https://youtu.be/etlBrw4WKGw?si=NxtN4Gg1iZ02nmgV
Ron Monteiro, Keynote Speaker, Facilitator, Trainer, and Author of Love Mondays, is driven by a mission to help professionals discover their purpose, build fulfilling careers, and burn their boats to fully commit to meaningful work.
We learn about Ron’s journey from a finance executive to an entrepreneur, speaker, and author, and how he embraced the Ikigai framework—a Japanese philosophy for finding meaning in work. He introduces the Path to Entrepreneurship Framework, a four-step approach that helps individuals transition from corporate life to a career they love: Find Your Purpose, Build Your Bridge, Burn Your Boats, and Flex Your Muscle. Ron shares insights on overcoming fear, learning to say no, and balancing financial stability with the pursuit of passion, while also exploring the mindset shifts needed to create a career where every day—not just Mondays—feels meaningful and exciting.
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Burn Your Boats
Good day, dear listeners, Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint Podcast. And my guest today is Ron Monteiro, keynote speaker, facilitator, trainer, and the author of Love Mondays. Ron, welcome to the show.
Thank you, Steve. I’m very excited to be here.
Well, it's exciting to have you. You have a very interesting career coming across the world to be here with us. And you also have some interesting frameworks that you're using. So, let's start with what drives you. What is your personal “Why?” And what is this Ikigai process that you mentioned on social media and your posts that help people find theirs?
Yeah, I want to rewind. Like I'm a big proponent of purpose and life work and things like that. Many years ago, I would be shaking my head because I wasn't clear on my purpose. So, I've done a lot of work and a lot of personal development work that a lot of it talks about how do you start with what is your “Why,” what is your purpose? Simon Sinek, as you've mentioned. And my purpose now is I get a lot of joy from helping others. So, the way I've phrased it, how do I help myself and others love Mondays and every other day? And I think it connects to my book, which talks about how do you love Mondays? So today's a Monday that we're recording, and every other day. And then Ikigai is a beautiful Japanese concept that talks about people who don't even have a word for retirement. They love what they're doing so much, and it's connected to their life purpose.Share on X So, Ikigai is a framework I love.
There's a whole book on Ikigai, if anybody's interested, which asks four simple questions. “What do you love to do?” is the first one. And this is something we journal. So let's say five years from now, what I love to do might be slightly different than today. So it's not a fixed destination. It's one of those iterative processes. So, you start with “What do I love to do?” The second is, “What am I good at?” So for me, I love teaching and I think I'm pretty good at it. I've done it for a while now. So, what do I love doing? The third is “What does the world need?” Okay, so if I continue with my example, I think the world needs people to teach them things. So, for me, one of my favorite topics to teach is soft skills and story time because I really struggled there. I landed a company that helped me overcome my fear and now I teach it for a living. So that in itself is a “Why” for me. And then the fourth question is, “What can you get paid for?” I know inflation and all these things are coming into play. So, if you can answer those four questions and it's right in the bullseye, right in the heart of those, and think about four circles, concentric circles. If you find something that's in the middle there, it's your Ikigai, it's your reason for living, it's your reason for waking up on a Monday and every other day. And that's, to me, a lifelong journey. And if you hit any of those two questions in isolation, it might be a profession or a vocation or something like that and so there's a beautiful visual and I can send it to you, I've included it in my book, which shows it graphically. And so if you take the time to journal on those four questions, you can find your Ikigai. So I love the concept.
Yeah, that's awesome. Jim Collins talks about this idea of the economy engine, and what is the economy engine of your business, and it has to be your “Why,” your purpose, and what you are really good at. And the third one is “What can sell?” And then in the middle, but that's only three circles. So, you have a fourth circle and that's the Ikigai in the center. Very interesting. So, tell me about how you found your Ikigai. How did you land on what you love doing and what people need and you also pay for? What was your process?
Yeah, I love Steve Jobs' quote, which talks about, it's really messy going forward, but when you connect the dots backwards, it makes a lot of sense. So, one of my favorite examples ever in business is he took this course on typography when he had dropped out of college because he was interested and then he brought it to the Macbook. So, my story is obviously not comparable to Steve Jobs, but it's very messy going forward. I didn't have this plan. I was just trying to do things that I love to do, like teaching and training. And I was doing a lot of speaking for free, whenever I could get some experience to do what I wanted to do, invest the time and energy. I did a free webinar, for example, where I was speaking around the world during COVID. I wasn't getting paid, and that's where I met my business partner.
So many things that I've tried to do within that Ikigai concept. What do I love to do? What am I going to do? Even if I do it for free, it's in the spirit of building confidence and competence because I went through a 20-year corporate career. I was doing finance and now I'm a speaker and author and trainer. It's a very different profession. So I had to find a way to bridge between the two. And I actually hired a coach. And one of the big things was how do I spend more and more time doing the things I want to do, while at the same time, I'm still working full time because I had to pay my bills. So it's a clean process if you look backwards, but at the time it was very messy. And entrepreneurship for me has been a fun road, but there's times where it's been very stressful, there's times it's been messy, and even now with all the stuff going on in the political world, many companies might put a hold on training, I still have to say, okay, I'm going to work that much harder to get my business going. So yeah, it's been a fun road, but but challenging and exciting at the same time.
Yeah, I like to think about this, what you're talking about, what you're describing is that during the eight to four, whatever, nine to five, you really are selling your hours to someone. And then the rest of the time, you can work on building your own business. And when you do that on your own time, it's really hard. It goes very slowly. You're trying to figure things out. And when you get to this tipping point, then you can leave that job and make your entrepreneur venture the full time. That's fantastic. But then you have the challenges of entrepreneurship. So, yeah, it definitely is messy. I can relate to this. Let's talk about your framework. So this is a podcast of frameworks and I'm always looking for something unique. We are over 250 episodes in and what is a framework that you or your colleagues have developed or stumbled upon that really helped you achieve something?
Yeah, so one of the frameworks I use in the book is, how did I get from working full-time to now running my own business? And the four steps, and I go through them in detail, I share my own experiences, I share other stories. Number one is what we talked about already, find your purpose. And so you could use your Ikigai, you could use the Jim Collins framework you mentioned, but let's be clear on, what is our “Why,” what's our purpose, what's our reason for being? So that's step one. And we've got some exercises in there to say how do people actually work through it? That was very important to me. Step two is what I call build your bridge.
So this is me, picture me as a finance person who now wants to go speak on stages and do training sessions. It was foreign to many people. So what I did was I actually hired a coach and he had this brilliant metaphor for me, which is build your bridge. And he always used to say, Ron, one line at a time. We're gonna do this, we're gonna do it one line at a time. And, honestly, if I didn't have that coach, his name's Wayne, he's a dear friend of mine now, I probably would not be talking to you today. Because another big lesson I learned is surround yourself with the people who are gonna uplift you and are gonna help you get to where you want to go. So I slowly built my bridge one line at a time. And that step is all about building enough confidence and competence. You talked about, what's that time to take the leap? Okay, so that's step two. Step three is pretty provocative. It's burn your boats. If this is the time, go all in. For me, it was resigning from my job because I now felt like I could do this on my own. And what it also does is it just says, look, you're going all in.
There's no paycheck coming in every two weeks. I didn't have a paycheck coming in every two weeks after that. And that's when it's like, okay, it's time to sink or swim. And I had to fight for it. And so that's an interesting time. And I never tell people to do that too early because you have to do a lot of work ahead of time to get there. That's the burn your boats. And step four is flex your muscle, which, look, we're in a constantly changing world. I always want to say it's a constant journey. There's never a destination. Like, I listen to a lot of podcasts.
