There’s a moment every coach, every leader, and even every person on Earth loves to feel:
The breakthrough.
When we break through something, we have the chance to move onto something greater.
To change who and what we are.
To step into our greatness and live life according to our primary purpose.
This happens personally and to us on a business level.
But it doesn’t come easy.
If breakthroughs were easy to do, they would happen all the time. They wouldn’t feel so special and game-changing.
There’s a resistance there. And many people feel this roof of resistance, and they shy away from it.
It’s too hard. It’s tough.
You’re right. It is for most people.
But you’re not most people. You’re a leader in your home service industry or whatever business you’re in.
And today, I’m excited to talk to you about how to break through the roof of resistance and change your life and business for the better.
Let’s not waste any time, my friends.
The Lid Of Leadership
I’ve had multiple clients lately who have been hitting their head as we dive deeper into specific home service scenarios and things that we talk about in-home service and things that I hear from clients.
I want you to think about your roof of resistance.
Maxwell wrote about the lid of leadership. I prefer the term roof.
I was first exposed to leadership lids by Gerber back in the day.
One of my mentors, Dan Sullivan, talks about the ceiling of complexity.
There are a lot of different names for this same idea.
We do quite a bit of work with clients around that.
And so today, I’m calling it the roof of resistance based on some recent conversations that I’ve had.
I want to share a story that I had recently with a client.
Let’s go for a little journey together real quick, and then I’m going to give you four ways to help you break through this roof of resistance.
Our Fallacies Around Resistance And Breakthrough
The biggest fallacy is that we think that we will get to a certain level, and the resistance will go away.
The resistance will always be there, but the reward will be there too, right along with it.
Imagine you were on a pulley system and you were getting pulled up and hitting your head each time you hit a new floor.
It’s kind of what happens with your leadership capability.
As you scale your business, the breakthroughs happen, and the resistance changes to something else.
When I had a team of 10 people in my HVAC business, the resistance was different than what I have now coached hundreds and thousands of leadership clients over the years.
But it’s always there.
Many of you reading are just like me, where I didn’t have a lot of formal training or formal education.
I didn’t know what I didn’t know about leadership.
I did know what I did know.
And a lot of that was from parenting, from peers, from previous experience that created my beliefs, how I saw previous bosses treat me and those around me.
And you know, one of the reasons that I launched this brand of me as Kenny Chapman, the leadership coach and speaker, and one of the reasons that we even went deeper into home service with it now is to share openly without calling clients out.
I just want to help you get better by understanding your peers are going through some of the same things.
You’re not alone out there.
My friend, that’s why we want to play together here in this community.
My Plumbing Client’s Story
I just want to go on a quick little journey.
This particular client’s in the plumbing space.
They primarily do residential repair and replacement, but they’ve decided and executed a relatively quick scale-up process.
They’re in the process of scaling up from about 2 million to 6 million in six months. They’re scaling like crazy.
And this is a company that went through some growing pains as they started this quest of massive scale-up, and they decided to set a new budget and bring some people in who know how to get this kind of thing done better.
If you’ve read or listened or seen me speak before, you know one of my key sayings is “Who before how and after why.”
We teach clients that it’s more important to have the right “who” first.
Now don’t get me wrong. The right systems and plans are also critical, but if you don’t have the right people or the right training for your team, it’ll never work to the potential it could.
You and I both know that the quality of what you get done daily is the quality of the team that you have.
They decided they were going to scale up from a talent acquisition standpoint.
And they went through, and they were building a progressive, great company.
All of a sudden, they lost six people in a week.
The sky was falling for this company.
All this profit and scaling and they lost six people.
I remember the airport I was in when I got the call and a lot of challenge and a lot of pain and struggle.
Were they failing? Did they make a mistake?
There was some degree of resistance to the scaling.
That’s the sign you’re on the verge of a breakthrough.
Everything Is Information
Here’s the reality: Everything is just information.
There’s no such thing as failure.
In the trades, guess what?
You’re going to fail all the time.
Your teams out there are failing; your salespeople are failing.
Why? Because they don’t have a hundred percent conversion rates.
Your CSRs are failing on the phone when they’re not closing.
Sounds ridiculous, right?
How is not achieving perfection “failing?” But really, this is what many of us are expecting.
Let’s change how we look at this.
There’s no such thing as failure.
We don’t close every deal, but the world says that’s a failure.
So I believe in information.
And I just believe that sometimes we get the result that we want.
We are trained to believe success is hitting some benchmark or goal we’ve set.
And if we don’t get the result we want, we have this knee-jerk reaction of a feeling of failure.
As leaders, you might be able to relate, my friend.
Are we not hard on ourselves?
As we look back in hindsight, losing six team members in a week was the best thing that happened to this company.
It wasn’t a failure. It was the pain of growth.
It’s a breakthrough.
They learned from the process, from the resistance, and now they have a 110% better process and stronger team than they ever could have had before.
One Roof After Another
Here’s the roof of resistance when I’m doing all things for all people.
Well, there’s a roof of resistance.
As soon as I breakthrough that roof and went to floor two, I learned some more things.
I can develop some new capabilities.
I created more capacity because I offloaded some things.
But with that, now boom! There’s another level of resistance.
We take the elevator up.
And now we’re on floor three.
Now I’m only the office and the service manager.
I go on up, and I’m the office manager.
Now I’m handing that off, and I’m only really focused on marketing or whatever that looks like.
What about you?
This isn’t about my client.
This is a hundred percent about you.
Where are you able to see yourself anywhere in that story?
Regardless of whether you’re plumbing, regardless of the trade you provide, I want you to think about where you are hitting resistance.
What are you bumping your head on?
4 Easy Ways To Break Through Resistance
Let’s run through this four-step process. This helps me and has helped countless others I’ve worked with reach their potential by getting through resistance, breaking through to our primary purpose, and realizing our greatness.
#1 Identify Your Internal Resistance
If you’re at the roof of resistance or approaching the roof of resistance, what is the internal resistance you have?
Because there’s internal and external.
We start with internal meaning:
- Do I have a lack of commitment?
- Am I afraid of something?
- What is it I’m afraid of?
- Do I lack confidence?
- Do I lack passion?
Honor your truth.
If you don’t have the passion, this resistance points you toward a breakthrough in another area.
Not everyone’s roof is the same.
I’m not passionate at all about social media, but I’m super passionate about relationships and connecting with people.
And I don’t love that other people hold the algorithm to who I get to connect with, when, and how, and all that type of crap.
But what I do know is it’s a world that we play in right now.
#2 What’s Your External Resistance?
What are your life and business things outside of your direct control resisting the breakthrough or the change?
This is external resistance. Yes, you may have some “control” over what happens with a person or event, but I’m talking about things that don’t come directly from inside you.
Is there external resistance in that you don’t have the right people?
Or maybe you have the right person, but they’re not getting it done?
Are you missing a strategy?
Is there something missing there?
Take a look at what is causing the resistance outside you.
If you can realize and work around or, rather, redirect your internal resistance, you’re golden.
You will break through.
Your business will progress to the next level.
But now, the issue becomes dealing with the external resistance.
What’s blocking you from taking the next step outside of yourself?
Is it money? Budget? Training? People? Resources?
#3 Schedule A Strategy Session For Yourself
I’m a big fan of self-strategy sessions.
My mentor, Keith Cunningham, calls it “thinking time” in the great book, The Road Less Stupid.
Spending time with him and reading his book taught me so much about implementing plans and not ideas to change my life.
And this is where I came up with my twist on his idea called the self-strategy session.
Review your commitment levels.
What do you want to go do?
How do you think we can step through the resistance or align ourselves to the resistance we’re ready to tackle?
I want you to schedule a time to do this.
I have time budgeted in my day for this sort of thing. You need to as well.
I strongly encourage writing down what you learn.
If you’ve read or listened to me, you’ll know I’m a big advocate for journaling.
#4 Action Item Lists
Every one of these steps needs to be here, but so many people skip this step.
Make an actionable item list.
Steps you can do now, or you can start now.
It’s different than a to-do list.
This is something you will do. Not when you get to it.
You will do it.
Put them in order of importance and the order you’ll tackle them.
Put down exactly what you’ll do, when you’ll do it, who needs to be part of it, etc.
It’s not a simple “Grow my team to include 10 more technicians.”
Be specific.
Make plans.
Final Thoughts
Put these together. Look at your internal resistance, external resistance, schedule a self-strategy session to think and reflect, and make an action item list.
Now move.
You are breaking through the roof of resistance.
That’s what we’re here to talk about.
We’re cracking that code of the driven mind.
Now go breakthrough, and make it a better-than-fantastic day!