Becoming an Effective Leader
Episode 922: Becoming an Effective Leader, with Tevis Trower
Becoming an effective leader can be attributed to many different things. Tevis Trower will teach you the steps to becoming an effective leader.
Tevis Trower is the founder and CEO of Balance Integration Corporation, focused on helping build corporate cultures that allow employees to thrive. Their remarkable client list includes companies like Google, Yahoo, Disney, Viacom, AOL, Soros, Bloomberg, Morgan Stanley, and more. Tevis is considered a pioneer and leader in the field of cultural transformation at work, with significant expertise in imposter syndrome, trust, innovation, emotionally sustainable leadership, and fostering an environment of resilience. She has been featured in prominent media outlets such as Forbes, Business Week, Fortune CIO, The New York Post, Yoga Journal and many more.
Early in Tevis’s business career, she recognized that there is a need for more human-focused leadership in today’s business world. Many companies say “people are their most valuable asset,” but not enough companies focus on creating powerful people-focused cultures that allow their employees to shine. Tevis believes that the key to becoming an effective leader is to recognize and embrace the reality that you bring your whole self to work, both your strengths and your weaknesses.
Tevis sees imposter syndrome as a sort of “default human state” that we all experience, created by our fear of failure and our strong need for success. She believes that what pushes many high performers to succeed is not a desire to win but a drive to avoid failure and the stigma associated with it. In her work, she helps people recognize their focus on the things that create discontent rather than the things that bring them joy, and she helps them reconnect with their heart and with the things they love.
What you will learn from this episode about becoming an effective leader:
- How Tevis’s upbringing taught her the value of curiosity and how she realized the importance of leadership engagement
- What are the smart ways of becoming an effective leader without compromising your company and the team
- Why imposter syndrome is a common problem in the C-suite that often affects the people we least expect
- Why Tevis started her company in 2002, and how the needs of her clients caused the company to evolve its focus to culture and wellness
- How, after seventeen years in business, Tevis realized that something was missing from the work she and her team were doing, and what eye-opening realizations she had
- Why Tevis realized the most important contribution she could make to her team was to back up and let them work through their own realizations about what needed to change
- Why employees want their leaders to be vulnerable, human, and unpolished and want to feel a sense that their own voice is helping shape their company
- Why people are trained their whole lives to believe that they don’t have a role in shaping the culture around them and why this creates blind spots in leaders
- Why getting input from your team doesn’t mean that you are an indecisive leader and why that input can be a powerful resource for your business
- Why self-awareness at work helps you further your leadership growth and form stronger relationships with the people around you
- How you could start becoming an effective leader that your team is going to love
Resources:
- Website: www.balanceintegration.com
- Twitter: @corporateyogi
- LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/tevistrower/
- LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/company/balance-integration-corporation/
- Start becoming an effective leader through some guidance and mentorship
Additional Resources:
- Sell With Authority by Drew McLellan and Stephen Woessner: https://amzn.to/39y7x13
- Predictive ROI Free Resource Library: https://predictiveroi.com/resources/
- Stephen Woessner’s LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/in/stephenwoessner/
- Listen to a related podcast about becoming an effective leader from our guest, Yigal Adato
Becoming an Effective Leader: Full Episode Transcript
Get ready to find your recipe for success from America’s top business owners here at Onward Nation with your host, Stephen Woessner.
Good morning. I’m Stephen Woessner, CEO of Predictive ROI and your host for Onward Nation, where I interview today’s top business owners so we can learn their recipe for success, how they built and how they scaled their business. Now, my Predictive ROI team, we’re recently rebuilding, continuing to scale and advance our free resources section. In fact, it’s turning into more of a resource library on PredictiveROI.com.
So if you haven’t visited our resource library, I would highly encourage you to do so. Like if you haven’t been there in a couple of weeks or a month or so, I would highly encourage you to do so because we just added, I think at last count, five new ebooks, a couple of checklists. The resources are becoming even more abundant than ever.
So these are real insights that we have compiled from the brilliant expertise and experience that our guests have shared over the last nearly a thousand episodes. So go to PredictiveROI.com/Resources. Whatever you request, we will send it right to your inbox.
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Becoming an Effective Leader: Tevis Trower’s Introduction
Before we welcome today’s guest, Tevis Trower. Let me share some additional context. So when Tevis and I have been going back and forth over the last 18 months or so, getting our schedules aligned and learning more about each other, and when we first crossed paths and I’m like, oh my gosh, Tevis, you have got to join Onward Nation and share some of these brilliant insights.
So let me give you some additional context. Why, when she said yes, I’m like, oh, this is going to be awesome. So she is the founder and the CEO of Balance Integration Corporation, and she is what I would consider to be a pioneer in optimizing corporate cultures. So some of the things that we’re going to really shine a light on today, Onward Nation are the things that, you know, oftentimes when you’re the owner of a B2B service business, you tend to be selling some of those things that you should also be doing for yourself.
Like if you’re an agency owner, are you also running those same types of marketing campaigns for your own agency as you’re recommending for clients? Are you doing the same video work? If you’re a PR shop, are you doing those things? If you’re an HR consultant, are you also doing those things well? Tevis and her team over the last 18 months really dialed in.
The whole mission, vision, values, purpose, strategy, work and really started doing that hard work because they knew it needed to be done and in really taking their own medicine. And we’re going to talk about that. Why she felt that was so important. But then also and I love this provocative view that she has on employee engagement, I think we all hear about employee engagement and how it’s so high.
We see those Gallup studies and other studies every year and it’s staggering. But yet she has this provocative view of how it’s not necessarily employee engagement, where it’s actually leadership engagement. We’re going to talk about that because I think that’s going to be super, super helpful for you Onward Nation. So without further ado, welcome to Onward Nation, Tevis.
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Becoming an Effective Leader: Tevis’ Path and Journey
Stephen, thank you so much for having me.
Oh my gosh. Thank you very much for saying yes. Really looking forward to this conversation for the reasons that I just mentioned, as well as many others before we dive in, though. I mean, there’s so much to your background and so much to your journey and path. So take us first behind the curtain and tell us more about you.
Obviously, you’ve accomplished some really impressive things in your business and the clients that you work for, but that’s only a portion of the story. So tell us more about you. Your path, your journey, and then we’ll dive in. Oh my goodness. Well, thank you so much. Yeah. I think the quote I like to give people is, the hippie chick who went to business school, right.
I’m the kid who grew up with a stutter, who became a multilingual presenter to thousands. Right. The former U.S. Army reservist who happens to be a beauty school dropout, which I am so many. I think a lot of us embody, so many paradoxes. And, when I think back to my journey and what’s led me to do the kind of work that we do, balance integration, I think it really is those paradoxes that allow us to back up and see the big picture.
My dad was a Montessori teacher. My mom was kind of a mystic. And I grew up in an environment that really fostered a spirit of curiosity and inquiry, but also a love for humanity, for learning, for work, for participation, for creativity and, when I, surprised everyone in my family by going to business school were like, what is right?
Yeah. Aren’t you going to get a Ph.D.? I have always been that person who can fall in love with an experience. And when I went to boot camp, I was absolutely terrified. I knew I’d be out of my element, and I fell in love with it. And I think that that’s what has made our work actually effective is based on this conviction that when you move into any culture, right.
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Becoming an Effective Leader: Ascending the Corporate Ladder
We had beauty school, right? Be it the US Army Reserves be a business school. Right. That when you move into a culture, if you can move into it with eyes of compassion and with a mindset that is of curiosity, it’s not so hard to fall in love with it, right? It’s not so hard to see why it is the way it is, and to appreciate how it’s unfolded, the way it’s unfolded.
And so that’s pretty much how I landed, at the tender age of 33. I had worked in a ton of mega corporations, a couple of really impressive startups. And, I start scratching my head going gosh, what is going on? That when you get on the elevator, the steps and the C-suite won’t make eye contact, but the cleaning lady will, right?
And that’s what kind of cast me off on this journey. Well, it’s a cool journey, but that’s that really, I suspect if I’m tracking with you that really sort of sparked your using your word curiosity for, okay, what’s up with the culture where that is not happening. Like why is that. Because that’s almost like divisive or what is divisive.
This isn’t it. Well, it feels that way. Absolutely. It lands that way. But I think that if you look at, what happens to a lot of people as they ascend the corporate ladder or the ladder of whatever power structure they’re participating in? I mean, it’s no joke or it’s a commonly held joke.
I should say that amongst CEOs, the conversation about feeling isolated, wondering if you’re equal to the task. Really some very deep, but also very normal human, second guessing. Right. And insecurities. I’ve done a lot of talking about imposter syndrome amongst high performers. Right. People who we don’t expect it from people with salt and pepper hair who wear Brooks Brothers.
Right. But I think that when we understand that what it takes to ascend these ladders is oftentimes the same kind of formulaic, conformity thinking like, can I fit in point one and then can I win? Right. Point two is exactly the type of worldview that keeps us from feeling able to show our humanity to others.
So spot on. And I love the work and the talks that you have given around imposter syndrome, that topic because, you know, every single person has been affected by it, either affected by it or continues to be. It’s a very real thing. And it’s now interesting how it changes our behavior. And so I’m looking forward to us chatting about that.
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Becoming an Effective Leader: How The Business Started
But let’s go to one of the things that you shared with me in the green room when you’re, when I was asking you a little bit more about, like, some of the new things that are gone on your business and when you mentioned, like the hard work around vision, purpose, strategy, like, I mean, that gets, you know, like me personally excited because I love that type of work.
So why did you feel like as the owner of the business, why did you feel like that was so important, to start doing that hard work and I shouldn’t say start because I know that that’s been an important piece. But why did you put such an emphasis on that? It was such a great question, and I have been humbled by this process.
I’ve had to learn where, I’m completely full of it. Right. It’s. And, so we’ve been in business since 2002, and our trajectory began as being a corporate, cultural transformation company. Right. And the world wasn’t really ready for this at that point. You can think back to 2002. The economy was in a ditch, so I quit my job.
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Becoming an Effective Leader: Serving Clients The Right Way
Then my mom seriously thought I was just insane, right, to quit my job and start a company. So we started really humbly, just kind of, teaching some transformational tools, some mindfulness work, some self-inquiry, some yoga and breathwork, etc. just from the resiliency perspective. And found ourselves pulled by clients and having more and more earnest conversations about shifting culture, which just delighted me.
This was before there were graduate programs and authentic leadership. Like not everyone was a coach. About two out of four people were coaches, as opposed to four out of four, which things like. Yeah, but so these were early days and we evolved through this trajectory of doing this earnest work. And then we got pulled into wellness.
Right? Because everyone needed help, shifting their culture to include provisions for employees to know how to take care of themselves and be supported in doing so. Okay. And, that was a place where it was a lot easier for us to get in and serve there, because it was a buzzword, and the president’s safe way was going around scaring the pants off of everyone.
Or the socks, I should say, these days, or scaring the socks off of everyone, around, employees, health care costs, etc. and so we have ridden the wave, right. And I want to give you this context because at each of these evolutions, there was awareness, there was talking to the team, there was really a conversation about, is this a rightful way for us to be serving?
How do we go about doing this? How do we scale it? Does this call on our skill sets? Do we need new skill sets by bringing people in or training? And so when you’ve done that for 18 years, right, and you’ve worked with a stable of clients that tell you that you have made some positive impact.
It’s really a frightening thing to wake up one morning after 17 years and say, this doesn’t feel right. Wow. And so I did some soul searching, right? I was right on the cusp of my 50th birthday, and had to kind of back off and say, why doesn’t this feel right? What, what truth are we not telling?
Right? What skills are we not using? Where are we playing small? Where are we dumbing down? Right. And what was interesting about it is I had just completed a lot of CEO roundtable type things like, like the vestige groups and some, some of the leadership academies. They were very, very patriarchal, right. Even with some transformational tools, folded in a lot of the language was around.
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Becoming an Effective Leader: Driving Your Business Towards The Right Path
You’re the CEO. You need to just drive this right? Part of what I realized, I’ve got a small team, right? A part of what I realized is that I was very clear through this soul searching. It took me all of about a day or two to get clear on what truths we weren’t telling. Where we were playing small and what conversations we needed to, grow into it, and start to approach.
And but part of what I realized is that I could have told my team, this is where we’re going, and they would have done so, but they would not have done so with a sense of ownership. They would not have done so with a sense of having organically arrived at an awareness that gave them the gravitas to move into the level of service I was asking them to.
And so we literally went through an 18 month process to really look at what is our vision, what are our values and our purpose. Who do we want to be serving? What’s been satisfying? Let’s look at our track record. Where have we had an impact? I don’t want to get out of bed if I’m not going to have an impact.
And I want that impact to be positive, right. So, really asking the team to do a lot of soul searching about what they had seen, over the years of working with us. And over these 18 months, we ended up in such a place that it wasn’t just my vision, right? It wasn’t just me saying, oh, come on, I know that you can do this right kind of thing.
I wasn’t a cheerleader, but they had worked there through their own soul searching process to really get to a place where when we formulated a new brand, a position that more accurately reflected who we had been all along, they were like, man, that feels good, right? It’s kind of like we had to start to say what had been true all along, and to stop doing it just from, oh, this is what’s right for the market.
And so, they’re incredibly on board now. And my God, they’re so incredibly fired up. Did it frustrate me at times that I was like, oh my God, I just want to get this time. Absolutely. But I think that for those of us who work in change processes, with clients, we know that it takes those folks a long time to socialize a concept, a long time to have people organically arrive at not just heads nodding.
Right. This is the seductive moment that none of us should fall prey to. It’s not about heads nodding. I could have had my team’s heads nod. In fact, the first conversation we had, I did have their heads nodding. But it’s a different thing to have someone who has really worked through, a seismic shift and say, I’ve got my feet on the ground here and I’m ready to run again, right?
That’s a different thing from heads nodding. And that is both an internal process and a collaborative process. And I think if I had tried to short circuit that, we wouldn’t be where we are now at all. So for me, this ties into what are the other big nuggets that I want to chat more with you about as far as employee engagement, leadership engagement.
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Becoming an Effective Leader: Like Taking Your Own Medicine
But before we get to that, because I suspect there’s a very, very tangible hook into these two pieces. But before we get to that, you described this to me in our greenroom as taking your own medicine. So, why did you describe it to me as taking your own medicine? Like I wrote that that down in my notes and thought,
Okay, there’s a story there. Yeah. Oh, thank you so much. Well, two things. You had a great clip in your intro. Oh, about the shoemakers. Oh. The cobbler’s kids have their shoes. Yeah, these are our shoes. The person who does the corporate consulting for video doesn’t have a great video. Recently, I met a guy who has done amazing corporate communications.
He didn’t even have a website. Wow. Right. And here’s why. I think it’s taking our own medicine. I think all of us have blind spots and all of us, especially if we worked hard. And we’re predisposed to being a leader. Right. And many of the people in Onward Nation are leaders, obviously. It’s really easy for us to think that that’s it, right?
Game over. Done. We’re good. You know, let’s keep going. And so this humbling process of really taking my own medicine and saying I can’t muscle through this, or I could, but the outcome won’t be as great, right? For me to take the medicine and say, easy there, trigger back up on the ego, give people space right to get there on their own.
If they get there on their own. It’s just like having a five year old learn to tie it well. Lovely or five years old to tie their shoes. But it’s just human nature. When we move into something on our own, it is ours and we’re going to give it our all. And so for me to acknowledge that the most powerful thing I could do for my team and for even my ability long term to have a company that contributes powerfully to the world, is to back off and give them space to work through.
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Becoming an Effective Leader: Making a Meaningful Change
This was, that was some medicine, and I had to remind myself of it on a lot of our strategy. We met about every other week for strategy over the course of the past year and a half, and he worked through a lot of methodologies. We work through stuff that we share with clients, and it was really revealing.
And if it’s not uncomfortable, it’s probably not a meaningful change. I just want to say that. Yeah. Oh, I totally agree. But isn’t it interesting though? It’s been my experience that many business owners think like the big fix, the big nugget, the big change, the whatever, if that it should be easy. Like if we’re doing it right, it should be easy.
It should just flow seamlessly and smoothly. That’s how we know we’re on the right path. I’m like, no, that flies completely in the face of the law of nature. I mean, when have any top performing athletes say, you know, it was really easy training for the Olympics this time around? Oh. My God, said no one ever.
I mean, no, it doesn’t happen. So okay, so let’s think about this because you mentioned organically and I thought that sounded really, really cool. And then and then it made me think, okay, so does this tie into the employee engagement thing that we were talking about before? And I think you have such a provocative view on that.
So it feels like when you took your team through that process and there were probably parts where they were taking you through the process, but you wanted that. Take your own medicine. Yeah. So then you arrive here and now they’re on fire. They’re engaged. And so does that help fix this employee engagement issue? Or my guess is it’s much bigger than that.
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Becoming an Effective Leader: People Appreciate Vulnerable Leaders
So help us through that piece. Yeah. So I think if we were a microcosm, an example of the many large organizations we work with, I think. Yeah, you’re absolutely right. If you look at the key points that have been unveiled by, let’s say, the trust barometer that’s shared by Edelman every year or Deloitte’s annual, Human Capital Studies.
All of them are really pointing to people who want their leaders to be vulnerable, to be human or to be unpolished. Let them see you sweat. Right? I read a blog post on Let Them See You Sweat, right? They want to feel a sense of participation in creating the solutions. They want to feel a sense that their voice has helped shape the direction of the company.
And you got to think about this like, I did that with my teeny tiny team. And part of what inspired me was all the work that we had done with these companies who had talked a great game about employee engagement. Look, we’re going to get a great Play Store, come hire out come hell or high water, right? We’re going to get our engagement scores up.
We’re going to create, total rewards package that includes everything you could ever want. We’re going to talk about a big game for diversity and inclusion. I’d like all these boxes everyone is tackling, but what it really boils down to is, are your leaders vulnerable? Are they human? Are they letting their people participate? Are they letting their people see them sweat?
Like, these are all of the things that legacy leaders are taught not to do, right? Be perfect, have all the answers to all of your statements through legal and through the communications group. Right? Right. Like don’t talk about your struggles with work life balance. Like all of these are things that our role model of this imperfect leader flies in the face of.
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Becoming an Effective Leader: Building The Right Culture
And so part of what we started to realize was that it’s not that people don’t like the idea of having a human culture, it’s that they have trained themselves out of being a participant in crafting a human culture their entire lives. And so they land in the C-suite or an SVP or whatever CEO. And they hear it. They’re like, yeah, I want my people to feel that way.
Or but they become blind to their own patterns of behavior that actually circumvent that from ever being a possibility. That is so powerful. And as you were saying, that I literally, was taken back to a story that I just read about George Washington and like in the historical context of how he led the Continental Army during the Revolutionary War, and he was always out front and, you know, making himself an easy target at times.
But he was always out front because he had the firm belief to be exactly the type of leader that you just described, the human he was. He was convinced that if I spilled the same blood in the same mud as my troops, that makes them better. Yeah, yeah. Even though that was a great risk to him personally because he was an easy target as the general.
Yeah. If you cannot avoid it. Right. But that’s what’s necessary. Right? I mean, being in the trenches of working alongside your team, letting them see you sweat, whether we’re talking about something extreme like the Revolutionary War or we’re just talking about building the right culture, that helps your team really learn who you are, that gives them the context.
How else would they have it? Yeah. It’s so funny. I saw Ted Turner speak very early on. In my career, I think it was like 24 straight out of grad school. And, he was talking about the farce of leadership. Right. And that, why does it have to become us pretending, right? To be different, right?
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Becoming an Effective Leader: Know The Things That Could Make You an Even Better Leader
It’s almost like you think of Louis the 15th or someone and pretending that his blood was different. Right? Or. But there’s really kind of a legacy of that. It’s just been re-interpreted in our business, power structures and what Ted said. And it’s true. And this is an old cliche said, look, last I checked, everyone wakes up in the morning and puts their clothes on and brushes it like one leg at a time.
Right. And for us to really be in it with one another, the other point that was made, to me is I took one of those leadership diagnostics. Right. And, it’s supposed to tell you, you know, what you’re supposed to do more of, etc. and it told me I needed to be more authoritative.
And less collaborative. And it couched it and was not decisive. And I was like, my people know more about my clients on the ground than I do. Why would I make a strategic call without getting their input? Right? Exactly right. It’s just nuts. So I think that, but I know that there may be some heads nodding to that.
Right. And part of what I had to realize is, even though I knew that conceptually, when I really started to back up and get my ego out of the conversation, which is impossible to do, it’s still there, right? But being able to acknowledge, okay, I hear you in the back of my head, I’m going to ignore you and listen to my people instead.
Right? And not having that power structure clouds my ability to make the right call. Right. The seduction of the power structure and what it means about how much more important I am than the people on my team, is really the downfall of so many great, great visions and missions. Right.
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Becoming an Effective Leader: Removing The Pressure From Imposter Syndrome
So if we could all kind of hold that as being our first task, I think that this cop out. Oh, let’s create an employee engagement task force, or let’s get a chief cultural officer or whatever. It’s such a corporate cop out. I’m like, oh my God, and God bless everyone of you who have that title or work on those task force, because you and I and everyone listening on this call, we all know that until the C-suite rolls up their sleeves and they have to do some changing, that everything that you’re doing is just going to mitigate and kind of lessen, hopefully a little bit to a degree.
Whatever the pain points are of going to work every day. Amen. So I know that we just have a few minutes left, and I want to be cognizant of your schedule, but I’d be remiss if we didn’t loop back to imposter syndrome for just for just a minute, because when you were talking about that and then hearing you describe, I’ll just say kind of the ideal leader, human make, you know, let your team see you sweat and being real and as you were describing that person, I thought, okay, if we all step into leadership in that role, doesn’t that remove the pressure of the imposter syndrome if like, if there’s nobody to like find out, right?
If you’re just truly that person, then the fear of the imposter syndrome just kind of maybe fades away. Right. There’s nothing to be found out then. But, I mean, Stephen, from that perspective, if we were all parented perfectly right, it would all just go away, which I think really, speaks to the huge opportunity for becoming self-aware at work, of course, to actually be such a boon.
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Becoming an Effective Leader: Being Self-Aware at Work
Right. And I love that word bone because no one ever uses it. But it’s really a great favor. It’s a great gift, right? That if we task ourselves with being self-aware at work, right, we get this great image feedback mechanism around us on how we’re doing, especially now with how incredibly data driven everything is, right?
We literally can work through, continuing learning, coaching exposures, feedback mechanisms, with our team, etc. and use that to help ourselves grow. And where else do you get that? That’s right. Yeah. Super smart. Great conversation. This is exactly the type of conversation that I was so excited to have with you, Tevis. So thank you again for saying yes.
Thank you for being so generous with your expertise. Before we go, before we close out and say goodbye, please tell onward business owners the best way to connect with you.
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Becoming an Effective Leader: How to Connect with Tevis
The best way to connect with me is if you go to our website. It’s BalanceIntegration.com and you can find me on Twitter, I’m @corporateyogi. I’m not on it a ton, but who knows.
That could change. And you can find us on LinkedIn as well. Okay. Onward Nation, no matter how many notes you took or how often you go back and listen to Tevis words of wisdom, which I sure hope that you do. The key is to take everything that she so generously shared with you the strategies, the actions, all of those.
Take them and apply them into your business right away and accelerate your results. And Tevis, we all have the same 86,400 seconds in a day, my friend. And again, I am so glad that you said yes to come on to the show, to be our mentor and our guide to help us move our businesses onward to that next level.
Thank you so much, my friend. Thank you Stephen. This episode is complete, so head over to OnwardNation.com for show notes and more food to fuel your ambition. Continue to find your recipe for success here at Onward Nation.
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