Certain Success™ Podcast

Divine Wisdom in Business: How To Make Your Next Big Business Decision

September 13, 2024 • Matt Fagioli & Joe Gaeta

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Imagine a business world where every decision is guided by divine wisdom, leading not just to success but to deep fulfillment. That’s precisely what we explore in this episode of the Certain Success Podcast. Through personal stories and experiences, I share how integrating faith into business can transform our professional lives. From recognizing divine guidance to understanding our identity in God, you'll learn how a profound relationship with Christ can influence every business move. It’s not about surface-level faith gestures but about deeply embedding spiritual principles into daily actions to achieve true, impactful success.

We dive into the concept of "certain success," emphasizing that real success is rooted in our relationship with God and extends beyond the transient nature of business highs and lows. The journey shared spans decades, underscoring the importance of love, relationships, and community. We'll discuss practical ways to submit to God's guidance daily, seek His wisdom, and align our business actions with His eternal plans. Whether you're aiming to scale your business or seeking greater fulfillment, this episode provides valuable insights on navigating your professional life with faith as your cornerstone. Don't miss this enriching conversation on faith and business!

Speaker 1:

Hey guys, welcome back to the Certain Success Podcast. Matt Fagioli here, and the amazing Joe Gaeta is MIA today, headed to the Riverhouse for the weekend with his bride and working today, I'm sure. But he set me loose with a microphone by myself and so I've got a bunch of stuff on my mind and just wanted to share with you Today. I've called this. You know, how do you make your next big business decision? Question mark, something like that.

Speaker 1:

And what I want to talk about is this the battle, the biggest battle of my life, and I think all of our lives to some extent, is how do I balance the physical world with my spiritual life, world with my spiritual life, and what does it look like to bring God into my business? And I think you know, for the most part in our world people, when you say stuff like that, people think it means like I'm going to put a fish on my car, I'm going to be really nice to people and I'm super not nice to everyone that I meet. And if you know me, you're probably laughing right now because you know that's true. You know there's lots of, there's so much humanity in me and sometimes love is missing, but that's not what I've come to find that it's about. What I've come to find that it's about is about the depth of relationship and understanding and awareness of the presence of God when I'm walking around and, in this context, when I'm making a business decision, small or large and I realize now in retrospect so many things you learn from looking back and going oh, that's how that was. You know, over the past decades of my career, I realized that I've been listening to God's voice and gaining insight from the Spirit and acting on that insight and making the decision.

Speaker 1:

But what I wasn't doing until recent years is really understanding what was happening, where that was coming from, and giving credit where credit is due. And instead I'd sort of be like oh, I had a great idea, I did a great thing, even though I was asking the Lord for his help when it happened. I was like I did that, yay, matt. And after some decades you realize, oh, you know, know what? I didn't actually do anything. All I did was take a step forward based on what he said, put in my head ideas that he gave me and and it's almost like misguided obedience or something of like, you know, got the idea, went and did it, which is obedience to the Lord. But you know, if you're just doing it because you think it was your idea, then sort of misguided.

Speaker 1:

Anyway, I think that the way to make phenomenal business decisions which are going to change your business, like we all hear this language about, you know how to go from six figures to seven figures in your business, or even seven to eight or or beyond. But you know, most of us on this planet are somewhere in a business cycle where we're doing some kind of six figures in revenue and trying to go to seven. That represents, I mean, 90% of the population, right? So raise your hand to yourself and be like yep, that's me, I'm doing six figure something and I would like to either do way more six figure and then, of course, I want to do seven, I want to do seven plus, and for the one out of the thousand of you who will ever make it to eight figures, god bless you. And but the decision tree doesn't change. So the way to make the best decisions is to ask the lord. But and it can't be, you know, god's not your ATM machine. I love that phrase.

Speaker 1:

I think I don't know who first said it. My pastor says it all the time, you know. So it can't be like, hey, I want to invite God into what I'm doing and ask him to bless it to. I am on the mission that God invited me into. I'm doing what God invited me to do, and I'm doing that from a clear understanding of who I am and who God is and what our relationship is. And so, like all of that grounding has to be in place first, and you know, we find ourselves in our you know, business, consulting life, finding people all along the journey in understanding that or not understanding that, and so all that groundwork has to be done. It's all prerequisite. You need to be clear about your relationship with the Lord, you need to be clear about who he says you are, and then you have to understand from that what's birthing out of you, what is burning in your heart to go do in the world as a result of what God's breathing into you.

Speaker 1:

And if all of that sounded like spaghetti to you, then that's, that's the stuff that you have to do first, um, otherwise you're going to like, keep on cycling through these like, uh, success. You know rabbit wheels or hamster wheels, excuse me, um, and I I've done that. That's the the reason I know that that's true is because I've done that over and over again. So what I mean by that is, if you, to the extent that you're out of alignment with any of those things, you're going to find some level of success, probably that reaches that matches up with your natural ceiling of achievement. You're going to find that level of success and you're going to get there and go like, oh, this isn't great. No, they gone. This is not what I thought it was going to be. And I feel a little stuck. And entrepreneurs do that way more and way faster than other human beings, because we do more stuff and we usually do it faster.

Speaker 1:

And so in my career I've started and cycled through a bunch of different businesses over whatever gosh 35 years and reached some meteoric successes in that cycle, but always found it empty at the top of it. It's's like, oh, okay, this is great, there's some money here, but the joy that fills my soul with what I'm trying to become, what I'm trying to submit myself to the Lord making me into, I guess, is a better way to voice that Always falls short. So, as you're going forward from where you are right now, wherever your place is in your business life right now. Every decision has to come from his counsel. Every decision has to start with surrender first. Right, like I'm going to do whatever you say, lord, even if it doesn't make any sense, which usually doesn't, and so it can't be like I want the answers to what I want. It has to be Lord, I surrender, you're in control, we're going to go from wherever we are right now. We're going to go wherever you say, lord, and whatever you say, I'm going to obey God. It's giving me that little sinking feeling, even when I said that to myself, because it's like, oh, what's he going to say? It might be scary, it might be terrible, he might lead me off a cliff he probably will, but he's also going to catch you when you jump, if you jump. But I digress. So we're going to make decisions in our business from a posture of surrender first, and then others focused. So I think one of the best questions that you can ask yourself when you're making a decision is am I focused on myself or am I focused on the others around me, and how is this decision going to impact the people in my life? And I think it's probably harder. It's definitely harder to say something like that, or ask a question like that, when the decision seems a little inconsequential. Seemingly inconsequential decisions are the decisions that make up the whole, that make up what's happening and what the direct direction is, and and all of that.

Speaker 1:

Um, I love this uh thing that I've learned recently, uh, about the story of king David in the Bible. I mean, of course, we've all heard those stories, even if we haven't read it as many times as you should. You kind of know who King David is and how he took out Goliath, and I bet you don't know all the backstory. But the piece of it that I found so interesting, that was pointed out to me fairly recently, is that God loved David and always said you know. People say you know it's a man after my own heart. You know God loved David because he was so well connected to the Lord and there was a communion and an understanding of God's presence with David, more so than, you see, with a lot of other people. Moses and others had it, of course, and Elijah.

Speaker 1:

But this thing that I thought was so noteworthy is that if you go back through all of the story, if you go back through all of the story, david made many, many, many mistakes and had many, many huge victories. And if you read the text, you can actually correlate the fact that every time he inquired of the Lord, he won. And every time he thought to himself is often the language. So, like I, made my own decision. Every single time he did that, he lost. Every single time he went to the Lord and asked for wisdom and insight, he won. And I just find that absolutely stunning Because, you know, as soon as I heard that, I thought to myself that's me, I do that all the time.

Speaker 1:

Which is the best way to to read the scriptures is to go like, how do I fit into this story? Who am I in this story? Um, and, and, by the way, like no, no fear guilt or shame in any of that, but like, how do I look like david? And it's that. It's this back and forth of sometimes I inquire of the lord and he gives me insight, and then I win. Sometimes I just go try to wing it and I don't win.

Speaker 1:

And and so back to this idea that you can build a business, get to your natural ceiling of achievement and get stuck and not be able to get past it. And not only that, not only be stuck but not be happy and full of joy in what you're doing is a function of how much you inquired to the Lord, submitted first and inquired to the Lord about every single decision that brought you to where you're going. And so that's the journey that Joe and I are on at Certain Success. That's the way that we're trying to make decisions and run our business and counsel our clients and partners about how to make their decisions, and it's a commitment to run in blindness, which is so counter-cultural, especially in the business space, to say we're going to do what the Lord seems to be leading us towards, the best that we can understand it, not knowing, jack, honestly, about the outcome.

Speaker 1:

In fact, it can't be about the outcome at all. It has to be about the process, it has to be about just how we're doing it, what we're doing today, the joy that we have today and the percentage that's a terrible way to put it of surrender. Like you know, how surrendered are we to our willingness to let the Lord lead and let him decide which way we're going? And even though we have ideas about the big picture and we think we want to go this way, and we're studying and we're learning and we're doing things, we're testing and we're trying our best to navigate through the fog, but first and foremost, we are attempting to surrender every day, attempting to ask the Lord for his insight and wisdom on every single decision and then attempting to obey what we think we heard and you know there's no clear process. Um, well, there are, you know these, these guideposts, you know these things that that we've learned and that scripture provides us for, like, how? Um? But I think step one is even understanding the process that I just explained.

Speaker 1:

And then step two is attempting to do it, and it almost can't be done to do it. And it almost can't be done. It cannot be done alone, because there's an enemy, in fact, there's a chorus of enemies the world, the flesh and the devil all telling you the whole way through. You can't do it, you're not good enough, god's not really going to help you, he's not going to show up. Why would he show up for you, you terrible sinner? And you know I'm speaking that to myself as well. So you have all of these enemies, all these voices, all of this badness in your head and it keeps coming back every single day, every minute of every day, and there's only two things that that are going to help that.

Speaker 1:

And the Lord and your community said another way the armor of God, you know, understanding what's happening and having the right people to to be with and talk to and pray with as we're trying to fight the battle. And here's another big piece of it is that the more you lean into your dream, the closer you actually get to executing on this kind of accurate, truthful way of approaching life and business. The more you're going to be opposed, the more the enemy is going to go against you. Um, you know, I I feel like it starts. The second, maybe before I opened my eyes, but the second that I start to approach consciousness in the morning and all day long, to approach consciousness in the morning and all day long. Uh, I feel the attack and the more you stand against it, the more that's going to be true and the battle is worth it, because it's the real battle. It's the truth.

Speaker 1:

We all have this thing called the battle within and I don't think I understood that all that well 20 years ago. I'm like, yeah, okay, there's a battle within. What does that even mean? And now I'm starting to that's, that's what it is. It's that relentless, from the first moment of the day until you go to sleep. All of the voices battling against the truth, which is God's presence is here all the time. He he's for you, he's with you, he's for time, he's for you. He's with you, he's for you, he's in you. The Holy Spirit, he wants to give you his direction and insight, and step one is to just embrace that, receive that, and so I hope this little rant of mine helps you a little bit.

Speaker 1:

And again, I think it's the way that business and faith align, which is a journey that I've been on for some years now, decades really.

Speaker 1:

But chasing hard after trying to solve these questions for myself in recent years and where the certain success brand came from. And if you don't know the whole point of certain successes, the only certain success is Christ and eternity and who you're becoming on this planet, based on who God says you are and what he's got planned for you, is the only certain success. Any of the business up and downs and all that stuff, none of it matters in the absence of love and relationships and community. Those are where your certain success is. But we're all a bunch of business people trying to do life in the physical world while we're here. Um, and so the best I can discern and articulate it, um, it's just this method of every single day submit yourself to the lord and ask for his wisdom and insight, and obey what you heard, and that that's the path to certain success. So happy friday to you, guys, and we'll see you back here on the certain success podcast.

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Matt Fagioli

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