"We are not just participants in this ever changing, rapidly changing world, but we are architects, shaping the course of our own lives, our careers, and the world around us. So I encourage you all to embrace change, but define it, rather than just adapt and react to it, be the catalyst in your own business as unusual world."

Intro:
Welcome to the Agile Digital Transformation Podcast, where we explore different aspects of digital transformation and digital experience with your host, Tim Butara, Content and Community Manager at Agiledrop. 

Tim Butara: Hello, everyone. Thanks for tuning in. Our guest today is Rick Yvanovich, whose numerous qualifications and credentials include being a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Management Accountants, CIMA and CPA Australia, as well as a Chartered Global Management Accountant, CGMA, and MSC Strategic Business Management at UK.

Rick is also the founder of the professional services firm TRG International, as well as the author of the recently published book, Business as Unusual: How to Thrive in the New Renaissance. The topic for today's episode will be future fit, and Rick and I will be discussing, you know, preparing for and embracing change, finding meaning and motivation among constant change and upheaval, which cause a lot of stress and burnout and stuff like that.

So Rick, welcome to our show. We're very, very happy to have you with us today. Thanks for joining us. Do you want to add anything before we dive into the awesome discussion? 

Rick Yvanovich: Thanks for having me, Tim. Now, yes, I would like to add something. So before we start, I'd like to sort of share a core belief that I hold quite dear.

I believe that we all, all of us, you, me, everyone who's listening in and people who aren't even in listening in, we all have the potential to be our own architects of change. And in this crazy business as unusual world that we live in is defined by constant transformation. I mean, that that's what people have been talking about for a while.

And our task is not just to keep up, but to actively shape the path forward. So looking at myself from stacking shelves and learning the ropes of people management as a trainee in a supermarket and then immersing myself in the precise world of debits and credits and accounting and later navigating this constantly evolving landscape of technology and humans, my own transformational story demonstrates the power of this continuous learning and the significant impact each one of us can make.

So every day, our actions, big or small, shape our future. So as we discuss this future fitness today, I want everyone listening to remember this, you are your brand and every single decision you make is part of your own unique story that you are crafting for yourself. How you react, how you adapt, how you innovate in the face of change or in the face of whatever is being thrown at us by the world will define your story and more importantly your legacy.

And this belief inspiring each of us to aim continuously for that consistently higher achievement is the cornerstone of my work. It's actually my life purpose. So as we dive into today's conversation, let's not just think about adapting to change, but about how we can define it. After all, when we embrace our unique qualities and, you know, all seven billion of us, or however many there are in the world these days, we are all unique.

And when we strive for that personal growth, we're not just participants, but we're catalysts in our ever changing business as unusual, or let's call it a BAUU world. So, let's get started, Tim. 

Tim Butara: Man, that was such a great intro, Rick. I love the phrase that we're our own architects of change. And you said that we all have the potential to create our own realities, but I would add to that, that we all have the responsibility to create our own realities, and you kind of highlighted that by using the word that it's a task for us that we need to improve. So definitely, definitely agree with everything that you pointed out in the intro. And yeah, let's now talk about specifically about future fitness. And obviously the first thing that our listeners will be interested in is what does it mean to be future fit, as we call it?

Rick Yvanovich: Great question, good opening question, like what is this future fit that we're talking about in the first place? Tricky, it's a tricky question actually, so let's, you know, I'm analytical, I'm the bean counter. Okay, let's break it down into two parts, they're two words, future and fit. Okay, now if we, if we go to the dictionary, fit, I'll do the second one first.

Fit is defined as, you know, being of good quality, suitable quality, being of a certain type or standard that that needs to meet its purpose, okay, or fit could mean being in good health, okay, especially if we're doing regular physical exercise, or being in the right shape and size for something. So that's the fit side.

Future is obviously, well, is a time happening after now, the present. So future fit is really talking about - because there's no dictionary definition of future fit, the two words together - it's really about meeting the required purpose, being in the right shape, being in good health and regular exercise should or regular exercise of something should achieve all that.

So you might say, well, that's a little bit bit obvious, and that's in the future. Now to shift that to the BAUU perspective, the business as unusual perspective. This required purpose is really about what do businesses require in the future? What will jobs require of us in the future? Okay, and being in the right shape means, are we in the right shape to fit into that future job that may not even exist today?

And that's all about job fit and being that sort of the right shape of peg. If we are humans, we're a peg, right? And we're all different .To fit into the job, which is a hole, you know, pegs in hole. I mean, it's pretty simple. Now, when we talk about, I'll be in good health. It's not just physical, it's mental, okay?

So it's about our mindset and it's about our attitudes. So the regular exercise, it's not just on the physical side, we need to do it on the mental side as well, as we need to grow our knowledge and our skills to become fit for the future. So reframing all of that to be future fit means... We need to be fit for the future.

We need to ensure that our KASH - our KASH means, that's an acronym for Knowledge, Attitude, Skills, and Habits - make us fit for those future job roles. And to do that, yes, we need to do some regular exercise both physically and mentally. Now, it sounds easy. It sounds pretty simple. And as Jeff Olson said in his book, The Slight Edge, which is a bit of a philosophy that I follow, what's easy to do is also easy not to do.

And so it's all about the daily choices that we make that determine the longer term outcome, and we need to make more right choices than wrong ones. Okay? I'll give you a silly example. I don't know, brushing our teeth. Okay, we get up every morning, we brush our teeth, don't we? 

So, if we don't brush our teeth one morning, is that going to make a big difference? No. Okay, is it easy to do, to brush our teeth? Yes. Is it easy not to do? Yes, it is as well. Okay. However, if we make the right choice and we keep on brushing our teeth every day, over a long period of time, we're going to have better health in our teeth, in our gums, in our mouth. If we fail to brush our teeth every day and do that for a long period of time, well, it's, you know, the dentist will love you and you'll be a little bit out of pocket.

Okay. So going back to this future fit that we're talking about, I see it as being curious, because what is going to happen in the future? All right. It's a guess. So we have to embrace curiosity and we have to have a willingness to explore new ideas, new concepts, new cultures, new technologies. And it's really that desire or, you know, that needle, you know, that want to ask questions and seek answers and continuously learn and, and grow.

The other aspect that I see in future fit is embracing Kaizen. Kaizen, that's a Japanese word for change for good. And it's my interpretation of Kaizen, is lifelong learning and constant improvement of ourselves. And I advocate for learning something new every single day. Additionally, it's a constant improvement of processes, because just because we've been doing it this way for the last however many decades, it doesn't mean it's still the right way to do. Okay? I mean, happens so many times in companies. Why do we do it like that? I don't know. We've always done it like that. It's not very good, is it? We can improve on that, can't we? So this is also linked to the slight edge, as we have choices of what to learn. It's a deliberate choice rather than being purely random.

Other aspects of future fit I believe are being adaptable and resilient and that ability to bounce back from setbacks and learn from experiences and adjust to new situations. Now we've all been through this COVID thing over the last few years and depending on which country you're in, It was brutal or less brutal. Okay? You were in lockdowns very often, or you, or you had still a lot of freedom and, and that was really, really completely new to most of us. Literally everybody on the planet actually. How did we adapt to that? How did that affect us? Did we bounce back from it, or are we still stuck in a funk?

And, you know, we haven't recovered yet. Okay. So as things change, we need to let go of the past. You know, that's going back to why is it called business as unusual because I do not subscribe to things going back to business as usual, you know that annoyed me a little bit during during the pandemic. Oh, when this is over, things will go back to normal. This is the new normal. You know, and the restrictions will be lifted and a month later restrictions are back again, then they'll be lifted and they're back, you know, come on, you know, we got to adjust to that. So embracing curiosity and Kaizen, we need to exercise and train our ability to be adaptable and resilient rather than just hope for, this is all going to go away and it'll all go back to as it was before, as in we're not going to change, we're not accepting the change.

So together with all of that, we need even greater problem solving and critical thinking skill, because as jobs and situations become more complex, the ability to think creatively and find innovative solutions becomes even more important. I mean, before we started the podcast, we were just, you know, chatting and you mentioned AI, you know, what GPT or Chat-GPT and artificial intelligence has done. It's taken the world by storm and we think it's new. Some people think it's new. It's been around for a long time, but it's really, really hit us. And that is going to affect literally every job, literally every single job on the planet. Okay. And so that's something we've got to think about now. 

So how are we going to adjust to that? How's that going to impact jobs? How's that going to impact my job? Okay, or if you know you are the business leader, how is that going to impact the jobs of the people that you employ? So we have to think creatively and find innovative solutions, and that's where AI can come in. That's pretty innovative.

Emotional intelligence has become even more important. Okay, let's really talk about self awareness. Awareness of ourselves, yeah. Awareness of others. Authenticity, emotional reasoning, self management, and positive influence. Again, during these pandemic times and the fact that now we are doing this on a Zoom session.

You know, but you know, I know this is a podcast, but we could be working in the same company. Okay, we could even be working with the same company for a few years, but because there was a pandemic, we've never seen each other in real life. Okay, and so our whole, we have to be really, really in tune on what's happening on that little tiny screen, because this is how we have to build a new relationship.

We have to be aware of more, even more aware of the other person and be, you know, empathetic to them. I remember during the the pandemic, what really surprised me and sometimes as we used to do these calls, you know, sort of check-in calls. And I remember one occasion at the end, one of my employees actually, you know, you know, they were an employee... No, they were an intern. They were one of our interns, a virtual intern. 

And they say, thank you so much for this check-in call. You're the first person I've spoken to in 48 hours. Or I've even seen in 48 hours. I'm in quarantine. I've been sort of locked up wherever I am. I'm in quarantine in some country, wherever they are, and if it weren't for these check-in calls, I have got nobody to speak to. I have no interaction. You know, wow. You know, that's a lot of emotional intelligence there. We've got to have a little bit of empathy there. You have no idea what the situation is of the other person at the end of that little screen that we see every day. 

Leadership. Okay, that's absolutely critical for this future fit. Okay, so future fit individuals need to exhibit leadership qualities. It doesn't matter what their role is in the organization, but they need to take initiative and inspire others and make decisions and keep the bigger picture in mind. And finally, going back to my architect of change, we need to be an architect of change as we need to pick our path.

Or, you know, is it Alice in Wonderland? Remember, you know, Alice speaks to the Cheshire cat and says, which way do I go? And the cat says, it depends where you want to go. And Alice says, I don't much care where. And the cat says, well, it doesn't really matter which way you go then. So in short, if you have no direction, you are not going anywhere. To me, that's what future fit is. 

Tim Butara: It also sounds like the growth mindset, as opposed to a fixed mindset is a key component of being future fit, right? It correlates to being curious, to learning something new every day. It correlates with the concept of Kaizen that we spoke about. And obviously, I mean, almost everybody that you'll ask and that you'll, in the context of this conversation, like, what can you do about the current times? How can you get through all of this like the stuff that you just talked about just now about, you know, maybe being isolated, maybe being quarantined, maybe having no one to speak to; just having a growth mindset as opposed to a fixed mindset is crucial here.

Maybe not so much for this particular example, but maybe for like the lockdowns and restrictions and like how you think about that and when it's all going to end. Here if you have a fixed mindset, you just think that, yeah, you know, it's going to be business as usual as soon as the next phase is complete and then the next phase and then the next phase. But here is where the growth mindset really comes into play. If I understand everything correctly. 

Rick Yvanovich: Absolutely. It is definitely growth mindset for sure. And Kaizen and everything else that you mentioned, you're spot on there, Tim. 

Tim Butara: So why is it so important, like, you know, both being future fit, both the growth mindset, obviously there's change, but you know, okay, the pandemic and everything that we talked about, but why now?

I mean, obviously it's always been important to be future fit. It's always been important to be receptive of change and embrace it. Why are we having this discussion and why is it so important to have this discussion at this particular moment in time? 

Rick Yvanovich: That's a great question. I' m a baby boomer, okay, which means I'm a bit more mature. I've been 21 a lot. And, and in school, in school, when I was taking the final exams, we used a thing called the slide ruler. Okay. Calculators weren't allowed. The PC came out in 1980 and that was the year I left school. So there were no computers in school. During my career, I've experienced the birth and the ubiquitous adoption of computers, which were science fiction when I was in school.

We've seen smartphones, the birth of the internet, productivity software like Office or Google Apps and Zoom, okay? Video calls, social media. It's a long, long list and each time people said things are changing fast. But, you know, for a long time, people said humans could not run any faster. Okay, humans can't do a four minute mile.

Back in 1954, Roger Bannister broke the four minute mile. Since then, since then, what's that, 60 years or so, 70 years, 2000 other people have also run it. They've also broken the four minute mile. And for those who are super curious, the fastest a human has ever run a mile is about 3:43. And that was back in 1999.

So we're due for another change, aren't we? So today the pace of change is super fast. The digital world is moving at such a pace that it's becoming so challenging just to keep up, let alone to get ahead. Now, even in the nine months to today's podcast, we've perceived the birth of AI or the explosion of AI via Chat-GPT. And, you know, which has gone crazy and even Facebook's new Threads, you know, within the last month, has become the fastest ever social media to get to 100 million users, only four days, four days. That's crazy. Okay. 

Now, you know, between the years, 1900, you know, a futurist was saying the other day, I was on at an AI conference, a futurist was saying that all the knowledge that we gained between the year 1900 and 2000, all the advances we made when we moved to the 21st century, it was accelerated and we gained the equivalent knowledge between the years of 2000 - 2016. So basically a thousand years of knowledge and progress in the 21st century, we've already compressed to only 16 years.

And since 2016, up till last year, you know, which is only, well, another six years, we've accumulated the same amount of knowledge and advancement in only six years. So just like I'll take Threads, you know, how can you get to 100 million users only four days, that is ridiculous. If, if we are not as individuals, if we are not constantly learning and improving ourselves and improving our KASH, then we've got to be moving backwards, because everything is moving so fast.

And this is why this future fit, okay, and it's a great topic you picked there Tim, future fit is so important, all right, for businesses, okay, but it's also important for society because we said before, you know, AI is coming in and it is going to impact every single job, okay, now you can look at that, you know, are you a glass half full or a glass half empty type of person, some people say, my job isn't going to get, you know, taken away by an AI, you know, I'm in marketing or whatever, and they just wiped out my ability to, to do, you know, copywriting or whatever I was doing, because Chat-GPT can do it a million times faster than me.

That's one way of looking at it. Another way of looking at it is saying, all right, if I embrace these tools and become expert at them, how much more efficient and productive can I be? How much more efficient and productive can I be? Yeah, I can still be a copywriter, but, you know, AI can't put that humanness into it.

They haven't got that life story to put in there. Okay, so yeah, so rather than spending several hours researching, thinking about something, I can use my GPT, whichever one I'm using, and in seconds, I get a nice draft and, you know, half an hour later, I've produced a, a wonderful blog post that might've taken me several hours. I'm super productive. I can, you know, increase my output. So yeah, I have now more value. So to go back to the question. We've got to be future fit. We've got to keep up. And if we're not managing and engineering our change and being in that architect to change, we're going to get left behind and it's your choice. It's your choice. 

Tim Butara: And the pace of change is so fast and it's only getting faster and faster that i t'll just, just keep getting easier to fall behind, basically, you know, the future is always already here because the pace of change is so fast. So basically, if you're not future fit right now, you're not even present fit. And that's a no no. 

Rick Yvanovich: Oh, I like that. You're not even present fit. Yeah. And yeah, if you continue like that, you won't even be past fit. You'll just be past it.

Tim Butara: Okay, so maybe if we now go into like more the nitty gritty and the practical aspect of it, and maybe more in the context of business, how can maybe companies help their employees become more future fit? Like one thing that you mentioned was your intern being super grateful for the check-in calls that you had.

And this is already a great example of like helping employees deal with all these changes. So what are some other great examples maybe that you've seen that you've done and also just that you can think of? 

Rick Yvanovich: Great question. So what can companies do? I think that one of the most important is to really, really, really encourage and support continuous lifelong learning. If anything, we need to teach people or remind people how to learn. Okay. And because individuals have to do it. Gone are the days where we get a bunch of people, stick them in a classroom, stick them in a conference room, go to a hotel and teach them stuff. You know I think the pandemic and the lockdowns and the inability to travel threw all that out the window and we now want it on demand.

We want to go online, sign up for the course and just get it. Okay, that's self paced. That's an individual deciding how fast they want to do it. Okay, so we need to, I think as organizations, we need to inculcate that desire in people to want to do that. And show them how to do it if they don't know how to do it, really encourage it, give them the framework and support them in doing it. Provide all those tools, provide the opportunities for people to expand their knowledge and experience. Coach them, mentor them, let them make mistakes. I mean, AI is wonderful. GPT is wonderful, but most of us are like babies or novices trying to use it, you know, and we can use it in that novice way or, you know, very, very simplistic way, but it's a highly sophisticated tool.

So if you use it in the right way, and if you know the better prompts to use, you're going to get a much, much better result out of it. So, but you need to go through that iterations of making the mistakes because that's how we learn. We need to inspire people and help transform them, not educate them. We need to transform them.

Educate is, you know, again, I could take you into the classroom, I can teach you stuff and or you could read a book and, you know, a week later you've forgotten most of it, you know, the whole reason why people are talking about transformation is we're not educating people, we're trying to transform people.

So by learning how to learn faster, by being curious, by absorbing all this new knowledge, by having that real desire for that lifelong learning, is we're transforming ourselves, we're absorbing it, we're using it, we're doing something, we're applying it, okay, we're setting them up for success. And of course, hey, if there are any business leaders out there, go out there and buy a load of my books and give them to every employee and use the tools in there. And there are a bunch of Easter eggs in there. There are a bunch of freebie offers worth tens of thousands of dollars. And yes, there's a bunch of online training. 

Tim Butara: That was such a great plug, man. I love it. And yeah, so I'm guessing that a lot of this is also relevant, not just for companies trying to help their employees, but also for us as individuals, for people listening right now, whether or not they're business leaders or developers, or just somebody who's maybe not even in a tech position, but is just interested in this stuff, or is interested in self growth and Kaizen and growth mindset and stuff like that. 

But I'm wondering, like, there's so, there's so many stimuli, there's so much kind of conflicting stuff, you know, you have all these change on the one hand, and then on the other hand, you have all of this instant gratification and all of these, all of these quick dopamine fixes intended or that mostly have the role of kind of diminishing the symptoms of the stress caused by all this change, but not really getting to the root of it. How can we navigate through all of this and kind of find meaning and stay, stay motivated and, you know, continue on our journey of being future fit without getting sidetracked by, by any of these?

Rick Yvanovich: That's another great question, Tim. I think the short and very cheeky answer is to go and buy and read my BAUU book. But seriously, let's break down the question. You're talking about finding meaning and trying to stay motivated. And this instant gratification that's become quite commonplace. Hmm. This change that you're bringing up is, you know, that can, it can actually overwhelm us. It can sort of paralyze us like, oh my gosh, a zillion things just changed. What do I do now? Okay, so how can I stay motivated with all that's really just shocked me already? And yeah, I get instant gratification doing something else. I'm going to quickly do that because it makes me feel better. So let's tackle the big one or one of the big ones. Change. Change.

Change or being stuck by change or having too many choices or being overwhelmed. Whatever word you want to use is really about how do we handle choices?

Steven Covey said, or he's quoted to be saying, I am not a product of my circumstances. I am a product of my decisions. Okay. And looking back again to The Slight Edge and Jeff Olson, the author, Jeff Olson said, for things to change, you have got to change for things to be better. You have got to be better.

As he said, it's easy to do, but it's easy not to do. So our life is the result of the choices that we make. And not making a choice is also a choice. So choice is so important. And even if we have so many choices, deciding to choose none of them is still making a choice. And in most instances it's not a good choice, okay, because we've let circumstances drive our choice. So we are not being the architect of change then. We're being, we're reacting or being, you know, we're just riding the wave or being pulled along in the current of whatever is happening. Okay. And, and that's not so good. That might be all right for some people, not good for me. Now let's talk about this instant gratification.

Driven by technology, of course, it leads to slightly different behaviors in people. It means that we have much less patience, you know, we have maybe shallower engagement, okay. Cause we want instant results. Our attention span is impacted. You know, we are impatient. We have unrealistic expectations.

And these all pose a sort of a challenge to having us focus to do a more deeper or a meaningful activity, because we're, you know, we're being distracted all the time. And if that's happening, that's also probably negatively impacting our longer term goal pursuit because we're getting distracted, not making a choice, going for the instant gratification.

These days they say humans have a shorter attention span at only about eight and a quarter seconds or a bit more than eight seconds, which is shorter than a goldfish. Which is nine seconds. So putting together this instant gratification and all this change, it does pose a bit of a challenge. And to me, that's also why that we're seeing this great resignation, this great reshuffle the great whatever, and I can talk about that, but this is me digressing yet again. Goldfish. 

Back to your back to your question. How can we find ,as individuals, how do we find meaning and how can we stay motivated without being paralyzed or whatever by this change and not being distracted by this instant gratification driven by technology? Fortunately... We have a how to guide. Yep, you guessed it. It's the Business as Unusual, the BAUU book.

Okay, this is why I wrote the book. Because a lot of people are asking the same question that you asked me. And right at the beginning of the book where I write that there's a page on the dedication and it's dedicated to family and that kind of stuff. But at the end, I also say it's dedicated to those people who are caught up in the malaise.

Okay. And the malaise is what was happening. Cause I was writing the book during the pandemic and people were really caught up in this. They didn't know what it all meant. Okay. Mistakes and life happens. I've learned the hard way. This book is your guide to escape. Go and build your castle. Okay, and in the book I use a castle metaphor to get us out of this malaise and give us some shape and some direction. And remember, we're the architects, and thus you get to architect your own castle. Would you like me to explain the castle metaphor, Tim?

Tim Butara: I mean, I think it's almost necessary for you to explain it now. 

Rick Yvanovich: Okay, so let me explain it. So firstly, I'm a Brit. And I like castles. I like castles. I like them. All right. And there was this judge, this English judge a long time ago, 17th century, something like that Edward Coke.

And he said, the house of everyone is to him as his castle and fortress as well as defense against injury and violence as for his repose, which is very old fashioned English and it's really hard to understand. Okay, so this has been simplified over time to mean a man's home is his castle. Quite simple, really. 

And so this castle, I used a castle because everybody knows what a castle looks like. You know, I like castles. I like you know, Lord of the Rings. That's got lots of castles in it. I even like Harry Potter. That's got castles in it. And so we all have our own unique view of what a castle is. And it symbolizes so many things. Home, safety, sanctuary, refuge, same thing structure, strong foundations, they're big stone structures, aren't they? Nobillity, and then castles are really quite majestic, many of them can be; worthiness, honor, respect, aspirations, community, impact, and legacy. Okay, so it can mean a lot. So, the castle I use in the book has eight structures, eight buildings, and I'll name each one and explain what they represent very briefly.

Now, for any castle buffs who are listening in, it's a metaphor. Okay, I've taken the liberty to merge multiple historical castle building concepts. So don't get too upset when it says that's not true. You've mixed up these different centuries. So the castle's innermost structure is its strongest. So right in the middle of the castle is the strongest structure.

And it's your stronghold. And we call it the inner keep. And it's inner because it's inside of you. It's internal. And in the metaphor, there are four towers. The first is the tower of purpose, which represents your value, your life purpose, your goals, and your legacy. The second tower is the tower of life force, and this represents how you manage your HERBS.

HERBS is an acronym for your health, your energy, your rest, your balance, and your stress. And the next tower, the third tower, is the tower of the mind. Okay, this represents how you show up, your habits, and your Kaizen, which we said before, I interpret as lifelong learning and growth. And the fourth tower is the tower of self.

And there are four selves, self confidence, self efficacy, self worth, self value, and self motivation. So that is the inner keep, those four towers, okay? And they, and they all work together to support each other. In the book, I talk about Alexander Dumas and, you know, The Four Musketeers, one for all and all for one.

It's a bit like with the four towers, you know, you can't just have one of them. They all support each other, which makes a super strong structure. Now, in the French language, donjon, excuse my terrible accent, means an inner tower in a castle, and was originally used in the English language interchangeably with keep.

We do that, don't we, in English, we steal other people's languages and change it. And around the 14th century, the English word dungeon started appearing, and it referred to underground prison in a castle, usually underneath the inner keep. So the fifth structure in the book is the dungeon and it's underneath the inner keep and it represents coaching.

Now why does it represent coaching? Because growth can only occur beyond your comfort zone. So in coaching, we stretch people out of their comfort zone into an uncomfortable zone, stretch, think of the rack, think of the dungeon. So we have to inflict some pain. Otherwise there is no growth. 

Now outside the inner keep in a castle is an area called the bailey and that part of the castle can extend it gets bigger you know you make you move your castle walls further and further out and this is as you go outside the castle and search and explore. And as your own domain extends, and your influence extends, and your buildings grow. 

And we have three buildings in the bailey. The first is the Great Hall, which represents community. Because this is where we entertain, you know, Lord and Lady, King and Queen of the castle used to invite people in and, you know, get everybody and have a good party, but it's also where they did business. It's therefore also where you show your culture and you build your culture for your domain, and you show your leadership because it's your castle. You are the king or queen of your castle. 

Then we have the stables, which represents looking forward. And, you know, just like stables with horses, you know, we get on the horse and we go out of the castle and we go exploring. So this is about looking forward. We're looking outward. We're transforming and we're searching for something. And in the book, I'm saying we're searching for satisfaction. And finally, the final building is the treasury. Yeah, we need some money. So represents some finances, both your income and your network.

So building your castle helps you see which areas of your life you need to focus on. to make a balance between all these buildings of your castle and to fulfill your life purpose. And since you are the architect, you can architect and build your castle in the shape and size that you want. Okay, so Tim, imagine your castle now. Can you see it? What would it look like? 

Tim Butara: Oh man, you caught me off guard here. I'll give it a think and I'll tell you the next time we, we speak, how about that?

Rick Yvanovich: Okay, so, yeah, I mean, to go back to your question, how do we get the motivation? You know, how do we maintain the motivation? How do we control all that change that's being thrown at us? How do we control that instant gratification? So we can find meaning in the Tower of Purpose. We can find motivation in the Tower of Self and in the stables, we can manage change in the four towers of the inner keep and the stables and the great hall and we can manage instant gratification of the tower of life force in the tower of mind.

So there's a whole load of tools in there to help manage change. Manage motivation, manage instant gratification. So what I've done in the book, rather than saying, hey, here's the one tool that you need; I mean, it didn't work like that for me. You know, I'm, as I said, I've been around for a while. I'm a baby boomer. So I tried lots and lots of different tools and models. I've been on all sorts of trainings as they've changed over the decades. And I've cherry picked the things that work for me, and I put together some brand new models that work for me, and I put most of them in the book. But in addition to that is everything I also found out on the way, so my model might say, great, it's based on these five other things.

I put the five other things in there, so you can try them and find out which one works for you, because you are the architect of change. We're all different. What works for me may not work for you. Okay. But just as I have synthesized these different tools, I'm assuming other people will do the same. So that's what I'm providing people with.

And if you do want some form of instant gratification, I have some masterclasses, like, will help you to formulate your life purpose, help you build your castle. And I have this, I am okay to fly, which is a coaching model, which is an organizational motivation tool. And these are all, you know, do it yourself solutions. And if you really need more of a done for you, I can do some individual coaching too. 

Tim Butara: So where can people, how can people get in touch with you if they want to learn more and or if they want to book a session for individual coaching? 

Rick Yvanovich: Well Tim, listeners who are interested in continuing this conversation and learning more about me or exploring more insights from my journey can connect with me via my website rickyvanovich.com. I'm also on LinkedIn and you can find me there. Just search for my name, Rick Yvanovich. I believe there is only one person on LinkedIn with that name. And surprisingly, I believe there is only one person on the planet with that name. Seriously. Go Google it and see if I'm right or wrong. 

So for a deeper dive into my perspectives, of course, please read my book Business as Unusual or one of my other books. I've only been talking about BAUU because it's the latest one, and that gives you a more up to date in depth look at my beliefs and experiences, and hopefully it will provide you some interesting and valuable insights. Now, as we close, I want to leave everyone with a thought.

Let's not forget, we are not just participants in this ever changing, rapidly changing world, but we are architects shaping the course of our own lives, our careers and the world around us. So I encourage you all to embrace change, but define it rather than just adapt and react to it. Be the catalyst in your own business as unusual world. And the transformation starts with you. And I'm really eager to hear about your journeys. So go build your castle. 

Tim Butara: Man, Rick, this was such a fantastic conversation. I really, really loved speaking with you today. Thank you so much. Thank you again for joining us today. This has been awesome. 

Rick Yvanovich: Thanks, Tim. I'd like to express my gratitude to you again for having me on your podcast today. It's been fun. It really has been great. And I hope your listeners have enjoyed it as much as I have. And to all the listeners who are listening to this podcast, I really, truly appreciate your time and attention. I look forward to hearing from some of you, learning from your experiences and perhaps sharing in some more in depth future discussions. Thank you again, Tim, and to all our listeners for this wonderful exchange. Until next time. 

Outro:
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