In this dramatic episode, Achim Nowak, Founder and President of BRILLIANT BEST, shares how he helps successful leaders embrace their fourth act and all the joy that it brings.
You will discover:
– What to do when you’re done and ready to sell your business or retire from your career
– How do develop a new vision for the months and years ahead
– Why you may not need bigger goals, and what you do need instead
Guest Transcript
Scott Ritzheimer
Hello Hello and welcome welcome once again to the secrets of the high demand coach podcast and I am here with yet another high demand coach. And that is the one V only Achim Nowak who helps CEOs and C suite leaders around the world to show up with a relaxed authority and amplify their impact. His clients include global enterprises such as Sanofi to kita. I don’t know how to say half of these Owens, Corning HSBC bank, wanza, Assurant web belt, Dover Corporation and chard industries just to name a few. Some of those are big, big names both on this side of the pond and the other. He’s a TEDx speaker, author of three books on personal presence. He’s also the host of the my fourth act podcast, and has been featured in The New York Times The Wall Street Journal USA Today, Fast Company, Forbes, entrepreneur, Mind Body green and NBC and NPR. He has an MA in Organizational Psychology and International Relations from New York University. And that doesn’t even begin to scratch the surface you’re in for a fantastic episode. And that’s all thanks to this man. Kim, welcome to the show. So excited to have you here. I was wondering, before we get into some of the phenomenal work that you do, I’d love to just pause for a moment and hear your story. Let’s hit rewind, what were you doing before getting into coaching and consulting? And how did that ultimately lead you to make the leap?
Achim Nowak
First of all, Scott, I’m happy to be here. I was chuckling at your wonderful introduction, because I guess I really have done all those things. And I, I tend to not live in the past. But in the spirit of your question. Let me take you back to two moments in my life that were important. And what to watch 20 years back, I live in South Florida now but I was living in Manhattan. And I was at this cocktail party. And I was talking to this guy who had never met before. And you know how you ask people, What do you do for a living? And he said, I have a temporary staffing agency and we have an office in Brooklyn, in one in Tampa. And out of my mouth came completely uncensored. I said, I could never do that. And he looked at me, he said, Of course you could. And I’m returned and eternally grateful that he called me out on this beliefs. Now let’s jump forward. About nine months later, I was working as a big corporate trainer for an international training company. At the time, it was a nice job. I had gone back to NYU to get my organizational psych degree. But I’m sitting in a cafe in the West Village in Manhattan on Sheridan Square, talking to a guy named Dan again, a social acquaintance. And Dan said, Hawaii, I just got a book deal to write a book about improvisation. And this is not pretty in my mind. My judgmental mind says the world doesn’t need another book about improvisation. out of my mouth, of course, I see Oh, Dan, I’m so happy for you. That’s amazing. But I have a competitive side. So my competitive side said if Dan can get a book deal, I can get a book deal. And six weeks later, I had a book deal with his publishing house to write a book about public speaking. And I chuckled because you could say the world does not need another book above I’ll be speaking, but I knew exactly what I wanted to say I’d also taught acting before, and and then let you finish the story. I realized, the moment I have my own book, I need to start my own business. I can keep working for other people. And that was the start of my entrepreneurial journey about 20 years ago.
Scott Ritzheimer
Wow. Yeah, that’s fascinating. And and this kind of combination of business and the arts, or you know, screenwriting and plays, that it shows up in a lot of what you do. And tell us a little bit you have you have your host of the my fourth act podcast, folks, go ahead and check that out. It’s fantastic. What, what is a fourth act? And why should it matter to the busy CEOs and founders out there?
Achim Nowak
Well, the fourth act is a theater metaphor. And in the traditional well written play, they have five acts. And usually, by the time we get to the fourth act, most of the major conflicts have been resolved. But you’re not at the end yet. So the fourth act suite in the sense that you if I relate this to business and life, hopefully we’ve accomplished a few things. We don’t have that much to prove to the world anymore. So there’s a chance to explore other stuff that we haven’t explored before. And so that’s how I came up with the idea my fourth act and it was very simply let me talk to people who have created unexpected lives, most of my climate that my guests are very successful. We’ll, but at some point they like took a turn, where it started to look very different from what it had.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, that’s fascinating. So, you know, what does that look like? To get into the fourth act? Do you like? Are you a business owner? You sell your company? How do you know you’re ready for your fourth app? Yeah.
Achim Nowak
It usually starts with some I’d say, I’d say, either a dissatisfaction with where you are, you feel like there is something more the current term that’s used a lot. And it’s a bit of a cliche, buy leave, you feel like there’s a there’s a bigger purpose or a deeper purpose. And, and it’s easier to step into another act. If you’ve done well, so far, I tend to coach very successful people, some money is not of concern to them. But let me give you an example of a great classic story. This is an episode I’m releasing this week I, I interviewed a couple, she was a successful lawyer in in a partner in a law firm in Miami. He was a successful journalist, he was the Time Magazine correspondent for South America, he, he ran the Bloomberg News bureau in San Paolo. Later in life, they met on match.com and became romantic partners. But in the meantime, Rory, the woman had started a non non for profit, that funneled money to organizations in Tanzania that support young kids and get a better and better schooling. And 100% of the funds go to that. And when Ian and Lori met him was a communications guy. He said, I want to be the communications director for Africans. So when I talk with him, it’s funny when you were growing up, I’ll be neither one of the thought something like Africans, that that was not in their consciousness. But so that the the ability to to trust that you want to do it, it seems unlikely, but you’ll pursue it. And it’s deeply satisfying, even if it isn’t always easy.
Scott Ritzheimer
Right? Right. So kind of dialing in on on what this looks like for, again, a lot of our audiences, founders entrepreneurs, so one of the things that I’ve found is, just before this fourth act, there’s there’s this kind of almost a stripping back process, almost like a like, you’re kind of being refined and challenged a little bit, you have to change a lot of how you approach the world, especially as a visionary leader, and it’s much more about focus and ailing in and you’re building a team and process, there’s a lot more structure to it. And then I found as you do that, really well, you kind of reached the time limit on that, you know, and, and it’s time to start looking elsewhere. But what I found is some folks struggle to kind of repurpose that visionary gift to something else. To, you know, to grab on to the next thing. Have you seen that? And how do you help folks get over it? If you do?
Achim Nowak
I’ll give you a very sort of banal metaphor, but it’s been true in my life. When he years ago, I bought my first house, When I lived in Manhattan, I always rent it. And I was raised in Germany, where if you buy something, you never ever let it go. That’s your house for life. Right? Well, I realized, you know, when, when there was a downturn in the economy, 2008-2009 No, I this is a good time to buy something else, I can get it cheap. So I bought something else. I sold the first house, then my neighborhood in Florida, where I live is very hot right now. So I got an offer, I couldn’t resist on my current. So I’ll sold that. And I live in a condo. This is a metaphor, like the fourth hack. But I had to let go of any notion that my home was forever. So if you apply this to your business, you know if required paying attention to opportunities to sell. It also required pay attention to my desire to wait a minute, maybe the next place could be a condo could be simpler. Let me relate it to just a moment ago when I started my business. Because my startup journey was I was terrified of running your business. But I put myself in a think tank in Manhattan at the time. I’m a great believer in mastermind groups and other smart people helping us and I was in a group with people who are entrepreneurs who are more advanced than I was in it. They helped me make some some very basic decisions that are my vision for the business, but it sounds sounds like a no brainer, which is I only pursued clients that were large companies. The idea was if I pursue those I do a good job. They’ll keep hiring. I also My vision was I want to have an international business, I want to work all over the world. And that can sound grandiose. But if I don’t claim that, it surely isn’t going to happen. So might as well flame that desire. And the other thing, I said, I want to make as much money as quickly as possible. So I can hire my first person who will run the company for me, so I don’t burn it. So these are like some early decisions around. And I know you and your partner Liz McEwen do a lot of work around. You’ve got to hire the right people. You’ve got to you’ve got to grow with, you know, in the in the end, we went through others. So I also brought in other people, and that was part of my scaling. But it started with hiring that first person.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, that’s, it’s so true. So you brought this up. And it was something I noticed, as I was researching for the episode, but you run these masterminds around this idea of the fourth act. Why is it that a peer group is so important at this stage of life?
Achim Nowak
I for about five or six years ran masterminds for corporate clients. And I’m currently actually supporting two big corporations where I ran masterminds in house. But you may, you may know that Napoleon Hill was one of the early American success gurus he’s credited with creating the term mastermind, which is a collective mind is always better than our individual mind, and we exponentially accelerate. growth for us. And one thing that tends to happen, and most corporate worlds is we surround ourselves with people that are just like us. And that’s not always a good thing. So in a mastermind, if I think I currently happen to have a mastermind with six women in it. And to give you an example, one of the women is the former head of IBM for innovation in Latin America. Another person is a 75 year old, American born Tibetan Buddhist nun who had her own monastery. Now the fact that these two women get to talk to each other, and influence each other’s thinking and challenge each other is powerful. So and in my own world, I’m an I’m an international mastermind with four other coaches from every part of the world. We’ve been together for four years. So I myself, I mean, caught some conversations with people that challenged my thinking.
Scott Ritzheimer
Wow. wow. so let’s go back and look at this from the individual perspective, what you mentioned on I don’t know if it was one of the videos on the site, but this idea that when you’re stepping into the fourth hack, you’ve resolved some childhood traumas, even in the show, you said you tackled some of the big problems. How does that even like the idea of childhood trauma? It seems like we’re a long way away from that, how does it show up? And why is that somewhat of a prerequisite to stepping into the fourth state?
Achim Nowak
Yeah. I am. I’m a firm believer that we don’t ultimately succeed in life, if we don’t play well with other people don’t let other people help us. And if we’re not willing to help other people, that sort of spiritual principle, and that tense, that ability tends to get blocked, if we were somehow damaged as children, if there is trauma, you know, we either are always on defending ourselves, or we’re always trying to prove ourselves. So I’m a great believer for things to unfold in that way, with a little bit of these, doing some of the personal homework, in my case has been hypnotherapy. It’s been over 20 years of therapy, and I’m not therapy now. But I’m just an advocate, like whatever the homework is, do it so the rest can unfold more easily.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah. Yeah, that’s good. And, and as you step into this stage, what are some of the questions that folks should be asking themselves?
Achim Nowak
Yeah. Here’s a question that I asked all my guests on the fourth hack Potkins. And these are good questions for anybody to ask them says, Any entrepreneur no matter how old you are. If you look to the future, what would you like to do more of? And what would you like to do less of in your life? What are some things that would sweeten your experience of life? And this is the hardest one, what are some things that you’re really good at? But when you’re honest with yourself, you don’t want to do anymore? Because we’re constantly get rehired for past successes. And at some point, we need to stop a week creating those so something new.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah, yeah, that’s so true. So I’ve got a question for you. And I love to ask this of all my guests. I’m fascinated what you have to say. But what is what would you say is the biggest secret that you wish wasn’t a secret at all? What’s that one thing that you wish everybody listening or watching today knew?
Achim Nowak
You know, I’ve been an executive coach for really successful people for about 20 years now. And I’m very old school in the sense that I went to work with anybody. We start with written coaching goals, you know, corporations hire me, I need to have that. And I write them. But it’s a 50% of the time, the person that’s brought me into code, somebody sales, somebody else will say something like, and now we have other goals, but can you just help them relax? So the idea that we relax that we don’t try so hard, and that sounds banal, but when we do, we don’t push other people away. People are drawn to us, there’s a space to co-create with others. So I will tell all of our listeners say, What does relaxing more? What would that look like for you?
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah. Well, yeah, as it goes straight at the heart of this kind of conception we have, it’s always up into the right. It always has to be bigger. It always has to be more and and I think what happens when when you dial in on that question is, you get a new opportunity to find the joy in where you’re at right now. Yeah. Right, the joy in the journey to joy in the process, as opposed to just trying to tackle that next hill? Yeah. Which actually brings me to a question that I want to ask. And that is, if you do act for well, right, and experience, the joy of that, what comes next? How do you know that you’re ready for the fifth act?
Achim Nowak
I am going to give you an a potentially annoying answer. But the answer is this. And I fully believe this I buy fully stepping into whatever is in front of us and committing to it. And knowing when to move on what’s supposed to happen next, we’ll reveal itself. But it can’t reveal itself unless I’m fully in what I’m doing right now. And I’m willing to move on like like the house metaphor, right? So having the courage to not know what we’ll do in five years, which goes counter to our program, we’re all supposed to have a five year plan. And I don’t knock those I think it’s great to have those they move us forward. But having the courage to not know but pay attention to when something wants to change.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah. And the patience and willingness to wait for it
Achim Nowak
the patience which is not a I am an impatient person.
Scott Ritzheimer
Oh my goodness. So on that note, tell us and take off your coach hat for a moment put on your CEO hat kind of get down into the ring with the rest of us if you will, and tell us what’s the next stage look like for you as a leader and what challenge we have to overcome to get there
Achim Nowak
I am in the process and it’s easy to me to say this but it’s not easy to do is I want to have a continuously simpler life simpler meaning how I live iced still overcommit myself because people asked me to serve on this and do all that and and I have to learn to not say yes to everything. That’s part of it. I’m probably going to live in Europe for a while and looking at what it might look like to be Europe based and work from there. So having the courage to change my physical life even though I truly love where I am and in Florida beach town and close the ocean that’s a great life. That means that so that’s it for me. I may be just to elaborate. I had a successful international training and coaching company for 16 years. And I’m which I then sold because I realized and I had associates at all they realized I don’t want any more. That was the beginning my simplification. I have people that work for me now that I hired. So I have somebody who runs my business. But that question of what is simpler life looks like, which is not easy to answer. The answer is very personal. And the deeper question which you already alluded to, which is what brings me the most joy and let that be the guy.
Scott Ritzheimer
Yeah. Well, Achim this has been just a phenomenal funnel On this episode of than a wonderful conversation I thank you so much for being on. It was an absolute joy and for those of you who are watching and listening today you know your time and attention means the world to us. I hope you got as much out of this conversation as I know I did. And I cannot wait to see you next time and before you go make sure you check out the My Fourth Act podcast with Achim Nowak and also check out his site. We’ll put the link in the show notes at achimnowak.com. Thanks so much.
Contact Achim Nowak
Achim Nowak helps CEOs and C-Suite leaders around the world to show up with relaxed authority and amplify their impact. His clients include global enterprises such as Sanofi, Takeda, Owens Corning, HSBC Bank, Lonza, Assurant, Welbilt, Dover Corporation and Chart Industries. He is a TEDx speaker, the author of 3 books on Personal Presence, host of the MY FOURTH ACT Podcast, and has been featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Fast Company, Forbes, Entrepreneur, MindBodyGreen and on NBC and NPR. He has an M.A. in Organizational Psychology and International Relations from New York University.
Want to learn more about Achim Nowak ‘s work at BRILLIANT BEST? Check out his website at https://achimnowak.com/
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