel like, yeah, I did this, guys. So it's hard to think of a specific story. I can tell you one where I messed up and I still ended up winning despite myself. It was like God let me win, you know, despite my screw up kind of a thing. And I was working at Gartner as a management consulting and research firm. And I had this deal that I had been working on. That was one of the larger deals I had all year, not the biggest, but it was a pretty big one. I walked in and I had very at this point, I was six, seven years in my career. I was hitting all the winner circles, all the presence clubs, top sales awards every single year, and got a little big for my britches. And I went into this deal and I just didn't do excellence. All the things that I knew that I that got me to that point of doing that, I thought, I'm me, I can cut corners and it'll be fine. The client, I've got a great relationship with them. I understand the business. I don't need to do this thing management's telling me to do, even though I know I should do it, all these other things, I'm good. And my pride and arrogance just started. Number one, it chipped away at the excellence that I had become known for. And like I said, I cut corners. And then number two, I was just arrogantly thinking, if anything does go wrong, it's me. I got this. Well, then what ended up happening? The client I had such a great relationship with that normally closed the deal, got let go. So then they brought in a new person I had no relationship with, had to start that all over again. They're looking at it going, yeah, I don't care what you did with so and so. Like now you got to prove it to me. And it's like, oh shoot, I should have done all these things that I did it, and basically lost the deal, and they didn't even renew what they had, which was a big hit. And then it was like, oh man, I messed all this up, had to do all this extra work, all these other things. And for context, Steve, how big are these deals, uh, Gardner? To give you context, this would have been like a $150,000 deal. That for where I was, that was about 3x your average size deal, kind of a thing. So I'm going in, and six months after they've canceled, they end up coming back on a whim. They're just like, hey, you know what? That person made a rash decision. We realized the value of what you guys have. We'd like to re-sign up again. And it was like, I had already tried to win them back. I had already tried to do all this other stuff, and it just didn't. And then it was just a phone call. Oh, hey, yeah, can you just send us our contract again? I ended up looking like an idiot to all of management. I cut the corners, made big britches for myself, all these other things. And then God was like, okay, here you go. Have you learned your lesson? And it's like, yep, got it. So that that would be one quick story of how that all kind of ended up playing up.
SPEAKER_00While I agree with you on this concept that ambition is not pride in itself, I would say it is a very thin tightrope to walk as an entrepreneur because you require it. And it's up to me, as in the makeup of so many entrepreneurs, that allowing the Lord to be leading this process can be difficult. So I've come to this idea. I want to share this with you. Ambition, image, and duty. These are the three motivations, right? I'm ambitious, pat myself on the back, I'm someone who goes after it. I care about what people think of me and my perception of them. And that could be because I want to influence them well as a believer, or because I want to be seen well and respected by peers. And the last one is duty. This is the way it should be done. This is what's either expected of my partnership or the standard I hold on myself. All of them in themselves are not necessarily pride, but the thing that I found at the center for me that helps me know the line is am I striving? And so the way I use that word in my own mind is am I trying to push beyond who I naturally am or how the pace that God's calling me at? Do I feel weary? Do I feel like I'm worn out? And so these are some of those accountability metrics, you know, other than like you said, having wise counsel around you, right? But it's to me the question I'm continuing to come back to is that am I striving here? Am I striving for the approval of man or of God? Galatians 1:10. That's a litmus test for me right now.
SPEAKER_01What do you mean by that? Because I mean, if you're striving, you're going to be weird. I like the other stuff you said, but that one I'm curious on.
SPEAKER_00I think there's a great example from my own story in my ability to say no. So I was unable to say no to a client request for a very long time. And so what happens is you keep going and going, you say yes to everything, and you go back to the contentment piece, the joy is evaporated. Was I in the wrong business? I can't even tell you whether I was or was not, because of the motive to please people brought me so weary. I didn't know how to sabbath. I didn't know how to pause, I didn't know how to just shut everything off. I just always on, always checking the next email. So that's one example. But you can be tired because you've put in 14 hours and you're content, or you can just continually worry and wrestle with thoughts and try and please others, and you become just worn down, wore out. And so that's how divine now, this is coming from someone who went through a pretty severe burnout and you know had to quit the business he was in. So I don't want that for other people. Don't be striving.
SPEAKER_01So you're drawing a little bit of a difference between tired and weary there, weary being beyond the physical, so to speak. I could see where that could come into play for sure. And to your point, with all the things that you were saying that led to that weariness, you were probably doing a whole bunch of things that either weren't in alignment with what you should have been doing or you weren't doing it the way that you should have been. Because how do we get to that point of weariness? Normally it's because we're taking so much on ourself and we're not delegating, we're not giving up certain things. Maybe prayer life isn't as strong as it should be, you know, whatever the case may be. But there could be a lot of contributing factors there.
SPEAKER_00Now, you've also had some experiences on understanding direction for people. You've 92% of your clients can't answer this one question. What was the one question that 92% of your clients can't answer? You've just released this book. This is brand new.
SPEAKER_01Brand new, out for just a couple weeks and everything. And this all happened because when I got into coaching, I thought I was just going to help people execute. I was like, I'm going to help people get what they want. And man, when I say I have worked with some incredible men and women that are smarter than me, more driven and ambitious than I am, just amazing people. But I had to start tracking it. That's what the 92% is an organic number that I truly track nowadays because it's so interesting how many people truly don't know what they want. A lot of people are probably going, 92%. Man, I must be in the top eight because I know what I want. Let me define really quick by what I'm looking for and how I qualify that, whether or not you're in that top 8% or not. The way that I'm qualifying that is when I whenever I'm having a conversation, I ask what somebody wants, I will normally give a timeline because that's a very, you know, we need a little bit of a timeline there. Normally it's something like this year. Sometimes it could even be, you know, this month. And when I ask that question, what I'm really looking for is something that's really specific and it has a deadline. You know, kind of your classic smart goal framework or packed goal, like one of those. But I'm also like, you know, seeking for something that's truly in alignment. And the other question is this when I ask this question, I'm normally not asking it in the context of a business. People have their goals there, usually. I'm normally asking it in the context of their life. I don't have a problem mixing and matching things with the business, especially with entrepreneurs. Work life harmony is incredibly important. But when it comes to their life, and I'm asking this question what do you want? Because what is the point of work if not to support the life that we want? And they Don't have acceptable answers. Some of them don't have answers at all. I've had fully grown men at a barbecue joint, okay, break down and start crying in front of me when I ask them that question. Because they literally just said, I can't remember the last time I stopped and had anybody ask me that or even ask that of myself. So it's like, all I want from people in that situation is to say, yeah, I'm trying to get this very specific thing. There's got to be a number tied to it. Because if there's not a number tied to it, then it can't be measured. A bad example would be I'm just trying to grow closer to God. That is not a good goal. That is a general direction. Okay. How are you going to know that you are doing things that will lead to that? Okay. I'm trying to read a third of the Bible over the next 90 days. Okay. That is something that we can track. It's measurable. There's this success-failure dynamic here. So next 90 days, read a third of the Bible, you know, what whatever it might be. I am trying to grow my revenue on this one product arm in the next month by 25%. Okay, great. We have an actual metric that we're driving towards. We're doing this. I want to make sure that I get two dates with my wife in the month of May, and that we're going out. We haven't been going out that much. So two in the month of May. Great. Number deadline. And the reason that people normally leave out one of the two, there might be a deadline, but there's not a number. The more common one is that there's a number, but there's not a deadline. And the reason for that is because the second that you have those two things, you have created a success-failure dichotomy. Now all of a sudden you have to succeed or fail. We don't like that as humans. We like flexibility. And we like to, oh yeah, you know, I'm going to try to date my wife more. I'm going to try to read the Bible more. I'm going to try to grow revenue. You can't really play into that. And that's why getting clarity on something like what do you want, a question so simple, can be so powerful. Because now all of a sudden, in psychology, they call it your reticular activating system. And it's this part of your brain that gets turned on when you have imprinted in your long-term memory, not your short term, when you put something in your long-term memory and you say, This is now very important to me. Now it's like a radar that notices all these things you never saw before. This is why when you go to buy a car and you either bought it or you're researching it, all of a sudden you see that car on the highway everywhere. When you're talking with your wife about, hey, maybe we should, what do you think about having kids? All of a sudden you start noticing baby strollers for the first time. Why am I noticing that? Because you have said this is important, this is something that's coming. And now your brain is actively searching it out and preparing you for that. So by getting clarity on that question, it's like turning on a superpower, but we avoid it because we're scared of failure. And that's why so many people normally don't have one or the other.
SPEAKER_00So if you're dealing with a large organization, would this be the mission statement, that clear, defined, measurable outcome?
SPEAKER_01What I did when I worked at Gartner, there's a very intelligent woman. She was one of the top-ranked analysts that we had. Her name was Tina Nuno. Fantastic woman, very smart. And I had her multiple times to speak to different executive groups that I had. And one time, this is probably the fourth time that I had ever heard her give this talk on strategy, but she said this and it just hit me differently. And she said, There's four phases of strategy. Doesn't matter if it's business, personal, wartime, does four phases destination, starting point, journey, and checkpoints. Those are the four phases. And she goes, and the mistake that most people make is they begin with the starting point and then they do the destination. But she goes, that's a great way to shoot yourself short of your goals because you're starting to dream or where you should be dreaming, you're just beginning where you are. And you'll naturally end up shooting for less because of that. So I heard that and I was like, I should start doing this in my own life. And that really became the groundwork of how I started running my life. And my clarity machine is these that I walk my clients through is these seven steps that all go through those four phases. The two things that go into the first part, destination, is your why statement and your objectives. And when you translate that from a personal strategy to a corporate strategy, that's the equivalent of the why statement is the mission statement. That's kind of your North Star. And then the objectives are one to three goals that are long-term goals that you have that you're going to shoot for. Any corporation, and I'm working with corporations that have billions of dollars, tens of thousands of employees, all the resources in the world available to them. Okay. And the there is a hard line in the sand drawn. If an organization has more than three objectives over the course of three years, they're exponentially more likely to hit none of them. So that was always the line. Hey guys, whatever you want to do with your corporation, whatever you're driving towards, that's great. You get three, no more than that. Because the data was so clear that all the resources became spread too thin. And it just caused none of them to end up being achieved. So I do the same thing with people and we do it on a three-year map. I ask the question, what do you want? We think three years out, and then we get clarity on that. And then we just reverse engineer it from there. So that's why I have my why statement because you need to know exactly what you get. That's the destination. But then when I ask the why statement, why do you want it? That's motivation. That's what's that's identity, that's values. Those are the three things that are driving that. So when I say my why statement is to glorify God, strengthen my family, serve others, and have fun while doing it. So that's just north. That's my north statement. That doesn't sound measurable. So it's not measurable, but it's still important because if I don't have that, it's like there's things that would fall within that won't fall with my objective. So the point is to have it to align to one or the other or both. But if it doesn't align to an objective or to my why statement, it's just no, absolutely not doing that thing. It's a distraction from the life I want to build.
SPEAKER_00I want to talk about distraction in a minute here, but to your point, I think you've clarified something that I was hoping to push back on a little bit. There's as part of what you want, I would refer to it as a purpose statement. You call it the why statement. And again, no matter what book you read, no matter what consultant you talk about, all these terms get intermingled. So you have to define them for yourself, essentially. But this purpose to me is the North Star. It's, you know, the magi, they're out there, they're moving towards this thing. We believe the Christ is there. We don't know where it's going to lead us to, but we're moving towards it. And when you talk about your four statements there, it's, I know I have to be going in that general direction. At some point, I have to be setting up objectives to do so and measuring the results and the objectives. Am I catching it all there? The reason I would have pushed back is because opposite to that, I believe there are some that really focus on the measurable. And so they'll write, you know, I've heard this about mission statements, they should be uh time-bound, they should be smart goals, essentially, right? Measurable, time-bound, and such. In doing so, it's like it rips the heart out of the organization. Because as much as we need the measurable practical goals, if we don't have purpose that is compelling, and they've done studies on this, especially for millennials and all the other generations that found came after that. If we're not aligned with this in terms of our heart desire, we don't want to do it, right? We're entitled generations. I'm an elder millennial, so I'll speak for my people.
SPEAKER_01And I think some mission statements need to be so ambitious that you don't know how you're ever going to get there. I know people who are like, Yeah, I want to end homelessness in my city. Great. How are you gonna do that? I don't have a clue. By when are you gonna do that? No idea. That's just I have a heart for that. That's what we're shooting for. That's great. Make it some crazy outlandish vision and put it out there. Then let your objectives be the thing that's measurable. And you know, but it's like, I totally agree with you that here's another reason I'm gonna piggyback on what you said. The other reason I don't like making something measurable in the mission statement is because, man, I think people are scared of dream personally and professionally nowadays. People just don't have dreams, man. They don't have hobbies. And because of that, I think that if you if we encourage that more, yeah, just put the why statement out there, put the mission statement out there. Don't have a clue you're gonna get it. Just make it a make it something big. I I think we'd be better off for it if we did more of that.
SPEAKER_00Yeah, to your point, we're using purpose, mission, and we haven't touched on vision. These terms can be construed, but the dream, as you said, like thinking, if I were to serve this thing for my life and made one step towards a thousand that needs to be made, but I brought others in on it and they kept making steps after my existence was gone, that's phenomenal, right? That's at the heart of God, right? If you ask me, you know. So assuming that this is something he's bestowed on me, a vision. Oftentimes we've got to craft a vision. I don't think we craft visions at all as kingdom entrepreneurs. I think visions are given, right? Mental dreams. And so I'll I want to draw a distinction that I've noticed here and tell me if you agree. I work with medium-sized organizations. You've probably worked with some larger ones. My heart is for the small business owner. Sometimes that's a solo entrepreneur getting something off the ground. All business coaching, by the way, is 80% life coaching, which I think is something we agree on as well. Probably about right. The person who's at the center of it is, to me, the most exciting person to coach because that's the person that's really trying to wrestle through their own fears, doubts, misunderstood statements, lies that they hold from their upbringing, and build something out of nothing. And so sometimes they're building small sales teams or small leadership teams as they're bridging that 1 million, 2 million mark. That's such a beautiful space to play. And they're going from a personality-driven business to a systems-driven business, most oftentimes. And the point I'm bringing up here is that in doing so, very few have clear outcome, clear objective, clear dream, other than just being more financially free or more time freedom. Those are the two major proponents of any small business. I got into this, I have more time or more money. And then they find themselves with less of both. But they hold that dream. But other than that, something beyond themselves is not really fully established. It can be in there, but it's not established. And they don't have strategic deployment towards doing that. So strategic planning is something you see in large corporations that I believe really help them keep growing. But the smaller ones don't often do it. So has that been your experience in working with my business?
SPEAKER_01Has really transitioned to the small to medium business owner over the past two years, I'd say, from the executives to the big. That's kind of where I started because I was doing coaching part-time when I was in that world. And then when I stepped out of it, I just found I don't like working with HR departments to get that stuff figured out. If you go with the smaller ones, I'm with you. It's more exciting. I am that person too. I'm a small business owner. And so I do have a passion for that person too. And it's one of those things to where that clarity is so important. So I'll tell you a story. I literally sat down with one of my clients the other day who we started working together a couple weeks ago. So we were going through all the assessments, and I've said, you know, I don't think you've told me what your business goal is for this year. He owns a roofing company, very successful, well known, doing about three and a half million in revenue. And I was like, What is your goal? And he said, uh, around four to four and a half million. I said, eh, wrong answer. And I know you've heard this, right? It a range cannot be a goal. I want to paint a little bit of a holistic picture for everyone as to why clarity in your is if you are an entrepreneur or founder, and this is why clarity in your personal life and in your business is so important. Okay. You will get so much more done in a smaller amount of time with less energy, sometimes with less money, even, because you won't go off and do things you shouldn't. And it all comes together to paint this beautiful picture if you do it right. We had already gone through and built out his personal goals and objectives. He just bought 47 acres of land and they're building him and his wife are building a beautiful house on there. One of the dreams that he has family, and she has family that are kind of in the area, some of them are up north. And he's like, we want to build our house, but then we want to build guest houses on there so we can bring the entire family and they can just come and stay. And then he was like, I would love to also rent out these houses to pastors who need a break and burnt out pastors, different things like that. So that is what he had said was his personal goal. And that's what we had clarity on. You know, by the end of year three, for what we had mapped out, it's like get the house done, property, all that other stuff. And then in that next three-year goal was going to be to build the other ones. So then when I come back and I ask him about his business, and he says four to four and a half million, the number one reason that's a problem is he just hired some salespeople. And I said, Listen, when it comes to sales, I said it needs to be very formulaic. If you're setting their quota, what are you setting it to? Is it four? Is it four and a half? Wait, how are they going to know how many leads they need to convert into meetings that will then close into businesses for either four or four and a half? They don't know. And you can't know because you have left it vague. Why? Because you're scared of failure. There is no other reason not to pick a target. Go for 4.2. I don't care. But you one of the things that I talk about in the book is how GPS works. But when you get in your car and it goes where to, okay, in the GPS, you can't be like the northwest side of town. It's not going to be able to route you. It doesn't work like that. So why do we treat our lives like that? But if you put in, yeah, I'm going to this restaurant on this street on this block, bam, here's the fastest way to go. By the way, traffic's bad. So take a detour this way. Great. Same thing works in our lives. So this is where the real magic happens. So then you get clarity in your personal life, and it's like, yeah, this is what I want. Okay, how much is all that going to cost? Okay. You need this much, you need 2 million for the house. You need 1.5 for these little yurts that you want to do with the family and all this other stuff. Great. 3.5 million total. Over the course of the next three years, how much do you need to make in order to do all of that? What if we could accelerate it? Yeah, if I eventually grew it by half a million year over year and did that, I'd be able to do this and hire the people and fund this personal dream I have. Wow. So things that we were talking about in six years, we could shrink that window if this year you went from three and a half to four. Next year you go from four to four and a half, and the year after that, you go from four and a half to five. Right now, all of a sudden it makes sense. Now he can create a business plan that immediately funds his personal plan. That's why the clarity in the two is so important for people who are founders and entrepreneurs.
SPEAKER_00Now you had said a sentence in regards to what you're saying. Vagueness is fear dressed up as humility. Vagueness is fear dressed up as humility. What do you expand on that a little bit? So a lot of times people speak Christianese.
SPEAKER_01I've grown up in the church, and one of the biggest red flags that I have learned is when, you know, and I'm not saying this is true of everybody, but it's a flag. When I talk to somebody I know, and they consistently, not one off, but they consistently just go, oh, you know, doing better than I deserve. Oh, yeah, nope, just living in God's grace. Oh, yeah, just freshly renewed every day. I've had so many people that have left the church, done terrible things to their families, cheated in business, all these things. And those were the answers they used to give. And I realized I knew that person for four years on Sunday, and I actually didn't know a thing about them. We use that as a cover sometimes. And I've had people who were good men and women who just don't want to put it out there. You know, no, no, I mean, business is going well. I mean, yeah, I mean, sales could be better, but not complaining. And oh, yep, things are actually, we've been successful, but who knows how it's gonna go? And it's just it's tough to get anything out of them. It's like, can you give me a detail? Like, what does that mean? And I think they're playing it off as humility. And this kind of goes back to the beginning of what we're talking about. They don't want to say, dude, God bless us, and we doubled our number this year. Like our business was we were trying to do five million, we did 10. It was amazing, right? They want to be like, you know, we had a great year. You know, let's just let's just leave it at that. Why leave it at that? What does that mean? What's a great year? Did you hit your number? What does that mean? And I think it's because we have a thousand books written on pride, but to my knowledge, there's only one book I know of that's written on ambition in the Christian world: Rescuing Ambition by Dave Harvey. Fantastic book. I don't know of another Christian authored book that's been written on ambition. Pride is the root of all evil, as we know. We are, I think we as Christians are so we put this timidity in front of us as other Christians that we don't in front of non-Christians because we just don't know how it's going to be taken. Are they going to interpret this as pride? Is it pride? I don't know. And we don't have a good lens on what is the proper way to say, I am, we absolutely crushed it. My business is doing amazing. My life, I love my life. I love waking up every day and so blessed to live what this has that we use is this vague Christian knees to play off being humble. And really, all it does is just prevent us from number one, giving proper glory to God. But then number two, having an actual opportunity to connect with somebody. That's what I meant by that.
SPEAKER_00I appreciate that statement. And I would wholeheartedly agree. Humility is one of the most misunderstood words in the church, if you're asking me. And I love, you've probably heard this simple definition of it. Humility is not thinking of yourself less, it's just thinking less of yourself. It's not thinking of yourself less, it's thinking less of yourself. And to me, this was revolutionary when I came to faith because I didn't grow up in the church, but owed a hundred thousanders, you know, in commission sales, a bunch of house fliffs gone bad. And the most remarkable thing I learned from the gospel was that Christ came to serve and not be served. This concept was revolutionary to me. And what I realized in that moment is that I have commission breath and I never smelt it till now. No wonder I'm pushing everyone away with my, you know, gregarious extra nature. I'm focused on me and everything. I'm focused on who can lead to another client. They sense that. We can sense that about people, right? And so when I show up to a conversation, and this is where humility comes in, is it's not about me being, oh, you know, I'm not that great, but you know, if you give me a chance, you would never show up in a sales situation like that. Nobody wants to buy off a salesperson that is like, wow, you have zero confidence. Interesting. And but if we just not talk about ourselves and what we can offer, even if you're insecure, all that imposter syndrome, to me, imposter syndrome is just mislabeled pride. When people say I have imposter syndrome, it's yeah, and you're thinking about yourself. Stop that. This isn't about you. This is about the person who's sitting in front of you. What do they need? Ask them the questions, elevate them. So thinking of yourself less, I mean that's true humility.
SPEAKER_01And imposter syndrome, by the way, just side note, it's a great way to go, like, yeah, I it's not a syndrome, it's just true. I don't feel prepared for this. God, I need you. It's a great opportunity for true humility.
SPEAKER_00I started to see this in in, I don't, I'm not a martial artist, but in the idea behind, you know, something like judo or something like that, where if your opponent is attacking you, they're throwing all their weight into a punch, for example. Are you going to use all your strength to block that? Is that the best approach? Or can you just step aside and use their own momentum to move them past you? The same is true about our adversary, the devil, right? When he says, hey, Steven, you're not good enough. You're not, you don't belong in this room. And on the inside, you're like, oh no, I don't belong in this room. You start making agreements with it. You start thinking, gosh, I better act bigger than I normally am. I better boast or I better act smaller than I normally am. One of those two. It was so much easier in my life when I discovered that I could be like, yeah, I don't belong in this room. It's so much free to be like, yeah, I don't belong in this room, but you don't know my God. And he does wild things, and sometimes he chooses me to do them. So I'm going to show up and see what happens. Let's touch one more topic before we wrap up distraction. Distraction as the enemy of a calling. Tell me a little bit more about why you believe that.
SPEAKER_01Distraction is the number one problem I'm looking to solve in people's personal and professional lives. Because what did so this goes down to the all the way back to the very fall of man? What did the devil do? He just, hey, look at this apple thing. Hey, look at this. You got you got this beautiful garden, Adam and Eve. You got all of God's creation, blah, blah. Yeah, yeah. Look at this thing. Yeah, look how shiny that is. Guess what? There's some cool stuff here. It started with a distraction from God's will. Hey, the one thing that we said not to do. And then where did it lead them? So there's the devil. Doesn't have to prevent you from your mission. He doesn't have to get you to hate God. That takes a lot of energy. It's not I go from loving God to one day I go from hating God. You know, there's situations where that can happen, unfortunately. But the easier path that the devil can do is just be like, oh yeah, are you sure that's what God said? Are you sure that was the thing you were supposed to do? Are you sure he said you weren't supposed to eat from this? Just get you to question it a little bit, then get you, hey, here's a shiny object right over here. Yep, over here. And next thing you know, you're drifting. We are the most distracted generation to ever walk the face of the planet. Depending on where you live, humans interact with 3,000 to 10,000 ads a day. So again, depending on where you live, and that doesn't even sound possible. But then when you think of like, okay, social media scrolling, billboards, books, you know, all like just walking around in signs and all these things, it's like, what is everything trying to get? Your attention. And one of the things that I framework that I've coined is called your teams. So these are your five most precious resources that you invest every single day. And that's your time, energy, attention, money, and soul. And those, so these are all things that we are that we are investing every day that ultimately determine whether you'll be a billionaire, broke, or anything in between that. And what I find is that the things that are vying for our attention oftentimes end up being the things that we spend the rest of our teams on. That's why it's so important. And our attention is such a hard thing to track. So, you know, when you have billion-dollar corporations just on this thing alone that are tweaking every little psychological twitch in your brain to get you to spend just a sliver of that attention on there, they value our attention so much. The question I always love to people is going, do you value your attention as much as that billion dollar corporation does? Because if you did, then we'd probably spend it differently. So that distraction is the the thing, it is the leash that takes us into the direction that we will end up going. And maybe that's toward our destination. Maybe it's not. But in that team's framework, time, energy, and attention, the T, what happens when you multiply time, energy, and attention together? You get focus. So that's where I think it's so important for us to have clarity on what do you want? Because if you don't know what you want, then you can't know what is or is not a distraction. It's just as simple as that. And I give this example because this was one that I didn't realize it at the time, but it was a decision I had to make in my career. One thing that I had to do, the worst distractions are the ones that I call good distractions. The phone is easy. We we know, yeah, we should turn off notifications. That's the easy one, but the good distractions are harder because they are dressed up in something that looks productive. And it's like, well, that is a good thing. I should do that. The reality is we don't know. We don't know if you should or shouldn't until we know what it's driving you towards. And is it what you want? So, two quick examples in my life was this that I had a friend come along and said, Hey, we need this treasurer for this nonprofit. And the nonprofit helped underprivileged kids get access to books. I mean, who could ever be against something like that, right? Great nonprofit. I got to rub shoulders with some very affluent people that were in the city, and I was like, Oh, yeah, you know, it'll be good for my network, all these other things. Supposed to spend an hour a week on it, ended up ballooning to like four hours a week. Then what ended up happening is though, even though I was rubbing shoulders with these people, there wasn't a reason. Like I didn't, it wasn't benefiting me in my role. I was working in a corporation, my accounts, like this woman leading it, was like the wife of the president of the University of Florida. My wife got pregnant with our first child. I'm going through with my first bout of entrepreneurship with a partner while still working my nine to five. And I was just incredibly stressed out. And it just became this point to where it was like I had done this for a year, and I just had to go. I had to, I read the book Essentialism by Greg McCown. Beautiful book. Wow. Unbelievable book, highly recommend it. And I just realized I'm like, I don't know why I'm doing this. This is just a thing that's taking up my time, energy, attention, money, and soul. It's not a bad thing. If anything, it's a good thing. But it's time, I need to step back from this and let somebody else do it and reclaim all that and then put it into the things that matter. And that was huge. And it was a big thing that I did that because then my wife's pregnancy became very tough. She had a condition and she needed more care from me. So if I hadn't cut that out, it would have just made everything worse, along with other things. And then the second thing I'll say is this is a smaller decision. One day I had to decide whether or not I was going to go to this happy hour for work. And I had been to these happy hours before, and they had been good. And I'm very intentional with networking and all these other things in there. I'm not just there, I'm working. And I'm like, this is a great way to potentially get in touch with this SVP, who would probably be the person I'd have to interview with for the next job whenever that was coming. But then I thought about it and I said, I'm actually planning on leaving and starting my own company here in about a year. So should I go to this happy hour? Or is this happy hour a distraction? And could I take that hour and a half to continue to work on my plans? The reality is, a year and a half ago, when I didn't have that plan, that wasn't what I wanted. I wanted to climb the corporate later. That same happy hour was a good decision. It was not a distraction. It was in alignment with what I wanted. But now that same happy hour, a year and a half later, what changed? The happy hour didn't. The people in charge did it, corporate structure didn't. What I wanted changed. And now that I knew what I wanted and I had clarity on that, it was, yeah, this thing that used to be a good thing that was beneficial to my career, it no longer is. So I'm not gonna go.
SPEAKER_00I love the idea of the teams framework. I'm assuming that's in the book as well. Go a little deeper on that. I've heard it said before that before you enter a relationship with Christ, that your adversary, the devil, is gonna true anything in his power to keep you out of the knowledge of Christ. But the moment you've made a decision to follow him and give your life to him, he'll do everything in his power to distract you, dilute you, and burn you out in serving him in a hundred different ways. And so, other than the core intention, the way that God has created the fabric of your being, and that's this whole conversation has revolved around that. Stephen, what's one piece of advice that you would have if you were to see your younger self 20 years ago? You grab him on the shoulders, you look him square in the eyes. What advice do you want to say to yourself? Buy Bitcoin, please.
SPEAKER_01More of it anyway. No, I mean, yes, but also if I was to go back and I was doing that, I'm trying to remember how the saying goes, youth is wasted on the young and wisdom is wasted on the old, something like that. And what I would just tell myself is just get clarity on what you want. I go back and I think about I really started forming some of these ideas, I think when I was like 28, 29, something like that. And man, I go back and I'm like, I made good money when I was 25, 26. I was making, I've made six figures every year of my life since I was 23. And that's coming from a poor family. Nobody in my family had money. So we were the kind of family that when you went out, it was, yeah, you're getting waters and then you know, we're taking leftovers home for the next three days, kind of a thing. But so I just look back at it and I go, man, if I would have just had a little bit more focus on what I wanted, like how much further could I have gotten along? And it's okay that what you want changes in your life. That's why I work off of three-year roadmaps, because anything much longer than that is very likely to change. And that's okay. Who you are at 28 is not who you are at 35. So that's fine. But if you just lived knowing, hey, what do I want? And I'll give a fun example. Maybe 25-year-old and me would have said, Man, I really want to travel more. I don't have kids yet. You know, I'm not tied down. Now's the, I've never been outside the United States. Like, now's the time I want to go do that. If I would have had that level of clarity, it's like I would have been much more intentional in booking trips. Or if I would have said, Yeah, you know, I really want to get a house by the time I'm 28, but housing's really expensive. That's tough. But I know that's an important asset. Well, if I put that down on paper, I would have figured out ways to get it. So I would just say for anybody out there, younger, older, whatever, take time to really, you know, just 30 minutes, just all screens, no distractions, get everything out of the way. To sit down with a piece of paper and a pen and ask yourself the question, what do I want? And if you struggle with that and really figuring that out, then ask this question instead. Ask, what do I not want? Because we know what we don't want. We know the things we don't like to do. And a lot of times that can be a helpful way to kind of start to naturally, you know, work on the clay. We don't know what we're making exactly. So that's what I would recommend to people because I truly believe, and I'll end it with this. The way I know this is this can be powerful is that I had a friend just recently who took my book to a public speaking gig that he had with some college students. And he told me this really cool story. And he said, you know, he goes, I went in there, he said, I just happened to read your book right before I went in. And he said, I went in there to talk to all these kids about what they wanted to do. And he goes, and all I did was change it to what was it they wanted? What did they want instead of what did they want to do? And he said, that changed the entire conversation. And he goes, because that's what we ask college students. What do you want to do? Not what do you want? And the what do you want can change the do. So I thought that I was like, man, it really blessed me because I didn't write that book with that kind of person in mind. But at the same time, I could see how it could have that kind of an impact. So that's what that's what I would encourage people.
SPEAKER_00Just keep more time for us.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, sorry. Not trying to make this an infomercial for the book, but it did just come out. Sorry. It's available on Amazon and really cheap on Kindle if you want a digital copy.
SPEAKER_00Stephen Corson, what do you want? And tell us, you know, if someone's interested in your life builder coaching program, your life builder business, and all your other resources, because you've got a ton of experience with AI as well. Where can someone reach you?
SPEAKER_01LifeBuilder.co is my website. You can get a lot of stuff there. LinkedIn is where I post daily. If anybody's not on there, it's one of the best platforms to do business on. I highly recommend it. Hit me up, love to give you some free tips. And honestly, the thing I love to tell people is that 0.9% of the people that go to my website or connect with me on LinkedIn, I will never be able to work with. I know that. But I am very passionate about putting out content. I have a podcast called Life Builder with Steven Corson. And I have free resources that I've worked pretty hard on that are all on my website. And I do that to serve the 99.9% because so much of this, I can only coach so many people, you know, and I excited to do that. But for the people that go there, check out the free resources section because hopefully there's something there that'll truly serve you and something that you're working on.
SPEAKER_00I love that. I love what you're up to. Guys, Steven Corson, get the book, What Do You Want, in your library as soon as possible. Don't be part of the 92%. That's all I'll say. This has been an honor and a pleasure. God bless you, my friend. We will see you soon.