Exploring Potential: Insights from Executive Coach Jake Fishbein on Choices and Growth

It's so much about regulating the nervous system and getting out of fight, flight, and freeze, because I know that for me, when I get hijacked by that reaction, I don't think clearly, I don't think rationally, and I don't feel safe because that's what happens. The amygdala feels unsafe and the body believes its life is under threat, and nobody makes powerful decisions in those moments where their body feels their lives are threatened. And meditation or grounding practices or just getting calm gets me back to an equilibrium where I'm not choosing from that place of being threatened. Usually there is no threat, but I'm not choosing from that place of being threatened, but choosing from an intentional aware place. Welcome to Super Entrepreneur's Podcast. I'm your host, Shahid Narayan. Today we have with us Jake Fishbein. Jake is a New York City-based executive coach and facilitator who helps people and organizations make and navigate their most important choices. He works with small business owners, mid-level executives, and runs a men's group. Welcome to our show, Jake. Thank you, Shahid. It's great to be here. Great to have you. So how'd you get into this field? Oh, well, that's a winding story, but the SparkNotes version is about eight and a half years ago. I was in PR. I was a publicist and very unhappy being a publicist. And a friend of a friend recommended I do a series of workshops and work with a coach. And it was through that I met my mentor, Nick Papadopoulos, and here I am eight-plus years later, executive coaching and running men's groups. I heard that name. It's the most common Greek name out there. It is the John Smith of Greek names. But Nick is a phenomenal leadership development consultant and executive coach who I've worked with for many years. Oh, that's awesome. And now you're moving on and providing that value to others. Absolutely. Have you ever come across a client, most probably you have, and they say, I don't know, or there's some kind of confusion, and then you turn it into a really big aha moment for them, something that changed their life. Could you share a story or something that comes to mind? Yeah, absolutely. And that's something that happens pretty frequently, I'd say, in my work, especially with one-on-one work. There's so many conversations and so many times people have blind spots that they don't even recognize. And the story that comes to my mind actually is the first client I ever worked with. I worked with him individually, one-on-one for over four years, and he's in the men's group we run called the Arena Men's Group. And early on in our work, when frankly I wasn't a terribly great coach, but I was trying very hard and cared very deeply, we were having a conversation and he was very stuck. He was a small business owner, a solopreneur, someone who had been very successful and was struggling a great deal. And we were working together and I offered a perspective on something that he was struggling with, and he was filled with I don't knows. I don't knows and a lot of resistance to any outside perspective on what he was doing, and he had hired me to work with him. I remember saying that he occurred to me as both incredibly lazy and incredibly hard on himself. That there was this dichotomy of experiences within him where he held himself to a very low standard and a very high standard at the same exact time. And for me, I thought it was a throwaway. Not quite a throwaway, but it didn't seem to land in the moment. But I'll tell you, the number of times he's brought up that moment in the five and a half years since I said those words is countless. Because something in that moment really stuck with him where it was this aha moment for him about how much pressure he put on himself and how much he let himself off the hook. And his transformation since I met him five and a half years ago has been huge. He truly is a different human today than he was. Or actually, I should say, he's more of himself today. I like to say in transformation, it's not about becoming something new, something that you're not, something that you haven't been, but about becoming more of who you truly are. Yeah, uncovering the true you. Exactly. Yeah. That's wonderful. So we know vulnerability is key for growth and for transformation. Could you share some type of tips or some recommendations, some help to someone that is not very comfortable with being vulnerable because they're not embracing it even though they know they should? Yes. Well, where I would start with vulnerability, especially when it's uncomfortable, is that vulnerability can look so many different ways. A lot of people have in their minds that vulnerability is sharing some big dark secret or uncontrollably weeping or revealing something that they haven't revealed to anyone before. And I always tell my clients and the men in our group that vulnerability is that, yes, but vulnerability is also asking for help at the supermarket. Vulnerability is asking a friend to grab a beer. Vulnerability is sharing your favorite song with somebody. Being vulnerable is anytime you do something when you don't know what the outcome is going to be. And so if you're struggling to be vulnerable, it's important to focus on those small moments of vulnerability and remind yourself, I am being vulnerable. And as you build up your muscle of vulnerability by asking for help at the supermarket, asking for directions on the side of the road, even calling up customer service versus sending an email online, you'll build up your comfort with vulnerability. And I would say it's also incredibly valuable to choose someone to take that larger leap of vulnerability with, someone you trust, in order to really stretch with what would be that uncomfortable, vulnerable thing to do, and just go do it. Don't overthink it. Just do it. Just that once. You don't have to set the precedent. I have to do this every day. That vulnerability is something we do every day. And this is my work, and there are plenty of times I don't want to ask for help in the supermarket because it's embarrassing. I feel like as a man, I should know, which is ridiculous because I didn't build the supermarket. I should not know. And yet even for me, it can be challenging to do that. And so I challenge myself as much as I can to take that leap of vulnerability, to know that when push comes to shove, I will be vulnerable, even if I'm not 100% of the time. Yeah, it's like taking baby steps. You don't need to overcomplicate that term. You can do it in very small ways where you can start getting out of your comfort zone to make it comfortable eventually. Exactly. The whole, the whole. The way we grow is not by leaping out of our comfort zone. It's by finding that space outside of our comfort zone where it's safe to fail. The space where there's a high degree of psychological safety and a high degree of accountability. Because oftentimes, particularly for men, but for a lot of people, the go-to is I've got to go jump 17 steps ahead of where I am. If I'm not being vulnerable, I've got to go reveal my deepest, darkest secrets to the person I'm most afraid of. As an example, I don't know if anybody's necessarily doing that. But that doesn't set anybody up for success. And that when we leap so far out of our comfort zones that we're not in that safe stretch zone, where we're in a space where it's not psychologically safe, where there may be a high degree of accountability, but there's no net to catch us, we set ourselves up for failure and never doing it again. And if you think about a child... If it turns out. Yeah, if it turns out, it's great. It gives you that elation. But it's not necessarily sustainable. And growth is all about sustainability. It's about being able to do things time and time again for months and years on end, not just for one moment, not just for a short period of time. It's the consistency factor. So in your philosophy, the way you coach, you experiment a lot. Now, is there something that you could share where you experimented and it went surprisingly well? Yes. There was a moment in the spring, I was working with a new corporate client. And my background is in ontological coaching and ICF coaching, International Coach Federation coaching. So the training, I didn't involve a lot of somatic meditation practices. In fact, for a long time, I felt they were silly. And I felt awkward. I had a lot of judgment towards them because when I'm not being my best version, I can be incredibly judgmental. And last winter, I did a program with this man, Dan Doty, who was one of the founders of a company called Everyman, which he has since departed. And this program was for men who work with men's groups, men's work practitioners. And in the program, Dan introduced a lot of different somatic practices. And so I decided I'd start experimenting with them in my coaching sessions. And so this past spring, I was working with a new client who works for a very large tech company. And he was saying he was very stuck. He didn't know how to open himself up. He didn't know what his purpose was. He felt like there was something blocking him from being vulnerable. And so I had this moment of insight and asked him to close his eyes. And we walked through a meditation that I actually learned from my father, where you walk down 10 steps, visualizing the steps until you get to a door. And you visualize the door and open it. And this man did this exercise, and it was one of the most profound moments I've had in coaching, where he really went for it. And what he noticed as he went through the staircase and opened the door, he saw this big wall that represented everything that was in the way of him connecting deeply with himself. And he described how he had to overcome that inside the visualization. And it was an incredible risk with a client I barely knew, with a modality that I'm not familiar with or hadn't been familiar with up until that point, that had a really big success for him. Because so often, and I fall into this trap, especially with coaching, it's easy to get stuck in the headspace of asking questions, of being intellectual, of thinking about things. And the body does hold an incredible source of wisdom and can be tapped into in different ways. And I found that this was incredibly powerful for this person, and obviously doesn't work for everybody. And so for me in my work, I introduce the sabbatics when it feels like it's going to be impactful, not because it's the thing I do with every single client. But do you meditate now? Not really. It's not part of my practice. I will on occasion. I have my own types of meditative practices. I have really grown to enjoy connecting with nature. I live in New York City, so that's not as easy. But there's a bench up in the Berkshires where my grandmother used to live that I discovered on a drive one day, and that is one of the places I go to go connect with myself and the earth. And when I go there, I meditate. And it's incredibly powerful in that space. Yeah, it is. It definitely is. I used to find it very surprising when I heard people meditate, and initially I didn't even know what it was. And then I heard some people do it every day and thought it was insane. And now I do it twice a day. I do it in the morning and night, every single day. I just absolutely love it. It creates that calmness. It brings you in alignment and just feels really good. What do you do when you're meditating? What's your practice? Just no thoughts, just complete silence, becoming very aware. And you're just in your awareness, very focused, without much mind activity, not much visualization, nothing like that. Just complete stillness to calm things down. And I feel that. It really is valuable. I will, when I notice myself reacting, myself getting anxious, or nervous, or just overthinking, I'll go through a few different... The huge one. I'll go through a few different just calming exercises that I know to get reconnected to where I am. And it's incredibly valuable. Yeah, I used to be overthinking and reactive, and it made a huge difference. And plus, I worked on subconscious reprogramming. It actually creates that foundation where you deal with life and the situations that things, more clearly, things don't affect you as much. They say you take your power back. And I find it incredibly valuable to retain that power because when you have it, no one can really control how you feel. You have that with you. Yes. It's so much I've learned. It's so much about regulating the nervous system and getting out of fight, flight, and freeze. Yes. Because I know that for me, when I get hijacked by that reaction, I don't think clearly. I don't think rationally. And I don't feel safe because that's what happens. The amygdala feels unsafe, and the body believes its life is under threat. And nobody makes powerful decisions in those moments where their body feels their lives are threatened. And meditation or grounding practices or just getting calm gets me back to an equilibrium where I'm not choosing from that place of being threatened. Usually there is no threat, but I'm not choosing from that place of being threatened, but choosing from an intentional, aware place. And so true. And a lot of people in sports, the stars, they utilize this before they go, for example, even boxing. If they go in with anger or frustration, they're not going to perform as well as someone who's calm and collected. That's why sometimes the opponent always tries to make them mad or make them upset because they lose their ground. Absolutely. So you work with entrepreneurs, corporate executives. How do you tweak your coaching style for each group? Is there a specific type of process that you go through to ensure that you're coaching the right system for each group? Yes and no, in that I have processes that I use, I have tools that I use, but I'm a very responsive coach. So I care less about what someone's role is or whether they're a corporate client or they're a business owner, an entrepreneur, and much more about... So it's the same. It's the same. It's much about who is the human in front of me. And I'm really good at matching my coaching style to the person I'm working with. It's in an intuitive level. I wish I could give you an answer to what I do that works, but I just find that I'm very, it's very easy for me to attune to who that person is to match their energy level and to understand where they are and what they need. That a lot of times, all of the time when I'm coaching, I keep a question in the back of my mind that I learned from one of my mentors, which is very simple. What's the most powerful and impactful thing this person needs right now? Not what do I think they need right now? What do they need right now? And it means being attuned to that person who's in front of me, whether they're a solopreneur, like I was talking about my first client, whether they're a corporate executive, like the client I used that meditation practices with at a large tech company, whether they're a man in one of our groups and we're not talking about work at all, that it's always for me about who is this person in front of me and what's going to bring value to them. I really don't even care what they do or what their role is. It's helpful to know and obviously I care about them, but when it comes to coaching someone, it's so much about the person themselves and not as much about the details surrounding them. So you're coaching the individual, you're not coaching on the business side of things. If they're an entrepreneur, you're not coaching them how to make their business better, so you don't really need that component. You just need to work with that individual. Yes. And I always start my sessions by asking, what do you want to work on? And so a small business owner might say, I want to increase my revenue. That's what I want to work on today. And in that case, that's where we'll work. And I will ask questions to understand their business, but I always think about- There's no different style. There's just different styles. I always think about something that I learned from another mentor of mine, who was actually, he was one of the founders of the International Coach Federation. And he used to drive me to camp in the summer when I was a kid, which is a funny coincidence. His name is David Goldsmith, and one of the best coaches I've ever worked with. And he said in this training program, he said, you don't want to ask questions that a client already knows the answer to, because it's all about value per minute. Especially when working with corporate executives or entrepreneurs, time is a precious resource. Attention is a precious resource. So if I'm asking a client to recap their entire business history, or why this transaction has gone the way it has, it's not valuable to them, because they know those answers. And for my job, I don't need to necessarily know those answers. So way more valuable for me to ask a question that reveals something that they haven't thought of before, because that's how they're going to get value. And I can put together the pieces or ask clarifying questions if necessary, but I try as much as I can to ask questions where the client has to do some thinking, not just tell me what they already know. You got it. Good. That's great. Jake, when you come across coaching an individual that's ambitious, enthusiastic, they want to improve their life, they want to do better, do you ever come across a specific quality or attribute that they have that is holding them back, even though they're ambitious and enthusiastic? That's a great question. Thanks. The answer that comes to me is yes, but it's hard to put a finger on exactly what that is, because it's so dependent on each individual. Yeah. It's that everybody's got something that's holding them back. Yeah. I'm just curious about that specific type, because they want the best, they're out there. But because you coach so many people, I thought there might be something that stood out for you about what might be holding them back and may help someone in the audience. Yeah. One in particular that comes up, especially with those high achievers, is they can be uber-focused on results. And so what's actually holding them back is their focus on the results and achievement. Yes. Got it. That it becomes like a checkbox. It becomes about checking the box of achieving the result, but not actually integrating the learnings. And it can get in their way from a long-term success, because being focused on results only gets a person so far. But it's always, in my experience, way more valuable to focus on process than results, because results follow process. If process is good, exactly. If process is good, if process is excellent, if we're continually innovating with process, the results will follow. That high achievers can be so focused on results that they miss the learnings along the way. They are actually disconnected in their lives, because they're deriving all of their meaning and fulfillment from their accomplishments. So they don't have strong personal relationships. They may not have friendships. They may be operating on the surface with a lot of people, and all of these things are holding them back. My father said something to me a few months ago. I was in the midst of a bit of a downturn in the business over the summer, and struggling to find motivation. And I was telling him, I said, Dad, I'm working really hard to build a sustainable business. And he said, Jake, it's not about building a sustainable business. It's about building a sustainable life. And many high achievers, many people with those big dreams are so focused on their dreams, they're not focused on building a sustainable life. And at the end of the day, I heard this, I think it was on social media somewhere, I wish I knew who said it, said the only people who remember you working late are your family. And at the end of the day, who really cares what you accomplished if the people closest to you remember you missing that precious time with them? I don't think anybody on their deathbed is really proud of the millions of dollars they made. Some people probably are. But most people are proud of the relationships that they carried. Yeah, it's a great point. Great advice for that, actually. It's such a valid point. You want to fall in love with the journey because when you take that stress off, you're focused on the results. You actually produce better results in the interim when you're focused and in love with life and in love with the moment and the journey. You relieve that pressure and you start seeing better things happen too. Absolutely. It makes a huge difference. It's one of the things that frustrates me looking at the world is the immense focus on results. So many people and so many systems have. And results in the near term, not results in the long term. There's this amazing book called The Good Ancestor by this man, Roman Kuznarek, who asked the simple question that Joseph Salk asked, which is, are we being good ancestors? And being a good ancestor is all about process. And the opportunity that was opened up in this book was all about long-term thinking, which was, how can we be good ancestors not for the next 10 years or 15 or 20 years, but for humans who are living in 100, 200, 500 years from now? And that all is about process. And just as individuals, when we focus on process, our results follow. They're much more extraordinary. We're happier and more fulfilled. And the future is set up for success if we focus on results as systems, as countries, as a world. Humans in the future will be set up for success too in a very different way than we're setting them up for success right now. Amazing. Great way to end the episode. Thank you, Jake. Appreciate your time today. It was great speaking to you. Wishing you all the best. I can see that you have a real good process and system in place to help people. And I can also tell that you very much invest in mentors to better yourself. And I feel like you have that beginner's mindset where you're grabbing what you can so you can utilize that information to help others and commend you for that. Thank you, Shahed. It's been wonderful having this conversation today. Really appreciate your curiosity and questions and sharing about your meditation practice. I definitely took something away myself. My pleasure, my friend. Thank you so much. Thank you. Take care.