IAM1264 – CEO and Coach Helps Clients Re-align to a Right Mindset

Kirsten Franklin is a self-proclaimed recovering attorney who turned successful entrepreneur and coach. She has worked with over 1000 high-level CEOs, Founders, and Professional Athletes helping them to master the mindset and skills necessary to get things done build the businesses, and create the life they aspire to.

• CEO Story: After leaving the real state business she first built, Kirsten moved on and built the first legal recruiting company which was completely remote.
• Business Service: Helping her clients find the right solution to their problems. MVP – mindset to execute. vibration and process.
• Secret Sauce: The level of understanding of other people with no judgment.
• CEO Hack: It’s not the book that you read but the ability to empathize with other people.
• CEO Nugget:  Helping clients stand on their own. Enhancing the ability to give to her clients.
• CEO Defined: Driving leadership. Being apathetic. A global view, understanding the oneness. Communication is the key.

Website: www.kirstenfranklin.com

LinkedIn: @kirsten-franklin

Facebook: ThriveTribeGlobal

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Transcription

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00:17 – Intro

Do you want to learn effective ways to build relationships, generate sales, and grow your business from successful 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.

00:42 – Gresham Harkless

Hello. Hello. Hello. This is Gresh from the I AM CEO podcast. I have a very special guest on the show today Kirsten Franklin of kirstenfranklin.com. Kirsten, it's great to have you on the show.

00:53 – Kirsten Franklin

Thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here.

00:55 – Gresham Harkless

Yes, definitely excited to have you on to hear about all the awesome things that you're doing. But before we do that, I want to read a little bit more about Kirsten so you hear about some of those awesome things. And Kirsten is a recovering attorney, turned successful entrepreneur, as well as a life and business coach. She has worked with over a thousand high-level C-suite executives, founders, and professional athletes. She's best known for her rapid transformations and for helping high achievers hit their next level. Kirsten, super excited to have you on the show here a little bit more about that next level. Are you ready to speak to the I AM CEO community?

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01:26 – Kirsten Franklin

I am super excited. I'm ready. Let's go.

01:28 – Gresham Harkless

Let's make it happen then. So to kind of kick everything off, I know I touched on them a little bit, but I wanted to rewind the clock, and hear a little bit more about how you got started, what I call your CEO story.

01:37 – Kirsten Franklin

Yeah, man. So everything's a journey. I had left the practice of law and started a title company. I've always been entrepreneurial. But I did it at a time where one, real estate was booming, it was Miami, and then it was crashing, right? So I thought I was the smartest person on the planet running this business, making hand-over-fist money, and then nothing. I also happened to have been pregnant with my first and only child as a single parent. So everything kind of crashed at once. It caused me to become homeless and a lot of self-reflection, and a lot of work were being done at that time. But as I came out of it, I ended up building another business.

It was the very first legal recruiting company that was fully remote. And I did that because I had a very specific need. And I wanted to be there for my child. Show up, drop them off, pick them up, know their friends, do the thing. And I couldn't do that because all of the traditional recruiting companies were like a ball and chain to the desk. I was very good at what I did, but I was losing out because I was taking my daughter to school. I was picking her up at 02:00, and 03:00 in the afternoon. Right.

And so I, you can't bring your three-year-old or four-year-old back to the office. Yet I had all this time that I could have been productive and it wasn't working for me. I figured if this happened to me, it's got to be having the others. And, you know, that was that was actually the catalyst that taught me how to actually be a CEO. The first company, I was just a business owner, nothing. But this one really showed me the love of what I love to do, which is building businesses, but really flip on that mindset, that mindset shift of being the leader, being the CEO.

03:15 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, that makes so much sense. And I love how you said everything is a journey. I think so many times throughout, you know, life and definitely throughout our businesses, sometimes we forget about that, you know, that journey piece. But, you know, it's great to kind of hear, you know, obviously, sorry, you know, everything that happened, but it sounds like you were able to recover and come back. It sounds like even stronger as a result of those experiences.

03:35 – Kirsten Franklin

Oh, for sure. I mean, if I hadn't gone through that, I just wouldn't be so aware and have knowledge, not just of the difficulty that other single parents go through, but I was fortunate enough, I have a massive network, friends, family, but anybody else coming out of homelessness, right? And as a vet myself, you see the large population of the homeless are veterans because people don't understand PTSD and other things.

And it just opened up my eyes, even people coming out of incarceration. If you don't have money, you don't have paperwork, how do you get an ID? How do you get a job? And then what? You have to show up. It's craziness, but it opened up my eyes in a big way. And it has been massively helpful for me and my empathy and my sight of humanity, right, on this planet. So yeah.

04:21 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, you definitely said a really strong word, which is empathy and getting to kind of understand and realize that. And I imagine that anytime anybody's going through any difficult situations, And of course, thank you for your service, being a veteran and those veterans are coming back potentially dealing with issues, PTSD and things like that. I imagine that you have that isolated feeling where you feel like you're by yourself, feel like no one knows what you're going through, but I appreciate you for one, bringing light to that, but 2, understanding how you can potentially do your part to kind of help with that.

04:53 – Kirsten Franklin

Yeah, and this is true actually for everybody. You know, I work with professional athletes when they leave the game, there is a level of depression. Guys, When you become CEO when you become a founder, there's this level of whether it's real or perceived, and it's probably both, right? In this level of isolation, you are now by yourself. Even if you have co-founders building this business, you know, your little pod might be isolated. As a CEO, if you're a minority female or just it's a new thing to you. You've never been CEO before you've never been C-suite. There's absolutely it's the same thing. It might be a different level of right a different impact, but it's the same thing that we all go through.

05:31 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. And you kind of alluded to, I'm guessing, one of the ways that you kind of help people out with that. I think you mentioned the mindset piece and flipping that switch and changing that. Is that a little bit about how you work with your clients and how you make that impact?

05:45 – Kirsten Franklin

Yeah, so I'm going to get a little floofy here, but I really believe in a method that I've coined MVP. So it's mindset, vibration, and processes. Everything starts that way. Your mindset, your thoughts, everything that is the number one thing without that. I don't care what kind of process you have. I don't care what kind of process you have, I don't care what kind of knowledge you have if you don't have the mindset to execute the mindset to live into that, it's going to be a bumpy road.

Right. And you could, you know, when people talk about self-sabotage, or people talk about, ooh, these blocks, All you're talking about is that there is a thought process, a belief, whether you're aware of it or not, that is causing these things either to happen or the manner in which you're reacting, which might end up a spiral downward versus expanding and going upward, right? So, you know, you've been involved with startups. It's a crazy hurricane. I don't care who you are, but the manner in which you react or respond to that makes all the difference, and that's within your mindset.

06:45 – Gresham Harkless

Absolutely. No, I love that. And so was there anything additional that you want to kind of touch on how you serve your clients, anything about your book or anything there, but also like, what do you feel like is your secret sauce and the thing you feel kind of sets you apart and makes you unique?

06:58 – Kirsten Franklin

So yeah, you know, over time, I think the thing that sets me apart is this really interesting level of understanding I have of people and I really come from a place of non-judgment. People tend to be shocked when they talk to me, whether you're a professional athlete, the garbage man, you know, the homeless guy on the beach, you know, everyone's very shocked at that and that's just, that's always been me. And I've also developed that even further as I've matriculated through life and as I've studied with some of the best people. John Asrath, Tony Robbins, Brendan Burchard, all of these high performers that have a certain, and do I agree with all of it? Yes, no, whatever. The beauty of life is you take what works for you, you take what you need and keep going.

I think one of the questions that we were going to discuss is, you know, kind of like what would be the sort of book or something, and all of them, honestly, when a book gets recommended to me, whether I feel it or not, I will read it because it causes me to have a different perspective. And that's what I want. The people in my network, they're not like me because if I have a bunch of people like me, I will never see beyond me. And this is what I do as a coach, right? Whether it's, you know, you're a professional boxer about to get in the ring and you're having a bout of anxiety and you know you're going to lose because you can't get rid of it, right, you call me up, 15 minutes, we're done, you're good, you're out there winning.

Whether it's the fact that you know you could be more productive or you know you have so much more to achieve and something's not happening, right, People come to me for that as well. And then there's always, you know, it's people who want to separate life and business. It's you have one life. Your business is a part of that. It's all universal, right? Just like we are, you know, whether you get that or not, We are all one, right? That homeless guy on the street or girl, that's a part of you manifesting, okay? And that's why your business looks the way it looks. Starbucks boomed, why? Because they understood that. They understood that it's every level, right? And they understood how that bleeds out into branding.

So they used to be super happy Starbucks employees, right? And all of that, right? And all the catering to the customer. But that's, you know, it's a oneness. And I think That's what's unique about what I do and how I help my clients, not just build businesses, but they come out, oh my God, I didn't get divorced and we're actually having a good time. My kids love me again, like, you know, because it's all, it's you. You are the common denominator in your life. So if things are not going the way you want, self-reflect because you're the only common thing in that scenario.

09:35 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. And I believe that, you know, even Gandhi, you know, had a quote, you know, in order to change the world, a lot of times you have to start with changing yourself. And I think so many times we're looking externally for those, you know, solutions, the things that how we can adjust and change it. But I love everything related to what you do because I think so many times we, especially during these times, it's so divisive where I'm not that person, that person's better than or that person's worse. There's so much that we don't realize the oneness of even who we are.

A lot of times when you get to hear people's stories, you get to hear the struggles that they're going through that you alluded to, while it might be quote-unquote packaged differently the essence is to struggle and understand how you can work through those things to get to where you want to be. That's something that we all want to, you know, do and have value. So I love that you're able to kind of, for lack of a better term, distill down that's the essence of the humanist that we forget in businesses and even in life at that.

10:28 – Kirsten Franklin

Right. And that's what makes a good CEO, right? That, you know, if you want to be the best CEO, it's not about the book that tells you, you know, do this, do that, do this. No, it's actually about your personal development, your ability to empathize your ability. And don't get me wrong, I'm not talking about the level of empathy where you keep on people who are not benefiting your company because the truth is you're not benefiting them either. I actually recently joined a non-profit organization and we cut everybody loose it was a very hard thing to do for some people but I understood exactly what we were doing. And, and, you know, you can't build the base and this happens for a lot of, first-time or second-time founders or business owners if you have a really good heart and you want to give everybody an opportunity.

But sometimes at the start, that's not the point at which you have the ability to do that. Now, once you've built your organization and you have a whole machine running, yeah, you can take time with certain individuals and foster them more, right? If they're having problems, you can help take care of that with them. But it's not at the beginning when you need the people who actually can execute work and have the knowledge to get things done. But yeah, so yeah, it's definitely a lot of self-work to be one of the top leaders.

11:53 – Gresham Harkless

Nice, I appreciate that. And especially, of course, hearing about the hack and understanding how to read all the books and the things, but would you consider that? And it sounds like a CEO nugget, I would say, which is kind of like a word of wisdom or a piece of advice. Is it that I think so many times, especially as leaders, you wanna help out, you wanna help out so many people, but it kind of goes back to the old adage of, is your oxygen mask on?

Is the business, the organization, or yourself in the right place? So that not taking away from the ability that you have to give, but actually enhancing the ability to give because you're able to give so much better and stand on your ones and twos to be able to do that. Do you think that's part of your- 1000%?

12:29 – Kirsten Franklin

Yes, 1000%, sure.

12:33 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. So I wanted to ask you now my absolute favorite question, which we kind of touched on maybe a little bit, which is the definition of what it means to be a CEO. We're hoping to have different quote-unquote CEOs on this show. So Kristen, what does being a CEO mean to you?

12:46 – Kirsten Franklin

For me, it's leadership. It's driving leadership. It's being empathetic. It has a global view. It's understanding the oneness because your job is to not just motivate, but motivate in a very sort of directed way, like right with a certain goal. And yeah, I think that's, you know, for me, it comes down to leadership, and all those things I said after that word are what I believe makes a leader a leader.

13:15 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, and I appreciate you giving that kind of holistic perspective on leadership as well too because I think so many times we can be very close-minded or in a closed box maybe limiting might be a better word to say related to what leadership looks like it's not just telling somebody do x y and z it's understanding the humanists of what people are doing is understand the mission is understanding all the quote-unquote cogs of life that we have that are in alignment with the oneness of the mission that we're hoping to accomplish.

13:42 – Kirsten Franklin

Yeah. And you know, here's something to reflect on too, is communication. But communication, again, the number one thing is awareness because you have to be aware of how you come off to others and how you are communicating so that they truly understand where you're going and they can buy into it and then, you know, motivate and get things done. So communication is key too.

14:06 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. And the big part of it is it's not just talking as far as communication, it's also listening and being able to kind of have that back and forth and that engagement and that understanding along the way.

14:16 – Kirsten Franklin

Yep, 100% sure.

14:18 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome. Well, Kirsten truly appreciates that definition, that perspective. And of course, I appreciate your time even more. What I wanted to do now was 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 can get a hold of you. Find out about all the awesome things that you're working on and of course, get a copy of your book.

14:37 – Kirsten Franklin

Awesome. Yeah, you can find me at kirstenfranklin.com. You can find me, the best place to reach me is actually on LinkedIn. You can find out a little bit more about my background what I do and what I'm working on these days. Tons of startups going on, and a lot of philanthropic work as well. But yeah, I mean, the best place to reach me is at LinkedIn or kirstenfranklin.com. And you can follow it, I actually have a podcast as well. It's called Girl on Fire. And the book is the book.

The book was actually written for my clients. So you could grab it. I'm sure you can understand it. I'm sure it's beneficial. But yeah, you can find me on Facebook as well. And you can actually enter my private group, which is Thrive Tribe Global. And it's a free group, it's private, and we discuss a lot of things there as well. So I can give you some free advice there.

15:27 – Gresham Harkless

Yeah, absolutely. And I think the quote that always comes to mind is that you can see so much further by standing on the shoulders of giants. I think Einstein said that and I appreciate you giving that free advice and that knowledge because that only allows us to again lean on each other but also to see so much further and to progress you know within our businesses or in our organizations.

15:45 – Kirsten Franklin

Yep absolutely.

15:46 – Gresham Harkless

Awesome. Awesome. Awesome and of course to make it even easier we'll have the links and information in the show notes so everybody can get ahold of you, Christian, and hear about all the awesome things you're doing. But I appreciate you so much for your time, and the awesomeness that you're doing, and I hope you have a phenomenal rest of the day.

15:59 – Kirsten Franklin 

Thank you. And thank you so much for having me. It's been a real pleasure.

16:02 – Outro

Thank you for listening to the I AM CEO Podcast powered by Blue 16 Media. Tune in next time and visit us at iamceo.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 iTunes Google Play and everywhere you listen to podcasts, SUBSCRIBE, and leave us a five-star rating grab CEO gear at www.ceogear.co. This has been the I AM CEO Podcast with Gresham Harkless. Thank you for listening.

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