In this profound episode, Matt Gerlach, Owner of mattgerlach.com, shares steps to align your business with your true aspirations. If you struggle with burnout or unfulfilling success, you won’t want to miss it.

You will discover:

- Why assessing your current situation clarifies your true motivations

- How to set aspirations that align with your desired lifestyle

- What barriers from your past may block your fulfillment


This episode is ideal for for Founders, Owners, and CEOs in stage 5 of The Founder's Evolution. Not sure which stage you're in? Find out for free in less than 10 minutes at https://www.scalearchitects.com/founders/quiz

Matt Gerlach is a trusted guru for entrepreneurs, with a proven track record of helping dozens of startups scale to 7, 8, and 9 figures over the past 15 years. A deep understanding of many entrepreneurs' struggles complements his expertise. After launching his first business, Matt encountered debilitating anxiety and depression. He emerged as a beacon of transformation by investing over $200k and 10,000 hours in personal healing and growth. Confronting and healing his past gave Matt the confidence and strength to scale his business, earning himself an impressive $1M/year.

Want to learn more about Matt Gerlach's work at mattgerlach.com? Check out his website at https://mattgerlach.com/

Mentioned in this episode:

Take the Founder's Evolution Quiz Today

If you’re a Founder, business owner, or CEO who feels overworked by the business you lead and underwhelmed by the results, you’re doing it wrong. Succeeding as a founder all comes down to doing the right one or two things right now. Take the quiz today at foundersquiz.com, and in just ten questions, you can figure out what stage you are in, so you can focus on what is going to work and say goodbye to everything else.

Founder's Quiz

And the countdown.

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All right, here we go.

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Hello, hello and welcome.

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Welcome once again to the Start, Scale and Succeed podcast, the only podcast that grows

with you through all seven stages of your journey as a founder.

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Today's guest here with us today is Matt Gerlach, and he's going to take us deep into the

heart of the founder who's asking themselves, is this it?

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Is this really as good as it gets?

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If you're in a season where you would have quit your job if you didn't happen to own the

place,

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This episode is definitely for you.

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And I don't normally do this, but if you know of another founder, someone in your life

who's having a hard time as well, do them a favor, share this episode.

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As we get into it, you'll understand why, but share it with them too.

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They'll be glad that you did.

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All right, who is Matt?

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Matt is a trusted guru for entrepreneurs with a proven track record of helping dozens of

startups scale to seven, eight, and nine figures over the past 15 years.

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A deep understanding of many of entrepreneurs struggles complements his expertise.

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After launching his first business, Matt encountered debilitating anxiety and depression.

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He emerged as a beacon of transformation by investing over 200,000 in 10,000 hours of

personal healing and growth.

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Confronting the healing his past gave Matt the confidence and strength to scale his

business, earning himself an impressive million dollars per year.

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Matt.

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You've got a handful of steps that I found really, really helpful for folks.

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And they're like, they're crazy obvious, but that doesn't make them any less real or

important.

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And actually, I've found it makes them easier to miss.

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So I'm wondering if we could walk through, there's six of them and we may not get through

all of them.

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We'll show folks how they can get to the last ones if we don't make it there.

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But I'd like to walk through, just starting at the top, step number one.

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you make a big point of focusing on where are you now?

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And again, I think that's an easy step to skip because we want to jump to vision and

destination and where you're going, but why is it that you started with the current

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situation in step

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Yeah, Scott, thanks for the question.

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And I love what you said about the steps being pretty simple.

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They're not overly complicated.

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And it's really a derivative of my healing journey.

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I have done a few fancy like framework programs that are just like, that's not what worked

for me.

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What worked for me was something simple that I could continue to work on in between

sessions with my therapists, with my coaches and everyone else in my life.

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We start with where are we now?

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Because we need to get a real firm understanding of what is going on.

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What is the why we want to change?

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So many people come in and say like, I want to make a million dollars a year, for example,

or I want to have a better marriage.

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But why?

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Like, where are we?

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Like, we want to have a better marriage because right now my wife and I are fighting all

the time and it's destabilizing.

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And it's destabilizing because growing up, my parents fought all the time.

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We need to get that foundation so we know what to anchor to.

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So between the steps that we put together that my clients take, there needs to be a why

behind this.

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That's what gets things to stick.

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And we can't just stay at the surface level and like, I'm not about, there's plenty of

coaches out there that'll help you attain those surface level, those outwardly successful

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goals.

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I'm about the internal success, the inward success as I call it, helping people create

lives as good as they.

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helping people create lives that feel as good on the inside as they look on the outside.

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Yeah.

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And so for, cause we've got a lot of founders that are listening and many of them would

have achieved some of that surface level success, right?

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For a lot of folks at this stage, it's not a new game, right?

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They've been playing it for a while.

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And a part of what I found is so frustrating or disillusioning is they keep hitting these

milestones and on the other side of it, they look around and everything's the same.

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The numbers are just bigger.

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And so for someone who's in that cycle of just ever setting bigger numbers, what is it

that focusing on where they are now, how does that kind of short circuit that cycle?

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It's so funny you say that too, because one of the first businesses I worked with, the

founder, she hit nine digits and she's like, same problems, just bigger numbers, you know?

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And I don't think she was any more satisfied at the nine digit number other than the

plaque on the wall, is an important, I mean, it's a cool plaque to have on the wall.

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Don't get me wrong.

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But yeah, I mean, we need to ask ourselves like what we really want with our lives.

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Almost everybody that I worked with, everyone that I asked this question to.

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Like would you rather have a business that generates $5 million in revenue, we'll say 60 %

margins that you solely own, you have the ability to scale this business to not only where

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it's making that $5 million, but where you're only working 15 hours a week.

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You're netting, know, million, million and a half dollars a year.

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Would you rather have that?

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Or do you want the $100 million business that's extremely leveraged?

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you have...

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50 different investors that you're answering to, a team of 300 people, all of their

problems, sales that are declining, and you're having to figure out payroll or layoffs and

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deal with all of these problems, the tariffs right now.

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I mean, and that is, I some people legitimately want that, like nothing wrong with that.

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Like our world needs people like that.

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I just don't work with people like that because I work with people that really actually

want that $5 million business that they have the life that...

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really offers them what they want.

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But very few people ask themselves that.

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Yeah, and it's a great kind of step into step two.

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These blend together to some extent, but once you know where you are, you do have to set

some goals.

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And I've got a couple of questions for you, but it really revolves around how do know that

they're the right goals?

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Because from what you just mentioned, and I've seen this happen a lot, for many people,

the right goals are actually in their rear view mirror, right?

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Sometimes the right goals are going back to a standard of living, a type of work in the...

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our language here at Scale Architects, an earlier stage, where you can achieve the things

that you want.

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You can actually achieve them better sometimes in the rear view mirror.

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Have you found that to be the case, that it's not always up and to the right, at least in

terms of what we normally think like revenue or profit?

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Most of my clients, not all of them, some of them are scaling from 500 to 1.5 million or

something like that.

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And sadly in today's life economic situation, 1.5 million isn't necessarily where you're

owning a private jet or anything like that.

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But yeah, I mean, I would say the majority of my clients it is going, I don't wanna say

backwards, but it's going back to what actually brings them that fulfillment.

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It's having three product lines versus 20 product lines.

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It's actually having a team that only, you know, that's, that's largely freelance that,

you know, is not where they're dealing with the HR nightmare that they're currently

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dealing with.

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Absolutely.

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And so many people just need permission from someone who's been there and done that.

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Like I, you know, I'm sure we'll, we'll, mean, we'll talk about this a bit more, but I

have, you know, I mean, recently walked away from the business that I had that was giving

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me seven digits a year.

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I don't think that I'm not going to get back there, but also if I don't like, have never

been happier in my life than I am right now in doing something that is a hundred percent

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me where work does not feel like work.

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And so many people just need permission to have that.

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Like on my journey, like, you know, I, so many of us, you know, here, like you want to

make a business that has a value that could be sold one day.

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Very, very legitimate.

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For me, a big part of my journey was realizing that while that is definitely a path that a

lot of people should follow, for me, what I'm looking for, I'm a coach, a mentor, I'm an

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author, and what I'm really looking for myself is to build a business that I enjoy working

in until I'm 75 years old.

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And some of us just really need help getting permission to actually go after that life

that they want to have.

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And I also sometimes take away that word goal and I interchange it with the word

aspirations because it's a little bit less like, you know, it's a little bit less like

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rigid.

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It's a little bit less like more and more and more.

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It's like, what's the life we're actually aspiring to have?

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So many of us don't ask ourselves that and we're just thinking more and more and more

makes us happy when really what we want is to spend more time with our families and kids

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and to start surfing.

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Yeah, there's not whole lot of surfing in Atlanta.

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I'll take your word for it.

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So there's this really interesting dynamic here because that permission, you're right,

it's a really, really big deal.

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But it's also kind of the other side of a coin on what's getting us into this problem,

which is we're borrowing other people's goals for our lives.

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Right?

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Why is it, especially for founders who in so many ways like

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either look like or are doing their own thing, why is it that we still get caught up in

this kind of permission challenge when it comes to setting our own aspirations and what we

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want?

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You're I mean, you just said it.

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It's that people aren't there.

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They're not making their own goals there.

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And I don't mean that disparagingly.

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I mean, we don't know that that's what we're allowed to do until someone really tells us

we're allowed to do it.

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And let me be clear, you don't have to call me to have that permission.

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There are thousands, if not millions of books and other places to get this information and

learn that you are allowed to create your own business.

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It has been like one of the most life changing things in my

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whole entire life to like realize that people like the mentors that I've learned from,

they design the businesses they want by first identifying the life they want.

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So many founders start making that business and they're they're going where the market

needs them.

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They're not ever thinking about the life that they want and they're just getting

themselves into another situation where they have a job except for they're working for

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themselves.

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And like you said at the beginning, they can't quit because they are, you know, they're

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they're running everything.

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And I mean, it's not a horrible place to be in.

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Don't get me wrong.

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I mean, a lot of people do that and they walk away with 10, you know, 100 million dollars.

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A lot of people don't know.

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And we're in a situation where, you know, money is not free the way it was to borrow.

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So there's a lot less investments happening in the world and businesses have to learn how

to become profitable.

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And for me, like I've always like my background before I started working and consulting

and coaching.

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was I worked in consumer products, which really set me up for a lot of success because

nobody lent money to consumer product companies unless they were profitable.

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So this whole world of where people get to borrow millions, if not billions of dollars

based off of ideas is not foreign to me where a lot of people are having to learn that for

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the first time right now.

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Right.

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You can talk about this idea of like the hundred million dollar exit and if you're

thinking, know, but Matt and Scott, you know, like, what could you imagine what I could do

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with that money?

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And I think the the kind of response to that is look at the statistics for life expectancy

after an exit.

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Right.

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Like, look at the statistics for severe medical conditions within the first year of an

exit.

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Like, it's it's stunning.

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It's just staggering.

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And

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And I think it's because even in that goal, we're still using someone else's goal and

justifying it because it seems to be the way to everything else.

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So one of the things that pops up then is what's actually getting in the way of all of

this?

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And that's step three of your process is looking for barriers, not only in the present,

but in the past.

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Walk us through that a little.

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Yeah, I these are all limiting beliefs we picked up along our lives.

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You know, it could be things that happened in childhood.

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I mean, we all have traumas that happened in childhood.

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A lot of people don't love the trauma word.

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For me, big, a big aha happened to me several years ago when I learned the difference

between what they call Big T Trauma, which is, you know, horrible things like, you know,

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violence, sex crimes, prisoner of war type things.

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And a lot of us didn't.

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I mean, didn't experience that.

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There's this thing called little T trauma, which is normal traumas.

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It's your dad telling you you're a piece of crap your whole life.

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It's your mom nagging at you for not being good enough.

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All of these things have an impact on us.

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And then we're still that 40 or that 50 year old founder who is trying to please somebody

when really we need to learn to love ourselves and create the life that we want.

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We're adults and we get to do that.

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we get to decide if we want to, just came back from Vietnam a week ago where, you know,

going to Vietnam and seeing, went with my partner and his family, five of us, like we had

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a lot of delicious food for like $15 for all five of us, you know?

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So you really start to see, I mean, that's why people are moving in a lot of cases because

like there is a lot of freedom to do something that really fits the life that we want.

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And I love that you said that about the $100 million exit because as somebody who made a

seven digit paycheck,

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I couldn't spend it all.

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I live in Los Angeles.

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I am assuming this isn't the top five most expensive places to in the entire world.

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I have a beautiful home, nice home, and I couldn't spend a million dollars a year.

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I mean, I could try and spend it.

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Don't get me wrong.

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It's not that hard to spend.

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But other than I was talking with somebody the other day about this, really, if I can't

have a private jet, there's really nothing left that I need in my life.

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probably not on the trajectory to have a private jet and I'm at complete peace with that.

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But like you said, think it was one of the Disney grandchildren came out recently and

said, if you need more than $999 million, you're a psychopath.

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I'm not necessarily accusing anybody of being a psychopath, but it is funny because for

decades I've been saying that.

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don't think, mean, people, sure, half a billion dollars.

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I don't know what someone needs $20 billion or more for, but.

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And I think what that kind of points to is that the question around particularly

organizational size, and I think that's just a proxy for resource availability, right?

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Is the amount of resource that you need, the size of company you need to build is not

dependent really on any type of lifestyle that we typically assign to it.

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It's what is the nature of the problems that you're trying to solve?

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Right?

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So the business that you're building oftentimes has this genesis in using maybe a small,

oftentimes a very big problem, right?

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That we face as humanity, as an industry, as whatever, fill in the blank.

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And what I have found to be one of the most consistent ways to identify the right goals,

the right size is to say, what size do you need to be to solve that problem?

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Right?

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And I think there's so much purpose that kind of comes along with that.

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But all of that falls short if we don't actually have a plan to execute on this.

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And so that takes us to step four, create a plan.

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And you advocate for some actionable steps.

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Now when it comes to like this really emotionally charged stuff, like.

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If I don't do this as a founder, I'm a failure.

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Or I would have to go back, or I'll never hit this goal that I've told everyone is so

important to me all my life, but it was really never my goal in the first place.

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There's a lot of emotion that comes into that.

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And sometimes that emotion can kind of freeze us up.

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what are some, maybe even example action steps that you've seen folks take when they're

really walking through how to clear some of these obstacles and get to the goals that they

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really have for themselves?

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Yeah, thanks for the question.

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mean, a lot of it surrounds self-compassion and just learning to love ourselves.

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So, I mean, the tools that I have worked with my clients on for that.

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And again, these aren't crazy things that you haven't heard of.

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It's mantra type work.

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So like writing down every day, three things, why you're worthy of making the choice that

you're making, why you're doing, who you're benefiting by making this choice.

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A lot of people are really saving their own lives by de-stressing their lives.

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That was the situation for me and that's really what's driven me into this work.

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I mean, I was suffering from horribly high blood pressure and I've been to the hospital

two times thinking I was dying because of it.

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you know, I I essentially saved my own life by moving into aligned work.

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And it's not that it's not hard.

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It's aligned work.

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So, you know, I work with my clients on just getting wellness practices going.

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So yoga, hiking, not having their email on their phones and taking time off.

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What's been really mind blowing for me is that as I, you know, I'm always reading and I'm

always learning.

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It's a big part of my life.

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And it's really quite honestly what's driven me towards this towards this professional

life of helping other people, because I'm kind of selfishly helping myself by just

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constantly being.

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in growth environments, but like everybody I talked to who was a high performer, high

achiever, like really, really high up, they take so much time for themselves to unwind

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because you can't be going all the time and be effective.

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You just can't do it.

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But when it comes down to it, you know, we need to remember that like we are in charge of

the businesses we want to create, the lives that we want to create.

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And to your question,

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So many people are like pushing for more and more and more and they're like, they're

hurting people in the process.

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They're not taking care of their employees.

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So by slowing down and de-stressing their lives, de-stressing the businesses, it's

actually showing compassion.

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This is really like, this really gets me in my heart right now, but it's showing

compassion to their employees.

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It's showing their employees kids that they're worthy of compassion.

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So I really work with people to understand the why and how they're, how they're.

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compassion and how them being gentle to themselves and others around them is just this

massive impact in everyone that touches this business.

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And it's just, I mean, I don't buy from companies that are more and more and more and more

that are like hurting people along the way.

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And it's nothing wrong with having a big company.

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There's a lot of big companies I know of that are purpose driven and really making huge

impacts.

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There's a lot though that are just out for the profits and don't care how their employees

get treated.

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Yeah.

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So there are two more steps.

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We'll make sure we let folks know how they can get access to them because there's some

exercises and questions.

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It's just a really, really helpful resource.

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So we'll get there in just a second.

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Before we do though, there's a question, Matt, that I have asked every one of our guests.

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Now I'm interested to see what you have to say as well.

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So the question's this, what would you say is the biggest secret that you wish wasn't a

secret at all?

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What's that one thing you wish everybody watching or listening today knew?

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Vulnerability is a superpower.

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It is being kind and gentle with our feelings and just like every, like in businesses and

personal life, so many of us get reactive and we're like, this person's not anticipating

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what I need.

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This person's not doing what I expected.

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If we just lower, lower the bar, like lower our guard and actually like approach that

person and say, hi, what you've done has actually hurt me.

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or I need this because I'm actually really scared of what'll happen if we don't do this.

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By getting to that deep emotional level and connecting with somebody, we can achieve

almost anything in life.

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Yeah, yeah, it's fantastic.

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Matt, where can folks go to find out more about the work that you do, but also where can

they go to get these final two steps?

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Well, I have something really special actually.

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In my home, I live in Los Angeles in the middle of LA.

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I've started what I call the Friday Brunch Club.

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So every other Friday, I invite local purpose-driven entrepreneurs into my home for a free

brunch.

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And it's been absolutely incredible how deep and vulnerable we get.

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So if anybody's in Los Angeles and wants to attend, I would love for you to reach out.

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My email, I'll just give it out.

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I don't normally do this, but it's matt at mattgerlach.com.

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Send me an email and I'll see if we can get you into one of the Friday Brunch Clubs.

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And if you are not and don't know anybody that is and want to connect with me online, my

website is mattgarlack.com.

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All the socials are there.

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And still feel free to email me if you have any questions, but you can download the guide,

the six step guide, and in there you can book a free call with me and happy to talk with

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you.

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I'm just in this place of service and I know what it's like to...

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feel like I'm gonna die from the stress that my business is causing me, so I am in service

of helping others.

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Fantastic.

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Matt, thank you for being on.

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Just a privilege and honor having you here today.

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I really appreciate it.

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Loved this conversation.

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I know it's gonna make a big impact in some folks' lives.

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For those of you who are watching and listening, you know that your time and attention

mean the world to us.

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I hope you got as much out of this conversation as I know I did, and I cannot wait to see

you next time.

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Take care.

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Well done.

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Excellent, excellent, excellent.

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Let me stop the recording.