Are you leading your business like you mean it? Or are you constraining your leadership greatness? Then you don’t want to miss this episode. Dena Patton, Founder of Dena Patton Coaching, dives into The Greatness Game to unlock your unique strengths in building a thriving business. Joining Alicia Couri, she shares her Greatness Methodology to help you identify invisible things that limit you from tapping your full potential as an inspiring and impactful leader. She also provides some tips on becoming unstoppable in growing your business.
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Step Into Your Leadership Greatness With Dena Patton
I have the incredible Dena Patton. Let me tell you about her and then we’ll bring her on. We’ll have this amazing discussion on leadership and mindset. Dena is a third-generation Venetian. However, she founded Dena Patton Coaching and Training company 22 years ago while living in New York City. She’s an elite coach who has worked with thousands of purpose-driven companies and world-changing leaders around the globe to help them build great companies that break records with their revenues and impact.
She transforms three key pillars of your business. 1) Your marketing and sales plan to increase your profits. 2) Your greatness mindset to elevate your vision and leadership. 3) Your systems to expand your business growth. Dena has garnered over 60 media stories, including CNN, Entrepreneur magazine and Business Journal. Check out her bestselling book, The Greatness Game which helps business owners to lead with boldness and greatness. She is here because she’s passionate about helping people build great businesses. Please welcome, Dena Patton.
Thank you so much for having me on the show.
We are going to first start with what the greatness methodology is, if you could share that with us.
Greatness methodology is something that I’ve created and have been coaching for about fifteen years. The premise is that we were all born with greatness, but we’re not raised or trained on how to access it. A lot of us go through our whole life listening to our smallness and that survival voice, not even knowing that we were born with greatness and that our highest self is possible. I am very passionate about people living and loving from their greatness and having access to their greatness because your life completely changes when you start living from your greatness mindset. It’s all about learning how to access it because we’re born with it. You just have to learn how to access it. It does take awareness and discipline, but your life changes forever when you do it.
I love that so much because it is true that we were born great and then we allow all these other things to filter out our greatness. We start believing the wrong things about ourselves, our circumstances, and our environment. It is inside of us. If you don’t have already innate in you that passion and drive to seek it out, you live your whole life thinking, “This is it. This is my lot in life. I guess there’s no nothing more for me here.” You have to have to learn how to access it. It’s there. I love that. You have this system in your methodology because I mentioned it in your bio, the three things that you are great at helping pull out of people. Do you want to share a little bit more about those systems and processes that you help leaders and business owners go through?
In my time coaching entrepreneurs and CEOs, what I found is there are a lot of things that entrepreneurs don’t have that when you start to become and step into CEO, you gain. in my opinion, the three most important are strategy, self-care, and systems. A lot of entrepreneurs don’t live in strategy. They are just putting out fires. They’re in survival mode. In my language, that’s smallness. Smallness is survival and safety.
It is very easy to spend years and years in that and not click over to that CEO mindset that has strategy, self-care, and systems. The first one that I help people shift over is strategy. Let’s get out of survival mode and put out fires every day. Let’s put some strategy into your business. Where are you going in the next 6 months, 1 year, or 3 years so that we can put the train on the track and start winning those milestones that are getting you closer to those big goals and visions? You can’t do it without a strategy.
Get out of survival mode. Put some strategy into your business, put the train on the track, and start winning milestones that bring you closer to your goals. Click To Tweet
It’s this learned behavior of this is how you are to be a leader, this is what leaders do, and this is how you have to be as a business owner. You are the fireman or fireperson putting out fires. That’s the model that most people step into the mindset of thinking that this is how it is. They’ve never seen a different way, or they’ve never seen something different. It’s about opening up yourself to understand that there can be a better way of doing this. Stop doing it this way.
When you start leading with strategy, especially small business entrepreneurs, you only have maybe one person or two people in your business, and you know you need to hire people. That needs to be strategic. Who do you need to hire 1st, 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th? Also, starting to lead, delegate, empower, and train them well, and have an onboarding system. It’s all kinds of breakdowns that come with hiring people.
If I had to give the trophy to the biggest pain to most small businesses, it’s the hiring and training of people. You need them. You want them. It’s a grueling task to find people, hire them, go through a good interview process, hire the right people and their skillsets, and then onboard them and train them. It is a humongous pain point for most entrepreneurs. It’s part of getting out of survival and smallness. Shifting into strategy and shifting into being a great leader, you got to have a strategy.
Most people are afraid of their growth because of that pain. Because they don’t know how to hire or train, it becomes this quagmire of, “I know I need help, but I can’t.” That becomes the mindset that “I don’t know how to do it. I can’t do it. I can’t do it right.” The strategy has to marry mindset in that sense because you’re leading the charge.
If you continue to have that mindset, you keep hiring the wrong people all the time because you say, “I need somebody,” but then you have this self-fulfilling prophecy to say, “Nobody wants to work. Everybody is bad.” You build these different ideas in your mind that it’s hard to hire and you can’t find the right people because you’re coming at it from the wrong mindset, energy, and perspective totally all the time. Strategy and mindset have to marry in that sense, especially when it comes to hiring the right people.
You bring up a good point, which is one of the reasons that my book is about mindset. I’m passionate about mindset because mindset will always sabotage if it’s not in the same game. You might be like, “I want to move to strategy. I want to hire,” but your mindset is still stuck in smallness like, “Who am I to hire?” Your belief system will always get in the way of your strategy, revenue, self-care, and systems if you don’t get your mindset straight first. We will never outdo or outsell our mindset.
If you are a leader, a CEO, or an entrepreneur who thinks you can task your way through to greatness and success, I am here to say you are in the wrong game because you can’t just task. It’s not in actions. It’s also in mindset. The mindset almost has to go ahead of the task. Your mindset, when you were saying those negative things, I call those smallness statements, all these smallness statements that we’re believing, like no one is going to work or no one is going to hire.
“Nobody wants to work. Nobody wants the job. Everybody wants to get paid and they don’t want to do the job.” That’s not true’s because people do want to do a good job, but a lot of times if you are not clear, they don’t know what to do.
What you are seeking is seeking you. You have to believe that and not believe the smallness of, “No one wants to work for me. No one wants to show up for work. No one is a good worker.” All you need is one. If you’re looking for let’s say a marketing director, you’re looking for one. What you’re seeking is seeking you. That’s a greatness belief instead of the smallness belief that no one wants to work. You got to get that mindset around that. It feels scary because it’s unfamiliar, not because you’re incapable.
What collapses in our brains is we get scared of growth, scaling, hiring, and hitting new revenue numbers. It could be scary to your mindset because your mindset is still in that smallness. When you start to shift and believe in greatness about yourself and what you want to do with your business and with all these things that you’re creating, you become unstoppable. We have to remember to tell our mindset, “I know it’s scary. It’s only because it’s unfamiliar for a minute or two, and then it becomes familiar.”
You become unstoppable when you shift and believe in greatness about yourself and what you want to do with your business. Click To Tweet
It becomes familiar then we become proficient and then we move on. It’s great what you’re sharing with everyone. I hope you’re getting these little nuggets about what you’re seeking is seeking you, and you’ll never outdo your own mindset. It has to go ahead of you. You have to grow. That’s why it starts with leaders. The leader has to grow. I’ve heard that just a handful of A players on your team is worth much more than a whole group of B and C players.
You attract those A players to your business. You have the capacity and capability to do that and even recognize someone else’s potential. They may not be A players when you hire them, but they have the potential and you nurture that potential or that greatness within them. You don’t have to keep hiring and creating this huge wide business of workers when a handful of great dedicated people will get the job done much more effectively and efficiently for you.
Great quality over quantity.
People think, “I need a marketing person. I need a salesperson. I need this person. I need a team of this and that. I need all these other things.” They get confused or overwhelmed with thinking, “This is what I need in order to scale my business,” without understanding the strategy that you’re pursuing, getting clarity around that, getting the right pieces of the puzzle in place, and not just hiring willy-nilly because somebody says I need this. “I’m going to hire that because somebody said I need it.” Who is that somebody?
Strategy is one, and then self-care. A lot of people think, “What does self-care have anything to do with leadership?” Self-care has everything to do with leadership. I have seen many leaders get sick, burnt out, depressed, divorced, and on the brink of losing their minds because they are not taking care of their minds, body, and spirit. If you are a leader or you are a business owner, the number one thing that’s going to transform your organization is you getting very responsible for your mind, body, and spirit on a daily and weekly basis.
Leadership Greatness: The number one thing that will transform your organization is to be responsible for your mind, body, and spirit daily and weekly.
This is what happens. When you start taking care of your mind, body, and spirit, what happens is a new level of creativity, innovation, communication, and presence that you didn’t have before because you were barely fueled or existing. I have seen many of my clients transform revenues and things that they don’t think are connected. You don’t think revenue, “I should have more self-care.”
When you come to work and you have slept well, you’re putting fuel in your body, you are awake and present, what happens is your power, creativity, innovation, and ideas go up. Who you are and your leadership style starts to show up like no kidding. That’s what transforms your results. It’s one very powerful thing that people totally miss and totally dismiss. It is my secret weapon with most of my clients. They’re like, “I had no idea.”
More sleep, movement, and things that fuel you. I want to give you an analogy of cars going because they have fuel, whether it’s battery fuel. A car needs gas. You don’t pull up to a gas station and take out that nozzle and pour gas on your car, talk about gas, and then put gas around your car. Your car is still going to be dead. It’s not going anywhere. You have to put the fuel in the car. You can’t talk about self-care. You can’t be like, “Next week, I’ll start working out. I got some sleep last week.” It is a discipline of a leader. This is the difference between my entrepreneurs and my CEOs. Entrepreneurs kill themselves for their business. They are in very bad self-protection. It’s almost like a habit of killing themselves for their business.
CEOs know better. They’re like, “When I go play golf with a client, instead of working 17 hours a day, when I get 8 hours of sleep, instead of getting 3 hours of sleep, I am a better leader. I grow my business with strategy, systems, clarity, power, and vision.” It’s one of the things that I had to learn the hard way. The first business I had was a marketing agency in New York City. I had a minor stroke that put me on my knees. I had to learn how to speak again. I make my living speaking. I speak on stages, podcasts, and clients. It almost ruined my life. I almost died. I was in that rapture of the entrepreneur mindset, hustling all the time, 24/7, saying yes to every client, which is the worst small habit that you can be in. There’s a consequence to those habits. I had to learn the hard way.
The entrepreneur mindset hustle saying yes to every client is the worst small habit you can be in. Click To Tweet
That’s why we’re seeing much burnout now in certain industries because of the lack of self-care. They don’t value that as being vital. Your spirit, soul, and body need self-care. You need to be able to take care of all those elements in order to be strong and productive. I went through my own health situation in my whole own health journey. I have stopped. My daughter asked me before we started this interview about a trip that I was talking about taking. I said, “I’m not going to do that trip because it’s going to put unnecessary stress and strain on me to do this for someone else.”
It’s not even doing it for my family or myself or anything. It was doing it as a favor to someone else. It was going to cause me an enormous amount of strain to make it happen. A year or two years ago, I would try to make it happen, but I’m not in that season in my life anymore that I’m trying to make it happen. I’m like, “No.” My sanity, stress levels, and everything, I own that. I’m going to put myself under unnecessary strain and stress to do something. It would be a nice-to-do thing if it was an essential thing.
I love that you aren’t forcing. We wonder why we got a weird outcome out of it because we’ve forced it to happen. Boundaries and self-care are easy to talk about. Maybe even easy to set in your calendar. Let’s say, “Every Tuesday and Thursday at 5:00, I’m going to go to yoga or gym and weightlift or whatnot,” but it’s the holding of that. When 5:00 comes around and you have much work on your desk, it’s easy to say, “Not today. I’ll skip today,” then two months later, you’re still skipping.
Relaxing and refueling are essential elements to self-care. It’s not just down energy relaxing like massages or sleep, but it’s also refueling. It’s important to identify what refuels you. I love standup comedy and Latin music. When I see things that refuel me, my take gets fueled. It activates me. Self-care is both the combination of relaxing elements and refueling elements in addition to the health stuff. It is super important to lead any leaders, entrepreneurs, and CEOs. If you are playing a greatness game in your life that has vision and an impact, you are the fuel of that train and you got to take care of yourself. It’s a big deal to incorporate that.
Self-care is vital. I agree with you on that. In the ‘80s, ‘90s, and early 2000s, it was all about the rat race. It was all about go, go, go. Don’t stop until you reach the finish line type of thing. The shift is happening to where people are now recognizing how much their health and wellness is more. You can have all the money in the world but if you have horrible health, it’s not going to help you. We have to take care of our health in order to be great. I love comedy and music. All of that refuels your tank.
You have to also know what it is that refuels your tank. Sometimes people don’t take the time to figure that out. When you ask them, “What are your hobbies?” “I don’t have any hobbies.” I’m like, “You don’t have a rounded life if you don’t know what your hobbies are.” The other thing you mentioned is working out and taking care. I do that first thing in the morning. The decision is made.
I don’t have to wake up and say, “Am I going to work out today or not?” Sometimes I do try to play that game with myself. I’m like, “Am I going to go for go walk?” No, the decision was already made. Get up and go. Put on your shoes and go. You make the decision ahead of time. You don’t have to think about it. You just get up and you do it. You have to make the decision that this is who you are.
I have a show called Unleash Your Audacious Confidence as well on Win Win Women TV. I talk a lot about this self-care thing, the things that you do for self-care, and how vital it is that you have to have a self-image of yourself as a healthy person. What does a healthy person do? How does that reflect in your doing? When you make that decision of a healthy person, then you live the life of a healthy person, then your self-image that, “I’m a healthy person. I do the things that a healthy person does.”
One of the exercises I do with every new client is starting to create their new identity as a great leader like, “What does that look like? What does it sound like? What are your daily habits? What does it feel like? How different is that from today?” Seeing yourself great and healthy as a vision and holding that image, and then having the habits and the decisions that reflect that. That is the essence of what a lot of coaches do. What we do is help get to that vision.
You said something important. That is you make the decision. Back to the, “5:00 Tuesday and Thursday I’m going to the gym,” when you make that, it’s not just a time on your schedule. Success is scheduled. We do want your self-care scheduled 100%, but the decision is already made. It’s not up for negotiation. The cherry on top is to put self-care in your calendar as a decision, not as an option. That is the distinction. There’s no negotiating or, “Let me see if I want to go.”
Leadership Greatness: Put self-care in your calendar as a decision, not as an option.
We never going to want to go. Who wants to go?
One of my health games is eating over 100 grams of protein every day, and then my water game. Neither one of those I like. What I love is the results from it because my brain is completely different when it’s on protein and water, who I am, how I show up, and my power, vision, and creativity are at new levels versus if I just get a whole bunch of carbs. I love cheeseburgers and donuts. Those are my two little guilty pleasures. I can’t eat those every day. I have to focus on what gets me the results and the identity that I want. I can still have a donut or a burger here and there. I just can’t have it every day because it doesn’t get me to that identity that I am going for.
What’s the third area?
We talked about strategy, self-care, and then the third is systems. I’m passionate about systems. I have seen massive transformations in both very small businesses, the $100,000 to $200,000 range, then some of my clients who are in the much bigger range, the $20 million to $50 million. It can double or quadruple your business very quickly when you have systems. A lot of entrepreneurs are on the fire stage like little hamsters on the wheel. They’re like, “I don’t have time to create a system.” I know that you know this, but what I want you to do is write down the systems that you know you need or need tightening. I have a saying, “Where there is chaos, there is no system.”
If I came into your company and gave an audit of productivity efficiency, I can probably see the chaos over here in sales, admin, and marketing. Where there is chaos, especially repeatable chaos, it’s because there’s no system there. One of the best places I can tell you to start is in sales because it has the biggest payoff. When you create a sales system, it is my favorite thing to create. It’s a sales system because you go from throwing spaghetti on the wall with sales one-off to I have a system that works that’s well oiled and I feel confident in. It not only serves you but it serves the customer.
The biggest place that leadership shows up is sales. If you don’t think sales is about leadership, you’re in the wrong game because you’re leading people through a process from being a stranger to knowing you, understanding you, knowing your process and your brand, testing you out, maybe buying something from you, and then buying more from you. That whole process is leadership.
It has to be step by step, or you’re recreating it every single time. That’s where it becomes very exhausting. When you get to some scale, it’s very overwhelming. I have two agencies that have two same exact situations, a marketing agency and a PR agency in London. They’re both struggling with the same thing. Their sales system and their onboarding system are non-existent. They create it at the moment for whatever client.
It’s exhausting. What happens is you let’s say you have four people in that process. They’re stepping on each other’s toes, “Did you get that information?” “No, I thought you did.” It’s confusing and overwhelming. Having a very clean and simple sales system is the best thing you can do for your business because you can see immediate results because you’re going to literally double and triple your sales.
You can then look at all the other areas of marketing and admin. You need systems and admin. I can talk all day long on the systems and admin, but where I would start with is a nice, simple, and clean system in sales that will help you close more sales because it’s a clean and simple system. For the customer, it’s a better experience for them because they’re not guessing like, “What are we doing here? This feels weird.”
James Clear says, “We don’t rise to the level of our expectations. We fall to the level of our systems.” I love that quote from him because it’s true. If you don’t have proper systems in your business, you don’t have a business.
You are winging it. You’re throwing spaghetti on the wall. Even if you just took an hour or two every week to focus on one. Choose one. Maybe your admin is in complete breakdown and you need to do that first, then do that first. Choose one and look at the chaos. I know chaos is uncomfortable to look at because maybe it triggers shame or embarrassment like, “I’m such a failure. Look at my admin. It’s a mess. My sales are a mess.” That’s this whole world of entrepreneurship and leadership, we’re learning.
You weren’t born knowing how to do this stuff. None of us were. All of us learn it. Give yourself some grace.
It’s important to look at your chaos and mistakes with eyes of grace and say, “I’m going to learn from this. I’m going to do it better.” Know better, do better. Another thing that trips up leaders and business owners is shame. We make mistakes all the time because we’re human beings. It might be a financial mistake in our checkbook. It might be for some reason, our automation system charged someone double.
Leadership Greatness: Look at your mistakes with eyes of grace. Learn from them, know better, and do better.
It might be that you missed an appointment and someone was waiting for you. We make mistakes, then what happens is that shame compounds. So much of this journey of leadership entrepreneurship is forgiveness. We’ve got to forgive ourselves every day because that shame does compound, then it’s going to be a screaming smallness in your head of like, “What a loser? What a failure?”
“Who do you think you are? What are you doing? You can’t even boil water. What’s wrong with you?” The shame is big. Brené Brown built her whole business around releasing people from shame, guilt, and all those negative things, which is why I love the Four Agreements. It’s a learning process. If you take it to heart, you’ll see that everybody makes mistakes. It’s about learning through them. Back to mindset again, you see this as data points and not take everything personally. Was that the second agreement? Don’t take everything personally. Even when you do it yourself, don’t take it personally that I am such a boob because I did this. It’s like, “What a learning moment for me.”
I always say, “Thank you for the lessons.”
What an opportunity. Napoleon Hill says, “Some of the greatest opportunities you have looks like failure. That’s where you can see the greatest opportunity.” I love the three S that you shared, strategy, self-care, and systems. Those are the things in your leadership journey and CEO mindset that you need to pay attention to. Strategy is something that you have to refresh. You don’t put it on a board and then never look at it again.
They say an aircraft is 90% off course. It’s always self-correcting. It’s always correcting. You always need to tweak, correct, and make sure you’re on course and stuff. Don’t put your strategy on a nice little laminated something and say, “This is the strategy and that’s it. I don’t care what else happens around me. The house could be burning down. This is the strategy.” That’s not how it works. We have to keep monitoring and adjusting as we go. I appreciate you sharing those things. I want to get into some rapid-fire things that we’re going into. Is there anything that I didn’t ask you that you want to share before we go into the Rapid fire questions that I have for you?
The only thing I would love to share is back to self-care because I’m super passionate about it. I have some free downloads and some templates that you can create your own self-care plan in my Greatness Methodology. There’s a template at AmazingGreatness.com. You can download that self-care template, print it out, and start your self-care. I call it CEO Self-Care Plan. It’s as important as your marketing or business plan. When you regard your self-care with that level of regard and importance, you’ll see your entire organization change, and your revenue and impact. AmazingGreatness.com, you can grab that template.
Thank you so much for that gift. That’s wonderful. I appreciate that for our audience. I have a few questions. Whatever comes to your mind. What’s the biggest leadership mistake that you ever made yourself or were a victim of?
There are many lessons along this way. Leading people all the same way. I wish I knew what I know now twenty years ago when I had my first business. There are a lot of consequences that happen because when you’re leading John like you’re leading Julie and Ally, they’re all different human beings with different needs in their role. I think when you don’t pay attention to that and you group lead, people quit.
They don’t give you their best.
To me, it’s smallness and survival leadership. There are many negatives that I could keep going on and on about it, but that would be one of the biggest things that if I could course correct twenty years ago, I would do.
Is it because we make many assumptions about how leadership should be? We lead from that place of, “This is the example I’ve seen. This is how it should be,” instead of understanding what each individual needs and how to meet that need as a leader. People don’t think they have time for that too. It’s like, “This is how it is. Everybody needs to fall in line.” We’ve grown up that way in schools. We’ve all had to be herded and treated the same way. We automatically assume that’s how we lead people.
It’s very school-modeled. A lot of leaders are just driving the result. Their objective is the result. Everybody is going after that result and trying to produce that result versus leading and empowering each individual. It becomes an awareness in these last twenty years of getting out of the old model, which was to produce the result.
Now, it is more about yes, we have to produce whatever result we’re going after, but individuals are the ones that are producing that result. Each individual has different needs and values. The 5 Love Languages, if you know that book, we use it in our marriage. It’s very powerful when you know someone’s love language. You can motivate them and they can feel loved because you are putting that intention to love them in their love language. How are we doing that in the workplace where if you have ten people on your team and you’re all loving them the same way?
Leadership Greatness: It’s very powerful when you know someone’s love language. You can motivate and make them feel loved because you are putting that intention to love them.
Based on your own love language. Based on what you need, and not what they need. They’re not always going to receive it all the same way because it is not their love language.
That’s the individual team and empowering team members, understanding your team members, understanding your people, and the human capital of this. We’re all getting better at that space and learning different tools. It’s important that you put tools on your tool belt to do that. If you don’t, you’re going to lead the same way. That would be mine.
What’s the most Jedi audacious leadership move you’ve ever made that was out of the box, but it worked?
In twenty years of coaching people, what I have learned is I am pretty a rigorous coach. I’m not one that fluffy-love-pets my clients. I’m a little rigorous. There were a couple of clients who had a humongous vision, but they were stuck in their smallness. To be rigorous with people on the brink of they might fire me over this, there have been 3 to 4r situations where I had to give tough love.
I’m standing for their greatness when they can’t stand for their greatness. They’re not there yet in the journey. They’re still addicted to their smallness. There’s a moment that I have to stand for them and hold them accountable to their greatness and vision, and what they have to do to break through. It’s very rigorous, but there are some huge companies that are very successful in the world because I did that with the owner and I didn’t back down.
Especially as a coach or as a leader, when you’re a leader and you are standing for someone’s greatness in their face, although I love it and I’m good at it, it’s still uncomfortable. They might say, “I’m done. I quit. You’re too much, or this company is too much. I fire you as a coach.” In the many times I’ve done it, I’ve never gotten fired because they want it, not want my rigorous coaching.
They want the result and that vision. There’s a point when you’re being coached and your coach steps on your toes and tells you, “This is what you need to do.” The fear, the imposter syndrome, the anxiety, and all those things rise up in you. Back to the decision, you made a decision not just to hire this person as a coach to hold you accountable to this but also to get you where you’re going. The rubber meets the road and you have to say, “No, I have to step into this. If it fails, it fails, but I can’t let it fail because I didn’t do.” If it fails because I didn’t do, then that’s a whole different story than, “We followed the strategy and it didn’t work.”
You are helping them hold that vision because you could see their greatness. That’s what a coach does. They see the greatness that you can’t yet see for yourself and hold that space for you to help get you there. If we’ve built the strategy right and we’re going there, I’m not going to let you back down because you got scared along the way. We’re going to go through the scary door. Our hands go through it together. You going to go. I’ll push you through whatever it takes. You’re going to get there.
It’s my favorite part of being a coach. I have had this company for over twenty years, but it’s so fulfilling to see the transformation from little win. One of my CEOs wants to be a speaker and bestselling author. I coached her through her book and got bestselling. I created her speaker system. She’s now a year into it and she’s getting $5,000 to $10,000 in speaking engagements. She’s done her first three in the last couple of months. A year ago, that was impossible. It was weird for her to even dream like that. Taking a dream or vision and then standing for it. When you fall down, stand for it more. You have to hold the vision and that identity, but you have to do the work. There’s work to be done. It’s the systems.
When you hold on to your vision and identity, be sure to do the work. Click To Tweet
It’s the strategy, systems, and everything we talked about to help get you down that road. Who is someone that inspires you every day?
I have many, but I would say my daughter most of all. I have a teen daughter. My commitment to her life and the experiences that I want to give her pulls me forward every day. I have lots of heroes and sheroes, people that I’ve admired over the years and study. On a daily basis, it’s my daughter Ally who brings out the best in me. I hold myself to a new standard for her. I want to give her a role model of, “You can be anything you want and dreams.” She’s probably my inspiration.
If you were cast away on a deserted island and you had three things that you could bring with you, one cannot be a cell phone, what would be those three things?
That’s funny because I just watched a movie. We got back from a vacation, and it was a survival movie. It makes you think about, “If I was in that situation what would I do? What would I bring?” You start to think about the things that you would need to do for food, but luxury items, I don’t know. Besides the survival stuff, I’d probably bring the Bible. If I had to bring one book, it would be that because it is the thing that I feel would keep my mind set.
Will hold hope for you.
I have lots of books that are my go-to for lots of inspiration. If I was in an isolated situation, the Bible would have to be a part of it because there many opportunities to lose hope and your mind. A nice pillow, a cheeseburger, and the Bible may be my three.
What are you reading now, or what are your top three favorite titles? Either one, you could either give me what you’re reading now or your top three, or even your own book so we could put that up.
The Greatness Game is my book. As an author, you have to walk your talk. I’m constantly referring to my book because it’s a lot of my coaching and my methodology. I have to hold my standard up and constantly be in it and know my own work. I’m always in that. I’m reading Dream Big by Bob Goff. I love dreams, people who dream big, and people who are going after their dreams. It’s something that’s been in me my entire life. I didn’t have words for it when I was young, but I’ve always been a cheerleader and an advocate for dreaming because as human beings, it’s hard being an adult. I’m about dreams. I was gifted that book and love it.
The Greatness Game: Inspired ways to live, love, and lead like you mean it
I was called a dreamer my whole life. At first, I had a lot of shame around it, but I was like, “That’s an awesome compliment.”
It’s a gift
I’ve always been dreaming about big things my whole life. Thank you so much, Dena, for being and playing along and sharing much valuable information with us. I hope everybody got great things out of this. Most importantly, they are great and they have that capacity for greatness within them. Thank you so much.
Thank you for having me.
I want to leave this with you to lead yourself, most importantly, then your teams and organization with audacious confidence. I will see you next time on another episode.
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About Dena Patton
Dena is a third generation Phoenician, however she founded Dena Patton Coaching & Training Company 22 years ago while living in New York City. She is an elite coach who has worked with thousands of purpose-driven companies and world-changing leaders around the globe to help them build GREAT companies that break records with their revenues AND their impact.
She transforms 3 key pillars of your business: #1. Your Marketing & Sales Plan To Increase Your Profits, #2. Your Greatness Mindset to Elevate Your Vision & Leadership and #3. Your Systems To Expand Your Business Growth. Dena has garnered over 60 media stories including CNN, Entrepreneur magazine, and Business Journal. Check out her best-selling book The Greatness Game that helps business owners to lead with boldness and greatness! She is here today because she is passionate about helping people build great businesses.
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