Jaime Taets of Keystone Group International On The Book That Changed Her Life
An Interview With Sara Connell
Remember who you are — I wish someone had told me that the world was going to influence me to be who it wants me to be versus who I want to be. I have been able to figure it out, but much later than I wish I would have. When I can be my authentic self, I thrive and the people around me are positively impacted.
Books have the power to shape, influence, and change our lives. Why is that so? What goes into a book that can shape lives? To address this we are interviewing people who can share a story about a book that changed their life, and why. As a part of our series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Jaime Taets.
CEO, public speaker, author, podcast host, and thought leader… in every one of these roles, Jaime Taets helps people reach their potential. She isn’t afraid to have “get real” conversations about the things that often limit people from achieving success. Harnessing her own leadership experiences, she inspires frank and sometimes challenging discussions about the crossroads between high-performance and healthy change. Ultimately, her solution-focused insights help people go from stuck to success every day — at work, home, and in their personal lives. Jaime is CEO of Keystone International Group, host of “Superpower Success Podcast,” and a keynote speaker. She, her husband, and their four children live in Minnesota.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory” and how you grew up?
If we want to go way back, I was born to a single mom who had me at 17. My great grandmother helped raise me most of my life and my mom got married when I was 5 to my father, the man who raised me. I grew up in a middle-class family in Iowa and had a great life — I was very active in sports and did well in school. I had a normal high school experience and ended up at a 4-year college where I majored in Management Information Systems (IT) and International Business. That led me to getting an internship and eventually a full-time role with Cargill, one of the largest privately held corporations in the world.
Let’s talk about what you are doing now, and how you achieved the success that you currently enjoy. Can you tell our readers a bit about the work you are doing?
I did my apprenticeship in Corporate America in a Fortune 100 size business and after 13 years of traveling globally for work, I decided to leave my corporate role to take everything I had learned and use it to help impact small and mid-market businesses and their leaders grow. Jumping off the cliff into the world of entrepreneurship was a risk, but my corporate career and the amazing training and experience I received helped me do it with confidence (but also a healthy dose of fear). And since then, I have been growing as a leader and helping my clients grow at the same time. My organization focuses on helping businesses and their leaders build scalable growth by balancing the needs of the business with the needs of the people that produce the results. We help businesses understand their strengths at a deeper level and become aware of their gaps and opportunities so they can create a competitive advantage.
You are a successful leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?
- Curiosity — I have so many examples where just being curious — about people, about business and growth has served me well. I learn something every day and I attribute that to my curiosity. It’s why my clients hire me to help them scale their business, because I will always ask them different questions to help shift their thinking.
- Vulnerability — this was something that I had to build as I grew in my career, but it always felt natural to me to share my thoughts and share my stories of both success and failure. Now, as the CEO of my own company, this is one of the most important attributes for my team. I want to model vulnerability for them, so they feel comfortable showing up in that way both with our team and with our clients.
- Approachability — I have a strong ability to build trust quickly with people — both within my organization and with my clients. It helps me develop deeper relationships faster and it allows them to open easily so we can discuss the strengths and opportunities in front of us in an honest and authentic way.
What’s the WHY behind the work that you do? Please share a story about this if you can.
My personal WHY and the WHY of the business is to create impact. When I left the corporate world to become an entrepreneur, I was leaving a very stable and successful career. I promised myself that if I was going to take the risk, then the company I was going to build had to create the biggest impact it could. Impact is something that drives literally ever decision we make in the business from what clients to bring on, to how we grow the team, to how we show up each day for each other in the business.
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
There are so many people that have supported me along the way — my family, my spouse, my business colleagues and former managers and my leadership peer forum that now supports me in my next level of growth. I learned at a very early age to surround myself with people who were smarter than me, had more experience than me and were go-givers. And when you get in those rooms of people, magic can happen for you, for them and for the ripple effect that it creates.
Awesome! Let’s now jump to the primary focus of our interview. I’m an author and I believe that books have the power to change lives. Can you please tell our readers about “The Book That Changed Your Life”? Can you share a story about how it impacted you?
There are several books that have had a profound impact on me, but the most recent one has been The Infinite Game by Simon Sinek. When I first read it — and I have since read it multiple times — I was at a place in my life and my business where it felt like a grind. I never felt like I was doing enough, I needed to work harder and longer, to hustle more to get the business and therefore my life to change. When I read The Infinite Game, it was like a smack in the face. It was so simple, yet profound. Business and life are not a finite game — there are no winners or losers in the game of life. When I am no longer here, when I’ve worked myself to death, life will go on. There’s no ultimate finish line that I’m supposed to cross and then I’m done. It was a game changer for how I looked at my life and my business.
What was the moment or series of events that made you decide that you wanted to take a specific course of action based on the inspiration from the book? Can you share a story about that?
The Infinite Game really gave me permission to slow down, to look around and really assess my life. What was I trying to prove or trying to win? It helped me realize that instead of trying to win some race, my focus needed to be on the impact I could make, which was my why. It also helped me share this same sentiment with my clients as I helped them create strategies to grow their business. The growth was an outcome of playing an infinite, instead of finite, game.
Can you articulate why you think books in particular have the power to create movements, revolutions, and true change?
The most impactful books I have ever read have not taught me new and complicated theories and concepts. They have brought me back to something I already knew — sometime simple that I have made more complex than I needed to. They have inspired me to get back to my true core of who I am and who I want to be versus telling me that I needed to be something or someone else. I believe that change happens when you get closer to who you really are.
A book has many aspects, of course. For example, you have the writing style, the narrative tense, the topic, the genre, the design, the cover, the size, etc. In your opinion, what are the main, essential ingredients needed to create a book that can change lives?
An authentic voice. When I wrote my first book and released it in 2021, the most important thing I shared with my editor and publisher was that it needed to retain my authentic voice. Because my favorite authors and people who have influenced my life like Simon Sinek, Brene Brown, Patrick Lencioni — all write in an authentic voice. You can hear them speaking to you from the page. Those are the books that take residence in my soul, versus just adding to my brain capacity.
What are your “5 Things I Wish Someone Told Me Before I Started My Career” and why? (Please share a story or example for each.)
- Remember who you are — I wish someone had told me that the world was going to influence me to be who it wants me to be versus who I want to be. I have been able to figure it out, but much later than I wish I would have. When I can be my authentic self, I thrive and the people around me are positively impacted.
- Define your values and stay true to them — My core values are my absolutely compass for my life and my business and give me confidence to make hard decisions when I need to. I wish I had defined them sooner.
- Be prepared to unlearn — Through my 20’s I felt like every experience, every career opportunity was a new mountain I had to climb. It wasn’t until I got into my 30s that I realized that to learn what I needed to learn to move forward in life, there were some key beliefs that I needed to unlearn because they were not serving me as I grew into the person I wanted to be.
- Don’t be afraid to break the rules — I grew up in a strict household and I was a rule follower — to a fault. I wish someone had told me that there are rules that are there to protect us and there are rules that are there to keep us small. I have learned that many of the rules I had in my head about what I was supposed to do, not do or become are rules that really needed to be broken.
- Embrace the stuck — I believe that we all have stuck points in our lives and every 7–10 years we start to get uncomfortable in our own skin and where we are. I now know that this is not a bad thing, it’s normal and it’s also an opportunity to change and grow. I have gotten better at normalizing these feelings and really paying attention to the change it’s trying to drive in my life.
The world, of course, needs progress in many areas. What movement do you hope someone (or you!) starts next? Can you explain why that is so important?
I hope I can start a movement around normalizing the feeling of being stuck. My book is focused on helping people see that we all get stuck throughout our entire lives and careers. The more we can talk about those stuckpoints and normalize them, the easier it is for us to move forward when we get stuck. So, I hope there is a movement around the fact that stuck is a great place to be because it forces us to change and evolve so we can move forward again.
How can our readers further follow your work online?
You can find out more about my company, Keystone Group International at www.keystonegroupintl.com and you can find out more about my book at my personal site, www.jaimetaets.com or follow me on LinkedIn: www.linkedin.com/jaimetaets
Thank you so much for taking the time to share with us and our readers. We know that it will make a tremendous difference and impact thousands of lives. We are excited to connect further and we wish you so much joy in your next success.
About the interviewer: Sara Connell is a bestselling author and the founder of Thought Leader Academy where she helps coaches, writers and entrepreneurs become best selling authors, TEDx and paid speakers. She has been featured on The Oprah Winfrey Show, Good Morning America, The View, FOX Chicago, NPR, Katie Couric and TEDx. Her writing has appeared in: The New York Times, Forbes, and many publications. Access her free masterclass: How to Write A Bestselling Book That Changes Lives (in less than 3 months) HERE
