Peak Performance for Education Entrepreneurs with Dr. Jared Sinclair

In this LMScast episode, Dr. Jared Sinclair from Sinclair Performance Institute discusses how to build capacity, navigate change, and improve performance as an education entrepreneur or WordPress professional.

Dr. Sinclair discusses the intricate relationship between discipline and motivation. He views discipline as an extrinsic motivator, essential for maintaining momentum when intrinsic motivation diminishes. Emphasizing the need for a clear ‘why’, he advocates for structured routines and systems to stay motivated, especially on challenging days.

The conversation then turns to the dynamics of team motivation. Dr. Sinclair highlights the importance of aligning team efforts with valuable outcomes. He suggests that effective leadership involves setting clear expectations and empowering team members, thereby fostering a sense of agency and commitment.

In the context of education and coaching, Dr. Sinclair points out the significance of facilitating meaning-making for students and clients. He emphasizes the role of educators in helping learners synthesize information independently, which is crucial for sustained motivation and effective learning.

Dr. Sinclair introduces the SMAC framework (Systems, Motivation, Accountability, Communications, Knowledge) as a comprehensive approach to expanding both individual and organizational capacity. This framework serves as a guide for identifying and addressing key areas that impact performance and growth.

A highlight of the podcast is Dr. Sinclair sharing a success story from his professional experience. He recounts how strategic planning and operational organization significantly transformed a non-profit organization, underscoring the power of well-implemented strategies in achieving organizational goals.

The episode concludes with Dr. Sinclair addressing the common challenge of imposter syndrome, particularly prevalent among course creators and entrepreneurs. He advises focusing on strengths and passions, and taking incremental steps towards goals. This approach, he suggests, can help overcome doubts and lead to meaningful progress and success.

For more insights and in-depth discussions, connect with Dr. Jared Sinclair on LinkedIn, YouTube (Performance Collective), or via email at jared@sinclairperformance.com.

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Episode Transcript

Chris Badgett: You’ve come to the right place. If you’re looking to create, launch, and scale a high value online training program, I’m your guide, Chris Badgett. I’m the co founder of Lifter LMS, the most powerful learning management system for WordPress. Stay to the end. I’ve got something special for you. Enjoy the show.

Chris Badgett: Hello and welcome back to another episode of LMS cast. I’m joined by a special guest. His name is Dr. Jared Sinclair. You can find him at Sinclair performance. com. We’re going to be talking about leadership. We’re going to be talking about capacity building. We’re going to talk about motivation. This is going to be a good episode around the inner game of being an education entrepreneur about leading a team.

Chris Badgett: About leading your students as a teacher. Welcome to the show, Jared. Thanks,

Dr. Jared Sinclair: Chris. I appreciate you to have me on.

Chris Badgett: Yeah, I’m stoked to talk about it with you. Leadership and [00:01:00] management and peak performance are all things that are near and dear to me as a busy guy who’s been doing this for a while, trying not to explode in the process and be a good leader.

Chris Badgett: Let’s start at the heart of the issue and take us to school around motivation, particularly around three areas. One area is just being a motivated entrepreneur ourselves, like self motivation. Um, second, if we’re building a team, sometimes I see a lot of entrepreneurs, whether they’re creating courses or running an agency where they’re motivated, but they’re having a hard time getting the same levels of performance in their team.

Chris Badgett: Or they just wish it was higher, not that it’s bad. And then the third is specifically as a teacher or a coach, when we’ve been hired to work with students or clients, how do we create motivation within our learning experience design? So sorry to throw three questions at you at once, [00:02:00] but let’s, let’s talk about motivation.

Dr. Jared Sinclair: Yeah, all good. So to dive into, to the self, I think, you know, there’s this. discussion that’s everywhere. You’ve seen it on Rogan. You’ve seen it on some of these other podcasts. You’ve seen it in the literature, the pseudoscience, whatever you might have. And it, it, it’s the art, this argument of, okay, discipline versus motivation.

Dr. Jared Sinclair: I would argue that discipline is simply a system that we use to motivate ourselves. So it’s a, it’s an extrinsic motivator that we’re using to motivate ourselves when we don’t necessarily feel motivated. So when you talk about motivating the self, I think it’s very important to have that why. Why are you doing what you’re doing, right?

Dr. Jared Sinclair: That’s kind of the first stop. The second stop that I would say is to have this structure of Uh, maybe you have your office set up in such a way or you have your coffee first thing and then you take the dog out and you come back to your desk and you hit that big first, um, you know, chunk that you need to bite off, maybe some [00:03:00] type of system in place where you’re doing the same thing the same way.

Dr. Jared Sinclair: Every time and that’s for those those more important topics that you’re doing throughout the day now Let’s say you got to get a module done or you have to outline something For a course you’re putting together that big chunk might be that first Outline that you do in the morning because based off of that outline, you know, you’re gonna be able to build out everything else So if you get that win, it’s kind of like some of these guys are talking about make your bed, right?

Dr. Jared Sinclair: It’s making your bed. So you get that early success. You can move on to the next ones and then I would say the third thing is Having a system in place for when you don’t feel motivated, so you have that discipline to do things. Uh, some folks do it with time blocking. They might block, you know, 15 minutes and then take a 5 minute break, walk around the house if you work from home or walk down the hallway to the water cooler or to the copy machine or, you know, to your buddy next door and say hi.

Dr. Jared Sinclair: But building in those, those blocks of times could be [00:04:00] helpful. Some other things that folks do is they they’ll tear their day where they’ll have those most, you know, top three things that they want to accomplish throughout the day and then everything else is just noise, right? So tackling those first three things in order to free up that space and create some margin where you have more time and energy to tackle those other things.

Dr. Jared Sinclair: So I think a lot of the times we get burnt out as individuals because either we’ve taken on too much, we haven’t taken the time to outline our day or provide that clarity or that path forward. And then when we have these additional things. Uh, bombarding us throughout the day, we don’t have that margin that we need.

Dr. Jared Sinclair: And that margin is very important, uh, provides psychological safety, provides a space for you to be creative and space for you to deal with those things that come up during the day that we might not necessarily have planned for. So that margin components very big. Um, as far as leading the team, I think when you break down motivation from a team perspective, [00:05:00] you got to look at the value.

Dr. Jared Sinclair: Uh, it’s a value proposition. What, what’s the value to the team as a whole? You know, is there a, a completion bonus or is there some type of pay raise or just the, the, the pride of accomplishing that task? Um, if you can tie that action to something of value, now they, they can see that their work is being, uh, is contributing towards something that’s gonna be valuable in the future.

Dr. Jared Sinclair: Uh, there’s various types of values. I don’t want to, I don’t want to go into too much detail and nerd out too much on there, but there’s a lot of value from physical value, um, kind of these internal, uh, value propositions that we have. And then there’s like instrumental value, acquiring things that will allow you to do other things.

Dr. Jared Sinclair: I would say the next component from a team perspective is expectations of managing those expectations. And within that, you have this whole kind of control versus non control component. So as leaders, we want to hire the right [00:06:00] people to do the work and then we want to really set them free so they can go do the work when we hire people that are capable of doing work and then we don’t set them free.

Dr. Jared Sinclair: They’re in an uncontrollable environment because they can’t control their destiny. They don’t have agency over what they’re trying to do. So from that perspective, it’s too constricting and with with constriction and regulation and whatnot, especially in educational space. When you’re trying to write course content, you’re trying to be creative or make these connections in various locations throughout your curriculum.

Dr. Jared Sinclair: It’s important to have that agility and that creativity. But with those constraints as leaders or in a team environment, Oftentimes it will stifle that creativity and, uh, which will stifle growth and stifle productivity. So the last one I think you touched on there was, uh, a teacher, a coach, is that it?

Dr. Jared Sinclair: Okay. I had to write it down because there was a lot there, but let’s get to it.

Chris Badgett: So are students or learners or client coaching clients different from team members? Or is it really just the same [00:07:00] stuff packaged a little

Dr. Jared Sinclair: differently? I think from like coaching clients, you know, they’re on the receiving end or the students are on the receiving end of that learning.

Dr. Jared Sinclair: I think for them it’s the meeting, the meaning making that will help them stay motivated, right? Because you have this kind of, this external force, which is your delivery, your content, your whatever, your questioning, your Socratic questioning, whatever the case may be. And they have this, Internalization of that and when they’re able to make those connections and they’re able to have those aha moments and they’re able to synthesize information on their own, even though it was prompted by you, it’s more valuable because they came up with that.

Dr. Jared Sinclair: Aha. They made the connection where in reality they didn’t. They were kind of helped along the way. Um, or it’s a combination of both. But I think that’s where it’s helpful to motivate them is giving them opportunities to make those connections. Make meaning and have those aha moments.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome.

Chris Badgett: That’s super helpful. Um, so [00:08:00] with the discipline thing, like I just, whenever I hear that word, of course, now I think of Jocko willing discipline equals freedom and I’m a big morning routine guy and time boxer. And when I feel, I don’t feel at my best, I just execute the routine, right? Even if I do it poorly, I, I just do it.

Chris Badgett: And I’ve been doing a morning routine so long, it’s been over a decade that. I feel worse and lost when I don’t do it. Like if I’m traveling or something like that, but unplug unpacked discipline, a little more. And how it’s different from motivation or like, it’s, it sounds like it’s a tool within motivation.

Chris Badgett: A hundred

Dr. Jared Sinclair: percent. And what I’d point to in that is self determination theory. If you’re in a self determination, there’s a lot of charter schools popping up right now, they’re in the self determination, you kind of self guided learning. But when you look at that theory, it talks about somebody who’s a motive on one end of the spectrum.

Dr. Jared Sinclair: I think my camera’s reversed, but on one end of the spectrum here, where they have no [00:09:00] motivation, there is no motivation. And then when you kind of overlay this. Transcripts provided by Transcription Outsourcing, LLC. And people are able to be prodded and prompt towards a certain behavior, right? So you have a boss, you have your significant other saying, Hey, you told me you were going to do this today.

Dr. Jared Sinclair: That’s an extrinsic motivator. You have that LMS little notification thing pop up saying, Hey, your course is due. Right? That’s a motivator where, in the theory, people can go across the spectrum from there’s this position of a motivation. And now this external kind of accountability system where there and I would argue discipline those things that you have to do is your morning routine fall into this category over time.

Dr. Jared Sinclair: When you do them long enough, they become automated. So you go down this path of it being external to this path of now you’re internalizing it to now it’s Automated in an automotive state. So [00:10:00] you go from a motive to automated potentially, depending on those discipline systems or those systems that you have in place, or those accountabilities that you have in place.

Dr. Jared Sinclair: It’s a big, ugly word, but accountability is do you have in place to do the things that you, your team or whoever else wants to do awesome.

Chris Badgett: Let’s let’s switch gears to one of my favorite words, which is capacity. And the reason, and I know you help with capacity building, and I want to unpack that. I don’t have a laser question, so I have to talk around it a little bit.

Chris Badgett: Like as a software entrepreneur, I always wish I had more. You know, engineering capacity as an example to ship the vision of the product faster or, um, you know, I, sometimes I wish my team had more capacity given the constraints of time. Now cashflow can solve wounds and allow you more budget to grow a team.

Chris Badgett: But when you’re bootstrapping as a course creator. Or any kind of entrepreneur. Um, [00:11:00] you’re working with limited resources and it all starts with your own internal sacrifice and capacity. Sure. Tell us about a different way to think about capacity, both in output and quality of work. Like how do we level up there as individuals and through teams?

Dr. Jared Sinclair: Yeah. So I would say capacity is what you have in that space between. Capability and current performance, right? So you’ve pushed your circle out. If you will, if you have two concentric circles, you have this. This capacity is the exterior circle and the interior circle is kind of what you’re what you’re currently operating at.

Dr. Jared Sinclair: And that margin. Around the edge is very important because that is room for growth, right? So if you’re not hitting that outer circle, if you will, I mean, just for that visual, right, what we try to do is we try to enhance that capacity. And I use a framework called smack. Um, it’s one of the things that I’ve [00:12:00] written on.

Dr. Jared Sinclair: It’s kind of the talk that I go to because it encompasses a lot of what organizations and individuals are challenged with, and it’s just S M A C K. The S is for systems. The M is for motivation. The A is for accountability. The C is for communications, and the K is for knowledge. So within this kind of capacity, uh, discussions, if you touch on all of those letters within SPAC, you’re gonna hit on those big topics that help individuals and teams to perform at a higher level to expand their capacity.

Dr. Jared Sinclair: Let’s take knowledge, for instance. You have, you know, you’re in the knowledge space. So you have this, this component of what’s the existing knowledge? Well, you want to expand that knowledge. Well, how do you expand that knowledge? The first question that I would ask as a consultant or somebody that comes in to coach a team or to build a system around this problem is what type of knowledge are you trying to expand?

Dr. Jared Sinclair: Are you trying to expand, you know, procedural knowledge that know how are you trying to [00:13:00] expand declarative knowledge that know what? Or are you trying to expand that reflection knowledge that metacognitive knowledge? What type of knowledge within your organization are you trying to expand? And then within that, We either provide learning opportunities to expand that knowledge, or we create kind of a churn within the organization, this kind of organic churn, where people are going out to find that additional knowledge, because now they’ve identified what that barrier is.

Dr. Jared Sinclair: So with, with all those letters in the acronym of SMAC. What I like to do is look at each one of those and kind of dissect it and see, hey, where can we improve this with minimal inputs to kind of push that inner circle out a little more, that outer circle out a little more if we’re kind of meeting it already.

Chris Badgett: That’s awesome. Let’s dig in on accountability a little bit. How do you build healthy accountability that, you know, people look forward to or enjoy? It’s an example. And I think an [00:14:00] extreme example, I don’t do this, but I know online businesses that, uh, they don’t trust their employees. To spend their time well.

Chris Badgett: So they install like a screen recording software that takes screenshots, every whatever, to me, that just feels like very creates a culture of distrust. What’s on the other end of that spectrum in terms of positive accountability?

Dr. Jared Sinclair: Yeah, I think, I think it involves interaction on all, on all parts, right.

Dr. Jared Sinclair: And communication, there needs to be a component that the individual, let me just back up for a second. And in any accountability relationship, there’s a provider and a director. The director is the person that’s kind of in charge and kind of, uh, call on the shot saying, Hey, this is what we need to get done.

Dr. Jared Sinclair: This is direction we want to go. And then the provider is the person that’s responsible for, for doing that. We can go, I mean, this is a whole separate episode in and of itself, but let’s dive down that rabbit hole of the screen, the screenshots and how do we get people. Um, how do we hold people accountable absent those [00:15:00] kind of extreme measures?

Dr. Jared Sinclair: And I would say it takes communication and collaboration. Um, there needs to be a sense of buy in, right? Remember we talked about in motivation earlier, we talked about that value and that that value attainment, right, attaining that goal. Well, oftentimes when things are closer to the self, they’re closer to us.

Dr. Jared Sinclair: They’re more important and oftentimes we will leverage more energy towards accomplishing that. So if we have this external thing that the organization is saying, Hey, this thing over here, go do that. Um, and we’re going to hold you accountable to it. That’s probably a little less powerful than than saying, Hey, this is kind of the direction that we want to go.

Dr. Jared Sinclair: What do you propose we do to get there? And how are you gonna hold yourself accountable to those metrics, right? What are those metrics? Um, and that’s another component that’s pretty important is metrics. I’ve seen, I’ve seen organizations go super overboard on metrics, not only in the learning space, but, um, you know, depending heavily, so heavily on KPIs that they kind of forget there’s people behind them and systems behind them.

Dr. Jared Sinclair: Um, Um, [00:16:00] so I think that engagement and getting, giving people a voice and giving them buy in and allowing them to kind of dictate where they want to go within, you know, that if you use the analogy of a bowling lane, you got those bumper lanes on the sides, like that whole runway is yours. We just got to go knock down those 10 pens.

Dr. Jared Sinclair: So within these left and right kind of bumpers, how do you propose we do that? And then how are we going to know that you’re making progress on your plan? Right. There’s a lot of use in there towards that goal. So giving ownership to the people, I think is very important.

Chris Badgett: I love that. Also in your, your smack analogy and capacity talking about the margin, um, where does burnout fit into that?

Chris Badgett: And then also. It, you know, that model really makes sense. If you, let’s say you have a junior team member and over the years they level up, then let’s say you hire a senior person or even you yourself as like the, um, [00:17:00] the entrepreneur or whatever, like you’re kind of hitting some capacity walls that are starting to feel kind of solid.

Chris Badgett: And, and like, you just can’t time box anymore. And there’s only 24 more hours of the day. Right. There’s also this personal development thing of like, there’s always another gear. I just need to find the next unlock. So, so there’s kind of two questions in there, burnout, and then. What do you do with like people that are already kind of peak performing, um, capacity

Dr. Jared Sinclair: standpoint?

Dr. Jared Sinclair: Sure. So I’ll address the burnout issue first. Um, typically burnout is due to lack of margin, right? Yeah. Lack of money, lack of time, lack of resources, lack of energy, whatever the case may be. You’ve pushed that inner circle too close to that outer circle. And you don’t have enough margin for when that phone call comes in or that boss puts the additional project on your desk or the dog gets sick or, you know, your kids are out of school.

Dr. Jared Sinclair: So whatever the case may be, margin typically will, will lead to burnout. [00:18:00] Now, when I talk about margin, you can talk about it in the cognitive sense too, right? You want sufficient level of stress on somebody’s abilities and sufficient level of challenge. Um, you know, but when that stress level gets too high, that challenge level gets too high, oftentimes that can lead to that cognitive overload as well, right?

Dr. Jared Sinclair: So this whole concept of margin, I think, applies to just about everything. Um, just having sufficient buffer on that inner line. But that outer line really is that capacity. So either by reducing, increasing the buffer, or increasing the capacity. You’ve got more margin and that inner circle can have a little more flex as far as performance is concerned So burnout burnout is pretty dangerous.

Dr. Jared Sinclair: I’ve seen a lot of folks go downhill Um when I talk about it in the leadership space, I talk about it from the sense of like leadership fatigue So if you’re a leader running a team of let’s say folks who are responsible for you know, x y or z [00:19:00] When leaders get burnt out, they end up start doing a couple things.

Dr. Jared Sinclair: They start either doing their people’s work for them. They start micromanaging. They stop that visionary kind of, um, supervisory kind of roles and they start doing the work. And with that, their, their own capacity and their own margin starts decreasing. The capacity might be there, but their margin starts decreasing.

Dr. Jared Sinclair: And sometimes that comes with resentment. It comes with substance abuse issues. It comes with stress issues like the whole nine. So I think managing that burnout component is very important. Not not pushing yourself to the point where you don’t have enough margin, but also not pushing your people to the point where they don’t have margin or expanding their capacity so that that additional workload or that additional task with additional ask.

Dr. Jared Sinclair: Isn’t so burdensome on them. Um, I’m sorry, I’m blanking on your second question

Chris Badgett: there, Chris. My second question is like, is there a limit to capacity expansion for human being, [00:20:00] particularly as it relates to either a seasoned entrepreneur who feels like they’ve really leveled up and there’s just. But they’re not really expanding capacity anymore.

Chris Badgett: They’ve kind of hit peak capacity. Is that just okay? Or is there always another unlock or how do we think about that for peak performers?

Dr. Jared Sinclair: Yeah. So in the, in the business landscape, I would look at that very, you know, the thing that resonated with me when you, when you were asking that question was like a tech startup, a lot of times, even a normal startup doesn’t have to be a tech startup, but they’re, you know, they’re, um, they’re known for this.

Dr. Jared Sinclair: Typically what’ll happen is you’ll get those one or two or three. Folks that have gotten together said, Hey, let’s start this right and they start this and none of them are specialized. Well, sometimes they are, but that can be a burden to a startup team. Oftentimes with a startup, you want a bunch of generalists because somebody’s going to have to be doing, everybody’s doing marketing, right?

Dr. Jared Sinclair: Somebody’s going to have to do finance. Somebody’s going to have to do R and D. Somebody has to do compliance. Like there’s, there’s all these hats that people wear during the startup phase. So their [00:21:00] capacity very quickly becomes maxed out, right? So what I would argue, and it’s hard to say without a specific business or specific case study though, is that when you get to that point where capacity is tapped out, you have to do one of two things.

Dr. Jared Sinclair: You either have to slow down and limit the offerings that you’re providing. Or if that’s not in alignment with where the business wants to go, now it’s time to scale. It’s time to expand your, your offering. So Oftentimes what we see in the startup space is that these, these teams of startup founders typically get something going and they get to this point where they’re super uncomfortable and they’re super stressed out and maybe they’re in the third, fourth, fifth round of funding, whatever the case may be.

Dr. Jared Sinclair: And then all of a sudden they’re like, okay, now we have to start hiring people. And what that does is then from there, it expands their capacity. So their capability is still pretty small, but it gives them that margin to continue to grow outwards. Um, I do think there is a limit on the individual, um, capacity building as well as organizational capacity [00:22:00] capacity building.

Dr. Jared Sinclair: But the, the beauty of organizational capacity building is that you don’t have to do it all yourself. You uh, forget that quote by Steve Jobs. I think it was Steve Jobs, but he nailed it. Like we don’t hire smart people so we can tell them what to do. We hire smart people so they can, you know, do what they do essentially.

Dr. Jared Sinclair: Um, I truly believe in that. And if, if you’re going to grow and you’re going to take your business to that next level, you’re going to have to hire people and you’re going to have to offload that trust to them and trust them that they’re going to do the things You know, you’ve hired them to do again. We get back to that accountability piece, right?

Dr. Jared Sinclair: So, uh, I would say, yeah, that’s it. You could, you could scale for sure. You could increase your capacity on the organizational level. I think easier, um, than once you’re tapped out at the individual level, but through professional development, through introspection, through, um, you know, focus, I think us as individuals can expand capacity to a certain extent.

Dr. Jared Sinclair: I don’t think the world is endless. You know, we can’t [00:23:00] do. All those things that our parents said we could do if we put our minds to it. It’s just not possible. It’s a big lie. Um, we can do a lot, uh, but not independent and individual separate from a team.

Chris Badgett: What’s can you double, double click a little bit on that thing about entrepreneur founder generalists and like kind of what makes them special or, or in some ways they might not even see their, see it or recognize it in themselves in terms of, um, That kind of gift they have as a generalist, but it’s also very dangerous and burdensome, like you mentioned, if you go far and, and start stepping outside of that margin.

Dr. Jared Sinclair: Yeah, I think it’s, I think it’s necessary, frankly, as a founder to be a generalist. I think you’d be good at a lot of things. Um, and the analogy that I’ll use is let’s say we have a pie shop, you know, if we have an apple pie shop, um, and we’re make, or let’s [00:24:00] say we have a bakery. Sorry, that was a bad analogy.

Dr. Jared Sinclair: Say we have a bakery and all we make is apple pies. We’re not a bakery. We’re an apple pie shop. So if you have that CEO or that founder CEO that they’re very good at tech. What’s going to happen to the marketing and the fundraising and the HR and all these other things that need to happen as that business is growing, it’s going to fall to the wayside.

Dr. Jared Sinclair: So what we need is a bakery. We need a bakery that has some brownies, some lemon meringue, key lime, some apple pies, right? We need this whole kind of well rounded. ecosystem where people that have their own respective strengths can play into what the organization is trying to do and where they’re going.

Dr. Jared Sinclair: So although at the outset being a generalist is very important, oftentimes these startup companies will find themselves in a place where now they have to start finding those people that are more narrowly skilled and they have a greater expert expertise in those narrow spaces. Now, I’m not saying as a business gets super big that there’s no need for [00:25:00] generalists because there certainly is.

Dr. Jared Sinclair: Uh, the world would not function if everybody was a specialist. It just, it wouldn’t. Um, but as they get bigger, they can have more specialists in the sense of R and D research, um, uh, HR finance, you know, you name it.

Chris Badgett: Tell us about the Sinclair Performance Institute. Like what, what do you do? Describe your perfect client.

Dr. Jared Sinclair: Yeah, so our perfect client is An entity within a larger, larger organization, I’d say, you know, a division, maybe a hundred people or less, maybe up to 200, depending on what they’re trying to accomplish or a small business that is, uh, in those, in that startup phase or they’re. They just have these very specific training or capacity problems.

Dr. Jared Sinclair: Um, that’s where we come and help them. So we’re, we’re a capacity building company. Uh, we have an advisory firm. We have several folks that we call on with the very [00:26:00] specific skill sets that we can bring to bear. On whatever those, whatever those problems are. So we focus predominantly on, on change management, leadership development.

Dr. Jared Sinclair: Um, gap analysis and then closing those gaps, doing strategic planning, writing business plans for small businesses. Um, and then we have a very small niche of executive coaching where, you know, if somebody wants to continue on with this leadership development, um, or maybe it’s an executive that is in that startup phase, you know, have they have that person to go to that they can talk to and be like, Hey, let me run this problem by you.

Dr. Jared Sinclair: Um, I’m trying to expand my capacity. What pointers do you have? So that’s what we do. Um, we started in 2017 and, uh, really cut our teeth working with nonprofits. I was in the government space for a long time. Um, did some time in the Marine Corps and then some time in the local government space, went back to grad school.

Dr. Jared Sinclair: And, um, I just have a heart for nonprofits. Uh, and then I knew there was an educational gap there [00:27:00] to that knowledge gap, that K, right? Okay. In my own self where I hadn’t worked per se with businesses. So I started offering pro bono consulting for nonprofit organizations and my framework really started resonating with them.

Dr. Jared Sinclair: We saw some good results. So from there we started kind of expanding out and um, that’s where we’re at now on the horizon. We’re, we’re looking at those bigger County, um, state and federal contracts. So we’re. We’re really submitting a lot of proposals in that space and trying to scale up, if you will, build our capacity in that realm.

Dr. Jared Sinclair: So can you

Chris Badgett: share like a fun story? I mean, of course, you don’t have to share names and company names or anything, but yeah, an example story from some of the work

Dr. Jared Sinclair: you’ve done. Absolutely. Um, I think one of my one of my proudest stories was a nonprofit that we were working with and we were going through some strategic planning.

Dr. Jared Sinclair: They were in the homelessness or poverty alleviation space. And [00:28:00] they weren’t quite organized. They were using borrowed space from schools and churches and whatnot. And we were able to go in, identify some gaps, write a strategic plan, kind of get things dialed in, write an operational plan for them. And this is obviously with ad hoc teams from that organization.

Dr. Jared Sinclair: And, you know, there’s a little Not disbelief, but I guess doubt that these things would pan out and these things would work. Well, what happened, I got a phone call earlier this year and because of the structures and because of the organization that they put in place, they had a donor that came in and bought them their own building.

Dr. Jared Sinclair: So now they’re in their own building. They’re not having to borrow space. They’re doing laundry service, shower service, employment services, computer labs, like all these things from their own space. So I would say that one for me is the most impactful. Because there was a little bit of doubt, but it shows that when you have the right people and the right systems and you have things in place, people will [00:29:00] recognize it and things will happen that you can’t even foresee.

Dr. Jared Sinclair: So that one, that one was really fun for me and the team. Awesome.

Chris Badgett: Yeah. Well, last question for you, Jared. Um, there’s a, this I guess would fall under the executive coaching realm. Uh, I see a lot of, or it’s a common problem in our space for course creators, coaches, even the people building agencies out there where they struggle with imposter syndrome.

Chris Badgett: It manifests itself in the LMS space where. People buy software. They spend years like building something, but they never actually launched. And under a lot of that is imposter syndrome is buried in that. Do you have anything to help people that have admitted that, Hey, maybe I might be struggling with that.

Chris Badgett: And who am I to teach X or I’m going to be judged as soon as I go live with this thing.

Dr. Jared Sinclair: Yeah, I think we’ve, we’ve all been there and what a blessing if you go live with it and it fails. Yeah. Right. [00:30:00] Because what lessons. Yeah, what lessons are within that? And it gives you an opportunity to pivot something that hurts and it’s sticky.

Dr. Jared Sinclair: So you won’t do it again. Um, I think, I think one of the things that I’ve done. Uh, with myself and then with some coaching clients is what I’ll do is I’ll, I’ll have them sit down and write down those things that they’re good at, right? So this week I want you to make just make a list in your phone Wherever you want to do it of all of those things that you’re good at all those things that you’ve done in your life Maybe those awards that you’ve received, you know playing soccer back when you were eight years old doesn’t matter like list everything And then come back a couple days later Refine that list.

Dr. Jared Sinclair: Come back a couple days later. Refine that list. But what I want you to do this time is I want you to omit those things that you didn’t enjoy, right? So only circle those things that you enjoy. And then as this list kind of it starts out really big and people are like, what do I do? Can I put it on there?

Dr. Jared Sinclair: No, I can’t put it. Just put everything on there. And then you go through it and you [00:31:00] circle those things that you enjoy. And then you revisit it sometime later, and what you’ll see is you’re going to see these trends of things that not only were you good at, but the things that you enjoyed, and then from there, it kind of, you can circle those things like, okay, what direction can I go with what I have with where I’m at?

Dr. Jared Sinclair: And the next step is just to go, go do it. Whatever that is, if it’s creating an LMS or that first course, Uh, whether it’s on LinkedIn or Wix site or wherever on your platform, wherever it is, just go do it. Um, because the only way you’re going to get better is to do it. The last thing that you want to do, or that at least I want to do, is to be super great, more great than I am, looking back at my life and think, man, if I only took that step and did that, where would I be today?

Dr. Jared Sinclair: Right? So just take that step, um, list all those things out, identify your strengths, identify what you like, and then identify those things that you can [00:32:00] do now and hopefully monetize. And then, um, take that next step. And when you’re in doubt, Just take the next logical step. You don’t need to take a giant step.

Dr. Jared Sinclair: Um, just put one brick in the wall every day or every opportunity you have. And eventually you’ll have a giant building.

Chris Badgett: Awesome. That’s Dr. Jared Sinclair. He’s at Sinclair performance. com. Any other ways for the people to connect with you,

Dr. Jared Sinclair: Jared? Yeah. I’d love to connect with you on LinkedIn. If you look me up, it’s just Jared Sinclair.

Dr. Jared Sinclair: Uh, we do have a YouTube channel. Uh, performance collective is what it’s called. Uh, I run a podcast as well. Just looking at leaders in various spaces. I think this last week I did a mom. You know, she’s a business owner and a mom. Um, and then I’ve got another one coming up, uh, for a gentleman in the tech space.

Dr. Jared Sinclair: So I just like talking about leadership, but you can connect with us there on YouTube, LinkedIn, or if you want to reach out directly to me, it’s Jared J A R E D at Sinclair performance. com. I’d love to connect with you. [00:33:00] Awesome,

Chris Badgett: Jared. Well, thanks for coming on the show, dropping the wisdom there. And I’d really encourage you out there listening or watching to go revisit the smack part of the episode.

Chris Badgett: I think that’s a really powerful framework. Could you just, as we close it out here, say out what the letters mean again? Yeah, it’s

Dr. Jared Sinclair: S M A C K, so it’s systems. Motivation, accountability, communications, and knowledge. If you go to our blog at Sinclair performance. com, there’s a short blog post that kind of dives a little bit into the smack framework.

Chris Badgett: Thanks so much, Jared. We really appreciate it.

Dr. Jared Sinclair: Yeah. Chris, thank you for having me on. I appreciate it.

Chris Badgett: And that’s a wrap for this episode of LMS cast. Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at lifter lms. com forward slash gift. Go to lifter lms. com forward slash gift. Keep learning, [00:34:00] keep taking action and I’ll see you in the next episode.

Did you enjoy that episode? Tell your friends and be sure to subscribe so you don’t miss the next episode. And I’ve got a gift for you over at LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Go to LifterLMS. com forward slash gift. Keep learning, keep taking action, and I’ll see you in the next episode.

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