Ep. 192: Nick Davies – Building Your Achiever’s Mindset

Connect with Nick: https://www.achievers-mindset.com/tools

Full Episode Transcript:
Adam: (00:05)
Welcome back to Count Me In, the podcast that explores the world of business from the management accountants perspective. I'm your, host Adam Larson. Today we are joined by Nick Davies, an executive coach to leaders and other professionals looking to take their expertise to the next level. At the heart of Nick's coaching philosophy is what he calls the achiever's mindset and how learning to harness that powerful mental tool can lead to transformative results for management accountants, and other go getters in both business and in life. I hope you enjoy the show today. Let's start the conversation with Nick.

Adam: (00:42)
So Nick, thank you so much for coming on the podcast today. We really appreciate you spending time with us. And today we're gonna be talking a little bit about the achiever's mindset, but before we get there, I'd like you to kind of give a little bit of your background for our audience today and how you got to the point where you are today.

Nick: (00:58)
How long have I got? You know, it's interesting. I was having this conversation yesterday with someone about talking about their story and fantastic story this lady had working in a business and it's something that I made a distinction of a long time ago that I had a resistance to share in my story. And I thought, well, who wants to hear my story, it's my story? And then what I realized was that, yeah, it's boring to me because it's my story, you know? So I always like it when people can share, because even if it feels like it's just your thing, it's like, well, other people haven't had that experience, you know? And so for me grown up in England, I worked for almost 20 years in the banking world all over the world. I've lived in three continents and five locations and been a long time doing something that I didn't really want to be doing and kind of went outside this personal development journey about 10, 12 years ago.

Nick: (01:51)
I asked myself like what did I wanna do when I grew up, you know, eventually moved to states and lived in Florida, worked on Wall Street for a while and, and decided that's it like I wanna, I like working with people. I wanna work with people working on what's most important for them, whatever it is, whatever industry, industry agnostic, but use my experience working in the corporate world and understanding how things work, but also work for people's goals that are most important to them. And so I'd ask to become a coach. And it's been an amazing journey over the last six or seven years. This point, coached hundreds of people, people walk different walks of life and a corporate setting, every different industry, business owners, non-business owners worked on more people's part of life. And it's something I get very passionate about now. And I'm privileged to do every day.

Adam: (02:35)
As you were talking, it kind of made me think about a lot of us are we may feel successful where we are in our careers, but despite having a pretty good handle on it, we feel like we're missing something, right. We feel like we're missing. We wanna be a top performer. And, but how do we get to the next level? So maybe that's kinda where we're gonna focus in on the conversation is how do we boost our skills and wherever we are, you know, this podcast is for folks, affecting the accounting and finance world. So accountants and folks in the accounting and finance world, how do we get to that next level? You know, we're not talking about specific accounting things right now, but it's just that, you know, how do we become successful in the next moment?

Nick: (03:12)
And I think that you talked about skills and you talked about, yeah, we don't wanna talk about the technicalities of mechanical and finance. That's not the point. And so what I found out, what I believe is that right. It really starts with, well, where do you wanna go? What type of person do you wanna create within yourself? What type of life do you wanna create, rather than looking for skills or practices or best practices or strategies it's like, let's start with the best version of what it could be. What if you could have it anyway, you would want it, like, what would that look like? And really start from that point. And oftentimes that comes with a resistance, like, well, what do you mean? I wanna get 10% better this year. I wanna get 20% better this year. It's like, well, that's great and good for you, no judgment. But what if you could flip it on its head? What if you could get a hundred times better? What would that mean? What actually does that look like for you? And if you're thinking with that end in mind, then you tend to find the path to get there.

Adam: (04:12)
So if you're thinking with that end in mind, how do you get to that, that change of mindset because you're here and you're like, I just wanna improve like 10% you said, and you just mentioned a hundred percent better. Like those seem like very drastically different numbers

Nick: (04:27)
Yeah, absolutely. Right. And some of it starts with being willing and something within, could you start to, to talk about, right? Like some of us consider ourselves successful, but maybe there's something niggling inside you go, well, maybe it's not quite what I want, or maybe I could be doing this in a different way. And it's really kind of leaning into some of that. And I believe that we all have it. And a lot of us go through a life scene, a little bit of a fog, sometimes a lot of a fog just doing what we think is the right thing to do. You know? And I think about when I got into banking, I felt was like, well, that's good. They wanna pay me to do this. All right. And I'll play your game. And then they're gonna pay me some more and I'll play some more, I'll get paid some more.

Nick: (05:09)
It's like, and it just goes and goes and goes. And that's really all, you know, and it's not often you just get to chance to step back and go, well, hang on. Is this really what I want? Like deeply to my core. Do I get excited to do this every day? Does it keep me up late? Not just because I'm told to, or that there's deadlines or is it cuz I want to, am I getting up early to go and practice to be the best version of this? And that's a question that like hand on heart that I believe most people can't answer. And I believe that that was just something that wasn't available for me. Like that wasn't the sort of person that I was. I thought that stuff was preserved for small stars or, you know, people that are in a creative field, but I believe it's available for everyone if you're willing to look.

Adam: (05:52)
Hmm. So if you're willing to look, maybe we can start talking about, can you define the achiever's mindset for us? And we can discuss that a little bit more.

Nick: (06:01)
Yeah. I think that, you know, the achiever's mindset is really about knowing that like there's always something else. There are no limits to what we can achieve. The baseline, the achiever's mindset for me is that I believe that anything's possible. If you think about what humans have achieved, just watching, me, my wife sat down last night to watch Netflix. We were watching the SpaceX documentary that was on there. And that what a great example, that is about what we could achieve. You know, even Elon Musk said, when we first started out, I thought there was a 10% chance. We'd get someone to orbit and it j...