Accepting Personal Responsibility with Andy McDowell

george grombacher 0:00
Hey what’s up? This is George G. And the time is right welcome today’s guest strong, powerful and amygdala. Andy, are you ready to do this?

Unknown Speaker 0:22
I’m ready. Let’s go.

george grombacher 0:23
Let’s go. Andy is an engineer by trade and a creative by nature. He spent 22 years with the Boeing company before becoming an entrepreneur and the aerospace design consulting business today. He’s helping people generate value in their personal and professional lives. He is the host of the Generate your value podcast, and he’s a frequent contributor to brains magazine. And he excited to have you on tell us a little about your personal life more about your work and why you do what you do.

Unknown Speaker 0:53
Personal life the eldest son of Two Sons of Anand de McDowell grew up in the Northeast moved around quite a bit. In the elementary school days, as my dad was getting promoted in the corporate world, and on the sales side, he always got a new territory or bigger territory retarget promoted so moved around quite a bit until they realized the impact it was making. My dad was still getting promotions needs to start turning them down going, Nope, I want my son’s to stay in one spot through junior and senior high school on so after high school, moved down to Atlanta attend Georgia Tech and Georgia State Universities and eventually made my way into the aviation world. You know, people ask me what, how would you describe your career, I say that I’ve seen many flavors of entrepreneurship. I was an employee of entrepreneurs. My first two go rounds. And then one of them got gobbled up by this company called Boeing. And then it became an entrepreneur within a large corporation starting a consulting practice from scratch. And then got laid off because of the 737 crisis in started my own coaching business where I am truly now an entrepreneur by the common definition of what an entrepreneur is. So it’s been an interesting journey have seen the world in living my way out loud today. I love it.

george grombacher 2:34
And what? What is that? Why

Unknown Speaker 2:37
today? One word service. It’s about helping others to lead their best life. How can you be successful, and then every single day, you’re filled with joy and happiness while you’re going along? And doing that? So one of the models I use in my coaching is around three simple words. Be do in half. If I were to throw a simple algebra equation at U of x plus y equals Z, which of those three words would you plug in for x? What would you plug in for y? What would you plug in for c and what society in Hollywood wants you to do is to say that do plus have equals b. You do all these things in the business world to become successful, then you get to have these things like Lamborghinis, and mansions in second homes and whatnot in your life. And then you get to be somebody in the world, meaning that celebrity status, you know, get to show off your wares and so forth. But we all know that there’s a lot of unhappy people that have lived that equation. So what I like to do is to coach people to scramble those words and have your equation be p plus two equals have be a certain way in the world. What are your values? What are your morals? Who do you want to be in the present moment in the world and then go do things whether it’s through your career or your personal life or whatever, that align with how you want to be in this world. And the end result on the right hand side of the equation after the equal sign is you get to have joy happiness every single day and be successful as you define it for yourself. And that’s what I try and impress upon my clients and in my podcast is concentrate on that equation for your life. I love it.

george grombacher 4:49
I’m so glad that you answered the algebra equation because I thought you were actually going to ask me to do algebra on a podcast and we’re gonna we’re gonna be have a pretty awkward

Unknown Speaker 5:00
wouldn’t do that to you this early in the morning. That’s awesome.

Unknown Speaker 5:08
B plus two equals have?

george grombacher 5:10
Who do you want to be? Figure out think and take the time to think about how you want to be in the world.

Unknown Speaker 5:17
Do you want to lead an intentional life? If you do, then you need to answer that question and be introspective and say Who do I want to be in this world?

george grombacher 5:29
I can’t imagine too many people that they really don’t want that. Is it that we’re just so caught up in doing our thing? Or just in in just being carried along by the forces that we we don’t stop to do that?

Unknown Speaker 5:43
Yeah, so you and I were talking before you hit the record button about how life overlaps business. So let’s take a Strat a business strategy tact with this, right. Everybody wants to be that but nobody wants to sit down and develop a strategy around it because that means you have to be introspective they’d rather sit in a in the quote tactics of their life just sort of managing their life and their processes and and not really sitting down. At any point, in a 365 days a year with a cup of coffee, or glass of water, or whatever your favorite drink is, in some quiet and think about these important questions for their life.

Unknown Speaker 6:27
They’d rather think about the tactics.

george grombacher 6:28
So it’s like, okay, how do I become more efficient? How do I do this? How

Unknown Speaker 6:32
do I get the kids to soccer practice? You know, how, how am I going to solve this problem at work today? How am I going to get a date for the weekend? Those are those are tactics. That’s process that’s management. Right? That’s the in the business world. That’s the middle core of the business. But tactics support strategy. And if you’re not thinking about these things, then you know the the analogy I use for my clients is you’re in the ocean. Are you in a rubber dinghy? Or are you in a motorboat in a sailboat so if you’re just sitting in the tactics, then you’re in the rubber boat, you might have a small war, but you’re allowing the world to just sort of move you around, you’re just managing the processes of where that dinghy is going in the ocean versus if you’re being introspective and strategic, if you will, and your life then you’re in a motorboat, or sailboat, you’ve got a destination in mind to how you want to be in this world. And you’re setting a course. And you’re being intentional with your life, and you’re making headway towards whatever you define success for yourself to be.

Unknown Speaker 7:58
What does that require? Requires ownership?

Unknown Speaker 8:03
Are you the CEO of your life? That’s my favorite phrase, my clients are either steal your life you’ve got, but what is the CEO, right? You got this business and you have some resources. And you’re trying to decide the best use of these resources to achieve the goals and success of the company. But why can’t you use that same structure for your own life? What’s your biggest resource in your life? Time? At the very least it’s time. So what are you doing with your time? What are you doing with that resource to achieve the goal of joy, happiness and success in your life. And once again, we have another business overlap, right? Where we can take life things and business things and pull pull from one side of that equation and use it in your life or take life things and pull it over and apply it to a business. To people resist

george grombacher 9:03
this, because once they actually start thinking about this like this is I’m going to have to do it every day. I’m going to have to work at this. Yeah.

Unknown Speaker 9:15
It gets into my one of my favorite subjects, which I talk a lot about on the podcast with my clients is love versus fear. Fear is easy, because it keeps you in your comfort zone. You can you can live in those tactics every single day because you’re either afraid to look at yourself in the mirror, or you’re afraid of abundance in your life. Or you’re afraid of something something is stopping you or disrupting your life

Unknown Speaker 9:45
with fear or

Unknown Speaker 9:50
you have the courage to push through the fear and live in a state of love, self love and say this is what I want from my life. You know, I used to have a son I named my office at Boeing that everybody could see when they walked in, because I wanted that constant message in front of them, which said, best way to predict the future is to create it. So how are you creating your future? Where’s the creativity in your life? Are you thinking about these things, and the creativity is based out of love. Love is the engine for creativity. So if you’ve done the inner work to have self love, then it becomes easy for you to sit down and use creativity to think, quote strategically in your life and start developing a plan of action to create the life that you want for yourself, you know, going back to P do have How am I going to be in this world? What things am I going to do that align with my being and then I get to have joy, happiness and success in my life?

george grombacher 10:53
The term self care has been on the tip of everybody’s tongue lately, at least seems like it has. But that’s different than self love? Or maybe it’s not. Do most people love themselves? Or is it the opposite of that?

Unknown Speaker 11:08
I think everybody wants to love themselves. The question is, have you developed the self leadership skills to do that? You know, I grew up with very low self esteem in high school college, my early 20s was the baggage that brought to my first marriage. But I decided that’s not the life I wanted for myself. So hours of therapy, reading self help books, practicing on myself, has led me to a life that I want for myself to be introspective and develop a strategy. And it’s from that effort that I’m able to, to then from that self leadership to turn around and do that and coach and help others because I went through that same exercise, I know the pitfalls from doing it. But if I if I didn’t sit down and say, Andy, this is not good. Now, this is not, you know, sitting in divorce court with two kids and a career that’s kind of stalled, and so no, not what I want for myself. So what do I need to do about myself to change that? I’m going to take ownership, take ownership of it, and do something about it.

Unknown Speaker 12:31
Other people that?

george grombacher 12:33
And I think that the answer is probably yes to any question like this, but is it is it also that I feel like I don’t deserve to be something like this, I’m not worthy of it.

Unknown Speaker 12:48
self worth, self confidence, self trust. Put all the things you’d like to have in the business world with a team and put the words self dash in front of it? Where are you building the foundation for a purposeful life, a happy life, a joyful life? It’s about doing all that found datian of work? Do you trust yourself? Do you have confidence in yourself? Do you have self ownership, you got to have all those things before you can start. Fill that bucket, so to speak, you hear that all the time, fill up your yourself bucket, so that you can then turn around and do that for others. There’s a lot of truth in that. But what what are you doing if you grew up in a childhood? Where the right circumstances actions behaviors didn’t provide an example of that for yourself? Well, then you’ve got to take ownership of your life and go find a means to do it for yourself.

Unknown Speaker 13:54
Yeah, I have that model.

george grombacher 13:59
That makes a lot of sense. And I, you, you shared your personal experience of what it took for you to get there. And I know that I have, you know, not that some kind of a similar experience of not feeling like I was worthy of doing the things that I really wanted to do. I think it’s just a very, very human thing. And, and these days, I also feel like instead of staring that staring ourselves in the mirror and doing that internal work, we we we choose to fill up everybody else’s cup or too busy ourselves with worrying about the myriad of causes that we’re supposed to be worried about on the internet. And that is that is like a kind of like an opiate where I’m hashtagging this and I’m advocating for that. So I don’t need to worry about me I’m not saying

Unknown Speaker 15:03
you’re trying to get value you’re trying to get value from somewhere else, right? So my business name, podcast name is generate your value. So are you extracting value are you generating value, right. So if you’re not filled with self love, that then enables you to generate value in other people’s lives, then you’re trying to extract it from other things, whether it be in your relationships, or drugs, or addictions, or video games or sports, you know, you’re you’re trying to fill yourself up with joy and happiness and extracting that from other things in the outside world. Instead of looking for ways to generate it within yourself, so to speak.

george grombacher 15:51
I think that’s really well said, extracting value from somewhere else, versus you actually generating and creating. Which is inherently selfish, because we need more people to be taking personal responsibility for themselves and engaging in these personal leadership things. And if we all did that, then a lot of these problems would just take care of themselves.

Unknown Speaker 16:18
How do you change the world? One person at a time and start with yourself?

george grombacher 16:22
Yeah. So what is that? What is that first step then? Setting the intention said, I’m going to do this.

Unknown Speaker 16:36
But it’s two or three things, right? It’s setting intention, which is basically taking ownership. So you’re taking ownership, I have an intention to lead a cert in life. And then step two is decide what is that certain life? How do I want to be in this world? And this is, this is the exercise that I take through when my clients is these three steps, right? So do you feel like you have ownership in your life? Are you the CEO of your life? Or is life just push me around? Let’s have a conversation around that first, too. How do you want to be in this world? Let’s let’s get on a whiteboard or something and talk about the values what words do you want to use to describe the brand, the self brand, so to speak, that you want to have in this world? How do you want to be? And then third, alright, let’s be strategic. What do you need to do in all areas, facets of your life? It sort of fits into the Simon Sinek Golden Circle model, right? Why? Why I do what your your intention and who you want to be is your why. Then what are those values, so forth that you want to be in this world, that’s the how and then okay, the what what things you’re going to do in your life strategically, that allows you to go after the life that you want for yourself on a daily basis.

Unknown Speaker 18:11
And love it. That’s not so hard, everybody.

Unknown Speaker 18:16
It’s easy to talk about, you know, cost the quarter. The talk about it, it’s the it’s the right in business, here we go. Once again, the business overlap and business. You can put a plan together, but it’s all about how well you execute that plan. That gets you the results that you’re looking for. That’s the hard part. You put a team of 10 100,000 10,000 100,000 people together, to work together to achieve that.

Unknown Speaker 18:54
That’s a trick.

Unknown Speaker 18:56
It’s, it’s just a scaling problem, right? Take it down to your personal life. It’s just you, but how do you surround yourself with the right people? What are you doing from a self leadership perspective to have the end result of the life that you watch for yourself just like with a business, we want our business to be a certain way for ourselves, so it just then becomes a scale problem. You already have the skills you’ve already done it for yourself, how do you then apply it? For business? If you wanted to start being an entrepreneur then it just becomes a scaling problem because you already know that? The brass tacks as they say about how to do it now. It’s just how do I execute it on a much bigger scale than what I’ve already done for myself in my life.

Unknown Speaker 19:44
I love it. B plus two equals have, huh?

george grombacher 19:52
Andy, thank you so much for coming on. Where can people learn more about you? How can they engage with you?

Unknown Speaker 19:59
My website is WWW dot generate your value.com Naming to podcast is generated value available on all major platforms to do with a co host. And I do a number of interviews like this so you can find me on a lot of the major business leadership life podcasts.

george grombacher 20:21
Excellent. If you enjoy this as much as I did so answer your appreciation and share today’s show with a friend who also appreciates good ideas, check out the Generate your value podcast wherever you listen to your podcast and go to generate your value.com and learn more about what Andy and I’ve been talking about. And I mean, the more people like Andy can inspire us to take these positive actions and to become the CEO of our own lives, the better off we will be and certainly the world. So thank you again, Andy.

Unknown Speaker 20:58
Thank you George for the invite. And thank you for generating your value in this

george grombacher 21:02
world. Amen. And until next time, remember, do your part by doing your best