Master the Game Within, with Patrick McAndrew – Episode 477 of The Action Catalyst Podcast

Patrick McAndrew, a seasoned entrepreneur and high-performance coach, and the Founder/CEO of HARA, talks about living inside of an art gallery, how speed reading paved the way for a new career, the things that often get mistaken for lack of motivation, finding fear at the top, where confidence really comes from, breaking the loop of distraction, and why engagement doesn’t necessarily equal value.

About Patrick:

Patrick McAndrew’s experience as an entrepreneur and high-performance coach has taught him that the path to success starts with mastering oneself.

Whether working with corporate leaders or entrepreneurs, Patrick has helped countless individuals escape the ‘Productivity Paradox’ and create something extraordinary.

As the Founder & CEO of HARA, Patrick focuses on developing the whole person, guiding visionaries to align their actions with their deepest values, cultivating unwavering focus and resilience, and achieving extraordinary impact.

Patrick has a wealth of experience in creating successful ventures that merge cutting-edge technology with deep human insight. He founded The Bowery Common, an audio marketing agency that produced campaigns for major brands like Spotify, as well as Momentum Mind Academy, a corporate training program that helped organizations and individuals sharpen their focus and attention.

A sought-after speaker for firms like Pacific Life, Lincoln Financial, and Alliance Bernstein, Patrick has guided top banks through the conversation of human performance in the digital age. He has also served as a speed reading and memorization coach for Iris Reading, teaching programs to top investment banks like Bessemer Trust, Northern Trust, and Raging Capital. Through his speaking, coaching, and leadership at HARA, Patrick empowers entrepreneurs and leaders to break free from distracting habits, cultivate authentic presence, and create lives of meaning, purpose, and impact.

At the heart of Patrick’s work is a deep passion for helping people reclaim their attention and agency in an increasingly tech-driven world. He believes that true success comes from cultivating a strong connection to our human essence, even as we navigate the challenges and opportunities of the digital age. Patrick’s approach is informed by his extensive training with world-class movement practitioners like Ido Portal and Jozef Frucka, as well as his deep study of mindfulness, neuroscience, and peak performance. He brings a unique blend of cutting-edge insights and timeless wisdom to everything he does, inspiring individuals to embrace vulnerability, empathy, and genuine human connection as the keys to unlocking their full potential. Whether he’s working with top executives at Fortune 500 companies or entrepreneurs building the next generation of innovative startups, Patrick is dedicated to creating a world where technology serves our deepest human needs, rather than the other way around. His message is a wake-up call for anyone who wants to lead with authenticity, purpose, and impact in the 21st century.

Learn more at PatrickMcAndrew.co.

The Action Catalyst is presented by the Southwestern Family of Companies. With each episode, the podcast features some of the nation’s top thought leaders and experts, sharing meaningful tips and advice. Learn more at TheActionCatalyst.com, subscribe below or wherever you listen to podcasts, and be sure to leave a rating and review!

LISTEN:

SUBSCRIBE TO OUR RSS FEED: https://feeds.captivate.fm/the-action-catalyst/

SUBSCRIBE ELSEWHERE: https://the-action-catalyst.captivate.fm/listen

__________________________________________________________________________

(Transcribed using A.I. / May include errors):

Adam Outland
Today’s guest is Patrick McAndrew, a seasoned entrepreneur and high performance coach and the founder and CEO of Hara, an exclusive membership community and network for the top 1% of entrepreneurs and business leaders. Patrick has a wealth of experience that merges cutting edge technology with deep human insight. Then we’re excited to talk to him. Well, Patrick, so excited to chat with you today. You’re coaching and providing a lot of value to, you say that kind of the 1% of the 1% in business. So if I somehow stumbled upon you in secondary school and I said, Patrick, what do you what do you want to be when you grow up? What would a secondary school Patrick have shared?

Patrick McAndrew
I think at that time it was, it depends. If it was like a beginning of secondary school. I think I wanted to be an actor. If it was the middle of the time in secondary school, I wanted to be I wanted to have a talk show. I wanted to host a talk show.

Adam Outland
Were you already like planning and thinking of coming to the states, where you want to build a career in Ireland, or what was that even floating through your mind at that time?

Patrick McAndrew
Well, I always, I always was very taken by the US and this New York in particular, where I lived for five years, and it was sort of hung over my head. But if you do well enough on these exams, Patrick, my mom would say, taking a trip to New York. But that trip to New York never manifested. The first time I came to the States, I think I was maybe 19, and we came on a family trip, and we went to Clearwater Beach for Christmas. And as you can imagine, the United States was New York in my mind, like that was the country that there was no sense or curiosity about the others. And I remember driving from Tampa to Clearwater, and I had never seen things like strip malls, and they’re the most foreign, alien looking thing ever, like seeing Dunkin Donuts and Wendy’s and Burger King, but all in these, just sort of these, these parallel units alongside a road. And I remember thinking, This doesn’t look like the impression that I had of this country at all. So I have to start to come to terms to realize that there, there are different parts of this country and and they all hold different characters.

Adam Outland
Yeah, yeah, a lot, a lot of drywall pre fabrication, not a lot of stone cathedrals that were modernized.

Patrick McAndrew
Indeed. Yeah.

Adam Outland
Walk me through a little bit of your time at Ireland after that, I mean going to school, developing what were things that you started to gravitate to as you, as you matured and aged up, and how did that influence the direction you were headed?

Patrick McAndrew
I think there’s always just been a tendency just to follow curiosities. So when I was in college, I studied law, but I had a radio show. I also worked in the regional radio station as a sound engineer. So I would be there during the live shows, and I would be turning on the the ads and fading in the music and all that stuff and meeting the guests. And there was something there. There was something about conversing and meeting people. I grew up in a home where there was constantly people coming through, whether it was people traveling from around the world coming to stay with us, or eccentric characters that my mom had come across, or she had an employment agency for a large number of years. The nurses that would be coming into Ireland, they would stay with us for a few days before they would go to the nursing home at the hospital where they were going to work. So we would sort of like take care of them, because they would be homesick and get them settled. She also had a jewelry business where she made bespoke engagement rings for couples. So there was a room in the house where they would come in and they would be presented. They would they would come in to design the engagement ring they wanted. And then my mom would take the design and go to Antwerp and get it made. And then they would come back and she would have a bottle of champagne, and we would see the joy, and we would maybe have a meal with them and talk with them. You know that that sort of nature, that could very convivial nature, was was very normal in my household growing up. So there was always different cultures, different characters. And I growing up as a young kid, growing up, grew up in London before I moved to Ireland, and for a number of years. And during that time in London, I actually lived in a gallery. So my parents had had rented the flat that they had in London and then took out a lease on this gallery to manage the expenses of it all. They built drywall, and they built rooms within the gallery which were never there was just a big open space, and they built like a little apartment and a home at the back. And when I would leave my bedroom, I would walk out onto the gallery. So when I would come home from school, I would I would enter in through a gallery to get to my room. And when I was there, and my mom was she didn’t really have many staff. So if there was a lot of people coming through as a five year old or a six year old, it was my role to to guide them around and show them the pieces of glass and the pieces of art and. And keep them entertained for a few minutes until my mom could speak to them. So all of that, I think, the the way of observing and engaging with people had sort of been inherent to to my my lived experience. We also had the most travel man in the world stay with us for a few days. I don’t know if he still holds that title, but he did at that time. He had been traveling for 24 years, and Ireland was the last country on his world tour. So I came home from school one day and my mom was at the kitchen table chatting with this guy, and she said, this is Mike Patrick. I think I was telling you about him. He’s the most traveled man in the world. I heard him on the radio three days ago. I sent a text into the station and said, if you’re coming to Galway and you need somewhere to say, just let me know. And he called her up on the phone. He said, Hey, is this Julia? And she said, Yeah. He said, It’s Mike. I’ve just arrived into Galway bus station. Is that offer still standing to stay with you for a few days? And she said, absolutely. So we got to hang out with him for three or four days. And he had been in Somalia. He had been in Mogadishu. He was one of the first tourists there in a very long time. He was in the town across he had not very far away from in Iraq, where Osama bin Laden had been captured. He traveled through Afghanistan. He had been all over, you know, but places that you rarely hear about. He was a quirky character, for sure, but it was interesting conversations with him.

Adam Outland
I can only imagine, and what a cool exposure that you got to diversity through your own home with all these people coming through. So fast forward from this, you’ve become a sought after speaker. What led to that type of work exactly?

Patrick McAndrew
Well it started out with speed reading. So I was teaching speed reading memorization workshops around the country. I was going into schools and colleges and companies like Bessemer trust, Northern Trust, quite a few hedge funds and investment banks, helping these people improve how they processed and retained information. And that was a very interesting experience, because I realized, you know, if you want to pay, I don’t know what is it? It’s somewhere in the region, like 160 or 180,000 for for an MBA at Columbia University, I got to go in and see those people in that room. Amazing networking, amazing conceptual frameworks and models and ways of thinking about business. But so much of business is about your own internal game. You know, the actual dynamics of business are not that difficult. There are problems which need to be solved Absolutely, and problems keep arising. But what’s the challenge there? Well, the inherent challenge is, is the capacity to sustain change and the capacity to be malleable and adaptive. I think that’s that’s what our unique capacity as human beings are. Is this capacity to mutate, to be one way and then to recognize that the environment has changed, I must mutate into another way, but yet I can retain my true essence. I don’t lose myself under the conditions of the environment. I maintain myself, but I’m not bound to this identity. I’m good at this or I like this, so therefore I’m only going to try and find a business that operates on the fundamentals of me being very good at doing stuff on a computer, but I don’t want to interact with people in person. Well, I’ve just cut off so much opportunity to myself. So maybe if I can develop certain develop certain qualities of how I engage with others, much more will show for me. So I saw in all of these environments that I went into that these people are learning a lot of information, but it’s not taking them so far because they’re not learning about themselves. In fact, they’re neglecting themselves. They’re only trying to develop this 10% area which it feels like it’s directly relevant to business, but there’s this other 90% which determines your clarity, your conviction, your essence, your value, your sense of self worth. And if you’re clear on all of that, you can achieve a whole lot more, and you can feel content, and you can feel like your whole life is is in alignment. It doesn’t feel like it’s so fragmented. So I began on that journey by teaching people about focus, because that was the thing. Through my exposure to different environments of teaching speed reading, I realized, wow, okay, these people that I’m meeting, they’re very driven. They’re not lacking motivation. Yet, companies are spending, you know, 1000s, 10s of 1000s every conference for a motivational speaker that people don’t need motivation. They’ve plenty. They’ve plenty drive. What they lack is a pragmatic sense of how to organize themselves. They’re missing internal structure. It’s pretty chaotic in there. So the first place that I approached was focus, because I thought that people needed help focus, which they did. But then over years and years of doing that, working with Pacific Life, Lincoln, financial, Morgan, Stanley, all these companies, I realized, okay, I can teach you how to focus, and I can make you very good at doing the tasks efficiently, but there’s a deeper problem there. There’s a much deeper problem, and it’s your capacity to regulate yourself. It’s your capacity to actually regulate and relate to yourself, and that’s actually more of the foundational layer that causes a lot of the problems, leadership problems, strategic problems. There’s a company I got called in to work with last November. They had 26 primary initiatives.

Adam Outland
That word primary, and 26 initiatives…

Patrick McAndrew
And 26. Yeah, it’s not, it’s not all aligning. But where is that coming from? That’s not coming from the fact that these people aren’t intelligent enough. It’s actually coming from more of a place that their whole emotional state is so scattered and so fragmented because they don’t feel safe and secure in their work. They’re unsure about this industry. It’s going through such rapid change, like many are, so a lot of the problems that are appearing across the company is a totality in the individuals within it, much more about an internal thing that’s happening. And a lot of my work previously was building fundamental qualities in people so that they could improve their reading and their memory and their focus, so that they could actually start to take action. But now I’m sort of interested in working with people who have no issue taking action, who have no issue getting things done, but yet, there’s a barrier. There’s some sort of an internal block that’s confusing. Either they have developed far beyond the business and the business is not catching up to them, so it feels like it’s out of alignment. Or the business has developed far beyond them, and they’ve been pouring so much into the business, but as an individual, they’re still quite underdeveloped in comparison to the demands of the business. So how do we calibrate these two and if we do, means that things move a lot more smoothly, and they progress much more in the right direction.

Adam Outland
My experience with a lot of these types of individuals who found a significant amount of in a comparative success in their their business or their practice, to be at the level I think we’re talking about is that they have to have a lot of self confidence in specifically what they’re doing, meaning that they’ve developed somewhat of a ego. And I don’t mean they’re all egoists, that they are dominated by it, but I find that a lot of them have to have gotten what they had. They have to have a certain amount of self worth and self value that they’ve crested over to accomplish things of a magnitude. And with that sometimes comes some defensiveness around change, or a defensiveness of them that maybe not verbalizing this, but I’m imagined you’ve maybe heard at some point, Patrick, you don’t you don’t know my business. You don’t know what we’re doing. So how do you how do you overcome that?

Patrick McAndrew
I don’t see a lot of self confidence. I see a huge amount of fear. I see a lot of people who where their fuel source is coming from, growing up in poverty, and they never want to be in that environment again, or feeling maybe once again poverty, but feeling trapped, feeling like they didn’t have choice. So what they want is they want money that’s going to give them the freedom to choose. There was a gentleman that I spoke with not so long ago, and I asked him, if you were to kind of look outside of yourself, what do you orbit? And for this gentleman, it was money and power. He was able to say it very quickly that that’s what it was. He was very accomplished, but he was extremely exhausted, but he couldn’t seem to stop his relentless pursuit of whatever he seemed to be pursuing. And it was more money and more power. Now, as our conversation progressed, at the root of it, he just wanted some love and self acceptance. It this is not bad. This is, this is, this is fine. It’s, it’s part of the development of the human being and of the psyche. We come from a place of pain, and we try to transmute that pain into something that will take us forward, because we don’t want it to hold us back. So maybe we develop another character. We develop this man or this woman who’s able to amass money or power, and now people are drawn to us because of the money and the power or the knowledge or the capacity to get things done or to help things in the community. And now people value you and see you for these qualities and these capacities. But underneath that, as soon as that is taken away the business or taking action every day, there’s a huge amount of insecurity. There’s a huge amount of insecurity, and that causes a huge amount of pain and limitation on the business that ends up getting created because the ego and the identity of the person who found that it is so interwoven with the actions or what that business reflects about them that they’re trying to keep it in a way that keeps their identity the way they want it to be. So what ends up happening is that our identity gets reduced to our biography. You know, you you got a biography on me. People at the beginning of the show heard about me. I’m not that. I’m not that. If I were to describe myself as that, it would feel like it’s another person. But yet, we need certain terms and containers to explain it. So you’re a coach, okay, great. Now I get a sense of who you are, but you’re so much more than that. You’re bringing your whole lived experience into it. So it’s fine to have these sort of monikers of who we are as people, because we need that to make allow people to have a reference point of who we are and what we do. But my days, it’s very dangerous if you think that you are, that if you allow your identity become wrapped up in that, you become very weak. And I, from what I see, there’s, there’s very little self confidence, there’s a lot of survival, even no matter how many millions you have in the bank. And I It doesn’t have to be that way.

Adam Outland
Yeah, interesting.

Patrick McAndrew
And I would say, from my observation, I would say confidence is a sort of emergent thing. You don’t craft confidence. Confidence sort of emerges and it merges through your view of yourself, and the evidence that this, this view of yourself, is being reinforced. So you can also be very confident that you can’t do something you know you it’s it’s a certainty. It’s a certainty of something. It’s a certainty of your capabilities and your powers, which can be that it’s a certainty that you can move towards something, or it’s equally a certainty that you cannot. And. Because it’s been evidenced so many times before. So my interest more so is because there’s many environments that I go into with very little confidence that I can do it, but I have confidence that I can find a way. I have confidence that I’ll be able to be in the the uncertainty or the discomfort of it, and I’ll move through it, because that’s something that I have evidence of, I’m much more interested in, I suppose, expanding people’s sense of value and worth beyond just their actions. So for example, something that we’re going to be launching relatively soon with Hara, which I now realize is so needed and so important is so many of the companies that I speak to, whether it’s the CEO or it’s an intern, are feeling immensely overwhelmed. Now, this overwhelm is coming because of the the amount of information and the amount of things that we feel that we should know, the amount of communication. There was one gentleman that I spoke with in Dallas at a conference couple of weeks ago, and he told me he gets about 480 emails a day like that’s such an insane quantity that’s that’s beyond a full time job just filtering through that every day. But why does this happen? Why are these tools that were meant to liberate us and free us through the work that was most important? Why are they becoming the things that are holding everybody back? Because it’s, it’s a total distraction. Now, you could say it’s in the design, and there’s a truth to that. There’s a design of a desire for engagement. That’s how these products measure their value, not how little time you spend on them, but how much time you spend on them, how much information flows through them. But I don’t think it’s enough to just place the blame on the product and the tool. There’s something deeper that’s happening here, and it’s it’s actually much more related to a sense of social security. And I’ve been watching this, and it’s only become clear to me very much. So in the last five or six months, if we just look at distributed teams, for example, where you’ve got, let’s just say, a couple of people in Omaha, Nebraska, there’s a company that I work with. I have a few people there, and then you have others which are dotted around the country, but their boss and their direct report is there in Omaha, and they get to meet up with each other two or three, maybe four times a year at conferences. Sometimes they get 15, 20 minutes. If it’s 20 minutes, 25 minutes as a one on one chat. That feels like it’s enormous, but most the time it’s in a group setting, so the conversation is more about the collective like, what are we all talking about? The person that I’m reporting to doesn’t really know me, doesn’t really know my true character. They see the analytics of what I do based on the metrics of what comes in, but as a person who I am, as human being, they don’t know me because they haven’t had much time with me. I’ve given leadership teams this this challenge to spend 45 minutes with their direct reports just on one call, and I’ve given them questions to ask which are much more deep about like who they really are as human beings. And they learn so much about them and realize that their assumptions of what motivated and drove them is so different to what it was. So that’s a norm that people are not really getting to see each other. Now, if I’m in New Mexico and my direct report is in Omaha, Nebraska, I see him or her three or four times a year. My promotion, how much more I’m going to earn next year, or maintaining my job, is dependent on their view of me, how they see me. So how can I prove myself? I make sure I do I succeed as much as I can in the realm of the metrics, and I also make sure that I am as responsive as possible in my emails and my communication and showing that I’m on, because by showing that I’m on and that I’m hyper responsive, it’s a display in the best way possible that I’m committed and that I’m a worthy human being, and that’s what’s happening more and more, is that we’re not engaging deeply with each other. So the context of how much we understand of each other is very low. So we invest a lot more of our energy into those low context transmissions of communication, which creates this very fragmented and distracted state. Because to be not distracted and fragmented is to choose for yourself, is to choose where you’re going to direct your energy, where you see that there’s things happening outside. But you downgrade their importance, because you upgrade the importance of what you want to do and what you see is important. But for the vast majority of people I meet, they’ve completely downgraded to level zero their importance of what they want and how they want to direct their lives or their business or their day, and they completely upgrade the importance of everything that’s happening around them, that’s coming in because they don’t want to miss a thing, because if they do, it might threaten their job. It might threaten their sense of how they’re perceived by their boss. And if that’s not met and if that’s not worked on, I can offer as much content and information about how the brain works and how to organize yourself, but it won’t make a difference, because the human beings are in a very survivalist very survivalistic state, and that’s driving the show, not the rational mind, but a very, very emotional, unsure, unsecure internal state.

Adam Outland
Reminds me of a book called Tribal Leadership. I don’t know if you’ve read this, but I think you’d like it. There’s, you know, a category of stages that the Stanford professor observed in different culture and communities, the lowest level was like the kind you see in prisons, which is like defined by the affirmation, My life sucks. That was the way they had to write it and put it. They didn’t see the way out. And then the second tier, it becomes a little bit less, My life sucks, and it. They can see others have it great. It’s My Life sucks, but other people have it great. There’s someone near them that’s succeeding, probably a manager or a leader. And then level three is I’m great, but you’re not. And this is prolific in the corporate world, lawyers, doctors and in order to be the greatest, they can’t have competition in their office, right? It’s always proving it’s a survivalist. And then level four is we are great, and Level Five is Life is great. And there are very few companies that operate at that level. But just kind of connecting these dots in my head, as I hear you talk, it’s, it’s a little bit of that, am I hearing this somewhat, right?

Patrick McAndrew
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Because I think, I think we’ve been given these incredible tools, which are there to support us, but they’re there to support the what we have to actually develop us so that we can develop internally. Whereas I think in many circumstances, there’s a regression taking place where we’re completely divorcing ourselves or neglecting how we need to develop internally to meet the demands of what’s being presented to us externally, and we’re just sort of playing the victim to how life is playing out around us and through Hara, the work that I’m doing is, I’m fundamentally trying to show people, you have a huge amount of agency here, but you’re, you’re the way that you live your life is what’s shaping this. If you feel like there’s no space or time for that, you’ll continue to suffer, and that’s the truth, because you’ll, you’ll find that your attention is constantly going out. It’s constantly about what’s happening outside of you, whereas what we give people our practices and ways to develop themselves internally, because we need that every time, our whole range of evolution as we as we develop as the human species, is dependent on changes to the external environment, changes the temperature, changes to food, changes to threats, changes towards opportunities. We’re being given an immense amount of comfort, and so much of the products that are being designed are around this are more primal and primitive aspects of us. So yeah, there’s, there’s definitely a lot that’s happening here in recognizing that the world is changing around us. So how are we changing internally to rise from top, as opposed to rising to the top thinking or recognizing that we have so many of these qualities in us that are incredible.

Adam Outland
Oh, yeah, one of the things that you talk about is how to break the cycle of distraction. What does that look like in motion when you’re working with someone?

Patrick McAndrew
Well, are there places that your attention is often getting brought to that you know is not serving you, yet it keeps happening, but the but then there’s a reflective tendency right to observe and say, Wow, that was not where I needed to spend my time, that that was not useful to me. And so there’s different states of mind that arise. So what’s the observation or the thing that you notice in yourself afterwards, the things that are sort of you keep going towards, and you spend a lot of time. So if we take a bit more of an objective perspective, so you’re looking at yourself from an outside body, because you’re in it at the moment, and you’re sort of like you’re analyzing and reasoning at the same time. So if we can be just more objective, so the analysis and the reasoning is separate, where is your attention going? Where it’s being wasteful. If we just look at it hard and like that, hard and fast. Because once again, I’m not of the opinion that you need to be this sense of being productive, which is bringing utility to every moment. You’re building a business and you’re running a business, you need clarity of mind thinking. I chatted with a guy a couple of months ago, he was joining Hara, and he was saying to me, you know, I want to map out a five year plan. If I could only find four hours to just sit down and map out a five year plan. I know how crazy that sounds. And I said, Is it crazy that you’re mapping out a five year plan, or is it crazy that you think that you need four hours to map out a five year plan? He said, It’s crazy that I think I need four hours I should be able to do it unless so there’s this constant sense that I should be able to condense and do things very quickly, when the reality is my days. If you’re going to think about a five year plan, which I personally feel is maybe it’s a five year vision, but it’s hard to implement a plan. You need more than four hours for that. I think it should. It should take a lot of time and self reflection. So from an objective view, where is your attention going? That feels as though it’s it’s wasteful, and the loop of distraction is the constant pattern of the mind. It’s not. It’s just the constant stay, you know, in the evening, watching TV, but also being on our phone, and then at dinner table, then at the dinner table, watching something or there, but your mind is being taken elsewhere. So whether we appreciate it or not, we might consider that we’re training or we’re working out when we go to the gym and we do specific things of our body, but when it comes to our character and our state of mind, we’re constantly developing and shaping ourselves to better or worse if you’re running a business and if you’re doing something for yourself, it’s your clarity and your vision that shapes everything. Because I think you know as well as I do, when the value system of the business, or as a way to generate interest, starts going through the lens of social media and posts and engagement, suddenly it can sort of. Start to get warped, that the opportunity comes from the degree of engagement. The opportunity comes from responding to what’s happening in that space. But you know, I have a friend who will share the dark truth, which is he runs a business around productivity. He wanted to build more leads. He spent a day a year posting, and had a team of freelancers helping him. Built up his Instagram to 360,000 followers. The Instagram page is solely about this topic of productivity, running a digital marketing agency. Zero point point zero. 6% of his followers converted to actually purchasing his product. Wow. So it can become a trap in and of itself, where now I’ve lost my the direction the vision has become skewed. I’m I just saw that there was a lot of engagement on the post, so maybe we need to double down in more of those posts. And now we’re getting more followers, and now we’re growing the engagement. But is that tethered to the ultimate vision of the business? I from that? I mean, it’s not, unless your vision is to become a content creator. You know, when you’re a small business owner, you can get caught in that loop.

Adam Outland
What’s your personal practice to remain clear? Because, as I think we both agree, it’s sometimes it’s easy to see than others, it’s harder even for us to apply some of this thinking to ourselves at times, because it gets cloudy.

Patrick McAndrew
Well, a practice which has changed a lot of things is, I think I used to place too much emphasis on the market. So a lot of the businesses that I built in the past, or even the talks that I gave, was my observation of what the market needed. But in that process, you can feel like you lose yourself, because you start, you start just completely adjusting to the needs and the expectations of the market, and inherently, you end up that’s it. That’s That’s a fast track to lose your own sense of value and worth. In the last year or year and a half, I’ve changed that. Where it’s a it’s a dance between the two. It’s what is alive in me, in what I’m seeing, in what I want to pursue, and what are the needs in the market. And how can I find a way to connect the two together? So there will be people in that space who will not be ready to receive it, and there will be moments where what I articulate is not clear enough for what the market is looking for, and that creates this constant observation loop of myself and the market. So then becomes the practice of my own observation that I have to engage with.

Adam Outland
Having done a lot of these transformative things yourself, put them in motion for clients, what advice would you give yourself many years ago? What do you think that young version of yourself could use?

Patrick McAndrew
I think it would be to acknowledge uniqueness, not to be afraid of that, and then don’t just try and explore that as a little thing on the side. Go right after it, go right after your appetite. That’s, that’s what I’ve done as an adult. And it’s, it’s, and I didn’t do that much. I did it as a kid, but I also had this fear of the group and wanting to fit in with everybody else. And I think as a kid, I would have, or if I was to meet that guy, I would have told him, You see things a little bit differently, and sometimes it feels like you don’t want to, because you want to see it the way everybody else does, because it can feel threatening to feel that that difference. But go there, just go there and let go of that judgment.

Adam Outland
What a great note to end on. Great conversation, Patrick, really enjoyed it.

Patrick McAndrew
Thank you, Adam, it’s really been a joy to speak with you. You were a great, great host, great questions. All the best.