Jeremy Weisz
We will go detail on this and we won’t go there yet. But if you can relate to this, anyone out there can relate to this. Steve was a burned-out entrepreneur who had a wall, okay. He has lived this for a long time and this is the same thing he used for himself. And he wanted to bring this to other people. So they didn’t have the experience that hopefully or if they have taken them across that chasm, but can you talk a little bit Steve about some of those inner what are the most common interferences so people because first is probably recognizing there’s interference when you were pushing through everything and burning out You didn’t even recognize all these interferences?
Steve Adams
Yeah, well, the most common one that you see with people who are achievement or oriented goal oriented is they simply do not know how to manage stress. And we have something called an autonomic nervous system, which is like the peripheral branch of your central nervous system. And that’s the that’s the system that’s keeping us into something called homeostasis, which means balance. And so it’s monitoring your environment. And the problem we have as humans is that unlike animals, you know, there’s a really catchy title to a book that says, Why zebras don’t get ulcers. Oh, yeah, by Robert sapolsky at Stanford, and animals are one to one with their environment, you know, they the lion chases them, they go into flight or fright, you know, and they go do their thing, and then they get away and then they can lay down and rest like a dog. You know, our dog gets worked up when the doorbell rings and then he shakes and then he’s good. Well, humans aren’t like that. We, we have this ability that is unique to us, and that is consciousness and so We, we can think about something in the future or we can ruminate about something that we did or did not do in the past. And we can create the same bodily responses boss was about to run over us. And so that’s the one of the most common and our first program really gets to the core of that through something called heart rate variability training where we are able to teach someone how to, first of all, experience balance, maybe they haven’t experienced in a long time and that now they know what it feels like to be in balance. And so when they are stressed, they notice it and then they can self regulate back out of it. And Jeremy, it has amazing long term health impact because people that have chronic what’s called sympathetic tone, meaning they’re always in flight or fright. That’s correlated with something called poor HRV heart rate variability and that leads to Nine of the 10 leading causes of death in North America. Well,
Jeremy Weisz
yeah, I mean, I was reading anyone I suggest go to Tigerneuro.com. And then they have a process or process and I was reading through that, see, and the first step you call it a baby step would be for me that would be not not a baby step. I don’t know, but I’ll tell you why. But you have the HRV and the sleep optimization. I that’s the number one thing I am horrendous at. I am amazing at diet and other aspects of health. I am absolutely terrible with sleep hygiene. Okay. And by the way, the HRV I have just to piggyback on that. I’ve done a program where I don’t know if it’s similar, but I was actually strapped into a computer and was trying to monitor you know, keep my heart rate at a certain pace. Like it was like a program that was was actually monitoring if I if I’m good at or not. So I’m really curious on the heart rate variability. But the sleep part for me would not be a baby step I’ve been I don’t know how. So I guess. managing stress is where I wanted to go. How do you manage stress? Or how do you get someone like me to change their habits around sleep?
Steve Adams
It’s not an insignificant amount of work. With sleep, it’s mainly an attitude. Our North American culture is, especially in the US is very much oriented around. That’s the first thing that gets compromised when they’re busy. And actually, it’s actually your number one to do every day is to make sure you get good sleep, because an hour invested in sleep is going to get you more than trying to extend your productivity an extra hour. You know, and I won’t we won’t go into all of it. Now I’m writing a book right now, you know, it’s gonna have a lot of this research, but there’s some very bad things that happen to you physiologically cognitively terrible things.
Jeremy Weisz
Terrible things. And I know that and I still do it.
Steve Adams
Right? It’s about education. Yes, we educate people on what’s happening inside in their body when they sleep well, and when they don’t, and that usually convinces them and motivates them to change.
Jeremy Weisz
What’s the best story that you could tell me to convince me to do it? I need to hear like a terrible story. I’m sure there are other people like me who are just sacrifice sleep sometimes. And so I don’t know if there’s a story that sticks out like just a scary story of someone who just did not get sleep for a prolonged period of time. Well, yeah,
Steve Adams
I’ve got a real scary one. I have a friend. I won’t name who I’ve known for 25 years in this. I’m just going to keep it gender neutral and everything. So we protect their identity but this person would fall asleep. You know? Maybe for 30 minutes at 730 in the evening you know watching a TV show go to bed at 10 wake up at 2am not be able to go back to sleep and he did that 25 years and he never I guess I blew it I said he was a he but he he never addressed it never sought help for it. And now he is 70 he’s in his 70s and he is in a full he’s he’s in a full dementia care with all well so poor sleep is highly correlated with onset of Alzheimer’s and dementia is because when you don’t get the the right sleep, the right quality sleep within the sleep cycles. there’s a there’s a cellular and neural cleaning process that happens at night that doesn’t. And so you’re just you’re just you’re you’re playing Sleep Should we go National Sleep Foundation says eight hours of sleep opportunity so that you can get roughly with a 80 to 85% sleep efficiency you can get about six to six and a half hours of actual you’re out you’re sleeping okay that’s the goal and so what we do we start simple with people we we outfit them with an aura ring and their coach is seeing not only their sleep total there’s maybe I need to buy one today. Yeah, serious. Yeah. And we can help you with that because we have a team coaching dashboard and, and we we teach you how to self regulate off your own data.
Jeremy Weisz
That’s really cool. That’s what you recommend aura ring.
Steve Adams
I do because it gives you really three slices of data. You get heart rate variability, you get morning readiness, and you get sleep data and we teach our clients how to modulate their output both in exercise and then work based on their readiness. scores.
Jeremy Weisz
Hmm, that’s really cool. Um, so what else about managing stress? How can people better manage stress?
Steve Adams
Well, I, you know, it’s really two things. It’s, I think it’s three things. One is, you know, you got to optimize your your health, your physiology so that you’re more resilient to handle it. You have to optimize your sleep, because we all know if we get a bad night’s sleep the next day, an issue is 10 times bigger than if we’re rested. Okay, you I’m sure you’ve experienced it too. And then yeah, really mastering heart rate variability is learning. We teach people how to do breathing exercises, deep state of coherence. And just a personal example. My HRV scores probably 40 or 50% higher than it was just three years ago. And the that correlates to longevity.
Jeremy Weisz
I’ve had Wim Hof on the podcasts. I don’t know if you’ve looked at Wim Hof stuff, but he’s like the, they call him The Iceman. And he does some. I mean, he really specializes in like cold exposure therapy, but he does some breathing techniques too. And it’s amazing the effects of just not even long term, but short term effects that you realize right away from doing those things anyway. Yeah,
Steve Adams
I think one of the things that we would have tried to do is say, okay, I’ve spent the last 25 years trying to be a peak performer. And people like us are super busy. And they’re there literally are dozens of experts in every domain that we try to work with at tire neuroscience. What we’ve done is we’ve reduced it down, simplified it and came up with a way for people who are busy to implement new habits in a simple, easy way.
Jeremy Weisz
Yeah, I mean, you have professionals, entrepreneurs. biohackers. Talk about you did some work with Penn State coach.
Steve Adams
Yeah, it was a fun story. Patrick Chambers is a great guy. He has been a division one basketball coach for many years. He was at Villanova for many years. And then the last nine seasons at Penn State and I met him out of a story and I’m sorry, if you hear a mower, somehow your front lawn service showed up.
Jeremy Weisz
That always happens when you’re right in the middle of an interview. Yeah, it’s gonna be someone like blowing leaves outside. So it’s not too bad.
Steve Adams
Yeah. So coach chambers had a tough thing happen on national TV the year prior, where you kind of lost control with one of his players. And I met him the following summer and he just said, you know, I’m, I’m struggling with this. I don’t have the control that I want. And then it leads to me not teaching my players I end up yelling at them. So in effect, he was interference for his players. Hmm, that Makes sense. Yeah. So we started working with him in August of last year and, and we really focused on heart rate variability. And and as he got into the season, the he noticed that there was a bigger space between what he saw on the court and how he reacted. And, and you know, I just interviewed him today, yesterday for my book. And in what he said the biggest thing was it gave me emotional control. You gave me a sense of calm and inner strength and resilience. And so as the game is unfolding, I was able to walk into the huddle during games and be very calm each effectively and my players fed off that and so they knew they didn’t need to look over their shoulders anymore. They could just play. And you know, I’m not gonna sit here and claim we’re the reason for this only but they went from a losing record last year two, they had their winning season in a decade this year. With the same players as last year, and they would have made the NCAA tournament, but it got canceled.
Jeremy Weisz
what I hate about the story is I went to Madison. And so as a Badger fan, I don’t like that you’re improving the Penn State program, but that’s totally cool.
Steve Adams
Fan, so,
Jeremy Weisz
Okay, there you go. But yeah, it makes me think of like, you know, being in Chicago, Phil Jackson, he always sees kind of like Zenn LA, you know, people call him like the Zen master and that’s kind of the what he embodied. Right.
Steve Adams
And that’s all it was for Coach shamers he is a brilliant basketball coach. He understands the game but this one aspect of his life was getting in the way and creating interference with players and so we’re able to resolve that
Jeremy Weisz
Hmm, that’s really cool. Um, the and then there was a top copywriters you work with, and talk about that for a second.
Steve Adams
Yeah, we’ve got a guy named Kevin Donlan. He, you know, he’s very effective calculator. He has been doing it for over 1520 years. And he went on our program about, I don’t know, four or five months ago. And what he said to me was, you know, you know, we all want to get in the zone all right that time when we’re at our best feel our best and we’re doing deep work like the author Cal Newport wrote about in a book the same title. And he said my ability to get into flow state and to do deep work and write my best work has expanded like threefold since I went on the program. Wow, is that because a part of what we do is also called neurofeedback, which is a brain training program where we optimize the electrical firing in the brain. And the thing that makes us unique in that regard is there’s a lot of people doing neurofeedback, not many people integrate heart rate variability and sleep we look at it as three legs to a stool. Which is the first kind of foundational aspect of a person’s physiology that we got to work on before we advanced them into our other programs?
Jeremy Weisz
You know, it seems like that’s kind of step one, which is synchronize and you’re doing kind of brain training and autonomic nervous system trading,
Steve Adams
right? So synchronize is really step one, that the, the baby step is just for folks who may be ready to step all the way in and get months, you know, but the synchronized program on our website is really all of that it’s sleep. It’s HRV. And it’s neuro
Jeremy Weisz
because really what you do and now when I was researching it is you take something average performance or even below performance, that’s low value to getting someone in the zone only performance really, right and so that’s kind of the end goal and then some of these steps in between. I was like, What’s that, that for me? That’s not a baby stuff like it should be like, like It should be not baby step but the most important step or something, you know, that’s like this is like baseline like you need to have this before you everything else. Step one is synchronize step two, talk about step two for a second
Steve Adams
is optimized about this. I have a doctor from Los Angeles who worked in Silicon Valley with overstressed burned out techie guys for for many years. Dr. Matt McNamee, he’s a natural Pathak MD and he has a specialty in neuro endocrinology. So he understands the brain, the chemical side of the brain, besides the electrical that we work on. And so after you’ve done this foundational work of optimizing your brain and your autonomic nervous system and your sleep, we offer the second program called optimize and this is a functional medicine program. And so what that format does is he does an in depth, very precision health screen that is a lot more advanced than what you’re going to get No practitioners office. And so we go into things like your genetics, your telomeres, we’re measuring your gut biome, a high level neurotransmitter and hormone test. And what he’s doing is he’s forming a mosaic of information that tells him where you are between health and disease looking at inflammation, oxidative stress and cellular age to assess where you are in those biomarkers pretty cool. And that spectrum and then through research we’ve we’ve built seven habits that if you implement them over time with your all of this stuff is delivered into the home through zoom with a performance concierge who works with you to coach you. We take several months to help build those habits into your life. And so now what we’ve done is we’ve we’ve balanced your autonomic nervous system in your brain and now we’ve optimized your body, your physical health and now That’s puts you in a position where you really are, have the whole package to be able to get into flow states to be in this zone much more than someone who, you know, struggling with weight or with energy or any number of other problems.
Jeremy Weisz
Talk about the seven habits for a second, by the way, like I know on the pockets, I’ve had some of the some of the top health longevity experts and they just one piece of that is is really valuable. Just the telomere piece. Like people say, Well, I think it’s if you shorten your telomeres they say that’s technically reversing aging. Not right. But so they are on the doing research on how do you shorten someone’s telomeres but one where your telomere is at, right if people know are you our baseline, yeah, no you are but those other things people you know, are super important as far as the biome and all like looking holistically at it. But that one piece is fascinating alone. So that’s pretty cool. That you have all of those pieces in in the optimized portion. What more some of the seven habits, the habits are
Steve Adams
HRV breath work. That’s the first one. Okay, you kind of already getting that because you did it in the first program. Second one is my mindfulness practice. So meditation. And we’re not prescriptive on how people do that, because everybody’s different. There’s a million ways to do it. We just say you got to take 20 minutes a day and you got a pattern interrupt, okay. And there’s been over 1400 studies on the benefits of that. The third one is movement. And we start everybody out just walking. Okay, because Harvard did a long term study on walking just 21 minutes a day, you’ll get massive health benefits. The fourth one is performance nutrition. We also keep that radically simple. And we also base it off your genetic profile because Dr. Matt can tell you specifically what’s going to be best for you based on your genetic profile rather than
Jeremy Weisz
just a blanket diet that basically, you know, who it’s working for. Everyone is specific, they have different genetics a different biomes. All that stuff.
Steve Adams
That’s correct. Yeah, we’re really trying to do is get you to stop doing dumb things and do smart things and keep it simple. All right, and then the fifth one is laughingly simple, it’s hydration. So you know, that one’s less work. It’s just, you know, and we have a habit tracker app that will help people, you know, track this stuff. And then, and then another one is called time restricted eating. It’s different from intermittent fasting. There’s a Dr. Panda, you should have him on your show sometime from Salt Institute. He’s got a tremendous research on this subject. I’ve been doing time restricted eating for the last eight weeks and it’s your day. 20 year acid reflux problem well,
Jeremy Weisz
I’ve been doing, I don’t know if you consider intermittent fasting or so for a year. So I’m curious of what the I’m gonna have you talk about the research I only within like a three to four hour period every day so maybe that’s bad but I eat from like 332 eight. That’s every day that’s that’s all the time I eaten
Steve Adams
you know I can’t comment I’m not a physician, you know what the I like time restricted eating? Yeah Tell me about that let’s eat why I like it is with intermittent fasting there’s multiple plans so that automatically adds complexity for our client. Time restricted eating is simply try to eat in about a baseline 12 hour window but what we really suggest is a nine to 10 hour window every day. And so that means stopping eating by a certain time so
Jeremy Weisz
it’s totally doable by the way like pan out you Like eating in an eight hour period is totally doable,
Steve Adams
right? So like mine is ice, we’re done at 5:30pm. And then I do not get any caloric intake until at least 7:30am. And so I do bulletproof coffee. I’m a Dave Asprey fan. Yep. And I do that, and I don’t do it one minute before, because coffee is your first calories. And the reason is, is when you want to optimize sleep and health, you have to optimize your circadian rhythm and your digestive rhythm. your digestive system has a clock just like your brain.
Jeremy Weisz
So the funny thing is, that’s why Steve, I feel like how do you do that? Well, one, I don’t drink coffee. So I don’t, it’s probably easier for me because I can wait until 330 like I don’t drink coffee in the morning, so I just don’t need to do that. Is there any benefit to shortening that or not? I guess so. Like you have 12 hours, 10 hours, eight hours, six hours. Do four hours, three to four hours. Is there any benefits to that? Have you seen the research? the research I’ve seen?
Steve Adams
Excuse me, the research I’ve seen is that at 10 hours, 11 and 10 hours when they take people who aren’t healthy, it seems to really start to have huge benefits. Because remember, most of the culture is eating for 15 hours a day, okay, they’ll start at six or seven in the morning and they’re eating a snack at nine or 10 at night. And what’s happening is, is the restorative repair mechanisms are not happening the way they should. Yeah. So that ends up leading to metabolic syndrome.
Jeremy Weisz
So So do you know if is it better to do shorter?
Steve Adams
Is there a nice Yes, but I’m hesitant on this show to say
Jeremy Weisz
okay, I mean, you know, I won’t hold you to it. I just didn’t know if there’s any research out there saying if you get to like, if you shorten that, or is there is it like, Oh no, like the sweet spots like six because obviously I am asking for selfish reasons because I just do three or four. I’m like, I think I read somewhere I had done a lot of research that this, this caloric restriction and you know, like you’re saying time restricted eating is really super beneficial. It’s a lot of research that shows that To what extent like you have a biohacking category. I wouldn’t say I’m a biohacker. But I definitely am an early adopter with health related things and I will just test the limits of that in a sense. It’s like Well, let’s say I could do okay, they say timers are getting good. Well, let me just do two hours. They’re saying do 12 like
Steve Adams
what happens when I do two hours your typical type A, yo, you know, do they do a five fold over what see, you know, what I have seen in the research is less is better. I haven’t seen how far you can play that. Okay, so happy to find out. I’m curious find out. Yeah, I mean, people are like,
Jeremy Weisz
I can’t even do 10 hours, like, who cares about four but, but when you’re when you’re talking to elite athletes, performers biohackers they’re one the edge like for them if they go, if you said you eat within one hour a day, every
Steve Adams
day they do it. I know, I agree. But we get a lot of people who they want that kind of performance, but it’s a bridge too far to ask him to go from 15 hours a day to go six hour when
Jeremy Weisz
totally, totally. But if you’re talking like, let’s say the coach Penn State coaches like hey, we’ve seen this proven, you know, perfect performance, do what you want to do. The research is showing three hours would like, pick you out. Good luck. The people that want to make the NBA be like, Okay, here we go. I’m meeting three hours in three hour window. Right?
Steve Adams
What the core mechanism that’s happening is, is you’re giving your system a break so that it can restore and the second thing It’s called a toffee G, which is cellular garbage cleaning effectively. And that happens after about seven, eight hours. And so you’re just going longer with that period. But you know, the people that are doing 11 and 10 are getting tremendous benefits because they were getting no a toffee g before our very little of it now. Yeah.
Jeremy Weisz
So what was the seven so we have HRV, mindfulness, movement, performance, nutrition, hydration, time restricted eating.
Steve Adams
So, Dr. Matt, based on his background and your profile, will do targeted supplementation versus just guessing and a lot of it not helping you. So I’ll give you example, my son is a performance concierge in our company. He’s had trouble with focus neurofeedback, eliminated about 80% of the problem is add. We put him through this program, found out he had a couple things his telomeres were extraordinarily long, that’s good, but he had an You know, response deficiency that he found. And he also found two neurotransmitter deficiencies. So supplementation and eating has corrected the immune response as well as his know his matters and now he is like a, he’s just like an elite performer now.
Unknown Speaker
So what kind of supplements do you take? What do you take?
Steve Adams
I take a lot. So I’m in my mid 50s. So I have to take certain things for prostate health. So that’s like a third of them because it’s a cocktail. But I take fish oil. I don’t take a multivitamin. I take official oil. I do. elderberry I’m just trying to think I’m sitting what’s in
Jeremy Weisz
your what’s in your water bottle. Is there like supplements in your water bottle I saw you drinking or no okay.
Steve Adams
No that Oh yeah, this is a probe. prebiotic, God Reek in but I really clean you know, my because of my reflux, that Dr. Matt, have you gone dairy-free, gluten-free. And my wife has put together an amazing eating program for me and cooks for me. And so I really clean so I don’t have to supplement as much as someone who does.
Jeremy Weisz
Yeah, it depends what your diet looks like also depends on what you’re supplementing with.
Steve Adams
But you know, I went from a burned-out guy two years ago I’m running I’m almost up to running half marathons now.
Jeremy Weisz
Wow. So let’s talk about how you why you got into this right Take me back Take me to the place where you’re burned out entrepreneur hit a wall. What did life look like at that point?
Steve Adams
So we, you know, we, I left banking, I was a corporate banker and tellers in my early 30s had a very successful career was a top salesperson, they’re generating a lot of loan volume and but I just, I, you know, the old saying, and our bank was trained the best keep the rest, and so I wanted to leave start my own company at did I signed up for a franchise because I didn’t have my own idea. And I had a vision right away. I wanted to grow to 100 million. And when I was in 1996, and we hit that number eventually. Well, the problem was though, was we, you know, in retrospect, I didn’t have the kind of market like a Chicagoland where I could do all of those stores. So we ended up having almost 50. And so we were in Dallas Fort Worth area, we were in Alabama, we were in Tennessee, Virginia, Wisconsin, up in the Fox Valley area, as well as Michigan. And so I had to travel extensively for a decade, hundred nights a year. And I didn’t know how to manage my stress. I didn’t know anything that we’re talking about today, like four years ago, and, and but I had bought into the psychology of performance. I didn’t understand anything about the physiology of performance. And so I really Ran myself into the ground until the point where the last year or so I lost my passion. I was irritable. My partners didn’t like me very much. I started making bad decisions and poor judgment. And if you’re if you want to know where you are, there’s a thing called the MAS lock survey. And I can get you the link for your show notes or something later, Jeremy or
Jeremy Weisz
Yeah, people can Google mas lock survey.
Steve Adams
Yeah, it’s the gold standard for burnout. And I had them all. And so I just came to the conclusion that based on you know, and as also hurting my marriage at the time,
Jeremy Weisz
I was gonna say that’s what I just wrote down is like, how did I mean the family infrastructure is affected, but it’s also, you know, can provide support but that support starts to crack when you’re on the road. 100 days a year.
Steve Adams
Yes. And my kids by then were graduated from college on their own. So that was good. And you know, and I was around for a lot. It didn’t do long term damage to my family. But, you know, my wife were empty nest and my wife’s home alone all the time. It wasn’t good. And so I knew I needed to make a change. And so I did, and I sold to my partners. And in the middle of all of that, though, I got referred to this neuropsychologist who had neurofeedback and I did his training, and then it just opened me up to all a new world. And I found a passion again. And so when I sold I took eight months off, and all I did was read, read, read and study and talk to this guy. And then out of that started this company.
Jeremy Weisz
That’s pretty amazing.
Steve Adams
Yeah, and I just don’t want anybody else to go through this or at least help people out of it. If they are.
Jeremy Weisz
There’s two things I want to hit on one. It’s it’s amazing what you created. With hitting 100 million dollars, I mean, that’s, I don’t know what the metric is for just hitting a million dollars for a company, it’s probably less than 5% or 1% or something small. So that’s amazing. What advice do you have for someone who really wants to grow their company to that level? Besides don’t burn out? And, you know, obviously, first you need to go to Tigerneuro.com make sure. But what are some of the things that allowed you to grow? Maybe leadership wise or systems wise or hiring wise? What What advice do you have?
Steve Adams
So I, you know, multiple things that isn’t an easy, simple answer. But what I’ll say is you have to be a voracious reader and learner, because if you’re going to grow and adapt and adapt properly, you’ve got to have lots of input. So you got to read a lot. That’s one thing. I read 100 books a year since I was 19 years old, 20 years old. And I’m 56 now. So you do the math. Yeah. Um, the other thing is you really have to dial in your your core value proposition and no because you can’t scale on a weak value proposition to validate that and know what’s good and I had help there because we had a franchise that was validated. And so the next thing is you know, I didn’t do that alone I had two brilliant partners that were real estate guys and I my weakness was real estate I knew operations and leadership and and all of that and marketing I didn’t know real estate so I partner so you’re going to need the partner to do that you’re going to need to build investors know because it is hard to replicate what we built would have taken you know, $40 million cash to get them to have the store asset base. The other thing is, you know, learn leadership you’ve got to understand leadership in you know, and I developed a culture there with the team based off the principles of intrinsic motivation, meaning everybody in the company had to have their own intrinsic motivators to be on the team. And that’s what was going to give us the ability to deliver a Disney like experience in our stores. Couldn’t do that by fi I couldn’t yell at people to do it. They had to come out of their own energy. And we were successful in doing that. You have to you have to know your numbers, you know, and break down because a business it gets that big, you’ve got to break it down into small pieces and isolate the economics of each piece and be able to understand that how it contributes to the whole and
Unknown Speaker
that’s probably enough.
Jeremy Weisz
We’ll talk about thank you for rallying. That’s, you know, it is a big question and topic. What were some what are some of the leadership books that you have read that had been or books in general in business or leadership that you have been some of your favorites, the leadership challenge
Steve Adams
By kouzes and Posner great book on leadership. I really like. Good, great, you know, it’s getting dated now and older, but the concepts are still really good. He’s got to ignore some of the companies. Yeah. The then I like john Maxwell’s leadership work because he takes a squishy, complicated subject, and makes it simple. That’s his gift communicator. And it doesn’t matter that he comes out of the faith community. The man knows leadership. And I’ve used his material for going on 25 years now to train my leaders underneath me
Unknown Speaker
anything about intrinsic motivation?
Steve Adams
Yeah. Well, there’s a really good book by Daniel Pink who poppy writes a layman’s version of it. called drive. Yeah. You know, there’s three things you need to know out of that one is you have to create purpose that everyone aligns with and buys into. The second thing is you have to create a path to mastery for each person in the organization so that they feel like they’re growing. And when you do that, that escalates engagement. And then the last piece is, you have to empower them. So think about it. If you if they’ve bought into your vision, and you’ve trained them up, you got to let them go. And so that was the key for my company. I had store managers, we had converted them to coaches. They were basically life coaches. And we had cashiers writing $5,000 orders. We had anybody in the store could do anything. And we were getting parents, we and we’ve had everybody do their own core values and mission statements, and goals. And we would do monthly we called careerbuilder interviews where we talk about how they’re progressing. And so we would have parents of teenagers ask us, what are you doing with our kid they’re so much more focused and so on. Really what we did was we turned our company into a success training company. And that led to great customer service which led to growth. Yeah. All Out of intrinsic motivation.
Jeremy Weisz
That I mean, I wrote that down and stars on my paper here. I think that’s your next business book whenever you decided to write it. The title could be intrinsic motivation, how you go from zero to 100 million dollar company. There’s your subhead in your title. Possibly, I think in book titles, Steve, for some reason. That’s really cool, because that’s really what almost seems like it’s the core center of it. Because you can’t do that alone. You need everyone to help. And you also need everyone to have an intrinsic amount of motivation, like an outside Corvallis. They need to have like this intrinsic motivation to actually do it.
Steve Adams
I agree. You can’t motivate anyone consistently from the outside. They’ve got to do it themselves. And I’m not So against the superstar CEO kind of thing, it doesn’t really exist. It’s great companies are built where everybody’s bought in.
Jeremy Weisz
Is there anything you know, with that process? Like you said, you had a sales training company is masked as like pet supplies or whatever? What are success trainer? Yeah, success training? Um, what are what’s another aspect of success training that someone in their own company be like, what else should they do? What else should they implement? Where should they start and that success training?
Steve Adams
Well, you know, one area that this is self serving to me, but I’m really mean this program is called maximize, and it’s not on the website yet
Jeremy Weisz
because we’re gonna it is on the web. It’s on Step three, Max. Well, it says flow state training. Yeah.
Steve Adams
The so what that’s about is, is you know, and we have it Step three, because you need to have the other stuff out of the way first, to be able to do it consistently. But the concept is, you can engineer flow and be your life. It’s trainable, it’s highly researched. And there are triggers things like autonomy and the challenge. The challenge, skill, balance, risk, different areas you can. So I’m going to bring it back to your question is a company of a leader of a company who wants to create a culture that wins can engineer this stuff into their company, not only their own lives, but they can engineer it into how they structure how people work. So one of the examples is the I have three people that work for me, we’re a small company right now. But all three of them have total autonomy in their schedule. I said, you can get up when you want. You can go to bed when you want. You can work when you want, you can go, I encourage them take an hour a day and go do something they really love outside of work. Because there’s pattern recognition and recovery built into that. That’s autonomy. So I’ve got autonomy into our company. It’s like Patagonia does that their people anytime they want to go surfing they can.
Jeremy Weisz
Yeah, I love it. Um, you know, do you are you allowed to share the working title of your new book? Or that’s still in progress?
Steve Adams
Yeah, unless the we’re pitching it to publishers in June they might change it but yeah, well right now it’s decoding human performance, the science of reaching your potential.
Jeremy Weisz
So right now is decoding human performance. Okay,
Steve Adams
reaching your potential most flexible on the subhead I the I really am kind of committed to that title because that’s what we’re trying to do for people is take a complex subject decode it for them and make it simple in a way that they can take action on
Jeremy Weisz
what’s the what’s the subhead again,
Steve Adams
the science of reaching your potential. Okay. The thought behind that is, is that integration of physiology and psychology Yeah.
Jeremy Weisz
I have a pitch for title for you. Okay. So when I wrote what I wrote down, Steve is what people want, what top performers want, what I want is to get in the zone. And so I wrote that down because that’s what you help people do. We do you help people get in the zone, or some version of that, right? I don’t know. So that’s my pitch for the title, something in that effect is the end result. Get in the zone.
That’s what I want. Like if I read that title, what’s up, maybe in the subhead or two Yeah, but if I read that, like, how do you get in the science behind getting in the zone? like okay, like, sign me up? You know, is, that’s my pitch for you on that. Last question, I always ask you first of all, thank you everyone should check out tigerneuro.com that’s Tiger like a tiger and then NE you are O.com, check it out. There’s a self discovery quiz there, whichever should take and just just browse around, right? Not just for your health.
Steve Adams
What’s all I would ask is if you’re interested, you know, hit the free console button. We do an educational call, we don’t hard sell anybody and myself or one of my performance coaches will talk to you and explain it in more detail. Totally.
Jeremy Weisz
Yeah, I mean, for your sake for your company say probably from your balance of your your family life sake. Also. There’s two questions I was asked see if since inspired Insider, I always ask what’s been a low moment and how you push through. And then what’s been a proud moment on the other end. on that journey, what’s been a really challenging moment, time that you could think of and then how you kind of push through it.
Steve Adams
I resonated with That early story you talked about about a guy coming home and saying no extras. I have similar story you know, I left banking was a you know, 31 year old kid that had a couple hundred million dollar lending division reporting to them
Unknown Speaker
in six months later
Steve Adams
you know, we’re losing money and have no income and I come home and my daughter’s comes up to me, when I walked up to the bedroom at night after I’d work too long. You know, she’s only like three and she gives me a hug and, you know, ask me where I was and was gone so long and I held her and kind of got her to fall back asleep and I remember just thinking What have I done? I you know, I’m sitting here broke. I can’t even take my kids to McDonald’s and I’m working my full tail off and just six months ago, I had the world by the tail. And and but you know, I You know, we’re all like that and weak moments. But I, you know, I had a core, you know, my head of why I wanted to have an unconventional approach to time I wanted to do things with my kids and my family that I couldn’t have done if I was gonna rise up in a big fortune 500 Bank. And then and so that was a low point.
Jeremy Weisz
Probably so it was it was it that core value of you wanting something more? That’s what kind of pushed you through that moment of because it’s like, heartbreaking. You know, when your child is like, Where were you? They just shoot straight, like, Where have you been? You’ve been working too much. I don’t see you anymore. That type of thing. It cut right to
Steve Adams
Yeah. And, and so yes, that’s, that’s what got me through it because I knew, you know, I just needed another year or so and it was gonna be fine. And it did. I proved out it was but now it was a low moment because it was the convergence of comparing What I had, where I was now being exhausted and having this precious little girl who’s now 26, you know, 27 years old, you know, there with me. So that that was probably that was a low point I have more, but that was one.
Jeremy Weisz
I don’t want to make this into like a, I don’t wanna make you cry on the interview. So I will make it go through all of them, but it is
Steve Adams
high. Yeah, that’s the opposite of that. But it’s related to the same idea was my son was a baseball player. He ended up playing in college as a pitcher, pitcher, left handed pitcher. And when he was seven years old, he loved baseball. We went down to a Detroit Tigers Chicago White Sox game. We’re Tigers fans.
Jeremy Weisz
I’m a Cubs fan. So no, no worries about that.
Steve Adams
Yeah, that little sneaker I was 3536 at the time and I had never gotten a ball my whole life his first game. The outfielder for the Tigers flipped the ball up to him and between him And he just thought, like, this is what happens, you know at the game. That’s normal. So we were leaving. And I remember a sports illustrated story. We’re talking about a father and son going to all the parks in one summer. And I said to Collin at the time, I said, Hey, buddy, what if we went to all the major league baseball parks as a family before you go to college, and he’s like, let’s do it. So we were able to do that we all 3030 or 32 parks, and so the high point for me was the all star game in 2013. One of my vendors, paid for two high end tickets for the whole week for me and my son to go because they’d heard about our story. We’d finish this earlier that summer in San Francisco was our last Park. Wow. And so we were able to go and it was, you know, that one kind is a tear jerker for me because I can go right back to being in New York City and ATM and Thinking about walking out in there for the last time and realizing we had done it and it all tied back to why I got out of banking first.
Jeremy Weisz
Yeah, you could have the flexibility to just go into all these stadiums,
Steve Adams
right? Yeah, love it. Your family all winter girls went to about half the games. They went over your top two favorite stadium. So the all star game is probably the culmination of everything. What were your top two favorite stadiums? Pittsburgh Pirates because it’s a place with a unique view at night, and then I’ll then obviously Wrigley but between regularly and Fenway Park. Yeah. Yeah, that’s the number one question we’re asked.
Unknown Speaker
Oh, what are your favorites? Yeah,
Steve Adams
it’s probably another book that needs to be read to just start doing
Jeremy Weisz
well, that could also be actually part of intrinsic motivation. And the subtitle is how you go from whatever you know, not going home. You know, having your son or daughter say, you know where have you been to stadium going to stadiums around the world or whatever stadiums across
Unknown Speaker
that way. But Steve,
Jeremy Weisz
thank you so much for I totally appreciate your time your expertise sharing your knowledge, people can check out tigerneuro.com. And just thank you again.
Steve Adams
Thank you Jeremy. I’m very grateful for being a guest.
