Building skills and scaling impact is never a straight line. Many times, we need to unlearn old patterns before we can grow in new directions. How can leaders balance strategy with mindfulness? What can surfing and nature teach us about entrepreneurship? And what does it mean to scale from the inside out instead of just chasing numbers? These are some of the questions we explore in episode #102 of "Poder aprender".

Leïla Lahbabi, strategist, author, and founder of Mind Impact, shares her journey from advising CEOs at Oliver Wyman to helping purpose-driven leaders unlock high-performing talent and scale consciously. She explains why unlearning is just as important as learning, and how a beginner’s mind can open new doors when building a business from scratch.

One of the most powerful metaphors Leïla brings is surfing. From timing the waves to conserving energy, she shows how the ocean can be a teacher for entrepreneurship and leadership. Instead of hustling endlessly, we can learn to listen, adapt, and ride the right wave when the moment is right.

We also talk about mindfulness as a leadership accelerator. Beyond words or strategies, it’s presence, energy, and awareness that allow leaders to earn trust, inspire collaboration, and turn vision into execution. These are not abstract concepts but learnable skills that can transform the way teams operate and scale together.

Finally, we dive into her book The Billion Dollar Purpose, where Leïla reveals why companies that put people and purpose first achieve lasting growth. Through stories and practical lessons, she reminds us that success comes from scaling skills, values, and relationships, not just revenue.

These are the topics of episode #102

• Mindful Leadership, from presence to performance
• Operating Rhythm, buffers, cadence, and energy
• Founder Skill-Stack & Burnout, what to learn vs. let go
• Sustainable Scaling & Word-of-Mouth, beyond the hustle

¡Sigan aprendiendo y acuérdense de practicar bien!

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Leïla Lahababi: https://www.leilalahbabi.com

“The Billion Dollar Purpose” book:

https://www.amazon.com/Billion-Dollar-Purpose-Attracting-Developing-High-Performing-ebook/dp/B0F8P8SVM3

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Sitio web: https://poderaprender.com

Instagram: https://instagram.com/poder.aprender

YouTube: https://youtube.com/@poder-aprender

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Sitio personal: https://walterfreiberg.com

Today's guest is Leila Lahbabi,

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strategist, author and founder of Mind Impact.

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After starting her career advising CEOs and investors at Oliver Wyman, Leila shifted her

focus to helping purpose-driven leaders scale their impact from the inside out.

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She now works with founders and executives across Europe and MENA, helping them unlock

high-performing talent, build conscious leadership and scale sustainably without burnout.

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Her upcoming book, The Billion Dollar Purpose, coming in 2025, dives into how companies

like Patagonia and AirBnb outperform the market by putting people and purpose at the heart

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of growth.

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Leila, welcome to "Poder aprender."

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Thank you, Walter.

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It's an honor to be here with you.

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You started out in high stakes strategy consulting and I wonder what personal learning

curve did you go personally through when shifting toward a more human-centered, purpose

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driven work?

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Very good question and difficult to answer in a way that learning for me happens all the

time.

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I went to strategy consulting because I wanted to learn.

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I didn't want to be in one place.

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I wanted to learn from different companies.

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I wanted to learn how they work.

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I wanted to learn how they interact with each other.

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I wanted to learn about the industry.

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I wanted to learn about their country, their culture.

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So was working with different countries and different cultures.

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And that for me was

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what I love doing and what I love living.

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And then from that, I switched from like corporate job and being something which is really

structured into being an entrepreneur.

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I was like, okay, let's start from zero because now you need to learn to unlearn.

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So you need to unlearn your old patterns.

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You need to unlearn the old things.

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Do all the way of doing things and go for a new way of building a business based on what I

call beginner's mind, right?

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So not assume that you know already, but just try some things out because what's used to

work for you may not work anymore now because you're not part of a big brand, you don't

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have a big name.

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So this will not work for you to run your business.

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You need to build it somewhere else.

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Which is more based on value, more based on connections, more based on everything that an

entrepreneur does.

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I love what you said about it.

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It sounds like more taking responsibility for your own future, for your own destiny.

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And I so appreciate what you say about unlearning.

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People underestimate the power of unlearning.

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Sometimes it's all about learning and we skip over like, maybe I need to do things very

differently from what I used to.

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So thank you for that.

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Thank you for asking the question.

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Many of our listeners are very passionate about building skills and exploring new paths.

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I wonder what hobby or learning habit outside of work has shaped your perspective the most

as a leader now?

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My first teacher is nature.

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I learned through nature.

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Like I look at birds and then I at trees and I look at how they live, etc.

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My second teacher is my kids.

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Because they have, they see everything from the lens of someone who is discovering it.

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Like, whoa, my God, Disneyland!

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And then you're in Disneyland for the first time.

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My God, this flower is so beautiful.

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And then, you you learn to see things differently and then they see something that we are

not used to see.

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And the third thing that really helped me when I went to entrepreneurship is surfing.

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All my life, I was thinking I want to go surfing, but didn't have the occasion, the

opportunity also.

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It wasn't a priority.

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And then since I moved back to Morocco like three years ago, I was like, I want to start

surfing.

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And this was my main mindset coach.

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The waves.

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Like going with the waves, not going against the waves, catching a wave that is at your

level, having fun when you're catching the wave and not thinking about the other waves.

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Sometimes taking time to relax and not just rush but just see what is the right wave to

take and not just stare there but there are waves coming in so you need also to catch them

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out.

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So many things on the mindset shift that I thought about moving from corporate to

entrepreneurship that surfing teach me in the way to handle my energy, in the way to go on

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the market, in the way to show up,

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and in the way to have fun along the way.

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I appreciate what you said about being sensitive to what's going on with the water and

also timing that and managing your energy and which wave are you riding when you're

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waiting, being patient.

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I don't surf and I know that's one of the ultimate

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sport skills because that relationship that it has with nature and moving along that flow.

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And you cannot surf whatever you choose to.

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You have to see what are the conditions, the natural conditions, and adapt yourself to

that.

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And you cannot surf any spots.

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And sometimes when you take a wave and you just want to rush into things, then you just

miss out on other waves that are better.

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They're like, because you weren't...

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watching you weren't seeing what was happening and sometimes my coach was like you know

you wanted to to gain time you're losing so much time by just hustling here and I saw my

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behavior and this behavior we also sometimes do it on a business side right.

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Yeah, it's like keeping an eye on the big picture and not being short-sighted.

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Absolutely.

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And as you said, the spot that you are picking to surf and also which days because maybe

there are days that not very conducive to surfing or times of the year.

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Yes, and this goes against the hustling culture.

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You know, the hustling way of doing entrepreneurship is like a new to wake up every day at

5 a.m.

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and then to take your coffee and then work, work, work until midnight.

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But all days are not the same.

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You don't have the same energy every day.

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You can do something in four hours one day and the other day it will take you ages.

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So if you don't accept that and take this time to recharge,

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you will always run on a low battery.

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Yeah.

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And talking about skills in general, I know that you help leaders perform at their best

with less effort.

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And what skills beyond strategy do you see as essential to becoming that kind of leader

today?

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It's learning to ride the wave.

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It's exactly that So this is what mindfulness teach me, right?

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And now what I'm doing is a mix of what I've learned through the years walking with

Fortune 100 CEOs, which is around strategy.

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It's good to have a structure.

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It's good to have clear vision.

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This always great.

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But then if you don't have this presence,

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to listen to the ground, what's happening on the ground.

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If you don't have team that is collaborative, that trusts you and they work together, you

will be the bottleneck of your business.

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And you will also struggle to transform strategy into real actions on the ground, into

transformation, to have the real execution that will have the impact, right?

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So in order to do that, there is a big mindfulness shift is to be aware.

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Of your presence, of your energy, of actually not what's only you're saying, but what your

team is capturing as a message from you.

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Some leaders come to me and say, I don't understand.

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I'm all about collaboration.

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I'm all about people coming in and bringing their ideas.

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And when you ask the question to the team, they're like, really?

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Are you sure?

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So it's not something that the leader is saying.

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But it's something that is showing up in the way he leads.

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And in the way he or she leads, can sometimes share a message around, don't really trust

you in what you're saying.

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Your idea doesn't seem to be so brilliant.

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Even if they don't say that, you can see it in their, the way of talking and the way of

responding and the way of reacting and the way of rushing and the way of

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telling people what to do, and this is a learnable skill.

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So for me, the mindfulness part is an important accelerator of the execution of the

strategy that leaders want to have an impact on the ground.

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It makes sense.

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It makes a lot of sense to me.

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Sometimes people deal more or are more concerned with the words and there's more to that.

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There's like how they're showing up, their presence, who they are being in that situation.

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That's something that goes beyond words.

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It goes beyond words and directs into emotions.

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And you, so you connected, you made a connection between mindfulness and leadership.

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And if leadership would be, let's say that it's a skill and I see that there's a component

of mindfulness here.

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Do you think it can be learned such as a language or a musical instrument or surfing?

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And if that's the case, what practices can be helpful to make it second nature over time?

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This is a beautiful question because what we have been taught at school is like the only

thing that you can learn is math, languages, science, literature, probably also

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philosophy, but listening to your emotions and understanding your internal engine is

something that we haven't been taught.

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And then also there is a big belief

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around your this or your that.

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This is why we call like the fixed mindset and growth.

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Your this or your that.

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You're nice people or bad people.

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You know how to talk or you don't know how to talk.

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You know how to lead or you don't know how to lead.

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You know how to manage your emotion or you don't know how to manage emotion.

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It's right or wrong.

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Binary, like zero one, zero one.

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And all the other skills, we have a range of gray.

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Like you don't have someone who speaks English or who doesn't speak English.

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Right?

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You have...

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Level 1, level 2, level 3, level 4.

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Spanish as well, mathematics as well.

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But then when we go into emotions, it's like, he knows how to handle them, he doesn't know

how to handle them.

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He's a great leader, he's a bad leader.

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Right?

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Or nothing!

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And then we go into this binary because we haven't said, or we haven't learned from our

childhood.

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One, that it's a learnable skill, and two, how to learn, and three, what are the different

levels, and four, how to recognize those levels, and five, how to train ourself in each

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level to attain the level after that.

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So it's great.

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There's hope.

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I mean, there is hope to everyone.

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And the hope is if I talk about my own story, if I thought to myself, like, I'm hopeless,

I wouldn't be here today.

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If I said to myself, my god, you're so stressed out.

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My god, you don't know to do anything but hustle.

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My god, you're yelling all the time.

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My god, you're always complaining.

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And then I sit with myself and like, that's the way you are.

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Shame on you.

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Can you tell us a personal experience of transformation, how you shifted from one being

this way to this other way?

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Yes, I can share an experience at work where I was trained to be this pushy, like you need

to push.

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The management is like you need to be really trying, especially when you're a woman, you

need to push harder because people will not listen to you.

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I had this experience.

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So I was like more pushy and seeing like why people are not answering, seeing people like

raising their eyes so they're like...

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Again.

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She's going to do it again.

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And when I started training myself into mindfulness, I started learning actually what was

happening inside and not just the words that were coming from my mouth.

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And making the link between my thoughts, my emotions, and my body sensations.

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So when I'm saying something and if I feel stretched and then I feel like inside me I'm

angry, I know that the only word that would get from my mouth are words of anger.

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And that people will not listen because people don't like anger.

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So whatever you said, if it is like, you're a great person, you see like, I can say you're

great person, but I'm angry.

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Right?

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And what happens, like I went one day to a retreat, a silent retreat, and I came back.

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And it was not only me, but I saw what was happening in the room.

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And when I was in the room, coming from the silent retreat, and it was a strategic

meeting, everyone was yelling the way I was yelling before, and starting to make their,

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like...

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their point, it's my point, I'm saying this, I'm the one who's right, at some point I want

to also express myself, but there was no room for that, who's going to listen, everyone is

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only thinking about what's on his mind, so what I did is like, I started whispering.

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I started something like this.

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And then people turned in like, what?

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What are you saying?

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It was surprising.

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For them.

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And it's made me smile.

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Because it was disruptive.

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Completely disruptive.

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It's like people were curious.

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Why is she whispering first?

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Second, why is she saying?

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What is she saying?

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And third, what's happening here?

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Right?

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So I was able to make my point by whispering.

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And I would have never done this before, training my mind into seeing what was going on,

understanding what I was feeling, and then holding the energy to speak differently.

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And I don't just use that at work, but also with my kids.

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You sometimes kids come like, ah, and then you start whispering like, what?

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Or sometimes I start just like moving my lips and my mouth like, and my little one is

saying, what?

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That's your secret weapon now.

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Completely, my secret weapon, yeah!

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So this is one example, yeah.

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I appreciate what you say about how the practice of meditation and mindfulness can be

helpful in a leadership context.

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So you said that you attended a retreat.

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I also have experience with silent retreats and meditation.

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And I know that's something that it might seem like it might...

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sound like a stretch for many people or like this is too extreme or I'm not doing that.

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I would like to practice mindfulness and this is not something I'm willing to do yet.

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What are other more gentle ways or maybe easier ways that we can, people can start leaning

in more into mindfulness practice without going to a long silent retreat?

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Yeah, sure.

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The first thing for busy leaders is just not to rush from a meeting to another.

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I've lived so many years, like you have the meeting ending at 2 p.m., the other one is

starting at 2 p.m.

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Like, leave just five minutes between a meeting and another.

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15 minutes would be great, but five minutes will change the way you will show up.

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It will change your presence and will change your energy and the receptivity of your

message.

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Five to 10 minutes and just take them to breathe, to go for a walk, to hydrate yourself

with water and connect to the present moment.

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Not thinking about this is what I'm going to say in this meeting.

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This is what is going to happen.

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Not just stay with that.

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Where you are

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for five minutes and try it.

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Because what we don't do is like, me, people say, give me three, give me five, give me 10

ways of doing it.

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And then I give them 10.

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And then they're asking, have you tried anyone?

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I don't remember.

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Too many.

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So prefer to give one.

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Try just this one.

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In your calendar, never allow

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to have a meeting starting when the other is ending.

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And allow this 10 minute step.

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And a way of doing it, a trick of doing it, is instead of having one hour meeting, you

program 45 minutes.

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Instead of having 30 minutes of meeting, you program 20 minutes of meeting.

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And sometimes people will find it weird.

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Why 20 minutes?

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Because you know if you program from 2pm to 2.20 nobody is going to put on your calendar a

meeting at 2.20.

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Unless if you're doing 20-20-20.

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This is not the point, right?

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This is a trick that you can use.

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That's wonderful.

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Yeah, so the strategy or the system would be not to have meetings back to back first, not

to have meetings back to back.

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So that's an idea to create some space in between meetings.

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And the one strategy to do that is not, you don't do that by finishing a meeting at the

hour.

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You finish it before like the hour or like...

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in the 30 minutes slots.

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So instead of finishing at, I don't know, 11 a.m., you finished 10.50 or 10.45.

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And so that would be the way that you...

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Otherwise it's like, I agree that it would be awkward to let's start, let's meet at 2.05,

like five past two, right?

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So, or 10 minutes past two.

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And I know there's people who might be, maybe are starting meetings at 15 after the hour.

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And usually it's like we start at the hour mark or after 30 minutes.

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So yeah, that's wonderful.

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That's very practical and actionable.

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And talking about exhaustion and disconnection.

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What signs do you notice when someone's performance is masking exhaustion or disconnection

in your experience?

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And what's something they can shift to

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do something different,

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to rebalance themselves?

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Yeah, you will see that in different levels.

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You will see in the way they show up.

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You will see it probably in their memory.

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So they're not present, they don't remember what you said.

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And sometimes they ask, could you repeat that?

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Could you please repeat that?

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You will see it in their multitasking.

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So they're with you, but actually they're on their phone or they're on something else.

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You will see it in the decisions, the way they making their decisions.

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Is it a reaction or a response?

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And there is a big difference between reaction or response.

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Reaction is more based on fear, on stress, and we need to do this now, otherwise this will

happen, otherwise this will happen.

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It's the fight or flight mode, right?

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The response is, first they acknowledge what's going on.

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They're able to talk about their emotions to see how they feel, because people who are

just watching, they say, I don't feel well, but not feeling well is not an emotion.

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Someone who is more embodied leadership and knows where he's going and is not hustling is

someone who can tell you how he feels with more precision.

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And can also make the link between how he feels and what is just happening.

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Would you give us an example?

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In this case, how it would be more specific?

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Yes.

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So let's say I had a client who was working on an AI product for a while, right?

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And AI products right now, there are so many companies working on AI at the same time.

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And so many of them are sometimes doing the same, more or less cycling the same markets.

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And this client of mine was in a final discussion to get a project

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to test his product on the ground with the client, right?

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And he was in the final line with another competitor.

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And this competitor had more features.

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He was doing the same thing as my client, but more features.

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And his reaction at first was like, let's build all the features that he has.

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This was the reaction.

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And then when he saw the timeline, like the presentation will be in one month, we cannot

anyway build all the features that the others have.

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So after the reaction, he took time to breathe and he tried to connect to what's really

important.

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What is the client that they're trying to have exactly wants?

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Does he want more features?

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Or is it this feature, but much better?

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And what is the competitive advantage that they do have?

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Not what the other has, what they do have.

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And this is connection with the alignment.

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So when you're out of alignment or when you're acting out of fear or acting out of

defense, you try to imitate what the others are doing.

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And imitation, we know it, is always just not as good as the original, usually.

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And when you're strong in what you're doing, you know what you're doing, and then you know

that you have something which is really strong, you connect to your power.

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And when you connect back to your power, you make something great out of it, and you go

with conviction.

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So when you pitch, you pitch with conviction.

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You work on something that's exactly your zone of genius.

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And this is how you compete.

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This is what, for example, Netflix

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did it, right?

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If we took concrete examples that people know about.

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Like, next week they didn't say, let's do all type of entertainment.

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No.

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They said, we're going just to do streaming.

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Just streaming.

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What's Slack, for example?

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Slack, could say, OK, let's do everything which is around the collaboration within the

workplace.

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It's like, no, just the communication part of collaboration.

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And you have so many other tools that you have so many other features.

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But they're not billionaire...

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billion dollar businesses.

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And this is the power of focus.

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So intention drives focus.

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Focus drives performance.

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And performance that is driven by

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simplicity and power in one place, than all over the place.

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Yeah, they made a decision to excel at one thing.

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It's not that they don't want to, they didn't want to excel at a lot of things.

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And what you said about your client reminds me also, it makes me think when people are

competing with others or are competing with themselves, they're trying to upgrade

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themselves and become a better version of their product instead of looking around, what's

everybody else doing?

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I need to do the same.

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I need to catch up with them.

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Yeah, exactly.

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And you remind me of something.

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I had a coach one day who told me, need to be the best strategy consultant.

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I was like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

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I'm not the best strategy consultant.

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There's so many great strategy consultants out there.

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I'm differentiating myself by being at the intersection of strategy and mindfulness.

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This is my sweet spot.

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Because this is what's in line with the way I do things and the way I help my clients and

people recognize me directly.

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They don't come to me to say because they like it's the best.

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No.

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Or it's the one next door.

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No.

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Because they feel that my story connects to their story.

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We don't need more than that.

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I have another idea how you can call yourself.

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You wanted to hear it?

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Yes.

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The whispering coach.

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The whispering coach.

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I've heard this one, like the CEO whisperer and this.

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Yeah, I've heard it.

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And you have a story about, mean, yeah, so that's the, that's, there's that, but I want,

also share this based on what you shared about whispering in the meetings.

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How you use you and how you use whispering.

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Yeah.

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So, yeah, we were talking about performance and in this podcast, that's something that I

usually talk about.

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People who are interested in mastery or learning something to a high degree.

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And how can we keep that balance when we, people who are very interested in mastering

something and how can we stay in high performance

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without falling into perfectionism or burnout.

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Mmm.

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The word is passion.

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Because when you have the passion, like perfectionism, it's just refinement.

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Because you're doing it out of pleasure.

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One thing that happens, because I work with companies that are scaling, and companies that

are scaling, the leader is scaling himself, but he's scaling also his team.

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And the scale in the way I define it and the way I explain it to my clients is just make

sure that you move from a team of generalists to a team of specialists.

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So that each person focus on it's so her or she's her or his zone of genius.

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Because when you do that, you're not competing about like

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perfectionism and you're not against the...

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time flies.

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And you don't have the other things that you need to do that prevent you from learning

what you have to learn.

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And this something that happens often.

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We say, I want to learn this skill.

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But then, I have so many things in my life that I want to do.

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So I'm frustrated because I cannot spend time and focus and energy on this skill.

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So I would say for each of us, really to pick and choose and feel what energizes us.

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And also what sometimes we're good at already,

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and go to the next level.

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Because what I found myself at, like, even at my level when I started entrepreneurship, I

had to learn so many different skills that I didn't know about before.

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Like, you need to learn how to sell, you need to learn how to market, you need to learn

how to build a product, you need to learn how to organize yourself, you need to learn how

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to drive revenue, you need to learn finance, you need to learn, like, legal stuff.

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So many things.

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And this, I've heard and I've read somewhere that you just need to spend 20 hours or

something to learn the basics of a skill.

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And this for me is important.

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I love doing that.

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Like spend 20 hours on one skill and learn it.

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But then...

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Trying to have the perfection in all the skills is where we burn out.

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It's not trying to have perfection in one skill that burns us out.

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It's trying to be perfect in everything.

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I want to speak English perfectly and now I just switch from French to English.

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So if I was like, I want to speak English perfectly and have a business that is perfect

and landing pages that are perfect and my book should be perfect.

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No!

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Right?

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So one thing that you're perfect at, that is at the core of what you do, and then the rest

comes as a support.

387

Where you're maybe average and learning along the way, but most of your focus goes into

one or two skills.

388

Yeah, picking your battles.

389

Yeah, pick your battle.

390

And that's something also that comes to me and you're a polyglot.

391

You speak three languages.

392

You speak Arabic, you speak English, you speak French.

393

And that's something that I heard around people who learn languages and people assume that

they learn like three languages or more languages at once.

394

And it's possible to learn things sequentially.

395

Like first I learned this and people don't know.

396

Maybe they assume that I was, that a person was learning everything at once and they...

397

see somebody at their, in their thirties or forties, and they are assuming that they did

everything and they were doing everything at once.

398

And maybe there was a path.

399

There was something that for a few years they did this.

400

Then for another few years, they did this other thing.

401

And that's how they ended up having multiple skills and developing different things in

their lives.

402

Oh my god, what you're saying like resonates so much.

403

Because we look at people like the final product and we assume that everything happened at

once.

404

We say, okay, they've learned, but they like, they know all that.

405

Yeah, but he's 40 or she's 30 or 50.

406

So they focused on one thing for five years and one thing for five years.

407

And it's normal.

408

At the end, they're just merging all those things

409

together and it works perfectly but the learning happens sequentially as you just said.

410

And there's something that you also speak about and you were talking about scaling before.

411

You help companies who are scaling and this idea of scaling from the inside out and how do

you apply that not only to beyond business, to personal reinvention or when people are

412

learning a skill, what are the implications of learning scaling from the inside out when

we're learning and when we are reinventing ourselves?

413

So, scaling from inside out, applied to learning.

414

This is a beautiful question.

415

It's the first time I have this.

416

So let me think with you about this one.

417

This is something that I apply to myself.

418

I don't care if someone has a better English than me.

419

I don't care if someone is a better guitarist than me or plays better piano than me.

420

I just look at how I was doing one year or two years before and I compare to that I'm

like, oh my God.

421

And sometimes we can also learn from ourselves and teach ourselves.

422

So sometimes I can watch myself on video talking and seeing their face I was like, oh,

here I was doing this, here I was doing that.

423

So usually...

424

We wait for other people to give us feedback on how we react, to give us feedback on our

language, to give us feedback on what to do better.

425

But there is something from inside out, is asking ourselves the question, this happened

this way, and they're reflecting.

426

How could I do better next time?

427

What should I learn?

428

What do I want to learn?

429

And we see ourselves as an evolution, learning an evolution over a lifetime, whether then

achieving a specific goal or looking like someone or having a skill in the same way as

430

someone else.

431

This is from my inside out.

432

It's like me, my own performance with what I love, with where I want to go, what's the

next thing for me to learn and how can I do better?

433

That's amazing.

434

And that's something that I agree that I can see myself also in that and that I

underutilize what's available to me to improve on my own learnings.

435

And that's something that I see all around.

436

We are waiting for someone else to give us feedback.

437

Now with this AI, I want AI to give me feedback.

438

I want the feedback of AI.

439

And I recently...

440

I was reflecting on this, how we are disempowering ourselves also in terms of what we can

do on our own right now, because there's so now with technology is so much easier to get

441

that type of feedback.

442

It's like now we don't even need humans to tell us we can rely entirely on feedback or the

reflections from AI what they, AI is seeing on us, what we should improve.

443

That in my opinion, that's costing us discernment and our discernment skills and powers.

444

And we become very dependent on others or technologies.

445

I love what you're saying and the word discernment that you used is very powerful.

446

It's not AI, like AI is not going to do just anything.

447

If we use it, we don't use it, it's our choice.

448

It's the discernment while using it.

449

I don't mind asking AI for feedback.

450

I don't mind asking people for feedback.

451

But then discernment

452

is the key skill also to develop.

453

So what am I going to do with this feedback?

454

Right?

455

And learning happens outside of classrooms because we were used to learn in the classroom

and go outside and then apply the learning.

456

What entrepreneurship, for example, taught me and when I work with my clients is action is

your classroom

457

and then reflecting on your actions is your learning curve.

458

So it's the other way around.

459

And if we take AI and we apply it into the way we were doing before, like classroom, AI

teach me this, AI teach me that, we will not move.

460

Let's act, maybe use AI, and then discern.

461

Yeah.

462

It's what we do with that.

463

It's what we do.

464

How we are using it.

465

I know that you are writing a book, The Billion Dollar Purpose, that is coming out this

466

And what has surprised you the most in the writing process of this book and how this

writing has stretched you as a creator and as a thinker?

467

So the book is already out now.

468

It's already available.

469

And it took me, I thought at the beginning it will be a one to two month process and then

it took me 14 months.

470

And the way I wrote it was through first interviews.

471

So I interviewed CEO of big companies, uh founders of small to medium sized companies.

472

more than 200 interviews across the world.

473

And that was really powerful because we see that we are all different, but at the core,

it's more or less the same problems around if you want to scale, you cannot go alone.

474

If you want to scale, you need also to scale yourself in order to scale your business, to

scale your own skills.

475

And then...

476

you need also to surround yourself with the right people and upskill them.

477

So the link between the skills and the scaling, know, scale skills goes together, what was

really remarkable.

478

And I felt like it was an unconscious bias, right?

479

So people, when we talk now about scaling, we talk a lot about

480

scaling means selling more.

481

Scaling means doing more marketing.

482

Scaling means more systems.

483

And then we forget the core of what a business is.

484

That is the value creation.

485

In order to create the value, skills are at the core of value creation.

486

So you can say whatever you want and spend your time selling.

487

And this is the hustling mode.

488

And then people come into your business and they're seeing that the value of what you're

offering is not good enough.

489

So they will leave, they will buy one time, but they will not come back and they will not

recommend you.

490

So you will spend your time hustling, trying to sell to someone else.

491

This happens a lot of time and moving from the hustling culture to building strong

foundations is through building your own skills, building the skills of your team

492

and making sure that you have the real value creation for your clients.

493

So when your clients come, they have the great product, the great service, the great

customer journey, and you can also have more upsells because you have more value to

494

provide them.

495

So you can build a very successful business with less clients, but a bigger

496

a life client lifetime value.

497

And this is something that we don't talk about enough.

498

And that's upskilling is the key to unlock this exponential growth, especially that it

compounds over time.

499

So when you do your selling, it's like something it brings the results or doesn't bring

you the result.

500

But your product, when you upscale yourself, when you upscale your team

501

the sky is not even the limit of what you can create as a value for your customer.

502

And then when everyone is talking about you, then the selling part becomes easier.

503

We are all interested in building new skills and at the same time we have limiting ideas

and limiting beliefs around that.

504

And my question for you is for someone who's building a skill can be in their business or

new language or side project.

505

What's one belief about success that they might need to let go in order to really grow?

506

Yes.

507

The response is in your question.

508

Is accepting to fail.

509

Not so much about success.

510

Yes, because you know, I mean what is success?

511

What is success?

512

It's like you've done it the first time and then said, it's not the way of doing it.

513

Okay, let me learn, what do I learn from that?

514

Okay, let me try another one.

515

What did I learn from that?

516

And when you overthink and you don't do the first step, then it's difficult to learn.

517

It's like people want to move from babies to adults, but to go from baby to adult and like

even a baby, it just lies one day and like, oh, I know how to walk, no.

518

They get up and then they fall.

519

They get up and then they fall.

520

And at some point they learn to walk.

521

Then they learn how to speak.

522

And somehow, I don't know, we have lost this along the way, thinking that being an adult,

it's going from zero to one on a skill and to go directly to success.

523

But failures are the steps to success.

524

And this is something I saw also in corporate jobs.

525

I saw...

526

Many people like saying, okay, I want to go to the next layer, corporate layer.

527

So the way for me to do it is to succeed and not to fail.

528

So they play in not to fail.

529

But by playing not to fail, what they do is that actually they don't learn as much as

someone else.

530

And they think that the career is linear.

531

This is not true.

532

It sounds like a safe game, but it's a dangerous game.

533

It's a dangerous game because the person, I've seen uh an image when they put two balls,

one who is going linear like this, descending linear like this, and one which is in

534

sinusoidal.

535

And which ball arrives at the end the fastest?

536

The one who's doing this.

537

The one who's in sinusoidal.

538

Actually, when you go linear, you think that you're going faster, but life doesn't work

this way, right?

539

It's ups and downs that can give you exponential growth and compounded effects.

540

So when you go in linear, you don't use this compounded effect.

541

And compounded effects, would that be in finance, would that be in skills, would that be

in anything, is what really help us to skyrocket our growth.

542

Thank you for that.

543

And is there anything else you'd like to add to this conversation before completing?

544

And I know that you have a resource that we are going to share at the end.

545

And before getting there, is there anything else you'd like to add that we haven't

covered?

546

No, I think we're good.

547

It was a nice conversation.

548

Especially, I love that because learning was always my first value on the list.

549

It's mine too.

550

Yeah, learning.

551

Learn, right?

552

Always the thing to learn.

553

And you know what?

554

Like I see that people who do things to learn

555

Usually they succeed fast, success comes faster.

556

And when you do things to succeed...

557

then you're so focused on the wounded thing, right?

558

That's when there is opportunity for learning to go faster, you're like, no, I don't have

time for that.

559

I don't have time for that.

560

I need to stay focused on my success.

561

So you don't enjoy the process.

562

And you don't take the leverages that learning can enable you to have.

563

And the other way around, when you learn, actually you're having fun along the way.

564

And then you arrive at some point and you're like, my God, I know how to do this already.

565

I didn't know one day I would be able to do that.

566

Even my English, for example, by practicing, sometimes I'm like, I have this new

vocabulary that I didn't know that I had in my mind.

567

This is new.

568

And I'm very happy about it.

569

You surprise yourself.

570

Yes, and this is what life is about.

571

We love surprising ourselves and seeing new things and discovering.

572

Yeah, when we are talking about nature and your kids, you are astonished about nature,

about your kids, about their sense of curiosity.

573

And that's how we keep ourselves in that learning spirit.

574

Yes, I want to add only one thing that just came to my mind.

575

We can learn from anyone.

576

Right?

577

And this, I find it a lot in the corporate world and also in entrepreneurship when they're

like, I will not learn from this person because they don't have my results.

578

They don't have my thing, they don't...

579

And when I said I learned from my kids.

580

You know, so we can learn from anyone but not anything.

581

Each person from me is more advanced than us on something, for sure.

582

So there is not something like comparison, someone is more advanced than the other.

583

Each one of us is more advanced than the other on something because they focus on that

skill.

584

And this curiosity to say, what can I learn from this person?

585

It's what helps us to connect more, to listen more, and to grow faster.

586

That's lovely.

587

Thank you.

588

And I can see your value, learning value shining there, your willingness to learn from

anyone.

589

I can learn from anyone.

590

That's beautiful.

591

Leila, it was great having you on my podcast "Poder aprender." And there's a resource that

you have to share with my audience.

592

Could you tell us more about that and what is this for?

593

Yes, so the book is already out now, so you can have it if you want it on Amazon.

594

It's on the link.

595

And on the same link, there is a bonus that goes with the book.

596

And the bonus is like all the cheat sheets of the book.

597

If you want like to go directly to the cheat sheets and understand how to scale using the

skills, scaling your teams, scaling yourself, scaling your missions, scaling your

598

adaptability, this is available for free as a resource.

599

Thank you.

600

Say they can find it as "The Billion Dollar Purpose", by Leila Lahbabi on Amazon.

601

Great.

602

Awesome.

603

It was wonderful having you Leila.

604

Thank you for sharing all your learnings and for your mindful presence with my audience.

605

Thank you for welcoming me in your show.

606

It was a pleasure.