The Kevin Miller Podcast

The focus of this episode is twofold. One is to look at how you are driven to show appreciation to people. How you show love and your motives behind your efforts. The other is some ideas for helping drive people to you. My muse is gift giving. The very concept has a lot of baggage around it. A lot of shoulds and expectations. Our focus here is using gift giving as a tool in your work, but we hit o...

I’ve admittedly put my focus on the work we do on the actual product and service we help deliver. No matter what you do, at the end of the rope is a product or service that is sold. To find fulfillment in your work, my experience is that it’s of utmost importance that you resonate with and support that end product or service. Or…is it? I find it hard to justify not having respect for what you help...

Yes, I’m talking about the TV series. With my family life I don’t get to see a lot of TV, but I really like a good story that moves me. And I like Kevin Costner as an actor. So I watched the original Yellowstone series. It was hard at first, I didn’t like any characters. But then it drew me in. So now I’ve watched the prequels, 1883 and 1923, and really appreciate them. 1883 has some beautiful cha...

We are all going to work. For most of our lives. We applaud people for their anniversaries. “Oh, you’ve been married for 10 years, congratulations.” Or the big celebration you have for a couple who has been married for 50 years! Well, most of us will work for nearly 50 years. I had my first consistent job at about 13, started my first business at 15, and my intent is to live till I’m 90 and work t...

This is at the heart of what drives you. Many of you. Most of you. And I’ve been there too. You are driving along every day after things you haven’t really agreed with. And then you wonder why you don’t feel motivated and you’d rather just scroll social media, eat, drink, numb or entertain. You want to tune into stories that make you feel cause you aren’t getting many good feels from your current...

I’m looking at how true friendships can be vital for your drive. I’m sensitive to this topic, as we know culturally, very few people have close and consistent friendships today. We are more isolated than ever and more and more people have never experienced a real, true friendship. As an introvert, I want to offer a few thoughts on the value of friendships, and some ideas on where to find and how t...

To talk about what drives you…your body transports you. All of you. It is your vehicle. And what you eat fuels it. I was at someone’s home recently and looked around their kitchen. What I saw motivated me to peek in their fridge and freezer. Yeah, I’m that guy. And what I found was hardly any real food. It was all FDA approved edible substances. But nothing with any nutritional value. I’ve come to...

I have an admission to make. I’ve been a lifetime advocate of making a difference in and with your work. Making an impact in the world. I viewed work like it’s a ministry to save the world. And I didn’t connect with people who primarily worked just to make money. I negatively judged it, to be honest. And yet today I’m friends with plenty of people who work to provide a basic product or service, an...

Not everyone is driven to be an entrepreneur, but sometimes we may need to go down this path in order to have freedom to do what we think is best. My best friend, Randy James, is a medical doctor. When he started he made a pact with God that he’d be a doctor, but he never wanted to be a businessman. Following is a story of why he reluctantly went into business for himself, and now testifies that h...

I continue to concern myself with the concept of retirement, and the concern isn’t just for those who are older in age. It’s completely relevant for my kids just leaving home and entering into their adult lives. I find so very few people retiring who are leading fulfilling lives. At the end of the day, we just want purpose, the subject of my last episode. People generally retire because they were...

In this episode I’m looking at the connection between lack of purpose and increased negativity. Is there a correlation between idle time and negativity bias? Obviously I think there is or I wouldn’t pose the question. I have an admitted positivity bias. But when I step back and look at the big picture of our culture, I can’t help but see connections, and it gives me cause to consider how my own dr...

I’m going from our values to today’s cultural issues. Considering your values which we covered in the previous episode will help you better understand your own position on the issues. Or if you even want one. I argue that it’s near impossible to have a concrete stance or even in-depth knowledge of every issue. Why? There are too many and if anything, I question someone who has a stance on every is...

In this episode Social Credit Report: The Qualities Everyone Wants To Know About Each Other. With anyone you care about or are interested in caring about or relying on, you want to know what they are about. What they value. Which is ultimately, what you can count on. Think about it like a social credit report. A credit report tries to measure if you can be counted on financially. People try to see...

We look at how our values fuel our drive and how they often come into friction with today’s sociopolitical issues that I feel we are pressured to all have a solid stance on. I see and have felt the tension it can cause. What we grapple with as individuals affects our work and where we work and the corporations that influence and employ much of the population. Patrick Lencioni is someone corporatio...

Nothing drives us like a purpose. We love stories of epic circumstances that led to heroic acts. Whether it’s Martin Luther King or your favorite fictional superhero who saves the world. Yet most of us lead lives that don’t feel so epic and the idea of having a purpose can sound far fetched and yes, even fictional. I feel the topic has gotten so diluted. But I feel it’s direly needed. Rabbi Daniel...

We watch the Olympics because it inspires us. Watching people give it their all just touches us at a soul level. Being brought to the very limit of our ability and pulling through is a deep, human experience. Some of us have experienced this from a voluntary activity like sports. Some of you have experienced it from trauma and being victimized. Now, not everyone dreams of being on the podium. Of a...

I’m taking aim at Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Maslow first introduced the concept of a hierarchy of needs in his 1943 paper, titled "A Theory of Human Motivation.” The point was to showcase that people are motivated to fulfill basic needs before moving on to other, more advanced needs. What I want you to pay attention to and consider is that Maslow showed us what we tend to do. Not what i...

I’ve long been curious about the difference in our immediate drive and our future drive. I often refer to it as our appetites. We have the appetite of what I want right now, and what I want in the future, and they don’t often align. Right now I want to eat that donut. In the future I want to lose weight. And the conflict. We think it takes self discipline and drive to cater to the future need and...

I’m more focused than ever on how our personal stories are what drives us. Part of my own story is care and concern for our planet. Not because I’m so altruistic, but I adore the outdoors. It’s my playground and I selfishly want it conserved and protected so I can keep enjoying it…and my grandkids can as well. So I’m driven to help conserve and protect it. But I also realize how frustrating it is....

We are driven to our work for many reasons. Those reasons we go into the job, the career, or the business are what dictate our overall happiness and success, yet most of us go after it for the wrong reasons, and suffer for it. This is a show anyone working will want to listen to, but I’ll tell you, I feel it should be a requirement for today’s youth. I published this show a few years ago on anothe...

I’ve spent a lifetime labeled as a high achiever. High performer. I bet you have as well. We have become experts in doing things. Going after things. Getting things done. And there are benefits to this. And yet the consummate mid life crisis is often a result of using ourselves as a tool and not knowing ourselves at all. In my recent conversation with Dr Richard Schwartz, he wrote in his book that...

Something happens in your life. A stimulus if you will. Something happens, somebody says or does something, and you have an immediate and uncontrollable reaction. Boom. This is natural and it is the human experience. Here is what happens though. Your brain does what it’s made to do. It attaches meaning to what happened. It creates a story based upon the entirety of your life experience and exposur...

There is a common belief and drive that we have good and bad in us. That we are at war with our flesh. We mean well but we fall to this darkness inside of us. I’m a spiritual guy who has placed faith in Jesus. Just my personal decision. I have decided to put faith in the existence of good and evil. But here I’m going to step outside and look at this more scientifically. In the previous episode I t...

In this episode I have a paradigm shift that will alter your drive. We are all raised in the mono-mind belief system, the idea that we have one mind, and from this one mind we have an infinite amount of differing thoughts and emotions and impulses and urges. That we often feel are competing against each other. We think of our good selves and our bad selves. Our healthy and unhealthy aspects. And w...

I’m looking at what drives someone who is on some of the biggest stages in the world, and the examples we can apply to our own lives. I’m curious about celebrities, and it seems we all are. My curiosity is around why we generally think they have something we don’t. How they got something we don’t have. And we often think of them as more driven than the norm. Chad Jeffers is a celebrated musician....