Dr. Dave Stachowiak | Podcasting, Servant Leadership, and Creating Boundaries to Avoid Burnout

Dr. Dave Stachowiak is the Founder of the Coaching for Leaders Academy, a year-long leadership development cohort where he personally works with an intimate group of managers, executives, and business owners to develop their leadership excellence — and empower each other through global relationship building. 

Dr. Stachowiak is also a coach and host of the Coaching for Leaders podcast. For many years, he was a leader in the Dale Carnegie Organization, which is the worldwide front-runner in professional training and development. 

Dr. Dave Stachowiak, the Founder of Coaching for Leaders Academy, joins John Corcoran in this episode of the Smart Business Revolution Podcast where they talk about creating boundaries to reduce stress and burnout, undertaking a podcast, and the value of servant leadership. They also discuss the importance of leaders being focused, consistent, and developing good habits.

Here’s a Glimpse of What You’ll Hear:

• Dr. Dave Stachowiak’s experience with podcasting
• Dr. Stachowiak talks about the digital challenges people have been facing due to the pandemic and how productivity has changed
• How leaders can create boundaries and structures to avoid stress and burnout
• What Dr. Stachowiak is seeing among the leaders he has been working with
• Dr. Stachowiak explains what his coaching academy does and what he has learned since starting it
• Servant leadership and Dr. Stachowiak’s advice on creating content and building great relationships
• The people Dr. Stachowiak respects and those he acknowledges for his achievements
• Where to learn more about the Coaching for Leaders podcast and the Coaching for Leaders Academy

Resources Mentioned In This Episode

• Coaching for Leaders Academy
• Coaching for Leaders podcast
• Dr. Dave Stachowiak on LinkedIn
• Dale Carnegie Training
• BJ Fogg on LinkedIn
• Tiny Habits: The Small Changes That Change Everything by BJ Fogg Ph.D
• James Clear on LinkedIn
• Atomic Habits: An Easy & Proven Way to Build Good Habits & Break Bad Ones by James Clear
• Kwame Christian on LinkedIn
• American Negotiation Institute
• Minda Harts on LinkedIn
• The Memo: What Women of Color Need to Know to Secure a Seat at the Table by Minda Harts
• Scott Adams on LinkedIn
• Keys to the Shop podcast

Sponsor: Rise25

At Rise25, we’re committed to helping you connect with your Dream 100 referral partners, clients, and strategic partners through our done-for-you podcast solution. 

We’re a professional podcast production agency that makes creating a podcast effortless. Since 2009, our proven system has helped thousands of B2B businesses to build strong relationships with referral partners, clients and audience without having to do the hard work. 

What do you need to start a podcast?

When you use our proven system, all you need is an idea and a voice. We handle the strategy, production, and distribution – you just need to show up and talk.

The Rise25 podcasting solution is designed to help you build a profitable podcast. This requires a specific strategy, and we’ve got that down pat. We focus on making sure you have a direct path to ROI which is the most important component. Plus our podcast production company takes any of the heavy lifting of production and distribution off of your plate.

We make distribution easy

We’ll distribute each episode across more than 11 unique channels including iTunes, Spotify, and Google Podcasts. We’ll also create copy for each episode and promote your show across social media.

Cofounders Dr. Jeremy Weisz and John Corcoran credit podcasting as the best thing they have ever done for their businesses. Podcasting connected them with the founders/CEOs of P90x, Atari, Einstein Bagels, Mattel, Rx Bars,  YPO, EO, Lending Tree, Freshdesk,  and many more.  

The relationships you form through podcasting run deep.  Jeremy and John became business partners through podcasting.  They have even gone on family vacations and attended weddings of guests who have been on the podcast.  

Podcast production has a lot of moving parts and is a big commitment on our end; we only want to work with people who are committed to their business and cultivating amazing relationships. 

Are you considering launching a podcast to acquire partnerships, clients, and referrals? Would you like to work with a podcast agency that wants you to win? 

Contact us now at [email protected] or book a call at rise25.com/bookcall.

Rise25 was co-founded by Dr. Jeremy Weisz and John Corcoran who have been podcasting and advising about podcasting since 2008.

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:14 

Welcome to the revolution, the Smart Business Revolution Podcast where we ask today’s most successful entrepreneurs to share the tools and strategies they use to build relationships and connections to grow their revenue. Now, your host for the revolution, John Corcoran.

John Corcoran 0:40

All right. Welcome everyone. John Corcoran here. You know me, I’m the host of this show. And every week I get to talk to such great interesting CEOs, founders, entrepreneurs, all kinds of companies ranging from, check out my interview a couple of weeks ago with the Co-founder and CEO, original CEO of Netflix, you know, leaders from YPO, EO, Activision Blizzard, Lending Tree, you name it. I’m also the Co-founder of Rise25, where we help connect b2b business owners to their ideal prospects. And I’m so excited today because I have an old friend here on the podcast who’s coming back. It’s been a while since we’ve had a chat on the podcast. His name is Dr. Dave Stachowiak. And he is an old friend. He’s a coach and a podcaster, the host of the Coaching for Leaders podcast, and Founder of the Coaching for Leaders Academy. And he, you know, was also a leader in the Dale Carnegie organization, the worldwide leader in professional training and development for many years. And I wanted to have him come back on just to reconnect, because it’s been a while Dave. And also, because we’re recording this in April of 2021, we’ve been through a year of some crazy upheaval through the pandemic. And I wanted to ask him, because he really has his finger on the pulse of how leaders have been adapting through this time period and want to ask them what that experience has been like. And so we’re gonna, we’re gonna hop into that in a moment.

But first, before we get to that, this episode, of course, is brought to you by Rise25, where we help b2b business owners to get clients, referrals and strategic partnerships with podcasts and content marketing. And if you’re listening to this, and you’re curious about starting a podcast, Dave and I will tell you, it’s one of the best things that I think we’ve ever done personally. And Dave, I’ll just bring you into it. You know, tell me a little bit about, you’ve been doing it for about the same period of time, as we both got started around the same time, maybe about 10 or 11 years ago now. And yeah, what kind of an impact does it have for you?

Dr. Dave Stachowiak 2:29

Oh, it changed everything. For me. It started as a hobby, or just, it was a couple of hours a week when I started. If you had told me 10 years ago, where I’d be today, because of that choice, I don’t think I would have believed you with what emerged from it. So it’s really been for me to tap into my strengths. And to utilize them. Well, in a medium that really speaks to me, one I enjoyed very much as a listener, and now get the privilege to get to be on the other side of the mic, too. It’s been a blast, right?

John Corcoran 3:05

Yeah, I couldn’t agree more. Well, so let’s, let’s talk a little bit about how things have changed over the last year. So first of all, take me back to a year ago, a little bit over a year ago now. March of 2020. And, you know, everything’s kind of going to pieces as this pandemics unfold. What are you observing in terms of your own business, and all these different leaders that work in different companies that you work with? What was it like, tell me tell me what it was like at that point? 

Dr. Dave Stachowiak 3:32

Yeah, well, I’ll answer our own business question first. The thing that I found, personally, hardest, from a professional level, is to set aside all the personal stuff for a moment, but on a professional level. I had been working virtually and mostly online for the better part of eight, nine years when this happened a year ago. And so I had been through all of the zoom fatigue, and working online, and mostly being on video conference calls and working from home. And I had been down that journey gradually over the course of a couple of years, until really moving into that full time for, you know, six, seven years since. And so the part that I struggled with on a personal level professionally, was leading to put myself back into a place of really trying to find empathy with people who were making that transition for the first time. Because I had made that transition, but it had been so long, and I was so used to working virtually, that all of a sudden, all of our clients and organizations that we serve, we’re making this transition and unlike the privilege I had, which is to make that transition gradually over a few years, they were forced to do it that I found Hard, just because I needed to really get myself back, you get used to doing something one way. And that was challenging for sure. From the perspective of our clients. I mean, there’s so many things that were challenging during this time. The single I think the best way I can answer this question, though, is like what I still see now? Because of course, there was the how do we get on zoom? And how do we get people the technology they need at home? And how do we set up home working spaces and all that. And for better or worse, a lot of that is kind of figured out at this point, like everyone’s been doing this long enough that those sort of tactical technologies, things have been answered? The bigger challenge, I think, now is the boundary space. And this goes back to something that’s been in the research for probably 10-20 years, John is, in all these studies over the years, I’m like, What is it like, to how productive are people working virtually ever since we’ve had the opportunity to work remotely?

John Corcoran 6:08

Yeah, there was some disagreement about that. I remember, you know, I forget

Dr. Dave Stachowiak 6:12

what her name was, the leader of Yahoo, she came in very controversial. She said everyone working remotely had to come back into the office. She did, yeah. Marissa Mayer, and that would be a very controversial decision at the time. And most of the academic literature, though, over the years, has painted a picture that people are as productive in working virtually, and in many cases, more so. And yet, we have had this cultural feeling in many organizations, that if you work virtually, somehow you are a second class citizen, or you’re not working as hard or God forbid, like, what if you did something else other than work? You know, while you were, while you were to be on the clock, or whatever version of that, and whatever organization,

John Corcoran 7:03

As if people who work in an office never do that.

Dr. Dave Stachowiak 7:07

And the research has been really consistent on this for years that when you look at and you actually do the studies on people, people tend to work more from home, for two big reasons. One is that they don’t have the commute time. And most of us don’t, it turns out, like to take that time and spend more time with family or spend more time on hobbies, we work more, which is what we replace it with. And then secondly, people who especially early on when this was an option, felt like they needed to overcorrect for the time that they weren’t there in the office. And so they were the kind of people who were doing this work. And by and large, there are always exceptions. But by and large, there were people who were like, Hey, I’m gonna really demonstrate that I’m getting things done. And I’m, I’m working hard. And now we’ve sort of all experienced this. For real. It’s not just a subset in a research study somewhere anymore. As we’ve all seen, I haven’t heard anyone say, while working from home for the last year, I’ve been working less, and I have better work life balance, right? Know what is happening now all the time, if we’re hearing people say I’m working more hours, I’m burned out. I’m working on weekends. And what is really becoming a reality. I think for a lot of us, and I’m struggling with this too, John is boundaries, the boundaries that we were used to that would separate our work lives in our personal lives, of commutes of picking up kids from school or outside activities of things places, we went on the weekend. For us, it was like Sunday morning, we go to church, we haven’t done that in a year. And, and so all of a sudden, work is still there. And it creeps into a lot of those times. And those traditional boundaries, a lot of us have disappeared. And this for me really culminated a week or two ago, I was facilitating one of our academy sessions, and someone mentioned that they had a couple of employees out on a mental health leave. And, and then someone else mentioned the same thing. And I sort of got this sense like, Oh, this is a bigger thing than I thought. And I just asked how many people were in the virtual room. There were eight of us, how many people here who have employees who are out on mental health leave right now. And not only did everyone raise their hand, but everyone had multiple people who were out on whatever their organization’s version of mental health, stress, leave, whatever. And I thought, wow, here we are more than a year into this. And we think we’re done. And we’re so far from being done. We’re so far from being done. We’re done with some of the logistical things. But now we’re all kind of struggling with this new virtual world and we are all trying to get better at it. And that’s hard. And that’s the biggest thing I see right now.