Welcome to HVAC Success Secrets Revealed, a show where we interview industry leaders and disruptors, revealing the success secrets to create and unleash the ultimate HVAC business. Now your hosts, Thaddeus and Evan.
Hey, welcome back to another episode of HVAC or HVAC Success Secrets Revealed with Thaddeus and Evan, where we have good conversations with good people and any good conversation worth having is worth having drunk in our opinion, today we have on Lilah Jones so Lilah is the head of ISV's and Marketplace Sales, North American at Google. Basically stuff that's on the cloud for those that are wondering that term. She explained it. We don't need to go there.
Keynote speaker, adjunct professional lecturer. I'm happy and excited to have you on in leading up to the show. You're obviously one of the keynote speakers here tomorrow. Super excited to hear your message. Welcome.
Thank you. I am absolutely thrilled to be here. It's 80 degrees, which is so much better than Chicago. Yeah, it was wonderful to get off the plane and be like, Oh, I can take off my jacket.
Yeah. Yeah. I got off and it was sunny. I'm like, Oh yeah, don't need this on. I'm like, I wish I had shorts. We're from Canada. So we get it. Yeah.
We're about the same.
Yeah. So you beforehand you had, obviously you've had a journey into the tech world, but it didn't start there. So walk us through your experiences in working in the trades.
Oh, that's my life. So I was saying earlier that I'm from Milwaukee, which is a very blue collar trade forward town, at least it used to be and I got my start with my family's business. So we were in the collision repair. business, which means that if you cracked up your car, you bring it to us to fix it. And my parents started that business when I was born, so I really watched them be entrepreneurs and build that into a wonderful business.
And so it's interesting how many things are parallel to the ladies in the audience that we have here in HVAC because male dominated industry and very straightforward.
And we'll get into, unpacking the, the feeling in women and all that. But you had a lot of complexities and the challenges that went into working with the family business.
Yes. That is something that I think builds character, a lot of character for me. When I think about some of the challenges of that being on the same page as your parents. Who may have a different idea of what legacy looks like. I always say, when you ever, you have a small business owner, you're always battling with growth or buying the boat growth or buying the boat. Hopefully you have enough funds to be able to do both, but oftentimes you're having. That battle.
It's also interesting when you are running a family business and people are underperforming. How do you manage under performers out of the business when it's your brother? And I actually had that experience where my brother was not showing up for work and just was not engaged. And he's my older brother, too. And I had to which was not a wonderful day. So yeah, those types of things are very unique.
And then also realizing that if you don't do well and you can't meet payroll and you have to either let people go and how many families are depending on you, including your own, Oh my goodness, it's stressful. But at the same time, I have to honestly say those days working in the shop with my dad, or some of my happiest, some of my happiest, so hard to match with any of my corporate experiences.
Why was it such? Why was it your happiest?
Oh my goodness. Because he was, and he's still living but he was just such a powerhouse and he and I were so ambitious and we were on the same page as far as what we wanted to do and how we wanted to do it and so when we got together, it was like fireworks. And we were like, we're gonna do this. We're gonna do that. We're gonna do this. And so we did very well together. We were great partners together. And he did not have that experience working with my brothers.
They were fighting with each other. He and I were working together. And it was so awesome because we would have Thursday night date nights. And whenever you have a business. In a small community, we would go out to Brady street and have our nights together and we'd be talking and engaged. And no matter what, we would always end up with like four or five people at our table who would like chime in and become a part of the conversation. We're like, who are these people? It would be crazy.
Like, Oh no, we bought our car to you. And so it was so awesome being a part of the community. It was so awesome. Enjoying my dad as an adult and as a business partner, that is truly unique. And it was just so much fun, and it felt so good to do so well. So when I got involved with the business, I was able to grow our sales and profitability 20 to 25% and my parents were happy. My family was happy. I was, it was just a happy time.
So transitioning from the happy time, and that's obviously good to have those positive interactions in the business to grow with the ideas, the mindset, the you versus the world mentality that you guys can conquer anything together. But I wrote down fighting and a lot of times we see, a lot of HVAC business owners, they have, it's a family business and not everything is all hunky dory and there is a lot of infighting. There's a lot of other complexities that go on involved in that.
So if somebody is listening to this and they're like Shit, that sounds like my family, there's a lot going on with running the business and trying to manage the family and the dynamics. What do you say to somebody to be able to help reduce the conflict and to be able to have both a successful business relationship and a successful family relationship?
That is a wonderful question. And what I would say is just because people are family doesn't mean that they're good for the business. And being aligned on that fact is probably the first place to start. I used to always say, we're not a catch all. We're a profit business. And so if you're aligned on that, it makes making decisions easier. However, a lot of times you're not aligned on that. And people are there for different reasons.
Either it's to feel important, or to show that they can, or to make up for something, or to get back, whatever it may be. I think, having an honest and sincere conversation with the people in your family, on what is it that they want? So in other words, why are we doing this? Why are we here? What do we want from this experience? And I may want something very different than you. And then how do we help each other? How do we partner together to get that?
It may not be something that we have to do into perpetuity. Maybe for the next year you want to be able to play this particular role. So prepares you for, X or Y. Now I'm saying that now a lot of times it's hard to have that conversation in your family because you don't have that level of credibility. And we're like, Shut up and they treat you like You're a little kid, which by the way, I'm the last of 11 Children, so I am so used to being like, not listened to.
But that doesn't mean that it doesn't work. And so this idea of having an honest and sincere conversation about what are we here for? What are we trying to accomplish? What does good look like? And then who wants to join us for this ride? Just because your family doesn't mean you have to work here. Just because your family doesn't mean that we have to disagree we want to be on the same page.
And so one of the things I wish that we could have done better looking back at my family's businesses, which we could have been a little bit more honest with each other saying, Hey, you know what, I really don't want to do this, dad, I really don't want to be here just because this was your legacy and he inherited it from his father. So it was third, he was second generation, my brothers and I were third generation doesn't mean that I want to be here.
So I would say having an honest and sincere conversation. What does each person want? Each person's their own unique individual and the business is another thing. One of the downsides. I remember about having a family business like that was we could never travel. We always I mean because Body shop is really retail. It's got retail type hours, not the weekends, but you have to be there all the time.
And we never could get to the point where we had enough people to step away at least my father didn't when we were growing up to step away so that we can enjoy just each other as family. A lot of times it's like, I don't want a dad and a boss. I just want a dad. I don't want a brother and a colleague. I just want a brother.
And so being honest about what roles people want to play, and being honest about the importance of the family as a family unit, separate from the business, are all things to have conversations about.
No, and super important conversations to have because it can, if you do it wrong and you Do it the wrong way. And there's not those upfront conversations. There's not that honesty. Guess what? It rips the family apart. And now there's a divide. And I've seen it firsthand with some of my really good friends, it's happened and now they don't have family or business because they weren't careful.
The other thing I might offer up is to make sure and to be cognizant of having experiences and creating memories with your family that aren't transactional. When you've got a core family business like that, everything is around for us. It was the shop. Everything happened at the shop. Everything happened at the body shop, right? It was the center of the family. And when that body shop wasn't there anymore, there was no center.
All of our Interactions were around a transaction, so be very careful to create more depth in those relationships that are not just focused on the, because the business can take it over, right? So that's another thing I might have people think about.
Was your dad good at separating the business from the family?
No. They were not. I'm going to say they, my mom and dad, they were not and not because they weren't great people. They just, they didn't have behavior wasn't modeled for them and so therefore it wasn't even something they were aware of. It was always this belief system around struggle. They had limiting beliefs around what success looked like. They had limiting beliefs around what could be accomplished. And they exacerbated those limiting beliefs and made them even more real.
So no, they didn't separate the two and after a while, you can imagine. Them working together for that long, their relationship wasn't great because they were, they had too much emotional capital caught in the same place and they didn't have enough space for them to each be their own unique individual and run their separate fiefdoms. I feel like they were always power struggling for. Whatever little bit there was fighting for scraps and you're like, just let it go.
And that leads to more fighting, right? So something to consider. I feel like this is therapy. I'm like, they were great, but these are things that happen in family businesses.
And like you said, it was something that they struggled with when they were younger too, right? And as they took it over from their parents and now they're running it, they just practice the same behavior that they were around. So I'm curious as you grew up in it. How did you start to break free from those limiting beliefs?
Going deep. Well, Oprah, when I was five, no, I actually did not want to have anything to do with the business. I appreciated the things that I learned about it. But when I was around 18, 19, I was like, you know what, I'm done. I don't want to be here. I don't want to fight over this. I don't know anything else, but this, because you can imagine you don't have a summer job at McDonald's. You're working at the shop, right? Everything's there. I really wanted to go and do my own thing.
I wanted to do my own thing and I did that for a little while. And then I went back and as an adult and I helped my dad out because he asked me to, and that was different that was different. He was like, I need you. And I was like then we got to change a few things.
And he was open to that, but the way it formed my opinions was first off, I was like, I don't want to be an entrepreneur because if an entrepreneur means I can never take my kids to Disneyland because I can never not be at the said place, then I don't want to do it. I was actually very anti family business. I was like, this is not something that I want to recreate for my family. I just don't I prefer to work for corporate America and have that experience.
Now, I didn't know anybody else, I didn't know anybody else working for Corporate America. When you work in a small town like Milwaukee, and you're in the trades, everybody you know is in the trades. All your friends you went to high school with, went to college, whatever, their dads are roofers or their dads are in the trades. Everybody's in the trades. So I didn't have any role models who weren't in the trades.
None. And I'm not talking about like teacher or fireman or firewoman or anything like that. I'm saying, just, I didn't have any. Any behavior I could model that was in corporate America, but I knew one thing. I was like, I want to live in a big city. I want to have an awesome boyfriend. I want to make a lot of money and I want to travel as much as I can. That's what I want. that was it. I didn't know how, but I remember thinking that's what I want.
And so it informed me to want to live in a different way and to have different experiences as I was growing up.
Why was that what you wanted?
A, I wanted freedom. having a family business is like. Awesome. But it's also like a noose around your neck. You can't have a bad day and not have feedback on it or let, be sitting down for dinner and hear what I could have done better during X, Y, Z, even if you live in different places, right? It just never leaves you and so that, that feedback while immediate. Sometimes not as helpful.
I also couldn't like go out and party because everybody knew everybody and so if I would go out and used to hang out at this place called Elsa's in Milwaukee, which is still there. And if I was like, over served like my dad would know about it before the next morning. And he'd be like, so did you have fun last night? You're like, dude, seriously? Really? Anyway. So I wanted to have a little bit of space and freedom from that. I also wanted to have my world be bigger.
I felt like my world was very small, right? I was doing everything and A couple square blocks. Now sometimes that's just a city that you're from, but I wanted my world to be bigger. I wanted to have different inputs and a different experience and so for me, that meant a doing something bigger than what my family had done, not bigger, different, and just being in a bigger city, having more and different. inputs and outputs.
There's a few things that I wrote down here. One of like birds of a feather flock together, right? And that's one thing that I thought of when you're talking about, you, that's the only thing that you know. So if you want to, if a person wants to break free of their, their belief or their family or whatever, and they want to find a different flock, but they don't know where to start. Where do they go? What do they do?
That's a great question. I think, for me, it wasn't easy. It's incredibly hard to break out of that flock. Why? Because there's safety in that flock and even though it's not perfect, you know it. So when you're thinking about going, and I like to say swimming upstream. Like everybody's swimming downstream. I want to turn around. I want to go the opposite way. The number one thing it takes is courage.
Having the courage to say, A, I'm going to do this and then B, once you, you have that courage, you have that will to do so, follow your curiosity. Oftentimes in family businesses, you're not following your curiosity. You're following a road map that's already there. So follow your curiosity. What's that thing that's unique about you? I would say become more introspective and understanding how are, what are my strengths? What is my jam? What do I really enjoy?
And once you get crystal clear on that and also knowing what kind of life do you want to live? I remember thinking when people would give me advice back then. They would say, Lilah, I've already been where you're going. I've already done what you're going to do. You should listen to me because of blah, blah, blah and I remember thinking, if you don't have the results that I want, I'm not going to listen to you. If I want a great plumber, I'll call you.
But if you don't have the results that I want in the life that I want in the lifestyle that I want, then I'm probably not going to listen to you. And so having that courage and conviction to say who does have the life that I want, first off, what life do you want? People say, I don't like this. What do you want? I don't know. What life do you want? Who do you know who has? Now at the time, I didn't know anybody, so I had to widen my circle. How did I widen my circle?
By following my curiosity around Sales around marketing around, I was in university and that's a great way to do it. It opens up your experience, but to be honest with you the way that I made the transition I've never talked about this before was working at my dad's shop running things and then I decided okay. It's time to do something different I didn't have a job. I just moved to a new city I was like, I don't know what I'm doing. I'm just gonna move to a new city. Very difficult.
No community. No coverage. No money for a very long time. But that's okay. And I met people, and I was in the city. I was like, if I get, I was in Chicago. If I get there, something will happen. And I met some folks, and sure enough, and it was like at a conference like this, they said, you know what? You've got a great personality. And I said thank you. They're like, you should go into tech sales. And I'm like, what's tech sales? They're like, you know, where you sell like software.
I'm like, what do you mean? What do you mean like software? And they're like, like the stuff like you, but at that time, phones weren't where they are now. And so we're just going mad. I was like, yeah, sure. Never heard about that. I have no idea what they're talking about. But we exchanged cards because we were exchanging cards back then. And we stayed in contact. And I built my network from there. And sure enough, that's where I landed.
Having the courage to be bold and to do something different and to give yourself space to be exposed to something new something I'd highly recommend but you have to have an idea of what you want.
Well encouraged to be bold it's the theme of the women in HVACR right now is go bold, right? That's right and they have the I don't remember what the bold stands for it's an acronym that they have But it's stepping outside that comfort zone, right? That's really what it is and if you can step outside that comfort zone, I think you're going to achieve greatness and phenomenal things.
And One of the things that you and I wrote down gold flecked and then you went on a very wonderful tangent about spreading I'm like, I'm not gonna do that justice is repeating it how you said it But when you have the courage to be bold and in this is part of what you're also transitioning why you're doing You know the speaking circuit in empowering Girls and women so walk us through well first off use the Goldflex sentence because that was money.
It's called the Goldflex. Now it's been coined. It's the Goldflex. Yes. So I call it my mission and purpose. So my purpose is all around living a life that is filled with joy, fulfillment, awe, and happiness. That's it. That is absolutely my purpose. And now when I think about my mission is to use. My gold flecked, crystal infused, sandalwood pixie dust to share with girls and women. that they have the opportunity to accomplish anything.
So I share my gifts through speaking, teaching, lecturing and any platform I can, that can give hope to those who need it.
So it's amazing, right? And like, when you think about the spreading that hope and spreading the courage, I think more people need to hear those messages more people need that hope. They need some positivity for them to believe in.
Walk us through a little bit in terms of the, obviously, specifically HVAC, traditionally male dominated, obviously the rise of females is happening, and it's coming, and they're there, and they're absolutely wonderful individuals that are in this trade, and this is what I love about this event and this conference, is that there are some phenomenal individuals that are here. Walk us through the feeling. But being a woman in a male dominated industry.
Well, it can be very lonely. I remember when I was working at my dad's shop and people would come in with a wrecked car and I'd say, I'm going to help you today. And they go, yeah, right. where's the guy who's going to come and help me? Do you actually know what you're talking about? And I'd be like, Let's see. Why don't we proceed and if I need help, I'll get it. How about that?
And having the chutzpah, and then maybe people don't know what that means, but having the courage to be able to manage that and manage that energy is something that while we can do it and we can pound on our chest and say, yeah, you can do anything you want to me and I'll come back kicking. It still leaves an imprint on us. Why? Because words have power and that power is energy that you absorb from other people.
And over time, it can do one of two things, in my opinion, make you feel like you have to change yourself to be successful. So I have to put on this male bravado, which is not even male. It's just what has been sold to us as male in order to be successful. I've got to change myself in order to be successful here. And I love to quote, if you ever Mulan, where when she was pretending to be a man. or boy in the army, she wasn't as powerful as when she just let it all out and said, this is who I am.
And then all those good things came to her. Similar. When you feel like you have to change yourself, and I always say, dress different, talk different, pretend you're into things you're not really into just to fit in, you're less powerful. You're not stepping into your complete self and so that feeling of it's okay to be authentic. Because, sister, your true power is in your authenticity. It's in your feminine, divine energy that you have. And let's celebrate that. Let's not hide it.
Let's not hide it. Let's make it front and center. That means wearing whatever you need to wear to be bold. Do that. I was talking to a group of financial services ladies just the other day, and I was talking about being think I was talking about colors or something like that. And everybody was like, I'd only wear black. I'm like, where did you get that from? Where did you get that from? That's what all the guys wear who work in this industry. And we need to fit in.
And I'm like, and are you in your authentic, beautiful power, feeling amazing when you're wearing black? Or do you feel invisible when you're wearing black? And they're like well, I feel invisible. So stop doing it. That's an example. So little things like that are very important because they slowly chip away. They slowly chip away at us. They slowly chip away at us. And that.
Usually can lead to things like burnout, isolation, feeling less than, all kinds of implications come from that over time. And so what I intend, my intention and my goal for women and girls is to know that It is okay to be you. You can choose to do whatever you want. You can write your own ticket to do whatever you want.
It's typically your own limiting beliefs and thinking and having vocabulary that is, I'm required to, I have to, I'm being told to versus things like I have the opportunity to, or I get to, or I'm excited to. Little things like that. which can be tweaked, can have a huge impact on your experience. The goal is to live a happy, fulfilled life every single day.
Now, maybe you don't get there every single day, but a lot of us aren't getting there every single month, or not even having that feeling over the, last couple of years. And so, the idea is, again, stepping into your power, stepping into that feminine greatness that you have being yourself having the courage to say this is who I am. It's fantastic. And I'm going to be successful no matter what, because there is no one way to look at success.
Everyone's going to be hard says who those limiting beliefs I talked about with my parents. She struggle says who, what if we change that? So I'll get off my soapbox, but that's the intent.
And it's funny because that's something that the last show that we had or the last conversation we had with Amberley that she talks about was choose happiness. she's in a wheelchair, she's paralyzed on the waist down and she almost had her love and her passion of riding horses taken away from her, but she got back on the horse. She still rides competitively today. Fantastic story. Highly recommend checking it out. Choosing happiness every single day.
It's such a gift and it's an opportunity and we're surrounded by negativity all the time. It's up to ourselves and the conversations we have ourselves in a mirror to choose happiness on a daily basis. When you have had those little things chip away at you. Over and over and over and over. What were some of the strategies that you went to build yourself back up and feel that joy again and feel that light again?
Great question. there were so many things. I'm always like life hacking, like how can I optimize here? How can I optimize there? But if I had to say the thing that was most impactful, which I'm going to talk about in my. Keynote is making space for what I call my own personal offsite. So in corporate America, people often will have an offsite. They'll say, Hey, we're going to get together. We're going to go and talk about last year's results and our mission for next year or whatever it may be.
And it's very common to do those on a relatively consistent basis, especially when you're in different levels of leadership. And I remember thinking like, wow, that's cool. And I got the idea from a book that I read that talked about doing your own. So this idea of taking every three months, take three hours, drive three hours away and spend time thinking about. You spend time thinking about how are you doing against your goals?
How are you showing up spend time thinking about your lineage who your grandparents? What did they do? What was their story? What was challenges they faced? What about your great grandparents? Do you even know who they are? Do you know their names? Do you know their story? Do you know how it impacts you? How have you been showing up the last couple of months? How close are you to that vision you created for yourself versus not? Where are you in the life stages? Are you in the doldrums?
Are you in the go for it stage? Are you in the stage where you're cocooning and disengaging? Where are you there? And so this time where you're not with friends, you're not with family, you're not doing Netflix and chill. You're not taking in all the sites. You are literally just sitting and reading or working on these prompts that help you meet you. Because over time, all that chipping away and all that changing, you start to not recognize you.
So this idea of reintroducing yourself to Lilah, reintroducing yourself to who you are, so that you can actually figure out, what do I want to do? What do I, how do I want to be? How do I want to show up? How do I want this next 90 days to go? And what do I need to help me get there? Not as a parent, not as a daughter, not as a wife, not as all these different roles that we play, but what do I need to help me with what I want to realize over the next nine days?
The other thing is, what can I let go of? Women are. Really bad. Sometimes with delegating, it's got to be perfect. It's got to be perfect. Perfection. I don't think that's just women. I know the woman's side, so that's the only one I can speak to. But that idea of, it's got to be perfect, which I believe is really just procrastination. But what can you let go of? What is no longer serving you? What are you doing right now? Doesn't give you joy.
You're doing it because maybe you believe you need to be or who knows, but what can you let go of to give yourself more time so that when you are with your family and friends, you can have this carefree timeless experience where you're present versus thinking about all the things you should be doing. So that's a very long answer, but I do that now. So every quarter I take time off.
From work, from friends, from husband, from all these, from, I meant to say my mom because my mom lives with us, which is a whole nother story. But I take time away from everybody. I just poof, I'm gone. And I don't go and, again, just sit in a hotel room and look at movies. But now that I've been working on this, I have my own practice where I'll do things like writing a letter to myself 20 years from now, or sitting down and writing out.
In five year chunks, every transition I've made since I've left my parents house, and then reading it to see where there's trends. Really cool stuff. That's how I might answer that.
Have you ever written your own eulogy?
I have not. That's a deep one. I've heard.
Yeah, I've done it once. And it was.
It's an emotional experience.
Yeah. It was a truly emotional experience when I wrote it and it was just like, wow. But it completely changed my life at the time. So for the better.
Phenomenal. I'm so happy you mentioned that. I've heard about it and forgot about it. And you just reminded me.
So build that into your next 90 day one.
I like it. Yeah.
Do you ever take longer periods of time when you reach a longer milestone? So breaking down the year into quarters. And then when you get to that annual one, do you take a longer period?
I do. I do. And so I don't just go three hours away. I actually sometimes will go to completely off site places that take forever to get to. And it depends on what I'm working through or what I'm working on and what time I have. If I don't have a lot of time, I might, I live in Chicago. I might just go to St. Joseph's, which is 75 minutes on a train. I don't happen to have a car and I, I've only got Friday, Saturday, Sunday, that's going to have to do.
But if I can build in a longer period of time, I might go to Big Sur where they have something called Esalen Institute, which is phenomenal. You can Google it. And there you get a chance to do deeper work, right? Where you get to understand different things about yourself and for me, it's all about understanding that inner self. Cause I've spent forever managing the outside part. I've spent forever knuckling my way through things. I've spent forever, taking that kind of. left brain.
I'm just gonna muscle through it and make this happen. And I haven't really co created and leveraged my feminine energy as much because I didn't even know about it. I didn't even realize it existed. And so now that I do, I try to make sure that I'm I am deploying her.
That's so cool.
We do have the gala tonight. And in the essence of your time, we thank you first off for joining us here this evening before the gala. We do have your website written down lilahjones.com in case somebody wants to check that out. It's up on the screen. We'll put it in the show notes for after and there's your contact info and everything on there about you and who you are, if they want to get in touch, ask questions they can do through the website.
But before we do wrap up, we do have one final question here for you, Lilah.
I feel like this is going to be a really good answer. No pressure.
What is one question that you wish people would ask you more, but don't?
What are you most afraid of?
What are you most afraid of?
That I'll have regrets. That I will miss an opportunity to live fully and regret it and not have an opportunity to do it again. So yeah, I'm afraid of that. And that actually inspires me to, again, try to be as present as possible. One of my practices is I write down every morning five things I'm grateful for, at least. So that I don't miss it because I'm aware of how short time is. I am super aware of it.
And I'm afraid that I'll miss something important because I'm distracted and that I'll regret it.
I'm glad that you went in with how you can overcome some of that because what was going to be one of my follow ups is, how do you manage that? How do you mitigate that from creeping into the mindset all the time?
So I'm going to go back to something we mentioned before we started recording, and this is important for me. It may not be important for everybody else, but it's important for me. One of the things that I made the decision to do a couple of years ago was to break up with alcohol. I did not have a super healthy relationship with alcohol. My body certainly was like, this is a one sided relationship. We need to break up. In doing so.
It helped me to make space to actually feel joy, to actually feel and witness and experience joy and by that, I mean to know like in the moment, like this is happening. This is happening. This is happening. And I am super aware of how important this is. And I'm super present. And it's almost like reading a story, but you're in it and it's like real time. So for me, being and working on and not having things that make me fuzzy, not having situations where I'm fuzzy and I'm not tuned out.
If you're old enough, you can remember when you said the rabbit ears and maybe your grandmother or grandfather used to make you like stand in a certain spot. So you could get television You can get the right signal. For me, I had a lot of things that were clogging my signal. One was alcohol, the other one was stress. Not understanding the relationship between sleep and performance.
Not understanding the relationship between having too many things on your calendar and too many things in your day and never letting your nervous system rest so that it can say I'm present. overstimulated all the time. And I don't just mean with caffeine, overstimulated with stuff and people and things and So making space, getting rid of the fuzz and having practices and rituals that are not, that allow my nervous system to relax. I'm so grateful for it, and I want that for everybody.
That's a good answer. I like it.
I told you it'd be good. No, it's, and then, and I liked how you prefaced that as well, where you said, this is what works for me. It may not work for everyone. Yeah. Which is true because not everything is supposed to work for everyone. But when you do some of those practices that you do talk about in terms of taking time to pause and think and reflect, that's when you can uncover what most of these things are.
And the interesting thing is that a lot of times we already know What it is that we ought to do, and yet for some reason it gets in the way,
I believe it's because we don't, and again, I mentioned this earlier. We don't have the behavior modeled for us, right? We don't have the behavior model. We listen to advertising. We see commercials. If you look at a movie, do you know how many times they pick up a glass of wine and movies slowly saying to us, we need to drink. It's everywhere. All these things are everywhere. And once you become aware of it, you're like, Oh, my gosh, no wonder. I had these things.
It's been programmed into me like math was, right? No one and you still don't know what the square root of pi is, but it's been programmed. So having the behavior model, that's another one of the areas that I seek to inform with my choices is to model the behavior. So when I'm at events or if I'm at a corporate event or when I'm engaging with women, I say, you don't have to stay out and do all these things. It's okay to say, Hey, I turned to a pumpkin at eight o'clock. It's okay not to drink.
Okay. You don't have to drink just because you're at this event, you could choose not to. That is absolutely okay. I can't tell you how many people are like, well, I'm not drinking because, I don't need to know. I don't need to know. It's fine. Anyway modeling that behavior, to me, is one of the things that's super important.
So if we could have more people who become stewards of this lifestyle of being present, this lifestyle of being mindful, this lifestyle of saying it's not either or, you can be successful in everything you do and still be mindful and take care of yourself. Mhm. Then it's possible. The last thing I'll share is certainly in corporate America, we glorify stress and working past your limits. People have to say, I don't know how this person sleeps. They're just so amazing. It's so much done in a day.
I'm like, stop glorifying that. Stop glorifying a lack of balance. Stop celebrating that. Let's start celebrating balance and saying, hey, this person is effective and they spend four weeks out of the year vacationing in Bali. That's normal. The other stuff isn't. We could change that. We could choose as a society to say, this is what normal is and so that's what I seek to inform.
The vacation part of things is huge. Like what is it? Over 50 percent of individuals in North America don't use all of their vacation time. The average vacation time is two weeks in the year, the fuck, give me six, right? Like I like my time off to be able to recharge. And I think a lot more people need that time to recharge. They just don't realize it.
Oh yeah. Again, and they don't have it modeled. Everybody says well, you know, you can't be, really? And then one day you wake up and you're like, all that stuff didn't matter. None of that mattered. All that effort. I was just proving that to myself. And guess what? I don't need to do that to prove anything to myself. I believe I can have success and greatness with ease. Who said it had to be hard, right? Who said that? Why? And why do we believe it.
It's the other ones of the business owners that want to say I'm doing this for my family and that's why I work 80 hours per week. What if your family didn't want that? What if your family wants you?
Very good point. I will say, and I became aware of this maybe three years ago, that for me, working hard and achieving was a way to. suppress trauma. Cause if I could be successful and do all these things that I didn't have to deal with, whatever it was, I didn't want to deal with that was lingering in the back. And we all got stuff that we're not dealing with that's lingering. You may not even be conscious of it.
Because you've just filed it away, but sooner or later your disc or your drive is going to defrag and that stuff's going to come back out. But I realized, I was like, I've been working so hard and so endlessly so that I could prove that I could do it. Because I was the youngest of all these kids. I decided to go off and do my own thing with no help. And so I had to prove everybody, Oh, brother and sister, I'm the horse you should have bet on because I'm going to go make this happen.
And that was all just based on. Being competitive and all these other things. So yeah, sometimes all of that is simply to repress. Probably another talk.
There's right. Hey, look, we're at 40 minutes. We could probably go for another 60 minutes on top of what we've already done. So but again respectful as the time so thank you for taking the Evan Did you have any other final thoughts?
Thank you for being a bright shining light No, literally you're like a ray of sunshine, it's fantastic you so much, joy.
Thanks for listening. I feel like I've just been randomly going here.
So it was on definitely on purpose. We appreciate you taking the time to sit and chat with two Canadians in Jacksonville, Florida. Yes. And until next time.
Awesome. Cheers, everybody. ClinK.
Well, That's a wrap on another episode of HVAC Success Secrets Revealed. Before you go, two quick things. First off, join our Facebook group, facebook.com/groups/hvacrevealed. The other thing, if you took one tiny bit of information out of this show, no matter how big, no matter how small, all we ask is for you to introduce this to one person in your contacts list. That's it. That's all. One person. So they too can unleash the ultimate HVAC business. Until next time. Cheers.