Colby Jubenville, PhD is an accomplished author, international speaker, professor, business advisor, entrepreneur, and inventor who holds an academic appointment at Middle Tennessee State University as Special Assistant to the Dean for Student Success and Strategic Partnerships in the College of Behavioral and Health Sciences.
Due to various experiences throughout Dr. Jubenville’s life, including being born with a condition that negatively impacted his vision, he’s figured out how to use adversity to accelerate growth in both his personal and professional lives.
In this episode, we talk about some of those adversities and how he was able to overcome them, why we need to rethink the process of how we change, why we can’t be lazy with language, the importance of trust when it comes to influencing people, the phrase we should replace the word goals with in our vocabulary, and so much more!
Take a listen to the episode below!
Mentioned in this episode:
- Dr. Colby Jubenville’s Website
- Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by J.D. Vance
- Be the Best at What Matters Most: The Only Strategy You will Ever Need by Joe Calloway
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Transcript
Hey, hey! It’s Andrea and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast.
Today, I have Colby Jubenville on the line, and he is an accomplished author, international speaker, professor, business adviser, entrepreneur, and inventor. He holds an academic appointment at Middle Tennessee State University (MTSU) as Special Assistant to the Dean for Student Success and Strategic Partnerships in the College of Behavioral and Health Sciences.
So I’m really, really excited about talking to Colby today. Welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast, Colby!
Colby Jubenville: Well, Andrea, hey, thanks for let me being with you today. Thanks for letting me share some ideas that hopefully will be valuable for you and for your audience. I appreciate of being with you today.
Andrea: Yeah, alright. So Colby, can you tell us a little bit about what you do at the college. What do you do in MTSU and how does that all fit into your overall career?
Colby Jubenville: Yeah. I run a Center for Student Coaching and Success at Middle Tennessee State University because I came to the simple conclusion that students come to higher education, come to some kind of formal education for one reason and that’s gainful employment.
When you ask students why they come to college, they can’t give you that answer. The very first thing that I teach them is employment straight income for money, and gainful employment is where you get some kind of meaning and purpose and contribution from the work that you do. Once you understand that you’re there for gainful employment then every decision that you make in terms of your education needs to go to that filter.
Andrea: Hmmm, yeah, go ahead.
So, I’ve been in education my whole life. I was born to two educators that taught me the way you take on the world is to become an educator and educate other people. That works all the way up till you get these things called lifestyle and freedom. Then you’ve got to figure out how to get paid for your value and not paid simply for your time.
So, there’s an old joke about college professors, you know the joke, they say “Those who can do, and those who can’t, finish your point.” That’s okay. I can handle it.
Andrea: Teach.
Colby Jubenville: Those who can’t, teach.
Andrea: Oh yeah, I was a teacher too.
Colby Jubenville: And those who can’t teach; teach PE. That’s the old Woody Allen joke.
Andrea: Oh no!
Colby Jubenville: I thought about that for a long time early in my career and what I said to myself is “If you can do anything and you get paid for your value and not your time.” So John Floyd is in Rutherford County in Murfreesboro and he runs Ole South, he owns Ole South, and he started Ole South. It’s the largest independent homebuilder in the State of Tennessee.
We workout every morning together and, while working out, he makes fun of me and says “You know, you _____ professors up there, you know, collecting a government’s check and not doing anything.”
So I decided to drift the success that we had. And then I had, specifically, with individual students throughout my time in MTSU, and along the way, he hired me as a consultant at a crossroads in his life and his business life. He said something to me that I’ll never forget. He said “Colby, if you can help me get this thing back on track, we can all prosper together.”
So we did get it back on track and survived the economic downturn. He is the largest independent home builder in the State of Tennessee, and he committed a seven-figure gift to the center because of the work that I’m doing, and the work is really simple.
So John Floyd, he was the president and founder of Ole South Properties, is a good friend of mine. We’d workout together every morning in about a decade ago. I helped him with his company during the economic downturn. I’ll never forget what he said to me, he said “Colby, if you can help me get this thing back on track, we can all prosper together.”
So we did get it back on track. He’s now the largest independent home builder in the State of Tennessee and we do prosper together. He committed a seven-figure gift to the Center for Student Success and Coaching in MTSU and it’s been incredible to watch the transformation that has taken place.
If you think about gainful employment and you think that that’s why kids are on college campus then you start to ask yourself “What ultimately would put them in a position to become gainfully employed prior to walking and cross the stage in graduation and that’s the vision for our center.
So here’s the simple conclusion that I’ve come to through this process and I think it might be the first big takeaway for your audience that the students, people, adults; they don’t necessarily want personal development as much as they want personal change.
So I think that personal development has become this extensive broad term that nobody really understands anymore. But when you talk about personal change and people start to nod and shake their head and say yes, then the question becomes “What is it that you’re trying to change?”
Here’s what we’re trying to change. For me to help you, Andrea, the very first thing that I have to understand is your narrative. There was a narrative that has been written for her or by her and if I don’t know what that narrative is then I can’t help her change. But we use narrative based coaching sessions. We use a personal assessment, _____ assessment which measures behavior versus personality. You can’t change somebody’s personality but you can change your behavior.
So we use an assessment and then the narrative based coaching templates to draw up change and create a new narrative for the students. The change is the narrative and we help them uncover that narrative through that process so that they can write a new story about the life they want to create for themselves.
It’s ultimately about becoming the person you’re supposed to become in order to live the life you’re supposed to live. So we use six foundational coaching sessions based on the personal assessment and that personal coaching to create personal change.
Andrea: Hmmm that’s exciting because I know that a lot of students when they’re going to college really don’t know any of this. They don’t know how to move forward or not sure exactly, even sometimes, how this relates to what choices their making for their major and where they’re going to apply after school.
I know that this is really important. I’m sure it helps retention at your school as well.
Colby Jubenville: Well, we’re just in the beginning phases of tracking the students that come to the center. But every piece of feedback that we get is there’s nothing like this in my college experience. It was more valuable than any other piece of my college experience.
Here’s a thing that people don’t understand and this probably the second big takeaway in terms of thought leadership, change does not happen _____. Change happens incrementally and do feel _____. If you change what you do, it would change the way you feel about what you do. That would change the way you think about what you can accomplish. So the coaching, it’s broken into two key pieces. What is the greatest conclusion that you’ve come to and what is greatest realization that you’ve come to.
So there’s an a-ha moment and there’s an end, and then based on those, what are the three activities that you’re committed to doing? We track that in 30-day windows, and the cool thing about helping 20s is you don’t really have to help him a lot to get him started. At the end of the day, _____ said it best, he said “Don’t let start stop you,” and that’s really what most…they don’t know how to transition off the campus and get out into the game.
Andrea: Yeah.
Colby Jubenville: So it’s been powerful. I build version one and version one was clunky. It was overwhelming. It was cumbersome. Version two is just very elegant and simple, and it’s personal assessment, personal coaching, and personal change.
Andrea: You know, you were talking about the narrative driving change and driving the person. Tell us a little bit about your narrative because in researching for our interview today, I was really struck by your childhood and some of the struggles that you had.
Colby Jubenville: Yeah.
Andrea: Yeah, how you came to where you are? Would you mind sharing a little bit about that?
Colby Jubenville: So just pour my heart out to the audience and be very vulnerable.
Andrea: Pretty much yeah. That’s pretty much what we do here.
Colby Jubenville: I really wonder if I chose this or it chose me. I was born to those two educators and one of them is my stepdad but usually my dad. His name is Wayne Williams, and we joke now but I tell people I went to the school for better living and better people by Wayne Williams. He’s from Citronelle, Alabama. His father served for Patton and he was the most kind, compassionate, loving father than anyone could ever have.
My mother who made a huge investment in me and never gave up was told early on that the best I could ever do was be some kind of functional literate working at a McDonald’s because I was born with something called remnants of the papillary membrane. It’s basically a protective coating that melts off your eyes when you’re born. Well, mine didn’t melt off away.
So from first through sixth grade, I had this really bad headaches and I never forget you know, I would just go back to my room and just really fall apart. My mom would pick me up and put me in a bathtub with my clothes on to calm me down because that was the only what that I could make that pain go away.
So I eventually taught myself to see through those cobwebs, through those remnants of the papillary membrane. And then along the way, through all the struggles, I learned how to use adversity to accelerate growth. And along the way, because I went to Millsaps College in Jackson, Mississippi, I fell in love with learning.
I became a student in the process and played football there for _____ and he taught me some new lessons along the way and part of that whole process was the general theme. If I look back on it now, the general theme was how to use adversity to accelerate growth.
So being born to those two teachers who really believe in self-reliance, you know, I never forget my dad said to me, he said to me early on, “Son, you got one or two choices,” this is probably from 7th or 8th grade, he said “You can either work for me for free or you can find a job this summer. I don’t care what you do.” I didn’t believe him and my dad was meticulous.
He knocked on the door that first day of summer and he had note cards that said inside and outside painting, you know landscape. And he said, “When you get down with these, _____ when you’re done with these let me know, I’ll give you the next set of things to do.” I got up on my bike that day and drove up to downtown _____ and knocked on all the doors and started the grass cutting business.
So my first hard skill in my life was knocking on doors and cutting grass. I realized I like knocking on doors a whole lot more than cutting grass. So I got _____ to cut the grass. He just told me the value of being self-corrected. He taught me the value of “If you want something in life, nobody can do it expect for you.”
So because I have a handful of loving people that cared enough about me to make an investment in me, and I think everybody that listens to this podcast at some point had probably decided to give up on themselves or give up on life, and so this is it for me.
At one point, I was a straggler that said “The success is for the rich and strong and the powerful but not for me.” And before that I was a reactor that said “Well, I am here because mom and dad, you put me here.” I went to St. Paul’s with these kids that drove BMW’s and Mercedes and you’re making me drive a 1972 Ford Thunderbird with a rust on its bottom where I had to find a piece of plywood to put on the bottom of the car so I wouldn’t get wet when _____ when it rained.
But upon looking back on all those things, it was that great, that resilience, that adversity to accelerate growth that gave me a competitive advantage when I decided to ultimately go to Millsaps.
Nobody ever told me that you have to go through all comprehensive exams under grad. I was never going to Millsaps. But I didn’t ask because I didn’t know because I wasn’t really invested in my life. And then I get to the end and they say “Have you signed up these all comprehensive exams? And I said “What are you talking about? I’m not taking that.” And they said “Oh no, you have to to graduate.”
So I didn’t prepare and this is just a really great story of using adversity to accelerate growth. But I didn’t prepare and I said “I made _____ this class because I played football. I was a pretty good football player. I play _____ through here. They’re gonna let me let me out this place.”
Sure enough, I went in there and I’ll never forget, it was this cold room and there’s four guys staring at you and they’re the four most expert in the world in areas like _____, the old south, the new south and the Great Depression and they just start firing out questions of which I had no answers too because I had not prepared myself.
So they said “Could you talk about the whiskey tax and colonization? Could you talk about the Whiskey Rebellion?” So all these questions were about whisky and I think it’s because they know I was over the fraternity house hanging out and drinking beer after the football game, so I failed. They called me back in after about four or five hours and they said “We think you would benefit by retaking these exams. I’m not saying you failed, we think you would benefit.”
At that point in your life, you can only call one person and that was my mom. I called her and I said “Look, I’m coming home over to South Alabama and I’m gonna finish up there.” And my mom said “You were absolutely _____. You’ve paid the money, you made the investment and you would figure out how to work through this.” I said “What should I do?”
She said, “Well, if you were me, I’d do two things. First of all, you learn a very valuable lesson here, son. If you gonna do it, show up prepared and then the second is, I go back in front of one professor that believes in you that thinks that you can do this and ask them, build a relationship with them and ask them what you need to do to successfully complete the _____.”
I go back to this one guy, and he said “You know, Colby, you got all the confidence in the world in the football field but you have no confidence in the classroom. So I’m gonna give you the first question, I’m gonna give you the answer and I hope that gives you enough to get you started. Now, go get yourself prepared.”
So while everybody else was graduating, going on their way and going on to the next stage of their life, Colby was over at the Café Seagulls reading all the books that I was supposed to read over that four-year period. And I went back in there and another four hours and Robert _____, I’ll never forget, he said “Colby, you obviously come here prepared this time and we appreciate that you took the time to do that. I’ve got one last question for you and if you get this right then I’ll pass you.”
So he said “Can you tell me how this is the foremost expert of Great Depression?” He said “Can you tell me how the _____ and the Great Depression _____?” And in that moment, in that classroom, he unlock something for me that changed my life because he taught me one of the key concepts of entrepreneurs which is taking patterns from one place and moving them over to another place and understanding how these different patterns work.
And so I said “Yeah, I can tell you. I’ll start saying that California is the _____.” And he said “I like it, continue on.” So I get through and talked about all these different analogies that are related to that. And so I passed and I walked out and I said “One day, I’m gonna be a college professor and I’m going to teach other people how to be prepared so they don’t end up where I did.”
It was because of that defining moment because I was looking for that defining moment and I had that defining moment that ultimately unlocked for me. And I think that’s what has to happen for people. I think that all of us have to have that struggle in order to find your voice, which to me is the intersection of talent, passion, and conscience and need in the world.
He unlocked it for me that day and it led me to Southern Miss and ultimately to starting a football team in Jackson, Mississippi and Eastern Kentucky University where a comedian says, when the world ends, he should be in Kentucky because they won’t find out about it until 20 years later. Then down to MTSU where I was lucky enough to catch a university and a president that had a vision.
And Sidney McPhee has built that university into what I consider to be one of the top universities in the country, and I’ve been lucky enough to be a part of it and be a part of Murfreesboro and be a part of John Floyd’s life and success and just been very fortunate.
Andrea: You know, you just mentioned the concept of voice and I’d like to go back there. I was wanting you to touch on this, but what is your thought on what it means then to have a voice of influence?
Colby Jubenville: Well, you can’t be lazy in language. People are making decisions about your value based on what you say to them and how you present it to them. I think you need to be really careful and think about what is it that you want to say. If persuasion is the key centerpiece of business activity then what is it that you want to say to them and how can you say it in a way that will connect with them?
One of the things that I figured out is that when you speak in emotional ways, it will allow you to connect with people in ways that most people cannot. So I’ll go back to Heath and Heath in Made to Stick, and they have that really simple framework and frameworks help us create predictability structure and efficiency. But what the framework was was a success framework. It’s simple, unexpected, concrete, credible, and emotional stories.
So if you want to build a voice of influence, the way I did it, initially was I watched _____, the movie. After he made it big, he went back to the New York night clubs and struggled. And it showed you just how hard it was to continue to be somebody that can engage the audience in ways that he’s one of the best.
One of the things that he did that I saw in the movie was that he had a piece of paper and he wrote down 10 words, 10 stories. I watched that technique and how he unpacked that. So that’s how initially I got started. So what are the 10 defining moments in my life and how can I tell a simple, unexpected, concrete, credible emotional story that connects with people in ways that nobody else can.
That led me to really where…I think my space is where I want to own is the intersection of personal brand and personal relationships. So the intersection of personal brand and personal relationships to me is trust. What is the foundation of trust? If we say “Hey Andrea, it’s Colby. You gotta trust me. I gotta trust you. We gotta trust the process. We gotta trust each other.” What’s the foundation of trust?
Well, to me the foundation of trust and to build influence is safety. And safety is, am I known, am I heard, am I valued, and I important? Does my opinion matter? If you want to influence other people and say “Hey listen, I’m gonna build a relationship. It’s going to be founded in trust. The foundation of trust is safety. I want you to know that when you walk through here, we’re gonna build a container of trust together.”
The container of trust looks like this, am I known, am I heard, am I valued, am I important? Does my opinion matter? I am the leader and leaders go first and good leaders make good followers. In this container, four things are going to happen, you have to believe that as the leader, “I’m confident.” You have to believe that as a leader that I have good intentions for you. You have to be vulnerable and show me that so that we can connect. And then whatever we agreed to, whatever we agreed to, if you do not live up to that agreement or I don’t live up to that agreement then swift action must be taken. That’s how you build influence with people, about building a container of trust.
Andrea: Yeah. I like that a lot. Respectful dialogue and definitely making sure that we hold space for other people that have and share their voice is such a huge piece of what we talked about here.
I want to go back a little bit. Did you always feel super confident in your own voice? I mean, when you started out after college, when you started sharing your ideas and putting yourself out there, were you always confident? Where did the confidence come from?
Colby Jubenville: Oh God no! No, I wasn’t confident; I wasn’t going to make it at a high school.
Andrea: Yeah. I hear yah.
Colby Jubenville: I wasn’t confident; I wasn’t going to make it at Millsaps. You know, I want to read and I have not put this to memory but I want to read a quote and I want to see if I can find it. It comes from a book called Hillbilly Elegy. Have you heard of it?
Andrea: No, I haven’t.
Colby Jubenville: Now, listen to this because you asked me a very specific question about where did this confidence come from. Listen to this, “I want people to know what it feels like to never give up on yourself and why you might do it.” That’s the first place of where my confidence came from. I know what it feels like to never give up on yourself and I know why you do it.
“I want people to understand what happens in the lives of the poor and the psychological impact that spiritual and material poverty has on their children. I want people to understand the dream as my family encountered it. I want people to understand how upward mobility really feels, and I want people to understand something that I learned only recently that for those of us lucky enough to live the American dream, the demons of the life we left behind continue to chase us.”
So my confidence is not from my IQ, my confidence is from my circumstance of being a middle child that was born with a brother that he looked up and idolized and he was better in every facet of life. I chased him my entire life to be better than him and he knew it. So that’s a piece of where my confidence comes from.
As a middle child, my older brother did it first. My younger brother did it better and I was constantly stuck in the middle trying to say “Hey, if I do this, didn’t I’m getting enough? Hey, if I do this, didn’t I’m getting enough?” Here’s the difficult part about that. So it’s not IQ for me, it’s circumstance that gave me my confidence.
Here’s the difficult part that it comes with a cost. When you start trying to build your life based on fear of failure and scarcity versus abundance then that comes with an emotional cost. That certainly something and that part of my story was that my mother said from a very early age, she said, “Colby, people just don’t know what to do with you.” And I had somebody recently tell me that. In fact, Warren Brent who is a mentor to me and really started the next phase of all these things that I’m talking about with container of trust and agreed reality and agreed upon the future, he has a background in therapy and divinity.
We had about a two-hour meeting. We met somewhere. We met at a New Year’s Day party. My good friend, John Byers, we met at a New Year’s Day party and we’re sitting, watching football. And I could feel him trying to pry to my soul, I didn’t like it. I know when people trying to pry to my soul because I do get it all the time. So he kept trying to pry to my soul, and I got in the car and I said to my wife, at the time I said, “You know, I really didn’t like that guy.”
About six months later, we had this meeting and it was one of the most incredible meetings that I’ve ever had. And he starts talking about all these ideas and then he just stands up and Warren is about 6’8” or 6’7”, he just stands up. He sticks his hand out and he shakes my hand, he said “Alright, Colby, I’ll talk to you later.” And I said “That’s _____ young man.” He goes, “I have no idea what to do with you.” And I’ll never forget, I walked out of that meeting and I was like “What do you mean?” He doesn’t know what to do with me.
So, Warren used his therapy skills to help me really looked inside of myself to get in touch with those emotions that I had over the years that were part of the collateral damage of trying to find success out of fear of failure versus abundance. So my confidence comes from those handful of people that knew how to pull it out of me, my parents.
If I look back at my life, these coaches that I had, great coaches did three things for me. They made me have conversations I didn’t want to have. They made me try to do things I didn’t think that I could do to ultimately become something I didn’t think I could become. So if I look back on my life, it says coaches have the greatest impact on me and helped develop that confidence; Charlie Miller, Bob Rutledge, Scott Atkins, _____ and Tommy Ranager. All those folks invested in me in ways that…you can’t really invest on people. Today, they call it child abuse. That’s a joke by the way.
Andrea: I was assuming so.
Colby Jubenville: How do you use adversity to accelerate growth? What is its trying to teach me? Once you understand that and can frame it up for other people in ways that help them make sense with their own lives, which is what that quote from Hillbilly Elegy does. I want people to know what it feels like to nearly give up on yourself and why you would do it.
I’ve been right there. At Southern Miss., I decided I was not good enough to get a PhD. I went in and out started managing a fine dining restaurant in Hattiesburg, Mississippi. After six months of doing some of the most emotionally exhausting work of my life, I said to myself “I going back and I’m going to get that PhD come hell or high water, whatever I have to do, I will do it,” and I did it.
Andrea: Yeah. The prevailing way that people handle the stuff though is that we try to keep people from experiencing that moment of almost giving up. We’re trying to talk people out of it.
Colby Jubenville: Yeah, absolutely! The other goals and some of the most overused and unrenowned words in America, we set goals and the minute we don’t achieve, we _____. So I get people to think about dominant focus versus goals. What’s that one thing you want to accomplish? What’s that one thing? And for me, it’s always been the coaching and teaching on ever increasing stage.
The reason that I’m interested in sitting down and having this podcast with you is because it is part of my dominant focus. I get to spend 45 minutes with you, coaching and teaching on the stage that has a national audience, which is what I love to do. Not goals, not goals dominant focus. What’s that one thing?
And here’s a nice question once you know what’s the dominant focus is, can you do three things today, five weeks, or 16 months towards the dominant focus in your life? Once I do three things today towards my dominant focus, I don’t have to do anything else because I’ve done the three things that I want to do. If I do five that’s great, but if I do three, I’m keeping it all. They’re all what I need to do.
Andrea: Those little things that you do each day, they just continue to add up and built.
Colby Jubenville: Yeah. I value activities, which is where part of that confidence comes from. At one point, I was scared to death that you didn’t get all these things and then John Lee Dumas in EOFire, entrepreneuronfire.com. That was my support ever, and I was scared. I was shaking. When we got it done, he goes “Colby, you absolutely crashed it.” He said “Man, you need to have your own show.”
Now, I should have my own show, but I have ADD and I haven’t slowed down long enough to put the show together. But it would be good and it would be fun, but I’m just not there yet, maybe one day, I’ll get there so I can make people like you and have a lot of fun doing it.
Andrea: Yeah. Well, that’s going to lead me to another question that I was going to ask you, because you’ve done a number of different things. I mean, your bio even says that you’re an inventor. What did you invent?
Colby Jubenville: Yes, it’s a big question. Coming back on an airplane, I was _____ yellow pad and I listen to other people in what they say and I call this the strengthening of weak thighs and so I just take notes. It’s people from different places saying different things with different perspectives about life and business. So I heard this conversation with this one person said “I’ve got 10 books to read and I don’t have time to read any of them.” And I thought to myself “Yeah. I know what that feels like.”
And the second person said “I never read books, I just want the best ideas.” The third person said “I read the books and I want the best ideas but I take notes in the margins and then I go back and look at those notes when I can’t read what I wrote.” And the last person said “I don’t need that. I just want a digital content. I want the information of podcast.”
So I drew up a self-content learning system that had big ideas, simple explanation and digital content and I called them “QR books,” Quick Read books. So the other side of that…what comes back with that is there are two questions that turn learning into action and I learn this from a VP of sales of a major medical company that said “You spend millions of dollars on the sales meeting, what’s the _____?”
He said, “Colby, here are two things we want to have happen. Here’s the number one. Did I get the information?” That’s number one. Number two, how they’re going to get that information to drive their business and life over? So why is the information important to me and how can I use it to drive my business and life forward? So that closes the gap and that was a self-content learning system that I built.
The sad part of the story is, I invested $12,000 in trying to pattern that and I didn’t get very far, but I didn’t mean it. So everybody here, take that or run! You got the simple explanation of digital content.
You know here’s the cool thing, so for example, I’m going to show you how I invented this. There’s a direct selling for a company called _____ and he wanted a simple, easy way to take this information and teach to other people and he saw one of these books and called me and said “You know, can I order 10,000 of these?” I said “Sure, yeah.” So I invented that. I got paid for it. I gave him the system and showed him how to do it, off and run.
Andrea: So you said, you’ve got ADD or whatever but I assumed that means that you have lots of ideas. You kind of move back and forth between them, do you have a hard time staying focused?
Colby Jubenville: Yes, can you help me?
Andrea: Well…
Colby Jubenville: Yes, I have a hard time staying focused but here’s the thing, I’m happiest when I have 10 things going on and all of them in progress. I am at my worst when I have zero things going on or five things going on and I’m stonewalled I get really upset and frustrated.
Andrea: Do you play into each other, like one thing that’s going kind of help inspire you to do something, another thing that’s going and they sort of have some synergy like that?
Colby Jubenville: Oh yeah, absolutely. I mean, I believe that progress is a natural motivator. So when you communicate progress, you’re communicating natural motivation. So yeah, they certainly play with each other for sure.
Andrea: So we shouldn’t be too afraid of having more than one thing going at a time. Even though you can have a dominant focus, that dominant focus is…how do those two things relate?
Colby Jubenville: OK, the dominant focus is one thing that you run the filter through. If my dominant focus is the coach and teach on ever increasing stage then every decision that I make should be based off that then you got to decide what activity or the highest value of the activities. What activities would create higher value in your life and then do this, focus on this.
Andrea: There you go. So when people say to me, they say “What should my next step be? Should I write a book next? Should I create a course, online course?” That sort of thing, what kind of advice would you give to emerging thought leaders, people who have a message about how to choose their next step?
Colby Jubenville: Well, I think the first thing you have to do is make sure the message is right where you want it to be. So I’ve spent many, many years honing ideas and deciding on what stories and what is the message that would resonate the most with the people that I want to try to impact and serve.
I’ll give you an example, whenever I write books, I turn on HBO and I listen to movies in the background and I listened to Jerry McGuire here recently. It’s my favorite movie, and of course the most famous line of Jerry McGuire is what?
Andrea: Ahhh you put me on the spot…
Colby Jubenville: “Show me the money.”
Andrea: Show me the money, OK.
Colby Jubenville: Yeah, and so that’s not the best line in the movie. The best line in the movie is when he _____ to write the mission statement. And the mission statement is “The Things We Think and Do Not Say: The Future of Our Business.” And I thought that was so powerful that…
Andrea: Could you say that again?
Colby Jubenville: Yeah. The things we think and do not say: The future of our business. That’s his mission statement and so he writes this stuff and my favorite line in that clip of that movie says “I became my father’s son again.” I became my father’s son again. And it took me back to walking at a football field or soccer field holding my dad’s hand and what that felt like and how that would be so important in how you build relationships and how you build a brand and how you communicate and articulate your value.
So I think you have to look for those big rocks, those messages and then what you decide what that message is. For me, that’s the thing we think and do not say the future of our business. Well, here’s the reason we don’t _____ because we don’t have the relationships because we have absence of trust that leads to fear of conflict, that leads to lack of accountability, that leads to status ____ versus collective results.
So if you want to get collective results, I mean look at the University of Alabama, all they have is some trophy winners these days. They did it for a long time. They just won national championships every year and their focus is on collective results, because they have a philosopher that runs their program, Nick Saban. Saban says things like “High achievers don’t like mediocre people and mediocre people don’t like high achievers.” And that’s OK but that’s his message.
He built a process where he said “Keep it simple. Surround yourself with _____.” Make wise investments in the future.” These basic things that manage the message, these basic things that everyone needs to understand on now to build culture and how you create culture as a competitive advantage in a workplace. All that starts with personal relationships and trust.
I mean, think about what Warren said, “Colby, I don’t know what to do with you.” Man, that is a powerful statement and now Warren, we get on the phone and “hey, I’m in a container of trust and I didn’t do something right. Guess who’s coming down on me.” “Colby, I love you but your ADD has gotten a way here. You’re not doing this the way that we agreed that you would do it.” “You’re right, Warren. I’ll get that corrected.” “Thank you, Colby.”
It’s seems a very powerful way to build relationships, and so you asked me what’s the next step? Well, I think the first step is to get the message right. You look in for those defining moments that when they give you the chance to stand in front of somebody…I’ll tell you who gets it right better than anybody on the planet in my humble opinion, my good friend, Joe Calloway. Do you know, Joe?
Andrea: I don’t.
Colby Jubenville: He needs to be on this podcast. Joe Calloway, his books are so good. I called him one day and said, Joe, your books are so good. And I don’t even have to read the book because the title is so good. He goes, “I know, Colby, ain’t it cool?” I said, “Yes, but I’m cool when you’re cool.” But his books are…my favorite book is Be the Best to What Matters Most: The Only Strategy You Will Ever Need.
Think about that now. If you and I are sitting there, we’re going to build a business together or build a consultant group together, or we’re going to have clients together and you’ll hire me and I say “Hey, Andrea, listen to me. I need to know one thing, what matters the most? Won’t you tell me what that is? I’m gonna do everything to make sure that we deliver on that.”
So I know we’re running out of time here, but my favorite Calloway story…now, listen how good he is. He comes on stage, “I use Discount Tire.” I’ll say, “How many of you have used discount tires?” And everybody does in Middle, Tennessee. Everybody does in the southeast, discount tires, and I’ll say why, and somebody from the crowd screamed, “Because they run through your car. When you pull up, they run through your car.”
And I said “I know, whenever I’m feeling bad about myself, I don’t go home because when I go home, I walk through the door and nobody cares. I go to the Discount Tire because somebody runs through my car.” Well, I feel a whole lot better about myself and you just came running through the car.
Now here’s the takeaway. When Calloway tells a story, he goes “I would imagine that it came from the top. That there was a _____ that came from the top.” He said “I imagine three guys sitting around _____ about 22 years old. He’s working hard all day. They sit around and talk and the man would say “We sell tires. There’s a hole, there’s a round. There’s a good, better, and the best. How can we do it different?”
And he said “I don’t imagine that somebody is in the _____ he goes “These guys are sitting and talking, and this guy with grease on his face who has worked hard all day says “I don’t maybe we can run through the car or something. And he laughed and says “Am I running through the car?” And I’m demonstrating to you that in this moment that you are the most important thing to me.”
When I heard that, it makes me think about the relationships that I tried to have with my kids. Do I demonstrate to Mary Burke? Do I demonstrate to Jack that in the moment that they are the most important things to me.
Andrea: Yeah. Oh, gosh that’s beautiful! Thank you so much, Colby! Thank you for being with us today and for sharing your voice of influence to the world.
Colby Jubenville: Well, hey, I love it and as you can see, we could keep going for hours. So if you want to do another one at any point, you have sometimes, we can keep on going, absolutely!
Andrea: Thank you so much, Colby!
Colby Jubenville: Thank you, absolutely!
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