Bryan McAnulty [00:00:00]:

Right now, it feels like everything is changing. The economy, AI, world conflicts, competition. And as a business owner, it's easy to feel like you need to work harder just to keep up. But what if working harder is actually the problem? Tony Loyd spent years as a Fortune 500 executive, leading teams through constant change. He's also a lifelong endurance athlete. But everything shifted when cancer surgery reduced his lung capacity by 25%. He had to relearn how to perform, how to recover, and keep going with less. Despite all this, he built a thriving business under his own terms.

Bryan McAnulty [00:00:32]:

That experience led him to a powerful idea. Success in business is not about intensity. It's about endurance. Today, Tony helps leaders and entrepreneurs stay steady, make better decisions, and keep momentum even when everything around them feels unstable. So if you're building a business in these uncertain times, this episode is for you. Today we're going to learn how to stay calm and make better decisions when your business feels unstable. Why pushing harder often leads to worse results. And what to do instead.

Bryan McAnulty [00:00:59]:

And how to build real endurance so that you can grow without burning out.

Tony Loyd [00:01:03]:

In times of rapid change, it's the learners that will inherit the earth, while the learned will find themselves beautifully prepared for a world that no longer exists. We have all this stuff that has gotten us where we are, and one of those things is resilience. And resilience is this sort of thing that you take a blow and then you bounce back, and then you take another blow and you have a moment and then you bounce back.

Bryan McAnulty [00:01:30]:

Welcome to the Creator's Adventure, where we interview creators from around the world, hearing their stories about growing a business. Hey, everyone. I'm Bryan McAnulty, the founder of Heights Platform. Let's get into it. Hey, Tony. Welcome to the show.

Tony Loyd [00:01:48]:

Thanks for having me.

Bryan McAnulty [00:01:49]:

Bryan, my first question for you is, what would you say is the biggest thing either that you did or you are doing that has helped you to achieve the freedom to do what you enjoy?

Tony Loyd [00:01:58]:

Yeah, I'd say writing is something that I have enjoyed doing, that I'm doing more of. And by writing, I'm writing for, you know, magazines, for business magazines. I'm writing with, you know, on my website. I've been creating a lot of content in that way. So I think that just that ability to shape a story and to tell a story, that places me on the side as the guide and the person I'm talking to as a hero. I think that's been a big change maker for me.

Bryan McAnulty [00:02:34]:

When did that come about? Did you always enjoy writing in some way? Was there some moment where you realize that this is how I have to position myself or what?

Tony Loyd [00:02:44]:

Well, I think necessity is a mother of invention. Right. So, you know how it goes as an entrepreneur. You do the thing that you have to do in order to get the results that you want. So, yeah, I've always enjoyed writing, but I'm just doing a lot more of it now. That's sort of at the top of mind right now as you and I are on this date. If you would have asked me yesterday, I might have told you a different thing that's making a big difference. Now I'm doing a lot of writing and I'm working on a book and I've got a bunch of other things in the hopper. So that expression through words has been a big game changer for me.

Bryan McAnulty [00:03:23]:

Before you got where you are today, you experienced all kinds of disruptions in your life and your business. Can you quickly walk us through your story and working for five Fortune 500 companies, battling cancer, and how that led to the success of today?

Tony Loyd [00:03:38]:

Yeah, so a few things here real quickly. So I did, I had a Fortune 500 career there. There were moments in my career when I began to question the whole construct, the whole system that I was working within. You know, when it comes to, for publicly traded companies, when it comes to shareholders versus the environment, shareholders win. When it comes to shareholders versus paying a living wage, often shareholders win. Shareholders versus our supp, shareholders versus, you know, whatever. And so shareholders win. Shareholders win.

Tony Loyd [00:04:14]:

Shareholders win. So I have a set of values like, you know, a good example of that is I don't think it's a belief system to say that the climate is changing and that we're pumping a lot of carbon into our atmosphere and it's having a big impact. I don't think that's a belief system. I think that's science. So when it comes to, you know, do we account for our carbon footprint as a corporation and how do we offset our carbon footprint, etc. A lot of times the shareholders win. Right. And paying a living wage is really important because then you have some social benefits throughout your organization and your people can afford to buy more products and they have happier, better lives, etc.

Tony Loyd [00:04:58]:

So I was always kind of in a bit of a struggle with this, but the higher up in an organization you go, the more you get to see how the sausage is made. And you know, honestly, I was really struggling. I just, I had always said the purpose of business for publicly traded companies especially is sustainable, profitable growth. So it's great if you're growing as long as you're profitable and you can sustain that over a long period of time, then shareholders will buy more of your stock and you have more capital and you can do more good in the world, and you do, you know, serve more customers, et cetera. Sustainable, profitable growth.

Tony Loyd [00:05:53]:

But later, I left my corporate job and I found these people who are called social entrepreneurs. So they're doing sustainable, profitable growth for good. They're making dollars, but they're also making a difference. They make profit, but profit with a purpose. And so that became a new model for me. I didn't discover it. I just, you know, I ran into some people who were doing this kind of work. I had a podcast called Social Entrepreneur, wrote a book on it called Crazy Good Advice, you know, but along the way, man, I mean, well, let's just take today, right?

Tony Loyd [00:06:35]:

So today there are geopolitical actions going on that are upsetting, right? There are tariffs that are on one day, they're off the next, our supply chains are disrupted. I talked to a person the other day, and she said, I don't even know what's true. Like, are the tariffs on or the tariffs off? Do I have to move my factory or do I not? You know, what is true in the world? And so I think in general today, we have sort of a level of upset, right, that somebody called it the chaotic churn of constant change.

Tony Loyd [00:07:25]:

And so we all are in that little hamster wheel. We kind of feel that vibration in the system. But then you take a person and you place them inside of a complex social construct called a business. And now that's more complex and there's more to overcome. And then you take one of those people and you prop them up as a supervisor. And now that's even more complex. Now you're not just accomplishing results, you're accomplishing results through others. And you make that person a middle manager. You make that person executive. It's a lot to tolerate.

Tony Loyd [00:07:49]:

Things are changing so fast right now that I have a chart that every time I put it up, people just go, oh, I get that. That it sort of shows how the rate of change was coming along. And then about 1947, when the transistor was invented, suddenly it just did this hockey stick where the rate of change just started going up. So you have the transistor, you had computer processing power, you had cell phones, you had AI. You had all these things. And today, you know, we're all walking around with an AI driven supercomputer in our pockets. So, you know, like, that's a lot to tolerate.

Tony Loyd [00:08:33]:

That's a lot to take in in the first place. So, you know, there's that. And then, you know, I struggled in my corporate career just simply because my values weren't aligned to what was happening. That was disrupting in my life. That was upsetting. But let me just tell one personal story from this. And as I'm sitting here, I'm looking across the room, and I could see the corner where I was standing on April 29th of 2025. So as you and I are talking, it was about a year ago, I was standing in that corner and I was surrounded by boxes. And the reason that I was standing in that corner surrounded by boxes was I was moving into apartment.

Tony Loyd [00:09:15]:

And the reason I was moving into this apartment was because I was going through a divorce. And, you know, I had been married for 27 years. So I was feeling really hollow, right? You know, that feeling like, your chest is empty. Like, right. I was feeling really hollow. And so I was having a. It was the worst day of my life. Without a doubt. And friends of mine had come over and helped me move, and we had a little, you know, celebration on the back patio. And they're all sort of filtering out, and there's one person left in the kitchen putting dishes up.

Tony Loyd [00:09:42]:

And I hear a little ding on my phone, and I pick it up and I look at it and it says, you have a message on my chart. And my chart is this portal that my doctor uses to communicate with me. So I open it up and the first words I see are, pulmonary malignancy. I have lung cancer. So I'm like, bruh, this is a hard day, man. You know, like, I'm going through a divorce and I get lung cancer by text. Like, how hard can this be? But what happened for me in that moment, Bryan, was this question sort of dropped in my mind. And the question is, how do you endure when the bottom drops out?

Tony Loyd [00:10:11]:

And so all these conditions I've been describing, it's like the bottom is dropping out for everybody. And so that became first on a personal quest. How do I endure when the bottom drops out? And then the question becomes, how do others endure when the bottom drops out? Because actually, that's a commercially viable idea. People want to be unshakable in a world that feels unstable. And so if that's something that I can help offer and I can tell you about how I did the research and where we get to where we are, all that later. But if that's something that I can offer, well, there are a lot of people out there that need that. And so I feel like that's something of value, that you can be unshakable in a world that feels unstable. So that's my story.

Bryan McAnulty [00:11:34]:

Real quick, Bryan here. You know me as the host for this podcast, but what you might not know is I'm also the founder of Heights Platform. It's an all in one platform that over 10,000 creators have used to build their online courses, communities and digital product businesses. We recently added some awesome updates to Heights AI to help you turn your idea into a viable business. Heights AI can build entire product offers, review your content, and even coach you on how to grow. You can try it for free for 30 days. Links in the description. Now back to the podcast.

Bryan McAnulty [00:12:03]:

Awesome. Yeah, I completely understand and it definitely sounds that it makes sense. And a couple of things resonated with me. The idea of your own values and being able to have that align with the things that you do is so important. And that's one of the things that I love about the business that many of our audience is in. When you're creating a course or some kind of knowledge program or coaching that you're offering somebody, it is, or it can be a lot more fulfilling than like selling some random widget on Amazon because you get to hopefully make a positive change in somebody's life.

Bryan McAnulty [00:13:04]:

And yeah, I think it's unfortunate that for many people they have to later on discover only after they've gone so deep into something that. Wait a second, the way that this all like expands out does not actually align with what's important to me. And so that's one thing. But then the other thing is about everything you're talking about now, and you didn't even mention so much about all the changes in AI and all this. It's definitely a very unstable time in many ways. So I think you mentioned endurance, right? So we're told that when things get difficult, we need to push harder, just try a little bit harder in life and business. Can you tell us more about this idea of endurance and how you would approach this instead?

Tony Loyd [00:13:36]:

Yeah, there's a guy named Eric Hoffer and he has this great quote and I'm going to get it wrong, but it's approximately this: in times of rapid change, it's the learners that will inherit the earth, while the learned will find themselves beautifully prepared for a world that no longer exists. And so we have all this stuff that has gotten us where we are. And one of those things is resilience. And resilience is this sort of thing that you take a blow and then you bounce back, and then you take another blow and you have a moment and then you bounce back. And that's resilience.

Tony Loyd [00:14:40]:

You know, we all went through the pandemic or maybe a housing bubble or whatever else it's been through, that we've been through in our life. But it's like something big comes along and you catch a blow and then you bounce back. But what happens when you get blow after blow after blow after blow after blow after blow after blow? Like it never lets up. How do you deal with that? Because resilience is no longer enough. So that was the thing that sort of was hitting me was that, you know, I'm out having a cup of coffee with over 100 different leaders so that I can sort of get their take on this. And I'm just going, you know, I'm seeing this thing. Is that true for you?

Tony Loyd [00:15:29]:

And people are like, yes, yes, this is true for me. But one of the phrases they use most often is one blanking thing after another. Right? One expletive thing after another. It's like, it's not just one thing. It's like we're being hit from every direction by all these different things all at the same time. So how do you build a tolerance for that? And I'm an endurance athlete. I'm a marathoner. I'm going to the age group world championship here in about a month. And so I've been a pretty good runner up to this point in my life. And one of the things about runners is we.

Tony Loyd [00:15:58]:

Like last weekend I did a 20 mile run. Well, why did I do a 20 mile run? There wasn't a race. I didn't get a ribbon. There was nothing, you know, like, I didn't get a medal for that. I did it because I am building an internal tolerance to being out on the pavement for that long. I'm building up. And I didn't start at 20 miles. I started like at 5 and then 6 and then 10 and then 20, you know, all the way up. So. So 10, 12, 14, 16. Right. So there's this internal condition that we need to build in order to tolerate the rate of change today, this accelerating rate of change, which leads to constant disruptions.

Tony Loyd [00:16:56]:

Constant, constant new information, constant new things. I don't even look at my social media hardly anymore because it's just too much. There's just too many things coming across my feed. Okay. So I do look at it, but not as much. So there's so many things that are coming at us at the same time. And so that's a set of conditions that exist whether we want it to or not. So we have to figure out how to tolerate that kind of environment. And then the second thing we have to do is we have to build organizations that can tolerate that kind of constant disruption that's coming in.

Tony Loyd [00:17:38]:

So I work on kind of two different levels. One is on the personal endurance, and the second is on the organizational endurance. How do we endure? And again, it's, you know, you want to be unshakable in a world that feels unstable. So how do we do that? So that's what I'm working on.

Bryan McAnulty [00:17:41]:

Yeah. Yeah, I like that. One of my favorite thing that I saw written by Tim Ferriss a very long time ago was an article on his website about the art of letting bad things happen. And how you have to learn to become comfortable with more bad things happening if you want more good things to be able to happen. So that reminded me of this and also, like the way I like to try to just personally think of everything that I'm doing is like, if I didn't need any money, if I didn't need whatever it was, how can I make it so the thing that I'm doing today would be the same thing I'd be doing tomorrow if there's no other things that I needed in my life.

Bryan McAnulty [00:18:45]:

And so, and trying to. That way, I feel both a sense of purpose, a sense of enjoyment and fulfillment trying to improve myself. And it's something that I know that I can keep just doing for 10, 20, 30, 40, whatever years instead of like, well, I hope I can make it through this year kind of thing.

Tony Loyd [00:18:45]:

Yeah, yeah. You know, and you mentioned something earlier. I think this is really true. Like your audience, we're all a bunch of creatives, but what often happens is we create the thing that we ourselves need. Right. So that's what's happened with me is that this endurance leadership framework, it came out of my own personal set of needs. And then as a secondary thought I thought, oh, this is commercially viable. There are other people who need something similar.

Tony Loyd [00:19:17]:

So started by solving my own problem, and now I'm working my way out to offer to organizations.

Bryan McAnulty [00:19:24]:

Yeah, yeah. And that's great, because, I mean, I feel like that's how so much of what I've built has come about as well. And when you're able to build a business around something that way, then instead of trying to find something in the world and understand it, you start with such a deep understanding of the problem because it was your own.

Tony Loyd [00:19:45]:

Yeah. Right.

Bryan McAnulty [00:19:48]:

So I want to go back to the kind of unstableness when everything feels unstable. What are the most common mistakes that you see entrepreneurs make?

Tony Loyd [00:19:56]:

Good question. I think what happens is we allow ourselves to become fatigued. We become upset. Right. And it's okay to have an emotional reaction to something, but it's not okay for your emotions to be controlling you. So one of the first things we have to do is we have to calm ourselves. And calm. It's not a state of being. I'm not saying be Zen, right? But I'm saying calm ourselves, you know? One of the greatest endurance athletes in the world is a woman named Des Linden. And in 2018, she ran the Boston Marathon.

Tony Loyd [00:20:54]:

And when she was running was the coldest, windiest, rainiest, worst conditions that have ever been at the Boston Marathon. And she actually, she hadn't been feeling well. She showed up that morning. She was, like, thinking about not even showing up at the start line, but what the heck, I'll just show up. I'll go help some other women. She shows up, she starts running. She gets along. A woman named Shalane. Shalane goes, oh, man, I'm having stomach problems. Des goes, I tell you what. You drop off, go to the restroom. I'll stay halfway with the lead pack, and I'll stay in contact with them. You catch up to me, and then you and I together, we will work our way up and catch the lead pack.

Tony Loyd [00:21:32]:

And so, like, she's just sort of playing with this, and so it's terrible conditions. You know, like, Des doesn't even take her outer jacket off. She runs in her jacket. It's just sheets of rain. It's horrible conditions. So, anyway, long story short, Des and Shalane catch the lead pack, and then one at a time, Des starts passing, starts passing, starts passing, start passing. And then pretty soon, she's in the lead with, like, you know, she's at 22 or 23. She's now in the lead. And she's like, whoa, I didn't expect this. I don't even come for this today. And she won. She won the Boston Marathon.

Tony Loyd [00:22:02]:

But the whole time she was out there, she was saying to herself, calm, calm, calm, relax, relax, relax, calm, calm, calm, relax, relax, relax. So we hear the word calm and we think that means be passive, be Zen, right? But calm can be active. And so it's getting a hold of your own emotional sense. And the word I was looking for a while ago was overwhelm. What happens is when we don't manage our own emotions, we go into overwhelm.

Tony Loyd [00:22:37]:

So the first secret is being calm. And then, you know, there are five different segments to this model that I have. And the fifth section segment, the last one, so that's calm as the first one. The last one is called continue. And in that one, it's the rhythm of rest and recovery. And I would say for most entrepreneurs, most business leaders, if they pay attention to their emotional regulation, and I'll tell you a statistic about that in a second, if they pay attention to their emotional regulation and they pay attention to the fact that they can't sprint their way through a marathon, they have to, you know, it's okay to sprint, but you need a rhythm of rest and recovery. Those two things, I think, can make a huge difference for any entrepreneur or business leader.

Tony Loyd [00:23:37]:

The one statistic I was going to tell you is there have been these studies that show when a leader walks into a room, the team can, within microseconds, sense their emotional state, and their mirror neurons will begin to fire to match that leader. And so if you walk into a room with chaos, they're going to sense chaos and they're going to reflect chaos back to you. So chaos is contagious, but so is calm. If you can walk into that room with a sense of calm, a sense of being grounded, that can make a huge difference to the entire organization.

Bryan McAnulty [00:24:23]:

So, yeah, yeah, I mean, I think that the same applies even over Zoom or virtual as well. I mean, I've seen reactions from my small team which I could tell was based on my calmness or lack thereof on a certain day. So let's say somebody realizes that they are not calm at all. Let's say they realize, okay, well, I'm completely overwhelmed. I'm completely stressed out. I know I'm not thinking clearly. How do they adjust or fix that?

Tony Loyd [00:24:59]:

Well, first of all, you know, we have a whole list of micro practices. And if you want, I can give you what the URL is to get these micro practices, but these are things that you can do within the first 24 hours after realizing that you're not calm. And what could you do about that? But there was a guy named John Kabat-Zinn, who wrote a whole bunch of stuff and what he basically did was he took a lot of the mindful practices from Eastern philosophies and he brought them into the West.

Tony Loyd [00:26:08]:

And so in the age of AI, we're seeing a real resurgence now interest about mindfulness, about breath control, about meditative breaks. One of the things that you can do for yourself is instead of like taking one 50 minute break, you can take five 10 minute breaks through the day. And that has more restorative power. You do more reflecting, et cetera. So there are a lot of practices, but they're all sort of related to this concept of finding your breath, centering of, you know, and these are things that aren't new. Right. So those are the kinds of things I think. But if anybody's interested, we have some micro practices that we could send them.

Bryan McAnulty [00:26:16]:

Sure, yeah. What's the URL? And we'll put it in the description as well.

Tony Loyd [00:26:20]:

Sure. So the website is cultureshift.com. That's C U L T U R E Shift, S H I F as in Frank, T as in Tom, cultureshift.com. And if you go to cultureshift.com/practice, then you should be able to find those micro practices.

Bryan McAnulty [00:26:47]:

Great. So yeah, I agree with and like a lot of the principles of mindfulness. And I feel that's important as well. I think that like, I try to tell my daughter even when I see her, she's only four, but like I'll see her worried about something that's going to happen later on and try to tell her like let's come back to right now first of all. And what I would say, I guess is that there's some places where it's maybe more obvious that it's a benefit than others. And one example maybe is like if you were playing a sport and it's some kind of physical sport or something where like it's very important all the actions that you're taking at this moment, of course you would agree that you have to be focused on the moment you have to be in the flow state, ideally.

Bryan McAnulty [00:27:46]:

Right. That you're able to perform exactly the things that you need to without being distracted or worried of, like, what if we lose? Or something like this.

Tony Loyd [00:27:46]:

Yeah, yeah.

Bryan McAnulty [00:27:47]:

But I think that it makes sense in a way that in business, it's like we don't think about the importance of this or we ignore that. We just don't make the correlation. Maybe because it doesn't feel as much of a feedback loop of you have to take these very rapid actions, but the importance still stands and that if you are stuck on all these things that are overwhelming you, then you're not performing the right way.

Tony Loyd [00:28:17]:

Yeah. Yeah, you're right. I think overwhelm is a huge issue in corporations and with entrepreneurs. I mean, right now, every morning, I get up and I put on my CEO hat for a while, and I'm doing my CEO job. Then I take that off and I put on my sales hat, and I'm doing that for a while. And then. Oh, got to do my accounting. Got to put my accounting hat on now and do that for a while. I'm building a team and we're getting more. I don't know if you read the book Who Not How. Recommend that one, but I'm getting more who's on the team right now.

Tony Loyd [00:28:56]:

But in the meantime, I still have to allocate time to do all those things. And what ends up happening is I'm halfway through my accounting work and some marketing call comes and I have to deal with that. So we're all constantly being disrupted. I just was writing a piece the other day that I found a study that said when you're working on something, when you get disrupted, it takes about 40 minutes for you to get back to the state you were at before the disruption. Well, who has 40 minutes to work on anything? You know, so I think our modern state, you know, just a while ago, while we were talking, I thought I had turned off my phone.

Tony Loyd [00:29:39]:

Well, it rang, and we're in the middle of this conversation. You know, how many times a day do I get notifications on my computer from. I use ClickUp to manage my team. I use HoneyBook to manage my client flow. I'm using Flodesk in order to send out emails. You know, like, I've got all these notifications going off on my computer at the same time, and that stuff can really disrupt you. So I have to put myself in a focus mode on the computer, stay on these tasks as long as I can. But a lot of people, a lot of us don't have that luxury. We just have to learn how to manage all those disruptions and how to manage ourselves.

Bryan McAnulty [00:30:19]:

Well, any specific recommendations for somebody who doesn't have that luxury? Any specific recommendations of like how you would either work around it or create that space for yourself?

Tony Loyd [00:30:31]:

Yeah, I think protecting your margins is really important. So, you know, one of the things I mentioned is like 50 minute meetings. So if you schedule your full hour, every hour, then you're going to walk out of a meeting with a notebook full of to do's, but there's no time to reflect on that, think about it, to do anything because you're off to your next meeting. So finding your margins throughout the day where you can just sort of like reflect, think, journal, all those kinds of things, that's really helpful.

Bryan McAnulty [00:31:09]:

Yeah. Yeah, that's a great point. Yeah. For the meetings I have, fortunately it's not very many. But when I do have meetings I have on my calendar, it's not possible to book sometimes back to back, sometimes I want a couple in a row, but then after that there has to be some certain amount of gaps and stuff. But yeah, I've also found for myself like I track every minute of where I spend working to be able to know for myself what am I actually getting done.

Bryan McAnulty [00:31:51]:

And I will try to leave blocks of time where there can't be any other distractions and I get to work on whatever is most important that I work on at that time. And I think that for those who are newer to being an entrepreneur and trying to deal with wearing the many hats and all of this and the overwhelm in what's changing in the world today, the amount that you can accomplish in even one focused hour, I think people still tend to underestimate themselves with. But the problem that many people have is they don't have even one focused hour. And so you've got to find a way around that.

Tony Loyd [00:32:18]:

Right. My writing partner, she talks about, she's also a psychotherapist, she's also a social worker, she's published author. She's got more letters after her name than I have in my name. Right. You know, she's one of those people, but she always talks about five things: eat, sleep, move, connect and pleasurable activities. And she sees people all day long who are filled with anxiety and depression and all that, and a lot of them are startup founders, they are entrepreneurs, they're business and they're, and they've got themselves tied up in knots. But if you make a plan and prioritize.

Tony Loyd [00:32:59]:

When am I going to have healthy food? You know, if I don't have time to cook, how will I get healthy food? Eat, sleep, how am I going to make sure that I'm tracking my sleep? I'm getting enough sleep, it's good, solid sleep. Move. How am I going to move my body every day in whatever way that might look? And then how do I connect with my people? How do I make sure that I'm connecting with people that matter to me? And then how do I have time for some pleasurable activity, whether that's reading or playing tennis or whatever that thing is that you really enjoy doing. How are you going to build that into your schedule? And if you don't block those things in your schedule, somebody will schedule over that time for you.

Bryan McAnulty [00:33:43]:

Yeah, yeah, I completely agree. Both in the reality of what will happen if you don't do that and how important it is. I've got a couple kind of quicker questions for you just to kind of hear your like, I guess like 10 to 30 second take on.

Tony Loyd [00:33:59]:

Okay.

Bryan McAnulty [00:34:01]:

Would you say is hustle culture making entrepreneurs weaker?

Tony Loyd [00:34:06]:

Yes.

Bryan McAnulty [00:34:08]:

Okay. Why?

Tony Loyd [00:34:10]:

I was under 30 seconds. Yes. So I think that there is the worship of hustle. And same thing happens in corporations. People will get praised for sending that email at 2 o'clock in the morning. Wow, you're working all the time. Wow, look at you. Right? And we tend to, you know, go on TikTok or Instagram or whatever, post pictures of ourselves going, look at me, I'm hustling over here. Right. You know, I think that can be deadly. It can be deadly to people. It could be deadly to you, your organization. So, yeah, I think that's a problem.

Bryan McAnulty [00:34:46]:

And next is, why do smart business owners make worse decisions when things become uncertain?

Tony Loyd [00:34:52]:

Yeah, great question. That is, that's a solid question. I will just say, when I am my best self, I am the best leader. When I am my worst self, I am the worst leader. I have hundreds of times asked this question to thousands of people in workshops and I have said, tell me about the worst boss you've ever had. And they just will pour out on you like, just, wow, this is the worst. I'm working for them now. Right.

Tony Loyd [00:35:27]:

And then if I go, okay, great, now tell me about the best boss you ever had. And people can also say, wow, this is who it is. And the truth is, if you take all those characteristics and I could name them. If you take all those characteristics, I have been both of those people. It's just I was having my best day, and I was having my worst day. So if you don't protect yourself and if you don't care for yourself, you can't pour out of an empty vessel. Right? So it's just. Yes, you can be your worst self.

Tony Loyd [00:35:58]:

You can be your worst business leader. You can be the worst salesperson. You can be the worst of all if you are your worst self. So you have to protect yourself and feed yourself in a way that makes you your best self.

Bryan McAnulty [00:36:16]:

Next, if the next 12 months stay unstable, which they're likely to, then what mindset shift do business owners need to make right now?

Tony Loyd [00:36:26]:

Yeah, I think I'll give you the top five. Here they are. One is, you have to find a way to calm yourself. You have to find a way to regulate your emotions. Two, you have to clarify your purpose and your values. You have to figure out what is most important to you as a human and how do you align yourself in your business to that? So clarify.

Tony Loyd [00:36:56]:

The third one is change. Be willing to pivot. A friend of mine says, hold fast to the vision, but let the form be flexible. Hold fast to the vision, but let the form be flexible. So be change agile. Then connect. Connecting with people. Endurance is a team sport, so it's something we do together. And then the last thing is continue through this rhythm of rest and recovery. That's the five things right there. For my money.

Bryan McAnulty [00:37:25]:

Yeah, that's great. All right. And then on the show, I like to have every guest ask a question to the audience. So if you could ask our audience anything, whether something you're curious about or kind of just want to get people thinking, what would that be?

Tony Loyd [00:37:37]:

Yeah, I would say can you name the chaotic churn of constant change in your life? Can you name it? The chaotic churn of constant change. Can you name the things that are constantly changing, that are rapidly changing, and that are coming at you? And just meditate on that question and then start thinking about, how am I going to build my personal endurance in order to be able to manage that chaotic churn of constant change that's coming my way?

Bryan McAnulty [00:38:16]:

Great question. Excellent. All right, Tony, thank you so much for coming on the show. Before we get going, where else can people find you online?

Tony Loyd [00:38:23]:

Yeah, find me at cultureshift.com. C U L T U R E S H I F T dot com. I'm Tony Loyd. My last name is spelled with one L, so if you're looking for me, it's easier to say T O N Y L O Y D with one L, not two L's, and you can find me almost anywhere.

Bryan McAnulty [00:38:44]:

Awesome. Thanks so much.

Tony Loyd [00:38:46]:

Thanks, Bryan.

Bryan McAnulty [00:38:47]:

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