This week's home automation podcast features our host Ron Callis interviewing John Geraghty. Recorded live on Thursday, March 26th, 2020 at 6:00 p.m. EST.

About John Geraghty

John founded the executive coaching firm, Courageous Authenticity, in 2007 after being confronted by the harsh consequences that came from his clients focusing their goals and objects on economic factors. As he witnessed multiple financially successful clients face life diminishing factors beyond their balance sheets, he decided to expand his focus and contribution to involve a more integrated and comprehensive approach.

Today, John's mission is to awaken, inspire and equip leaders to envision, pursue, and celebrate living lives of joy and impact.

Interview Recap

Here are some of the topics Ron had the opportunity to discuss with John Geraghty:

• John’s recommendations on staying connected with your team in a virtual work environment
• Why right now is the time to dive in and focus on how to keep adding value to your clients and your company
• Ways to shift your approach and processes to stay transparent and align with the recent stresses caused by the COVID-19 pandemic
• What it means to “reframe” your mindset during uncertain times with the “The Prism of Perspective” approach
• John’s approach to fitness and the importance of practicing routine as a way to stay grounded and focused

SEE ALSO: Home Automation Podcast Episode #102: A Custom Integration Industry Q&A With Rohan Dunbar

Transcript:

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Ron: Hello, everybody! Odd time and on an odd day. Why not? Who says you have to stick to your routine? Strange times call for strange measures. There's a lot of people out there dealing with a lot of stress and dram due to this Coronavirus and all the stresses in the economy and in life. I got to thinking, "What are some things that my team and I could do to help?" Along those lines, I started to think of some people in my life that I'd like to introduce you guys to that would bring value and maybe some different perspectives on how to think about and deal with what's going on out there in terms of your personal and business lives.

In that regard, I'm going to be bringing you episode #103, someone that is not from the industry. John is one of maybe only a couple of people that I've brought onto the show that are not from the industry. John is a business coach and life coach, I've known John since day one of my business almost 13 years ago, and he's always been a rock. He and I don't interact that often, but when we do, he's really a rock star in terms of the value that he brings to people in his life. I know you are all going to love him and learn something. I'm excited for this interview. Let's go ahead and jump right into it here with John Geraghty from Courageous Authenticity.

John: How are you doing?

Ron: I'm good, buddy, how are you?

John: I'm doing great. Great to see you. Thanks for having me on!

Ron: Awesome. It's my pleasure. You and I were just having lunch about a couple of weeks ago, and we were talking about podcasting and going live, and then this thing happened, I said, "Well, man. John is top of mind. I want to bring him on."

John: What's the thing that happened? I have no idea what you're referencing!

Ron: Well, we're going to get into that. So what is this thing and how do we deal with it. But just for the audience, they don't know you. So, where are you coming to us from? Let's start there.

John: Sure. I'm John Geraghty, as he said. I'm coming to you from Palm Beach Gardens, Florida.

Ron: What's the origin story of John Geraghty?

John: Today, I'm an executive coach and a business coach, primarily working with owners of closely-held businesses. Helping them to align their actions with their values better so that they can consistently create the lives they want. Historically, I come out of really a service industry. At the beginning of my career, I was in the fitness industry really working to help people optimize their health and fitness through exercise and nutrition, along those lines. As I was doing that type of work, I kind of came to believe that there were other areas where people needed some help. That's when I transitioned into the financial services industry, and I became a CFP, an accredited estate planner. I worked with business owners in that area, helping them again to find ways to envision what it was that they wanted to create in their lives and then how to activate their financial plans and resources to align their those resources and values with their actions.

What I found there again is that it was an incomplete approach. A lot of people were really benefiting by the work that we were doing but there were other aspects of their lives that they weren't paying as much attention to. And so I had a really strange week-long period of time where three clients were going through big life-changing events that had nothing to do with whether or not they had money, but it had everything to do with whether or not they were living in alignment with their values. At the time, I was reading a book by Stephen Covey called 8th Habit, which is finding your voice and inspiring others to find theirs. I didn't feel like I was inspiring anything. I three clients - one was getting a divorce after twenty-five years of marriage, his final child was going off to college, and he's like, "My wife and I have nothing in common, we don't even talk. So we had to get a divorce."

A few days later, I reached out to another client who, all of these guys were financially successful, but this guy had just come back. I called him. He answers the phone and is like, "Hey, I guess you haven't even heard yet." And I'm like, "What?" He goes, "First of all, I'm fine, but I am coming back from a heart attack, I had a heart attack a few weeks ago." And a kind of joke, I say, "He did not have a heart attack because he had bad genes, he had a heart attack because he had really big jeans.".

Ron: Right! OK, there you go.

John: And then the third situation was a person that we had worked on educational plans and things like that for his kids, I called him, and he was driving two of his children, son, and step-son to check them into drug rehab. I realized that unless we look comprehensively at all the different things we need to do to realize our objectives, there are weak links in our plan. From there, I began evolving my financial planning practice into a coaching practice.

For the past 13 years, I have been working with businesses, business owners, and executives around the country to help them integrate all of the different aspects of their lives so that they can live lives that are rich not just financially and physically but in every area.

Ron: I don't know that I've said this to you to your face, but I'll say it publicly. You were one of those rocks for me right when I launched my business.

John: I remember the day you talked to me about evolving out of the work that you were doing in the sales position about, "Hey, I'm thinking about doing this." I remember the day well.

Ron: I had met you when I was in that sales position because you were at an integrators' that was a client of yours, and you are evolving and getting your thing going. It's funny how the world works.

John: Circles back, baby.

Ron: It does. And here we are. Who is a typical client for you? Just to kind of set the stage of some of the perspectives that you have and you bring. Who are you normally working with day-to-day?

John: I work with small, closely-held businesses. Small might be anywhere from five employees to 300-400 employees, anywhere from a million to a hundred million dollars in that ballpark. I typically work with the owner and some of the executive team to make sure there's alignment as it relates to, what is the purpose? What're our values? What are our principles? And then really help them to execute on strategies that they have, to realize their goals and objectives. I do a lot of work around communication and relationships to make sure that people are communicating in effective ways because that's one of the challenges we have in relationships period. I do a lot of that work as well.

Ron: Just out of curiosity, how's the lockdown or the social distancing affecting you? Have you typically been doing most of that work remotely and over phone and video conference, so it's business as usual?

John: Not affecting me a lot. I travel to clients quarterly, so I don't do a ton of travel. I do most of my work over the phone or maybe do it kind of something like what we're doing here. It's not having a huge effect on me, but a lot of my clients are shifting the way that they do work.

Ron: Let's get into that. Obviously, shit is hitting the fan, the proverbial fan out there.

John: Yes, it is.

"What's happened is there's a lot of turbulence, a lot of anxiety and unknowns encountering everybody's life. From the entrepreneur or the executive down to their team down to their families."

Ron: And there's our friendly virus and the economic situations, too. What's happened is there's a lot of turbulence, a lot of anxiety and unknowns encountering everybody's life. From the entrepreneur or the executive down to their team down to their families. I mean even here at One Firefly we're going to start instituting a bi-weekly town hall just to communicate and share what's going on in the company. We just discovered that college loan payments are going to be forgiven for the next six months. I have my H.R. team trying to find all those pieces of data that my team might find valuable and that communication is really paramount.

As an aside, the idea that everyone's lives are much more anxious right now, I wanted to bring you on and maybe have you just talk about how to frame - this word of "framing" what's happening. Everyone's having a tough go at it. Everyone's in different seats, but everyone's having challenges. I know that you and I have worked in the past on framing and how to think about things. I wanted to have that conversation with you in this public forum.

John: That's great. And I think framing or perspective is like one of the most important things we can ever look at. Because it's been said that we don't see the world as it is, we see the world as we are. What we have to pay attention to is, are we looking at things from an opportunistic situation? Are we looking at what opportunities still exist? Or are we allowing ourselves to get into fear? Einstein famously said, "The most important decision you'll ever make is whether you live in a safe or a dangerous world." The reason that that's an important decision is that if you look at the world from as if you were living in a dangerous place and you look at the world from fear then actually the way that your brain begins to work is you begin fight or flight or freeze. That's what happens.

There's a part of your brain called the amygdala, which is backed by the limbic region of your brain and kind of the reptilian part of your brain at the brain stem. It's always scouring the world for danger. But what happens is we see what we're looking for. If you're looking at the world and you're waking up every day saying, "Oh my gosh, this is the end of the world we're never going to recover. This is different than it's ever been before. This is catastrophic." Then you are going to see evidence of that. On the flip side, if you say, "This is a challenge, and I've succeeded through tons of challenges in the past, I've moved through different challenges my past," and we reconnect to our power to make that happen then we're going to look for opportunities. How do we move forward? What I'm finding with my clients that's interesting is many of them are saying you know, "We have to change our rituals."

Some businesses are disrupted more than others, but many of them are saying they're shocked that there's actually a lot of efficiencies that are coming from working at home in different situations that they didn't have to in the past. Even to the degree of communication, you have to be more intentional about your communication. If somebody is sitting across the hall from you, you can talk to them whenever. Now that's going to be more challenging. You may want to structure it and say, "Hey you know what, we have to catch up on that collaboration we're doing. Let's put it on the calendar." What we're finding from a lot of the clients that I'm speaking with is communication is enhanced.

There are a lot of people are switching from just doing a telephone call to doing video calls because they can see how that person is responding. When we're working in situations like this, engage different media so that you can see how someone's responding. Are they engaged? Do they have a question? Are they following you? Really think about how you can listen deeply to what that person said, not just listen to respond but listen to really understand it. That way, I can pay attention to your physiology, your tone, and your words and say, "OK, here's what I'm hearing, Ron." Then I can paraphrase what I hard and allow you to say, "Yeah, John, you're right on," or "You're close, but here's what you missed."

Ron: Is this your advice for the business owners that now have all of their teams or much of their teams working remotely? The idea of video conferencing and turning your camera on?

John: Turn your camera on. Yeah absolutely.

Ron: What if their teams aren't used to doing that, and they resist? Does the manager enforce it, or you know or maybe explain why based on your explanation?

John: You don't want to power through anything. Again we talked about reframing, so let's pretend that I'm speaking with you. I say, "Hey what we're gonna do is stay connected and we want to be able to do it visually," and you're an introvert and you say, "Hey I'm not comfortable in this situation," instead of saying, "Ron, well that's what we're doing, and I made a decision," what you want to do is, what I find helpful is I call it aligned influence.

And what aligned influence means is I want to align with you in as much as I can and then shift at a higher level to find where we align again. I can acknowledge you, and I can validate you. "Hey I can appreciate where you're coming from because this is different. We haven't had to do this in the past. And being on camera in front of your friends, I can understand how we could feel as if you might be judged if you're not a rock star in this particular area. And while that's true, what else is true is that as an organization, it's going to be vitally important for us to be able to stay connected, to stay emotionally connected, socially connected, and to be able to interpret one another and what we're saying, just as if we were sitting around the conference table. For that reason, I'm going to strongly encourage that everybody has the camera on so that we can read one another and we can connect. And what you'll recognize over time is it will become just like being in the conference room for you. Is that something you're willing to try out?"

"I would think that business owners would get a pretty positive response if they took that well-intentioned approach."

Ron: I would think that business owners would get a pretty positive response if they took that well-intentioned approach.

John: Right. And one of the things that I will share is it relates to communication because often, I work with business owners who are often drivers, and so drivers want to get from point A to Point B as fast as possible. Sometimes when you introduce such a concept, it seems like, "Why are you meandering? Go straight at it." But when you go straight at it, the reality is you don't get the outcome you want. Then you have a broken piece that you have to go mend later. What we want to recognize is the shortest distance between two points is not necessarily a straight line; it's the path of least resistance. And if we can create alignment and I can get you to lower your fear, to get out of the amygdala into the prefrontal cortex - the part of your brain that's creative and thoughtful. If I can help you to shift out of fear, then we can engage in a different conversation. It saves way more time than me slamming the idea. Does that make sense to you?

Ron: I get it, I dig it. Now tell me more about reframing as it relates to the reality that there's so much uncertainty in the world. When will our businesses be able to get back to business? How is this going to affect employees? How is this gonna affect the future of one's personal and professional life? I know you have a perspective around a prism, and there are different components of that, and it's a really interesting approach.

John: Let me start off with, you don't want to be overly optimistic. We don't want to be unrealistically optimistic, but we don't want to state that we know something we don't know. I think there's a Winston Churchill quote that I'm going to blow here, but essentially the worst leadership you can do is to make promises that are quickly swept away. If we say to your employees, "Hey, we're going to work from home for the next two weeks, and then everything's going to be back to normal," if those two weeks go by and things aren't back to normal, you lose credibility. Instead of diminishing their fear, you begin to increase their fear. Because you've made promises that didn't come true. I think we've had a conversation in the past as it relates to Good to Great by James Collins.

Ron: That's funny. I have the book!

John: One of my favorites! You can see it right behind me.

Ron: That's right. Love it.

John: For those of you who haven't read it, Jim Collins is an outstanding author. He's done a tremendous amount of research. This was a research program written by Jim and his graduate students at Stanford. What they were looking at is how do businesses differentiate themselves from just being good to becoming great. And there are different principles inside there. One of those principles, what they call the Stockdale Paradox or I think they may call it Face the Brutal Facts, but --.

Ron: That guy was like the high-level officer, right?

John: Right. James Stockdale. He was imprisoned in a POW camp in Vietnam, the Hanoi Hilton. He was the highest-ranking officer there. And what he was known for is being strong even though he had been tortured, being emotionally strong and succeeding coming out of this torturous time. When he came out, he's interviewed, and people were like, "Well, tell us what it was that enabled you and some others to continue to prosper through this period and to come out strong? One of the things he said is, "You have to face the brutal facts but never lose faith, and you will ultimately prevail." He actually referenced the optimist, the guy that thought he was going to get out two weeks, that two weeks from now everything's back to normal. And those two weeks would go by and another two weeks and what would happen if they lose faith, lose energy, and they quickly died. The other people that didn't make it at all, as you might imagine, are the cynics right.

We don't want to be an overly optimistic person nor the cynic. We want to be the person who says, "Hey, you know what? Right now, we're in an environment that we've never really seen before, but we are going to learn." We've shifted as a society often and have learned how to continue to prosper and add value, that's what we do professionally. We learn how to add value, that's what we get paid for. We may have to shift the medium through which we do that - the way we engage, how we engage. We're absolutely going to learn that.

And so what we want to do is say, "OK, there are things that are different, but we can absolutely learn this, and we will ultimately prevail in the end." The other thing that I think is important to think about is - not only will we prevail in the end, but as long as we bring our best and add value at this time, we'll look back on it and say it was the most productive time ever. We were willing to stay engaged and to add value when other people were running away. When other people run away, and we dive in, and we continue to think about, "How do I add value to my client? How do I have value to the world?" That's when we begin to differentiate ourselves. Under this turbulent time, you got to recognize that this is actually an incredible opportunity.

Ron: It's an opportunity to lead.

John: It's an opportunity to lead, and it's a time when we need that leadership. One of the things that you mentioned the Prism of Perspective. Everybody understands how a prism works, so you've got white light that comes into a prism, and then it's refracted, and what happens is the white light is refracted, and it's separated into its parts. You might see red, orange, yellow, the colors of the that we are aware of. What I want you to do is recognize life is just like that prism. Life comes at you with all of the different possibilities inside it. Depending on how we have our life refracted based on filters we put in, we might experience life as a victim with a very low level of energy feeling like the world is just happening to us.

We might be a little more positive than that and be a fighter like this is a dangerous world, but I'm going to fight my way out of it. But again remember what Einstein said, a dangerous world is not where you want to be. We can move up to the point where we do not feel it's dangerous but limited. And so we're in a situation where we pay to negotiate or manipulate because we think "I've got to get mine because there's not enough for you." If you think about negotiating in a situation where you really think about the win-win for the client, you're just thinking, "I'm going to get as much as I can get for myself." You might win that particular action, but you're not going to win that client or win that relationship. On the flip side, you might say, "There's not enough for everyone, so I'm going to give to Ron, and I'm going to lose in this situation." You could be a contributor but not really thinking about the way you can win. What we want to do really is move upstream to a place where we're abundant, and we're safe. And that's collaboration partnership and co-creation.

If you think about the rainbow, those are the rainbow colors working from the victim, fighter, negotiator, contributor, collaborative partner, and co-creator. The way we shape that is three filters, just like the prism. The first one is, what do we expect to happen? You set your expectations based on what do you believe to be true. This is your belief system. If your belief system is like, "This is the end of the world," then the stuff you're going to begin to filter and look for is evidence that you're right - this is the end of the world.

Ron: More people died today than died yesterday, it's the end of the world!

John: Right! We have that situation if that side of the prism. The other thing that makes a big difference is the way we manage our physiology. That's kind of the base of it.

Ron: Health, right? Your physiology.

John: You got it. Your physical vitality, how much energy you have to put forward. And there are two different things you want to look at there. One is how do you manage your physique or your health on an ongoing basis? As it relates to the rest you get, the exercise you get, the nutrition you get, how many toxins you allow into your body. Based on that, it's going to begin to shift what's possible for you. We're all aware that someone who has ongoing poor health really can't engage in the world at the same level that someone's managing their health. They might be capable at a certain level, but they're not hitting their optimal potential because they don't have the physical strength to do it. The other part is that in every single moment, you have an opportunity to shift the way your physiology shows up. What I mean by that is imagine if I were to describe to you, let's go back to that victim, what does the victim look like physically when he walks into your room? Describe him to me.

Ron: I would say that person is defeated, maybe they're looking at the ground. Perhaps they're hesitant to give eye contact, their shoulders are slumped, or they drag their feet.

John: Exactly. Most of us are aware of the mind-body connection. We often think the mind to the body, but it also goes body to the body. If you're listening and paying attention, drop yourself into that kind of victim state and feel what it feels like. What's happening is you're sending a message to your brain that you're at risk. When you're at risk, what happens is we're now in stress. When we're in stress, the chemicals that are released in your body - cortisol, adrenaline, epinephrine, norepinephrine, are designed for short term bursts of energy. But if we're doing it in a chronic way, it's bad for our health. And we're not expecting to win. We're not envisioning the future. We don't bring power to our day. We don't wake up in the morning and say, "Here's what I'm going to achieve today, and I'm gonna bring my power to it." On the flip side, if you manage your physiology and when you're in this powerful state, the different chemicals that are being released are dopamine, serotonin, oxytocin.

Ron: hose are the good drugs!

John: All the good ones.

Ron: I want those good drugs!

John: They're endogenous, literally endogenous - heroin speed marijuana and cocaine. Like literally the triggers in your brain. But what's great about is it gives you the perfect trigger, so you get all the positivity out of it without the negativity. And it's no detriment to your health, but it gives you like a bit of the bump that you're looking for. Right, so the chemicals are changed there. And so if we pay attention to how what we believe and how we manage our physiology, we have this last situation of, "How do I frame this?" Because it's possible, like right now, for something to happen. The economy is not doing spectacular right now. We're in different levels of quarantine, depending on where we live. Now we have to frame it. We could look at and go, "Oh my God this is horrible, this is the worst thing that's ever happened," or we can look at it and say, "How else can I look at this?" There's a guy named Mark Goulston; he's a psychiatrist and a hostage negotiator who wrote a book called Just Listen. He talks about how we engage in this way. And here's a little five-step process that he says, "Everybody in the world can go from "Oh fuck," to "Okay," in a couple of weeks.

Ron: Don't worry, you're allowed to curse on this show!

John: I should have gotten clearance, right? I hope I didn't offend anybody! When you think about it, that means like you're going to spend a couple of weeks being unproductive. But what happens during that two week period of time is you go from the amygdala that part of fear up to the prefrontal cortex. That's all that's happening. And so since we know that journey, why does it have to take two weeks? How can I shortcut it? His process that he teaches is these five steps, and he goes that first is the "Oh, fuck" or whatever your exclamation is. And then it goes to "Oh, God." I like to use the serenity prayer there. "Oh God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change the courage to change the things I can and the wisdom to know the difference," and so once you get there, you're like, "OK, I'm starting to feel a little better." The next one is just, "Oh, jeez." He said to use "Oh, geez" because how upsetting can it be? Like how bad could be when you're like "Oh geez.".

Ron: I think I texted Taylor on my staff. "Oh geez," a few times today maybe a few times over the last couple of days.

John: From there, you just go, "Oh well" and "Oh well" is an acceptance. One of the things that is a real challenge is that we don't accept reality. "Oh well" is an acceptance of reality. "Oh well, this is what's true." And then the next step is "OK, I'm ready to engage." So I went from "Oh, fuck" to "OK," and I can wait two weeks, or I can intentionally move in that way. Think about it. "Oh fuck" is victim "OK" is moving your way up into "I'm here. I believe I have the potential to succeed. I'm not a victim; I'm going to move forward." I have a client, a friend of mine Jeff Miller and I was sharing this with him, and he goes, "Isn't there a sixth one?" And I go, "What's that?" He goes, "Oh, yeah!" What we're doing is we're moving in a way where we could be fully engaged. Again if you think about the prism, pay attention to the beliefs that you're holding. You're going to create the reality that you're looking for. We find what we're looking for. Have you ever heard anybody say, "That was a self-fulfilling prophecy?" Everything is a self-fulfilling prophecy. We want to think about, "OK, so what am I expecting to happen? How am I managing my physiology, my health, in the moment on an ongoing basis? How am I doing that process of moving from 'Oh, fuck' to 'OK' in a hurry?

Ron: You talked about the five steps, how to raise from the "Oh, F" to "Okay," and how to do that quickly. The average person, if there is such a thing, does it in two weeks, and a more, I don't know what the word is, advanced, trained, practiced, an experienced person maybe can do it quicker. How did you get there? What's the strategy like? It sounds right. I'm buying in. How does someone listening say I want to work on this?

John: You work on it. It sounds kind of simple, but what you want to do is begin to do that process and work through it. What's going on in your brain is you're releasing your brain from fear. You are the most influential most motivating person in the world for yourself.. You're going to give yourself sixty thousand thoughts a day. And so if your thoughts stay in the "Oh, F!" place, that's where you'll be. And so what you need to do is say, "OK, I can be there for a moment." I can acknowledge that I wish that we weren't in quarantine because otherwise, you're going to keep telling yourself, "Liar, liar." But if you say, "Yeah. I'm not happy about that but then let me accept," Going back to the serenity prayer, "Oh God grant me the serenity, grant me peace to accept reality and the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."

One of the things that I have always thought about often is that people focus on acceptance but not thinking about courage and wisdom. They're like, "OK, I can't really do anything about that I'll accept that," but a lot of times you have to say, "No we have to be courageous to do that which we can do." We have to look at and say, "Am I really saying that there's nothing I can do about the situation I'm in right now? That there's nothing we can do?" There's everything we can do. Begin to get clear about what that outcome looks like. You work through that. Identify what you can change. Get wisdom. "What can I change? What actions can I take?" And again, courage is not a lack of fear. Courage is acting in the face of fear. "Give me the courage to take the actions despite the fact I'm not certain about the outcome." And then again, "Oh geez" is just really accepting the reality, like "Oh geez, this is not as huge as we thought." And "Oh well" brings us right back to, "Oh well, this is true." Goes back to James Stockdale, accept the brutal facts, but never let go of the faith that you will ultimately succeed. I'll tell you another strategy while we're sharing this that works in a similar way. It's a little different. I call these the five questions.

Ron: I'm taking notes, by the way. This is great. I'm going to have re-watch my own video.

John: Good! The five questions came to me through a guy named Kurt Wright, who wrote a book called Breaking the Rules quite a while ago. He was a contemporary of Maslow, Maslow's Hierarchy of Needs. What he said is, when he was studying what he called "Effortless High Performers" and "Wholehearted livers" - people that dove into their life wholeheartedly without fear. W he found is that the way that they looked at the world was different in that they asked themselves different questions. What I challenge everybody to do is to answer this question. What is great about what we're going through right now? And come up with a few different answers.

Don't say nothing is great because there are absolutely opportunities here that we can't move forward until we embrace what's great about this. Then think about what's the principle of this? What makes that principle great. What's great about this is your first question, and what makes it great is the second. What's great about this is there's a lot of volatility, and we have an opportunity to revisit how we want to structure and how we strategically want to move forward to achieve the goals and objectives that we have. That's awesome. Why is that awesome? This is the second question. What's the principle behind that? The principle is that the more clear we are about what it is that we're trying to do and the better our strategy is developed, the more energy we have to move forward because we're moving a lot of the blocks and barriers out of the way. And then once we're in that place grounded and now kind of feeling safe we get to envision what would be ideal. And this is an exercise that everybody should be doing. What would be ideal? What does outstanding look like when this is over for you? What did you learn? How did you grow? How did your team grow? What systems were improved, processes enhanced? What does the ideal look like? Once you do that work now, you get a chance to juxtapose what ideal looks like and what you have.

The next question is, what's not perfect yet? You get to identify, "OK here's the projects I need to work on, here is what's not perfect yet. Our communications strategies may not be great, and we don't have clarity, we hadn't planned around this kind of situation." We identify what's not perfect yet. The final question is, what resources do I have to make it so? After you identify that, now you're like what resources? Intellectual capacity? Are there things you can learn? Are there people in your life? What other resources can you tap into? This is a great time to be a collaborative human being. And to think, "Who else is available that maybe I can tap in and collaborate with?" That's a resource the people your skills your money - All of those, your effort your attitude. I can tap into a great ritual of getting my mindset in the morning. Everybody needs to exercise, but we also have to exercise our minds. We have to think about, "How do I position myself to have a great attitude when I wake up in the morning?" Because sometimes people act as if it gets thrust upon them, "My attitude is not my responsibility, I'm just really angry. I'm an angry person."

It's accepting responsibility for our thoughts, our beliefs, our attitudes, and having a practice in place. I'm a big believer in creating rituals, create the rituals that are going to allow you to create the success that we're looking for. That might be meditation or prayer or journaling, or a combination of all of them. What is it that you're doing in the morning so that when you get out, you're ready to rock and roll? And you have the great expectation so that your belief system is attracting what you want, and you see the world from a frame of possibility instead of a frame of fear.

Ron: Love it, John. You've done something rather interesting and special in your approach to fitness. You've talked about your physiology being one of the important filters for the prism. I don't know whether that was on purpose or not, but in my mind, because I know you the idea of preparing yourself in the morning through rituals, you have a ritual I follow you on your Facebook.

John: Sure. Sure. Anyone can follow me. I'm John Geraghty - you can follow me on Facebook. Fitness Presence is an approach that I created. I mentioned early on that I started the exercise field. Actually, when I was in college, I had the great fortune of working for one of the top health clubs in the country under the tutelage of a guy named Joe Cirulli, who is the leader of that industry and also Arthur Jones, the inventor of High-Intensity Exercise. Any of you do CrossFit or HIIT exercise, it all comes out of Arthur Jones's research and the work that he did around Nautilus.

I began my fitness career a little differently than most as it relates to exercising with intensity to get the outcomes I needed. In other words, at a very early age, I realized you don't need to spend a lot of time to get great outcomes. What I was able to do that was really fun, Fitness Presence. One of the things that were interesting to me is that I realized that we could create this benefit in a very brief period that would work on every single aspect of fitness strength flexibility, cardiovascular, balance, coordination, and also mental focus creativity. All those different areas, and we could do it in as little as 10 minutes a day without requiring any exercise equipment by understanding certain principles of exercise. That is the intensity of the exercise full range movement engaging every different system engaging every different joint and muscle and doing it the way that activated what I call, antagercising.

Antagercising is recognizing that every movement you do has primary movers; every time you have a primary mover, you also have antagonist muscles. And the antagonist muscles are the muscles that are fighting that. What I've been able to do is create an exercise program that really uses your body as the gym to create the resistance, and it works on every single aspect of your fitness, and it only takes ten minutes. What's great about it is it only takes ten minutes, and it's incredibly safe. I don't mean to imply that it would be impossible to hurt yourself, but it would be difficult to do so.

Ron: You're not using weights or any other exercise equipment?

John: You're not using weights, and you're doing it slowly. Because there is nothing there, if for some reason you start to feel a tweak or something like that, you can just stop because there's no momentum. If you think about, force equals mass times acceleration. If you pull acceleration out, you don't have a force to create an injury. What we're able to do is exercise all the time. As a 57-year-old guy, I exercise every day for about 10 minutes. I started a little over 3 1/2 years ago, doing this everyday program. Today, as a 57-year-old, I'm in better shape than I've ever been in my life in every single aspect of fitness. I'm stronger than I've ever been, better balance, more coordinated, better cardiovascular. It's interesting because a lot of people believe you have to spend a lot of time exercising, and you just don't.

"If you say, "I want to have this particular outcome," then you have to ask yourself if your lifestyle includes you doing things that enables that to happen."

Why I think this matters is because we're going to be here for a long time, they're learning how to keep us alive. But modern medicine isn't learning how to teach us how to thrive - that's on us. As a 57-year-old, when I look into the future, I want to be as physically capable at 85 and 90 as I am today, and I don't know who doesn't. But many people aren't living their lives as it's reasonable to expect that to be the outcome. If you look at your outcome and say, "I want to have this particular outcome," then you have to ask yourself if your lifestyle includes you doing things that enables that to happen. We can do it easily in as little as 10 minutes a day, so there's no reason not to do it. If anybody wants to learn about that, I've been sharing a little workout every day during this quarantine. You can join me, and I'll teach you this stuff. If anyone has an interest, just tell me you're from Ron, and I'll give you full access to the program that will teach you the physiology, it'll teach you the principles, and it's transformative.

It's a passion of mine because it has been so remarkably effective for me and a lot of my clients. What they consistently say is that they can't believe it's as effective because you grow up thinking you have to work out for an hour, and you just don't. It's just not real. I hope you guys stop by, let me know how I can help in that way - or any way! Through this time, I want to be a contributor. As I said earlier, our job is to think, how do we contribute? That's the only thing I think about. I know I'm going to be rewarded in different ways, I don't pay attention to the reward - it's going to come. But if I can be a contribution to anybody in any way, just let me know. If you have questions on anything I brought up here today, I'd love to. If I can ever add value, just know I'm having just as much fun giving it as hopefully you are receiving.

Ron: I think that comes through loud and clear, John. I want to thank you for taking time out of your schedule. I appreciate you sticking around and doing this. My audience appreciates it as well. This content is always needed, but it's maybe even more right this minute when so many people are in need of guidance and direction.

"When everything is steady and concrete, there's not as much movement. But when everything is shaking, we have an opportunity to create the world we want. It's important to take this time and think about your values, what you care about, and how you act to engage that more and bring forth a contribution towards that."

John: If you can all recognize that this is an amazing time to engage and add as much value as we can fully, we're going to look back at this as being one of the most remarkable times that we've been given. When everything is steady and concrete, there's not as much movement. But when everything is shaking, we have an opportunity to create the world we want. It's important to take this time and think about your values, what you care about, and how you act to engage that more and bring forth a contribution towards that. Even though there's going to be a lot of pain in the transition, in the end, we're going to look at it and realize that we actually prevailed and that we were better for it.

Ron: And that we grew. Wise words. John, thank you, sir. Thank you for coming on.

John: My pleasure. Thank you.

SHOW NOTES:

Business and life coach John Geraghty shares his perspective on the importance of mindset and how our day-to-day approach can affect us during a time of crisis.

Ron Callis is the CEO of One Firefly, LLC, a digital marketing agency based out of South Florida and creator of Automation Unplugged. Founded in 2007, One Firefly has quickly became the leading marketing firm specializing within the integrated technology and security space. The One Firefly team work hard to create innovative solutions to help Integrators boost their online presence, such as the elite website solution, Mercury Pro.

Resources and links from the interview

• 8th Habit by Stephen Covey
• Good to Great by Jim Collins
• Just Listen by Mark Goulston
• Breaking the Rules by Kurt Wright
• The "5 Questions"

1.  What is great about what we're going through right now?
2. What's the principle behind that? Why is that great?
3. What does your ideal look like?
4. What's not perfect yet?
5. What resources do I have to make it so?

More Automation Unplugged:

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