Patrick McAndrew, a seasoned entrepreneur and high-performance coach, and the Founder/CEO of HARA, talks about living inside of an art gallery, how speed reading paved the way for a new career, the things that often get mistaken for lack of motivation, finding fear at the top, where confidence really comes from, breaking the loop of distraction, and why engagement doesn’t necessarily equal value.

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Today's guest is Patrick McAndrew, a seasoned

entrepreneur and high performance coach and the

founder and CEO of Hara, an exclusive membership community

and network for the top 1% of entrepreneurs and business

leaders. Patrick has a wealth of experience that merges cutting

edge technology with deep human insight. Then we're excited to

talk to him. Well, Patrick, so excited to chat with you today.

You're coaching and providing a lot of value to, you say that

kind of the 1% of the 1% in business. So if I somehow

stumbled upon you in secondary school and I said, Patrick, what

do you what do you want to be when you grow up? What would a

secondary school Patrick have shared?

I think at that time it was, it depends. If

it was like a beginning of secondary school. I think I

wanted to be an actor. If it was the middle of the time in

secondary school, I wanted to be I wanted to have a talk show. I

wanted to host a talk show.

Were you already like planning and thinking of

coming to the states, where you want to build a career in

Ireland, or what was that even floating through your mind at

that time?

Well, I always, I always was very taken

by the US and this New York in particular, where I lived for

five years, and it was sort of hung over my head. But if you do

well enough on these exams, Patrick, my mom would say,

taking a trip to New York. But that trip to New York never

manifested. The first time I came to the States, I think I

was maybe 19, and we came on a family trip, and we went to

Clearwater Beach for Christmas. And as you can imagine, the

United States was New York in my mind, like that was the country

that there was no sense or curiosity about the others. And

I remember driving from Tampa to Clearwater, and I had never seen

things like strip malls, and they're the most foreign, alien

looking thing ever, like seeing Dunkin Donuts and Wendy's and

Burger King, but all in these, just sort of these, these

parallel units alongside a road. And I remember thinking, This

doesn't look like the impression that I had of this country at

all. So I have to start to come to terms to realize that there,

there are different parts of this country and and they all

hold different characters.

Yeah, yeah, a lot, a lot of drywall pre

fabrication, not a lot of stone cathedrals that were modernized.

Indeed. Yeah.

Walk me through a little bit of your time at

Ireland after that, I mean going to school, developing what were

things that you started to gravitate to as you, as you

matured and aged up, and how did that influence the direction you

were headed?

I think there's always just been a

tendency just to follow curiosities. So when I was in

college, I studied law, but I had a radio show. I also worked

in the regional radio station as a sound engineer. So I would be

there during the live shows, and I would be turning on the the

ads and fading in the music and all that stuff and meeting the

guests. And there was something there. There was something about

conversing and meeting people. I grew up in a home where there

was constantly people coming through, whether it was people

traveling from around the world coming to stay with us, or

eccentric characters that my mom had come across, or she had an

employment agency for a large number of years. The nurses that

would be coming into Ireland, they would stay with us for a

few days before they would go to the nursing home at the hospital

where they were going to work. So we would sort of like take

care of them, because they would be homesick and get them

settled. She also had a jewelry business where she made bespoke

engagement rings for couples. So there was a room in the house

where they would come in and they would be presented. They

would they would come in to design the engagement ring they

wanted. And then my mom would take the design and go to

Antwerp and get it made. And then they would come back and

she would have a bottle of champagne, and we would see the

joy, and we would maybe have a meal with them and talk with

them. You know that that sort of nature, that could very

convivial nature, was was very normal in my household growing

up. So there was always different cultures, different

characters. And I growing up as a young kid, growing up, grew up

in London before I moved to Ireland, and for a number of

years. And during that time in London, I actually lived in a

gallery. So my parents had had rented the flat that they had in

London and then took out a lease on this gallery to manage the

expenses of it all. They built drywall, and they built rooms

within the gallery which were never there was just a big open

space, and they built like a little apartment and a home at

the back. And when I would leave my bedroom, I would walk out

onto the gallery. So when I would come home from school, I

would I would enter in through a gallery to get to my room. And

when I was there, and my mom was she didn't really have many

staff. So if there was a lot of people coming through as a five

year old or a six year old, it was my role to to guide them

around and show them the pieces of glass and the pieces of art

and. And keep them entertained for a few minutes until my mom

could speak to them. So all of that, I think, the the way of

observing and engaging with people had sort of been inherent

to to my my lived experience. We also had the most travel man in

the world stay with us for a few days. I don't know if he still

holds that title, but he did at that time. He had been traveling

for 24 years, and Ireland was the last country on his world

tour. So I came home from school one day and my mom was at the

kitchen table chatting with this guy, and she said, this is Mike

Patrick. I think I was telling you about him. He's the most

traveled man in the world. I heard him on the radio three

days ago. I sent a text into the station and said, if you're

coming to Galway and you need somewhere to say, just let me

know. And he called her up on the phone. He said, Hey, is this

Julia? And she said, Yeah. He said, It's Mike. I've just

arrived into Galway bus station. Is that offer still standing to

stay with you for a few days? And she said, absolutely. So we

got to hang out with him for three or four days. And he had

been in Somalia. He had been in Mogadishu. He was one of the

first tourists there in a very long time. He was in the town

across he had not very far away from in Iraq, where Osama bin

Laden had been captured. He traveled through Afghanistan. He

had been all over, you know, but places that you rarely hear

about. He was a quirky character, for sure, but it was

interesting conversations with him.

I can only imagine, and what a cool

exposure that you got to diversity through your own home

with all these people coming through. So fast forward from

this, you've become a sought after speaker. What led to that

type of work exactly?

Well it started out with speed reading.

So I was teaching speed reading memorization workshops around

the country. I was going into schools and colleges and

companies like Bessemer trust, Northern Trust, quite a few

hedge funds and investment banks, helping these people

improve how they processed and retained information. And that

was a very interesting experience, because I realized,

you know, if you want to pay, I don't know what is it? It's

somewhere in the region, like 160 or 180,000 for for an MBA at

Columbia University, I got to go in and see those people in that

room. Amazing networking, amazing conceptual frameworks

and models and ways of thinking about business. But so much of

business is about your own internal game. You know, the

actual dynamics of business are not that difficult. There are

problems which need to be solved Absolutely, and problems keep

arising. But what's the challenge there? Well, the

inherent challenge is, is the capacity to sustain change and

the capacity to be malleable and adaptive. I think that's that's

what our unique capacity as human beings are. Is this

capacity to mutate, to be one way and then to recognize that

the environment has changed, I must mutate into another way,

but yet I can retain my true essence. I don't lose myself

under the conditions of the environment. I maintain myself,

but I'm not bound to this identity. I'm good at this or I

like this, so therefore I'm only going to try and find a business

that operates on the fundamentals of me being very

good at doing stuff on a computer, but I don't want to

interact with people in person. Well, I've just cut off so much

opportunity to myself. So maybe if I can develop certain develop

certain qualities of how I engage with others, much more

will show for me. So I saw in all of these environments that I

went into that these people are learning a lot of information,

but it's not taking them so far because they're not learning

about themselves. In fact, they're neglecting themselves.

They're only trying to develop this 10% area which it feels

like it's directly relevant to business, but there's this other

90% which determines your clarity, your conviction, your

essence, your value, your sense of self worth. And if you're

clear on all of that, you can achieve a whole lot more, and

you can feel content, and you can feel like your whole life is

is in alignment. It doesn't feel like it's so fragmented. So I

began on that journey by teaching people about focus,

because that was the thing. Through my exposure to different

environments of teaching speed reading, I realized, wow, okay,

these people that I'm meeting, they're very driven. They're not

lacking motivation. Yet, companies are spending, you

know, 1000s, 10s of 1000s every conference for a motivational

speaker that people don't need motivation. They've plenty.

They've plenty drive. What they lack is a pragmatic sense of how

to organize themselves. They're missing internal structure. It's

pretty chaotic in there. So the first place that I approached

was focus, because I thought that people needed help focus,

which they did. But then over years and years of doing that,

working with Pacific Life, Lincoln, financial, Morgan,

Stanley, all these companies, I realized, okay, I can teach you

how to focus, and I can make you very good at doing the tasks

efficiently, but there's a deeper problem there. There's a

much deeper problem, and it's your capacity to regulate

yourself. It's your capacity to actually regulate and relate to

yourself, and that's actually more of the foundational layer

that causes a lot of the problems, leadership problems,

strategic problems. There's a company I got called in to work

with last November. They had 26 primary initiatives.

That word primary, and 26 initiatives...

And 26. Yeah, it's not, it's not all aligning.

But where is that coming from? That's not coming from the fact

that these people aren't intelligent enough. It's

actually coming from more of a place that their whole emotional

state is so scattered and so fragmented because they don't

feel safe and secure in their work. They're unsure about this

industry. It's going through such rapid change, like many

are, so a lot of the problems that are appearing across the

company is a totality in the individuals within it, much more

about an internal thing that's happening. And a lot of my work

previously was building fundamental qualities in people

so that they could improve their reading and their memory and

their focus, so that they could actually start to take action.

But now I'm sort of interested in working with people who have

no issue taking action, who have no issue getting things done,

but yet, there's a barrier. There's some sort of an internal

block that's confusing. Either they have developed far beyond

the business and the business is not catching up to them, so it

feels like it's out of alignment. Or the business has

developed far beyond them, and they've been pouring so much

into the business, but as an individual, they're still quite

underdeveloped in comparison to the demands of the business. So

how do we calibrate these two and if we do, means that things

move a lot more smoothly, and they progress much more in the

right direction.

My experience with a lot of these types of

individuals who found a significant amount of in a

comparative success in their their business or their

practice, to be at the level I think we're talking about is

that they have to have a lot of self confidence in specifically

what they're doing, meaning that they've developed somewhat of a

ego. And I don't mean they're all egoists, that they are

dominated by it, but I find that a lot of them have to have

gotten what they had. They have to have a certain amount of self

worth and self value that they've crested over to

accomplish things of a magnitude. And with that

sometimes comes some defensiveness around change, or

a defensiveness of them that maybe not verbalizing this, but

I'm imagined you've maybe heard at some point, Patrick, you

don't you don't know my business. You don't know what

we're doing. So how do you how do you overcome that?

I don't see a lot of self confidence. I see a

huge amount of fear. I see a lot of people who where their fuel

source is coming from, growing up in poverty, and they never

want to be in that environment again, or feeling maybe once

again poverty, but feeling trapped, feeling like they

didn't have choice. So what they want is they want money that's

going to give them the freedom to choose. There was a gentleman

that I spoke with not so long ago, and I asked him, if you

were to kind of look outside of yourself, what do you orbit? And

for this gentleman, it was money and power. He was able to say it

very quickly that that's what it was. He was very accomplished,

but he was extremely exhausted, but he couldn't seem to stop his

relentless pursuit of whatever he seemed to be pursuing. And it

was more money and more power. Now, as our conversation

progressed, at the root of it, he just wanted some love and

self acceptance. It this is not bad. This is, this is, this is

fine. It's, it's part of the development of the human being

and of the psyche. We come from a place of pain, and we try to

transmute that pain into something that will take us

forward, because we don't want it to hold us back. So maybe we

develop another character. We develop this man or this woman

who's able to amass money or power, and now people are drawn

to us because of the money and the power or the knowledge or

the capacity to get things done or to help things in the

community. And now people value you and see you for these

qualities and these capacities. But underneath that, as soon as

that is taken away the business or taking action every day,

there's a huge amount of insecurity. There's a huge

amount of insecurity, and that causes a huge amount of pain and

limitation on the business that ends up getting created because

the ego and the identity of the person who found that it is so

interwoven with the actions or what that business reflects

about them that they're trying to keep it in a way that keeps

their identity the way they want it to be. So what ends up

happening is that our identity gets reduced to our biography.

You know, you you got a biography on me. People at the

beginning of the show heard about me. I'm not that. I'm not

that. If I were to describe myself as that, it would feel

like it's another person. But yet, we need certain terms and

containers to explain it. So you're a coach, okay, great. Now

I get a sense of who you are, but you're so much more than

that. You're bringing your whole lived experience into it. So

it's fine to have these sort of monikers of who we are as

people, because we need that to make allow people to have a

reference point of who we are and what we do. But my days,

it's very dangerous if you think that you are, that if you allow

your identity become wrapped up in that, you become very weak.

And I, from what I see, there's, there's very little self

confidence, there's a lot of survival, even no matter how

many millions you have in the bank. And I It doesn't have to

be that way.

Yeah, interesting.

And I would say, from my observation, I

would say confidence is a sort of emergent thing. You don't

craft confidence. Confidence sort of emerges and it merges

through your view of yourself, and the evidence that this, this

view of yourself, is being reinforced. So you can also be

very confident that you can't do something you know you it's it's

a certainty. It's a certainty of something. It's a certainty of

your capabilities and your powers, which can be that it's a

certainty that you can move towards something, or it's

equally a certainty that you cannot. And. Because it's been

evidenced so many times before. So my interest more so is

because there's many environments that I go into with

very little confidence that I can do it, but I have confidence

that I can find a way. I have confidence that I'll be able to

be in the the uncertainty or the discomfort of it, and I'll move

through it, because that's something that I have evidence

of, I'm much more interested in, I suppose, expanding people's

sense of value and worth beyond just their actions. So for

example, something that we're going to be launching relatively

soon with Hara, which I now realize is so needed and so

important is so many of the companies that I speak to,

whether it's the CEO or it's an intern, are feeling immensely

overwhelmed. Now, this overwhelm is coming because of the the

amount of information and the amount of things that we feel

that we should know, the amount of communication. There was one

gentleman that I spoke with in Dallas at a conference couple of

weeks ago, and he told me he gets about 480 emails a day like

that's such an insane quantity that's that's beyond a full time

job just filtering through that every day. But why does this

happen? Why are these tools that were meant to liberate us and

free us through the work that was most important? Why are they

becoming the things that are holding everybody back? Because

it's, it's a total distraction. Now, you could say it's in the

design, and there's a truth to that. There's a design of a

desire for engagement. That's how these products measure their

value, not how little time you spend on them, but how much time

you spend on them, how much information flows through them.

But I don't think it's enough to just place the blame on the

product and the tool. There's something deeper that's

happening here, and it's it's actually much more related to a

sense of social security. And I've been watching this, and

it's only become clear to me very much. So in the last five

or six months, if we just look at distributed teams, for

example, where you've got, let's just say, a couple of people in

Omaha, Nebraska, there's a company that I work with. I have

a few people there, and then you have others which are dotted

around the country, but their boss and their direct report is

there in Omaha, and they get to meet up with each other two or

three, maybe four times a year at conferences. Sometimes they

get 15, 20 minutes. If it's 20 minutes, 25 minutes as a one on

one chat. That feels like it's enormous, but most the time it's

in a group setting, so the conversation is more about the

collective like, what are we all talking about? The person that

I'm reporting to doesn't really know me, doesn't really know my

true character. They see the analytics of what I do based on

the metrics of what comes in, but as a person who I am, as

human being, they don't know me because they haven't had much

time with me. I've given leadership teams this this

challenge to spend 45 minutes with their direct reports just

on one call, and I've given them questions to ask which are much

more deep about like who they really are as human beings. And

they learn so much about them and realize that their

assumptions of what motivated and drove them is so different

to what it was. So that's a norm that people are not really

getting to see each other. Now, if I'm in New Mexico and my

direct report is in Omaha, Nebraska, I see him or her three

or four times a year. My promotion, how much more I'm

going to earn next year, or maintaining my job, is dependent

on their view of me, how they see me. So how can I prove

myself? I make sure I do I succeed as much as I can in the

realm of the metrics, and I also make sure that I am as

responsive as possible in my emails and my communication and

showing that I'm on, because by showing that I'm on and that I'm

hyper responsive, it's a display in the best way possible that

I'm committed and that I'm a worthy human being, and that's

what's happening more and more, is that we're not engaging

deeply with each other. So the context of how much we

understand of each other is very low. So we invest a lot more of

our energy into those low context transmissions of

communication, which creates this very fragmented and

distracted state. Because to be not distracted and fragmented is

to choose for yourself, is to choose where you're going to

direct your energy, where you see that there's things

happening outside. But you downgrade their importance,

because you upgrade the importance of what you want to

do and what you see is important. But for the vast

majority of people I meet, they've completely downgraded to

level zero their importance of what they want and how they want

to direct their lives or their business or their day, and they

completely upgrade the importance of everything that's

happening around them, that's coming in because they don't

want to miss a thing, because if they do, it might threaten their

job. It might threaten their sense of how they're perceived

by their boss. And if that's not met and if that's not worked on,

I can offer as much content and information about how the brain

works and how to organize yourself, but it won't make a

difference, because the human beings are in a very survivalist

very survivalistic state, and that's driving the show, not the

rational mind, but a very, very emotional, unsure, unsecure

internal state.

Reminds me of a book called Tribal Leadership. I

don't know if you've read this, but I think you'd like it.

There's, you know, a category of stages that the Stanford

professor observed in different culture and communities, the

lowest level was like the kind you see in prisons, which is

like defined by the affirmation, My life sucks. That was the way

they had to write it and put it. They didn't see the way out. And

then the second tier, it becomes a little bit less, My life

sucks, and it. They can see others have it great. It's My

Life sucks, but other people have it great. There's someone

near them that's succeeding, probably a manager or a leader.

And then level three is I'm great, but you're not. And this

is prolific in the corporate world, lawyers, doctors and in

order to be the greatest, they can't have competition in their

office, right? It's always proving it's a survivalist. And

then level four is we are great, and Level Five is Life is great.

And there are very few companies that operate at that level. But

just kind of connecting these dots in my head, as I hear you

talk, it's, it's a little bit of that, am I hearing this

somewhat, right?

Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Because

I think, I think we've been given these incredible tools,

which are there to support us, but they're there to support the

what we have to actually develop us so that we can develop

internally. Whereas I think in many circumstances, there's a

regression taking place where we're completely divorcing

ourselves or neglecting how we need to develop internally to

meet the demands of what's being presented to us externally, and

we're just sort of playing the victim to how life is playing

out around us and through Hara, the work that I'm doing is, I'm

fundamentally trying to show people, you have a huge amount

of agency here, but you're, you're the way that you live

your life is what's shaping this. If you feel like there's

no space or time for that, you'll continue to suffer, and

that's the truth, because you'll, you'll find that your

attention is constantly going out. It's constantly about

what's happening outside of you, whereas what we give people our

practices and ways to develop themselves internally, because

we need that every time, our whole range of evolution as we

as we develop as the human species, is dependent on changes

to the external environment, changes the temperature, changes

to food, changes to threats, changes towards opportunities.

We're being given an immense amount of comfort, and so much

of the products that are being designed are around this are

more primal and primitive aspects of us. So yeah, there's,

there's definitely a lot that's happening here in recognizing

that the world is changing around us. So how are we

changing internally to rise from top, as opposed to rising to the

top thinking or recognizing that we have so many of these

qualities in us that are incredible.

Oh, yeah, one of the things that you talk about

is how to break the cycle of distraction. What does that look

like in motion when you're working with someone?

Well, are there places that your attention

is often getting brought to that you know is not serving you, yet

it keeps happening, but the but then there's a reflective

tendency right to observe and say, Wow, that was not where I

needed to spend my time, that that was not useful to me. And

so there's different states of mind that arise. So what's the

observation or the thing that you notice in yourself

afterwards, the things that are sort of you keep going towards,

and you spend a lot of time. So if we take a bit more of an

objective perspective, so you're looking at yourself from an

outside body, because you're in it at the moment, and you're

sort of like you're analyzing and reasoning at the same time.

So if we can be just more objective, so the analysis and

the reasoning is separate, where is your attention going? Where

it's being wasteful. If we just look at it hard and like that,

hard and fast. Because once again, I'm not of the opinion

that you need to be this sense of being productive, which is

bringing utility to every moment. You're building a

business and you're running a business, you need clarity of

mind thinking. I chatted with a guy a couple of months ago, he

was joining Hara, and he was saying to me, you know, I want

to map out a five year plan. If I could only find four hours to

just sit down and map out a five year plan. I know how crazy that

sounds. And I said, Is it crazy that you're mapping out a five

year plan, or is it crazy that you think that you need four

hours to map out a five year plan? He said, It's crazy that I

think I need four hours I should be able to do it unless so

there's this constant sense that I should be able to condense and

do things very quickly, when the reality is my days. If you're

going to think about a five year plan, which I personally feel is

maybe it's a five year vision, but it's hard to implement a

plan. You need more than four hours for that. I think it

should. It should take a lot of time and self reflection. So

from an objective view, where is your attention going? That feels

as though it's it's wasteful, and the loop of distraction is

the constant pattern of the mind. It's not. It's just the

constant stay, you know, in the evening, watching TV, but also

being on our phone, and then at dinner table, then at the dinner

table, watching something or there, but your mind is being

taken elsewhere. So whether we appreciate it or not, we might

consider that we're training or we're working out when we go to

the gym and we do specific things of our body, but when it

comes to our character and our state of mind, we're constantly

developing and shaping ourselves to better or worse if you're

running a business and if you're doing something for yourself,

it's your clarity and your vision that shapes everything.

Because I think you know as well as I do, when the value system

of the business, or as a way to generate interest, starts going

through the lens of social media and posts and engagement,

suddenly it can sort of. Start to get warped, that the

opportunity comes from the degree of engagement. The

opportunity comes from responding to what's happening

in that space. But you know, I have a friend who will share the

dark truth, which is he runs a business around productivity. He

wanted to build more leads. He spent a day a year posting, and

had a team of freelancers helping him. Built up his

Instagram to 360,000 followers. The Instagram page is solely

about this topic of productivity, running a digital

marketing agency. Zero point point zero. 6% of his followers

converted to actually purchasing his product. Wow. So it can

become a trap in and of itself, where now I've lost my the

direction the vision has become skewed. I'm I just saw that

there was a lot of engagement on the post, so maybe we need to

double down in more of those posts. And now we're getting

more followers, and now we're growing the engagement. But is

that tethered to the ultimate vision of the business? I from

that? I mean, it's not, unless your vision is to become a

content creator. You know, when you're a small business owner,

you can get caught in that loop.

What's your personal practice to remain

clear? Because, as I think we both agree, it's sometimes it's

easy to see than others, it's harder even for us to apply some

of this thinking to ourselves at times, because it gets cloudy.

Well, a practice which has changed a lot

of things is, I think I used to place too much emphasis on the

market. So a lot of the businesses that I built in the

past, or even the talks that I gave, was my observation of what

the market needed. But in that process, you can feel like you

lose yourself, because you start, you start just completely

adjusting to the needs and the expectations of the market, and

inherently, you end up that's it. That's That's a fast track

to lose your own sense of value and worth. In the last year or

year and a half, I've changed that. Where it's a it's a dance

between the two. It's what is alive in me, in what I'm seeing,

in what I want to pursue, and what are the needs in the

market. And how can I find a way to connect the two together? So

there will be people in that space who will not be ready to

receive it, and there will be moments where what I articulate

is not clear enough for what the market is looking for, and that

creates this constant observation loop of myself and

the market. So then becomes the practice of my own observation

that I have to engage with.

Having done a lot of these transformative things

yourself, put them in motion for clients, what advice would you

give yourself many years ago? What do you think that young

version of yourself could use?

I think it would be to acknowledge

uniqueness, not to be afraid of that, and then don't just try

and explore that as a little thing on the side. Go right

after it, go right after your appetite. That's, that's what

I've done as an adult. And it's, it's, and I didn't do that much.

I did it as a kid, but I also had this fear of the group and

wanting to fit in with everybody else. And I think as a kid, I

would have, or if I was to meet that guy, I would have told him,

You see things a little bit differently, and sometimes it

feels like you don't want to, because you want to see it the

way everybody else does, because it can feel threatening to feel

that that difference. But go there, just go there and let go

of that judgment.

What a great note to end on. Great conversation,

Patrick, really enjoyed it.

Thank you, Adam, it's really been a joy to

speak with you. You were a great, great host, great

questions. All the best.