Realizing the Power of Your Inner Circle in Achieving Success

In this episode of the Endgame Podcast, you will learn about the importance of surrounding yourself with the right people in order to achieve success in your personal and professional life.

We'll discuss the concept of your "inner circle" and how it can help you fill your blind spots with talented individuals who share your culture, vision, mission, and purpose. We will explore the importance of self-awareness in identifying your strengths and weaknesses, and knowing where you need support in order to reach your goals. 

I will also share my personal experience with building my own inner circle and provides tips on how to create and maintain a network of individuals who can help you grow and succeed. Join me in this episode to discover the power of your inner circle and learn how it can change your trajectory toward success.

00:44 - Introduction: The Power of Your Inner Circle
01:53 - Embracing the Concept of Your Inner Circle
04:33 - Building Your Inner Circle
03:49 - Importance of Self-Awareness and Situational Awareness
04:33 - Identifying Your Blind Spots
07:27 - Finding the Right People for Your Inner Circle
08:57 - Personal and Professional Inner Circle
10:16 - The Importance of Trust, Rapport, and Culture
11:56 - Conclusion: The Role of Your Inner Circle in Achieving Success

Transcript

Dr Ryan Wakim: 0:00

You wanna be self-aware, you want to know where your blind spots are. You wanna fill those blind spots with people that are incredibly talented, certainly more talented than you in those spots. They're using their highest and best use of their professional situation or licensure. Just so you can do the same, that you trust them. They have incredible rapport, not just with you, but with each and the team, and that they carry the culture, the vision, the mission, and the purpose, that you all want to have, and that you're shooting towards. Welcome to the Endgame Podcast, where I bet you didn't know, which you didn't know. I'm Dr. Ryan Wakim, successful entrepreneur and your endgame coach. I'm here to talk to you today about, a critically important topic as it pertains to how you might build success in your own life. One that I was able to achieve And iterate on throughout my professional career. And that is this concept of surrounding yourself with the right people. We'll often call that the power of your inner circle. And it really touches on very much the same topic we've touched on before, which is this idea of a mentor or a coach, someone who can get you to where you want to go quicker, faster, better. Hopefully with fewer headaches and more successes. That ability to kind of change your trajectory but also create that inflection point where you can go from, kind of a single shingle provider or maybe a, a very small business to something that grows into a more medium, moderate, and even an even larger size business from there. So it, you know, the spirit of sharing and the spirit of creating that inner circle the people that you can bounce ideas off of, and that can be personal or professional. You don't always have to surround yourself with just business professionals. You can create the same concept or do the same thing in in your personal life as well. So looking back at my career and kind of my trajectory, I was really able to change my trajectory when I started to embrace the concept of my inner circle. And that doesn't have to again, mean in person. That doesn't have to even mean someone who is your one-on-one coach or mentor. Beefing up your inner circle could just include your own personal development and following podcasts, interviews, and YouTube videos, Other materials from other successful entrepreneurs or someone who really resonates with you in the personal development space. So I had kind of leaned in pretty heavily to Tony Robbins early on and Simon Sinek and really embraced a lot of their concepts and, and that can be, How you build your inner circle as well. Again, it does not have to be someone you text or call or could pick up the phone and talk to. Having said that, it is important that some of the people you surround yourself with or some of your inner circle is people that you can text or lean on. Personally or professionally for assistance. And the, you know, the kind of statement is you wanna walk in and be the dumbest person in the room. You wanna surround yourself with individuals who have been there, done that. Individuals who fill your blind spots. Me personally, I'm not a numbers guy, I'm not a finance guy. It was always really important to me to surround myself as someone who did understand the numbers better. Someone who was able to get really nitty gritty into the financials. And create budgets and business plans that I just didn't have the skillset for. And so as you think about how you build your inner circle, you actually have to become pretty self-aware and we'll actually talk about that in a different podcast. This idea of kind of self-awareness and situational awareness, which when you, when I enter into the podcast and say, I bet you didn't know what you didn't know, or I bet you don't know what you don't know, the most important part of that statement is. Understanding that those things exist, right? Understanding that there are things in this universe that you don't even know, that you don't know. There are things in this universe that you know you don't know. Like for instance, I know I don't know how to build appropriate person facing business plans and proformas. I'm not an Excel spreadsheet expert. And so as you think about how you build your inner circle, Probably the most important first step outside of knowing that you should do that is knowing who should be part of your build of your inner circle. Thinking about having some self inflection, some self-awareness, and thinking about where do you have blind spots? Where are you not incredibly proficient or efficient? What are you maybe good at, but not great? Or what do you frankly just don't have the time to do? Right? You, you might be incredibly good at something or very talented at something, but if it's not your kind of your sole goal, your key focus, not, you know, if it's something that. Others could do maybe cheaper again, better or faster. Those are the kinds of positions, so to speak, that you should be looking to fill as part of your inner circle. Your inner circle can be truly business professionals as you think about your own enterprise, you might be the CEO. A lot of kind of entrepreneurs tend to lean towards the CEO role, though they don't have to. And so a lot of CEOs end up hiring CFOs or controllers. They end up hiring COOs or operations directors. And so again, as you think about who you are and what your strengths are and what is the highest and best use of your talents or licenses, if you're a healthcare professional, then you start to think about surrounding yourself with people that can do the stuff that you, again may be really good at, but just don't have the time to do. May be really good at and shouldn't be doing or not so good at and there's certainly someone who can do better. And all of that requires you to have a certain amount of self-awareness and self inflection, so you can go fill those roles and fill your blind spots. Without, learning those difficult lessons on your own without getting too far along in your own career process and path, and finding out that, oh, you really should have hired a CFO two years ago. As you think about getting your financials in place and thinking about due diligence for private equity sale and maybe. Needing audited financials, the last thing you wanna do is trying to pull together all your, you know, kind of polished numbers over a trailing two, three year period when it wasn't your strong suit, it wasn't what you should have been doing to begin with. Those are really kind of basic examples. Of what the inner circle should look like. Right. So again, just to recap, you'd want to think about what are your blind spots? What do you know you don't know? What do you think you know? But clearly you can know more. And those are the kinds of positions or spots that you should be filling as part of your inner circle. I'll reiterate, your inner circle does not have to be people that know. Again, I was, I would consider Tony Robbins part of my inner circle, and maybe we need to define inner circle a little differently. Maybe it's a, a moderate, a moderately ringed circle or or outer circle. But the point is personal development. Surround yourself with the right people, being the dumbest person in the room. All of those concepts are critically important for you to become as successful as you possibly can be, for you to create the highest and best use of your time is all about. Finding the right people, surrounding yourself with the right people and leveraging those people. So again, how you use their time, how you empower them, how you lead them. Especially if you talk about COOs and CFOs and you know, HR business partners. Everything that it takes to build kind of a larger business entity should come in the form of who you surround yourself with as part of that inner circle. It goes without saying but one of the other critically important pieces of an inner circle is it has to be the people, or it has to be people that you trust. It has to be people that you can rely on. It has to be people that you believe. And so as you think about your inner circle and fill in your blind spots, especially if it's a blind spot you don't know a whole lot about, you probably want to check references, you probably wanna see what they've done in the past. Pedigree when you think about selling to a private equity group or IPOing going public, pedigree matters. And so who you have as your C F O, who you have your COO, who you've outsourced your, again, financials or operations or legal documentation to are all really important. The pedigree matters. I've been in discussions before about taking a company public and when it, when it comes down to the securities law and, you know, doing an IPO, it's critically important that the business is very clean. From an operations and financial perspective, but that it's also very clean from a legal documentation perspective, that you have all these things wrapped up very cleanly and stored in a data warehouse. As you think about your inner circle, you think about who might be a good fit for that. Make sure that you don't get blinded by the moment, kind of the honeymoon period of meeting someone new, or maybe they have some incredible backstory or credentials. It's important that they're a good fit. It's important that they can be relied upon, and it's important that you check and make sure that they belong in your inner. Especially if it's those individuals that you're hiring to be part of your team. So that kind of feeds into the final thing about Inner Circle, which is that relationship, right? Building the rapport, building the relationship, building the culture. If your inner circle is full of incredibly talented CFOs and CLOs and, and attorneys and, and, and the like, and the communication and culture are terrible. The chances that that business will thrive goes down exponentially. So I would, I would wanna put one final focus as you think about who you're picking for your inner circle, and that focus would be, make sure that they're not just a good fit for you. Make sure they're a good fit for your team, and make sure that they are in fact, what I would call a culture carrier. That they're there, they're inspired by the same things. They're aligned with you a hundred percent, and that they're able to lead and empower others and not disempower or create toxicity in your culture just because they might be incredibly skilled at a task that you want them to do. So thinking truly about not just where are your blind spots, what do you need more awareness around? Again, that requires you to be self-aware and do self inflection, but then taking that to the next level on, not just who's a really good fit from a background and a skillset perspective, but again, as you think about building a personal or professional team, culture matters. Rapport matters, connectedness matters. Alignment on purpose matters. And those are all critically important as you think about your inner circle. Just to conclude today's podcast as, as we think about how we build the inner circle so that we can improve upon our successes, we can create inflection points and we can speed up the process and change our trajectory. The concept of a coach or mentor, as you've heard me talk about before, is critically important. The concept of self-awareness and self inflection is incredibly important. Knowing what you don't know knowing that there are things that you don't even know that you don't know, and then being able to delegate that to a team or an inner circle that you've developed over time is so important in how you will grow your business. Be successful and feel fulfilled, and I hope you're able to do that one piece at a time, but always in the right direction. So one final mention here. You wanna be self-aware, you want to know where your blind spots are. You wanna fill those blind spots with people that are incredibly talented, certainly more talented than you in those spots. They're using their highest and best use of their professional situation or licensure. Just so, just so you can do the same, that you trust them. They have incredible rapport, not just with you, but with each. And the team and that they carry the culture, the vision, the mission, and the purpose that you all want to have and that you're shooting towards. So I want to take an extra moment to thank you for listening to today's podcast, short and sweet, and incredibly important around the power of your inner circle. Understanding that that can be people, you can call text, and people that you just listen to. Again, thank you so much. Please take a minute to like, subscribe, share this episode. Once again, I'm Dr. Ryan Wakim, successful entrepreneur and your endgame coach. I'm here to teach you how to exist today so that you can expand tomorrow and create the ultimate end game of your desires. Talk to you soon.