1916 – Leadership Success for Businesses with Erin Andrea Craske

Josh (00:00:05) - Hey there, a thoughtful listener. Are you looking for introductions to partners, investors, influencers, and clients? Well, I've had private conversations with over 2000 leaders asking them where their best business comes from. I've got a free video you can watch with no opt in required, where I'll share the exact steps necessary to be 100% inbound in your industry over the next 6 to 8 months, with no spam, no ads, and no sales. What I teach has worked for me for over 15 years, and has helped me create eight figures in revenue for my own companies. Just head to up my influence. Com and watch my free class on how to create endless high ticket sales appointments. Also, don't forget the thoughtful entrepreneur is always looking for great guests. Go to up my influence. Com and click on podcast. I'd love to have you. With us right now it's Erin, Andrea Craske Erin, it's great to have you. You are a business and leadership success coach, and you're the author of the book From Purpose to Profit.

Josh (00:01:16) - Your website is Erin Andrea Craske. Com that's craske e.com. And again to our friend this listen to our conversation. Just click on the show notes. Click around and you're going to find a direct link to Erin's website. Erin it's great to have you.

*Erin Andrea * (00:01:31) - Well it's fantastic. Thank you very much for having me.

Josh (00:01:34) - Yes. based in the UK. So thank you so much for joining us. And, and tell us about the work that you do, who you serve and kind of your impact in the world.

*Erin Andrea * (00:01:43) - So, as you rightly said in the very beginning, a business, a leadership success coach and I work with purpose driven or value driven businesses and ethical business leaders. And basically what I do, surprisingly, I make them empower them to make their business and life less effortful.

Josh (00:02:05) - How do we do that?

*Erin Andrea * (00:02:07) - Oh, we work on our mindset. Well, basically. Okay, let's start from the very beginning in our society and in our lives somehow would happen that we're conditioned to take care of symptoms.

*Erin Andrea * (00:02:21) - We are fixing one symptom after another, and often it's like a chain of event. You have one fixed and then another one comes on board and you need to fix another one. Actually, the same event happens in healthcare if you think about it. But underneath all these symptoms, always there's going to be a root cause. It's going to be a systemic issue that creates all the things that annoy us in our lives or in our business. So what I do when I work with my clients, I go and I look underneath all the symptoms to find to define the root cause. That is the reason behind running businesses effortful about creating all this striving and struggles and changing directions and all the stress and not knowing where to go and asking for looking for immediate return on investment. And then if it doesn't come, you know, what we're going to do and all the things, it just becomes like a massive steamroll, you know, all our heads is like, what I'm going to do now, you know, I tried this and I tried that.

*Erin Andrea * (00:03:30) - It's still not working. I still want my money back and and all that. It just creates the situation where we start running, you know, creates all the stress. That is not necessary because I don't believe and I know from my experience that driving a building business from this place is no good. It doesn't really help, and it shouldn't be that way. It can be.

Josh (00:03:53) - Awful. It's like everything that it goes against why we got into business in the first place. So yeah, I and I think, you know, this sounds very aspirational. Erin, I'm curious, like, if someone's identifying with what you're talking about, how can we work to start fixing this? How can we get in the flow?

*Erin Andrea * (00:04:12) - Oh, that is actually very, very easy. You won't believe it. Just the tiny, tiny moment when you swap your how to question was why? That is all that is needed. Yes, there may be multiple whys, right? It may be so you can get to the root cause it may be looking at different things in the same time because symptoms can be different.

*Erin Andrea * (00:04:36) - But what is underneath all the symptoms? And in all fairness, I can just give you a little hint. So I believe that underneath business struggles we have strategy. Strategy is the root cause of businesses. You know, often running like headless chickens simply because there's no direction that can take in leadership itself. Concept. It's not about, again, how to be a good leader or in another 25 trainings I'm going to take because I want to remember I won't remember because I'm stressed and that's it. Right? Okay. So it is a self-concept is how you see and feel yourself as a leader and as a capable and confident human being that you are, that you might have forgotten about in profitability. It is a holistic and mindful approach to business because business, it's like a puzzle, right? Offer lots of different pieces and if you want to have it worked properly, we need to look at the whole picture. It's not about only one thing or another thing. It's all together. And another thing why I say mindful? Because it's not about striving to achieve the goal.

*Erin Andrea * (00:05:47) - It's about improving your processes, your contribution, whatever you do on a daily basis, step by step. So you have holistic business improvement. And when things get better on a daily basis, it's inevitable it's going to get profitable, right. So it is a change of mindset that. A change of perception. But it's not scary. It's not challenging. It's not effortful. It's just for somebody who wants to have a change. That's it.

Josh (00:06:16) - Yeah. What would be a good practice that maybe we could make as part of our daily schedule or daily work, or maybe something a little bit more, you know, deeper on a weekly basis, like if you were to say, listen, every leader needs to take time. And hopefully I think you're going to talk about, you know, these deep work principles that you're talking about, right? But like, if we were to look at our schedule and really start prioritizing, you know, some of this asking questions, a deeper work and, you know, in getting in clarity with who we are, that sort of thing.

Josh (00:06:49) - What would you recommend?

*Erin Andrea * (00:06:51) - Well, the first thing, and again, the easiest way is to ask why. You ask why about business issues. Okay. You know what? Don't try to go deep work on yourself at the moment because you may not used to it. Look at the business and ask about what is underperformance. I was talking to one person recently and it was totally amazing because he's a consultant and he was invited to fix productivity issues. Right. And I asked and he said exactly. How to make my team more productive. And I said, and did the client ask you why the team isn't productive in the first place? Right. So instead of trying to fix productivity issues, ask why they're not productive instead of say, we need innovation, you're not creative enough. So why there is no creativity in the team? And when you start asking why is immediately you going to at least get one level deeper, right? And if you fix from at least one level deeper already, you're going to see positive benefits.

*Erin Andrea * (00:07:54) - And with regards to your personal self-improvement, I guess the best way you can do ask yourself question journal. You know, you had something during the day that you didn't like about yourself. Why I didn't like it, why it happened this way, why I liked it, you know, so you can have a balanced perspective. Just ask yourself about one little thing that was significant for you in your eyes, and try to understand what was behind it.

Josh (00:08:21) - I like that. And you know, so again, it's like any time like, you know, it's like our emotions or like some something's off. Right. And and I agree with you like my, my wife is a family therapist. And her phrase is, well, that sounds like something to get curious about.

*Erin Andrea * (00:08:38) - Yeah, it's exactly that, you know, because that's a very good word. Because curious doesn't mean judgment. Oh, no. Curious is very generic, because when we start inquiring, often we fall into self judgment situation. And this is something you have to avoid because it's only about understanding.

*Erin Andrea * (00:08:56) - It doesn't mean it's bad or it's good or even worse. So you are bad. It means that you just trying to understand there are no labels, no emotions attached to it. So that is very important point. Thank you.

Josh (00:09:10) - Yeah. And so let's talk about that just just for a second. I think that, you know, generally high achievers, you know, people that have high expectations for their output or for themselves, sometimes we're not too kind with ourselves and, and maybe we don't extend ourselves the grace that, that we should. Right. Because again, we have expectations. We have, you know, high demands for ourselves. And, you know, hopefully, you know, when things don't go our way. Right? We don't blame ourselves for that. Right. And, and we stay out of this kind of self shaming, kind of behavior, but it can be very natural, I'd say, you know, and some of it might come down to, you know, well, your parents didn't allow you to make enough mistakes and, you know, or somehow that making mistakes was bad or something like that.

Josh (00:10:01) - Do you mind maybe just sharing some concepts around, you know, when we don't live up to our own expectations or when we do feel like, oh, well, I sure failed at that or something.

*Erin Andrea * (00:10:12) - Okay. There are two things. The first one is we probably know, or at least we heard about it, that expectations and desires are the reasons for suffering, right? So that is something to really bear in mind that when we don't feel good about ourselves or something else or somebody else, or the world is not because we are wrong, people are wrong, and the world is wrong because we expect them to be different or we desire something that we can't get. So that's the first thing. And another thing in terms of the expectations of ourselves. And we feel bad because we don't live up to our expectations. That is a very good thing to ask or to question yourself. These expectations, are they yours or are you conditioned to think about yourself that way? Because very often that is actually quite fascinating, because you know that we create our own reality, right? And very often we believe that what we think is true.

*Erin Andrea * (00:11:17) - That. You know what? It's not. No, there's no connection. What we think and truth. Because very often it's actually isn't. But we are conditioned to believe the first of all is truth. And secondly, we're supposed to believe what we think. And the worst thing was supposed to act on what we think, right? There's no correlation. So whatever you think you expect from yourself because those are your expectations. So the first thing, where are they coming from. And likely you will figure out that they're not coming from you. And another thing ask yourself what do they make sense to you? If you are in a situation that you are not judged by other people? Would you do exactly the same thing as you're doing right now? Would you behave? This would be this way. Will you think this way? Assuming nobody cares, how will it make you feel? And likely you will probably figure out that you know what? When nobody cares. And I'm leaving, I don't know.

*Erin Andrea * (00:12:18) - Somewhere on an island by myself and my dog. Oh, you know what? Probably it's going to be different because it's probably not what I expect from myself, but what I believe others expect from me.

Speaker 3 (00:12:32) - Yeah.

Josh (00:12:33) - I love it. You know, going back to some things that you were talking about earlier, too, I was just thinking about this too. for folks in this same vein that maybe ruminate a bit more, maybe they have an unpleasant situation with a client or a team member or, you know, some dumb dumb on social media or something like that, right? Yeah. And we let it bother us. Right. And so it's, you know, maybe we're replaying a conversation in our head, maybe we're rehearsing what you're supposed to say, or we should have said, right. And it just, you know, it's the brain, I think, you know, trying to protect us. Right. And but I, I love this approach of, you know, along with getting curious about that.

Josh (00:13:14) - Like, if something keeps coming up for us, say why, you know why. Why does this you know, what or how would you phrase the why question in some of those situations?

*Erin Andrea * (00:13:25) - In a very straightforward being totally blunt, again, if we talk about somebody helping themselves, I would probably say, what are you afraid of? That may be a little bit more specific, because when you mentioned that, you know, all the thoughts trying to protect us, kind of. Yes. But often what they're trying to protect us from is not existent. Right? It's not the real threat as a fictional threat. And we don't perceive that way, afraid of it because we don't think that way. And sometimes, you know, people are afraid of things that really shouldn't, shouldn't pose any threat to anybody. So ask yourself what I'm afraid of. That would be the first thing. And the second thing, if you have time left after journaling, assuming you do your journaling, you ask your questions right.

*Erin Andrea * (00:14:21) - You're feeling better. Work on use different techniques to stop rumination because it's no good to anybody. If you can keep your mind and say, and this is the second part of effortlessness. The first one was mindset. When we talk about leaders and self concept of how you perceive yourself. And the second one actually is keeping your mind empty. Because that's going to help really big time.

Josh (00:14:50) - Boy, that sounds easier said than done. I want to ask you about your book, but can you tell me just a bit about what you mean by keeping your mind empty? Because I've got one of those monkey brains, right? That's just like, always. Like it's. You wouldn't want to hear what goes on. There is just like a nonstop cacophony.

*Erin Andrea * (00:15:09) - You know what? I don't believe you would want to hear what's going on in there, so. All right, my book has nothing to do. You know what? What was just discussed? Because my book was, for a while, I guess, to corporate marketing as I knew it.

*Erin Andrea * (00:15:24) - And more importantly, it was a tribute to brands because I'm in love with brands. I loved what I did, and I believe that brands are forgotten. We now have branded products, we have no brands, we have no concept of emotional branding or human connection with consumers. So it's all again went into this instant gratification thing. You push sales, you get money, you push sales, you get money. Right? So I wanted to let people know that there is a world behind it and the world of strategy where things are different, where things are much easier, where resources are properly managed, where profitability come, you know, comes together with your contribution to the business, together with your progress, something that people don't know about because surprisingly, they're even called tactic strategies. So there's no even understanding of the difference between the two. And the book introduces people, business people to different types of strategies in a very easy to read, easy language, easy to, you know, scalable format. All you want to know about brand strategy, business communication, portfolio, you know, growth, market entry, they're all described by it's kind of bite size.

*Erin Andrea * (00:16:39) - It's like a textbook reference book for all things marketing. And yeah, so that's something that I wanted to share with the world because I believe brands deserve it.

Josh (00:16:52) - so your book is titled From Purpose to Profit. Who needs to read the book?

*Erin Andrea * (00:16:58) - Oh, those people who would like to get profit, they would like to get to profitability. yes. I had obviously purpose driven, you know, ethical businesses in mind because for them purpose is something that is part of their foundations, business foundations. But at the same time, you know, if you want to genuinely introduce purpose to your business because it comes with multiple benefits beyond just being a purposeful business, it comes with mental health benefits. It comes with reputational benefits. It comes with motivation, morale, benefits. It comes with many things. So if you'd like to introduce purpose to your business together with strategy that you can definitely use this book. And even if you don't want to use purpose, fine, you're still going to get information about business strategy and how to build your brand, communicate and all other things.

Speaker 4 (00:17:51) - Well.

Josh (00:17:51) - Erin, tell me about the work that you do with clients, like how do you engage with people, are you working within organizations? You work with individuals? what does that look like?

*Erin Andrea * (00:18:02) - I work with individuals, simply because I believe that your business is as good as the leadership team. Right. So I work with people who are in a position who are capable of changing the culture that are capable to cascading in different atmosphere, different direction, and stick to this direction, you know, by this direction, to their teams. So, yeah, the people that can be change makers, I so want.

Josh (00:18:30) - And what does that look like? Like engagement. Like if someone might be listening or like. Well, How could you help. How could we work together?

Speaker 5 (00:18:39) - Well, the.

*Erin Andrea * (00:18:39) - First thing you know, we can definitely work together if my message resonates. Because that is massively important that your view of the world and your view of the business resonates with a coach that you engage with.

*Erin Andrea * (00:18:51) - And the second thing that there must be trust. There must be mutual chemistry. Because the work I do and the why question that I ask, they may sometimes feel uncomfortable. And although I really take care of the comfort, emotional comfort of my clients, you know, everybody is different. So honesty requires trust. So that is one thing to bear in mind. And with regards to all other questions, you know, there's no I do have programs that focus on different things, but all every program is a collection of different techniques and different tools that are sourced, you know, from, psychology, sociology, neuroscience, coaching, therapists, arts philosophies. So it's really a combination of different things. It's like a toolbox that within every program I can adjust it to whatever the client is looking for. Right. So there's no cookie cutter approach problems. Yeah. Because there's certain logic, you know, how you go down, you go deeper and then you go up from totally different mentality from being a different person.

*Erin Andrea * (00:20:08) - But then, you know, it's not always necessary. Some people have smaller fixes. Some people have something that is deeper transformation. It really depends where where the starting point and how they want to. Yeah.

Josh (00:20:21) - Your website is Erin Andrea Craske dot com. And I know you also have some free resources. Do you mind? So for someone that's been listening to our conversation, where do they go from here? What do they do next?

*Erin Andrea * (00:20:31) - All the information going to be in show notes. I believe that is just the easiest way, because I always think, you know, when somebody says, this is my website and then it starts, tell the whole website and then just I'll spell every letter. I was like, okay, and if somebody is driving, they're not going to stop immediately, you know, just to write down letter to the website. So just being mindful of where listeners may be either interested, all information could have been show notes. So you can always come back, you know, a click to, you know on the website that that is featured.

Speaker 4 (00:21:04) - Yeah.

Josh (00:21:05) - Again. Well, we've got everything all kind of linked up to our friend. Let's listen to our conversation. Just click in the show notes. Click around. You can find that direct link Aaron, to your website and your book. again Aaron Andrea Craske, business leadership success coach and author of the book From Purpose to Profit. Aaron, thank you for joining us.

*Erin Andrea * (00:21:22) - Thank you very much, Josh. Thank you.

Josh (00:21:29) - Thanks for listening to the Thoughtful Entrepreneur show. If you are a thoughtful business owner or professional who would like to be on this daily program, please visit up my influence. Com and click on podcast. We believe that every person has a message that can positively impact the world. We love our community who listens and shares our program every day. Together, we are empowering one another as thoughtful leaders. And as I mentioned at the beginning of this program, if you're looking for introductions to partners, investors, influencers, and clients, I have had private conversations with over 2000 leaders asking them where their best business comes from.

Josh (00:22:11) - I've got a free video that you can watch right now with no opt in or email required, where I'm going to share the exact steps necessary to be 100% inbound in your industry over the next 6 to 8 months, with no spam, no ads, and no sales. What I teach has worked for me for more than 15 years and has helped me create eight figures in revenue for my own companies. Just head to up my influence. Com and watch my free class on how to create endless high ticket sales appointments. Make sure to hit subscribe so that tomorrow morning. That's right, seven days a week you are going to be inspired and motivated to succeed. I promise to bring positivity and inspiration to you for around 15 minutes every single day. Thanks for listening and thank you for being a part of the Thoughtful Entrepreneur movement.