A contractor's journey to self-mastery requires discipline, integrity, and respect. Welcome to Hammer and Grind. Podcast built for contractors. Real contractors, true stories, real solutions. My name is Brad Hebner and I will guide you on your journey to mastery of your construction business. You can find Hammer and Grind on all the social media platforms. Just search for Hammer and Grind Podcast. Now, if you're looking for more help, you can check out our free Facebook group called The Contractor Profit Group. I do free trainings in there and it's a great community to be a part of. Now, if you're serious about making more money, saving more time, and creating a business that supports your lifestyle, check out my paid coaching group called The Profit Club. I've put together a proven system for creating a winning business. Now listen, I'm so confident that you will succeed in my program. I'm now offering a 10x ROI guarantee. That means if you don't make at least a 10x return on your investment within a 12-month period, I will refund you the full amount. You can find out more information about The Profit Club at hammerandgrind. com forward slash The Profit Club. So before we get started with the podcast, I want to let you know that I have a special... announcement to make at the very end. So make sure you stay to the end and hear what the special announcement is. There's some bonuses I'm going to be giving out. So make sure you stick around to the end. All right. On this podcast, we're going to be talking about why this simple mindset shift could be your catalyst for winning. And what am I talking about? I'm talking about how you self-identify. Now, this is a fascinating topic for me. And I've done a lot of research on this or continually do research. I did research for this podcast. It's something that I don't fully understand the scientific reasons behind it, but I'm definitely diving into it so I can better understand it. And the reason is because it affects every contractor that I've talked to and it affects myself. And that is your ego. And that is how you identify yourself in your job and what you do. See, this very simple mindset shift is... When someone asks us, what do you do or tell me a little bit about yourself, we usually respond with, I'm a carpenter, I'm a roofer, I'm an electrician, I'm a tile setter. We respond with the trade that we do. And that may not seem like it's a big deal to say that because if you are a carpenter, it makes sense to say, I'm a carpenter. But the problem is that you're giving... Your trade, your identity, your identity lives within what you do, not who you are. And those are two separate things. Here's a perfect example of what this is and how it affects people. Some of you may know, if you've listened to my podcast, I've talked about it, or if you know me, you may have heard me talk about this, but I served in the Marine Corps out of high school. I joined right out of high school. I did four years. I was in the infantry. I served with the 3rd Battalion,1st Marines out in Camp Pendleton. I did one deployment with the 15th MUSOC. So, you know, I've done something that's very, it makes me proud. Like I'm proud of my service of being in the Marines, serving the country. I'm very proud of that and what I've done in my life. However, I don't label myself as a Marine. Now, everyone, if you're a Marine, you listen to this. Oh, that's not true. Once a Marine, always a Marine. Well, that's bull crap. Right. Yes. I get the, I get the brotherhood of it. I get the, the meaning behind that. I fully understand and know what that means. But if you've ever seen someone who's 40 years old,50,60,70,80 years old, they walk around every day and they wear their, you know, their, their military hat, or they have a t-shirt and this is more prevalent with Marines, but they're wearing a Marine t-shirt or they're wearing their army t-shirt and they're. Like I said, they're much older, right? And there's nothing wrong with doing these things, by the way. There's nothing wrong with having a, you know, wearing a Marine hat or a Marine shirt. But everything in their life, like they've been out of the military for 40 years. But if you went to their house or you looked at their truck or you looked at their wardrobe, everything is about the military and the Marines and what they've done in the past 40 years ago. Like there's nothing else. about who they are or what they've done since then. Like, what have you been doing the last 40 years? You've just been driving around in your truck with your Marine Corps sticker on it or you're wearing your Marine Corps hat and your Marine Corps t-shirt and all that stuff because once you left the military, you never had an identity. Your identity was the military because you were a, quote, Marine. And so this is where it affects contractors with their ego. Because they associate what they do with who they are. And I'm going to get into here why this can be deadly, not deadly, but why this can cause a lot of pain and why it can cause you to even go out of business because of the mental, this mindset of who you are and your self-identity. So I was in the Marines. I served in the Marine Corps. Yes, by the definition, once a Marine, always a Marine. However, I don't identify as a Marine. I very rarely bring it up. Not because I'm not proud of it. I'm very proud of it. But it's not who I am today. It does not represent who I am as a person today. Yes, there's leadership qualities. There's things I learned in the Marine Corps that I will take with me until I die. But that is not who I am. And that is not the same thing. And I want you to make this distinction because if you start doing this, it can change. It can be the catalyst for you, the change that you need to start seeing things in a different way. Okay? So I served in the Marine Corps. I'm not an active duty Marine. I'm not in the Marines now. It's my past. It's part of my past. It's not who I am as a person. It's a very distinct mindset shift. Okay? You are not a carpenter. You are not a roofer. You are not an electrician. You're not a tile setter. That is your trade on your craft. That is what you do. Even for myself, when I started my construction business 11 plus years ago, I always knew that I was a businessman who owned a handyman slash remodeling company. I was not a handyman slash remodeler. I was a businessman who owned a remodeling company. And that is a difference. Because when you associate with a specific trade, subconsciously, you associate all of the negative things that that trade has, and you don't even realize it. And so when your identity is caught up in that, and then someone talks about that trade, right? If you're an electrician, and someone talks about how bad electricians are, and they never clean up after themselves, you feel that as a personal attack on you. Because you are an electrician and they're talking about electricians. You can't make the distinction. Maybe that person had bad experiences with another electrician. It is not a reflection of you whatsoever. It's the same with contractors. It's not a reflection of you whatsoever. And so you have to understand this. Now, I did a lot of research for this podcast and I have some... Some notes here I want to share. I'm going to read them to you because it's just easier to read than try and put it in my own words. So according to the website Destiny's Odyssey, they define ego and pride. Now, I've interchanged those words a lot of times to mean the same thing, even though I know they're different. But I'm going to define what those are. So ego is the way an individual feels or thinks about him or herself. This is also the awareness one has about him or her. Ego is sometimes interpreted as self-esteem or self-respect. However, ego is responsible in showing one of his or her personal identity. Ego is all about I, me, and myself. Negative qualities such as excessive pride, vanity, self-importance are all associated with ego. This is why you see people in a specific trade, when you talk about their trade, they get mad is because their self-importance is associated with their ego and their ego is based off of what they do, not who they are. And we'll get more into that here in a second. It'll make sense if you hang out with me. So pride is an emotion. So ego is a way an individual feels or thinks about himself. In other words, their self-esteem or self-respect. Pride is an emotion. which arises as a result of one's achievements, success, or qualities or properties that are admired by others. Pride brings satisfaction and pleasure to oneself. Pride is also a type of admiration for one's performances or personal traits. This emotion can be viewed both in a negative and positive way. If an individual feels so high and proud about an attainment, i. e. the Marines, and feels that he, she is superior to others, pride works negatively. When this happens, the particular individual may not feel like talking or hanging out with others, but may prefer to be alone. When pride is taken as a positive trait, it acts as a motivating factor. If an individual is proud of his or her performances, he or she may always try to improve them. Pride, in a way, paves the way to success. So going back to the Marine Corps example. I know lots of people in the Marines that leave the Marines and they never leave the Marines, if you know what I mean. They physically leave the Marine Corps, but they never leave the Marines. This is why you see a lot of Marines having trouble, or military for that matter, having trouble transitioning from the military to the private sector because their entire identity is tied up in what they did. Especially true for combat veterans. They're an elite class of their own. And they feel like no one else understands it. Now, this is not taking into consideration PTSD and all that stuff. I'm not talking about that. It's a totally different thing. But people who simply cannot leave because it's like taking a part of your body away from you. If your identity is tied up in the military and then you leave the military, it's like you left part of yourself behind and you feel lost. And that's why they said pride whenever it's a... It works in a negative manner is that you don't feel like hanging out with others and you prefer to be alone, right? Because it's a negative effect of being prideful. When you think that you're better than everyone else, that's a negative effect of pride, right? So I hope the ego and pride makes a little bit more sense of what we're talking about. And so they further break it down in this article. Is it ego or pride? And they give you some distinctions that you can use to try and figure out. So meaning, Ego is one's feeling about his or her own self. Pride is an emotion which is a result of one's achievement or success. Results. Ego results in arrogance most of the time. Pride usually leads to self-satisfaction and sometimes motivation. So if you do a kitchen remodel and you get done and you're like, this looks great, and the customer comes in and says, wow, Brad, this is beautiful. You guys did an amazing job. I have a lot of pride. It makes me feel good about myself. It makes me satisfied that I accomplished something. And that motivates me to go do other stuff. But ego, in that same scenario, results in more arrogance. Yeah, I know I'm good. That's why you hired me. Because I'm the best. So, origin. Ego, this emotion arises solely because of one's own self. And pride, this could arise due to own self or somebody else too. So you can start with having an ego and an ego results in having more pride. And those kind of go back and forth, right? But you can have pride without having ego. So the base of it, ego, this emotion may be based on false ideas and thoughts. This is where it can be deadly for contractors who have an ego is because your identity And your thoughts and your emotions and stuff are based on false ideas, right? Based on false thoughts. Your ego, like you do really good at landscaping. And you go and you do this really beautiful landscaping project. And the people are like, wow, you're so amazing. That boosts your ego, boosts your pride. But what that does is it can give you a false idea is that you know how to be successful in business. Because people... congratulate and they praise you on the work that you physically do, but they don't know anything about what you do to run a business. They don't know that you're barely making any money. They don't know that you're missing your kids' games because you're working so much. They don't know that stuff. And so you can have this false idea or thoughts about you're really good at what you do because you're good at the physical part of it, but you suck at the business part of it. And that's where that can lead you in a negative impact of your business. On base pride, this arises as a result of an achievement or success. So you complete the landscaping project. Customer tells you that it looks wonderful. You have pride. You're proud of what you did. And then you move on. It's an emotion that comes and goes temporarily. And then you move on to the next thing. Behavior. Ego. This usually forbids individuals from apologizing, appreciating from others, and making new friends. If any of this stuff is starting to sound familiar, you might be able to have a little bit of a wake-up call. So pride in terms of behavior. Pride sometimes makes others feel motivated about something. So you can be proudful about something and that'll motivate you to do something else. And then here's the last one. This is really important. What is the dent? What kind of dent does pride or ego have? Dent. People with strong egos can be hurt very easily. I mean, has anyone ever been on a Facebook, a contractor Facebook group when somebody posts something and then all of a sudden all of the emotions come out and people start arguing about stuff? Could that be an ego? I don't know. You tell me. The pride part, the dent in pride is that usually leads to disappointment, right? So in this case, pride would be a healthy thing because if you do a project and the customer comes out and is like, oh man, I know you worked really hard on this, but... To be honest with you, we're just not quite happy with this over here. Can you redo this? Can you repaint this wall? Can you fix this? For a painter, the disappointment is coming back to a painting project that your customer looked at and you walk in the door and there's like 500 pieces of blue tape all over the wall and the room. That could lead to disappointment. Could also be a crazy customer. But whenever we're prideful about something and someone tells us something we don't want to hear, we're disappointed, but we're not hurt. We're not hurt by it. We don't take it personally. If you have an ego about it, you take it personally and you get hurt very easily. This is why ego is such a bad thing to have in construction. And a lot of people have it because they get really good at their craft, what they do. Right. Not who they are, but they get really good at what they do. They get lots of praises and adoration and then that feeds them to keep doing it. And we'll get into that here in a second as well. So there's another article, a website that I found on medium. com. And this was an article written by, or it was a book. He was quoting a book written by Ryan Holiday called Ego is the Enemy. Now I have not read this book and I do plan on reading it. But it's very fascinating. The book is called Ego is the Enemy by Ryan Holiday. And so the article on medium. com says, the ego we see most commonly goes by a more casual definition, an unhealthy belief in our own importance, arrogance, self-centered ambition. It's that petulant child inside every person, the one that chooses getting his or her own way. over anything or anyone else. The need to be better than, more than, recognized for far past any reasonable utility. That's ego. It's the sense of superiority and certainty that exceeds the bounds of confidence and talent. So why is ego the enemy? There's several reasons that he puts them here. One, it keeps you out of touch of reality. Two, it creates unrealistic expectations and entitlement. And three, it makes you dependent on external validation. This is so important. Don't miss this. When you have an ego, you rely on external validation, i. e., wow, Brad, this kitchen job you did is so wonderful. You're really good at what you do. That's the external validation that I need to say, yep, I knew it. I'm good. I'm really good at what I do. And so when someone comes along and is like, hey, you're not making any money. You're broke. You suck at running a business. No, no, I don't. All my customers love me. I do high quality work. My quality speaks for itself. Does that sound familiar? My quality speaks for itself. That's because you believe that you are what you do. And so when someone's like, hey, you suck at running a business. No, I don't. I have all the validation I need from my customers because they say my quality is wonderful. I was like, I didn't say anything about your quality. I was talking about running a business. But your ego blinds you to that. So there was another article I researched from the New York Times. This was written by Tim Herrera. And he was referencing a book by Allison Green, who's the founder of a blog called Ask a Manager. And she wrote a book called Ask a Manager. And there were some good takeaways here that I wanted to talk about as well. She talks about why it's important to compartmentalize. different parts of our lives, right? Especially when doing it requires a lot of effort, but it's important. So if you compartmentalize like what you're doing, the job versus who you are and your family and home life, it's not the same thing. You need to compartmentalize that. And so she says in the book that experts say it's important to protect yourself from letting problems in one area of your life affect the other areas, especially now that the borders between every aspect of our lives are blurrier than ever. You know, back in the day before internet and technology and all this stuff, you would get up in the morning, you would make your thermos with coffee and pack your lunch and you would go work at the factory or wherever. And then you would come home. And when you get home, like you're done, right? Well, now with the internet and technology, you're on 24 seven. You get off work, you get on the contractor groups and you start looking at everything and you're just in construction mode all day long,24 seven. So you need to compartmentalize that, right? So, Here's where this is really super important. If you don't listen to anything else I said in this, listen to this because this is where it truly brings it home. She goes on to say that it affects every aspect of our lives more blurrier than ever. A bad week at work is a drag on your mental health. But if your work is only a part of your identity and not defining it completely, the overall emotional impact of that bad week is less severe. The problem with having your identity tied up with your job is that it's not fully within your control. We can't control everything that happens with our work. We can't control if the material gets delivered damaged. We can't control if the customer changes their mind. We can't control if our employees don't show up. So if our identity is tied in with what we do, then we take that personally and it stresses us out. So we're always in a constant state of stress. The problem with having your identity tied up with your job is that it's not fully within your control. If things start going badly at work, it can affect your mental health in ways that it wouldn't if you weren't so deeply invested. So it's giving work a lot of power over your happiness in ways that can end up hurting you. She added that centering your life on a job, i. e. work, may even make you act against your own self-interest and happiness, perhaps by working long hours or accepting behavior you normally wouldn't. If this information is not resonating with you, if it's not sitting home with you, there could be one of two reasons. It's because your ego is not letting you resonate or because it doesn't apply. Some of you listening to this may not have a problem with this. Some of you may think that this is stupid and doesn't make any sense and doesn't apply to you. If that's you, it probably does apply to you. Because your ego is preventing you from accepting this information. So here's the tweak. You're not a carpenter. You do carpentry. That's it. That's the tweak. When you're talking to yourself, when you're talking to your clients, when you're talking to strangers, you're not an electrician. You do electrical work. You're not a plumber. You do plumbing work. You're not a plumber. You own a plumbing business. You own a plumbing company. You're not a roofer. You own a roofing company. You are a businessman who owns a roofing company. Now, even though I say businessman, there's identity in that. You can have self-identity in being a businessman. So super important, guys, don't take this as you. What you do is not who you are. You should have a life. You should have an identity outside of what you do, even if you love it. Even if you truly are a craftsman and every aspect of your life is about this because you love it so much, it is still not your identity and who you are. Right? You should be able to, you know, either you by choice. or by not your choice, if you lost your business today, or if you close it down by choice, and then you just went and did something else, like all of a sudden you decide you were going to be a professional fisherman, right? You're a carpenter today. You own a carpentry business. And then tomorrow you decide you want to be a fisherman. You should be able to just close down your business, start and become a fisherman and not have any impact whatsoever on your life that you're not doing carpentry anymore. I'm not talking about like, oh, I love doing carpentry. I don't want to do anything else. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about your identity. You shouldn't have your identity tied up in that, that you would be depressed because you're doing something totally different now. So this is, I wanted to talk about this and I really want to do more studies on this and I even want to try and find some experts to come on and interview them because this is the single biggest thing that I see getting in the way of contractors getting help that they need. They're very good craftsmen. Almost everyone I talk to are very good craftsmen. They're not very good at running their business. But because they believe their ego says that they're good at the crafts part of it, their trade, therefore, they should be able to figure out their other part of it. It's not true. It's not true at all. So if you're getting butt hurt all the time, if someone can't come up to you and say, hey, tile setters are the worst contractors I've ever ran into. I hate tile setters because of X. Tile setters suck because of X. If you get upset because of that statement, you are too close to what you do. You should be able to be like, maybe that guy's had a bad experience and that's on him. I know it doesn't affect me because that doesn't apply to me. That's not true what he said. That's just his opinion. If you get defensive and be like, well, F you, buddy. What the heck do you do? What are you, an electrician? You know what electricians do? If that's your response, you have an ego problem and a serious one at that. So don't hang your hat on what you do. You are who you are, not what you do. I hope this podcast was helpful and enlightening. Enlightening? Yeah, enlightening. There you go. I am not a teacher, professor. I'm not a smart person. It's not who I am. It's not what I do. So anyways. Guys, I appreciate you tuning in this time. You know where to find us on the podcast, Hammer and Grind Podcast and all the social media platforms. If you want help in your business, consider checking out my coaching group, The Profit Club. I got some big changes coming in there and I'm pretty excited about it. I think you might be excited as well. So make sure you stick around, pay attention, join my free Facebook group, The Contractor Profit Blueprint. I share lots of things in there. I go live once a week. I do training, lots of great resources. If you want to check out my potential profit calculator to figure out how much money you're potentially losing on your jobs, compare it to the top 5% of contractors, also the contractors that I work with in the Profit Club, and see how much money you're leaving on the table. You can go to the links, the show notes, and get that downloaded for free, the potential profit calculator. Okay, now for the special bonus that I'm excited to share with you all. You all know about the Profit Club and what I do with my group coaching and how I help contractors. The special promo, a special bonus I'm offering this week until Thursday at midnight. September the 29th of 2022 at midnight, this expires. And what it is, is the first five people who sign up for the Profit Club will get 12 weeks of one-on-one accountability coaching with me. I will look at you and your business each week. We will meet for 12 weeks, one-on-one. and figure out where you're at in your business, your stumbling blocks, and what's keeping you from getting to where you need to go. Now, inside the Profit Club, I have a 90-day profit blueprint because if you hit those marks every week for 12 weeks, you will receive and achieve the profit that you deserve in your business, and you will be well on your way to creating the lifestyle that you always have desired and the business that supports it. So that's why I'm offering this special bonus only to the first five people that sign up. And there's going to be a lot of people getting this information. So you're not going to want to wait until Thursday at midnight because you may miss out on being the first five. The first five people will get one-on-one coaching, accountability coaching each week for 12 weeks after you sign up. That is worth thousands of dollars, guys. I do one-on-one coaching with a lot of contractors and they pay me a lot of money. Just so you know, they pay me a lot of money to help them in their business. You're getting this absolutely free. There's no additional cost. I'm just offering it to the first five people that sign up for the Profit Club by midnight on Thursday, the 29th of 2022. If you're listening to this after that day, you missed it. But maybe, maybe there may be some other bonuses. So if you're listening to this after the 29th, don't start crying. Don't get mad. Just check on the link, click the link in the show notes, click the word profit club, and you will find out more information about what kind of bonuses that may or may not be having at the time. All right. So click the link, the profit club in the show notes to find out more information and get signed up. Guys, until next time, you know what to do. Be the best version of you.
