Stop Making Excuses. Create Your Own Reality by Gary Whitehill (Full Transcript)

I also sit on the board of Astia. How many folks have heard of Astia before? So I sit on the board for Astia, and I also do a lot of things with Dell. I sit on the advisory board for Dell, and the women entrepreneurs program and I do a lot with Springboard Enterprises, which I am sure you’ve heard of as well.

But everything I just told you about is the business justification for why I’m here, as if that’s not really what I care about. They pale in comparison to the woman that you see right there. That’s my mother, Callahan and this picture was taken the year my mom got turned down three times in a row for an assistant vice president’s job at Travelers. I was six years old. I got in the car out of school and my mom, as we were driving started crying, uncontrollably. And I had no idea why. This little kid you have no idea why and of course I asked my mom, you know, why.

She said one word – well, two words – “I’m a woman”. And so that started my journey since the age of six till now of trying to understand why half of the world is full of folks like you, yet less than 4% of you are CEOs of Fortune 100 companies – it’s completely inverted paradigm.

We all know the statistics of the power that women have in purchasing. Yet, guys like me, we never think about you when it comes to the companies that we build. I think it’s absolutely ridiculous. And this is a lie you’ve been told, just like my mom was told, because my mom spent — my mom never went to college. My mom started off as a clerk at Travelers and she spent 15 years on the IT side and 25 years on the business side and is now one of the top consultants in the world in the insurance industry. But she was told the same thing, you know, why, because in the early 90’s it was easier for — everybody wanted women to just get patted on the top of their head. There was two ways you got ahead in the insurance industry. You were submissive or you slept your way around. My mom did neither of them and I’m sure none of you have either. And that is how you truly make a difference.

When you want to create your own reality, when you fight against the men, folks just like me, I’m your stereotypical average white guy and I hate people like me. I really do, because the fact of the matter is that’s not where the world is going, and we’re going to talk a little bit about where the world is going.

So I’m always a get-stuff-done guy and I hear all these excuses. This new trend called Lean In, don’t know how to show up to the boardroom, need to ask for permission. I think it’s ridiculous, because how is that helpful — how is that inspiring to women like yourselves? How does that give you a framework to change the paradigms that you see that don’t make sense? It doesn’t, and neither do these statistics. I’m sick of hearing about income inequality. I’m sick of hearing about unemployment. I’m sick of hearing about board roles, you know why because statistics look in the past and the future of the world is not what the past is like, these big corporations, this male-driven society. It’s not.

So when you look in the past, I don’t understand how you can be looking at the future, you can’t. Your opportunity is right now. We need 600 million sustainable jobs by 2020, according to the World Bank, to keep the same global unemployment rate. I don’t have to tell you the income inequality statistics. I don’t have to tell you any of the other statistics of why things are starting to change and need to change. We all know it. You’ll be outside talking to another woman asking them, “Hey what do you do? What do you believe?”

And I will guarantee everybody in this room is here because that word impact, you realize there is a different way that the world is going to be, and it has to be. 7 billion people, 7.2 billion people are going to be on this planet by 2050. We don’t have enough food. We don’t have enough water. We don’t have enough housing, and all these big companies that tell you it’s great to get out of school, work 10 years, get your MBA, then get your PhD and maybe you have an opportunity to be a mid-level manager. It’s ridiculous. It’s a lot easier to follow your passion, how to create your own reality, because the future of the world is 5, 10 and 20-person companies, and I hope that all of you being here to a summit about impact will want to make an impact, want to build a business, want to take your passion, actually operationalize it. The challenge is normally not understanding what the right way to do it is.

So we’re going to talk a little bit about how to build on your passion. So when you have time, an hour or two, by the ocean, sit in a forest, put your phones down, and your computers down. Write down your top five goals and dreams. What do you want written on your tombstone that you want to be remembered for? However crazy they are, write them down.

And write next to them, put down the resources that you already have right now that you can use. And right there is a right now that you have to build on, and then put a dash that says next step, because the biggest problem most people have is that next step. We can all write down our passions. But we always struggle with the next step.

Second thing to do: print what you wrote and post it. Post it in three places, where you go to bed, where you brush your teeth, and the door you go in and out of the most in your house. And the reason why is because your house is your sanctuary. It’s the place that you trust and it takes more than 20 interactions to create a habit, any type of habit.

So if you look at those post twenty days in a row you will start to believe. What you believe becomes your reality. The challenge is that we also surround ourselves most of the time with the wrong people and not the right people. And what I find intriguing about surrounding yourself with the right people is people who have tattoos. There are people in this world who viscerally believe so much in something that they literally go through pain for hours because they have a story to tell. There are countless numbers of people in this room and in the world who believe that stories are the epicenter of everything humans care about.

But here’s the difference. It’s maybe you can think of ten people off the top your head who would support you in your hopes and dreams no matter how crazy they are. But how many of those ten people, if there was a life or death situation would take the spot of your loved one, your child, your partner or even you. Very few would, probably less than five.

So the reality is the people that you surround yourself with to get to where you want to go are not the right people most of the time, whether it’s your boss, whether it’s your friends, sometimes it’s even your partner. You need a supportive environment to follow your dreams, because it takes a lot of energy and the world thinks you already can’t do it. And I think that’s ridiculous too.

And that’s why you need to start with why, because people don’t buy what you do, or how you do it, they buy why you do it. What’s your passion, what’s your purpose, what’s your cause and what’s your belief? When you talk from a why-centered communication, it’s very simple: people either believe what you believe or they don’t. So it’s a really easy mechanism, even when you’re outside today or when you’re outside at work, talk about what you believe and why. Don’t talk about what you do. I am a manager, I do marketing. I’m a consultant. You’re not a consultant, you believe in something, you believe in helping make a difference. Talk from that perspective because that is how you build a tribe, and a tribe is what’s scalable. And without a tribe, changing the way in which these paradigms are right now is not going to happen, because it can’t. You can’t do it by yourself.

So we’ve talked about how to get to your passion, we’ve talked about who you should surround yourself with and we’ve talked about how you should communicate. But we haven’t talked about if the future of the world really is these five ten and twenty person businesses, how can you build a business that manifests all of those things? How can you make sure that there’s an opportunity that you can still provide for your family or not just fall off the beaten path? These are the five principles that I believe make a difference when you start a company, because most of the time in just about every case I’ve seen around the world, the biggest problem in a company is not anything to do with tactics that has nothing to do with skills. It has to do with the thing between your two ears: your brain.

So if you want to get it done you need to foster an open environment where communication is key, where people do what’s in the best interest of the company, because the last thing you want is people who have an agenda. That’s how big companies go bankrupt. So have a zero tolerance policy for folks who don’t believe what you believe and that’s why you post your manifesto right as people walk in the door of your company, because they either believe or they don’t. They’re either inspired by you and your vision or they’re not. It’s very easy self-selecting HR process.

Be values based, hire for and retain employees who only have the same values as you. There are two great tests out there that I recommend every single one of you uses for every single person in your company, whether it’s a co-founder or an employee, it’s called the Kolbe A type test and the StrengthsFinder 2.0, those two tests together will ensure that the people you have around you are the right people for the right reasons.

Create a culture of listening. We love to hear but we very rarely listen. Implement a true open door policy. Any woman who is in this audience that has been in business for more than 15 years knows exactly what I’m talking about, because HR is there for the company, they are not there for their employees. They’re there to protect the interests of the company. And the minute you are a whistleblower, the minute you say anything, the minute you mention a statistic or that you feel awkward because right now it’s this male driven culture in most of these companies, the people above you are on a witch hunt to find you, because you’re the tattletale, you’re not a tattletale at all. You see what should change and why and that’s why I hope that you will create your own reality.

The challenge is a lot of times we don’t know what’s on the other side of the door, or we don’t know what’s on the other side of when you jump in a hole. We get so caught up in, I know what I want to do, I see where I have to go but I don’t know what’s on the other side. It’s really simple, ladies. Sit down, think about what you have and what you’re going to need. Strap it on your back and jump in, because there’s no better time than now. There’s no better time to manifest your dream, follow your passion than right now. The world’s going to tell you don’t — don’t jump in. You can’t do that, that’s scary.

What’s the worst thing that’s going to happen to you if you jump in? What’s the big difference if you failed? You can build again, you can go back to corporate America but you get less than three opportunities as a female to build a high growth startup to follow your dreams, if you want to have children or if you want to travel the world, or if you want to make a difference, because the average company takes three and a half to four years to operationalize, and that’s on a quick trajectory. So very quickly, if you’re 25 or 30 already that means you’re going to be 40, 42 because the average person fails at least two or three times before they get to what they really should be doing and how they should be doing it.

So creating your own reality seems like it might be a little tough and I figured being a young white guy speaking in front of a bunch of women who might just say anything. So instead here are some women, some touchstones that when you go out on your journey, you can remember Jeannie Sullivan, founder of the one of the only-women owned venture capital firms in the world. Ingrid Riley is fighting most of those big male-driven corporations that I talk about right now in Jamaica, because most of those corporations think that Jamaica should be the next outsourcing hub. She’s fighting to make sure that it’s a tech ecosystem where every person who’s passionate can follow their dream, and there’s a lot of opportunity in Jamaica.

Amy, founder of Springboard, multiple IPO, supports women to no end and just in case, three weren’t enough, Liz Hubert lives in New York, 5000 page redesign of a Fortune 200 company, $12 million project and she was only 25. I want to talk about an outlier — Liz is an outlier. Lauren Flanagan, Michigan, invest in companies out of Michigan. She’s got a company that invests in green energy.

So the opportunity is yours, ladies. The time is right now, there’s never been a better time and I hope if you learn one thing and you take away one thing from everything that I’ve said — create your reality and always remember that luck is an accumulation of superior effort and focused execution.

Thank you.

 

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