Delena:
You can't help someone who doesn't want to be helped or isn't in the right mental state to be helped.
James Robert Lay:
Greetings and hello, I am James Robert Lay and welcome to the 176th episode of the Banking on Digital Growth podcast. Today's episode is part of the Exponential Insight series and I'm excited to welcome back my wife [Delena 00:00:59] to the show because we had such a good time in Episode 167, we had some good feedback too and thought it would be fun to do this again but from a different angle where we reflect on 20 years of growth as we celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Digital Growth Institute. You see in Episode 167, Delena shared why honesty is essential in your journey of growth and it was a great conversation because it forced Delena to get out of her comfort zone a bit as she is more comfortable being behind the scenes and in today's conversation, we're both going to get out of our comfort zones because it is in fact when we step out of our comfort zones where we come out of our caves of complacency with courage, that is where we experience our greatest growth.
James Robert Lay:
So with that context in mind, I am going to turn the podcast over to Delena because she is going to host today's conversation and I'm going to be her guest where I'll share some key lessons, some patterns, some trends that I've seen over the last 20 years since starting what would become the Digital Growth Institute as a sophomore in college and how those lessons can be applied in your financial brand or your fintech's own journey of growth. So just like Kirk told Spock on Star Trek, Delena, the podcast is yours.
Delena:
Thank you James Robert. In Episode 167, we got into the original story of Digital Growth a bit and don't want to bore the dear listener with any more.
James Robert Lay:
No we don't.
Delena:
So first I want to start off with what are a few things many people don't know about you?
James Robert Lay:
A few things that people don't know about me, you know for sure. I would say number one is growing up, I was in the orchestra. I played the viola and I was actually pretty good. I just didn't really practice or apply myself. I had other interests and other things that I wanted to do, a big one was basketball, I played a lot of basketball growing up, I got a couple of scholarship offers to go play. One was actually the Coast Guard, but realized that that's not what I wanted to do and so started a punk rock band which we had talked about in our previous conversation but I think the other neat thing was developing a very early social network before social networking or social media was even a thing. This was one of the very first projects that I did when starting the company, this was probably back in 2002, 2003. A friend of ours from high school, and I think that's another thing too, we've known each other since -
Delena:
A long time.
James Robert Lay:
We met first day of freshman year in Mrs. [Bungo's 00:03:59] class but you and I actually went to the same elementary school and did not know it and so coming back to the social media idea, developed a very early social platform called [BearSwap 00:04:13] with a friend in high school, he went to Baylor University, his name was Robin Harris, and he had this idea of ... In college, the bookstores were just ripping all of us poor college kids off to go buy a book for $200.00, $300.00 and then they'd buy it back for like $10.00 or $15.00, and he said, "Why don't we build something that we can bring people together and we can do a book exchange?" And that was the foundational idea for BearSwap and it was -
Delena:
For students.
James Robert Lay:
For students, so students could connect with each other digitally and then meet in-person to either exchange, swap or buy books and this was before Facebook was even around and we had these ideas that we could take this model and go franchise it and then this guy Mark Zuckerberg got a much bigger vision of connecting people online but it really showed me the power of how technology and digital, the internet, could be used for good, it could be used to bring people together to solve a problem and it's this idea of I think what we're all experiencing today which is the decentralization because essentially with BearSwap, we cut the middle man out, we cut the bookstore out and we connected people together directly. So those were a few things that people [inaudible 00:05:37] -
Delena:
You went full circle on basketball and why you stopped and BearSwap. What about orchestra? How good were you? Let's not ... I know you don't like to brag, but why don't you tell everyone how good you really were?
James Robert Lay:
So first chair viola player, UIL, all of that stuff, competition, first chair as a freshman in high school in varsity orchestra.
Delena:
Pretty impressive.
James Robert Lay:
Yeah, it was fun.
Delena:
It was pretty impressive.
James Robert Lay:
But I think a lot of it was ... It was kind of dorky, it was kind of nerdy. I mean there was the label being an orch dork but I see that has changed a lot 20 years later, this idea of music and even of orchestra and the internet does play a part of that because you think of even with our kids, the Two Cellos, and if you don't know who the Two Cellos are, go check them out on YouTube, they are here because of YouTube, because of decentralization if you will that they're able to go directly to the audience that they built digitally and have made orchestra -
Delena:
Cool again.
James Robert Lay:
Cool. Yeah, cellos being cool, and they cover all of this classic rock and Lindsey Stirling did that. Once again, similar story of using digital to build an audience. And so there's just this repeated pattern that I think life might have been a little bit different for me if I had another path forward with orchestra, with music. I mean even this idea of punk rock, around that time period, 2001-2002, there was Yellowcard out on the West Coast that had a violinist in their band. So you see a lot has changed over the last 20 years when it comes to just digital communication, even through the lens of music.
Delena:
So since I'm controlling the mic today, I'm going to ask you the question that you ask everyone else. What's been going well for you this year in 2022?
James Robert Lay:
What's been going well for me to start 2022? I would say ... I'm just in a much better mental state to start the year and I think there's a lot of intention that has come from that. I know if I look back over the last 20 years, it's been ... There's been a lot of challenges along the way but a lot of that has come through just continued personal development, personal reflection and a lot of I would say really deep conversations with you, with myself, with others, with even the coaches and the advisors that I've had to get out of my own way, to get out of my own head and to let go of a lot of things that I think were really just holding me back from achieving what I didn't even realize was possible.
Delena:
So since you're thinking about the past 20 years, going back in time, past 20 years, what has been your biggest wins?
James Robert Lay:
Personally that would be easy, that would definitely be you and the kids, getting married, traveling, starting a family.
Delena:
Which was the best decision you ever made.
James Robert Lay:
Yes ma'am. Yes ma'am, it was. And I think that's the key thing, if I look back, the "early days", the early days were easy. I was 20 years old, I was waiting tables, I was playing in a punk rock band and then I started up out of a bedroom, I was still living with my parents and went to school, came home, and developed websites until 2:00, 3:00, 4:00 in the morning and just rinse and repeat, do the same thing the next day and then pretty much we'd get to go out and have a good time and then things got a little bit more complicated as the business grew. I would say for me professionally a big win has just been making it through what I call the dark night of the soul, and all of the massive transformation and changes that have been required to get from where we began to get to where we're at now. I mentioned before we got married, we traveled the world. I had never been out of the country.
Delena:
Yeah, I think going back to what you were talking about before we talk about travel, I think something that's good to note is whenever you are in your dark low times, the things to think about are the good times and the good situations. Because we talk about no marriage is a fairy tale, we only have fairy tale moments, and I think that it's important to know that we have situations where we're not in the best place, but think about the good times and know that you will not always be in the darkest of times.
James Robert Lay:
That's a great point, I mean, and I was just sharing this on another podcast recently, the trip that we took two years ago with the family. We picked the kids up from school on Valentine's Day, picked them up a little bit early. It was right at the beginning of the COVID pandemic, it was just starting to creep in -
Delena:
To the West Coast.
James Robert Lay:
On the West Coast and we went out to Disneyland in California. Made so many great memories as a family, really filled us up, and then the world shut down, was it two weeks later?
Delena:
Yeah.
James Robert Lay:
And I'm so grateful that we had that opportunity, we took that opportunity, because I think a lot of that, it allowed us to really say -
Delena:
Push through all of this time.
James Robert Lay:
Push through. Yeah, just be home.
Delena:
Where we had to ... Yeah, we couldn't travel.
James Robert Lay:
And it's that idea of travel, I learned a lot and we could probably just do a whole podcast on that because there's a lot of lessons that were gained there, but after that, the business started to grow, hiring, we got pregnant, you got pregnant, and that was what, 2009? And that's where things I would say started to get really challenging for me because in 2009, we took a trip, we went to Bora Bora, we're in like the most beautiful place in the world but I am in probably one of the worst mental states and I wasn't even aware of that at the time. I was literally physically hurting.
Delena:
Yeah.
James Robert Lay:
And a lot of that hurt, a lot of that pain was what I would be diagnosed ... I think it was like two months later, I got diagnosed with an autoimmune disease called ankylosing spondylitis. And I will never forget, I was driving across the Texas-Louisiana border and I got a call from the doctor and he said, "You have ankylosing spondylitis," and at that point, I was 28 years old, our first child was due in May. I was pretty much crushed. I was young, had this business, everything was great from the outside, like winning all of these awards and accolades, speaking all over the place, but from the inside, I was was just ... I was crumbling, I was a mess, I was falling apart on the inside, and it was a lot of just change happening all at once and it was just too much.
Delena:
And going back to our first podcast, that was the time where I had to sit back and watch because I could only tell him so much without ... Whenever it was me talking to him, knowing that all this was going on in his head, he didn't know I knew, but you sit back and you watch and you can't help someone who doesn't want to be helped or isn't in the right mental state to be helped.
James Robert Lay:
Yeah, and I was. I was not in a good place, I was lying to myself, I was lying to you, I was struggling with some addictions and I needed my help and so I would say if I look back over the last 20 years, it was that moment in time in 2012 when I said, "Hey, I need some help and to get through that dark time together through my life, through our life," and really I think a lot of that is now looking back over the past 10 years. I can begin to speak more publicly about this and a lot of this is going to get packaged up in book number two, Banking on Change, because there are a lot of lessons that we can all learn and take from this that if I can take my struggles, my challenges, my failures and then use them to help empower, elevate someone else, I'm willing to do that.
James Robert Lay:
I would say the second big win, it does come back to books, it would be writing the first book, Banking on Digital Growth, and a lot of that started ... If you think about it, if you go back, a lot of that began in 2012. That whole process of hitting rock bottom and working with David Baker and he was like, "You're going to write a book," and I remember when he told me that I was like, "You're crazy." Because I could not see it at that moment, and he said, "You're going to write a book," and I remember going to a conference that he was hosting and I think it was called Write the Damn Book and it was in Nashville, because I think a lot of people, they talk a lot about writing a book. Like, "I'm going to write a book, I'm going to write a book one day," and I was like I couldn't even see that. So I went to this conference, like, "Okay, I'll write the book," and then I remember you kept on me about this. You kept -
Delena:
You had a contract on your desk. I said, "Stop being a certain way and just sign the contract and get going."
James Robert Lay:
Yes, and it was that push is what I needed to get over the edge to start writing Banking on Digital Growth and that was in May of 2019 and then we launched the book in May of 2020 right at the start of the pandemic, but with no speaking tour available, all the conferences were nonexistent at that point. You innovate, you pivot, and I launched this podcast and now we're 176 episodes into it and this has been one of the most fulfilling and energizing things that I've ever done professionally. I always joke, like if I could do this five days a week, I would find my happy place because I love learning, I love bringing people together -
Delena:
You love the conversation.
James Robert Lay:
I love the conversation. I love connecting people before and after shows and it has just been such a great fulfillment. But I think the other thing too is writing a book, launching a podcast, it's required a lot of change, it's required a lot of courage, but it's required a team effort. It's required a lot of collaboration to make this a reality. This story is far bigger than just what you see publicly on the front end. There is a lot that's going on behind the scenes and I would say really the third big win, if I look back over the last 20 years is running the business debt-free with no outside funding because that has created a lot of freedom to do things that might not have been possible otherwise.
James Robert Lay:
Granted if we go back to that time period, rock bottom in 2012, we took on six figures of debt to make that transition and that created a lot of anxiety for me personally. We had business debt, we had personal debt, and it forced me to get really clear about why I do, why we do what we do as an organization but then also realize where some of my anxiety around money and finances was rooted and that came from just my family of origin, my childhood upbringing, where money anxiety was always kind of an issue of sorts but I would say again, it's like you take a negative and you transform it into a positive, it's that financial stress that I felt bringing on that debt and the anxiety tied to it and fortunately we've once again worked through that, but realizing that there's an opportunity here to educate and empower financial brands and fintechs so that they can guide the people that they're working with, the people and the communities that they serve, beyond financial stress that takes a toll on their health, their well-being, their relationships, towards a bigger, better, brighter future.
Delena:
Okay. So we've heard about the past and we can't obviously grow without realizing where we've been and where we've come from and not making the same mistakes that we've made in the past but continuing to change and evolve and be better.
James Robert Lay:
Failure is learning.
Delena:
Yes, absolutely. Let's talk about the present moment. What are you feeling most excited and energized about?
James Robert Lay:
Three things come top of mind for me. Number one is what I'm calling human transformation, and what I mean by human transformation, it is the exact opposite of digital transformation. I've seen patterns where organizations, financial brands will bring in some new technology, it could be marketing technology, sales technology, it could be fintech, but there's challenges and struggles. We've heard so much about digital transformation over the past years that we know looking at data coming out of BCG and McKinsey and all of the big consulting firms, 60 to 85% of digital transformation projects fail and the reason that I'm seeing that they fail through the lens of financial services as a digital anthropologist that studies the intersection between marketing and sales and technology and human behavior, the reason that digital transformation projects fail is because of the human condition.
James Robert Lay:
And so my thesis is is if we can empower people, if we can guide human transformation internally to help people bank on change if you will, they will ultimately maximize their digital transformation initiatives going forward which then leads me to what I'm excited about here, point number two is writing Banking on Change and just like in Banking on Digital Growth, packaging up all of that thinking into a playbook, into a manifesto, I'm excited about doing the same thing with Banking on Change to help organizations, financial brands, fintechs navigate the complexities of change through the lens of human transformation and then also I'm just excited to be having this conversation with you because this is ... I would say something that we do a lot but to just do it in this type of context with this type of platform, it is energizing.
Delena:
So a lifetime of learning will lead to a lifetime of future growth. And you read a lot, possibly too much, but thinking about the past 20 years after starting digital growth, what have been the biggest lessons you've learned along the way that might help the listener move forward along with their own growth journey?
James Robert Lay:
So the point of reading, I do read a lot. I'm one of those people that buys more books than I will probably ever read in a lifetime. It seems like every day or every few days -
Delena:
I handle shipping and receiving at the house and it's not fun. I'm like, "What's this box now? Oh, it's another book."
James Robert Lay:
Yeah, and you're like, "Are you ever going to read all these?" And I read in a very unique manner. I will probably have five books that I'm reading concurrently at a time and I'll flip back and forth and I think a lot of it is just the way that my ADD mind connects these different dots and I might start a book and I will never finish it. But I remember like a key insight or a key element that I can then transfer into those that I'm working with and so I think if anything our kids are going to have a massive library that they're going to inherit.
Delena:
Hopefully they're interested in all these business books.
James Robert Lay:
Yes. Well I think a lot of it too, they're not just business books. I would say the books of late have probably -
Delena:
Personal development.
James Robert Lay:
Personal development, leadership, psychology, sociology, anthropology. More of the study of just humanity because technology is always going to change, but it all comes back to people and I would say for me that's a big lesson here, reflecting on 20 years is if you're wanting to maximize your future growth potential, you're going to have to act for growth and that is a key model that I'm writing about in Banking on Change to where in digital [inaudible 00:23:11] we have all of these acronyms because it's the only way that I can remember things and so ACT is an acronym for awareness plus commitment equals transformation. And awareness comes from learning and it comes from thinking, and then transformation comes from doing and it comes from reviewing what you've done. But it's the C in the middle, it's the commitment that I find where a lot of organizations struggle, a lot of teams struggle, a lot of people struggle. They know what they need to do, but they fail to commit to achieve the transformation that they're seeking and I think about my own story here, getting help from the outside.
James Robert Lay:
In our last conversation, I talked about the brutal honest truth, and you telling me that my punk rock band sucked and to do something with my life. Well that's help from the outside, you helped me see things that I was not able to see. I think about 2012 in working with David Baker, he helped me see things that I could not see. And so when we're looking for transformation, when we're looking for growth, a lot of times we must look outside of ourselves, we must look outside of our teams, we must look outside of our organizations, and that requires a continuous investment back into yourself, back into your team, back into your organization through training, through coaching, and I think a lot of people are surprised when I tell them I have invested six figures at this point into just my own personal growth and I would not be where I am at today had I not made that investment and I'm very grateful to you for the opportunity to do just that, so thank you.
Delena:
You're welcome.
James Robert Lay:
I would say another key lesson is really identifying and a lot of this is just pattern matching here what I call four exponential growth environments and I think it's important to define what is exponential growth. Exponential growth comes when you're growing personally and you're growing professionally. I don't think that we can separate the two worlds any longer.
Delena:
There's a ceiling you'll eventually hit.
James Robert Lay:
Yeah. And so a lot of people talk about work-life balance. I don't think work-life balance is possible. What I'm more interested in is work-life integration to where your personal growth creates a positive impact on your professional growth and your professional growth creates a positive impact on your personal growth and so there are these four exponential growth environments that I have identified to where you must always be learning, thinking, doing and reviewing. Where I think a lot of us get stuck and there comes that point of outside help, accountability, coaching, training, whatever you want to call it, we get stuck in the doing and when we get stuck doing, we just simply cannot see what the next steps forward are.
James Robert Lay:
A lot of that idea of seeing the next steps forward for me from just the lessons learned is what I frame as digital stoicism. Stoicism has played a big part of my journey over the last 10 years, and it's this idea of the only thing that we really can control is our mind. Everything else, we don't really have a lot of control over, but we can control our mind, we can control our emotions, we can control how we react to situations in the environment, and I think our minds right now are under a massive attack of a lot of different things of information.
Delena:
[inaudible 00:27:50] more like a hijack.
James Robert Lay:
Yeah, a hijack, hacked would be another word with that. We probably don't have time to get into all the specific details, but we see it in social media. Our attention, our attention has been hijacked and we must reclaim our own personal attention because what we give attention to is where our future will be. And so on that note, a big lesson learned is disconnecting to reconnect, to reconnect with ourselves, to reconnect with those that we're close to in our personal relationships, to reconnect even with what I've talked about before, which is the superconscious, the superconscious mind, the mind of God, because that's where we can get massive insight and I think about just my own personal experiences there and it's like when I do disconnect to reconnect, I get downloads that have been helpful in writing the first book, when writing even the second book, and I would say the last lesson, and it's a little bit morbid, but it's stoic philosophy, it's memento mori, which is to just simply remember your death.
James Robert Lay:
I used to fear death and you and I have talked a lot about that. I used to fear death growing up, and I think once again that was more of a symptom of maybe some childhood trauma and when it comes to death, my entire perspective has transformed. I'm using death as more of a guidepost to guide my thinking, which will then inform my own doing. Because I want to play an even bigger game, to reach, to teach, to educate, to empower even more financial brand leaders and fintech leaders and there's that old saying about when someone dies, you have the year you were born, you have the year that you died, but then it's what's in the middle that matters, it's the dash. And I want to make sure by remembering my own death, I can make the most impact during my time here, during the dash. And I think this idea of death too, a movie that we both grew up watching and one that our kids, it's Hook, which is just an interesting story of Peter Pan. Captain Hook tells Peter Pan, "Prepare to die Peter," and Peter replies to Captain Hook, to die -
Delena:
To die would be a great adventure. Yeah.
James Robert Lay:
Will be a great adventure. And so my whole mindset, this idea of memento mori, remember your death, has really created just such a huge impact for me, even to the point to where for my 40th birthday, I wanted to go get a memento mori tattoo. Haven't done it yet. You and I are still negotiating on this one. But it is something I think that if we all remember our deaths, not from a place of fear, but using it as a guidepost, we'll do even more during our limited time here to help even more people.
Delena:
Speaking about that, I think that is a great way for us to go back into the original podcast that we had in 167. If you can put your head down every night and know that you did the right thing, there's no reason to fear death. Because you know that you went to sleep doing the right thing. And had you not, then that's where, yeah, you maybe should be fearing a little bit. But if you live every day doing the right thing, there should be no fear.
James Robert Lay:
Yeah. That idea of doing the right thing and playing basketball too, I would have to give a shout-out to Coach Carlisle, who was my basketball coach, and I remember I was in eighth grade and my coach told me, he said, "You're never going to play varsity basketball." And that was fuel enough needed for me to prove something wrong.
Delena:
Go kick some butt.
James Robert Lay:
Yeah, but I would say too, like when you start trying to prove people wrong, that can easily flip you into a negative path which is I think ... That's what happened to me along the way in so many different areas of my life. I was trying to prove so much to so many people that you begin to lose your own way. It's kind of like the dark side of the force in Star Wars, so you got to be very careful of what is fueling your future growth? Is it from a place of ... We'll call it love, light and positivity, or is it from a bit more nefarious, darker side?
Delena:
Yeah. Does it play into what you want yourself to be or is it just to get back at someone?
James Robert Lay:
Yeah, and the other thing too, maybe this is a lesson learned, comparison. Comparison is a killer.
Delena:
A terminal.
James Robert Lay:
And you don't compare, and this is stoicism too I feel like coming out now. You cannot compare yourself to others. You are you, you don't want to be anyone else. Be the best person that you can possibly be and let your past provide you with the tools, those lessons learned, to then inform your future ahead.
Delena:
Okay. So we're here in the present. What about the future? 20 years from now, what are you most excited about? Knowing that what all has happened within 20 years, what are you most excited about for the next 20 years? Because you'll be 60 at that point, and what needs to happen for you between now and until then to feel good about the progress you've made.
James Robert Lay:
When I hear you say that I'm going to be 60, I would say before, if you told me that 10, 20 years ago -
Delena:
It's a little scary. But now it's exciting.
James Robert Lay:
It would have been a little bit scary. I would say now it's exciting. I just turned 40 a few months ago and I would say I am more energized about what I'm doing now as a 40-year-old. I cannot wait to see what 60 looks like or what 80 looks like or what 100 looks like or even 120, 140, because I do feel like we have the possibility to make that age, the advances that we're seeing in healthcare technology, and so this is the game that I'm playing.
Delena:
The most important thing about health is all mindset. All mindset. If you have a positive mindset, you'll live to be much longer than if you have a negative mindset.
James Robert Lay:
And this is one of the big lessons that I've learned from Dan Sullivan and my time in strategic coach, Dan has been a guest on this podcast a couple of times and it's this idea of always make your future bigger than your past and for me, death is my exit. I'm not retiring. I've already put that into my mind, I love what I do, and I'm excited about the future that you and I, Delena, will continue to create. I'm excited about the future that we as the Digital Growth Institute will continue to create and so for me at 60, I'm going to break this down into what I would call short-term, midterm, and longterm visioning and goals and that's me.
James Robert Lay:
I'm a visionary, it took me a while to get really comfortable with this idea of being a visionary, and I think that created a lot of conflict, I was working outside of my own growth ability within the business, which is why we got into the bad situations that we got in around that 2009-10-11-12 period because I was doing things that I should not have been doing and that realization came from whenever I took my Kolbe profile, and Kolbe is a profile that you and I have done, Delena, Audrey who is here with us on the team at the Digital Growth Institute. She facilitates Kolbe profiles for financial brands and their leadership teams. Because Kolbe is not about personality. Kolbe looks at the operational system of the mind, Kathy Kolbe and her family have been studying the brain for a very, very long time, her father created the Wonderlic test and so it looks at what they call the conative part of the brain. And so I'd say for me as a visionary, I can see what the future looks like. I could almost in essence sometimes and I do this with financial brands, I bring the possible future into the present moment and so let's do that here.
James Robert Lay:
When I look out over the short term three to five years, building a digital community of like minds is an area of focus for me, a community of like minds that leads to even greater collaboration between financial brands and fintech. Once again, rooted at the center of marketing sales, technology and human behavior to community that will provide training and coaching programs at scale. Taking essentially what we've been doing over the last 20 years in more of an individual one-on-one, one-on-one being the organization and working with another organization, but I want to start bringing organizations together to collaborate and it's that collaboration that I think we'll get some exponential growth capabilities from and also it's the training and the education that will come through what I view as just my own path of thinking and writing, the Banking on bank series, I see five to eight, maybe ten books in this series that I will write over the next 10 to 15 years. Perhaps we'll even see a publishing arm for the Digital Growth Institute, think books and podcasts and training, that will help to elevate and amplify the voices of others who are all aligned this purpose of getting people beyond financial stress towards a bigger, better, brighter future. So that's my short-term.
Delena:
What about your mid-term?
James Robert Lay:
Mid-term I would say ... Well we'll just call that the next five to ten years. I don't think we're here as an industry just yet. But if I go back over the last 20 years, I've called things typically three to five years before they hit a critical mass in the industry and it would be some sort of financial coaching program that goes beyond just providing financial education, it goes beyond just providing financial literacy because I'm going to be honest, I don't think financial education programs and financial literacy programs do that much good. It comes back to what I viewed as these four exponential growth environments, you can be learning, you can be thinking, you can be doing, you can be reviewing, you gain awareness through learning and thinking, you transform through doing and reviewing, but it's the commitment piece.
James Robert Lay:
The commitment piece in a person's own financial journey, and I've talked with [Jaler Grio 00:39:08] about this on the podcast. I mean she works in the mortgage space and she has a financial coach herself and how important that has been for her and her own journey and her own money story, but if we can as financial brands and as fintechs, make coaching a key offering, and there's multiple ways to package this up. It could even create non-interest income, something I think we're going to need to think more about, it can replace some of the overdraft income that you probably are going to be losing but it's one that puts the transformation of people beyond the commoditized transaction of dollars and cents. That's my vision when it comes to coaching.
Delena:
And what about your longterm?
James Robert Lay:
So longterm, longterm, big, big vision would be to launch either a fintech, so collaborating with the financial brand and a technology platform, or a digital bank. I'm not so clear on this, but the vision on this would be to empower people through three areas of their life, to help level up their health, level up their wealth, level up their well-being and to level up their happiness. Because I think these are the three core elements that people struggle with. People struggle financially, we know that they're going to struggle with mental well-being. The research is very clear and I believe that we are in a financial epidemic that is taking a massive toll on people's health, on people's well-being and their own mental states, that if we can transform their wallets, we can truly transform their lives.
Delena:
As we wrap up the conversation, thanks first and foremost for letting me take over even though I know you love that mic, so I really didn't have to do much. Okay, one last question for you. What is one thing that you had to let go of in order to grow personally and professionally? Because when we let go of things is when we find our biggest growth.
James Robert Lay:
That's a good question and it's actually one that is the expanded version of what I call what's going well times L, because to your point, when you let go of all of the baggage that holds us back, it weighs us down, that's where we can spring forward. So for me, I would say three things. One, letting go of the past. Failure is learning, and progress is far greater than perfection. I've had this voice in my head, and I think the dear listener might think that I'm a bit crazy if I share this, but it's one that has been playing probably for a good three years now. Attach to nothing, detach from everything. I think it's so easy that we attach to the doing, coming back to those four exponential growth environments, we attach our identity to what we do and if we even look at this philosophically, we are not human doers, we are human beings, and I think the more that we can focus on that, attaching to not what we do and then we can detach from everything else, that allows us to continue to move forward. It's when we attach to something, we create anchors that hold us in place.
James Robert Lay:
I think one of those anchors that a lot of us struggle with, I know that I have that I've really made a lot of progress in my own life is around fear. I mentioned before fear of death. I think fear creates a fixed mindset. And one of the best books that I read on this subject that helped me let go of just a lot of fear was a book written by Napoleon Hill, who a lot of people know his works, Think and Grow Rich, but this book is Outwitting the Devil. Not a lot of people know about that one, whenever I make this recommendation. And Outwitting the Devil is a unique read because Napoleon puts the devil on trial and gets the devil to confess about how he controls people.
Delena:
In their minds.
James Robert Lay:
In their minds, in their minds, and a lot of it is through fear. And I truly do believe that if we can let go of fear, fear of death, fear of change, fear of the unknown, fear of failure, and even one that I struggle with is fear of success. Like if we can let go of those fears, we will propel and move forward. We will continue to make progress on our own journeys of growth.
James Robert Lay:
I want to say the last point here is letting go and it's a tough one, it's a tough one for a lot of people. Just kind of like letting go of fear, because we create these attachments to them, but it's relationships. It's letting go of relationships that are holding us back, and these could be super, super close relationships. But as Jim Rowan has so eloquently talked about over the years and you can go watch his YouTube videos, we are the sum of the five people, or we are the average of the five people, that we associate with most, and there comes that idea of building a community of like minds like is my focus in the short-term because as Napoleon Hill writes, this is about creating a master mind where you bring minds together to create even more value exponentially and there are two types of people in life.
James Robert Lay:
There are people who are growth-bound, they have a growth mindset, and there are people who are GAP-bound, meaning they are stuck in the GAP, and GAP is an acronym to where all they do is gripe about problems. And at this stage in my life, I only want to surround myself with people who are growth-bound. If you're stuck in the GAP, I know at this point I'm probably not going to be able to help you, you're going to be the one who has to get yourself out of the GAP and truth be told, I fall into the GAP, but I have the awareness that I'm there, number one, number two, I don't want to stay there, and number three, if I realize that I'm in the GAP, and I'm griping about a problem of sorts and I don't know how to solve it, I'm going to go ask for help. So I would say those are three things to let go of, the past, fear, and relationships.
Delena:
Okay. So thank you for sharing that. As we wrap things up, I want to thank you for letting me be the host for today.
James Robert Lay:
How has it felt?
Delena:
I really didn't have to do much to be honest with you. I felt like the last one I had to do more work, I had to think more. But this one, you took over and you love that mic, so it worked out well and it's been a lot of fun, so thank you. It will be a while till dear listener hears from me, but I will be here, backstage and behind the scenes. So do you want to wrap this up?
James Robert Lay:
I definitely will and I do want to thank you for coming on. It has been a lot of fun and maybe we'll bring you back sooner rather than later. If you have enjoyed getting a little bit of a behind the scenes peek into what we're doing here, this is something just new, we were experimenting with this type of format, but if you want to hear Delena come back on, send me a text message. Send me a text message, 415-579-3004, 415-579-3004. Text me, "I want to hear Delena. I want to learn from Delena."
Delena:
Oh boy. You're putting me on the spot.
James Robert Lay:
I am, because you do. You do always have something of value to share. I've learned a lot from you and I know that others can as well on their own journeys of growth, so thank you Delena for joining.
Delena:
Thank you for having me.
James Robert Lay:
As always, and until next time, be well, do good -
Delena:
And make your bed.
