00:00:00 Thanks for joining us on episode 701 of the inspired stewardship podcast, a special rebroadcast of episode one Oh six, an interview with shed and mills. I'm Shannon miles from ballet. I challenge you to discover your calling and find your third option so you can be empowered to live every day. You need to know yourself to be inspired. There are third places all over the place that you can just be around people and connect in your community.
00:00:34 There's no, no reason to feel isolated when you're working from home these days. Welcome, and thank you for joining us on the inspired stewardship podcast. If you truly desire to become the person who God wants you to be, then you must learn to use your time, your talent and your treasures for your true calling in the inspired stewardship podcast. We'll learn to invest in yourself,
00:00:59 invest in others and develop your influence so that you can impact the world. In today's interview with Shannon miles from ballet, I asked Shannon about servant leadership and investing in others. How you can invest in others, even in ways that aren't following the typical career path and how to find community. Even if you work in a nontraditional environment and lots more. One reason I like to bring you great interviews.
00:01:53 Like the one you're going to hear today is because of the power in learning from others. Another great way to learn from others is through reading books. But if you're like most people today, you find it hard to find the time to sit down and read. And that's why today's podcast is brought to you by audible. Go to inspired stewardship.com/audible to sign up and you can get a 30 day free trial.
00:02:19 There's over 180,000 titles to choose from. And instead of reading, you can listen to your way to learn from some of the greatest minds out there. That's inspired stewardship.com/audible to get your free trial and listen to great books. The same way you're listening to this podcast. Shannon miles is the CEO of belay, inc. A inc 500 fastest growing company and winner of culture,
00:02:48 IQ and entrepreneurs. Number one, company, culture awards. Since 2010, the company has grown to nearly 700 team members and nearly 1000 clients on a daily basis. Whether through team development or balanced mentoring, Shannon is passionate about serving others and inspiring them to live life more fully while firmly remaining her own worst critic. While on Necker Island with Richard Branson,
00:03:18 she learned that if your dreams don't scare you, they simply aren't big enough. Shannon lives in Atlanta with her family. Shannon, thanks so much for coming on the show. Thank you so much for having me Shannon. I know that one of the core values that you have at belay is the passion to serve others. How does having a servant mindset lead to investing in others in a way that is both empowering and enabling Servant leadership is an underpinning for us at belay.
00:03:54 We feel like our vision is to help you achieve your vision. And what that means for us is our clients have a vision for what their business or their nonprofit or their organization needs to look like. They have a vision for what their individual lives need to look like. Maybe it's simply just having time to go see the soccer games that you haven't been able to see.
00:04:17 And so we are in a position where we can serve them and help them achieve their vision. It's a very practical way that we feel like we're changing the world. Also, we're serving our contractors, those who have entrusted us to bring them opportunity and clients to serve. Like we need to be there to support and equip them so that they can achieve their vision and live out the type of life that they're called to live in.
00:04:44 And the same is true for our team. I really am a firm believer that the customers will only be as happy as your team is. So we spend a lot of time and money investing in our team members and our culture because first of all, there's amazing people. And second of all, we feel like we are called to serve them. And sometimes that service is you're doing an amazing job.
00:05:10 And sometimes that service looks like let's review your job description. There's some gaps I'm noticing, and I want to help you bridge those gaps and your performance like that's serving too. Um, so regardless of who we're interacting with, and it goes for vendors to like, we want to, we just want to serve in a way that even if their relationship ends,
00:05:33 they're better off for having worked with belay, we feel like that's part of our storage ship. And I think that's interesting. And it's important to point out what, what you just said about serving others and having that servant mindset doesn't always mean saying yes to everything or not holding people accountable. It is about serving them. And sometimes that means saying something that's difficult to say,
00:06:00 because that is truly serving them. Yeah. I mean, here's the deal with accountability. We are very, very results driven organization. And I think that's been one of the key components to our rapid growth. If you don't hold your team members accountable, first of all, you're doing them a disservice because if they're consistently missing the Mark and you're frustrated and you're not talking about it with them,
00:06:25 that's your fault. That's, you're the one with the problem, not them, but if you've identified what the gaps are and put together a plan to help them bridge the gaps, then the onus is on them and they have the opportunity to do a better job. They have the opportunity to determine maybe this isn't the right fit for me, or you have to let them go.
00:06:47 One of those three things happens. But what we've seen in any of those scenarios is, is isolated. As you think, a situation like that might be your team knows your team is aware if you're not holding people accountable. And that affects the morale and the contribution and the culture of, of everybody around that individual. I would just encourage your listeners to have those courageous conversations,
00:07:13 not just for the sake of your bottom line and your results, but because you're working with people and it will have an impact on your culture. If that's not addressed over time, Thinking about the folks that are looking for that third option, if someone is struggling because they want to invest in others, they do want to serve others, but they want to do it in a way that maybe isn't in perfect alignment with that.
00:07:43 You know, I'm going to put this in air quotes, typical career path, how can they best identify what other options may work for them? Is there a process that they can or should use A lot of research? You know, there are a lot of legitimate work at home opportunities that could be the conduit for your third option. And there are a lot of scans.
00:08:09 I think leveraging your social networks would be a great place to start. I mean, if you find somebody who's doing something similar to what you desire, talk to them, see how they got the opportunities, see what they like and don't like about it. But I would do a lot of research on the front end because once you finally decided, okay,
00:08:26 I'm going to make this, this change. You know, you've put a lot of energy into it and you want to make sure that it's, that you're as informed as possible about the good and the bad of what this new working situation's going to be. I think there are probably some professional organizations that you can join that are affiliated with what you're interested in going into.
00:08:47 Those are some really practical things that you can do. And I just, I think, just do your homework, do the research and don't rush into it. You know, you mentioned, you know, in the pre-interview that we're talking about your side hustle, you know, a lot of people have that these days. And that is a way to validate that you're onto something before you make a leap,
00:09:08 because you don't want to just pursue your third option thinking something's going, going to pan out. When in reality you've had blind spots all over the place. So I would say, do the homework In the third option, you talk a bit about the isolation that people can feel when they do work from home or when they do virtual work. So how can people find ways to invest in others outside of work that can help them feel connected and in community,
00:09:38 if they're working in that virtual environment, I will, I will answer that question, but I will first say that if you work from home, it doesn't mean you have to work alone. I am constantly connecting with my team members, networking partners, clients, contractors all day. And so you can do, you can do it in such a way that you still have real relationships that you're building with people that you're working with.
00:10:07 Video chat is a super easy, free, obvious way to make those connections. There's just some other layer of nonverbal communication that you can pick up on. When you're video chatting with somebody, we use zoom. There's plenty of platforms out there. So I would say the two are not mutually exclusive. As far as building relationships out of the community. I tell a story of,
00:10:33 um, somebody named Holly that came to work for belay. She had just moved from Ohio because of her husband's job transfer. She found ballet. She started working here. She did a fantastic job. We get together. Most of us are here in the Atlanta Metro area. So we'll get together for happy hours or business meetings, but not every day,
00:10:54 right? It's, you know, maybe once a month, you may have some reason to get together with somebody face to face, but that was really difficult for Holly because she had just moved to this new community. They weren't an apartment until they determined where they wanted to live, you know, after buying a home, all of that. And, and she quit because she really was missing the opportunity to connect with people on a daily basis.
00:11:20 So she went to go work for a hospital in the area. She was going there, you know, to the office every day, supporting the CEO, like a really great position for her. The problem was she was working all the time and in her pursuit to develop relationships through work, she ended up not being able to have the kind of relationships that she wanted because she was working all the time.
00:11:46 And so once they finally got settled into their house in a neighborhood and their kids were plugged into school, the relationships that she wanted pursue, she didn't have time for. So she ended up coming back to work for us and, and found that she could have the time and flexibility to still have those relationships in her community, through her church and, and the people that she wanted to connect with.
00:12:12 And not just the default relationships at work, I will say she's a great, like, she has strong relationships with the people that she works with too. But, um, it's not a choice that she has to make any more. She can have them on both fronts. And I do love using technology to leverage some of that as well. You know,
00:12:30 I work from home, even though it's a solar preneur kind of business that my wife and I run together, you an entrepreneurial business. I still I've have conversations every day with people. So remaining connected through technology has been really helpful. And I think he needed to know yourself too. Like if you are just craving being around, people go to Starbucks.
00:12:50 I mean, there, there are third places all over the place that you can just be around people and connect in your community. There's no, no reason to feel isolated when you're working from home these days. So one of the things we talked about last week was this idea of finding mentors, going out and finding people to invest in you through mentorship.
00:13:14 But let's kind of flip that if you're in a position, how can you go about being a mentor to others? And especially, I think a lot of people don't think they're ready to be a mentor. So how can they be a mentor? Even if they think they're not ready, You're never ready. You're never ready to be a mentor because you're always learning.
00:13:36 You're always growing. You're never going to be perfect. And so there's never necessarily all the boxes that you can check to say, now I will mentor. I would be afraid of that person to be honest with you. But for me, I created a formal mentoring program in 2016 and took four women business owners through the program. It, we met every month for three hours.
00:14:00 We did two retreats. They read a book a month, they provided a net out. There was homework in between. It was an intense program. So that's one extreme. I think another extreme is just finding somebody who you see a lot of potential in and just saying, Hey, can we grab a coffee? Like, I'd love to learn more about you and what your dreams are and see if there's anything I can do to help.
00:14:22 You know, it can be as informal as that. I think one thing that's intimidating about mentoring that doesn't have to be the case. I don't think you have to mentor forever. Like it's, it can be a pretty, um, intense, exhausting is going to sound more negative than, I mean for it to, but when you're pouring into other people constantly,
00:14:40 sometimes you just need a break from that. And I think the people that I mentor while I still have a relationship with them, they don't, they don't call me every week. So it's not like a forever thing. And I think when you look at it that way, it seems a little bit more doable. It can be for a season of time and you can still make a huge impact,
00:14:59 even though it's not somebody that you're going to be formally mentoring, mentoring forever. You can connect with Shannon by following her on Instagram. She's at Shannon K miles. And of course there'll be links in the show notes or connect with her via the third option on Instagram as well at my third option, be sure to check out the info from Shannon's book over@mythirdoptiondotcomorcheckoutbelaysolutions.com
00:15:31 to find out more about working with their company belay. They're actually looking to hire great people now as virtual assistants. So if you're interested in maybe pursuing that as your third option, go there and apply to join the team. Shannon, is there anything you'd like to add? I'm very grateful for the opportunity to be on this interview and I hope that it helps them.
00:15:55 Somebody who's feeling a little stuck, a little uneasy maybe. And what they're doing to, to just make a change in life is really short. And it's such a cliche to say it, but it's true. I would say to the listener and get your ducks in a row and go for it. Thanks so much for being on the show. Thank you.
00:16:21 Thanks so much for listening to the inspired stewardship podcast as a subscriber and listener, we challenge you to not just sit back and passively listen, but act on what you've heard and find a way to live your calling. If you enjoy this episode, do me a favor, go over to facebook.com/inspired stewardship and like our Facebook page and market that you'd like to get notifications from us so that we can connect with you on Facebook and make sure that we're serving you to the best of our abilities with time and tips there until next time,
00:17:05 invest your time, your talent and your treasures, develop your influence and impact the world.