How To Ascend To The Next Level In Business with Authenticity and EQ, with Natalyn Lewis, Founder and CEO of Ascend EQ!

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Speaker E: And welcome to another elite episode of the Get Authentic with Marcus show. I'm your host, Marcus Ogden. On today's episode, we are joined by Ms. Natalie Lewis. But before we bring her onto the stage, want to thank one of our amazing sponsors, the Mandel family office. Josh and his brother Jason are amazing at helping give their clients options and a blueprint to to create financial wealth and legacy. We thank the Mandel family office for sponsoring this episode. Now, here she is. Nalan. How you doing today, Nallen?

Speaker F: Oh, uh, I'm doing very well, thank you.

Speaker E: Good, good. Well, we're glad to have you here. So now, and first question, young lady, what does the word authentic authenticity mean to you?

Speaker F: You know, when I think about being authentic, I think that it means we stand boldly in our intentional identity. And we do that whether regardless of what role we're playing, regardless of circumstances we find ourselves in and regardless of who we're around. But we show up true to who we are on the inside and who we want to become on the inside all the time. That's what authenticity is to me.

Speaker E: I love that. I love how she said, ladies and gentlemen, Being bold. But more importantly than that, and being bold is because again, the first word of the acronym BISON is bold or boldness. You know, I love that. But I love even more, and I couldn't agree more with N is intentional, right? When you're intentional, when you actually are doing something with purpose and with precision and with a hollow of execution, that's when you're living your best life. Because when we're intentional, we're watching our time, we're watching our energy, and we're protecting our focus. Love this now. And can you please tell our global audience a little bit more about yourself and then the work you're currently doing now in your career?

Speaker F: Yeah, absolutely. I come from a long background in athletics, so I love your show. I love the sports and played in college. I was a soccer player, uh, in college and, and just love athletics. But that competitive drive took me into the corporate world where I spent, uh, a good 14, 15 years in corporate America. And then I turned entrepreneur. I have, uh, started and sold seven of my own companies and I have done consulting and worked with corporate executives, um, in, in human performance, over 200 companies around the globe. And it is something that I am deeply passionate about. I, I found a love for human performance in, in my work and look, recognizing that. So every business, regardless of what business you're in, is a people business. And if you don't know people, if you don't know how to work with people, if you don't know how to maximize people's potential, you're going to struggle. You're going to struggle finding good people, you're going to struggle maximizing the performance of the people you do have and you end up in the game of hiring and firing instead of building and thriving. And so I, I just got deeply passionate about the work with people and went through my own journey in the business world in recognizing that. We spend a great deal of our life learning things like English and math and science, and yet no one ever taught us actually how to be somebody. No one taught us what it looks like on the inside, what it feels like, how to deal with those things, how to rectify those things. We learned how to talk when we were little, but nobody taught us how to communicate. We learned to feel when we were little, but everybody told us to stop doing that. And yet those things drive human performance. And so my own personal journey in how that world impacted me in business, in life and my role as a wife, as a mother, as a woman, as a entrepreneur, as a CEO, I, um, could not turn a blind eye to it anymore. And it drove me into the work of emotional performance in the human performance space in high levels of achievement. And that's what I do now.

Speaker E: You know, I really love this. So our brand got hired for a job, uh, for IHB. It is like a human behavioral brand out of Chicago. And we're doing a speech on how to be resilient under pressure when it comes from things like burnout or high stakes decision making or stress in general. And we actually I just reviewed and approved the PowerPoint with one of my team members today and we just got through registering for the conference. We're going to be speaking at it September 9th and, uh, Oakbrook, Illinois, which is about 20 minutes outside of Chicago. I love what you're talking about around human performance and being resilient under pressure. We're going to touch on that here in a moment. But before we get into that right, uh, now. And you said something about you sold seven of your companies, right? And I tell people that that is a true art form. That is something that is very complex and arduous and takes a lot of time and precision. And you did it seven times. Just absolutely staggering and amazing on both levels. Can you please shed some light to our global audience on what was it? What is the common thread in you successfully selling seven businesses that you can share with our global audience?

Speaker F: Yeah, well, I think the common thread is that the first three weren't successful because I didn't have the tools to recognize that emotions and humanity are at the bottom line of everything that we do. And because I didn't know those things, I didn't do it well. I didn't exit well. I was impatient. I was not locked into vision. I got out of it not what I wanted. I built things that I didn't even want. I built my career right on into miserable success and had to sell my way out of it until I finally figured out that there is an opportunity to have it all. I. I think at the root of all successful acquisitions is absolutely locked in to vision of what you want. Absolutely locked into the intentional identity of who you are and what you want and who you are. Better drive the bus. Because if you start getting driven by money, you will be driven by people and by things and not by values and by the core roots of who you are. And you'll end somewhere, but you will not end where you want to be. And that's what I learned in those processes. And I learned how to build something that I wanted. I learned how to build Something that was true to who I was, where I could get true fulfillment and not just monetary reward. And that's what I learned in that process now.

Speaker E: And I really respect this, because when people are very authentic and even more transparent than they have to be, because, I mean, you have to be on the show when you get into. Like you said, you sold those businesses. Three were not successful. I feel that connected you on an even deeper level with our, uh, audience, because a lot of people can talk about they sold something successfully, but I feel a lot more people who, especially people who are just starting out, probably did not sell successfully. I know I tried to sell right now. We almost got to the table of selling, but unfortunately, the buyers backed out, and then we went bankrupt and lost it all. So this is really, really great stuff. One more thing I want to ask you, because you talked about this, and I want you to expand further for our audience. Miserable success, ladies and gentlemen. Just because you have money or fame or people know you or love you or think you may be right, all these things that really don't matter if you're not fulfilled and have purpose and excitement and passion about what you're doing. I think what Natalie is saying is that you are going through or you are living miserable success. Nadaline, can you please, from your perspective, shed more light on that? Because I feel people that are listening, that aren't truly doing what they want to be doing, they need to hear this so they can make an informed decision if they want to continue what they're doing and be miserable and successful or actually make a transition or pivot towards something that's going to give them purpose, passion, and courage.

Speaker F: Yeah, absolutely. You know, we. I see people all the time who have miserable success because of three things. One is they are functioning outside of their identity in their professional space. They're one person at the office and somebody totally different at home, totally different to themselves, which means they can't show up authentically in their relationships. They can't show up authentically to themselves, and they are putting on a Persona at work that they don't even like. And they're miserable. They're successful, and they're miserable because they're not true to themselves. The second reason I see people experience miserable success is because they never stopped to align vision of what they actually wanted. They chased what everybody told them they needed to want, whether that was the big office or the growth. I meet entrepreneurs and work with corporate executives every single day. And I can tell you that the person who's generating $30,000 a month, but has the right profits. They're doing exactly what they want to do. They have the right team, and they're generating the lifestyle that they want. Is happier than some of the executives I work with that are generating 200 million. Those, those are not. It's not about the dollar value. It is about what you're doing, why you're doing it, what you're getting out of it, what you're putting into it, who you're showing up as. There is. There is no dollar value that can compensate for those things, or you're just miserably successful. And then the third reason that I see people, uh, fall into this miserable success category is really one of the reasons I, I fell into it in my first three companies, which was I was chasing something somebody else told me was supposed to be the vision. You're supposed to want the corner office, you're supposed to want the big title, you're supposed to want success, you're supposed to want a raise. Even if you're perfectly content in your current job, you're supposed to want these things. What they don't talk to you about is what does that look like when you get to have it all? What does it look like when you get to be the kind of mom you want to be and the kind of spouse you want to be and the kind of professional you want to be. They don't talk about that being important. And so we chase sometimes the wrong things and we stay in careers we don't like, and we function in spaces that aren't true to us, and those cause a lot of problems.

Speaker E: You know what, Natalie? I totally agree with you. I remember trying to build our construction company. We built into multi eight figures. And the next year. Well, I'm sorry, a few months later, right, that next year, in 2013, we're bankrupt, we're broke, we're out. Because in November of 2012 of, uh, 2012, the problem started to really happen. December, it got magnified to the umpteenth degree when the bank shut us down. Come January of that next year, we were out. So it happened that fast. November, we're heading downhill. December, bank shuts us down. In January of 2013, we're having to file a complete Chapter 7 bankruptcy. Natalie is saying that you need to make sure that what you're doing fills your soul, because if it doesn't, you're going to end up regretting it in the long run. Which I couldn't agree more. So let's now dive into human performance. You Know, talking about how to handle stress or burnout. So, again, I said, right now, we're speaking in September for IHB. We just got through that PowerPoint. I'm very excited to have this conversation. So, first question right now. And how do you help people become more resilient under extreme pressure?

Speaker F: Uh, but the first thing that. That I do is lock into who they really are. Um, what I have found is that people crack under stress and pressure when they have no idea who they are, and they're trying to be what people think they need to be. Um, I get the opportunity to do some nonprofit work, and I go into the prisons once a week, and I work with the inmates. And in that environment, there is so much pressure to be who they've been told they are. To be a criminal, to be a felon, to be aggressive, to be a problem that even. And. And their. Their ability to just get out of that space is so challenging for them because they haven't yet figured out who they actually are or want to be. And they cannot resist the pressure that comes and the stress that comes from somebody telling them they're supposed to be something else. And I see this in corporations all the time, when people are trying to deal with the stress of money, the stress of sales, the stress of growth, the stress that the board is putting on them, stockholders are putting on them. They had a vision for the company they were trying to grow, the people they were trying to be, the purpose they were trying to fulfill. But then stockholders put pressure on, the board puts pressure on. You have to hit numbers, you have to hit sales. And next thing you know, we're outside of our value proposition. We're outside of who we really are. And now we're chasing dollars for somebody else. And when we. When we can absolutely know, this is who I am, this is who we are. This is what our company does. This is what we stand for. And we're so locked into that that we can go head into the storm and face it and be okay with it, because we know who we are, and we know we'll come out the other side. Those are the people who show resilience in the face of stress because they stand boldly on that intentionality of what they're doing, and they're not swayed back and forth, chasing revenue. No one is more stressed out in this world right now than people who are chasing revenue back and forth because they're getting whipped around with the winds of social change and financial pressure.

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Speaker E: and gentlemen, it's all about understanding how to go through and deal with, you know, what happens in life. And so when you're able to understand this and create for yourself a common ground and work through these things, it's a much better place to be. And I love this because and now is 100% right. A lot of times in business, people who are trying to hit quotas, sales numbers, certain number of calls, certain number of bids or whatever the case may be, if they are not doing things that they really should be doing because again, they don't have the expertise to do it, but they kind of been thrown to the walls. And you're asking to do something that is pressure and that is extreme pressure, especially if people are not equipped with to handle that pressure. So this is really interesting in that regard. So my question is right now and um, how do you help people build more resilience to be able to be very calm and be very, you know, efficient under pressure and or stressful environments?

Speaker F: Yeah. Well you'll appreciate this as an athlete, but the first layer that we actually work with, we act within human performance. We actually work with the human. So I don't know if you remember learning about Maslow's hierarchy of needs, but Maslow's teaches that the human nature is that we cannot be, we cannot out motivate ourselves, out vision ourselves, out esteem ourselves out of base physiological needs. So interestingly enough, one of the very first steps we Take with our corporate executives we work with is a baseline of sleep, hydration, sunlight, nutrition and movement. Five basic elements of human survival that literally do something to your nervous system. They expand your window of tolerance to, to handle stress. Everyone has a base layer of window of tolerance to handle stress. And your capacity, you may not be able to eliminate stress. If you're in the workplace and you have real world pressure and you're like, I can't just walk away from this. You can't control the fact that stress is coming. What you can do is increase your capacity to tolerate it. And that starts literally with the baseline of honoring your body's nervous system physiologically. Sleep, hydration, sunlight, nutrition and movement. The next layer of that comes in with what we call safety, right? That's Maslow's teaches that safety piece. And that piece is where we actually lean into those situations and say, I'm going to honor the fact that I am stressed out and I'm going to take five minutes, I'm going to go for a walk, I'm going to breathe, I'm going to move, I'm going to come back to my desk. I'm not going to force myself to sit at a keyboard for nine hours a day feeling completely wrecked and rocked and think I'm going to do my best work that way. I'm going to honor what shows up here. I'm going to honor the fact, I'm going to honor that I'm a physical being and I'm going to honor the fact that there's some unsafety due to the intense amounts of stress. And once we've done those two things, then and only then can we actually lock back into who we are and what we want and go do it on purpose instead of just reacting to the things happening around us.

Speaker E: You know, ladies and gentlemen, uh, we talk about this all the time. And Natalie referenced it earlier. Intentionality, focus, being intentional and knowing where to put your energy and, and knowing where you need to be to accomplish your reality. I'm loving this. And so now, and I saw a clip that Tony Robbins was talking about that one of the most important things in business and in life is to focus. And ah, he went a little bit deeper, said focus is people's reality. He said when people are focused and locked in on a target, they don't care about what else is around them. They get quote unquote, um, laser and beamed in. So he said focus is emotions. He said, because when you feel locked onto something and you feel that connection towards it, you are Much more likely to go after it and achieve it going forward. So my question for you is right now, how do you help people focus not just on resilience or burnout, things of that nature, because there's, there's got to be problem, solution, problem solution. We got that. How do you help people overall just get better about focusing in their everyday life?

Speaker F: Yeah. Well, I'm going to give you a simple little tool right here, right now that is a framework for focus that has been game changing for every executive and team that I've ever worked with. And it's the idea of, I want you to make three columns on a piece of paper and in the outside column, I actually want you to write down everything that's going through your head that's causing you to not focus all the thoughts. We have a, we have a brain that is designed and wired to predict the future. It's supposed to do that. It's a survival instinct. And when we just tell it to shut up, stop, I don't want to think about that. I need to think about this. It's not even wired to receive that command. But what it can do is actually if we will take what we're thinking about and write it, just put it down in a list. Here's what I'm thinking about. I'm worried about my money because if I don't get the, if I don't get the sales numbers up, then we don't hit revenue. If we don't hit revenue, we're not in profits. I can't afford my employees. I'm going to have to lay people off. I don't want to lay people off. It's Christmas time. These people are going to have no job, no money. I'm going to ruin people's lives. It's a squirrel of thought. And next thing you know you're like, and I haven't been to the gym, I haven't eaten decently for a week, and I haven't even seen my kids. And it started with a sales number and it ended with, I'm a bad parent. Um, I'm not taking care of myself. I'm lazy, unhealthy and in pain. And all of it is there. Write it all, everything that squirrels onto, attach it, write it all down on that left column and then allow. And then honor the fact that, holy moly. No wonder I feel overwhelmed. No wonder I feel frustrated. No wonder I feel a little anxious about what's going on. No wonder I feel the stress. And then go to the middle column and Put control at the top of that thing and then say, okay, all of this is reality for me right now. They're real circumstances, they're real pressures, they're real stresses. What do I have control over with these things? What do I have actionable, tangible control over? Make a list of those things and then go one step deeper and say I was. If I could only focus on one thing in that item of control, in that control list, what is the one right next step. That if I were to focus entirely on that thing, there is a high probability that there's a ripple effect from that that could affect 20 of those concerns just by focusing on one thing. Take, for example, the person that feels like they're not getting enough done, that they're running behind in the day, that they are always just one step behind, that they're. And that they're failing in all the aspects of their life. They'll make that list. We'll put things in their control. The number of times that if we will focus on a morning routine, waking up on time, taking care of our needs, taking care of the needs of the things that are most important to us, and then going in there with complete drive into work without all of those concerns in the background of making noise in our head, their capacity to handle a hundred of their concerns off of one focused, intentional action. It's so powerful, it has a ripple effect that is. That's beyond words. And people are. I can't believe that waking up on time and getting that morning routine done has changed everything. It's like, yes, but it's because you focused intentionally on something you had control over, something you could control at all times, actionably, tangibly engage with. And because you shifted that focus, you are no longer living in your mind of concern that is highly emotional. And so that shift shifts everything.

Speaker E: Yo, I, uh, like this. That shift shifts everything. And it's so important. Remember this. If you're trying to achieve something, you have to look at it from a perspective that you can do it, that you can accomplish it, that there's nothing you can't do. There's no task that's too great or too audacious. You, ah, have everything you need to take on the problem head on and be a bison and live that bison mindset and that bison mentality. This is great stuff. So now, last question. You have less than two minutes to answer. Two minutes or less. You ready? Is relatively new and people are loving it. Okay. What does, uh, authenticity look like for you when no one is clapping for it?

Speaker B: Yeah.

Speaker F: For me, it looks like doing exactly what I said I would do when I said it would do it. Standing is exactly who I am. Irregardless of who's watching, including when no one's watching. Uh, again, I have the opportunity to go into prison. And, uh, you cannot say one thing and do another in that place. They will eat you for lunch. I also have teenagers. You cannot say one thing and do and be another. They will eat you for lunch. I also own a business, and you cannot say one thing and do another and expect your employees to show up. They will eat you for lunch. Authenticity for me means that I am exactly who I say I am. And I am an unstoppable woman of God. I am that woman at all times, in all things and in all places. And it doesn't matter if anybody's watching, because I'm always watching and so is he. And authenticity means I show up like that at all times.

Speaker E: Ladies and gentlemen, what do we always talk about here? The only person you should want to be can be and needs to be around 247 is the person looking back at you in the mirror. That's it. That's all. Because that person is the person that's going to get to be accountable to. You have to take ownership for and you have to work hard to improve and be the best version of yourself. If you don't do that, doesn't matter what you do, because as Nalan said, people will eat you for lunch. They will see right through you and call bs. And when they do that, that's when bad things happen. Natalie, great interview. How can our global audience get in touch with you?

Speaker F: Yeah, I'm on social media, Instagram, LinkedIn. Um, Natalie Lewis. Most. Most of my handles are Natty O. Lewis. Most, uh, people call me Natty. Uh, and, uh, I say all my friends call me Natty. And if we're talking together, then we're friends. So you call me natty too. So natty.o Louis. I also, my website is ascendeq.com ladies and gentlemen.

Speaker E: Fantastic interview. Fantastic lady. And here is the authentic tip of this great interview. In life, the most important thing is to be the real, true version of yourself. Be bold enough, have integrity at all times, and do the right thing, even when no one is watching. Because at the end of the day, doing the right thing is not a every once in a while thing. Doing the right thing is a 247 type of thing. When you have that mentality, you're deemed for greatness. Again, my name is Marcus Ogden. I am the host of the Get Authentic with Marcus show. Thanks for tuning in. Have a fantastic day.

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