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Kendal netmaker, one of Canada’s most accomplished entrepreneurs with over 25 awards in business to date. Kendal was recently named one of Canada’s Top 40 under 40, the Country’s most coveted award for young business leaders. Each year, Kendal speaks to thousands of people worldwide on resilience, leadership, and indigenous values. Kendal’s keynotes, workshops and consulting programs have inspired thousands around the globe, and his goal is to inspire you to become who you were born to be. And now the Kendal Netmaker Show.
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Hello, tansi. This is Kendal Netmaker. I hope you’re doing great today. You’re probably wondering, you know, Kendal, where have you been? It’s been a long time since you posted online. I’ve been away, I’ve been busy putting my head down into a lot of different areas of, of focus in the past couple years, and in the past couple years, I had to do some reflecting. I had to do some, some deep work into where I really wanted to put my energy and focus for the future. And I want to welcome you to, I guess, my first episode back and, and sharing with you some of the, the insights that I’ve, I’ve learned along the way. And I want to focus this show into sharing with you some of the things I’ve learned about personal, personal development, branding, entrepreneurship, leadership, team building, public speaking, coaching, communication, and so much more.
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That’s my goal. It’s a way for me to give back to whoever needs to hear these messages. And I hope that if that’s you here today and you find it valuable, I encourage you to go and share this with someone who, who needs to hear it. Could be a friend, family member, colleague. You can share this with them. I’m also gonna have an audio recording as a, as an audio podcast. I’ll have it on my site very soon. And the goal is that I take everything I’ve learned from, from, from knowledge keepers to professional coaches, other speakers, and so on.. My journey through business. And I want to package them in a way through stories. And I want to share them on this platform with you. So I wanna give you a brief background on I guess for those of you who are maybe watching this for the first time, you don’t know who I am.
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I’ll give you a background on, on myself. Again, my name is Kendall Netmaker. I’m from Sweetgrass First Nation, that’s my home community. And I focus a lot of my, my time right now on doing keynotes. I speak to different companies, nonprofitsfirst Nations communities throughout Canada. And I do a lot virtual. Like right now, I’m in my virtual studio doing this episode with you. And my focus has been that in the last couple, two and a half years. But I’ve been speaking for almost 12 years now. Throughout that time, before I got into the speaking field, I was, I was a university student and I was trying to finish my beed here in Saskatoon, trying to, to manage that, raising a young family. I now have two children and my wife’s a teacher here in Saskatoon as well.
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So busy family, lots on the go. And in the early stages, I tried to find a way to, to start a business as a full-time student. And I struggled with that. You know, my first brand failed. Eventually, Neechie Gear became the one that I would start way back in 2011 as a full-time student. And I had to manage all the stuff of, you know, being a new father, trying to, to learn how to be a husband, trying to learn how to be a coach, trying to learn how to start a business. And, and, and there’s so much on the go that I just had a hard time focusing. So I wanna share with you the first lesson that I want to give to you is that the power of focus, the power of choosing something to focus on. A lot of, a lot of people, oftentimes, they’ll, they he a lot of projects on the go, and they, they have all these different side hustles or, or different things that they’re working on, and they wonder why they can’t get to where they want to get to in their life.
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Here’s my advice to any of you who are struggling with that. Choose something, choose one and put all of your energy into that thing. Choose that one thing that, that really, it’s a gravitational pull towards it the most, it’s the strongest pull. Go and do that thing, whatever project idea that is, and go and put all of your invested energy into that thing. Because if your energy split up into all these different things, which I really struggle with for a long time, you’re only gonna get a little bit of results from that. But if you choose something, you put all of your energy into it, your chances of it succeeding go way up. So I encourage you to do that back in each of your days. I had no choice but to do that because we found ourselves struggling to pay for rent for Pampers and formula for our newborn son.
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And we found ourselves lining up for social assistance downtown Saskatoon. It was a very, it was a very tough time for, for myself, my, my young family. And that was the, the trigger point for myself. And I remember going back to our apartment, we lived just off of eighth Street at that time, and I had to tell my wife, Rachel, I said, you know, I, I have this business idea each year, and if you support me, I will do everything I can to try to it successful. And I, I didn’t have an answer to that, but my block, my mental block was that I couldn’t commit to this because I was, I had so many things I was working on, and with her support, I was able to put all of my invested energy into this brand. For those of you who maybe I’ve read the book, Driven to Succeed, or maybe you’ve been at a previous speaking engagement, you’ll know the story that, you know, we, from that moment of that decision, we took it from that, that apartment to an office, to a kiosk, to multiple stores, to doing custom orders, wholesaling, doing e-commerce.
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And then people invited me to do speaking engagements at, at schools, at colleges, at nonprofit events, and then corporate events, provincially, nationally, internationally. And then grew into something.
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Now, the challenge becomes, how do we move forward when times get really tough, when there’s a lot of change happening in our, our society, in our communities, in our organizations, even in our families. You know, there’s, there’s change is inevitable. Everyone’s gonna have to go through it in some form. The challenge is how do we move forward through that? And the, the best case scenario, the best possible way moving forward. My advice to you, for those of you who are struggling with it, having a hard time making decisions, having a hard time going through life, having a hard time moving forward in a good way, here’s what I was taught. Anytime there’s a challenge, anytime there’s a problem, anytime there’s an obstacle, there’s always a hidden blessing embedded into that moment. But so few people make the effort to look for that. They get stuck on reaction mode.
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They react to everything that’s happening around them, and they lose the message. They lose the meaning. They don’t realize that sometimes the things that happen to us happen for us. So we can grow into the person we are meant to become. So it’ll open a new, new door for us. Just because something doesn’t work out for us doesn’t mean that another door is not gonna open for us. We have to hang in there, we have to move forward in a good way that allows us to grow, mentally allows us to strive for more. Another thing I was taught was that all of us were here on purpose. We have a purpose for our existence. You were born, you were chosen to be here. You have gifts that have been given to you. And when you align your gift with a chosen field, what tends to happen is you start to feel fulfillment through a role like that.
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Because when you give your gift to something, an act of service to helping this world become better, whether it’s a career, a job, business, and so on, maybe you’re a coach, a teacher, whatever that might be, when you give your gift to the world that way and you’re helping people to become better, you feel better about yourself. Oftentimes when I’m, I’m working with, with different organizations, one of the things that we find is that sometimes there’s people that are put into roles that are not aligned with their true gift, their true calling. And so they go through life, they go through these roles, and they’re very unhappy. They get miserable, some of them. So it becomes a dangerous mix. You know, when you’re a leader, when you’re someone who has influence over a community, an organization, other people, your job as a leader is to look at aligning those people with certain roles.
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What is this person good at? And you try to find a way to put ’em in a role that solves a solution for the greater good of whatever you’re trying to accomplish. So the past two years, it’s been over two years since I did a livestream, and over these last two years, I’ve been doing a lot, a lot of reflecting on where I wanted to go and choosing a path on where I really wanted to focus. I did a lot of deep diving, I did a lot of meditation, I did a lot of inner work. And it’s, it’s brought me to this moment where it was time to come back and to hopefully share these messages with you. Whoever’s watching this right now, whoever decides to share this with their friends, their communities, their coworkers, and so on. But you can also replay this as many times as you want.
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I got pulled to come back here, I guess you could say. Yeah, you know, I, I, sometimes there’s, there’s certain things that happen in our lives that we get requested to do. Some of you that’s on a personal front, some of you that’s a, you know, could be a family related issue, it could be something in your job and so on. So, I, I feel like I was pulled back to, to try to help as best as I can with the stories that I have, the scenarios, and try to give, try to create a space where I can create a platform to, that’s free for anyone to listen or, or to watch this episode, these episodes that will come in the future. And I would love to hear a feedback, you know, comment on these, these videos. Let me know what you like about ’em, what you want to hear in the future.
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And I will do my best to, to speak to that. If there’s something you wanna learn about, you wanna hear more about, let us know. Send me an email, put it in the, the comments below, and I will do my best to try to answer that on future episodes. And another thing I wanna share with you is that as this, as this progresses, I wanna look at interviewing other people as well. So that’s a future possibility. If you, if you want me to bring some people in getting to tell their stories, that would be really cool as well. So let me know if that will be helpful to you. Put it in the chat below and I will do my best to, to accommodate everyone’s hopes that we make this as positive as possible. Because we all need that positive encouragement. You know why it’s very difficult for us wherever we live, to find that oftentimes at home, oftentimes that’s why a lot of people go on social media.
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They try to find something to relate to, something to that will align with their own values, their beliefs and so on. And sometimes there’s a lot of negativity out there. So we can be conditioned to believe certain things that maybe are, are not so healthy. My goal with this is to keep it positive, as positive as possible. Cuz that’s what we need. And I hope that you listening to this, you get value from it. And regardless of how difficult times get with your own life, your career, that you move forward in a healthy way to always move forward and to as I was taught, to pray, to focus on what your strengths are, not what you’re not good at, and to always work on yourself. It’s okay to ask for help. It’s okay to go and ask for help if you don’t know something. And to always be a knowledge seeker, always trying to find that knowledge that you, you, you strive for, to help you to become better, to help your family, to become better, your communities, your workplaces, and so on. So I wish nothing for the best of you, thank you for watching to for my first episode here today, and there’ll be many, many more to come in the future. Take care. We’ll see you.
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If you found this episode helpful, please like, share, and subscribe. To book Kendal to speak at a future event, please go to KendalNetmaker.com. Consider sharing the Kendal Netmaker show with someone you feel needs to hear this message.
