In this episode of The Business Owner’s Journey, host Nick Berry discusses mental toughness and resilience as a business owner. Drawing from the teachings of his Hall of Fame college baseball coach, Beauford Sanders, Nick uses the analogy of rocks, jellybeans, and marshmallows to illustrate different levels of mental toughness and how they manifest under adversity. This episode provides actionable insights for aspiring leaders aiming to assess and develop team members, fostering leadership growth amidst challenges.
Nick emphasizes that mental toughness and resilience are key traits for any successful business owner. He shares his experience with Coach Beauford Sanders, who taught him that these traits can be developed and are essential for navigating the pressures of leadership.
Nick explains the analogy of rocks, jellybeans, and marshmallows as types of people based on their resilience. A rock remains unaltered under pressure, a jellybean appears tough but breaks down under stress, and a marshmallow quickly collapses under heat. This analogy serves as a tool to assess both self and team members' responses to adversity.
Using the analogy, Nick discusses how to assess team members' resilience and provides strategies for helping them develop stronger mental toughness. He encourages leaders to engage in honest conversations and seek feedback, guiding their team towards becoming more "rock-like" in their responses.
Adversity is presented as an opportunity for growth. Nick highlights that understanding one's own weaknesses and working to strengthen them is crucial for leadership development. He stresses the importance of continual self-assessment and striving to maintain resilience as an entrepreneur.
Nick concludes with practical advice on building a resilient team. He encourages leaders to use the rock, jellybean, and marshmallow analogy as a framework for discussions about team dynamics and development, promoting a culture of growth and resilience.
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Nick - Rocks, Jellybeans, Marshmallows (00:00)
mental toughness and resilience is, I think, a very, very important part of the makeup of being a successful business owner, but it's one that you can my college baseball coach, Beauford Sanders, probably, I know he's in the top 10 of active coaches in the country in wins. He's been around for a long time. He used to always talk to us about being mentally strong, about being resilient.
And he would use this analogy that I'm going to share that I think is really good to keep in mind when you're looking to build your team and when you're assessing people in general. And even when you're kind of having your, as a leader, you're looking to mirror moments that we have from time to time and helping you kind of shape the, where you want to take yourself, what you aspire to be as a leader. He would say there are three types of people. There are rocks.
There are jelly beans and there are marshmallows. you can take a marshmallow and you can feel it and it's squishy and soft and like that's, you know, you have an idea of what you would expect out of that marshmallow. Then you have this jelly bean that like hard on the outside, you can bang it on something and you know, makes a sound. You could press on it. If you press hard enough, you can maybe break it or like mash it a little bit, but like it's, it feels solid. And then you have a rock which feels very solid. You can,
press on it, you can bang on something, not gonna change its shape. Rock is there.
you really learn about people when there's pressure applied, when there's some heat, some adversity. And so we would apply some heat to the rock jelly bean and the marshmallow. And that's when we really learn what we could expect out of them. So if you take a marshmallow and put it over a flame, you kind of know what happens. It doesn't take very long, a few seconds and the marshmallow is like gone. So that's not the kind of person that you want to be counting on
there's adversity. It also isn't the kind of person that you would aspire to be under pressure. Then you have jelly beans. Remember the jelly like a rock when you hit it on something like it's solid, it feels solid.
So you might think that it is rock -like whenever heat gets applied. Put a jelly bean over a flame last for a little long enough for you to probably start to think, hmm, we might have something here. And then it'll just kind of crack and turn into like this disgusting jelly.
And that's what you'll get when you put a person who has this jelly bean level of mental toughness and under some adversity, under some tension. those are the ones that are very dangerous because they looked like something. They seem to have the properties of something that you would want that are more similar to a rock under normal circumstances. But then when the heat got applied, the jelly bean
was more like the marshmallow.
Then we can take our rock. We can put that over the flame. You can hold the rock over the flame for a while and nothing changes. The rock's going to be the rock, whether there's adversity or not. And that's the way that we all aspire to should be working towards. so I think it's good to ask yourself, which of these am I? I think it's even okay if you have to answer yourself honestly and you're not where you want to be.
What's important is that you will take responsibility for developing into what you want to be. So everybody wants to be a rock. If you already feel like you are a rock, work on staying there because it could erode. those muscles could weaken and you could turn into having more jelly bean like responses. You don't want that. So work on staying a rock. If you're a jelly bean, talk to the people around you, talk to...
peers, talk mentors, whomever is willing to give you honest feedback and find out what are the situations that are causing you to respond more like a jelly bean? What would a rock -like response be like? And work on adjusting your behavior, your responses to be more like a rock. And it can be done.
And when you're looking to build your team, you can kind of use this as a lens to assess people through. We would talk about it openly.
well, we want them to be rocks, that they could be a rock or a jelly bean or a marshmallow. And we would even talk which bucket behaviors fit in. And the idea was to just to give people enough context that they could work on growing on their it was gave us a language and a label to use when we were working on
development for individuals on our staff.
that is the three types of people, the rocks, jelly beans, and marshmallows, based on their mental toughness and how they respond to adversity. And that's courtesy of Coach Beauford Sanders,
If you have any tools or valuable analogies that you've used similar to this, please share. I'd love to see them.
Nick Berry is an accomplished entrepreneur and CEO, whose track record includes founding and leading numerous companies since 2002.
He is also a mentor and coach to other entrepreneurs and business owners who are looking for a trusted (and proven) advisor.
Among peers, colleagues, staff, and clients, Nick has been referred to as both 'The Business Guy' as well as 'The Anti-Guru', due to his pragmatic approach and principled leadership.
He shares his insights and lessons learned, along with those of his expert guests,
on his podcast, 'The Business Owner's Journey'.
