What if the thing standing between you and the next level of your business isn't a marketing strategy, a sales tactic, or a system you haven't found yet — but the story you tell yourself every time things get hard? I sat down with Mike Irving, founder of Advanced Business Abilities, and he didn't just give me tactics. He walked me through the internal resistance that quietly sabotages leaders long before it shows up as a business problem — the buttons that get pressed, the masks we wear, and the radical honesty it takes to actually change. If you've ever hit a wall in your business and couldn't figure out why, this conversation is for you.

Highlights

• Mike shares the personal breaking point in 2005 that led him to walk away from a nine-year sales business and find the mentors — his "research team" — who reshaped how he thinks about leadership.
• The "three pillars to success": radical awareness, total accountability, and conscious creation — and why skipping the first one derails everything else.
• Why the real problem in business is never the how-to (that's free now, thanks to tools like Claude) — it's the resistant thinking that blocks implementation.
• The importance of self-acknowledgment: celebrating your team is good, but people also need to acknowledge themselves for keeping their own commitments.
• Mike's raw story about discovering his own "critical," "competitive," and zero-patience traits through a diagnostic assessment — and what it taught him about pressing other people's buttons.
• Why sales, leadership, and client relationships all run on the same underlying skill: making and keeping commitments, then managing the ongoing perception of value.
• A candid, personal "mulligan" story from a boating trip gone wrong — and the healing that came from going back to the same spot a year later.
• Mike's definition of personal success: fulfilling his life's purpose of helping people intentionally choose how they communicate and respond, one person at a time.

Chapters

0:00 — Meet Matt and Mike

3:37 — Human First Question

4:38 — Childhood Dreams

6:35 — What ABA Does

9:02 — Self Acknowledgement

11:04 — Australia Sales Hustle

14:41 — Hitting the Wall

16:42 — Reality Creation Mentors

22:49 — Implementation Blocks

26:14 — Three Pillars to Success

29:31 — Creating Safe Space

35:17 — Diagnosing Root Causes

37:26 — Scaling Challenges Ahead

38:17 — Evolving Business Problems

39:10 — Buttons and Resistance

39:53 — Trait Profile Wakeup Call

44:22 — Mentors as Research Team

47:02 — Why Leaders Need Coaches

49:38 — Brand Story and Client Journey

54:45 — Sales as a System

57:18 — Delivering Value and Trust

1:02:37 — Behind the Brand Questions

1:09:32 — Purpose and Next Steps

Resources Mentioned

• Advanced Business Abilities
• execbenchmark.com — Mike's free executive effectiveness benchmark tool and 90-day plan.
• Scale Beyond Referrals — Matt's new workshop/framework for B2B service providers relying on referrals.

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