An Entrepreneur Wears Many Hats

Interview with Trushar Mody

E Podcast Network (EPN): https://epodcastnetwork.com/the-new-you-the-wholestic-entrepreneur/

Eric: Today we are speaking with the managing partner at Encore Consulting Group Trushar Mody, who is a thought provoker business coach and soft skills trainer. Mody, as he is called is a self improvement guru, a thought leader in holistic coaching and emotional intelligence. Trushar, it’s pleasure to have you with us today on the program.

Trushar Mody: My pleasure to be with you.

Eric: It’s our pleasure to have you with us today and thanks for your time. So tell us For starters, what are the challenges faced by business leaders and entrepreneurs today?

Mody: Eric, the answer is very simple. They forget how to live their life. And let me tell you the answer by starting with a quote: 

“When I was young, I was dying to be a graduate. When I graduated, I was dying to come to the USA.” By the way, I’m from India. “When I came to the USA, I was dying to get my first business. When I started my first business, I was dying to make my first million. And when I made my first million, I was dying to be happy. And in all that dying, I forgot how to live.”

So the biggest mistake business leaders make is figuring out how to live their lives. They get so caught up in this madness. Here’s something very powerful that the Dalai Lama said. 

Someone asked him, “What surprises you the most?”

And he replied, “Man: because he sacrifices his health to make money. Then he sacrifices his money to recuperate his health. And then he’s so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present. The result being that he does not live in the present or the future. He lives as if he is never going to die. And then he dies, having never really lived.”

So when I coach, I provoke leaders to think. I asked them some questions. 

1. Do you feel overworked and overwhelmed?
2. Do you manage people and resources or do you let them manage you? 
3. Are you mentally locked up in a box or do you think outside the box? 
4. Do you have a board of advisers? 
5. Do you worry about your work when you go home?
6. Do you wait for the future to happen or do you make the future? 
7. Are you micro-operating inside your business as compared to managing your business on autopilot? 

So those are some of the questions I provoke them to think about. And when I go through this process, they think they need a complete makeover. I call it “Wholestic” coaching. If you want to be a full person, a self actualized person to your full potential, you’ve got to be Wholeistic 

Eric: You certainly made some great points right there. And thanks for your perspective, they’re most helpful. Now, you mentioned the word holistic with a “W”. Can you tell us more about that?

Mody: I’m glad you asked that. 

I’ve been in business since I was 12 years old. At 17 years old I managed my father’s business. And so I got a lot of experience and learned a lot of things mostly from my mistakes. You learn from your mistakes more than from your successes. And so I’ve learned a lot from my mistakes. And what I’ve found is that a businessman wears 11 hats and I’m going to go through this real briefly with you: 

1. A businessman is a Technocrat as a member of a technically skilled elite crew. He needs to be original and creative and have an inquisitive mind. And the love of technology has to be so strong that he can innovate.
2. He’s also an Entrepreneur. He wants to follow his passion. When I say ‘he’, I mean ‘he or she’, don’t get me wrong. People who wear this hat dream big and think outside the box with a millionaire mindset and are willing to take appropriate risks.
3. The third one is what I call a Communicator. You have to understand other people and listen, develop verbal skills, and non verbal skills which are very essential in success of running a business. How you say something has just as much impact as what you say. So your tone and your body language is also as important as the words you put out. Communication is key.
4. A businessman is also a Leader. These people know the meaning of success and how to uphold the corporate mission, values, and goals. They collaborate and build relationships and understand the difference between “pull” and “push” leadership. They build trust, credibility, and know how to create “win-win” situations for everybody.
5.  A businessman is also a Chief Happiness Officer. He or she is the one standing-out in the room. They create the corporate culture by role-modeling good behavior. They bring a sense of belonging and teamwork and help everyone have a great experience and engagement. Wearing this hat means you’re positively an ambassador. You let it shine through whether it’s a good day or a bad day.
6. A businessman is also a Marketer. These people have a toolbox, they know their market platform, and they sell their company’s values and products.
7. A businessman needs to be financially savvy. So he’s a Financial Manager. They need to know their financial objectives. They need to know the numbers, the industry standards, and be able to analyze financial statements very fast.
8. A Family Person, that means he or she knows how to balance their work and life. They know how to build a permeable wall to allow things to flow through. Meaning they don’t have a watertight compartment but they still can control what can come in and go out.
9. He is also a Social Motivator. Nowadays everybody needs to be a social networker. The internet has opened up a big Pandora’s box here. And you know, they’re creating personal wealth with their principles, morals and ethics for the company. They understand leadership and how to live an unselfish life.
10. Health Coach, if you’re not healthy, your business is going to suffer. And I have a very good formula for that. I have an acronym called YESSMAN. ‘Y’ is for yoga. ‘E’ is for the entire environment both internal and external. ‘S’ is for sleep, the next ‘S’ is for sunshine. ‘M’ is for the mindset you have. ‘A’ is for the air… breathing. Breathing is very important. And ‘N’ is for nutrition. So when I coach executives, I also bring this health aspect into the training and I follow this formula.
11. Every businessman needs to be Awakened. That means they have to raise the level of awareness with emotional intelligence in their daily lives. They have to overcome the fear they have cultivated and improve their willpower. They have to change their habits, learn to manage their time better, and know how to stick to a plan and make it work.

So each of these 11 hats bring something new to the table, and you’re only as strong as the weakest link of those 11 hats. And therefore, the Wholestic approach shows a total rethinking of your own life, whether it’s business or personal, the way you want it. And this is the test, Eric, you know, “I work when I want, where I want with whom I want, doing what I want to do“. You never achieve real success unless you like what you’re doing. So that is what I call the Wholestic model.

Eric: Certainly appreciate that full coverage good information there. Now as a self improvement guru, what is your suggestion here?

Mody: Well, if you want to improve yourself, what are you going to do? The only way we can improve ourselves is if we change habits and behaviors. And that’s not easy, because that requires understanding our mindset and fine tuning the mind every day, you get one step better, to become a better person because it’s all about soft skills. Right there. 

There are two types of skills. One is ‘soft skills’ and one of the other ‘hard skills’. Hard skills are attached to something external. Like an auto mechanic, he learns how to operate a car therefore he needs tools and other things. Soft skills are something we are born with. We have a “Windows 10” operating system in our mind, and you really need to understand that operating system and how to use it with the apps that are available for our mind. 

Alright, so the first thing I would impress upon my entrepreneurs, my leaders, my business people that I coach, is the mind is a very powerful tool. And you are not using it to your utmost ability and full potential. 

So we have to figure out how to use the mind, and the first thing you start with is you have to understand that you are a dual personality: you have a dark side and you have a light side. The dark side is you don’t know what you don’t know, but other people know. And unless you figure out what the dark side is, you’re always going to be left in the dark, you’re going to be walking in your shadows. You don’t want to do that. So taming the subconscious, that dark side, the dual personality of the reactive mind and the responsive mind is very important.

The second thing I impress upon people is to climb the ladder of awareness. Because we have what we call a triune brain. We have a three level brain. It goes with the evolutionary process. 

We started with the reptilian brain, then we got the mammalian brain. And now we have what we call the human brain. We’re very fortunate to have a very powerful neo-cortex that can think responsibly, allows us to take responsibility for our actions and think about consequences of what we do.

So we have to climb this ladder. Are we going to behave like reptiles? Or a mammal, or an animal state? Are we really going to be human? That’s what I call climbing the ladder of awareness, getting better and better and better with the tuning our mindset. Mindset is our software and we need to constantly keep it updated. All right?

So how do we start with that? When I start coaching, I’m always trying… just like you want paint to stick on a wall, you want learning to be retentive, you want to retain what you learn. And that is a very powerful tool. If you go online and do a search of Edgar Dale’s cone of learning, you see how we can do that. And the theory behind that is, the more senses you use, the better your learning is. So for example, if you’re just reading something, you’re only using your visual sense. And so roughly if you read something you retain about 10%. But if I use my eyes, if I use my ears, if I use my hand, if I use my tongue, and I have full action and perceptual awareness, I probably go to more than 50% retention. So how you learn is very important.

And there are four steps of learning we start with:

1. I don’t know what I don’t know. You’re not aware of something that’s there (and you don’t know it).
2. I now know what I don’t know, because I know I’ve seen it. 
3. I start training myself and I now know what I know. And most of us stop at that. Stage 3 is okay, I know what I did at the intellectual level. But if you really want to learn something, make it part of your subconscious, make it habitual, then you got to go to the fourth step.
4. I don’t know what I know. That means I don’t even have to think about it. It becomes automatic. 

And that’s the first step of learning. We talked about the triune brain, which, to us, is understanding the difference between reacting and responding.

And the last thing I want to impress is, we have four functions of the mind. All right, I call it the feeling, the thinking, the willing, meaning the willpower, and the staying meaning the awareness, being in the present. So feeling, thinking, willing, and staying. 

The feeling and thinking are two that work on the electrical and chemical level in our nervous system. 

So if you really want to be good in your business, this is how we’re going to start. This is the primary strategy you’re going to apply to understand how your mind works. You’re going to think about behavior changes, and you’re going to start working on it. Back to you, Eric.

Eric: Today we’re joined by managing partner at Encore Consulting Group, Trushar Mody, here on the Enterprise Podcast Network. Trushar, what are the core skills that leaders need to acquire? Would you mind touching on some of these?

Mody: Eric, I have a formula called IQ, EQ and AQ. 

These are the three step ladders we need to climb. 

Everybody knows IQ, you know, we are smart, we are brilliant. We have a high IQ. We learned that in school and we come out believing that IQ will get you through the door, get to your first job, and get you started on it. But in order to sustain something you’re doing, an actual sustaining business, we need EQ, which is emotional intelligence. And it is very important.

Emotional intelligence is something that gives us the ability to be humble, be a better communicator, create great relationships. And it has four components: 

1. Self awareness. How much are we aware? Can you be in the present? Can you be in the now? Can you ignore the past and the future and just focus on what you’re doing now? Self awareness will also build your listening skills.
2. Social intelligence, or how do you interact with the rest of the world? With humans & other animals, it’s all about social intelligence. You know, it’s very powerful that you do that. And it’s all part of EQ. 
3. Self management. How do you control your emotions and thoughts to be a better person so that you can respond rather than react? 
4. Empathy, or understanding and feeling what others are feeling, is very important. If I can do that, I become a more compassionate person, I’m a more sympathetic person. So empathy is very important. 

So EQ is really very powerful. How powerful is it? 

There are studies after studies that have been done that say that emotional intelligence is the best predictor for success. And Google has done studies about it which they have come out with. Despite hiring the most intelligent people and people that ace interviews, what they found is that there was very little correlation between high IQ and your success in the company. They dug down further and discovered that success was highly correlated with humility, and so Google is a big proponent of humility.Sunder Pichai, their CEO, is very big on humility.

If you want to become an astronaut at NASA, they will test you in emotional intelligence. Facebook does a checklist. You have to be compassionate. Satya Nadella, when he became the CEO years back at Microsoft, the first thing he wanted his leaders to read is Nonviolent Communication and he talks a lot about empathy and compassion. 

Uber CEO, Mr. Kalanick resigned. The first sentence he said was, I wish I had more emotional intelligence, because there was a culture in his company of sexual harassment. And he knew… it was so widespread that he had to resign. He realized it at a late stage that he needed it… same thing with Fox media, you know what I mean? There’s so much bad culture in there. People have been resigning left and right. And so you see how emotional intelligence affects the workplace, the culture, how people think and react. So that’s the second thing I would like people to understand.

We talked about IQ and EQ, and the third one is AQ. AQ is a new paradigm shift coming, it’s not in the mainstream academic world yet, but it’s coming. AQ, I call it Adaptability quotient. And that means if you’re not adaptable, you’re going to be left behind and outdated like Kodak.

Sears made a paradigm shift 70 years back. They made a disruptive environment in the retail industry. They brought in mail order business, migrating from retail to mail orders… you get a catalog business, and they made a whole new disruptive business. They could not do it now. And so they are going out of business with the Amazon’s coming in. You know, they’ve disrupted the whole retail industry. And so, if you are not adaptable, if you’re not swift to change, if you don’t see the lines on the horizon and know what’s coming, you’re going to be left behind. 

Things are moving very fast. What happened in the last century in fifty years is happening now in probably three years, you can see how fast things are changing. And if you don’t keep up with change, you will be left behind. So that’s what I call AQ. It’s the new paradigm shift coming. It’s a new thing that everybody needs to embrace. And if you don’t, you will be left behind.

And so I think the three core skills that everybody needs to have are IQ with knowledge, EQ with emotional intelligence and tuning your mind, and AQ with change management. That’s my answer, Eric.

Eric: And I really appreciate your time spent with us here today you shared some good information, food for thought. And if listeners wanted to get further information about Encore Consulting Group and get in touch with you, where’s the best place that they could do that?

Mody: Yes, my website address is encorecorporatetraining.com.

So, Eric, you know, here’s what I have learned in all my life. You have to manage yourself, nobody else can manage you. If you want to get started, you have to learn how to self manage, okay? You have to create that willpower you have to create that energy. And what I do is I get up every morning at 5:30 AM and I do one hour of meditation — it’s a very powerful tool. It’s a way to fuel your mind every morning and get it ready for a hard day’s work. And then I read for an hour. If you look at most of the successful people, they have one common attribute which is they read a lot. I’m not talking about Facebook. I’m talking about really reading things that build your skills. 

For leaders:

1. First recognize your attitude: how is it affecting your internal and external environment?
2. Number two, what is your awareness?
3. Number three, acceptance. Acceptance is a very powerful tool — you have to accept the way things are, you can’t change it. And nonacceptance has a lot to do with negative emotions, when you don’t accept something. When you don’t accept somebody else’s success, you become jealous and angry. So you start accepting things. 
4. The number four I talked about is adaptability, you climb this ladder, and now you want to look at the changes coming your way and adapt to the changing environment.
5. And then number five is advocacy. That means you become an advocate of what you’ve learned, like I am doing — I’m sharing what I learned in the past so many years, and I want to share it with the rest of the world. That’s what my LinkedIn website says. I’m a Warehouse of Knowledge and I want to share it with you.

I encourage people to climb this five step ladder; number one, change your attitude. Number two, become more aware. Number three, accept the way things are. Number four, be adaptable, otherwise you will be left behind. Number five, be an advocate of change. 

Eric: Again folks, it is EncoreCorporateTraining.com with Trushar Mody. Trushar, thanks so much for spending a moment with us here today on Enterprise Radio, much appreciated.

Mody: My pleasure, Eric, thank you so much.

Eric: You’re more than welcome. We’ve been speaking with managing partner at Encore Consulting Group, Trushar Mody, who is a thought provoker, business coach, and soft skills trainer. He’s a self improvement guru, a thought leader in holistic coaching and emotional intelligence, and for further details visit encorecorporatetraining.com. This is Eric and you’ve been listening to Enterprise Radio, a part of the P in the Enterprise Podcast Network. 

Our training sessions use storytelling, deep learning, humor, and movement to enhance the dissemination and assimilation of core learning topics. Tangible, measurable results are the goal of our consulting and training initiatives. Learn more at EncoreCorporateTraining.com.

About Trushar Mody. A Warehouse Of Knowledge to Share: Trushar Mody (known as Mody), is an accomplished business entrepreneur and mentor with over 35 years of experience in the printing, manufacturing, real estate, finance, retail, nonprofit and service industries. He is a thought leader in the field of Emotional Intelligence (EI) as it applies to business success.