“As you read The Crystal-Clear Leader, you will notice that Eric talks a great deal about his previous failure as a business owner and how he used what he learned to become a success.” – Jack Canfield, coauthor of the #1 New York Times Best-selling Chicken Soup for the Soul® series, on Eric Jackier’s book The Crystal-Clear Leader: A Proven System for Maximizing Your Success, Productivity, and Profitability.
What is the secret to Eric’s success? Stay tuned to find out!
GracePoint Publishing author Eric Jackier, the CEO & Founder of JTD Coaching and Chairman of the Disability Mentoring Day program in New York City from 2005-2014, joins Michelle to talk about the release of his new book, The Crystal-Clear Leader. This book is a testament to Eric’s success story and Michelle and the GracePoint Publishing team are so excited to share Eric’s story with you.
In The Crystal-Clear Leader, Eric shares his story about being a failed business leader who made every misstep that could be made. At the height of his despair, he started a three-year journey analyzing his mistakes and understanding the keys to success. This began an amazing journey to leadership excellence that is shared within the pages of his book and on this show. Told with humor and honesty, The Crystal-Clear Leader is an essential component of the Eric Jackier Leadership and Productivity System and inspires readers to become the best business leaders they can be. Whether you’re an entrepreneur or CEO, the skills and principles Eric shares will allow you to build, improve, or scale your business to heights you’ve never imagined. The Crystal-Clear Leader is available now in eBook and paperback, on Amazon (https://amzn.to/3HmughK) and wherever you get your favorite books.
To find out more about Eric and his work, please visit his website at jtdcoaching.com.
Keep writing. Keep creating. Your words matter.
Find out how to begin your own book publishing journey and learn more about our amazing authors at gracepointpublishing.com
Produced by Number Three Productions, numberthreeproductions.com
Full Transcript
Intro
Welcome to the GracePoint Publishing authors podcast. Join us as we discuss the challenges, triumphs, inspirations and unique aspects of our authors journey. As you listen, you will learn about how we publish our books, the ways we pivot and adjust to our ever changing industry, and how you can begin your own book publishing journey. And now here’s your host, co-founder and publisher of GracePoint Publishing, Michelle Vandepas.
Michelle
Hi, everyone. I’m Michelle Vandepas. And welcome to GracePoint Publishing podcast today, I’m thrilled to have Eric Jackier with me, he’s written a fabulous book, The Crystal Clear Leader: A Proven System for Maximizing Your Success, Productivity and Profitability. Instead of doing a bio, I’m going to be talking with Eric and a lot of his background is going to come through. Welcome to the show, Eric, I’m going to jump right in and ask you, your system for maximizing success didn’t come easy, because I know you had some bumps and struggles. Tell us a little bit about your journey and welcome.
Eric
Well, first of all, Michelle, thank you so much for having me on. It’s great to be here with you today, I haven’t had a chance to see in a long time. So it’s a treat. And I’m just really thrilled to share some of this with you know, success was not easy, never raise. But in my case, it was extra hard because I went into my previous business, thinking that I knew what I needed to know to be successful. And it turns out, knowing about 2% of what I really needed to know. So I made every mistake in the book. And before it was over and done with it caused me my marriage, it cost me a fortune financially. It cost me all sorts of different things. And it really was just awful. And it wasn’t that long ago, either. At the height of my despair, I decided to really go back to work, and really try and figure out what real success was and fill in the gaps for what it was that I was missing. And here I am.
Michelle
I think that’s a real interesting comment what real successful as he said, he wanted to figure out what real success was. What does that mean to you? What is real success?
Eric
Originally, it really had to do with just the business. Where did I fall short in the business and there were numerous areas. Real success, though is it’s everything it’s financial see says it is personal success. It is waking up in the morning and feeling happy and confident about what it is you’re doing. And that was a component I didn’t see coming. Throughout this journey. Michelle, I learned an awful lot about myself. And I also learned a lot about what went wrong and why it went wrong. Things that shouldn’t be obvious, which should have been obvious, I should say that we’re not necessarily the way I liken it now is to try and put a square peg in a round hole. And that’s really what I was up against in every area of my life. And what I’ve done now has really helped me make those corrections. It’s a business book. But there’s a lot more to it than just that.
Michelle
Well, I’m really interested, what is the one thing looking back with your as you call them, missteps that you took? What is the one thing that you wish you would have known that you think could help other business leaders and entrepreneurs today?
Eric
I would say the biggest mistake that people make in their business, especially when they’re just starting out, is to try and do every single thing themselves. You always hear this and I was always told this, you have to do every single thing yourself, you can’t look for help. You got to do the accounting, the marketing, you got to run the business, you got to take care of the clients, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. You got to do every one thing yourself. There is no room for help. Well, I’m here to tell you that is the fastest way in the world that you’re going to fail. Because no one person is capable of doing every single thing well, you need to be able to draw on help you need to be able to draw other people’s expertise. You also need to surround yourself with people that are smarter and more experienced than you are. I have gone through three different steps. And when I finally hit on the right formula, everything took off from there because I have a person working for me as a consultant, the former CEO of a major coaching company. I have a marketing expert who is second to none who does work with Jack Canfield. I have somebody on the ticket I was worried for Brian Tracy. No, we’re talking about top names. Right?
Michelle
Right, I’m gonna ask you because Jack Canfield wrote the foreword to your book. And then when you get to that in just a minute.
Eric
These are the people that showed me how to do it, right. They were generous and kind enough to allow me to tap into some of their knowledge and their resources, then you’re able to tap into that A plus expertise, everything takes over from there, I didn’t know how to do that.
Michelle
You alluded to a bit of a self development journey or personal exploration earlier in our conversation. And it sounds like you are saying that you have to go through that personally to also let go of things like being in charge of everything, accounting, and marketing and all of it because as entrepreneurs, we think we can do it all. So how much of letting go and letting other people help you do have to go internal and let go as well.
Eric
It comes down to this for me, Michelle, it didn’t work the other way. I fell a lot farther than I ever thought I could fall in my life. So there was really nowhere to go but up. Know, the reason I wrote The Crystal Clear Leader. And a lot of the coaching that I do in my practice, and new things that I do when I work with clients is help them avoid these missteps. My goal is to help others avoid the mistakes that I made. There are many other facets, besides trying to do everything yourself is time management, who’s keeping good clients and getting rid of the bad ones. And these are all things I talk about in my book, what I try and do when I coach someone is we try and do a diagnostic, get a very clear picture of where they are now. And what some of their struggles are and what some of their successes are. My goal is to bring people into what I call their zone of excellence. And that’s the goal of the book. And it’s the goal and what I do with coaching, help people work on and achieve what it is they’re really good at. And have them be able to focus on that and then be able to outsource and delegate the things that they’re not so good at. I like to think I’m a good coach. I like to think I’m a good speaker. I am not necessarily my own best accountant. I have someone take care of that. I know and understand marketing. I don’t know how to write copy all that. Well. These are the little nuances.
Michelle
So you wrote a great book. You got Jack Canfield to write the foreword. I know a little bit behind the scenes, but for our audience and our listeners here, how did you get both Brian Tracy and Jack Canfield to endorse this book? That’s quite an accomplishment.
Eric
Brian and Jack really had become my mentors. And they’ve also over time become my friends. There was a lot of luck involved. But I also mastered what they needed me to master, which got me to Brian Tracy’s door. I spent three days with him and a small group out in San Diego, at his speaking Academy. And at the end of the speaking Academy, he said to me, you can make a living doing this, you’re as good as 97% of the people that are out there. But to really become great. To really become top of the line, you’ve got a lot of work to do. You got to get that extra 3%. And if you know anything about Brian Tracy, that extra 3% is a big number for him. I went back home and I went to work. I studied everything I could get my hands on, Brian then introduced me to Jack. And as we’ve become friendlier and friendlier, and I’ve come to know each other better and better. They’ve really given me a lot of help. And they’ve really been kind enough to let me in to see how it’s done. They’ve been so kind to give me more and more to work with everything from reading my book, to analyzing my programs, to being afforded the opportunity to work directly with them. It’s been quite a journey. When the book was finished, I asked both of them Brian gave an endorsement and Jack wrote the foreword, and I can’t tell you how grateful I am to.
Michelle
Congratulations on that. I want to go back to the 3%. It feels to me like many entrepreneurs solopreneurs small business people feel like it should come easier. And they’re not always willing maybe to put in that last 3%.
Eric
You’ve got to do the work. His rags to riches stories, Michelle are one in a million. Very rarely do you open a shop and then a week later, you’re a millionaire. You must put in the work you got to put in the time. You got to keep getting better.The one thing that I really learned over the course of the last four years is, when you reach a level, you got to go on to the next level to become really, really good to really become the best. Now, not everybody wants that. But in order to get to the top of wherever it is you want to be in whatever industry you want to be, you’ve got to continue to grow, continue to increase that knowledge, put the hours in, I’ve spent 1000s of hours, studying, learning, correcting trying things, not everything I’ve done is worked. Not every program, I’ve taken his work. But you’ve got to keep going. And you’ve got to find what works. And you got to really just continue to reach and develop. Again, it’s not for everybody. It’s really the sort of thing where you either want it or you don’t.
Michelle
I think that’s very key. You either want it or you don’t people often ask me the key to my success, pretty much just showing up every day. You have great days, you have bad days, you have bumps in the road, you and I talked about bumps in the road, and you just keep showing up and doing the work show up every day. I think that’s part of the success.
Eric
Right? At the same time, it’s okay to have a bad day. Right, right. It’s okay to wonder how this is all gonna work. It’s all fine. Do you think you would have gotten to where you are today? If you hadn’t hit rock bottom? Is there a way to because we’re trying to help other people not hit rock? Bottom? Right? It’s a subjective question. I’m going to qualify my answer, I would say probably not.Or at least certainly in a very different way. I ran a program years ago called Disability Mentoring Day for the city of New York. I did that for 10 years, we did a very good job. We were the most successful program of our kind of the United States. But I’ve often said this, I would almost wish we could do something like that again, because I would like to take what I’ve learned, going back the last seven or eight years and applying it now. Do I think I would have gotten to this point, probably not.I still wonder if the price of is worth it. Because the bottom was pretty lousy.
Michelle
We hope through your book, you’re gonna help other people not have to go through some of what you did.
Eric
And that’s really why I wrote it, because you can get to the top without living through the nightmare that I did. And that’s the goal, you can take corrective action, before the worst happens. Rather than take corrective action, you can prevent it. So the first thing is, surround yourself with people that know more than you stay in your own genius, right? You help people find their genius and stay in that place. What other lesson can you give someone who maybe isn’t doing as well as they would like? The answer that comes right away from me is time management. What do you and I, Michelle have in common with Jeff Bezos, and Bill Gates, and whomever else, we have the same 24 hours in a day, seven days a week. The key is how you manage your time. And especially in this day and age, where there are so many distractions, there is social media, there are the distractions of home life, all sorts of different things that do nothing but take you away from the task at hand. I bet you know the answer to this. But I’m going to ask the question anyway. In an eight hour business day, how many hours of productive work are actually done?
Michelle
Oh, heavens. I don’t know the answer to that.
Eric
But it’s not as many as you would think the answer is three. Yeah. So in an eight hour day, you spend less than half the time on average. When I say you, I mean all of us. We give away more than half our time to things that have nothing to do with our bottom line. One of the things that I spend a lot of time with is helping clients get those hours back by eliminating the distractions, times that you spend not checking the phone now checking social media, your own workspace, where you’re not disturbed, like where you and I are sitting now. And also making it clear to others that when you’re working, you’re at work unless you’re dealing with a life and death emergency where you absolutely must be interrupted.Everything else goes away. But how many of these distractions are avoidable? How many times does somebody approached you, Michelle, the owner of a major publishing company needing two minutes, everybody needs two minutes. If you’re disturbed for two minutes, it takes your brain 20 minutes to refocus on the task at hand. So think about this for three tiny two minute distractions. You lose an hour of productivity. I like that two minutes of distractions. You’re losing an hour productivity.
Michelle
That’s interesting. I have to think about that. I also think part of the productivity isn’t always doing stuff, some of it for business owners, especially it’s thinking, writing. I need quiet time to think I need to walk, I need to write out and talk out concepts that are bigger concepts to help lead the company and your book is all about leadership says not just all about do do doing.
Eric
Very true and you hit on something key. And I’ll give you a primary examples, somebody called me not long ago with an opportunity that floored me. And before I did anything else, I shut everything off, just so I could spend two or three hours just processing thinking. And I’ve got a process before I start writing, and the writing process. And you know, this better than anybody takes a certain amount of preparation and thinking, and you got to be in the right mindset to do that. If you were to ask me to write a book chapter right now, I couldn’t do it. So much of this is mental and emotional, you got to do all you can to be in the right mindset daily. And again, things are gonna happen. There are things that are out of your control. But if you’re able to go into each day as a business owner, with a pretty clear objective of what it is that you want to do, and need to get done, you’ve hit on something and you’ve gone a long way to being successful. I’ll give you one other thing. And that’s the process of writing things down. Yeah, write down your top three tasks for each day. Do that before the next day. Do that before you leave the office. That’s a very important way to transfer from one day to the next, make sure that you understand what your tasks are, every single day, I keep a weekly calendar, not a daily calendar, but a weekly calendar. Because each Sunday before the week starts, I have a pretty clear picture of what I need to do for that week. The Times may change, the dates may change, because life happens. But my goal each week is to accomplish the test that I see in front of me.
Michelle
You talked about your writing process and the process of writing a book and that you need to be in the right headspace. What’s your process? How did you come up with the process for writing this book?
Eric
You know, it’s so funny. I recently had dinner with my niece. When she was really little I used to read to her all the time. So she says to me, uncle Eric, how do you write a book, like I can’t even read a book. So after I stopped laughing, because it’s hardly true, you do it by doing it. As much as anything else. It’s a commitment of time. It’s a commitment of what it is that you really want to say to your audience. Your readers are like any other audience, if you’re speaking on a stage, you’re speaking to your audience, if you’re writing a book, you’re writing for your audience. So before I write a book, my first question is, Who am I trying to reach? My second question is, what am I trying to tell them? So in terms of the writing process, what I try and do is work backwards, answering those two questions, and then trying to outline how we go from step to step to step. It’s not something I ever thought I can do. And I’ve written three of them. Now, I’m proudest of the crystal clear leader, it’s also a commitment. When I am writing, I make the commitment that I’ve got to write something every day, I can pretty much tell what kind of day it’s going to be 10 minutes into the process. Even if I’m not having a good day, I’ll still write a paragraph and then put it away on the days that I really am into. Alright, for as long as I can. I’m committed to doing something every day to keep moving the ball forward.
Michelle
How long did it take you from when you started to write about to finish writing a book?
Eric
This particular book, probably three months.
Michelle
That’s pretty good.
Eric
It’s also not Crime and Punishment. It’s a small book. But I also think that especially in this kind of forum, I think small books are important. And I think the other thing is to engage the reader and give the reader a chance to really think and do exercises and answer questions. So it’s not the lengthiest book in the world. But my hope is that for the reader, it really gives them something to think about. Yeah. So again, it’s being committed, I hear you say the same things over and over, which is important for those of us that want to go on and impact the world and get our messages and inspire other people. A lot of it is discipline. A lot of it is okay, it’s Sunday, and you don’t feel up to it, but you still gotta write at the very least you got to write your paragraph. whatever time of day works for you is fine. I did a lot of the writing that I did at night. I can also tell you that there was one day that I blocked off just for writing. The one thing also is a you don’t want to stop your life. Because that’s no good eating. If I want to go and play with my nephew, I’m going to do that. I’m going to get something done but I’m not going to not see family not see friends. You got to have that too in your life. Because what is just one thing all the time that’s not healthy eating, giving yourself a rest. And giving yourself a change of scenery and spending time with people that you care about? is every bit as important because you need that support system to.
Michelle
Yeah, yeah. Are you still writing? Right now? Maybe you’re writing another book? Are you working on another book? Or do you write in between books?
Eric
I know a hint when I hear what the answer is not yet. I really don’t have a concept that I nailed down. To me, it’s almost sequential. Everything I’ve written has been in sequence based on the journey that I’ve taken. I’m not quite there yet. And when I get there all know, what has been the most surprising thing to come out of writing this book for you that I was able to do it number.
Michelle
Well, you’re disciplined your focus, you have good time management, and you sit down and you write even it’s just a paragraph at a time. So I’m not surprised. It sounds as though part of writing the book also helps you to continue to develop and learn from your mistakes, and reflect on your life. For those of you who want more information, you can find out more about Eric and his coaching at jtdcoaching.com. I’m gonna make sure I said that correctly. Jtdcoaching.com. I’ve got one final question for you. If you could sit down with anyone and pick their brain, who would that be?
Eric
I’ve always been a bit of an American history buff, probably be one of the former presidents. I’m going to pick George Washington. And the reason I would pick George Washington is because he had no blueprint to go from everything that we take for granted today, in terms of how our country works, is based on the way he set it up. The Congress was a brand new thing. There was no such thing as a cabinet. He filled the first Supreme Court, it was all him. He really was the founder of our company. He was the first CEO of our company, if you want to look at it that way. Everybody at that time knew that he was the only person in the country at that time to be able to lead it. He was a unanimous choice for president. How did he do that? How did he handle that? How did he know? I’ve studied every single president. It’s a hobby of mine. I have biographies of every last one of them. Most people put Lincoln at the top of the line. He to me is number two, because what he did was equally impressive holding the Union together. If you as Lincoln, where he went for guidance and advice, he will tell you Washington. I mean, he didn’t know him, but Washington was a mentor of sorts. But Lincoln, I find it fascinating that you study presidents, and I’m sure in our next interview, we can talk about the correlation between that study and your success as an entrepreneur. Thank you so much for being here on the Gracepoint publishing podcast today. Right now. It was delightful to be here, Michelle, anytime, and I look forward to hearing from you soon. The book is the crystal clear leader, a proven system for maximizing your success, productivity and profitability. And everywhere books are sold. And join us again on Gracepoint publishing podcast.
Outro
Thank you for joining us on this episode of The GracePoint Publishing authors podcast. We can’t wait to talk more next time as we introduce you to another one of our amazing authors. Make sure you hit subscribe on your favorite podcasting platform, so you never miss a single episode of The Gracepoint publishing authors podcast. To find out more about our authors and to see how we can help you publish your book. Head to Gracepoint publishing.com. Keep writing. Keep creating your word matter.