IAM1561 – Transformational Coach Empowers Leaders and Achieve Life Goal Potential

Lee Povey is the CEO and Founder of Maximize Your Potential Coaching, as well as the Co-Founder of Coaches Soul. As a previous elite cycling athlete and Olympic Development Program Coach for USA Cycling, and from coaching hundreds of World, National, and Olympic champions, Lee understands the importance of World-Class leadership.

Additionally, Lee has experienced the challenges and financial rewards of business ownership as a Real Estate corporate manager and eventually, the owner of his own real estate firm. Today, Lee provides transformational executive leadership coaching, facilitates leadership groups, and offers workshops for CEOs, Founders of Startups, and Sports Coaches through his two companies.

His mission is to empower and support leaders, executives, and elite coaches in achieving their leadership and life goal potential.

• CEO Story: Lee has always been smart since young though not good at working with others. He evolved to be successful as a corporate real estate agent and thought he could do it better on his own. Lee worked on his own in his mid-20s. Since then he really works hard to work well with others and that's his leadership journey and how he can teach others to work well with others. He admits he messed up so many times, so his journey of making mistakes,  is so he can help other people make fewer mistakes.
• Business Service: Executive and leadership coaching. Consultancy. Workshops.
• Secret Sauce: Helping companies how to get better but dig deeper and unpack the luggage (personal emotional baggage) and get rid of that.
• CEO Hack: 9 box life. fill in what it means to you and what you need to do. Buff and below the line – Below the line is your emotional response. Above the line is what would I like to choose now. Give grace to others.
• CEO Nugget: Humans get more satisfaction by helping and being of service to others.
• CEO Defined: (1) Meeting the people (you work with) where they are, to get the best out of them. (2) Keep looking for the good. Empowers people. Keep working on appreciation and acknowledgment.

Website: www.maximizeyourpotentialcoaching.com

Linkedin: maximize-your-potential-coaching

Instagram: maximizeyourpotentialcoaching

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Transcription

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00:25 – Intro

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful entrepreneur entrepreneurs, startups, and CEOs without listening to a long, long, long interview? If so, you've come to the right place. Gresham Harkness values your time and is ready to share with you precisely the information you're in search of. This is the I Am CEO Podcast.

00:52 – Gresham Harkless

Hello, this is Gresh from the I Am CEO Podcast. I have a very special guest on the show today. I have Lee Povey of Maximize your Potential Coaching. Lee, is excited to have you on the show.

01:04 – Lee Povey

Wonderful to meet you, wonderful to be on your show and as I said, you're offline. I love the T-shirt.

01:11 – Gresham Harkless

Absolutely. I appreciate that. Said they brought back a little nostalgia and I definitely, hopefully, it does that. So before we jumped into the interview, I went to read a little bit more about Lee so you can hear about all the awesome things that he's doing and all the reasons that I love all the awesome work that he's doing. So Lee is the CEO and Founder of Maximize Your Potential Coaching as well as the co-founder of Coaches Soul.

As a previous elite cycling athlete and Olympic developmental program coach for USA Cycling, and from coaching hundreds of world, national, and Olympic champions, Lee understands the importance of world-class leadership. Additionally, Lee has experienced the challenges and financial rewards of business ownership. As a real estate corporate manager and eventually the owner of his own real estate firm.

Today, Lee provides transformational executive leadership coaching, facilitates leadership groups, and offers workshops for CEOs, founders of startups, and sports coaches through his two companies. His mission is to empower and support leaders, executives, and elite coaches in achieving their leadership and life goals potentially again. Excited to have you on the show my friend. Are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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02:19 – Lee Povey

I am.

02:20 – Gresham Harkless

Let's get it started then. So to kind of kick everything off, I wanted to go a little bit farther back. I don't know as far as the shirt, but I wanted to rewind the clock and hear a little bit more about how you got started, what I call your CEO story.

02:31 – Lee Povey

It could actually go back to A shirt. Funny enough, my mom bought me a T-shirt when I was young. I don't remember the No Fair brand and they had a T-shirt. Doesn't play well with others. My mom bought me this T-shirt when I was young. The point of it was I was always very smart. I wasn't necessarily well at it. I wasn't necessarily good at using that smartness in combination with others.

So that involved me doing pretty well in the corporate world, as you said, in a corporate real estate agency, cockily thinking I could do it better and start my own real estate business. From my mid-20s, I worked for myself. Since then, I've spent the rest of my time learning how to really work well with others.

That's kind of been my leadership journey. Now how I can teach other people to work well with others. Because frankly, buddy, I messed it up so many times. I got it wrong so many times. So my journey is one of making all of the mistakes so I can help other people maybe make a few less.

03:36 – Gresham Harkless

I absolutely love that. I love how everything started to be planned with a T-shirt. I'm such a believer in binaries where I feel like in order to experience good, you have to go through bad. Sometimes they experience a great job, you have to have a really bad job. It sounds like not being able to play well with others has kind of catapults you into the ability to be able to empower people to do that.

03:59 – Lee Povey

Yeah. When I think of my own sporting career, it helped me be an awesome coach because I wasn't as good as my peers. So, I mean, I was good. Don't get me wrong, I wasn't an awful athlete. I was good, but I was that 2 or 3% off the very most gifted. So I had to think about what I was doing so much more than them and analyze it so much more. So when I became a coach, I understood the sport better than the more gifted athletes because they just did it.

They got a bike and they could just ride faster than me. I'm trying to figure out every little marginal gain area to be as quick as them. That's even been the same since I started competing again as a masters athlete, 35 plus, and eventually won national titles and medal world titles, won European championships against what I believe were more gifted opponents because I had to out-think them. So I had to out-race them, out-prepare them, and out-think them with the training.

04:55 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, I appreciate you sharing that and you hear that so many times where you try to realize, like, if somebody's the most gifted athlete in the world and whatever sport it might be, you almost act. They're always going to be the best. But it's that mental aspect, it's the tenacity. I think it's the desire to kind of understand the nuances and put in the work that I think obviously translates in sports we see, but I think it translated in so many aspects of life as well, completely.

05:20 – Lee Povey

This is why I've moved into executive and leadership coaching. There's such a big crossover between the two worlds and I'm taking this information backwards and forwards. So what are, what do leaders and CEOs of companies need help with? A lot of it is learning how to handle pressure well. Athletes are awesome at that, and I've got a lot of experience around that, learning how to look after themselves physically so that they can emotionally perform well. Then the biggest part of the work that I do, and this is, I think, what sets my work apart from say, a consultant.

So a consultant comes into a company and says, here are all the things you need to change to do better, and then they leave. The problem is what they don't address is the reason why the company wasn't always doing that. A lot of that is the personal emotional baggage, for want of a better term, of the leaders of the company. You might have a leader who struggles to fire people and therefore can't get the right people in to do the jobs. You might have a leader who's brilliant but can't communicate their message.

They're either shy or introverted or just not very good at communicating verbally or motivating people. So the work I do is look at how companies could be better. But we start with what your stuff that's getting in the way and we call it your survival mechanism. So this is the shield that you've put on as you've gone through life. So to get through your family system, to get through school, to get through all the different jobs you've done to this point.

My job is to help you unpack that get rid of that and just turn up as you are. Because if you're running a company, you're already a brilliant human being. It's helping people to start trusting that trust in their judgment. Be open to feedback, know what feedback to take, and what feedback to put your hand up and go, thank you very much. I'm not Going to take that one on board and just be so much more confident and comfortable in themselves and it's really deep work. We get into some interesting spaces in this work.

07:27 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, that's so powerful. I think that when we first connected and talked offline, I thought that was so powerful the work that you did. I love sports and love the mental as much as the physical and all of that. That's why I love the work that you do because I've always felt like there was a crossover. I love that you see and hear the same way in the work that you do.

Each of those three aspects is powerful that you mentioned that you outlay that you work with, but it almost sounds like that, I guess working through the stuff is somewhat of a foundational thing. It sounds like where those survival mechanisms could kind of come up.

08:03 – Lee Povey

Absolutely. If you don't do that work, it doesn't matter what leadership skills training courses you go on, what books you read, what podcasts you listen to, your stuff's just going to keep getting up in the way. So that's where the real gold is. It's more about who you are rather than what you do. So many people are focused on what I do.

What do I do, how many hours do I work, how good I am? I organize my calendar, so I'm the most efficient human being. That stuff still going to get in the way. Their judgments, their worries, their fears, their story. So. So a good one we explore with everybody, but especially leaders, is stories. So an example of that, is if somebody texts you and says, we need to speak what do you think when you get a text that says we need to speak?

08:54 – Gresham Harkless

Something that's going to be bad and bravo, I don't want to hear it.

08:57 – Lee Povey

Exactly right. So that's a common experience for most people. They get that text, we need to speak. Oh, my God, what have I done wrong? Why is this person angry with me? The text doesn't say that. It just says we need to speak. Then from there, we create a story about the potential and possibilities that might happen. Because we move into fear, we're kind.

09:15 – Gresham Harkless

Of capping our potential, capping that opportunity for us to kind of be our authentic and sometimes our best selves by doing that. So. So I think it's so powerful, all the work that you do. So I wanted to make sure we touched on the different ways that you work with your clients. I know I touched on it. When I read your bio, I just wanted to make sure we didn't miss anything and cover everything. Of course, I think we talked about your secret sauce as well too and your being able to touch on and understand that human aspect of business and make sure that you aren't kind of glossing over that when you're helping to empower your clients.

09:46 – Lee Povey

The deeper work that we do, and I'm not the only person that does, there's many great coaches that do this kind of work. My one is I've done the journey, so I've done it both. I've had my own businesses, I've sold two companies and I've done elite sport and I've coached elite sport. So I've really worked in a very high-pressure environment. Being at a world championships is a pretty high-pressure environment, both as an athlete and coaching athletes at it. Although interestingly, it's also one of the most fun environments.

10:23 – Gresham Harkless

Absolutely appreciate that. I wanted to switch gears a little bit and I wanted to ask you for what I call a CEO hack. You might have already touched on this, but this could be like an app, a book, or a habit that you have. But what's something that makes you more effective and efficient?

10:37 – Lee Povey

So the first one is a really simple exercise I got from a book called Feel the Fear and Do It Anyway. A little bit of a clunky title, put me off reading it for six months. When I read it, I'm like, why did I not read this sooner? Such a good book. It's called a nine Box Exercise. What you do is divide your life into nine boxes. So you put a title in each box so it can be romantic Relationships, friendships, work, career, hobbies. Then under the title, you fill it with, what does that box mean to you and what do you need to do?

When I do this work with people, I really encourage them to make each box very separate. If there's any crossover, combine it and then put something in a different box. The other thing from this is if your career's not going well, or let's say you've broken up with your romantic partner, you can look at this thing and go, well, I've got nine. I've got eight other areas of my life to lean into. So one box is empty right now. Have eight other areas of my life to lean into. My life is not empty.

Then the other one is a concept called above and Below the line. This really describes the work I do. So below the line is Your emotional response to any situation. Somebody cuts you off when you're driving down a road in your car. Most of us have an emotional response to that. We get angry. We might swear, we might flip the bird at them. We have an emotional response. Then above the line is, what would I like to choose to do now? So now if somebody cuts me off in a car, I feel my anger. Why do I film?

Well, because I was scared for a second because I didn't want to die. If somebody gets close to you, you have that initial fear and then it moves to anger. Right. I'm angry at you for putting me in fear. Then the next stage is, how can I give this person grace instead of having the story of this person doing this to me? How can I just accept it's happened? It's got nothing to do with me. It's about them. They could be rushing to the hospital to see a sick relative. They could have just gotten fired and been in an emotional state.

They could just not be paying attention right now. It's got nothing to do with me. So how can I have grace for them? We can take this above and below the line into everything we do in the world. The thing I'd like people to take from this is we will always have a below-the-line reaction to start with, even if it's for a microsecond in any kind of stressful or triggering situation or challenging situation. The emotional response is normal. We need to feel it, don't ignore it. I teach people emotions are data. What does an emotion tell me?

13:13 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, I appreciate you breaking that down.

13:15 – Lee Povey

Studies continually show us that humans get their greatest satisfaction from helping others and being of service to others. Giving gifts gives us much more satisfaction than receiving gifts.

13:27 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, that's so powerful. I almost wonder if that's kind of like your CEO nugget. So is that how you would define, like, what it means to be a CEO? Our goal is to have different quote-unquote CEOs on the show. So being a leader, being able to provide that gold started to provide that leadership. Do you feel like that? What does being a CEO mean to you?

13:45 – Lee Povey

One meeting the people you work with, and you said this just now, where they are the greatest sports coaches I've worked with, that's exactly how they work. The best CEOs that I work with, they're constantly thinking, how do I meet this person to get the most out of them? Not how do I make this person understand me. They're like, how do I understand that person and be on their level, whatever it is, how do I change myself to be effective for them?

Then the other one is to keep looking for the good. I have a sticker on my computer that says, be Ted Lasso. Look for the good. For those of you who haven't seen Ted Lasso the show, is probably the best leadership training show you could watch. The guy is just absolutely fantastic. Series on Apple TV about an American football coach who becomes a soccer coach in the UK, doesn't know the sport, but his leadership is exemplary and he understands how to empower people and he just always looks for the good. You can never appreciate and acknowledge somebody enough.

Just keep doing it, keep working on it. We're always going to have the critiques. Great leaders, they see what needs to be done. They're always going to have the critiques. So just keep working on that appreciation and acknowledgement.

14:56 – Gresham Harkless

Absolutely appreciate that definition and of course, I appreciate your time even more. So what I want to do now is pass you the mic, so to speak, just to see if there's anything additional that you can let our readers and listeners know and of course, how best people could get a hold of you. Find out about all the awesome things that you're working on.

15:11 – Lee Povey

Thank you, mate. Come find me. Maximize your potential coaching on all of the social media channels and LinkedIn. Do you work? Do your work. It's okay to have a coach, it's okay to have a therapist. It's okay to be in groups. Do your work. I wouldn't be living in an apartment with a sea view in California with a great wife and a wonderful relationship. If I have not done my work. I would be bitter and unhappy and still think it was about what I was achieving rather than what I was experiencing. So don't be afraid to do your work.

15:45 – Gresham Harkless

I absolutely love that. To make it even easier, we're going to have the links and information in the show notes and I love that last aspect of doing the work. I think doing that work means a lot of times delving deeper and having those conversations, getting people that have the expertise, like yourself to really have that magnifying glass and actually understand what we're doing, but also why we're doing it, which is probably even more important. So thank you so much again, Lee, and I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

16:09 – Lee Povey

Thank you, brother. Great to meet you.

16:11 – Outro

Thank you for listening to The I Am CEO podcast, powered by CB Nation and Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at Imceo Co. I am CEO is not just a phrase, it's a community. Be sure to follow us on social media and subscribe to our podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts and everywhere you listen to podcasts. Subscribe and leave us a five-star rating. This has been the Imceo Podcast with Gresham Harkless Jr. Thank you for listening.

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