Leading Yourself Well with Maggie Perotin

Leaders are made and not born. In fact, the best leaders learn how to lead themselves first. How do you develop your own leadership skills? Listen in as I chat with Maggie Perotin about leading yourself well.

In my conversation with Maggie Perotin some of the things we discuss…

• How to discover your own personal core values and why they matter
• Her Dream, Plan, Do model
• Creating solid habits that reinforce your goals
• Combating some of the barriers of progress
• Navigating failure and turning it into success

About Our Guest

Maggie Perotin lives in Canada, Toronto area, with her blended family with 4 kids. She is a self-development geek, loves nature, traveling, and good food. She holds an executive MBA from Jack Welch Management Institute and has over 14 years experience in various corporate leadership positions.

As an international business and leadership coach, Maggie helps service-based entrepreneurs make the income they want in their business and become outstanding leaders in the process.

Through her DREAM-PLAN-DO coaching model, she supports her clients in becoming confident CEO’s by aligning their mindset, business skills and high-performance habits. This allows them to transform their businesses from an unreliable source of income to a client attracting diamond.

Resources Mentioned on the Show

• https://stairwaytoleadership.com/
• https://www.linkedin.com/in/maggie-perotin-business-and-leadership-coach/

Transcript

Maggie Perotin Start with one thing. Don’t try to do it. You know, sometimes let’s let’s say we read a book and then the book has ten ideas and we’re like, Oh, my God, I need to start the whole ones. I want to implement them yesterday, right? That doesn’t work. It’s too much change into our daily routine that we cannot handle because it requires a lot of energy in the beginning to put it in and our brain doesn’t like it.

Right? So it will resist that might do it for a week, and then we fall off the wagon and read So I would say start the smallest and the simplest possible…

James Laws Welcome to another episode of the Leading to Fulfillment podcast, where everything we talk about is meant to encourage people-first leaders, empower individuals to achieve fulfillment, and help your organizations become places people love to work.

I’m your host, James Laws, and I have a great show in store for you. My guest this episode is Maggie Perotin. Maggie holds an executive MBA from Jack Welch Management Institute, has over 14 years experience in various corporate leadership positions, and as an international business and leadership coach, Maggie helps service based entrepreneurs make the income they want in their businesses and become understanding leaders in the process.

Through her Dream, Plan, Do coaching model, she supports her clients and becoming confident CEOs by aligning their mindset, business skills and high performance habits. This allows them to transform their businesses from an unreliable source of income to a client attracting diamond In my conversation with Maggie, some of the things that we discuss was how to discover your own personal core values and why they matter.

Her Dream, Plan, Do model, creating solid habits that reinforce your goals. Combining some of the barriers of progress and navigating failure and turning it into success if you enjoy this episode, I want to encourage you to subscribe to leading a fulfillment podcast in your favorite podcast tool. We’re on Apple and Google Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, and everywhere else. Podcasts can be found, and if not, let me know so I can crack that.

Also, don’t forget to check out ciircles.com, that’s Ciircles with two i’s, and subscribe to our newsletter there will let you know when each new episode drops as well as send you original and curated content on leadership, managing teams and finding fulfillment. Another way you can help us promote the show is by simply giving us a review wherever you listen to the show.

And now here is my conversation with Maggie Perotin.

Maggie, thank you so much for joining me on the Leadership to Fulfillment podcast. I really appreciate you being on.

Maggie Perotin Well, thank you, James, for having me. I appreciate you having me as well.

James Laws So absolutely. As we were talking kind of pre-show and as I was looking over some of your background, you had you you define yourself as an international business and leadership coach for those who might not know exactly what it is that you do or what somebody with that kind of role does.

Why don’t you give a little bit of background for our listeners of the type of work that you do on a day to day basis?

Maggie Perotin Yes. So on a day to day basis, I help service based entrepreneurs grow their businesses. And why I emphasize that I’m not only a business coach, but also leadership coach because I truly believe that anybody who is in a position of leading their business, whether you’re a solopreneur, whether you have your employees, you need to embrace that, that you are the leader of your business.

You might not have a title of a CEO or whatever. You might consider yourself a founder or owner, but you still need a business. And in order to do that, you need to lead yourself first. I truly believe and leading by example and growing yourself the way you think about the business, your skills and so on in order to make better decisions for your business.

So that’s what I do. I help my clients grow their businesses and at the same time become high performing CEOs in the process.

James Laws I love that idea of kind of leading yourself. First, I try to impart that to the leaders in my company that before you can lead others, you have to first be able to lead yourself. What are what are some of the things where do you start when you get into a relationship with a client who’s looking at managing their business, perhaps growing it, perhaps taking on team members?

What are the what are some of the tips and suggestions you walk through with them to help them be better leaders of themselves? What are your thoughts on that?

Maggie Perotin So we really start first, of course, to help my client. I need to understand them. But they also that leads to them understanding themselves better. So what I mean by that is we look at, okay, what what are your values?

How do you operate as a person, as a human being, that because that you know what do we ask? How do you say you say the way we do one thing is the way we do everything right. So how do I operate on a daily basis? What’s important to me that I bring to my business? And some of it might be unintentional, but you want it to be intentional, right?

So you want to bring certain core values that you live by any ways into your business, because that creates a foundation for how you deal with the clients, the culture down the line. When you are having employees and so on. Right from that, we think about we we make sure that you are clear on your mission and the vision for your business.

So many businesses, they don’t even know what it is. Or even if they did think about it some time, then they put it on the shelf and it just collecting dust. And we never look at it someone. But then they might be surprised, okay, why are we not meeting our goals or why are we having clients we don’t really want?

Or why are we having employees that are not really aligned with who we are? Right. And it all comes from either not having the clarity of what we’re all about as a business, how we’re helping people who are we helping in? Someone, or maybe we have done that, but things change and we didn’t even like we’re not really aligning our actions and our goals with it.

So I would say like, that’s the first thing. Let’s understand who you are, what you stand for, what’s your mission, what’s your vision? And then, of course, I understand where they are. In their business and where they want to go. And then we kind of, you know, create plan to get there.

James Laws Absolutely. I, I love the idea. We talk so much and we do this in businesses all the time, whether it be in the small business or the corporate world where we will develop, you know, a true purpose statement, mission statement and core values.

And I love that you brought that out from even as an individual leader or solopreneur is staying down saying, hey, personally what are my core values? What do I stand for? What am I bringing into even my solo service business? What am I bringing into that? And it’s something that I don’t think individually we do enough. We spend a lot of time talking about it as an organization that, oh, my company stands for, you know, these things.

These are our core values. But as a person spending a little time to really get to know ourselves and say, what do I value deeply? And and with that in mind, what are your core values?

Maggie Perotin So my core values that I brought into my business because, you know, like I would say, okay, one of them is family. And but family is very personal but the three that I brought into my business, the first one was simplicity.

I truly believe that life can be as simple as we want it. And it’s not complicated. It’s just as humans, we make it complicated. And that’s something I lived by all my life. And I brought that into my business not only for me, but also for my clients. Right? Because sometimes we get so overwhelmed by everything we think we need to do, or we think that the problems are complex, but when you start breaking things down and coming back to basics, then you realize that things are not as complicated as you think they are.

And then there are simple solutions to them, right? So that’s number one. The second one was excellence and not perfection. Right. So excellence, meaning I’m doing the best I can with the resources that I have and the knowledge that I have. And once I know better than our improve that excellence, this really propels growth and continuous improvement when we are stuck on perfection.

And not avoiding. We’re trying to avoid mistakes. We’re not growing. And some of it sometimes a lot of people are perfectionist. That comes out in their business, but also organization. You know, again, I come from the corporate world and sometimes that trying to pretend that we can be perfect in front of the clients and committing to 100% KPIs and things, that just doesn’t happen, especially if you’re in service business and you rely on human beings for those services.

It’s just unreasonable. Right? And like we need to frame in normalize the fact that as humans we’re not perfect. Yes, we can be amazing and we can be really 99.9% sometimes with help, with help of technology. And so one delivery things, but it will never be 100% all the time. Right. And then the third one is courage. And courage comes from the fact that especially as entrepreneurs, we really need to go out a lot out of our comfort zone.

Right? It’s just like the growth you need to go through, getting even even, you know, larger companies. If you don’t grow, you kind of die, right? So it takes courage. And again, it was for me to remember that I have it as well. You know, I’ve made a bunch of sometimes critical decisions in my life that required courage, but sometimes one day today you tend to forget that I grew like I’m scared of that by Wade, like I’ve done some crazy stuff, so that means I can do this little thing, right?

So it’s the same. It’s to remind me and remind my clients that sometimes, you know, taking a risk and evaluating it, but believing in the possibility of the goals that they want to do and having courage to go after them and that they have it in them, right. That they can take those steps and so on. So those are the three that that I brought over.

James Laws I I love those. And one of the one of the things that I love and one of the things I teach when I teach people as a developing their core values is that idea of keep them, keep them minimal, like keep them as few as possible to really capture the core essence of who you are be. And one that helps them be memorable, helps you kind of remember what they are.

So you can always check against them, but it actually keeps you focused. It doesn’t, you know, having, you know, you see these companies and I don’t know of any individuals who have done this but you see companies have like 20 core values. It’s like there’s no way you’re keeping track of any of that. Like, come on.

I worked at I worked at a credit union that had that for many, many years ago. They had all those values and they actually required everyone to memorize them. And it was almost impossible. Think it was just out of control.

Maggie Perotin Yeah. And sorry, what I wanted to add is that, like, if everything is important and nothing is right, I actually said and and you it’s it’s you know, there is certain like, yes, I understand that like people thinking integrity, honesty, nobody it’s a core value.

But for me, that’s like just an entry level. Like to be in business, you should have integrity and you should have. Yeah, that’s right. So you don’t necessarily need to bring that to because for me, like not being dishonest, you should be out of business, maybe in jail, not in business. Right. So there is sometimes like this fear.

Oh, if we don’t include that, that means people won’t follow it. No, it’s not about that. Right. It’s about, as you say, like just defining who we are. And then through that, you know, remembering and aligning our actions with it, you know, absolutely.

James Laws We call those a lot of times I call those table stakes, right? It’s like in order, in order to be a decent human being in business integrity has to follow. Yes. You have to follow. Like those are of course those are there. And we should we I would hope that by assuming the best, we assume that those things are there. I want to know what’s what’s makes up you that’s different. You have three core values that I can tell are meaningful to you.

How did you and how do you coach your people, your clients to wrestle with their core values and bring out what might be their core values? Because my guess is the process is when you go into that and having gone through it myself several times with businesses and individually is it can sometimes be hard to narrow that down and find out like what is my essence, what is it the answers like or how do you help your clients do that?

Maggie Perotin So at first I get them to brainstorm, to write every everything, what’s important to them, read all the values, whether I give them sometimes. So as you know, all that that’s available out there actually Brene Brown has a lesson, her book there to lead the which is like a great resource just to start to start brainstorming. And then we start going okay.

Well, sometimes you can categorize certain values fall into the same bucket, right? So then when you start categorizing and certain bucket, then you can narrow it down. So you have 12, okay, let’s get four out and let’s narrow it down maybe to six, right? And then even narrowed down to three or, you know, no more than five. So that’s that process of LED.

Just put it everything out there. See what kind of buckets are there? Sturdy filing back into, you know, what makes sense. And so to bring into business, is there certain personal values that are really mostly in a personal life so they might not be as relevant in the business? What makes sense to bring into business and just buy by that the, you know, method of elimination and kind of categorizing, we go down to whatever three or five days.

James Laws So I love it and I encourage people to go through that process. If you’ve never gone through as an individual to to determine like what are your core values? So it’s a really fun exercise actually to think through what is important. What do I value? And once you once you solidify that, once you write that down, once you memorialize that to some level, it does start to change the way you make decisions.

You wouldn’t think that it would, but it does actually start to impact your decisions because now you’ve actually like put it down on paper. You’ve actually memorialized that it’s it’s harder now to make a decision that would oppose those things that you have identified. Do you find that to be true as you’re coaching your clients?

Maggie Perotin Yes, it is. And I always tell my clients because sometimes they say, okay, well, why am I doing that? I said and I say to them, every time you’re in the crossroad and you’re making decision in your business and you’re not sure where to go, go back to your values, go back to your mission and look at that. Right? Because sometimes actually in the beginning, when you grow your business, it may seem like it’s actually harder to grow it and there’s not enough opportunities.

But when you get past that ham, there’s actually more opportunities usually than you can. You can take on and being able to pick the right opportunities for you, the one that will really strategically fit for you, that the values mission and vision are perfect filters through that, right? And if you have them, if you establish them and you truly identify with them, again, not something I put on their wall and I don’t believe in and nobody looks at it but something that I’m really connected to.

Then making those decisions and picking the right opportunities and saying no to the ones that don’t align is so much easier.

James Laws Absolutely. So it sounds as you’re working with various clients, a big part of what you’re doing is kind of helping them carve a path towards ultimately fulfillment for them in their business. Personally, yes. You spent 13 years in corporate leadership roles and then decided to make that very change for yourself.

What caused that change? Because you look at the corporate world and you know, it’s funny and lot of there’s a lot of social media platforms and people out there talking about the benefits of kind of tying yourself into the corporate world. And, and surely there is plenty to be learned in that environment. But you made the conscientious shift to leave the corporate world and go out on your own and do something that ultimately I believe was more fulfilling for you.

What was the catalyst of making such a fairly dramatic change after you done it for 13 years?

Maggie Perotin So you know what? The catalyst was definitely or the moment that really pushed me to think deep about it was my burnt out. So about four years ago now I at that time I was already thinking like, where do I want to take my career?

But it was more still thinking in terms of like corporate career. But I just want to do more of what I love, right? And stop doing things that I might be good at. But they’re not bringing me fulfillment and I’d rather causing stress and so on. But about four years ago, I went through, like I call it, situational burnout.

It wasn’t systemic. It was just a situation in there in a role that I was where we were just put out a lot of work on our plates on top of our full time jobs without support. We were not ready to deliver things that were promised to the clients, and I found myself working. I don’t know, it was a few months nonstop, no breaks, no weekends, no nothing.

\My kids were let go, and one of my personal values is I value balance, right? I’m a mom. I want to spend time with my kids, but I also value my professional fulfillment, right? I feel fulfilled when I have both, right? That’s me. And I found myself sort of cornered in that situation that got me thinking as well.

You know, you didn’t have control over that decision. So that was one. And I’m a Sagittarius. I like to be free rein. So it’s like, you know, you you see them, you know, maybe some better ways of having made that decision. And you couldn’t control it. And then you found yourself on the delivery side of it. And I didn’t like that.

And, you know, the more senior you become, you like to make decisions, right? Like maybe when I was junior I wasn’t ready for that. But as seen more of a senior leader, I’m like, I like to make my decisions and then implement them in this and so on. And so then I started thinking, no, I need in it.

Really, I needed that balance. I’m like, I can’t do it like that. I have to have balance between my family and work and balance. I don’t mean like perfect amount of hours every day that I’m spending with my family. It’s one but balance in whatever terms that means to me. So what do I am going to do? And then the thought was, Wow, going in a corporate, that situation can happen again.

And whether it’s in this company or in the other one, it doesn’t matter right? I can still I will have somebody over me or certain levels that will make decisions without necessarily consulting. And then I end up not only doing delivering that, but also my team and so on. Right. So then the thought was no, so what what are you going to do next?

Like, okay, you’re don’t want to grow in a corporate career anymore. And that’s the, you know, my thought process was I really love coaching and developing people like being a people eater. That was my favorite part of any role that I had. And then, you know, as you say, I actually like business and business is fun and it can before feeling when we remember that we’re humans and we’re doing it not just for money, but for other things as well.

And when we are realistic, yes, bold but realistic. And we can be proactive about things we don’t always need to react. And so that by taking that skill isn’t my passion led to me creating, you know, my business coaching practice.

James Laws I love it in that process. You you actually talk a little bit about a model that you use in your coaching practice called Dream Plan Do. Can you can you explain a little bit about what that model is? What makes up that model, where that came from?

Maggie Perotin
Yeah. So the model came from, I think is just like I operate this way. And then I, I was working, creating my net, I was growing my business and starting creating concepts for my clients. It’s just the naming competition came where Dream is part of.

Of course, everything starts in our mind, right? An idea and thought whatever project so that’s the dream part. And then the important key to that, to that point is believing that we can be successful in whatever idea we have. Now, it doesn’t mean being dangerously optimistic when you’re not considering risk absence one. Yes, you do that in the planning part, but you’re making decisions based on the fact that you believe in the probability of your dream, your idea being successful, and you’re moving forward towards now the planning part is something that a lot of people skip and especially entrepreneurs, they just like.

I have an idea. Let’s go. That’s right. And that’s where you create a lot of unnecessary hurdles in front of you. It could take you longer. You’re wasting sometimes money as well because planning and I call it like creative part of business. This is where you actually solve for certain problems that as an intelligent human beings, you can predict your brain is capable of doing that.

And what is what is creativity? It’s really solution ing, right? It’s the same parts like, yes, artists are creative in painting, but we in business where we’re creative in creating solution, but our brain, only that part of the brain can only function when it has time and space to do it. We can’t move from tactics to strategy, from tactics to start, it’s impossible.

We need to create that container and that’s the planning. And it doesn’t have to be five days every time you have an idea, right? It can be a 30 minutes, it can be an hour. But thinking about how can I implemented what’s the best route to go, what could happen and how can I prepare for it? Right. It’s not about me stopping because I’m catastrophizing and thinking, Oh my God, that’s how I’m going to work.

But okay, if that happens, okay, let me prepare. Right? And then I do and then I execute and it and it’s so much less stressful. It saves so much time again, it doesn’t mean unexpected things won’t happen, but it’s so much easier to deal with them when you went through that planning process.

James Laws I love the planning process too, because I’ve talked to I actually talked about this in the previous episode and I talk I wrote about this on our website.

I talk about the idea of the power of boredom, and I use the term boredom because you, like you said, right? We can’t just our minds have to be in a certain state in order to work through that process of creating solutions. And I think boredom to me is that perfect state of I don’t I’m sitting down with nothing no agenda, no no tasks on my list, and I’m just going to sit and let the thoughts kind of come at me.

And because I am who I am and I work in the capacity that I work in, I will find myself solutioning and solving problems and mediating around ideas because I let myself have that space to just be bored, even if it’s I have to put it on my calendar for an hour a day or whatever the case may be.

If I love that planning stage, age, how do you what are some tips and some ideas that you encourage your clients to help develop that planning stage in their own schedules?

Maggie Perotin So as you say, definitely creating that space, even if you need to put it on your calendar, right? And everybody’s different, maybe ten hour a week a day, or maybe it’s just two chunks of time in during a week or once a week that I do give my clients a journal.

\That’s Adrienne Black to her journal that do help helps them create a plan not only for like a month or a quarter, but also weekly. This is more tactical, but still it’s that one of High-Performance Habits that allows you to go through a week. Again, not overwhelmed. That’s one but just execute. What’s your plan? And so that helps them too.

And then I help them create good habits. So it’s just not about, Oh, you need to you know, me telling them, Okay, you need to put it in the calendar, but I have meetings and I have bills and that doesn’t work. And so one is that’s working through that and actually creating you know, changing their mindset about creating a little habits that allows them to put that space into their weekly operations.

James Laws You speak about the power of good habits, right? Putting in some habits in place. What are some of the best ways leaders can, can, can stack those habits and start to put those habits in place and make that a functional part of their day?

Maggie Perotin Yeah. So start with one thing. Don’t try to do away, too. You know, sometimes let’s let’s say we read a book and then the book has ten ideas and we’re like, oh, my God, I need to start the whole ones. I want to implement them yesterday. Right that doesn’t work. It’s too much change into our daily routine that we cannot handle because it requires, you know, a lot of energy in the beginning to put it in and our brain doesn’t like it.

Right? So do I resist that? I do it for a week and then we fall off the wagon and read. So I would say start the smallest and the simplest possible. So let’s just say you decided, yeah, I do want to create that boredom, the space, the creative space in my week and you know that whatever you read a book and they say, Oh yeah, 4 hours a week, you should do that.

And you’re like, What am I going to think? That’s not possible. Start with an hour a week, right? Start with which day is the easiest for you to be able to keep that? Maybe it’s a Friday afternoon. Maybe on Friday afternoon, to sort of slow down and want it. Maybe first thing Monday morning when people are just like over the weekend and emails are not flowing yet and so on.

Right. So in your current schedule, what is the easiest time that you could schedule that minimum? Let’s say, oh, an hour a week and start there and as you do well for a certain amount of time, then it just becomes natural. It becomes part of your who you are daily operation and only then expand only then add something else.

Right. And that’s I would say that it’s a journey. It’s not like once and then thing or I can pile a bunch of stuff at once and do it. It is a journey, but it’s worth it.

James Laws I have to say that that’s something that, you know, I take from, from being in the technology space when in development, one of the things that we always talk about is the idea of small iterations, small micro improvements towards a better product and habits fall really well into that environment.

Right. And I teach that to others as well as when we’re when you’re developing new habits try to break it down to the smallest possible piece and get that so solid and in place and then stack something a little bit harder. So if you’re you know, for instance, for your health, if you’re trying to stop drinking soft drinks, for instance, don’t just stop drinking soft drinks.

How about start drinking at least one glass of water a day? Yeah. Still drink the soft drinks, but just drink water. No one glass of water a day. Then eventually you can transition that to drinking only water or whatever the next stage is that you can build little increments and build up that. So I love that. And it speaks to actually what I was thinking about, which is the next kind of line of thought I have is that we we believe that in order for professionals to find fulfillment, in order for our team members to find fulfillment, they ultimately need a purpose, passion and progress.

Right? They need to experience these types of things in their everyday. So they have to believe that the work that they do matters. They have to love what they do, and they have to actually see the impact of their work happening, you know, throughout that process. What do you think when you’re with the clients that you’ve spoken to? What do you think are some of the things that hold these individuals, leaders from creating or seeing progress in their day to day work? What are some of the barriers that they that they may have bad habits or or not that create this seemingly lack of progress?

Maggie Perotin So definitely bad habits is one of them. Right? So just being in certain motion and not necessary early.

And it starts finally with the mindset, not necessarily believing that something else will work great. And that’s natural for our brain to dismiss certain new ideas. And so one just because again, change requires effort and change requires energy and so one so definitely the mind set of a this can work and and then this can work and I can make it happen by May taking the smallest steps possible.

\I don’t need to do it all at once. And so one and sometimes fear is right. So again, it comes to the thing. Do I believe I can be successful sometimes the fiercer settling in ride, the fear of failure, the fear of whatever hours of judgment or shame or whatever. And so the bad habits one and then also the fact that depending or where they are but what I find that like the the lack of understanding that when you are a business owner, you do need to control yourself as CEO in your business.

Right? So it’s not just about improving your product or getting more expertize in your the way you service your clients. If you’re a service based owner, that’s necessary too. Don’t get me wrong. Bad. You need to equally invest in yourself as a leader of your business and CEO, right? Like I just had a conversation not that long ago with a lady who was telling me that she was running her business for three years and then kind of stagnated.

Right. And and she lost a bit of confidence. She didn’t believe it could work. But when I started, like pinpointing where the problem was, it was that I was saying that you never really notice that it’s important for you to understand marketing and understand strategy, understand a bit of finance since one, because you’re the leader, you don’t need to be an expert, you don’t need to be a CPA, you don’t need to be a marketing strategist, the best person in the world.

But you need to have some information, some knowledge, so you understand through your understanding in your business, you know how the business shows up and you you direct the way it shows up to your clients and so on. So then when you actually grow it to the point where you can outsource, right? You can direct the people who are doing the work and understand if they’re portraying your business properly, or not.

Right? So sometimes that’s a big blockage. People either don’t do it at all and then the business stagnate or they do it a little bit, but then they burnt out. They are not able to scale because they have and they are not running it strategically. And just because again, they’re not seeing the importance of investing in them in their business skills and their leadership mindset and things like that. So that’s one of them to another part of another part of that progress.

James Laws You talked about it when you’re talking about dream plan, do you talk about this belief, the belief that you can do this, that this thing can be accomplished that you can you can do this? And yet we know no matter how much we believe sometimes you talked about the fear of failure.

Well, sometimes that fear comes true. Failure does happen. In fact, I would say if you’re going to do anything risky, failure is probably inevitable. Yes. You’re going to fall on your face a couple of times. Right. How do you help people navigate failure gracefully and turn that failure into a success? I am I am of the opinion that no failure is a waste if you can learn and gather something from it.

So how do you help your clients learn from a perhaps what may feel like a catastrophic failure or a stumble by?

Maggie Perotin First of all, again, changing mindset, engines fail around failure that first of all, failure, detaching failure from them as a person. Failure doesn’t mean anything about you as a human being. It’s part of the process. As you say, there’s no successful business in this world that didn’t go through multiple failures.

I learned from it to be successful, right? So far, as couple that missed the failures that happened or even the positive results, because if we attach our worth to the amount of money we make, that’s not healthy either, right? So decoupled that from the person. Then, as you say, just acknowledge that it’s just part of the journey. It will happen no matter how much you plan and so on.

Now, you can save yourself some of it by planning, but it will happen. And then how can I make it so valuable just by learning? Right. So what did I learn from it? What worked and this what didn’t work, why it didn’t work? And how can I improve next time? Because the only way failure becomes detrimental is if we make the same mistakes over and over, right?

But if we learn and grow and make different mistakes at a different level because we grow, that’s just means that we’re going in the right direction. Truly EPS.

James Laws Absolutely. Yeah. I constantly tell my team, right, I expect you to fail. I just I the lesson should be don’t fail twice at the same thing. Like like learn. Learn from their mistake and learn from it.

\Maggie, thank you so much for being on the show. I hope people really listen to especially the last portion of decoupling, the failure from their identity and separating that and recognizing like this and failure is going to happen. And that doesn’t mean that you are a failure. It doesn’t mean that you are the problem. It just means there’s a lesson to be learned.

And if you take the time to pick yourself up, dust yourself off and analyze the situation, you can actually turn that failure into a massive amount of success moving forward. In the future. And that is how we make progress. And I really appreciate you being on the show and sharing some of your wisdom with us today. If people want to get in touch with you or learn more about what you do or even acquire on your services that you provide to to your clients, how can they do that?

Maggie Perotin
The best way to find me is through my website. It’s StairwaytoLeadership.com says. Stairway to Leadership. When WorldCom or LinkedIn under Maggie Perotin through my profiler as well.

James Laws Awesome. Well, I hope everyone will check it out. Check out your website you have some great content on there as well, some blogs that they can learn. I know you do some some various coaching and courses, both free and to your clients, so I hope they will check all that out.

Maggie, again, thank you so much for being on the Leading to Fulfillment podcast.

Maggie Perotin Thank you so much for having me, James. Thank you.

James Laws Thank you so much to Maggie Perotin for joining me on this episode. It was a real pleasure getting to have this conversation with her. Everything we mentioned including the full transcript of the show, is available over on our website and you can access it any time by visiting leading to fulfillment dot com slash 008. One of the biggest things we have to learn if we want to lead ourselves well is how to have a healthy relationship with failure.

Failure isn’t something to be sought after but it shouldn’t be something you fear either. Failure should be seen as an opportunity. It’s an opportunity to expand your understanding, to grow and knowledge and in character. We do this by examining our preconceptions or assumptions. We do this by recognizing that our goal is not perfection. Our goal is better, and failure is a looking glass into how we can think incrementally better, how we can do incrementally better, and how we can be incrementally better.

In your journey, it is inevitable that you will have to face failure. If you are a leader. It is inevitable that you will have to lead through failure If you want to be great and do great things, you will need to learn how not to avoid resist failure, but to embrace it as the opportunity has the potential to be.

Thanks for listening and I hope you’ll join me on the next episode of Leading to Fulfillment