Be consistent with who you're speaking to, what you're posting off. Still show yourself and be a guest on other shows, especially if the show is like yours, because those listeners will also want more and more variety and they'll come to you for that. Most hosts never achieved the results they hoped for. They're falling short on listenership and monetization, meaning their message isn't being heard and their show ends up costing them money. This podcast was created to help you grow your listenership and make money while you're at it. Get ready to take notes. Here's your host, Adam Adams. What's up, podcaster. It's your host, Adam Adams. And today I'm joined with Jerry Dugan from Beyond the Rut. And Jerry's passionate about supporting business leaders, helping them with different things like work -life balance. So one of the questions that I'm going to ask, does work -life balance even exist? Because I'll tell you it's very polarized. On one end, everybody's like, you have to balance, you have to balance. And then I read this other book that said, no, it's not balanced. It's switch tasking. You go here all the way, then you go here all the way. And then there's other people that say you have to be out of balance for a certain amount of time. So I'm really curious just to start there. Jerry Beyond the Rut supports people with a life worth living in faith, family, and career. So a lot of the listeners that you have are probably around my age and your age that are probably struggling with the work -life balance and making sure that they are putting enough to their faith and their family and their career. And I love that. I want to ask, why do you think work -life balance is real? And what have the other people said? Yes, ultimately, I think they're all saying the same thing. Like if you really break down to what, like, even the folks that say there's no such thing as work -life balance, what they're ultimately saying is like, we make life choices based on our priorities. And when I talk about work -life balance, I'm saying the same thing. One of my hope is that when you're on your deathbed, I already know you're not going to say, man, I wish I did one more launch of my program or man, I wish I was at inbox zero more days in my life. You're going to say things more like, I wish I had one more day to spend with my grandkids and my great grandchildren. I would have loved to have been there for my daughter's wedding or for my son's wedding, whatever it is. And in serving in combat and knowing some folks who worked in hospice care, that is the thing that they hear over and over again, that people wish they had more time to be with the people they love and on the flip side, when they have the people they love, they wish they succeeded more in their career. And so it's like, what if you could win in all of that? What if you could take your career as far as you can and not sacrifice your family at the same time? And so you look at what's important to you and how are your current activities impacting those areas of your life? How are you doing with your family life? You know, okay, work's taking a lot out of me. Okay. Is that a permanent thing or is this a temporary thing? If it's temporary, then you talk it over with your partner and you decide from there, like, okay, yeah, this is temporary. What's the deadline? What does success look like? And what's the bailout trigger that says, all right, we're not hitting these measures doesn't look like we will let's scrap that and go another direction. So that to me, that is why I'm a big fan of work -life balance. It's not just strictly. I spend so many hours at work, so many hours at home. It really is. How is getting out early impacting all the things? Am I going to miss my children's big school events? What's that impact if I do? And what's the message I send? Because I'll tell you from personal experience, I was a lot of kids, superheroes, because I would volunteer my kids' school for a day and their dad had to go to work and it's not the same thing against their dad, because why did the dad go to work? Because he wanted to provide for his family. And so the motivation for a good thing for the family was there, but there wasn't that balance to, I also want to communicate to my child that my child is important. I want to communicate to my partner that she's important. And so it's, how do you win at all those things? And how do you find the right company that will support you as a person while also supporting you and your career growth and getting you to perform well to help the company also succeed? It's like, there's a way to find all that. I want to hear a tip or two. And I'm thinking you and I talked a little bit about this before we first press record. You were talking about the checkbox and a lot of us, we got a checklist and we're checking off all the boxes and it's seems like we're checking off all the boxes. It feels like when we look at the checklist, it's pretty much full, but we might not feel fulfilled even at the expense of checking off lots of boxes. So if that's us, we're listening and we're trying to think of what is it that we think we've had success on paper, but we don't really feel it. We don't really feel like we're everywhere we need to do. What's one or two tips for the listener to be able to feel like they're doing the right thing right now? I think the first thing is you got to know who you are and that's the big broad umbrella piece of advice. Know who you are, what is valuable to you? Like, what do you believe in? What do you not believe in? It's if you believe in respecting the dignity of every person, then that is key. If you value time with family, then your calendar should reflect that. If you value being a supportive person for your family, does that go beyond just monetary support? And so knowing your values, I think is very huge. What is your vision, your purpose in life? I have a couple of mottos I live by. One is the Dugan crest motto. So somebody around the 1500s and it's a miracle that the Dugans are still around because apparently these guys called the Saxons came into like Ireland and almost wiped us all out, but like good Irish people, we stuck around. And so that's not important. The important thing is somebody added to the family crest. Oh man, it's by virtue and valor. So for Tute et valore, and it sounds cooler when it's Latin. I hope I said it right. So that's one thing I live by is am I living my life according to my family's crest motto, am I living by virtue? Am I living by valor being courageous to do what's right when even nobody's looking. But then from there, I had a vision that I wanted my children to live a life that was better than mine, but also be set up to be better adults than I was to have better successes than I did to know who they are and to feel comfortable pursuing their own dreams. Like that's in a written vision that I have tucked away on Evernote somewhere. So you got to have something like that. Like, what do you stand for? What is life like for you when you die? And I love talking about these things called the five Fs, your faith, your family, your fitness, your finances, and your own future growth or possibilities. Like looking at your life through those lenses, what does success look like for you? So I guess that's the second one is defining a second, Jerry. I missed an F F that I got faith. I got family. I got finances. I got fitness. And what did I miss? Emily, faith, finances, and fitness, future possibilities, future possibilities, always growing to be better today than you were yesterday. And then what's that future state of yourself you'd like to become. And so being a constant learner is that future possibilities. One reading books that are outside your usual norm, listening to podcasts that are outside your norm, being open to ideas that are not typically in your bucket or wheelhouse either a, to see how your own ideas and beliefs stack up, because sometimes like I myself had gone through life and realized, oh wow, I held onto this belief and I met three people who completely challenged that is my belief wrong or is it just not as strong as I thought it was, is there more context? I needed to add. And, and so sometimes I realized I was completely wrong about something. And other times I realized, oh, I was missing a lot of context here. I believe this, but only in this context, because I also believe this and my belief should not undermine somebody else's right to be who they are. And so it's like, oh yeah, okay. I can wrap my head around that. And I can be a decent person in my community that way. And so that, yeah, the future possibility is that a bit more unpacked, I should have put that in. Have you ever heard of, I think it's Gino Wickman and I hope I'm not wrong. And he wrote like three books. One was like, I'm going to just type in Gino Wickman. This is going to be the easy way. Then I'll sound so smart instead of dumb Gino Wick man. All right. So he wrote three books. Yes. Yes. What the heck is E O S he wrote traction and he wrote what it's not showing me the last one traction, what the heck is EOS and there's another one called rocket fuel. Okay. So these three books are interesting and it kind of is what you're talking about, but in more of a business category. And so I think this is really great to extract it and bring us to the listener in rocket fuel, what the heck is EOS and traction, ultimately what Gino Wickman talks about is your business should have a culture or have values that you all live by. And so it's interesting because when we look at all of the things that we can value, let's just pretend that I don't know the number. I'm just going to say that it's 20 values. There's 20 things that are good. And most people would agree with 18 or 19 of them. So one would be honesty, but at what expense are we going to be rude and honest? Another one might be politeness. Another one might be doing the right thing. Even when it hurts, you kind of mentioned your integrity. Even when people are not looking, am I going to be doing this with my family crest and everything? So the Gino Wickman also talks about like all of these things that we can value. And most of them are important to everyone. Honesty, of course, that sounds right, but not everybody puts that at the top of their value. Maybe they put discretion, maybe they put kindness above it, or maybe they put honesty above kindness and et cetera, et cetera, they might put doing the right thing, even when it hurts as one of the top values. And so in RocketFuel and EOS and Traction, Gino talks about how we need to build our team, our company culture around where all of us agree on these main values. Like we value making money, we value serving the client, we value X, Y, or Z. All of them are good, but which one is in the hierarchy? And so when I'm hearing you, you basically gave me two things. The first one is you got to know who you are. You got to know your culture. You got to know your values. What do you believe in? And you talked about by virtue and valor. What do you believe in? What matters to you? And then you focus on it and you bring people along. And the second one is a written vision. Like you actually write down the vision where you put in faith, family, finances, fitness, and future possibilities, and you figure out how are you doing these? How does this work for you? And you write it down because everybody's vision, like a fingerprint has to be different. Everybody's culture or their values have to be a little bit different, how they put them. And for you, you're saying a way that you can check off the boxes is to just know exactly what the heck the boxes are in the first place. Know which things matter to you and get rid of the rest. So you can really focus on those. And I thought that was really interesting because not only can we do it in our business, we can do it on our podcast. And as you've illustrated, we can do it with our family, with our own lives, our personal lives. So I thought that was really, really beautiful. I appreciate you going into that before we move on to anything, something that I missed or something else you want to share about being able to check off those boxes and feel really good about it, even that person who might be listening might feel like it looks like they're checked off, but they don't feel completely fulfilled. Yeah. Similarly to how business, they have their strategic plan that pushes them and they make big decisions off of that. Does this activity support the strategic initiative of this organization? And the answer is yes, they keep pushing forward with some adjustments. If it doesn't, they're like, well, then why are we doing that? Let's cut that out and let's restructure and reorganize. And it's cool to see that there are these business and even podcasting principles and practices that help us create a better podcast, create a better business, and we don't realize how easily we can just transfer those same skill sets into our very lives. And so it's the same thing. You know, how many people do we know who are physicians who hate being a physician? I can think of two or three or somebody who became a lawyer because the money was good and they quit being a lawyer because they realized that wasn't fulfilling for them or me, I left my corporate job because I realized I didn't want to start all over again and build something that belonged to somebody else and it was time to go after my dreams. So even my mom like kept encouraging me to become a doctor. I was a pre -med student. I'm not a doctor now because I did not do well as a pre -med student, but I realized later on it's because that was never my dream. That was my mom's dream. She wanted me to be a doctor. She wanted to be able to live vicariously through me and what she wanted success to be, and once I realized, Oh gosh, I don't want to be a doctor. What do I want to be? Of course, now it took a 10 year journey for me to realize what I did want to be, but I got there, man. That's that's important. So anyway, that was it. Yeah. You're willing to walk away from something really good stuff. I want to move into just your podcast journey now for the listener. I'll point out a couple of things that I'm seeing with your podcast. Hey, I think it, haven't you been doing it for like eight years? Yeah, this particular year, eight years. Yeah. Amazing. So with eight years, over 400 episodes and a lot of traction, not going back to Gina Wickman, a lot of traction on your podcast success, I think that we've got a couple of listeners that haven't quite been doing it for eight years, they may have been doing it for a year or two, they're new. And they would like to have the type of success that you've got with your podcast. So I'm like to get a couple of takeaways, what you've done, what you've learned, what you would do differently. First, a quick word from our sponsor, but when we get back, I really want you to focus on what made your podcast successful so that the listeners podcasts can also be successful. We'll be right back. Hey, my friend, as you know, this episode is sponsored by my company, growyourshow .com. We want you to be able to have the best tools at your disposal without costing you a whole arm and a leg. So right now you can get a free list of vetted equipment that like mics, mixers, webcams, sound treatment, editing software, everything that you need. I created the whole PDF with direct purchase links, just to save you time and money to help it be more convenient for you. So this free PDF will help you skip all the guesswork. If it's on there, it's vetted and approved by yours truly. And if it's not on there, it's probably not worth the money. So go ahead and get yours at growyourshow .com forward slash PDF. Let's get back into the show. We're back with Jerry Dugan. And we've talked a little bit about work -life balance, helping leaders with work -life balance, making sure that you're checking all the boxes and feeling fulfilled and the five F's and his family crest, which I don't even remember what it said in Latin. I think it was Latin, but it really means by virtue and valor. And I wanted to talk about now, how is his podcast so fricking well known and he's doing a great job. He's getting a lot of success through the podcast. And hopefully you'll be able to take away a couple of things that can support you in a successful podcast as well. Jerry, what do you think made your podcast? Yeah, a lot of what I'm seeing really is in the last year, year and a half, really. So I jokingly tell folks, but I'm not joking that it seems like I did year one, seven times, and then finally I had year eight happen all at once. So it's no overnight success kind of thing. I think the first thing that really helped was when there was a team of three of us. So we started off with three of us. We all agreed on one thing other than the name of the show. And that was the avatar of the show. So we have an avatar that we named AJ. He's 35 years old, married to his college sweetheart. He has two kids that they both have together. One's in elementary school. One's in middle school. AJ has a mid -level leadership career going on with a corporation in a metro area. And got the car, got the house, got the six figure income, but feels stuck in life. And so from there, we start to unravel how AJ feels stuck. There's the commute to work. There's the no real future in the job he's in. Not really making any progress. Wants to be a good family man when he gets home, but he's just drained of energy. And this cycle is putting a strain on his marriage. The kids feel like he doesn't love him, which is so far from the truth. So how does AJ live the life that he really wanted to live in his faith, in his family, in his fitness, finances, and his future? And so that's what we did when we came together to start the show. Now where we had a lot of weak spots, and I feel we did the first seven years over and over again, was that when you listened to the early episodes, we were all over the place, we didn't really stick to that mantra. Like what does AJ really need? And I hate to say it, but it wasn't until like the other two guys quit from the show that I realized, Oh, we're so far from what we wanted to do, who we wanted to help. And so how do I get there? And so year six, really going into year seven was how do I niche this down? I worked with a couple of different groups that really helped me start to niche that down. Jerry, you're helping specifically this demographic. You're helping them specifically with things like work -life balance and really having a mapped out future or a vision for their future focus on that. Okay. What kind of guests should I have? And so this kind of leads into the second one, which was that pairing down that niching down. So the first one was having that vision of who I wanted to help. The second one was really paring down and niching down. How am I going to help AJ? And once I started to see that a bunch of doors opened up and the third thing was I needed to get the word out there. So the marketing piece, I threw stuff out there for the first seven years, but really it's in this last year that I've been more intentional about it. The posts that I put out there on social media are aimed at AJ. The shows I appear on are aimed at AJ and you know, as that guest appearance on other shows, I think so far in the last 10 months, I've been on almost 70 other podcasts and to the point where now I'm starting to feel like I'm in alternate realities down. Like, how do I know Adam Adams? Oh yeah, I was on his show. All right, there we go. We talked about this, this, and this, or how do I know, Deirdre? Oh yeah, I'm here, here and here. It's just all that starting to overlap. But anyway, those would be the big three is know who you're serving. The second thing is truly niche down. Even if you have a lot of passions, interests, try to stick to one thing and just kind of lit little dose of yourself, sprinkle into your episodes. That way people know what they're getting when they come to your show. And then the third thing, I know I just said it. Marketing.