Pod Insights Vision Pros Live Podcast Becoming Epic: Vision, Decision-Making, and Leadership with Matt Kutz | Session 2 About this episode In this episode of Vision Pros Live, we explore Matt Kutz’s vision for leadership, decision-making, and personal growth through the lens of conscious thinking and self-awareness. Matt Kutz dives deep into how leaders make better decisions by understanding how they think, learning from past experiences, and developing clarity about present conditions to build a stronger, more intentional vision for the future. Through reflections on insight, foresight, and personal responsibility, this conversation challenges entrepreneurs to move beyond reactionary leadership and step into purposeful, values-driven decision-making. This episode is designed for visionary entrepreneurs who want to sharpen their thinking, lead with clarity, and build long-term impact through conscious leadership.#VisionProsLive #MattKutz #JacksonCallum #Leadership #DecisionMaking #VisionaryThinking #EntrepreneurMindset #BecomingEpic
Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 All right. Welcome into Vision Pros Live with Jackson Callum. I'm your show host. We'll be doing interviews for visionary entrepreneurs and guest leaders who are building fantastic visions out there.
0:19 Speaker 00 What's up, everybody? Welcome into another episode of Vision Pros Live. I'm your show host, Jackson Callum, founder and CEO of First Class Business, and I am really excited to have Dr. Matthew Koots on the show today. He's got a book called Becoming Epic. He's also all about leadership and helping us learn how to lead. And this is one of those sacred topics for me that really wasn't until my 30s where I started to realize what a bad leader I actually was. And that's not a process of like self-deprecating or saying I'm a bad person. I just didn't know how to lead. I didn't know how to inspire people in the ways that they needed it. I had only kind of learned like things that I wanted for my life. And so if you're in your 20s,
1:02 Speaker 00 you're way ahead of me on that, congratulations. My hope is to, that we can inspire you to continue to lead better and better. Speaking of great leaders, a couple of really important resources for those of you out there. I know most of us who listen to podcasts understand the value of creating a great podcast space. I'm down here in Ecuador on a humanitarian mission. And so I don't worry so much about the theatrics. But if you do care about having a great studio with great lighting and all that, I highly recommend Junaid Ahmed of Home Studio Mastery. Check out what he's doing. He builds $50,000 plus studios. But he also helps people just get started with the process and understand what microphone to have, how to set up your systems for success. And a big part of the success of your podcast is that people can see you well and they can hear you well. It's super important to get those elements in place and it's far more difficult than
1:46 Speaker 00 than it has to be when you try to go about it alone. So Junaid is amazing. Then there's Dr. Danny Brussel. Dr. Danny Brussel is one of the world's leading educators, period. I've gotten to know him over the past year. It's been awesome to see what he does to help parents inspire their children to learn to gain a passion and love for reading. It is so cool to see him teach. The guy is is on fire. If you have children who could use a boost in terms of educational power and know how to how to move their lives for them, by all means, reach out. If you know other people who have children who are struggling with that, again, Danny's a great way to introduce him. They call him the Jim Carrey of education. He's super funny, super caring, super loving. He's great at helping children with reading. He also does a lot for
2:31 Speaker 00 corporations. Um, so definitely reach out to Danny. He's one of my favorite people on earth. And then there's the water project. I'm not affiliated with the water project, but we do not donate to it on a monthly basis. I found out that there are millions of people who don't have access to clean drinking water. I have never suffered with that. Maybe today. Maybe, maybe I've had my first week of this experience. We won't go there, but my stomach does hurt a little bit. So when you're without the type of drinking water that you need though, um, you know, for even a little bit, it's kind of a scary process. There are people in Africa who don't have access to clean drinking water. Their kids have to leave school. The parents have to leave work. They have to give up everything and the least that we could do and what I hope you will do is just talk about this.
3:10 Speaker 00 And I'll bring up the water project to others and let people make their decision. You never know how far the ripple effect will go of your act of doing just that. You might inspire somebody to invest in several of those. And we're talking about a generational impact that allows people to stabilize their life situations. So they can focus on things like proper education and moving forward. And we can have generational impacts in parts of the world that normally wouldn't be able to reach. So we got eight billion people out there to help. If you know of a cause that you'd rather see us support, if something's burning, you're like, man, why doesn't he talk about this? Drop the link. Let me see the cause. Let me get involved. That's also a request of mine is let me see what's going on in the world and let's support you on that. And if you're a visionary, come and join us on the show as well. Back to Dr. Mack as we, we gotta maximize his time here. Matt, welcome to Vision Pros Live.
3:54 Speaker 01 Thanks, Jackson. It's great. You've got some great things going on. The water project, I'm actually familiar with. I used to live in Rwanda and
4:02 Speaker 00 Oh, you did?
4:03 Speaker 01 I did, I did. So yeah, I was a Fulbright scholar there, worked with some people there, a lot, did some work with some NGOs, some leadership development stuff. So that's a great project.
4:13 Speaker 00 Well, I love it. Well, you know, I'll reveal a secret for the whole, for the whole show for everybody who's listening. I just look for really cool, amazing, impactful things and then I hang on to it, you know, like that's it. It's like, who was it? A Dr. Rob McClelland, I think it was just yesterday posted about how people who are consistent and reliable are often called genius. Just because you show up and you get things done. It's like, I also had another friend that said, a leader, a mentor when I was younger said, if you want something to get done, ask a busy person to do it. Um, so with those, with those little caveats, Matt, thank you for your energy.
4:53 Speaker 00 Um, what, what question could I ask you that people kind of overlook when it comes to leadership?
5:01 Speaker 01 How? Yeah. So how do I make a good decision?
5:06 Speaker 01 And I think, I think that comes up a lot because I think that's the heart of the issue, right? I completely one thousand percent agree with, ask someone who's busy, you know, they've got a track record of, I've given that advice myself. They've proven a track record to get things done. That's why they're busy. So you do that and, and you bring in all these other things like you talked about. But I also think that what's critical about leaders who stand apart versus, versus leaders who don't, if I can use it that way, is the leaders who stand apart understand how they think. They, they, you know, we use this a fancy word, metacognition, you know, we, we, we throw that word around and, and they, they think about their thinking while they're thinking in order to change their thinking.
5:50 Speaker 01 And, uh, and I think that that's really what we need to be focusing on is how am I thinking? What needs to be adjusted in my thinking and how quickly can I initiate that adjustment? And so I think to get there, we've got to ask ourselves the question, how do I make decisions? And, and what, what is in there that I'm not aware of that feeds that? And that's what I think is, is so critical. Yeah, I'm sure you've read, I'm sure your listeners are read and familiar with, you know, Daniel Kahneman and a lot of his work, Thinking Fast, Thinking Slow. He talks quite a bit about cognitive biases and logical fallacies and all those things that
6:34 Speaker 01 really prevent us from seeing the world accurately, or the way that it really is, instead of how we actually see it, which is how we want it to be. And, and we need to make that adjustment. And I think it starts with asking the question again, how do I make decisions? And what's the process that I use? I like to introduce a model to people that, that has been helpful. People have told me it's been helpful. I wrote a book on it a few years ago called Contextual Intelligence. How 3D Thinking Enhances or Solves the Problem of Uncertainty, Complexity, and Ambiguity. And we just released the second edition of that book in September, but in that book I talk about
7:16 Speaker 01 the, the 3D thinking process and the three Ds are the three dimensions of time. Hindsight, insight, and foresight, and past, present, and future. And, and we, and I think that's an incredible way to get people to start to think about how they think. I use it in my coaching and my leadership development courses as a way to introduce metacognition directly in the real moment time. So I ask people, you know, hindsight, how has hindsight, how has your experiences affected how you see the world right now?
7:54 Speaker 01 And I ask, what, what experiences are biasing your response to the opportunity you're facing right now? And I think that's an incredibly important question. And when I ask that right off the bat, people are like, well, A, I've never considered that, but you have to realize that any resistance, any opposition, any, any, you know, unwillingness to, to take a risk comes from somewhere. So I like to ask, but what experience are you referencing when you say, I don't know about this, or I don't know that we should? And then it forces them to go back and remember the past differently because then it's a great opportunity to point out,
8:36 Speaker 01 well, you interpreted whatever event it was this way that's shaping how you're acting now, but what if I told you I would never have interpreted it that way? I would have looked at it this way or that way, and all of a sudden they have a major change. So, so we start with hindsight and we've got to have hindsight, then we've got to have insight. And insight is awareness of what's actually going on right now in real time. And what's so profound about insight is, you know, we tend to say things like, we've tried that before and it didn't work. Well, the assumption behind I've tried it before and I didn't work is that, well, the conditions that were in play then are the same
9:18 Speaker 01 conditions that are in play now. So it's because it didn't work then, it won't work again now. And that's a major fault in our, in our thinking.
9:27 Speaker 00 Huge.
9:27 Speaker 01 We have to understand the conditions now are different. You know, we all have experiences where we tried something a long time ago. We tried it again. It's like, why did it work this time? Well, it's because you're a different person. The person, this, this, just keep it within the
9:42 Speaker 00 There's difference, there's all sorts of areas.
9:45 Speaker 01 There's so many things that are different.
9:46 Speaker 00 You're not hungry right now while you're having the argument?
9:49 Speaker 01 Exactly. Hundred percent. So, so those are the, so insight, but it's really, really important. And then finally foresight, and this is my favorite one of the three time orientations is understanding how to actually perceive the future accurately and, so I make a big difference between foresight and fantasy. And I think too many of us deal in the realm of fantasy and avoid the reality of foresight. And, and one way that I talk about how to distinguish the two is what I call the I can't because clause.
10:26 Speaker 01 So let's say you have a future in mind, a dream, an aspiration, a vision in mind, you know, that's gonna take you a couple of years to get there. I wanna finish my PhD, I wanna write my novel, I wanna, you know, and I wanna give clean water to Africa, you know, whatever it might be. And you have this vision out there, and it's a noble, worthwhile vision to pursue, but then you come up and you tell, it's self-talk, you tell yourself, "I can't because I would like to finish my doctoral degree, but I can't because I would like to have a great relationship with my spouse, but I can't because..." And it's the "I can't because" clause that indicates you're dealing in the realm of fantasy when you're thinking about whatever that is
11:10 Speaker 01 you want, you want to have or be. Whereas a person who's operating in foresight recognizes the challenge and the obstacle. Yes, I would like to finish my novel or have a great relationship with my spouse, and I realize that there's challenges there, but this is how I'm planning to inch toward that every day. And they set it anything. I mean, it can be miniscule, but they set some sort of strategy to move them in that direction. And that's really how we move away from fantasy into foresight. And the third piece of all that is, all three of those pieces need to be connecting,
11:49 Speaker 01 connected. You need to be operating equally in all three time orientations. And what we tend to do as humans is emphasize one time orientation over another. I've got thousands of data points, you know, in my research on this. And statistically speaking, most people default to hindsight. You know, most decisions are made based on what happened before or last time. And, and they don't realize, like we said, the situation and context is different now.
12:26 Speaker 00 It's a survival instinct as well. It makes a lot of sense. So Matt, I wanna make sure to be aware of your time. Do you have a hard stop at the top of the hour?
12:34 Speaker 01 I don't.
12:35 Speaker 00 Okay, well, we'll still try to be respectful on that because I don't wanna, I don't wanna just team you with another thirty minutes of dialogue, but I do, I do wanna bring you back because we've talked about one question, you've already given us a whole bunch of different things that we can utilize. And I wanna unpack some of this because there's a, there's a couple of different ways to look at this. So the hindsight, insight and foresight reminds me so much of the book, The E-Myth by Michael Gerber. That is one of the few books that I regret not reading the moment it came across my desk, visionaries. And those of us who are visionaries, we, we tend to be stuck in the future. We tend to see things based in the future. We don't tend to see things based in the past. People who are great managers, they tend to organize the past
13:17 Speaker 00 quite well. And so technicians, as he points out, tend to be more insightful. They tend to be more aware of, oh, I wanna work on this right here and now and get things rolling. So I highly recommend visionaries that you take a look at that book and you consider again, how do, how do these concepts that Matt is talking about relate to what is we're bringing to fruition for our life as leaders and as visionaries? In addition to that, I wanna go back to this question of how do I make a good decision? I wanna call out my own brand on this in relation to this episode recording, Matt, because there are many leaders who, if they had gone through what you went through with the constant cancellations, we had system issues that, that led to
13:59 Speaker 00 understandings about time or that we would be here. It would have been a perfectly normal thing to say, you know what, this podcast is amateur, they're not well-prepared, there's problems going on, I'm wasting my time, I'm just gonna move on. So you had to go through some of these and I would love to know authentically, what, what, what, what gave you that sense of awareness to say, you know what, I'm gonna take a shot anyway, I'm gonna show up for this interview? What, what was your process like for that?
14:28 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's a great question because that's a real thing. I, my next message, I already take, sorry, just cancel it. You know, I had that ready to go. That was gonna be the next communication, whatever happened. But the reason why I stuck with it is You know, I hate to say it this way, but gut intuition really was, was, you know, and I did, I read your website. I went to the different things. I looked your stuff up and, and I really just thought to myself, I, I think these people are like-minded people.
14:58 Speaker 00 Yeah.
14:58 Speaker 01 And, and, and that's really why.
15:01 Speaker 00 So your gut was influenced by a lot of external factors there. And you just took a minute to, but yeah, we got a brand that stands for itself. Yeah. We got a list of, of leaders that you can see. And so subconsciously visionary, sometimes these aspects can influence us. When we have these types of comprehension skills that Matt's talking about, and that's exactly what I wanted to allude to is. I knew Matt did not come based on a lottery, right? And you're smarter than that. You're more successful than that. So it's like, he didn't just like, well, I'm just going to show up because I have nothing better to do with my time. You had a series of, of past experiences, a catalog of things that influenced your decision-making and I think you made the right decision. Um, in addition to that, I had the same thing happen yesterday.
15:45 Speaker 00 I have a new therapist that I work, by the way, shout out to Coach Fletcher Ellingson. We had a great conversation about you before we talked today. But I have a new therapist down here in Ecuador too. And yesterday when, when I went to the office in the morning, I rescheduled for an hour earlier. I guess I didn't give him the memo. And then when I got there, they didn't inform him. Uh, but it didn't tell me that. It told me they informed us. So I went upstairs and I waited for, you know, by the time I got to about 15 minutes, I was getting a little bit frustrated. And I was thinking a few weeks ago, maybe a few months ago, probably I would have been like, all right, I'm just leaving. I'm just going to cancel. I'm going to be a little bit upset. But that would have had a ramification on my relationship with him going into future sessions too. And this guy's a champion. He is awesome. Um, and so I didn't want to plant a negative seed that could burden our calls, especially calls that I pay for.
16:30 Speaker 00 Uh, so I'm like, I'm just going to use my time wisely and, and you do stuff on my phone while I wait. And it got to about 25 minutes after I'd gone downstairs twice and asked for a month. And I was trying to be, you know, polite about and all that. And so, okay, fine. All right. It's, we're in Ecuador. Times, time sensitivity is not the same in different countries. You know, maybe that's it. And so he, as I'm walking down the stairs to, I guess, leave and like, say, I'll just do this next week and it'll be fine. I'm not going to be upset about it. Uh, he comes in and it turns out they did not inform him. Of his appointment and he's kind of in like a clinic, hospital style clinic thing where the, it's not his staff that does these things either. And so all these discoveries
17:12 Speaker 00 led to me and Dr. Oscar having a phenomenal conversation. We had a little bit shorter conversation. He would have been a little, little, a little bit longer. He tried to explain what he was doing and I said, look, I said, Dr. Oscar, one, we're in this for the long haul. Don't even worry about it. Um, two, with Americans, at least American entrepreneurs, more important than explaining yourself is ending on time. Yeah, I'm grateful for the last 20 minutes, but next time if I tell you I need to leave by a certain time, cut it off at that time. That's part of my culture. Um, and so, and he respected that. We had a great conversation about it. Visionaries, your life's going to get disrupted over and over as you try to bring your vision forward.
17:53 Speaker 00 And if we can learn the art of patience, if we can learn the art of leading by example, uh, making room for mishaps, we can discover opportunities that are often far above and beyond whatever our angst ends up taking us towards. So Matt, I just want to honor you for that because again, there was a lot of bumpy things over the course of months to get us into this conversation today. And you showed up like a champion.
18:16 Speaker 01 Yeah. Well, two thoughts on that, as you talk about disruption, as you're talking about that, I actually have on my other screen over here. I've been working all day. That's why I was sitting at my computer to even be able to interact back and forth is I started a new writing project that I'm calling curating disruption. And how important it is for us to not only use disruption and benefit from it, but actually curated ourselves so we could benefit from it, use, and uh, so that's, that's interesting, but.
18:45 Speaker 00 Story of my life. I have pissed a lot of people off curating disruption.
18:49 Speaker 01 Same, same here, same here. It's been a ton of fun, but.
18:52 Speaker 00 Creating a lot of good movements too though, right?
18:54 Speaker 01 And yeah, absolutely, absolutely. And, and I wanted to come back to the other point you made about perception in this gut instinct thing. And I have a new book coming out in December called Becoming Epic. And epic is, is an acronym for being excellent. Being perceptive, being inspired and being compassionate. And I spent a lot of time in the chapters on perception, on how to develop that perceptive mindset, that, that almost like a, a, a prophetic awareness of your environment and situation and how we can cultivate that in our lives. And of course, one of the things that I point to in that is learning to experience life in those three dimensions of time.
19:40 Speaker 01 And you know, a classic example, Charles Dickens, you know, you have nothing new under the sun kind of a thing, but Charles Dickens, you know, wrote the novella, Christmas Carol, however long ago he wrote, but he's basically talking about hindsight, insight and foresight, how the ghosts of Christmas past, because Christmas present and Christmas yet to come, changed Ebenezer Scrooge's life and the way that he was known and recognized as in his own community. And I believe perception, when we learn to develop that, has the same power for us. And, and it's just an incredible thing and a lot goes into that. Malcolm Gladwell wrote a great book on that, on the tipping point, when he talked about
20:22 Speaker 01 thin slicing and how we perceive how our experiences affect us and all those things. And I think a lot of us miss those things because it's not a mystical, you know, experience, a supernatural phenomenon. You may or may not believe in all that stuff, that's fine. But it, it doesn't have to be just that. It very much can be curated, it very much can be cultivated. And for people who have a visionary, a motivation, they definitely need to pick up on the perception because like you said, they can miss a lot of incredibly great opportunities and they can also avoid some painful ones as well.
21:02 Speaker 00 Huge amazing opportunities. My friends, let's lean into leadership. Let's lean into vision. I love that excellence, perceptiveness, inspiration and compassion. Those go right along with our core values of first-class business. The foundation of love, patience, persistence, consistency and reliability are our pillars for success. Super, super valuable to dive into these values, virtues. Use chat GPT to create your own personal assessment on these topics and see what can I be doing better to improve on, on these realities. It's amazing the resources that we have in our lives disposable to us to create abundance and wealth in our lives. Visionaries, we wish you the best. In the top right corner, it says be our guest. Come and share your vision. You don't have to be
21:47 Speaker 00 a leadership guru who's been studying and became a doctor to do so like Matt Koots. You can be starting out on your path and come on the show and talk to us about how you're going to make a difference in this world. We want to support you in that. Want to help you in the process and Matt, final words, fortune cookie for us before we leave.
22:05 Speaker 01 Fortune cookie, be consistent.
22:07 Speaker 00 Be consistent, part of the pillars. I appreciate that. We'll see you guys on the next episode of Vision Pros Live. Thank you, everybody. Thank you for being here today. I'm really happy that you tuned in to Vision Pros Live. I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions as these episodes continue to move forward. This is going to get more and more fun. We'll have more and more engagement as well. We'll invite people to participate in the show. And thank you for giving us your time and attention. Have an excellent time building out your vision and becoming a vision pro yourself.
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