Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining us today. My name is Eric Nutting. I am the owner of the growth coach of St. Petersburg, Florida and the founder of the Sage Approach and.

And now a proud podcast host of the Sun Leaders. And that’s where we are today. This is our first episode.

It’s very exciting, a little unusual. We are recording in front of the Sun Leaders right here, which is a vibrant group of thought provoking people, like minded people with great energy moving in the same direction. Our guest today is awesome because he is the founder of The sun leaders, Mr. Josh Naiman.

We’ll speak with him in just a second, but I want to give a quick shout out to Jordan Rosenberg over there in the corner. He is our audio expert, but more importantly, he is the founding member of PM Tiger. They play locally and abroad and I encourage you to check them out and give them a listen.

So thanks for everything you do, Jordan. So we talked about energy. I am an energy guy.

I’m rooted in metaphysics. I feel it, but I want to hear it. Everybody make a little bit of noise, clap, cheer, whatever you have to do.

We get this thing started. All right, Mr. Josh Naman. Naman creative.

Welcome to the first episode of the Sun Leaders podcast. Wow. Well, I didn’t see this coming, but thanks for having me on.

It’s really cool that someone made this all happen, but no, for real, it wasn’t just me. Like, everybody in this room is responsible for this. So, Eric, you, Jordan, our wonderful leadership team and everybody in this room.

This would not be a thing without all of you. Literally every person in here needed to get that out of the way. I appreciate that.

And I need to get one thing out of the way because I think we speak almost every day. We ramble on, we share ideas, so we have the chance to do that today in front of people. So I’m curious to see how that goes, but I did prepare a few questions and I want to get these.

I don’t want these to go unaddressed. So the first question I have is what gives? What? What gives you the right? I was wondering if you were going to sleep. So I love that we are office geeks, the show, Right.

And you always try to sneak a reference to the office in your episode. So I wanted to get it out of the way and not miss it. Oh, I love you, Eric.

I don’t have the right. I mean, all of us have the right to do something like this. It’s.

That’s so amazing. We live in a country that we’re free to do whatever we want in to a degree, obviously, and like create. We can create things out of Thin Air.

My company, I created out of Thin Air because I wanted to do something great and work with lots of awesome people. People in this room. I work with like half the people in this room on some form or another.

Actually, we work together. Everybody in this room works with us. And creating out of Thin Air has been my world since I can remember.

As a musician, as an artist, as a designer. I love making things that were not there before. And I feel like.

And many of people in this audience can hear, are involved in many different networking organizations. And there’s something very powerful to that. There seemed to be something missing with like all of the networking organizations, which was a focus on.

On leadership. And I talking to Doug, who’s in the. In the crowd here, Doug Jackson, and talking to yourself, Eric, and lots of other people.

We started to be able to express these cracks and it was like, how could we fill this void? And one thing led to another and all of a sudden here we are at meeting six and there’s an unstoppable momentum meeting, meeting six. So I want to talk about how this originated. But first I want you to just to share a smidge because we’re going to reach some new people that we haven’t had a chance to meet yet that will be listening.

So I want to talk just briefly and then we’ll jump into sunleader specifically. Tell us about name and creative, what you do, why you do it, and then hit us with your tagline because it’s one of the best. Okay, cool.

Well, I’ll try to. Well, our tagline I’m going to get right at the beginning is to create for good. And it’s a double entendre.

We create logos or a website that you can build on that will last for good for the life of your business. That’s the goal, unless you make some sort of big pivot. But also the second aspect to that is that we are trying to use our talents.

Jordan’s unbelievably talented right here. I want to collectively use our efforts to do good in the world. As maybe cliche as that sounds, we have the power to direct where our efforts go.

So the museum of motherhood is right here. Joy is in the crowd here. And now we work with them as a partner and.

And we help them with their website. That is meaningful, great explorations. Children’s museum is in the crowd right here, Alex.

And we work with them on their website I had a meeting with them earlier today and it was unbelievably meaningful. And in fact, I am about to introduce the Museum of Motherhood to work with Great Explorations Children’s Museum, because that is what it’s all about. So this stuff means a lot to me.

I could. We could do websites for all sorts of entities. But what I really want to niche down to, and we don’t just do websites, by the way, we do logos and branding and we work with businesses on their ongoing marketing efforts.

And we have an audio division run by my good friend Jordan Rosenberg. And we produce podcasts, do music for commercials. We could do music scores for film films and ideally documentary film productions.

But ultimately using all of these talents directed towards businesses and organizations that are out there doing good. So we help propel that good with our efforts. So it’s a win, win, win, win.

However many you’re keeping track of there. Yes. And so we are targeting museums, nonprofit organizations, science based entities and educational entities.

Those are our four main goals as far as who we’d like to work with. If we can just go out there and choose which we are starting to do that. However, there are people in the audience such as the law firm of Douglas G.

Jackson, who is a community based law firm. And we believe in what they’re doing and so we are really excited to work with them because they’re not just a law firm and that pumps us up. So we align with all sorts of businesses and all sorts of industries, but ultimately at the end of the day, do they align? If not, there’s a lot of other marketing companies they can work with and we wish them the best, but we make sure to keep that alignment at top of mind.

So I think that really speaks to why we’ve gathered in this room today. We meet the first and third Friday of every month right here at the Florida Nest in St. Petersburg, Florida, owned by Hampton and Hampton. But let’s connect the dots.

So name and creative. Great. Now we’re here with Sun Leaders.

Who is a sunleader. Anybody can be a Sun Leader. Everybody in this room is now a Sun Leader.

There’s no barrier to entry. Whether you like it or not, you’re a Sun Leader. No, I mean, one thing about this organization that we wanted to do is keep it open.

It is fully inclusive and there’s no barrier to entry. If someone wants to develop as a human to help the community to get involved and to develop themselves as a leader and develop their business, this is their home and there’s no there’s no membership fee to do so. There are.

There are bonuses that you can buy into, like being a host of the Sun Leaders podcast. And we’re building more things that come with the organization. But ultimately, at the end of the day, we want everybody to be able to be involved, because the more people that we uplift and we take care of each other, the better our community is.

Right, so that explains who you envision a Sun Leader to be. So where did this idea originate? How long have you been working on it? How long did it take to put together? Doug, when did we have that first meeting? It was like a year and a half ago, probably, I would say, which, honestly, 18 months is not bad, right? 18. 18 months for an idea.

Well, that’s when it. When it, like, the. We were starting to, like, put the two pieces of sticks together and, like, build some sparks.

Whereas, like, hey, there’s. There’s this need, but we’re not sure what this thing is going to be. And then we had a wonderful lunch group, which is still a wonderful lunch group.

And they’re. And. And that lunch group has a particular vision of let’s pass leads, which is fantastic.

And. And. But that’s not the whole picture that I saw.

Could be a group. I saw there’s, like, much bigger opportunity than just passing leads. And in fact, you haven’t heard, except for right now, that I’m talking about it.

The Sun Leaders is not about passing leads. However, I know for a fact that people have gotten business directly from being involved in this group and. And developed new partnerships.

It’s inherent when you get people of this caliber together in one place consistently, but that’s not the goal. And so, you know, our goal was how can we build the community up? And so two and a half months ago, it. It kind of resurrected and was like, why don’t we fill this need? And timing was right for me.

When I see an opportunity, I just absolutely roll with it. I made the logo like, a week later and just started to define what this thing was. Not only do you roll with it, you become obsessive.

Yeah. So, I mean, I speak with you, and I always say to my clients, I go, hey, listen, let’s pick the target, not move the target, hit the target. But you have a lot of targets, don’t you? Yeah.

And you are what I would call, with a young family, sleep deprived. Is that true? Yeah. Right, right.

I remember those days. But I’m now an old man, and I look at you and go, oh, Josh, I hope you get some Sleep someday. Talk to me.

I think we talked about this on the episode that, that you hosted. Tell me on name and creative. Tell me about, tell me about your sleep patterns.

That’s what I want to know is we’re going off script, but I got to know about these sleep patterns. It’s sleep when you can. I have a really good friend.

He was on episode four of our podcast, Zeb Wood. Shout out to him. He’s a great man and he’s doing a lot in the community in Indiana.

He always used to say, because he was my professor, that’s how we met. Now we’re just best friends. He said, I’ll sleep when I’m dead and I like it and don’t at the same time.

And I kind of take that philosophy where it’s like, well, I need to get stuff done and this is meaningful and to make keep this momentum, I just need to get the work done. Also, there’s something about the night. I don’t know how many people resonate out there with me, but from 11pm to 3am you are not getting new emails, you’re not getting new calls.

So everything that’s on your plate stays and there’s a quiet in the world. And for me, that allows me to really focus on the production of work, working on people’s websites and logos and pricing sheets, etc. So I take naps when I can during the day.

So I’ll sneak a 20 minute in there. Oh, I’ve seen you. Yeah, you probably sometimes there’s no hiding it.

Sometimes the nap just takes over me ultimately, you know, most of the nights I’m up till 2 or 3 lately and I’m really trying to change that. I have a wonderful business coach. Have you heard of Eric nutting the guy? Don’t know the guy.

And he’s really helping me formulate processes, get things in tune so that I can get more sleep. Ultimately, what’s cool is when I wake up, like right now, I was up till 3 last night. I am pumped up, I’m not tired 1%, so it doesn’t matter because I get energized throughout the day and, and I just utilize that, that energy.

So the sleep pattern is sporadic, but ultimately I try to get, you know, four to five hours a night. Okay, I sneak it in there. Well, we’re going to do an exercise a little bit later, but I think what I’m hearing is leaders don’t sleep.

I think that’s a T shirt. Is that what it is? That’s actually Not a bad T shirt. We’re going to come out with a merch line, so we’re going to put that on there.

Leaders don’t sleep. Just a quick little check in here. Who thrives during nighttime hours? Make some noise.

All right, so we got morning people. Who thrives during morning hours here. There we go.

The morning zone. The day. Right now that is an indicator of why I can stay quiet at night.

Because I think if all of you were active at night, then I wouldn’t get that as much peace possibly. So that’s cool. We can keep it that way.

I used to work into the evening because I have a big family, a lot of kids, and when they were quiet, I could work. But now it’s shifted because everybody works in the morning. So I got them, I got to meet them where they, where they want me to meet them.

So now where do you see us going as a group? What’s your vision? Do you have a vision? Are you waiting for the collective to help you form it? Talk to us about that. Both. So what’s cool is.

And Eric, I don’t want this to go unsaid. You have been my right hand man through this entire journey and developing it. You gave us the idea for, for the sharecast model of what this podcast is going to be.

You gave it to me in passing. This. So let me jump in for a second.

Hold that thought. Bookmark is. So the sharedcast idea.

This is why it’s exciting. We get to hear from multiple people hosting shows, so we get all these different perspectives. They’ll have their guesses that they want to have on.

I’m really excited about it because it’s going to give us this great lens to evaluate and break down leadership. All right, continue. Well, that goes into the mission.

So the mission ultimately is to do all of those things that I spoke to you about before. Building each other up, being involved in the community, developing strong partnerships, education, teaching each other. And then all of us then uplift from there and all of us continuing to uplift each other is like this perpetual motion machine in a positive direction.

So ultimately that’s the foundation. It’s now the programming like the Sun Leaders podcast that is this wonderful thing that, that now propels this mission in a different medium in a different way. I’m really excited about this.

We’re going to do each year a summit and we’re developing the idea right now. But I’m telling you what, this is going to be really cool. But essentially we’re going to spend a day if not more together.

And we’ll have educational seminars, development seminars. We’re going to do a ton of stuff together throughout a large chunk of time, not just an hour and a half. And our wonderful Devika here is helping us develop the plan for the first one.

A lot of exciting stuff there. We’re going to do a merch shop, so we’re going to have our brand out there, T shirts, stuff like that, to say, hey, you know, like this is a thing. We’re going to develop the website in 2024 and.

And we’re going to gamify the website so everybody in here would have a. It’s going to have. As a Sun leader, you attend one meeting, we’re going to make you a profile, and you’re going to have a profile page on the website.

And then from there you’re going to earn badges. And so you came to one meeting, you get a first meeting badge, you sponsored a meeting, you get a sponsorship badge, you were a featured speaker at a meeting, you get a featured speaker badge, you did a beach cleanup, a beach cleanup badge sponsored by the law firm of Douglas G. Jackson or something like that.

So we’re going to have this really robust website and just continue to build this community and ride the momentum. We have a book club that you called Sun Readers. Yes.

That’s pretty cool, right? We’re on our first book right now. Local Author. Yeah.

And we have hopefully our second book that we’re reading. Are going to read. And that local author is in the audience right now.

And so that’s taken a form on its own. We were just going to do a book club at first and then someone locally who’s an author we were connected to and we go, we all voted. Let’s read her book because she’s local.

We’ll support local. And it’s a great book in alignment with leadership and this now we’ve been graced with another one. Yeah.

And so I think we’re just going to pull that thread until the thing I trust most of our audience are going to be people in St. Pete. So it’s really kind of speaking to the choir, preaching to the choir. But it’s a pretty amazing community.

We meet amazing people every day, which always makes me think, who have we not met yet? We have such a talented, diverse group in St. Petersburg, Florida, which is why we’re here. I want to ask you, what do you feel our responsibility is to our community as leaders? Well, I know that the two words is coming and I’m trying to figure out what two were. I still haven’t decided the two words, but community is kind of embedded inherently in leadership.

You, if you. I mean, you can lead yourself solely, if that’s a word, or you can lead yourself alone. And so you need to lead your life individually.

But ultimately, when we normally think of a leader, it’s leading a team. That team, therefore, is a community inherently. And then that team goes out into the world, purchases things, interacts with their friends, their family who are embedded in the community.

Community is literally everything. It’s where all the decisions are made. It’s where all the purchases are made.

It’s where everything happens. And. And leaders are.

I feel like they’re the ones who have taken on maybe just a little more responsibility on trying to help move things in a positive direction, whatever their position may be. And community is literally embedded in the definition of leadership, in my opinion. So lead for good.

Could be a new T shirt. Is anybody writing these down? I’m not even the marketing guy. Look at me go.

It’s incredible. We are recording it. That’s a good point.

Good point. Thank you so much. So do we think we’re going to grow to thousands of people in our group? We’re going to.

We’re going to need new space. What are you thinking? Yes, I hope. Because that would be awesome.

And it would be a really great indicator that people care and want to move the needle in the positive direction collectively and work together. At that point, we’re going to have one of these buildings of our own, and that. That is ultimately a goal.

Also, another goal is what happens when this starts to seep out outside of St. Pete. Okay. Clearwater wants to do something.

Tampa wants to do something. What if Zeb wants to take it and do something like this, this model in Indiana? So we’re already starting to think about how we can use this as a model for other cities, other states in the nation. Right.

I think the other interesting thing is we’re not seat specific. We’re not a deliberate networking group. But this is one of the best networking groups I’m in.

And I think to that point, there’s that word coopetition that I stole from other people. Right. But that’s really what we want to be.

We want to be this big, huge collective of coopetition. 100%. Yeah.

I love that word more than like anything. It’s fantastic because people who get all defensive about their competition or like seat specifics or this. I get it.

Get it completely. I’m in a networking organization that is Heat Specific. It makes sense.

You paid money for it. Right, Exactly. But it makes sense.

But ultimately, at the end of the day, no matter what, outside of those walls, there’s a million other marketing companies and audio production companies, etcetera, Doing what we do. But it’s like, why do they choose us? And you have to be out there building trust, building relationships. Because everything stems from relationships, as we know, Eric.

Yes. And that’s. That’s where you actually, you know, cooperate.

Did I say. But, you know, I mean, your competition is always going to be there. Copyright pending Copyright Trademark.

That’s mine now. I’m gonna use that. I like that.

That’s mine now. But, you know, your competition is going to be out there, so might as well, like, make friends. And honestly, your competition is probably going to throw you work because you don’t do everything that they do, and they don’t do everything that you do.

Always. Banks, museums, you name it. Jingle writers.

You do some. Something different than we do. So we can work together, and it’s fantastic.

And we lift each other up, and now we go to bed feeling great, and we uplift each other. Why wouldn’t we want that? It’s not hard. We have just a few more minutes for this segment, and then we’ll.

We’ll get the group involved. But talk to me a little bit about ego and the leader. A leader’s ego.

What does that mean to you when I ask you that? I think, you know, you can’t get rid of an ego. It’s, like, embedded in us. I taught at the Art Institute for six years, and I went through academia through my master’s degree in a creative field where every project that we did here, you guys are my peers.

I would have to put my work. Here’s my logo. What do you guys think of it? I want to learn from you.

I want you to pick this logo apart so that I can get better and make a better peace, ultimately. And what we used to say is that when you get in the door, you check your ego at the door. Same with scientific endeavors.

You can’t bring that stuff into the lab. It does nobody good. Let’s.

Let’s work with what we have available, the information at hand, evidence and the facts. And let’s work from there, because that’s the only language that we can commonly speak. Everybody has their different ideas of the world and what’s going on, but how can we all talk about the same thing and stay on the same page? And that ego just gets in the way.

But if we can. If we can actually eliminate that, there’s a vulnerability there. But that is where growth happens.

That’s where success happens. I think ego gets in the way a lot of times, even in sports. Like, think about it.

Someone who’s a ball hog, yeah, they might score more points, but collectively, does the team win just because of that? No. And also is just getting more points than the other team all is. Is that winning or is it that you guys had a great time and you worked as hard as you could? Right.

So there’s all these aspects to that. Hi, my name is Devika. I am a travel agent.

My company’s name is Inspiring Quests Travel Agency, which basically means quests or travels that inspire you to become a better version of of yourself. My website is inspiringquests.net we are a concierge travel agency, which means we specialize in our clients and we provide you with customized itineraries and booking services at no additional cost to you.

And that’s me. You’re a good interviewer, Eric. Thanks.

So we are going to segue just a smidge. And for those of you who’ve not had a chance to visit us in person, SunLeaders, we meet, as we said, the first and third Friday of every month, and we have a sponsor that is kind enough to provide lunch, and then they get to share their business specifically with the group. And that’s what we’re going to do.

Usually in our podcast as we move forward, it’s going to be recorded, but we get a chance to do that live today. But as we move into that portion we had in our Facebook group, which I encourage listeners to reach out to us and join as well. Get involved.

We had an exercise, which I believe you originated, Josh, and it was give us two words that describes a leader. Two words. You get two words to do this.

Doug, being an overachiever, gave us how many? A whole bunch. 20. So I’m going to ask you for your two words, and then we’re going to toss it over to Devika so she can tell us all about everything that she has going on for us and her two words as well.

And then we’re going to open it up to the group. And I encourage you, as we do in our group meetings, to stand up, tell us who you are, who you work for, and give us your two words, because we want our listeners to know all about you. Josh, you’re on.

Like I said, I’ve been thinking about this for a while, even since I posted that post. I don’t know If I actually answered my own question, because it’s really hard and one thing I wanted to say is all these answers were making shirts from them, at least the good ones. Yeah.

But honestly have a lot of cool designs and I didn’t think of that when I started the question, but I was like, these are perfect shirts. So this just a thing where like it’s really cool to like just run with these ideas and let the community evolve naturally. My two words based on now this conversation is inspire.

Community. So a leader can inspire in many different ways and I think that’s huge. Inspire being motivating.

Inspire to do better, to grow, to, to do better in the world. That’s the inspiration. And then the community aspect is the world in which they operate, what they’re doing in the world.

And keeping that top of mind that whatever actions you do correlates to the community. And what action I do right now affects you guys and vice versa. I love it.

I love it. Inspire was one of my words too. I had invest and inspire.

So I mean I think inspiration is a huge portion of it. What’s the investor? Can you, can you. Oh, you need to have a lot of money, invest investment of energy because it’s always investment in return.

A lot of people think that great results will happen if they just sit back and manifest things. But action has to be behind that. So there’s got to be an investment behind that.

So thank you, Josh, it’s been a great pleasure. We’re not completely through yet, but I’m going to turn it over to my good friend Devika Devika. Please approach that microphone.

Tell us everything we need to know about you and what you do. Did you know 100% of the people who did not use a travel agent were stressed out during their vacations? And 100% of the people who used a travel agent like myself had a clear itinerary telling them what to do day by day. So it led to stress free vacation.

This according to a statistic that I just created for the purpose of this. Don’t go anywhere. Devika, I have to ask you to pronounce your last name because I can’t yet.

If you write it down, it’s quite simple. It’s Srivastava. Now put it all together because it’s lovely.

Srivastava. Okay, Love it. So you, I am proud to say, just have a new certification which I’m really, really excited about.

Do you want to share that with everybody and how it connects to what you’re doing? Yes, absolutely. I Have a wellness certification. It is a wellness travel certification, which basically means I’m working towards my niche of promoting wellness travel as a means of life.

A lot of times we as busy professionals forget how important it is to disconnect and just reconnect with yourself. Disconnect from technology, disconnect from the world. That’s when the best ideas flow, and.

And that’s when you recover from the stresses of the world. So that’s my inspiration to do travel. Awesome.

I love it. Thank you so much. Now you’re on the spot.

Two words that describe leadership to you. I have two sets of two words. Okay, okay, Doug.

I’m sorry. I may be the new Doug. Okay.

So my first was coordinated efforts, because as a leader, it is your vision, and then it becomes your job to make sure that you coordinate the team’s effort towards that main goal. So that’s pretty straightforward. My second set of words was shared consciousness.

Believe it or not, we all are related somehow. We all started from somewhere, and that consciousness still flows in each one of us. And that is how you can see when we are about to have, like, a major event, we all start feeling it.

And that speaks to me as a leader. You have to be in tune with the shared consciousness, at least of your team, to know how they are feeling, which direction, and how best to lead them. Awesome.

Thank you for being you. I appreciate it. Of course.

So we don’t want to stop there now. We wanted to open up, open it up to everybody. I encourage you.

This is your chance to let people know who you are, what you do, and give us two words for leadership. Anybody brave enough to approach that microphone? All right, you’re on. All right, podcaster, by the way.

Hey, tell us about that. A fellow podcaster, I’m Valerie Hale. I have two sides of my company, and the umbrella is Chez Valerie.

It’s a French origin because they used to sell French wine in New York for 20 some odd years. My podcast is Wealth Yoga Wine. The wealth is all about a mindset, and it’s all about people.

Women especially. Somehow or another became my focus. People who are improving the world are people who I interview for my podcast, Yoga Kundalini Yoga I’ve done for 30 years, every day wine.

I sold French wine. How can I walk away from that? So that’s the podcast. Nice.

Now, Josh has done an amazing job of consolidating my logo into something that I love doing, and that’s public speaking. Awesome. My two words would be poise and power, because in public speaking, if you don’t have that agility, you lose both when you speak to people and when you communicate.

If you don’t have poise in your voice, you lose your power. That name of the company is all in our minds. All in our minds.

Poise and power. Thank you very much. Definitely going to be a shirt.

All right, and who do we have next? Step on up. You’re going to have to count down. 3, 2, 1.

Because I always do this live. Okay, here we go, ladies and gentlemen. Three, two, one.

I am the jingle writer, your top of mind provider. Write the songs that make the whole world buy. I write the songs that make them.

Give you a try. Got to do that. Also decided.

So I am doubly live. I’m live on Facebook. Say hello to Sun Leaders, everybody.

We are. I just have to say. I just have to say, we are in beautiful Sun Leadersburg.

Oh, come on. There’s another shirt saying I kind of like that. So anyway, that’s another shirt for sure.

So, yeah, I create slogans and melodies to make your message more memorable. That’s what I do. So I’m going to say goodbye.

Oh, no, I’m not. Two words. You said two words.

Very important. I’m going to say create opportunity. Nice.

Because, I mean, I can’t be in what I do and not use the word create and be creative, but also creating opportunities. And I think that’s something that we all do. And thank you, guys.

Come check us out. Here it is again. Awesome.

That’s a logo. We’re at the nest in Saint Pete’s. See you the first Friday of January.

All right, this is your chance to be heard and share, please. Who’s next? So I first off, just want to thank Josh because this is just such an amazing room of people here and at this point, I actually know quite a few of you. So just so happy to be here at this first recorded live edition.

So my name is David Pavone for anybody that doesn’t know me. And I am with Evolve Social Community. It is a group here based in St. Petersburg.

We focus on personal growth, relationship building through activities, and also facilitate entrepreneurship and the enrichment of human relationships. Here with me today also is joining us, Anandita Paulus, who will come up next here and introduce herself. She is also one of our organizers, but she is also a business owner and a realtor here in St. Petersburg.

Nice. Thank you so much. Thanks so much.

Hello. Hello. Thank you.

Thank you for having me here and thanks so much for doing this. It’s such a wonderful opportunity. To be here.

And thanks to David for letting me know about this. I’m really enjoying and I hope to see you all at the upcoming meetings. So my name is Anandita Paulus.

My friends call me Annie. I think it’s less of a tongue twister so I just introduce myself as Annie. And yes, I’m a local realtor here in the area.

I especially love working with for sale by owners as well as those whose listings expired. Working with a previous agent for a couple of reasons. Because for sale by owners often don’t know how much money they’re leaving on the table by trying to sell the property themselves.

And sometimes people when they have worked with some agents and they didn’t have a good experience, their homes just sat on the market, didn’t get sold, they just feel so I guess they get disheartened and they feel like they also sometimes end up selling their homes for much less than what they could. So I love to especially work with them. Apart from that, my another line of work is also teaching meditation workshops.

Like David mentioned, I’ll be teaching the next one on December 18th and that has been my passion for a long time. Having doing that for over 10 years now. So.

Yes. And I recently authored a book. Actually it’s not that recent.

A few years ago I have it. Yes, that’s right. Yes.

It’s called the Healing Sutras. So yeah. And my two words for leadership would be service and integrity.

Service and integrity. Because I feel like as leaders we need to put forward or you know, focus more on the idea of focusing on others needs first, the people we are working with before our own needs. And sometimes I see that not happening so much with big businesses and integrity because again, integrity in my mind it means standing for what I believe in.

And of course I am open to the idea that I’m not always right. I can be wrong sometimes too. But in the given moment, whatever it is that I believe in, whether I’m standing for it or am I deliberately standing for something that I don’t even believe in.

So that is what integrity means to me. So I feel like as leadership to be of service, to place service behind personal gain or personal benefit. And integrity is what I personally stand for.

Well, we’re glad you’re here. We’re looking forward to reading your book as a group. Thank you so much.

Absolutely. Yeah. Thank you.

As we wait for our next person to approach the mic, I want to encourage our listeners to also participate in this. In the show notes, you’ll have some ways to get A hold of everybody. But more importantly, we encourage you to share your two words with us over social media and in the show notes.

Wherever you’re listening to our show, Approaching the microphone right now is. Hi, I’m contestant number 21. Number 21.

And I represent the state of St. Petersburg, Florida. Oh, that’s not a state. And I’m looking for world peace.

No. Hey, everybody. Dan.

Dan the payroll man with Landmark Payroll. National payroll company, locally owned. Let’s see, definition.

I’m going to do exactly what Josh told me to and not tell you 10 minutes of my business. But I like the words of empowering others for leadership. Empowering others.

I like it pretty simple. You wear it proudly, you win. And by the way, thank you.

Thank you very, very much. Hi, my name is Adam Morris. I’m with Be Smart Accounting.

We do bookkeeping services for small businesses. Quite a few clients in the room. So my two words for leadership, they are responsibility and influence.

So responsibility is just. As a leader, you’re not only responsible for yourself, you’re responsible for the people under you, your organization, or whoever you’re leading. You have to hold that responsibility for them.

If they make mistake, it’s your responsibility to fix it and to do it in a good way. You know, you don’t want to put people down for their mistakes as well. Also, influence, and that kind of goes into that as well, is just having good influence on people.

You’re. You’re constantly influencing people as a leader. So those are two words that I think you really should focus on as a leader.

I like it. Thank you. Thank you for sharing.

All right. Yeah. Approach that microphone.

We have some more. Yeah, we got time. My name is Joe Hutchings.

I manage the First Citizens bank branch right down the street on Central and 59th. And I’m primarily a business maker, but also just a relationship manager in general. So I love what I do.

Although there are things, three types of bankers, those who can count and those who can’t. So thank God for Excel calculators. I think I told that joke earlier, but, yeah, I. I think so.

For me, because I’ve been a leader, gosh, since I was in college working at Best Buy and, you know, through a couple different banks that I’ve worked for. And I think being intentional is very important. A goal without a plan is just a wish.

And also making sure that your team knows what that plan is and knows how to execute it and being there to support and guide and help them grow and learn. Right. And with that, I’m always Growing and learning.

To Josh’s point earlier, talking about, you know, being vulnerable is my second word. Right. So just having the ego check it at the door.

Ego is very important though, too. So it’s kind of a double edged sword. But at the same time, being vulnerable encourages followership and just connecting with empathy.

And it helps to really just kind of have everybody on your team work with you. So it’s not like a you work for me type of thing. Nice.

It’s we work together. You work with me, not for me. Awesome.

That’s it. All right. Thank you so much.

So I’m going to say last call, but that doesn’t mean you can’t go. I want to make sure everybody who wants to participate participates, but we’re going to keep you moving. Step on up to the microphone.

Share everything you want to share. Well, not everything, but yet. Hi, I’m Alexis Egoscue from the law firm of Douglas G.

Jackson. I do the community relationship marketing, coordinating everything. That’s not law, that’s me.

So I have so many words. This is kind of my thing, so. But I’ve narrowed it down.

So you need to be accountable and you need to be collaborative. So if I am saying, let’s be somewhere at a specific time, let’s go do this together, and I’m not there or I’m late, it doesn’t look good for me. I can’t expect out of you what I don’t do myself.

And being collaborative, I mean, there’s. That’s what we are about. The only way to get your business to grow and thrive is by working with others.

And there’s enough space for everybody. So build each other up, work together. See how you can help other people network.

Well, do things in the right positive way and they come back to you. Thank you. I love it.

Thank you. Yeah. Great.

All right. Hello, welcome to the mic. Hey, thanks for having me.

Joy Rose for the Museum of Motherhood. And I think I’m gonna be followed by more museums. And we’re so happy to be represented in the nonprofit world here in St. Pete.

Right. It’s the city of museums and arts and everything else. I would say my two words are back to the sleepless nights that we were talking about in the beginning.

Courage and commitment. So sometimes as a leader and in my experience, you can have a great idea, things take off for a hot minute and then they slow down. What’s going to keep you going when things slow down? Your sense of purpose and courage and what you have to do to swashbuckle through whatever you need to do to get where you want to go.

If you lead, they will follow. And also the commitment. If you’re slacking off as a leader, your team was going to slack off too.

So you’ve got to be willing to do those sleepless late nights sometimes to pave the way so that others can see this is a meaningful endeavor and I’m willing to put in the work. I hope you are too. So thanks for having me.

Great group. Museum of motherhood. Check us out.

Thank you so much. And bonus points for swashbuckling. Swashbuckle.

I love it. Hello. Hi, I’m Alex Sierra Marco and I’m the development assistant at Great Explorations Children’s Museum down the street in St. Pete.

We’re a nonprofit children’s museum and our mission is to stimulate learning through creativity, play and exploration. So we have our physical museum on Fourth street in St. Pete and then we do a lot of outreach in the community and in the schools, trying to reach as many children as we possibly can and just further our positive impact in the community. So thank you.

Go museums. Two words. You can’t go.

Sorry, that was the first part. My two words that I think about the leader that I want to be and the leaders that I look up to. My two words are unify and empathy.

Ah. And I’m not going to give any other speech about that. You can take that from if you want.

Ho ho. Thank you so much for sharing. Who do we have here? You better introduce both of you.

We have the first animal on the podcast. That’s right. All right, I’ll be quick.

My name is Zachary Gottlieb. I own Exact Payment Solutions, the highest rated merchant services provider in Town. Almost 105 stars on Google.

The two words I picked. I was outside with my puppy here, so hopefully these weren’t used awareness. Like being aware of maybe not bringing your pitbull puppy to a.

A live podcast. I think that’s really huge for leaders. You know, being aware of the whole team dynamic.

There’s a lot of moving parts. How are you impacting those around you? Right. And then the last one is resilience.

I think leaders need to be able to build themselves back up from the ground if necessary and just kind of have that attitude of you can’t keep me down. So thank you. Awesome.

Thank you very, very much. Love it. Is there anyone who has not had the opportunity to go that wants to go? In that case, I am excited to introduce Ms. Whitney Smith, also a friend of mine.

But there are so many things that we could talk about, but specifically, Whitney, you’re our next host. Yes. Tell us all about what we can look forward to.

I am super excited. Proud to be the second host of the SunLeaders podcast. My name is Whitney Smith.

I am the owner and attorney of your rental property Attorney, pllc. So we do real estate, but we focus primarily on landlords. So I spend the majority of my day thinking about the real estate industry, landlord, tenant relationship, and how that affects who we house in our community.

So I wanted to focus my episodes on female leaders in either the real estate industry or in the housing communities. Affordable housing community. The first episode is going to be starring Jackie Casella, and she has such an interesting story about coming to Florida, experiencing homelessness, and then taking what she learned through that experience, creating a property management system and our company, an insurance company, and then broadening her horizon to reach out to leaders and teach
leaders how to remember how to fill their cup before they lead.

Awesome. Super interesting. It just.

It goes. It proves how you can go from one thing and evolve into another. And her three core values are empowerment, elevate, and educate.

And I just think that’s great for a first episode, some seriousness. It’s very powerful. I can’t wait to hear it.

Yes. So those are three possible words right there. Now do you have two words for leadership? Well, I’ll piggyback, but it’s resilience.

Empowerment, for sure. Awesome. I think that comes from not only being an attorney, but a human being.

Bad things happen, and we gotta stick through it, and we need to teach our team how to just keep going. Yes, I agree. Love it.

All right, thank you so much. Thank you so much. Yeah, Josh, final words, then I’ll close it out.

Oh, man. I’m not even sure what to say. I feel like there.

This thing that we’re all at right now is. Has taken an energy of its own that’s well past me at this point. And it’s crazy early to say that, but I just wanted to let you guys know that this is not just like my baby.

I want you all to feel like this is part of your. Part of you that you. You’re.

You’ve helped make this and that you continually help make this what it is. And that’s what I want this to be about. Obviously, someone’s got to be on the microphone.

We have to figure out a way to continue to organize programming for these meetings and things like that. So we have a leadership team, which I’m so very grateful For. But at the end of the day, I just.

I guess I want to emphasize that this Sun Leaders is because of the community here. And I just can’t. I just can’t really imagine at this point, because of the momentum that we already have, what this is going to look like in a year.

Right. It’s really wild. I don’t know how well I’ve been able to formulate my words through these meetings, but hopefully you get a sentiment that.

I’m kind of flabbergasted at what this thing is because I didn’t expect it. And it’s kind of like. Kind of like with my business.

You make something and it’s just now it’s got a momentum of its own. It can’t stop. I couldn’t stop it if I wanted to, I think.

And there’s. There’s something really neat about that. I wanted to thank you, Eric.

You have been inspirational in my business, for this Sun Leaders entity, this organization, and for my life, for my relationship. I value you and what value you bring to the world with your energy so much. I don’t know how I’ll be able to verbalize it, but over time, I hope you get it.

And I think you’re an embodiment of leadership, and I just really appreciate all that you do. I appreciate our leadership team. I appreciate everybody in this room for.

For what you do, every single person in here. This is unbelievable. I’m probably going to start sounding like a broken record if I keep going, but you guys all mean so much to me, it’s unbelievable.

Well, I appreciate you, Josh. You almost made me cry. And for those who don’t know, I am one of the easiest criers on this planet.

And I thought, holy crap, he’s going to do this to me. So thank you so much. So my special thanks to Josh, to Jordan, to Devika, and to each and every single one of you.

If nothing you take from today, this is a message I want to share with everybody as much as I possibly can. Each and every single human being is important. You are worthy.

I want you to realize unconditional love for yourself, and then I want you to share that with everybody else. As many people as you can on this planet. There’s no reason to not love yourself, and there’s no reason to not share that.

So thank you so much for sharing this time, this space with us. For those listeners out there, I encourage you to get involved. Come to our meetings, reach out to us on Facebook.

Drop those two words of leadership with us. Let’s start a dialogue. Let’s get involved.

Ladies and gentlemen, let’s make some more noise. One last time, Sam. Because leaders never sleep.