The Habit Architect

THA S02 EP#34 - Why You Can't Just Pick One Thing and Start: The Guide to Getting Unstuck

Most people know they have too much on their plate. What they don't know is why their to-do list keeps growing no matter how hard they work. In this episode, Michael Cupps sits down live with Florencia Llosas, producer of The Habit Architect and founder of her own marketing agency, to walk through a free tool Cupps built: the Priority Matrix at matrix.timebandit.io. Flor brings a real problem to the table. She's new to running her own business, managing multiple clients, juggling production work, and trying to hold her habits together. Everything on her list feels urgent and important, which means nothing actually gets prioritized. Cupps walks her through the four quadrants of the matrix, Do First, Schedule It, Delegate, and Park, and explains why a flat to-do list is designed to fail. They get into the real difference between a task, a calendar event, and deep work. Flor's strategy sessions, the kind that take two hours of data collection before a single decision gets made, don't belong on a task list at all. That's time that needs to be blocked, protected, and treated as non-negotiable. The same goes for habits. When the task list swallows everything, the habits that keep you functioning go first. They also take a live question from Blake about underestimating time, work through the delegate quadrant with a real example, and talk about what work-life integration actually means when you're a business owner trying to hold it all together. The matrix is free. No catch. Go try it at matrix.timebandit.io and bring your actual task list. This Show is sponsored by TimeBandit.io [https://timebandit.io/] Check out our Live Show Events here: The Habit Architect Live Show [https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelcupps/recent-activity/events/] Subscribe to our Newsletter: The Habit Architect Newsletter [https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/welcome-habit-architect-building-your-blueprint-success-michael-cupps-fq5kc/?trackingId=6JugMhfyQR6Xaqm9vzk8fA%3D%3D]

THA S02 EP#33 - What a Health Crisis Can Teach About Values

Most people hear a story about someone who built a company, scaled it to 1.5 trillion in assets under management, and sold it to State Street, and they think that's the whole story. It isn't. In this episode, Michael Cupps sits down with Haresh Patel, entrepreneur, author, and founder of Senari Health, to talk about what was running underneath all of that success for over a decade. Haresh was living with a chronic skin autoimmune disease called urticaria, misdiagnosed by 12 doctors over 12 years, managing it with a $3,000 shot every four weeks, and never once being asked the question that eventually changed everything. That question came from an Ayurvedic doctor in Costa Rica, and it wasn't "Are you stressed now?" It was "When's the first time in your life you were stressed?" The answer took Haresh back to age six, to a car accident in Colorado, and to a grief he had carried for 55 years without ever naming it. What followed was unexpected, unconventional, and, three and a half years later, he has not needed the shot since. Haresh connects that journey directly to the company he built afterward. The same fragmentation problem he solved in private markets at Mercatus turned out to be the exact problem in healthcare. Your data exists. Your story exists. Nobody is putting it together. Senari Health is his attempt to fix that. Michael and Haresh cover the 13.5-minute doctor visit problem, why modern medicine takes snapshots instead of reading a movie, what it actually means to be the CEO of your own health, and why opening multiple doors at the same time is better than going through them one at a time. Haresh's book, The Ghost in Your Body, is available now on Kindle. The physical copy releases May 13th. Connect with Haresh Patel hareshpatel.ai haresh@senarihealth.ai [haresh@senarihealth.ai] senarihealth.ai Early adopter access for the Senari Health platform is available for the first 100 listeners who reach out directly. This Show is sponsored by TimeBandit.io [https://timebandit.io/] Check out our Live Show Events here: The Habit Architect Live Show [https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelcupps/recent-activity/events/] Subscribe to our Newsletter: The Habit Architect Newsletter [https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/welcome-habit-architect-building-your-blueprint-success-michael-cupps-fq5kc/?trackingId=6JugMhfyQR6Xaqm9vzk8fA%3D%3D]

THA S02 EP#32 - Diagnose Before You Lead: What Makes a CEO Worth Following

Michael Cupps sits down with Chantelle Preston, healthcare entrepreneur, investor, growth strategist, and co-owner of a League One volleyball expansion team launching in San Francisco in 2027. Chantelle built Mentis Neurorehabilitation from the ground up and exited to private equity in 2015. What she found at the finish line surprised her. Not fulfillment. Not arrival. Just the quiet question of whether she had been chasing the right things all along. That question became a book. The Success Lie breaks down nine narratives most leaders absorbed early in life. You can have it all. Say yes to everything. Someone will take care of you financially. It is too late. Chantelle and Michael work through several of them in this conversation, including the one that catches experienced leaders off guard: the habit of serving goals you set years ago that no longer reflect who you are or where you want to go. They get into work-life integration (not balance, Chantelle is clear on the distinction), the cost of perfectionism waiting until something is 120% ready before moving, why feedback and failure are data points rather than verdicts, and how culture does not live in a values statement on the wall. It lives in micro decisions made daily at every level of the organization. Chantelle also shares the one non-negotiable habit she puts on her calendar every week and never cancels. Connect with Chantelle Preston LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/chantellepreston Website: chantalpreston.com Advisory: prestonpartners.net Book: The Success Lie, available for pre-order now, launches July 28th on Amazon and Barnes & Noble This Show is sponsored by TimeBandit.io [https://timebandit.io/] Check out our Live Show Events here: The Habit Architect Live Show [https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelcupps/recent-activity/events/] Subscribe to our Newsletter: The Habit Architect Newsletter [https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/welcome-habit-architect-building-your-blueprint-success-michael-cupps-fq5kc/?trackingId=6JugMhfyQR6Xaqm9vzk8fA%3D%3D]

THA S02 EP#31 - Bold Plans Don't Build Themselves: The Execution Gap

Most leadership teams are pretty good at the big idea. They get in a room, whiteboard it, agree it's the right move, and then hand it off. What happens after that hand-off is where organizations quietly lose. Leslie Holman has spent 15 years studying exactly that space. As the leader of Pinnacle Performance Group in Minneapolis, she works with companies ranging from $10 million to Fortune 100 on what she calls strategic execution: everything that lives between the bold plan and the moment John on the front line finally understands what's being asked of him. She came up through McKinsey, got her footing in quick-service restaurants where clarity in operations isn't optional when the stakes are a consistent hamburger or a food safety incident, and has brought that same precision into some of the most complex organizational transformations across industries. In this episode, she and Michael dig into why great ideas die, how to diagnose your organization's capacity for change before you add one more initiative, and what it actually looks like to lead with humanity when the world outside the office starts bleeding through. Leslie's take on the execution gap is practical and direct. Clarity, focus, and tenacity. Not motivation. Not culture decks. Not a project management tool. Those three things, built into the rhythm of how a team operates, are what separate organizations that get things done from the ones still talking about the plan they made two quarters ago. They also get into AI adoption, what honest leadership looks like when the workforce is genuinely scared, and why Leslie's firm has a rule: they don't work with jerks. If you are leading a team through any kind of change, building a habit around execution, or just trying to understand why your good ideas keep stalling out, this one is for you. This Show is sponsored by TimeBandit.io [https://timebandit.io/] Check out our Live Show Events here: The Habit Architect Live Show [https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelcupps/recent-activity/events/] Subscribe to our Newsletter: The Habit Architect Newsletter [https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/welcome-habit-architect-building-your-blueprint-success-michael-cupps-fq5kc/?trackingId=6JugMhfyQR6Xaqm9vzk8fA%3D%3D]

THA S02 EP#30 - Showing Up Where the Search Happened: Building for the New Search Reality

For more than 20 years, marketing teams built an entire discipline around getting found on Google. Keywords, backlinks, content calendars, ad spend strategies, all of it engineered around one outcome: rank on page one. That system did not disappear, but it got a new set of rules on top of it, and most teams have not caught up yet. In this episode, Michael Cupps sits down with Arnold Huffman, CEO of Yalo, an Atlanta-based digital agency he founded 14 years ago as a one-man operation. Huff and Cupps have worked together before and that history shows in the conversation. They get to the point fast. Huff walks through what has shifted in search, how ChatGPT and Gemini are now processing 2.5 billion searches a day between them, representing roughly half of all internet searches, and why that number is expected to more than double by 2028. The old SEO habits still matter, but they are no longer enough on their own. Today's AI engines reward brands that are clear, easy to navigate, and talked about positively in places beyond their own website. Reddit threads, Facebook reviews, third-party comments, all of it feeds the engine's sense of whether a brand deserves to be cited. Huff calls the standard he applies to every site the "Boomer filter." If your mom cannot find what she is looking for on your website, the AI engine is not going to like it either. Cupps immediately renamed it the Linda Cups filter. That kind of clarity and that is the real point of the conversation. The brands that will get cited and recommended are the ones that sound like people, not landing pages. They also talk about what AI-generated content does to your credibility with AI engines. The short version: the engines know, and they will not give you the same weight they give to content that reads like a real person wrote it with a real point of view. On the personal side, Huff shares what keeps him grounded. He still runs and plays basketball five to seven days a week, something he traces back to identifying as an athlete since his college sports days. He also talks about a company habit worth noting: Yalo gives every employee an annual concert stipend, backed by research suggesting that people who attend live music regularly tend to be happier and live longer. His son and he are heading to Cleveland to see the Foo Fighters in August. Cupps closes with a question about what happens when AI changes a personal daily habit too, and Huff's answer on how to challenge the engine rather than just accept the first answer it gives you is one of the better practical notes in the episode. If your team has been putting off a website review or assuming your content calendar is doing the work on its own, this one is worth the 35 minutes. This Show is sponsored by TimeBandit.io [https://timebandit.io/] Check out our Live Show Events here: The Habit Architect Live Show [https://www.linkedin.com/in/michaelcupps/recent-activity/events/] Subscribe to our Newsletter: The Habit Architect Newsletter [https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/welcome-habit-architect-building-your-blueprint-success-michael-cupps-fq5kc/?trackingId=6JugMhfyQR6Xaqm9vzk8fA%3D%3D]