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Episode 510: “Leadership Powered by Common Sense” with Host Doug Thorpe
Introduction
When you’re out there as a leader in business, you ultimately want to win the day. Sometimes your goals and your forecast are longer term, but winning today and every day after that is really what makes the long term success. My guest today is someone who has had some firsthand front row experience doing that in the professional sports world as as well as the corporate world. His name is Josh Lifrak. Josh, welcome to the show.
Thanks so much, Doug. Really appreciate you having me on. And yeah, I think I think you just nailed it right there. Like when you’re trying to when you’re trying to achieve something big in the long term that that like, you know, Mount Everest, you don’t stand at the bottom, you don’t jump to the top, right? You go up, you go up by and little margins and you just take the step that’s right in front of you. And what we have as human beings is we have today.
And so let’s go out there and let’s just go win that, and then let’s do it again tomorrow and do it again tomorrow. And, you know, little by little becomes a lot. Yeah.
You know, I often tell my clients that when we think about leadership coaching, executive coaching and business development ideas and business growth, I should say there are some amazing parallels from the sports world and a few people. When you say that, they roll their eyes and go, oh no, here we go. And and they, they kind of shudder at that. But I try to be respectful of that. And at the same time, those are metaphors and analogies that really fit well in in terms of leadership development, leadership growth, and really ultimately about your mindset, you know, how do you think about what you’re supposed to be doing, and you’re not going to win them all. You’re you’re going to have setbacks. You’re you’re going to have disappointments. But building that winning mentality and that winning system and that discipline about winning is is inevitable.
For those that score success, give. Give us a little bit of your story arc on on some of your career journey.
Yeah. So I just want to kind of point out something here to Doug and just kind of hit what you were just talking about there. You know, sports is is the ultimate business. And I say that because regardless if you win or if you you lose 30% of your workforce typically changes over year to year. And think about that. Most of the people in baseball are on a one year contract, so the need to perform and the need to excel is just in your face. So you talk about a hotbed environment, a stressful environment, an environment where you can’t really make excuses. You know, I think that that’s why I think that’s why the sport business thing works. You know, because here it is. And that pressure to perform, it’s every day. And so what can we learn if you’re in that pressure that we could apply to ourselves. And I think that’s the biggest thing is that that translation a lot of times when I talk to a corporate audience, I’ll go in and I’ll be like, look, I’m the expert on mindset.
You’re the expert on the pharmaceuticals that you’re selling. You’re the expert on the, you know, the burgers that you’re selling for McDonald’s. When we talk to them or Amazon, the distribution centers. You know, you’re the experts there. But here’s what we’ve learned from being in these very, very, very intense environments where mistakes are amplified. You saw last night in the US men’s national team, one mistake. Boom. It’s in the back of the net right. And so those mistakes they they are they are very loud. Let’s put it that way. And so how do you recover from them. How do you how do you learn from them. How do you grow from them. And I think that that’s one of the biggest things when we talk about that corporate to the sport analogy, that’s why I think it’s so important.
A very good point. And I think you’re right. The performance pressure is very intense. And for company CEOs out there that might be listening, you know, their reality of the pressure they’re under feels really intense to them.
And and it is we’re not saying it’s not. But to your point, there are things to learn from that high pressure sports environment that that do translate very well. So let’s talk about some of those things. You’ve written a book called Win Today and that that was the inspiration for my lead in comment. You know, winning today. But it hit the high points of that book for us.
Meet the Guest: From IMG Academy to the World Series
Well, I think, you know, one of the things you were just asked about my arc in the world of professional sports, I started off at a place called IMG Academy, which is here. I live in Sarasota, Florida. It’s just up the road in Bradenton, and that is just the just a one of the most forward thinking. Mental performance, physical performance, sport performance academies in the world. It is. It is. I always say it’s about three years ahead of everybody else in sport. They just they’re just on it. And so I had the privilege of working there for about eight years.
Then I was able to move over to the Chicago Cubs and be there, director of the of the mental skills program for the Chicago Cubs from 2014 to 2019. For my Cubs fans out there, you already know 2016. So when we won the World Series almost ten years ago now, but we broke a streak of 108 years of losing, not winning the World Series. And so just being around those environments. And then also went on to work for the New York Mets for a couple of years after that. But just being around those environments, you get to learn about the things that really are trainable for the mental side and that can really impact your day every day. And so that’s what I did, is I extrapolated that information. And what I really wanted to do was help people live the lives they want to live. And the way that you do that is you can train your mind. And so here you are. And what I did is I laid out six of the biggest things that I saw, because I thought six was a good number three and three.
Step One: Define Your Story
Right. Because you can tie and if you do four out of the six things, that’s a w four out of two, right? If you only do two of them, well you’re probably not going to win that day. So I thought I thought that was a good number. But the six things are really, really pretty simple to do. But take focus. Take purpose. Right. You just kind of got to do them every day. And the first one that I talk about all the time is define your story. And I think this is probably one of the most important ones because it’s about intentions. It’s about deciding who you want to be in the world, not what you want to do. You can look at what you want to do, but then you got to roll it backwards to deciding who you’re going to be in order to achieve that. So, for example, if I have, you know, if I want to do a lot of business development and do a lot of reach outs and things of that nature, well, I’m going to have to be energized.
I’m going to have to be focused, and I’m going to have to be disciplined. Right? So if I say those things, if I decide those things in the morning, then I’m more likely to achieve those, those goals of that day. If instead I’m like, well, you know what? Today. Today is the day where I got to write a lot. I want to be like, I want to get a lot of new content out there. Well, maybe that day I’m going to be creative and I’m going to decide to be creative and open minded, write something of that nature. So I think that that’s one of the biggest things that people do not do, that they can do every single day. That will change the trajectory of their ability to win that day.
Let me let me jump on that. I love that you experience that and see that as a pillar of, of of this idea. I quite some time ago, in my own coaching practice, I discovered that a lot of the leaders I was had the opportunity to work with.
When I asked him the question, have you ever thought about the leader you really want to be? And in 99% said, no, I haven’t really. You know, I got on the train, I started writing, I got my first promotion, and then that led to another one and another one and so on and so on. So I pretty much unilaterally introduced the idea of helping a client start with a solid definition of the leader they want to be, you know, paint the picture, map it out. And it is about the being, not just the doing. And it when people really lean into that and start thinking about that. You can see the light bulbs going off, you know. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Some of that, some of that. And then we take that base and we design and define the intentionality they have to work on daily to, to bring it to life. Make it happen. Turn the dial. You know, however many clicks you have to turn it to get it going and and really be impactful and influential in your leadership ability.
Step Two: Build Bonds and Create Connections
Yeah. And then the other thing about that too, is if you write it down and you took a sticky note and you stick it on your computer and you put it right there on your screen and it’s just in your face, guess what? You’re going to have a real good opportunity to to live that life. Right. But again, there it is. It’s like a life by design versus a life by default. And you mentioned it. Hey, getting on the train and oh wait, I’m getting off in Parsnip City. Wait, where am I getting off on? Am I getting off in Hoboken? Oh, maybe I want to get off of Manhattan, I don’t know. Right. But you deciding where you want to get off and you’re deciding how you’re going to go about your business. That’s that’s a, that’s a game changer. And I think what that allows you to do, what that allows you to do, is it kind of opens up the rest of the five steps for you.
And and so the second step within, within the framework is, is to build bonds and to create connections and not just surface, like, what are they going to do for me or what? But more like, you know, like what Adam Grant talks about and a lot of his work where you’re really leaning into people and you’re empowering them and you’re lifting them up and you’re and you’re just trying to to connect with them at a level where there’s an understanding. So I always thought that like that building bonds piece that, is that so crucial to success. Like if we go through the day. Yeah. I’ve often asked this question, Doug, is, you know, what great thing in the world, what monumental, life changing thing in the world has ever been done alone. And it’s really hard to think about, like, I still don’t have an answer like Mount Everest. There was a team of people that got him up there. I work with a number of professional golfers. They have an entire team around them.
You know, like, it’s there’s never there’s never that. You’re not going to do anything great alone. Even if you’re a writer and you’re like, you know, Ralph Waldo Emerson stuck in the woods somewhere, right? Writing, writing his great books like Walden or whatever it was. Right? People had to read it, so we needed the other people still to he. People had to publish that. Right. And so you’re never doing things alone. So that building bonds thing, I think is really, really, really, really crucial.
Yeah. You know, I as you were saying that again, back to the sports world, I think about the frequent commentary when a coach or a manager is asked about a certain player when they say he’s a leader in our locker room, that that tells me the, you know, the guy is much more than himself. And it’s real easy in sports and we see it all the time in the headlines. Some athletes gets a mic shoved in his face and and he starts talking about himself in the third person and all that.
And you know, it’s like, what do you do? You know, like, what kind of person are you? What kind of teammate are you? You know. And when you hear about the guys that are so-called great leaders in the locker room, I think about that ability to make connection, build bonds, lift people up and, and, you know, really help turn things around.
Step Three: Be Present — “You Are Here”
Yeah, without a doubt. And I think one of the things that great leaders do. You’re talking about leaders in the clubhouse is they’re they’re really present for others. They’re really in the moment. You know, they’re doing the Ted Lasso where they’re living through curiosity versus judgment. And I think, you know, that’s actually the third, the third part of of the the steps for when today is being present. I titled that you are here and that’s a that’s a that’s a very trainable skill, believe it or not. And and we there’s tons of research out there on it. A lot of it from from Harvard.
Some of it from the Shah labs at University of Miami. But there’s a lot of different ways to train your ability to stay in the present moment. We are often we’re getting. I don’t know about you, Doug, but like you and I were talking just before we started the podcast, and both of us did the same thing. We put Do Not Disturb on our phones and that element of life nowadays, in this, in this world, the amount of distractions that there are, the amount of things pulling on you that get you away from being in that place where real performance occurs. It’s it’s never been like this before, ever in our history. And so that work to stay here now is really, really, really crucial. And you got to work at it. And one of the things I often say is when you do the work, the work works on you. But again, if you’re just if you like. Hope is not a strategy. So I hope I’m present. Well, no, it’s not going to work.
You know, you got to train yourself to be there, and then you got to catch yourself when you drift and draw yourself back in.
Well, you know, in the modern business world, particularly in the larger companies, I hear this stated frequently. People say, gosh, you know, I go from meeting to meeting to meeting and I get spun up in one and then it spills over into the next one. And it’s it’s that challenging moment of shutting off what you just left and turning on and being present and focused on what you’re moving into. And as a leader, if you got spun up in your 8:00 meeting and now you take that negative energy into your 9:00 meeting, the 9:00 meeting is not going to be what it could have been.
Step Four: Stop the Storm
Yeah, absolutely. But check this out. Doug, if you had set an intention for the day, if you had somebody to lean on after that meeting and, you know, you worked on being present, well, guess what’s going to happen to that 8:00 meeting? It’s going to stay in the past, and you’re going to deal with it at 3:00 when you have time to process exactly what happened.
Right. You’re going to be able to compartmentalize it a little bit better and not take it from one to the other. Right. I often say, you know, the past is not predictive of the future. What you think and what you do in the here and now is. And so that’s going to be a crucial piece for people too, is to recognize that. And I think that’s one of the other things, you know, in the book I described, it’s the fourth step is stopping the storm. You’re going to have negative things happen to you. Guess what? Your brain is going to think negatively a lot because that’s the survival mechanism. It’s called the negativity bias in psychology. Your ability to recognize thoughts that are holding you back and undermining your growth, your performance, your execution, your ability to lead, your ability to lean into others, your if you can catch yourself going down those quicker than your opponents, well, then you have a competitive advantage. And that’s the whole key. We’re going to have negative thoughts that will happen.
I work with some of the most positive athletes in the world, and oftentimes the text messages I get for them are how do I stop the negative thoughts? I keep thinking this. I keep thinking this catastrophe is going to happen. I’m like, good, that means you’re a human being, and let’s accept it and then let’s move past it. So the fact is we’re going to have those negative things. How long are you going to live in them? That’s the big question I talk about in the book about one of the tools is a stop a shot clock. Right. You’re in Houston. Good good basketball team there. The rockets NBA shot clock. Right. So you can have a negative thought. There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s just. It’s in there. Is it going to help me perform? Is it going to hold me back? Well, if it’s going to hold me back, let me put a shot clock on that. I’ll be that negative. I’ll have that thought for the next five minutes.
Next ten minutes until lunch. And then I’m going to change it. But you taking control of that can really flip the script on it. And then you can help me move past it.
You know. And those negative thoughts are often related to anticipating something you hear about a decision that’s being announced, and you start spinning up all the what ifs. And I always share with clients a quote from Mark Twain that I love. He said something to the effect. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve discovered my life has been a series of horrible tragedy and catastrophe, most of which never happened.
Yeah, yeah. That’s it. I pegged you as a mark Twain guy, Doug. I knew you’d have Mark Twain on your sleeve. Yeah, that’s exactly it. And I think actually, the research shows I wish I had the stat. I wish I had the citation right off the top of my fingers, but I don’t. But I know I’ve seen research where 85% of the things that we think negatively are going to happen never happen.
And out of the 15% of the things that you think are going to happen negatively that do occur, 10% to 12% of those things are solved within about 30 to 40s. So think about that. You know, like so it’s like 2 to 3% of the things that we think are going to happen, happen in an hour. Tough to deal with. That’s like nothing, right?
Yeah. And it’s certainly not worth the energy and draw that all the negative anticipation and worry you know, creates. And I think that’s probably why, you know, the books of wisdom written over the decades have said, you know, don’t worry about tomorrow. It’ll have its own worries. You know, worry about today.
That’s right.
And and.
Absolutely. So do you want to win today? Win today? Yeah.
Right.
Choose Growth
Well, the other thing too I think that that really helps. That helps people, you know, manage that is when and I’ve seen this over and over and over again I think people are happy this when they’re growing.
You know, they I just see this happiness when when they’re learning, when they’re ingesting, when they’re when they’re just improving themselves or others around them. Choose growth is how I, how I call it in the book. But like, I just see that all the time too, where if I’m, I don’t know, every once in a while I will wake up with anxiety and nervousness is I think it’s a not an unnatural thing to occur, especially in the mornings as you’ve been in a vulnerable position. So now you wake up and you’re in survival mode. And, you know, one of the things that that I’ve found is that when I get into action about something, when I, when I’m starting to to grow. Learn. Like I was just on LinkedIn yesterday. I was learning new things, like we talked about marketing earlier and it’s like, no, I’m not a marketing expert. Like I have no clue how to market. I didn’t take that. I took sociology in college and I took sports psychology in college.
But, you know, so I’m learning all this stuff about marketing and it’s like that whole piece when I learned something and I can implement it and execute it, I’m like, oh, okay, cool. And you feel a lot better about yourself because you are growing. And I think that’s one of the biggest, biggest things to, to, to happiness and to winning is to just get a little bit better. Right? A little by little becomes a lot, right? They aggregate a marginal gains. So as you grow a little bit, you become stronger. As you grow a little bit more, you become stronger. And I think over time that can be really, really, really impactful.
Be Where Your Feet Are
Josh, let me shift gears a little bit and maybe I’m running ahead of you here. There was another principle I saw in your bio notes, and I think you talk about it in the book is something about you are where your feet are. Did I get that right? Correct me on that principle.
Yeah. Be where your feet are. You are. You know, it’s funny. I often tell the story about my last year in professional baseball. I was working for the New York Mets. It was post-Covid. I had realized in May of that season. Of course, the season goes from February, when you’re in spring training, usually through if you’re a good team through October, if you were the team that I was on at the beginning of October. And in May of that year, I had realized that I was done with baseball. I, I was burnt out. I had just been through Covid, where I got spend every day with my family, which, you know, it was a sharp, a stark difference to the 200 days a year I was spending in hotels. And so I, I was done and my wife and I had a conversation. We were in Baltimore. I had just come off a redeye from, From San Diego. And I was just like, I’m done, I can’t do this.
And we had a conversation about it because she’s like, well, that’s awesome, honey. But, you know, we have a mortgage to pay and we need health insurance. So both of those things. So maybe check that before, you know, before we jump down that that thing and and so so that year I, you know, I put a lot of effort into finding an off ramp to, to move out of professional baseball, which I was able to do by the end of the season. But throughout that season, it was it was a challenge. And and one of the things that I did was I would literally walk around Major League Baseball outfielders barefoot, and what that allowed me to do was to be where my feet were. Right? And so I had this desire to not be there. I had the desire to be with my family and to be with my wife and be with my two beautiful sons, to walk my stupid Labrador retriever in the morning. And, you know, I was missing all that.
And but I was able to take a step back and go, wow, I’m walking barefoot in Dodger Stadium. Like, I don’t know, Doug, if you’ve ever been to Dodger Stadium, I think they they cut the grass with toenail clippers. It’s literally that clean. Every single blade of grass is exactly the right height. It’s absolutely perfect. It feels amazing on your feet. And so what I was able to do is in those moments when I wasn’t all spun out in my head, I was able to ground myself in those in those moments and just walk in the outfield and just kind of get, okay, look, we know we’re done at the end of this year. Let’s just embrace this right now. Let’s just have gratitude for this moment right here, right now, and to this day. I think I have such an affinity for Dodger Stadium, because that’s really where it kind of started hitting me, walking around in that grass. And then there was Fenway Park. There was, you know, the Phillies Stadium, there was San Diego, there was Baltimore, there was all these different places where, you know, I did that and it was just like, oh, this is so cool.
And then I would take a picture of my feet in the, in the grass just to remind myself, you know, to be here, be where my feet are.
That’s a great visual. And I can only imagine then having toured some of those parks. Not all of them. I can only imagine what it was like actually being able to walk the outfield. Not to digress, but quick sidebar during one of the baseball strikes, I happened to be in Boston and I was at a trade show conference in my banking days, and a guy I had met there, we just kind of struck it up, and we decided we wanted to take a detour and go over to Fenway. And neither one of us had seen Fenway, and we thought, well, let’s just see if we can get in. It’s a lockout. The baseball strike was going on. And anyway, we go over there and sure enough, there was a guy that said we could go up the ramp. We’d stand at the top, look out over the field and turn around and come back.
You know, he was he was going to be after us if we did anything different. And he told us, you know, people would get there and they would run away and they’d go dig chunks out of the outfield and stuff like that for souvenirs. And he didn’t want us doing any of that. Well, we got absolutely mesmerized when we got up to the top of that ramp, and just this whole almost out-of-body experience hit us, looking at the Green Monster and just the whole setting there. And we started wandering a little bit. We ended up going down the ramp behind the first base dugout, and we found ourselves downstairs in the tunnel there, and these two guys come across on a golf cart and they say, oh, you must be the guys the old man’s looking for. You better get out of here. And and so we went back and we decided we would ask for forgiveness rather than permission. You know.
I like that. I like that one.
We did. I mean, we we behaved ourselves, but we wandered a little bit.
And the old man in his Reds Red Sox jacket, he was not happy with us. He gave us our our Boston earful. You know, and we go. Yes or yes, sir. We’re gone. We’re out of here.
Ballpark Gratitude: Fenway, Wrigley, and the Moments We Miss
That’s a busy. Yeah. Family is a guest. Listen, there’s two ballparks in my mind, right? Everything else is a stadium. There’s two ballparks that ballparks are. Wrigley Field, which I had the unbelievable privilege of being around for five years. I mean, that place is so, so special. And then there’s Fenway Park and both of them. It’s very interesting. Both of them underneath sound the same. There’s no other ballparks that sound exactly that. And I think it’s the metal girders and things of that nature. But there’s just this, this, this feeling when you’re in there and you’re walking around the concourse is that you’re back in like 1930. You expect to walk out and have people with hats smoking cigarettes and the in the crowd, you know, and it’s just in full suits.
Right. And so it’s just it’s they’re really, really, really, really, really special places. and I think you talk about gratitude, right. And I think that’s one of the things that we, we miss all the time, Doug, we forget to take those moments. It’s funny watching the World Cup recently. Zlatan Ibrahimovic, who’s the announcer on Fox. He does the panel in between the games and he’s a he’s a very famous soccer player in the world and the United States. People are starting to get to know him. But he’s he talked about happiness. And he said happiness isn’t about having a ton of money, and it’s not about having a ton of friends and things. It’s about the moments. And and unless you’re open to those moments, you’re going to miss them. And so that’s one thing I would say to all your listeners and everybody that’s that’s a part of this podcast. Take those moments every day and just find something to just kind of be peaceful with and listen to and sense and just be around.
there’s so much beauty in this world, and it just blows by us so fast, and we get caught in our own heads and we get into this negativity thing and we just miss it. And that’s what it is, though. Happiness is about the moment. So, you know, Fenway Park, if you ever get a chance to go there, Listen. Listen to the sound on the concourse. Have a Fenway. Frank. If you ever get to Wrigley, you know, get get out to the bleachers. Smell the stale beer. Do a snake. You know, just, just just to really embrace it because they are really, really special places.
Celebrate the Win
Well, to that point, I think in the again, back to the modern business world, the pace has accelerated so tremendously. And and truthfully, it’s only accelerating more with the advent of AI and what people are trying to do there. And I think your point is a very good cautionary tale for people to consider. You know, your your moments are going to accelerate, but finding the time to score the win.
And I and I often talk to leaders about whether or not they even celebrate the wins they get in business, because people that show up as the A-plus players in business. They have a tendency to deliver on a project, deliver on a contract, do their execution, and they’re there, done in the traditional sense of the word on that piece of work. And they kind of take this. What’s next? Let’s let’s move on. Let’s keep moving. And I argue that you need to celebrate that win when you get it. And even though, yes, it might have been expected and yes, it was on the schedule. Take a moment with your team and with the significant others that might have been involved, stakeholders or otherwise, and find a way to acknowledge and celebrate a little bit. You don’t have to throw a giant party, but, you know, feel the moment. And I know that I’d think about college football playoffs a lot. I among all the sports, I tend to lean to college football more than any, and I think about those moments when the playoffs are happening and they’ll ask the coach, you know, what’s next, what’s next? And the coach will often look and say, we’re going to celebrate this for a minute.
You know, we’re we’re we’re going to enjoy the moment. We’re going to take our time and tomorrow we’ll get back to work. But tonight we’re going to we’re going to do some celebrating. And I think that’s important. I think that’s a good word for business leaders to consider.
Yeah. We in Chicago I mean, to that point we had a we had a rule if you won the game, you got to celebrate for 15 minutes. We had a we had a disco ball, and a and a DJ and a smoke machine. So the guys would come down and we would have the smoke machine going off and the disco ball going. If we lost, you were quiet and you were to yourself for about 15 minutes and you pondered what went wrong and what you could have done better. And then after 15 minutes, you turned the page and, you know, we called it mile zero. You get back to mile zero. Okay. Let’s reset. There it is. That was awesome. That was great.
Okay, here we go. Now we’re going to move forward. But I think that that’s one of those things that that is really, really crucial in business is to catch your team winning. And if you catch them winning, you know they’re going to they’re going to want to win more, believe me. So. And if they lose, you know, learn from it and grow from it versus berate and put down and things of that nature. You know that that’s the whole key is like how do we move forward. Right. That’s we’re not trying to go backwards. So yeah, celebrate it for 15 to 20 minutes and then move on.
Success Leaves Clues — But Own Your Values
What did you experience Josh, in terms of players leaning toward prior players who had great batting averages or great fielding percentages or great pitching numbers? You know, it’s it’s it’s a temptation, I think, even among business leaders to point to a predecessor and say, well, they did these things and that made them successful. So I’m going to try to do some of that.
And I, I caution people about going too far with that. It’s one thing to emulate a positive behavior, and if you can figure out a way to make truly make it your own, that’s great. But to just totally sell out to being something different from what you really are, that’s never going to work.
Yeah, well, two things on that. Number one, success does leave clues, right? So behaviors and habits are often what lead to success. You know your mindset matters. And that will lead you to really good behaviors and habits. But the behaviors and habits are create the results. So what are those behaviors and habits that other people are doing. That’s not that’s not changing who you are. That’s changing what you’re doing. Right. So I like that. I mean, I’m in on that. If you’re if you’re doing stuff that isn’t working and you look at this other person, they’re doing two things differently than you are. Hey, let’s let’s take a look at that. Let’s see what those are and see if I can implement those two.
And they, you know, success leaves clues. So there’s that. The second part is, is what you talked about owning your values and owning who you are in the process. You don’t have to change who you are to change your behaviors and habits. Right. I mean, you don’t. You just have to. You can still own it. Like I’m going to be a compassionate, caring individual. Awesome. And I’m also going to be really, really focused and really, really ruthless when I’m going after something great. Well, you could still be all those things, but it’s just about kind of managing that. And again, it goes back to what we started with being intentional. Being intentional in defining your story, deciding who you want to be. That’s the crucial thing. And then you live those values. And then there’s different actions that will honor those values. And then you can decide, hey, if this action doesn’t honor my value of compassion, do I want to do it? No I don’t.
Okay, great. That one’s off the plate. This one over here. That was a good one. I learned from that person. Oh, yeah, and it honors compassion. Beautiful. I’m going down that road, you know. So you know that that’s the way to do it. Yeah.
I really like that. And I am a coach that’s guilty of of really focusing off and on that concept of being intentional. And I think more than just saying that phrase, be intentional every day. You have to do the work to decide, intentional about what you know. You you have to know what you’re supposed to be intentional about. And that’s probably implied. But I think it’s important to do the work upfront to make those decisions and choices about what are you going to pursue and who are you going to be so that you can identify the be habits and behaviors that that work for that?
Yeah. And then you’re defining you’re defining who you’re going to be. Right. You’re living by design versus default.
And that’s the whole case right?
Closing Thoughts
Right. Well have we left anything out of the book, Josh, in any other point?
No, not that I’m aware of. You can still go by it. I know we just talk about the whole thing. There it is. It’s not. No, there’s, The whole. The whole thing about the book is it’s written in a way that’s. It’s a pretty easy read. It’s a page turner from everybody that I’ve talked to who’s, who’s had the opportunity to read it. And they talk about how there’s a ton of stories in it from the sports world, from the Chicago Cubs, from my own journey. And then there’s exercises, too. And so, again, when you do the work, the work works on you. So every chapter has an exercise. We’ll have a workbook out by the end of the year that will be an accompaniment to it too. So you can continually, if you know, if you want to keep winning days, keep stacking those days you know you want to keep winning them, then you just do the work and boom, here you go.
That’s great. Well, Josh, tell us the best way to get in touch with you if people are interested in knowing more.
Yeah. The best, best way to get in touch with me directly. If people want to ask me a question about anything we talked about today is just go on LinkedIn and then you can direct message me. Joshua LeFrak. LeFrak. If you’re interested in purchasing the book, you can get it on Amazon. You can get it on Barnes and Nobles. If you’re in Europe, you can get it on Waterstones. And or you can just get it through my website. Joshua LeFrak. LeFrak.
Great. Well, folks, as always, we will have those links in our show notes. And so feel free to drop down and check that out. Josh one last time. Thank you. Man this has been great I love the idea. Let’s win today.
I love it, Doug. And I see the planes behind you. You know, so if you’re ever flying over to Sarasota, Florida, just, you know, ping me, man.
We’ll go out and have a coffee.
I make a note of that. Thank you. Well, folks, this is part of the show. I want to remind you, we do have a video version over on YouTube channel by the same name. Not only do we have the long form, but we’ve got snippets and shorts of these messages and content that you can browse through. We’d love to have you join us over there. The channel is the same name leadership powered by common sense. Check us out and leave us a note. Let us know what you might want to hear about in the future, but for now, I’m going to sign off. Say goodbye. Go out there and make it a great day.
Meet Our Guest
Joshua Lifrak, M.S., author of WIN TODAY, is Director of Performance and Coaching at Limitless Minds, a mental performance consultancy, delivering keynotes and advising individuals, small businesses, and top multinationals including McDonalds, Novartis, Pfizer, KPMG, and Amazon. He started his career as a mental conditioning consultant with IMG Academy, working with MLB players, NBA and NFL draft picks, the US Soccer U-17 Men’s National Team, and many elite college programs. He then joined the Chicago Cubs as director of their mental skills program. His work there culminated in the Cubs’ 2016 World Series victory.
https://www.joshualifrak.com/
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https://www.linkedin.com/in/joshua-lifrak-59ab5442/
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