Burned Out, Stuck, and Overthinking? Here’s How To Get Unstuck and Grow Again With Robert Gilbreath

Robert Gilbreath is a fractional executive specializing in CEO, CMO, and COO roles for SaaS and e-commerce companies. He provides consulting services in areas including go-to-market strategies, SEO, product development, and C-suite coaching. Robert is also an Executive at Rivur, a technology startup for managing construction projects online. Previously, he served as the Vice President and General Manager of ShipStation, where he led teams of over 175 employees and managed substantial marketing budgets.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

[4:53] What is decision fatigue, and how does it manifest?
[10:37] The difference between individual and group decision fatigue
[15:06] How fear, procrastination, and defensiveness contribute to decision fatigue
[19:19] Why the fear of decision-making increases as businesses scale
[25:21] Making macro-level decisions to empower teams and avoid daily micromanagement
[29:16] How documenting thoughts and time-blocking tasks helps balance mental workload
[32:51] Robert Gilbreath discusses using the SBAR framework and leadership pyramids to present decisions
[37:02] Tips for catalyzing decision-making and reducing daily tasks
[47:20] How to overcome decision paralysis using the double diamond framework
[1:01:49] The five whys for identifying a problem
[1:09:02] Robert’s approach to strengthening decision-making capacity

In this episode…

Running a business requires constant decision-making, but over time, even high-performing leaders can find themselves mentally drained. The barrage of choices, from the smallest daily tasks to high-stakes strategic moves, can lead to decision fatigue, quietly killing momentum, clarity, and joy. How can founders and executives protect their mental energy while leading effectively?

According to fractional executive Robert Gilbreath, leaders can reduce decision fatigue by simplifying routines, creating clear macro-level goals, and building frameworks that empower teams to make decisions independently. He suggests documenting your decision-making process, blocking out your calendar, and leveraging structured frameworks like SBAR (situation, background, assessment, recommendation) and the double diamond diagram to clarify problems and guide teams. Additionally, prioritizing sleep and exercise and reducing unnecessary decisions allows founders and leaders to preserve mental clarity for crucial choices.

In this episode of the Up Arrow Podcast, William Harris interviews Robert Gilbreath, fractional executive CEO, CMO, and COO, about overcoming decision fatigue in business leadership. Robert talks about breaking decision-making paralysis, how fear impacts leadership choices, and how to empower teams to make informed decisions.

Resources mentioned in this episode

Quotable Moments

"Imagine a day where you wouldn't have to make any decisions. It's a little double-edged sword."
"I've controlled my decision fatigue. It's just that I can be a tool for other people."
"I want them to get to some of these conclusions themselves."
"Frameworks like EOS, they maybe don't get marketed like this, but they really are to help."
"Don't confuse action for progress. You're grinding yourself down to a nub, but you're actually not."

Action Steps

Simplify daily routines to reduce decision load: Streamlining choices like clothing and scheduling preserves mental energy for higher-stakes decisions. This helps prevent early burnout and keeps cognitive resources available for business-critical thinking.
Establish macro-level business objectives: Clear, overarching goals provide a framework for team members to make aligned decisions independently. This reduces bottlenecks and empowers teams while protecting leadership bandwidth.
Document decisions and reasoning: Writing down the thought process behind decisions creates clarity, reference points, and learning opportunities for others. It also minimizes rehashing discussions and supports faster future decision-making.
Implement frameworks like EOS and SBAR: Structured approaches organize complex issues into manageable steps, reducing overwhelm and enabling quicker, more confident decisions. These systems also foster consistent language across teams.
Prioritize personal health and recovery: Adequate sleep, exercise, and nutrition directly support better judgment, focus, and resilience under pressure. Leaders who maintain wellness make stronger, more consistent decisions over time.

Sponsor for this episode

This episode is brought to you by Elumynt. Elumynt is a performance-driven e-commerce marketing agency focused on finding the best opportunities for you to grow and scale your business.

Our paid search, social, and programmatic services have proven to increase traffic and ROAS, allowing you to make more money efficiently.

To learn more, visit www.elumynt.com.

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:03

Welcome to the Up Arrow Podcast with William Harris, featuring top business leaders sharing strategies and resources to get to the next level. Now let's get started with the show. Hey

William Harris 0:15

everyone. I'm William Harris. I'm the founder and CEO of Elumynt and the host of the Up Arrow Podcast, where I feature the best minds in e-commerce to help you scale from 10 million to 100 million and beyond, as you up arrow your business and your personal life. So two years ago, I had the chance to sit down with Robert Gilbreath. He was a fractional executive, and he was the former cmo and GM at ShipStation. He's a veteran of the e-commerce and SaaS world, and someone who's led teams on both sides of the trade show aisle. That episode was a hit, we pulled back the curtain on what life really looks like at the top and the unspoken pressure that leaders carry. But since then, a different theme continued creeping into our conversations, one that's just as real, just as common, and way more dangerous than most people realize, decision fatigue, that invisible weight we all carry the tiny, micro decisions, the 80 thread slack discussions, the fear of picking the wrong path and stalling momentum, it all adds up, and for founders, marketers and executives trying to scale, it can quietly kill progress, clarity and even joy. So today, we're making that the focus. How do you protect your mental energy. How do you design your life and work to minimize unnecessary decisions? And how do you get from white knuckling your way through every day to operating with calm, clear momentum? We're talking about the models, the systems, the habits that can help you regain clarity and lead without burnout. Robert Gilbreath, welcome back to the Up Arrow Podcast.

Robert Gilbreath 1:41

Oh man, thank you so much for having me back. I really appreciate it. And you know so much as so much has changed in two years. I know for both of us, things we're working on, even if I know the folks who are listening so much as seems like it's changed. Change is something we're always a part of in some way the if you recall, we, when we did this two years ago, I was coming to you live from my my closet, Yes, Master, master bedroom closet, because I was in a different house at the time, and the house didn't have a Proper office or place for me to do these types of things. So,

William Harris 2:25

you know, I love your office now. I love that color, too. Oh, thank

Robert Gilbreath 2:29

you. I appreciate it. Yeah, it's, you know, I think we, maybe we talked about this once before, but so I've been in this, all in this, this thing, this, this house, in this office, probably moved shortly after we recorded that last episode, and I, I have already sort of moved my desk around once because of, like, a little bit of getting a little bit of a different environment. But one thing is true, that I've used, I guess, just an aside I have, I have, you see, I have all kinds of personal stuff around. I'll even like feel a little bit over the wall, some other pictures and things, and it's, it's fun to use all those things, as you know, conversation starters or quick asides in in meeting. So I'm, personally, I've made a decision talking about that, that I don't have to worry about what my background is, because this is me, and it's my background I don't have to worry about, ever have to worry about, but, you know, buzzing it out or anything. But yeah, excited to, excited to talk with you. I know we've done a few free chats about this, and, yeah, I think both of us are excited to talk about it. Because not only have we we struggles, it sounds really kind of negative, but not only have we dealt with this personally, but you know, as I started to reflect on it, and we can get into this more as we talk this decision fatigue is sort of two sides of it, because some folks, some folks sort of cause it, or are enthralled by it, or get energy from causing it. And so I think there's we're gonna have a really good conversation, because it's not just about, you know, here's the 10 hacks that you personally need to use to not experience it, right? It can also be that you're causing it for people, right? And that's maybe something we will talk a little bit about as well.

William Harris 4:15

Really good point. I want to dig into that before we do as always, I want to announce our sponsor, then we'll get right into it. This episode is brought to you by Elumynt. Elumynt is an award winning advertising agency optimizing e-commerce campaigns around profit. In fact, we've helped 13 of our customers get acquired, with the largest one selling for nearly 800,000,001 they ipoed. You can learn more on our website at Elumynt.com which is spelled elumynt.com actually right there. You can see that there. Okay, let's talk about decision fatigue. You started in this. I want to talk about what it actually looks like when you talk about decision fatigue. What's really happening here?

Robert Gilbreath 4:53

Yeah. I mean, you know. And I guess this conversation is going to be very you know, let's, if you need. Interrupt me, let's, let's make this. This isn't just not a debate, but, you know, I think the way that I think about it is at its basic core, your brain, your brain can only process so many things at any amount of time, right? That that takes many forms. It could be the volume of things in over time. It could be the amount of things at any one moment in time. I mean, I personally think it's a form of, like, self control, and, you know, the synapse firing to do the right thing or go a certain direction. You know? I believe that there's, like, there's an efficient amount of those that can happen in a day, right? And so, you know, what's your take on it? Is it? To me, it's the same, the same thing that that is or manifest as decision fatigue, is the same thing as self control, or similar. It's a similar like, it's in the same, the same realm, if you will.

William Harris 5:58

I think there's a lot of interesting research out there that seems to be supporting this idea that you mentioned about there's only so many decisions that you can make, and we've seen a lot of other founders get around that to a point by eliminating unnecessary decisions. And everybody knows about Steve Jobs and his his uniform essentially, that he had to, have to think about that. But before him, or at least around the same time, another one of my favorite inventors was similar, and he was the first one that I read about with this, which was Dean Kamen. So Dean Kamen, if you're familiar with him, he was the inventor of the most famously, the inventor of the Segway little scooter thing. But before that, he actually is, like a legit inventor too, like beyond just like this novelty, he invented the insulin pump and a whole bunch of other things. So, like, it was looking at my my heroes, but he basically just wore the Canadian tuxedo. He's like, you know, same pants, jean shirt, you know, shirt, or whatever black belt is, like, the same thing every single day. And so going back to the point of what you were asking, it does seem like there is some kind of threshold that most of us can make certain amounts of decisions throughout a day that might be different for each person. I don't know if it's been proven one way or another. Whether you could increase your threshold. I think there's some interesting stuff that people are talking about, like, how do you increase your ability to make more decisions throughout a day? But either way, you're going to reach a point, likely, as a founder, where you can't make any more decisions. You literally just feel like you're like, I can't make it out of the decision. Right now,

Robert Gilbreath 7:28

yeah, you know the Yeah, and maybe it goes without saying, but the idea of jobs wearing the same clothes all the time, or, you know, I think even Zuckerberg was doing some version of that at one point, you know, having a routine in the morning, right? This is other thing that comes back to, like, all of those are really just efforts to push off having to make any decisions till later in the day, right? And so, like, that's one, that's one to me, this, that's an easy thing. And, like, I personally don't do the same, the same shirt every day, but, I mean, if you went in my closet, you're going to see, like, you know, there's four, four things more or less to choose from with a few different patterns. They all work together. Like, you know, that's my version of that, right? So, you know, the the the other piece that you kind of just said you said something about this earlier is also just like the gravity of the decisions. So I think it's hard to say, oh, you should only make 12 a day. Well, I mean, if you're making decisions, if you're making decisions that are obvious, you know, maybe you can do hundreds a day. It's, it's the ones, to me that it's like the big ones, the ones where you maybe aren't as confident with the past or, you know, I think what I was alluding to earlier is when, when the decision has a lot of stakeholders, right, and, you know, and you might maybe, like, maybe I'm not actually the only one making the decision, but I'm having to defend a path, and there's fatigue around having to do that too much right? And maybe, it may be coming to points in a decision process differently, like those, those kind of things take take hold, as well as you quick aside this other thing that the two things I always hear Steve Jobs about is the clothing. The other one is this, this whole thing where he found a loophole in the state of California that you could drive a car without registering it, as long as you had to build a sale for like, six months or nine months before you had to register it. So he would just buy a new Mercedes, SL, like, every six months. So he never, he never had a car with a license plate on it. Didn't realize that, which, you know, I don't know if he did that for some, some degree I probably was doing to be frugal and to not have to deal with the government that way. But also it's like you got this guy riding around. He was probably pretty he's pretty famous to be riding around, if people figure out who he was, right, which is kind of funny, because you see the guy in the Mercedes SL without license plate, you know, in Palo Alto, then you know, it's him, or was him, right? So, but you know he, he probably made. That is a decision, and it stuck to it, because you didn't want to have to think about registering cars

William Harris 10:04

anymore anyway, right? Yep, so talking about what this looks like, I want to make sure that we, we lay this out there. You talked about, there's, there's two types of decision fatigue. One to a point is, as an individual, your ability to just make decisions throughout the day, and then the other one, like you said, is as a group defending a point or whatever. So maybe two branches of this. Which one do you think ends up impacting businesses the most Oof?

Robert Gilbreath 10:36

Can I just say yes? Yeah, sure, Nino, oh, man. I mean, I this is like death by a million cuts, or death by a few blows, right? You know, I guess in theory, really, either one, probably the worst would be if it's happening at a like group executive level, and happening with a large number of, you know, line level workers, you know, that's the that would be, the be the word man. It's a good question. What do you think which one is? Which one is, which one is scarier? Or like, I guess, you know, the one

William Harris 11:18

that I hear the most. I think the reason, the reason why I lean towards the individual one versus the group one is because I feel like that one's the more the more difficult one to assess and see that that's what's really happening. Yeah, if you're arguing as a group and you can't come to a decision, I feel like it becomes fairly obvious that you're circling around something and a decision needs to be made, and at some point in time it's like, let's just make a decision when it's the individual. I feel like it's easy to be more in denial about the fact on why you're not making the decision. I'm not making that decision because this really isn't the right thing. I'm not making that decision because of this, and we can rationalize it very easily when the reality is we're just not going to decision because we've just reached our

Robert Gilbreath 12:07

limit. Yeah, and I guess then, then you could talk about, I know this has a topic of this, but like, you know, the individuals on a team understand what their actual mission is and what they're supposed to be accomplishing, and does that give them, you know, something of validity to lean back on when it's time to make a decision, and helps them make the right decision, right? You know, it's, it's, oh, man, you can go into a whole sort of org chart and work to be done, discussion around, you know, where that, where those impacts are? Yeah, I think so. To your point about the group, to me, the group group, the benefit of the group is that there's the group naturally has guard rails, right? And if you have the right players in the group, you've got all the right perspective, right? Then, then what comes up, maybe a little segue, is like what I was mentioning earlier, where you can have some of those group dynamics that actually aren't beneficial, and a one or two people in there could be causing, sure, the causing the need to make additional decisions, or too many decisions. You know that that are yes, the final decision is not even that impactful, or that maybe not even that important, frankly, but they've blown it up into this, to this thing. And, you know, I've personally worked with people where it's like more fun to debate about the thing that actually do the thing, sure, right? Yeah, you know, as well, you know. I mean, I think, from your perspective, you know, good, good and bad. You've got, you've got client stakeholders and other folks that are trying to bring them, you know, bring that all together. And I can't remember, did you, did you share the whole idea of, like, making sure that, like, a little bit of, like, if the impact is big of the decision, you probably should spend more time on it. And then there's, like, sort of confidence piece, I forget. There's might be a, there might be a little saying or something that that goes down that path, but,

William Harris 14:03

yeah, I didn't say that, but I like that concept. Yeah,

Robert Gilbreath 14:07

it's, it's like, impact and effort. It's probably in my head. This happens. We've talked about this before, you know, like, I've read all these books and, you know, went back to school and do all these things, and I end up having these, like, as I said it out loud, it sounds sort of like a Six Sigma kind of thing, where you have this impact and effort and kind of thing, same with maybe, maybe there's a little bit of that play in play when you're going to think about, maybe, thinking about the tools you're going to use to help you make decisions, or the tools you might use to help limit the amount of decisions you need to make. Right?

William Harris 14:39

Why you think people end up reaching this point of decision fatigue? Let's just say, like, you know, and I want to preface this, yeah, you're not like a you're an expert at this, in the idea that you're not a psychologist, but you're an expert, because you see this happen all the time, a lot of businesses, because you come in as a fractional help for them. And. You run into this a lot. What are the main reasons that are causing somebody to reach

Robert Gilbreath 15:06

that? Part of it is, I think people are scared to actually make a decision, and then they end up making the act of doing that makes them procrastinate. It makes them maybe then forced to make decisions later the day, Later in the period, later on a project, because now they're rushed, right? You know, think about it, man, if you could sit around not have to make any decisions all day. That's not what we're talking about this podcast. This isn't like create your life and your work so you never have to make decisions. But imagine a day where you wouldn't have to make any decisions, and so a little double edged sword, like guy could, I wouldn't be a pretty easy day, right? Sure. And you know, is, is, is the is that nerve nirvana? Is that because you've already mapped out everything you're supposed to do and how you're supposed to do it and when you're supposed to do it. So like, to some degree, that sounds boring as hell, but on the flip side, like, if you don't have to make any decisions, that's you do you have any responsibility. I'm not trying to get philosophical, but it's like, I do believe some people not that they hide behind decision fatigue, but it's like they're actually the act of not ever really making decision. And thinking about making decisions is what gets them to that fatigue point. Sure. Right? Yeah, because, because of procrastination and, like, the stress that they can build up around it. And, you know,

William Harris 16:27

you know, I posted about this on on LinkedIn one time about the you have to be a person if you're in charge, you have to be a person who wants that responsibility. There are a lot of people who say that they want that title. They don't want the responsibility of actually having to make those decisions. Because, guess what? You because guess what? The reality is, every decision that you make is going to suck in some way. It's going to hurt you or somebody in some way. Every decision is hard,

Robert Gilbreath 16:52

yes, yes, yes, no, yes. That's part of like the advisory, fractional executive portion of my day to day work over the last two years. You know, I believe a big part of what's beneficial to my clients is there are times I'm on these calls and they're struggling to make a decision. And it's not that I have always the perfect right answer, but I have more experience and more history of viewing these things, I can get to a decision faster, or I can help them break a tie. And so, you know, I can help them not procrastinate. I can help them not and so, you know, it's not that I have controlled my decision fatigue, it's just that I can be a tool for other people. And so that's been, that's been an interesting, you know, thing that's happened. I think, for me, though, that just means I actually, I'm making more decisions across more industries and clients. And so I do have to be careful with that throughout a day, right? And have have now developed, over the last two years, a few different methods for sort of that multi level decision making that I have to make.

William Harris 18:03

I want to get into those methods, but I want to call out the fear piece that you mentioned, because I do think that that's, let's just say that there's several reasons why people run into this decision fatigue, and I want to really make sure that we unpack that before we dig into the solutions for it. One of those like you said, is you're just simply making so many decisions throughout the day. And I'd say there's one way that we need to look at solving that the solving the You're making too many decisions. And why are you making so many decisions, right? So there's a solve for that. The other one, though, like you said, is there's fear. I had Melanie Marshall on. She used to be like the, I forget the exact title, but like the head of BBC covering like the Middle East, and so she's over there, and she was talking about how, you know you have to make a decision there in a split second, because there's bullets flying over your head. It's very easy for fear to paralyze people in that situation as well. And so sometimes, you know, fear can be one of the things that is keeping us from making these decisions. It's it's not that we haven't thought about it a million different ways we've looked at, you know, our North beam in, our triple whale and our Google Analytics and our Shopify, we have all the data we could possibly imagine, but we have this fear of making that decision. Why? Why do we sometimes run into this fear?

Robert Gilbreath 19:19

I mean, we, as humans, we want to be correct, right? We want to, we want to feel like we're moving things in the right direction. You know, I would say, also, there sometimes that fear is because maybe I've previously made decisions and they were deemed wrong, or they were, you know, I think I would say, oh, maybe even till I became independent and started doing this for started doing this fractional work, the level defensiveness I would have around people and things was was super high, so that I know my my decision fatigue at one point was somewhat driven by my defensiveness of decisions I had come up with, right? You know? Or and, and, or fears being wrong. And, like, you know, then you're like, well, I'll just, well make this decision now, because at least no answer is not a wrong answer, you know, like, get the literal sense of it. But

William Harris 20:13

I think there's also to follow up with that. I think there's a point where it becomes materially, it actually matters. Will Nitze was talking about this on Twitter the other day. He's the founder of IQ bar. I think they're doing like, 150 million, right, like, so they've grown to a decent sized business. I don't have a sweet handy but it's something along the lines of, you know, like, you reach this point where you're like, if I make the wrong decision, it actually matters. Now, when you're a startup, you make the wrong decision, it's like, so what? Like, you just start over again the next day, like, there's not that much momentum. But if you're 100 million and you make the wrong decision on something, it can be a $20 million dollar bad decision, it can actually be very material, and I think that that's where there's a point where we want to hold on to what we have, and we're actually more afraid of losing what we have, and we are afraid of not acquiring what this decision could allow.

Robert Gilbreath 21:16

Yeah, you know that's I like, I like that. We gotta, I gotta I gotta find that tweet, because it is, you know, you know, if we're, if we go back to old school e commerce days and websites, and we used to, used to talk about how impactful a conversion rate change might be, right? And show the compounding of that over time. This is very similar, like, as a business gets bigger, your traffic, your traffic is bigger to your site, and you make a small change and it's impactful. It's going to be more impactful if you have more traffic, obviously, yeah, it's, I think it's part of as part of what we're, what we're just now talking about, too. It seems like there's a level in here of like it's, it's easier to make decisions and make right decisions if you're really in touch, and your team is in touch with what we're trying to accomplish, right? And you know, my take on that, if we were to agree that that's the thing is, like, I tend to try to get people to make the most macro decisions first when, like, let's say we're starting a new project. Let's agree it at a macro level as possible, right? So, for example, um, God, even somebody I was on the phone with maybe yesterday. Like, we don't need to discuss what channels we're going to use for content marketing, but can we have a discussion and make decisions around the fact that we are going to use what is academically called Content Marketing. Like, let's just talk about that. And so then you start to me, you start, I know it's top down, but it's really to me, it's like, foundational, right? Like, I think a lot of sometimes people get in, they think they have to make this degree, like, decimal point decision, and that's where, to me, like, this tweet you're talking about, like, Okay, I think you're going directly at something, and I make a major decision, it's too deep, and you don't have all the financial foundational thoughts around it, you know, like the whys, all those whys behind it. Then that's to me, also, like that causes fear. I'm not sure if this is in the path, right? I think that. I mean, like you said at a startup, maybe you can do that more often. I would, to some degree, want to add to that, like the sooner in the life of a business you can start, you know, starting at a macro level, making sure people understand what the micro then means, and hopefully give them, give them the confidence to understand, like, you know, what they should be doing. Because the beautiful thing is, where you don't have to, you know, as a leader or a managing team, you don't have to be there making, you know, that's one way to have the managing team make less decisions, as if that's all been set up. And to some degree, it gets passed down, right? And I'm not saying to like, I don't want to do the work you do it, but it's like, if you can get that buy in at that level, then those decisions can go down. They get spread out a little bit, you know, frankly, they're hopefully made by the people that are like pros at that thing, right, you know, versus some talking heads or whatever, right? And so I love we're on this podcast too, talking heads on the podcast, I'm making fun of ourselves.

William Harris 24:20

Well, okay, but I like where you're going with this. This is, to me, one of the first things that I was able to unlock in my business was when we implemented EOS traction, because, to your point, it was a framework of language that we could all share. And I'm gonna sound like I'm a rep for them, but I'm not. I just really have liked what it was able to do for our business. And one of the things was, you know, how do we establish the most macro pieces of the business so that way everybody can use that as a framework or a rubric to decide, make decisions against and so, to your point, it's like, well, what is the problem that we're solving? Let's all agree on that first, and how are we. Solving that problem. Let's all agree on that. And if we have that, we have our mission. We have our values, the way that we believe problems should be solved. If we have those written down, and I spend my time as as an owner, as a CEO, working on those things, then ideally, the only other big decision that I have to make is, Who am I hiring to make those other decisions?

Robert Gilbreath 25:21

Sometimes that works very, very fluid. I know what I was going to say is, like, you got all that, you know the ideal situation. I can't say that I've ever fully executed this anywhere. I think I've been close a few times. But using those things then to hire the right people, yeah, because you it's then, it's not necessarily about a job description or it is, but the job description takes on a different life of like, you know, more, maybe more concrete goals, or more, again, macro stuff boiled down to the micro of a department or a position, and then, you know, that's the, that's The, you know, could be an amazing situation. So, yeah.

William Harris 26:04

So, so let's say that one of the ways, one of the problems that we're solving from a decision fatigue standpoint, is the insurmountable amount of decisions that you have as a really dumb sentence, but the amount of decisions that you need to make as a founder sometimes is too many to be able to make, and so you have to delegate some of those decisions. And one of the key ways to delegate some of those decisions is one establish what the overall trajectory is, right your vision for where you're going, establishing these bigger macro things, and then hiring the right people to make those decisions. And to your point, by having this, the thing that I like about EOS traction is because we have a vision laid out for where we want to go, because we have a mission that specifies who we are and what we're doing, because we've identified who our ideal customers are, because we've identified our values. Now when we interview people, we can do a better job of like like you said, not just saying, Hey, do you know how to run a meta ad or not. Now we can actually say, Do you believe in solving these problems the way that we do? If you do that, I already know that when meta changes its algorithm and it will, you're going to go about solving it in a way that I likely would have as well.

Robert Gilbreath 27:15

Yeah, I'm grinning because frameworks like EOS. They maybe don't get marketed like this, but they really are to help you make better decisions, right? And they're not out of the box instantly, ready, ready and built out for you. You have to follow a framework to get there, you know? And there's a level of like discipline that you have to go through to fill out the template, if you will, right? And so whether you know it or not, you are making a bunch of macro decisions about these things that then allow you to be faster better, have your team be better. So that's a good I think that those kind of frameworks of business are, you know, them in themselves. Sometimes they're scary because, and maybe this is back to the fear just giving up control, sometimes making decisions actually is giving up control. So the decision to grow out a team, the decision to, you know, like, to your point, hire an expert in a certain field, you know, maybe more so with a startup, you know, you founders are ingrained and you know, don't want to admit that they don't know everything, or don't want to dilute themselves, or all those reasons like that that sometimes could come into play, that might come into play with this as well. I don't know if you call that fear, I guess it probably is.

William Harris 28:37

Sure I don't think we like, Yeah, we don't like to give up control as a general rule. What about what are some other ways that we can eliminate so many decisions if we feel like we're at the point where we're making 1000 decisions a day, and that's part of where our we're truly experiencing decision fatigue, not fear, but decision fatigue, implementing frameworks that allow us to make decisions and delegate those decisions to be made by others on our team that fit within our goals. Aside from that, do you have other tips for how to eliminate some of the decisions that we're having to make throughout the day?

Robert Gilbreath 29:16

I mean, I, I, I personally am one who I try to document what I'm thinking. And so, you know, let's say I do some research on something, and that research leads to some decisions. I try to document that number one, writing it or even typing it for me, helps me retain it, but it also puts it in a form that I can share. I can use it to help other people, bring them along the journey, if you will. You know, I think all my other all my other tools tend to be, you know, things we all hear, like time, boxing certain things at certain times a day. Um. You know, I, I know we all kind of do. I sort of do a bastardization of to do list. And typically, if you think about what a to do list is, there's probably some decisions micro hidden in those to do's right? And so I try to time box and be cognizant of how many decisions this project that I put on my to do list is going to take, and I try to balance out a week, and it doesn't always work this way, but try to balance out a week. And it's kind of funny, my wife would make fun of me about this, but it's like these crazy days that maybe I have some lightweight projects to end the day, and it's almost a treat, right? Because I've already done all this really difficult stuff, either earlier in the week or earlier in the day, and so that's how I do it. It's a form of time boxing, you know, and blocking things out, and then, you know, trying to, trying to weigh the heavy, hard stuff. Giving some of those, like I said, the treats mixed in is sort of how I've done it.

William Harris 31:05

I like what you're talking about, helping people come alongside you, to be able to make those by documenting it. The framework that I use for doing this, that I've really liked is, I believe it was a military acronym that was adopted by hospital systems. I, at one point in time, was in the medical side. I was a nurse there, and so I used this framework called S bar, which stands for s, B, A, R, situation, background, assessment, recommendation. And I love using it because, you know, you call a cardiac surgeon at 3am you better have a really good reason for waking them up the night. They've got surgery in the morning, and so the very first thing out of your mouth needs to be the situation. John's bleeding to death, right? Whatever it is, like, what is the situation that you're dealing with? Okay, great. You've got my attention. What's the background? Well, okay, John had open heart surgery at noon, by so and so. You know, cabbage times four, coordinator by price, graft times four. He had this and this and, like, he's on these medications. Okay, got it? I've got the background. What's your assessment? Well, he's putting out, you know, this much blood out of the chest tube. You start going through these things now, and it's like, now you can get to, okay, well, what's the recommendation and, and the reason why I like this, and I take my team through these things whenever we're trying to diagnose things that are going on with ads where it's like, what's the problem? Well, their ROAs went from a two to a one within the last week. Okay, yeah, this is an issue. Like, let's what's going on here, what's the situation, what's the background, what's the assessment, what's your recommendation before I give my recommendation. But now, when they can bring me into a decision, it's much easier for me to be able to come up and say, Great, I understand what you're doing, where you're going, I can help you make a decision now. And so to your point, documenting things in a way that allow others to come alongside you and make decisions. I think that's a really smart idea.

Robert Gilbreath 32:51

Yeah, I like the S bar thing. That's, I love all of these, like acronyms for different, different things. It reminds me of a interview process where you use safe sa fe, and it's like situation, action taken, final outcome and evaluation. It's a similar it's a similar thing. You know this about taking different different tools and forms of things and pushing them together, as you're talking about s bar, you know, there's also a level of who are you taking this S bar information too, right? Are you causing someone else to have to make decisions that they don't really need to? Sure? Then you get into these, the leadership triangle, or the leadership pyramid, which I don't remember if we talked about last time, but, you know, it says you can Google this. I don't like I tell people I didn't mean anything. I just, I'm really good at Google, but you're this pyramid is like, at the top of it are executive level folks like these are, you know, C staff level kind of people and leaders that kind of have their they have their shit together. They've been there, done that, and they deserve to be at the top of this pyramid, right? Maybe it's an organization. It could not be anything. You know, at the bottom is someone that's probably not making any decisions, right? Right there they're turning a crank on a machine. They're, you know, punching the keyboard or whatever. And leadership in management then has this progression up. And, you know, using your S bar as an example, as you go up, what you're sharing with others is less in need of them helping you with decisions and more about maybe you just sharing it with them, right? And so, you know, the person at the very bottom is like, you know, something's on fire. And they have, they don't even know what fire is, maybe, and they go to William and say, Hey, William, on fire. And that's all they can do, right? That's that lowest level. As it starts going up, you start getting into some of the almost as bar situation, especially with the, you know, what's the what's the remedy, or the action we're going to take? And he started getting into, Hey, William, the trash can was on fire. I know they'll use a fire extinguisher. You know, we didn't have to call 911, just letting you know. Yeah, right. You know, then as you go up even higher, you're at a point where it's like, Hey, William, we've implemented a new safety protocol. It kind of come. It came to fruition because there was a trash can fire a few weeks ago, but we went ahead and put together a whole new safety protocol. It just Just FYI, guess you see that in a report, right? And so a lot of this is almost a bottom up, you know. And so you can imagine someone that's that's being more impactful for their company, someone who is maybe, you know, ready to take on more responsibility, be it just bigger projects or have a team. Similarly, we see this ability for them. I think it goes back to your s part. They have, they possess more ability to see a situation, you know, see what's going on, you know, on their own, come up with a with a good decision, a recommendation, take action. And I think then it becomes a sort of weird yin yang thing about as the leadership, giving the people what they need to be able to move up that pyramid, right? And as a person at the top of the pyramid allowing that to happen back to even, like the fear of making decision, if I'm scared of making decision, because a guy at the mid my superior is, you know, someone who makes me defensive, or that wants to over analyze everything or whatever, you know, I mean. So it goes. That's where it starts getting into that two way thing we were talking about earlier.

William Harris 36:22

If you get into a situation where this is, let's just say, critical state decision making, you've reached the threshold and you feel like you can't make any more decisions. You've made at least the decision to implement EOS or a framework like that. You've made the decision to reach out to Robert to help you make some of these decisions. You've made these like that, but there's still, like, this period of time where you feel stuck in making any more decisions. Do you have tips or ideas of like, let's just even say like, this is not necessarily the be all, end all, but these are some things of just getting through the day right now today, sir,

Robert Gilbreath 37:02

I mean, if I understand your question, it's like, okay, well, if we've made the decision to do Eos, I don't need to go fill out the whole handbook tomorrow, sure. But like, Could I go ahead and do page one? Right? Could, could I do some things that aren't decisions? There may be questions, right? And there's a lot of context sharing inside of Eos initially, right? And so, you know, you know, it could I just some action. That's where it's like, you know, I've made a decision. I don't know, maybe, maybe the trick there, this is just coming to me right now. Maybe the trick there is, like, it's not just deciding that you're going to do EOS. You decide you're going to do EOS and you're going to do the first two pages of the handbook, sure. And so, like, I'm not going to make any more decisions this afternoon. I'm burnt out. But man, it's going to be fun to start filling out this thing about the culture of my company, right? And so that might, that might be a part of I know that for me, that manifests itself as, like, I feel like I'm procrastinating and but then I make a decision, and then I just get at it right, and then that's what I since I made the decision. Now I can do, like, the lifting, right, but I had to decide to drive myself to the gym first. But now I'm here, time to lift. Yeah. Like, no more other decisions like me. Frankly, I go to a little private gym in my neighborhood. I do these classes with three to 1820 people. My biggest I think my joy of it now is I feel good from working out, but there's a very personable they have a very awesome framework on how they do these classes. I don't have to think, right? I literally don't have to think, like, you have to count a little bit, sure, but I my brain cuts off. I don't worry about anything. And you know, it's those kind of it's those kind of things, the same with like, you made a decision, and you know that the next step is to outline a, b and c, then just do it right? Again, macro level, even it could be a macro level even it could be a macro level doing, because if you get down to the weeds too quickly, you just you're having, you're back into the decision land, right?

William Harris 39:06

Yeah, so I'm glad you brought up working out, because I feel like that's a really good example of one. Yeah. I say when I have been in these situations myself, I eliminate as many decisions that I can. And one of the things that a mentor of mine, Dave Mortensen, told me was, you know, even as far as what you're going to order on a menu, can be a decision, right? And when you reach true decision fatigue, you you do? You look at the menu like, I literally, I don't even know. I don't even know what I'm gonna order right now, it's like, the best way to do it. Ask the waiter, the waitress, what should I get? Great, that sounds good. Like, eliminate that as a decision that you have to make. So literally, go through and eliminate as many decisions as you possibly can from your day during this critical period. And then to your point, how can you, I don't know if this is the best word to say, but like, how can you automate a lot of the other decisions that you're going to make? You. And one of those being you're like, are you going to work out or not? Right? If you can just decide that you're like, I'm going to work out Monday through Friday. That's what I do. And the reason why is because my business can't succeed if I die, my family can't succeed if I die like they like all of these other things matter. So I know that I have to do this now. When I make up the morning, I don't have to make that decision anymore. I wake up, it's Monday, it's time to work out. I know that already, I've already made that decision. We have to make that decision. And so one of those goals is figuring out, what are those frameworks make those bigger decisions. The bigger decision is I work out Monday through Friday. Okay, great, then I don't have to make a decision every day, whether I do or not. You

Robert Gilbreath 40:42

know, I like that. She say that I'll carry that so like for me, with working out it is I have the they use some derivative, a mind body app for their scheduling. You have to schedule ahead of time. And I I go in and I schedule out as far as I can sure and and then those populate my calendar, my personal calendar, Home calendar. I then I have recurring wake up on there. And so I try to keep those that cadence as normal as possible, meaning, unless I'm traveling, I'm always doing Monday morning is always the same routine, Tuesday, whatever. And then carry that over into work, whether you're independent, like I am, or at a company, I think it goes back to a little bit of time boxing, but for me, knowing, knowing to some degree, and I know it can be perfection, but knowing to some degree what calls I'm going to have for the week ahead. You know what? What? Hard Things, easy things, bonus things I'm gonna have for the week, for that, for me, that makes all the difference. And I don't do this perfectly. I think we might have talked about this before too, but this idea of either ending Fridays or maybe doing it Sunday night, I don't recommend people do it Monday morning, but kind of noting that even if it's just like, you know, pen on pen on paper. Love it, you know, you know. And call it whatever makes you feel good. Is it your what you're going to accomplish next week? List? Is it your to do? For me, it's usually a pretty boring to do list. Some things are super impactful, and some of them are as easy as like, you know what? I that email sequence just needs to be tweaked. I just need to go do it right? And so for me, it's some version, and I don't do it every week, but yeah, back to I think what we're talking about. To me, it's I use count, a calendar, a time box, everything, right? And that's not just meetings. That's also I need to get away from my computer and whiteboard something, but I do put all the personal stuff in there too, right? So if it's going for a walk with my wife, or going to work out, or drive the kids to swim or whatever, all that's there. So I kind of, I know, you know, somebody might look at my calendar be like, that's crazy. It's all over the place, like, Yeah, but it's, it's going to control the environment right

William Harris 43:00

there too, yeah,

Robert Gilbreath 43:01

empty calendar, to me is that's, that's, I'm that's where I started getting nervous and anxious. And there's two, you know, I can't remember if it was Brent hurt of Bizarre Voice and core metrics fame here in Austin, at least, I think it was him. But he would have to, I'd have to ping him to see if it really was him. Get something about like your calendar. Maybe it's more as a leader. Also, it's like the you want to have a level of openness in your calendar, to be to be able to react to things, sure, but if, but if you have too much of that, there's probably a problem, right? And maybe that's actually who's the Hold on. I gotta look at the books. Now I remember the guy I might have been one of the guys that you I know you and I read, read a lot, but, you know, so you think about this thing some some people, you know, as you could talk about it both ways. You can't possibly have every moment of your day not be reactionary, right, right? But you know, if you're allowing for that too much, do you have the right team? Have you made the right macro decisions already, you know. So it's sort of just kind of weird back and forth, right? If you have no free time, you know, maybe that's because you're booked with very impactful things as a leader, and you have a team that can handle all that stuff that might need to be reacted to, right? And you've given them the framework, again, that macro leadership to be able to do the right thing. But, you know, I feel like I want to tweak that. Maybe I've tweeted a pass. It's like, you know, does is an open calendar, good or bad from a leadership perspective,

William Harris 44:28

you know, I like it. I lean towards agreeing with you. There has to be some padding in there. But at the same time, I put personal stuff in there. I have in there when the girls get off the bus, I have hug girls when they get off the bus. I have that because I know what time that is roughly and so it's like, as a time for me to say, like, don't schedule a meeting, then I want to go say hi. How are you? I'm glad you're home today, right?

Robert Gilbreath 44:49

Yeah, we have all these tools. That's me as I'm using it. I'm using these tools in a way to make sure, right? And so, yeah, it's funny. I tend to write wake up exclamation point, like, I don't know. Why it's not like, the Google Calendar is going to, like, explode at me or something, but it becomes, it becomes, so now the flip side, all this, this organization, we're talking about, where it can, where it can lead, where it's not good, if someone is just overtly, always planning, yes, so I don't want to make a decision, so I'm going to, you know, rewrite the go to market thing that we already had made decisions on. And that's like, sort of work, but it's not really needed, right? You know, in in olden days where we'd be, like, on a on prem server with file folders and stuff, you'd have these people that were like, they're going to reorganize the folder layout every other week, or whatever. It's like, that's client. That's because you either, right, there's something else going on there. And so, you know, I think we need people need to maybe this goes back to talking about procrastination, you know, going and finding some busy work. Maybe it feels good, but it's just a different version of procrastination. I'm not saying don't go do that. Sometimes. That's what it takes to like, you know, I'm sure I have some version of writer's block. Well, how do you get around that? Try to write smaller things and then then stuff starts opening up. So I think that might be a tool for some folks, but not to the point of, you know, all you're doing is busy work, instead of the hard work or the impactful work, right? This is

William Harris 46:17

exactly where I wanted to go next, because I think that we've talked enough about that, decision fatigue, when you cannot make another decision. But then the next step is, what I wouldn't even say is decision fatigue as much as decision maybe paralysis, right? Like, because it's not necessarily fatigue. You're just, like, I just can't make the decision, not because you are made to any decisions, but you're just for one reason or another. You're scared to make the decision. And so to your point, you can make another decision. You're still making a decision saying, I'm going to rewrite this, or I'm going to plan this, instead of actually making the decision that needs to be made. And so oftentimes, there's a fear, and we'll blame it on potentially, we have so much information that we don't know what the right decision is right because we've got everything coming in from our platform. And Google Analytics and everything we've got, all of the information we could possibly imagine having. But we say, I don't know. This conflicts with this. This conflicts with this. I don't want to be wrong, like you called out, right? So there's this decision paralysis. How do we work through solving those types of decisions?

Robert Gilbreath 47:20

Yeah, and then then, you know, there's, there's that in for an individual, but then there's the maybe, maybe you've come to a decision, maybe you've gone through the s bar thing, or, you know, if we want to talk about, like the double diamond and some of these other forms, right? But it's also, then, how do you handle getting someone else to make a decision in line with or maybe different than the decision you came up with, but still impactful and moving things forward? You know? And that's to me, that's a piece of it too, that it's not maybe it's not just fear. It's just, or maybe it is fear, but it's like, okay, I have made a decision in my head. I know it all is going on, but now I need to go explain to William what it is, and maybe, like, William's an asshole, and I don't, he doesn't talk about these things, which he's not. Folks like, I need to tell them that you're not so you know that that becomes a part of this too, where it's like you could almost have paralysis around like, Okay, I've made all these decisions, but now I've got to go debate and share and show with a bunch of people. And maybe that's not what that's now, what I'm going to procrastinate on, right? But

William Harris 48:41

there's a book by Dan Martell called buy back your time, and he goes through, I think there's five different types of personality, decision making, types that we have on why we decide not to make a decision. And to your point, like, you know, one of those can be fear. We're actually just afraid of being wrong or whatever. Another one of the reasons why we're afraid to maybe make that decision that we need to actually make is because we like that we are the ones that have to make the decision right. And so you could call that a fear or whatever, but let's just say that like I want to be the one making this decision, so I don't want to delegate that decision. There's a number of different things that he goes through. One of the things that I like to tell people, and myself included, when I get into these situations, is that action is diagnostic. I believe that more often than not, just making a decision ends up being better than replanning or reassessing or whatever. For the umpteenth time, there's a period of time that you need to do some research, but then there's a period where you just have to make a decision and know that you can change it. We see this in medicine. You go to the doctor, you say, I've got these symptoms. I've got this, this, this, this going on. They're gonna say, most likely. They don't say this to you, most likely you have this, take this medication if you get better. I was right. If you don't get better, come back and see me. That's what they're saying, though they're not saying most likely you have. This is saying, okay, you've got a cold. I feel like that's true for business, where, more often than not, if you just make a decision, you will find out very quickly if that was the right decision or the wrong decision. And most of those can be reversed. Some of them can't. What is that situation? Sure, I understand

Robert Gilbreath 50:17

that's that is a great that's a great thread, because we do. I wish I had a whiteboard to draw this. But you know, if you guys can imagine an X and Y coordinate, right? And, you know, sometimes these debates, or even in your head, you pretend like so we got the x y, let's pretend that you've got just this 45 degree angle going up, and that's decision a at the outermost point there, and then you've got one that's like, you know, one that's 45 degrees down. That's sometimes people act like that's the decision they're making, sure, right? But the truth is, there the decision is the difference between a 42 and a half degree line and a 47 degree line, right? And, you know, and because they're to your point, they can be changed. Neither one of them is so far out of this thing, like, what the brain or the group might do of this, you know, 45 positive, 45 negative, right? And I think that's a piece of it too. It's like it to me. I've always tried to work with folks to say, like, either show them that and make them understand that. Look, we're not really debating negative positive. We're debating degrees here. And you know, then also, back to us earlier, it's like, okay, well, let's we're all agreeing on this macro thing, like, how do I just need to go one level above this to agree? Okay, we've already agreed. There. Great decision made. Yeah. So now, what's the action? What's the action to be to be taken? And I don't know if you want, do you want to get into the diamond thing at all?

William Harris 51:56

This is No, well, you and I have talked about it offline, but not at all cost, because I think this fits really nicely here. I want to I'm going

Robert Gilbreath 52:03

to, well, let me try something really quick. I'm going to draw something and show it on the screen. So I think it'll help. And then I don't know if it's backwards. I might have to try to do this backwards again. This is one of those things that like, I think if you asked me where I learned this, or, you know, who invented it, I don't know who did. I know who that I learned it from Nathan Jones, who's a friend of mine, a confidant, a former boss. We did many different businesses together, and he would use this, not only to he would use it to some degree, to explain to people how he needed their help in making a decision. So it's very interesting in the way he used it. But so double diamond. Can you see that? Yep, so it's two diamonds. And my drawing is not perfect. It's not intended to be racial, uh, spatial, correct, or anything, but two diamonds, right? And now that I know which direction is going, I'm going to draw, try to draw it backwards, but we're starting, we're starting over here, right? There's an issue, there's a goal, there's a problem, something's broken, whatever. And the way that the brain works, whether you do this in a group or by yourself, right? Let's say it's by yourself. I know what I think the problem is, and then I go, Well, okay, well, let's make sure we understand. So you start conversion, can you start, like, expanding away from what the original thought was, and you, and you, you take in more information, you research more, maybe you discover other things that could be wrong. And then you, then you start converging again, and you get to a decision or answer. So maybe this was, you know, blah blah blah, this is actually blah blah blue, right? So then you, you've, you substantiated that by by expanding and contracting your thoughts in your your purview and whatnot, right? And so then, now you're then at a point where, okay, we know now we know in the middle what the real problem is, or the real thing is, or the real goal is, right? And we agreed on it. Well, in this, again, this could all be in your head, right? Then you you're trying to get to a solution or the answer or the decision. And so you, what you do is you expand all the different ways we could fix it, all the different viewpoints, opinions or whatever. Right? Again, this could just all be in your head. And then finally you get to, you get to the thing, right? Right, the decision or whatever. And so, you know, way Nathan would sometimes show this, I think we do it, is like, yeah, when I walked into the CEO's office this morning, I had already done all this in my head, or maybe with my team, and I came in with the answer. But if you, if you have a leader, this is a little bit up, it could go different directions. Maybe they need you to take you through this whole process, they need to, you know, quickly tell me what you thought the original problem was, all the things that were involved, what you came to next, you know, briefly, give me an outline of what you thought about. And then, okay, yes, I'm with you, right? And so that's, that's the A. Yeah. And so I'm saying I kind of like, bastardize a lot of these. That's how I've used it with people, right? And, you know, sometimes you might go in and say, look, hey, William, we decided to do this asterisk looking thing. If you have any questions, you know, maybe I don't know your style, so I might just say, Look, this is the decision we made. Now, what I started to do is, if I'm presenting, like, maybe I've come up with a plan for a client, and the plan is here, right? Well, I might have gotten a bunch of information from them here, and maybe I got some in relation to whatever I came up with here. I might provide an outline of them. Of like, here are all the things we possibly could have done based on this. And you know, maybe some of this, right? You know, for like, what Elumynt works on, some of this might be like, Hey, we know we want to do Facebook ads. And you might actually go backwards through this to discover what they did before that maybe didn't work, or what was all wrong with their initial thing, or way of doing it. So it's a it, it's a framework that can help you not have to, I guess it's, it's, it's actually funny we're bringing up. It's probably more of a framework to help you make better decisions and then sell your decisions to others. Yeah, right, you know, or even just to communicate. I know that that I don't know off to send this to Nathan so he can listen or watch it someday. But you know him, and I would talk about this in the context of your home relationship, right? And you can imagine, I'll use myself, my my competitive swimmer children, there's a lot going on in that world. My wife has run swim teams here in Austin. That's her. That's a lot of her day to day, back when I wasn't at home, this was like, thank you that I'm independent at home, it's a little bit different. But if I was at the office all day doing office things, maybe a couple texts throughout the day with her, but not anything in depth, she's been thinking about the swim meet this weekend all day, and she's possibly gone through that 10 times on a topic in her head, right? And then I walk in from work, and she says, You know that? Well, you know you can imagine how you could react incorrectly to that right? Meaning, like, well, hold on. Did you think about, you know, when you start doing that. And so like, this can this can be in your personal life too. Like, if your your significant other understands that you need to be taken through some of this and not just told that you know, or you can be more self aware, also on the flip side, and just know that, like, I trust that significant other has gone through this process. I trust their judgment, and it's not a decision I actually need to be a part of. So back to the point of this whole podcast. It's like, you know, you know, you can, you can, you can imagine if I've already burned all those those cycles throughout my day, and I have, maybe someone in my, my non professional life, that is making these other decisions, I don't need to be a part of them. Like we were on the same team. We're on the same page, and I trust that that person's done those things. Otherwise, I know that I have caused fights because I come home and and and don't respect this and start going away back here, right? And sometimes it's for things that aren't they're very micro, they're not like macro change our lives, kind of things, right? So, yeah, I Sorry, not sorry for getting sappy and personal. But for me, like so much of this is, like, how we handle ourselves that our coworkers is, you know, is indicative of how we treat our family and vice versa. And it, you know, it's all, we're all humans, right? It's humans and humans thing, human things, always, regardless, right?

William Harris 58:40

So I like that you brought it up because I actually have put together, more or less like a mission vision values with my wife, for our family as well. For that same reason, where it's like, when we're trying to make decisions as a family, sometimes that can be hard to say, like, is this the right decision? And then you have to go through all these if you actually have a rubric, though, that says, well, here's what our goal as a family is. Here are the things that we value as a family. Does this fit? Does this align? Where does it align? Now we actually have a decision framework for ourselves as well, and it eliminates that a little bit. And then to your point, then I can say, if I come up with an idea, or my wife comes up with an idea, and she says, Hey, here's the decision I made on what we're gonna do. I can say, Okay, did it align with what we've talked about? Great, let's go ahead and do it like I don't need to rethink through all of this stuff. So I'm with you. I've never seen that double diamond, but I like that, because I think the thing that I've realized in let's just say again, going back to Eos, there are other frameworks, but this one I use, I'll reference it. You get to this section called IDs, where you're going to, you know, figure out what are these problems that you want to solve, right? Which is what the s part of the solve is. And a lot of times, what seems to happen is we can jump down into solving the wrong problem. Right? We're going to solve this thing that was brought up. And we sometimes don't take enough time to say, wait a minute, kind of like that. We just go through one diamond. We're like, let's just solve this diamond. I like the idea of, like, Wait a minute. Can we go through this first process to figure out is that the right problem to solve? Then we get to that second little point that you had. Now, one of the ways that we can solve that problem, because that's the actual problem that he'd solved.

Robert Gilbreath 1:00:22

Yeah, no, you're right. And the magic there is not overdoing the RE analysis, the questioning of it's, is it the right answer, but doing just enough to make sure to feel right about it, right? That manifests itself maybe in, you know, having a leadership team make this decision together, yeah, right, and stacking hands or whatever cliche you want to say, but like having having a moment to do that, and typically do it as a team, I do like you bring up the family mission value. I've heard other EOS supporters and coaches or implementers talk about implementing it at a family level as well. It's an interesting, interesting idea. Um,

William Harris 1:01:07

what about if you're trying to make decisions as a group? Now, I think we've talked a lot about on the individual side, then as a group, we're kind of getting to this, you know, diamond, Double Diamond, I think can work really well as an individual or as a group. Let's say that you get into the situation, somebody says, here's the problem, and now there's the back and forth on figuring out what the right problem is. Are there tips or tricks that you've run into that help you identify let's just say, besides figuring out all the possibilities to really nail this is the problem. Because you said, like, we get to this, and then we agree. And I thought I liked that. You said, we agree that this is the problem. How do you get to that point? I'll

Robert Gilbreath 1:01:49

say, what I do for my clients is I'll have conversations with them, where they I hear, I listen to them, and I'm taking notes on what they they believe the problem is, right, and in their language. I then after that, I kind of look at that what they've said, and I'll do my own through this at a more of a macro level, and then try to send me more, more times than not, I'll go back to them and say, Tell me more about that problem. Tell me more why you think it's a problem, and that's where I usually figure out what's really the issue. So either sometimes they've gone to macro and it's not really helpful, like, it's not helpful to say we don't have a sales process, like, that's Sure, well, maybe there's a reason, right? But it's also not super impactful to go way down the weeds on it. So that's that's a piece of it. It's really for me, it's a little bit of back and forth of describe it to me, let me think about it and then maybe describe it again. But that's when I start at that point. And maybe this is similar with Eos, that allows it to then be put into a box or put into a framework, you know, whether that's a outline of marketing channels or, you know, any, any, I guess it could be anything in our world, right? So it's, that's sort of what, what I've been doing recently with folks I don't know, I do, I do. I do, there's a piece of, like, letting people realize and voice the problem themselves, yes, and maybe just my style of consulting, I don't have a playbook of do it this way, or you must be doing it wrong, sure, right? And I know that that comes from my background. I've got a weird, you know, my weird background of the kind of marketing I've done through the years the size of companies I work with and stuff, and so I think that's a big part with me. And maybe it goes back to diamond, is like, I want them to get to some of these conclusions themselves. Yes, they have to, yeah, you know. And just like with the OS, a big part of it is just expressing it and putting it down on paper or, you know, on a template or whatever, right? So you guys probably that's, that's a big piece of it.

William Harris 1:04:02

I think you're right. Step one, you have to at least say what you think the problem is, and start there, right? Like, if you donate, you say it, then it just exists in your mind, and it, you got to get it down there. One of the frameworks that I like that I heard from my dad actually is the five whys. And I like this framework for figuring it out. Yeah, you're familiar with it. Okay? You're nodding your head, for those who don't know it, right? Know it, right? But it's like, okay, this is the problem. And the example that I've given, that I've heard, because this is the one my dad gave me that first lit up was, it's like, ran out of gas on the way to work. Okay, why did you run out of gas on the way to work? Well, because the gas Gage is broken. Well, why is the gas gage broken? Well, because I didn't have the money to fix it. Well, why didn't you have the money to fix it? Right? Like you keep asking to actually get to the real problem. So the real problem was, you know, X, Y, Z, and so you can actually now begin to solve that. Yeah, no, that's great. I like that framework, because, to your point, I think that a lot of times it's easier for us to point out the map. Macro problem than it is the micro problem. It's one or the other, right? Sometimes it's like the nuanced problem. You're like, okay, that's not the actual thing we're solving. But on the macro we need better, you know, better Client Onboarding, Sure, great. That can be on our problems list every single week for the entire rest of our company. That can, we can never take that off. You should never begin with that. Yeah, right. So why? Why do we need this? Well, because of this, okay, great. Why did that happen? Right? And now we're actually getting somewhere to something we can solve. We're not going to solve all of it, but now we can get to the thing that really bothered that person and said, This is the problem that needs

Robert Gilbreath 1:05:38

fixed. Yeah, no, it's interesting, right? Because the why is to get from macro to micro, right, or current, you know, to your S bar, like, what is the situation? But then, did we really do we dig in properly? I like that, you know, I chuckle about it, because we young kids are known to be asking why about everything? Like, that's that's innate in kids. And then as we get older, that goes away, but then we talk about it now, in a leadership standpoint, it needs to come back, right? It's just really funny how our lives work and human nature works, right?

William Harris 1:06:12

There's an anecdote about Albert Einstein. I don't know if it's true. I don't remember, but the anecdote is something along the lines of one of the reasons he was able to come up with some of the ideas he did about general relativity is because he was just simply still willing to ask why. He was curious enough that he would look up at the sky and say, Why is that that way? Why does that start do that? Why does this happen and where a lot of us, we just stop asking why?

Robert Gilbreath 1:06:37

Yeah, there's not, not inquisitive to it, yeah, that that's part of, to me, some derivative of that is, like, is, to me, the spice of a career, or the spice of working is, like, it's okay to never be done, but it's like, Are you constantly getting better, right? Did you? Did you, you know, they, I would say, like, as we get to a more tenured level, or 10 year amount of time is like, are you able to to see the patterns? You know, put together new patterns because of these things, but still have that? Why? Right? I mean, for me, I don't. I would get bored, if I like, magically, I know all the answers, and this is what's going to be like. No part of what I'm loving about what I'm doing is, like, I'm touching different industries, and I get to ask some of these new wise again, and then say, well, can I make, can I make what worked? Let's say at ShipStation, work at this other company. You know, it's SAS, yes, but it's not, it's accounting, it's not shipping, right? And so, like, that's a that's a piece of too. And maybe that goes back to, like, back to the whole decision situation. Like, I think a person does have an appetite. You do have to have an appetite that you have to make decisions, right? Like, it's just kind of, there's no, if you not, don't have to make any it's you're potentially in a situation that you don't want to be in, or, I don't know, like, that does sound derogatory, though, like, it's probably not a great for me, it wouldn't be a great, great situation. So we get to where we are today and talking about juggling stuff around, I

William Harris 1:08:06

feel like we've talked well about some of the different frameworks. I want to talk about mental strength, because sometimes you can't make the decision, maybe because of you're actually sleep deprived or whatever this might be, right? This is a real thing. And I'd say, like I ran into it again as a founder. It's very easy as a founder to do, do, do, do, do, do, do, do, and then you forget to take care of yourself. And I've talked to a lot of founders on here. Chris Carey is one that I remember talking to where, you know, we get going in the action mode, and before we know it, we're, you know, sleeping four hours a night, eating McDonald's and not working out. And it's no wonder why we can't make a good decision, because we've ruined it. Um, what are some things that we can do to make sure that we are mentally capable of making good decisions.

Robert Gilbreath 1:09:02

Yeah. I mean, I know I didn't always agree with this, but like, the rise and grind mentality and the, like, I don't need sleep and health and stuff. It just doesn't work. I mean, I don't, you know, it just it doesn't work. Humans need to sleep, you know, never. We don't even have to go down the road of all the other vices that we partake in or don't partake in, and how those can affect, you know, can affect how we're performing, you know, for me personally, I just don't, I don't, I don't want to not feel good in the morning like, you know, and so does that mean I'm perfect all the time? I mean, sometimes I do, you know, you I think this, you know, I think a lot of startup folks are just entrepreneurs in general, have this mentality. Sometimes it's like your work is sometimes the stuff you're working on is actually kind of like your hobby, too. And that's a whole other path thing. Maybe that's, that's podcast three, where we talk about better. Education avocation, right? But, you know, there's some pieces. I know a lot of people listening. I know you've done it where you like go, start going down this rabbit hole, but you're making decisions. You're seeing progress. Things are moving forward. That's okay every once in a while, but that can't live like that. It's not good for you. As a human. We talk about action when we're talking about this. I think it's interesting to because sometimes what those folks are actually doing. And I don't remember who taught me. This a startup guy in Austin. I don't remember his name, though, but he had this saying around, I don't think he invented this thing, but it was like, Don't confuse action for progress. And so, you know, I know there's people listening, and we you and I have probably done it where you're like, you're like, you're grinding yourself down to a nub, but you're actually not made. You haven't made the right decisions, not working on the right things, right? And so, you know, I think someone who's in this, in this thing where they're sleeping four hours a week, I'd almost ask them, like, Do you really think you're the actions you're taking? Are the correct answer actions, right? Are you making forward progress? Because I can, I could stand here in front of you and jog in place. So it looks very action oriented, but I'm just jogging in place, right, you know. So that's a piece of it as well. So it's like, yeah, I think, I think, at my age now, and what I'm up to, I still do it in burst. There's still burst of like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna grind through this thing. You know, sometimes too, it's funny, even when we're talking about sometimes that'll happen not entirely by like, conscious choice, but it's like, Hey, I've been procrastinating doing this thing. And then once I really get, like, they'll be, Oh, get over the block, or the writing block or whatever. Then I don't want to stop, because, like, then you get in this flow, right? And that has its own benefits. That's a different kind of endorphin. That's okay, like, Okay, if I'd stay up till three in the morning to get that, that flow, that's awesome, right? You know that hit, if you will.

William Harris 1:11:51

The way I explain this to my daughters, there's, there's two parts to this. One is, I said, Imagine that we go outside our house, front door. I want you to just give me some directions. Just tell me left, right, right, left, right. You just go. And we said, we make this all up, and we go down this thing, and I write it all down. I'm like, okay, great, where are we? I don't know. Nobody knows, right? Like, thankfully, even if they don't know with it, like, you know, maybe my wife could actually think through it's like, oh, we're at the grocery store. It's like, but they don't like, but they don't know where we are. It's like, well, how can you be more sure of where you're going to end up? Well, how about picking a destination? That's a good place to start. Well, I know that I wanted to end up here. Okay, how about using a map then to identify what amount of rights and lefts you need to do to get there? Does that guarantee you're gonna end up at your destination? No, it still doesn't right. You can get a flat tire run. There's a lot of things that can still get in the way of that, but you have a lot higher likelihood of ending up in a good place by actually picking a destination and using a map. Yeah. Now let's take this, you know, even a little bit further, because I think that you call this out about action, there are certain things that we know in life likely lead us to the decisions and these ultimate destinations that we want to be is working out, likely going to lead you to a good or a bad place in life. Most of us would agree it's going to lead to a probably a better place in life. How about is going to bed at a decent time? Going to lead you towards likely good things in life or bad things? Is drinking likely going to lead you towards good things or bad things? We can look at this from a statistical perspective and say, well, here's statistics are going to say they favor these certain things, right? And so now you don't have to make a decision with whether or not you want to work out you say, I know that I want to be here. I know that this likely leads me towards more things like this. So I already have made the decision. I don't have to remake that decision. And then when you get stuck, and this is where I get with my my kids, right where it's like, because we all get stuck, where it's like, I can't even organize my room, or I don't even know where to start, or whatever this might be, it's like, do the next thing that is the most helpful thing I can say. It's like, Well, do you know where those socks go? I do know where the socks go. Put the socks away. Start there. Don't try to plan it all out. Or were

Robert Gilbreath 1:14:10

you at my house this last weekend? Because I helped. I helped my 18 year old, my oldest daughter, she needed, we needed to do a deep organizing of her room. And multiple times the couple of hours, I hung out with her and helped her with with all that, where she was, like, holding something and saying, Dad, I don't know where this should go. And, yeah, I love that you say that. Because what I ended up saying to her is, like, look, anything you come to that you don't know where it goes? Let's just put on your bed. Perfect. The decision is, don't know it, put it on bit right? Because the next 20 things you're going to do, those are all socks. They go in the top left drawer, right? And so, you know, that's, that's, it's point to like that was. A decision that if I had left the room, I think she would have sat there somewhat, you know, paralyzed, that she wanted to make that next decision. And they, you know, they're, you're, then you're doing weird content shifting. Because, like, one thing she holds up is a book, the next thing is, like a cup with a bunch of pencils in it. Well, they're not probably going in the same place. They're actually not related, you know. And then you know what happened at the end? I think I'm, I'm assuming what happened, because I didn't, I didn't help her then organize the stuff on the bed. But as I'm looking at the bed, she was already sort of self organizing it by putting it on the bed. So magically, there was a huge pile of different kind of, like, iPhone and computer cables. Great. You started see so you sort of like, by not worrying about the organization, you had some level of organization, which was bad, right, you know. So that that's interesting, too. I think you're talking talking about, like, where are we going to go as the as a decision, you know? I think I'm sure you've heard this. The flip side of that is like you're debating with your family where you're going to go out to dinner tonight. We don't know yet, but we know we need to get in the car. Yeah, we know we okay. Do you kids? I've done this before to with my son. You we're going to get in the car. Do you want me to go left or right out of our neighborhood? Because, you know, then does he have to decide where? Maybe it's a treat night we're going to go out for tacos or whatever he decides, right? Well, he knows if we go left, that's probably more likely, like a brunch place and taco place and whatever, you know. So he's kind of made a decision, but not the final decision, but at least he got us out of the house, right? It's, that's why I go back to like this. I keep saying macro, but maybe there's different way. But it's like, pick something like, same with your story. It's like, let's pick the destination, then we can pick the route. Or, you know, we know we need to leave the neighborhood, right? And I'm sure we could, you and I could, could pontificate over to how that you know that that holds true to to decisions we make with our clients, or Adam macro or micro

William Harris 1:17:06

level. If what's one decision that every founder leader should make, just right now, just it's going to free them up for the next stage. It's like, just make this decision. Start

Robert Gilbreath 1:17:20

doing, oh, man, that's a really good question. I don't know. I think I'm going to answer it by changing the question just slightly, please. You know, I don't know that I have the perfect like, oh, decide to call Elumynt and start doing Facebook ads. That's the best decision. Or go to robertgilbreath.com And send me your email, I would say like, and this is not just the startup people or executives, whatever people, anyone listening, you probably have some decisions you've been sitting on, right and when I say decision in this context, it could be a to do. It could be you've been meaning to call someone you've been meaning to pull the band aid off of something. You know, maybe, maybe you've been holding some bad news from a boss for a few days, because the next all hands or the next staring session is until Tuesday. Do picks one of those things you just get it done. I mean, we're you and I recording this on a Friday. I guarantee you that list I held up earlier, I probably should do that for something myself before the day ends. So that's the that's the thing. Like, find, find something you hadn't decided that, that, you know, that's been bugging you or you're worried about and, you know, figure out how to put it to bed. And that might just be like, Hey, I don't need to worry about this thing anymore, and I'm okay. So like for me, sometimes the Act of, like, tearing it off my to do list, or deleting the email permanently, like some closing activity, sometimes, again, it's a decision. But like for me, it's very freeing. You know, just move, move on, which it's easy for me to say, not always easy to do, obviously,

William Harris 1:19:03

right, but you're taking an action, right or wrong? It's an action. You take that action, and you'll find out very quickly if you need to pivot or change, you're turning left out of the neighborhood, right? You're getting in the car, just take that step. It's been a lot of fun talking to you today. It always has been. If people want to work with you or follow you. What's the best way for them to

Robert Gilbreath 1:19:25

do that? My website's Robert Gilbreath. So it's my it's my name. I'm mostly on LinkedIn. Again, if you search for Robert Gilbreath, you'll find me. You know, I do. It's interesting. I Two years ago, when we first we had another cast, I had really just started doing the kind of work that I'm doing, and it's interesting. It'll be interesting to maybe chat again in a year or two to see where I'm definitely one that doesn't believe I don't believe I'm that I've ever really done and so, you know, I I have been. Been really lucky to have not an aggressive amount of sort of evergreen clients. But you know, a number I can count on one hand that have been, have been. You

William Harris 1:20:13

still there? William, I am.

Robert Gilbreath 1:20:18

Hey, wait. Is this? Is this the equipment? Are you cutting your toenails?

William Harris 1:20:21

No, I'm gonna change batteries quick. No.

Robert Gilbreath 1:20:26

So, yeah, no. So now I just, I first hate distracts me, then your battery pack distracts me. No, but you know I was gonna share my my sort of most prolific and most involved client is a startup out of Atlanta called Rivur Rivur, and, you know, it's, it's one of a couple in my stable of clients that I've started to feel more missionary about than mercenary. And so like, that's, that's been an interesting sort of transfer of thought of, you know, you maybe some of these guys have hired me to come in and I joke with someone, like, I'm the A team from the 80s, and I'm sure I'm here to get this job done, and you're going to pay me, and I'm out of here to fool. And then I and then I've got these other ones where I start. I think it's my personality. It's like, I can't let this go, like I am now on this mission with you. So for me, it's gonna be very interesting what the next six to six to 12 months looks like with some of these clients and some of what now like. It's funny, I start saying, We with them. I think, I think you, and I know you feel the same way with a lot of your clients, and you've got had all these proud moments with with many of them, right? And so that might be, that might be something else to talk about. Is like, I don't know if that manifests itself. Is like the satisfaction we get out of our work or those things, but not so, not to project out too much into the future, but it makes me think, like, do you ask? Did you ask, did you ask the question last time? Like, advice I would have given myself years ago or something

William Harris 1:22:04

like that? Probably that sounds like something I would ask, yeah, yeah. I

Robert Gilbreath 1:22:07

think everything I'm saying about like, the next thing is, like, I have to remind myself patience. And I wish I could tell myself 1020, years ago, patience, right? And maybe it's even patience with yourself on these decisions you make, like, to your point, they you know, you want to make the right one, but you probably can change whatever you want you make, and you can always, you know, what's the quote about it? It's never too late to to be what you wanted to be, or to become what you wanted to be, or whatever. And the point of that is, like, you know, we had, you have the power to shift gears and change decisions move forward. We and we tend to do that, not always for the positive, but we can do it for the positive.

William Harris 1:22:46

Yeah, yeah, I love that, and we didn't talk about that, but maybe that's a good point to end on, which is just have patience with yourself and grace, right? And so I think if you're struggling to make a decision because you're worried about being wrong, maybe it's not because of anybody else's opinion, but your own opinion about yourself that you are worried about making that and so give yourself some grace. The reality is you will make some wrong decisions. You just got to make enough decisions. In general, make a decision, yeah, always change it. Yeah. Very true. Very true. Robert again, amazing talking to you. I love learning from you, and it's been a lot of fun. So thank you for sharing your time and your knowledge with us today, William, appreciate it. Thank you everyone for listening. I hope you have a great rest of your day.

Outro 1:23:29

Thanks for listening to the Up Arrow Podcast with William Harris. We'll see you again next time, and be sure to click Subscribe to get future episodes.

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