285 | Living Your Calling in Business: A Conversation with Jeff Willmore

[INTRODUCTION]

[00:00:35] Hilary Hendershott: Well, hello, Money Lover. Today, I am talking with someone I consider both a mentor and a friend, and I want to share with you something that has absolutely transformed how I do business for the better. Today’s conversation is for you if you’re a business owner, an entrepreneur, or if you work for a company that is heart-centered or could be heart-centered. Like, many of you work for groups or organizations or companies that want to be heart-centered. Maybe you have a mission and vision painted on the wall, but if it’s just wallpaper and not really informing your experience of work, this conversation really is for you. So, the work I’ve done on my business with my team as a result of knowing the person I’m interviewing today has been infused into every aspect of the way we do business, including even the name of this podcast, Love, your Money^®.

[00:01:28] My guest today is Jeff Willmore. Jeff has led transformational programs for over 23 years to over 160,000 people all around the world. He’s worked with Olympic athletes, Navy SEAL and Special Forces members, top executives from all fields, Oscar-winning actors, Grammy Award-winning musicians. He has trained and worked with the best. He’s masterful at teaching and coaching others to accomplish their vision and professional goals, while at the same time really living, including traveling, building wealth, family time, taking care of your health, and living a life of contribution, not just lip service. He literally asks in the beginning of the course if you and the individual in the course are on your path to financial freedom. Are you actually saving for and funding your retirement? I’ve never had a business coach ask me that before. I was so impressed when he did. As you know, that’s right up my alley.

[00:02:23] But most business coaches just sort of hand wave that thing when why else are you in business? Right? So, we’re going to be talking today about a course he offers called The Autonomy Course. Jeff worked on the principles behind The Autonomy Course for more than 10 years before he launched it. He designed the course using the latest research in cognitive science, behavioral economics, ontology, and biology. The course’s methodology deliberately steps away from “tips and techniques” and it allows you, as it allowed me, to embody the advanced knowledge of a market leader. To design cutting-edge practices based on your own original thinking and living true to your heart and soul.

[00:03:06] Jeff helps extraordinary people who are already top performers leap to the next level and fulfill their vision by learning to see themselves, the marketplace, and the world differently. That’s a pretty big promise, but I think that you’ll see after you listen to this conversation between myself and Jeff Willmore, that he really is prepared to fulfill on all of those things with you.

[INTERVIEW]

[00:03:32] Hilary Hendershott: Jeff Willmore, welcome to Love, your Money^®.

[00:03:35] Jeff Willmore: Thank you. I’m so happy to be here.

[00:03:38] Hilary Hendershott: So, Jeff, I know that your work with entrepreneurs was born out of a particular struggle in your own life, something that you saw in a past career, past life that led to the foundational work that you did that led to the coaching that you’re now doing. Will you share with my listeners about how that journey went for you?

[00:03:57] Jeff Willmore: Sure. My brother and I launched a business right after college where we were buying distressed assets and failing companies. And we were moderately successful at it. We weren’t all that successful because we didn’t know a lot of what we were doing. However, we worked our ass off and we applied ourselves. And I was very committedly engaged and getting better at running a business and building my business. So, I was doing various different workshops and reading Inc Magazine and et cetera, et cetera.

[00:04:33] And had an epiphany that has really stuck with me to this day–one of those things that gets in your brain and doesn’t let go, which was: everything I was doing everyone else was doing, or at least they had access to do it. And it doesn’t mean that stuff wasn’t useful, but it’s what I now term common business knowledge. And if something’s common, it means it’s relatively cheap because it’s plentiful. So, it’s like if someone comes to me and gives me advice on how to do a website, and I may follow it, but they go next door and give much of the same advice. And so, pretty soon we’re all looking alike, sounding alike.

[00:05:18] And the big piece of this epiphany was the realization, I just felt like I had a vision for my business, which connected to a vision for my life. I didn’t know what it was though. It wasn’t clear other than I felt it, that there was something there more than just I was making money now. And I began to look for, where could I go to get access to articulate and clarify what my vision was for my life and my profession, my business, and I couldn’t really find anywhere. And it led me on this quest and search.

[00:06:00] I started to do different things and got into different ways of empowering myself and people, which then led to The Autonomy Course, which you and I know each other from, of a way to give committed, ambitious professionals and entrepreneurs an access to align with their soul’s purpose and really reinvent and redesign their business so it’s aligned with it. So, I’m just really grateful for going through that struggle, that hard work grind, and really discovering for myself that that wasn’t the answer.

[00:06:46] Hilary Hendershott: Of course my business experience is in running a financial services firm. Being so regulated, there are ways in which they sort of force us to be the same, right? And that’s not true. I have many friends who are a lot more autonomous in that sense. But the common knowledge now is to differentiate yourself, BE yourself. In terms of building star marketing or a personality brand. You pick up the microphone, you go live on Facebook, and you be yourself. Your work…

[00:07:17] Jeff Willmore: You’re right.

[00:07:19] Hilary Hendershott: Which I tried. I did. I’ve been doing that. My version of that is like, “Okay, let’s give it a go.” But your work takes it steps further for the business owners you work with, and for me in my life and my business. How would you describe the way that you show business owners to be unique?

[00:07:39] Jeff Willmore: Yeah. Boy, that is a good one. So, the thing about that, what’s now become common of Facebook Live and I will record myself walking down the sidewalk, I mean, it’s something that’s now become a common business knowledge, and the way I market; the way I connect. And it surely doesn’t mean you should never do it. However, what I found for myself was once I’d identified what I term as my life’s calling and someone could call it whatever they want, fundamental life purpose or dharma or raison d’etre or whatever term someone wants to use, then the next step was standing there, what’s the answer to why my business exists?

[00:08:35] And mostly I found, and when I say mostly, it’s like 99%, when you go to look at what a company’s stated mission is, it’s almost always a description of what they do. It doesn’t connect them to why they do it. So, that was a critical first step. And then the really challenging part is how I’m going to express that into the marketplace, how I’m going to connect with my people, how I’m going to be heard and known. That’s now a function of invention. It is pure creation and invention and it just can’t be copying. It can’t be, “Oh, this is what is being told to do.” My term for this, it requires a triumph of imagination where you really are designing your offer and inventing it in such a way that it is a powerful expression of who you are and why you do what you do.

[00:09:43] First of all, it will stand out as unique. And as I like to say, the marketplace rewards uniqueness. It’s got a special value to it. But it’s not you’re now being unique as a strategy to try and be unique. It’s because your vision is unique, whatever that is. And then, but more than that, it engenders trust and connection. And given we live in this internet era where there’s an abundance of possible clients for us, you can trust if you’re diligent and disciplined about putting your offer and your message out in the world, people will find you. So, it’s that design part where you’re designing like an architect designs or like an artist designs. Who am I and what’s my offer for people?

[00:10:41] Hilary Hendershott: Well, let’s talk a little bit more about this idea of the calling. I want my listeners to understand it as distinct from… Because they’ve got years of time spent undoubtedly at a company with a mission and a vision, right? And so, this idea of the calling, I mean, one of the world’s most famous TED Talks is Simon Sinek. “People don’t buy what you do. They buy why you do it.” And so, it sounds like it’s all enmeshed and it’s all ubiquitous, but it’s not. Back in 2018 when we first worked together, you asked me, “If you could give your daughter only one thing, one thing, and if you really knew that she got that, what thing would you pick?” And I said, “She would be free.” I didn’t have to think about it, right?

[00:11:27] Jeff Willmore: Right. Right.

[00:11:28] Hilary Hendershott: Because that really is what I want most for her is that she’s free of the self-imposed constraints, socially composed constraints, that she’s free of obligation, of judgment, of paths she thinks she must follow in order to blah, blah, blah or whatever. And, first, would you share your calling and how is the calling different from the mission and vision statements in Simon Sinek’s TED Talks?

[00:11:51] Jeff Willmore: Right. Well, first of all, I think Simon’s talk points to it, but it doesn’t give a powerful access to discover one’s calling for oneself. So, this process began for me with my late best friend and business partner working together, Richard, who you knew well. And it began with Richard spending time with his dying father a dozen or so years ago. And his father had lived this really amazing life and he had retired in Paris and so Richard was spending lots of time in Paris with his dad. And he was surprised to find out his dad was afraid of dying and he was surprised because his father had lived both this amazing life, but secondly, what he considered a very spiritually connected life.

[00:12:48] And what he came to find out is, what his father was afraid of was that he hadn’t lived–what my term for now, what Richard and I came up with–is he hadn’t lived true to what was most important about his life. And Richard and I began that inquiry for ourselves. And probably many of the listeners are aware of, there’s a well-known book written about it, but a number of surveys have shown that people at the end of their life, if they have a moment to reflect, their most common regret is, “I wish I’d lived a life more true to myself.” And the second one is, “I wish I hadn’t worked so much.” And that so resonated for me because it’s a real conundrum.

[00:13:44] And for someone like yourself and probably every one of your listeners, when you’ve decided early in life that accomplishment is important to you, like it’s an important part of your identity, “I want to accomplish.” And not everyone is like that, which is fine. Not everyone needs to be like that. What it often leads to is an over-emphasis on work and getting validation and the value from our work. And then before you know it, there we are at the end of our life with, “Sh*t. I wish I hadn’t worked so much.”

[00:14:24] Hilary Hendershott: Right. But what you’re not saying is it’s a foregone conclusion that work doesn’t fulfill on what’s held most deeply true to us.

[00:14:33] Jeff Willmore: Yes. And there are two directions to come at that from, and what’s become very common out in the world is, “Oh, work-life balance. Oh, I need more vacations. Oh, I need…” and yet that doesn’t do it either because I love accomplishment and I love my business and I love what I do. So, the real answer for us became, “Okay, we want to create a way where someone can reinvent the world of business for themselves so it’s a pathway to live true to their life’s calling.” So, that was the first big commitment. How do I separate myself from what I call the force field of business that’s filled with compete and win and selling and cold calls and leads and process, all that familiar verbiage and language.

[00:15:31] Hilary Hendershott: Dominate.

[00:15:34] Jeff Willmore: Yes.

[00:15:36] Hilary Hendershott: Win at all costs.

[00:15:34] Jeff Willmore: When confidence is the ultimate scorecard. Yeah. So, how do I reinvent business so I’m not sacrificing wealth and market success? In fact, that can be an outcome of aligning myself, but how do I reinvent it so it’s a pathway for me to experience living true to my life’s calling? Then the big question for Rich and I became, what’s the access for someone to get in touch with what they can then articulate as, “This is my soul’s purpose. This is my life’s calling. This is why I’m on planet Earth.” And we were fortunate in the sense that we’ve had years of background in personal ontological work and transformation with people that we developed a methodology, which you’re well aware of, but just to share with your listeners, where we postulate that one of the things that makes a human being unique is our capacity for inspiration.

[00:16:50] And that my dog gets excited, I don’t know if they’re inspired the way we, as human beings, we think of inspiration. And we’ve all had moments in our life where we’ve experienced what I’m going to call profound inspiration, moments that defy language, moments that defy description. So, what you were just sharing about poignantly and movingly was part of that conversation with you where someone gets in touch with those moments of inspiration through their life and they happen out of nowhere. It’s not, I made that happen, but they happen to all of us and they have happened. We found there’s a theme to someone’s life of the inspiration that connects to their essence, to their heart, to their soul, however someone wants to say it.

[00:17:53] Then someone can become what I like to call, you become a poet about your own life. You give language to that experience. So, for myself, my calling is, “People are triumphant and live in gratitude.” And that points to a world of inspiration for me in my life. And the point of giving language is so I can connect to it. Then standing there, okay, what’s the why of my business? And whatever that ‘why’ is, it’s a pathway to experience people being triumphant and living in gratitude. It’s not the only pathway, or at least it better not be. My family better be a pathway and my relationship with friends better be a pathway and so on. So, my calling is, People are triumphant and live in gratitude.

[00:18:52] Hilary Hendershott: And people’s callings turn out to be so different. At this point, everyone who works for me has articulated their calling and they’re so different. They’re about experiencing gratitude. They’re about the power to achieve anything. They’re about being connected. They’re about experiencing being cared for. And one of the amazing things is how they’re different, but they all go together. They’re all harmonious, right?

[00:19:21] Jeff Willmore: Yes.

[00:19:22] Hilary Hendershott: And we’ve weaved those callings into our company’s guiding document, co-created with you. And so, everyone on my team has the opportunity to experience that when they get up and they sit in front of their computer, because we’re all virtual, right, we don’t even work in the same office, that that action or what they get to fulfill on that day fulfills the part of the reason they’re on the planet. So, from a very practical standpoint, it’s great for retention, Jeff.

[00:19:52] Jeff Willmore: Yeah. Well, yes, and I think it’s important to point out, they all weave together because you’ve created an environment in which they can and do weave together. And to underline that last point, there’s great data out there now from McKinsey & Company, and Harvard has a study on it, and there’s great data that the more people at a place of business; at a company experience, that working here is an access to fulfill my personal purpose, measurable impact on retention, productivity, problem-solving, people taking fewer sick days, all that. So, it’s a super smart business strategy, and you can’t just do it for that. You need to do it because this is the kind of company that I want.

[00:20:53] And what you’ve done and what we’ve now seen as possible in just many cases is you’ve created a place where each person who works there can authentically answer the question, me working here fulfilling the mission of this company is a pathway for me to live true to my calling. And that’s what someone should want. That’s what I want. If I want maximum productivity, et cetera, et cetera, but even more than that, I want joy, I want fulfillment. I don’t want to be at the end of my life saying, “I wish I hadn’t worked so much,” with that regret. Yeah, so.

[00:21:39] Hilary Hendershott: The other thing about it is when you know someone’s calling, you know a lot about them.

[00:21:46] Jeff Willmore: Yeah. Yes.

[00:21:48] Hilary Hendershott: If you pay attention, you can ingratiate yourself in ways. That’s not quite the right verb, but I’m closer to my team. I know more about them. That kind of thing isn’t the thing you share at the lunch break, right? And it’s circling back to Simon Sinek. The company he wanted to feature in that TED Talk was Apple and their thing is, “Think different,” right? And Apple is a great company. I mean, Apple’s probably the number two or number three company in the world as we record this today in terms of market capitalization and I’m loyal to their products. But “Think different” is a lot different than people are free and author their lives, right, or people are triumphant and live in gratitude. I mean, that comes from the soul and that is poetry about your life. And so, just wanted to make clear for people how this is different.

[00:22:36] Jeff Willmore: Yeah.

[00:22:37] Hilary Hendershott: You’ve talked about your mindset about success and money that you inherited and that you’ve evolved. What do you want to say about how your thinking has changed on those topics?

[00:22:50] Jeff Willmore: Well, we all certainly have our own direct personal experience that influences our relationship to money and generation of wealth, generating wealth, or not. And I certainly had that. My dad grew up in the depression and so I inherited a healthy dose of potential imminent panic around money as well as, do not trust the stock market. No. Don’t put a dime in that.

[00:23:24] Hilary Hendershott: That’s good. That’s good messaging.

[00:23:25] Jeff Willmore: Yeah, right? I mean, real estate was his thing. But the biggest message, which definitely was from him but it’s more from him, it is generational that goes along with what I’ve termed the labor tradition, which is really from the last 70, 80 years of if you work your ass off, if you apply yourself, and if you stay motivated–this was Dale Carnegie and Zig Ziglar–and that mindset and work hard, you can make it. And that’s still so much the message that’s pushed and sold. Even if someone’s not pushing it overtly, very often, unconsciously, they’re pushing it. I mean, it just doesn’t take much to just do a scroll through Instagram and the various people who were promoting certain mindsets and coaching and so on.

[00:24:37] There’s so much of don’t give up on your dream and persistence and stick with it and you can do it. And there was my realization of–in fact, I was a prime example of it–yes, you can find examples of I didn’t give up on my dream, and here I am holding the Oscar, as I think Lady Gaga when she won hers. Don’t give up on your dream.

[00:25:05] Hilary Hendershott: Baby, you were made this way.

[00:25:08] Jeff Willmore: Yeah. There are millions of people who have worked their ass off and the future has not and will not turn out for them. And that was the beginning for me of a journey into really out of I think you could call scarcity about as it related to money where output is always a function of input. One hour worked equals X amount of pay because I’m paid for time invested and effort made where I could start to see and experience and retrain my brain into the magic of compounding and abundance. I almost hate to use that because it’s such an overused word, but when it’s not just a word and a concept, then it’s an actual experience and possibility. It really is different.

[00:26:06] And so, this was also part of it was like, “Okay. I now see it as hard work is a necessary skill to develop to be a successful, productive entrepreneur, but it’s not enough. Not only is it not enough in the age; in the era we’re in, of the internet-AI era, and so on. It’s not the pathway forward. It’s necessary at times to have that skill, however. So, to be freed from just a lifetime of, “If I work my ass off, I’ll inch my way up the hill,” to doing great work that’s an expression of my heart, and the value is related to the contribution it has been a whole other revolutionary possibility for me personally.

[00:27:07] Hilary Hendershott: We all know someone who seems to have tripped and fallen into success, someone who got straight Cs in college, or who isn’t the sharpest tool in the shed, or who seems to make money like Midas, right? No matter what he or she does, I don’t get it because they don’t show up as someone particularly skilled or particularly hardworking, yet they seem to have this fortune. Conversely, we know someone who’s a PhD toiling away in some broom closet writing papers that never get published or acknowledged, right? And yet we don’t tend to put two and two together and figure out for ourselves in a real as lived way that hard work doesn’t always translate to certainly not financial success. Career success is probably distinct, but let’s just lump them in together.

[00:27:59] Jeff Willmore: Yeah. In fact, not even doesn’t always translate. Very often doesn’t translate.

[00:28:07] Hilary Hendershott: Yeah.

[00:28:07] Jeff Willmore: There’s a lot of hard workers out there. I can say this and speak about it with people because I consider myself the president of the work-your-ass-off club.

[00:28:18] Hilary Hendershott: You really were.

[00:28:19] Jeff Willmore: 70 hours a week. Yeah. I mean, it got celebrated. It was, “Oh, I sacrificed weekends.” In fact, it still does. I sacrificed and I gave up this and that, and that’s way often more celebrated than the examples you were just using of, “Oh, are they just lucky?” Yeah.

[00:28:43] Hilary Hendershott: Some people just seem to be able to do it. It’s like we should be studying those people.

[00:28:50] Jeff Willmore: Right.

[00:28:50] Hilary Hendershott: Let’s talk about the value of slow thinking, one of your most popular quotes. I don’t know if it’s yours or Richard’s. Slow down. Slow down. And many of my listeners will have heard of or hopefully read the book, Thinking Fast and Slow by Daniel Kahneman. Which pieces of his work…? And you’ve been introducing these distinctions and they work on me slowly so no big surprise there. But I definitely have been–less so now–afflicted with the more I can get done, the more efficient I am, the better I am like that, right? So, fast thinking was my way. What pieces of his work do you really want business owners to apply to their work and their lives? And what benefits does that allow?

[00:29:38] Jeff Willmore: Yeah. Great question. So, at any point, I can open up that book of his, which is really he went his whole career not writing a book, and he was, as he said, badgered to write one. So, he finally wrote one, which was the distillation of his life’s work. And it’s just brilliant stuff. So, the content itself is useful. But even if you don’t get into it, what I have found as most impactful is, first of all, the recognition that the business environment we’ve all inherited leaves us very often, as you were just talking about, where we’re just busy. In fact, with the advent of the internet and technology, which is supposed to, in theory, make us more productive and work smarter, but now we’re just doing, or you can end up doing emails at 10:00 PM at night in your bed. It’s like working more, busy more.

[00:30:44] So, I often call it that most entrepreneurs are living in an epidemic of, “I’m too busy to… fill in the blank,” whatever it is. It’s because it’s so many things. I’m too busy for yoga. I’m too busy for vacation. I’m too busy to study. I’m too busy to meditate. So, there’s a couple  elements to it that Richard and I discovered. So, the first part is, unless I redesign my life to have moments of what we call slowing down, moments of pause, moments to wonder, to rethink, moments to speculate, moments to connect with a colleague and share ideas and struggles, moments to notice how blue the sky is today, moments to relook at where we’re headed.

[00:31:52] Unless I actually take that on to develop that muscle for myself and design my day and my week and my month to do that, well, where do I end up? Well, I end up with a life and a career that’s short on connection, rethinking, deep thought, study, introspection. It’s really, really busy and it doesn’t mean you can’t get some success that way, but talk about, “I’m at the end of my career looking back and it’s like, ‘I wish I hadn’t worked so much.’ What the hell was all that about?” And then even more importantly is the human impact. Unless I take moments to slow down to press pause, in the Buddhist tradition, it’s known as the sacred act of pausing. What happens when I pause is I connect. I can connect to my calling. I can connect to the other person over there. I can connect to the life I’m living right now, just in that brief moment.

[00:33:10] And our brain, as you were pointing to, and this is what Kahneman’s work distinguishes so powerfully, our brain isn’t designed to slow down. It’s designed to create shortcuts, what he terms as heuristics, so that I don’t have to do deep thinking because deep thinking’s hard and it takes effort and it takes calories and all that. And listen, it’s not that that stuff’s not useful. I can’t stop at every green light and ponder the meaning of a green light and a red light. So, we need those shortcuts, but if I just let my life be filled up with my ‘fast thinking’ as he calls it, and I don’t take the time to slow down and reconsider and look, first of all, I’m going to miss a lot, and most importantly, I’m going to experience being disconnected from what’s most meaningful to me. So, I hope that’s enough of an answer for now.

[00:34:17] Hilary Hendershott: Yeah. Again, my experience is my skill to conjure slow thinking has improved dramatically over time, and that I will set my mind to work on a problem and it might take 24 or 124 hours. I mean, the time isn’t really relevant. It’s that I come up with answers that I wouldn’t have come up with before.

[00:34:44] Jeff Willmore: Yeah. Very good.

[00:34:46] Hilary Hendershott: Yeah. And can solve bigger problems. Said simply, it’s a skill. I’m working on it. And by the way, could you just take a minute? And I don’t know if my listeners are as steeped in the form of coaching that I was steeped in. A lot of people are accustomed to going to a three-day mastermind, and it builds relationships and people talk about what they’re suffering about and then they give tips and techniques, tips and strategies. And you come home and you have four weeks of new work to do in your business that produce some results and then sort of rinse and repeat. Or, they get one-on-one coaches who get on the phone with them for half an hour every two weeks or something. How would you describe your methodology in comparison to that?

[00:35:35] Jeff Willmore: Yeah. First of all, those first two methods, which are very popular, have incredible value in their own way, you know, having a great coach.

[00:35:46] Hilary Hendershott: I’ve had very meaningful experiences, those ways. Yeah.

[00:35:49] Jeff Willmore: Yeah. Likewise. And what I wanted to do and what I saw as incredibly valuable for me, and there also wasn’t a lot out there, was to create an environment and a process that allowed for evolution. And the idea of this first got into my mind a number of years ago studying a noted biologist, Humberto Maturana. Anyway, he asked the question, “How does a living organism change just by being themselves?” which is a pretty provocative question. When you just stop, you slow down, and think about it, “How does a living organism change just by being themselves?” It’s like how do you change and you’re not trying to change?

[00:36:47] And his answer to that question is, “That’s how evolution works.” If you take a living organism that’s designed with the possibility of evolution, like you and I are, there’s no guarantee we will evolve. I mean, there’s plenty of organisms that go extinct. So, how was it you and I evolved? And his answer was, “You create an environment that flips on the evolution switch and that encourages and empowers and engenders evolution.” And that has a lot to do with time. You don’t get evolution in three days. I mean, you just don’t. You might get the beginning of something. So, that’s why with The Autonomy Course, it’s many months, 10 months long, and it involves having a community of other high-level thinkers who are engaged in the same conversation.

[00:37:50] And so, you’re creating a… It’s got enough demand to it so it’s not comfortable because you don’t get evolution just from sitting on the couch. But at the same time, it’s not fear-based where you’re running for your life because that doesn’t produce evolution either. So, it’s got enough demand to it, and at the same time nurturing to it and engaging in new thinking and challenging thinking that you find yourself at the end of it surprised at how much growth has happened. So it’s, how do we produce evolution? That’s the fundamental question for me.

[00:38:33] Hilary Hendershott: So, I want to tie this to my experience of how the work I’ve done with my calling and my team and our organizing document that you call the Blueprint, how it’s so distinct from every mission and vision in every company I’ve worked in before is because, practically speaking, we keep coming back to it. It’s a living document. It’s not static. It’s not gift wrap. It’s not wallpaper. At this point, that work is weaved into every word of copy on my website, every email we send to clients, the names of the meetings we schedule with our clients, how we format our team meetings. It is not just lip service. I think that’s really powerful. Is there anything else you want to say? I mean, I don’t mean to be reductionist and say we keep coming back to it and that’s the magic sauce. Is there anything else you want to say about that, that I can’t articulate poetically?

[00:39:39] Jeff Willmore: Well, I think you’re doing fine. So, I want to underline what you were just saying. That’s the integration and the embodiment and the implementation of an invented and created future of why we exist. Because that doesn’t happen overnight. It’s like, okay, how do we build this into our offer and our interactions and our performance reviews and our meetings with clients, so it becomes the air we breathe and the water we swim in? And you’ve been at it four or five, six years now.

[00:40:20] Hilary Hendershott: Yeah.

[00:40:20] Jeff Willmore: Yeah. And then the second piece, which you’ve also engaged in, which is critical, which you pointed to, is it’s not going to work to relate to, first of all, one’s calling and what you create as the future we’re claiming for ourselves and our company that we exist to fulfill. It’s not going to work to relate to that as static. First of all, because the articulation part is I’m being a poet part so that’s always up for edit, for adding, for subtracting. And the other thing I found, I know you have experienced this in your own way, when you put yourself into the game of fulfilling your calling and then fulfilling an invented future for my business, and you’re now evolving.

[00:41:26] And so, someone may find that they add a word to their calling years later. They may tweak something. They’ll definitely find, especially as their company is at work fulfilling the future they invented, they may reach a point where it’s like, you know, we really fulfilled much of this. Let’s step back and let’s reinvent newly now. So, both of those happen. It’s, we’ll work to embody this and implement it and live true to it. And it’s a living, breathing, working document, you could say. It’s not, “We said it, now it’s cast in stone,” kind of thing.

[00:42:12] Hilary Hendershott: Right. There’s generally a few ellipses, incomplete sentences and ellipses in ours. It’s always like we get together in 2024 and we are like, “Oh, we left that sentence incomplete in 2023 but it’s okay because we had enough to fulfill on.” By the way, and I said this in the introduction, but there are whole teams participating in your work. So, it’s not just for business owners, but do you want to share any particular best experiences, case studies, wins? Because I’ve talked a lot about my business and you’ve shared empirically or philosophically. Anything you want, just so people know who this all applies to?

[00:42:49] Jeff Willmore: Yeah. Well, I love that it’s a range. So, first of all, primarily, and I designed The Autonomy Course for people who already have achieved some level of success. So, it’s not specifically designed for someone who, “I just can’t get my business launched and we’re struggling.” So, it’s for people like you who came to it where, “I was already in business and already had a chosen profession.” And from there, it’s a range. So, there are definitely many people who have used it to catapult forward in their market success. I’m thinking of a company that started with us the year after you did. And they were at about 8 million, which is pretty small when they started, and they’re going to hit 40 million this year.

[00:43:49] So, there’s plenty of those kinds of stories from the founder of a commercial cleaning company who has a… It’s a great origin story of having a premature son born. And when they finally got home from the hospital, realizing she had to clear all the toxic stuff out of her house and finding out how toxic all the cleaning things were, and so cleaning all that out and getting as non-toxic product in the house as she could. And then she was a VP at a well-known bank at the time. And then having the realization, “I wonder how toxic the commercial cleaning stuff is at the bank,” and finding out it’s practically poison.

[00:44:34] Hilary Hendershott: They’re poisoning you overnight.

[00:44:37] Jeff Willmore: That’s right. So, launching her own non-toxic commercial cleaning company and then just getting beaten down with price competition because she was the most expensive in the market. And gradually losing touch with the origin story of why she’s doing it and more and more just fighting over, “We’re going to be $50 less per month.” And to reconnect with that and redesign her offer so she doubles their business and is proudly the highest price point in her market. There are stories like that and then there are also the ones of people who come and they’re very successful and have been for many years and they’ve built up significant wealth. And they’re really at that point in their professional career of, “What’s the next era of my career?”

[00:45:44] It’s like, “I’m not trying to ‘retire’ and play golf, and yet what I’ve built, it’s gotten jaded and it’s kind of empty.” And it’s a partner in a national CPA firm who’s in The Autonomy Course right now, who it’s like, okay, when asking him the question, “Why are you doing accounting?” “It’s just what I do at this point. What do you mean, why am I doing it?” So, for someone like that to reinvent or even discover and create anew the why they’re doing it and create a whole new expression of it. And, in his case, it had a whole lot to do with creating a whole mentoring program in their CPA firm for the new people they’re bringing on, which is like he has a new life now. He’s no longer just closing big clients which was kind of all he was doing.

[00:46:46] He was sent in to do the final meeting with the new big client. And it is like, “How many more of these do I need to do?” So, there are also plenty of those people who have really fulfilled what the beginning of their career started out–to build a great company that’s profitable, and they’ve really fulfilled it. And it’s like, “Now what? What am I doing here?” So, I think primarily those two arenas.

[00:47:16] Hilary Hendershott: And where can people find you on the web?

[00:47:18] Jeff Willmore: AutonomyCourse.com. And they can connect and we have inquiries, Zoom calls, or feel free to connect with me one-on-one. I love doing that and happy to do it, anything people want to talk about, really.

[00:47:33] Hilary Hendershott: Final question for you today, Jeff, is about your money.

[00:47:37] Jeff Willmore: Yes.

[00:47:38] Hilary Hendershott: So, if your money were writing you a love note, what would it be thanking you or complimenting you for?

[00:47:45] Jeff Willmore: It would be thanking me for finally realizing–and not waiting until it was so late–but finally realizing I didn’t have to hold onto it so tightly. And you don’t have to squeeze me so darn tight, and you can actually let me contribute to your life and let me contribute to fulfilling what you want your life to be about.

[00:48:16] Hilary Hendershott: Thank you. As you were saying that, I had visions of my kitten. I think that’s my kitten’s communication to me this morning. “Don’t squeeze me so tight.”

[00:48:25] Jeff Willmore: Yeah. Yeah.

[00:48:26] Hilary Hendershott: Jeff, it’s great to see you, great to have this conversation with you. Usually when I see you, you’re leading the conversation so this has been really very nice for me, and I’m just really excited to hopefully share what you’ve done in my life and my business, my husband’s life, and his business, and now our business with my listeners. So thank you very much. Thanks for being on Love, your Money^®.

[00:48:49] Jeff Willmore: Yeah. Thank you very much.

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