Ep415: Joy Abdullah – Enhance Your Self Awareness for Success

Andrew Stotz 00:02
Hello fellow risk takers and welcome to my worst investment ever stories of loss to keep you winning in our community we know that to win in investing you must take risk but to win big you've got to reduce it to join our community go to my worst investment ever.com and receive the risk reduction checklist that I created from the lessons I've learned from all my guests and also get my weekly email to help you increase your investment return in the community you can also get a super special podcast listener discount on my six week valuation masterclass boot camp. The boot camp is for those who want to learn exactly how to value companies like a pro and advance their career in finance, just go to my worst investment ever.com to join the community for free. Fellow risk takers. This is your worst podcast host Andrew Stotz from a Stotz Academy, and I'm here with featured guest Joy abdulah. Joy, are you ready to rock? I'm absolutely ready, Andrew, your show? Let's go. Let's do it. Well, you know, I just have to say that there's no way you're gonna go wrong with a podcast with a man named joy. And I just love that. Now, let me introduce you to the audience. From his 30 years experience in various leadership roles across Southeast Asia, Joy abdulah learned the importance of people in the success of an organization. And when it comes to giving our attention, people are influenced by the content, technology, and value that a brand communicates as a business humanize or joy helps b2b service business owners, CEOs and their teams to create emotive impact and influence using organic marketing, my goodness, joy, take a minute and filling further tidbits about your life.

Joy Abdullah 01:54
Absolutely, Andrew, first and foremost, it's a pleasure to be on my worst investment podcast. And I'm glad you reached out because it's a story that I hope is going to help a lot of the audience. Speaking of me tidbits, let's just start with the first thing. I'm just human flesh and blood as you are, as our audience is. The only difference possibly is why we are on this podcast on your podcast together is neither of us have a mask on we are as we are we stand forward. And that leads me to say my four key things that I really value in life after this 30 plus years of journey. honesty, integrity, kindness, and words. I'm going to share start with this we are on a podcast, we are communicating verbally, words, matter. So when I'm communicating verbally, or I'm writing and I'm a prolific writer, anybody who's interested can jump into my LinkedIn and find that out. I'm very particular about the words I use. Now, let's get back to my a little tidbit. Here is something a lot of people don't know about joy. Yeah, well, my mission is to give you a bit of joy in your own life. I'm ethnically Indian. I'm technically British. I'm a British citizen. And my family is a mini un, literally the Security Council by itself. So my wife and my younger two kids are Malaysian. I'm British, and my other two, God bless their souls are Indian, they settled in Germany. That's the little bit of tidbit from my end.

Andrew Stotz 03:28
So we have a Security Council meeting, when the family gets together.

Joy Abdullah 03:32
When we have the family powers in terms of major decisions it is right now it's been the last year and a half zoom calls every other month on anything major, including brothers going to school not going to school online. So yeah, it is literally that I don't even I don't even take the vote. I just take the casting decision and go with it.

Andrew Stotz 03:53
There you go. It's interesting. You said honesty, integrity. What was the third one? Not honesty, integrity, kindness, kindness. Okay, got it. I couldn't read my writing. I was writing it so fast kindness and words. Yeah, you know, that is really interesting. You know, there's some books about how to set goals in one of the different types of ways I've actually I've written a short, a short course called 30. Let's say don't read these 36 books. And that is basically 36 books that I have on, on goal setting and all that. And so one of those books talks about, you know, creating a vision. Yeah. And, you know, on the surface of it of vision seems like a good thing. But what I do is I teach in another course I have called achieve your goals. I teach about words. And I say you've got to be able to verbalize what it is. So for instance, my goals my bigger goals are, I want to be healthy, wealthy and attractive. And then you've got to describe those words with good words. So what does it mean? to be healthy? Right? What it means to me to be healthy? Is my energy overflows, everything beautiful. What does it mean to be wealthy? Money flows to me? And what does it mean to be attractive? Well, for people that aren't watching, you can see I'm not going to win the most attractive, you know, man in Thailand award, but what it means is, I attract good things, and good people really, and, and no picture that I could produce could could help me really get that clear. But also, now you make me think that the benefit of words is that we can clearly communicate that in unequivocal method, right, like a picture could be interpreted in a lot of different ways.

Joy Abdullah 06:02
I wanted to jump in here and digress slightly on this issue of words. We all know the saying a picture speaks 1000 words. Great. But there's a flip side to it. And Andrew, you've done work on this area, we've written a book, and I come from communication. So I'm sharing this, you see, when we use words, why we have to be very, very particular and I run a program all on communication for senior leadership in mindset leadership course, why we have to be clear is the words I'm speaking, carry awaited from my experience from my databank in mind memory. Now, what I'm trying to express using that word, is not exactly the same picture your brain is giving you from your databank in your memory. Now, this is why I said, I'm very, very particular about the words that I choose, because communication isn't complete, until you have transferred your essence and intent of that sentence, as it is, you've transferred that picture from your brain, to your recipients brain. So yeah, if you I personally prefer I couldn't draw to save my life, even if somebody has a gun to my head. But give me a pencil and a paper or anything to write with. And I will be able to draw out everything that you want to express and put it in words. Therefore, what I'm getting at is articulate your vision. Because when you articulate your vision, you start questioning and clarifying. And getting to clarity, your own thinking, you go from conscious into the unconscious, and that's where, you know, you said, I attract the money. That's your definition of welding. So let me give you my definition of welding for our viewers to put it together. I am extremely wealthy. But by your definition, I'm a man on the street. I'm not a billionaire, because I do not have eight digits in my bank. However, I have the love of my family, I have people that I can turn to who love and respect me, to me, that is a huge, huge amount of blessings. As a human being, that is my wealth. I have been of some purpose so far in my journey. So again, words, you see, well, the what it means to you, from your perspective is correct. Well, the what it means to me from my perspective is also correct. It's just two

Andrew Stotz 08:31
viewpoints, looking at the same item from two different angles. That's it, this makes you realize, you know, I like what you said about, you know, what is the intent that you're trying to get across with your words. And I think a lot of times, you know, I have another course I teach, which is how to be a great presenter. And with this particular course, I teach that words convey emotion. In the world of finance, financial people love to talk about numbers. And I ask people to close your eyes and think about these words. So maybe we just do that right now, let's say for the listeners out there, and of course, if you're driving, don't close your eyes, but you're relaxing at home, close your eyes. And, you know, think about think does this word positive to you or negative emergency? Probably negative, right? Let's think of another word like success, probably positive. And then family. Well, in the audience, when I teach this line, I realized, okay, I had a really great family experience, but not everybody did. Drew but that word has a different, you know, meaning and a different intent. And there's a lot more behind that word for different people. And so, finally, I end the exercise by saying Okay, now concentrate very carefully. Think about them. Think about your emotion. Is it positive or negative, and then I say that the number 15. And of course, numbers convey no emotion, no emotion. And so that's what I try to teach young people in the world of finance is that don't get caught up in numbers because they don't convey emotion. Well spot on. It's great to get to know you and understand a little bit more about what you're doing. And I know, I'm a testament to this, I reached out to you on LinkedIn and connected, and we got together. And I know for the listeners, if you want to know more, just reach out on LinkedIn, and connect. And now it's time to share your worst investment ever. And since no one goes into their worst investment thinking it will be tell us a bit about the circumstances leading up to it, then tell us your story.

Joy Abdullah 10:46
happy to share this and I I'm glad Andrew you asked me to come on the podcast and to share this story because it's also something that's taken me the past year, the year of 2020 to work through. So what happened was, and you will appreciate with this your resonates or you resonate with this because we are of the same age and career experience. So you get it. It was October 2018. I had been on a job hunt for 10 months, I had finished my last seven years tent on the January of that year. And like any default senior corporate executive, you have a default setting which is take out your five page resume drill it down to a three page resume pick up that phone and and our good old days we would have gone through our Rolodex now you go through your phone contact, and go bum bum bum bum bum bum bum, Joe, and we carried Larry, I'm here Can I have a cup of coffee and you meet them and you you know, try get a referal look for your new roles. I said 10 months, recruiters, job ads, job boards reference networks, I came out of a financial industry. After seven years, it's on my LinkedIn resume. I had niched myself in extremely badly if I may say I should have left the industry like four years ago, but that's separate. So I was coming off this job hunt. And to give you a picture of my mindset. I had faced ageism, I had faced, you're too overqualified. Sir, we can take you in but you got to drop like, Yeah, what's 55% of whatever you were crossing? I said, too high cost? Could you do a three day week? Do you think you could work as an advisor, not full time, etc, etc, etc. And so my mindset was, what happens after 32 years, you mean to say I have no value. You know, I've got a family and my human being and purpose giving you my mindset. And the reason is, never go into doing something when you're unable to work your mindset out and you said, you value you cherish and you're grateful that your health is your energy that you bring, it's so very important because what we radiate out what's happening here, radiate out, we don't realize it, it's an unconscious behavior radiates out. And that was a mindset. That was the energy I was having at that point in time. And I went into starting a business venture. Now, just one more point before I did this much later. And as I said, literally, it was during COVID internship home homebound, but I had time to really reflect I realized that the decisions I was taking in October 2018, going into early 2019 were actually not driven by emotion, or logic up sorry, they were not driven by logic or strategy. They were partly driven by emotion and the emotion was unfortunately fear. And the fear was acute financial pressure, because my float was, I could see my float disappearing weekly. And you are a finance person. You know what I mean? When you see that? My basic qualification as finance though, for 32 years, I never practiced finance. I've stayed in advertising, marketing and corporate strategy. It was really humiliating to self to see your zeros just getting knocked off week on week even and have to say no, to your family to your most loved ones. No, we can't do dinner this Friday night out. No, we can't do that shopping mall, we have to cut this cut that run down to one car, Park, the other car, no fuel expense, all sorts of stuff. So it was a Financial Express. And it wasn't this mindset that I wouldn't say I jumped but I was driven into a collaborative venture. And this collaborative venture was in business and corporate strategy targeting corporates and mid sized organizations and the SME groups and with another partner who was similarly also out of work out of Singapore. And the two of us had already ganged up. We were Doing a, you know, Punch and Judy show if I may call it for those viewers who will remember from yesterday years back in UK, but we were basically accountability partners to each other and pointing jobs trying to do referrals. And so to our network, in the first six to seven months, going into March, April of 2019, we had this fantastic referals. And we started doing a lot of projects in just planning for certain corporate activities, great, you know, good money, you got 3000 5000 8000 coming in, we were splitting it to office, we're doing it online, no problems. So initially, it was fine. And then we started a podcast, which is called create the edge, it's still available on LinkedIn. And a lot of time went behind that podcast, we started bringing people together to share their stories and their businesses, how they've made an edge in their business growth. The idea of being the podcast could be the face, it will get us visibility, and therefore from there will generate engagement. And my marketing hat was I wanted to get four retainer clients to arrive at our number to have a sort of foundation to grow up. And before we realized 2019 ended, we had done 140 143 episodes, we had done live to, you know, with 50 people globally, sort of 16 hour live from this part of the world. And whilst the whole objective was, can we get our retainer fees, so we have a steady cash flow, because our cash flow was really erratic, we were getting, suddenly we'll have a month where we have four projects, we're getting like 27 $28,000. And then there's because you're delivering on those projects, you can't prospect, you can't do your referrals, and you have a couple of months down, and then boom, you know, third month, you're back into the cash crunch. This was a scenario till literally February, March last year 2020. I was absolutely burned out. I'm not a young pup and I come back to your point health and energy. I'm healthy by God's grace, I'm blessed that I have health. I don't have any major, you know, comorbidities that goes around this region by God's grace, and but I could realize the signs were coming when I knew I was just going to really fall flat on my laptop on my desk, I have a family, I have a responsibility. And I said this far and no further. I said, boom, stop. And just as we were coming to that stop, we were running our second season doing how to manage COVID. I told my partner I said, I'm really sorry. But when we stop this podcast, we've also got two, we've got two projects, we end the deliveries in April, I'm out I really need a breather, I got to take we got to regroup and everything. So as COVID came in, I started realizing I didn't have a few things. I was a consultant on site. I was working projects in Bangalore and Dhaka and Hyderabad and Dubai and Bahrain, flying in flying out my associate was doing the same on on the sales side. And that was not a model that was going to work in COVID when we are all being locked in. And I didn't have a product. I mean, you know, I don't have what today you have Andrew like an online thing. And literally my online programs are just has just come on, come on stream about 45 days ago, I mean, you know, I've just done a three day, two hour session, and I'm going into another one three day, two hour session, and I'm building my online from all of that learning. So I didn't have the retail, individual oriented service products. And I everything was corporate skewed, it was skewed to talk to the CFO, the CEO, the CFO, the CEO, it was all corporate management, team leadership lead into team processes and structures and execution. So the world started going fully online from March April last year. And that's when I had to take a pause, I stopped, I pulled out and when we pulled out my personal debt, and it's it's I brought it down right now it's at 14,000 US dollars bedded down from middle of last year to now and I'm sharing this number openly is because it might not seem to be a large number 14,000 US dollars. But trust me, when you make that transition from being a corporate executive to being I won't call it an entrepreneur back to being an independent consultant advisor business and you're running your own business, everything here that you have, at least for me, I can only speak for myself, or my knowledge of process structure, leadership and policy of 30 years, to be very honest, was of no use when I started doing my own thing and the biggest and I'm jumping here a little bit and I'll share this part of the lesson. What it taught me last year that that debacle when we went to the Because I had lots of high hopes I knew what I'm doing today is going to shine. Last year when I knew it's going to shine, I put myself into a corner by saying, I'm going to make the shine and turn 65 days I forgot being a planner, take into account your environment. dimech do a simple SWOT audit, that your environment is changing your your legalities are gonna change. People are not behaving and doing work the way you've been used to, for 30 years. I missed that bus. Like so badly blindsided, I just missed it or that sheer financial pressure that fear it just left me blinded with a with a visor on. And the lesson was, it's not what you know, it's not your expertise, you've got to understand where the pulse of your target audiences, which means you've got to understand who has a need, that you can solve that simplistically, but you identify that and that's what took me end of last year, first part of this year, literally four months to get going where I was working, marketing, consulting, mainstream. I was doing b2c b2b, e commerce, you name it, I was stretching myself very thin, because the financial pressures were driving me at that point in time. I said, Oh, okay, focus, what's going to happen? Let's do some math. Let's do some numbers. We crunched down, I sat with my, as I said, my mini un, you know, my eldest is 28. And I said, Dude, you're all men need some advice? It's your world. This is what I want to do. And today, I'm really delighted that we speak as friends and conferences and that you've got it right. But your approaches a bit wrong, can you go ABCD, he dropped the Roman, I do three kinds of stuff. And I said, Thank you, love you. Let's go do it. And that's when I started purely focusing on b2b, I realized the research that I had coming in, at least I could access showed how human behavior is starting to affect b2b in terms of marketing, how the high value, you know, in financial b2b service, especially and an investment sometimes has a very high cost. You know, the guys who are the six or eight guys in your investment committee that are sitting in making that decision to go with Andrew, are literally laying their careers on the line, if the returns are not going to be good. So how can you that's where I come in, I actually come into capitalize to point out to say, allay those fears. So as the best investment service possible, how are you going to say, and Andrews credibility of 35 years, and you know, the work is done in Thailand, and the region helps build that up, say, Come I mean, I'm getting into marketing right now. But you build it up, and you focus on that b2b in terms of people, and that's where I've been since February of this year. And I must say, today, those lessons are helping me because I am very picky about clients. Number one, number two, I do not take on more than four, I'm glad I have three at the moment, because me and I have a remote remote team of four, we're able to service for clients, full month, very comfortably. We are always in contact with the clients and we work. And so that's the nutshell of my real estate investment. It's left me with a 40,000 hole still from close to 22,000. And well, I'm almost out Yeah, I think the rest of the year, I'll be able to recover from it. Well, I

Andrew Stotz 23:38
appreciate that. And, you know, I think it's great that you can share, you know, sincerely the struggle that you face, because I know many of the listeners have and are facing similar struggles. How many people in the last year or so have lost their jobs, their corporate jobs, they never thought they would ever lose? How many of those people thought, Okay, I'm going to do something on my own, or I'm going to try to create this and struggled with it. And so by listening to your story, I think it shares a lot. Now one of the things that I take away too is this, I call it chasing revenue. Yeah. When you go into business, you think you're going to be doing this, you think you're going to be selling this, but the fact is, most the time you're wrong. The market doesn't want what you think you what value you think you bring, and then you have to pivot and then provide some other service. And sometimes you have to take jobs that are really, you know, take their ad hoc, they're not something you could repeat. And so you know, you just get frustrated and I'd say that's what I call chasing revenue. And I've been there. I am there right now sometimes and I've been there in the past and I know that it's just a challenge. And I think you know, what ends up happening with any business is that I suspect What happens is that most of us go into business with what we think is a good idea. But we don't go into business saying, I wonder what would be good for people out there, you know, we generate our idea of what we want to add to this world from inside, whereas, you know, by generating it from the outside and what other people want, we don't have to chase revenue as much, but I learned that very slowly. And I still, you know, struggle I recently, I've been teaching the valuation masterclass online for about five years. And I decided, since COVID came, and we were in kind of lockdown mode, I invited eight young people in Bangkok, to my home, to my home office, right. And I set up a classroom for eight people. For six weeks, I operated a boot camp, they had to be there on time at 7am, doors closed, locked, they put their phone in a little box, they didn't get it until the break came. And then I taught them everything I knew from the valuation match class, and coach them as they valued companies. And through the whole process, I got so close to them and got close to my customer, let's say. And what I learned, you know from that was that they want a transformation, they want to come into that cause not knowing really how to value a company, how to forecast the company. And they want to be able to come out of that and say, I can confidently do that. And so we worked hard to make sure they had a final project that was a final valuation project that now and then they we have a great videotapes of them presenting it. And I realized like that, and then I realized that I'm starting to solve a problem that young people face. And that is the perennial problem of I can't get a job because I don't have experience and I can't get experienced because I don't have a job. Yeah, well, by working with me and helping young people to create that first valuation report goes through all the trouble and pain, but to be able to present that at a job interview is gold. And I wouldn't have come up with that if I hadn't had gold time with them for six weeks. And so yeah, I think there's the concept of chasing revenue. And then the concept of trying to hone in on what your market wants is such a great lesson. Anything I would add to that?

Joy Abdullah 27:20
No, I mean, just to add the level. And I couldn't I couldn't echo more know what your market wants. And one of the things in this know what your market wants is that look, the world has changed in the last 18 months. And I'm not going to get into behavioral psychology. But whether we are 25, starting our career, or you're at my age point at 58. And you think, look at 58, I've got more fire than I had when I was 40. Or I was you know, Senior Vice President I was CMO of higher educational institution, etc. The point here is, it taught me my mind, I'll use the word failure. It's not used usually. But I love looking at my failure because my learnings are not in my successes. successes are repeat, repeatable, scalable processes that has helped me achieve a goal. But my learnings, growth has come from my failure. And here's my second lesson, I would love to share with you Andrew and Mike and the audience, which is always remember who's on the other side of whatever you are doing. That's a, you're viewing this as a transaction, you're viewing valuation as a, a and b given day, there's people. And this is why the tagline for my organization, it says people matter. Because you know, at the end of the day, in my world of the b2b, we are a highly logic fact, and data driven decision makers. But let me tell you that that is not how human beings behave.

28:52
We

Joy Abdullah 28:53
are extremely illogical, emotionally driven. animals who have a field first we decide. And then we retrofit logic into that decision. So you can look up psychology on this as much as you want. That's my only lesson I'll leave it. Remember, the other person is an human being human beings are emotionally driven. So if you want, and now I'm coming into a bit into reverse psychology. If you want something to be done. Don't give with the intent of getting it but you must help understand what is going to make that other person look good, feel good, right? And I talked about this in my profile. So remember, this is a second lesson. There's a person behind a designation. There's a person behind the title. Go to that person find that person find the heart. That's what really helps in business, which is what brings me back to my my story of why for clients. People have asked me joy, why for clients? Why don't you prospects when you got a lead? I said because I know my bandwidth. I'm not sitting here to be Jeff Bezos. I'm sitting here on a mission to turn 30 companies to be human in their marketing In the b2b world, look 30 companies, you're a numbers guy, Andrew, you can drill this down. It's two companies a month, or a little over two companies, three companies, sometimes that's not a tall task. Why? Because I'm biting off what I can chew. That's all.

Andrew Stotz 30:16
That's where it's at. Great. So based upon what you learn from this, and you know what you continue to learn, I want you to think about a I normally say a young man or woman, but I want you to think about an older man or woman a person who's got you know, our hairstyle. Yeah. A lot. Mind, by the way. Yeah, exactly. For the listeners out there, we're rubbing our bald heads. Mine, mine is not bald by choice, unfortunately. But so for a way to think about the person around our age has just been bumped out of a job because of the crisis and all of that. What one action would you recommend that that person take to avoid suffering the same fate?

Joy Abdullah 30:59
Three words for actually enhance your self awareness. I purposely slowed my normal rapid fire speech to say that and I repeat, enhance your self awareness, there is no other even if you're down to your last $1,000 us use 950 of that, to get yourself to understand what is your mindset, how your beliefs and habits impact your behavior, which actually impact your decision making, and your self leadership, enhance your self awareness. That's people in our age bracket where you feel bumped off, number one, number two, stop feeling sorry for yourself, you're more than a title, you're more than a designation, and that's in your path. You drive your car, looking at the rearview mirror, you check the rearview mirror, when you stop, or you're crossing something, or you're about to gauge how far is the car, don't drive with your eyes on the back, it ain't gonna get you in the front. Right, enhance your self awareness. I invested exactly the amounts that I'm telling you to start off in 2019. This is one other learning after 32 year corporate and tons of leadership and skills and all of those workshops and everything again, my growth has come from what I have been able to invest in myself, and it's actually led me to doing a collaborative venture. So please, enhance your self awareness. And I'll point you this way. Those who are Andrews audience, you're listening to this podcast, reach out to him, he'll give you where to go and how to do even he can do it. Yep.

Andrew Stotz 32:44
Right. And last question. I'm just writing down, enhance your self awareness. I love it. Last question, what's your number one goal for the next 12 months.

Joy Abdullah 32:53
I've already mentioned this in passing. So I'm not going to labor on this. I've got two number one goals. From a business perspective. 30 b2b companies to be human. What I mean by that is to have their people, their employees, their customers, their buyers, their partners feel good. I'm part of the worst investment podcast. I'm part of humanizing business. Now. It's not who A lot of people have said, I've done this with my clients. That's my first objective, which is you really have a family bond happening between your brand your company and yourself in your roles as an employee, customer buyer or whatever. So that's my first goal. And that's my process in humanizing business. personal perspective, to be very honest, and this is a little selfish one. I simply want the family to be together physically in one location for just a fortnight I've been missing my daughter and my eldest one it's been it's on its third year they were supposed to come home in 2024 a month in Christmas and New Year and it didn't happen. Now we don't know when travel is gonna open so that's those are my two running big list number one goals for this year. Perfect.

Andrew Stotz 34:10
Well, listeners there you have it another story of loss to keep you winning. My number one goal for the next 12 months is to help you my listener, reduce risk and increase return in your life. To achieve this I've created our community at my worst investment ever.com so join and also get a special discount for podcast listeners to my six week valuation masterclass boot camp. And as we conclude, joy, I want to thank you again for coming on the show. And on behalf of a Stotz Academy, I hereby award you alumni status for turning your worst investment ever into your best teaching moment. Do you have any parting words for the audience?

Joy Abdullah 34:50
Most kind of you, Andrew. My parting words is our golden rule which you are aware of. Do unto others as you would have them do unto To you. That's it. Been a principal all my life? I'll leave you with that. Remember, the other person in front of you is just a human just like you with fears, worries, hopes and aspirations. Stay well stay safe. Pleasure, Andrew. Thank you.

Andrew Stotz 35:17
Beautiful and that's a wrap on another great story to help us create, grow and protect our well fellow risk takers. This is your worst podcast hose Andrew Stotz saying. I'll see you on the upside.