The Role of Mindset and Optimism in Entrepreneurial Success with Matt Drinkhahn

Despite what many people think, being an optimist doesn’t mean that you’re out of touch with reality. It’s actually far more complex than that. And our guest today will tell you all about the eternal optimist mindset.

Meet Matt Drinkhahn. Matt is a successful business coach, a podcast host, and a thriving entrepreneur. As a recovering perfectionist himself, he is passionate about helping other high-performance individuals get unstuck and scale their businesses at a faster pace. His secret sauce? Eternal optimism. Matt firmly believes that you can transform your life and business through the right mindset. Not only does he guide other entrepreneurs to the top, but Matt also practices what he preaches. After suffering a spine injury in 2015, his physical health deteriorated to the point he couldn’t walk anymore, let alone focus on his work. But he didn’t let that stop him.

Quite the opposite; Matt turned his greatest challenge into a great lesson. Now, he’s passionately helping others find an opportunity in every moment.

In this episode of the Think Business with Tyler podcast, we talk about the dark side of perfectionism, why mindset makes all the difference in business, how to stay focused on your goals, and the importance of eternal optimism.

If you want to learn more about optimistic entrepreneurship, tune into this episode to hear what Matt has to say.

Guest-At-A-Glance

💡 Name: Matt Drinkhahn

💡 What he does: He’s a business coach, a podcast host, and a successful entrepreneur.

💡 Noteworthy: Other than hosting his own Eternal Optimist Podcast, Matt is also a thriving coach. He coaches organizations nationwide. So far, he’s coached and given talks to companies such as Equitable, Vector Marketing, Red Hat, CoreNet, EO (Entrepreneur’s Organization), Oracle, Bank of America, Tarkett, Rheem, Google, and Front Row Dads.

💡 Key Quote: “There’s a positive in everything, and there’s a teacher or a gift in every moment. Put that together, and we have eternal optimism.”

💡 Where to find Matt: LinkedIn

Key Insights

Your perfectionism is getting in your way. Striving for perfection might sound like a recipe for success in business, but that’s not the case in the real world. If you’re an entrepreneur, your perfectionism might actually be getting in your way and hurting your business in the long run. As a recovered perfectionist himself, Matt believes that you can get so much more done when you overcome your perfectionism. He says, “The recovering perfectionist, if you ever feel overwhelmed or ever feel like man, I just got so many ideas and so much stuff, and I’m fired up to go do it. And before you realize it, now I’m off doing something else. Now I’m off doing something else. So that recovering perfectionist, highly functioning, workaholic, trying to do it all, that’s the person I worked really well with ‘cause that’s the recovering me.”

Mindset matters. It’s a tale as old as times; your mindset defines your reality. If you dream big, you will achieve more. That’s why it’s critical for entrepreneurs to adopt the right mindset and learn to live in the moment. Matt explains, “Your mindset does matter. And that incident, probably the best thing that ever happened to me because it taught me that I’ve been taking my help for granted. I’ve been taking my wife and my newborn child for granted, and I’ve been taking a lot of stuff for granted. And now, here’s the secret sauce strategy that I will coach people to and that I live every single day right now is to live fully present in that moment, and when you are able to live in a moment, you can find magic in every single moment.”

Stay laser-focused on your goals. Setting goals is not enough. If you want to make them happen, you need to stay laser-focused on them at all times and be consistent with your everyday routine. This is where discipline plays a major role. Matt explains, “I’m not going to tell you don’t do this. Don’t do that. I’m going to coach people to focus on what you are to do to get where you want to go. And they’re not going to like it sometimes ‘cause it’s hard and it takes a lot of discipline. I know the D word, discipline to get where you want to go, and the discipline is to practice. Practice what? Practice the skills that are going to get you to where you want to go.”

What is eternal optimism? Matt owes much of his success to his eternal optimism mindset. So what does it actually mean to be an eternal optimist? Matt explains, “Optimism is seeing things through a positive lens. The eternal part is taking everything that happens and filtering it through a lens of, ‘How might I use this to my advantage? How might I use this experience right now in the moment as something they can teach me? How I can improve and serve the world?’ There’s a positive in everything, and there’s a teacher or a gift in every moment. Put that together, and we have eternal optimism.”

Top Quotes

“All of the extra stuff that takes two minutes, three minutes, and it’s a distraction. I’m not saying the people who are doing it are, are worthless or they’re less than in any way. They are very valuable ‘cause they have a skill I don’t have. Hire out everything.”

“Strategically, scientifically, we can prove that when your mindset is focused on what you want most versus what you want now, and focused on being present where you are right now, that you’ll be able to achieve more, focus more, get more out of your life and more out of your business than you ever thought possible when you’re able to have that level of focus in the present moment. And that’s what I teach leaders how to do, is stay present to the opportunity in the moment.”

“Eternal optimism does not mean that everything is rainbows and unicorns. Everything’s just always happy. No, the ability to learn from the hard stuff is hard-baked into it. So optimism and realism are actually the same things when you practice eternal optimism.”

“There’s always a gift on the other side of every challenge when we simply flip over that coin and look for it. Training ourselves to look for that gift, that in itself is one way that will help our audience, every single one of them, get what they want most. To retrain that mind to look for the opportunity in every moment.”

“Are you trending towards completing the activity that you feel is going to be the best thing for you? Well, we gamify that so everyone gets to play with their avatar and their little stack ranking and see how they rank in their own company according to their own self-defined goals. That’s what we call gamifying your business.”

“I would challenge the idea of taking an assessment of where you are with your friend circles and your business circles. Are they helping you get where you want to go? Are they holding you back, or is it net neutral? My friend circle has been what’s got me to where I’m at today.”

Links

Who Not How: The Formula to Achieve Bigger Goals Through Accelerating Teamwork by Dan Sullivan

Tools Of Titans by Tim Ferriss

Eternal Optimist Podcast

ProAdvisorCoach Website

Eternal Optimist Podcast on Instagram