Passion, Purpose, and Perseverance: Powerful Lessons from Dragons’ Den

Have you ever wanted to pitch your great ideas on a show like Shark Tank or its Canadian equivalent, Dragons’ Den? Canadian entrepreneur Tonia Jahshan had the experience of a lifetime when she and her husband pitched their loose-leaf tea company, Sipology, on Dragons’—and Tonia recently came onto the Mindfulness Manufacturing podcast to give a behind-the-scenes look at her journey and share some powerful lessons she learned from her Dragons’ Den experience.

Whether you’re dreaming of pitching a great product or looking for a way to show your leadership on the manufacturing floor, Tonia’s tips ensure you’ll be able to show up with your best foot forward!

Tonia’s Tip #1: Show Up With Passion

In all aspects of your life and business, you need to show up with passion! When you’re positive and passionate about what you do, it will spread to others on your team and improve morale and productivity for everyone in your organization. And if you’re not passionate about what you do, others will feel the lack of energy.

Tonia’s Tip #2: Find Your Purpose

Similarly, you need to find purpose and joy in what you do. If you lose your sense of purpose, it can lead to burn-out and maybe mental health issues, which can wreak havoc on all areas of your life and business. If you feel like you’ve lost your purpose, don’t be afraid to take a pause. Reflect on what you want and need, think about creative ways to rework or reconsider what you do.

Tonia’s Tip #3: To Keep Persevering, Protect Yourself

Leadership and entrepreneurship require challenging work and many different demands on your time and energy. To give yourself the tools you need to persevere, attend to your own mental health. This might mean setting boundaries, creating a mindful routine for yourself, or being open to support from your team.

Learn More on the Podcast

Tonia Jahshan’s episode of Mindfulness Manufacturing is filled with great stories about her experience on Dragons’ Den and her growing success with Sipology. To hear her stories and insights for yourself, be sure to listen to her episode here.

Mindfulness Manufacturing

Our show is about providing listeners with real stories that come from a place of experience, transparency, and authenticity. Most importantly it’s about what we learn from these stories and applying Mindfulness in our everyday work and personal lives.
Our intention is to create an environment where people can learn through open honest discussions on how we apply Mindfulness. Although our experiences and stories come from time in a manufacturing environment hence the title “Mindfulness Manufacturing”, we still see our discussions and topics relatable to any organization or profession.

When a mistake occurs on the plant floor, your mind might jump to one question: who caused this issue, and should I write them up for their mistake? But there’s a more productive approach you could be taking—and in this episode of Mindfulness Manufacturing, guest Dr. Jake Mazulewicz breaks it all down!

With a background as a firefighter, EMT, and military paratrooper, Jake knows the challenges of high-hazard industries, and works with organizations to reduce errors and create safer, more reliable workplace environments. In this episode, Jake shares why you can’t procedularize everything, including the way you handle errors and accidents, and offers great insights and stories about how to use connection and curiosity to improve safety, address errors, and strengthen your organization.

3:35 – Procedures and policies are the work that is imagined, and on the floor is how the work actually gets done

4:19 – The work as-done is almost always radically different than the work as-imagined

5:20 – Even when you have standards and people show up wanting to do a good job, you can still see issues that need to be addressed

6:44 – There will always be areas that absolutely need to have procedures in place

8:02 – There are also adaptive jobs, which leans less into procedures and more intro troubleshooting and tacit human knowledge

10:56 – In an ideal environment, both mechanistic and adaptive models are used and respected and needed

12:11 – There are four levels, ranging from strict procedurals to looser guidelines that show what to do, but not how to do it

15:36 – Tacit knowledge gets shared through conversations

16:22 – A way to share important information is to have frontline experts record videos sharing their insights to problems, especially those that are not covered in procedures

19:44 – Through conversation and connection, more knowledge is shared

21:58 – Debriefing also plays a central role

23:45 – If you have strong discipline, you’ll find more freedom

25:31 – In most situations, errors are signals, not defects

27:07 – When an error occurs, be curious and find the deeper cause of the problem

Connect with Jake Mazulewicz

Find him on Linkedin

Visit his website