Category Archives: Podcast

Posted on

How to Become a Citizen Leader for a Cause with Susie Hageman

Episode 66

Susie Hageman is a local friend of mine and I’m very excited to have her on the show with me because she is doing very important work, at a local level, on a global crisis.

Susie has a clinical doctorate in Physical Therapy and works primarily with patients in an outpatient orthopedic setting, spends her time with her sons, and volunteers in her community with a passionate voice in her efforts to address the issue of human trafficking in her community and state.

In this episode, Susie and I discuss how learning human trafficking existed in her community and state changed her life, why human trafficking became Susie’s cause instead of other societal issues, the place Susie’s found for herself in the fight against human trafficking, her advice for speaking to your children about human trafficking, and more!

Take a listen to the episode below!

Mentioned in this episode:

 

Play here (the red triangle below), on iTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Radio (Amazon Alexa) or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Susie Hageman Voice of Influence Podcast Andrea Joy Wenburg

Transcript

Hey, hey!  It’s Andrea, and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast!

Today, I have with me my friend, Susie Hageman, who is a local friend.  And I’m excited to have her with me because she is somebody who is really doing some important work on a local level over a global topic.  We’ll explain that here in a minute, but let me just introduce you to Susie Hageman.

Susie has a clinical doctor in physical therapy and works primarily with patients in an outpatient orthopedic setting before choosing to stay home with her son, and now she is working a little more again.  She continues to volunteers in her community with a passionate voice in her efforts to address the issue of human trafficking in her community and her state.

Andrea:  Susie, thank you so much for being here on the Voice of Influence podcast.

Susie Hageman:  Hello!  Thank you for having me Andrea.  I appreciate this.

Andrea:  Alright, so you’re a physical therapist, a mom, and a Christian, somebody who just really has a passion in your heart for a topic that you really have pursued in a very wholehearted way.  But also, you’ve got all these other things going on as well.  I’m curious.  Those of us who are trying to figure out what our purpose is, our mission, or our message, is there something that is driving you like a message or a mission that is driving you as kind of a citizen leader?

Susie Hageman:  You know, I think it just kind of came in bits and pieces initially.  When I first learned about human trafficking, it disturbed me and I just thought, “How can I apply this to my life?  How can I be making different choices in what I purchase and be making an impact that way?”  It just grew from there.

When I learned that trafficking exists in my state and it exists in my community that broke my heart and I just began questioning again, “What can I be doing as an individual to address this?”  I think this topic of human trafficking in particular because _____ obviously other areas in our society where our hearts can be broken also.

But human trafficking, I think, spoke to me personally just because I tend to be kind of an independent girl that just kind of like to move to the beat of her own drum a little bit and I’ve just really appreciate independence.  I think that’s what drove me to choose physical therapy as a career.

Andrea:  Explain that.  What is physical therapy has to do with independence?

Susie Hageman:  I really enjoy restoring people back to as much as independence as much as they can.  I enjoy helping them find a way to make adaptations or restore whatever physical restrictions they may have so they can get back to living life the way they want to and that’s what is the feeling for me in my career.

I think when I learned about human trafficking, it just really bothered me to think that someone might not have a say in how they live their life.  That’s the part that independence, that freedom is the part that just really kind of spoke to me as individual and kind of drew me in and why I’m passionate about it.

So I kind of see as kind of a common thread that runs through the different areas of my life.  So yeah that’s I think why human trafficking in particular stood out to me as far as where I get involved in my community.

Andrea:  It’s really interesting.  I like that connection that you mean there between restoring people to their independence physically and like with their physical body but then also in this human trafficking arena.

We know that this is a big issue on a global level.  It’s hard to even kind of fathom I think for most of us and some of us maybe more familiar with the issues around human trafficking while others may not.  But I know that your focus has been more of that state and city level, so can you tell us why that in particular, why did you decide to focus more locally?

Susie Hageman:  So when you look at the issue of human trafficking, it is very complex.  It can be overwhelming and so I just kind of began to look at what I could do with an individual.  When I saw the statistics of other states that every month, 900 individuals are sold for sex in the state of Nebraska and out of those 900 individuals 70% to 75% show indicators of being trafficked.   And that Grand Island, my community is the highest per capita in the state for individuals sold for sex.  Those are statistics for the human trafficking initiative.

When I looked at those numbers, they obviously creeped me and I realized that the problem here where I live, and if this is where I live and where I work and move; this is where I could be making an impact.  I’m not a service provider.  I’m not in the law enforcement so I don’t want to be doing job if I’m not qualified for.  So I just began to look at “OK, this is the problem, where can I fit on the team and make a difference?”

When I asked that question, I started to see that there was need for funding for programs to help support survivors and victims of human trafficking I thought “Well, I had experience in putting together events.  I have this group of friends that are willing to help me.”  So that’s kind of a direction I went

Part 2

We started the STOP fund and there’s a need to stop trafficking on the planes.  And our intention is to build up this fund so that we can provide financial support to service organizations that directly assist trafficking victims that needs such as medical care, counseling, shelter, transportation to shelters, basic need, and helping them transition back to independent living.

So that’s kind of where we saw where we could fit in to the team and be a useful contributing member.  So, yeah, that’s kind of where I found my place in the fight against trafficking.

Andrea:  You know, I know that there are some different service organizations that you’re helping fund with the STOP fund, can you explain why you chose to do to create this fund rather than just supporting every single one of this in other way?  Is there a reason why you chose to fund versus supporting one particular organization?

Susie Hageman:  Well, when you look at the trauma that trafficking victims go through, they need more than just shelter.  They need counseling.  They need medical care.  There’s a lot of different pieces of the puzzle to put together and that involves teamwork from a lot of different organizations.

So yeah, we could have done fundraising from one organization but then we wouldn’t have been meeting the need in all the other areas.  So we started the fund to be kind of just a general place for financial resources for all the organizations so that we can kind of help put in pieces to all the other areas of needs for the trauma survivors.  So that’s why we started the fund because we saw there was more than one organization that was going to need help.

Honestly, when we look at our nonprofit, they’re service providers but they also have to do a lot of the fundraising themselves and that takes up time.  They’re doing an important work.  I want to release some of the energy that they’re having to put into fundraising just to support their programs and relieve them of that so they can be doing the important work that they’re trained to do.  So that’s why we did with the fund rather than fundraise for a specific organization.

Andrea:  What kind of reception the STOP fund received from both service organizations and the community?

Susie Hageman:  It’s been beautiful to see the community embraced it and come alongside and support it.  Our first banquet was very successful.  We’ve been able to give out two grants so far and the service organizations do appreciate the support that we’re giving them and they do appreciate just being recognized for the amazing work that they’re doing.

They tend to be very humble people.  They don’t take a trumpet and announce all the amazing things that they’re doing.  So just for someone to recognize the amazing work that they’re doing that is honestly really hard and heartbreaking.  Just for someone to recognize that and give them a pat in the back and say, “We see you, we’re wanting to help you,” is I think really encouraging to them.  So they appreciate it.

I did not anticipate how encouraging it would be to law enforcements.  I just have a lot of respect for law enforcements and I just learned to just appreciate them even more after starting this fund, just their hearts for justice.  They’ve been very appreciative of the STOP fund as well.

I didn’t really take the time to realize that their job is to catch the perpetrator.  It’s not their job to help the victim.  They’re helping the victim by catching the perpetrator.  They don’t have the resources to then help the victims.  That’s somebody else’s job and the resources is there _____.

So for them to know that there’s funding available to help transport someone to a shelter or there’s funding available for a shelter those kinds of things have been really encouraging to them.  They’ve been really supportive of the fund also for those reasons just because they have a heart for justice.  They want victims to be taken care of and _____ heart for that has been really beautiful as well.

We’ve been very well received and it’s just encouraging to see the community come around it.  We knew that the community wanted to fight trafficking too.  They just needed a way to do so.  To see it fly out so beautifully has just been an amazing experience.

When they got a call when the first grant went out, I kind of just wished to all the people that had donated to the STOP fund could have been there for that moment because it was a powerful moment.  I wish they all could have been there for that because they’re all part of it.

Andrea:  That’s really cool!  I mean, you’re giving people the opportunity to help where they might not otherwise known how to help and it just feels overwhelming.

Susie Hageman:  Yes, yes!  This gives us all chance to be able to do something.

Andrea:  So Susie when you’re thinking about people gaining the independence and restoring people to their independence, why is it such a burden for you?

Susie Hageman:  You know, I have this quote “God is my favorite artist and you’re His masterpiece.”  And I think that we are all made for a purpose and it’s beautiful.  What makes human trafficking so heartbreaking is because people aren’t allowed to live the life they want to.  They’re being controlled or coerced by someone else.  That’s not their whole story and even that part of their story can be woven into a beautiful tapestry.

I just think that when we live out our own purpose, when we live out our own passion, there’s a deeper sense of joy and satisfaction rather than just going through life trying to as comfortable as possible.  That might be okay but it doesn’t give you a deep sense of satisfaction and joy.  When you’re living out what you’re made to do and you’re kind of using your gifts and your talents and your experiences to make an impact, it’s kind of meaningful, joyful, and satisfying.

I think for me, anyway, being a part of the story of others and being a part of a team or being in a community of others and I think it’s important for everyone even introverts.  I would say I’m an outgoing introvert myself, being a part of that community and bringing that out in others is also deeply satisfying and then seeing them live out that joy and satisfaction, brings you joy and satisfaction as well.  Does that make sense?

Andrea:  Sure!  Oh yeah, I totally agree.

Susie Hageman:  I think we are meant to live in a community and I think we are meant to live out who you’re made to be and when that happens, it’s just a beautiful, beautiful experience.  So I would encourage people to, it may not be human trafficking, but quite honestly if you’re mentoring youth in your community, you’re helping prevents human trafficking.

I mean, it’s such a complex topic that there’s multiple ways to go about addressing it.  But if you’re living out what drives you, if you’re living out where your gifts and talents are and when you are fulfilling your purpose, it’s a beautiful thing.  I guess I would encourage people to do that and to not be afraid to step out there and try new things.  Don’t be afraid to fall.  It’s OK to say I don’t know everything.  You know, I don’t think any of us expect other people to know everything.

Throughout this experience, I haven’t known everything about how to set up a fund along the way, but I’ve been willing to say, “I don’t know about this but I’m gonna try this.  Will you help me along the way?”  And people have been very gracious about it.  So I think fear of not knowing how to do it perfectly shouldn’t pull anyone back because you can always learn along the way.

Andrea:  Hmm love that.  OK, so you’re also a wife and a mother of some small kids.  Really, how do you bring them in what you’re doing with the STOP fund?  What kind of conversations do you guys have at home with your kids, with your husband?  How does this work with your family?

Susie Hageman:  Well, so the STOP fund, Travis, my husband is a part of it too.  He’s a physician, so his job, obviously, requires a lot of his time, where I could develop more of my time too to actually work with the fund and he’s very much a part of it too.  It’s something that’s on both of our hearts.  We are a team of this.  So it’s kind of a partnership, I would say.  It’s not really my thing or his thing.  We do it together.

And with the boys, it’s hard because of their ages, they’re 5 and 8, I mean to go into specific details about it.  They know that human trafficking is making someone else work a job that they don’t necessarily want to work.  We kind of just go into a more level that’s appropriate for their age and they know that that’s not nice.

So they know that mommy and daddy are trying to bring awareness that it didn’t happen anymore and to help those people out of that life so that they can live the life that they want to live.  They know that’s important and they know what’s important.

We, as a family, do things for other people in our community and we take time to be appreciative of the things that we have.  They know that that’s important to be involved in a community, being thankful for what we have and to share what we have.  So I guess, they know about it through that way.  Does that make sense?

Andrea:  Yeah.

Susie Hageman:  And it’s not just the STOP fund, it’s more just teaching them to be good citizens and good community leaders in general.  So the STOP fund comes under that but it’s bigger than just the STOP fund I guess is what we’re trying to teach our kids.

Andrea:  Yeah.  It sounds like you’re teaching them core values of your family.

Susie Hageman:  Yeah, but they’re proud of it.  I don’t know how much the completely grasp it but they’re still young.  But they’re supportive of it and they see it’s a team between Travis and I too.  So I think that makes a big difference too when both parents are onboard and supportive of something, the kids are more likely to come onboard too and that’s unified family decisions.  Does that make sense?

Andrea:  Oh yeah.  I think that’s something that can get kind of confusing knowing how to talk to your kids about a topic like this that’s so mature and so intense but yet, you’re so involved with it.  I think there’ve been times when I’ve tried to talk to my own daughter about it and my son.  It’s kind of confusing but I think it’s confusing to know what to say to them I guess.

But I think it make sense that you would focus on the fact that these people are being forced to work jobs that they don’t want to work and that’s not right and you’re trying to do something about it.  I think that makes a lot of sense and I think it helps other parents to think about how we can address this with our kids too.  So I appreciate you sharing that.

Susie Hageman:  Yeah and I think with human trafficking in general, I think there’s a lot of parents or most the parents of teens or preteens that asked me questions about how to bring up with their kids.  I think to look at it from a bigger picture than just talking to them about trafficking.  But like for smaller children talking to them about _____ what’s appropriate context versus inappropriate context that kind of thing.

And with older kids, talking about healthy relationship, having healthy relationships modeled at home so that they know when they start dating if what’s healthy and appropriate way to be treated and to treat others and what’s inappropriate.  Because oftentimes trafficking isn’t the headline grabbing, you know, child kidnapped at a big store type of setting.

It’s a traffic who grooms the child is their friend or their boyfriend or girlfriend at first and then starts saying “Well, I’ve bought you these nice things, how are you going to help me pay for them?  We can have this nice life if you help me pay for it.  How about you do this to help me pay for it?”  That’s kind of how as far as sex trafficking, that’s kind of how it starts.

So teaching kids healthy relationships and that kind of thing teaching them to be wise on the internet.  Those are ways for parents to educate their kids and kind of start the conversation in a way that keep them safe from human trafficking versus “Just be careful so you don’t get kidnapped.”  You know what I mean?

Andrea:  Right.  Oh yeah.

Susie Hageman:  That doesn’t really keep them safe you know talking to them about healthy relationships, what makes a good friend and what makes a bad friend, and how to be a good friend.  You know those kinds of things are topics that are going to keep them safer overall.

Andrea:  Those were really great things for us to keep in mind for anybody that has kids in their life, whether you’re a teacher or you’re a parent or aunt or an uncle or whoever to make sure that we’re modeling those healthy relationships like you’re talking about, Susie.  And then being able to really explain to make sure that they know not to…I don’t know, to make sure that they know what it looks like when somebody is grooming them.

I think that that is something that adults need to understand because it’s easy for adults even to be drawn into inappropriate responses in relationships because we’re being groomed or shamed or we don’t know what those healthy relationships are.  So we don’t know how to model that for our kids.  I think that can often be the case.

So I think that what you’re sharing here is so important to these parents and those educational institutions and churches, anybody that deals with kids for them to understand like we need to be communicating these things, I think.

Susie Hageman:  For me personally, I am trying to learn not to react but to listen and keep conversation open and engaged so that when the boys get to those ages where they don’t think I’m cool anymore and hopefully I can still have conversations with them.  I mean, I’m not an expert but that’s the part that _____ just keeping those lines of communication open and then having a support system around you because they aren’t always going to listen to their parents but maybe they’ll listen to a family friend or the aunt or the uncle.

You know, I laughed because I picked up a friend’s daughter for her from her practice and she’s going to spend that evening at our house.  And so of course the first thing you do is feed the kid.  So we were in the fast food drive through and we started having a conversation about the perils of alcohol, “Oh maybe you won’t listen to your mom.”

Although she’s a very good girl and she’s not going to be doing that, but at the same time, and knowing that she’s going to be getting that age or she’s going to be facing those kinds of questions amongst her peers.  So I started into this whole _____ about the perils of alcohol while waiting the drive through lines.  And so I thought, “She might not listen to her mom but she might listen to me.”  _____ kids are probably going to be running away from crazy Susie, but yeah it takes the whole support system, you know.

Andrea:  Absolutely!  I really appreciate it when other parents or other adult figures have wise conversation with my kids like that. I really appreciate that.

Susie Hageman:  We have to invest in each other and in each other’s kid, you know.  It’s takes everybody pitching in.

Andrea:  What we’re talking about here I think is really interesting because one of the other thoughts that I’ve had on this topic is that when we have a more authoritarian kind of parenting or leadership style, we’re kind of really training people to not have a voice, to not use their voice, and to not either believe that they do have one or that they should have one.

So I’m afraid of situations like that.  I fear for kids who grew up in authoritarian households or in a context with a, you know, whether it’d be a church or a school with a really heavy handed don’t-question authority kind of situation because I do think that maybe even, especially girls they want to please.  So they learn to not question.  They learn not listen to that inner voice inside when they get into that other situation where there might somebody grooming them for something terrible, it’s harder for them to be able to speak up.

Susie Hageman:  Yeah, the shame keeps them from speaking up to the people that care that would help them out of that situation.  Yeah, and I will admit that I am the parent that will speak up and state my opinion mostly out of fear in my heart because I want my kids make the right choice.  I’m really trying to back off from doing that and I keep my mouth shut and let them talk through their scenario before I insert my opinion or wait _____.

So that I do keep those lines of communication open because if it is just black and white and I’d be wrong then it shuts down that communication and it shames them then I might be putting them at a higher risk _____.

Andrea:  Yeah that inner voice too.  It makes them think that “Oh gosh, I dunno what I’m talking about.”  And then they start to believe that they don’t know what they’re talking about.  They shouldn’t trust what they’re feeling and that sort of thing.  I think that it’s so true we have still have to insert our opinion or we still have to calm down with “No, you can’t do this and here’s why,” but to guide them through the…

Susie Hageman:  But that should be the initial response.

Andrea:  Yeah, I really appreciate the way you said that because if there’s something really important about guiding them through that process of thinking it through.  This is teaching them how to have that inner voice in the future which is incredibly important and valuable in so many different levels.

Gosh, I love the topic.  I love this conversation went in that direction, and I love what you’re doing.  I love that you stood up and said “You know, I’ve got to do something.  What am I gonna do?”  Instead of “I wish I could do something.  I don’t know what to do,” you just kind of figured it out.  “What kind I do?  Where do we fit in this equation of helping this problem of human trafficking?”

I’m really thankful for people like you who step in to those roles and do this kind of behind the scenes but very important work of helping to fund these other nonprofits and things like that.  Or whatever kinds of efforts that you’re wanting to make in life, you know whatever kind of things you’re wanting to support to be able to just step up and say, “OK, how can I help,” instead of saying “I don’t know how to help,” and then just giving up.

So thank you for everything that you’ve been doing in that regard.

Susie Hageman:  Thank you for giving me an opportunity to here in your podcast and I really appreciate it.

Andrea:  What would be something that you would like the listeners to really take away from this conversation today?

Susie Hageman:  That there’s a reason that they are here and it may be related to human trafficking.  It maybe something completely unrelated with human trafficking, but they are here for a reason.  They’re made for a purpose.  And if there’s something that’s keeping them up awake at night, if there’s something a nagging thing that just won’t go away that just really keeps coming back to them, I just want to encourage them to pursue that and just keep pursuing it and keep approaching it and working on it until they find what’s in store for them there.  Because I think that we all have amazing things that we can do and everybody has gifts to share.

It is beautifully satisfying and joyful to find where you fits and how you can help.  So I would encourage your learners to just keep pursuing that nagging thing that keeping them awake at night because they may find that joy in that.

Andrea:  It’s great.  Thank you so much for your time today, Susie!

Susie Hageman:  Thank you, Andrea.  I appreciate you!

Posted on

What to Say to People Who Are Angry with You with Andrea Joy Wenburg

Episode 65

As a voice of influence, I’m sure you’ve experienced your fair share of negative people or trolls. They often seem angry for no reason, don’t respond to logic, and only hoping to bring others down.

In this episode, I’m offering an explanation for a reason as to why they seem so irrationally angry and a few ways that you can respond to this situation that will be beneficial to both of you.

Take a listen to the episode below!

 

Play here (the red triangle below), on iTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Radio (Amazon Alexa) or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Voice of Influence Podcast Andrea Joy Wenburg

Transcript

 

Hey, hey!  It’s Andrea, and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast!

 

Think of a time that somebody was really rude to you, mean, or whatever.  You’re in the moment and somebody is just cutting you down, or perhaps it’s happened online.  A lot of times, people call them trolls.  Perhaps they’re attacking your business or they’re attacking your world view or that sort of thing.

What is your response? How do you handle negativity? What do you do with those kinds of issues that come up?  That’s a question that somebody else’s asked me a few times.  So I wanted to address this on the podcast because I have a very specific point of view on this.

When somebody is really upset and they take it out on you and you just feel like they are being irrational or unreasonable or just ______ mean, maybe they don’t even realize that you’re a human being.

If you’re a business owner or you’re in a position of leadership, which I’m guessing you are of some kind, you’re in some kind of position of leadership, a lot of times people look at leaders as though they are not human.  Almost like a person who is in leadership or who has power of some kind is to be feared, is to be thwarted.  It’s just like they’re the enemy not the helper, not the influencer that you want to be.

You want to be seen as an influencer who’s making a difference and gently _____ helping people to think through your problems so they can come to good solutions, you know, things like this.  But a lot of times, when you’re in a position of leadership, that’s not how you view it. A lot of times people are intimidated by you or just generally feel like it’s not fair that you have what you have.

That’s just really frustrating especially when you worked really hard for it.  When you know the blood, sweat, and tears has gone into the point of you getting to where you are today.  And that’s really hard to deal with somebody who comes to you an acts like that.

I don’t know about you, but sometimes I want to just yell right back or get into a debate.  A lot of times this can happen on Twitter or Facebook, you know, people are commenting about something or another and they just start into this Facebook shouting at or this Twitter shouting at.  It’s understandable, I get it.  But at the same time, it’s not particularly effective.

I think it’s really important that we think about what’s effective and what’s not.  I think it’s also really important to realize that there’s so much more going on in people when they are having that kind of reaction to you.

So from this counseling, this ministry background that I have, I’m going to bring that to the table here, this discussion about what to do with the trolls.

So online, it’s interesting but if you engage online in conversation with somebody who is spiteful or who is trying to kind of get at you and they’re upset and they want you upset. To interact on that platform is not a wise option.

There are times when we can invite them into a conversation or talk on the phone especially if it has to do with a business or somebody being really upset with illegitimate concern that maybe they’re not handling it the right way but you really do want to know what you can do to make things better, then I would really encourage you to conversation as soon as you can.

So when you’re online and somebody is attacking you, you do want to address that you can either just totally ignore it and not pay attention and not feed that, or you can address it and you can say, you know, I really do want to address this, I’m going to take it to conversation as quickly as possible.

So what that that means getting on the phone with somebody or getting into instant messenger whatever it might mean but bring that to conversation where it’s one-on-one and taking it out of the public view is so important.  Because a lot of times a lot get lost in translation and I’m sure you probably experience that yourself.

So take it to the conversation as soon as possible.  If this happens in person, if you’re in a group that sort of thing, pull that person aside, bring it out of the public view and bring it into a conversation as soon as possible.

Now, what do we do with it when that happens?  When we do have somebody in conversation with us, what can we do next?

I want to tell you a little story and this happened, gosh, it’s been almost 10 years ago now, but not quite, maybe eight years ago and my daughter was 3 years old.  I remember she was just a cute little thing like everybody would just say, “Oh my goodness, she’s so cute.  She’s so articulate.”  You know all these things, she’s just the cutest little thing, cutest little button, but she has a little temper of her own.

So this one particular day, I asked my daughter to go brush her teeth.  And literally that is all I asked.  I told her it was time to get ready for bath and brush her teeth.  She looked at me and she got so upset, like she started yelling and you could see the escalation in her energy and in her voice.

This had happened before so I had previously been studying and trying to figure out what in the world, why a simple request or command evoked such a response from here?  This is just out of control, I just didn’t like that.

I was a teacher.  I was a mom; I knew how to handle this.  I thought that I just couldn’t get it under control where I wasn’t also escalating.  Or it was just getting to the point where she would get in big trouble after a simple command and that just seems silly.

In this moment, she was really escalating.  And it came to a point when I thought to myself, “Now is the time to try out what you’ve just been studying, what you know about yourself, what you know, Andrea. This is it.  This is the time.”  So here she is kind of starting to throw this fit.

And instead of getting angry at her and putting my foot down and telling her to get her tail to the bathroom and brush those teeth otherwise this, this, or that; I knelt down on the floor and I opened my arms and invited her in.  It was the craziest thing but my daughter saw me do that and as I did that she came to me gently with tears in her eyes and then she started crying in my arms.

I didn’t know what she was upset about and I’m not sure I’d still know why she was so sad.  But I do know that that moment in time solidified this belief that I have that sad is under angry.

So whenever you see somebody who is angry and they’re coming at you, if you want to address that anger and escalate the situation, you can.  But most likely that’s exactly what will happen the situation when we escalate. However, if you start to address the sadness that’s underneath the anger and get curious about it, “What is going on that this person is so angry?  They’re so sad.”

So when you see somebody yelling or just really complaining with all their hearts, you can look at them and say to yourself, this is sadness.  I see all this anger and that’s what I see, I see sadness.  So why are they sad?  So that’s where you’re going to start.

If you really believe that sad is under angry, I invite you to try it out and just experiment it a few times because you’re going to be shocked.  If you believe that sad is under angry then what you do is instead of letting that conversation escalate, you get down on your knees and open your arms and invite them in.

Now, how do you do this with somebody who’s not a 3-year-old daughter?  Well, you stay curious.  So instead of getting defensive and letting yourself feel attacked, instead of feeling like you have to hit back or prove them wrong, what you do is you realize that that’s one level of the conversation.  And you’re going to take it to totally different level, deeper level.

So that means that you’re going to let that stuff go.  Everything that they just said on the top, you’re going to let that go.  You’re not going to address that right now.  Maybe you will when you come back to it but not right now.  So you let that go and then you get really curious and you say, “Tell me more about that. I wanna understand.  Explain to me what’s going on.”  Or “This reaction I can tell that this is really, really hard for you.”

When you just say something like that, this is something that allows the other person to open up because when they hear that they really care and that you recognize what they’re experiencing, they’re very likely to open up to you if you’re sincere.

So you to start to hear more and you stay curious, you stay there and you keep asking those questions or giving those responses like “Look, wow, I didn’t realize that was so hard for you.”  Or “I didn’t realize that this was going on.”  And give them those opportunities to just keep talking until they got it out.

Once, they have it out then you have the opportunity to respond with grace.  So you then can say “Wow!  OK so what I’m hearing is that you really would like this but this is what happened and so you’re upset,” or “Whatever it might be, it’s really hard to help you through that conversation right here in this moment.”

But in general, the rule is to stay curious and remember that sad is under angry.  So look for the sadness and address the sadness and get clear on that because it’s not because you’re trying to manipulate somebody, it’s not because you’re just trying what you want, but this is a chance for you as an influencer to really show love and leadership.

You do that by not responding in kind.  You do that by realizing that you have a vision that sees beyond the surface level anger that’s out of control, and that you’re willing to go there and to take the time to be without somebody as they are expressing their frustration.  And then you come back with your response, then you come back with some logic.

But if you don’t address that hurt first, they’re not going to hear any of your logic.  It’s just doesn’t matter.  No reasoning makes sense to somebody that is upset.  It doesn’t matter because they’re brain is in that place where it’s in that fight or flight or it’s in that positioning so that limbic system has really taken over and it’s saying “I have to figure this out. I have to express this or I have to deal this in this way.”  That is not the rational brains.  You have to calm that down first.  You have to help them to calm that down and that’s something that not a lot of people realized they need to do.

So as a voice of influence, realize that sad is under angry.  Whenever you’re dealing with the trolls per se, whenever you’re dealing with those folks who are maybe irrationally upset, they’re rude, you’re dealing with this just kind of out of the ordinary sad kind of situation with this, remember that sad is under angry.

Remember this image of a mom leaning down and getting on her knees and opening up her arms because that’s exactly what you can do in a conversation with I don’t care who it is. Every single person has the same brain. We all need to be able to calm down before we can truly address the issues at hand.

So as you move forward, remember that sad is under angry.  Treat others with compassion, treat the trolls with compassion and you’re going to be astounded at the kind of impact that you can have.

So get down on your knees, open those arms, and make your voice matter more!

 

 

Posted on

How Small Shifts Lead to Big Transformation with Claudio Toyama

Episode 64

Claudio Toyama is committed to raising the awareness of people around the world, so they live full and fulfilled lives at work and home. He is an international bestselling author, an award-winning speaker, and the CEO of Toyama and Company; an international leadership consultancy specializing in small shifts that produce big results. Claudio has delivered projects in over 113 countries and has lived in five countries on four continents. He is also a Forbes contributor and is a featured guest on NBC and FOX; where he shares his unique experience on leadership and company culture.

In this episode, Claudio and I discuss the main message he’s putting out into the world, why his message is so important, why he chooses to help people at the core of who they really are in addition to helping with their mindset or teaching a skill, why he believes most leadership programs fail, how to balance who are with small changes that can improve your impact on those around you, and so much more!

Take a listen to the episode below!

Mentioned in this episode:

 

Play here (the red triangle below), on iTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Radio (Amazon Alexa) or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Claudio Toyama Voice of Influence Podcast Andrea Joy Wenburg

Transcript

Hey, hey!  It’s Andrea, and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast!

Today, I have with me Claudio Toyama who is a committed to raising awareness of people around the world so that they live full and fulfilled lives at work and at home.  He’s an international best-selling author and award-winning speaker and the CEO of Toyoma & Co., an international leadership consultancy specializing in the small shifts that produce big results.

He has delivered projects in over 113 countries and has lived in five countries on four continents.  He is a Forbes contributor, a sought after international speaker and a featured guest on TV, including NBC and FOX, where Claudio shares his unique experience on leadership and company culture.  He lives with his daughter outside Washington, DC (USA).

Andrea:  Claudio, I’m so happy to have you here today on the Voice of Influence podcast!

Claudio Toyama:  Thank you so much for this invitation, Andrea.  Thank you very much.  I’m glad to be here.

Andrea:  And your bio didn’t mention it but you also have a book that you published, can you tell us a little bit?  The name of that book, The Samurai Samba and Vinci Way:  How to Improve Your Executive Presence, Increase Trust and Lead Your Team at a World-Class Level.  I really enjoyed reading this book and I’m excited to share and have you share more about it.

Claudio Toyama:  Yes, yes excellent!  So yeah, this book was published last year and it’s going to be a year now in October first.  It was a great thing because in the first 24 hours.  It got sold in 12 countries and now there has been 16 countries that people picked up a copy of and it’s been an amazing journey, getting a lot of positive feedback and people were saying that the message that I have is very needed message right now.

Andrea:  Alright, tell us a little bit about this message of yours.  I mean, what would you say is the core of your message that you’re trying to get out there as a message driven yourself?

Claudio Toyama:  My main message is combining the three persona, you know the persona of the Samurai, the persona of the Samba, and the persona of the Vinci.  Basically with the samurai, what I’m talking about is knowing who you are, the core.  So focusing on your core and knowing truly who you are and going for mastery at everything that you do.

In this world, we see people getting lost.  Before social media, it was the advertisement on TV.  The advertisement said, “Oh if you don’t buy this car, you’re gonna be miserable but if you buy this car, you’ll gonna be loved and everything.  If you lose weight, you’ll gonna be loved, if you don’t, you’re not.  If you’re too skinny then you’re not loved.”  So it’s always an external validation.

And my message with the Samurai is know who you truly are.  Once you have that strong core, it doesn’t matter if you’re being bombarded with different messages and even sometimes they say, “Oh no, you should lose a lot of weight,” and then sometimes they say “No, you should put on weight.”  And I was like “Oh which one do I follow?”  But if you know who you are, the core, and you’re good with yourself then it doesn’t matter what’s going on around you and it doesn’t matter because you’re going to be very very centered.

And then the Samba is the fluidity, the flexibility.  It is about going with the flow.  That one for me was much more about the adapting to different cultures and then I started seeing that that message applies everywhere.  If you go to a different place, if you go and talk to different friends, you can also be malleable and adaptable.

But why am I talking about the samurai and the samba together because if you are too rigid, you know because the samurai can have that rigidity to them.  If you’re too rigid, you’re not going to go with the flow.  But if you’re too flowy and too adaptable, you’re also going to lose yourself and you don’t know who you are any longer.

And then there’s the third element which is the Vinci, which is actually amalgamating everything that you are.  If you remember the renaissance period in Italy where they had in Florence and different parts of Italy, you have that renaissance person like Leonardo da Vinci, you know that’s where the king comes from.  He was very good at anatomy.  He was very good at painting.  He was very good at all sorts of different things and it was not just one thing.  So he was bringing his whole self to everything that he was doing and that’s why he was so successful.  That’s what I’m bringing back again is this renaissance person.  So I’m bringing it altogether.

So if you combine the Samurai, Samba, and Vinci, you have knowing who you are, the core; being very flexible and being adaptive to different cultures and different environments and at the same time amalgamating everything that you are and thinking about the future and bring the future to yourself.  So that’s the message in a not so much of a nutshell.  It’s a little bit bigger than a nutshell.

Andrea:  Oh yeah.  No, that’s alright.  It’s a big message.  It’s a worthy of some discussions.  OK, so why this message?  Where did this come from for you and how it’s personal to you?

Claudio Toyama:  As you mentioned, I have lived in many countries, so five countries so far.  I’m now living close to DC and I was one that got lost.  I was very flexible, so flexible that I wanted to become the stereotype of each one of the country that I lived in.

So I grew up in Brazil but when I went to live in Japan, I wanted to become the stereotype of the Japanese person.  And then I went to Italy and started to become the stereotype of the Italian and I went to the UK and becoming the stereotype and I was like “Who am I?  I don’t even know who I am anymore.”

There’s always change, there’s that pendulum.  So if you’re too flexible then you’re going to go all the way to the other side of the pendulum and become very rigid.  So I became very rigid and like “OK, my ideas are mine,” and like you know “Oh, this is who I am, take it or leave it.”  And I was like “It doesn’t work either.”

Andrea:  Right.

Claudio Toyama:  Also, because when you have that kind of mentality, a lot of it is because you’re getting triggered because of your past and it’s not really who you are.  You need to excavate who you really are and find yourself back again.  We know that from coaching and we know your true self needs to be excavated from all of these layers that were imposed in society, you know societal expectations and all of that.

So I went in this quest to find out who I was truly and then I was always bringing beauty into life, which is also another part of Vinci.  It’s amalgamating yourself and bringing your whole self to the equation but also it is about bringing beauty to everything that you bring to life.

That was one thing that when I moved to the US coming from European lifestyle where it’s much more about the joy of life and being in the moment.  You know these kinds of things about _____ coffee that doesn’t exist in many parts of Europe.  Coffee is meant to be a conduit for enjoying the presence of another human being with you and having the conversation.

That’s why it is so important to me because I was living that.  I became that samba.  That was too much of a samba then I became too much of a samurai and then I didn’t know how to amalgamate everything into the Vinci side of it.  So that’s where I came from kind of my personal life.

And when I was thinking about what are the characteristics of leaders in the world that are the most successful leaders, they have elements of these three.  So it’s not one or the other or another one.

Andrea:  Yeah.  When you start to talk about this with leaders, are they open to growing in this way?  Because one of the things that you pointed out in your book is that subject matter experts tend to want to go deeper in their expertise where, quite frankly, they’re just more comfortable and they had success instead of learning something new.  How do I apply this or how do I convince others or lead a team or whatever other kinds of things involved with leadership, how do people respond to this idea of going deeper and excavating their true selves and things like these?

Claudio Toyama:  Mixed reactions.  So I have people that are ready to embrace it and ready go to through this journey because it’s a journey.  It is not something that’s one and done session and “OK, you’re gonna be transformed.”  No, it’s a journey.  When you start opening that up, it is a journey that sometimes it takes years to, not necessarily working with me but sometimes this journey once you open that can of worms, it’s going to take some years for you to really find yourself and especially if I work with a number of _____ executives and they have been doing that for their whole lives.

They’re now on their 50s or they’re in their late 40s or even on their 60s, can you imagine trying to change and trying to find themselves back again at that age?  They’re very used to that, so very mixed reactions.  But if they’re ready to go on this journey, it is amazing what they see and all the patterns that they see in their lives “Oh this is why this kept happening!  Oh this is why I kept having this reaction to these things and it had nothing to do with the people that I was talking to.”

So they start seeing the pattern in their lives and then that journey becomes so interesting.  So yes, mixed reactions but if they’re willing to go through that, it’s an amazing journey.  There are bumps on the road but it’s an amazing journey.

Andrea:  Yeah.  I know how hard it can be to be the one, sometimes to even help somebody open up that can of worms.  Not that you’re wanting to put them in a where they’re uncomfortable but at the same time when people aren’t comfortable and experiencing pain, sometimes that’s when they are able to best grow and they’re most open to learning something new.  But that’s kind of hard.

I know you’ve been doing it for a very long time but when you come up against that resistance and you know that somebody is about ready to experience something difficult or remember something difficult, how do you help them or being with them and guiding them through that part of the journey, that difficult bump on the road?

Claudio Toyama:  I think it depends on who was the person engaging my services, was it that person or was it their boss because they felt that there was something missing in them.  So these are two completely different types of clients or people that I work with.  If it is that later and if it is their bosses that wanted this person to change, sometimes you cannot go that deep, sometimes they are not willing to go that deep.

They say, “Well, you know, I’ve done this my whole life.  I’ve done it this way, I’m not gonna change now.  There’s nothing in it for me right now.”  Even though there is because then it’s not just about their work, it’s about their whole self.

A lot of times, I see a pattern how they’re behaving with their children and how they’re behaving with their employees.  And it’s the same problems and they cannot see it and I go “OK, if you shift just one degree here,” you know the small shifts.  “It’s just one degree, it’s gonna be so much easier for you.”  But they’re like “Nope, this is how I’m doing and this is how it’s gonna be done.”

So it depends, yeah.  If they are the ones engaging with me then I can actually open more and I can actually talk to them and say “This is one of those moments that I said.  It was going to be a little bit difficult or it’s going to be a little bit challenging and let’s go through it.”  And the other side of me that a lot of people don’t know which is the spiritual side, so I work with a lot of energies.

A lot of times I can scan the person and see if there are some blockages on their energies and I can actually help them to release those energies.  I work on the cerebral _____ on the mind but I also work on those energy levels that a lot of times people are not even aware of but that is also influencing them.  There are certain blockages there that they are not even aware of but they are contributing to them not moving forward.  So that’s another layer that I work on as well with my clients.

Andrea:  So many, so many layers that could be addressed.  You take everything really deep.  You’re a deep person and you bring people into this conversation in your book in a real deep way and you’re inviting them to this deep transformation.  Why do you go so deep?  Is it always been something that you have done?

Have you just always kind of been really that reflective person or you know there’s other people who choose to focus on skills or to learn something new.  You just kind of knew in your mind or mindset, but you’re kind of working at it in a deeper level at that core of somebody’s being, really.  So tell me about why you do that and how that kind of started for you?

Claudio Toyama:  Yeah.  I was always this very introspective guy and I think it was a mixed of learning that and also being like that.  So I grew up in this family where we had different languages being spoken, you know it’s a different parties.  My father was Japanese.  He grew up in Japan.  My mom, you know, half Italian, half Austrian.  My daughter is blonde and people look at me and is like “You look Asian and you have this blonde daughter, how did that happen?”  You know because my mom is blonde and my ex-wife is blonde.

From an early age, I was always very introspective and always wanting to know more, because of that that mix of different cultures that we had, I was always very curious to go very deep into things.  It’s fascinating because I was always the one noticing, let’s say, the person in the corner at school, the person who’s not being paid attention to.  I was always the one going to that person and saying, “Are you OK?  Are you fine?”

So I was always that person that wanted to know more about people and wanting to get to know people.  I don’t know how to answer that question, but yes, it is innate in me.  So I’ve always have that.

Andrea:  You mentioned in your book too that there’s a lot of reasons why just focusing on leadership programs that kind of focus on those leadership skills that there’s a high failure rate in actually making the changes that they want to see happen in a person.  And the fact that there’s not a deeper connection to the material seems to be a really important piece of that.

Claudio Toyama:  Yes and it’s interesting because when you said you go very deep, thank you for acknowledging that.  And also what I like to do whenever I’m working with clients or whenever I’m having conversation is how can this person have a quick win and at the same time be on that journey, on that long journey, because I know as human beings, we love quick wins as well.

In the Japanese tradition, it can take you 30-40 years for you to be able to _____ at the ceremony because you’re going to go for mastery.  If you remember Karate Kid, you know like _____.  I was like “OK, it’s gonna take you years to perfect something.”  But for me, it’s “OK, so how can we have quick wins end go for the deep stuff as well?”

But your question about and the initial development and all that, what I always like to do is focus on who are you being when you’re doing anything.  I don’t know if you got to that part of when I was delivering an advanced negotiation skills workshop for high powered lawyers at a new World Trade Center in New York and these guys came from different parts of the world and they were all there.  Some of them have been negotiating for over 20 years these multimillion dollar contracts and I was there to deliver it in three days, three-day event negotiation skills workshop.

Andrea:  And you’re laughing because?

Claudio Toyama:  I’m laughing because I’m like “Oh my God, these guys are gonna eat me alive here, all these sharks.”  I’m going to be _____ at the end of the first half hour, let alone three days.  So I was like “OK, what kind I do?”  So what we did was to focus on who are they being when they’re negotiating and pointing out different things that they were not even aware of because they have so unconscious behaviors that they were not aware of.

So even though they had all the techniques really mastered, they were very very different when they were negotiating.  That’s why I talked about small shifts that create big results, when we did those small shifts and how they were being perceived, oh gosh that was an amazing shift, really amazing.

I just got some feedback recently from this guy that the small shifts was just putting his head down by half an inch when talking to people.  And I said, “Do you notice that it looks like you’re talking down to people?”  He was like “Huh thank you for that feedback, Claudio.  I have this _____ and in order to see you clearly and it _____.”

So it felt like he was really snobbish and just like looking down on you.  Once you start looking squared eye to the other person, people started commenting on him and everything.  It was just a half an inch of a shift, really a physical shift.  That gaze was a physical shift and how are you being perceived, who are you being when you’re doing anything.

Andrea:  Yes, yes!  I really appreciate the thoughtful way that you bring balance.  Though you are talking about deep transformational kinds of things, on one level there’s the small shifts that you’re talking about and you also brought in the idea of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.  And this is something that I was recently talking with a client about as well but when you are a subject matter expert, you’re really at the top level of the Maslow’s hierarchy.  But then if you’re not addressing those deeper human means then it can easily topple over, so do you want to expand on that a little bit?

Claudio Toyama:  Yes, it’s interesting that you say that.  I would make a very similar comparison which is we are beginners.  So coming from being the expert in a subject matter and when dealing with people, we are beginners all over again.  That’s why it is so difficult for a lot of subject matter expert or for anyone for that matter to actually focus on the people side of the equation because in that realm, they don’t know anything or they know very little about it.  So they are beginners.  We are beginners in that.

To be able to say, oh I’m a beginner, for someone that gets paid to have the answers.  Can you imagine if you’re an expert in a field and you’re getting paid to know the answers and not to ask questions or to be like “Oh I don’t know anything about this, can you explain it to me.”  They have been trained to always have the answers.  So being a beginner say it again who’s like “Oh this is scary.  I don’t know if I can make it.”

Andrea:  Yeah!

Claudio Toyama:  You know, there was this guy you know, VP in an IT company.  He was the vice president of the company and was still coding with his hands.  He was still being involved in not just managing the people, he had a 100 people under him and he was still kind wasting time coding because that was what he was comfortable with.  You see that very, very often in a lot of conferences because that’s their comfort zone and just like “Oh I’m not gonna go there, people, huh scary stuff.”

As you learn your profession, as you learn to become an expert at your profession, let’s say a biochemist or whatever it is, you got to learn how to deal with people.  It’s all learned and that’s one thing that people don’t realize that it’s all learned.  You can learn about that.

Andrea:  So when you brought up the person, you mentioned to him in your book as well I think that was coding by hand as a vice president, is there any point in time that you ever recommend to somebody just don’t think the promotion?  You know, because they’re really enjoying who they are and what they’re doing or maybe you don’t recommend anything?  Do you ever think to yourself, you know, “I don’t think that they’re gonna enjoy moving on into a new position where there’s gonna be so much more required of them.”  You know, basically making them start over again with people when they really are so good with the subject matter.  What’s your take on that?

Claudio Toyama:  I ask a lot of questions on that.  You know, I have worked for some companies that now they have two different tracks.  One track is the track of managing people and dealing with people.  So they have that track of OK, so you’re going to become a manager, you’re going to become a director.  You’re going to become a vice president.  And the other track is you’re going to be an expert even more of an expert and you’re going to be a thought leader for the company and that’s the track they’re going to.

So if they have those two tracks, I ask “OK, so which one would you like to choose if you’re offered a promotion?”  And then I ask “Why is that?”  If it is out of fear of managing people then I ask if they’re willing to learn how to manage people.  If it’s out of passion about what they do that’s a different story.  Because if it’s passion then they can just go and they’re given deeper into what they’re doing.

And the other thing is for companies that don’t have those two tracks, so they have to take the promotion, otherwise, they will be you know.  Then I ask them, “Ok let’s say that you don’t want to take the promotion, what would happen in your life?  Are you gonna be ostracized?  Are you gonna be fired after a couple of years?  What is gonna happen to you?  Is the company accepting of your decision not to move onwards?”

Sometimes you see the person is not going to go anywhere because they didn’t get the promotion.  Sometimes there’s no option of not getting the promotion.  If you don’t get it then you’re going to be booted out.  So what are the consequences of not doing that?  And again, I ask the same question you know, “Are you not wanting to do it because of fear or because of any other things?”

So I ask a lot of questions to really understand where that is coming from because sometimes it’s just that they don’t know how to start knowing how to deal with people.  If that’s the case, they say “OK, we have a path and I can help you with that, or it’s not me there are other leadership coaches and leadership development people that can work with you.”  But I always ask a lot of questions to see where they are, where they’re coming from, what is really getting in the way and all of those things.  They’re so important you know.

Andrea:  It sounds like, as long as somebody is open and interested, that they can grow.

Claudio Toyama:  Yeah, it is.  If they are open, there’s so much to be done.  If they’re open there so much and that’s why when I go into different assessments to know what are their styles and to actually understand a little bit more, what can we focus on.  Again, you know the small shifts and the quick wins, what are some of the small shifts so that they can see the changes and then they get inspired to continue on the journey.

Like this guy that I was working with, an Indian guy who has been living here in the US for almost 30 years now or even over years and working with his team.  And because he would get so passionate about his subject matter, he would be like talking loud and everything and then people would get really scared and he didn’t know.

So one of the shifts was, I said “OK this is happening you know.  This is the perception of people around you.  They get really scared because you start talking really loud.”  He was like “Oh, because I’m passionate.”  I’m like “OK, but that’s not coming through.  It’s coming through that you’re either too angry or whatever it is, but there’s too much emotion.  So can you dial down a little bit more?”

He started doing that in different meetings and the feedback was immediate.  The people were like “Oh my God, you have changed!  Wow, this is really great!”  He was still being really passionate but dialing down the volume and just one small shift that was just like a big, big change.  So he was willing to go through the other changes that were needed also but he saw some positive feedback.  So that was really great.

Andrea:  I have to ask, you know, the next question then.

Claudio Toyama:  OK!

Andrea:  I love everything that you’re talking about and I think about this stuff too.  So it’s just always fun to get into a conversation with somebody else that just thought about this as much as you have.  OK, so let’s say this gentleman is too loud.  He’s very emotional when he speaks, but in what sense, and how do you know and how do you balance that with “well, this is who I am” kind of a comment or not just a comment but owning who I am and I am a passionate person?

So if somebody says “I’m a passionate person,” how do I be me but turn the volume down and when is that OK and when it’s not?  Tells us, what are your thoughts?

Claudio Toyama:  I thought a lot of about that as well because I get a lot of people that people talk really loud and they say “Because this is me take it or leave it.”  Again, going back to the samurai, “OK, so are you being adaptable?  How are you being perceived by others?  Is that the kind of perception that you want about yourself or not?”  Sometimes you want to have a big impact but you’re rubbing people off in a wrong way and the message is not going across because you’re a little too much of something.

Then also the other thing is, in this case with the guy was cultural and I also look at that but I also look at their background, what is the background of the person because sometimes they are being loud because they didn’t have a voice when they were little.  Remember that I talked about the pendulum?

Andrea:  Uh-huh.

Claudio Toyama:  They are that at that phase where they now feel that they have to be loud because that’s who I am.  If you go back to their history is because maybe they were the third child or whatever, the middle child that never got to listen to and now they feel “Oh I now have to be over the top loud because people then will hear me.”  And I was like, “Are they really hearing you or they just turning you off?”

So I ask those questions of “OK, what is the impact that you want to have and where is that coming from?”  Where is that desire of, “Oh this is who I am?”  Remember when I was talking about the different layers of societal layers, “Is that coming from you really or is that coming societal expectation or different things in your past that made you be this way?”

Andrea:  Hmmm that you’re reacting then.

Claudio Toyama:  Yes, I see that all the time.  I see that all the time and sometimes with some women as well.  Like that they have been in a very difficult marriage where the guy was just taking over and he was in command in everything.  When they get out of that marriage, they get really loud and bold but it’s not who they are.  They’re just over the other side of the pendulum and they will come back to a near ground.  I’m not saying that loud voice is a reflection of something that happened in the past but a lot of it can be.

Andrea:  Sure or a soft voice, yeah.

Claudio Toyama:  Yes, exactly.  Or soft voice like “Yes, I cannot do this.  I cannot do that,” or you know, “Who are you really.  Is it because you cannot or is it really who you are?”

Andrea:  I don’t know.  I’ve been able to handle it myself by saying you can be real without bearing all.  So it can be authentic without being completely a 100% transparent, whether that’d be the message that you’re speaking or the way that you’re presenting it.  I think you can be real without necessarily having to be the fullest version or tell the fullest version of your story.

Claudio Toyama:  Yes, I agree totally.  And for me for instance the spiritual side, a lot of times and very recently as I started talking about in professional environment because I was also feeling that “Oh my God, I’m gonna talk about being spiritual.  They’ll gonna say that I’m gonna be doing Kumbayah every single meeting.”  And it’s like “Oh we don’t want that guy in here.”

No, but the spirituality informs me and also these thing about depths because I always see, like it’s not only in this lifetime, it is also in this lifetime.  So that’s the spirituality in me as well.  What are some of the universal truth that applies to every single situation so that’s where it informs me, but I’m not going to be like bring an incense to your office you know.

Andrea:  I know exactly what you’re talking about.  OK, so I feel like we could keep talking for a long time and there are still some questions that I would love to ask about your book but I think time is kind of up.  So Claudio, what point would you like the listeners to take from this interview, just talk to them right now?  What do you want to say to them?

Claudio Toyama:  Well, I think is what I would say is life is short.  So find yourself and be yourself.  That’s the journey that I have been on and it has been an amazing journey with a lot of bumps on the road but it has been an amazing journey of finding myself and knowing who I truly am and everything.  So what I would say is yes, find voice.  Yeah, that would be the message.

Andrea:  How can the listeners find and connect with you or find your book, where would you want to point them?

Claudio Toyama:  So yes, you can connect with me, if you’re on Twitter, it’s ClaudioGT or claudiotoyama on Instagram.  If you send me a message or even on Facebook, Claudio Toyama and my website is toyamaco.com, toyama&co.  You can reach out and that would be great to hear from you.  My email address is claudio@toyamaco.com.  I look forward to hearing from your fellows.

Andrea:  I will put all those links in the show notes to make sure that people can find you on voiceofinfluence.net.  So that’s where that will be.

Claudio, thank you so much for the work that you’re doing in the world with your voice in helping others to find theirs.  I really appreciate it.

Claudio Toyama:  Yeah, thank you.  Thank you so much, Andrea!

Posted on

Uncovering Money Blocks with Eleni Anastos

Episode 63

Eleni Anastos is the CEO of Business Insights Now and she specializes in uncovering money blocks to help business owners and individuals grow and learn in ways they never thought possible in life and business. She believes making connections and cultivating relationships is what matters most; including in your relationship with money.

In this episode, you’ll learn why Eleni believes that how you do money is how you do everything, how having a scarcity mindset about money can negatively impact your finances, the importance of realizing you’re enough, the different money personality types and how to discover your money personality, how to know when it’s the right time to invest in yourself, common limiting beliefs around money and how to reframe them, and so much more!

Take a listen to the episode below!

Mentioned in this episode:

 

Play here (the red triangle below), on iTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Radio (Amazon Alexa) or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Transcript

 

Hey, hey!  It’s Andrea, and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast!

Today, I have with me, Eleni Anastos.  She is the CEO of Business Insights Now and specializes in uncovering money blocks.  That’s right, we’re talking about money today to help business owners and individuals grow and learn in ways that they never thought possible in life and business.

Now, aren’t you intrigued?  She believes making connections and cultivating relationships is what matters most, including your relationship with money.   Eleni has found that how you do money is how you do everything, and uncovering money blocks significantly impacts all areas of life, both personal and professional.

 

Andrea:  Eleni, I’m so happy that you’re here with us today on the Voice of Influence podcast!

Eleni Anastos:  Thank you so much, Andrea.  It’s an absolute honor and pleasure to be with you today.

Andrea:  Alright!  So what would you say then is the core of your message?

Eleni Anastos:  That money absolutely affects all of us and whether you’re an entrepreneur, you work in corporate, or you’re thinking about starting your own business; money impacts you.  It’s a part of our every day existence.  You know, you have bills to pay, you’re thinking about buying something, you’re saving for a house, yet money is often the one area that most people never want to talk about.  And I always question, if you had a better relationship with money, how would your life then be different?

Andrea:  Hmmm that’s interesting because I think that a lot of people who are kind of more message-driven were people that are thinking about the way we want to change the world and that sort of thing, money is not exactly something that we want to have to deal with.  We wish we didn’t have to deal with it and yet, I can say what you’re saying.  At some point, this is part of the problem or part of the issue.

So I’m excited to hear more about this.  Why this message?  Where did this start for you?

Eleni Anastos:  Well, I started to realize that I felt a little disconnected in thinking about money as a relationship or having a relationship with money.   I mean, if you want a rich and rewarding relationship with your spouse, with your kids, with a business partner, or with friends don’t you have to pay attention to them?  So how you can expect to have a rich and rewarding relationship with money if you don’t pay proper attention to it?

Andrea:  OK, I’m really curious, why this message for your voice?  I know that you’re a teacher a long time ago, right?

Eleni Anastos:  Yeah.  I was a teacher for many many moons.  For me, especially, you know, I was realizing that I was little uncomfortable talking about money and I had a very like close tight-knit relationship with money, almost too tight to the point where I had a scarcity mindset thinking “Oh there’s never gonna be enough to go around.”  That can have the opposite of that like when I was teaching, I was constantly over delivering.

I was giving way above and beyond; you know what I was being compensated for.  And I imagined that for people listening, they can relate to that to a degree.  I was uncomfortable talking about money.  I thought, “Wait a minute, I’m gonna have to deal with money for the rest of my life.”

And then several years ago when I wanted to start with my own business, I knew I had to get a grip on this.  I had to right the ship because if I was so uncomfortable talking about money, how could I asks for a sale?  How could I confidently state my fees?  There had to be a better way.

Then I also realized too because I was kind of stuck in that little scarcity mindset that I ended up giving things away in that sense, undervaluing myself.  I ended up just feeling miserable about it and I thought, “I can’t be the only person struggling with this.”

Andrea:  What’s the difference between wanting to give and do things for other people having sort of a generosity mindset versus having a scarcity mindset?

Eleni Anastos:  Yes.  Well, one of my mentors often said, “Do not confuse your business with your charity.”  And I’m extremely charitable and I love being able to help people when I can.  But on the flipside though when I was undervaluing myself and undercharging for my services, you know, the irony is I didn’t have the money then to help the people I wanted to help or to do for others.  So it’s a double edged sword.

So once I started placing proper value on myself and in my services then I was able to have the income to do the things to help others to donate when I wanted to.

Andrea:  Yeah.  We’ve talked about this on a podcast a couple of other times with some other guests about the idea of not realizing that you need to have a cash project in order to fund the heart projects.

Eleni Anastos:  Yes.  Yes, absolutely!  It always goes back to me to really realize, you know, I mentioned scarcity and as you did as well and I believe it was Brene Brown that said, “The opposite of scarcity is enough.”  You know, we have to start with I’m enough.  We still need to grow and learn new skills, new behaviors; but if you don’t start with “I’m enough” that’s the only way to make and begin to grow and move away from the scarcity mindset.

When I was stuck in that scarcity mindset, thinking I just wasn’t enough and practically giving away my services, it was like I ended up chasing a quick fix or I just wanted a bandage to stop the bleed.  You can’t build anything sustainable for the long haul in that headspace.

Andrea:  OK, so when you say “enough” and maybe when Brene Brown says it, but what is it that we’re trying to be enough for?

Eleni Anastos:  To realize that you have everything within you that you need.  We all need help getting somewhere.  We all need a bridge to get from where we are to where we want to be.  But it’s realizing that you’re still whole regardless of where you’re starting from.

I just thought of a client that I’ve had who, he was brilliant.  He’s extremely talented and creative but he was so afraid of talking about money.  He had such a scarcity mindset and it wasn’t until we start working together that he realized that he adapts all these beliefs from watching his parents struggle with money.  He heard things growing up, there’s never going to be enough to go around.  Money is the bad guy.  Money is evil.  It’s just something we have to deal with.

So of course when he was venturing out on his own in his own business that was all weighing on him.  Literally, the first thing he said to me when I met him was “I’m sick and tired of having to lower my fees just to get a client.”  So he was already fed up and frustrated but he didn’t really realize the depth of what was going on, how lowering his fees kept him playing small.  And he wasn’t going to ever be able to make the impact he wanted in the world to keep himself playing small.

Andrea:  You know the fact that you can be enough but also want to grow at the same time; it reminds me of something that a professor of mine said a long time ago in a seminary.  He talked about they’re being two stories a lot of times and we have to be comfortable with both stories.

There’s the story that essentially were enough or what I like to say on my end of things that “your voice matters” and it absolutely does and that’s just the way it is.  It’s just, innately, it matters but at the same time you can make it matter more.  You can grow in whatever that you’re going to grow and both stories are true.

To be able to hold those both at the same time is kind of tricky but it’s seems like it’s really important especially here when we’re talking about money and being able to say that what you’re offering or what you have is enough, while at the same time it’s OK to want to grow and want more.

Eleni Anastos:  Yes, exactly!  And again, I believe that it impacts every area of your life.  When you can start to own your worth versus being so uncomfortable, because I’ve been here.  I was so uncomfortable even talking about money, that again, imagine if you’re in your business for yourself that you could hesitate to ask for the sale or you might even apologize for your fees, or put way too much in your packages or program in what you’re being compensated for.

I had someone reached out to me that has a corporate job and he said, “Well, how did it impact me if I’m not setting my own wage?”  I said, “Do you ever find yourself over delivering above and beyond what you’re being compensated for?”

So regardless for where you’re at in life, if you’re so uncomfortable even talking about money and owning your worth, it’s going to impact you.  Then I will also question, “What other areas in your life are you not standing up for yourself or you’re uncomfortable even talking about?

Andrea:  And money illuminates some of that?

Eleni Anastos:  Yes.

Andrea:  You’d an attitude about money or whatever?

Eleni Anastos:  Yes, because when I see people being able to learn to have strategies or knowing how to value themselves and deep in their relationship with money, because we’re all hardwired to deal with money.  We all have a money personality, if you will.  And like any personality, we all have gifts and we all have challenges and there’s definitely no one that’s better than another at attracting abundance into your world, it really is about the awareness.

So you can champion your gifts or consciously navigate around your own challenges.

Andrea:  OK, money personalities.  Now, I’ve seen plenty of people become just so much more comfortable with themselves by understanding their personalities for this or their voice for that.  And based on assessment and then realizing like you just said that there’s just strengths and challenges with any of these personalities that they’re not right or wrong or whatever.  Tell us more about these money personalities because that’s something that’s really interesting and I know you had me take an assessment to help me find mine.

So can you tell us about this assessment a little bit or how you talk about personalities?

Eleni Anastos:  Yes, absolutely.  The assessment is a series of questions.  Well, the good news is, you can’t study for it and you simply can’t get any answer wrong.  It really is designed to get who you are.  So for example my top money personality is called an accumulator and I’m an inner banker and I have this very tight close-knit relationship with money and _____ that could be like match-made in heaven, you know, great!

But there’s always the challenge, the shadow side and those of us that are strong accumulators can be so tightly controlled with money that it may mean we hesitate to invest in ourselves or we block ourselves from growing.

I know many years ago when I decided that I was going to start my own coaching business, I felt the calling.  I believe I have the skills set and I knew I wanted to serve people.  But as a strong accumulator to invest five figures in something that wasn’t a car or a house or my college education that was scary.

I remember walking up with my credit card in hand and I couldn’t even break stride and I just turned right around going, “Oh there’s no way, I’m putting this much on my credit card.”  And I did some deep breathing.  I was talking to myself and I said “No, I know I mean to serve people in a bigger and better way.”  I walked up the second time.  I love the person touched the credit card but I don’t even think _____ a life could have drifted out of my hand.  I walked away a second time and I’m like “OK, Eleni what are you saying?”

And I talked to myself through it and I realized, if I didn’t invest in myself then I also wasn’t going to be able to reach the people that I wanted to help and serve.  So I walked up the third time.  I was able to release the credit card.  I admit, I think I kind of like throw up a little in my mouth but _____, so it was a success.  But now that I know how I am wired as an accumulator, I very consciously know when to invest and it’s not a matter of me throwing up in my mouth or getting so much anxiety that I can’t do it.

Andrea:  OK, so I want to know a little bit more about…you don’t have to tell me exactly what it was you’re investing in but in general it was investing in yourself in your business and being able to sell more?  What made that investment so attractive, enough that you would actually go so much against what was inside of you?  I don’t know if that’s quite the right way to put it, but what was it?

Eleni Anastos:  I completely appreciate that.  Well, you mentioned teaching and education and I know I was born a teacher.  I know that I was born to impact people in a positive way.  But at that point in my life it was time for a shift to do it in a different venue, in a different manner.  And coaching really resonated with me, doing personal coaching, working with people one-on-one and doing group programs.  An educator, it was very important to me to get certifications, to get a proper background, if you will.  Even though, I already know I had the skill set, kind of going back to the “I’m enough.”

I knew that I have a skill set for it, the raw material, if you will.  But I also wanted to have the proper certification and training to make myself the best I could be to reach the people I was suppose to reach.  Whenever I thought, “Well, if I don’t invest in myself, because as accumulators, we just love saving for the sake of saving.

We love seeing our bank accounts go higher, so the thought of putting money out there, again five figures that’s not a car or a house, it was very scary.  It was very intimidating for me but I was looking to the future.  I got myself to the point where I was making a decision from where I want it to be.  So I knew if I didn’t invest in myself, I wasn’t going to get to where I wanted to be.

Andrea:  OK, so for those of us who are interested in investing in ourselves, how do we know when it’s a good investment or not.  Do you have any advice for that sort of question or scenario?

Eleni Anastos:  Yes, because I have spoken with a lot of people that sometimes look at for example, “Oh I can’t take on that debt.”  Debt has just a negative connotation from many people and I understand that, but it’s really looking at the difference.  Because to me if you can be grateful for what it is, for example most home owners here in the US, you’re able to purchase a home.  Not many people own the outright and they have taken on technically debt for that as an investment but it’s to make their life better in some way.

So if you can sit down and look at, where do I want to be personally and professionally?  Is this going to help me get there versus am I spending an investing money just to fill a void, like feeling lonely or empty or back to the opposite of I’m not good enough.  That really is worth looking at because I worked with a lot of people that have taken on debt in their mindset is completely different, not always the same.

Some people have a lot of shame and guilt around taking on debt, but they could possibly, you know when they were younger, who knows what they heard growing up or what they witnessed growing up, because we all have a money story we grew up with.  And maybe they saw, you know, “You should never take on debt.  You should only buy what you can pay off within the end of the month or something.”  I’m not saying those are bad things, not at all.  But it’s an individual decision to invest when you know that it’s going to elevate your life.

Andrea:  I mean it’s like college.  It’s like investing in college as well.  And I know there’s plenty of people saying don’t take on debt to go college too, it’s just fine.  But when you’re investing in yourself for your business or for essentially for financial gain in the future, that’s a little different than I guess like what you said to try to fill a void or that sort of thing.

I know some people do life coaching or they do coaching around health and wellness, I think that sometimes it’s harder if it’s not directly tied to money, the investment or reward isn’t directly tied to money, it’s harder for people to invest in something that doesn’t seem to look like it has the potential to pay them back or at least _____.  So what should be considered when we’re looking at investing in something like a health program or other sorts of things that aren’t necessarily directly tied to a business?

Eleni Anastos:  My first thought immediately goes to what’s the cost of not doing this?  Like you just mentioned a health program, you know, if you want to seek out your guidance and counsel for yourself.  If something is happening in your life, you’re unhealthy, you know you need some support accountability, whatever it is, to enhance yourself basically which everything is connected.  You know one area of your life is out of alignment; eventually it’s going to affect all the other ones.

So when you look at yourself physically, mentally, emotionally, or financially; the idea is to have it all in alignment.  So for me and when I work with others, regardless if it’s not directly you’re saying “Oh investing in this is not going to turn around and put money in my bank.  But if you’re investing in something that is going to enhance your physical health, enhance your emotional health that’s going to make you better at everything else you do, right?

So the end result is yes, you will be attracting more abundance into your world and I think the bottom line is still impacted.  I have a client right now, he’s absolutely brilliant, super high IQ, wonderful man, great integrity; but he was so professionally-driven and so business-driven.  You know, 24/7 that’s all he focused on that his physical health is greatly suffering.  And until he put the proper focus on that, I mean because the other areas stopped growing, professionally he kind of hit the wall because his physical health is taken a toll.

So, you know, it’s all connected.  Eventually, it might not be an instantaneous thing so I think that’s why it’s easy to ignore.

Andrea:  Yes, yes, it doesn’t feel it’s urgent.  Like my husband, he’s a physical therapist and he likes to say that investing in something like that, investing in membership to the Y or a gym of some kind or personal trainer is way less expensive than a heart attack.

Eleni Anastos:  Exactly!

Andrea:  Both financially and emotionally.

Eleni Anastos:  Yeah.  I mean, what’s the cost of not investing in that whether, again, it’s a trainer or some kind of health program.

Andrea:  Yeah.  OK, so going back to the personalities, what are some of the different quadrants or I don’t know how it fits all into a scheme of, but what are some of the different kinds of personalities that are out there when it comes to money and why does that matter?

Eleni Anastos:  It matters individually, and especially it matters if you’re in any significant relationship; whether it’s marriage, business, or close friendship, having the awareness.  For example, you could be business partners or a married couple and you know that there’s some stress and friction between the two of you regarding money.  That’s fairly common.  But you don’t really know what’s at the roots of all of it and what’s causing it so that awareness makes the difference.

I mentioned that I’m the Accumulator that Inner Banker that has a really tight close-knit relationship with money.  The opposite of an Accumulator would be a connector.

Andrea:  Me!

Eleni Anastos:  Yeah, so that’s the inner relationship creator and they just illuminate faith and optimism which is beautiful.  And connectors generally don’t pay a lot of attention to money because that faith and optimism kind of gives them the freedom that the money is always going to be there.

Imagine if you put a connector and an accumulator together without the awareness, like a quick example if I go shopping as an accumulator, I look to the best deal always.  I want the most banks for my buck.  If I’m going to purchase and article or clothing, I will go to the clearance rack first.  I could very least look at price tags before I try anything on.

I went shopping with a friend of mine who’s a true connector.  She never looks at price tags.  She doesn’t even know the stores have clearance racks, which is just fine, and she made purchases.  Now, as an accumulator when I make purchases, I’m watching every item being wrung up.  I’m paying attention to every number.  I’m double checking their receipts before I sign.

My friend, the connector, just handed over her credit card, did not double check any numbers, didn’t listen to what they said.  And again, it’s not that I’m right and she was wrong, not at all.  But I was like clutching my chest wondering where the defibrillator was.

So imagine if you have an accumulator and a connector in business together or any close-knit relationship and you didn’t have the awareness, you could make each other crazy.

Andrea:  Sure!

Eleni Anastos:  And again, it’s not one that’s right and the other one was wrong.  It’s just having the awareness so you can synthesize each other’s gifts and consciously navigate those challenges.

Andrea:  That makes a lot of sense.  Yeah, I think my husband and I…I’m not sure if he’s an accumulator but that’s _____ for him.  I think over the years, it’s been easy for me to sort of just let him deal with the money because he pays very close attention and then I don’t have to because I really don’t want to.  But at the same time, I’ve recognized that as I started wanting to get the message out and I want to get in to this as well.

As I wanted to get the message out, I started to realize that money was playing a role.  I didn’t wanted to but it did and it was playing a role and I was continuing to spend more and more to get the message out without thinking about it and thinking about how it was impacting that.  And then it got to the point where I was asked to speak somewhere.  People don’t realize how much time and effort you spend on a speech.

And I was asked to speak somewhere and I thought “Oh gosh, if I ask for this much, will they give me a little bit less than that?”  I was just trying to figure out.  My husband said to me, “How much time are you gonna spend on that?”  And I thought, “Oh probably about a week’s worth of time.”  And I would have a babysitter for my kids because it was summer time and they were home and they were actually little then.

He helped me see realistically how much money we were going to be investing, and me, giving a speech for somebody else.  And then it became a very eye-opening about “Oh my goodness, this is expensive for us.”  It’s too much for me to ask from my family if I don’t ask the appropriate amount for speaking for an hour.

So when that happens, it was just this really big eye-opener for me and I needed to own the fact that the time that I’m spending and the effort that I’m offering is not all just for free.  It can’t be.

Eleni Anastos:  That story, I so appreciate you sharing that.

Andrea:  And what’s funny actually, let me just throw in the very tail end of that story.  Then the people asked me “What would you charge if you didn’t even know me?”  And I said a number and they said “OK” and I did it and I did it for that amount and that was just like boom, like this huge eye-opener.

Eleni Anastos:  Yay, that’s amazing!  I love it.  It’s beautiful.  How did you feel?  I’m curious when you just said that amount?

Andrea:  Well, I put it in a proposal and explained.  I didn’t explain why.  I didn’t justify the figure, I just kind of really explained why it would be a good fit and I felt a little overwhelmed about doing it but at the same time, I felt good about it.  And then actually when I gave the talk, it was just for a few people.  It was for a dozen of people, educators actually.  They handed me a check and they felt good.  I received the check and I felt good and I thought “This is a good thing.  There’s nothing wrong with this, me receiving this money.  It’s a lot of money but I invested a lot and it’s OK.  So, overall, it was just this really great learning experience for me.

Eleni Anastos:  That’s beautiful because you’re truly owning your own worth and placing a proper value on your skills, on your expertise, and what you brought to them as an individual.  That’s great, especially you know you get to decide “Is the juice worth the squeeze?”  You get to decide what your time is worth.

Now, there may be sometimes, especially where speaking is concerned or actually in anything else.  You may make a decision to do something that upfront you’re not highly compensated for but you have the potential to gain influence and gain clients from that scenario.  That’s all good too but the point is making a conscious decision not again thinking “Oh I’ve got to low ball this, I’ve got to play small” just to get in the door then we know you’re never really getting in anywhere.

Andrea:  OK, so what is your take on when somebody has a message whether they have a job with a company or there’s somebody who is an entrepreneur or at least think that they’re a writer.  If you have a message inside, why should they care about money?  How should we approach it as somebody with a message?

Eleni Anastos:  Yes, because I have heard countless people say, it’s not about the money.  Money doesn’t matter.  I think we all have heard that somewhere or we verbalized it ourselves.  But I want to go back to the reality that money is a part of your every day existence regardless of where you live or what your current life is, money is going to be a part of your every day existence.

So I think it speaks to the mindset of “I should just do this.  I should just be giving.  I should just be sharing,” almost as if that person doesn’t have a right to be compensated for sharing their gifts with the world.  I think that could be a very dangerous mindset, a very slippery slope how we’re talking to ourselves.

Andrea:  And you mentioned before this idea of playing it small.

Eleni Anastos:  Yes!

Andrea:  And that is definitely something that I can relate too.  I mean, I went through a period of like “Oh my goodness, if I don’t start charging money, I’m just going to stay here.  I’m kind of stuck in this little pool when I feel like I belong in a bigger pool.”  And so yeah, playing it small seems like a big part of it too.

Eleni Anastos:  Yes and how you speak to yourself, is it a low-value statement, is it a high-value statement?  For example, if you say that “Oh no one’s gonna pay me for what I offer,” obviously that’s very disempowering.  It’s a low-value statement.  But I always want people to ask instead of going right to the negative, “no one’s ever going to pay me for my skill,” you know, what if they could?  What if you could get the money that you want?  What if your clients will pay you for your skill, for your expertise?

Napoleon Hill’s iconic book was Think and Grow Rich.  You can’t say, _____ and grow rich, instead Think and Grow Rich.  It may sound simplistic in nature but it really is really a concerted conscious effort on how we’re talking to ourselves and to place a value on ourselves.  Because those of us that are very mission driven and want people to live their best lives, is there anything more that we want for people to be wildly successful however they choose to define that.

Andrea:  You know, I guess I’m just sharing all kinds of my personal experience here but I think that’s another piece of what was hard for me when I was starting out.  What’s been frustrating to me probably on my life is that I don’t want to go in inch deep and a mile wide.  I’d much prefer to go an inch wide and 60,000 miles deep.

What I was realizing every time was that I could only literally, I could only go so deep because they were only invested so deep and they weren’t ready to go further until they were ready to put money behind it.  And I was like “I just have to be like this.”  I don’t necessarily want to be that you need to spend more money to have more transformation.  But at the same time, it’s kind of like that sometimes because people aren’t ready to totally throw their whole selves in until they put their money in.

Eleni Anastos:  Yes, and it’s backing that up and looking at it again, this is an investment.  I don’t want to spend that money, but that’s a different mindset from investing in yourself and then what you’re demonstrating for other people is not just like I had a client.  She was absolutely lovely, creative, and a beautiful soul but so tightly around with money, so scared to even talk about money.  She could barely state her fees to clients and practically apologize for them.

In fact a couple of times, she asked for permission like “Is that OK?”  She’d state her fees, “Is that OK?”  So that completely was undervaluing herself and she was giving them all the power.  I want people to be in the driver seat for themselves.  When she realized through our work together that “Oh, you know, it was from mom that constantly said, you just get whatever you can get.  Get whatever you can get, it’s OK.  Some money is better than no money.  Bread is better than no bread.”

I mean, no disrespect to her mom because I’m sure she meant with the best possible intentions that you what you can do to earn a living.  I think that’s a great advice on many levels.  For my client, being that creative soulful entrepreneur, she realized that she was not going to be able to impact and influence people if she just keeps trying to “Oh let me just get somebody in the door, whatever it is.  I’ll low ball it.  I’ll just give this away.”  Again, going back to the _____ and playing small.

When she was able to shift her mindset and she kind of adapted this new paradigm that money really is not evil.  That’s one of the things that I find amazing all the limiting beliefs that are still out there, “You know money is evil.  There’s never enough to go around.”  In reality, money is just is, it’s neutral like anything in our world; we apply the meaning into it.  It’s just energy, you know, an exchange of one service for another.

I think when people can wrap their heads around that money is really is the energy and exchanging one service for another that put some back in the driver seat where they feel they have control of money and therefore more control in their life.  That’s what I want to see for people to not feel like money is controlling their life.  How many decisions have we made based on money or lack of money?  That gives money the power.  I do want people to take their power back.

Andrea:  OK, this is great.  What would you leave us with?  You know this person who, they care about other people and they’re not sure what they want their relationship with money to be but they know it’s not quite at the place where it probably or should be in order for them to be free from, I guess like you’re saying the power of money over them instead of them having power.  What advice would you give that message-driven leader?  What do you want to leave with them today?

Eleni Anastos:  I’d like them to think about what they want most for the people they want to serve.  It’s almost always you want them to feel empowered and you want them to feel capable of doing anything they want to do regardless of what you’re teaching them or showing them in your mission.  And the best way to do that is to do it for yourself to be that role model, to demonstrate, “This is what’s possible.  This is what it’s look like.  This is how you can live when you’re on your own worth.”  “If we don’t start with us, how can we demonstrate to others that we want to serve what’s possible?”

Andrea:  Oh so true!  Alright, well thank you so much, Eleni, for being here today.  How can people get a hold of you and even take that assessment that you’re sharing with me.

Eleni Anastos:  Yes, thank you for asking.  The website is businessinsightsnow.com and the assessment on there is called, Crack Your Money Code.  So Business Insights Now and Crack Your Money Code.  It will take you maybe 10 minutes to take and again it’s painless.  You can’t study, you can’t get anything wrong and I am happy to engage and discuss results with folks that want to take it.  So you can reach out to me through the website with any questions.

Andrea:  Awesome!  OK, we will link to that in the show notes and I just thank you again for being here today and for helping the world to get used to this idea of money and being comfortable with it in the way that we interact with it and our relationship with money, Eleni.  Have a great day!

Eleni Anastos:  Thank you so much, Andrea!

Posted on

Living Boldly with Andrea Joy Wenburg

Episode 62

This week I have a very special episode to bring you. Today is actually my 40th birthday and, as I started to approach this birthday, I began reflecting on my life. What is that I really want for my life and my family? What are the things I’ve been doing that aren’t serving me? How have I been holding myself back? Take a listen to this quick episode to hear the powerful realizations I’ve come to.

Take a listen to the episode below!

Mentioned in this episode:

 

Play here (the red triangle below), on iTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Radio (Amazon Alexa) or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Transcript

Hey, hey! It’s Andrea, and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast!

So today, the day that I released this episode, it’s my 40th birthday. I don’t know, I’m not sure why I think about that. I’m not too worried about that I guess, but at the same time, it does make me think a little bit.

Today, I wanted to share with your some of my thoughts. I have a question for you. Do you ever wonder what your life is really about? I’m not talking about your overall beliefs, about the meaning of life really, rather I’m talking about how you actually live, what you actually say and how you actually do what you do…how are you spending your life.

A while back, I watched a movie that really kind of rocked me to the core and it got me feeling what I already been thinking about my life and what my life was about. This movie is called Still Alice, and the main character is diagnosed with early onset Alzheimer’s disease, which it hit really close to home.

As I watched this movie, I really kind of grieve with her as this brilliant 50-year-old Alice consider her future and forgot about her family, she grew anxious. She lost her ability to interact with other people. Honestly, I thought about myself and I wondered “How much time do I really have left?” None of us really know, but this really put in the perspective.

If I’m about 40 years old and this Alice in her mid 50s, yeah 50 year old, she’s just 10 years away from me, “What if I only have that much time left?” How would I spend my life, what would I want my life to be about?” And I can tell you what was easier to figure out. It was easier to figure out what I don’t want to be about, because I know based on just life and my own experiences and the way that I’ve come to view myself in the world.

I don’t want to spend my life protecting myself. I don’t want to hide or hold back just for fear that I might not succeed or that someone might actually not like me or think negatively about me or be annoyed with me. I don’t want to hold back out of that kind of fear and protect myself in that way just to keep myself from feeling hurt. What if I have something to offer? What if it really could impact people?

Of course this is something that I’ve talked about a lot. But I think in the end, we all need to kind of do the math a little bit and realize that all of those times that people don’t appreciate what we have to offer, don’t accept our offering, maybe you count them as negative ones, if you want.

But those times when the people do, I mean those are very small. They’re just passing blips on the radar. But when somebody does actually receive what you have to offer, how much bigger of a number is that? There’s so much more positive that comes with someone receiving your offering and you making a difference in their lives than all those little negative rejections essentially.

So I don’t want my life to be spent protecting myself from these tiny little negative blips on the radar. I want to go out seeking those out knowing that if I’m seeking those out that eventually I’m going to find somebody who actually does want what I have to offer. Do you ever think of it like that? Or do you see all of those rejections or those I guess negative moments in your life, or those people that tell you no. Do you give them more credit than they do? Do you give them more weight to them than they really have?

It’s nothing against those people that might say no or that might say not now or might not be interested. It’s not about that, it’s about OK, move on. So who does need what you have? Let’s find them and then think about how much more exponential impact you have with that one person who’d actually is open to receive what you have. Oh man, it’s worth the rejections!

So I don’t want to spend my life protecting myself, I know that. So I’m going to go for it. I’ve been going for it. I’m going to keep going for it and even when I get down, which happens, I just know that I have to step out and do something bold and brave and then I have to do it again. I might fail and I might not be everybody’s favorite person but I plan to learn and grow from it all and I don’t want to protect myself and I don’t want to just live protecting myself; I do want to love boldly.

Something else I don’t want is I don’t want to spend my life overwhelmed. It’s really easy to feel overwhelmed, doesn’t it? Honestly, this is not something I do well. I probably tend to feel overwhelmed. I packed my mind and my schedule. I try to not super pack it, but I do like it fairly full but then if I allow myself to get too tied to the outcome, I can easily get overwhelmed.

I don’t like the idea of shuffling stuff around my house and it’s interesting because we’ve lived in the house that we’re living in right now, we’ve lived in it for almost five years now, which is way longer than I lived in anyone’s house besides the one I grew up in since I was 18 years old.

So every couple of years, really, I had the opportunity in my adult life to go through everything. Almost twice, because you know, you go through it once when you’re packing and you think you’re getting rid a lot of stuff when you move. And then you realize “Oh my goodness, I need to get rid of so much more stuff.”

But I know that I don’t want to spend my life just shuffling stuff around my house because I haven’t had a _____ to go through everything every couple of years here at this house. I still have to be super intentional about going through things and I think it’s not just the things, is it? It’s the relationships. It’s the activities, which ones are kind of; I don’t know, be lasting and make a lasting impact.

I’m not sure that I always know the answer to that. I think sometimes we have to try things out and just see how it fits with our new schedule. And with two kids, one who’s going to 6th grade who is just starting youth group and just starting band and just starting all kinds of fun activities, I realized that it’s going to take a lot of reassessing as we go to kind of think through it. I guess that has to be OK!

So as I’m looking at the next few years and I’m thinking about not wanting to be overwhelmed, I know that I want to simplify as much as I can and not takes a lot of effort and intentionality. I’m going to cut back on stuff and activities that turn into detours or stumbling blocks between us and what we really feel like as our family purpose.

Like I said it’s going to be constant balancing act and I know it has been a constant balancing act, but there will be less to balance. Because I need to think clearly, overwhelmed makes it really hard to think clearly and that’s something that it gets really important.

The last thing that I know that I do not want, I did not want to spend my life running away from feeling…I don’t want to distract myself with meaningless things just so that I don’t have to feel the intensity of the meaningful things. I don’t want to numb my feelings or carelessly feed my emotions so that they grow out of proportion. I don’t want to diminish or exaggerate feeling and that’s something that I can easily do. I want the moment to be what it is. I don’t need to anticipate it ahead of time and hold that emotion, carry it out before and carry it out after.

This is the time in life when you start to realize how there are a lot of people around you that could be dying, a lot of people around you sick and becomes more and more evident. And I think it’s important to hold each one of those moments with the weight that they deserve while not carrying them too far forward anticipating bad things, while not dwelling on them too long afterwards punishing oneself perhaps for what you didn’t say or didn’t do. That’s something my husband and I talked about recently.

What is it that we feel like we really need to say to the people that we love? What do they need to know from us, to hear from us so that we don’t live without regrets? I wonder about that for you. Is there anything that you want to say to somebody that would help you to not live with regret? I think that’s probably one of these little buckets in our lives that probably need to continually be checked and dumped, if that’s how you want to put it; to look inside and say “OK, what now? Is there anything?”

Not necessarily because there’s stuff going on and like or some things specific that you’re concerned about. Though, it could be that. You could let those be triggers. You could let other people’s experiences be triggers for you to say, “Oh you know what, I’m going to do this now. I need to say this now.” But I think we also do that on a regular basis just because…so what do we need to say to live without regret?

So I want to explore. I want to dig dip, to uncover what I’m honestly feeling and why. I want to bring those feelings, those feelings to God and allow Him to turn them into power with love because I believe that’s what happens. I believe these feelings are fuel that they may not be structure, they may not tell us what to do, but boy they can sure fuel us through something hard or through something great.

So I don’t want to look at feeling and say it’s bad. I want to live passionately. So that’s basically it. I am confident that I don’t want to spend my life protecting myself, but I do want to live boldly and I don’t want to spend my life overwhelmed. I do want to think clearly. I don’t want to spend my life running from feeling because I want to live passionately.

To my question for you is how do you want to spend your life, your actual day-to-day life? What are you going to do to get there? You know what I hope you do; I hope you go for it. I hope you step out and do something bold and brave and then go do it again because your voice matters.

 

 

END

Posted on

How to Stop Being Afraid of Standing Out with Alicia Couri

Episode 61

Alicia Couri is a dynamic empowerment speaker, author, and personal branding expert who shares her message of how overcoming low self-esteem and lack of self-confidence has created massive opportunities that influence, transform, and impact lives.

Alicia’s books focus on self-development and self-care and, while simple, are incredibly profound.  Her mission is to influence, educate, inspire, and entertain with audacious confidence and to help her clients do the same with a strong personal brand.

In this episode, Alicia discusses why the core of her message is focused around confidence, the difference it makes for the world if people are confident, how to gain confidence, why we shouldn’t look for external validation to boost our confidence, the three P’s of personal branding, and so much more!

Take a listen to the episode below!

Mentioned in this episode:

 

Play here (the red triangle below), on iTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Radio (Amazon Alexa) or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Alicia Couri Voice of Influence Podcast Andrea Joy Wenburg

Transcript

Hey, hey!  It’s Andrea and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast.

Today, I have with me, Alicia Couri, a dynamic empowerment speaker, author, and personal branding expert who shares her message of how overcoming low self-esteem and lack of self-confidence has creative massive opportunities that influence, transform, and impact lives.

I personally benefited from Alicia’s abilities with personal branding especially in the area of hair and makeup recently at an event that I spoke at.  So I’m excited to share her with you today.  Her books focused on self-development and self-care and they’re really fun reads and they’re both very simple but profound.  Her mission is to influence, educate, inspire, and entertain with audacious confidence and she helps her clients do so with a strong personal brand.

Alicia how wonderful is it to have you here today on the Voice of Influence podcast.

Alicia Couri:  Thank you so much!  I really appreciate how you introduced me.  That is so wonderful and I appreciated the opportunity to work with you recently.  Thank you so much!

Andrea:  Yes.  It was so fun. You were a delight.  You were very encouraging and I liked how I looked so that’s so great too.

Alicia Couri:  That turned out great, yes.

Andrea:  It’s nice to know that somebody professional has done the hair and makeup thing before you go up onstage.

Alicia Couri:  It makes a world of difference.  It certainly does.

[Off-topic conversation]

Andrea:  So Alicia what is the core of your message?  Tell us about what drives you in your message?

Alicia Couri:  In the introduction, you talked about me overcoming low self-esteem and low self-worth.  So the core of my message is really focused around confidence because everything that we do starts with being confident and it starts with having that confidence within yourself.  So for me that is such a staple and such a vital part of life so that is really what drives me.

Andrea:  What is it about that then?  I want to hear about your story then because it sounds like you have a pretty good story about why this is personal for you?

Alicia Couri:  Absolutely!  You know, I was born in Trinidad and I grew up in Australia.

Andrea:  You grew up in Australia but you don’t have n accent now?

Alicia Couri:  OK, so that’s part of my story.

Andrea:  OK, good.  I want to hear it.

Alicia Couri:  That’s also part of my story, because I was one of three black children in an entire school of 700 to 800 kids and so…

Andrea:  Wow that’s a lot.

Alicia Couri:  Yes, it was a really big school because it went from a kindergarten all the way through 12th grade.

Andrea:  And such a small percentage.

Alicia Couri:  And it was just one was a native Aborigines and other was my sister.  So it was three of us in the whole school that I’ve ever seen that were dark, at least as dark as we were.  So I got a lot of stares.  I got a lot of questions and as a 5 year old getting questions about your skin color and where you from and your accent and why do you talk like this and all of that, it was intimidating because I didn’t have the answers.  I didn’t know why my skin was different color than theirs.  I couldn’t answer that question intelligently, and so it has caused me as a rambunctious, really outspoken, outgoing little girl to become shy and kind of introverted.

It completely changed my personality.  It changed how I was.  I wanted to blend in.  I didn’t want to standout.  I wanted to be just like everybody else but the minute I look at myself, I knew I was like everybody else that I was around.  So later on in life, I realized that what impact that had on me, because when you’re in it you don’t realize what’s happening, but as I tried to step out and do things, I would realize that I would shy away and I would want to be in the background and I wouldn’t step up and I wouldn’t speak up and I couldn’t figure out why wouldn’t do these things.

So later on when we moved back to Trinidad, I looked like everybody else so I can fit in but the minute I open my mouth to speak, heads would turn again and people start asking questions and they start wanting to know “Can you say these words?  Can you say that word?”  So I started feeling self-conscious about even speaking.

Andrea:  Because of the Australian accent at that point?

Alicia Couri:  Because of the Australian accent.  Yeah, a heavy thick Australian accent from this little girl.  So my way of fixing that was “Let me just speak in a way that is clear and enunciate and so that people cannot identify me by an accent anymore.”  So that’s kind of why I speak the way I speak because I just didn’t want people to ask me where I was from and now I got it all the time because nobody could picture where I’m from.  I always hear say “Hey, where you from.  I detect something but I don’t know what it is.”

Andrea:  Yes, interesting.

Alicia Couri:  So yeah that’s kind of my story and so that’s why I so strongly believe in confidence because it erodes who you are if you don’t have it.  It erodes your worth, your value, your self-esteem, your ability to really go out and shine at the highest level that you can possibly achieve.  So that’s what I want for people to be able to realize.

Andrea:  OK, so what difference does it make then in the world if people are confident?  Why does this matter?

Alicia Couri:  Well, it matters, especially if you’re in business, it matters how you value yourself.  It matters how you show up.  It matters how you perform.  For instance, we love to watch world events and Dancing with the Stars and all these really great reality shows that are based in competition, say like Dancing with the Stars for instance.

When you put someone out of their elements and so you take someone who has never done ballroom dancing before and now you’re training them to ballroom dance and you see the process that they go through and how the lack of confidence at the beginning really holds them back from giving it their all to when they reached probably the semi finals or the finals and then you see that change in not just the way they danced but the attitude that they have when they danced because now they’ve got it.  Now, they’re confident in their steps that they’re taking and they’re no longer holding back.

So when you live in a world that you’re not holding back, that you’re actually giving it your all because now you’re sure of what you’re doing, you’re confident in what you do, it makes not just a difference in your performance but it makes a difference in your clients and customers in how they receive it.  They are able to celebrate it with you when you do a great job.  They’re able to be the beneficiaries of that great job, so I think it’s really important.

Andrea:  And it totally levels up what you can offer it seems like.

Alicia Couri:  Absolutely, absolutely!

Andrea:  Yeah.  OK, so how does someone become confident?  I’ve asked a lot of people on this podcast you know, “Have you always been confident, because they come across so confident.  And they’re like “Oh no,” and they kind of go back and then, “No way, I’ve always been confident.”  But I think that a lot of people are sitting there looking at people who looked confident and saying, “Gosh, I wish I was like them but I don’t really know how to get from here to there.”  So what do you tell people about that?

Alicia Couri:  So that is a really great question because so many times, people think there’s a formula to getting confident but we really have to start looking back at why you think you’re not confident or why you believe you can’t do this because sometimes it’s a universal belief that some people are born confident and others aren’t.  And so if you have bought into that universal belief then you’re always going to think that you can never be confident enough.

So think back to really what that seed that was planted that made you feel like either you couldn’t do something or you weren’t confident enough or you didn’t have enough skills, education, or whatever it is.  So for me when I looked back at my childhood and I recognized that it was that time in my life when I felt that I wanted to disappear then I can kind of shift back and I can say “Well, you know, that was my reality as a child, that’s not my reality now.”  So I don’t have to bring that baggage with me everywhere I go.  I am a choice now that I’m aware that that is where I came from, I am now a choice.

I think we even spoke about this when I was doing your hair and makeup that we can choose in this moment now how we are going to be.  So that kind of can get you out this idea that you think that you’re not confident enough or you think that you can’t do a good job is recognizing where it came from, being able to now make a different decision because now you’re a choice because you’re aware of where it came from and then just choosing it.  The other thing is recognizing where your skills, your talents, your gifts, and your abilities lie.

Andrea:  So big!

Alicia Couri:  Yeah, your talents, your abilities, your gifts, and your skills.

Andrea:  I like that tags.

Alicia Couri:  Yeah, your tags.

Andrea:  That’s good.

Alicia Couri:  If you know where your tags are, if you know that I am really good at this that is where you’ll shine and that is where you’ll be confident.  When I started doing makeup, it was a passion of mine.  It was something I love doing but I didn’t have all the skills yet, but because I love and I enjoy doing it and I was encouraged by the people around me that I was doing a good job, I got more training and more training until I felt that “You know what, I believe that in any situation, I can make this work.”

So I don’t need to know what everybody looks like before they sit in my chair because I understand now, you know face shape.  There’s a certain understanding of the technical aspect of it but I also know that I have a natural gift for it.  So I rely on my natural gift and I rely on the skill set that I’ve developed.  And so I’m confident when someone sits on my chair that I can do a good job for them.

Andrea:  I really like that you’re pulling up both the internal belief and where it came from as well as the need to develop the skills and to sort of level up where you’re already gifted because I think it’s definitely not enough to just say that I’m more confident.  Confidence has to be grounded in something…

Alicia Couri:  …in something, exactly.

Andrea:  Yeah, yeah.

Alicia Couri:  Absolutely, absolutely.  Too many times, especially young women looked externally at everything.  You know, beauty was a big, big thing for me because I spent a long time not believing in my own beauty, again came from my childhood and not seeing a representation of what I look like as beauty in the world in the 70’s.  There weren’t really people on TV or in magazines that were portrayed with my skin color, my nose, or my lips.  It was more, blonde, blue eyed, light skinned.

My concept of beauty was cute because of my surroundings and I had to figure out what beauty really meant to me.  So when so many young girls are looking externally for validation and they’re looking externally for things to identify with, it erodes their confidence because they no longer have confidence in themselves but they’re trying to be like the image that they see out there.  And it’s really important to develop your own concept of beauty and confidence and all those things for yourself and then like you said, make it tangible and then match the inside of what you’re now believing for yourself and then make it tangible.

If you’re going to use, for instance makeup, don’t make up yourself to hide yourself or try to alter your features to look like something else, but use makeup to enhance.  Say, “You know what, I love my lips and I am going to put on this bright red lipstick because it makes my lips just look juicy and beautiful.”  So you know, instead of underlying your lips so that they look thin and more acceptable.  So trying to build and develop confidence in yourself comes from the internal but also you have to add the external to it but don’t add the external as a way to mask, hide, or alter who you are.

Andrea:  Hmmm.  OK, so I love that you just said that we need to find that within instead of basing it on other people and getting approval and basing our idea of beauty or whatever _____ that we’re trying to set for ourselves basing that on somebody else or something else outside of ourselves.  But how do we do that, really?  I think it’s hard to get those images or those expectations out of your head and kind of comeback inside to yourself to find those answers.

So, Alicia, how did that work for you?  Let’s use beauty as an example because you’ve used it.  So how did you decide what was beautiful for you and what made you beautiful when you didn’t have representation in media and you didn’t see people like yourself out there _____ this beautiful?  How did you find that for yourself and how do you recommend that other people look within to find some of those things?

Alicia Couri:  It took me a long time!  It certainly did because I did not like looking in the mirror.  I did not like my picture taken and if you look at my Facebook page or my Instagram page, you would never believe that in a million years because there are selfies everywhere, but honestly, I was hiding myself.  I would hide myself and people would say, “Oh you so pretty.”  “You’re so beautiful.”  I couldn’t receive it.  I couldn’t accept it.  I would just politely say, “Oh thank you,” but inside I was like “What are they looking at?”

But it took me a while to kind of make the shift and so what shifted for me was to start seeing myself differently.  I had to actually start looking differently at myself in the mirror.  I had to take pictures of myself and stop criticizing myself and putting myself down and looking for the beauty.  When I would look in the mirror, instead of saying, you know, pimples or oh my gosh, my nose is this way, you know, just finding everything that was wrong, I looked in the mirror and I thought, “You know what, you’re not too shabby today.”  You know, I have _____ a little bit of a compliment, “Not too shabby today.”

And then I started taking pictures of myself which is something I really didn’t do. When I started taking more and more pictures, I started to see myself differently because I looked at myself objectively as if it wasn’t me I was looking at.  I thought, “If I didn’t know this person would I think she was pretty?”  And I would look at each picture saying, “Yes, she’s got beautiful eyes and she’s got red lips.  Her face shape is very good.”  You know, just start picking little things and looking at different features and saying, “Yeah, she’s kind of pretty.”

Andrea:  Yeah and just are ____, I mean, you’re gorgeous.  So yeah, I can’t even imagine not realizing that, but it’s so interesting that you took the time and energy and effort to do that because I think a lot of us don’t put the extra time and energy into that kind of reflection and to that kind of awareness.  You know awareness of taking the picture and then reflecting on it and saying, “OK, what do I see here?”

I think we can do the same thing with other areas of our lives that we’re trying to grow in and or become more confident in but yeah, we don’t.  It takes so much effort or decision or permission or something to actually do that.  So what was inside of you or what’s outside of you, I don’t know what kind of got you to that point where you said “You know what, this is worth the time, this is worth the effort to take my pictures and start thinking about this and overcome this issue from myself?”

Alicia Couri:  I was just tired of not feeling great about myself because there are so many people always telling you something about you that you’re _____ and all the stuff and you don’t see it then what are you missing?  So I thought and really wondering, why am I always shying away from the spotlight?  When people say, “Oh my gosh you make a great speaker.”  “Oh my gosh you will do great camera work.”  And I kept denying that from myself and I finally said, “Why do I keep denying my potential just because I don’t see it?”  But obviously, other people were seeing it.

So let me stop denying my potential.  Let me stop denying and saying, “Oh no, I’m trying to be polite or trying to be humble.”  You know, people think that’s humility when it’s false humility.  It’s really pride.  It’s not really humility, “Oh no, not me.”  So I really started looking at that and saying “Well, maybe I can speak in front of people and what will it take for me to stand in front of an audience and deliver a message without falling apart.”

And I thought, “You know, if I stand in front of an audience and I was nervous, what’s wrong with that?”  And I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with that.  Nothing was wrong with that you’re standing in front of people.  OK, so my voice shakes, so if my voice shakes what’s wrong with that?  Will people make fun of me?  Maybe, but will I get my message across?  Yes!  OK, so just start trying, just start doing and the more I did, the more stepped out and I did, the more confident I became and the more proficient I became and the less judgmental I became of myself and the less critical of myself.

So I didn’t do it right.  I didn’t do it perfectly and I think that is another thing that does not go well with confidence is perfection, because if you think that you have to do everything perfect, and if you think that you cannot mess up or make a mistake then you will never get to that confident place in yourself because you’re always going to be afraid you’re going to mess up.

So I didn’t do it perfectly.  You know, I have my radio show and sometimes, I look back at the radio show and I think “What was I thinking?”  “Oh my gosh.”  But people comments and they say how much fun they had listening to the show or how much they gained and as a matter of fact my last guest, she was talking about the opportunity for it’s about everyone else instead of about you.  So when you start thinking what I have to share can be a value to someone else then you think less of yourself and all the things that you think are wrong with you because now you are in service to someone else.

Andrea:  Yes.  Yes, love that!  One of my recent guests, Neen James, said, it’s hard to be nervous when you’re standing in service.  That’s the way she puts it.

Alicia Couri:  Right.

Andrea:  And I remember distinctly a point in my life when I was getting up to speak and I thought, “I got to love these people more than I fear them, more than I fear their judgment, more than I fear messing up in front of them.  I got to love them more than that because if I do, I’ll be OK.”

Alicia Couri:  Right and all the ums and the ahs and you know it happens and that shows we figure real.  You know, there are some speaking programs that are trying to cut all those things out of you, kind of try to slap it out of you and I don’t necessarily feel that it needs to be taken completely out of you.  Yes, it can be curtailed a little bit so that your message isn’t modeled in the umhs and the umhs and the umhs.

So there is a balance that some of those things can be removed a little bit but you don’t want to be robotic.  You don’t want to be too stiff when you’re delivering something to someone, when you’re in service to someone because you want them to be able to feel you.  You want them to able to experience what you’re sharing with them in that moment and if you slip off here and there then it’s fine, at least that’s my philosophy.

Andrea:  I totally agree with you because I think that people get so obsessed with that sort of thing that they do, they lose their voice.  They lose who they really are in that like you’re talking about.  People can’t really feel me if I’m there trying to do a perfect job because I’m not truly connecting with them.  I’m not connected to my message because I’m so worried about it.

Alicia Couri:  Oh yeah that can really mess with your confidence too because if you don’t have it down exactly correct, perfectly then you don’t feel as powerful in that moment.

Andrea:  Oh yeah.

Alicia Couri:  But if you can let it go and just say whatever it is it is and I have a strong message inside of me and I’m just going to let it out, not that rehearsal isn’t important.  Rehearsal is a very important part of it but don’t get so locked into your script that you’re not making that connection.

Andrea:  Yeah and even your story or your message in general, even if you’re having a conversation with somebody if you’re not connected to it in that moment.  If you’re trying to make sure that it doesn’t get lost, I think that’s something that is definitely even frustrating for me at times.  If I’m not totally clear in what I’m trying to say, I get flustered.

Alicia Couri:  A little tongue tied.

Andrea:  Yeah and then I used to just give up and that doesn’t do anything for the person that you’re talking to and it definitely doesn’t serve your message at all.  So having a sense of what it is ahead of time is helpful.

Alicia, you also talked about personal branding and I remember when you’re doing my hair and makeup, I asked you, “what is your perspective?”  What is your points of view on personal branding and would you share that with us now because that is something that we talked about a lot here and I think it definitely ties into awareness of who we are so that we can build that confidence.  So what is your point of view on personal branding?

Alicia Couri:  I talk about the three P’s to personal branding; Posture, which is about building a solid core and the core, of the C in core is confidence so that is your foundation to your posture, so posture.  And in building your core, we have confidence how you’re oriented which is what you believe and what you value.  We talk about your results and your relevance to your industry and what your education and your experiences have been.  So that is core, you know, anytime I talk to anybody about core, those are the things that I’m referring to.

And then Presentation that’s the second P, which is so important.  When it comes to presentation, most people when they hear about branding, they think about presentation.  They think about your logo and your colors and your image and those things.  What is your website look like?  What is your business card look like?  So that is part of presentation but an important part of presentation as well is your performance, how do you actually provide your service to people and your story, your copy, all those things that represent you in your presentation.

So we want to make sure that everything in that part of your brand and the presentation of your brand is consistent.  You have a consistent message and you have a consistent look about you, not a cut and paste.  It’s not like your wearing the same thing all the time.  You know, every time people see, like “Yeah, I’m in my brand,” but everything has the same feel.  Everything has the same flow.  If you have a particular font that you use for your brand, you’re always using that font so that people get used to seeing that in your brand, people get used to seeing your brand colors in your presentation.

Most of the time when I speak, people know I’m going to show up in red.  When I’m on camera, they know I’m going to show up in red.  So people just come to know me in red and in red lipstick, so they have just kind of embrace that part of my brand.

Andrea:  Which is awesome because it’s like the opposite of holding back.

Alicia Couri:  Exactly!

Andrea:  It’s like you’re saying, “Now, I’m standing out and I’m not afraid to stand out, here I am!”  I love that!

Alicia Couri:  It’s so funny, I did a media interview sometime ago, not too long ago and one of the notes that they sent me, the producers, “Don’t wear bright red.”  And I’m like “She don’t know who she’s talking to.”  Of course, I’m gonna wear red.  Are you kidding me?”  So you just have to fix the lights and the tone and everything when I get there.

You know, some people says, better to ask _____ information.  But I did actually send them a picture of my dress ahead of time because I want to be respectful and they said, “No that’s fine.  It will work.”  Even though they said, I guess people wear this really crazy bright red that mess with the camera.

But anyway, when I have instructions like that, I try to be respectful of it and I send them ahead of time and if they really say no then I might tone down the shade or wear something different.  It’s not a big deal to me, but most of the time, yeah I’m in red.

So then the last P is Positioning and I think sometimes we don’t really pay attention to how we’re positioned in our brand.  Are we speaking to the right people?  Are we in front of our target audience?  Are we positioning ourselves as an authority?  Do we have these pieces in our marketing like media?  I need to get some of this myself some articles.  I need to do more writing and get some more articles in magazines.  And how you’re positioning yourself to be considered the expert in what you do, to be considered a leader in your industry, to be considered a thought leader.  Are you really positioning yourself correctly?  Another thing that people don’t really think about in positioning is who is coaching and mentoring you.  What sort of groups do you belong to?  Are you positioned correctly in those things?

So those are my three P’s for branding and that’s how I look at it.  I know there are so many people who do branding out there.  Everybody has their own unique point of view on how you should brand yourself.  So again, position yourself correctly, find the right person that you believe can develop your brand for your and make it stand out.

Andrea:  So how does, Positioning, Posture, and Presentation; how did these things relate to your core message of confidence then?

Alice Couri:  Well, branding relates to my core message of confidence as a whole because finding your unique quality, finding what’s unique about you, what stands out about you and then being able to highlight that and having the opportunity to really to really allow that to shine is it can only come when you’re confident within yourself because then you’ll keep holding something back, like red for instance.

I did not even think red was my color because for two years, my graphic artist and I were trying to figure out my logo.  We’re trying to figure out my colors and everything that I came up with, she kept telling me, “Nope, I don’t see that.  Nope that’s not right.”  I wasn’t feeling it in and she wasn’t feeling it.

And then I did a photo shoot that was really just impromptu.  I really wasn’t expecting to do it so I looked in my closet.  I pulled out a top that was red.  I pulled out a dress that was gold that I had never worn and I said, “OK, I’m going to do this photo shoot and I’m bringing these three things with me, a black shirt, a red top, and this gold dress.

When I finished the photo shoot, I got the pictures, that red and that gold were just like, you know like when the light shines down from heaven and when I looked at the _____.  So it was just really by chance that I found those colors for my brand.  Sometimes, it will happen that way.  And because I had ran from red so much in my life, the only reason I picked that red top was because of the cuts.  I’m a stylist so I help people with their wardrobe.  It’s part of their brand.  I do a lot of image styling for people’s hair and makeup and wardrobe.

So the cuts of that top was really why I grabbed it because it was a very a flattering cut, not for the color.  So it’s very interesting that the color was the thing that actually stood out more in those photos and that’s what made people comment more.

Andrea:  Alright, Alicia, so what of all from today’s talk, what do you really hope that the listener would take with them this week?  What nugget do you want them to remember?

Alicia Couri:  Oh that is so great!  What I really want people to remember is that any point in time, they can choose to be more confident.  They can choose who they are in that moment.  You can make a decision to, let’s say climb Mount Everest for instance, that would not be me but let’s say you make a decision, “By next year this time, I want to climb Mount Everest.”  You can choose to not train and then last minute try to get yourself up to _____ or you can choose to do a little bit everyday to get to that goal.

But if you choose to do something every day to get to that goal, there’s a second decision that you have to make and you have to choose who you are being in that moment.  Are you going to be the person that procrastinates or you’re going to be the person that gets up and continues to march towards your goal?  Are you going to show up ready to work and give your best and your all, or are you going to phone it in?

You have the ability to make those decisions, to choose that action and then choose who you’re going to be in that moment.  When I was cast as a lead in a movie that’s filming down here, I thought to myself, I could choose to read the part and acted out the way I think it should be acted out or I can choose to actually put myself in this character and live this character and give a performance that is not comfortable for me, Alicia, but will fit and suit this character.

So I had to make that decision because I had never acted before and I’m doing this movie.  I’m casting this movie and I’m like “Well, how do I do this?”  I had to make the decision who am I going to be.  Am I going to be the person that they say, “Oh yeah, nice job,” and then cast somebody else or am I really going to turn into an actor and become this person?

And so that’s kind of the job that you have when you’re building your confidence, “Am I just going to phone it in and act the part or am really going to become who I meant to be?  Am going to become this person that I visualize that is awesome, great, wonderful, and everybody loves and it’s totally authentic to you because it’s coming from within from inside of you from within and it’s not coming from anything external.  So you choose who’s going to bubble up from me inside of you and show up on the outside.

Andrea:  Hmm love it!  OK, Alicia, I know that you have a free download for people, so can you tell us a about that?

Alicia Couri:  Absolutely!  It’s my first book.  Again, I didn’t know that I was going to write a book.  It’s the first book that I wrote and it’s called Your Signature Style:  Unlocking the Confidence, Style and Influence of the Savvy CEO, and also talked a little bit about my journey that I mentioned earlier from Australia and some of those struggles.

One of the most impactful chapters in that book is chapter 2 when we talked about overcoming fears and how to release step out and not consider the fear but do it, do what you need to do and do it in a very great way.  So I love chapter 2, so hopefully, you will enjoy chapter 2 as well.

Andrea:  How can we find that?  We’ll definitely link to it in a show notes, is that sufficient or do you want to give out another link?

Alicia Couri:  You can link it in the show notes and they can also go to my website, it’s www.aliciacouri.com and there will be a link to the book.  I know it’s available for a limited time since it is on Amazon.  I do make it available anytime I do a radio show, television show, or podcast.  I make it available for the listeners and the viewers.

So if you can go to my website, the download will be there but it will only be there for a limited time.

Andrea:  Gotcha!  OK and we’ll have it in the show notes at least for that limited time.

Alright, thank you so much, Alicia.  It was so great to _____ with you today and hear how you came into your own voice of influence.  We have so much in common and I’m just really grateful and I want to thank you for your voice of influence in the world.

Alicia Couri:  Thank you!  There are two things I want to say about what you just said, I know we’re _____, but one is that it’s so important when start sharing your voice and your story how much you realize how many people can relate to what you’re going through and so anytime you have an opportunity to share your journey with someone and how you’ve overcome and some of the tools and tips that you have, it is a value because they’re also going through some of that and they can benefit from what you have to share.

I’m also launching a podcast soon, so look out for that.

Andrea:  Yes that’s right and once that’s all ready to go and everything, we’ll definitely put that in the show notes as well.

Alicia Couri:  Perfect!

Andrea:  Awesome and yes good luck with that.  That’s exciting.  Alright, thank you so much, Alicia, and we’ll see you soon.

Alicia Couri:  I appreciate it.  Thank you, Andrea!

Posted on

Sell Like Crazy While Serving Others and Being Yourself with Jim Padilla

Episode 60

We’re all salespeople whether we identify as one or not. If we want to use our voice of influence in the world, we’ll need to become better salespeople and this week’s guest is here to help with that.

Jim Padilla is the Founder of Gain the Edge, a go-to guy for all things sales, and a master collaborated whose purpose is to help entrepreneurs leverage the power of collaboration to scale their businesses, so they can impact the world the way they intended.

In this episode, Jim discusses his core message, the powerful story that led Jim to create his core message and to use his powers for good, his “park bench” approach to sales, the difference between manipulation and influence, the first thing you need to say during a sales conversation, why Jim focuses more on helping people with unrelated issues than selling them his services, and so much more!

Take a listen to the episode below!

Mentioned in this episode:

 

Play here (the red triangle below), on iTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Radio (Amazon Alexa) or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Jim Padilla Voice of Influence Podcast Andrea Joy Wenburg

Transcript

Hey, hey! It’s Andrea and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast!

Today, I have with me Jim Padilla, the founder of Gain the Edge. Jim is known in the personal development and the business coaching world as the go-to guy for all thing sales. You’ll just be able to tell by listening to his voice that he’s passionate and engaging, and you can see why he would be really good at this.

He is a master collaborator whose purpose is to help entrepreneurs leverage the power of collaboration to scale their businesses so that they can impact the world they way that they intended and Jim is known for instilling it to his sales teams, “It’s not what you say, it is who you are being when you say it.” Uh I love that!

Jim, it is so great to have you here on the Voice of Influence podcast!

Jim Padilla: Hey, Andrea, I’m super excited to be here and talk to you and just the total alignment with your brand and your vision here and just a great way to be able to share and connect.

Andrea: I’m curious how you would describe your core message because there are sales involved but you also talk a lot about this collaborative kind of atmosphere. So can you share with us, what is the core of what you are trying to get across with your voice of influence?

Jim Padilla: Yeah, you just actually hit it. The rule #1, the thread that we used to everything in our company is that who you’re being is far more impactful than what you’re saying or what you’re doing. So we’re always checking that. It’s literally something that’s get tested and checked every day.

So anytime somebody reacts in a certain way or result happens, who you were being that led to that result or who you were being that generated that response? Who were you that were constantly focused on how do we stay at or pick elevated state as a human being because from there we make incredible decisions. We make great partnerships and we inspire people boldly. Everybody operates at their best and I just find that in life that it just not how most people work.

[Off-topic conversation]

Andrea: So, who you are, how you’re being in this moment matters to everything else. I love that why that in particular…what is that have to do in sales, what is that have to do with your business? Yeah, tell me more about that? Where did this come from?

Jim Padilla: Yeah, you know, I have a pretty sorted past. My mom was 16 when I was born and she was in pretty unfortunate circumstances. So the way she responded in that situation was primarily with fear and anger. So I grew up getting abused on a pretty regular basis and pretty severely to the point that I was in a poster care at 13. I was on the streets at 16 and in jail at 19.

So it was pretty much then my first 19 to 20 years of my life spending all of my waking moments trying to figure out how to master my environment so that I can influence the people around me to feel safe around me so that they wouldn’t want to hurt me because that was my only self. That was my defense mechanism.

I was always constantly checking in on who might I’m being at the moment, who night being here, who might being there, or how am showing up to this person. It’s something that’s always being able to just regulate and it was mostly because I had to. And then you know, fast forward in 20 years and now I make a lot of money teaching other people how to master the art of the sales conversation by being able to influence the people around them to feel safe and to trust you and want to buy from you.

So we don’t focus on scripts and techniques and tactics, we focus on being-ness. We actually have a sales program called Sales Unscripted. That’s the whole focus of it. It’s all about who you’re being because everybody is selling something all day, all the time. There’s no human being on the planet that hasn’t sold something or influence their environment. It’s just you don’t do it in purpose. So we just try to help you get completely aware so that you’re doing it intentionally.

Andrea: Oh man, I love that so much. So you kind of went from…doing it as a survival mechanism to somehow turning it over the course of the years into business. When did that shift for you? Do you think it shifted or what was that transformation for you that took something that was really hard thing that you did just to survive and then turn it into something that is incredibly proactive and powerful?

Jim Padilla: Well, it’s interesting because there were actually two major shifts. One was that I learned I could do this on purpose and I could do this to my advantage but then you _____ and with the upbringing that I had and I essentially had this power that I could use to destroy people. And so I did, I build businesses. You know, I used to own a _____ company. I ran a mortgage broker shop. I’ve been an entrepreneur my whole life but I spent most of my time figuring out how to get what I needed from people by using these skills.

So I conquered a lot, made a lot, and burned a lot of bridges, learnt a lot of relationships because that was all about me. I was manipulating my environment so that I would win. Then in 2008 when the mortgage crisis hit, I was at mortgage at the time, I had put a lot of people into loan for they had no business being in because I made a lot of money doing it. And I met a woman where I coach _____ in a high school basketball team. Her grandmother came in to do loan and I put her in a loan, it was a gamble. I knew it was a high risk gamble she didn’t belong in.

So fast forward couple of months or couple of years in a gas station here in Sacramento and her mom comes up to me across the gas station and she was like, “You’re a crook, you’re the devil, and you deserve whatever comes to you.” So my mother was living in that car over there and I knew everything she said was true and accurate and right and I didn’t know what to do. Everything came flashing back, my childhood, all my skills, all the things I’ve done. And I said, “Okay, I’ve got to change who I’m being, because it didn’t get me anywhere.”

Ultimately, I made a bunch of money and end up losing it because we gambled it all the way. I filed bankruptcy and foreclosed on multiple homes. We were back down to zero. So everything I had gained through bad means, I lost. And In that moment, I was like “I have to stop. I have great skills set. I have ability to be able change people’s lives and it’s time that I start using it for others’ benefit instead of mine.”

Right at that moment, I started going to town and said, OK, all the things that I’m doing in the sales process and all the things about sales that I hate that make other feel bad, that make sales people feel bad, I stripped them all out. What was left was all the things that actually serve people and make people feel good and make me feel good. But it was all about the power serving others that leads to the outcome instead of the other way around and that’s how this whole thing got started in 2008.

Andrea: Wow, I’m in total goose bumps here. When I hear you say that in that moment with that conversation, the way that you were using it before us, manipulation, your skills, that you realized that that wasn’t the answer but it could be used for good. Did you ever have a point when you were saying to yourself, could this be used for good? Did you ever question that? Sometimes we have these really big awesome superpowers that can really look bad and feel bad and it’s hard to turn it around and see the good. But did you see that automatically or was that something you’ve ever struggled with?

Jim Padilla: I struggled with it that time. My challenge was I was this kid from the streets who didn’t have anything, who had a mother on welfare. I saw capital, money, and resources as a need. So I was like, “Well, I need to get it at any cost.” So many times, I put people in a loan and I would feel bad about it. We would get people into the mortgage loan.

We’ve shown something on the paperwork and it would still be a little bit different when they showed up to sign at the escrow. But they were irritated enough that they didn’t like it but they weren’t irritated enough that they want to start the process over so they would sign but then we would never hear from again. I never got referrals from them, follow-ups, and callback and ______ do with us and we were just you know chop chop.

But great values were high and my phone would ring all the time, I didn’t care about how I took care of these people because I have more business coming in every day. And I started watching this cycle go on. It was just like eating away and I knew I was doing stuff wrong. The real problem was, I was like in my own island because I couldn’t even share the stuff with my wife.

At the time, I was actually scheming stuffs from my own paychecks. If I had a $15,000 commission, I would bring home like 8 of it and I would take the other 7 and I would invest in some properties or do some stuff and my wife had no clue. She thought I was out doing work. I was living my own lie. I was like, “OK, how can I control this,” and it just started eating at me completely. But I just tried to ignore it because, otherwise, I just had to look at the _____ of who I was being and I don’t want to do it.

Andrea: Oh wow! OK, so how do you go from that point to the point…was there a period of kind of forgiveness and redemption? I mean, now look at your business and how much good you’re doing for people. I mean, it’s incredible to hear about all the different people that you’re helping and I know that the sales process that you have now is legit. So there’s such a huge redemption story here. But what was that in between, how did you get to that point where it was better, I mean even in those relationships or what was that like for you?

Jim Padilla: Well, unfortunately, I was not the guy who learned anything in my life the easy way. Every single lesson I’ve ever learned up until that point was always learned the hard way and including that one because ultimately what happened is my wife…our three daughters are all grown and through college and a couple of them are married now.

But at the time when they were going in college, my wife was also getting her degree and had to apply for ______. And whether you qualify or not, you have to apply. You know, we owned properties and we were debt free. And my wife was applying for loans and she was fully expecting for them to say, “Oh you don’t qualify because you make too much.”

Instead, they called us and said “Hey, we want to let you know, you’ve been declined because you have too much debt.” She was like “What are you talking about, debt?” Because I was planting the market and things aren’t going bad and I had $50,000 invested here and money invested here and I needed _____ credit cards taking cash advances to try to fraud them at these debts because we weren’t making money in the mortgage anymore because _____.

All of a sudden, we’ve got multiple six figures with credit card debt. And my wife said, “What are you talking about, we’re debt-free.” We separated. We filed a bankruptcy. We foreclosed on our homes and I was gone for a year and a half. Literally, I got an apartment. I was basically on my face broken before God every single day. I was like, “OK, I did the first 40 years my way and screwed it all up. I’m ready to do your way now.” It was just daily over and over.

Over the course of a year and a half, in 18 to 20 months, my wife started seeing a difference in me and a change in me. I was thankful because I never thought I would get her back. I was hopeful, but I never thought it would actually happen. She just decided, “Look, if we’re gonna be broken apart, we might as well be broken together.” So we started that next year.

This is why it’s so powerful in the story because it went from me being the financial ruin of our family. My oldest daughter didn’t talk to me for six years and for my wife to be able to say, “OK, we’re gonna do this together.” This really finally pulled our finances together. We never had joint account, nothing before this. I was always running my own stuff then the next year, she was a retail manager for Target _____ in corporate management, she came and said, “Jim, I’m retiring from my job and I’m gonna count on you.”

So for her to come full circle to me being the cause of the problem to now I’m being the sole support of the family. Business was huge because she had to come full circle in my character and who I was being to be able to say, “Yes, I’m in this with you.”

And then that next year, she jumped in a business with me and we did nothing but explode and go skyrocket through the roof. And now, we’ve got this amazing business, this incredible marriage and an amazing family. My daughters are back in fold. My middle daughter didn’t talk to me for about three years after all this. I officiated her wedding last year. It’s just been amazing.

Quite honestly, I wish I had a better answer for this but I’m not out conquering business. I’m just out changing lives and business comes. I promise that’s how it works. I mean, yes, we got some strategy. We’re not just throwing stuff up in the air, but our sole purpose is helping people overcome their challenges because we have overcome so many things to get where we are. There’s nothing that you can’t overcome. You just have to be totally clear on who you need to be to make it happen.

Andrea: Oh Jim, thank you so much for sharing that story. It’s so powerful. I saw Jim at a conference just recently and not just Jim, Jim and Cindy. You guys together were just adorable and powerful. You’re both very engaging, powerful and you were holding hands and all that. It’s so cool to hear the back story on how much work it took and how much brokenness it took to get to that point where now you’re living just such a triumphant kind of life.

Jim Padilla: Very much so!

Andrea: Oh man! And now the core of your message, it sounds like there’s so much about that. It’s so much about this who you are and what you’re bringing in who you’re being. So do you incorporate, I don’t know who you’re talking to if you’re talking to using this message with more than your sales team or with the people that you’re serving, but do you talk about this kind of brokenness? How does that play into the influence that you have with people and how you encourage other people to have influence?

Jim Padilla: We’ve never done a ton of marketing and visibility because we’re pretty well connected and we get great results for our clients so that’s where a lot of our business comes. But this year, we just started to start really getting visible and it’s about sharing that. We’re in a position to hold a lot of the industry accountable because we see things that are going on behind the scenes. I’m like “Look, stop doing it that way, do it this way because this is the people are seeing of you.”

But I haven’t been sharing as much of myself in that publicly and that what’s just starting to happen now. I’m actually launching a podcast next month so I want to start being able to put my message out there and start getting people in tune and holding people accountable to a higher level.

You know, Cyndi and I see ourselves as leaders of leaders. We haven’t been necessarily called to reach people one by one, we’ve been called reaching by the masses and we do that by really reaching influence centers. Most of our clients have massive reach. The more of them that we can impact, the more people we can impact indirectly through them.

Andrea: So true. I mean, if you can have an impact on their message on who they are, they’re being then that impact all these other people, absolutely! Wow! This is really powerful. How do you see this for other leaders, other message-driven leaders like yourself, people who are listening to this podcast to have a vision of some kind?

They have a message and they’re struggling with this I guess balancing or understanding when they’re being manipulative or when they’re not? So they don’t want to be manipulative because who listens to this podcast don’t. They don’t want to manipulate but they do want to influence and that line can get really blurry. Do you have any advice for people on how to differentiate their message so that it is on the side of influence and not on the side of manipulation?

Jim Padilla: It’s interesting because the skill set is the same. The mechanics are really the same thing. It’s all about the intention and this is where people have to really get honest with yourself because we all like to say, “Well, I’m not attached. I really just want to help this person. It’s not as important if I make the sale.” Is that really true? Is that really true, right?

You have to get to the place where you can separate it and say, “I want to impact the person. I want to change that life,” and then watch the results come, I’m telling you. People go, “It’s always easy for you to say, Jim. You guys make millions blah, blah, blah.” I didn’t start making money like this until I started helping people first.

Andrea: So when you’re saying helping people, does that include the sale? Or how do you look at that because I think that’s one of the struggles is we have that internal struggle, but you’re saying get honest with the fact that you do want to sell to somebody?

Jim Padilla: Right. But here’s where it comes down to, I remember you’re posting something about the super problem in the group that we’re in, here’s the key. When we talk about our problem and we talk about what people do and we talk about how we help people, if you’re selling an idea, if you’re selling a vision for something, if you want people to donate to your cause or buy your program whatever, the only thing that you should be talking about is why it matters to them because that’s what they’re going to resonate with.

Here’s an example when I was in mortgage, I wanted everybody to be able to call me to get their solutions for whatever it is. We had tons of people who would move to the area, relocate, get a loan, whatever; and I said, “Look, if you’re looking for a school, a babysitter, a place to get your oil changed, or the best restaurant to go to, call me and I’ll take care of it. I don’t want you to have to look up on things.”

So people would call me for all kinds of stuff that had nothing to do with mortgage. But because they knew I’d care about making sure they got whatever they wanted, I got referrals, I got introductions, or I get invited to barbecues. I was in the people’s community. I was part of their lives and I do the same thing in my business. I make it a point to know what everybody around me does, who does it well. If they don’t do it well, how can I help them do it well, even if they don’t hire me because I want to be able to send people to you, right?

I have all kinds of people come to me because of who we are and because of the positioning we have and I hate turning people away without a solution. So if I can’t help you or you can’t afford us for whatever it is, I want to be able to say, “Hey, look, I know exactly who can.” I don’t want to have them to go anywhere else to look. I want them to come to me and maybe we can help them solve their problem.

The people that we do that for like our best referral sources in our business have come from people that we thought never been our clients. But because they appreciate in how much we value them and respected them in the process that we weren’t trying to sell them anything. We’re trying to help them solve the problem.

Andrea: There you go. So it’s not necessarily about the sale but you’re also being honest about it and it’s ultimately about helping them solve their problem and a genuine desire to be that resource for them.

Jim Padilla: Completely, and I will make this two _____

Andrea: That’s alright. Go right ahead.

Jim Padilla: We ____ with Jesus around here.

Andrea: Yeah, so do we.

Jim Padilla: Okay. We all have gifts. We all have a very specific gift that God has given us, some of us have multiple and most people have it hidden and buried. We need to be breaking that out. All the tumultuous childhood and upbringing that I had was the greatest gift that God has given me because that I know that you can literally overcome everything and that everything is possible to go from where I came from where I am now never should have happened.

I see everybody as a finished product and most people don’t see themselves that way. So I see that’s my job to inspire people to overcome and then help equip them with a skill set to be able to make it happen. Will you just work with me on this for a second, everybody just close your eyes for just one minute and visualize just your immediate community would be like.

If everybody you personally know was doing everything to the best of their abilities, your wife, your husband, your kids, your mailman, the teachers at your kids’ school, your pastor at church, or the police officers in your community, whoever; and if everybody was literally doing their absolute best that they’re capable of, how different will your personal life be? How different with the world around you would be? That’s just in your community.

Imagine the world like that. All of a sudden, we don’t have poverty. We don’t have the crime that we do. We don’t have all of the crazy political turmoil. We literally have a political environment whereby we’re just trying to help each other. We are shining and we become the _____ change in the world as a country. This may sound altruistic but it’s possible if we can just get people there, right? That’s my big mission. That’s what I want and I know that I can impact that kind of change as I see it happen every day.

You know, I was listening to one of your earlier podcast about pain can change because it’s all about perception. It reminds of the book that I read often. I actually just read it again last week and I recommend it to all of our salesman and clients. It’s called Zen Golf by Joseph Parent. Everybody should go get that book. It literally has nothing to do with golf. It has everything to do with how you perceive your environment and it’s all about visualization. He actually calls it imaging because visualization is more about eyes. Imaging is about using all the senses to bring it in.

You can start actually seeing yourself, hearing yourself, feeling yourself in the future, in the moment as a completely processed in winning. Your mind down sees that it can happen and then you start focusing on it. It becomes the new target. It becomes reality because you’ve seen it happen in your mind. You literally recreated reality and now you have to do is just follow the steps and go make it happen. That’s exactly what we need to be doing on a daily basis. That’s what you’re doing in the sales conversation.

Before I got on this call, I visualize, “What would be the mountaintop experience for this call? How can I impact people who would read this? How can inspire Andrea? How could I just say something that people just go “Wow, that’s awesome, I can use that.”” And I do that with every call, every single call. I don’t take anybody for granted.

I have this crazy sense of self-delusion that I believe that every room I walk into is better because I’m there. The conversation I’m in is better because I’m in it. As a result, I have the most…what I said when we first talking today, I live in a dream, right? I have the most friction-free life of anybody I know because I don’t look for it. I see the best in everybody and I do everything I can to help them achieve it.

So I have this circle of people, I have everybody in my life who just, you know, even if you don’t like me, I never see it because people don’t share it because it’s no benefit. I’m not like the center of attention and the life of the party but I’m just like, “I just love people and I love life so I put it out and I get it back all day long.”

Andrea: Gosh, I love that! So Jim, pick me apart for a minute.

Jim Padilla: OK!

Andrea: Because I’m not the only one that struggles with this and this is certainly something that I’ve struggled with in the past. I’m starting to get over it. I think a lot of people out there struggle with this and that is simply just not believing that they’re going to get the sale per se or that they’re not going to have a voice.

So people who want to have a voice for example, they want to have their message make a difference, but they don’t see it happening or they don’t feel like it’s going to happen. They can’t see it. They haven’t seen it before. You know, you’re talking about this visualization and that sort of thing, how do you coach somebody over that into actually feeling like “You know what, this gonna happen and actually make it happen?”

Jim Padilla: Well that one thing that gives us integrity with ourselves. You know, we always hear the _____ fake it till you make it. It’s funny, it’s interesting but it’s _____ that the inner you knows it’s not real so he doesn’t buy it, right? So you need to get into action as fast as possible and only focus on the things that you actually accomplish, right?

Andrea: Yeah.

Jim Padilla: Because every time you’re actually accomplishing, you give yourself real true credits so now you have integrity with yourself. And you say, “Hmm, I was gonna do that and did do it and I was able to do it.” Instead of going, “Oh man, I did 80% of that wrong.” “It doesn’t matter, you did this far right?” So now, how can we do 20% right, 30% right?

You have to learn to give yourself credit in life. “Did you get the right person show up on the phone?” “Yes.” “Awesome.” Okay, maybe you didn’t close them but your messaging was right, you’re in the right ballpark. Now, we just got to focus on who _____ being that led them to believe that you weren’t the person to buy from or today wasn’t the time to buy.

Now this is the key. This is where we focused on the most is you have to stay in action. Action is going to be vital to everybody part of their success because the more you accomplished, the more integrity you have with yourself. And then when you can be standing in that place of, “I am the expert. I own my expertise even if I’ve never had a client. The reason I’m doing this is because I’m great at it and I’m passionate about serving new with it. So whether I can sell this or not, I give myself total permission to screw this up as much as I want.”

And I tell everybody, if you’re talking to people in a sales conversation, the first thing you have to owe them is the truth and that truth can be everything across the board. I’d be first and foremost, “Hey, look I’m just learning how to sell but I’m phenomenal at what I do. Please don’t let the fact that this sales conversation might be a little bit cranky because I’m kind of nervous but I’m a bad-ass coach and I absolutely know how to solve the problem. This conversation is gonna be about how do we help you figure out the problem. Now, you just give me a self permission to screw up everything.” How do you think the person on the other side of this phone is going to respond to that?

Andrea: Uh-hmm absolutely!

Jim Padilla: You’re doing great.

Andrea: They’re falling for you now.

Jim Padilla: Totally. You could _____.

Andrea: Yeah. Try being honest by not being manipulative but by being honest.

Jim Padilla: Exactly and then that honesty has to come out throughout the conversation. I literally have a contract with myself that says, if I get to a place where I have to ask myself should I ask that question, I now must ask the question. Because the only time we ask that is that when you’re nervous about asking it. And usually, those are the most important questions.

So if you’re about to call somebody else on something and you’re like, “Oh I don’t know if I should say that?” Guess what, that might be the most important question you can ask them or the most important piece of insight you can give them and you just caused them the opportunity to take that and nobody else was going to tell that to them, right? And that’s how they buy from you. It’s not about the scripting and your seven-step process, it’s about being super connected and genuine with them and being able to tap into somebody.

The thing that I get a lot when I’m in conversations is I can hear people breathing patterns, you know, you connect with people energetically, right? We are all energetic being that’s on the phone, over Zoom, whatever; we are connected. You know, maybe _____ they’re trained. If they’re going to do _____ attack with somebody with a knife to not look at the person. They’re trained to look at the crown behind the person that’s going to attack because if you’re looking at the person, they can feel you looking at them and then you blow your surprise.

It’s the same thing. You can feel and read people as long as you’re focused on them and not you. When you’re worried about losing the sale, you’re worried about not sharing the message properly, you have to abandon that. You have to abandon that because it hasn’t work for you at this point. So get rid of it and start focusing on the other person and you’ll be amazed because you’ll start hearing them, “Oh they’re talking faster, or their mood has changed.” A lot of times we missed that stuff because we’re so focused on getting to the next part of the script.

Andrea: Totally! It’s interesting because I think I can hear people just sort of settle in and their energy comes up and their rhythm is just so natural and all of a sudden they’re just being themselves, like you’re talking about, just being, how does being is. You can tell when people are motivated by fear or by love and that’s essentially what it comes down to, isn’t it?

Jim Padilla: Totally, and you know, the most enrolling thing you can ever do is being yourself. People buy you all the time; they don’t buy your stuffs. They don’t care about your stuff. They buy you because they trust you to be able to help them get what they want. So you just have to be yourself.

We’ve all experienced this. We’d be on the phone or you’re at the store, whatever and somebody was trying to sell you something and you left the conversation, you’re like, “You know, I like him but there was just something about him, I don’t know what it was.” People don’t know how to identify it but they can sure feel it. So you want them to leave going, “I don’t know what it was with that guy, but I have got find a way to work with him because I love how I feel around him.”

Andrea: Yes, yes!

Jim Padilla: And that’s what I get a lot when I’m working. When I’m talking people on the phone, people get like super inspired. I get them grounded. I get them elevated. They’re like, “Hell yes, I can do this.” People will be sadly disappointed if they listen to my sales call because it’s not a bunch of magic. It’s just me being me. I don’t have a bunch of magic formulas, I’m just totally connected to the person I’m serving and I truly don’t have any concern or the best interest in the outcome, except that I want you better at the end of the call than you were at the beginning. I want you to have crystal clarity on what it is you’re trying to accomplish, why you want to accomplish it, what’s the cause of not accomplishing it and what’s in the way?

Andrea: That was really powerful _____. Can you say it again?

Jim Padilla: Yeah.

Andrea: OK!

Jim Padilla: I call it a Park Bench approach to sales, a Park Bench Philosophy; you as a sales person, which all of you are by the way, you should be able to sit down on a park bench with a random stranger. It didn’t come through a phone, _____, random stranger on a park bench and inside of 30 minutes, you should know what they want, why they want it, what’s the cause of not getting it, and what’s in the way? That’s by having a conversation about somebody you care about.

And then you say, “Hey, I know someone that has that solution.” Or you’ll say, “Hey, I can help you with that and here’s how.” That should be your approach to everybody you talk to. It shouldn’t be about, “Let me see if they’re a good client for me.” I was like, “No, let me see how I can help you solve your problem.”

Andrea: I love that. I do and I know that that can be totally contrary to what can be talked about around these ideas of sales and sales conversation and things like that and yet, there’s something very freeing about that, isn’t there?

Jim Padilla: Yes. Yeah, because your only outcome and agenda is to help them, which is what we’re designed for. So it’s right inside all of our will house, every single one of us.

Andrea: I think that one of the difficult pieces of that is getting to that point where you see that you can help them but then having to put a price tag on your help for them. And maybe that’s a different conversation but I think that there are a lot of people that do actually struggle with this. When do you share something and just share it and help people and when do you put a price tag on what you’re offering?

Jim Padilla: Well, it’s interesting because we just started this Facebook drop-in coaching membership group and it was formed from this idea. I get on the phone with people a lot. There’s a lot of people in our industry that are seven-figure, eight-figure people and they kind of live in the castle on the hill. They’re not accessible to the average Joe and I don’t like that. I totally understand protecting your time, I absolutely get it. But I want to help as many people I can.

So I’ll jump on the phone with somebody who’s expressing that they have specific challenge, “No, I can help you with that. Let’s get on the phone for 10 minutes.” And then we do it but it’s hard for me to do that randomly. So we’ve started this whole membership group just last week and it’s like 47 bucks a month and you get a dollar for the first 30 days. The whole objective here is to just drop in and ask the question and then we can help you. It’s mostly discussed with the admin running the group. But I cannot make money on it, I’m just happy.

And then in that the more we have dialogue and you can go, “Hey, I really like the way he thinks. I like his team or I wanna work with them.” That’s when we started pulling people into something bigger. You can do the same thing. You don’t have to have membership but we can do the same thing. You know, get into groups, get into discussions online or figure out networking.

Start listening instead of talking so much and listening for people’s problem and you got to have at least this one key problem or three areas that you can speak into and say, “Hey, I can help you with that.” And just talk to him. Don’t say, I can sell you that. Just say, “I can help you with that or I know somebody who can. Let me talk to you a little bit more.” The key is when we start worrying about wasting our time, because what happens is, I promise you guys, most people who buy it for me have to pull it from me.

I’ll get on the conversation with them and I’m like “Oh this is great. Oh I’m super excited about that. Here’s how I see this working. Oh, we could totally do that. Here’s what I see you need to do.” And they’re like, “How would we do it?” “Well, here’s how we do it.” “How do we pay for that?” That’s all a lot of my conversation and it’s just because I give this genuine, 100%, sincere passion about helping people. They feel it and they see it.

So you really have to check yourself. If you’re not getting those types of responses because you’re showing up in a way that’s not you, you need to be crystal clear why do you want to help this person or do you want to help them? If not, why not? This is a place you got to do some soul searching and how can I help the most on the people.

Like the event that we were at last week when we met each other there, I had a specific objective. Over the course of two days, I wanted to connect a dozen people. So over the course of two days, I was looking for, “OK, you are a copywriter, you need copywriting, awesome!” “You’re looking for bench members over here, you’re looking for someone else to serve, awesome, let’s connect you here.”

So it has nothing to do with me. It was, how can everybody else get help and then people go “Man, Jim is awesome. He’s a great guy. He really helped me.” And you know what, it leads to referral or at least a phenomenal relationships and leads to people going…

You know, I was on interview last week and the person who was interviewing me, she said, “You know what the first time I met you three years ago were at a Mastermind group, I walked into the room and I was like “Yeah, I got a table with 10 people,” and I said, “I’m really struggling with my sales. I need some help.” She said, “All 10 people at the same time _____,” right? That’s the power of being able to serve and everybody knowing what you do.

Andrea: Oh gosh, Jim, that’s so great. What a beautiful redemption of your story and to see you living in such a…I mean, it’s not totally selfless, I mean, it’s not totally selfless. I don’t mean it be like I don’t know, but it is in the sense. It’s that just giving and desiring to help and all of that. It’s just totally different in your experience before and it’s really beautiful and it’s exciting. I’m just so happy for you and I’m happy for all the clients that you serve and the people of the world at large and for the voice of influence that you have in this area.

Jim Padilla: Thank you! Yeah, I appreciate that I honor that quietly giving my track record in the past. These last 10 years has been whole different life and the first 40 was done my way, the next 40, I wanted to do the God’s way. So that’s really what has been about. I speak a lot, I get interviewed a lot and I’m on a lot of stages and I always get one particular piece of feedback, a 100% at the time. It used to bother me because the macho male ego in me wanted to get something bigger but people always say to me, “Man, I can feel your heart,” or “I could sense so much you care.”

It used to bug me because I want them to say, “Man, you rock,” you know or whatever. But that has subsided. My ego is gone and now I valued us so much and I want people to know that I care. I’m authentic. I’m real because I stopped trying to be Jim the dad, Jim the mortgage broker, Jim the sales person, or Jim whoever. I’m just Jim now. I’m just Jim all the time. I represent time. This is me. If you don’t like this version of me that you’re hearing right now then you don’t like me because I don’t have another version.

Andrea: Hmmm love it! Alright, Jim, so how can people connect with you?

Jim Padilla: I’m in two particular resources on; one, we just talked about it with the membership group. I really recommend it if you’re looking for any kind of influence sales support. Again, it’s in the Facebook group. So basically what we have is if you go to Gain the Edge now, which is our company, gaintheedgenow.com/influence-lab.

I know it’s a mouthful, but gaintheedgenow.com/influence-lab. That’s the membership drop-in coaching group. It cost you a buck for 30 days. Ask as many questions as you want. We’ll you answer stuff. We’ll post videos for you. You can network with other people who are on the same journey, great place to just get connected and get support without having to spend a whole bunch of money on coaching.

The other thing I wanted to include is a resource that, you know, our team does a lot of back of the room sales at live events. So basically, we help people in crowded rooms make powerful decisions, which is not an easy thing to do. I did a video and a PDF on Seven Keys to Making People feel Comfortable in a one-on-one room, so did you feel like you’re alone? It’s about reading people and being able to help them feel like it’s just the two of you ____ 150 around you and you’re freaking out. That’s powerful. I don’t care where you’re at, _____ relationships in your marriage, with your team, and with your clients.

So that one is gaintheedgenow.com/sevenkeys, and that’s a download. Check in, you’ll get on a list. You can opt-out if you want after that but just get the resource, check out the video while you’re there. Check out our YouTube channel that will take you there. What you’re hearing right now, that’s what I do in my videos. It’s just me sharing whatever I can. I’m a content machine so I always have new ideas. I just try to give out as much as I can and get on our world and you get a lot.

Andrea: Love it! So Jim, thank you so much and we will definitely include all of those links in the show notes. So if you’re listening and you’re thinking, “I’ve got to get back to this,” then definitely go back to voiceofinfluence.net and you’ll find the show notes for this episode and Jim’s resources.

Thank you so much for spending time with us today, inspiring us for the way that you have really embraced this life of beauty and redemption and the way that you’re influencing others. Thank you so much!

Jim Padilla: Definitely! Thank you and just one last word to everybody, whatever it is you’re thinking that you can do your wrong, don’t make it happen. Go out and take your responsibilities. Just scale yourself up wherever you need to so that you can go out and do the work that you’ve been called to because the worlds need it. I need it. My soon-to-be grandson needs it. Go out and change people’s lives.

Andrea: Thank you, Jim!

Jim Padilla: Awesome!

 

 

 

END

Posted on

How to Respond With Grace & Power When You’re Under Pressure with Crystal Davis

Episode 59

Crystal Davis is a certified Leadership Development Coach, consultant, and speaker whose business personality and work practices are the foundation of her success.

I’m incredibly excited to introduce you to Crystal because I personally love her “voice” and the way she comes across as a voice of wisdom.

In this episode, you’ll hear how Crystal works with companies to improve their business processes to become more efficient and profitable, the organization she started to help women thrive in difficult industries, the events that led her to commute to Mexico for work every day for four years, the difference between management and leadership, the importance of not trying to emulate how others handle difficult situations, how being comfortable with who you truly are will help you find your voice, why she has her clients write a love letter to themselves, and so much more!

Take a listen to the episode below!

Mentioned in this episode:

 

Play here (the red triangle below), on iTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Radio (Amazon Alexa) or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Crystal Davis Voice of Influence Podcast Andrea Joy Wenburg

Transcript

Hey, hey!  It’s Andrea and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast!

Today, I have with me Crystal Davis, speaker, coach, and consultant whose business personality and work practices are the foundation of her success as a speaker, coach, and consultant.

I’m really excited to introduce to you to Crystal because I have gotten to know her personally.  And I love her voice, the way that she comes across as a voice of wisdom and she shares her personal story whenever she needs to but she has incredible expertise.

So, Crystal, welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast!

Crystal Davis:  Thank you so much for having me and thank you for the wonderful and personal introduction.  I really do appreciate that.

Andrea:  Sure, yeah, absolutely!  So, Crystal, you got a couple of facets to what you do as a voice of influence.  You have something that you do more with corporate and then something that you do more with individuals.  Could you share with us a little bit about both of those?

Crystal Davis:  Absolutely!  About four years ago, I took the leap of faith and left my corporate job where I’ve been working for over 20 years.  I started a company called The Lean Coach, Inc. works with organizations and Fortune 500 companies and other medium and small companies to help them improve their business processes so that they can be more efficient, more productive, and more profitable.

Also, I am a certified leadership development coach, so I also help raise the level of confidence, courage, and resiliency within the leaders of the organizations that I work.  So that’s one facet.  The second facet is that I majored in industrial engineering and I spent my first 17 years out of college working in the automotive industry, which was very very good industry before the decline in 2006.  But it was very, very tough environment to work in.

Andrea:  Why is that?

Crystal Davis:  Well, I’m going to tell you about it.

Andrea:  Awesome!

Crystal Davis:  That’s part of my story, part of the Faith For Fiery Trials.

Andrea:  Go for it!

Crystal Davis:  I started actually, here recently, maybe within the last two years a women’s leadership development pillar.  I took just another niche out of leadership development and focused in originally on women working in STEM and women working in male-dominated industries.  However, since I started disrupt-HER, so it’s like a play onwards.  So instead of disruptor, it’s disrupt-HER, and just really helping women to, be able to, not only survive very challenging work environment but to, actually thrive in them and be able to change those work environments.  I’ll explain what the whole concept behind this disrupt-HER as well as doing our talk.

Andrea:  Awesome!  I know that you worked for really big companies doing amazing things and so can you give us context or do you mind sharing a little context what that was?

Crystal Davis:  Absolutely!  So I started my career as I mentioned before, in automotive and I worked for two really small tier 3 or tier 4 suppliers and what that means is that they were that far removed, so three or four tiers removed from the OEM.

Andrea:  The what?

Crystal Davis:  From the original equipment manufacturer.

Andrea:  There you go.

Crystal Davis:  Sorry about that.

Andrea:  You talk to me like a lay person.

Crystal Davis:  Then I spent majority of my career for General Motors and then at some point early in my career in General Motors span of parts division, and that company was then named Delphi.  So I worked for General Motors Delphi.  I worked for Coca-Cola refreshment and also Thermo Fisher Scientific before going on my own.

Andrea:  And in working in those places, you were helping them become more efficient and that sort of thing?  Is that part of what you’re doing?

Crystal Davis:  Yes, but later to Coca-Cola and Thermo Fisher that was my primary role.  My role in automotive span various departments, so I started out, as I mentioned before, in the engineering department.  And then I did some work in quality department, procurement, or purchasing department as well as working directly in manufacturing as a supervisor.

So I had varied experience, and supply chain also.  How can I forget that and that was probably the toughest assignment?  So anyway, I worked in supply chain.  The reason I said it was a very tough environment, first and foremost, it’s a very high-paced, very stressful environment and when mistakes are made, they are extremely costly.

So I’ll just give you an example what I mean by that.  So I was working for a tier1, Delphi was a tier 1 supplier to a General Motors, meaning there may be parts that went directly to the automobile.  If we missed a delivery, and the delivery ended up causing a delay in their manufacturing process, and this was in the 90’s, it cost $18, 000 every minute that we interrupted their production.

Andrea:  Wow!  Yeah, gotcha.  High stakes.

Crystal Davis:  High stakes, very, very high-stress environment.  Of course, you know with vehicles in consumer, just a lot of regulations, a lot of safety requirements, and a lot of quality pressures.  So it’s just a very, very tough environment.  While there were a lot of women working in the environment, it’s still operated and functioned in the manner that men like to function in the majority of leaders were men.

Andrea:  OK, the manner in which they like to function, I’d love to hear a little bit more about that.

Crystal Davis:  Yes, you know as women, we’re more collaborative.  We like to have conversation, talk things through, or balance ideas around.  Men are just very matter of fact straight to it, don’t mince words, especially under a lot of pressure _____.  So you end up taking on a lot of that or becoming intimidated by a lot of that or afraid in some instances.

I can remember a very stressful meeting where people were yelling and screaming and cursing.  And if you’re not there for that, it can really, really either change who you are to adapt to the situation or you try to become the person that mediate to situation so that you can find the different way.

So I found myself as a young engineer evolving through trying to find that safe and happy place that fit who I was and not having to take going the same mannerisms and roles but also to not become a pushover because I didn’t.  So at first, I took on that persona.

Andrea:  Uh-hmmm put on the boxing gloves kind of thing?

Crystal Davis:  Put on a boxing gloves and it’s just not…

Andrea:  And it didn’t fit right.

Crystal Davis:  Right you know.  But somehow you know that does fit right until you stay within the dysfunction that you know, “You know, this is crazy.”

Andrea:  Right.  Oh man, I hear yah.

Crystal Davis:  Yeah, and so the opportunity working in automotive was one that was really, really great as much as I talk about what I learned of how tough the environment was, it was really great.  For me, I had so much more responsibility even though I didn’t the privilege to travel the world and to work in other countries.  So it was a good overall life experience for me as well as professional in terms of developing me and expanding my breadth of knowledge way beyond just you know the engineering space that I started out in.

Andrea:  I know that you have contributed chapter two of really important book, Faith For Fiery Trials and this sounds like something that would have qualified as fiery trial?

Crystal Davis:  It was.  Absolutely it was!

Andrea:  How does the story relates to or other stories perhaps subsequently happened relates to this idea of having faith in the midst of all?

Crystal Davis:  Great question.  In the chapter of the book that I contributed to, I talked about in my stories, I always look for “What am I to learn from this experience and how is that what I’ve learned changed how I might approach situations in the future, or how I might shift my behavior to either avoid a repeat of the situation?”  I shared this a lot of my stories from my early career in this book, Faith For Fiery Trials because it was the time and period in my life where it was my first real faith walk in life.

So I was 25 years old, I was working in Gadsden, Alabama for this automotive parts manufacturer.  It was Greenfield site, we’re building a completely new plant and this particular plant was going to be nonunion.  So it meant that we were trying to model after another successful nonunion plant collaboration that had been going on for years.

Well, long story short, the people there try to unionize the facility and the company decided to move that business to Mexico.  I remember that the vice president came down from our headquarters and talked to all the engineers and the essence of this conversation was the union is trying to disrupt this facility.  We need to stay on schedule with the launch of this new product line removing the business to Mexico.

As the engineers laying up the operating processes, we don’t have the time to start new, so “You can go or you can go.”  Meaning you can go to Mexico or you can find a job elsewhere.  Then you could not apply for jobs anywhere else in the company because this is so critical for the business.  I was just so young and not married.  So I talked to my parents about it and decided to go to Mexico.  So I moved to El Paso, Texas and I crossed the border every day to work in Juarez, Mexico for four and a half years.

Andrea:  Wow that’s a long time in going across the border almost every day.

Crystal Davis:  Yes, almost every day.

Andrea:  Just every day, flat out, four and a half years.

Crystal Davis:  Just every day, yes.  And it’s so funny because when we went down there, we went for orientation, we sat in this room and they talked to us about basic stuffs like benefits and taxes and all of the different things that would apply because we were working outside of the US.  But then they also _____ and said, “So here’s what happens if we have a bomb threat on the bridge and you can’t get home.”  “What?  What I did just sign up for?”

So it was very, very interesting experience that actually, again, turned out to be one of the best experiences of my life.  Because here I am, I’m from Mississippi, I’ve moved to El Paso, Texas to the desert where there’s only one season.  The African-American percent in El Paso at the time was 2.5 and I’m working a lot of overtimes.  I’m dealing with just a lot of life-changing experience all at one time.  I don’t have family or support system there with me and I am having to cross the border where I do not speak Spanish.  I took French in high school.

So it was just a very tough time and I found a small church there that really, really got me focused on studying the bible, applying things to my life, and I found that to be my refuge with all of the stressors that I was under.  So I’m having to move, I’m moving far away from my family, I’m moving to a place that has one season, it’s brown.  And I’m used to greenery and trees and hills and water and all of that in Mississippi and I’m working under immense pressure because we also had to move the factory and I’m having to work with people who don’t speak English to keep this project off the ground and still on time.

That is why for me these stories reflect so much in terms of how my faith grew during that time because at the end of the day, it was just me and God.

Andrea:  So how did your faith impact the way that you responded in this situation do you think?

Crystal Davis:  I think that, for me initially, my faith increased because there were lots of time that I wanted to give up.  There were lots of times that I was homesick.  There were lots of times that I felt extremely undervalued on my job.  In addition to working in a male dominated space in automotive, now I’m actually working in a country where women were making stride.

Well, first of all, let me say this.  I later learned that there’s just a hierarchy of respect in Mexico no matter your gender.  So someone is considered jefe or boss, which is another level of respect that you give and how you behave _____ to say.  So that was difficult for me along with the machism that’s still around in some instances.

I can definitely say that was not the case for every man in Mexico because I have a lot of really good friends till to this day in Mexico that are men.  They’ve worked with me but that was just a very different environment.  So one of my stories that I _____ with when I’m speaking to women about being a disruptor, I was sitting in a meeting, I was the only woman in the meeting at the time.  One of my other American counterpart, he was also an engineer, was in the meeting.  He had a particular product and I had one of the larger products.

So we were in this room, in this conference room with manufacturing managers.  One of the manufacturing managers kept addressing my counterpart about my product.  So my counterpart would then in turn asked me for the answer and then communicate to this guy.  Finally, I started paying attention and I’m like “You know, why are you not talking to me, I’m sitting right here.  What’s the problem?”  I got so angry.  I was so angry and I was a hot head back then.

Andrea:  You sound totally not a hot head right now.  So you were a hot head?

Crystal Davis:  I was a hot headed because those were the mannerisms that I had picked up from the couple of years that I worked in automotive.  You got to be tough.  You got to stand your ground.

Andrea:  Yeah, and then you turned into a totally new environment where you’re trying to be this old persona.  Well, keep going.  Keep going!

Crystal Davis:  Yes, exactly.  So I was sitting there and I was literally like boiling over so much so to the point that I really just wanted to slide across the table and chalk him.  In a matter of seconds, I’m having these emotions.  I’m thinking these thoughts and I’m like “Wait a minute, I have what he needs.  So I have the power.  I just have to make sure I choose wisely how I use that power.”  And I said, “You know what, I have the information and if you want it, you will speak to me, otherwise, you won’t get it.”

Andrea:  OK, so you lead a very clear boundary about him and you said, if you respect and have this conversation with me then you’ll get what you want.  I think that boundary line is incredibly huge.  Those few seconds kind of came to you?

Crystal Davis:   Those few seconds, because I also realized that the room is watching.  I’m the only African-American in the room.  There’s a stigma about the angry black woman and I was angry.  I had a right to be angry.  This guy was not treating me like I was a human.  But that’s not the story that’s always told.  I just thank God that I was able to quickly regroup and be able to say that because had I made a choice to physically attack him or yell and scream then it really would have, I believe, change the path of my career.

Andrea:  So instead of demanding it in that manner where you would have, you know, essentially chalking or yelling, you pulled back into something where you were making it clear what the path was.  It was an invitation to speak with you and that this is the path.  So instead of demanding it, it was an invitation.

Crystal Davis:  I would say, at the end of the day, where you just said is correct, I honestly don’t know that I stated it as calmly as you just said.  So I don’t really know honestly if I gave him a choice, but I basically just let him know that I am the keeper of the information and if you don’t have enough respect for me to talk with me then you just won’t get it.

Andrea:  That’s so powerful.

Crystal Davis:  But at the end of the day, we said the same thing.  It was just an extremely emotional time for me, one where I did not feel supported.  So I went to my boss and I shared what happened that because of this whole respect for bosses and this hierarchy, my boss would not to go to back for me and he was also of Mexican descent.  And so it was just a very, very, very tough time and I found refuge in church through prayer and learning more deeply what the scriptures meant and how they applied for me and I could interpret from the scriptures.  It was just a very, very difficult time.  But it led to some of the most amazing time that I’ve had in my career.

Andrea:  And that was because…what are those amazing times?

Crystal Davis:  Well, you know, I talked about a few things in the book and I talked about the one thing that I can say about every promotion and elevation and new thing that I’ve taken on in life is that God never left me.  He always provided me with what I need or who I needed in my life.  At the same time that that was a tough environment, I experienced some of the best leaders in my life so that leader didn’t go to back for me.

There was some additional American that came to work in that region and I remember vividly the director of engineering.  These are guys who grew up in Ohio area, American-Italian descent.  The guy was a genius.  When he came in and he really started to go to back for the engineering department and he also appreciated talent and he also does not want a leader who’s going to tell you what to do.  He was going to challenge you to define what you needed and what obstacles you needed him to engage.  He would challenge you to go above and beyond.

Crystal Davis:  So I say that that was some of the best experiences I had because that was my first time ever when he came down there, to experience real leadership, not management, but leadership.  He opened doors for me.  He invited me to work on projects that were outside of the scope of my job title, if you will.  He is the one who invited me to be on a team of only seven engineers that were sent to Europe to work for a year to help them make them make some improvements in the operations, which was a bigger _____ of the headquarters, not just of Mexico.

So I got a chance to go work in Europe for a little over a year.  He’s a really, really great guy, because most people when they find your best people, they don’t want to lose them to anyone else but he was willing to say, “No, go, help, explore.  You’ve done well here.”  He was really just amazing because that just opened my eyes to so much more of the world.

Yeah, just tremendous and he gave me experiences where I could improve my skill set and learn more about diversity and inclusion and not what we talked about.  But I actually doing it because here I am in Spain, in Portugal and I am the minority there having to learn diversity and was so appreciative to people who were patient with me and who helped me during that time to just be able to live comfortably.

Andrea:  You know, Crystal, I think of that guy, that leader that came that really…it seems like he saw you.  He could see you for who you were and what you were contributing and he called that out of you and even more, really.

Crystal Davis:  Right, he did.

Andrea:  And kind of invited your voice out.  He wanted to hear your voice.  I think that’s one of the most difficult things for people when we feel like our voice doesn’t matter, when we feel like we don’t have a voice in a situation.  As women, I think a lot of times, and it might be men too, but I’ve heard it more often with women is that not feeling seen.

That situation of you in that office with this conversation taking place between these other two people and not including you, you were totally invisible in that situation.  You stood your ground in terms of saying that, “No, this is me and here I am.  If you want this information, you’re going to see me.”  And then you did have somebody that came along and saw you.  How did this change or maybe even impact the way that you approach working with individuals, with disrupt-HER?  I would imagine that you are excellent at seeing people for who they are and what they can offer.

Crystal Davis:  Absolutely, and it’s such a great question.  You’re spot on you know, I’m sure men experienced that also but women are probably most impacted or at least communicate their impact more about feeling invisible.  One way that I help all leaders but through the way that I help women is I meet them where they are.  I encourage them to learn how to operate within the authentic nature of who they are.

And then thirdly, I equip them to be confident and have the courage to be comfortable in the skin that they’re in.  So this weekend, I hosted a disrupt-HER retreat which was amazing.  I didn’t have a lot of women there.  It was a very small intimate space.  One of the women there said exactly what you said and she is a high-level executive.  She said, my entire life, I have felt invisible.  But yet, she still has been able to achieve you know, being a very high level in a very well-known company.

Andrea:  Hmm, isn’t that interesting?

Crystal Davis:  It’s very interesting, right?  And there’s one thing that people also need to recognize when you have mental health issues or depression or whether or not you just need an encouragement or some different ways to respond to situation in a workplace.  Because you know, when you look at, God bless her family with Kate Spade, someone who hasn’t acquired her level of success or financial wealth, Oh my God, she’s so successful and amazing and beautifully designed _____ but something is broken.

There were some areas in her life that she was not happy or she has suffered from depression.  You have to really separate coaching from where you need help around mental health issues.  I just wanted to say that to people but in talking right to this executive who said she felt invisible, she said part of what I have, the way that I operate is, I have to take time to…when someone says something to me that gets me off-kilter, she needs a being kind of process and then have time to respond.  But when she does _____ as she internalized and give power to what other people say.

So she said, “Crystal, sometimes I wish I could be a lot more like you, you know.  You’re very quick to respond.”  And I said, “Well, let’s be clear, you are who you are and there’s nothing wrong with how you’re made.  But what we might need to do is develop at least a scenario that you’d experience in the past.  I could tell you how I will respond but that’s not authentic to who you are.  But what need to do, we need to be able to _____ a protection, a wall that stops you from internalizing what they said so their words then don’t give power to over you.”

So that’s one way of how I help because she needs to be who she is.  She doesn’t need to act like me.  It wasn’t comfortable for me to try to take on the persona of how men were acting early in my career in automotive.  And she said and felt pressure to act like me.

Andrea:  That’s such an important point because I think so many people; they kind of look around and assumed that they should be like somebody else because they admire the ways that other person handles on thing.  It can become so pressure filled and it’s draining to try to be somebody else.  But to have somebody like you who could come alongside them and say, “But, no, this is you.  So let’s look at this from your perspective and your voice.”

And that’s what I love about this voice of influence concepts in general is that you find your voice of influence by helping other people theirs.  So for this gentlemen who helped you and kind of set you free to be you in your work environment.  I mean, he was a huge influence on you by letting you be you and now that’s what you’re passing on to somebody else.

Crystal Davis:  Absolutely!  He really was and he also taught me how to use my voice.  He was not a calm individual.  He was very intense and very high paced.

Andrea:  Because that’s his style.

Crystal Davis:  That’s his style and, while he was an influencer, he definitely could intimidate a lot of people.  But for me, what I learned from him and what I appreciated about him, he was very similar _____ said to me.  I appreciated the fact that he was going to be heard, and despite his approach, he was going to be heard.

That really, really helped me as a young engineer from that point of my career.  So this probably about 1998 before I left when I was like, “You know what, he says what’s on his mind.  He doesn’t mince words and while I’m not at his level, in terms of position, I’m going to make sure that I say what’s on my mind that I don’t mince words and that if nothing else, people will always know where I stand.”

I can honestly say that over my career, over my entire career, there were times that they got me in trouble but I could sleep at night.

Andrea:  Interesting.  Is that how you would define your voice at this point, like that not mincing words and making sure people understand where I’m at?  This is what I’m always going to bring.

Crystal Davis:  Yes.  Overtime, I’ve learned to adjust my tact.  I’m able now to speak calmly to situations.  I’m able to insert humor.  I can remember people always ask me, “Why do you laugh so much?”  And I’m like “I laugh sometimes _____ but I laugh because I’m a happy person.  While I’m happy, I’m gonna stay happy despite what’s going on.”  I remember I said, being comfortable with who you are and skin that you’re in.

Overtime, I’ve reached the point where, I am who I am.  There are behaviors that I can unlearn and learn new behaviors but I am who I am.  I have to be ultra comfortable in that and if I learn to operate in who I am and my strengths and the areas that I want to grow then I feel better and I have more to give to the world because I feel better about it.

Andrea:  OK, so when you’re working with women in particular, how are you helping them find out who they are.  You mentioned at the beginning that when you put on this persona of the male-dominated workforce around you that did it partly because you didn’t know what else you could be.  And I can totally relate to that so do you have any particular recommendations or suggestions about a woman who’s feeling fairly invisible because she has accomplished a lot.  She is good at what she does but people don’t seem to see her deep down.  Yeah, talk to me about what you would say to her.

Crystal Davis:  Right.  Definitely, there are lots of assessments that are out in the marketplace that really teach people about their cognitive skills, strengths finder, what their strengths are.  And so depending on the person and the situation that they want to resolve, I try to find an assessment that helps to give me more insight for how they behave.  It’s the first thing I do, because I have them write a love letter to themselves.

I remind them of being a young girl when you might have been giddy about a boy or a partner or whatever and the feeling that you had and what you wanted to say that person and how you wanted to tell them what you love about them.  You love their eyes or their smile or the way they make you laugh.  So you write a letter saying things, so whether that means you have to go back to a time when you love yourself or when you were unaware of all of the pressures that the world places on you.

I hear lot of women saying, “You know, I feel like I’ve lost myself.”  So I’m like “OK,” but when you were the person that you feel like you’ve lost, let’s describe her.  Let’s find out where she is.  What’s suppressing her?”

Andrea:  Do you find that women have a hard time writing a love letter about themselves?

Crystal Davis:  Most of them were very shocked when I asked them to do that, like “What?”  They were very shocked when asked them to do that and for the retreat, I did the same thing.  After I got them very comfortable with me and very comfortable with sharing amongst to other women and I told them, “You desire when you write it.  You can write it before we leave; you can write it tonight, or the next day.  But before we leave, I want you to write yourself a love letter.”  And I collected them and mail them to them at some random point in year to remind them.

Actually one of the ladies who were there, she said that she had that same experience at another retreat or similar.  It wasn’t a love letter but a similar experience.  She said that it was so amazing that when she was going through something, her letter came in the mail.

Andrea:  That’s fun.  That’s awesome!

Crystal Davis:  So that’s the second thing I do and then the third thing that I do is I try to find or develop with them a plan, a realistic plan where we can talk about equipping them in an area where they feel deficient, whether that’s increasing their own confidence, courage, resiliency whether that’s dealing with a difficult person at work or whether that’s applying for a new position or a new promotion, having a conversations with their boss about their career path or if it’s even about starting their own business.

I help them centered with self and then I help them to put together really effective plans to take a few steps that keep them pointed in the right direction and then we check in and of course we have coaching thereafter.  So like with this lady who talked about, she felt invisible and she wished she could _____ back like me.  You know, I told her that maybe one of the things we should work on is let’s talk to some different situations and I’ll create a lexicon and then you write a lexicon of what my responses would be and then you write how yours would be.

Again, it’s not about responding so that she respond negatively back to that person, but it’s about making sure that you go to that protection so that person’s words don’t have power over, you know making you feel bad or making you feel not valued or not worthy or anything that kind of stuff.

Andrea:  Hmm, interesting.  So one of my last questions here is if somebody is wanting to empower somebody else and to be that voice of influence for somebody else, not necessarily to be somebody else’s voice but to help them find theirs to release them to being more themselves, what would you leave them with? What would you want them to remember?

Crystal Davis:  The first thing that I would say to people, anyone who wants to find their voice is….

Andrea:  Well, how about the people who want to help other people?

Crystal Davis:  For people wanting to help other people find their voice is they should be transparent and be comfortable taking the risk of being super transparent.  People nowadays are inundated with information and you and I both know that the one thing that stops people from taking action is because they’re not clear.

So what I’ve learned is that people have access to information at the tips of their fingertips.  There are so many coaches out there.  There are search engines, insight papers, white papers, research; so there’s a _____ of information available to people dealing with any situation or circumstance.

But what people most relate to, at least the people I have encountered, they relate to the fact that I’m transparent and I’m able to share things that I’ve been through.  So they are looking at me as someone who has achieved the level of success and I have it altogether but I’m willing to share what I’ve been through and I’m willing to share what I’ve learned from it and I’m willing to share my success steps.

And that to me is what helps give power to the voice of influence, because you’re not coming from such a mechanical space of just knowing information and knowing approaches or tactics, you’re able to share with someone. Yes, I left a very, very well-paid job and I’ve a good position to take on the risk of starting my own business.

But here’s some of the challenges that I faced or here’s some of the things that I didn’t know I needed to think about and people kind of appreciate that level of transparency I think and welcome what you have to share because you have the story attached to it.  You have the experience attached to it.

And so if they can relate to your experience they now view you as a person that can influence how they might do things differently.  So I say to anyone, we all have stories, we all have life experiences.  We may not all have made the right decisions, but our wrong decisions and sharing it that might help someone else not make the same decision.

Andrea:  Absolutely!  That’s great.  Thank you so much for that advice, Crystal.

Crystal Davis:  You’re welcome.  I kind of just add one other thing, Andrea.

Andrea:  Absolutely!

Crystal Davis:  I studied leadership development coaching under John Maxwell organization and I love one thing that John Maxwell’s say, “Leadership is not about position, leadership is about influence.”  And so when you think about that despite whatever position you hold in an organization, in your family, or in your job, you can be a leader and you can influence other people in a very positive way and of course they should be used in a positive way.

So I think everyone can be a leader to someone else if they sought to take on responsibility.

Andrea:  I love it and do so through connecting it sounds like for being transparent and truly connecting with someone else with your story.  I love it.  Well, Crystal, tell us a little bit about the book because I want to know how people can find it.

Crystal Davis:  So the book is Faith For Fiery Trial and I believe there are a total of 20 authors who share their stories.  Some of the women have overcome illnesses, challenges on their job, or challenges in business, etcetera, etcetera.  We were asked not to only share our stories but to share the lessons that we want to share.  We want other people to learn from it.  So I think it will not only be a book 2of great stories but also a book of great advice and steps that you can take.

So the book will be launched at the end of the month, June 30th and you can follow me on forms of social media at crystalydavis and I will be selling the book also through my website.  Our hope is that the book will be picked up by major publishers and carriers.  But at the moment, we are freelancing and they can share with getting the word out because a lot of people are struggling and they need to hear these stories and they need to know that they can overcome the challenges that many of us face in life.

Andrea:  Absolutely!  So if you’re struggling, if you found yourself in that situation where the trials just keep coming, you’re feeling kind of down about it or you know somebody who is feeling that way or you want to have some inspiration and be kind of buffer your own ability to handle those situations before they even occur, go out and get this book because I think that Faith For Fiery Trials will be a really powerful book for you to really inspire you and then to equip you to be able to handle them.

So thank you so much for being with us today, Crystal, and will be sure to link all of this in the show notes for this episode.  This episode will be coming out right after your book launch so it will be a perfect timing and I hope that you’ll have a great success with it.

Crystal Davis:  Thank you so much.  And thank you so much the opportunity to share with your audience.  Like I said before, I love your title, Voice of Influence and I just love that you’re exposing other people to different ways that they can become more influential.  I love the work that you’re doing.

Andrea:  Thanks Crystal!  Alright, we’ll talk to you soon.

Crystal Davis:  Great.  Thank you!

Posted on

How to Make & Keep Your Message Relevant with Joe Calloway

Episode 58

There are new businesses, thought leaders, influencers, coaches, consultants, you name it coming onto the scene every single day. So, how you can stand out and make sure your business, and voice, is relevant in a crowded marketplace? This week’s guest is going to tell us exactly that!

Joe Calloway works with leaders to help make great companies even better. He is a business author and conducts interactive sessions with leaders on how they can better simplify, focus, and execute in their businesses. Joe is also a partner in The Disruption Lab; which is a consulting group that helps companies with innovation and transformation.

In this episode, Joe talks about differentiating yourself by creating genuine value for your clients or customers, why he believes his influence is greater in smaller settings, why he takes a collaborative approach to his work, why just being different from your competition isn’t enough, the simple way to get the marketplace to “beat a path to your door,” how simplifying something is more difficult that it being complicated, and so much more!

Take a listen to the episode below!

Mentioned in this episode:

 

Play here (the red triangle below), on iTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Radio (Amazon Alexa) or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Joe Calloway Voice of Influence Andrea Joy Wenburg

Transcript

Hey, hey! It’s Andrea, and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast!

Today, I have with me Joe Calloway. I’m so thrilled to have him because he works with leaders to help make great companies even better. He’s a business author and conducts interactive sessions with leaders on how they can better simplify, focus, and execute in their businesses.

Joe is also a partner in the Disruption Lab, which is a consulting group that helps companies with innovation and transformation. Oh, all these words that I love. He lives in Nashville, Tennessee with his wife, Annette and her daughters, Jessica, and Kate.

Joe, welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast!

Joe Calloway: Hey, Andrea, thank you so much for having me!

Andrea: So what would you say is the core of the message that you have in your business with your voice of influence, what are you trying to get across to the world or to leaders?

Joe Calloway: Yeah, I think that if I boil it down, it would be about value, how differentiate about creating genuine value for your clients or customers. And with leaders, it’s how do they create value as being a place to work for their employees and then also how do you lift that team of employees so that the entire organization is creating value. That’s mostly, as you said in the introduction, I mostly work with leadership groups now, which I love doing. It’s funny, after doing this forever; I’m really having more fun now than I think I ever had.

Andrea: Why is that?

Joe Calloway: You know, I think I’m like a bowling ball that bounces around and finally gets in the grove. I think I’ve got my grove on. I’m doing a message that I enjoy and that message continually evolves and changes. It has to, because I’m talking with businesses and business changes all the time. I’ve also gone from, I used to give speeches, I mean I would give a speech to 10,000 people or 5,000 people and it was made you in all the talking and the spotlight was on me and I really got sick of it.

Oddly enough, I got bored with it. And now, I prefer to say, I do conversations. I work with much smaller groups and it’s very conversational and, to tell you the truth, I have more meaningful influence. So I’m having more fun. I’m working with groups that I love to work with and I’m doing it in a style, in a format that’s fun for me.

Andrea: Hmm, yeah. I love those smaller groups where you can really go back and forth. So you feel like your influence is greater in this smaller setting because why?

Joe Calloway: I think because it truly does lend itself to that word that you used which was conversation. The group I’m going to be working with tomorrow is about 60 people and it’s going to be a very much a roll-up your sleeves and I’ll talk then I’ll give them something to work on and then we will talk together about what they came up with.

Here’s the coolest thing that I’ve discovered, Andrea, I think I’d do my best to work and I give them the most value in terms of my ideas in what I’ve learned when I’m responding to something that they just said as opposed to me going on with my outline, which I do. But I kind of set the stage for the conversation and it’s in that conversation that I think I have the greatest impact.

Andrea: It sounds to me like you’re talking about a difference between content and insight. Because content, it seems like we can share that and then they have to go and apply it, but with insight you’re able to offer something that’s specific to them in their situation.

Joe Calloway: Yeah, it is that, and I’ll tell you something interesting about this speaking business, a lot of people start out and they really just kind of do and book reports. They’re talking about what other people have said or written, which is fine. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with that. And then a lot of times, the next day, you start digging out the information on your own. But sometimes where your career leads you, and this is where I’m think and hope I am now, is the people that I work with they’re saying, “Well, Joe, what do you think? What do you believe about this? What’s your opinion about this?

You know, it takes some years and some going around the truck a few times to build up the credibility to, I think, legitimately have that kind of bliss with credibility and I hope I have accomplished that. But it’s that give and take of “Here’s what I think, what do you guys think?” And tomorrow I’m going to be doing a lot of that. I’m going to be saying, “Look, everybody in this room an experienced leader, what do think in addition to what I think?” So I think the combination of those opinions and those insights gives all of us greater insight.

Andrea: Hmm love it! I know that you are all about this collaborative environment and I’m curious if that sort of always been an important thing to you, you know, this bringing value, creating value and doing it with this collaborative environment? Is it personal to you in any kind of way?

Joe Calloway: You know it’s interesting. It’s funny; I just made a short promotional video, just a couple of minutes about how I work. The word that I focused on was exactly the word that you just used, which was collaborative. And what I say is I’m very collaborative in the way that I work, not just in the decision itself but I’m very collaborative before the event or the meeting because I want to know what’s going on with them.

It doesn’t happen much anymore but every now and then _____ would say, “Joe, just come in and do your thing.” And I’m thinking, I don’t know what my thing is until I know what’s going on with you guys.” I have some sort of contexts so that this really has some meaning for you guys. Yeah, it’s personal in a couple of ways. One way that it’s personal is that I simply find it personally much more satisfying for me to make it about them. Because a lot of times, we’ve all set and listen to people and we’re thinking, “OK, this is interesting and this is all well and good.” But I don’t really see how it applies to me.

The reaction that I want because it’s more fun and, because duh, it’s good for my business, the reaction that I want is for them to be thinking, “My gosh, I can do what he’s talking about and it makes all the sense in the world for me to do that. So I’m gonna go tomorrow and start doing that.”

So I do try to make it personal in just that way of working, the really highly customized messaging. Andrea, it’s just more fun for me because I get bored if I do the same thing over and over. I’ve got a very low threshold for boredom. I think it’s a double edge sword. It’s a blessing and a curse. But anyway, it’s the way I’m wired. So yeah, I like to make the messaging as personally relevant, and that’s another I think key word, as relevant as I can possibly make it.

Andrea: OK, so we’re talking about differentiation and that’s a big piece of your message. What kind of suggestions or what approach do you have to differentiation?

Joe Calloway: There are a lot of people out there and a lot of businesses that are falling into a trap. You look at the root of the word differentiation and the root of it is different, and yet, I think it’s a mistake for people to sit down and say, “OK everybody, we’ve got to be different. We’ve got to be different in the competition and if we’re different then we’ll do better.” Look, everybody can put on a funny hat and that will make you different. The best different and the only different that matters is to be better.

If you got a restaurant, you can be different through some sort of gimmick but that’s going to wear off. But if you’re different because you’re better, because the food is better, because the value is better, because your service is better, you know, just go down the list. If you’re different because you’re better that’s the wisest thing. Oh my gosh, what was it? I cannot take credit for this. I read it on the website of some company, who I would love to credit them but I simply can’t remember who it was. But it said, bells and buzzers wear off, value never dies.

So for me, that’s not key, key, key point on differentiation. Look, in every aspect of everything that you do and how you serve your particular market, how can you be better? How can you improve on that?

Andrea: OK, so value meaning improving what you have and making sure that what you offer is something of value to the other person. I’m assuming that’s what you’re talking about.

Joe Calloway: Yeah, it is. I tell you what, in business today more and more that’s getting to the point. Here’s a question that I post to my clients a lot, I’d say, “Something’s gonna put you out of business in the next five years, maybe the next three years or maybe quicker than that. Something will put you out of business, meaning the way you exist today. Now the question is, is somebody else gonna put you out of business or are you gonna put you out of business?”

Andrea: Right.

Joe Calloway: By moving on to be the next thing that you need to be or the next iteration or the next state of evolution for your business so that you can better serve whoever your market is because the market changes all the time. I mean, it just constantly changes and we all have to get better.

So a lot of differentiation is rooted in, what do we need to change? What do we need to start doing that we’re not doing? What do we need to be better at that we’re already doing? And this could be the biggest one, what do we need to start doing? That’s a tough one, Andrea. It could be that you say, “Well, everything is working. I’m not gonna start doing anything,” and that’s a trap. You’ve got to be one step ahead and figure out how you need to change because if you don’t, the market is going to tell you and it may tell you in a very unpleasant way.

Andrea: So, let’s say you have a couple of, maybe three or four leaders in a room that they realize that they need to stay on top of this. But how did they decide which things to target or is there…

Joe Calloway: Great question. That’s a great, great question. Let me tell you, there are a lot of big companies _____, you mentioned the Disruption Lab that I’m a partner in, we’re working with some very big corporations. But what we’re doing is taking a couple of people and working with them in their assignment from their employers, from that corporation is you need to think like a startup. We need to have part of this company thinking very entrepreneurially.

And the nature of a startup is you say, “OK, here’s the product or service based on what you wanna do, what you think has value, or what you think people will pay for it.” Here’s the product or service that I’m going to set up and then you put it out there and guess what, the market is going to give you some information and you’re going to say, “Oops, I think maybe we need to change course.”

And maybe then you’ll need to change course again and again or maybe you need to say the market is telling us, they’re not interested in this. We need to start over. But the nature of starting something new, and you have to look at it this way, is it’s largely a learning process. Now, where do we find these areas of opportunity? Here’s a really good place to look, what can you make easier for people to do? What can you make easier for people to buy? Look, at least I have a couple of examples.

Andrea: I love this by the way.

Joe Calloway: Say that again?

Andrea: I love this, what can we do to make things easier.” Keep it going.

Joe Calloway: Think about this, why is Amazon such a name of success and such a master in the marketplace? Because they made it so easy to buy anything, I mean anything particularly an Amazon Prime member, which more and more people are all the time, you press one button and you own it. It’s getting to the point where pretty soon, you’ll press the button and in 10 minutes a drone will be outside your front door with whatever that you just bought.

OK, look at the company that everybody’s sites is being the poster company for disruption, Uber. What did Uber do? They made it easier to get a ride. So if you can figure out an easier, simpler way to do almost anything, the market place as the old saying goes will be a path to your door.

Andrea: Hmmm love that! OK, so I know another thing that you talked about, it’s kind of related to easier is simpler and simplifying, which you have very, very eloquently stated in videos and in your website things about how being complicated is easier than simplifying. So talk to us about these concepts.

Joe Calloway: Yeah, I think in the video on my website. I don’t know where this word comes from. But I said, any knuckle head can make something complicated which is true. Listen, I will have a room full of anybody, but certainly if I’ve got a room for the leaders, I’ll say this, I’ll say, “Raise your hand if you frequently have this thought that the audience you know I think were making this way more complicated than it needs to be.” And Andrea, every hand in the room goes up every single time. We all make it, meaning pretty much everything more complicated than it needs to be.

I challenged them by saying, “Look, if you’re a leader,” but really this applies to anybody, “but certainly if you’re a leader, I would challenge you that one of your core responsibilities is to simplify the complicated.” I’ll give you a great example. I was working with a nonprofit 30 years ago. They were wanting to rethink their purpose in how to go about creating more value to their marketplace as a nonprofit. Well, they had a three paragraphs statement of purpose. It was kind of a vision statement. Three paragraphs and the paragraphs were kind of long, this is here we are and this is what we do.

So I charged them with boiling that down to the absolute essence of what it meant? Now, this was a nonprofit that works with young women, with girls in all sorts of ways helping them better themselves. What they boiled that three paragraph statement down to was three words and the words were, We Empower Girls. And they were so fired up over tapping into that _____ that in months and months later they said, it’s the most empowering thing for ourselves that we ever did was to simplify that goofy, complicated mission vision purpose statement.

So yes, simplification is kind of like making it easy but that’s a great thing for anybody to do in their business. Well, I tell people, go back and simplify. They say, “Simplify what?” And my answer is “Everything, everything that you can possibly simplify, simplify it.”

Andrea: Here’s what I have gotten…I have had some frustrations with this area and I’ve seen this a lot in working with other people who were trying to simplify their messaging. That is just doing it down to those few words like you’re talking about without becoming too abstract or confusing.

Joe Calloway: Yeah, because you sure don’t want to be confusing. You know, the first mission I think in a lot of communication, and this applies to your employees, to your customers; is number one, they have to understand to what you’re talking about. They have to get it. My gosh, I looked at my own website, this was about four years ago and I just look at it through my hands up and I thought, “You can’t even tell what business I’m in from this thing. This is so convoluted, so abstract, and so complicated.”

I’ve kind of boiled it down to, for me, I can have three paragraphs describing what I did and I boiled it down to, “I help leaders make great companies even better.” That opens up a question, which is how do you that? How does that work? But that’s fine. On the front end, at least I w ant them to get that he works with leaders to make their companies better. They may not want that. I may not be a good match for them. That’s fine, that’s okay. I don’t want to be working with the wrong people and they don’t want to be working with me.

So you bring at such a great point. You bring at such a great point because if there’s not clarity and that you know when I talk about simplicity, the very next step in that is to create clarity and that leads to the next step, which is so that you can create focus on what matters most and what’s most important. The winners are not the people that do the most things, the winners are the people that do the most important things and do them extremely well and with great consistency.

Andrea: And they choose the most important things based on how they have simplified…I mean, how do they choose?

Joe Calloway: Yeah, I generally look at a couple of things. The things that are most important to me are the things that will help me create the greatest value for my clients coupled with that will help my business grow. And then the third element which is that is something that I want to do because listen, Andrea, I have been caught in the trap so many times.

I mean, this is classic because I’m constantly telling people not to do this and I was the guilty as one in the room. I’ll put it this way, don’t get stuck doing something that you’re really good at but that you don’t want to do. I have gotten stuck doing things that I did well and there was a market for it and I didn’t want to do it. It wasn’t fun. It didn’t make me happy but I was really good at it and it was making money. So I got caught in that dumbo trap and it’s hard. It’s hard to give up something that’s working.

Andrea: Oh definitely!

Joe Calloway: It’s taking me a long time but I’m starting to get the hang of it.

Andrea: And so the reason why you shouldn’t get stuck in it is?

Joe Calloway: Well, you know, a couple of things, you could get stuck in anything particularly today. You’re putting yourself at some point in the future, and probably the fairly near future, and this goes back what I was talking about earlier, if you get stuck in anything, you’re going to go out of business or your business is little by little going to go away.

The other thing is, and I’ll go back to the very personal _____ of it which is, I mean, come on, what’s worth paying the price of doing something that you can’t stand to do. Listen, I understand the real world, there are people that have jobs they don’t love. It drives me crazy when I hear people say, “Oh you have to be patient about your job. You have to love your job and if you don’t then you’re a loser.” Well, wait a minute. There are some people that have to support families and they got to have a job and it may not be the job of their dreams. Come on, that’s just real life and that’s about responsibility.

Having said that, I am a great proponent of doing whatever it is that you can do to bring fulfillment into your life and joy into your life anyway you can and for some people that means what they do after work, away from work. But certainly for an entrepreneur, for somebody that has their own business, come on, we’ve got a leeway to try things.

The trick is, it maybe something you want to do but there’s another part of the formula. Is there anybody willing to pay you to do it? And there a lot of people that say, “Well, all I have to do is be patient about what I’m doing and I’ll be a success.” Yeah, if there’s anybody that wants to pay you to do it, you will be but it could be you’re passionate about what you do and nobody has the least interest in giving you the credit cards for you to do it so that’s a problem. That’s an indication you might need to shift a little bit.

Andrea: So I’m still curious about the simplicity thing because I interviewed your friend, Colby Juvenville, in episode 51 and he and I were talking about how it’s hard for him to simplify or not necessarily simplify, because I might be talking about two different things, but I want to see how they fit together for you.

Joe Calloway: Sure!

Andrea: But I’m similar to him in that. It’s easy for me to get a lot of plates going and I kind of enjoy spinning plates. I kind of enjoy having a variety of things going on and going on in my head sometimes. But then, it does, I think, become a problem when it comes to trying to simplify the message about what is the market message or the brand message or whatever because of so many different things.

How do people who are kind of on that creative spectrum of, we’d like all over the place a little bit but at the same time there’s this necessary piece of needing to simplify in order to communicate and actually grow something?

Joe Calloway: Yeah a couple of everything, and number one, I saw that you interviewed Colby. Colby is great. I like Colby a lot. He’s a smart, smart guy and great of what he does. You’re talking to somebody who loves nothing more than the next idea. Oh my gosh, I’m like the classic. I’m like a dog, squirrel. I mean, I’ll have a great idea and I’ll start to execute it but then I look up and go, “Oh but here’s a new shiny idea over there and I wanna do that too.”

So for me simplification partly means discipline about understanding the difference between a true opportunity and a distraction. I would never advice anybody to not try new things. And if you are wired such that you love to have, as you said a lot of different plates spinning, great, do that. There are people that are at their most productive when they are doing it.

Go back to Amazon. Oh my gosh, Amazon is getting into healthcare. Amazon is going to be into everything eventually and yet, Amazon still has to have some sort of unifying vision that makes all of these pieces work together. And I go back to what Amazon does; everything that Amazon gets into, they get into it to make something simpler or to make something easier, to make it easier to buy stuff, or to make it simpler to access healthcare.

So you can have a lot of different things going on but you still have to simplify in your mind to the point that you can keep up with at all, that you can manage at all. As you said, and this is really important, simplify to the marketplace so that they get it what your brand is about. Because if they look at your brand and go, “I can’t figure out what she does, she’s all over the map.” That’s not good for business.

For me, I do a few different things but it’s all now around effective leadership. And so I try to simplify the value of proposition but my delivery system, the way I deliver that value can take any number of different forms.

Andrea: Oh I like that. So simplify the value of proposition in what you’re saying what you offer but you can offer it in many different ways.

Joe Calloway: Yeah, exactly!

Andrea: Yeah, I love that. Oh this is so good. I’m so happy that you’re here, Joe. And I am curious, if you were to take this conversation we’ve been having and pull out something that you really think that somebody who has or wants to have a voice of influence. They want to make their voice matter more for a cause or inside of their business as a leader or even as a speaker, consultant; what piece of influence or advice you have around how they can make their voice matter for today?

Joe Calloway: There are a number of things that comes to mind and I just go to, I mean I have to do that, Andrea. I’ve been in business a very long time. I’ve got to work on those elements that you’ve just sited all the time for me to stay in business because the business I’m in has gotten way more competitive over the last few years. A lot more people doing it now, and my competitors, I hear people say, “I’m so good. I don’t really have any competition.” I think, “Gosh, what’s life like in that planet because on my planet, I’ve got tons of competition and they’re so good.”

I mean, these leaders are so good at what they do. I have to constantly stay on top of it. So a couple of things about creating value and truly being a voice of influence and one of them is this is to be 100% you. You know it’s funny, I don’t do so much anymore but I used to work with executives on giving more effective presentations. The main thing I have to do with them was get them out of their heads about giving a speech.

And I would say, please don’t give a speech, don’t ever, ever, ever give a speech just talk to them. You’ve got something that you feel is important to say and if you don’t, you shouldn’t be up in front of them in the first place, but if you do have something to say that’s important just talk to them. You’re not supposed to be in a particular way. You’re supposed to be you, 100% you, because people sense that and if they sense that you are fully present and if it’s truly coming from your heart with what you’re telling them then you’re going to have more impact.

I do think there’s a lot to be said for what we’ve been talking about in terms of getting clarity yourself on what you’re core message is. I’m not saying, it needs to be just one thing but you’re core messaging. I’ll put it that way, because if we don’t have clarity on it then nobody else is going to have clarity on it. And another part is listening and listening on the front end.

I can’t do a presentation unless I feel like I have absolute clarity on who I’m talking to, what their concerns are and what’s _____ for them. I’ve been relate my message to that. It doesn’t mean that I write something brand new just to suit them. That strikes me as kind of faking it.

And here’s the other thing, sometimes I find out that I’m not the right match and I want to know that, because my gosh, any of us that have been in front of the audience and we got that realization of, “Uh uh, I really shouldn’t be in front of these people.” So I want to know on the front in, “Am I the right match and how can my message match up with their concerns? How can I be relevant in such a way that truly creates value?”

Andrea: Being relevant with and also being 100% you.

Joe Calloway: Yeah.

Andrea: Great, I love that! Well, thank you so much, Joe. I really appreciate you taking time to be with us today in sharing so much wisdom and so much inspiration for us as we move forward with our own voice of influence. Thank you for your voice in the world.

Joe Calloway: Well this is…can we go this again tomorrow?

Andrea: I love that.

Joe Calloway: This is fun. Thank you so much for having me. Listen, I don’t ever ask people to agree with me but I hope that what I say at least provokes a thought or two. If I’m a catalyst for people thinking about what they do and what they want to do and what they should do then I’m happy. I hope we were a catalyst at least.

Andrea: I’m sure. I know that that is the case so thank you so much!

 

 

END

 

Posted on

Stop Putting Yourself On the Backburner with Keri Stanley

Episode 57

When someone asks who you are, how often do you respond with your title? Wife, mother, physician, executive, etc. You’re more than just your title and this week’s guest wants to help remind you of that.

Keri Stanley is the CEO of Keri Stanley Coaching, Huffington Post Writer, and Inspirational Speaker who spends her life looking for the a-ha moments to share with her clients. She now hosts international experiences for healthcare and service-based professionals to Ground, Grow, & Give so they’re able to serve from a space of fulfillment rather than sacrifice.

In this episode, Keri talks about her journey of living a picture-perfect life while feeling lost and empty inside to now helping others prevent the same thing happening to them, how you can become more connected to yourself and those around you, the importance of letting go of some control and focusing on the positive “what if’s” instead of the negative ones, and so much more!

Take a listen to the episode below!

Mentioned in this episode:

 

Play here (the red triangle below), on iTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Radio (Amazon Alexa) or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Transcript

Hey, hey!  It’s Andrea and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast.

Today, I have with me, Keri Stanley, a sweet sweet, awesome, power-packed woman.  I’m so excited to share her with you!

She is the CEO of Keri Stanley Coaching.  She’s a Huffington Post writer and inspirational speaker who really spends her life looking for a-ha moments that she can share with her clients.  She enjoys the diversity of a worldwide client base, helping healthcare professionals learn how to fully connect, first to themselves and then to the rest of the world creating a really fulfilling life of meaning and impact, I’m excited to hear more about this in a minute.  She now hosts international experiences for healthcare and service based professionals so that they can Ground, Grow, & Give to be able to service from a space of fulfillment rather than sacrifice.

So, Keri, it is so great to have you here with us today on the Voice of Influence podcast!

Keri Stanley:  Oh Andrea, thank you so much.  I am honored and blessed to be here with you and I’m super excited to just have this conversation with you and to listeners.

Andrea:  Yes!  OK, so let’s start with…you’re really passionate about a lot of things.  If you could kind of distill it down to a core message or a main thing that you’re wanting to get across to the world with your voice of influence, what would that message be?

Keri Stanley:  Really that message would be that we all have a difference that we can make in this world and that we get to do that at the same time as we are taking care of other people.  And so, so often, we put ourselves on the back burners, so often we live our lives just fully in service to other people and then we’re kind left in the dust.

So my main message is that we can actually have both and do it in a way that tapped into the gifts that we have that we have meaning and impact in the world and that we get to take care of ourselves at the same time.

Andrea:  We have so much in common in that area for sure, so why does this matter to you?

Keri Stanley:  So yeah, just going back real quick, I am a single mom with two kids.  I have twins that are getting ready to turn 14 and I lived the life of a healthcare professional for a really long time.  I always knew that I wanted to help people or animals like that’s been a _____ since I was a little kid.  So the core of me is about helping other people.

So I lived my life based off of that and I lived my life in healthcare.  But what happened along the journey is that like I had everything from a picture perfect picture that from the outside looks great.  I had a successful career.  I had the marriage, the white picket fence, the kids, the whole nine yards, right?  But on the inside, I was completely lost.

I had days that I would look in the mirror and I’m like “I had no idea who I am anymore and how I exist in this world.”  I was feeling empty.  I was feeling used.  I was feeling abandoned.  I really didn’t know who I was anymore.  I didn’t feel like I was a good mom.  I would have days where I would just yell and scream at my kids and then I would feel awful.

I lived my life just in sacrifice of others, both in my profession and at home.  I didn’t understand the value of taking care of myself at that time and everybody else got _____ that.  So I ended up losing almost everything in my life.  My marriage fell apart.  I ended up losing my job.  I ended up, like all of these things that I was doing the right thing out there ended up costing me so much.

In that time, I stepped back and really started looking at like, is there a way to do life different?  Is there a way that it doesn’t need to be like this?  Is there a way that I can feel fulfilled that I can feel a really good mom and that I can make a difference in the world and like it all can work together?

I started seeing other people in life just in general that I was exposed to that they were making this happen.  I was like “If they can do this, why can’t I?”  So I started surrounding myself with people like that and I really started learning this value of understanding that you don’t have to give from a sacrifice state that you actually can give from a fulfilled state and starts with you.

So transforming my own life and even going back in the healthcare with a completely different shift and perspective, and now coaching individuals into how they can create this in their own life, my kids now see a truly happy mom on the inside and the out and they understand the value.  So not only am I doing that for myself but I’m actually teaching them on how to do that in their future as well as other individuals in the world.

We get to choose how we live this life but a lot of times, we’re just conditioned that we have to put all of our needs to the side.  And so learning how to shift that really makes the difference for both of you and the world.

Andrea:  So Keri, do you think that people get lost in that way that you were describing here a little bit ago?  I see it happen mostly with women but I think it happens with men as well at times, especially in that midlife kind of range when you’re starting to kind of question everything and ask what you’re really all about.  But how do you think that we end up really getting lost like that?  Does it have to do with the way that you’re talking about that living from this place of sacrifices instead of abundance, or what do you see there for that?

Keri Stanley:  Yeah.  I love your point about men because it is from women a lot.  But I do _____ with the fact that men go through the same thing, it’s just that that’s not talked about in the same way.  Women actually will talk about it more when they feel safe enough to share, when they get in an environment that they’re seeing other women in the same place.  Men tend to hold that inside way more than women do but they actually go through the same process of feeling lost and not having that identity.

So part of the things that I see, and I love that you talked about from sacrifice to abundance, that a lot of people actually don’t even know what the word abundance means.  That it’s just, again, we’re conditioned in how to live and we just kind of accept that as it is.  And you start saying things that just like “I’m just gonna survive this day,” or you start saying things like, “If I could just make it through this stage,” or “If I can just make it through to tomorrow,” or those types of things.

The other things is that we start identifying with our titles as who we are rather than remembering who we were as a _____ child that we have turned off through our life and we started accepting our worth is based off of our title at the time.

So whether we are a mom, whether we are an administrator, whether we are a wife, whether we are even single versus divorced versus whatever.  We just start identifying with these titles of that who we are.  If you ask anyone for the most part who they are, they’re going to start rattle off their titles.  The truth is that if you look at, look you and me for example, you are a mom just like I am, right?  You’re a woman just like I am but we may have all these similar titles but that the core of who we are, it’s actually very different, right?

We have so much in common but we have different gifts.  So who we are is really who we are as individuals and those are the pieces that we forget.  We forget our worth and actually who we are in the world and who we’re meant to be in the world because we’re just completely identified with a title, which means if you ever lose that title for some reason, a lot of people go into massive self doubt because they identify themselves completely by labels.

Andrea:  Right.  Yeah and then they don’t know who they are in the inside which is what really sustains the person through life and through hard times and through everything.

OK this is really cool, so what difference would it make in the world if people were to really embrace this idea that they can be more than their titles?  Yeah, what sort of difference would this actually make in a bigger sense, more than for just the individuals but also for the world in general, like what is your vision for this?

Keri Stanley:  Yeah, it makes such a difference in a way that we lived our lives and not only for ourselves but the impact that we have on the people that we touched on a daily basis.  So when you think about the people that you want to be around every single day, what do they have in common and what are the people that you don’t actually want to be around?

You know the difference in a person that is somebody that’s like really attracted in this magnetic way and they are people that like they have really good energy, they’re doing things in life.  They’re making a difference, like you just enjoy being around them.  So you get to choose to be one of those people.  The difference is the impact that you can make by just showing up in the world as you, like we’re always trying to be someone else.  So you get to be you, you get to bring your gifts to the world and when you’re authentically happy with your life, because 90% of people aren’t happy with their life.

If you ask people on a scale of 1to 10 how happy are you with your life, 90% of people are going to be less than five.  So you want to ask yourself, are you OK with that?  If you could actually make the changes to where you’re living a life that was, at least from the upper end if not closer to 10, what difference does that make for you as an individual, how you show up in your family as an individual, the impact that you actually feel like you can make in the world, it completely changes the entire perspective and your confidence in what you can achieve.

Because the reason that we don’t go out and do the things that we are actually meant to do and the reason that we’re here is because we don’t believe that we can.  So suddenly, when you allow yourself to step into that, you now see the world as possibility rather than, like “I’m just trying to survive.”  We were not mean to live on this earth in a way that we are just supposed to make it through the day.  That’s not at all why we were sent here, right?

So once you adapt to this lifestyle of living on purpose, living while you were here, taking care of yourself so that you can actually take better care of others then in some way you have a reason to be here rather than just making it through the day.

Andrea:  You know what I really like about what you just said is that you’re not saying that people need to totally change all the circumstances in their lives.  I understand that that could be a part of that, you might need to change your job or you might need to you know whatever, but you’re also talking about this internal shift that actually changes the way you approach your current circumstances.

Keri Stanley:  Absolutely, and to remember that you are not your circumstances.  So we like to go into blame, complain, and justify all the reasons that we are where we are.  So our circumstances are simply that that’s our circumstances.  We still get to choose how we want to create our life and how we want to live our life regardless of our circumstances.

As a matter of fact, your circumstances actually maybe a gift or something that you are learning so that you can do the next thing, but if you’re not connected to you and you’re not connected spiritually and you’re not connected to people, because we live a very disconnected life.  We’re very connected to technology that we’re very disconnected from all the things that are out there even the opportunities, the messages, all of that.

The people that are the most important in our life, a lot of times, they’re the most disconnected because we’re so focused on our _____.  So when you can step back from that and actually grasp the magic of the everyday life and the miracles that are happening all around you then you actually get to even enjoy the circumstances that you’re in with entire different set of lenses.

Andrea:  OK, Keri, when you’re just talking about this connectedness and how we’re disconnected, but what is it look like to be connected or how does one…you know if you feel disconnected in either areas of your life or just totally in general, what is it look like for somebody to actually become more connected in these ways that you’re just talking about?

Keri Stanley:  I truly feel that once people get so much more connected, because it’s a rhythm, right?  We go in and out of being connected versus disconnected.  It’s not a 24/7 am I connected but the goal is to be more connected on a much more regular basis.  So first of all when you’re connected to yourself, when you’re truly connected, there is the peace and a calm that you can even achieve in the midst of a storm because you are moving through it and there’s a light that happens to where people actually, like I said that actually want to be around you.

So there’s a different energy that you carry as you are going throughout life.  Mo most people are looking for this peace and fulfillment factor and so you actually can feel that peace within because so often we’re trying to get back from someone else.  So imagine being able to just create that regardless of what’s going on in your world within yourself.

And then when you are connected from a spiritual standpoint whatever that looks like for you, but when you’re connected from that spiritual standpoint, there is always a message, there’s always an answer, there is always something of what my next step gets to be when we allow ourselves to be supported.  Especially, we as women think like, I have to do this on my own _____ always have to be on my own.  And so create this on my own-ness and when we can learn to receive from others and from just the universe God whatever that maybe _____ in life doesn’t have to be so hard and lonely.

So that connection in and of itself allows you to feel primarily supported in life and you’re not ever doing it on your own or alone.  Those connections are critical in living a life but then it allows you to be truly, truly, truly connected in your relationships and that includes with your kids that includes with your spouse or your partner, relationships with your friends.

It could go on such a deeper level because how often do you pass by someone and just have a conversation that’s a fly by, right?  And we don’t actually get into real conversations.  So that is partly just because we are disconnected, which also doesn’t _____ to make a true difference.

Andrea:  Yeah, I cannot think of it too and so like the connectedness, it’s centeredness.  There’s something about that point when you feel like that calm that you’re describing that you realized how distracted you’ve been in these other conversations with other people or whatever.  That’s definitely been my experience as well and that’s been the kind of grand scheme of things, like I used to feel super distracted and that’s been decreasing overtime but it’s also been a cycle like you talked about.

You kind of go in and out of this feeling distracted, feeling the angst and that sort of thing and then kind of coming back to that center or connected place where you _____.  It’s just so distracting and I think that for me, this is something that I’ve been thinking for myself recently so maybe you have some thoughts on this, but I have felt an increasing amount of peace around what I’m doing.  I think when you’re creative or when you’re on a mission whatever, you can get in that hassle mode.  You can get in that mode of like “I gotta get a stuff done.  I gotta figure this out, I gotta figure this out.”

We actually talked about this recently where I was just like so like you said “You’re just so in your head right now, Andrea.”  And I was like “I know, but I don’t know how to get out of it in this moment,” because I was feeling this angst and I think that this angst to find and to kind of come to a conclusion about something is something that I’ve adapted as part of my identity like I have to feel angst or something.

Recently, I’ve been feeling less of that.  I’ve been feeling like “Why do I need to feel that way?  Why I’m always saying, I don’t know when I actually do know?”  So when people ask me a question about what you do or what you’re thinking or that sort of thing, I’d answer with, “I don’t know.  I don’t know.”  I’d get so lost in my head like you’re talking about.

So what is that looks like for somebody like what were you trying to help me do in that moment when you said, “Andrea, you’re so in your head?”

Keri Stanley:  There are two words that comes to mind as I’m talking to you right now and I remember this conversation because how often do we all get into that space because we’re doubting.  We’re doubting our value, we’re doubting that we can have the answers, and we’re doubting that it’s going to be okay because there’s this need for control.  So most of us have gotten to a point that we’re living life on the defensive, we’re trying to protect as _____, right?  We’re trying to protect.

So we’re living in life to where we’re trying to make sure that nothing bad is going to happen.   We’re trying to make sure everything is taken care of and we lived this life with control.  So when we do that, we lose sight of letting go to surrender and trust.  So those are the two words that as you’re asking me that and I have so many clients that there is their biggest thing is learning to let go of control because that’s really, really scary and that’s back to the “I’m the one that has to do it so I’m the one that has to figure it out.”

When you surrender and you let go and you actually trust that it’s all going to work out, that I actually already have the answers or they’re coming in perfect timing then the pressure gets to be released and I actually get the opportunity to be and enjoy my life.  And that’s a very scary thing even getting connected for most people because we live so distracted lives.  It’s a resistance and a way for us to protect ourselves from getting connected.

We use “busy” as this shield of our badge of honor because actually most people are scared to have stillness because they’re afraid of what they might find out and they know they’re lost but they’re afraid of what they’re going to find out as they go along with their journey and so in their minds that’s all what ifs that could be bad.

So what I challenge everybody that I work with is, what about all the what ifs that are amazing and that you get to experience by going on this journey.  I’ve seen time and time again; executives, VPs, moms, or physicians, that when they start letting go of all the control they’ve been holding so tightly to, which is actually just an illusion and it takes so much energy, that when they start letting go of that and the allow themselves to be supported that life actually gets easier and they’re amazed of how quickly things can happen in their life.

Andrea:  Love it.  Yes, awesome.  OK, I want to get into what you’re doing now because I didn’t come from a healthcare family but I married into one, so I have a big heart for them, for healthcare providers and you are now providing a means of support and vision for them.  I would like you to talk to us about your program first of all and then we can _____ out a little bit as far as why and that sort of thing, so what is the program?

Keri Stanley:  So the newest program that I’m launching, because I ran international retreats across the globe, some of just for women, some are for men and women together that anyone can come to, and the entire purpose of them is to ground, grow, and give.  When we talked this idea of surrender and that messages get delivered to you, I really got this clear message on a run because I’m a runner and I do that for my own self-care and I also do that for my own mental stability.  It really helps me from that standpoint but at the same time it’s when I can get those messages come through.

So this one was a very clear message that one of the gifts that I have is teaching people how to get grounded in their lives so that they can hear better, because we’re blocking that on a regular basis, because it’s disconnected and living from the state of fulfillment.  So allowing individuals to go on a retreat experience where they get to get grounded both in their own like who they are.  They get to get grounded in being disconnected from the day-to-day and actually just getting connected in life and getting connected in what really matters because how often are we focused on doesn’t matter that we think of.  But once we get quiet, we realized it doesn’t.

Then we have opportunity to grow which is getting out of our comfort zone, getting out of our routine, getting into a space where you’re connecting with other people, connecting with other cultures.  And then finally the last piece, and especially with healthcare providers and professionals just in general, is that after a while you give so much that you almost become resentful.

And we will love our jobs, and I’ve been there, we will love our jobs and we give and give and give but at the end of the day, if you go home exhausted day in and day out and not doing any kind of self-care, you start getting resentful whether it’s even to your kids or to your husband or whoever it may be, it starts appearing in life and you’re just not enjoying life as much as you could which also translates into how you serve.

So being able to really take the time to recharge and refuel yourself in a completely different place where you disconnected and reconnected to you, allows us to give to an environment wherever we may be, for example in Peru we’ll be with the farmers of Peru that we get to connect with the actual people that don’t see the _____ on a regular basis.  We go into the villages and get connected to the heart of the people and are able to give back in this beautiful sacred way that you really feel like you’re giving from a fulfilled state that then in turn can fill you backup.

Andrea:  That’s an interesting concept.  I’d like to hear about this giving from this fulfilled state because I end up feeling being resentful.  I think that you’ve totally hit it on the head that people who are here to help others or in professionals in general, like you said, I think that sometimes we feel like we’re serving someone else even our boss or the company at large or whatever and it can totally turn into that feeling of resentment.

So how does this resentment change because of giving?  How does that shift happen in a person, is it because you’re getting more connected and you’ve already grounded and now you’re growing?  What would you say as happening in a person when they shift from feeling resentful to a place of willingness and ability to give so much?

Keri Stanley:  Yeah, you know there’s that thing out there that you can’t pour from an empty cup and how often are we trying to do that on a regular basis even your gas tank in your car that you would panic if it was getting ready to run out of gas, right?  You might let it get all the way down to _____ but you’re going to make sure that you stop and you refill it backup.

We run our body and our physical lives on a regular basis not only with the low-fuel light but also with the maintenance light and every other light on and we just keep going.  We would never do that for other things in our life but we do it for ourselves.  So a car can’t keep going unless you stop and refill it and at a certain point like it’s just done, right?

So when we can take our perspective for ourselves to understand that if we would take the time to fill back our tank, if we would take the time to do some maintenance, if we would take the time to _____ some of those things like we actually function on such a better state and can go further.  We just have been taught that we’re not supposed to.  We actually don’t even know what it feels like to truly be able to be fulfilled in a giving state.

So yes, once you get grounded _____ and to be able to give then that process allows you to give in a way that is truly heart centered.  We talked about this idea that am I giving to give or am I giving to get?  At some point, you’re expecting or wanting somebody to say something to you like a thank you or something and that’s actually giving to get but that’s the state that we get into.  Once we realize that if we are constantly in a filled upstate or we understand how we can fill our cup back up that we actually don’t need those things and it doesn’t have to take this really long time.

I mean, I was just _____ in San Diego last week and in 24 hours there was a group of us, that even in our off hours of a training that we were in, we ran a project and we raised over $14,000 in less than 12 hours essentially overnight in the off hours and fed over 325 homeless people on the streets.  And actually deeply connected with them on the streets and gave them flowers and gave them food and heard their stories and gave them love and gave them hugs and literally just connected with them, you know talk about you’re not your circumstances, really just connected with them as human beings, because how often _____ at something?

So you can create that giving experience from a fulfilled state very quickly once you learn how to do it, it just that most people don’t even remember, like it’s been so long that they’ve given themselves as a break.  It’s been so long since they’ve allowed themselves.  There’s a lot of guilt that comes from “if I take time for myself.”  But once you realize, “I’m a better mom.  I’m a better caregiver, I’m a better physician.  I’m a better administrator.  I’m just a better person in the world,” and that makes the difference in everything.

Andrea:  I think it’s huge and it also…you know all that energy that we waste on that angst, on that desire to control and that grip that we try to have on life that we can even really ever really grip.  It’s such a waste of time and energy and when you’re not doing that, gosh you have so much more.  I think we forget how much we actually really have because of that, so I love that.  I love what you’re doing.

OK, so what would something that you would want the influencer listening to remember about themselves and their own influence in the world?  What something that you can give them to take home and say, “I’m gonna remember this this week.”

Keri Stanley:  So they always say on a plane to put your oxygen mask on yourself first.  Most of us in life don’t actually understand that concept nor do we do that, but if we don’t save ourselves, and we have a choice in life to save ourselves and actually choose living, ____ exist.  But once you choose living and you choose to save yourself, you actually get the opportunity to make a difference in so many more lives than you ever would if you choose not to give yourself that oxygen.

Andrea:  Hmmm yeah.  OK so what’s the challenge?  What challenge do you leave us with then Keri?

Keri Stanley:  My challenge to you is for all of you listening is find one thing.  It’s so common that I’ll ask my clients and those who come my retreat, I will ask them what’s one thing that truly makes you happy that you really love to do.  And most people have forgotten, they’re like “I don’t even know what that means anymore.”  So my challenge to you is find one thing that maybe you’ve enjoyed as a kid or find one thing that truly is something that just makes you feel excited about life again.

Maybe you love to dance, maybe you love to play tennis, or maybe you love to be in a drama like you love to doing the acting piece, whatever it is.  There’s something out there that you forgotten that you love to do and allow yourself to step back into that and even feel like a little kid again because that child in you still exists and that when you tune into there is where the magic happens.

Andrea:  Hmmm love it.  OK Keri, how can people find you?  What should they do to find you, your program or you as a coach, whatever?  Where should they find you?

Keri Stanley:  You can find me on Facebook that’s probably where I’ve been most active.  I do video every single morning and it’s Keri Stanley and Keri Stanley Coaching that I’m on there for both pages.  So either one, you can find me.  I’m extremely active on there and always giving tips every single day and my retreat and everything on there as well.  You can also find me, my website is www.keristanley.com and all of my retreats are on there.

I’ve got the next, Ground, Grow, & Give is coming up in September and October and then there’s a ____ specifically for women in Costa Rica in November so those are the two big ones that are coming up.  My challenge is just to continue taking care of yourself and enjoying every day because each and every day is a miracle.

Andrea:  Thank you so much, Keri!  Thank you for your voice of influence in the world and the way that you’re impacting people.  I appreciate it!

Keri Stanley:  Awesome!  Thank you so much for having me, Andrea, I truly enjoyed _____.

Andrea:  And I’ll be sure to link everything in the show notes.  Alright, thank you so much!