Mark Reynolds Discusses His Book, Make Every Day Great! And His Framework For Creating Your Best Day Every Day

Success Profiles Radio

Mark Reynolds, a decorated Army veteran and executive coach, shares insights from his book 'Make Every Day Great!' on creating consistent ex

Key takeaways

• Adversity is often necessary for personal and professional breakthroughs.
• The most important person in your life is yourself—treat yourself as a valuable asset.

Main topics

• Mindset transformation
• The role of adversity in success

Notable quotes

"Sometimes adversity is what you need to face in order to be successful." – Zig Ziglar

Conclusion

Mark Reynolds emphasizes that lasting success comes not from tactics alone but

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) It's time for Success Profiles Radio with your host, Brian K. Wright. Have you ever wondered if there's more to life than you're currently living? Then Success Profiles Radio is the program for you. Every week, we'll explore different aspects of success and how to apply them to your life. Guests will come from many different backgrounds, including expertise in leadership, business, relationships, careers, networking, health, overcoming adversity, and much more. Every show is a dose of inspiration. This is Success Profiles Radio. And now, here's your host, Brian K. Wright. Speaker 2 (0:39) Hello and welcome to Success Profiles Radio. I'm your host, Brian K. Wright, and it's an absolute pleasure to be with you here today. I'm honored that you chose to spend part of your day with me here, and this is going to be a fantastic and amazing show. I'll be introducing my guest shortly, and I promise this is going to be a fun and informative time. I do want to take a minute or two to share some things I've been learning and thinking about lately, and I typically do this every single week. As we go through life, it can be very easy to question why certain situations happen to us, and even more specifically, we may ask ourselves, why me? While I don't claim to have all the answers, I do think a quote by Zig Ziglar seems to address this perfectly, and it's simply this. Sometimes adversity is what you need to face in order to be successful. If you think about it, nothing seems to grow without some resistance applied to it first. Very often, it's the adversity in our lives that causes us to stretch out of our comfort zones and forces us to look for new ways of coping. If you are facing financial issues, it's a perfect opportunity to ask how you could either cut debt or make more money. If you are facing relationship issues, it might be a good time to ask how you could either cut debt or make more money. a great opportunity to discover why you respond the way you do or why the other person responds the way they do. No matter what the adversity is, the level of thinking that got us there will not be the level of thinking that will solve the issue. So just remember this, sometimes adversity is what you need to face in order to be successful. Zig Ziglar. And if you have not downloaded and subscribed to Success Profiles Radio on Apple Podcasts or iTunes, please do that. Leave a five-star review. That would mean a lot to us. You can also hear us on Spotify. Audible, Amazon, iHeartRadio, and everywhere that finds shows like this can be heard. My very special guest this week is Mark Reynolds. Let me tell you about him. He is a decorated Army veteran, award-winning international speaker, and executive coach who helps high achievers break the cycle of bouncing between fix my mindset and just give me the tactics, the pattern that quietly keeps ambitious people stuck for years. He is a certified high-performance coach, owner of Reynolds Coaching, and author of the book How to Make Every Day Great. Mark speaks to listeners. who have done the thought work, read the books, and built the habit trackers, but still find themselves stalling out. We have a lot to talk about today, and I cannot wait to get started. So here we are with my very special guest, Mark Reynolds. Mark, how are you? Welcome to the show. Speaker 3 (2:45) Hey, Brian. Thank you so much for having me on the show. It's a real honor. I'm super excited to dig into today's topic and to finally get a chance to speak with you and to share a little bit with your audience. I wish you have a good time today. Speaker 2 (2:57) Absolutely. So the first question I love to ask is, did you envision early on that you'd be where you are right now? Speaker 3 (3:04) Not at all. Not at all. I mean, one of the great gifts of life is that I find that your path often only makes sense in reverse. But if you try to look forward, you know, I was on a podcast earlier today and we were talking about, we were both. former comedians. We said we're both failed comics. And so if you had talked to fourth grade, Mark, I had visions of being a comic and just being an actor and living that type of life and just making people laugh and having a good time. And, you know, a teacher had said to me at the time that I was probably, you know, I was still getting a lot of use and conduct. You know, she said, Mark, you can be smart or you can be funny, but you can't be both. So you better pick. And that kind of set me on a path of choosing wanting to be the smartest guy in the room and seeking those types of accolades for a real, real long time. And, you know, that led to me, you know, I always did well in school and wound up, you know, like you said, I entered the military and got scholarships from there and always won. I mean, I won a number of academic awards. I mean, I won the science fair for years and even pursuing, you know, academic achievements early on. I knew I wanted to write books and teach, but all of those were still. geared towards this identity of being, you know, one of the smartest guys in the room. Wow. So what Speaker 2 (4:25) did your military experiences teach you about entrepreneurship? Speaker 3 (4:29) Well, I think the number one thing that you get from the military is what everybody expects you get from it, which is this discipline. What you really get are a bunch of intangibles that people don't expect. One of them that I think makes for extraordinary coaches is this absolute expectation and requirement, an absolute demand from every leadership level to train the people around you. to make those better than you. The thing that it really gave me an unfair advantage early on as well was that I never, I never expected to be the smartest person in the room Speaker 2 (5:09) when Speaker 3 (5:10) it came to specific areas. Yeah. So anytime there was a mission, we always said like, Oh, who are the people that we need? And you always sought out the skillset because a lot of times you just don't have time to train that. And so as an entrepreneur, especially a lot of my clients are, you know, solopreneurs or small businesses, you know, you can waste a lot of time trying to master. a new technology platform, a new CRM, a new email marketing, a new social media versus just hiring it. And so, you know, obviously, you know, I try to fill that space for my clients in terms of the personal development. You know, you can do what I did, spend 20 years reading all the books and attending these types of podcasts, or you can hire an expert that can guide you specifically into those areas that you're trying to grow both either yourself or your business. Speaker 2 (5:58) Yeah, absolutely. And of course, as a coach, you probably have had and currently have coaches too. So what are some of the greatest lessons that you've learned from those who you've been mentored by? Speaker 3 (6:10) Yeah, I believe everyone deserves a coach and should want to coach. I've had coaching my whole life. I was very, very lucky. I say one of the things that catapulted my career right from the beginning was my very second assignment. I was selected to be the aide-de-camp to the commanding general. And, you know, a lot of people think that's like getting coffee and donuts and just being his errand boy. And it can be that. for a lot of folks, but I was lucky in that the general I worked for pulled me aside and he said, no, I want you to imagine 20 years from now, you're sitting in this seat. He said, it's an executive in residence training program. And the thing that it really opened my eyes to was the need for clear, concise, and honest feedback at the executive level. I noticed the higher you got up, you rose in the organization. There were less and less people that you could rely on. to give you feedback about how you're performing, to bounce thoughts off in a safe environment. I noticed, you know, one of the very first days I was working with him, the general was in a meeting and he just said, oh, I wonder if we did X, what that would be like. And I knew that he was really just talking out loud. Speaker 2 (7:26) Yeah. Speaker 3 (7:27) But when we left the meeting, I watched the staff just start to scramble. And all of a sudden, you know, less than less than an hour, the entire organization, in our case, we're on the West Coast from Alaska down to Mexico, was mobilizing on that the general had wants this new thing to go forward. And that wasn't at all the case. Right. He was really just seeking. He was just talking out loud and trying to share what he was thinking and how he was approaching an idea and wanted some feedback. But you can't do that in a lot of rooms. And so one of the things that, you know. every executive needs, and that's what I've always wanted, is that coaching feedback where I can just say, hey, this is how I'm thinking about things. What do you think? Is that right? Or I think this about myself, or this is what I believe about myself to be true. But am I demonstrating that on a consistent basis? Because, you know, we just don't have that in our lives. If you don't. actively seek it out. Like your spouse wants the best for you. She's not there to tell you your weaknesses, your friends and your friends, you know, they're not trying to give you the most honest feedback at times as well. You know, and like I said, as you rise up, you know, there's really no, no space for that from your, the people that you work for. They're relying on you to be the best and a large portion of leadership is being optimistic and, and making them, helping them believe in that. So. You know, when you say, have I had a coach? For sure. I'll never not have a coach, you know, and I don't mind having multiple coaches. That's the other thing, too. I don't expect just like I was saying, I'll go hire for whatever expertise. I'll hire a coach for expertise as well. And I have, you know, I have multiple coaches and I'm glad to pay them. And I think it's the greatest ROI. I try to train everybody that works with me, especially to come out of the financial field, to break free of this idea that. I say, you're the asset. You're the most valuable person in your company. You're not an expense to be managed. And that's how we talk about employees. But as an entrepreneur, you can't do that. You have to really believe like, look, I am the engine of the business. I'm the most important person in the business. I'm certainly the most important person in my business. I know you are the most important person in your business. So what would you do with your most valuable asset? You would invest in it, right? You would maintain it. You would service it. You would do everything you could to. extract maximum value from it, not just try to minimize it and cheat yourself Speaker 2 (9:50) out. Absolutely. What do you think is the highest value skill that anyone can develop? Speaker 3 (9:58) I would say it's the ability to create new thoughts on demand. So one of the things we spend a lot of time in my coaching practice working on, which we call intentional thought development. A lot of people have gone through life and they inherit thoughts as they've grown up, right? They grew up in a community. You know, if I remember right, University of Nebraska, Lincoln, right? My wife's from Lincoln, Nebraska. That's a very different community than where I grew up in Florida. And I was a son of a naval aviator. And so, you know, I grew up all over the seas and overseas in Japan and Iceland. And, you know, you pick up these bits of just growing up and where you go to school and your first job. And, you know, I started in the military. The military teaches you some things. But at some point, every highly successful person has to start to learn this idea of. What do I believe? Do I want and do I want to continue believing that? Speaker 2 (10:52) And Speaker 3 (10:53) so we say that's where a lot of people get hung up is because they get, they spend all this time learning skills and reading books and getting hacks and you get caught in the do's. But there is a, there's the whole other part of that, which is like, what am I thinking? What do I believe? And that's really the heart of leadership. And so for me, I always say. Every result that you want in life that you don't have is just one new thought away. Speaker 2 (11:19) Yeah. Wow. That's really profound. The result you want is only one thought away. And that is really true. I really appreciate that. I mean, Bob Proctor teaches stuff like that. Speaker 2 (11:34) Well, Speaker 3 (11:34) it must be true, right? Because Bob's a genius. Yeah, absolutely. Speaker 2 (11:38) We've got two minutes to our first break. Here's something that I like to ask people. What do you think is the most expensive mistake you've ever made? It can be financial. It doesn't have to be. It could be something you held on to for way too long or something that you gave up on too soon. Speaker 3 (11:52) I would say the biggest mistake everyone makes is believing that there's going to be more time later Speaker 2 (11:59) for Speaker 3 (12:00) whatever it is that they're putting off. It's really hard, you know, in the financial space, we understand exponential growth curves around your money a lot and the cost of delaying savings. But I see there's a real cost that you can never truly appreciate when it comes to your own personal growth. This idea of, who you could become and money you're leaving on the table, but also the delay and what it means to just improving your marriage by a week, a year, two years, five years, spending that time becoming an even better father, a better business leader. If you believe in exponential growth curves, the biggest mistake you are making is not addressing whatever need you believe as soon as possible. Speaker 2 (12:45) Fantastic. We are coming up against our very first break. My special guest is Mark Reynolds. And when we return, we will talk about his book, How to Make Every Day Great. There is a framework. The word great is an acronym, which is a framework for how you can make your day great. I cannot wait to dive into that. And we're going to talk about his coaching practice. I'm going to ask him about... His first client, does he remember his first client and how did that go? Because that's always a fun story. And we're going to talk about the morning multiplier, a 60 second daily habit that high performers just cannot stop talking about. And we will do all of that and so much more when we come back. This is Success Profiles Radio. Please stay with us. Don't go away. We'll be right back on the other side. Speaker 1 (13:44) The mission is to motivate and inspire others to discover their unique talents and follow their dreams in life. This is Success Profiles Radio. Speaker 2 (13:57) Have you ever thought about writing a book? Surveys show that 81 % of people