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Navigating the Human Side of Marketing with Vanessa Yeh

Episode 115

Vanessa Yeh has ten years of experience in brand building and integrated marketing. Vanessa is a creative and entrepreneurial storyteller who is passionate about leveraging strategy, creativity, technology, and human connectedness to form a powerful brand story across multiple mediums.

Vanessa previously served as the Vice President of Brand Marketing and Communications at 1871, an internationally recognized incubator for tech startups in Chicago. She is currently the Director of Marketing at Ascent, a high-tech B2B startup serving financial services.

In this episode, Vanessa discusses how losing out on her dream because of a simple mistake led her into marketing, how the storytelling skills she learned working in Hollywood helps in her marketing career, why customer service should be a team effort across the entire company, her advice for adopting this mindset in an organization, why she utilizes “win-lose meetings”, the importance of understanding your co-workers’ struggles and appreciating their work, why we need a diversity of values and opinions in the workplace, her predictions for future trends in marketing, and more!

Vanessa Yeh on LinkedIn

The CliftonStrengths Assessment (Formerly StrengthsFinder)

 

Transcript

Hey, Hey!  It’s Andrea and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast, where we explore the intersection of human dynamics, communication, and service.  If you’re interested in growing your own voice of influence or the influence of those on your team, check us out at voiceofinfluence.net and contact us to talk.  It’s always fun hearing from our listeners.  You can always rate and review the podcast as well, which is a real benefit to us.  We really appreciate it and helps other people to find it.

So today we have with us Vanessa Yeh, with 10 years of experience in brand building and integrated marketing.  Vanessa is a creative and entrepreneurial storyteller passionate, and I can tell you that’s true.  She’s passionate about leveraging strategy, creativity, technology and human connectedness to form a powerful brand story across multiple mediums.

Vanessa is currently the Director of Marketing at Ascent, a high-tech B2B startup serving financial services.  And previously, she served as VP Brand Marketing and Communications at 1871, an internationally-recognized incubator for tech startups in Chicago.

Andrea:  It’s so good to have you with us on the Voice of Influence podcast, Vanessa.

Vanessa Yeh:  Thank you so much,Andrea.  I am really happy to be here.

Andrea:  So, how did you get into marketing in the first place?

Vanessa Yeh:  Actually, for most of my life, my dream was actually to be a movie producer.  So, I moved to LA right after high school and I did the whole, you know, I worked on sets.  I was an assistant where I did everything from scheduling auditions to helping an actor pack when they were moving house, like all of that, you know, kind of grunt work.  It was very Anne Hathaway in Devil Wears Prada, but like without the nice clothes.

Then after some years of this, I finally had gotten anintroduction to Universal Studios forbasically my dream job and then I proceeded to screw it up massively.  I ended up mistyping one digit on my phone number so they were calling and calling some other phone for a week before they gave up on me.  After that happened, I was just sort of tired, you know, I’d spent six or seven years of sort of being broken, eating ramen and being screamed at by Hollywood producers and you know, to lose outon that major, major opportunity over such a stupid act of self-sabotage, you know.  It was tough and I was like, “Do I really want to keep doing this?”

So, sort of on a whim, I startedtemping at a company and that company was SapientNitro, which is a global digital advertising firm.  They actually merged with Razorfish a couple of years ago.  But that’s kind of where I got stokedon marketing because I found that so many of the things that I loved about theater and film, telling good stories, making an audience feel or respond in a certain way, engaging in this weird two-way relationship where you sort of both implicitly agree that you’re along for the ride, but at the same time it’s like this push and pull, like the constant negotiation for attention.  Like all of that, which is so kind of integral to storytelling and theater and film,transposed, I think,right over into marketing.

So, you know, I started doing brand and marketing for a number of startups in LA and then, you know, fast forward quite a few years, Chicago and I ended up at 1871, which was amazing.  And then today, yeah, I head up marketing at Ascent, and we servefinancial services. So yeah, in a nutshell, that’s basically how it happened.

Andrea:  Wow. That’s really fun, that’s a fun story. I mean, it’s obviously very sad in many ways because a single digit on your phone number would possibly ruin a whole entire direction of your career, but yet maybe gave you an entry path into a new one.

Vanessa Yeh:  Absolutely.  And I’m actually so grateful that it happened.  I mean, I still obviously have a huge heart for kind of the movies and TV and theater, but I am very, very happy where I am.  So, I’m actually really grateful that it happened.

Andrea:  So how do you see your past working on movies and this idea of storytelling in that regard, really integrated into what you’re doing even today at Ascent?

Vanessa Yeh:  You know, it’s interesting because I feel like in the same way when you’re working in film and production and directing, you do so much of everything,and I think that’s translated directly into what I do today.  I mean, I would definitely consider myself a marketing generalist.  I actually met someone at a dinner just last night who was like, “I don’t like generalists.”  And I was like, “Oh, well, so glad we’re seated next to each other then,buddy.”

So, I actually don’t have deep, deep expertise in any one marketing discipline.  Instead, I’m fairly dangerous at a lot of things.  You know, branding and digital writing, design, web development,and on, on, you know, which as it happens,is I think exactly what’s made me successful as a marketer so far because I have enough knowledge spread out over all of these things that I can basically stand up a marketing function from scratch.

So, I think that is something that I picked up very much from sort of guerrilla theater and guerrilla thumb is you have a hand in managing people and directing and writing and designing things.  And you have to be good at kind of all of it in order to make this weird baby that is your film, or your marketing campaign, or whatever the case maybe, actually like breathe life into it, right?

Andrea:  Hmm.  So when it comes to your customer experience, the digital experience, the marketing that you’re doing, what are some of the successes that you’ve seen or what’s made it a success for you?

Vanessa Yeh:  So, in my experience, I find that something that’s really key is creating a culture and expectation internally that customer experience is everyone’s job, right?  It’s not just the people in customer support or customer service who are on the phone or emailing with customers the most.  It’s everyone’s job.

So, you know what’s interesting about that too is that I was hearing someone speak recently and she said something that really resonated with me, which was that, when you, at a company, at a brand, when you lose a deal, you don’t lose a deal because it was any team’s fault.  It wasn’t like the sales team’s fault.  It wasn’t product’s fault.  It wasn’t marketing’s fault.  Typically, it’s because that customer had a negative experience over a number, dozens, maybe even hundreds, of touch points along their journey with you, and that’s what made you lose the deal.

So, this idea being that customer experience isn’t kind of relegated to one silo or one team in the organization, but that it’s everyone’s responsibility, I think has been really critical in creating a successful customer experience team.

Andrea:  That makes a lot of sense.  But how do you communicate that, how does that get communicated so that everybody is onboard with this idea that everybody has to provide the best experience?

Vanessa Yeh:  Yeah, I mean I think it’s hard because it almost has to come from management, you know, that has to be like a top down culture decision, right?  And I think it’s so natural for organizations, sort of no matter how big or small they are. I’ve been in big companies and I’ve been in small ones,and organizational silos are always an issue, which is crazy.  You think that smaller companies wouldn’t have that problem but they still do.  And it really kind of feel like an only, it can only change course on that if, you know, management team is really committed to fostering a culture of sort of cross collaboration.

And I think the huge part of that is ensuring that no person or team is the gatekeeper of customer knowledge.  And what I mean by that is that, you know, there are usually individuals or teams within a company who do, like, customer research or user research and then sometimes that information is hoarded, sometimes it’s dispersed or sometimes you have subject matter experts in the team who supposedly are like the voice of the customer and that’s who you go to, right, to learn about the customer.

But in my experience, I feel like we can’t rely on that.  You can’t rely on certain people just to be the gatekeepers on knowledge on the customer because everyone comes preloaded with bias.  We all do.  So I think a really important part of the process is establishing rigor around how we collect customer feedback and insight and how we disseminate that internally.  And I think that can really make or break the customer experience overall.

Andrea:  What are some of the tactics that you’ve used to collect that data, but also then to kind of distribute it so that everybody’s understanding about, you know, on the same page with it?

Vanessa Yeh:  Yeah, I think when it comes to collecting that data, it’s so easy, especially if you’re a small company.  Just to sort of ask a few customers, maybe your mom,who knows, maybe your friends, you know, like, “Oh, what do you think about this feature?”  “What do you think about this or that?” And there’s just not enough rigor around that process.  I think that the ideal situation is you have someone in product or someone in, like, customer research who has an understanding of interview and survey methodology that can actually go out to your customers wherever they are and sort of develop a real process for that.

But if not, like you don’t have those people on staff, I think all of us have access to Google and we can at least do some of that work ourselves.  Like figure out what does like good interview methodology look like.  How do I, you know, not inject bias into my questions? How do I frame questions so that I’m getting, you know, as objective answers as I can from the customer, because a lot of times the customer doesn’t necessarily know what they want or how to phrase what they really want.  It’s up to the interviewer to sort of understand that or gain that from the information that they give us.  So there’s that.

And then I think in terms of disseminating it, I mean, there’s a couple of things tactically that we do that have worked so far.  I mean, we have something called win–lose meetings, which is kind of a painful process, but super beneficial when we have representatives from product, sales, customer success, and marketing get in a room, you know, once a month and we really perform a post-mortem on why did we win or lose deals these past months.  And that, like I said, can be a painful process but really, really valuable.  So, and that’s just a couple of things I think tactically that anyone can do.

Andrea:  So when you’re in that conversation, who leads that conversation, and how do you handle the tendency or I guess, it’s maybe not a tendency but maybe it’s a temptation to sort of point fingers and blame others or that sort of thing.  How does that actual conversation kind of play out?

Vanessa Yeh: Yeah, I mean I think I’m fortunate in the fact that I don’t know…at my current company, I don’t think we have a lot of the finger pointing yet.  Thankfully that hasn’t happened, which is great.  But I know that that is sort of a constant pressure, especially I think between product and sales because it can feel like they have such different objectives, right?  Like sales is trying to go out and sell a dream and create revenue and product is saying, “Well, we can only build so much in this amount of time,” like you stop selling features that don’t exist, right?  That’s sort of like a constant battle between those two.

But something that I think we draw on as a company is this really beautiful sentiment of calling ourselves a best effort community.  And what I mean by that, when I say best effort community is that a commitment that we make constantly to each other.  And that is reinforced and when we talk at our team meetings, when we communicate with each other is that we’re abest effort community.  Meaning that we assume that no matter what any of our colleagues does, they’re doing the best they can with the knowledge and information that they have at their disposal at that time.

So that’s just a really important like mindset to have because I think it’s really easy no matter what team you belong to say, “Oh, like that deal didn’t go well.”  “You know, it’s Carol’s fault.”  Or you know, “That feature is totally bugged out.  Kevin messed up on that again.”  And it’s usually comes from a place of ignorance or not understanding just how difficult that other person’s job actually is and all the different sort of obstacles theyare contending with to get their work done.  So if you come at it from this perspective of actually no, they’re making their best effort with what they have available to them right now, it helps to ease a lot of that tension and develops like a really healthy culture and undercurrent of respect.

Andrea:  Is that something that is just sort of is it a value in your company or how does that get communicated?  I love it.

Vanessa Yeh:  Yeah, it is.  I believe that actually originated with our tech team, I don’t know what genius penned that in the beginning, but I think it’s been sort of present at, at least Ascent, for quite a while.  And I don’t know that,it’s not like we have it written in big letters on the wall, although I do think that is a great idea.  But I think it is reinforced in the sense that people are encouraging to each other.  Like in all hands meetings, you know, we’re always encouraged to praise each other, to give respect to each other, to give kudos to each other.  And it’s just like constant sort of drum beat of appreciate your coworkers, be understanding and try to learn about (what their tribal about,) what their jobs entail and you know, kind of go from there.

Andrea:  Hmm.  Cool.  All right, so as a marketer you are oftentimes the marketing team is usually in charge of kind of understanding or coming up with the voice of the brand.  I’m curious about your experience with that and how that takes place.

Vanessa Yeh:  Sure.  Well one, if you’re coming into a situation where there isn’t a really strong brand voice or brand aesthetic developed yet and you’re sort of tasked with doing that, it always starts with the customer, right?  And this kind of goes back to are you interviewing and surveying customers in a sort of methodical and objective way to understand what their challenges are?  What are their fears and motivations, their pain points, what are they scared of?  What keeps them up at night?

Like trying to understand and get this really holistic picture of what our customers are dealing with on a day to day basis, that’s going to drive what our brand ultimately looks, feels, and sounds like.  Because really when you look at it, you know, you got to come at it from two places, right?  Direction one is the customer, you know, what are their desires and needs and motivations.  The other side is our product.  What does our actual product value?  What does it do and how does it solve the customer problem and where they meet that’s the perfect brand, right?  So what you deliver has to answer the customer’s need and their desires.

So, for us personally, you know, we know that our customers are risk and compliance officers at banks and other financial firms and they’re really scared of being fined and being held in noncompliance by a big government agency.  That’s really scary.  So for us, when we think about that, we’re like, “OK, well, that means that our brand needs to reflect a sense of safety, security, want to make you feel safe.”  At the same time, we’re also a high tech company operating in a very conservative industry.

So, how do you also kind of impress upon customers, “OK, we’re accessible and we’re safe and we’re friendly, but we’re also, you know, very human.  You don’t have to be scared of the technology, technological side of it, right? The robots aren’t coming to steal your jobs.  So it’s balancing sort of, again, all of these customer(s)needs with what your product actually delivers.

Andrea:  So, you know, with best effort community and things like this that are really important to your company in particular, what is like for you, for an individual as an individual to have a sense of your own purpose or your own things that you really care about,your values?  How does that come across in the way that you lead teams and lead the marketing efforts?

Vanessa Yeh:  That is such a great question, and honestly something I am still really to figure out.  I mean, I think I’ve certainly had amazing bosses who really know how to identify people’s personal values and help them leverage those values to do better work.  And I’ve met some people who have this really kind of uncanny instinct for that, right?  Like who can zero in on your exact motivations and it’s actually kind of scary how good they are at it.  But for the rest of us that hasn’t come naturally.

I think a huge part of it is developing this level of trust with people, where they feel they can share their values in a way that is going to elicit like a nonjudgmental response from you as their boss or their manager.  And I think it’s really kind of an interesting concept here because I feel like what we don’t talk about a lot of is, you know, it’s been popular for a while to talk about things like values and impact, passion and purpose.

And I think implicit within these words, there’s this pressure to say that you’re internally motivated by these really lovely things like helping people or making the world a better place.   But what if you’re working with someone or you have someone in our team who’s like their honest to God value is like they want to make money, wealth, right?  Or some other non-feel-goodytype of things, you know.  Do we only invest in people who have more sort of feel good values or values that align very, very closely with ours?  And I think my answer to that is no, (you’re right).

I think when we talk about things like diversity, which is obviously very important, we don’t mean just diversity like gender, racial associated, economic diversity, but also like diversity of thought and diversity of how different people approach the world.  So, it’s really interesting when you think about figuring out what your teams like really their personal values are, even if they’re different from yours.  And then leveraging them in a way that makes them be better at their jobs.  And like I said, I think it’s something that I’m still trying to figure out.  I don’t have like a super solid, “This is what you should go do and that’s the playbook.”  I think it’s just a process of learning.

Andrea:  Hmm. Yeah, I think that’s a really interesting point because there are people certainly that are motivated by wealth, by money, by success and climbing a corporate ladder or whatever it might be.  And that’s certainly important when you are building a company because you certainly have to make money in order to continue the company and to have it be profitable and that sort of thing.  So, how do you kind of navigate the relationship between people who are really motivated in one way or versus motivated inothers?  It really is an interesting question.

Vanessa Yeh:  Yeah, it really is.  And I think a part of that, you know, there are so many different sort of exercises, team exercises that are available out there.  Like StrengthFinders is a really common one.  There’s a bunch of other ones as well, but I think they’re super valuable for a team leader to actually do with their team on a regular basis because it helps us understand each other,like what our different strengths and weaknesses are and how we complement each other in a team.

And again, I think sometimes it’s just really easy to assume that because someone doesn’t have the same values as you or they work in a different style than you do that somehow that’s going to clash.  But it doesn’t have to, right?  And this is when we talk about, you know, when we interview for things like culture fit, like what does that really mean and should we really be thinking about, “OK, it’s not cultural fit, it’s culture add”, right?  We don’t want 15 people who approached the world the way I do, right?  There’s enough in me already.  I need a team that approaches the world very, very differently than I do because that’s going to increase the chances that we can hack a problem in different ways and solve it faster and better.  So I think having a constant appreciation for sort of that process.

Andrea:  I think that’s a really, really important point.  Just the point that you brought up earlier about having a diversity of value and(it)diversity of opinion,of course,is so important to moving a company forward and to be able to tackle problems like you said.  So, I really like that. So, you know, when you’re looking at the future here in the next couple of years maybe, what kinds of things are you looking at as a marketer when you’re seeing AI become a bigger deal and customer experience is just really, really hitting its stride in terms of how much it’s being talked about and that sort of thing?  What kind of things do you think are coming down the pipe in terms of changes or trends?

Vanessa Yeh:  Yeah, I mean, this stuff is wild, Andrea.  We’re living in a crazy world. I’m really interested to see how,kind of what we call the age of assistance, how that’s going to impact how brands interact with consumers.  So, you know, when I say age of assistance, you know, I’m talking about, you know, that you can kind of turn to Google Home or Alexa or Siri, right?  And they can do all these different things for you, and today you can ask Google Assistant or Alexa to, for example, buy things from Amazon for you, right?  Like, you know, shop this and they’ll actually buy it for you and deliver it to your door.

And I recently saw a Google demo of the Google Assistant actually calling a hair salon and scheduling a hair appointment for someone.  And the Google voice, the actual voice was like a real human voice.  And the person at the hair salon didn’t even realize they were talking to a robot the whole time.

Andrea:  I’ve seen that same… yeah, I’ve seen that too.  That’s crazy.

Vanessa Yeh:  It’s fascinating, yeah!  So, you know, I’m just thinking, you know, as assistants become more and more capable of serving as a proxy and interfacing with the world on our behalf, how will that change how we market, right?  Even when you think about social media these days and how many accounts are actually botsand how that impacts how we target audiences. You know, arethese even real humans that we’re talking to? I’m just super fascinated to see how the age of assistance really shapes the way we change our strategies to actually meet customers where they are versus talking to their robot assistants.

Andrea:  Oh yeah.  You know, one thing that comes to mind though, when I’ve been paying attention to some of these trends that are coming, I start to question how many of these algorithms and things are going to start making decisions for us.  And you mentioned the age of assistance, Google Home, Alexa, that sort of thing.  You know, Alexa already knows what I want from Amazon and can order it for me or whatever.  I mean, at what point do we get to a point where, things are making kind of a decision for us and we have to be on the corporate end of things making sure that people understand their own agency, their own ability to make decisions for themselves and things like this.  Are you with me on my, my topic here?

Vanessa Yeh:  Totally, 100 percent.  I think it’s such an interesting question to be asking and it’s so relevant for these days.  And I often questioned too with sort of the cyber security concerns, right?  You know, we’ve talked about there’s so much activity on like hacks, and Cambridge Analytica, and Facebook and Google stealing your data.  All this kind of different stuff that we just don’t have control or visibility or agency with our own information, and our own digital fingerprints and footprints.  It’s areally interesting thought to see.

I’m always just sort of curious as to whether the generations that are really young now who are sort of growing up with these machines in their hands.  Is the pendulum just going to swing totally the other direction,andthey’re just going to abandon some of these technologies just out of frustration and sort of a revolting kind of against the control that technology has over their lives?  I don’t know.  It’s a really interesting question.

Andrea:  It is.  That is really interesting.  I’ve got a couple of them in my home and I wonder about that too.  It’s interesting watching them for sure.

Vanessa Yeh:  Yeah.

Andrea:  OK, so Vanessa, it’s kind of time to start wrapping up our conversation.  So, I’m really kind of curious bringing it back to influence and being a voice of influence.  What kind of tips or what kind of final tip would you leave with the audience?

Vanessa Yeh:  I would say that there are, just to keep in mind, there are so many different ways to influence, and by the way, I’m still again learning and figuring this out for myself.  But it’s this idea, right, that you can influence by having swagger and confidence and owning the room.  But you can also influence by being the person who speaks very rarely, but when you do it super meaningful and kind of everything in between, right?

And so leading into whatever that is for you, instead of just trying to replicate what people around you are doing.  At the same time, and this is going to sound a little bit contradictory and, again, that’s because I’m in the midst of figuring this out for myself, that while you want to lean into your own style, you also don’t want to rope yourself off.  Like I feel like I went through a phase where I just decided that I was terrible at small talk and I didn’t like it anditkind of my shtickwas sort of this grumpy misanthrope who avoided parties.  And I kind of convinced myself that that’s who I was and I’m pretty sure I’d locked myself out of some really amazing relationships and opportunities because I constrained myself in this little box.

But ultimately, I think that we can be whoever we say we are in our minds.  And it’s kind of balancing that with like owning and appreciating who you are, like your own style and kind of what you bring to the table, but also not putting yourself into a box and saying, “Well, I am just this thing.  I can only ever be this thing,” I think is what I would kind of leave with everyone.

Andrea:  Very, very wise words.  Thank you so much, Vanessa!  How can people connect with you if they’re interested in following you?

Vanessa Yeh:  Yeah, for sure.  So I’m on LinkedIn.  It’s just Vanessa Yeh.  I think I’m the first one on there,no crazy numbers or letters after it,so that’s pretty cool.  I’m happy to connect.

Andrea:  Awesome!  All right, we’ll link to that in the show notes too, to make it easy for folks.  So, thank you so much for being with us today, Vanessa, and for being a voice of influence for our listeners.

Vanessa Yeh:  Thank you so much, Andrea!  I enjoyed it a lot.

 

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How Different Generations Influence One Another at Work with Porschia Parker

Episode 114

Porschia Parker is the founder and CEO of Fly High Coaching and the Millennial Performance Institute. She is a Certified Professional Coach, an Associate Certified Coach, and Myers-Briggs Type Indicator Certified Practitioner. Porschia also has experience as a director and business consultant helping companies unlock millions of dollars in potential. Porschia has a B.S. in Psychology from the University of Georgia and she serves as a Career Contributor for BioSpace and has been featured in FlexJobs, Levo, iOFFICE, and the Rochester Business Journal.

In this episode, Porschia talks about the main differences between the different generations in the workplace today, what companies can do to help millennials stay longer than the average of three years, the importance understanding the backgrounds of the different generations you’re working with, why you need to listen more than you talk in order to get your ideas heard, what we can likely expect from generation Z employees once they enter the workforce, and so much more!

Millennial Performance Institute

Fly High Coaching

Glassdoor

Harvard Business Review | Are Companies About to Have a Gen X Retention Problem?

 

Transcript

Hey, Hey!  It’s Andrea and welcome to the voice of influence podcast, where we explore the intersection of human dynamics, communication, and service.  If you’re interested in growing your own voice of influence or the influence of those on your team, check us out at voiceofinfluence.net and connect to us to talk.  We love talking.

So, today, I have with me Porschia Parker.  Porschia is the founder and CEO of Fly High Coaching and the Millennial Performance Institute.  She is a Certified Professional Coach, an Associate Certified Coach, and Myers-Briggs Type Indicator Certified Practitioner. Porschia also has experience as a director and business consultant helping companies unlock millions of dollars in potential.  Porschia has a B.S. in Psychology from the University of Georgia and she serves as a Career Contributor for BioSpace and has been featured in FlexJobs, Levo, iOFFICE and the Rochester Business Journal.

Andrea:  Porschia, welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast.

Porschia Parker: Thank you so much for having me, Andrea.

Andrea:  All right, so a Porschia and I met each other at an event about a year and a half ago. When thinking about what kinds of things we wanted to tackle on the Voice of Influence podcast, we have certainly address this before, but generational communication and influence, I think it’s a really interesting thing for us to talk about intergenerational.  And Porschia is particularly adept and experienced in helping companies really be able to understand the millennial generation and how to talk intergenerationally.  So, Porschia, let’s talk just first what are some of the main differences that you see between the generations that are in the workplace today?

Porschia Parker:  Yeah, great question, Andrea.  So, I guess if we’ll start with millennials, because you know that’s what I am obviously, you probably picked that up from the millennial performance Institute.  When it comes to illennials, talking about millennials is kind of become a hot topic within the last few years or so.  And, you know, all of these buzzwords, Gen X or baby boomer really kind of commonplace now, but when we think about some of the differences, millennials really value authenticity and having a connection.

And I know you’re all about, you know, the voice and how different people influence each other throughout the organization.  And this is really different when it comes to talking about authenticity and a connection, because in the past if we look at other generations, we’ll say baby boomers for example and authoritative management style is what, you know, was commonplace when they were, you know, first coming into the workforce.  And that’s what they are more accustomed to.  Meaning, “Hey, I’m the CEO, I’m the executive, I’m the manager.  You listened to me.  It’s very directive.  I tell you what to do.”

Millennials are a little different.  They feel like in general, and you know, we’re using generalities here.  There are obviously exceptions to all of these rules, but in general, a lot of millennials aren’t as preoccupied with some of those established titles and structures.  And they believe that they should have a voice like everyone else.  And Gen-Xers that I didn’t touch on, they’re the sandwich generation in between millennials, but right after the baby boomers, they’re generally seen as more of the long ranger type, adaptable to different types of environments.

But when it comes to sheer number, a lot of times people kind of forget to talk about Gen-Xers because there’s a smaller population of Gen-Xers in the workforce.  So that’s, I think, kind of just high level a little bit about the different generations and when it comes to communication, there might be some noticeable differences there.

Andrea:  I found that that interesting when you mentioned baby boomers and talking about the authoritative management style.  My interpretation of some of the conversation that I have heard around this intergenerational communication is that baby boomers tend to be almost a little afraid or maybe even Gen-Xers a little afraid of the millennial generation.  Almost like they’re the crazy teenagers that adults are afraid they can’t control.

Porschia Parker:  Yeah.  I think that’s very accurate.  And I have obviously worked with a lot of baby boomers and Gen-Xers around coming up with a strategy.  For example, one of the most common ones is an employee engagement strategy to kind of curb some of the turnover that’s common with millennial employees.  And yes, you’re right, the idea of, “Hey, let’s wrangle them in,” so to speak and kind of get them in line and in control so that, you know, business can go on as usual.

Andrea:  OK, so is that effective?  Is it effective to try to control them?

Porschia Parker:  It depends on your definition of control.

Andrea:  Sure.

Porschia Parker:  But in short, I would say no.  A lot of millennials like I mentioned that authenticity, they want to be a part of the conversation, they want transparency.  It’s a very big thing that I know you cover some times.  So, really the whole hard line and to try to control them usually does not work.  Across the board, across generations, the tenure and, you know, time that people are employed has drastically reduced.   Most people in general, newly hired employees are going to work for their organizations for about three years at this point.  And so, a lot of times, you know, trying to control certain things only speed up that process in terms of employees exiting your organization.

Andrea:  In your experience then is there a way or is there a successful sort of tactic or type of culture that tends to keep millennials longer than three years at a time?

Porschia Parker:  Yeah, there are a few things that companies can do.  So, really promoting collaboration and so working in small groups. A lot of millennials were used to working in teams and in groups, you know, from elementary school.  So, having a more collaborative communication style, some companies, and you might see this, they have completely revamped their workspaces.  There’s an organization that I’ve, you know, done some podcasts for and they’re all about kind of this actual physical space that you work in.  So, more open environments, free flowing.

You probably have seen some of the offices now that don’t even have dedicated offices.  It’s like you come in and you work from wherever.  And all of that helps to kind of promote collaboration across different teams in different business functions.  So that’s one thing. But also in general, a lot of millennials are looking for mentoring and coaching and when that professional development is provided by the employer that improves employee engagement and the length of time that a millennial employee will stay with their organization as well.  Because they feel as though, you know, the company is really investing in them in their career growth and that’s important for most millennials as well.

And then also, the other main component to this is to have access to professional growth opportunities.  And it’s funny, Andrea, I was actually reading a study last month and I wrote an actual newsletter article on it for our audience, and it was looking at the professional growth of millennials in terms of rates of promotion versus Gen-Xers. And what it showed was millennials have a really high, they place a high priority on being promoted and that we can talk a lot about, but student loan debt, coming of age in the recession, and all of these sorts of things have kind of driven millennials to focus on finances and getting promoted and making more money so to speak.

So, if you promote from within and have opportunities for that that’s going to be really appealing to millennials.  But in the study I was telling you about, they were showing that now a lot of baby boomers actually are not retiring.  A lot of them are continuing to work well into their 60s and beyond.  And so what this has created is an environment where the baby boomers, a lot of them are still executives, they have not retired and don’t plan to retire.  The millennials, because they’ve gotten a lot of, you know, some people think attention and focus, they’ve been promoted at rates faster than Gen-Xers.

And so a lot of Gen-Xers even in the last two to three years have not been promoted at the rates that millennials have.  And so this study was really interesting because it was kind of looking at, you know, the interplay between all of the generations in the workforce, what’s going on and you know, just kind of really analyzing it.

Andrea:  Hmm.  That’s really interesting.  Do you mind sharing with us the resource where you got that article?

Porschia Parker: I can, I don’t want to say the wrong thing.  So can I…

Andrea:  We will just include it in the show notes.

Porschia Parker: Exactly.  I will definitely send it to you right after the call.  I don’t want to quote the wrong thing.

Andrea:  Perfect.  No problem. So when it comes to baby boomers, Gen-Xers wanting to have influence on millennials, wanting to have them, you know, whether it be a stay in the environment or change the way that they’re handling things, how does somebody who comes from a different kind of really culture almost, it’s almost like a whole another culture that baby boomers grew up in versus the millennial generation.  So when you’re coming from that so much of a difference there, be able to kind of like grapple with the fact that it’s not about what a millennial should be but about what they are and now I have to deal with that.  It just seems like that might be part of the issue that people are kind of grappling with.

Porschia Parker:  Right, right, very good point.   I think it comes down to understanding and understanding that others are coming from a different perspective, perhaps a different background, different environment.  And when you understand the environment that, you know a potential employee or subordinate is coming from, it’s easier to be able to relate and find some common ground with them.

A lot of it I think is mindset, like you were saying before, if someone just comes at it from the perspective of, “Oh, this is a rowdy teenager or this person is like my kid,” because you know, a lot of millennials are actually the older ones are in their  mid 30s at this point.  And so, you know, we still have baby boomers that are, “Oh, that’s like my kid. That’s like my daughter’s age,” even though this person is, you know, 35.  So, I think really understanding the environment.

One easy way to kind of do that at a high level is to think when they study generations, most generations are defined by some piece of technology.  So for baby boomers, that piece of technology was the television.  The television was new.  People were, you know, exploring, you know, all of the shows and that was a new mode of disseminating information.

Gen-Xers were defined roughly by the computer.  So, you know, Silicon Valley, the computer is the new thing, you know, understanding how computers can really help you throughout your life.  Millennials, their piece of technology that they’re mostly defined is the internet.  And so, you know, the speed of the internet, the connection so to speak virtually, those different aspects of the internet when we think about millennials and some of their preferences, it actually defines a lot of things about them.

So, for example, sometimes people say, “Oh my gosh, they want everything so fast.”  I partnered with a lot of people in recruiting and one thing I hear a lot is of is, you know, in an interview, this millennial candidate that I put in front of a client said, “Well, hey, can I become a manager in two years?”  You know, almost kind of expecting that speed of the internet, right, to kind of translate to other areas of their career and of their life. So, just at a high level, if we think about environmental changes being different, technology being different, I think that is one way to start framing the conversation of kind of understanding how people come from, you know, different backgrounds in what was influential to them and how that might affect their decision making moving forward.

Andrea:  When you’re looking at how to help people from different generations communicate with one another.  You know, let’s take the millennials perspective; you’re wanting to be promoted, you’re wanting to push an initiative through that you’ve see is really important.  What kinds of things do you encourage them to do in order to speak to these other generations and potentially have influence?

Porschia Parker:  Yeah, great question.  So, this is actually the same thing that I encourage everyone to do, millennials included. I think listening more than you talk, especially in the workplace, is going to help you get so much more insight into other people.  And I think, you know, you’re specialists in this, Andrea, but I think a lot of times people are so focused on getting their point across, you know, staying their piece, so to speak, that they aren’t really aware of the other perspectives and other, you know, differing points of view or ways of doing things.

So, the first thing that I recommend for millennials but also anyone is to listen more.  If you have an idea that you think could improve efficiency or productivity in some way, listen.  Ask some questions about why the current status quo is what it is and take some notes and be open, because sometimes people are also listening with the perspective of “Oh, this is dumb or this is stupid. I could do it better.”  And after that, you know, introducing your new idea in a way that doesn’t necessarily kind of cut down or demean, you know, how the current process is.

So, a lot of times with millennials, they could sometimes, you know, not be as open to, you know, the previous way of doing things and just come in quickly and think that they know better.  And so that’s I think one thing that could really be highlighted.

Andrea:  But really it sounds like you’re talking about genuine curiosity.

Porschia Parker: Yeah, absolutely.

Andrea:  Because if somebody is genuinely curious, they’re going to be open to having that conversation to, you know, listening and introducing an idea that is potentially disruptive, but in a way that will maybe be based on the listening that you have just encouraged them to do, maybe then they can frame it in a way that they look, I see where it, why you’ve done it like this in the past, but maybe in the future.  This is another perspective.  I love that. OK, so that’s from the millennial perspective.  Let’s look at this from a Gen X or the baby boomer perspective, even if they’re the same two things that you would have them do, how does that look different for them?

Porschia Parker:  Yeah.  So this, you know, actually I think is a good, I could incorporate a good story here, Andrea. So, when I originally started my business, I was working with mostly individuals and a company that I’d worked with previously for a consulting firm.  They asked me, “Well, hey, do you do coaching and consulting for companies?”  And I said, “Sure!”  And jumped right in and did a time management workshop for them.  But while I was in right after that workshop, I’d say, I started picking up on it during the workshop.

But after the workshop, one of the managing partners pulled me to the side and he was a Gen-Xer or is a Gen-Xer or I should say and he starts venting to me about a millennial employee.  And this particular employee had gone on Glassdoor and had given the firm one of those average types of ratings on Glassdoor.  He was able to figure out who it was and he was shocked because he said, “You know, Porschia, I see this employee multiple times a week.  She’s never said any of this to me.  She’s never said any of this to her direct manager.  How does she feel comfortable just putting this online?”

This was probably in about 2014 so this was a while ago.  Glassdoor wasn’t as, you know, big as it is now, but that was really kind of my light bulb moment, Andrea, when I noticed that one, you know, kind of these differences in opinion were really along generational lines but also how the communication was different.  So this Gen-Xer, who was firm managing partner, he would’ve never gone online and communicated something to strangers right out on the internet and felt comfortable doing that.  But the millennial employee did and had never discussed it.

And so he thought it was kind of like a violation of trust that instead of speaking with him and the rest of the management team, they would go and put this online.  And so I think that’s a good example to kind of highlight preferences and communication, one, but also how different things can possibly be addressed.  So when it came to that firm particularly, you know, it was kind of touchy because as with Glassdoor, a lot of it is anonymous.  So, you know, confronting someone like, “Hey, I know you did this and I know you put this up there online about us,” could be really accusatory and come across, you know, pretty negative.

But in that case, and in most cases, I like to say that those types of instances let you know that people have opinions and they don’t feel comfortable sharing them in a public forum, so really looking at communication between management and their direct reports.  Openness throughout the organization are really important, so maybe that’s an opportunity to change your performance review system or change the amount of communication that manage _____ with their team.

Maybe they should be having one on one meetings or phone calls with their team members just to kind of see how things are going.  Or perhaps more company-wide meetings if it’s a smaller company to where it’s a literal open forum where people are encouraged to speak up in front of a group.  You know, it could look different depending on the size of the organization and how it’s structured.  But I think that that’s honestly kind of a cry for someone wanting to be heard, wanting to be listened to and just going in their preferred way of doing that, which can be different among generations.

Andrea:  Hmm.  It sounds a little bit like, you know, by providing those ways of coming to talk to the management or the leadership that it’s giving them permission.  It’s saying, I really do want to hear from you and I’m not only going to say that I’m going to provide you the opportunity instead of expecting you to take the initiative to do it, which might be kind of difficult to do, but it sounds like it’s really, really helpful when it comes to some, a millennial deciding, “Well, am I just gonna post this on Glassdoor or am I going to go actually have a conversation with somebody who really seems like they care.”

Porschia Parker:  Exactly.

Andrea:  Have you in the course of all this work that you do with intergenerationally, and I know that even though you’ve focused on millennials, do you have any insights into the next generation that’s coming up, Gen Z?

Porschia Parker:  Yes.  So there’s a lot of study going on about Gen Z.  The people who do a lot of the generational research, they tend to make a lot of observations until the generation kind of comes of age.  And so prior to that, a lot of it is fluid.  So we’re talking about a lot of, you know, preteens and younger and then some teenagers as well. So, there’s still kind of, you know, forming their opinions and their preferences. But yes, in general, they’ve done a lot of comparisons between Gen Z and the millennial generation and there are, you know, some similarities and some differences.

Obviously, the technology piece is that been even more I guess integrated into the lives of those individuals that are Gen-Zers in terms of, you know, the whole idea of having to wait for something is foreign.  I saw something not too long ago, but even with Gen-Zers, those teenagers, you know, working to get their license, it’s a lot lower because some Gen-Zers say, “Well, why do I need a license?  There’s Uber for that.  There’s Lyft for that.”  “Why do I need to drive a car?”

Andrea:  There will be cars that will drive themselves here in two years.

Porschia Parker:  Exactly.  So that whole mindset is a little different, you know, having things on demand.  Who needs to walk out and go get your own takeout, someone will bring that to you.  So, a lot of things in terms of speed are actually seen as faster and more instant than millennials.  And I’ve also read something more recently that said Gen-Zers tend to be even more financially conservative than millennials because they’ve seen the millennials to, you know, student loan debt is a huge issue and a driver for a lot of things.

So a lot of Gen-Zers are wondering, do I really even want to go and get saddled with all of this student loan debt from college in that traditional education model.  So yeah, there are a lot of comparisons and contrast being made right now.

Andrea:  It’s really fascinating.  I mean, I have a couple of them in my house, so I understand.  So I’m going to ask a couple more questions, but this is one of the last one I promise.  I just feel like we could talk about this for a long time.  Is there a forum, like an online forum in which you recommend that people communicate with millennials and even Gen-Zers, but in particular millennials, to kind of be able to close feedback loops quicker because it sounds like part of the problem could be, “I’m really busy.”  “I’m an executive, I’m really busy.”  Or “I’m a leader.”   “I’m a team leader.  My team is having a hard time hearing back from me.”  They don’t like the fact that they have to wait for answers, but they also maybe need answers quickly.  Do you have any practical tips on how to handle that?

Porschia Parker: Yeah, I think a lot of it also depends on the organization and kind of _____, you know, what that set up is like in general.  And you made me think of another distinction that a lot of companies are having to make, but a lot of people have like, you know, instant messenger kind of chat options in their CRM systems, customer relationship management systems.  There other kind of internal systems have some type of chat feature as opposed to email.

And so I’ve heard a lot of companies have, you know, conversations on what should be an email versus what should be a chat or casual communication avenue.  But yeah, there are a lot of, you know, just for lack of better words say chat or instant messaging platforms that can help you kind of get answers quicker than an email or waiting for a meeting or things like that.

I would say though, I think if someone has a feeling or a suspicion that something is going on in person or having a virtual meeting where you’re using, you know, your camera through your computer, I think there’s still a lot of value in that just to see people and to get a feel for what’s not being said, right?  And that made me think of something else.  And another critique that I hear a lot of times from recruiters and managers is they sometimes feel like the millennials have trouble with the in person communication.  They’d prefer to just chat or text or email because it might feel safer for some of them who haven’t done as much communicating in person.

And so when I work with millennials, specifically, sometimes we talk a bit about the in person communication and being more comfortable with having conversations that might be considered difficult in person.  So I know I kind of added a little bit there, but it made me think of a few other things.

Andrea:  Yeah, no, it’s very important.  Thank you. What is one final sort of tip that you would like to offer for intergenerational communication influence in particular?

Porschia Parker:  Yeah.  I think starting with a level of respect and it sounds really basic and almost kind of like “Hey doesn’t everyone do that?” But they don’t.  And similar to what I was mentioning about listening, coming from a perspective where you are respecting people, whether they be 30, 40 years older than you or 30, 40 years younger than you is really, I think, the place that everyone can start.  And also knowing that, you know, yes, we’ve talked a bit about generations as a group and as a whole, but everyone’s not the same.  Just because someone is, you know, 68 doesn’t mean that they can’t use technology.  And you know, just because someone is 28, you know, doesn’t mean that they know everything about all social media channels.  So, I’m not necessarily generalizing to the point where you think you’ve got it all figured out.

Andrea:  Hmm.  Very good Porschia, if somebody wanted to get in touch with you, how, how should they do that?

Porschia Parker:  Yes.  So, we’ve got actually two websites you can check us out if you want specifically to know more about the millennial aspect and focusing mostly on intergenerational communication.  Our website is millennialpi.com.  And also our other website is fly/highcoaching.com.  You can find information about us on both of those platforms.

Andrea:  Great.  And we’ll make sure to link those websites into our show notes on our websites.  So, Porschia, thank you so much for coming here today and sharing your voice of influence with our listeners.

Porschia Parker:  Thank you so much for having me, Andrea.  I really, really enjoyed chatting with you.

 

 

 

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How to Build Credibility to Advocate for a Big Idea Heather Hansen

Episode 113

Heather Hansen has her psychology degree and spent 20 years as an award-winning trial attorney and is a trained mediator. She has appeared on NBC, Fox News Channel, CNN, MSNBC, CBS, and Sirius Radio. She has presented in Kuwait, Ireland, Mexico, and throughout the United States. Heather is also the author of the bestselling book, The Elegant Warrior: How to Win Life’s Trials Without Losing Yourself, and is the host of the podcast, The Elegant Warrior. In this episode, Heather talks about her journey from being a trial attorney to where she is today, the difference between communicating and advocating, why you need to hire yourself as your own advocate, the value of owning your mistakes when it comes to building your credibility, how to build credibility when you’re in a position of power, how to build credibility when you’re not in a position of power, and more!

Mentioned in this episode:

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Heather Hansen Voice of Influence Podcast Andrea Joy Wenburg

Transcript

Hey, Hey!  It’s Andrea and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast, where we’re going to explore the intersection of human dynamics, communication, and service.  If you’re interested in growing your own voice of influence or the influence of those on your team, check us out at voiceofinfluence.net and contact us to talk.  I always love hearing from listeners.   Today, we have with us Heather Hansen, you know, facts tell and stories sell, but advocacy wins.  So, Heather has her psychology degree and spent 20 years as an award-winning trial attorney and is a trained mediator.  She has appeared on NBC, Fox News Channel, CNN, MSNBC, CBS, and Sirius Radio.  Heather has presented in Kuwait, Ireland, Mexico, and throughout the United States.  She is the author of the bestselling book The Elegant Warrior: How to Win Life’s Trials without Losing Yourself.  I love the title, and is the host of the elegant warrior podcast.  

Andrea:  Heather, it is wonderful to have you here with us today on the Voice of Influence podcast.  

Heather Hansen:  Andrea, I’m so excited to be here.  I love your podcast.  

Andrea:  Oh, thank you so much.  I’m excited to talk to you because your book is so good.  I’m going to tell you this just to start with, I really love the fact that your chapters are bite-sized and then it gives people a chance to really just kind of sink their teeth into it real quick, take a bite and then know how to move forward.  So congratulations on your book!  

Heather Hansen:  Thank you so much!  That was on purpose.  I really wanted people to be able to open to one chapter, maybe read it before they head out into their day and have it as a little tool with them all day long.  

Andrea:  I love that.  I think calling those little chapters tool is a really good way to put it.  That really makes sense.  So, Heather, tell us a little bit about your experience in being a trial lawyer and how you came to where you are today?  

Heather Hansen:  Oh boy!  So, I have been at the same firm since I was in law school and I have had the fortune to represent tons and tons of doctors and nurses and people who work in hospitals when they’re sued by their patients.  And that work has been rewarding but also extremely upsetting, very emotional, and very stressful.  

And I learned pretty quickly the difference between communicating and advocating. I love communicating.  I started college thinking I was going to be a journalist and I majored in communications law, economics and government.  But when it comes to winning, you know, communicating is defined as sharing ideas.  And that’s great for relationships.  It’s great for teaching, it’s great for journalists, and it’s great for psychologists, which is ended up being my major.  

But when it comes to advocate to win, you have to publicly support your idea and you have to advocate for it   And I found in all of the years of teaching my clients how to speak to juries in a way that we could win, that I was teaching them how to advocate.  And I found that I could use that skill outside the courtroom as well.  

So now, I do work with CEOs, venture capitalists, environmentalist, and all kinds of people who have a big idea and they want to find a way to advocate for it.  And the book was really meant as, you know, as you mentioned, bite-sized tools that if you don’t have me in your pocket, perhaps these tools will help you be a better advocate for your big idea without me there.  

Andrea:  Hmm.  And do you find that people who do have a big idea that there are times when they struggle to actually own it publicly, I guess, to stand up for what it is that they’re trying to advocate for?  

Heather Hansen:  Yes.  It’s so funny because there’s sort of two things there.  One is to have the confidence and the trust in your idea and your knowledge to actually do it.  And then the second part becomes how do you do it, and I train people on both because first you have to know how important it is to use your voice and you have to be reminded that this idea, sometimes, especially, women were more likely to do things for other people or other things.  

So, sometimes when I remind people that this idea is a thing that needs you to stand up for it, they find it easier than thinking that it’s them putting themselves on the line.  And then once people are OK with stepping into being an advocate, then we can get to the “how do you use your voice?”  “How do you use the tone of voice?”  “How do you use your body language, or which questions to ask?”  But sometimes, Andrea, your point is very good one.  Sometimes the hardest part is for people to step into the role of advocate with confidence and with strength and with a true knowledge that what they’re doing is to promote that idea.  

Andrea:  Why do you suppose it is so hard?  

Heather Hansen:  I think that we doubt ourselves.  Oftentimes, we don’t know that we are the right person to do that.  We think that there’s someone better suited for the job and there’s not.  One of the things that I really work hard with my clients, on and also I do a lot of speaking to women and to children, because I think that we often say, “Well let me find somebody else who could do it.”  

And you know, I know that even in my job there’s a lot of times where I’m like, “Well, if I could just hire someone to do my sales or hire someone to promote me.” But truly there is no one who is a better advocate for your big idea and for you than you are, because you know it better than anyone else.  You’ve lived with it longer than anyone else.  You love it more than anyone else, and hopefully you know yourself, you’ve lived with yourself and you’ve loved yourself better than anyone else.  

So there isn’t anyone who can do it better.  And when you remove yourself from the situation, I often teach my clients to hire themselves to be their own advocates.  So to, you know, lay out all of the qualifications that you need and then advocate, and then lay out all the ways in which you meet those qualifications or get the skills you need in order to do so.  So that ultimately, the person with the most knowledge, the most passion, the most faith, the most background in this big idea is the one out there publicly supporting it.  

Andrea:  I really like the way you put that just hiring yourself as your own advocate.  And making the decision, it sounds like to not just rest on your strengths and the things that you’re already good at.  But to add to that the things that you need to be able to get your idea into the world.  I think something that a lot of people don’t realize that it’s OK to say “I’m not good at this yet, but I will be.”  

Heather Hansen:  That’s absolutely right.  And most of these things can be trained, you know, they can be learned.  You have to be curious though, and you have to be open to the idea that you’re not an expert in everything.  You’re an expert in your big idea that is for sure.  But some of these other things you’re not yet an expert in.  And that’s OK.  

We can make you an expert by training and tools and specific.  I mean, some of the tools are really easy, but things that you can remember just as you step out, like the idea of hiring yourself to be your own advocate.   And the nice thing about that, Andrea, is that there’s all kinds of studies that show that when we remove ourselves from a situation and refer to ourselves almost as a third person.  So if I were to say to you, “Oh, Heather is getting upset about that,” it sounds ridiculous but it helps us to see things from a different perspective and to take them less personally.  

So when you hire yourself, you’re able to sort of remove yourself and say, “Well, this new hiree is lacking in these skills.  So she’s gonna need some training there, but she’s very strong in these skills so that’s why we’re hiring her.”  And it removes you from the situation, so you don’t take it so personally if you’re lacking in one or two of the things that you need.  

Andrea:  That’s really interesting.  I guess I’m kind of wondering how it hits on value and how we value ourselves, how we value our own voice or not.  What’s your take on that?  

Heather Hansen:  I think that there are some people who are very centered in their value and they’re well aware of how valuable they are to their institution or to their boss or to their family.  But it’s interesting, Andrea, because I think a lot of people know their value in one area of life, but maybe are less confident in another area of life.  

So you may know that you’re a very good mother and friend, but less confident in your ability to use your voice or to get on stage and talk about your big idea.   And so I think that the thing that we need to realize is that you have value in all of these areas and a lot of the skills that you use as a mother and a friend are transferable and you can use them in advocating for your big idea.  Once you know your value in one area, it becomes a little bit easier to extend that to the other areas.  

Andrea:  Hmm, really good.  When it comes to having a voice of influence is telling the truth or having a good idea enough or what role does building credibility or serving as an advocate play in promoting change?  

Heather Hansen:  It’s funny that part about telling the truth.  You know, in my trials, both sides believe they’re telling the truth.  You know, both sides have a story and it’s the person who is the better advocate that wins.  It’s the person who tells that story with more evidence to support it.  And in the corporate world that ends up being data with more confidence and, to your point, with more credibility.  

So, it is very important to have and build your credibility, but you can do that in a whole host of ways.  A lot of people struggle with this idea of credibility because they say, “Well, I don’t have the corporate background.  I don’t have the education.  I don’t have those years of experience.”  But you do have this natural talent for communicating or you do have a natural way of holding yourself physically that’s going to be very effective when you’re advocating.   So, building credibility is an important part, but it doesn’t mean that if you don’t have the background you can’t do it.  

One of the biggest parts of building credibility is simply to set expectations and meet them and make promises and keep them.  And if you can’t, this is the most important part, if you can’t to own it and fix it.  So, you can build credibility in a huge way, very quickly, by doing that. And it’s not going to matter so much if you don’t have the years of experience or the education.  If you have owned a mistake and fixed it or set an expectation and met it, you are well on your way to building your credibility.  

Andrea:  Uh, that’s really important, this idea of owning where you’ve messed up.  Do you have any examples of that?  

Heather Hansen:  I have a lot of examples from my experience as an attorney.  You know, I often gave keynotes in my early years to doctors and one of the things I would recommend to them is that when you have a complication and they happen, you know, they happen to you and I in our day, we make mistakes where things happen.  

They happen in medicine as well.  But I would always urge my clients to run towards their problems instead of away from them.  Because studies show that when doctors sit down with a patient and own a complication, say, “Listen, this happened, I’m sorry, this is what we’re going to do to try to fix it.”  That prevents lawsuits better than almost anything else.  

So that’s a perfect example of building credibility in the worst possible scenario by that doctor has made a promise that they were unable to keep, they had set an expectation that they couldn’t meet but they owned it by talking about it with the patient in terms of the patient could understand and then they offered to do what they could to fix it if possible.  If possible and that really builds credibility quickly.  

Andrea:  It sounds like it builds trust that allows for credibility.  

Heather Hansen:  So trust and credibility are close siblings.  In my mind, trust just takes longer to build.  So you know, in my cases, sometimes I’m only in front of a jury for three days, other times it’s three weeks.  But three days, even three weeks isn’t time enough to build trust.  But it is time enough to build credibility and that credibility would hopefully someday lead to trust. The relationship between a doctor and a patient, if you’ve been seeing that doctor for a long time, you may have built that trusting relationship.  But if you haven’t, you can start with credibility and that can be a foundation for trust.  And sometimes it can be enough on its own.  

Andrea:   Hmm.  That’s really interesting.  Credibility sort of leads to trust then if you’ve been around long enough, that’s, that’s really interesting.  You say in your book on page 81, “When we build credibility at trial, we do it with evidence.  You need evidence too.  You can build credibility with evidence of honesty, patience time and hard work.”  Tell us a little bit more about that.  You’ve started to talk about it. I think that there’s more there.  

Heather Hansen:  Yeah.  I mean, you know, evidence is how we win or lose cases.  It’s the pieces of data that we put before a jury.  So evidence of your credibility is…so for example, when I step into the courtroom, I’m always dressed a certain way.  I always act a certain way.  I don’t tend to be like loud and laughing in the courtroom because my cases tend to be very emotional for the parties, oftentimes, very sad.  

And I want to set an expectation with the jury who’s wandering around in the hallway or sitting in the jury room, which is just next door that I am always going to act with empathy and with respect for them in the system.   And I set that expectation and then every day I do what I can to meet it..  And then as far as promises in my openings, I make promises to the jury, but I don’t make them until I’m really sure that I can keep those promises.  And so day by day you build.  You know, you set expectations by saying “I’m gonna be on time and prepared for that meeting.”  And then you meet it.

And by doing so you’ve started to build your credibility.  You make a promise, “I’m going to get you that proposal by Friday.”  And you keep that promise and with that you have started to build your credibility.   And again, if you can’t do it, then you own it on Friday afternoon, you call the client as difficult as a call that might be and say, “I can’t keep that promise that I made to you.  This is why I’m going to work on it all weekend and I will have it to you by Monday.”  And then when you do, when you actually follow through on that, you have built a huge amount of credibility, but it takes step-by-step piece of evidence by piece of evidence to build that kind of credibility.  

Andrea:  Can we, can we take a look at this from a couple of different perspectives?  I’m thinking about maybe framing this in terms of somebody that’s empower and somebody that’s in a position of power or authority where they are wanting to get people on board.  They’re wanting to build credibility with the people that need to get on board with the thing that they’re going to do and then also from the perspective of that person that maybe doesn’t have as much power but they’re wanting build credibility with the person who does so that they can sort of see their thing go through.  

When you see somebody who has from that perspective of I’ve got power, I’m in the position of power, and getting people on board; what kinds of things do they need to really be mindful of when it comes to how they look and how they act, just like you were talking about coming into the courtroom.  

Heather Hansen:  So, it’s easier for people who have already reached high levels of power and success to build credibility because we see their successes.  And that starts to create a feeling of I trust them in that respect.  But here’s the thing, Andrea, they may not have built any credibility when it comes to their relationships with you or their ability to follow through on a promise or the way that they treat their employees.  

So it’s important to look at this, not just from a very, sterile black and white like numbers proposition, but also a relationship driven proposition.   And the other problem that people who are in positions of leadership, people who have already done well, people who already have a lot of years behind them, they have what’s called the curse of knowledge.  They know things so well that they forget what it’s like not to know them.  And so they’re often talking in terms that the people that they’re trying to build credibility, “We don’t understand at all.”  

I’ll give you another example from the courtroom.  My doctors walk into the courtroom with a certain level of credibility simply from the fact that they went to medical school, they have done a fellowship.  They’re been doing this operation for 15 years.  That’s great.  They have credibility with respect to their expertise. But that doesn’t mean that the jury finds them credible with respect to their compassion or their kindness or their ability to tell the truth.  So they have to build that kind of credibility.  

And one of the things that gets in the way is when they’re talking in words, the jury doesn’t understand.  So, one of my jobs is to help them to remember what it’s like, not to know these things.  So for example, if I have a case that involves a vascular surgeon that’s a surgeon that teaches treats blood vessels, I will say to the doctor, say the blood vessel surgeon, why confuse the situation with words that the jurors might not know rather than make it simple, make it understandable, and allow the jurors to really get into the story that you’re telling so that you can build that credibility.  

Andrea:  That’s interesting because I can see somebody on the jury thinking to themselves, “I don’t know what that means.  Why don’t I know what that means? I feel like an idiot.”  

Heather Hansen:  You just hit something so important in the head that I worked so closely with my clients on.  If I say one word that the jury doesn’t understand, Andrea, they don’t even hear the next eight to 10 words I say.  Because doing that in their head like, “Wait a minute, what is that word?  What is she talking about?  This trial is gonna be hard.  

I’m not gonna understand this stuff.”  I can’t afford to have people not here eight to 10 words that I say and neither can any of you.  If you are advocating for yourself or a raise, if you’re advocating for your big idea on a stage, if you’re trying to get funding for your huge idea that’s going to change the world.  You’ve got to use words that your audience understands or else you will lose that opportunity for sure.  

Andrea:  Hmm, so good.  OK, so, so you have to use words that people understand.  What about the way that somebody acts in?  OK, we’re still talking about this person who is already in power.  How can they act around others who may be underneath of them in a sense in a hierarchical kind of a situation, or at least there’s, they don’t have as much power as they do for whatever reason.  I am assuming that setting people at ease is an important piece of it, but what are some other things that you would recommend?  

Heather Hansen:  So, setting people at ease is certainly an important piece of it.  Body language is an important piece of it.  I work a lot with my clients on their body language, you know, crossed arms.  A lot of these things are the things that sort of come naturally.  But I don’t know if you know about power posing and powerful poses versus less powerful poses.  There’s also ways to sort of use your body language to make people feel more comfortable around you.   And the other thing that we don’t talk enough about is tone of voice, the way that you not only use your tone of voice but also listen to others.  

And one of the most important pieces that a person empowered needs to know is that when you are the powerful person in the room, it is your job to do more listening and less speaking because you want to know what the people in the room need.  That is the opposite for the less powerful person who should try to do more speaking and be given the opportunity to do more speaking.   So for the person who is in power, it’s being very receptive and open and almost empty.  You know, they have all these preset ideas, they have all this training, they have all this knowledge, and they have all this experience.  And yet, in order to truly advocate, you need to know what the other people want, need, see, and perceived.  And you don’t find that out without asking questions, listening to answers, paying attention to body language, and looking around a little bit.  

Andrea:  Hmm.  So how do you help somebody who is maybe not in power or not as powerful in that particular situation, be able to advocate for themselves, you know, where they are speaking up more and that sort of thing.  How do you encourage them to do that?  

Heather Hansen:  So, a lot of that comes down to what we started this talk about with respect to confidence, you know.  So, we have to try to build the confidence to speak so that you can build the credibility by what you say.  

One of the hard things that I talked to a lot of young women about is because you can’t have credibility immediately.  You have to build it and that takes time.  You know, and I gave a talk to a group of young women the other day and I said to them, you know, “I don’t want to disappoint you, but you’re not going to have credibility tomorrow.”  You know, it is a series of expectations met and promises kept.   But if you prepare like crazy, you are going to have more confidence to speak up because you’re going to be secure in the knowledge that you have the information that needs to be shared.  And then the thing that I really tried to help people to focus on is you are now speaking for your big idea.  You’re not speaking for yourself.  You’re doing this for something else or someone else.  

Andrea:  There’s something at stake that’s beyond my need.  

Heather Hansen:  That’s exactly right and when that’s true, we all are more likely to step up to the plate when we know that if we don’t advocate for our big idea, people will be worse off for it.  There will not be this opportunity.  You know, I work with some people who are in the environmental fields and if we don’t get that big idea out there, this thing that could help us to clean the oceans will never be realized.  Or for women who are looking for VC funding, if you don’t get your big idea out there, you’ll never get the money that you need to create this product that’s going to change the world.  That is important.  And that means that you have to speak up for that thing.  It’s not for you because we oftentimes get more insecure about speaking up for ourselves.  It’s for that thing and that thing needs you.  

Andrea:  I think we’re a lot more willing, at least women, are a lot more to sacrifice for something else than we are for ourselves.  

Heather Hansen:  Gosh, you are innately brilliant, Andrea, because you’re a 100 percent right.  There is this study out of Harvard Business Review that shows that when it comes to negotiating, women are actually more likely to lean towards unethical when they are negotiating for someone else, whereas men will lean that way for themselves.  So, not that anyone should be leaning towards unethical, but you’re right in that women will do things.  I mean it’s the Mama Bear Syndrome.  

Andrea:  It is.  

Heather Hansen:  And I know this from my experience in the courtroom, I will negotiate for my clients in ways that I would never negotiate if I were buying a car like aggressively and confidently.  And there’s so many things that we’re willing to do for others that we aren’t always willing to do for ourselves, which is why it really helps to reframe the conversation to recognize what it is you’re advocating for.  

Andrea:  OK, so we’re in the midst of quite the interesting political climate and I don’t expect either one of us to talk about politics too much.  But I am really curious about the actual conversations or lack of conversation, perhaps lack of dialogue, that’s taking place.  And I’m curious if you have any advice that you would give to political leaders who are sort of vying for position and authority, who want to get people to believe that they are more credible than somebody else.  What kind of advice would you give them?  

Heather Hansen:  The most powerful person in the room is the one who’s doing the most listening.  When you’re listening to what your constituents want, what your audience wants, what your potential funders want, no matter what it is.  So if you’re a politician, if you’re truly listening to what your constituents want, you are getting the information you need to win.  You also have to be willing though to listen to those that are different from you.  You know, we can’t win by only having the choir that we love to preach to vote for us.  

So there has to be some level of compromise and some level of being able to move to the center, but you’re not going to even begin to have any sort of authority with people of the other side until you are listening to them and proving that you’re listening to them by repeating it back.  One of the things that’s really powerful, Andrea, in all aspects of advocating for yourself is mimicking the person you’re speaking with.  

So I used to be a waitress and I got pretty good tips and I always thought it was because I worked my butt off, but I recently read a study that explained it a little bit more.  When a customer would order, they would say, “I’ll have a swordfish with anchovy butter on the side, baked potato with sour cream, and a salad with Parmesan and pepper dressing,” and I would say “Got it.  Swordfish, anchovy butter on the side, salad with parmesan and peppercorn dressing and a baked potato with sour cream.”  I would repeat it back word for word, and people love that.  

Studies show that waitress and waiters who repeat back a customer’s order word for word get 73 percent higher tips because it shows that you’re listening.  People want to be heard and seen.  And I think in politics right now, I mean there’s so much going on in politics and so much that is wrong, but every single person in this country wants to know that there is a leader out there who sees them, who hears them and wants to get it right.  Just like I did with those customers at the Chartroom.  I saw them, I heard them and I told them what it was that I heard and they knew I was going to try to get it right.  

Andrea:  Hmm.  So, so good.  And I am sure that those customers, after you repeated that back to them, they could sit back in their chair and have a really good conversation instead of worrying about whether or not you were going to get it right.  

Heather Hansen:  That’s it.  That’s it.  They were confident that I was going off to do my job and they couldn’t drink their mudslide and have a great time.  

Andrea:  Yeah.  

Heather Hansen:  That’s right.  And in politics it’s the same.  I mean, you know, for yourself, Andrea, all you want to know is that there’s someone in politics who sees you, who hears you and is trying to get it right for you.  And I think that if more of our politicians were focused on that rather than fighting with each other and not listening to anybody other than the echo chamber that makes them feel more important then we would have a much better dialogue going on and we would ultimately end up with much better leaders.  

Andrea:  Wow, Heather, this has been a fantastic conversation.  It’s sad that we’re at the end, but I would like to ask, if the listener is like really intrigued and would like to connect with you, where can they find you?  

Heather Hansen:  Well, I’m in transition right now.  So right now the website is a heatherhansonpresents.com but the best way to reach out to me would be my email, which is heather@advocatetowin.com and the new website’s going to be advocatetowin.com and I said, in transition.  But direct email me is fine if you want a little piece of some of the tools that we’ve talked about, there is at my heatherhansenpresents.com website.  There is a webinar on picking people and I talked with the jury consultant on the tools that we use to pick jurors and how that can be applied in your life outside the courtroom, and that’s free at the website.  

Andrea:  That sounds fascinating.  I’m going to personally check that one out.  That sounds great.  All right, Heather, thank you so much for being a Voice of Influence for our listeners today.  

Heather Hansen:  Thank you so much for having me.  I really enjoyed our conversation.

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The Power of Presence with Dr. Nancy Gordon

Episode 112

Dr. Nancy Gordon is a Chairperson and Associate Professor of the Graduate Department of Counseling, Leadership and Expressive Arts at Salve Regina University in Newport, Rhode Island where she has a full-time teaching load. Dr. Gordon is also a Program Director for the Holistic Graduate Programs with oversight of several cross-disciplinary programs including an innovative MA and Holistic Leadership. Her most recent published work is entitled Women and Leadership: An Integrative Focus on Equality. Dr. Gordon received her Doctor of Education from Harvard University. In this episode, Dr. Gordon discusses the main purpose that weaves it’s way into all of her work, what it means to be human, the importance of integrating humanity into our work, her simple and effective tip to help you be present in the moment, why people of influence need to focus on making sure those around them are fully present, the power of utilizing storytelling to help those around you focus, why trust is crucial when it comes to collaboration, the difference between management skills and leadership skills, the details of her upcoming leadership summit, and more!

Mentioned in this episode:

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Nancy Gordon Voice of Influence Podcast Andrea Joy Wenburg

Transcript

Hey, Hey!  It’s Andrea and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast.  This is where we explore the intersection of human dynamics, communication, and service.  If you’re interested in growing your own voice of influence or the influence of those on your team, you can check us out at voiceofinfluence.net and just give us a shout out.  We’d love to talk.  

Today, I have with me Dr. Nancy Gordon.  Nancy is a Chairperson and Associate Professor of the Graduate Department of Counseling, Leadership and Expressive Arts at Salve Regina University in Newport, Rhode Island where she has a full time teaching load.  Dr. Gordon is a Program Director for the Holistic Graduate Programs with oversight of several cross-disciplinary programs including an innovative MA and Holistic Leadership.  Her most recent published work is entitled Women and Leadership: An Integrative Focus on Equality.  Dr. Gordon received her Doctor of Education from Harvard University.  

Andrea:  Dr. Gordon.  It is wonderful to have you here with me on the Voice of Influence podcast.  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  Thank you.  I’m very happy to be here.  

Andrea:  So you have a lot of different things that you do.  So, I’m kind of curious, what do you consider out of all those different roles and your experience is there any kind of message or purpose that seems to be running throughout what you do and who you are?  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  Yes.  I think my purpose has always been to help people find their own selves, their purpose, their voice, their mission, their ability to function effectively in whatever it is they’re interested in doing.  And in many ways, that’s been a lot of my life, my career, my interest in education and learning.  

Andrea:  Hmm.  And is there a reason for that, do you think?  I mean, is this a personal thing for you?  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  I think it started out that way.  My background, I’ve always been interested in several things, in large system thinking.  I have a BA and MA in International Relations and then I end up in Rhode Island where that is not really a _____ for a career and began to work with all kinds of educational programs.  One specifically was with corrections and another was with urban adults wanting to come back to school and get degrees to further their own learning and education.   And I was always very interested in how education is a social change force, so that kind of guided me for many, many years.  And I went back to school to try to figure out how to use the ideas I had in education at a larger level and then found a voice in teaching.  As I came out of my doctoral program, I began to do the usual that some of us do go from one adjunct course to another.  But what I discovered is I really love teaching and I hadn’t known that.   So, in many ways I came accidentally to that part of what I’m doing now.  And then I came to Salve Regina University, which is a sister of Mercy University dedicated to justice and mercy.  And so I found a way to use that in the programs that I’m now running because they really are, in many ways, formative around those ideas and teaching people how to integrate the best of human, our humanity basically, into what they’re doing.  I don’t know if that…does that answer you?  

Andrea:  Yeah, I would love that.  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  That was very long winded.  

Andrea:  No, no.  I love that.  So integrating our humanity into what we’re doing.  Tell me a little bit more about that.  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  Yeah, what it means to be human.  Sometimes, I think we’ve lost that.  What does it mean to be human and how does that apply?  I am personally very interested in how things integrate and lineup.  You named my article about a focus on equality for women, I’m interested in how the body, mind and spirit are integrated into the work we do, which is why I found a perfect home itself at Salve Regina University because that’s pretty much the background foundation of all the programs we run here.  How to integrate body, mind, and spirit, what’s a holistic approach?  And holism has become sort of a jargonized term now.  And if you think about it as integrative, how do we integrate all aspects of our lives, our work, our families, our hobbies, our communities?  How does that all play a part in the way that we function in the world?  And how do we see that?  

Andrea:  Let’s go back first to…tell me this.  What does it mean to be human?  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:   Ah, that is the question, isn’t it?  

Andrea:  Hmm.  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  I think it means, first of all, finding a way to be present in the world so that you’re not constantly reacting and judging what’s going on.  So, being human means to have compassion for folks that are different from ourselves, for folks that may not have had some of the same advantages or are more disadvantaged for being able to step back and live in a world of our own presence, our own voice influencing that more towards what could be improved.   What is important also I think from where I sit is that we are all human beings living on one planet, and I think we have forgotten that it doesn’t matter where we’re living, but that we are brothers and sisters in humanity.  And so that’s another thing that I’m very interested in helping all of us see.  

Andrea:  Yeah.  I think that idea of being present is, you know, in some ways it feels like, well, yeah, of course we need to be present, we’re present.  But being present in that moment and participating almost in that moment rather than being critical and looking at everything through analytical eyes is a really interesting distinction.  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  It is.  

Andrea:  So tell me a little bit more about that.  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  Well, presence, first of all, probably for any of us is “How am I here?”  “Where am I?”  “Am I in the place that I’m sitting in?”  “Am I focused in my own being, in my own body or am I here but I’m somewhere else?”  So presence is where a good question I would ask is where am I literally?  And I mean, literally.  I will sometimes start my classes by saying to my students, where are you?  And at first, everyone used to laugh at me and I’m saying to them, not how are you, but where are you?  What do you need to do to bring yourself into this moment in this room so that we can have a learning environment?   And since then, of course I asked the question whenever, whatever, I’m myself.  If I find myself off, I’ll just say, “Where am I?”  “What do I need to do?”  “Do I need to put my feet on the floor?”  “Do I need to walk around?”  “Do I need to take a breath?”  But the real question underneath it all is where am I?  It sounds so simple, doesn’t it?  

Andrea:  It does.  And yet I really understand because just a simple example when I was in college, I was a vocal major.  And so singing was just something that I did a lot.  And I would go in for my voice lesson and my teacher would ask me kind of, how are you doing?  And she would kind of ask those questions even though it’s not a where are you right now, it was getting to where are you, you know.  It was allowing me to kind of process a little bit how he was feeling so that I could come into the moment and actually sing.  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  Exactly.  

Andrea:  And I think makes a lot of sense.  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  So that’s part of it.  And now there’s a lot of research and work being done changing it from just presence to presencing.  Now think about that one because then it becomes an active process and an active practice.  And there are things you can do to really, and this is at a slightly higher level than just where are you, what are you doing in your own life, but as leaders, how are you guiding others to find their voice, find their heart, and find their spirit.   And then how do you find that as you’re working with other people, how do you line up a group so that the group can be fully present and working from all of that integrative place in their own being?  It’s really important as your teacher was showing you and your vocal.  You can’t sing if you’re not in your body.  And I can’t talk if I’m not in my body.  I can, but I can’t talk from the place that I want to work from.  

Andrea:  So why is it so important that leaders be able to help a group of people, be able to become more present?  I know that that’s not necessarily what everybody is thinking all the time.  You know, people don’t go into leadership thinking I need to help people be more present.  And yet I know that this is certainly important.  So tell us why.  Why should we even put effort towards that when we’re people who want to have influence?  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  Well, first of all, the work now is starting to come together around this.  There’s a lot of work about how do you working more from your authentic self.  You begin to hear that or working from the inside out, leading from the inside out, finding your own purpose, your own values, your own core, your own place.  And so it’s starting to come together that this is critically important to how to thrive whether you’re in a group, you’re in a large system, you’re in a community, you’re in a church, or you’re in an agency, you have to start from the place of presence in order to be able to function effectively, to live more fully.   Now, I mean that’s a really simplistic term to say it and if you’re working with a corporation, you might say it helps the bottom line.  If you’re working with a not-for-profit, you might say, this is really a way to show your core values.  Do you see what I mean?  But really, it’s how do you have an effective meeting?  How do you get out of the police where we’re always judging each other or we’re doing 5 million things instead of just being there in that moment doing the thing that we need to do to effectively contribute to whatever the product or the service or our own wellbeing in any endeavor that we’re involved in.  

Andrea:  So let’s take it to a meeting.  Let’s take that as an example.  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  Sure.  

Andrea:  People are walking into the meeting and there is an agenda.  Somebody is leading the meeting, what’s going on in the individuals that are coming in the door and how can they move from being distracted and out in, you know, trying to get their to-do-lists done in their own head rather than, you know, sort of being in the moment.  How does a leader guide the group in that situation?  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  Well, first of all, if the group is used to the leader doing that, say for my department, we always start with a moment of say silence or centering because we all know that’s what we’re modeling for our programs and our classes.  However, I go to other meetings and we immediately start right in.  And so if I’m starting something where I’m the leader in a new place, I’ll ask permission.  I’ll say, “Would it be OK with us if we start with just a quick moment of focusing?”, I never say meditation or grounding or you know, you all are way out of your coming in with all your to do list.  I’ll just say, “Can we just stop for a moment and come together so that we are able to function together in concert.”  So that’s one way to do it.  

Andrea:  I really like that idea of saying, “Can we stop for a moment of focusing?”  I think that that is a really good tip.  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  Yeah.  And also to ask permission because some folk, I mean I think that’s really important.  Sometimes, some of my students, for instance, will learn a new technique or a new concept.  And they’ll go home and they’ll say to whoever or wherever they’re working, “Oh, I see what you’re doing whatever it is, you know, your odd alignment, you’re jumping the ladder of influence.”  And I’m saying to them, “Don’t do that.”  You’re learning some new things that you need to incorporate into your own being before you can cow call out somebody else because they’re not doing it.  So, that’s would be the same thing for a leader in a group.  You know, rather than calling out, you might say, “I really like to try something new to get us more effective in and probably out of here quicker.”  

Andrea:  Uh-hmm, exactly.  To most people they would be thrilled to hear that.  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  Yeah.  I think you know, let’s try away of being able to focus quickly and also another thing is just doing it in a couple of minutes.  You know, don’t take people who aren’t used to this through 20 minutes of something.  You know, give five minutes of, put your feet on the floor.  I’ll walk around and you know, if that isn’t going to work in a group then find something that does.  You know, it could be have a little snack before we start walk around.   I have a tendency in my groups, I make people walk around, stand up, but they’re used, you know, that’s what they’re used to me.  If they’re not used to me, I’m very cautious.  

Andrea:  Have you ever used storytelling to help them focus?  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  Yes, I’m starting it, yes.  And I’ve been part of what we did over the last couple of years was to begin to take some of our courses and integrate in our community.  And we brought somebody in who would guide us to begin with a storytelling.  I have just instituted that into one of my classes.  Each of my students is going to have to do a circle story starting October 22nd and I have never done this before, but I’m giving them some guidelines about.  I want you to just tell a story.  The only hard and fast rules, it has to be five minutes and then they can write it.  They can talk it.  They can do whatever they want in that five minutes, but then they have to write a summary of it that they handmade.  So I’m really curious to see how this is going to work.  

Andrea:  That’s my primary way of getting a group to focus is start out with a story.  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  Well how do you do that?  

Andrea:  I usually just start in.  I don’t tell them I’m going to tell them a story, I just sort of start telling the story.  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  I love this.  

Andrea:  And I take them into the moment.  I learned really how to do that when I wrote my book and it’s a memoir and I didn’t really know how to do that before that.  But to really bring people into the moment, setting the scene, that sort of thing, making sure that there’s something, a reason to listen to the story, you know, that there’s something at stake and then either closing the loop right away or at least giving some enough of a conclusion that it will lead into the topic at hand.   And then coming back at the end to make sure to close it up completely with that last little, and so therefore, you know, you go and do the thing, you know, whatever the thing is.  And I feel like it has been super impactful and effective.  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  Well, I love this.  We’re going to do a leadership summit here in April and that’s why I’m testing this now.  I’m beginning to think that’s the way to start the start the summit.  

Andrea:  Yeah, yeah.  Oh, that’s exciting.  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:   I haven’t got it all in my head yet, but this is the beginning of thinking about it.  Because stories, the way you’re describing them, “I’m closing the loop.”  They can be personal.  They can work with the group.  The group can have a story or the system can have a story or a person can have a story.  I love the way that you’re describing it.  

Andrea:  I find that it really helps when it’s a light story where there’s something deeper underneath always.  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  Always.  

Andrea:   Yeah.  Yeah.  So it’s not a hard, hard thing to tell.  It’s not a hard thing to listen to, but there’s something really deep underneath of it.  Yeah.  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  Like a parable.  

Andrea:  Yeah.  Right, exactly a parable, which Jesus used quite well and it’s something that we have gotten poor at doing.  We’ve want to just tell people what to do instead of sharing a story that could illustrate it.  It’s very interesting.  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  So what has been some of the results for you?  

Andrea:  Well, I guess mostly people being able to pay attention and people feeling like I feel like I see people actually present in the moment and that sort of thing.  So let’s go back to you.  Let’s go back to you.  I’m sorry, I didn’t want to hijack the conversation, but I thought that’s such a good idea of bringing people into that focusing moment and I hadn’t made that connection myself before that that’s exactly what was going on.  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  Right.  I just need to say I don’t feel hijacked at all.  

Andrea:  OK.  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  I thought that was a great intervention.  

Andrea:  OK that’s fun.  I think you and I could talk a long time, Nancy.  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  It’s beginning to feel that way.  

Andrea:  But I’m actually really curious more about this idea of collaboration and working within a system.  These are other things that you really talk a lot about.  And so what do you see as being some of the most foundational elements of a team that can really work together in collaboration well?  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  Trust is huge.  How does that happen?  A team needs to be able to communicate.  And I mean literally, the root word of communicate is commune.  So, a team that is used to working together may need a little bit of tipping into another direction if the communication is off.  Collaboration means first, also being able to say, “I’m great at this.  You are great at that, can we share whatever we need to do because none of us is by ourselves can handle the whole thing.”  I’m sure you’ve heard the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, but that’s literal.  I mean that is a literal equation that works for collaboration.  Everybody can contribute and everybody has a gift.   So if you really want collaboration, we need to learn how to honor each other’s gifts and be able to say, “You’re great at this, can you handle that?”  And that’s of course if everybody’s willing and also that there isn’t always one leader.  There may be somebody that’s in the ability of seeing the whole, but can also let the parts work on their own ways.  Does that make sense?  

Andrea:  Oh yeah.  And I wonder too, do you think that people kind of need permission to be themselves in those situations?  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  They not only need permission, sometimes they need to learn how to do it.  And in conversations, especially hard ones have to be facilitated usually, but conversations in groups where we just need to get things done, some folks can’t stand the process around the communication.  Others love the process but want to get right into the structure of something.  So, I think for collaborating in a group, you have to have it all.  You have to have a way to open and close the loop, as you said.  You also have to have an agenda.  You also have to have probably goals if that’s needed or tasks or whatever the purpose is.   And I think that’s underneath the whole thing as well as you have to know the purpose of a group. Otherwise, have you noticed things just they’ll flounder, you know?  But if you know your purpose then you have sort of a landmark or a map or a way to stay on purpose even if things go differently from the way we think they’re going to go.  My own idea for planning is to have like three separate arm strategies and then an optimum and then OK.  Maybe none of those are going to work but at least I’ve thought about them.  

Andrea:  Yeah.  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  And then I don’t walk in with that.  I’ll throw that away.  But I’ve thought that there’s always a way that whatever I’m thinking about can somehow be integrated, but maybe not necessarily the way I’m thinking it ought to be.  So, yeah, I suppose the collaboration is a lot if I’m really truly living that the sum is greater than the sum of its parts, then I also have to live with the fact of letting go and controlling some of it.  That has been a hard lesson.  

Andrea:  Yeah.  Being kind of open to offering your ideas without demanding that they’d be the way that it goes.  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  Exactly.  That’s kind of interesting to have to learn to do that.  A professor in a classroom, my classrooms, I have to do it all the time.  And my students laugh with me now because I’ll recalibrate standing right in front of them.  “OK, this is going to have to change right now.”  But I’m not afraid of that anymore.  You know, I’m into it long enough to know they’re appreciating me doing that.  

Andrea:  You used to be afraid of it?  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  I didn’t know how to do it, you know, I mean I’m trained highly left-brained.  I’m trained in traditional ways of, well, research for one thing, but also for the way you consult, say, in systems.  And I’m standing in the classroom and I was trained, you’d never tell anything about yourself and that’s sort of got to be thrown away in a program like I run.  And then I don’t lecture, so what’s going to emerge in the classroom is something we’ll have to work with.  I don’t know that I was afraid.  I just didn’t connect up that it was a skill that I could do it.  That it was OK.  

Andrea:  And is that something that you teach people to do?  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  I do.  

Andrea:  Yeah.  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  I absolutely do.  

Andrea:  And what sort of process do they have to go through internally to kind of get to the point where they can do that?  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  Well, it depends on the level of the class and whether they’re in my program or, you know, in my leadership classes I have a lot of sometimes across different disciplines.  They’re not as used to me as my own students.  So, I have to _____ really carefully, like in my first class, I’ll ask permission to do focusing.  Now, they expect it in my own classes there, especially those that have had me more than once.  They’re ready for this.  They’re ready to be a part of the process.  So, they’re learning that they can be a part of the process.   In some of the classes, I’m teaching leadership skills because leadership skills have to be…they can be learned and that’s the message underneath our whole program. And that they’re different from management skills.  We have great MBA programs, but that’s not what I’m doing.  

Andrea:  So, what is the difference between management and leadership?  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  It’s really appropriate.  They’re totally different, disciplines really.  Leadership is teaching a set of skills of how to see systems, how to lead, how to lead change, and notice that it’s lead.  Management is a control function and really the important one, but it’s still a control function.  And a lot of times what we’re finding is people who are really great managers who are all thrown into leadership positions and then it’s a “Duh, what do I do now?”  Because the skills for management and control are not necessarily the skills for leading, especially leading people or systems.   So, they’re just totally different skills.  I’m teaching interpersonal communication skills.  I’m teaching some cross-cultural awareness skills, a way of seeing holistically.  Can you hear the language?  If I were teaching in an MBA program, I’d be teaching some finance and management and control.  I would be teaching planning and I teach planning as well, but it’s a different way of thinking about planning.  For me, the planning is at the vision level.  For management and control, it’s at the implementation level, and they’re really both important.  

Andrea:  Absolutely.  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  It’s just that I’m not doing that.  

Andrea:  They’re just different.  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  Yeah, they’re totally different and there’s been a lot of, I think, confusion, especially in the beginning of, leadership, now is a great jargon word.  Everybody is into leadership but what does that mean?  Do you see what I’m saying?  

Andrea:  Oh yeah.  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  “Oh, I lead all the time.”  “Well, OK, you know, that’s great.”  But that is also not the way we’re teaching it.  We’re teaching people to be effective leaders, to be effective in their bodies, to be effective _____ projecting to really look at their biases and the way that they communicate _____ other people who are equally skilled, be able to also function at the same level.  Does that make sense?  

Andrea:  Yes.  So, Nancy, I know that you said that you have this leadership summit that’s coming up.  When is that?  Is that something that you want to tell the audience about?  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  Yes, it’s coming up April 17th, 18th and 19th.  We’re calling it Salve’s Leadership Community Summit.  It’s an emerging summit, but we’re in the process now of…we want to get folks together that really want to actually start learning about storytelling, about planning, design learning about the ability to create dialogues around topics that are of interest.  And we’ll create some topics that we think of our interests.  We’re thinking probably inclusion is going to be one of them.  Also what it means to lead now, what it means to lead going forward into the future globally.  

Andrea:  Hmm.  That’s huge.  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  And our program is a program that works from the individual all the way through thinking global issues.  So, I think what we’re going to try to do is use that as our ability to help people work through a lot.  But mostly, I think underneath it all, it’s get together and have people learn to have good conversations across sectors.  I think that’s my main vision.  That’s as far as we’ve gotten.  

Andrea:  That’s so important.  Well, it sounds wonderful.  If people are interested in attending that, how do they find it?  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  Well, we’re going to have a domain up very soon, but for the moment they can contact me at nancy.gordon@salve.edu.  So that’s one way.  They can contact our grad studies program.  Kristen’s number, I think you have it.  

Andrea:  We’ll make sure to put that in the show notes so that people can find it easily.  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  We’ll have a domain up for the summit very soon.  

Andrea:  Then it might be up by the time the podcast episode comes up.  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  When is it coming up?  

Andrea:  I’m not sure yet, but we’ll talk about it later.  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  Oh OK.  

Andrea:  So no problem.  So yeah, we’ll have information about how to find this summit and if you’re interested in attending, if you want to look, check it out.  We’ll have the information on that on our website in the show notes so that you can easily find it.  But Nancy, one more question for you today.  Again, I feel like we could talk for hours and hours and hours.  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  I agree.  

Andrea:   But what would be one final sort of tip that you would leave with the audience for somebody who really wants to have a voice of influence.  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  Be yourself.  And that might mean find out who you are.  If you know who you are, trust it, use it, and be proud of it.  

Andrea:  Beautiful.  Beautiful.  Love it.  Thank you so much for being a voice of influence for our listeners today.  

Dr. Nancy Gordon:  Thank you so much for having me.

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How to Show Up to Old Relationships With Your New Self with Brian Dixon

Episode 111

Brian Dixon is a podcaster, conference speaker, and business coach who is passionate about helping authors, speakers, and aspiring messengers create a sustainable business through growing their platform and creating compelling online courses. Brian has a doctoral degree from the University of San Diego and is the co-founder of Hope Writers, a membership site of over 2,000 working writers. In this episode, Brian talks about the inspiration for his new book, tips for putting people ahead of projects and living a people-first lifestyle, why we need to outgrow our upbringing, the importance of leading with humility as you put yourself out there in increasingly public ways, why he strives to peak when he is sixty-five years old, his advice for becoming a voice of influence, and more!

Mentioned in this episode:

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

Brian Dixon Voice of Influence Podcast Andrea Joy Wenburg

Transcript

Hey, Hey!  It’s Andrea and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast, where we explore the intersection of human dynamics, communication, and service.  If you’re interested in growing your own voice of influence or the influence of those on your team, check us out at voiceofinfluence.net and connect to us to talk.  We’d love to hear from you.   Today, I have with me Brian Dixon.  He has a podcaster, conference speaker, and business coach.  Brian is passionate about helping authors, speakers, and aspiring messengers create a sustainable business through growing their platform, creating compelling online courses.  He is the co-founder of hope writers, a membership site of over 2000 working writers.  Brian has a doctoral degree from the University of San Diego, and he and his wife Julie live in Charlotte, North Carolina with their three young children.  

Andrea:  Brian, it’s great to have you on the Voice of Influence podcast!  

Brian Dixon:  Andrea, I’m so excited to be here.  Thanks for having me.  

Andrea:  Yes, and congratulations on the recent launch of your book, Start with Your People: The Daily Decision that Changes Everything.  I love that.  

Brian Dixon:  It’s so important.  You know, we’ve got to realize how important people are in our life and in our business.  And that’s really where it all begins, is our relationship with the people that are already in our life.  

Andrea:  Hmm.  Let me start with that.  Let me just start with why did you decide that that was an important thing to discuss?  Why is it that you wrote this particular book?  

Brian Dixon:  Huh, I mean the reality is our message.  The thing that we are struggling with right now, the thing that you’re dealing with in your life right now that I believe you’re going to overcome.  I believe that if you keep listening to podcasts, if you keep signing up for training, if you’re working with a coach, if you have a mastermind group, like the things that we know to do, if we’re doing those things the stuckness that you’re in right now in your life is not going to be there.   And a year from now or two years from now, there’ll be another thing.  But the thing you’re working on right now, you’re going to move through it, you’re going to move past it.  And so for me, that thing was my relationship with, people specifically, I was putting projects and accomplishment over recognition and relationships.  

Andrea:  OK.  Projects and accomplishment.  What did that look like for you?  

Brian Dixon:  You know, it would look like somebody having my full attention.  So, we’re in the middle of a launch.  Part of what I do is I help people get their online thing off the ground.  So, a lot of times that’s a course or that’s a membership site.  I do that through coaching and then all through some building some agency kind of work.  And so I’m all in, right?   So, I’ll work, you know, 21 hours a day on this thing and get it off the ground and like really go hard.  And then after it’s done, I won’t follow up or I wasn’t, like I want to follow up for like six months because I already did finish it.  Like the thing that we did together is good and, you know, for years I wanted to write thank you notes.  I wanted to be the kind of person that continues relationships even after a business arrangement had ended or I completed.  

I don’t know what it is.  I think honestly, I think just think it was a lack of self awareness and it was really seeing people for the value that they can bring to me and the bottom line instead of seeing people for who they really are and just that power of relationships.  And so, I’ve learned so much in the last few years about authenticity, vulnerability, intimacy, and relationships.   I think I’m about that into-me-see, like I love that word.  I want people to see into me, you know.  I want them to be able to say, “Hey Brian, this is what you’re awesome at.”  And also here are a couple of areas that I’ve noticed that, you know, it kind of rubs people the wrong way because when we’re aware of those things, I believe that we deliver better client service.  I believe that we show up in a bigger way and we actually attract our ideal clients even more when we’re really authentic.  

Andrea:  Hmm.  That’s interesting.  I like the authenticity piece of all that for sure.  I’m wondering too about, OK, so projects you get done with a project with somebody and then how much of just busy-ness and the reality of the fact that we just can’t possibly, you know, keep up with, you know, thousands of people or whatever, you know, it might be.  How do you reconcile that with that new found desire to really have that authentic relationship with people that would be ongoing?

Brian Dixon:  It’s a great question and I think it’s really, really hard, right?  Most of us have hundreds, if not thousands of “friends” on social media, like we’re connected to people.  I’m so connected to people I went to elementary school with, you know, like we just keep adding relationships into our life.  And so it’s impossible to stay in touch with everybody and that’s definitely all what I’m saying.   But I do believe that we make an effect like we have an effect on the world around us.  We have an effect on the relationships that are in our lives and we get to choose that effect.  We get to choose if we want to be somebody who says life giving words, somebody who builds others up, somebody who encourages people to reach their highest potential.   And I was doing that like in some ways, I’ve received good feedback but I also recognized that there were areas of my life where all I needed to do, Andrea, was just to like slow down and turn and say, “You know what, I had a blast working with you.  Thank you so much.  Thanks for hiring me.”  Or you know, “Thanks for having me speak at your conference, I never did that before.”  And those little actions don’t take a lot of time, but they make such a big difference.  

Andrea:  It’s almost like a closing a loop or you know, that hole like.  We have this thing, we’ve done it well to come back afterwards and close that loop to be able to say that.  But I really appreciated that.  You’re right, there’s something so powerful and I don’t know like relationship building about that for sure.  

Brian Dixon:  Yeah.  You know, what one practice, just to make it really practical for you guys listening, because you’re probably thinking like how do you do it?  Like, what do you actually do?  So this morning, you know, so I have this morning routine that I go through and part of it, it includes a journal.  So, I have my journal out and you know, I’m a person of faith and so there’s some prayer and some Bible reading, but you don’t have to be a person of faith to use a journal in the morning, right?   And so I’ve taken the journal out and what I do is I pray, but you could just meditate, you could just think.  And what I do is I just, whoever comes to mind, I just write down their name.  And so this morning there were four names that came to mind.  Two of them I realized in that moment that, “Whoa, there’s some brokenness here.”  There are two relationships from way long ago that I just need to reach out to him.  Just say, “Hey, I was thinking about you today.”  That’s where it starts, just, “Hey I was thinking about you today,” and there’s a chance that I might need to say sorry.  There’s a chance that I might need to clean something up that I left broken.  But what I know is that when those names come to mind, I now have a responsibility.  

I was talking to my business coach yesterday and he said, “You know, the thing about a blind spot is once we see it, it’s no longer a blind spot.  It’s now something we’re aware of and we have a choice.  Are we going to address it or we’re going to ignore it?”   So this morning, you know, one guy’s name came to mind.  I wrote it down and as I’m like taking the trash out to the curb, I sent him a text message or a Facebook messenger message and I just said, “Hey man, I was thinking about you, like what’s new in your life?”  He’s going through a divorce.  I didn’t know.  And now he said, “Well, I’m headed on my way to the attorney, and then hopefully that the judge will sign off on the divorce papers.”   And I had no idea.  So I write him back right away and I’m like, “Oh man, I’m so sorry.  I had no idea.”  And I have to believe, you know, that’s not coincidence that his name came to mind today as he is on his way to his attorney’s office.  

And I think that’s the impact that we can have whatever you want to call us, “influencers,” “speakers,” or “messengers.”  I like the word “messengers,” but as people who want to make a difference in the world, when we think about the people that we’ve interacted with, we have an opportunity to build them up or tear them down.   I just realized a few years ago I was doing more tearing than building and I wanted to switch that around.  It’s a lot easier than I thought it would be.  

Andrea:  Oh, that’s really cool.  I think that really applies to even sales.  You know you’re actively out there prospecting or talking to people about something that you have to offer.  When that’s the case, it can tend to lean towards the whole, I need something from you feeling, but when you are in sales and thinking about, “Now, who do I just need to reach out to just to touch base as a human being?”  All of a sudden you become a person to them and that’s really powerful.  

Brian Dixon:  You know, it’s so funny there’s this kind of what you call it like an agency, like a marketing agency online.  And I’ve been following the two guys that own it for awhile.  Their stuff is fun, you know.  I’ll click on their ads because I kind of like their style.  It’s a little aggressive, but it’s funny, you know, and so I reached out to him to say, “Hey, I’d love to work with you guys.  Is there a course, like, do you have a weekend boot camp or something like that?”  And I also kind of wanted to like learn their system, you know, their sales process because I think they’re doing a good job.  

So, as I’m going through the sales process, it went from, you know, a conversation of like, here’s some free content to them trying to sell me a $24,000 six month coaching thing.  And it just felt like such a big leap without a lot of information.  I’m not against investing in my own business but I just wasn’t ready.  It was like I came in for a skateboard and they’re offering a Maserati, you know.  It’s just like, it felt weird.  

And so, I pushed back on the guy and said, “Wait a second, that’s not what I’m looking for.  I’m looking for maybe something a little and more entry level ‘cause I wanna get to know you guys and check out your content.”  And he laid into me like, “You’re not ready to like…”  It was just weird.  So, I thought that was the end of the relationship.  

Well, there’s two things first of all regarding sales, number one, I’m telling the story right now, and I’m not going to say their name, but there’s still a bad taste in my mouth about this guy, you know.   And then number two, one of his team members followed up with me yesterday.  And so I took the call and I said, “Listen, I really like you guys.  I like a lot of what you’re doing, but this call, the way it went, just wasn’t effective.  And I really feel like this is something you guys could work on.  But it doesn’t mean I don’t want to do business with you.  I would love to find a way to do business with you and here’s specifically what I’m looking for.”  

And here’s the thing, Andrea, he heard it, like, he actually heard it.  And I think that we as people of influence, me as messenger have an opportunity to not just serve our clients but to speak truth into the marketplace.  And that’s what I did in this conversation.  I don’t always get it right.  That’s what I did in this conversation, and it’s on them now to fix that brokenness in their process. 

I used to think that giving feedback or giving suggestions to other businesses was like arrogance or was not my place.   But what I’ve realized is I want somebody to do that for me.  You know, if I send an email, and it’s a little too aggressive or too spammy or whatever, especially with my friends hit reply and say, “Hey, Brian, that email was a little off.”  I’m like, “Oh, thank you so much, like, what can I do to make it better because we all want to improve?”  

So, I think starting with your people means, especially in business, means having this openness to feedback.  Now, you don’t change everything you’re doing just because one person said something, right?  But being able to listen to feedback and being able to give feedback makes it all a better industry.  It makes us better marketers, makes us better messengers, and actually improves the client experience.  

Andrea:  Hmm.  All right, Brian, before we started talking, I asked, or before we started recording, I asked you what’s something that you haven’t gotten to talk about a whole lot but think, you know, you’d like to really be able to address this.  And I am so interested in the next part of our conversation.  What do you mean by outgrowing your upbringing?  

Brian Dixon:  We have a choice.  In 2018, we we’re recording this, you know, wherever you happen to grow up.  This is pretty common knowledge, right?  But wherever you happen to grow up, you don’t have to stay there.  So for me, I grew up in this little town in Manitoba, Canada and I’ve actually visited that town this last summer.  And there are people that went to my elementary school and then went to the same high school I went to and even went to the same college that I went to that are now living in that same town, like they’re still there.   Some of them took over their parents’ business, some of them were working, you know, just got normal jobs.  

And there’s a little bit of this, not judging them, but from my conversations, there’s this mindset of, “If if I try to do something outside of my family upbringing, then I’m going to be judged.” Or actually this one person used this shunned.  “I’m gonna be shunned.”  

And I was like, “First of all, I haven’t heard that word.  Has anyone used that word in hundreds of years?”  

And so it caused me, anytime I hear something like that that applies to somebody else, what I first need to do is check myself and go, “Whoa, how does that apply to me?”  And it caused me to realize that as messengers, as people that are trying to launch a book or trying to start a brand or striving to become a speaker or start a podcast, that we’re changing the rules of the relationship.  We’re going from, you know, go to college, get a job, live your life to trying to do something really public.  And there’s this weirdness in that gap of going from a private person to a public person.

Now, you might even argue in social media in 2019, we’re all kind of public people, you know.  But there is a difference when you get intentional about your social and when you get intentional about your website, you know, when you get intentional about your branding that there will be people in your life that are like, “Who does Andrea thinks she is?  Who does she think she is to start her own podcast?  She’s not an expert.  I went to sixth grade with her.”   And there’s a weird feeling that we have in going through that, especially when somebody in your family says something, which I think we’ve all heard or heard from somebody else.  And I think it’s something we don’t talk about, but it’s so important to process so that we can move forward in boldness and in truth and in grace.  

Andrea:  All right.  So how have you processed to this in your own life, in your own experience?  What does that process look like for you?  

Brian Dixon:  You know, you have to lead with humility and I messed this one up every day, like every day.  But that’s where it starts, you know?  So for example, like really tangible because I’m a visual person, the cover of my book Start with Your People, there’s these like little avatar pictures, these little cartoon pictures on the front.  And the idea was that we start with the people at home and then it moves to our friends and our team.  And then eventually it gets to the larger industry, to the influencers and the people that can really make a difference in your career.   And the first version of the cover was just a bunch of like random drawings, you know, just like they didn’t represent anybody, just this basic idea.  

And as we worked on it, I hired a graphic designer to customize all these avatars.  So, every single person on the cover of my book is a real person.  And I’m looking at the cover right now.  The fifth person is my 93-year-old grandmother.  She’s a little avatar on the cover of my book.  And the reason I’m mentioning this is because like, she knows me, you know, I’m her grandson.  My kids are her great-grandchildren, like she knows me.  She’s my 93-year-old grandmother, and I want to be authentic.  

Here’s the challenge.  We don’t have two lives.  You don’t have an online life and an offline life.  We don’t have a work life and a home life.  We have one life.  We are one person, and the Brian Dixon that launches the book, the Brian Dixon that’s on your podcast right now, like the Brian Dickson that shows up on a Facebook ad is the same Brian Dixon who calls his grandmother, you know.  I want to be the same person.  And that’s where it gets a little weird is when somebody expects you to be, you know, just working in a job and now you’re on social all the time, you know, they see your stuff everywhere.  

So what I learned to do is to lead with humility, which is to say, “Hey guys,” like literally an email and a text message to my family this summer before the book came out in September, so like in July and said “Hey guys, just want to let you know, you’re gonna see a lot of me over the next few months.  So, I just apologize.  You have to know that’s just part of launching a book.  It’s not that I’ve changed.  It’s not that I’m like suddenly full of myself.  It’s just that people don’t pay attention.  They need to hear seven to 10 times that there’s a book before they even realize there’s the book.  And then they have to see it another seven to 10 times before they even know to buy the book.  So you’re going to see a lot of my stuff online.  But I want you to know I’m still Brian, I’m still here.”   And so that was a message I sent to a few people in my life. 

We continue doing things that we would normally do in our life.  So, you know, we host a few families that come over every couple of weeks just to build that social connection.  So just like, what can we do to keep showing up for the people in our life, even when our career accelerates, even when we get really busy?  

And I think that’s the real challenge right there because I’ve seen, Andrea, I’ve seen the inverse. That’s the point, right?  I’ve seen people go from, nobody knows them and they’re attending a conference to now they’re the keynote speaker and they don’t have the time, you know, time in their day to just say hello to you, you know?  And it’s just like so off-putting, and that’s the big challenge is like as we’re growing in our career how do we maintain authenticity and maintain some of those connections and it can be a big challenge.  

Andrea:  When you do maintain those connections, how much of your professional life is discussed or is brought in or whether you’re the one that’s bringing it in or not, you know.  I mean, do you talk about it?  

Brian Dixon:  I had to adjust my expectations and I’ve talked to many friends and colleagues you that really doing well online and we have to adjust their expectations.  Like my dad, I mean, just to get real personal, like my dad is an author and he hasn’t had a big book like my book was a pretty sizable book.  You know, the print, however you measure it, the number of stores it’s in, the number of sales, the advance on the royalties, the number of people on the book launch team, like however you measure it, it was a big book.  He hasn’t had one like that.   And so that gets a little weird.  You know, we both kind of do the same thing.  He writes books and launches books.  I write books and launch books, and now how do we deal with this thing?  And so I think that there’s grace.  I think that there’s being polite, you know, so he’ll ask “How’s it going?”  But I also don’t have to rub it in his face either, you know.  One thing I would just to be totally transparent, I really had to learn that my family is not my audience.  You get what I’m saying?  

Andrea:  Yes!  

Brian Dixon:  My family is not my audience.  And so if I post something online that rubs them the wrong way, first of all, they’re not my audience.  I want to honor them, but they’re not my audience.  But second of all, I’m not writing for them either, so I’m not writing to impress them, but I’m also not writing to slander them.  And that is a weird, weird balance.  You want to talk about that?  

Andrea:  Not writing to impress them, but not writing to slander them either.  What do you mean?  

Brian Dixon:  Yeah.  You know, especially writing a book about people, you know, writing a book about relationships like you want to use examples from your life and no matter what you’ve been through and how long you’ve lived, there’s been positive and negative examples.  You know, it’s really easy to say, look at what these people have done wrong or look at what I’ve done right.  And you want to connect to a reader, but you need to honor the people that are in your life in the way that you do it.  And I’m not saying that I did do it right a 100 percent of the time.  

I think the books are helpful because you have an editorial process, you know, so your editor can work with you.  But especially when you’re posting on social, you know, you’re posting on social and talking about how you had to do this thing that required you to be braver than you normally are.  OK, that’s a great post.  People want to read that post that’s encouraging.  That’s like, “Yeah, way to go.”  Like, “Thanks for posting that.”  

But what I had to realize in the process is when I use this example from my life, the person in my life might be reading that post and have opinions about it, you know. And what I’ve been learning to do, and I again, I don’t do it well all the time, is learning to check in, you know, so the real tangible.  So my wife Julie, before I post something that has anything to do with her, I just say, “Hey, I’m thinking about posting this thing.”  

Actually, you know, this happened just before we got on the call.  I’m going to send a Facebook messenger broadcast to our messenger list for one of our brands and one of my partners in that I want to use a picture of her face in this message.  And I would have just sent it a few years ago because that’s a project over a person just like get the project done.   But what I did today, like again, I don’t do it well all the time, but what I did today is I took a screenshot of the message, the preview message and I sent her a Voxer message over to my business partner, I said, “Hey, are you cool with me sending this?”  I haven’t heard back from her yet. 

So, first of all, I’m like delayed getting this message out, which sucks.  But number two is I know this because we’ve been working together for awhile.  She feels honored by me taking the time to make sure she’s cool so that I can send that message.  Because if I sent it and I didn’t ask her, she’d probably be OK.  But maybe, just maybe there’s a little part of her that would say, “Oh, I wish he asked me,” you know.   And that’s what it means to Start with Your People, it’s just slowing down, checking in, “Harry, cool, if I post this?”  “Are you cool if I tell this story?  Are you cool if I share that detail?”  Because those are the people that matter even more than your audience, even more than your clients is the people at home, the people that you’re closer to.  And we’ve got to do that because it’s so easy to want to over share, you know, and try to build a connection with a real audience, but like burn all the relationships around us.  

Andrea:  You know, I mean, it’s almost like opening a loop without even telling them.  

Brian Dixon:  Yes.  

Andrea:  If you post something or if you’re thinking you’re going to post something or you think you’re going to change something in somebody’s life that’s going to impact somebody else.  And to not close that loop and say, “Hey, by the way, is this okay with you?”  Or “By the way, this is what’s happening.”  It’s being mindful of others and it definitely impacts the way that people perceive how much you respect them.  

Brian Dixon:  You know, the feedback I’ve gotten on this book is like these are all the things I know like I should be doing with people but like I know it but I don’t do it, you know?  And I think that’s a good book, like a good book is a reminder of the things we already believe and maybe some practical examples of like why it matters.  And to start with people to see the value of people in your life, to put people first isn’t rocket science.  It’s not a brand new concept, but it’s so important because that is right there.  That is the difference, and I’m convinced of this, that’s the difference between somebody who’s in this for the long run and somebody who’s there, you know, 18 months and gone.  

You know, I’ve been full time online as a messenger, as a marketing guy for six years now.  There’s not a lot of people I know that started around the same time as me that are still doing it.  And there’s this great book called The Slight Edge and he’s got this graph in the book where basically like “for years you’re at the same level as the people that you like grew up with and then somewhere around your 40’s you start to see this slow divide, you know.  And it grows and grows and grows over time.”   And that happens in industries too, you know, you see all these people that got into their Instagram messaging or you know, whatever TikTok consulting or like whatever the new thing is, and you give it six months, you give it 12 months, you give it 18 months and people start to burn out and they’re not around anymore.  And I don’t want to not be around, you know, I want to be somebody who’s continuing to serve people in 10 years from the future.  

I love Don Miller, you know, the author of StoryBrand, he says, “Peak at 65” and I just love that I’m 41 right now.  Like, imagine if this isn’t my peak, if my peak is in 24 years from now, like how can I show up for Andrea in such a way that you can’t wait to have me back in a year from now and I’m just a recurring guest on your show, right?  And I serve you well and we know each other for the next 24 years.  That’s the kind of way I want to treat people in my industry.  That’s the way I want to treat my team.  And I think that’s what it means to live with people first lifestyle.  

Andrea:  So good.  Brian, what last piece of advice would you like to give the listener on how they can really be a voice of influence?  

Brian Dixon:  I love that.  I love that question.  You know, I was skeptical for years, but I become a big believer in these personality tests.  You know, the one that opened my eyes was the Enneagram, but there’s Enneagram, Strength Finder, Love Languages, the Kolbe Index.  I love the Fascination Advantage.  You know, Sally is fascinating.  

Andrea:  Oh yeah.  We know that one well here.  

Brian Dixon:  You know well.  OK, so me knowing that I’m the Victor, like that’s my archetype that tells me how I show up.  It tells me how I get filled up.  It tells me how I come across to people.  And I think one of the best things that you can do if you want to have influence is to understand and read your own manual, understand how the machine works, you know. 

How do I get when I’m tired?  How do I get when I’m feeling stressed?  What do I do when I’m feeling filled up?  And to recognize the way that I come across the people, like where’s my zone of genius and where do I totally fail?  And knowing that and then being able to surround myself with a team who I’m authentic with, I’m vulnerable with.  

They know me; they know what I’m really good at, like what’s my lane.  But they also know like, “Don’t ever let Brian touch that thing.  You know that one thing.  Let him do this, but don’t let him do that.”  

That’s how I think you have the greatest influence because you’re in your zone or whatever you want to call it, you’re in flow.   And to do that, I believe that right there when you’re living in that sweet spot, that’s where you can make the biggest impact and, here’s the fun part, the biggest income.  So for me, I think strategy and I think about the future and what I’m thinking strategy in the future, our company makes a lot more money.  But when I’m in the details and the minutiae, I’m slowing everybody down.  

So, for you guys to understand, what’s my Enneagram type, what’s my Strength Finder, what’s my Fascination Advantage, Love Language is a big one.  Like how do I hear people when they say “Good job,” that doesn’t mean anything, but then they bring me a gift, I’m like “Oh, that meant the world.”  Like I need to know those things about myself so that I can speak life into other people.  

Andrea:  Awesome!  Coming from a, like a fellow personality test junky, I echo what you just said.  So, Brian, how can people find you and find your book?  

Brian Dixon:  Oh, I love it.  Thanks so much for asking.  Well, the books available on Amazon or wherever you buy books and there’s an audio version.  It’s on Audible.  So the book is called Start with Your People.  And I love you guys to pick it up and then, you know, just let’s be people, right?  Just connect to me as a person.  So I love Instagram.  You can send me a message on Instagram.  I’m Brian J. Dixon on Instagram, but there’s nothing more fun than you hearing this show and then send me a messenger just tell me, “Hey Brian, this is what I got out of it, or here’s a question that I have.  I’d love to continue that conversation with you.  

Andrea:  Awesome!  And if you need any of that, again, we will definitely have that in the show notes on our website.  So Brian, thank you so much for sharing your voice of influence with our listeners.  

Brian Dixon:  Andrea, thanks so much, I appreciate it!

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Creating Emotional Connections with Your Brand with Kerri Konik

Episode 110

Kerri Konik is a leading expert, consultant, and speaker on how to catalyze the emotional bonds between customers, brands, and companies to increase revenue, value retention, and advocacy. Kerri has launched and managed six businesses and is currently the CEO of Inspire Fire, a woman-owned brand marketing advisory firm. She is also the CEO of Equality Communications Group. In this episode, Kerri discusses why she chose her field, the importance of understanding the emotional driver of your customer and what emotions you want them to experience when they use your product or service, the four experience stages she helps her clients create a roadmap for, the value of bringing your potential customers to a state of possibility, the most powerful question she asks her clients, and more!

Mentioned in this episode:

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

Kerri Konik 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 Kerri Konik who is a leading expert in maximizing the ROI of emotional connection and customer experiences.  I’m super excited to talk to Kerri today.  She is a consultant and speaker on how to catalyze the emotional bonds between customers, brands, and companies to increase revenue, value retention, and advocacy.  Kerri has launched and managed six businesses and is currently the CEO of Inspire Fire, a woman-owned brand marketing advisory firm as well as the CEO of Equality Communications Group.

Andrea:  Kerri, it is great to have you here today on the Voice of Influence podcast.

Kerri Konik:  Hello, hello.  Thank you so much.  It’s a pleasure to be with you.

Andrea:  All right.  I love emotional connection.  Love this idea.  Why does this topic of emotional connection?  Why did you choose this topic?  How did you get started here?

Kerri Konik:  Uhh, well, I started working with brands and products, consumer products, and groups back when I was in New York, and I worked with the New York Times and I worked with Campbell Soup and services as well as products.  The most valuable component beyond having an item of value, an item of quality is how people feel about it, which became branding, right?  What is the brand relationship between your customer and your product or your service? And yeah, it does a thing, you know; let’s say you bought a shoe polisher.  Yes, a polisher or shoes.  It’s a quality product.  It does what it’s supposed to do, but the relationship actually lives in how they feel about what you enable them to be able to do because of what you did, if that makes sense. So, I start to notice of the most important piece to a brand or a brand’s growth, and this is true for startup brand or a very small solopreneur type brand is the customer connection.  And that connection is an emotional connection.  Like after it’s all said and done, how did they feel now?  Are they like totally in love with that experience?  Do they refer you?  You know the quote by Maya Angelou, “People won’t remember what you said, but they’ll remember how you made them feel.”

Andrea:  Absolutely.

Kerri Konik:  Yeah, so it’s like, “Yeah, yeah, I got the shoe polish and it was great in it polished my shoes.  But what it did was it enabled me to look awesome on that stage and I felt like one million bucks.  So what it did was it raised my courage and my confidence so I could go full out.”  So that’s an emotional _____ what we call the emotional solution you really provide.

Andrea:  I love that.   It seems like it is not the easiest thing to achieve though.  How do you help or what do you suggest or how do you approach this whole idea when somebody calls you and says, “Kerri, we need help connecting with our customers so that they actually feel like whatever we want them to feel like.”  Or do they even know what they want them to feel like when they contact you?

Kerri Konik:  Usually not.  That’s a great, great question.  And actually it’s really, really easy to unpack and get at it once you know what you’re looking for.  Like if you’re going fishing and you know exactly what fish you’re looking for and how they like to swim and if you know the behavior of the fish. So, what happens when we do get those phone calls where they know that their brand or the experience was transactional and one thing, you know, they bought it and they were satisfied.  It was like, “Yeah, that’s great.”  “Yeah, it was fine.  Thanks.”  But there’s no emotional connection like, “Oh my God, I have to tell my friend Andrea about this.”  There’s no like emotional experience.  

So, one thing I say is there’s always an emotional transaction before there’s a commercial transaction. So, what we do is we _____ with the brand and we get at the core of the brand identity.  And there’s four components to that, so we help them look at in what problem do you solve to your product, to your service, and who’s your audience.  Who do you solve it for, and that’s the most important piece.  And then why do you do what you do and that’s more for the business owner or the brand purpose.  And then we look at the why, which is why do you do that, but we look at the _____ behind it and that really helps fuel the brand. But we look at the emotional solutions like, so what’s possible?  And I just demo that a little bit with you, Andrea, with the shoe shine.  It’s like, “Yeah, I bought shoe polish.”  There’s nothing very emotionally connected about that, right?  It’s transactional.  It’s like “My shoes are scruffy.  I wanna look good on stage.  I have to buy this, you know, $6 item.  

But, oh my God, the packaging was incredible.  The customer service was great.  They helped me match my shoes.  And when I got on that stage, I knew I looked like one million bucks from head to toe and I love Kiwi,” or whatever the brand might be.  And so that love figuring out in the core four of the identity, the who, what is your customer emotionally motivated by? So there are two sides to that, a little bit of education here, right?  So, on the one side is what’s the emotional driver like your customer, you know, what do they want?  How do they want to feel?  They should buy a shoe polish.  I don’t want a shoe polish today, but here we are.  Well, she wants to feel confident.  She wants to feel like she’s buttoned up and looks great, right?  

So, she wants to feel confident, let’s just say.  OK, so that’s her motivator.  Nobody wants to spend 6 bucks on shoe polish if they don’t have to.  Nobody wants braces either, you know. So, when you get clear about the driver then when you craft the sales experience, the purchase experience, the product unboxing experience, that I just kind of mentioned, and it’s lovely.  Or it is in alignment with her or his or their emotional driver and you satisfy that driver, you design the moment what we call the touch point in that experience of buying shoe polish where you design what is the emotional goal of that moment.

And so if you know who he, she, or they are and what they’re after and it’s pretty true across the board why anybody would buy a shoe polish, that’s actually a good example for today.  And then when you actually deliver personality or experience or messaging that then resonates and aligns to that, so you’re creating an emotional connection moment that they receive and now there’s a bond and there’s an emotional reaction and an emoting. So, this is where you’re going to say, “Oh my gosh.”  You couldn’t see it, but once you see it, you can’t unsee it.  We’re humans, right?  We’re human beings and we’re actually programmed.  

We’re emotional beings.  We respond emotionally, first and foremost every time, from the moment we were pre-verbal, inside the womb, inside being a baby, we didn’t have words.  We didn’t have language.  We had emotion.  So we’re hardwired for this. And so once we work with our clients and we work with small businesses and growing businesses, but once we figured out, OK, who are they, what’s the emotional driver and then let’s architect experience to create experiences with the right emotion at the right time then the customer is like in love.  They’re so loyal, they’re “Oh my gosh, I would never go anywhere else.”  We all have these experiences and I can give you a couple of questions and like boom, I could get you emoting about your favorite brands.

Andrea:  Love it.  OK, so let’s go back to this example that you’re using with a shoe polish and confidence.  So, if in general that is what the customer’s wanting, they’re wanting to feel confident, but you’re saying that there are different touch points at which there might be different emotions that you’re trying to evoke.  What other different emotions you might be touching on when the overall emotion is confidence?

Kerri Konik:  Uhh, great!  OK, so the confidence is what they want for why they’re buying or shopping the category of shoe polish anyway, right?  So, they have an event.  Usually, there’s a reason they’re buying it, right?  Their shoes are scruffy.  Their boots are scruffy.  They have an event.  I used the example of being on a stage.  So, maybe someone, and we can shift genders here, maybe he is going for his big job interview up in New York City and he’s taking a train and everything like just came out of MBA or just came out of undergrad, right? Everything’s riding on this moment, right?  Think of that anticipation.  

Think about the emotions involved with, “Huh, this has to go right.  I’m gonna do everything I can.  I’m gonna iron my shirt.  I’m gonna polish my shoes.  I’m gonna press my jacket.  I’m gonna dry clean.”  So, if you know who the audience is, why would you buy a shoe polish or all these scenarios, but it’s because you want to be spiffy.  You don’t want to be scruffy.  And so confidence might be one and that’s a really nice broad emotional goal, right? So, that’s the shopping experience.  That’s the overall arch, like why would anybody buy that?  I’d rather buy an ice cream sundae.  Nobody wants to spend 6 bucks or 10 bucks on shoe polish.  

So, the question of backing up when you’re a brand and you are a manufacturer of the best shoe polish in the world and when we look at the emotional connection, there are different emotions because they’re not ready to buy when they first find out about you. So, we actually help our clients create a roadmap, you know, you’ve heard the term, the customer journey, where we do emotional customer journeys.  We do an ECX roadmap where we start a stage of marketing and we go into the sales process, because they’re not a customer yet, and I’ll walk you through slower.  And then the delivery, what’s it like to get it, to buy it, to use it.  You know, “What if I’ve never done it before?  Are you gonna send me videos of how to do it well from doing it myself?”  

And then the loyalty of what we call the retention stage. So the four stages we help with; we look at marketing, sales experience, the delivery experience, and then the loyalty or retention experience.  So, for example, I have this big gig in New York City.  I have a big important meeting, my shoes, I pull them out, “Oh my gosh, they’re scruffy.  I need shoe polish.”  So, maybe I’ll take to Google, right?  Or I’ll ask my friend, “Hey, where do you buy shoe Polish?”  So you’re going to ask and then they become aware of you. And so the marketing stage is they don’t know about you before.  They didn’t need you before, now they need you.  

So, now they become aware.  The different emotions of that journey where if you look at the marketing, if they Google and they find your website or they find your product in Target or they find your product on Amazon, they just became aware you can’t sell them confidence.  And we’re not going to look directly at confidence; we create the atmosphere of confidence but they’re not there yet.

Andrea:  Can you hold on just a second, because you just said you do not talk directly about confidence, you create the atmosphere of confidence.  I just want to pause on that for just a second because I think that’s a really an important thing for people to hear.

Kerri Konik:  If it’s OK to switch metaphors, I have a really great example.

Andrea:  Go for it.

Kerri Konik:  All right and we do this all the time.  You have a great keen ear, Andrea, for that because when you’re playing with somebody’s emotions, you don’t go straight at the emotions, especially if it’s a pain point.  And the reality is it’s always a pain point because we’re trying to solve a problem when we’re buying something.  So, you have scruffy shoes.  So, we wouldn’t say if we went head on and we went after the shame that would be a bad idea.

Andrea:  Right.

Kerri Konik:  So, we said, “Are your shoes scruffy?  That’s not very confident, is it?”  What you’re doing is you’re shaming, right?  We don’t go after the confidence straight.  The other example I’m going to give you is we’ve worked with professional organizing brands before where people who hire a professional organizer have kind of lost control of the calm and organization and the peace in their home. And that can be anywhere in the continuum of being just a little bit messy because let’s say their in-law has moved in and their lives have been disrupted or they have toddlers or they added a dog. 

That’s one level of being disorganized or having to like reevaluate flow in your home all the way across the continuum to someone who might be a hoarder, right? Well, you wouldn’t go right after somebody who is embarrassed to have anybody come over to their home, doesn’t have dinner parties anymore, doesn’t go out, or doesn’t invite anybody in because they don’t want anybody to see the state of chaos in their home.  So, you wouldn’t go right after that shame.  What you would do instead is create an atmosphere or you would normalize the problem and say, “We all get disorganized.”  This is really sort of an advance, I’m sorry to go there.

Andrea:  No, I think this is great.

Kerri Konik:  OK.  So, and I have a more severe example as well in which everybody can relate to, but you wouldn’t say “Hi, are you embarrassed?  Are you ashamed of the state of your house?”  So, you wouldn’t do that because someone’s going to run for the hills, right?  They’re not going to resonate and they’re not going to feel OK and they’re certainly not going to invite you in to help.  But if you say, “Hey, all of us have times when our house gets beyond us, we can help.”

Andrea:  Yes!

Kerri Konik:  So, you’re talking to the shame, you’re talking to that part of human being who feels really embarrassed, you’re talking to it, but you’re not adding fire or gasoline to the issue.  You’re adding calm and relaxation and you’re normalizing the problem.  And a more obvious place, let’s say somebody was on a bridge and look like they might want to jump.  If you were going to try to help that person, you wouldn’t say, “Are you going to jump?”  Say “Hey, hey, what’s going on?  Come here, talk to me.  Come here, come here.”  Like you would kind of try to talk them off the ledge.

Andrea:  Yeah.

Kerri Konik:  That’s what we do emotionally at different stages of the connection between two people or two parties, in this case, the brand and the consumer.

Andrea:  Yes.  This is really, really good and it’s really, really important, especially in light of what we’ve tried to accomplish at Voice of Influence.  When people want to have influence, they should not be speaking directly to the shame to make it worse.  But they should be speaking to the shame to calm it down to say, “This happens to everybody, it’s OK,” kind of helping them.

I mean, I think everybody who’s listening right now can feel how, you know, the difference between the tension that you feel when somebody calls you out on something that’s bad versus saying, “OK, look, we all go through this.  This is hard for everybody.  I totally understand and here’s a way out.”  I mean there is so much more.  It’s such an easier path.  Like you said, when people feel better, they feel more emotionally connected to you because you’ve made them feel good like you said.

Kerri Konik:  Yeah.  Like I said, it’s human nature, right?  Now that we’ve planned that out, it’s like, “Oh, it’s OK, I get it.  I’ve been there too,” if that’s true.  But it’s like, “Yeah, no worries.  Hey, we help people with this.  It’s a temporary situation, so we’ll fix it.”

Andrea:  Exactly.  Yes, yes not catastrophizing it.

Kerri Konik:  Yeah.

Andrea:  Not making it like you are this bad person or you are the person who always has scruffy shoes.

Kerri Konik:  So, now that we’ve handled that one, the piece about the marketing, when they first discover you, they try literally tripped onto your brand, your website, or your product and they know nothing about you.  So, what needs to happen is there needs to be a little bit of, they’re not even curious or interested quite yet.  So, the messaging and the connection goal is maybe moving them into a state of curiosity or a state of possibility.

Andrea:   Possibility, I love that.

Kerri Konik:  Yeah and then moving them into being inspired or excited by buying shoe polish and then you can be like be your confidence self, right?  You see this on advertising, a 30 second spot every day, every day.  It can be done very quickly, but it’s the right emotional goal at the right time.  But the overarching, you know, nobody needs or wants to spend money in that category.  And that’s true for most of the stuff we buy, actually.  It’s what we want from the thing we’re buying.

Andrea:  Oh yeah, absolutely that was so powerful.  You just shared so much that applies absolutely directly to the customer experience, but also to our experience of life with people.  So that’s fantastic.  Why do you care about this topic?

Kerri Konik:  Uhh.  Well, I’m really, really most passionate.  I mean, we can brand or we can do marketing and emotional CX for anything, but I’ve chosen to help small businesses in particular.  I used to be a chief creative officer for food, drug, cosmetic, luxury brands, and worked with some of the most emotional icon brands you would all know and aspire to have in your home or in your closet.  But that doesn’t really change the world for me. So, when we were working with, you know, really huge iconic brands that are amazing, that doesn’t really change the world or make progress in the world and we can move the needle, we can sell more volume, but where my heart, my passion, and my purpose lives is leveling the playing field for business owners, right?  

So people who have the courage to set out on their own and do something that they’re looking to accomplish. So, I shifted and bring all my chief creative officer knowledge from big agency strategies and packaged it up and bring it to the smaller underdog, if you will.  And the reason is because I want to level the playing field between the small business owner competing with the really giant marketer.  Let’s say you did shoe and shoe polish and you’re going up against Nike, right?  That’s like a David and Goliath thing. So, I’m not always for the underdog.  But what I’m for is leveling the playing field, so small business owners can not only survive but grow and make the positive impact in the world that they came into make through their business.  That’s my why.

Andrea:  Yeah.  I love that.  So when you’re going through and helping people or helping brands to be able to kind of identify what their why is, or maybe they already know what their why is, how does that connect to the way that you helped them with the customer experience?

Kerri Konik:  I just had a conversation yesterday with a really fast growing brand in the southern hemisphere.  And they’re growing so fast and as you know, at the end of the day, you have to evolve your brand message, your marketing because your purpose needs to be obvious.  And that entrepreneur, the owner said, “Well, my purpose is crystal clear.  This is what it is.”  And I’m like, “Great that you know but the world doesn’t know that, it’s not in your brand messaging.” And so chances are, if a brand has started and they’ve got some sea legs and proof of concept is there and they’re surviving, the purpose is now known.  But it’s not in their appearance.  

So let’s take a big brand like Apple or Virgin Records, right? You can name the founder of both of those organizations and you can then pretty quickly dial right into what they stand for, right?  So what does Steve stands for?  What is Richard stands for? That’s the purpose that as the brand grows, it doesn’t become like the core messaging of like trying to sell the sneakers or sell the iPod or sell the computer.  But it becomes what you stand for and what you’re about and the possibility that you’re creating.  

With Steve, it was about changing the way people relate to each other through technology.  And for Richard, it’s in his book the cover, “Screw it, Let’s do it.”  It’s about empowering going for it and creating something that never existed before.  The pure meaning of creativity, which is creating something that doesn’t exist yet. So, that purpose fuels the brand.  And you know, Apple is 45 years old, and I don’t know how old Richard when he started, about 40 years old also, right?  So that why becomes bigger than the entrepreneur, it becomes the vision of the brand.  So, one of the most powerful questions we ask a brand, and we just put this on Instagram yesterday, is “What are you trying to accomplish?  You know, what would you like to accomplish through your company?”  Which cuts right to the core of the heart and soul of purpose?  “I want to create a lot of computers.”  “Why?”  “So that people everywhere have a voice and can express themselves, you know.”  Boom!

And then as a brand becomes more and more successful, they talk less about product marketing, product promotion, and they talk more about brand marketing.  That’s what we really specialize in is elevating the brand, not necessarily the product.  So, we don’t do product marketing.  We don’t do, you know, the latest sneakers, the latest jeans, or fashion apparel, we elevate the brand.  And not the brand story and storytelling, but more about the brand’s purpose and how it changes you and your life.  That’s how brands grow, really.

Andrea:  Hmm, love it.  OK, Kerri, so how do you work or what are some things that you offer?  I know that you’ve got a podcast that you’re launching.  Tell me a little bit about where people can find you and how they can work with you.

Kerri Konik: Oh, thanks.  Well, Inspire Fire is the name of our core brand and we are launching a podcast hopefully in Q4, yes, yes, yes and it’s going to be about customer experience.  It’s really going to be about inspiring fire and emotional connection that ROI.  What does that mean?  How do you do it specifically for small brands so that they can grow and change more lives, make a greater impact, whether it’s just for your own family, your community, or changing the world, you know, however broad or your ripple effect is. So Inspire Fire, you can Google us.  You’ll find us on Instagram and our websites inspirefire.com and I’m on all of the social platforms as well.  And we love talking to small business owners who are really looking to leverage that big, big, big throttle called emotional connection so that they can like propel their brand forward farther, farther, faster we say.

Andrea:  And you mentioned before we started recording that you even have some, it’s not just a matter of we need to do this really big consulting with you, but you’ve also got for small brands, you have something for them to, is that right?

Kerri Konik:  Yeah, definitely.  The big shift from moving from big iconic brands with huge budgets to small brands with modest budgets is we productize, packaged up our services in what we call Lego modules.  And the two we talked about earlier what I mentioned to you is called Calibrate, which is a CX customer journey auditing discovery, strategic initiative that’s really affordable to any small business including a startup.  Although there’s nothing to look at it with a startup, right?  Not yet. And the other service we do is we architect that Resonance Roadmap where it’s a strategic engagement, but really looking at what is the experience end to end. 

And then we can help them with system.  They identify systems and processes and automation and digital tools that they need to build.  We don’t build those, but we identify those and then we reconstruct or add touch points into what they’re currently doing to really advance the emotional connection.  And you know, pricing, it’s not expensive stuff.  It’s just adding a moment that’s meaningful and memorable into key stages. So, we always add a stage in the shift between marketing and sales.  Because what happens is your prospect or your visitor, their identity changes with you.  Your relationship changes in every stage, so we help you look at them.  In the Resonance Roadmap, when there’s just a browser, they’re just checking out and they shift into being a prospect.  

That’s a different relationship.  And what can you do?  What should you do there?  And then in the delivery, they’ve become a customer.  It’s a brand new relationship, right?  They decided to marry you or get engaged at least and that needs to be memorialized through meaningful moments.  So that’s also a service that even the small businesses can afford to invest in. We’re doing several of these right now and if the brand is up and running, we highly recommend that people do this because it changes who they hire or don’t hire.  It puts in systems.  It puts in technology, what my friend Paul Sokol calls the Digital Plumbing. 

So those services are really affordable.  So it’s not branding.  And people say, “Well, I know you’re a brand expert.  You know, we don’t want to change our brand.  We just want to grow our company.”  That’s what I’m talking about. The other thing, we also really fix is we laser fix the messaging in the marketing state so that positioning statement lands emotionally.  It makes sense to the target audience, phone rings.  That is always upside down.  We literally flip people’s messaging literally upside down.  We focus on making it customer centric and not you, not what we call narcissistic.  It’s never about you in all of the communications throughout the entire journey.  But how do you say what you’re trying to say in a way that’s about them? So we have a messaging offer as well called the Messaging Matrix where we solve for nine distinct verbal marketing messaging assets, and boom, they run with it and they grow more and then they come back and we’ll do some more things with them. 

We try to make really our services are strangely affordable and it’s because like I get it. You know, I’ve started six businesses, and investing in your own brand growth is expensive.  You don’t have a line item for that usually, not yet, you need to.  We make it affordable and we make it modular so you can _____ then you get the ROI.  You know, you sell one or two client engagements, boom, that’s paid for, now let’s do the next one. I just had a meeting before talking to you, Andrea, where they said, “OK, that’s nice to have.  You know what we have to do now and we’ll come back and get that in Q1.”  I’m like “Perfect.”  So you know, we can make it bite-sized or we can take on three-year engagement also.

Andrea:  That sounds awesome.  OK, so you’ve just shared so much with our audience.  I’m so grateful.  Thank you so much, Kerri.  But I’m going to ask you one more thing.  If you could leave this Voice of Influence audience with one tip to help them to grow their voice of influence, what would you say?

Kerri Konik:  Getting crystal clear, clarity on who you serve.  Who’s your client, it’s not everybody.  I know you could probably do something for everybody, like let’s say you work with women.  That’s a really way too big.  Getting clear on exactly what kind of person, what kind of woman or man, who do you work with?  What problem do you solve for them?  Once you know who they are then identifying what drives them emotionally. And we have tried actually, I don’t know if you want to offer this to your group.  There was a great article in HBR that talked about the 10 emotional motivator drivers and I’d be happy to make that available to you, Andrea, and you could share it with your folks.

Andrea:  Sure.

Kerri Konik:  But once we know that, you have a lot more insight to grow, because once you’re clear, “Oh, OK, and I sell shoe polish to anybody who has scruffy shoes and wants more confidence.”  Boom, that alone, that alone would change and move the needle in sales if you knew that and started messaging and marketing around that, around what you say and who you say it to.  And I’m talking psychographically, demographically, where you put that message, where you don’t put that message, who your customer is not, “Come on, stop marketing, stop wasting money,” doing that sort of thing. So that kind of clarity and then you identify their emotional driver and then you look at your own experience and you can architect like what’s it like to call us, what’s it like to buy their thing from us?  What’s the sales process look like?  Do they come through a register and give you a $10 piece of cash and you give them a thing in a bag and say, buy, you know, what is going on?  And then what should go on, right?  And then change it, just little steps. 

If the devil is in the details, the profit and the gold mine is in the… Every detail sends a signal.  If you think it doesn’t matter, you’re killing your brand or you’re killing your sales, everything matters.  And you can consciously decide not to handle something, I get it.  But everything does send a signal because we are sponges, we are emotionally connected and we’re taking in and creating meaning out of everything. That’s a whole other conversation about what happens with the messages that are going into the brain of your client, but they’re noticing everything, not necessarily consciously.  But if you just change one or two things, and every time you get a moment, up-level the next little thing, you’ll see your sales go up.  You can add a zero to your revenue, guaranteed.  It’s what we do every day.  It’s amazing.  That’s what I love to do.

Andrea:  Awesome!  Thank you so much, Kerri!  Thank you for sharing your voice of influence with our listeners.

Kerri Konik: Thank you.  Thanks for having me.

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Find Joy in Choosing to Miss Out with Tonya Dalton

Episode 109

Tonya Dalton is a productivity expert, speaker, the author of The Joy of Missing Out, and the CEO and Founder of Inkwell Press; a company that’s centered around productivity tools and training. She has been featured in Real Simple, Entrepreneur INC., Apartment Therapy, and several other places.

In this episode, Tonya shares how she came up with the perspective and title for her book, why she refers to herself as a “recovering perfectionist” and how she accomplished that, the difference between actually wanting something and only wanting it because you think you’re supposed to, the importance of finding a balance between doing something well and letting perfection stop you from moving forward, her advice for making decisions with your ultimate mission for your business in mind, the negative impacts of overwhelm, why she wants you to throw away your to-do list, the main thing she wants people to understand after reading her book, and more!

Mentioned in this episode:

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

Tonya Dalton 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 Tonya Dalton.  She is the CEO and founder of inkWELL Press and the author of; get this, The Joy of Missing Out.  I’m so excited to talk with her about her book today.  Tonya is a productivity expert, writer, speaker, and as we previously mentioned, the founder of inkWELL Press.  It’s a company that centered around productivity tools and training.  She has been featured on Real Simple, Entrepreneur, Inc., Apartment Therapy, and bunch of other places.

 

Andrea:  So, excited to talk with you, Tonya, about your book today, The Joy of Missing Out.

Tonya Dalton:  I am excited to be here.  I can’t wait.

Andrea:  So first of all, I want to start with the title because it is such a great reframe of that familiar FOMO kind of a feeling that people have all of the time.  We’re always worried about missing out on things.  And at the very beginning of your book you define it as JOMO.  I love that.  And you say “It is about intentionally choosing to live in the present moment by embracing open spaces of unrushed time.”  Tell me about how you first of all came up with The Joy of Missing out as the title of your book and why you think it matters to people?  Why this reframe?

Tonya Dalton:  Well, I think you’re so right when you say so many people have this fear of missing out, and I feel like I see again and again where people are overwhelmed.  They’re stretching themselves so incredibly thin because every single time that opportunity knocks, they feel like “I got to answer that door,” right?  “Opportunity only knocks once, so I got to answer it.”

And so, here they are opening that door again and again and again not even necessarily the things that are meaningful to them or things that feel good.  We just opened that door to opportunity because we think we’re supposed to and we fear missing out that if we let this go by that it’s never going to come back again.

And so, really, for me as an entrepreneur, as a mom, as a wife, as a CEO, and as a former perfectionist; I like to call myself a recovering perfectionist because it is something I struggle with as well, I found myself in that same situation where I was saying yes to too many things.  I was not really actively choosing how I spent my days because I was in this fear of missing out.  So, when I really started to reframe my life and make it so I was living more intentionally, both in my business and in my personal space, I found that I was so much happier.

I was doing less, but I was feeling so much happier.  And I was actually achieving more because I was able to give my time, my energy, and my focus to these fewer tasks that were more meaningful and were really more important driving me closer to that North Star.  And so when it was time to name this book, I was thinking about, you know, we obviously went through a lot of different titles and what could this be called.  I thought about playing on that word overwhelmed because I hear that so much from so many people.

But really when it came down to it and I thought about it, it really is about the joy of missing out.  That when we think of our ideal day, when we daydream while we’re in the shower or we’re standing in line at Starbucks waiting for our coffee, we think about this ideal day and there’s a lot of amazing things in it.  But there’s also some key things that are missing, stress, overwhelm, feeling stretched too thin, saying yes out of obligation and guilt instead of saying yes out of, you know, happiness and excitement.

So, to me, there is joy in those missing pieces, in those things being gone.  So, let’s really structure our life so we can actively choose to miss out and then focus our life on what we really want to do and what’s truly important to us.

Andrea:  Oh, I love that.  One of the tools that you use is this idea of, is it clear, is that what it’s called?

Tonya Dalton:  Yes, the clear framework?

Andrea:  The clear framework.  I mean, it’s connected to your North Star, linked to a goal, having been essential, advantageous and reality-based.  And I’ll let the listener actually read your books to find out most of that.  But I lived the last one, in particular I wanted to pull this out, you talked about asking yourself if it’s really reality-based and you say on page 98, “Oftentimes we feel something is important because we believe it’s something we are supposed to do even if it’s not something we really want.”

Tonya Dalton:  Yes.

Andrea:  That is so true.  OK, why do we do this?  Why do we think that we are supposed to want things?

Tonya Dalton:  Well, I think there’s this whole obligation.  If you pay attention and you look around you and you check out the social media, it feels like everybody’s doing it all and doing it extraordinarily well, right?  I mean that #allthethings that’s on a lot of posts and then we see this glorification of busy.

You know, I’ve seen posters and bags and I’ve seen notebooks that say “I am very busy.”  Like, that’s a badge of honor, because I feel that when we are not busy, we somehow worry that we are failing, that we’re not doing enough, that we should be filling our days running from things to things.

And so in order to do that, we just cram our day full without really paying attention to what we really truly want to do.  So, we have all of this, you know, pressure from society and from these stories that we tell ourselves.  You know, a lot of us have these stories about what a good mom always does.  A good is always there when her kids get off the bus or a good boss always stays later than their team.  A good entrepreneur never stops working.

So, it’s these ideas that are so unrealistic, but they become this truth to us.  There are these stories that we tell ourselves that often are not really stepped in our own values, but things that other people have kind of pushed onto us.  And because of this, we lean into a lot of our perfectionism tendencies.  And that’s what I question, is this reality based comes in because when that clear framework is designed to help you really discern whether something is important or unimportant.

Because that line becomes really blurred and it’s easy when it’s black or white, you know, good or bad.  It’s harder when it’s good, better and best, when that area becomes gray.  So, this question of is it reality based is really are you telling yourself a story that you are supposed to do this even though it’s not really tied to the life you want?

I feel like we go through life and we see these pictures and these images in magazines and on Pinterest.  And we scroll through Facebook and we see these people with these exquisitely designed desks, you know, and these office spaces and we think, “Oh my gosh, I cannot start a podcast until I have this beautiful space to do my podcast because that’s what everybody else has.”  I’m going to be honest with you, those people who have those pictures of those beautiful spaces probably cleared out a lot of stuff.

Andrea:  They definitely are not looking at me right now in my husband’s closet.

Tonya Dalton:  Well, you know, I have a podcast with over a million downloads and I still record it in my closet.  You know why, because _____ are so good and it’s readily available.

Andrea:  Exactly.

Tonya Dalton:  So, yeah, it’s not Instagram worthy but it is working and that’s really what’s important.  So, the reality I could tell myself is “Oh, I can’t podcast because I don’t have this beautiful space or I don’t have like a studio or having a studio,” when really I just drag a table and a chair and I go down in my closet just like you do.  And you’re able to create something amazing because you didn’t wait, because you didn’t get caught up in that story of what you were supposed to have it look like or what we really want in life when really what you really wanted was to have a podcast.

Andrea:  Absolutely.

Tonya Dalton:  You know it’s not about the fancy office; it’s really about what are we creating and putting forth into the world.

Andrea:  I think that that you’ve brought up another really important point that’s almost like an extension of this idea of what do you really want, and that is that we put things in between ourselves and what we really want in the pursuit of perfection, in the pursuit of doing it really well.  There are times when we need to be careful.  I’ve noticed, I was just listening this week and I tweeted something out, I was like, “There are a lot of podcasts out there put together by people who are selling really high end programs who don’t edit their podcasts and it just absolutely drives me crazy.”

Tonya Dalton:  Yeah.

Andrea:  So, there is a sense of like “But we need to do what we’re doing well.”  Where do you see the harmony or the balance of wanting to make sure that we actually, you know, pursue the goal and actually execute on it versus putting something in between ourselves and that whole idea of not doing it well enough?  Where should we find our balance there?

Tonya Dalton:  Right.  You know, I’m not going to start to, “I have to have it perfect.”  Where is that middle ground of where it’s good enough, yeah?  I love this question because you’re right, I mean, yes, it’s OK to do the podcast in your closet but take the time and the care to really edit it.  And I think probably what ends up happening for a lot of these people who are not really editing their podcasts is there’s not that care behind it.

To me, taking the time to edit your podcast presented in a way that’s professional that represents you and your brand that shows a lot of meaning.  It shows a lot of thoughts and intention behind it.  And I think that’s where we really need to draw the line is what is your intention with whatever it is you’re putting forth.  If your intention that it’d be absolutely positively flawless, because if that’s your intention, I’m sorry, but that’s not going to happen because perfection does not exist.

So, we don’t want to get stymied by this idea that it has to be perfect, but what’s in that middle ground?  What’s really acceptable?  And to me, all of this comes down to this idea of your North Star, which we talked about in the first section of the book, but it’s essentially your mission, your vision, and your core values.  So, everything that I do, everything that I present, everything; whether it’s writing a book or a course or it’s a podcast or whatever it is, does this work with my North Star?  I use that as my filter.

And so, if it really does filter through this North Star, if it’s why I do what I do, which is my mission, where I want to go with my business, which is my vision and how I want to get there, which is one of my core values, that’s really what helps me make those decisions.  So, for example, one of the parts of the North Star for the inkWELL Press brand is our core value is excellence.  That I’m not going to put something out there unless I feel like this is a benefit to my customers and it’s presented in a way that’ll be meaningful to them.

So, perfection is not one of my core values.  Having things to be absolutely, you know, flawless or with no mistakes.  That’s not really part of my brand because there needs to be an element of authenticity there that we are humans and it’s OK to show some softer sides of ourselves.  But two, because everything is filtered through your North Star, you’re not trying to do so much that you don’t have time to edit the podcast.

If you want to do a podcast, do the best podcast you can.  That doesn’t mean being perfect but what’s the best vision of what that could look like for you and sit down and map that out.  Does it mean that you have to have, you know, some fancy editor editing your podcast?  Probably not.  You can use GarageBand on your Mac and edit your podcast.  It doesn’t take a lot of work to really, you know, take the time to Google up a couple of, you know, YouTube videos on how to edit your podcast.  So again, if it’s meaningful, you’re going to do it right.  And I think that’s really where this comes into play this idea of whether you want it to be perfect or just start finding that middle ground of what’s acceptable for you and your North Star.

Andrea:   Mission, vision, values, this North Star, this is something that we don’t necessarily call it North Star but we talk about this a lot.  And so, I am so curious when you talk about actually applying it, how does this work when you are making decisions?  Do you have it like put up someplace on some board on your wall and you go to that and say, OK, does that fit this, this and this?  Or is it just now ingrained in your head?  Or how do you recommend that people who are really just starting out trying to make sure that everything fits their North Star?  How do you recommend that they do this, like what is the practical application of that?

Tonya Dalton:  Yes, so what I would say is when you’re first starting with your North Star to write it out because you want to put it in a place where it becomes really easy to integrate into your everyday life.  Now, what you know, one of the things that’s really key I think with your mission and your vision statement especially is that they’re short.  They should be concise.  They should be kind of to the point.  You don’t want these long fancy words that don’t really have any meaning.  You want that to be meaningful to you.

So, really making sure that it’s concise and short enough that you could memorize it so that when an opportunity comes up you can say, “OK does this really fit why I do what I do?”  Your mission statement, “Does this really fit what I’m wanting our company to do?”  Then you look at the vision of “Is this going to get me closer to my vision of where we need to go?”  So, having that written out to start really does help because you can actually literally ask yourself the question that’s written out on the page.

You know, for example, the inkWELL Press North Star is to provide productivity tools and trainings that empower you to achieve your goals and dreams.  So, when an opportunity comes up, I ask myself, “Is this really going to help people empower them to get closer to their goals?”  If this is not going to get them closer to their goals and this is just in some way to elevate myself or something that’s, you know, extra then that doesn’t really fit that mission statement.  So, you just turn it around and make it work for you.  But eventually that mission statement, that vision statement of your core values become just so internalized that those questions become a little more natural.

But here’s the thing that I think is important too is those things are always evolving.  Your mission statement that you had two years ago may not apply now.  So, I think it’s really important to make sure that you are revisiting that mission and the vision and the core values to see if it really does still fit with where you want to go and how you want to get there.

Andrea:  OK, I totally agree, re-evaluating is so important; question though, what about the person who is saying to themselves “Yeah, but this would still really help people.”  They see something that would be good for them to do and even though it doesn’t quite fit the mission, it still would really help people and I feel this obligation to help people.  What do you say to them?

Tonya Dalton:  Well, here’s where we get into that thing with opportunity knocking, “Oh but this would somehow be good because of…”  We can always make up excuses why something is good.  Here’s what I would say to you, every time you say yes to an opportunity, to a project, to a task, you are saying no to something else.

Andrea:  Bingo!

Tonya Dalton:  So, yes, this opportunity that comes up that may help other people, but could I help people better if I was not spending my time on this and instead spending it on what is truly part of my mission, my vision, and my core values.  So, really thinking that through every time you say yes you’re saying no to something else.  Take that time to really pour your time, energy, and focus into that North Star because that’s really when you will help people the most.

Andrea:  I think that it’s really a muscle that people have to kind of build up because it’s often people who are really creative and caring who have the hardest time with this, like they want to do so many things.  They want to help in so many ways and it’s hard for them to recognize that; wait a second, I need to stop for a second and ask that question that you just, you know, presented which would help people more.  And it’s a hard question to ask.  It’s a hard question to answer, but it’s so important and I’m really glad that you are helping people with that.

Again, I encourage people to get the book to be able to really help themselves think through these things.

All right, let’s shift gears just slightly.  So on page 111, I want to go to that as well.  You talked about overwhelm and you kind of give this example from a Stanford University study.  Can you tell us a little bit about that and how overwhelm really affects us?

Tonya Dalton:  Well, you know that feeling when you get to the end of your day and it’s time to eat dinner and you think, “All right, what do we want for dinner?”  And then you can’t think of a single thing.

Andrea:  Oh yes!

Tonya Dalton:  You can’t even think of a single restaurant or anything that you make out of the pantry.  Like there’s just no thought in your mind and you feel just literally brain dead.  That feeling is a reality.  That’s a real feeling.  It’s actually called decision fatigue.  And what happens is our brain is burning all of its calories, making all these little minute decisions in our day.

You see, our brain is literally 2% of our body and yet it burns 20% of our calories every single day.  Your brain is this calorie burning machine.  So, every time we make a decision, whether it’s a big decision or a small decision, we’re burning calories.

So, when you get to the end of the day, when you’ve made all these like little minute decisions where you’re spreading yourself really thin, making all these choices instead of using habits and routines and automations to your advantage, we end up burning through all those calories.  And your brain is like, “Nope, I’m done.  I’m not making any more decisions.”  And it quite frankly can’t.  This is why, you know, even though we’ve eaten healthy all day, we’ll eat that cookie that’s been sitting in the break room for two days at the end of the day, right?

Or when we’ve gone on a shopping trip why we would buy three pairs of shoes at the very end of the shopping trip instead of at the beginning because we’ve ran out of calories for our brain to make decisions.  And this is when that feeling of overwhelm really does start to settle in over us because we cannot make good choices if we’re spending our day all day on lots of menial things, on lots of things that are insignificant.

We really want to focus our brainpower on those big things, on the goals, on the passion project, on the things that do drive you towards that North Star.  And there’s so many great ways to do that.  And we walked through that in the book through habits and routines and automations and different processes that you can do so that those things happen seamlessly without a lot of thinking.  I like to say you can bring home the bacon and fry it up in a pan, but if the kitchen is burning down around you, it does you no good.

So, we want to make sure all those things are still happening in the background.  You know, laundry still needs to happen, bills need to be paid.  You need to do, you know, yard work.  You need to, you know, make sure you call your mom.  All those things need to still happen, but we don’t want to spend all of our brain energy and all of our calories on that.  We really want to spend our brain focus on the things that are most important.

So, that’s really where this study comes in where you know, these researchers found that when people had to memorize a number and they had two groups, one had a two digit number and the other group had, I think it was a seven digit number, after they had to memorize that number, they walked down the hall and they were offered a snack.  The people who had the two digit number most often chose the healthy snack.

The people with seven digits, only five numbers more that they have to memorize yet they shows the unhealthy snack like I think it was, you know, a piece of cake or something like that.  They chose the unhealthy snack more often because their brain was tired of making decisions.  It was too busy thinking about these numbers, these seven digits, it ran out of calories.  Even something as small as that really they can make a difference in how your brain works.  That’s why we want to do less and that way we achieve more.  When we focus on fewer things, more important things, we really can achieve bigger things in the long run.

Andrea:  Love it.  OK, what about when someone is kind of prioritized a project, they know that it’s important.  They’ve decided that it’s more important than a lot of the immediate things around them, but they continuously do not execute on that project.

Tonya Dalton:  Uh-hmm yes.

Andrea:  What is getting in the way?

Tonya Dalton:  I would tell you honestly, my first thought would be, it’s probably the to-do-list because I think you have to throw away that to-do-list.  A to-do-list really just takes you everywhere but where you truly want to go.  So, what I really encourage people to do is not to make it to-do-list, but instead make a priority list.

Because what happens is when we have a long list of things that need to happen, even if you know that task is important and it’s just there on that to do list, you know, amongst going to the grocery store or running to Target, you know, picking up the flea medication for the dog and everything else, it gets lost there.  And we will naturally go for the easiest win because our brain loves dopamine.  We get a little dopamine hit every time we scratch a line through something on our to-do-list.  And your brain doesn’t care whether it’s a big task, an important task, or a small task.

So, our brain naturally navigates towards “Hey, let’s get that flea medication for the dog” instead of working on the presentation that really will drive you forward.  So, when we make a priority list, we start with our list at the top and we work our way down based on priority, based on whether something is important, whether it’s urgent and we work our way down.  And again, we go through that whole system of how a priority list works.  But the best part to me is a priority list takes the exact same amount of time as a to-do-list.  It’s just a to-do-list with intention.

So, when you start your day at the top and you work your way down that to-do-lists or down that priority list going from top priority down to your lowest priority, that’s when you make sure that you make time for those big things that truly are important.  It’s no longer a jumbled mess of, you know, unorganized tasks that are written on a sheet of paper.  It’s now organized and intentional making sure that you carve out time for those things that do matter the most.

Andrea:  If your readers could make one shift in their lives from reading your book, what shift do you hope that they make?

Tonya Dalton:  I want them to understand that they have choices.  You know, a lot of times we believe that we don’t have ownership over our calendar.  The number of times that people say to me, “Oh, I wish I could do that, but I just don’t own my day.”  Or “Oh, I’ve got an overbearing boss and they take over my calendar.”  I want to remind people that you do have choices and we talk about choices throughout the entire book.

Truly choices are what helps us discern and stop being busy and move towards being productive.  Understanding that even in situations where you don’t think you have a choice, there are still choices there.  But we just have to dig for them.  We have to use what I call squirrel strategy to approach it at different angles and try to, you know, think outside the box to make this happen, but we have choices.  We just have learned helplessness that tells us that we don’t.

Andrea:  Oh yes.

Tonya Dalton:  So, we go into that quite a bit in the book, but when you understand that you have choices and how you spend your day and where you focus your time and your energy, that’s when opportunities, the true opportunity to move towards that North Star.  That’s when that begins to open up and that’s really when you can step into that greatness that you really want in your life and what you deserve in your life.

We all deserve to end our days feeling happy, feeling satisfied, feeling successful, and far too many people right now because we don’t feel like we have ownership because we’re running around trying to check a thousand things off our list, slip into bed at night and think “I didn’t get enough done.  Why didn’t I work harder?  Why did I do this?  Why did I do that?”  And we don’t feel satisfied.  That’s what I want most for people is to finish their days and to really feel like, “You know what, today felt good and there is a lot to be said for feeling good, feeling happy,” and being productive really does make that happen.

Andrea:  That is a incredibly empowering and I think we have a voice of influence and you have a lot of synergy here because we really want to see people realizing their own agency in their lives and being able to realize that they have choices like you’re talking about is such a huge piece of that.  And so, I am sincerely grateful that you took time to come be on our podcast and share this message with our listeners and I hope that they get your books.  So, tell us about how they can get your book.

Tonya Dalton:  Yes.  So, if you go to joyofmissingout.com, there’s information about where you can buy.  It’s available really anywhere that books are sold.  And then really if they’d purchase before October 1st, I have some really amazing pre-bonuses including a discover your North Star course, which is a $247 value which you get for purchasing the book before October 1st and you can redeem that at joyofmissingout.com.

But we dive deep into how do you decide what your mission is.  Well, how do you decide what your purpose is and your passion and your priorities and we get into that.  We peel back the layers of the onion and dive into who you truly are.

So, I’m really excited about that preorder bonus because I think that’s one of the things that people really struggle with is who am I and what do I really want out of this life?  So, that is one of the preorder bonuses, but you can get the book at any time at joyofmissingout.com.  Get on Amazon or Barnes & Noble or Target.  But joyofmissingout.com is the best place to get all the information.

Andrea:  And if they want to learn more from you from your podcast, what’s your podcast called again?

Tonya Dalton:  Productivity Paradox.  You can find information on me at tonyadalton.com, so Tonya with an O and a Y.

Andrea:  All right.  Thank you so much again for sharing your voice of influence with our listeners, Tonya.

Tonya Dalton:  Thank you so much for having me.

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Creating Memorable Experiences with Manuel Christoffel of Woom Bikes

Episode 108

Manuel Christoffel is the (Interim) Chief Customer Officer at Woom Bikes where he manages marketing in customer service for all North America.  Prior to joining Woom, Manuel has held global cross-functional customer success, program, marketing and brand strategy roles at ADP, Dell, American Express, Bazaarvoice, Hearsay Social, and his own consultancy business.

In this episode, Manuel explains what he means when he says huis declared goal is to deliver the best possible internal and external customer experience by combining EQ with IQ while cutting the red tape, the importance of realizing that the one purchasing your product isn’t always your true customer, why he believes there’s no such thing as “finding the right person” for your customer service team, why he doesn’t have penalties for team members who make mistakes, how he helps his CEO share their voice of influence, and more!

Mentioned in this episode:

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

Manuel Christoffel 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 Manuel Christoffel from Woom Bikes USA.  He is the (Interim) Chief Customer Officer at Woom Bikes, managing marketing in customer service for all of North America.  Prior to joining Woom, Manuel has held global cross-functional customer success, program, marketing and brand strategy roles at ADP, Dell, American Express, Bazaarvoice, Hearsay Social, and his own consultancy business.

His declared goal is to deliver the best possible internal and external customer experience by combining EQ with IQ while cutting the red tape.  Now, we discussed ahead of time Manuel.  I gave you a fair warning.  I would like to know what in the world you mean by that.  Please, please do tell us.  Thank you for being here.

Manuel Christoffel:  Well, of course, thank you for having me, Andrea.  And yes, you did warn me with one minute heads up but as you said, I wrote it.  So what do I mean by that?  Really, to me there’s a difference.  IQ to me does not necessarily mean that you went to an Ivy League school and they gave you a 4.0 GPA.  It doesn’t mean people who go to an Ivy League and have a 4.0 are not highly intelligent.

But to me what comes down to is where’s your passion and are you intelligent about articulating that passion or pursuing that passion.  Then taking the EQ to it where it’s not just about you and how you get the most out of this passion, but how do you really bond with your customers, whether internal or external, and how do you really make it a win-win along the way, right?

So, for us at Woom, I’ve basically and I’m the third iteration of our team here for customer service.  I believe this is the winning team; phenomenal people, very driven, very passionate people, which is challenging for me because I come in and I’m just a little grumpy.  I have a 4 year old and a 4 month old, so I’m not getting sleep.  And my head of customer service, Sherry is just there.  I’m not kidding you; she’s dancing at 8 o’clock in the morning with biggest smile ever and she’s like 20 miles one way to work before I even get there, right?

So, super, super passionate that will be done with the customer service team.  I deliberately hired a mix of parents and non-parents and bike people, non bike people because to me it’s very important.

Andrea:  Interesting.

Manuel Christoffel:  I don’t want a bike specialist.  My ultimate customer or consumer is a child.  The people buying our product are parents; at least most of them are not hardcore cyclists.  They might be bike enthusiasts.  They might enjoy family bike rides.

Andrea:  Can you just say that again?

Manuel Christoffel:  I apologize.  Yeah, what I was saying is a lot of our parents are, you know, they’re bike enthusiasts but they’re not hardcore cyclists, right?  I live in Austin.  Obviously, Lance Armstrong is here.  There’s a lot of people that are a very hardcore, you know, race bike community, triathlon community, mountain bike community.  So, we have all that.

But then there’s all these other parents, the normal people, and normal parents like myself that say “I have certain fond memories of my childhood riding a bike.”  Falling on my face a couple of times until I learned is not one of them.  But you know, all said and done, they were certain bonding moments with your parents when you achieved this monumental feet of balancing and propelling yourself forward.  So bringing that passion to our brand is phenomenal.

And that’s why I said I don’t want, you know, semi-professional athletes only on my customer service team.  I want people who are parents who have gone through some of these anxieties finding the right size, finding the right weight, even the right color, because the color makes a difference.  You can buy the best, the nicest bike if it’s not the color the child wants _____.  So there are all these aspects.

And so for me, it’s very important that I have an ecosystem of mutually, and I say, complimentary traits and skill sets and personalities.  You know, when you start realizing, this is a very emotional purchase or there’s some anxiety around some inquiries around the bike, “Are they more technical in nature?”  “Hey, maybe you should talk to my colleague.”  “Are they, you know, more emotional in nature?”  “You know what; you should talk to my colleague.  He has three children.”

He literally started working here.  He harassed us so much that I had to hire him you know.  He’s phenomenal because almost every question we get in that regard he will say, “Well, you know, when I faced this decision, here’s what I thought about this.  Here’s my decision making process.  Does this sound anything like yours?”  And you know, you have this bond that you can’t script it.  You can’t pre anticipate of what is somebody going to ask and how do you, you know, maybe soothe this anxiety.

How do you justify the purchase price of our bikes, which in all fairness are not, you know, the most affordable in the market?  They’re a little bit in the upscale side of things, but at the same time, what we hear time and time again from everybody across the board, our bikes are designed for children.  They do make a difference.

The reason your 6-year-old girl does not really know how to brake is not because she’s not coordinated.  She may not be able to reach the brake lever because she has a kid’s bike but these all shrunken down parts from a grownup bike.  They’re not custom designed for a child’s hand at that age, right?

So, some of these attention to details that we put into bikes that ultimately turn people from, let’s say, potentially curious about the product in what they’ve heard into people that will take to social media and share their experiences that will send us pictures, videos, testimonials, you know, and triggered saying, “This is so phenomenal.”  “We’re so happy.”  “Thank you so much for putting the smile on our child’s face.”  “Thank you so much for this experience.”  And that, you know, it’s just a validation of what we’re doing and how we’re doing it is the right thing.

Andrea:  Hmm.  So, you mentioned that you get a variety of people who participate on your customer service team and that they readily refer each other for different causes or different problems that come up.  I love that.  How do you start the process where they begin to get to know each other well enough to know that this is the person that should handle this call or talk to this person about this particular problem?  How do you develop that atmosphere besides, you know, finding the right people, like what’s the other process when it comes to getting to know each other?

Manuel Christoffel:  Oh, absolutely.  I mean, there is no such thing as finding the right person, right?  You find somebody that I would say fits the mold about 80% and then 20% is you hope for the best, you pray for the best.  And at the same time, you also hope that this person will take to your atmosphere, your style of management, and your company philosophy, right?  And if all this works out, it’s great.

For us, when I started this entire team, it pretty much came on at the same time.  I made it very clear, “Look, here’s X amount of _____ discretionary budget that you have to make a customer whole.”  I do not want to nickel and dime somebody if a bell breaks or you know, if maybe a grip gets worn or whatever.  If they take the time to call us, let us give them a new one, right?”  And our people feel empowered doing that.  And on the flip side, internally, what I keep preaching is essentially I want us to be reflective, not reflexive.

And by really hearing what a customer is saying, and this is something that’s very hard, our founder here, you know, Mathias, will tell you, he’s been in customer service.  He’s meant the phones and he has a deep appreciation for what our people do because he self-admitted he said, “I can’t do it anymore because three seconds in, I know exactly what their problem is.  But I also know they will talk for another two minutes and obviously it’s rude to not hear them out.”

So, just listening factually what are they saying and how are they saying it?  The more rational person will say, “OK, rationally, I can answer this, but I’m sensing there’s some emotional triggers in this.  There’s some anxiety about this.”  And then it’s all about probing questions.  So, we role play a little bit, but much of what we do, even after a call, you know, see they were transferred or end it, it’s the, “Hey, I heard you say this and that.  Can you tell me more about this?”

It’s not necessarily that we police each other, but I want to foster this level of curiosity the way I hear something that “Hmm, I would’ve maybe said something different.  Why did you do it this way?”  “Oh,” because you know, you only hear the customer service side of things in the office.  You don’t hear what the customer’s saying.  And like, “Oh, OK, I understand.  I’ve been through three bikes and weight is the most important feature.”  Not necessarily the custom designed handles, not a different feature that we’re very proud of.  It might really be the weight.

So, the entire conversation is around the weight or lack thereof with our product and our bike.  And as we kind of have this, our knowledge base expands, and we have huddles every week where we say, “OK what was the best and the worst call you’ve had this week and why?”

Andrea:  Love it.

Manuel Christoffel:  So, this is sort of what we kind of, I don’t want to say we celebrate our losses because now we have some escalations, we have some unhappy customers.  We cannot make all of them happy.  And at times we feel it’s our fault, absolutely.  But in kind of talking about that, what I see that the point we’re getting to is the team self regulates.  I rarely have to step in and say, “Well, maybe you should try this or you should try this.”  Because everybody feels comfortable enough to sort of admit their mistakes.  They know I’m not going to, you know, publicly demean them or not really a penalty for making a mistake.  My big ask is let’s learn from them and more importantly, do you now understand how this mistake came about?

Andrea:  OK that is really, really important.  I’m not sure how long have you been at Woom and was that already the way that it was?

Manuel Christoffel:  So, I’ve been consulting to the CEO for about three and a half years and I’ve been here full time for this year.  On the philosophy piece, it definitely always has been that way, but you know, we are essentially still as someone in startup mode.  You know, a four and a half year old company started in a garage and moved to the third office, if we count the garage as an office, you know, in Austin growing nicely.

But it is very challenging because our CEO, a collegiate athlete, very, very passionate about the bike, about the product but really more, I’m going to say, from the bike geek point of view.  So his passion doesn’t necessarily translates.  So has the passion always existed?  Absolutely; and our CEO will be the first person that will tell you, “If I’m not been passionate, I can only plead insanity as to why we are still here and why I didn’t give up along the way.”  Because there’s definitely been some moments where you’re new to a market, you’re more expensive, nobody knows your brand and it’s difficult.

So, no matter how passionate you are about it, kind of seeing that basically your baby not being appreciated for what it is or being misunderstood, you know, it’s going to be very challenging.  So, the passion has always been there.  My job sort of is to say, “OK, how do we translate this?”  Very similar to, you know, _____.

When I joined Amex early in 2007, I was a very hardcore visa credit card user.  And I did not understand why people would pay for a charge card, because in my mind, the message that Amex had at a time was very much, “If you can’t afford this fee, maybe you just don’t make enough money.”  That was my perception of the company because their brand messaging, their value messaging was not tailored to a personality like mine.

And going in and having some opportunity to speak with some marketing leaders and getting some feedback, they’ve heard some of that.  But we’ve also gotten better as a company just educating and supporting our customers in understanding the value around some of these products.

So, fast forward, what I’ve seen is, it’s not about trying to hit your CEO over the head and saying you’re doing everything wrong, it’s about what matters and what is getting lost in translation and how do we add these pieces back in in a way that it resonates not just with the bicycle community.

And they are very passionate and they’re incredibly supportive.  They spread the word.  We would not be where we are without the bicycle community, no doubt.  But you know, there are also other parents out there who don’t know the single pieces of a bike and why it matters that this is manufactured one way on machine the different way.

So, how do I translate this into a broad set of audience in a way where you understand there’s passion and there’s pride but you don’t feel necessarily like you walk into this high-end boutique and the salesperson will just never leave your aside.  I don’t want that impression either.  I want you to be able to form your own opinion.  That is why we have the up-cycle program where you can return your bike when you buy a bigger one, or you’re a part of our up-cycle membership basically you get 40% of the initial purchase price credited towards the new purchase, the bigger bike that you’re buying.

It’s something where we say, “We do appreciate your initial purchase.  We do understand we’re a little bit more expensive than some of these other brands out there.  And we want to give you an incentive to stay with us.  You know, we do want to acknowledge that that is why we rarely ever ask how did something break.”

But of course, if somebody you know, bought a bike a day ago and says this thing is totaled,” we will ask and say “You ran over it with your truck.  I’m sorry.  There’s not much I can do.  I may send you a shirt just to cheer you up, absolutely but I can’t send you a new bike.”  But generally, _____, like what does this mean functionally?  This means, you know, we’re not going to nickel and dime our customers.  This means now we will really hear them out and if we need to transfer them, not because we’re tired of them, but because we sense that somebody else can support them in a more meaningful way.

Andrea:  OK, so you have so much here that we can dive into and I have some questions based on what you were just talking about because there’s so much here.  And one of the things that came up here kind of more towards the end of what you were saying was that you really help the CEO kind of apply and act on their vision as it applies to customer service.

Manuel Christoffel:  Right.

Andrea:  Our company is called Voice of Influence, the podcast that we’re on right now is called Voice of Influence and what you said was that, you know, there are times when you have to be a voice of influence with the CEO in order to help them to translate their vision into something that’s going to make a difference for the customer.  So, do you have any specific ideas about what is one of the best ways to communicate that to the CEO themselves?

Manuel Christoffel:  It really depends on the personality of the CEO and the relationship that you’re able to establish and the authority that you kind of bring to the table.  In my case, the company is extremely fortunate; our CEO does not have what I call “founder syndrome.”  He does not have an ego.  You could be an intern on your first day and literally radically change an aspect of the business just by asking one question because it just doesn’t make sense to you.  In some companies I’ve worked at, you would have probably been scolded for even daring to speak up on day one, let alone talk to the CEO.

Andrea:  Right, right.  So people have a voice?

Manuel Christoffel:  People have a voice, and because he’s always sort of known that it takes a village to build a brand, right?  And it takes a community to grow a brand and really, you know, become a brand even in the first place.  So, for him, it’s all about how do all these individual pieces, all these things he wants to accomplish, how do we kind of prioritize them?  And also, you know, we’re growing quite a bit.

So, we get inundated or he gets inundated with so many increases, so many proposals, so many suggestions, so many tools, and so many partnerships.  I’ll say “OK, let’s ignore all that for a second, either you will read through all this tonight or I will do this or somebody else will do it.  What matters to you?  What are we doing this quarter or this year?  Or what’s the single biggest thing you just wish we could change?  Then let’s see who can help us on this journey whether that’s internally like hiring the right people, growing the right people.”

It’s important to me that when somebody comes and works at this company, especially on my teams, since I have the most influence over them, that they are more marketable and more knowledgeable than they were before they came to us.  Obviously, I don’t want people to leave, but I understand, you know, opportunities are out there and some people, you know, may just want to move to a different city.  They want to live by the beach.  So, I never want to stop anybody, but I will make sure that we’ve also made your career more noteworthy and meaningful while you were here.

Andrea:  So that’s connected to your purpose, it sounds like.  You feel that you can make a difference in their lives and so that’s something that’s going to come out in the way that you lead.

Manuel Christoffel:  Definitely, I do feel that way, but I have almost unlimited patience and support in pursuing that from our CEO because he does it for you.

Andrea:  Yes.  That is awesome.

Manuel Christoffel:  He understands.  You know, as I said he’s a very intelligent person.  He’s a very accomplished person.  He understands that not everybody is here for the same reason he is here, but it’s his baby.  It’s his company, right?  So he can’t expect it.  So what he’s saying is how can we make this meaningful and at the same time, how can we make this, for lack of better term, how we can make this as a partnership.  It’s not an employment.

There are two or three very, very hard rules that I pursue.  Aside from that, and these are predominantly related to like, you know, HR and just don’t do silly things.  Let’s be PC here, right?  But aside from that, you can revamp on almost everything.  If there is potential, there’s promise.  And we do not want to be that boss that hindered your career, that CEO that just did not even give you a voice.

We want to be, at times, that people that kind of save you from yourself internally.  I’ve had that in my career many times when a boss said, “You know, I know you’re really angry, just go take a walk.  Don’t say what you want to say right now, just go take a walk.”  And it takes some time to realize you just saved me from myself.

Andrea:  Yes.  That’s awesome.

Manuel Christoffel:  So, I kind of want to be that and, you know, some people are very receptive to this, obviously others are not.  But what’s just really important for us, we know if we jive, we’ll work well together.  We support each other, you know, no matter really what that takes.  Our customer service team, at times, comes and helps build bikes.  At times, some of our technicians on the up-cycle program come and help mend the phone lines if we have incredible demand.

And there is not really like this, “Oh, I have to go out there and it’s kind of warm and I have to build the bike” and “Uh, I just really want to answer phones.”  It’s the “OK, maybe there’s a suboptimal,” if they even think that.  But it’s much more, “Hey, you know, let’s just get this going what needs to happen.  What do we need to do?”

So that’s what I look for in people.  I don’t want people who want a job.  I’m looking for people that want a career.  I think that’s already a big distinction.  And then I very much ask them, “Hey, look, what can I expect from you and what are some things I should look out for?”  And some of that stuff I’m hearing, at times, I have heard of people that we have hired, I didn’t love so much, but you got to appreciate the honesty.

Andrea:  Yeah, they admitted it.

Manuel Christoffel:  Exactly.  You’d have to admit it.  I mean, you know, I know right before a job interview, “I’m gonna Google this company.  I’m gonna Google all the answers.  I’m gonna go at Glassdoor.  I’m gonna know how I’m gonna be 85% perfect in all my answers.”  So, somebody really breaking script and being honest, like this is a phenomenal starting point because that means I can be honest with you and you’re going to tell me whether this resonates or not.

Andrea:  And…

Manuel Christoffel:  Sorry, go ahead.

Andrea:  No, I apologize.  Keep going.

Manuel Christoffel:  No, no, by all means.

Andrea:  Well, I was just going to say, and they’re not going to feel shame.  You have created a culture where it’s not about shame.  There’s not this penalty for making mistakes, like you mentioned before, and so people can more freely share their voice.  They can more freely be authentic and make mistakes but go for it more too.

Manuel Christoffel:  Absolutely.  You’ll pursue your passion and if you work something, you know, this is an ongoing thing that we’re still working on, at times, especially when you go in like chat on social media.  When you get into like, you know, comments you want to respond, you try to be somewhat brief.  You don’t want to write a book because, you know, people will just not read a book but you do want to address the comment.  So, as you kind of track it that down, at times we some, I want to say, less fortunate phrasings and whatnot.

So, I know, we’ve come across and like “hey” and usually it’s like, “Oh, that last thing.  Yeah, I was struggling with this too.  I really wanted to say this but you know, we’re trying to keep this below X amount of lines, so that’s why I chose this.”  “You know what, make it two lines longer.  It’s OK, it’s just really is the better thing.”  But we’re getting into such a groove to where it’s not this, “Oh my God, you’re just tearing me down and I can’t do anything perfectly.”

We’re almost in sync already but we’re still kind of, you know, feeling each other out a little bit.  Where is that perfect balance of what you said, keep it below X sentences.  I’m trying to do that.  In my mind though, it would have taken another sentence or two.  So we’re compromising, “You know what, use what I’m saying as a guideline.”  It means don’t triple the amount of sentences, but if in doubt, if it’s between potentially unfortunate phrasing or really saying what you want to say, say what you really want to say.

Andrea:  Hmm that’s really empowering for them too.

Manuel Christoffel:  Honestly, it helps me because it helps me understand how they take what they are good at.  Some people, on our customer service team, are phenomenal with local customers and walk ins.  They’re passionate about it.  They really love it and others say rightfully.  We know you have a local sales department, but I really was helping our people predominantly under phone or email, like more traditional customer service supports type of role.

So, “OK, where are our personalities?”  What do you prefer doing?”  I want everybody to be well versed, but it doesn’t mean we can’t try to specialize down a little bit and say, “OK, do we have the bandwidth for, you know, my person who really loves talking with customers and interact with children and share his story about his children and all these other things?”  Yeah.  If in doubt, I want that person.  I want him to speak to our customers.  I want him to spend some time with them.  And even if they don’t buy a bike, he’s just had a really good time at work giving thoughts about what he’s passionate about, sharing things about his family life, and about his children in our customers. 

Even if they don’t buy anything, you know.  Again, they don’t have this boutique experience, they’ll come in “What bike do you want?  What size?  What’s your credit card?  Oh, you want to try, what do you mean you undecided?  Why?  You didn’t do your research?”  And that’s the experience that some customers have with some other brands, or you know, just generally when it comes to that type of purchase.

So, we really want to make sure that we do a very good job educating our customers upfront, sharing some of the pride and the passion that we have and being really empathetic and listening to their needs and then kind of making that decision, “OK, you very clearly know your way around bikes and you have a concern about this and that.”  We may not even have the right person in customer service, “You know what I have a bike technician that you would really love talking to.  Do you mind holding, either you mind holding for a minute or can he call you back within the next five minutes?”

Andrea:  That’s got to be like really impactful.

Manuel Christoffel:  It makes a difference and this was, you know, my philosophy.  I personally would rather exchange 15 emails than pick up the phone once and call customer service.  So then the worst thing you can do to me is put me on hold for 10 minutes.  So, if you tell me I’m going to call you back within 10 minutes and you call me back into three, by default, there’s almost nothing you can do to upset me at this point.

Andrea:  Right?  And _____ somebody else and you’re like breaking scripts I can tell.  You’re breaking script with the customer.

Manuel Christoffel:  It’s the red tape, right?  We’re a call center; rep just does not have the authority.  I mean they may want to say, “You know what, Pete over there knows so much more about the ins and outs of your fiber line, but unfortunately I can either transfer you to a supervisor if you really want to escalate or you have to hang up and call back.”  So, a lot of people in his industry, in customer service don’t have the freedom to kind of say, you know, “May I please transfer you to one of my peers who can help you a lot more.”  Or you know, “Hey, you seems really, really unhappy.”  And then you got up, “Hey, look, this person is really unhappy.  I honestly think they wanna feel heard, you have a good title; if you want to talk to them.”  And, you know, it tends to work.

Again, we can’t make everybody happy.  We make mistakes, we learn from them, myself included.  But to me, what’s important fundamentally is the attitude and really just reiterating, “It’s OK to not be perfect, but let’s be honest along the way.”  That to me is important and when we hear, “Hey look, now there’s still some more red tape, or I still don’t have this.  I don’t have this.”  “Hey, we don’t really know what’s going on in the company.”  Our CEO went to the extreme, he set up 15 minute one-on-one every single month with every employee at his company.

And I can tell you, he doesn’t really have all that much free time.  He said “If they really don’t know, I could do a town hall, but guess what, some people can’t make it.  Some people are stuck on the phone.  I will talk to every single person and we’re gonna do this, you know, every month.”  For the time being, _____ because it’s not sustainable, right?  But it’s the “You’ve spoken, I’ve heard you.”  It’s not that “Well, let’s send it to an assistant who then tries to schedule a calendar.”  And “Who are you, you have been here two months and you want to FaceTime with the boss?”

Now, we have all this in companies that are a lot smaller than us.  And you know, we’re not all that big word, you know, on a good day we’re 50 people in the US.  So, it’s not that we’re all that big, but I’ve been at smaller companies and you just did not get FaceTime with, you know, you skip-level, let alone the CEO.  So that to me is just very important that really everybody here feels like they have a voice and more importantly they have an opinion, we hear it.

Sometimes it’s, you know, this would be perfect.  I have a wish list of tools and infrastructure and people for that matter, “Hey, if I do my job right in three to four years, I’m gonna get all of that.  For the time being, well, here’s why you can’t have it, but this is what you can have.  What can you do with this?”  And that to me, again, is more powerful than just saying no.

Andrea:  Yeah. Wow, that’s really, really great.  I love this.  I love that you and your company are focused so much on helping people to have a voice and utilizing their voice to really make your company better and make your customer service better.  And that is a clearly making a difference in the way that your customers experience your brand, so congratulations on that because that’s a huge feat.

Manuel Christoffel:  Thank you. I appreciate that.

Andrea:  So, Manuel, if people are interested in Woom Bikes or interested in you at all, where should they connect with you or could they?

Manuel Christoffel:  Well, absolutely.  I mean, you know, I’m a really, really big fan of LinkedIn, although I will say, I sadly do not know every single person in my LinkedIn profile.  But you know, that’s Manuel Christoffel on LinkedIn.  My Twitter is a little bit harder because that’s manuel_c, apparently there’s another manuel_c out there.

Andrea:  We will link to those on the show notes so that people can find you.  Go ahead.

Manuel Christoffel:  No, thank you.  But, absolutely, I mean it’s been a phenomenal journey.  It’s a great company.  I love talking to people.  I like learning from people because what we’re seeing, you know, a lot of the best bits of, you know, I’m going to say food for thought we’ve received from some people, not necessarily in the marketing industry or the customer service industry or even the bike industry.  It’s just people who, you know, have lived a life who say, “Well, you know, when I have to scale something or when I had this problem or when I manage people, here’s kind of what I do.”

Those kinds of tips that’s what I’m saying networking is so incredibly underrated.  A lot of people only network when they need a new job or they need a reference or an introduction or something.  To me, it’s kind of like you kind of pay it forward its service leadership and the networking space in a sense, because one of these days you hope karma is a real thing and somebody else will return the favor.  But for the time being at the very least, let me meet some interesting people.  And even if we have some opposing views or, you know, tell me really why you think everything we do is so fundamentally wrong.

I’m not saying I’m going to convince you, but at the very least it’s going to potentially help me maybe reevaluate some of the things we do and say maybe we should fine tune this because we will grow and we might hit this particular problem down the road, how can we kind of preempt?  And that that to me is very important.

And networking is great.  Meeting new people is phenomenal, you know, going to conferences kind of speaking, hearing opposing views.  And hopefully, in the process getting some more people to come visit the website, take a look at our bikes and become part of our journey.

Andrea:  Hmm.  That’s great.  Well, thank you so much Manuel.  Thank you for sharing your voice of influence with our listeners.

Manuel Christoffel:  Thank you, Andrea.  I look forward to seeing you in Chicago.

Andrea:  Yes!

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Guiding a Team to Take Your Customer’s Perspective with Tim Bay

Episode 107

Tim Bay is the Head of Digital Marketing at Fellowes Brands where he is responsible for building comprehensive strategies and programs to drive greater brand awareness, increased engagement, and profitable growth via digital channels. Before joining Fellowes, Tim had accumulated 20+ years of B2C and B2B digital marketing leadership experiences in roles such as Vice President of Digital Marketing at Wilton Brands and Co-Founder of Shay Digital, an internet marketing consultancy where he developed and executed online strategies for a wide breadth of organizations. In this episode, Tim discusses what he does in his current role, the common challenges he sees between digital marketing agencies and their clients, the balance between automation and utilizing actual people, the role empathy plays in how you market to your consumers, how to integrate empathy in all aspects of your business, and more!

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Tim Bay 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 Tim Bay.  Tim is currently Head of Digital Marketing at Fellowes Brands, which he’ll explain in a minute, where he is responsible for building comprehensive strategies and programs to drive greater brand awareness, increased engagement and profitable growth via digital channels. Before joining Fellowes, he had accumulated 20+ years of B2C and B2B digital marketing leadership experiences in roles such as vice president of Digital Marketing at Wilton Brands and co-founder of Shay Digital, an internet marketing consultancy where he developed and executed online strategies for a wide breadth of organizations, Gatorade, Ty, etc.

Andrea:  So, Tim, we’re thrilled to have you here today on the Voice of Influence podcast.

Tim Bay:  I’m excited to be here.  Thank you.

Andrea:  Well, Tim is also speaking at a conference that I’m also speaking at the end of September, the Digital Experience Summit in Chicago.  So, Tim, let’s start with what do you do as head of digital marketing at Fellowes Brands?

Tim Bay:  So, I would say at the highest level, it’s looking at how we can leverage digi-channels.  That could be website.  It could be social.  It could be email to achieve our business objectives.  You know, these objectives are how do we enhance brand awareness, how do we drive product awareness, and ultimately how do we convert to sales?  So, that’s sort of from the business side. You know, thinking about it from a consumer first perspective is what can we do to help people along their journey?  And we sell products, everything from shredders to storage boxes, to sit stand desks, to chairs, or to laminators.  How can we help people find what they want to find?  How can we make it easiest for them to get what they need, to get when they want to get it, and how they want to get it?

Andrea:  Great!  So, when it comes to digital marketing, you know, you being the head of it, how did you get to that point, like what was sort of the journey that you’ve taken because you mentioned in your bio that you also had a consultancy for awhile?  So, we were talking beforehand that it was really interesting that you have been on both sides of agency and client in terms of, you know, this relationship between agency and clients.  So, I guess I’m just wondering what has been that path for you?

Tim Bay:  So, I actually started out when I was an undergraduate as finance major and accounting minor, and I thought I was going to be a stock analyst or stock researcher at some point.  I went back to get my masters and I took my first marketing class for my masters and just fell in love with marketing.  And then what led me to digital was I think a little bit of the right brain and left brain and the ability to get the immediate feedback and analyze, you know, what’s working, what’s not working given that sort of real time feedback in terms of what we can do to be more effective. And then from a digital marketing perspective, you know, as you mentioned over the course of my career, I have been on both the client side and the agency side.  And largely that depends on where I saw some great opportunities and the ability to learn.  And so I like having been on both sides because I think it made me better on the agency side to be able to empathize with the plight of the client and to understand what it’s like to work in an organization.  And sometimes there are challenges that you face. And then on the client side, understanding sort of how agencies work and how I can be a better partner from my client perspective, but also understand a little bit of the nuances of agency and helping me in terms of the clients I get the most out of that relationship.  I can always feel like, you know, the best relationship, the best partnership is one where it’s mutually beneficial.  So, I do feel like being on both sides sort of gives a perspective that allows you to get not only more out of it from your side, but also help be a better partner.

Andrea:  Do you think that there are any common mistakes that you’ve noticed, maybe you’ve helped mitigate them so that they don’t happen that when it comes to that relationship between client and agency, when they’re trying to figure out plans and execute plans and all that sort of thing, have you noticed any particular mistakes that kind of pop up quite frequently?

Tim Bay:  Yeah.  I think the biggest challenge from the client side is believing that you can just offload strategy to an agency and the fact it’s the best relationships and I feel like this from the agency side as well.  The best relationships are our partnership and you have to give the right amount of time, you have to be fully vested, you have to be transparent.  The more information, the more time that you can spend with your agency, the better ultimately they will be able to be. And I think the other thing too is, and this goes from both sides, is really being honest about what you need in a relationship and what you need in a partnership and what success looks like.  Because I think too often you get a few months in and you just realize that things are operating as effectively as you’d like and that comes back sometimes to expectations in terms of how much time, from the agency perspective, they have to spend to manage the account, some of the challenges they might be facing in terms of gaining information or deadlines or things like that. And so I think, you know, going in understanding what is needed from both sides and being committed to doing that and having those conversations up front really helps.

Andrea:  So, making sure that the relationship is structured in a way that is going to allow for the time and the energy that needs to be spent in order to establish your goals and get everything in place before you even begin so that you can keep referring back to it?

Tim Bay:  Exactly, exactly.  And I think part of it too is, you know, you mentioned strategy.  Another challenge is if I as the brand can’t communicate a strategy, I can’t expect my agency to actually execute against that strategy effectively.  And I think sometimes recognizing that there needs to be some work done first from a strategy perspective before you can engage in agency and in a very effective way.  And again, that goes back to just really understanding what you need to do from your perspective to partner successfully with an agency.

Andrea:  OK, so at the conference we’re talking about managing and optimizing digital customer experience to drive greater loyalty and profit, and one of the things that I feel like is super important in the managing and optimizing of the experience is the digital piece of, you know, automation and that sort of thing, but then also the people side of things.  So, for you, when you’re working at Fellowes or when you’ve worked with other clients in the past, how much energy and effort goes into each side of that equation, the people side versus the automated side?

Tim Bay:  I still think the greatest asset that any organization can have is its people.  As much as I get excited as a marketer about things like Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence, you know, there’s nothing that replaces a great team of people.  And that’s not just from a customer service perspective but it’s also from sort of thinking proactively about how to create that best customer journey.  You have to think about the customer first.  You have to be proactive in terms of understanding what is it they want and meet their needs before you can sort of, you know, get them to give you what you want in a way. And so, I think the technology has to work hand in hand with people.  I don’t think you can certainly, not anytime soon, I imagine a situation where you feel like whatever technology solution you have is going to be as effective in a lot of areas as just our ability to communicate, interact, engage, and strategically think through issues. Now, there are things that obviously technology can do better than us as humans, right?  Things like, you know, quick computing and things like, I think personalization.  But at the end of the day, you know, I think people want to feel from a customer service perspective, people want to feel like there’s somebody there on the other end that is helping them out and listen to them and understand the nuances of human language. And I think on the forefront it’s being able to, you know, people want to feel like that experience that we’re providing to them via a website, for example, was created with an understanding of what their challenges are.  And that is something that, right now, the best way to do that is with really creative and smart people.

Andrea:  Hmm.  So, when it comes to giving them a good experience from the outset and would you say, it generally starts out with the website and that sort of thing, right?

Tim Bay:  Right.

Andrea:  So, you’re going to make sure that the websites optimal for people and then they’re going to encounter people.  And so, how do you decide as a company?  What is the line that kind of crosses into the actual human experience?  So what needs to be automated and what needs to be human to human?

Tim Bay:  Well, I think that is always a bit of a challenge, because you want to provide the best experience possible, right?  Almost like a customized, you know, white glove treatment, but then you have the realities of just staffing and maybe 24 hours and things like that.  So, for us, yeah, I think, we’ve always tried to think about is how do we find that right balance.  And also recognizing that in today’s world, there are some times that people, you know, they’d rather chat versus call a phone, and sometimes, they want to sort of do self service. And so, I think for us, it’s looking at the situation.  It’s looking at what the product or service is and saying based on that, what are the types of help that people are going to need.  If it’s, you know, something very basic, they may want to know dimensions or they may want to know a specific product feature.  If it’s something that’s maybe more complex or even more expensive, they may want to be able to talk to somebody and be able to ask that person questions. So, in some cases a really good FAQ, a really good _____ on the page, a chatbot, or even a chat that connects to a human might be we think good enough to provide that direct level of service.  But sometimes it’s more than that and that’s part of where I think we have to look at the situation and think about it from the perspective of the consumer, you know, what is that thought process, what is that decision tree looked like for her?  And at what point might she get stuck and do we feel like no matter what tactic is we’re doing enough to help her get unstuck from a situation that she’s at?

Andrea:  So, I love how much you’re talking about getting her perspective and coming from her perspective.  What are some of the best ways to actually figure out what her perspective is?  How do you actually take her perspective?  Do you ask, do you imagine, or do you use a committee to talk about it?   What is the process that you guys go through?

Tim Bay:  I think to start off with, there’s got to be a mindset.  It’s a mindset, and one of my favorite words in marketing beyond that is empathy.  And you have to put yourself in a situation of who that consumer is, so one is understanding who is the consumer.  And then, you know, we’ve done a lot throughout my career in lots of places, we’re doing this at Fellowes about building a persona, because the danger is you always look at your customer as yourself.  I think, especially in organizations, you know, let’s take for example an engineer talking about the product is very different than a consumer buying the product, right? And so, we very much look at who is our consumer and let’s put ourselves in her situation, understand what’s driving her motivations, what is she looking and what concerns does she have.  And part of that is just if you build that persona out and you put yourself in that perspective, you can go very far in terms of understanding that person, but then we supplement that with things like focus groups. It could be any type of research that you can do, maybe it’s first party, maybe it’s third party to sort of build out that understanding.  And then of course you have an idea, you build something out, you feel like you’ve done everything you can but you need to test that out.  And then you continue to listen after you roll something out to see, are they experiencing what we expect them to be? So, I think it, ultimately, has to be a commitment too.  You’re always thinking about that consumer and always thinking about who that person is.  It’s not necessarily you, in most cases it’s not thinking about everything through that lens of her.  And I think if you do that, it’s always keeping you on the right path in terms of whatever you need to do to make sure that you’re providing the best experience for her.

Andrea:  Do you find that the people that do this with you, that work together with you to build this empathy and build the persona, does this translate into better relationships in general with them because they’re able to do that?  Because this is not something that people do well in general.

Tim Bay:  You know, one of the things that I think that’s really important and whether if you’re talking about ecommerce, digital marketing, management, personal relationships, empathy and trust.  So, from a team perspective, one of the things that has always been challenging in terms of building a team is building that level of trust, especially as you’re bringing new people together or asking people to do things that they haven’t done before. And so, one of the byproducts of what you just said is that even from a team perspective, you’re sort of learning to put yourself in somebody else’s position.  And that works whether or not you’re talking about website visitor or you’re having a conversation with a teammate about creative or a wire frame, a copy or content.  And so, I do think that overtime it does help not just in terms of what you’re trying to do with that particular customer journey but overall.

Andrea:  Yeah, I would think so.  It’s interesting to me this connection between what we’re trying to accomplish in business and selling and having actual relationships, because we’re sort of taking the idea of having a relationship and taking it to a completely different level when it comes to business.  And I think businesses are getting more and more aware and becoming more and more aware and more attuned to the idea of, “No, this really needs to be a relationship with the customer not just, you know, a transaction.”

Tim Bay:  Absolutely.  You know, I love and I’m passionate about and most of my times thinking about the digital world, from a digital marketing perspective.  But when we talk about a customer journey, I always think about that website like a store, if somebody were to walk into a store, what would you want that experience?  How would you greet that?  What would be the first thing that you say to them?  How would you help them navigate the store?  If they wanted to talk to you then how would enable that?  If they wanted to browse and if they’re a tech person and want to do a little bit of researching, exploring on their own, how would you make that really efficient for them? And I think the other point that you talked about is, again, even though it’s a digital relationship, it’s still relationship.  And I think any business, whether you’re selling shredders or you’re selling consulting services, you really do want that to be a long-term relationship.  And just from a practical perspective, much easier, much more efficient to engage with your current community of folks that already know you and believe in you and like you than going out and finding new people. So, thinking about anything that we can think about from a digital perspective as a relationship and something that we’re trying to, and this is important for our brand at Fellowes because of what our brand stands for, we want that to translate into the digital world.  And so even though it’s a digital relationship or a part of it maybe, we always still think about it as you’re still connecting.  It’s just the medium that you’re doing it is different than if you were in person.

Andrea:  Yeah.  I love the analogy of the website being like a store and how you’d welcome them and all that sort of thing.  I think that’s really good.  So, when you said that Fellowes has, how did you put that, what you’re trying to be about or what you’re trying to communicate as a brand, what is the communication that you’re trying to communicate as a brand?

Timothy Bay:  Well, I think part of our DNA, and so Fellowes has been around for 101 years.  It is a family owned and run business.  John Fellowes who is our current CEO is a fourth generation.  And, you know, one of the things that John has mentioned and he has said this in a couple of different settings is he was told by his dad who’s third generation that they are there to serve the business, not the business or the family and part of our DNA is helping people.  We’re very much about workplace wellness, how can we make people feel better?  How can we make them work better?  It’s really part of sort of our tagline.  And so that can’t just be, you know, tagline or slogan but that you have to live it. So, going back to that sort of relationship part, we have to think about “Are we providing value to the consumer?”  “Are we giving her the right information?”  I mean, obviously from a product perspective, we’re thinking about that in terms of “Are we making it easier for her to do better?”  “Are we ultimately make her feel better as part of that experience?” And if that’s part of your DNA, you think about that in every single thing that you do, whether it’s part of your feature set or product, it’s building a website, it’s an email communication, or it’s something on social.  And so again, going back to, you know, as a company, when you have this notion of what your values are and what’s your purpose is, it needs to permeate every single thing that you do, including digital marketing.

Andrea:  Oh yeah, that’s really, really seems to be important.  And I’m curious as to how that plays out.  So, when you’re talking about your DNA, the values, the purpose and all that, when you’re needing to build out these different things whether it be product, the service, the website or whatever, like practically speaking, do you look at your DNA first and say, “OK, how can we make sure it does that?”  Or is it just something that’s sort of in the back of your mind all the time?  Practically speaking, how does that workout for how to integrate that?

Tim Bay:  So I think, it’s a bit of both.  It is always present at the back of our mind, but we can’t forget to explicitly remind yourself of that.  I just walked through with the team recently, a playbook that I call on, you know, how we’re thinking about email marketing.  And playbook is basically, here’s the things that we think we need to be doing to do the best that we can in a particular channel or particular tactic. That playbook starts with a reminder of the things that we need to be thinking about from that sort of DNA perspective, thinking about the customer first, thinking about how we’re communicating that in everything that we do, whether it’s a LinkedIn post or an email campaign or a banner. And of course there’s always some sort of spectrum in terms of how much you can do that.  You can do a lot more with a blog post than you can with a web banner.  But I think, again, you want to always be there to remind yourself consistently that you got to be thinking about _____ that’s always in the back of your mind.

Andrea:  Hmm, so you integrate that into the playbook itself too.

Tim Bay:  Absolutely.  You know, one of the things I’ve learned throughout my career is that it’s really difficult to over communicate something.  You know, 99 percent of the time, it’s the under communication that takes a lot of time and a lot of enforcement and reinforcement of something before it becomes part of our sort of daily nature and habit.  And in a way, you want to always have a top of mind.  It takes a lot to do that and it’s really difficult to over communicate.

Andrea:  Yeah, yeah.  That’s so good.  Tim, I can’t believe it’s already about time to wrap up.  But when, you know, people are looking to be a voice of influence and when it comes to either on a team, whether that be on an agency or an a client side, whether it be because we’re thinking about our client or our particular customer or our relationships, do you have something that you would like to leave with the listener in terms of a tip or a strategy or one last thought?

Tim Bay:  I think that all of us have something to offer and have a unique perspective.  And, you know, I think as managers, as leaders, we want to empower folks, we should also feel just a natural empowerment to give our point of view, you know, to recognize that everybody has a different perspectives.  And when we talk about diversity of opinion, you know, it’s so important.  And so, I think when you talk about voice of influence is, you know, I think we have to on one hand, you know, _____ sometimes and trust a little bit that our opinion matters. And then, I think, again, as leaders we have to enforce and reinforce that we want to have folks voice.  We want to have that level of trust and comfort there because, you know, two smart people are always going to come up with a better solution than one person.  And we have to create that environment that facilitates folks having comfort and talking about bringing their perspective and bringing different ideas.  And that’s something that has to be nurtured.  You just can’t say it’s going to happen.  It’s something that you have to continually tend to like you would, a flower garden.  If you don’t, it runs over with weeds and eventually the flowers die.  I can’t overemphasize how important that to me in terms of building good teams and making sure that people feel comfortable with those works of different ideas and opinions.

Andrea:  So good, so good.  Thank you, Tim.  How can people find Fellowes or find you?

Tim Bay:  They can find Fellowes at fellowes.com and then, you know, you can see our social channels from there and they can find me on LinkedIn and Twitter.  So, I’m happy to talk to anybody at any point in time.  I always love talking to folks who are interested in talking about anything from customer journeys to culture, to digital marketing.  I love talking to people.

Andrea:  Awesome!  Thank you so much for doing that and for sharing your voice of influence with our listeners, and we’ll be sure to link all of the things that you mentioned here in the show notes.

Tim Bay:  Great!  Thank you very much.  I really enjoyed it, Andrea!

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David Neagle Interviews Andrea Wenburg for the Successful Mind Podcast

In August, Andrea was interviewed on The Successful Mind Podcast with David Neagle. They talked about Andrea’s book UNFROZEN: Stop Holding Back and Release the Real You. Some of the insights discussed include:

  • The unexpected path to connection and impact
  • How Andrea learned to take risks
  • Why gaining the approval and respect of men turned into a need for validation that held her back
  • How to become “unfrozen”
  • Why your first purpose may need to die so you can find a purer version of your purpose in life

“The title of the book alone Unfrozen that says so much because I think that people really are there.  They really are frozen so to speak in many different areas of their life.  But your whole idea about owning your desire and being willing to be vulnerable and whatever is to come of that is extremely powerful, like there’s so much courage in that.” – David

Listen to the episode on Apple Podcast or on David’s website.

Transcript:

Successful people learn how to make their mind work for them.  I’m David Neagle and this is the Successful Mind podcast.

Hello, everybody, this is David Neagle, I’d like to welcome you to the Successful Mind podcast.  Today, I have an amazing guest, Andrea Wenberg.  As a CEO and founder of the consulting firm, Voice of Influence, Andrea Wenbug draws out the best in leaders and teams, helping them develop motivating influence with customers and key stakeholders – a Maverick leader known for her fearless approach to difficult conversations and her ability to rapidly cut to the core of any problem or issue.  She serves her clients and audiences with life changing strategy, keynote trainings, and executive retreats.  Andrea is the author of the memoir Unfrozen:  Stop Holding Back and Release the Real You, and the host of the Voice of Influence podcast.

David:  Welcome Andrea!

Andrea:  Hey, thanks for having me, David!

David:  My pleasure.  Tell me about this book.  This book is absolutely amazing.

Andrea:  Wow, thank you!

David:  How did you…because it’s a memoir, right?  It’s written very different than most of the books that I have the privilege of reading.  How did you come about writing this?  Tell us a story?

Andrea:  Well, I was in a place in my life where I was feeling stuck.  You talk about that all the time and I was in that place.  When we moved into a new home and there were…I’m just going to go ahead and case it in a story because that’s what I love and that’s what I realized is really impactful.

So, anyway, we moved into this home and there were these fruit trees in the backyard.  When we got here, there were all these apples just nearly dripping off the branches.  I mean, it was amazing and it was fall.  It was time for harvest.  We took our kids to the backyard and were picking all these apples.

Well, having fruit trees in my own backyard kind of made me more aware that there were fruit trees all around town and that other people had fruit in their yards too and how great was it?  I would tell my kids, “How great is it that you’re gonna have apple pie like us.”  And it was so great and we’d picked all these apples.  And then a couple of weeks later after our own harvest, I started seeing all these fruit trees around town just rotting.  Their fruit just rotting on the tree or falling down and rotting and I was so upset.

I mean, I was literally yelling at these apple tree owners like from inside car window rolled up my children in the back seat.  My daughter was like, “Uh mom, they’re just apples.”  And I’m like, “Yeah, but I think there’s more to it than that for me.”  And whenever I see that emotional spike inside of myself, I get a real hit to like, “OK, there’s something else going on here.”  And especially when it comes to anger, I’ve noticed that at least for myself, that sadness is usually under anger and if I can dig into that, I can figure out what’s going on.

And what I realized was that I was actually sad for these trees whose fruit was getting wasted. And I wonder why am I so sad, because that’s how I feel about myself.  I feel like my fruit is going to waste.  I’m not able to really share what I know and the things that I’ve learned, and I just felt stuck inside my own head and without a real outlet.

So, fast forward, a couple of months after grieving that waste inside of my own self and I went to the movie Frozen, and didn’t know that I would even enjoy the movie, let alone what it would be about.  And it just rocked my world because I could so relate to Elsa and how she was trying to hide and hold back all of her power.

There were number of moments, I kind of cried a lot in the movie.  And there was this moment towards the end of the movie where she finally realizes that it’s love that helps her to be able to share her gift with others instead of fear that she’s going to hurt people or fear that she’s going to be judged and keeping that fear and holding it back.

And so when I saw her at the end and she sort of just offering her gift and not worrying about what other people think and it’s just going I thought, “Oh my gosh, I had like this something speaking to my heart saying, Andrea, this is the scene you have not yet played out in your life.  You may have played out all these other scenes.  You’ve learned all these things, but you’ve not actually gone out, put yourself on the line and really share what you have to offer in a bigger way.” And so it would just felt like a calling.

So, at that point I just decided I really wanted to share something and I thought, “Well, maybe I could just share everything that I learned from Frozen and do it for kids so I could create this little kid book that would sort of be like something parents could use with their kids.  This is what it means when Elsa puts on gloves and you can make all those connections for them and how do you cover up and numb yourself and that sort of thing.

And my writing coach, you know, she helped me find my writing voice and eventually after throwing out three drafts, three whole drafts, I really found my voice and ended up with a memoir instead of a little children’s book to study, yeah.

David: So what is that journey that this book takes us on?

Andrea:  Well, when I was younger I always felt like I had this something inside, like I really wanted to do something big.  I really felt like I really wanted to help other people.  But there were things that, you know, seeking other people’s validation in particular men and it was really painful and vulnerable to share that I was really realizing that I was thinking that I needed men’s validation.  Like whoever was the most respected person in the room, I wanted their respect.  I didn’t need them to think that I was pretty, I wanted them to respect me for my intellect and what I had to offer and my voice.

And because of that, I was seeking validation from men all the time, even though it may not have looked like that, but you know, looking back I realized that’s what it was.  I was waiting for somebody to come pick me.  So, eventually I realized that I wasn’t going to get picked and that I had to own what I really wanted and own my desire essentially and, so coming to kind of full circle, when you really want something then that makes you vulnerable because you might not get it.

And I wanted to be strong and competent and appear that way to everybody because I thought that was how my voice would matter.  But what it turned out was that when I really put that aside that really wasn’t what drew people in it.  It was when I really was honest and vulnerable and willing to share those things.

David:  What was it like getting to the place where you could do that, where you could step into your vulnerability and how did you do that?

Andrea:  Bit by bit by bit.  Yeah, just realizing that I need taking a little step, every little step felt like a huge giant leap.

David:  Well that is right.  I mean, all of those little steps are huge for us internally when we’re making them.

Andrea:  Yeah.  So, it did. I felt like, “Oh my gosh, I’m going to die.”  I actually, talked about it in the book, but I came across a student of mine who was in a group with me.  She was a college student.  She had painted this huge painting of a woman literally jumping off of a cliff not to kill herself, but in that sense of like, “I’m gonna take this risk.”  And I think, you know, finding that every time I took that leap made me more and more confident that I would be okay.  That it wasn’t as much of a risk as I thought it was.

And even if I did lose somebody’s respect, even if somebody wasn’t upset with me, it didn’t mean that I didn’t cry about it because I’m a crier.  It didn’t mean that it didn’t hurt me, but it meant that I wasn’t destroyed and that my purpose was greater than the fear of this I guess internal sort of death, like “Oh my gosh, I’m gonna die if somebody doesn’t love something that I’m doing.

David:  Yeah.  Did you have the opposite experience growing up, like were you rejected, you know, when you were like, you know, how we were kids and we haven’t guarded ourselves yet for the pain of rejection or being not being accepted for certain things.  Did that start then for you?

Andrea:  I don’t recall a time as a young child where I was rejected in that kind of a way.  I think I was always very sensitive and aware of my environment and other people.  And so a lot went on in my own head that didn’t actually take place in real life.

David:  Gotcha.

Andrea:  Yeah.  So, I would see a little boys laughing at giggling girls and I’d think to myself, “Oh, well then they’re not going to respect girls because they’re giggly.”  So, I made all these assumptions in my head about what that meant for me and “Well, therefore I will not be the giggly girl.”  And so I would do that over and over with all kinds of different things.

David:  So, you were just creating your own narrative around what was happening?

Andrea:  I really was.  I mean, there were certainly other things that were happening in terms of like, you know, I come from a church background where women were not in great leadership positions.  I shouldn’t say ‘great leadership positions,’ but they weren’t in higher up leader leadership positions within church, which was a huge part of my life.

And so seeing that I thought, you know, I just made all these assumptions that it’s the men that have the power.  It’s the men that have the authority to say whether or not my voice should matter.  And I really felt like I should contribute to some of these conversations because I certainly thought I had insights in my head that would be helpful.  But even as a young child or, you know, a teenager, college student, I just didn’t see how I was going to be able to have that kind of voice with people unless somebody, like I said, came around and said, “We need to hear from you, Andrea.”  I didn’t want to just offer it.

David:  Yeah, you want it to be more invited into it.

Andrea:  I did, because if somebody says to me, in fact that happened a number of times in my life I can tell you that someone would invite me to do something that I really wanted to do.  But I would say no and then I would wait for them to ask me again, so that I was like “OK, fine.  I’ll do what you’re asking me to do.”  “Yes!”  You know, so that I wouldn’t have to own my own desire so that somebody else, “Oh, well they wanted me to do it so I don’t have to look like I wanted something so bad.”

David:  Because you wouldn’t be strong to watch something?

Andrea:  It would be certainly vulnerable.

David:  Be vulnerable.

Andrea:  Well, if I messed up then it wasn’t my fault.

David:  Gotcha.

Andrea:  If I messed it up, it was well, or if somebody didn’t like what I said, “Well, they asked me to do it.”

David:  Yeah.

Andrea:  That sort of thing.

David:  Yeah, yeah.  And how do you find that this book is helping people?

Andrea:  Well, that’s a good question.  I hear that people say that they realize that they’re holding back or they’re starting to see that there are also a lot of women who are sort of putting men in that position in their own minds that they need validation from them in order to be OK. Some people have written.  I know somebody that has written a book.

At least one person has written a book because I wrote the book, deciding to make choices to offer themselves to the world instead of holding back kind of out of that selfish need for validation and need to protect themselves, instead they’re putting themselves out there.  I’d like to believe that there are a lot of people doing that, but who knows, you know?

David:  Yeah.  I think there probably are and I think there probably will be a lot more.  I mean, the title of the book alone Unfrozen that says so much because I think that people really are there.  They really are frozen so to speak in many different areas of their life.  But your whole idea about owning your desire and being willing to be vulnerable and whatever is to come of that is extremely powerful, like there’s so much courage in that.

Tell me about a time when you did this.  So, you’re going on this journey.  You’re recognizing your desire and you’re owning it.  You want to put it forward.  You want to be vulnerable and you started doing this for awhile, but then tell me about a time when you were rejected it after you started doing this.  How did you handle that?  Or how do you handle it now?  What does it feel like now?

I think what I’d like the listeners to get an idea of is like when you step into this and you start to go down this journey and you start to really get a sense of self and you start to develop your courage, that doesn’t mean that you’re not going to be rejected again.  You’re going to have people that don’t like you or try and manipulate you or whatever, but how do you deal with it now?  What is the difference and how you feel about it?

Andrea:  I think that the thing that has bothered me the most and the thing that I knew was going to be hardest would be the rejection of or just the people ignoring me, ignoring the fact that I’m doing what I’m doing and not just people, but people that I love and respect.  That sometimes relationships turn into a one way interest, like “Why I’m interested in what you’re doing, but you’re not interested in what I’m doing” kind of thing.  And for me, that’s the stuff that cuts the deepest.

You know, if somebody goes on the Amazon and puts a bad, you know, negative review or calls out something that they don’t like about my book, that doesn’t bother me.  But the people that I love that’s the most painful and how do I deal with that?  Honestly, I think I’ve learned that I have to grieve first.  I can’t deny the fact that I feel this way.  So there has to be like a period of time where I can at least, even if it’s for a few moments, and like I said at the beginning, I’m a crier.  So there are times I have to release it.

And so the tears have to come out when they do come out though I can’t dwell on that.  I still have to bring my eyes back up and say, “But this is my purpose.  I’m here to help other people find their voice and to find agency and that is going to be how they make a difference in the world.  It’s gonna be when leaders give other people a voice, that’s when they’re going to actually have their voice of influence.”

So, you know, for the leader themselves, I believe in this stuff.  And so when I remember that I believe this, I have to move on.  I have to say, “OK that is what it is.  I will continue to be here in this relationship as it is and not expect it to be more than what it apparently can be.”

David:  OK, you just said a tremendous amount, like you could do it a one day talk on just that part there.  You said something that’s important that I want to hone in on.  You have to grieve first.

Andrea:  Yes.

David:  Well, a lot of people just suppress it or try to find a way to numb out from their paint or that discomfort.  What are ways that you recommend that people grieve and why is that so important to get that out of you?

Andrea:  How do I recommend that people grieve?  It is a yucky feeling inside.  Most people do not want to feel yucky.  If they can see that it’s not going to be the end of the world, that they’re not going to be destroyed by it, it’s OK.  So again, starting with something small and admitting…Well, this is what I really do when people are really angry about something, I say, “OK, what are you angry about?  OK, what sad about that to you?”

David:  That’s great.

Andrea:  And slow down.  Let’s just slow way down.  “OK, so somehow this is sad.  How is this sad to you?  What about this is sad?”  And it was me and the trees.  What is sad to me about the trees?  It’s sad to me that the apples are not getting to the people who need their nourishment.  There are people all around the world that are hungry or even around town, they’re hungry and yet these apples are just rotting on trees.  That’s sad to me but it cuts even more personally when I think about the fact that that tree was created to make these apples and nobody’s eating them.  That was the personal part.  It was even more sad to me.

So, if people can identify “This is what I get angry about, kind of irrationally angry. This is what I get angry about.  This is what’s sad to me about that.  How does that connect to something in me?”  And if people can start to go there and realize that there are people who have gone before you, like me who can say “This is the path.  This is the unexpected path to connection and impact.”   It’s not what you think it is and if you know that that’s the truth then you’re going to pull up your courage and you’re going to go ahead and enter into that grief.

David:  I think one of the most brilliant things that you said so far here is that that apple tree and those rotting apples on the ground that your personal experience of that moment was that you were sad, was reflecting the sadness that was already in you.

Andrea:  Yes.

David:  And a lot of people see it and they think that it’s the thing and they go after trying to rectify the thing instead of asking what is it about this that is pulling up sadness inside of myself and what is that and what do I do with that? It’s a much more intelligent question for a person to ask of themselves instead of just going around trying to fix everything that’s wrong on the outside, you begin to do the work on the insight first.

Andrea:  Hmm absolutely.  And then it can open up the possibilities to what your true calling is because you might think that, “OK, my calling is to be a harvester of apples.” “But no, my calling is not that, my calling is to help connect the people’s expertise and gifts with the need in the world.”  This is more general, but at the same time that allows me space to backup and say, “OK, so how could I do that in the world?  Any way that I choose is fine.  It’s all gonna fit and match up with that calling.”  And so in that sense then it also frees you to be able to, I guess, find and choose both a calling or a purpose.

David:  I think what’s so powerful about that is that in that moment that you do that you’re really have to take into consideration that in order to find the calling or step into it, you have to be vulnerable.

Andrea:  Uh-hmm.

David:  Because you can’t do it without being vulnerable.  Not only, well, it’s our purpose and it’s going to reveal our destiny, but it’s a growth phase that we’re going through where we’re being stretched and the weakest parts of us are coming to the surface and we’re having to learn to deal with them and make sense of them and then find productive ways of handling them.  And you said that you have to grieve at first, but then you had to get on with your purpose.  You’ve got something to do so you have to be able to then move this pain over here, deal with it, get it out of you and then refocus on where it is that you’re going.  Am I right?

Andrea:  Yeah.  Let it be fuel.  Emotion is fuel.  Passion is fuel, but it’s not strategy.  It’s not actually taking the step to do anything.  And so if you don’t actually do something with it then I don’t know.  I have a hard time thinking that.  I don’t like feeling like the things that I’ve learned are going to waste.  So, obviously I want to do something with it and I believe that everybody could and probably should.

David:  Right.  So, it makes a lot of sense; however, I think that also comes out of your own awareness that you have a purpose.  There’s a lot of people that don’t think that they do.  They don’t believe it yet, right?  I mean, you know, life can be rough for a lot of people.  There’s a lot of people that are suffering and _____, you know, you have a purpose but they have an experience along those guidelines, so to speak of there’s a real reason why you’re here not just to be a lump of flesh taking up space.  But there’s a real reason.  You had the courage to look deeper inside of yourself to pull that out.

Andrea:  I would be remiss if I didn’t say that at one point in time and for a period of time I felt like my purpose had been squashed, like I’d lost it.  I thought I had a purpose.  I thought I’d identified a purpose and then everything that I thought it was just sort of got trampled and it wasn’t all, you know, external but I mean a lot of it was internal but it got crushed.  And then I felt like I didn’t have a purpose again and I wanted one.

And so it took me awhile.  I mean, I was in depression for definitely a couple of years and maybe struggled with it some before that too.  So there were a lot of ups and downs, but definitely a certain kind of death that happened to me in order to be able to find a more…because that first purpose was still seeking validation.  It had to die so that I could find the purpose that could outlast any other, you know, now I can’t be destroyed.

David:  I’m going to read something that you wrote in your book that I think is really, really powerful.  You say, I know now God, my heart is secure evenindestructible.  I don’t need to feel pressure and shame if I am not relying on aperson to love me.  If you love me, I am free to love others no matter how they feelabout me. Let’s do this.  You remember writing that?

Andrea:  Yeah.

David:  I mean, there is so much personal responsibility in that and ownership.  I think that’s absolutely incredible.  Is there a moment in time that you came to that realization or was that just over the series of events that were making you more aware of how you were, you know, kind of owning your own agency and stepping into the desire of your heart?

Andrea: Yeah.   There was a moment.  I was doing what’s called the school spiritual direction with Dr. Larry Crabb, who I consider to be a mentor of mine.  He said something and he wrote this diagram and everything just kind of clicked in my head all at the same time where he said, I was feeling like I was distant from God, and he said something along the lines of “In order to experience God, maybe it’s about expressing God, you don’t have to actually feel close to God in order to express the character of God.”

David:  I love it.

Andrea:  And if I can do that, that I can find purpose in. And it was that moment in time in this class, I’m like, I’m jotting down notes and my leg is just like going like crazy underneath the table.  And as soon as he’s done, I like get up, and I still have goosebumps just as I’m telling you, and I just sort of run up to the front of the room and I’m like, “Larry, this I can live for.”  I was like, “Oh my gosh, this is it.”  And I just gave him this great big hug and he’s like, “This is kingdom relating. This is what he was describing just previously.”  And I was like, “Wow, this is it.  I can live for that.”

David:  And I can see how in that moment the idea of accepting or having your, having the purpose and your desire matchup be kind of verified.  It gives it a reason, because I think that a lot of people go through life where they have these desires, but they either feel they’re selfish or they’re self centered or they’re foolish, or “Would anybody really be interested in this?”  But when he comes from that perspective of you’re actually expressing God and God is speaking to you through this desire to then put this out into the world or be this person or whatever it is that you’re supposed to be doing.

Andrea:  Love like that, yeah.

David:  It’s a love like that.  Yeah, it makes a huge difference.

Andrea:  Yeah, yeah.

David:  I think it makes sense to a lot of things.

Andrea:  Yeah, it certainly did for me.  And that was prior to writing the book, definitely.

David:  So where do you go from here?

Andrea:  Well, I’ve experimented with some different things and now really settling into building a team of people who are helping me as we build Voice of influence, a consulting firm.  And I’ve worked with Angelique Rewers who you know so intimately and know well and have worked with.  So, I’ve benefited indirectly from you through her and we were really starting to find our legs in customer service.

So, we’re starting with service and my ultimate goal is that I’d love to speak more and two more executives and that sort of thing.  But to be honest, we’re at a place right now where we’re going to start at customer service and build our way up.  I know that that’s where we’re headed.  But we’re going to do whatever the next step is that’s going to get us there.  So, I’m excited to start with customer service where we are talking about service and how to offer and not worry about what other people think of you and all those things.

David:  Absolutely. Well, you could be in better hands with Angelique

Andrea:  Yeah.

David:  That’s for sure.  And for everybody that’s listening and though you couldn’t listen to the podcast; I’ll have Brandon put it down in the notes.  Angelique was a client of mine for about three years and a really good friend.  Now, we joined together on certain projects from time to time.  She’s absolutely an amazing coach and mentor.  So let’s wrap it up with this.  If you could leave everybody with one successful mind tip, what would that be?

Andrea:  When you put yourself on the line for others, this is when you really find out what you’re made of and this is where you really find your voice of influence.

David: I love that.  It doesn’t get any better right there.

Andrea:  Hmm.  Thank you so much.

David:  You’re welcome.  Thanks for coming on the show.

Andrea:  Appreciate you.

David:  We have to do this again some time.

Andrea:  Sounds great.

David:  Okay.  All right, everybody that’s it.  Make sure that you get the book UNFROZEN.  Where can they learn more about you?  Tell us where we can learn more about you, Andrea.

Andrea:  Voiceofinfluence.net is our website.  You can find me on LinkedIn or on Facebook, Andrea Joy Wenburg. AndreaWenburg on Twitter.  And you can find UNFROZEN:  Stop Holding Back and Release The Real You on Amazon.

David:  Awesome!  And it says on here there’s a free video discussion guide

Andrea:  Yes on the website.

David:  On the website?

Andrea: Yep.   So if you’re wanting to have a conversation with anybody about some of these topics then there are some videos on my website, Unfrozen book discussion guide and that should help.  But anybody who wants to reach out, you’re welcome to reach out.  I’d love to hear and share what I can.

David:  Andrea Joy Wenburg ladies and gentlemen.  OK, have a great day.  It was so fantastic having you on the show.  We’ll talk again soon.

Andrea:  Thanks, you too.

David: All right.

 

Thanks for listening to the Successful Mind podcast. And if you like what you heard and want to know more, go to davidneagle.com/free stuff.