Recently, my children came home from school and they were telling me about a girl who was “bossy” and it was clearly a negative thing to them.
This made me think about how children, especially ones who’re sensitive to the feedback of others, struggle to know when it’s appropriate to assert their voice and when they should hold back.
In this episode, I speak about how to find that balance and read an excerpt from my book, Unfrozen: Stop Holding Back and Release the Real You, of a story from my own life that perfectly represents this struggle.
Kim Gravel is a veteran tv host, entrepreneur, public speaker, and life coach who’s appeared on The Steve Harvey Show and was regularly featured on SiriusXM’s Dirty Pop with Lance Bass. Through her own hit show, Kim of Queens, she was able to entertain audiences with her quick wit and vivacious storytelling. In just two years, Kim was able to build her business from nothing to a $60 million success.
In this episode, Kim shares the core purpose of her message, how her voice was always as strong and confident as it is today, the value of communication, why helping others with self-expression is a large part of what Kim does in her work, why you need to quit preparing and start doing, the importance of being passionate about what you do, and so much more!
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Transcript
Hey, hey! It’s Andrea and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast.
Oh my goodness, you guys, today is a treat! We have Kim Gravel, who is a veteran TV host, entrepreneur, public speaker, and life coach. She was booked on The Steve Harvey Show and was regularly featured on SiriusXM Radio Show, Dirty Pop with Lance Bass.
And through her own hit show “Kim of Queens,” Kim was able to entertain audiences with her quick wit and vivacious storytelling. Indeed, I know, and you’re going to experience it. Her Passion for people was made obvious onscreen as her unexpected depth and genuine heart helped her clients find confidence and self-love.
For her newest venture, Kim has partnered with retail giant QVC to launch the Belle by Kim Gravel apparel line and Belle Beauty Cosmetic line. And in just two years, Kim was able to build her business from nothing to a $60 million success.
Andrea: Kim, it is so good to have you with us here on the Voice of Influence podcast.
Kim Gravel: Oh, so exciting. I love it. I love Voice of influence. What a fantastic title, right? Because we all have an influence, so, you know, and we all have a voice so people just don’t get that. So I love the title of this podcast.
Andrea: Awesome. Thank you. I love it too. It felt like it was like this, I don’t know, handed to me or something, you know.
Kim Gravel: Yeah. Uh-hmm.
Andrea: OK, so Kim, I know that you’re really driven by purpose and mission and your message, so could you share with us kind of what you’re all about, I guess. What is the purpose and message, the core of your message?
Kim Gravel: You know, I think my particular message has been what it’s always been. It has evolved, it’s changed, it has had many faces, it’s taken many turns, and manifested in many different ways. But for me, it’s about knowing the ‘why you’re here’ and ‘what are you going to do about it.’ You know what I’m saying?
Andrea: Yeah.
Kim Gravel: I think some get it at a very early age, most people never get it, and some of us are trying to get it on a daily basis and some of us, it’s just a journey. But when you can figure out the why you are here then you can get onto what are you going to do about it because everybody has a purpose. And that’s such a self-help guru type, you know, answer but it’s just the truth.
I’m a straight shooter, so I’ll just tell you straight up, you weren’t here, you weren’t put on the earth just to take up space, there’s a reason. And you can call it whatever you want to, super spiritual, super new ages, super…whatever they’re labeling it today. But that’s just the heart of it and I think everybody is always searching for that. People say, you know, “Uhh, people are searching for love. People are searching for self-worth.” No, people are searching for ‘why am I here?’
Andrea: Yeah.
Kim Gravel: Yeah. All the other stuff that’s just add-ons, you know, what I’m saying?
Andrea: Uh-hmm.
Kim Gravel: And so for me, helping people see that or helping people even understand that that is why they’re here is what the message is. It’s so difficult but so simple at the same time because for me, I found out what that was. I was doing that. You’re always doing your purpose. You just never can define it. You know what, I’m saying? It’s everything you never thought you always wanted. That’s what purpose is, you know.
Andrea: Yeah.
Kim Gravel: It’s everything; you never thought of, that you always wanted. And so, you know, that to me is everything and that’s the ‘why’ behind everything I do.
Andrea: OK, so usually I find that that when people are driven by such a strong, you know, purpose like that, it’s personal. So is there anything that, you know, any stories that really connect you personally to why you care so much about that?
Kim Gravel: Yeah, because when I was young I just remember, you know, because back then, back in the day, because now I could say I’m middle age, which I can’t believe I’m saying that out loud but it’s the truth. But back in the day when I was a kid, and like my children who were 9 and 11, when I was sitting in my bedroom, we didn’t have video games and iPhones in distractions.
So I would sit for hours on end and line my stuffed animals up on my bed and either sing to them or talk to them or communicate with them because, you know, girlfriend didn’t have a lot of friends at the time. My parents moved a lot. And so for me, I had to entertain myself. I didn’t have a sibling yet. I just remember those days and I knew that I was meant for something at a very young age.
I grew up in the church. I grew up with very strong, encouraging parents. But I would stop and take the time as a young kid and listen to that still small voice that would speak to me, the inner me and say “There’s something out there for you, there’s something out there.” I wasn’t distracted. You know, we didn’t have the distractions back then.
So for me, I can remember a specific time, I was riding in my mom’s brown Malibu car and back then we don’t have to wear seat belts and I would chew on the back seats. I know I had an oral thing, “Don’t talk to me about that right now.” Well, I would sit there and I would daydream and dream. And I would tell my mom about all these dreams and my mom either she wasn’t listening or, you know, she just let me talk either way and I would just say it.
And I remember one time coming home, I think it was from, we called it Richway, I think it’s now Target. But back in the days, it was called Richway, it was a department store. And I was eating a slushy my mom had got me, and I said to myself and I said it loud, I said “Mom, I’m made to sing or talk to people.” And I remember my mom going, “Well that is true, you can run your mouth.” Only my mom could do it and that hit me and it stuck with me now. That has taken on so many different forms, so many different ways. But I truly believe, if you could trace back to when you were young, your purpose will be there.
See, a lot of people are trying to get over their past or they’re trying to…a lot of people have gone through hard times and struggles, but all of that is locked into that purpose. There’s a ‘why’ you went through that and there was a reason behind it. But we get hung up on what happened to us instead of what can happen through us. For me, I clearly remember the moment. I remember that period of my life where I knew and then the real work and frustration and hail began.
Andrea: OK. I was hoping you were going to say that because, oh my goodness, because I really felt…I remember feeling some of those similar things and especially we share a passion for both speaking and singing. I remember, I actually watched the song that you sing, you sang Phantom of the Opera.
Kim Gravel: Oh God, help me.
Andrea: And you’re in the Miss Georgia competition, oh my gosh, it was great.
Kim Gravel: Well, the only reason I would demonstrate, you know, I wanted to have scholarship money and I want to be heard.
Andrea: Yeah.
Kim Gravel: I love your “Voice of Influence.” I wanted my voice to be heard.
Andrea: Yes, yes!
Kim Gravel: You know what I’m saying?
Andrea: Yeah, I do.
Kim Gravel: That’s everybody. That’s everybody on the planet, you know, so for me, that was just a way for my voice to be heard.
Andrea: Did you ever struggle with the fact that, I mean, you have a really strong voice. At least at this point, you’re very confident. You’re not afraid to say it. You know, like you said, you’re a straight shooter. Was that ever something that you held back?
Kim Gravel: Sure.
Andrea: OK, why?
Kim Gravel: As a woman, can you imagine as a southern blonde or at that point I was probably live brunette. God fearing Christian Bible belt big mouth girl, are you freaking kidding me? I would go to church where you’re supposed to be I loved and cared for. And let me tell you something, I’m a strong believer. I still go to church. I love God, everything. But those early years, I was told, you know, be seen, not heard. I was told you just get married and have kids. And I thought, “My Lord, why would God give me this voice? Give me this passion; give me this preaching quality…” I’m saying that in air quotes as I’m talking to you “…and not be able to use it?”
Andrea: Oh I do.
Kim Gravel: I went through all of that. You know what I’m saying?
Andrea: Yes!
Kim Gravel: I went through all of that. I’m still going through that to some degree. There’s sometimes I still have to say, “You know, I’m pretty much not going to do that,” and slide that piece of paper and say, “We’re not going to do that deal. I’m better than that.” But I still go through them. I’m like, “I hope if I slide the paper over and they say no and I’m rejected.” And then, you know, especially as women, and I’m sorry I’m a woman, I’m pro woman. I think women run the world. I think we are the backbone, the neck bone, the tailbone, you know, leg bone, you know, we’d make it happen and I live with three men so I can say that confidently.
But yeah, the doubt, the insecurity, the “I’m not enough” or “I’m just a girl” or “You’re not smart.” Oh God, if I could write down how many times someone has assumed that I was unintelligent based on whatever, fill in the blank. And you know what; let me take this right now. I know somebody as dumb as hell, now I must say dumb as hell. I almost say it when they think I am. When someone meets me and it takes them a month, two months, six months, a year to figure out I’m intelligent then they’re stupid, not me. You know what I’m saying? So that’s what I want to say to people.
A lot of people are having all this expectations, all of this in the box thinking about what they should be and what they shouldn’t be. I see the school system with my children, it’s such a frustrating thing and they’re the ones that don’t have it together. And so for me, yes, the struggle has been long. I still struggle. I laid in bed yesterday. I’ve had a little bit of a cold and watched Charmed on Netflix from season one, I’m up to season three now, just because I had this deal just going so wrong and it’s clearly a lack of communication, and I can’t figure out how to make these people understand.
And so I lay in bed all day wanting to get a chocolate cake, but I’m really working on trying to lose weight. But I just lay in bed and watched Charmed and thought “This is never gonna happen. These people are never gonna get it. This is never gonna happen.” And that still small voice said, “Keep communicating,” because that is the biggest problem we are facing, millennials, us, and everybody is lack of communication and connection.
Andrea: Well, do you think that part of that is fear?
Kim Gravel: Oh, sure! Oh girl, you could go ahead and speak on that. Anything based out of fear, being fear motivated, you’re in trouble. Fear insights are the complete opposite. Now, I will say this, I get excited talking about this, doubt, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. I love this line in the song by YouTube it says, I have just enough low self-esteem to get me where I need to go.
So doubt and a little bit of self-awareness in that way, that’s good. Fear, no. OK, because really fear like…my mother has spiritual…“What if it snows while we’re on the plane.” “We can’t do about it anyway, honey.” You know, God’s got it. If it’s time, it’s time. If it’s not, it’s not. And she’s not even a fearful person, but just that things we can’t control is what we really fear. The self-doubt and the little bit of insecurities that we have about ourselves that we can’t control and that’s not necessarily always a bad thing. Does that make sense?
Andrea: Yeah.
Kim Gravel: Fear is a myth. It’s not real. Bad things we fear never come pass anyway.
Andrea: Right? So much of it is in our own heads and so much of it is a misconception too of what other people are actually thinking.
Kim Gravel: Absolutely, or miscommunication. Again, everything is about communication. Your confidence, like my relationship with God is communication. My relationship with my husband is communication. My relationship with my business partners is communication. I mean bad communication could set a whole lifetime off. So that’s why I think what we do, girl, is so powerful.
Andrea: OK, so part of what I think we’re both doing, but I’m really wanting to hear more about what you’re doing to do this is helping people express themselves.
Kim Gravel: Uh-hmm.
Andrea: So, self-expression and I know that Kim of Queens, I mean a lot of that was self-expression.
Kim Gravel: Sure!
Andrea: Helping pageant girls be able to kind of figure out who they are and what they’re doing with all of the different pieces of the pageant. So tell me more about why self-expression and you helping people with self-expression is so important to you.
Kim Gravel: OK, because what we teach at schools, what we teach at colleges, what we teach in a lot of times these self-help books or these YouTube videos, what we teach has great self-expression, right?
Andrea: Yeah.
Kim Gravel: Express yourself, be you, do you boo? If I’ve heard that one time, I heard it a thousand and I totally agree with that. But then we tell them how to do that based on laws, rules, or regulations. I love it. This little teacher told me this and she said, “You know, this is not about the theory, _____,” because they go to a private Christian school, have its own ideas but he can’t do this, this, this, this, and this.
OK, well that’s an oxymoron. Those two things cannot exist on the same plane, OK? So what we’re doing is we’re saying to people, “Do you boo?” But then we are censoring it, covering it up, denying it saying “You don’t fit here, you’re a weirdo.” “You don’t belong.” And now we have this massive backlash and everybody’s trying to belong to somebody somewhere and you really don’t belong and that is a good thing.
So for me, I will never forget a conversation I had with a very, very powerful agent in New York and I was embarking on the whole QVC thing. And I didn’t want to work with this man because I knew 10 years from now this isn’t going in well because I’m either go kill him or he go kill me. So I remember him saying to me, he said to me and this is where it came to blows, he said to me, “Let me ask you something, Kim, are you able to speak in anything other than southern colloquialisms?” Oh my God. So there he goes. OK, so he took an arrow, took a shotgun and just blew through my heart of everything that makes me who I am, my self-expression, right?
Andrea: Yeah, yeah.
Kim Gravel: So we love you to be cute, funny, and say no, _____ on a fire hydrant; we love you to do all that crap, but you’re not good enough to hang with me because you do that. So that’s what we do and I knew at that point he’s small. He’s never going to get anything other than what he gets. He’s not going to recognize who I am other than “She is a size 14 with a big butt, big hair, and a big accent.” He can’t get beyond that.
And that’s how we’re killing self-expression. We’re not supposed to be alike. We’re not supposed to be anything like anybody else. We shouldn’t even _____ or compare ourselves to anybody else because that kills creativity. So to me, self-expression, that’s everything. That’s your DNA. That’s your fingerprint. That’s the one thing no one can take from you.
Andrea: OK, so how do you look at or how do you approach helping people find their voice?
Kim Gravel: You know, it’s different in different ways. I always say this every time I’m on a show or something. I said there’s nobody that can bring out the best in you better than me. They might can do it as good as me but not better. And that is because when I look at an individual, and this has taken a lot of practice, a lot of prayers; I don’t see their race, their color, their weight, their height, their financial status, what they can give me, or what I can give them, I just look at them as like really…I pray to God, “Let me see people the way you see people,” and when I pray that, be careful what you pray for because he answered it.
And so I see that role potential, role purpose, I see too much good sometimes. Sometimes I have to be like “Run, Forrest, run” when I see some people that don’t, but it’s because I’ve trained myself to do that. So when I look at someone, I don’t speak to their insecurity, to their power. I can see all the bullcrap and say, “God, this person is naturally good at, fill in the blank.” And sometimes it’s just, “Oh my gosh, have you ever thought of…and whatever, fill in the blank.” It’s not about really me; it’s just about being able to notice something and being able to communicate that. That’s it.
Andrea: It’s like opening up doors for people. I liken it to, you know, somebody…it’s almost like people are inside of their own jail cells and there’s no lock and all I’m doing is coming over and open up the doors so they can walk out like, “Hey, did you know that this is open? Look at all the possibilities.”
Kim Gravel: You know, a lot of times, I _____ things like this and your podcast and I need a pick me up. I need a _____. I need a good workout and that helps, but the magic is not in us. It’s in us. We already have it in us.
Andrea: OK, so I know that experiencing it though, like actually taking the steps actually doing the thing is such a huge piece of it. Even in the things that you’re working on now, do you have any examples of…or stories that you want to share of how you help people take those steps?
Kim Gravel: Sure! Yeah, let me get you a personal story because once you take steps, it’s easier to take more steps. People that take chances and step out on faith take more chances and take more chances and step out on faith more and more because they’ve built up their faith muscle, OK?
Andrea: Yeah.
Kim Gravel: So for me now to jump off a cliff and do something crazy and out of the box is a lot easier for me now. It’s not as risky. It’s not as scary because I’ve done it. But I remember the first time I did it, OK. I wanted to ask, I said, “OK, I had this little singing group girls, we’re traveling around church to church.
Andrea: Love it!
Kim Gravel: Community center to community center or _____. We were producing our own CDs, we’re writing our own music, middle-aged women. I had two at home, little infants and I said to myself, I’ll never forget it, I said, “I’m gonna take this to the next level.” OK, let’s talk about stay-at-home mom, you know, sagging boobs, you know, your hind end and everything. So you take about three women like that out there trying to make it in the music world where everything is grabbing your crotch and butt naked.
So here we go and I said, “I’m gonna take this to the next level.” I said “I wanted to have a reality show.” Girl, I know nothing about nothing. I know nothing, OK.
Andrea: Except that you’re brilliant, right?
Kim Gravel: Well…
Andrea: You just knew you got it.
Kim Gravel: I knew I had something to say. I just knew I had something to say. I didn’t know who wanted to listen, but I remember doing a little video in my girlfriend’s basement for this little TV show that ended up being Kim of Queens, by the way. I said, “I’m going to take it to another…” I remember sending it out to all these producers.
Long story short, we got the show, you know, two years later. People don’t know that the _____ takes forever _____ and this producer; I met with this producer in Hollywood. Again, air quotes I’m doing right here. And I remember feeling like I was the dumbest idiot of what the heck have I got myself into, scariest thing. I wanted to quit because I thought they were so smart and they were telling me, “You gotta do this, you gotta do this, and you gotta do this.”
And I will never forget on set one day, I looked at this guy and then someone will tell you something. I don’t know where it came from but I knew it was wrong, I said, “I’m not gonna sit here and fight with these little girls and fight with these moms and fight with you. You can either do the show the way you wanna do it and get somebody else or get the heck out of my building.” Girl, I don’t even know where that came from.
I was scared to death to even say it but I knew if I didn’t take that step up and get this dude straight, my career will never happen. This is like what, 39. I’m not talking like I was 20, almost a 40-year-old woman sitting here letting this dude just tell me what the heck I am and who I am. So that moment, you’ve got to take that first step. So you’ve got in total fear in total, “Oh my gosh, if I piss this guy off, he’ll never hire me again.” But you have to know yourself and know your worth and know that you’re worthy and step out and be who you are whether they like it or not.
When you do that that’s when your when your confidence will rise. It will get easier to take those jumps. It will get easier to invest and bet on yourself, you know. I mean, some people, it’s doing a podcast. Some people, it’s going back to the school. I mean, fill in the blank, whatever that thing is for you, that is holding you back and you know what it is because if you listen to this podcast, you know exactly what I’m talking about. There’s that one thing that you say, “If I don’t do this, it’s over.”
And let me tell you something, you get a lot of chances in this life, take one for the love of God. Take one.
Andrea: I’m listening to the people who are saying though, but what if this, this, this, or this happens, but this, this, and this are on my way?
Kim Gravel:OK, well, you can’t live your life on what ifs. You’re not going to get married, what if you get divorced? You’re not going to have a baby, what if the baby dies during childbirth? What if you’re not going to…you know, you can’t what if your life you, you just can’t. At some point you have to do something or you’re going to be just reading books and make again vision boards the rest of your life. OK, here’s an example. I hear more people saying, I’m making vision boards. Well, my vision board, I haven’t had a chance to make it. I’ve been so busy since January.
Andrea: I love that.
Kim Gravel: OK, quit preparing and start doing because I’ll tell you this, once you take a step and you do like when I told that joke, this _____, either you get on board or don’t. That’s when the show popped. That’s when we got second season, and now this guy’s a good friend. He texts me and says, “Oh my God, I wish I could work with you again, blah, blah.” That’s never going to happen but “Oh my God, we should work for you.” You know, you have to do something and you have to believe in yourself enough to do it or nobody’s going to believe in you. Quit working your vision board, honey, and reading your books. Get up there and check _____, do something.
Andrea: I love it. I love that. Do you think that that part of part of what we do when we…OK, here. I think one of the things that we’re afraid of is, you know, like we’re going to polarize people, like some people won’t like me. So talk to me about that like polarizing people. Surely not everybody is into Kim Gravel, you know like…
Kim Gravel: No!
Andrea: Who is Kim Gravel’s audience and why do why do you speak to them and not everybody else?
Kim Gravel: OK, so look, I know everybody doesn’t like me. I always say this, if you don’t like me, that’s fine. I still love you. It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter who likes you. The only person that matter who likes you is you. And this is the thing, I like me. It’s been a long journey and I don’t like the way I look all the time. I don’t like the way what I say all the time. I don’t like the way I act all the time, but when it comes down to a little bit in my heart and soul, I do like me and I hope my children like me. But if they don’t, which they don’t right now because, you know, they’re supposed to when they get older. That’s fine because I still love them.
You got to please you, and that sounds narcissistic but it all goes back to being worthy. Being worthy and you believing that you’re worthy has nothing really to do with you, and I hate talking super spiritual but I know…
Andrea: No, it’s totally fine here.
Kim Gravel: It’s just what I know. I don’t know psychology. This is what I know. I know that I am fearfully and wonderfully made and I’m an individual and I know that there’s nobody else like me. So if I’m here, I know that he loves me, accepts me, likes me, and I’m worthy. And so when you know that you’re worthy and you feel that self-worth coming from something bigger than you, it has nothing to do with people’s opinions or even your own, or even your mom’s and dad’s or even your husband’s or whatever then it’s so much easier to not care. I don’t say not care because I think that’s a lie because I do care what people think, but I don’t stay there. Does that make sense?
Andrea: Well, it could be that too that you’re driven by such a purpose by that purpose. You’re secure in the love. You’re driven by the purpose, and so you’re willing to sacrifice the fact that people might not like you. What do you think?
Kim Gravel: I love that because when you’re passionate about something, nobody can tell you anything. I remember when I started selling on QVC and the tops or the jeans or whatever that I would sell that I was passionate about that would sell out. And the tops I was not crazy about, I couldn’t sit there and lie and be unauthentic. I could, I could go, “Oh, this is a great top.” And I would say that but everybody knew. They didn’t know why they did know. So they didn’t believe me, they didn’t say, “Oh my gosh, she’s lying.” You can just feel that, you know, what I’m saying?
Andrea: I do.
Kim Gravel: So when I’m passionate about something, you can’t tell me nothing, I’m a bulldog. I’m a bulldozer. And I’ve seen that in so many people, like in politics, people get so freaking passionate about politics and I do not know why it is this crooked industry on the planet. But they get so passionate about it but that’s why they’re willing to fight to the end for it. You got to figure out what you’re passionate about and do it. If you’re not, it’ll be stale. It won’t be authentic. It won’t be true. Does that make sense?
Andrea: Yeah, I mean it brings us right back to where we began with your why, why you are here and what you’re going to do about it. That’s essentially it.
Kim Gravel: That’s everything. And I just didn’t know if your only reason here is to really figure that people think is supposed to get married and have children, although that’s fantastic and I love my children and that’s my biggest job and responsibility right now. And they’re always going to be my children but that’s just for a season, OK? I asked people, “What do you call to do? “I meant to be a wife.” No, no, no, no, nope. “I meant to be a mom.”
Andrea: It’s our role.
Kim Gravel: No, that’s not it, sorry. And they get mad at me. Some people say “Kim, you’re just crazy.” I’m like “You’re not here to be a mom. That’s not your job. That’s not why you’re put here. You get to do that as a woman, what a blessing and what an absolute huge responsibility and it’s your most important responsibility while they’re in those formative years but your kids are going to be gone in a short amount of time. What you’re gonna do with the rest of your life and the best thing you can do for your children is to have purpose so that they can recognize.” They didn’t even know they were doing it. They didn’t even know they were doing it back in the day. I think it’s even harder now to find your purpose than it was back when you just had to survive, you know.
Andrea: Sure!
Kim Gravel: And when our parents were coming up, they just work, you know. Now, there’s so much information and I’d say information, not knowledge. There’s so much coming that people are so confused, depressed, and it’s just because they’re sitting there watching on YouTube, Instagram, and Facebook. Other people leaving out their purposes instead of them getting about theirs, so bottom line is I should’ve been a preacher because that’s all I’ve done so far.
Andrea: Oh, no, no, no. I love it. No, this is so fun. I mean you are a preacher. I mean in a sense, you know?
Kim Gravel: Yeah, yeah. I miss that. I told you I miss my calling. I was told when I was a southern Baptist girl, you can’t preach, you’d be quiet. I should’ve never done that, biggest mistake.
Andrea: Yeah. I think for me, hearing that and feeling that sense of there’s no opportunity here in the church for your voice. I don’t know if anybody wants to hear that from me but yeah, that definitely motivated me to move towards business so…
Kim Gravel: Yeah and let me tell you something. Let me tell you all these women out here listening to the entrepreneurs that don’t think they had business to send them, you do. You sound certainly do and there’s plenty of room out there for all of us and we’re supposed to have a voice in business. The marketplace is dying for women. I cannot tell you how many business meetings I’ve set and they’re like, “Well, we want to sell to Susie, The Soccer Mom.”
And I got one now and I can’t really get into it. One is like “We wanna to sell to Liz and Elizabeth. “We wanna to sell to the mom and the daughter.” We’re always the people that they want to get our money. So you better get about getting your business that sell to each other because money in this world gives you a lot of seats at the table and that’s what women need. Entrepreneurship and money and business gets you tons of seats at the table.
Andrea: It changes the game.
Kim Gravel: It changes the game, right. And that’s what we should be teaching our young girls in college is how to…because we the workers, “I’m sorry, we don’t want to get it done.” So I’d love to see women take that part of who they are and put it in more of an entrepreneurial vein and get more seats at the table that way.
Andrea: Wow! This has been a really great, fun conversation, Kim, and inspiring. Is there any one thing that you would like to leave with the listener, like some sort of a call to action or thought that you want to leave with them?
Kim Gravel: Yeah, I do. My motto is if no one’s going to encourage you, encourage yourself. Take responsibility for your own feelings, thoughts, actions, and spiritual wellbeing, your soul. Because I will say this, the drought is over. The days of being less bad and depressed and fatigued and in debt and all of that is over. It’s time for us to stand up and it’s time for you to stand up and take your rightful place in this thing called life, because we need you and I say that all the time, “I need you.” You know what I’m saying?
There’s no one person who has it all together. We all have something together that we can all collectively share together. So we need you!
Andrea: Alright, Kim, where should people look for Kim Gravel?
Kim Gravel: Oh, just go to kimgravel.com, you’ll find something there.
Andrea: You’ll find a lot there.
Kim Gravel: You’ll find something there for you and if not, you’ve been blessed. I’m telling you what’s you’re doing, girl, with this podcast, do it. Do it, I love it! This is the future. And keep communicating because we need it.
Andrea: Yeah, thank you! Well, thank you for your voice of influence in the world.
Kim Gravel: Well, my pleasure, and I love you guys and thanks for having me, girl.
Whether you’re working with people one-on-one, an executive working with a team, or you’re a parent who wants to the best come out of your kids, you’ve been tasked the challenging and rewarding work of helping others find their voice.
In this episode, I’m talking about what it looks like to help others release their voice. Some topics discussed are how my son’s cub scout troop was the perfect reminder of how amazing it feels to help someone find and use their voice, why so much of how people express themselves has to do with what’s inside their mind, why it’s important to give immediate positive feedback when someone begins to share their voice, how doing so allows you to challenge them later, and more!
Play here (the red triangle below), oniTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Radio(Amazon Alexa) or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Transcript
Hey, hey, it’s Andrea and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast.
Today, I’m going to help you become a better coach, whether you are somebody who is working with people one-on-one, maybe you’re an executive that wants to help your team do better to bring out their voice and that sort of thing. Maybe your parents who are looking at your kids going “I want to see the best come out of them.”
If you are someone who is in that position where you know that have the opportunity, the ability, the responsibility even to draw out someone else’s voice to help them to become more of who they are, to help them step into who they are to use their voice and make a difference in who they are then you have a special, special place in my heart.
I totally know the amazing opportunity that you have, both for yourself and for them, because it is transformational work to be able to encourage others and to see them change, to be a guide that comes alongside someone, to encourage them, and to bring them out and challenge them and help them reach the next level. It’s so exciting.
But one of the biggest, biggest challenges that people have is that they are very intimidated by others. We’re very, very often…I mean, everybody I think, but definitely when you’re in a position, when you’re specifically are in a position and there’s somebody who looks up to you, who is looking to you to help them, looking to you as a leader or as a guide, most likely they’re wanting your approval. They’re wanting your nod and they’re wanting to know that you like them.
And so in a sense, you kind of just buy the fact that you’re in that position, you’re kind of intimidating, which makes it difficult for someone to come in and feel comfortable with you and to really be able to warm up to you and that sort of thing. So today, what we’re going to talk about is when we talk about what it looks like to help others really release that voice.
OK, and as usual, I have a kids’ story for you. I told this kids’ story. This is totally part of who I am and part of my brand are all these kids stories because I have kids and I think that when we bring it down to that level of just really simple level of children, I think everybody can relate because we were all kids at one time and many of us have children or you know children or you love children. And so I love to use these examples in order to make it so that everybody can kind of relate.
So we’re going to go to the kid story now. Recently, I have started working with my son’s Cub Scout troop because they’re going because they’re going to be singing the national anthem at a college basketball game. And they’re so excited; I mean some of them are excited. I think the older ones are having a harder time probably getting excited, but the younger ones, oh they’re so excited about this opportunity because they love to sing.
So the first thing that I do is I have them gather around me while I’m sitting down at the piano. Now, if you don’t already notice about me, I was a music teacher and I taught music lessons and voice lessons. So when I’m talking about this, this is the background that I’m coming from and I make all kinds of connections between how people use their voices in a singing sense and how they use them in a more figurative way or that voice of influence kind of way.
So I have these boys standing around me and we’re doing these scales and the more that they sing, they more excited they get. And then we go and we started singing the actual anthem and we do some call backs and echoing and things like these so that they can really learn it. And by the time we’re done, it was so fun. I had such a blast and one of the little boys looked at me and goes “I wanna be a music teacher when I grow up.” And I _____ “Oh yes, steal my heart, take it now.” I love it. I love it when they get so excited.
And that whole experience just reminded me of a couple of things that I want to share with you today. So number one, it is an amazing experience to be able to help people find their voice, to help them find joy in expressing themselves and help them find joy in singing. Number two, singing and sharing your voice in the world, a voice of influence or singing, either one of them. It’s 10 percent talent and probably 15 percent practice and the rest of it is all in the head.
Now, that is totally my own statistics. They’re actually not statistics, this is my estimation. But this is after years and years and years of working with people and helping them and what I’m saying is that so much of what people or how they express themselves has to do with what’s going on inside of their minds. You see this is a music teacher, when kids are bout in 4th grade, they start to really pull back until 4th grade, kindergarten. Earlier, I worked with little, little kids and going on up to about 3rd grade, they are very enthusiastic. They’re not afraid to sing. They enjoy it. They smile and they get into it. It’s so much fun.
And then about in 4th grade, they still kind of do it but they’re starting to pull back and you see a consistent pull back on that voice throughout the rest of their adult lives up until about the age of the late 30s maybe. At late 30s, at least women, I’ve seen this from women more than men, but at least in women in late 30s, they start to care less about what other people think about them and so they start to share more. They start to sing out more.
And then they hit 40 and there are some sort of like _____ in people and it’s amazing to see how much more comfortable they are with just who they are and they start to really share. They start to really sing. They start to really let their voice go.
So that desire to impress people, I think really start to hit around 4th grade, that desire to not just impress people as a younger child who want to impress people as well. But there’s more hesitation because the older you get, the more you realize that other people don’t necessarily adore me like I thought they did and the world is a lot more harsh that I thought it was. And some people don’t like my voice, some people aren’t going to just smile at when I sing, when I share it.
And so, so much of what goes on in the other person or maybe in yourself has to do with this head game. It’s a head game. What is going on inside of the other person that you’re working with? OK, let me give you a couple of tips based on both. I’m going use the example of working with these Cub Scouts little kids, but it absolutely applies to the way that I work with adults as well in just helping them communicate and find their voice of influence.
So when I have these little boys stand around, I have them stand around me at the piano and I’m playing these little scales and the very first thing that I do as soon as they open up their mouths and they started singing is they get immediate feedback from me. They know right away that I am so proud of them for opening up and letting sound out.
It doesn’t have to be perfect, because when someone first shares their voice, when someone first comes up with an idea, oftentimes it’s not the best one. Oftentimes, it’s a far cry from the best thing that you want from them, but if you affirm their voice immediately then they had a sense of OK, so even if that wasn’t perfect, at least it’s wanted. They want to hear more from me.
So what I do, when I’m working with these boys here, I was going up and down the scale and I was singing with them a little and they would call back and we work together and then I hear it and I go “Oh, let’s just listen to that sound. I wanna hear more of it,” and that sort of thing.
And in encouraging them as they saw the joy on my face because they were producing that joy by singing, when they could see that they had the power to make me delighted, to delight in them then that give them more confidence to sing out louder when I wanted them to sing out louder. It also give me more room and buffer to be able to correct them when I needed to.
So if they did something that’s wasn’t quite right, I could say “Oops, let’s hold on a second, it wasn’t quite as good as you did it last time,” or I could say “This little line right here, let’s take a look at this more closely and pick it apart a little bit because _____, isn’t it?” And of course these are little boys and at the same time, guys, people appreciate it when you appreciate them.
If you really want to help somebody else, if you want to help them by coaching them and that sort of thing then one of the biggest gifts that you can give them is encouragement. And I’m not saying that to ever, you know, give a challenge because I talked about this before but I think people need to be safe, celebrated, and challenged. They need to feel safe, they need to feel celebrated and then you need to bring in the challenge.
And I absolutely believe this, if you provide that atmosphere where they feel like their voice is wanted and that you are for them, you are here to help them, this is about them then when you are ready to celebrate something about them, you can do that, you can say “Wow, that was actually really great.” And then when you need to bring in that challenge, you can bring it in powerfully.
And they know, “Look, this person is my coach, my mentor, my parent, my manager, they care about me. They are for me. They are so for me that they are putting so much energy into this. They believe in me. They believe that what I have is special and that that’s worthwhile to hear even if I need to keep working to refine that, I’m willing to put myself under their tutelage in order to get better because I know that it’s not about shame, it’s not about feeling bad about myself, it’s about revving it up and feeling like it matters and that I can do something about it. And because they care about me, I have the confidence to keep going even when I get tired.
So these boys, I tell you what for 20 minutes, we were singing like crazy, and like I said, I have them around me in the piano. I’m constantly giving this feedback and then we turnaround and I look at them in the eyes. They mirror you. You guys, people mirror you and of course you’re going to really see it in a young child when you smile at them, they smile back at you. When you frown at them, they feel crummy and so they frown back at you. But it’s not unlike when you’re adult, when you’re an adult and you’re doing this.
When you’re encouraging people, they might not smile back at you right away. Because, I mean think about high schoolers, when I was a high school music teacher, it would be so funny because, you know, I would share my enthusiasm for them and the whole group. And with the whole group, they would just sort of like they were still very stoic a lot of times, especially when I first started, they didn’t know me and feel comfortable with me yet. But when I started to work one-on-one with people, when I could work one-on-one and I could hear them then I could give them immediate feedback and they started to really believe in themselves and they started to smile.
It’s the same thing when I’m working with folks one-on-one and they’re talking about how they’re dealing with a problem, how they’re working on a situation, or something that they’re struggling with. It is absolutely important. I absolutely believe that that is so important for me to start out with an affirmation of some kind.
I love how you are working towards this with this person, even if I totally disagree with the way that they’re approaching it, I can come back to that but I need to start with “What can I affirm in them first?” What can be celebrated?” Because they need to know that I care for them, I care about them and I’m for them then when I come back with a “You know what, this is really an important what you’re doing here.” And they recognize that in themselves and they see that in themselves and they start to realize “Yeah, this is important. I am important. My voice here really does matter.”
But then we get to the point of saying “Alright, so let’s take a look at this a little more closely.” “Why do you think that?” Or “How do you know that?” We need to take a look at though then we get to bring in the challenge piece then people don’t want to just be safe and celebrated. They don’t want to feel of all sense of affirmation from you. They want to know that you are here to help make them better.
So you’re not only here to be for them, with them, to celebrate them, to make them feel comfortable, or to help them find their voice. No, no, you are also as a coach, you are also here to challenge them, to bring in that extra effort, that extra beat of advice or help them think through things so that they can improve and they can feel more confident in who they are and who they are becoming as a person, whatever they are, or whatever they’re trying to become.
So much of the coaching relationship is about this head game. It’s about voice. It’s about the head game of voice. It’s about what’s going on inside of people so that they can feel comfortable enough to actually sing, to actually let their voice be heard.
I find that this is through with myself. When I start to question my abilities, when I start to become self critical or I let a criticism sink in and then I think “Oh my gosh, I do stink.” “This doesn’t work.” “I’m not going a good job,” whatever it might be. When I start to do that, if I do that before I’m about to step on stage or if I do that before I’m about to approach a group of people with an offering of some kind to help them in some way, I’m not able to offer as freely as when I want to feel like I actually have something that’s of value to offer.
So in order to help other people find that voice of influence in themselves, we need to help them connect with the fact that they are valuable, that they are worthy, and that they have something important to share. And so once you get to that point then you come in with some additional ideas about how to improve that will help them really find and release their voice. In helping them do that, you will find your Voice of Influence.
Oscar Trimboli is on a quest to create 100 million “deep listeners” in the world. As a former marketing director at Vodafone and Microsoft, Oscar has always been passionate about the importance of listening to his customers.
In this episode, Oscar talks about the five levels of a “deep listener,” why focusing solely on the person speaking doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll be a better listener, the cost of not being a deep and present listener in the workplace, what he would have his team listen for while reviewing calls from customers, how he used the insights gained from listeners to customers into other aspects of the company, and so much more.
Play here (the red triangle below), oniTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Radio(Amazon Alexa) or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Transcript
Hey, hey. It’s Andrea, and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast. Today I have with me Oscar Trimboli. He is on a quest to create 100 million deep listeners in the world. I am excited to hear what he means by that. As a former marketing director at Vodafone and Microsoft, Oscar has always been passionate about the importance of listening to his customers and he brought that passion to the next generation leaders at Microsoft, rebuilding their graduate leadership program which was implemented in 26 countries.
Andrea: Oscar, let’s start with this: what is deep listening?
Oscar Trimboli: Well, most of us see in color but most of us only really listen in black and white. We listen to what’s heard and what we see, but a deep listener listens at five levels. They listen to themselves first, they listen to the content next, they listen to the context after that, they listen to what’s unsaid. It sounds like a bit of a Ninja move but we’ll explain that. And ultimately, they listen for meanings. So deep listening is your ability to listen and have an impact beyond the words.
Andrea: OK, so what made you, in particular, interested in this topic? Where did this originate for you because this is obviously something you really care a lot about?
Oscar Trimboli: Well, as I look back, there wasn’t a lightning bolt moment where something happened and it all fell into place. I’m not that fortunate. But as I look through my school life where I went to a school with 23 nationalities, I would be able to listen to and connect their non-English-speaking migrants with the English speakers at school, the sports jocks and the academics together, the teachers and the students. That ability to listen beyond what was being said and listen to people’s intention and their body language was really handy because we played a variety of card games at school, some of them card games that you’d call English card games, some of them Italian card games, and some of them Chinese card games. I was always asked to be on everybody’s team, because I didn’t know it consciously then but I was listening for people’s body language in those days.
As I went through various stages in my professional career, there was this consistent thread. I always never struggled to hire people as a people manager whereas a lot of people managers did. What I learned later on was it was because I was really customer focused in that before every team meeting that we had, you had to spend a half an hour in the contact center as a team listening to what the customers were actually saying. So it might surprise some people who might be business owners out there that when you’re working in a large corporation, you’re not very close to your customer at all. The closest you get to a customer might be a row in a spreadsheet or a graph that’s generated. Or maybe you get really close and you hear a piece of the verbatim feedback that is the transcription of what a customer said.
So my teams were always encouraged to put on the headphones and then go to the contact center in… I’m dating myself here because we didn’t always have software to log into the contact center, but listening. And if you wanted to interview with me or join my team, everybody knew the first question I would ask is, “So based on the last hour you’ve spent speaking to customers, what have you learned?”
That listening thread went all the way through my career. It was about six years ago where somebody said, “Maybe that’s your purpose on the planet is to help people learn to listen as well as you do.”
I was fortunate enough to sit down with a mentor and I said, “Look, by the time I get to 2030, I’d like to train a million listeners in the world.” _____ looked at me and he said, “Sounds kinda simple for you. Do you think you can get there?” And I said, “Yeah, I can see a million listeners really easy.” He said, “Well, if you can achieve it in your lifetime, it’s probably not ambitious enough.” And I said, “Hmm. good point Dermot. I have that 10 million listeners.” And he straight away came back and said, “How about a hundred million listeners. That should safely scare you.” He was right. That stretched my thinking ever since.
Andrea: That’s fascinating. I love this topic. It is so near and dear to my heart because the whole point of having a voice of influence in my mind is actually totally flipping the whole thing around. It’s when you can help others find their voice that’s when you really find your voice of influence.
So the idea of listening, and not just listening but also helping people draw out, and I suppose that’s part of what you talk about, how do you help other people to be able to express or to have the space to express what they’re thinking or what they’re feeling?
Oscar Trimboli: The very first thing most people are taught, if they’re ever taught how to listen, is to focus on the speaker and give them your complete attention. That’s handy but it’s not really the powerful foundation of deep listening. Deep listening actually starts with you. If you’ve got so much self-talk in your own mind, if you’ve got a story playing in your head, if you’ve got a movie going on about the next thing that’s going to happen or the last drama that you’re trying to process, it’s very difficult for you to have space in your head to listen to the other person.
And listening to yourself is the foundational component of being a deep listener. You need to be available to the other person to listen. In doing so, I’ve researched about 1,410 people over the last 24 months in a consistent survey group and 86 percent of people don’t struggle with focusing on the other person. The things they talk about is the distraction in their head, their inability to stay in the dialogue. They’re big struggles that people have when it comes to listening.
So three really simple tips are the deeper you breathe the deeper you listen, so holding your breath a little bit longer, exhaling a little bit longer. I’m not asking people to move into a yoga pose before they listen to people.
But whether you’re an opera singer, a navy SEAL or an Olympic-level athlete, they all breathe very deeply. They do something called box breathing. So if you visualize making a box out of your lungs where you go down one side, you go across and you come back up. Then just hold that breath and take it in 10 seconds longer. They hold it for 10 seconds longer. They exhale for 10 seconds longer because listening is a very high load on your mind. So if you can get oxygen to the brain, you’ll be a better listener.
So tip number one, deepen your breathing. Tip number two, a hydrated brain is a listening brain. Your body uses 25 percent of its blood sugars in the brain. So anything you can do to get the blood sugars to the brain faster is a good thing. So always have a glass of water when you’re listening to somebody. A cup of coffee is interesting but it’s not helpful. So water and coffee, that’s really good as well.
Finally, and probably the most difficult for everybody to do, switch off your mobile phone, switch off your cell phone, switch off your laptop, switch off your iPad device or tablets. Get them out of the way. It’s no coincidence that software designers from the slot industry, from Las Vegas that help people stay in the zone that’s completely dopamine-enabled they have dings and colored lights coming on and it’s exactly the same on your cell phone. The red notifications, the ding that you get and that’s completely designed to fry your brain and distract you.
So the most powerful example of this I saw was a traveling exec that I was hosting in 2010. He had flown all the way from Seattle to Sydney. That’s an 18-hour plane ride. But he got straight off the plane and into a meeting with me with 10 business owners in a hotel in Sydney. And Peter stood up and announced himself to the group, sat down and then realized something. He stood up again and he says, “Forgive me. I’ve left my phone on.” So he went to his bag. He took his phone out of his bag; he switched it off, announced it switched off and then put it back in his bag.
Andrea, what do you think happened to the other 10 execs in the room at that moment?
Andrea: They all went and did the same thing with their own phones.
Oscar Trimboli: Yeah, so seven of the 10 people did that.
Andrea: That’s fantastic.
Oscar Trimboli: Three didn’t but the point is a lot of leaders ask me and a lot of people who are parents ask me, “How do I teach other people how to listen,” and I always say role model listening. And in that moment, Peter said, “The most important thing I can do for the next hour is give my full attention to this group of people.” That was probably one of the most productive meetings I’ve ever seen at that level because nobody was using their phone as a status symbol to show everybody else how much more important something else was than the meeting. And that was a really, really productive meeting and set up a very different experience.
So when I debriefed the leaders, as Peter went to another meeting in another part of the city immediately afterwards, we we’re talking about future technologies and roadmaps of the future and some of the software that people take for granted today. Back eight years ago, it wasn’t even being built. I said, “You know, what was the most useful thing today,” expecting them to talk about software in the future or how much money they can make. They all said to a person, “Watching Peter switch off his phone. It was very empowering.”
Andrea: That’s awesome. I know that it’s really hard for people who feel like they have so many things going on, so many plates spinning, so many people that need things from them to feel like it’s OK to be that present. This is how you do it but explain to me why it is that… you know, what’s the cost of not listening like this? What’s the cost of not being present? What’s the benefit of doing that?
Oscar Trimboli: The cost of not listening is extraordinary in the workplace. We feel that as conflict, confusion, chaos sometimes. We feel that in projects that run a schedule because people leave project update meetings thinking they heard something going and implemented what they think they heard and then coming back to the next project meeting and people looking confused at each other going, “Isn’t that what you told me?”
One of the simple costs of listening is rework. I was talking to a client about six months ago and I was sitting down with her and she’s got a very complicated job sheet. She puts together the pricing of complex financial instruments that help people save money. She was in a meeting with two people who were leaders in the business and that were peers of each other and the two peers weren’t listening to each other but they needed to approve this pricing. One was saying, “We need the pricing lower.” Another one said, “We need the pricing higher.”
Each time my client would go back to her working group and redo the pricing. And every time they redid the pricing was 120 hours of effort. But more importantly, as she noticed, the opportunity for error in this very complex pricing model increased every time they did a new version of the model. So that would come back on a regular basis to this committee doing what they think they heard.
Ultimately, the pricing came back and the ultimate decision maker said, “Why have you gone and put the pricing together like that? We were just thinking out loud. It wasn’t a recommendation to go and change the pricing.”
I come into many situations working with clients in the workplace where the cost of not listening is a simple misunderstanding in the short term, but in the long term it’s a lot of rework. You could even say one of the most significant costs for the 2016 Democratic Party was its inability to listen to its heartland. And the cost for them has been quite significant in US elections as an example. So whether it’s in businesses or organizations.
But my favorite story about the cost of not listening as a client, an executive I was working with about two and a half years ago, Michael, he rang me up on a Friday evening and said, “You’ve nearly cost me my marriage.” I said, “Oh, why is that?” And I’m always very clear. This is always work around deep listening in the workplace. And I said, “Mick, what’s going on?”
He said, “Well, I’ve been doing all your stuff but, last Friday, we put the kids to bed and my wife sat me down and she looked me straight in the eye and said, ‘OK, let’s be honest with each other now. And I want you to tell me straight, are you having an affair?’” And he was completely knocked off his seat. Rather than try and defend it, he just asked his wife why she’d formed that perspective. She said, “For the last eight weeks you have never paid me as much attention as you have in the whole seven years of our marriage. I figured you must be having an affair to cover it up.”
And Michael breathed out at that point. He sighed and he smiled and he explained to his wife that he’s been taught how to listen. She said, “That has completely changed our relationship. Your ability to stay focused on me completely is the most intimate thing you’ve ever done for me.” So sometimes it can cost a marriage.
Andrea: It’s fantastic. I love that example. So let’s go back to when you would take your teams into the customer call center and listen to the customers there. What were you listening for when you were there?
Oscar Trimboli: Personally, I’m listening for a couple of things. The first thing I’m listening for is what is the listening stance that the person in the contact center speaking to the customer is listening for? Are they asking questions that are exploring the content? Are they exploring questions that are exploring the context? Are they doing a great job of understanding the back story and how somebody is coming to the conversation rather than what they’re saying?
So a lot of times in contact centers, contact center agents are asked to literally follow a script. Whether that person calling in or not knows how a contact center works, they know somebody’s following a script. What I noticed very quickly was it was the more experienced contact center agents who are very comfortable going off script being led by the conversation, being in a human-to-human connection, not being in a robotic, scripted example where, well, we have to get the average hold time down, we have to reduce the amount of time people are on hold and we have to get the customers off the call as quickly as possible.
You know, there’s a great example with Zappos where it’s not about the amount of time on hold, it’s not even about the amount of time on call. It’s about the resolution. One of the things I was always careful to make sure we listen for as the marketing organization is what is it that’s missing in the information we need to provide to our customers via our website, via software, via our newsletters, via the voiceover recordings when you’re waiting on hold to arm the contact center agents to be successful? So the other thing we spent a lot of time doing is listening to what’s unsaid and listening to the language that the customers were using and making sure that language is being used in our documentation, not the language that we used.
And we use this very sophisticated MBA-ese kind of language and yet the people who were calling us didn’t speak like that. I always say to people, “Honestly, explain it to me like we’re in a pub.” That’s the best way to explain. “Explain it to me like were in a coffee shop.” That’s the best way to explain it. “Explain it to me like you’re talking to my 5-year-old granddaughter, Ruby, or my 78 year old dad.”
And if you can explain it to them simultaneously using the same language, we’re probably a lot closer than using words like ‘scalability’, ‘synergize’ and all these lovely MBA-ese words that are completely meaningless. They’re jargon-filled words that don’t connect with the problem that the customer has.
Ultimately, what we’re listening for as a group, and I’d always have a thematic challenge for them to listen for, so it might be listening to the problems that are the simplest ones. We’ll listen to the problems that are the easiest to fix or listening to the problems that are costing the customer time or listening to the problems that are frustrating the customer with connecting with other software. And listening to what’s unsaid is really the most potent thing I felt was our learning and our gifts to other parts of the business where we could bring them insights because we were listening to our customers deeply.
Andrea: Oh, that’s interesting. How did you bring these insights to the other parts of the company because that’s, of course, one of the most frustrating or difficult things to actually accomplish? So how did you do that?
Oscar Trimboli: Well, maybe some people can. It’s unusual for people to listen this deeply and this consistently to customers in the contact center. What I would do, I would issue challenges to other divisions to go, “You know, our team spent 17 hours this week listening to customers. How many hours does your team?”
And they’d always go, “Oh yeah, yeah, but you’re our internal customer.” So Finance would always say to us, “You’re our an internal customer. We listen to you.” Or Legal would say the same thing.
And I said, “No.” I said, “That’s a copout.” I said, “I’m only asking you to listen. I’m not asking you to actually take the calls.” Which we did do every quarter. We would make sure that our team not only listened but we would ask them to do three calls as well because it’s a completely different level of empathy for the customer when you’re on the hook as opposed to listening for a contact center agent there. So we would bring, literally, audio recordings into the room where we had customer permission. We apply those to other divisions. And it was more potent when the customer’s voice was heard in a meeting.
Andrea: They’re actually voice.
Oscar Trimboli: Yeah.
Andrea: Nice.
Oscar Trimboli: To explain why that change needed to be made in pricing or why the change needed to be made from a legal point of view. So for a lot of us, particularly when I was working at Vodafone, in mobile communication, in those days pricing was very complicated. We would price per text message, we’d price per dataset, we’d price per call whether it was local or international, and it was really confusing. A customer never really knew where they stood, particularly if they were prepaid and they were paying in advance.
So bring that and it’s the most powerful way to listen. The other thing we did as well was marketers work with a lot of advertising agencies as an example. Typically, when they brief the advertising agency, they’ll put some slides together. They’ll put some market research together, the slides, all that pie charts and pie graphs and some verbatim about what the customer is saying. We actually brought the customers into the advertising agency and we got the advertising agency to listen to them.
So it wasn’t a piece of qualitative market research. That’s a very different approach. But I simply said, “Rather than me explain why this product is important, let me explain that through the potential customers that I’ve brought together today to speak to you.” They loved it because, again, the customer and the way they would explain a problem was completely different to the way that would be translated by the software company that was Microsoft or the telecommunications company that was Vodafone.
So I think in that really simple thing, let the customer’s voice speak for everything. No filters, no translation, no summary. You can curate a group of very simple, diverse stories. We always made sure we had one customer from government and one customer from commercial and one customer from a big organization and one customer from a growing, maybe a smaller number of employee organization. And that’s how you can have an influence without you speaking. That’s how you can give the customer a voice in an environment that’s really powerful to them because, of course, you can guess those customers who came in at that part of the research they wanted your product to succeed because they felt they were part of it, but only because you listened to them.
Andrea: That, in itself, is a powerful statement because I think it’s true across the board when you really listen to people. When they have a voice, they’re going to be more supportive of the ultimate goal.
Oscar Trimboli: And look, we spend a minimum of 55% of our day listening and yet only 2% of us have ever had any training. The more senior you are or the closer to a customer you are, those percentages go up. If you’re the most senior executive in an organization or an owner, you’re probably spending 80 to 85% of your day listening to customers, suppliers and staff. If you’re in a contact center, it’s closer to 90% of your day spending listening to customers.
We’ve spent the 20th century learning how to speak. I’m on a quest to spend the 21st century training people on how to listen because they spend half the day doing it. If you wanted the productivity hack of the 21st century, it’s how to listen.
Andrea: How can companies better listen to those people who are on the front lines, these customer-facing teams? How can they listen to them better so that they have a better sense of this? For example, when you were presenting these customer recordings, did those come from when you were in the contact center yourself and you guys drew those out as the marketing team? Or were those things that you asked the actual call center agents to curate and help curate for you?
Oscar Trimboli: Yeah. It was a combination of both. We drew out thematic examples that would support our business case, but equally we asked the contact agents to come up with one call that would be representative of their month. We had a number of themes that we were looking at over a period of time and we would pull out the calls that were recorded by or held up by the contact center agents as the one that supported that theme. So we didn’t tell them what the themes were. We just asked them to give us one a month for the representative call of the customer.
And some of the contact centers I’m dealing with, we’ve got hundreds of agents in the contact center then so the spreadsheets became quite complex because we had to code them. And by code them I don’t mean software but just give them some labels and some themes and stuff like that. Sometimes the labels would be about complexity. The label might be about billing complexity. The label might be about billing complexity and international calls but then we’d have to code it by male-female, we’d have to code it by age group, we’d have to code it by metro-non metro area because the buying behaviors might have been different in those contexts, and we had to code it personal versus business usage. You can imagine it if you were to filter that, you could have a lot of insights there as well.
We also ask the contact center agents to prioritize them and give them a rating of 1 to 5, with 5 as the one they thought was the most representative and 1 the least. In that way we could get them to start to think about what is that thing that is really representative there.
As an interesting example, I’ve interviewed the former head of market research for Coca-Cola and former head of market research for Nike in Asia Pacific. What she said was the most powerful listening you can do as an organization is to watch your customers using your product. The best example she uses was Toyota engineers followed people in supermarket shopping center car parks in the US and just watched. They literally sat there and watched people using competitors’ cars and Toyota cars.
What they discovered very quickly was the lip of the back of the car when people were loading food and groceries into the trunk of the car was just too high. Now, more modern versions of Toyotas have a very flat no-lip on the trunk of the car which makes it easier to get food and groceries into the car.
Now, as Vanessa said to me, she said, “You would never see that in a market research, in qualitative research, and quantitative research because the customer didn’t even know they had that problem. They just thought it was the way cars were made and they just had to deal with it.”
And just listening to that little thing, by going out and watching the customers, Toyota were able to transform that experience. Now, will that make customers more loyal to Toyota? What they noticed is a lot of moms would tell other moms about that and that became a quite a distinctive feature of Toyotas at the period of time.
Now, the market has caught up. A lot of the competitive cars now have adopted that as well. But what’s the lip to the trunk of the car for your customers and your organization? Unless you watch them using your product or your service, you’re very unlikely to be listening deeply to what matters to them.
Andrea: That is a great way for us to wrap up this conversation. I love that, that last image that you gave us in the challenge, really, that is embedded in that.
Oscar, how can people get a hold of you if they want you to come and speak to their company or connect with your website? I know you have a white paper there. Why don’t you share how they can connect?
Oscar Trimboli: The easiest thing to do is just type ‘Oscar Trimboli’ into your search engine. There’s pretty much only one of me on the internet and that will connect you really quickly. If you land on my website, the white paper is there, which will wrap up what we’ve said in a really clear document. There’s also a series of podcasts where I interview professional listeners, whether they’re market researchers or judges or journalists, air traffic controllers or FBI hostage negotiators.
In about three hours I’ll be releasing a Hugh Forrest. The head of South by Southwest from Austin, Texas runs an event and has incredible listening technologies and methods to listen to the 50,000 people that attend South by Southwest every year and create a huge economic impact for the city of Austin in Texas as well. So there’s a great starting point.
If you love to read, check out Deep Listening on Amazon.
Andrea: All right. Thank you so much, Oscar. We’ll be sure to have all of this in the show notes as well. So appreciate you being with us and teaching us how to listen. Let there be more deep listeners because of this podcast.
Do your employees feel respected?
Business leaders know respect is important but there’s often confusion as to what that respect looks like and what it really means.
In this episode, I cover the main points of Kristie Rogers’ article; including the distinction between “owed respect” and “earned respect”, how a recent experience with one of my sons is the perfect example of these two types of respect, what needs to be considered when deciding how to balance the two types of respect in an organization, and more!Mentioned in this episode:
Play here (the red triangle below), oniTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Radio(Amazon Alexa) or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Transcript
Hey, hey, it’s Andrea and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast.
Lately, I’ve been working on a project. It’s a little training or an offering that I am putting together that would help companies or organizations be able to get really clear on their values, their mission, their vision, and their purpose in order to be able to share that with the rest of the company so that they can help people connect their purpose to the purpose of the company. So a feeling like it matters “What I do really matters here.”
And in the process of working through this and working on this and testing it out with people, I’m also putting together a talk to use at conferences. So in the process, I’m reading some articles. And I came across this one from Harvard Business Review. It is by Kristie Rogers who’s out of Marquette University, and I really appreciated what she had to say about respect.
So today, we’re going to a look out what she does say about respect just like a couple of things that she says and discuss what that looks like or what it means for us as people who are trying to help others connect their purpose to the company, help others be able to feel like we matter and that their voice matters because this is something that we talk about a lot here, you voice matters, but you can make it matter more.
This is sort of the tagline that we’ve been working with the last year or so and this idea that your voice does matter. It matters inherently. You’re a human being that matters.
But on the other side, you can still make it matter more in a different sense. And I talked about this a number of times. You can do things that make your voice have more influence. So there’s an inherent quality but then there’s also this quality that has to do with your performance and what we do, what we say, and how that actually impacts our influence.
So what Kristie Rogers says in this article is that that there is kind of a consensus that people know, business leaders know that respect is important. They kind of know that. We’ve been talking about it quite a while, but maybe there’s confusion around this idea of what it really, really means and what it looks like. So she makes a distinction between owed respect and earned respect.
Let me read to you her definition. This is from the article Do Your Employees Feel Respected?Show Workers that they’re valued and your business will flourish. This is from Harvard Business Review, July-August 2018. And owed respect as she defines it is accorded equally to all members of a work group or an organization. So this is for everybody. It meets the universal need to feel included. It signaled by stability in an atmosphere suggesting that every member of the group is inherently valuable.
So, owed respect is really this general overall feeling and this general overall consensus that everybody matters. It’s this idea that your voice matters, inherently you are valuable. But earned respect recognizes individual employees who display valued quality or behaviors. It distinguishes employees who had exceeded expectations and particularly in knowledge work setting affirms that each employee has unique strengths and talents.
Earned respect meets the need to be valued for doing good work. So earned respect has to do with performance. I think that is so important. I love this distinction. I think it’s so important because you have to have a sense of owed respect. Everybody like that people matter and if they don’t feel like they matter at all, they’re not valuable, that they don’t _____ value then how are they supposed to feel like what they do matters?
Or maybe they get kind of stuck on this cycle of trying to climb the corporate ladder in a sense or be more and more and more successful because they’d be more valuable if they’re more successful. So we don’t want people to find their inherent value in success. That is something that is just there that everybody is valuable as a human being. But when there is a distinction between that and earned respect that means that the people can truly outperform somebody else.
I know that one of the things that gets confusing in schools for example is you know, do we give everybody the same grade? Do we kind of make grades a deal an issue at all? Or do we reward for things like, you know, your grades or your test scores, or do we need to just make it about attendance and the only things that you get rewarded are your behavior, you know, being quiet in class and being there.
Well, students just as much as any other human being needs to know that they are valuable and that being there is important. And at the same time, they also need to be rewarded for hard work or their abilities of what they do, with what they have and outperforming themselves essentially but it could be outperforming others as well.
So it becomes tricky though, right? It becomes tricky as a teacher, as an educator, as somebody who’s trying to decide what to recognize and what not to recognize because you don’t want to have people feeling bad and then giving up but on the other hand, you don’t want people feeling like, “Gosh, it doesn’t really matter what I do with my abilities. It doesn’t matter what I do with them so I’m just gonna give up as well.”
There is a need for both owed and earned respect. It kind of also made me think of a story with my son. So we went out to eat as a family and it was actually…let me think about this before telling you but this particular meal, we went out to eat, it was a celebration because one of our children did really well on a test and one of our children did really well with their grades, and we wanted to celebrate that. This was a moment of earned respect.
There are many times that we just do things with them and for them because we love them, because they are our children and they don’t have to do anything to earn that love and so we’ll rotate them out. We’ll do special something with them just because they’re our kids, but this was a particular celebration.
So we wanted them to know that we were recognizing, that we recognized how hard they’d worked and that it’s important and it’s good to do that. And so this was a moment of earned respect. So we decided; we were playing games at our table while watching a football game and eating and that sort of thing. That was really fun.
And then our son realized that he had forgotten something in the car. So we gave him the keys. He’s 9 years old, we gave him the keys and he walked out. We kind of looked at each other hoping he doesn’t get hit you know. We warned him before he left, you know, “Make sure you’re watching for the cars,” because he kind of tends to be oblivious to his surroundings sometimes. He looks down and walks instead of looking up. So we were a little concerned about that, you know, sending him out there by himself.
But pretty soon we saw him coming back in the door. We were across the whole entire restaurant. We see him walking in the door. He opens the door and he’s kind of looking down and he opens the next door and he sees an older gentleman that is kind of struggling to walk, and I was like “You guys, what’s he’s gonna do?” I actually said that. I wondered, you know, “Will he really do something? Is he just going to walk right by or is he gonna notice?” And you know what he did, he actually opened the door for this gentlemen and I was like “Oh, yes! I’m so glad that he noticed.”
We were sitting there and just kind of like “Oh this is awesome. Good for him.” He can’t see us. He doesn’t notice us. And then I said “Do you think he’ll open the second door?” I really wasn’t sure, and sure enough he did, he opened the second door. And my mom heart just beat out of my chest. I was so happy that he did that. It just elevated the level of respect that I had for him in that moment.
And so he came back to the seat or the table with us and we told him, we’re like “Grant, we are so proud of you.” Like him doing a good job on a test, but he didn’t actually worked too hard at was one thing. But Grant actually paying attention to another human being and giving him owed respect, opening that door for him.
He didn’t notice the gentleman _____ so it’s not like he earned their respect in the sense that he had done something for Grant, instead he gave him owed respect because he’s a human being and he could see that he needed help, he opened the door. And this made me so proud of him, and in that sense, Grant, earned more respect from me.
When it comes to how we apply this to our work environment or to our organizations, we need to, and these are some of the things that Kristie said in her article but also some things that some of my thoughts as well kind of make _____, we really need to provide an atmosphere where everybody knows that they matter, that they are valued and their contribution does matter.
So when I’m doing a workshop or I am helping a company come up with their values, we make sure to do things and to integrate ideas that will help bring out the voice of the people that are working there, not just the executives but also those who are kind of on the frontline and doing work with customers and things like these. So we capture their voice. We give them an opportunity to speak then we go and have conversation with the executives then we get more clear from their perspective.
You know, we kind of hear both perspectives and what kind of the executives kind of do some of that real work of determining which things we’re going to really highlight in terms of values or initiatives that they’re wanting to move forward and then we go back again to the people and we say “This is based on what you said and what the executive said and do you have any ideas of how we could implement this?”
So in each instance, we’re making sure that these folks feel like, and that truly are respected, that they are giving a voice. But at the same time, a voice doesn’t necessarily carry as much weight or influence as another voice because some people are in a position where their voice, their influence is greater simply because of their job position and they earned that position. And so they do have greater influence over the whole entire process; however, that doesn’t negate the fact that everybody has influence. Everybody has a voice in a sense and all of those voices do matter.
But we do have to acknowledge both and that when somebody does put the extra effort that they should be rewarded. So it is a balance. It is a balance of certainly understanding what the people need in terms of respect and owed respect as well as rewards or celebration or the opportunity to take new opportunities to explore new options or to have more influence.
Another important point that Miss Rogers makes is that when you’re trying to decide what the balance should be of owed and earned respect in your organization, there are some things that you should take into consideration. If you are trying to produce a collaborative result perhaps it has to do with innovation or coming to consensus on something then owed respect should be given more weight.
However, if you’re in a situation where there does need to be some competition or it’s more of an individual situation where individual effort and success needs to be measured, well maybe then earned respect needs to carry a little bit more weight.
But it is certainly true that every single place you go, owed respect is absolutely important. It’s imperative. If you want to have a voice of influence, if you want to make your voice matter more then you will give voice to others. That is how you make your voice matter more.
So respect all and give even more respect or celebration to those who have gone above and beyond and make your voice matter more!
Alan Stein Jr. is a coach, speaker, and author with an expertise in improving organizational performance, cohesion, and accountability. He spent more than 15 years working with highest-performing basketball players on the planet; including NBA superstar, Kevin Durant. Alan now travels the world teaching organizations how to utilize the same strategies in business that elite athletes use to perform at a world-class level. Alan has a brand-new book called Raise Your Game: High-Performance Secrets from the Best of the Best.
In this episode, Alan discusses the work he did with high-performing basketball players and how that’s translated to the work he does with worldwide organizations, how an experience with Kobe Bryant taught him about the importance of mastering basic skills no matter what industry you’re in, why building relationships are the foundation of successful athletes and businesses, the main basic skill that will help you improve any relationship, how to determine your identity as a business, the benefits of collectively creating standards as a group instead of passing down rules from the top of the organization, and more! Take a listen to the episode below!
Play here (the red triangle below), oniTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Radio(Amazon Alexa) or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Transcript
Hey, hey! It’s Andrea, and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast. Today I have with me Alan Stein, Jr., who is a coach, speaker, and author with an expertise in improving organizational performance, cohesion and accountability. He spent 15 plus years working with the highest performing basketball players on the planet, including NBA superstar, Kevin Durant, which I’m excited to hear about in a little bit.
He now travels the world teaching organizations how to utilize the same strategies in business that elite athletes use to perform at a world class level. Alan has a brand new book out called Raise Your Game: High-Performance Secrets from theBest of the Best.
Andrea: So good to have you on the podcast with me today, Alan.
Alan Stein Jr.: Hey, I’m equally thrilled. This is going to be fun.
Andrea: Alright, so now coming from a family who loves basketball, I have to ask you, what kind of work did you do with these highest performing basketball players in the world?
Alan Stein Jr.: I was actually a performance coach, which most people would probably know as strength and conditioning coach. So I’ve focused on helping players improve their athleticism, their mind-body connection, their movement efficiency; and help them bulletproof their bodies so they’d be resilient to injury.
And I did that mostly at the youth and high school level, but was able to work with some pretty good players that ended up being really, really excellent players as they got older. So I really enjoyed working with, working alongside and serving the basketball community for almost two decades.
Andrea: Okay. So what led you to write this particular book about Raising your Game and high performance strategies? What kind of brought you to this point?
Alan Stein Jr.: Sure. Well, about two years ago I decided that I was ready to take everything that I was learning through the world’s best players and coaches of the things they were teaching me on leadership and team cohesion and accountability and winning mindsets and creating championship level culture. And to take all of that, pivot and apply that to the business world and show folks in business how to utilize those same strategies and mindsets.
When I made that decision to kind of change my audience, I quickly came up with a professional bucket list item of writing a book and I did it for a couple of reasons. One, I’ve always felt that I’ve had a book inside of me. I’ve been a voracious reader for my entire adult life and I know I’ve read so many books, countless books that have had a really profound impact on me, in my life and in my perspective. So the thought that I might be able to pen something that could offer that to someone else, you know, was something I was interested in pursuing.
But equally important as I entered the world of being a professional speaker in the business world, writing the book actually forced me to curate all of my content and look back over 20 years and really put pen to paper and write down all of the lessons I’d learned, you know, all of the stories that I’d seen and I’d heard, you know, action steps, everything and really organize that material. And that’s what, you know, writing the book did for me.
Funny enough, I’m very proud of the book. I’m excited to get it in the hands of some readers. But even if I decided not to publish the book, the process of writing, it was still worth every ounce of effort because it really forced me to get organized and get clear on my message, which I use now as a professional speaker.
Andrea: Oh yeah, I can completely understand that. So what would you say the core of your message really is?
Alan Stein Jr.: Well, the core of my message whether I’m speaking or in the book is that the basics work, they always have and they always will. And if you want to be elite in any area of your life, you have to commit to doing the basics and in understanding that just because something is basic, it doesn’t mean that it’s easy. A lot of people think those are synonyms and they’re not.
You know, the principles in this book are incredibly basic. However, implementing them with consistency in everything you do in your life is definitely not easy. It’s not easy for me. It’s not easy for you and it’s not easy for any of your listeners because if it was easy, we’d all already be doing that stuff. So it’s making sure that people understand that there’s a difference between basic and easy.
And you know, the high performing basketball players that I’ve been around, they never get bored with the basics. You know, they still take 10 to 15 to 20 minutes every single day to work on basic footwork and basic offensive moves and things that middle school age players do routinely because they know that the basics are the foundation and their fundamentals are the foundation of everything else that they do.
Andrea: You know, I know you tell this story about Kobe Bryant. Could you share that just real quickly with us because I think it really applies to what you’re talking about right now?
Alan Stein Jr.: Absolutely. Well, it’s hard to believe it’s already been a decade. But back in 2007, Nike flew me out to Los Angeles to be the performance coach for the first ever Kobe Bryant Skills Academy. Nike brought in the top high school and college players from around the country for an intense 3-day mini camp with the best player in the world.
And I know you and your family follows basketball but if any of your listeners don’t, let me just tell you that in 2007, Kobe was the best player in the game. I mean, Michael Jordan knew everybody’s heard of. He’d already retired a couple of times at that point. And Lebron James was great, let’s not get it twisted, but he was still climbing that mountain. I mean, Kobe was the best player. And you know, I, like your family, have lived in a basketball bubble my entire life, so I had heard this urban legend of how insanely intense Kobe’s individual workouts were.
Well, now that I was on camp staff, you know, I figured this was my chance and this was my shot. So at my earliest opportunity, I walked right up to Kobe and asked if I could watch one of his workouts. And he was incredibly gracious and kind and said, “Sure man, no problem. I’m going tomorrow at 4:00,” and I quickly got confused because the nerd that I am, I was studying the camp schedule and it said that the first workout with the kids was the next day at 3:30, and he noticed the confused look on my face and quickly clarified that with a wink and said, “Yeah, that’s 4:00 a.m.”
Andrea: That’s awesome!
Alan Stein Jr.: Well, Andrea, I know as you can appreciate and so can your listeners, yeah. There’s not really an excuse on why you can’t be somewhere at 4:00 in the morning, at least not an excuse that somebody like Kobe Bryant is going to accept. So I basically committed myself to being there. And I just figured, if I’m going to be there anyway, you know, I might as well try and impress Kobe. I might as well leave my mark and show him how serious of a trainer I was.
So I made the plan to beat him to the gym. So I set my alarm for 3:00 a.m. When the alarm goes off, I jumped up, I quickly get myself together and I hopped in the cab. Remember, this is 2007. This is pre Uber and ore Lifts. So I got in an old fashioned yellow taxi and I get out of the taxi, it was 3:30 in the morning.
Of course, it was pitch black outside, and yet from the parking lot I can see that the gym light is already on, and I can even hear a ball bouncing and sneakers squeaking. I walked in the side door; Kobe was already in a full sweat. He was going through an intense warm-up with his trainer before his scheduled workout started at 4:00.
Now, out of professional courtesy and because I was thankful to be there, I didn’t say anything to him and I didn’t say anything to his trainer, I just sat down to watch. And for the first 45 minutes I was really surprised. For the first 45 minutes I watched the best player in the world do the most basic footwork and offensive moves. He was doing pivoting drills that I had done with middle school age players.
Now this is Kobe Bryant, so he was doing everything with an unparalleled level of focus and intensity and everything with surgical precision, but the stuff he was doing was very, very basic. The whole workout lasted a couple of hours. And again, when it was over, I didn’t say anything to him. I didn’t say anything to his trainer, I quietly left. But my curiosity as a young coach got the best of me because later that day I had to know.
So I went up to him again and said politely, “Kobe, I don’t understand you’re the best player in the world, you know, why are you doing such basic drills?” And that was again when he was incredibly gracious but said very seriously, “Why do you think I’m the best player in the world, because I never get bored with the basics.” And that was a pivotal and for me a life-changing lesson and that was what I had said earlier, that just because something’s basic, it doesn’t mean that it’s easy.
You know, here you are, you’re talking about a multi-time all star, a champion, a multimillionaire many times over. Somebody in the conversation is one of the greatest players ever. And in NBA off season, he was still getting up incredibly early to go in and continue to master the basics. And I think there’s an important lesson that if somebody that’s in the upper 10th of one percent and his craft can commit to the basics then all of us should be doing the same thing.
You know, in the world of sports, I actually find it a little bit comical, you know at the time of this recording, we’re in primetime NFL season and inevitably when an NFL team loses two or three games in a row at one of the post game press conferences, the coach will say something to the effect of, you know, “On Monday at practice we’re gonna get back to the basics.”
And I’m certainly not implying that I know anything more than an NFL head coach. But I always laugh because I’m thinking, why did you ever leave them in the first place? If your answer to solving your problem is to get back to the basics then, hey, don’t ever leave the basics. Make them a foundational principle that you live by every day and that’s something in my own life, in my own business, you know, I certainly try to adhere too is never getting bored with the basics.
Andrea: Alan, why do you think that people do get bored, or why do they stray away from the basics?
Alan Stein Jr.:One, the basics are usually mundane and they’re routine and they’re monotonous and they’re boring. But you have to fall in love with that process if you want to get the outcome that you desire. The other thing and, you know, I’m not one of those guys that likes to blame technology. I think technology can be an amazing tool for us, but I do think technology in general with social media and everything going on online, it makes it much easier for us to be distracted.
We get distracted by the things that are hot, flashy, sexy and new. And we skip over the things that are tried and true that we know work and all of us, at some point, fall victim to that. But I think if you can have the discipline to figure out whatever it is that you’re trying to improve, whether you’re trying to personally improve your level of fitness, you’re trying to grow your business, or you’re trying to lead others more effectively, whatever it is you’re trying to improve, actually look at what are the basics of that. What are the foundational principles that are needed to improve this and then make sure that you’re working on those every day.
And like I said earlier, it doesn’t mean that Kobe has to be doing basic footwork for seven hours a day, he just needs to do it for 10, 15, 20 minutes a day, but it’s the consistency of doing it every single day that adds up over time.
Andrea: Do you feel like there’s a way to kind of generalize the basics? So, you know somebody who’s in one area of business versus somebody who’s in another area of business. You know, somebody who’s in customer service on the front lines versus an executive who is trying to determine the strategy of the customer service for example, do you see that there are similarities in the basics of what they need to focus on? Are there a lot differences? How do you kind of talk to that?
Alan Stein Jr.: More often than not, there’ll be similarities and really in any area of business and even in sport, if you look at coaches and the teams, you know, relationships are the foundation of everything that we’re trying to build. I mean, if you look at a business, for example, there’s two crucial relationships that determine how successful your business will be and how sustainable those results will be.
One relationship is with the folks that you work with, those of your colleagues and your coworkers. You know all the way from the top to the bottom of the org chart, everybody that’s within the organization you’d want to consider a teammate. And your relationship with each of the people in that group is vital to your success. Then of course, the other relationship is with your customers or your clients, the people that you serve. And clearly the more quality your relationship with those that you serve and those that you work with, the better your culture and the better your business will be. And I found that one of the foundational basics of improving any relationship is the ability to listen, to actively listen.
If you want to improve any relationship in your life immediately, whether you’re a parent and you want to improve the relationship with your children or your spouse or you’re in business and you want to improve your relationship with your customers and clients or coworkers and colleagues, all you have to do is improve your ability to actively listen.
Now, of course I say that in a very matter of fact tone, because improving the skill of listening is very basic, but doing so is definitely not easy. It takes a ton of practice, but practicing the skill of active listening is one of the best investments you can make. You know, if you want to be a great leader, actively listen. If you want to be great at customer service, the best tool, the number one tool you have in customer service is the ability to listen and then ask insightful questions as a followup.
You know, most of the times, especially in customer service, people just want to be heard. You know, if you allow them to vent their frustrations or whatever was bothering them or the issue they’re having, that in and of itself if you listen with an empathetic ear, usually you’ll start to inch towards a resolution. And then if you can ask insightful questions and then you’re able to come up with a resolution by working with them instead of talking at them, then you’ve really created something special. So active listening is something that all of us need to consider as one of the basics for whatever it is that we’re trying to do.
Andrea: Do you have an idea of a drill per se or a way to practice that particular basic of listening?
Alan Stein Jr.: I do. And it’s one that’s served me well over the years, because in full transparency many years ago I was a less than mediocre active listener and once that was brought to my attention…
Andrea: Less than mediocre is a pretty good description.
Alan Stein Jr.:Yeah.
Andrea: Not for you but just an interesting description.
Alan Stein Jr.: Yeah, I was going to say crappy, but I just decided to go with less than mediocre. And once that was brought to my attention then I realized there was something that I really needed to work on because the relationships in my life, you know, as a father, as a business owner, as a professional speaker, I mean these relationships are really important to me. And once I knew that improving my ability to listen would actually nourish those relationships then it was something I took a lot of pride in improving.
And what I do and still continue to do, although now, it’s so much more natural. In the beginning it was somewhat robotic enforced, which I think happens a lot when we’re trying to master a new skill, and it’s called a list back. And when you list back, you when you wait for an appropriate break in the conversation because clearly if you interrupt someone while they’re talking then you’re not active listening.
When there’s an appropriate break, you list back in their words the exact way they said it what they just said. And you do that for a couple of reasons. One, to make sure that you have the correct information, to make sure that you heard them correctly. It’s common for any of us in any conversation to get distracted or space out for 20 to 30 seconds. Well, if the speaker shared something incredibly important in those 20 to 30 seconds, you missed it. So a list back will help make sure that it’s more accurate. But a list back also shows the person that you were actively listening and that unconsciously tells them that you care about them, that you value what they had to say, that they’re important to you.
So a perfect example would be something to the effect of, “Andrea, I want to make sure I heard you correctly; you said A B C and D, is that right?” And then that’s your chance to either correct me and say, “No, Alan, I must have misspoke because I said A, B, C, and E.” So either way I’m going to make sure I have the correct information or you’re going to say “Yes, Alan, that’s exactly what I said.” And unconsciously you’re going to smile internally because you’re going to think, “Man, Alan really cares about me. He’s listening to what I have to say. He values what I have to say and he’s treating me as if I’m important.” And that’s the glue that binds any relationship. So by organically doing these list backs, you really improve your ability to actively listen.
Andrea: That’s great tip. Okay, so let’s go in a little bit different direction right now. One of the things that you say is that identity drives standards. Standards need accountability. Accountability creates culture and culture produces long term sustainable results. I’d love to hear about how you get from identity to sustainable results, but let’s start with this. What is identity?
Alan Stein Jr.: Identity – and we could do this personally or we could do it organizationally, so let’s tackle it from a team standpoint. Let’s tackle it from the business perspective.
Andrea: That’d be great.
Alan Stein Jr.: It’s a series of these questions and there’s no right or wrong to these questions and this certainly isn’t a completely comprehensive list. But ultimately you want to figure out why you’re is in existence as a business, like what do we do? What problem do we solve? Who do we solve it for? Why does everyone on our team, why are they going to make personal sacrifices to pour into something bigger than themselves? What’s their reason for doing that? What is our purpose and vision as a business? And once you can kind of collectively answer that, that is your identity. This is who we are. This is the problem we solve. This is the target audience that we solve it for. This is why we’re in business. This is how we’re going to turn a profit, and that is your identity.
And it’s incredibly important to get clarity on that and to make sure that everyone in the organization from the founder and CEO all the way down to whoever would be considered the lowest on the org chart understands and can buy in and believe in to that identity. And what I found is interesting, I mean if you have a, let’s say, you have a small business now that has 30 folks on the team and you ask every one of them those questions and get them to write it down, I guarantee you’ll see some differences.
You’ll see some people that believe your business is in existence for different reasons than other people do. And it’s not about whether someone’s right or wrong or someone’s good or bad, but in order for a team to be successful, everybody’s got to be swimming in the same direction. So if we have three people that think the business exists because of this and another five think it’s because of this, and you know, I’m the CEO and founder and I know it’s for this, that’s why I founded the company, we need everybody on the same page. So it’s okay for people to have different perspectives and different advantage points and use different terminology, but everybody needs to know to their core what is the identity of this business.
Andrea: Have you found that when you talk to owners, for example, or founders, that if they have a different kind of identity that they’re seeing or mission or even if they’ve communicated it if it’s different than what the rest of the company or somebody else in the company is seeing, is there a way to kind of reconcile that? Have you found a really good way to collaboratively come to consensus on that?
Alan Stein Jr.: Yeah, your number one tool would be going back to actively listen because when you actively listen, you’re looking at life through an empathetic and humble lens that you’re willing to say, “You know, I may have started this company with this mission and this vision and this purpose in mind, but I’m still open to hearing the perspectives of everybody else.” And this is where it’s really important to get the perspective of people in different departments.
You know, if you’re in the marketing department, you need to break down the barriers to talk to the folks in the customer service department or the folks in the sales department or the folks, you know, in R&D, like the more we can get everyone on the same page, the better. And you need to be open to hearing their feedback, but it doesn’t mean that you have to go with it.
I mean, as a leader, you have to be decisive. And if you feel adamantly that the identity of the business is this and yet everybody else feels that something else then your job as a leader is to get rid of the ambiguity and speak with great clarity on why you feel so strongly that this is what it is and get everybody on board and make sure that it’s explained with great clarity. You know, lots of times that’s where the issue is, it’s the communication. Like I know every morning when I wake up that I created this business for this. But if I’m not consistently with great repetition, communicating that to everybody else then it’s going to get foggy.
So again, we don’t want to think in terms of right or wrong or good or bad. We want to think in terms of let’s all agree on what the North Star is and then let’s get everybody moving in alignment and harmony towards that North Star. And I’m a big believer that open, effective communication can resolve almost every problem within an organization
Andrea: And yet, it’s so common that we’re afraid of that open and honest communication. Why do you think that is?
Alan Stein Jr.: Well, again, it goes back to the difference between basic and easy. I mean, you and I being open and honest and transparent and empathetic with each other is very, very basic. But that’s not easy to do because we’re human beings we’re rot with emotions and tempers and all sorts of things. You know, one, I think it comes down to terminology. Most people have a negative connotation of the word confrontation that if I know that I have to confront you about something, that that’s going to be uncomfortable for me and it’s going to be uncomfortable for you. And most human beings do everything they can to run from and resist discomfort.
Well, if we can kind of flip the switch on and say, well, confrontation is really nothing more than meeting the truth head on. It’s two people that care enough about each other to speak openly and transparently with each other so that they can come to some type of resolution. And that takes a level of respect. It takes professional courtesy and I think just being able to flip that where I say, “Hey, you know, I need to confront Andrea about something.” This has nothing to do with whether or not I like her or not. This has to do with there’s a certain behavior that I believe needs to change in our organization and we need to confront it head on and we need to discuss it.” And we can do that in a very respectable and professional way.
So no one needs to raise their voice, no one needs to use foul language, we just simply need to be able to speak from the heart and talk about this issue and let’s both be committed regardless of which side of the fence we’re on, let’s both be committed to resolving this. And if groups would be much more open to that, you’d see a lot of these problems go away. And really this is a way of describing accountability and I know we’re not at that level yet because we haven’t even talked about standards. But accountability, we have to realize that it’s something that you do for someone, it’s not something you do to them. That when you get everyone in the organization to realize when someone holds them accountable, that’s a good thing because it means that person cares then we’re in business.
Because usually people look at that the other way, they think if Andrea is holding me accountable, why is she always busting my chops? Why is she always nitpicking? Why does she care if I’m three minutes late? Why does she care if I send out an email that’s grammatically incorrect? Why don’t she just leave me alone and stay in her lane instead of saying, “Man, thank you Andrea. You’re right, that email, I should have spelled check it before I send it out. That was not a great representation of us or our business. I appreciate you caring enough to call me on that.”
Andrea: Alright. So you said that there was something in between identity and accountability and that standards, so let’s go back there and explain that briefly.
Alan Stein Jr.: Sure. The old school level of leadership and management is top down, which means I’m the founder, I’m the CEO, I’m the top of the org chart; I’m going to come up with a list of rules and everybody below me is going to follow them and if they don’t, they will leave. Instead of rules being passed from the top down, I like the idea of a group collectively creating standards and standards are basically the code which the organization will live by in order to uphold the identity that we already talked about.
So we would collectively discuss what standards do we need to live by every single day in order to make our identity come true. And if you have a small business, you have 15, 20 people, you can literally put everybody in the same room and discuss and come up with your standards. If you have a bigger organization, you have a thousand people that’s probably not doable. But that’s when you can get representation from each of the departments. Let me get someone from sales, someone from customer service, someone from marketing, someone from R&D and make sure that each group is represented and put those people in a room and say, “Okay, what are the standards that we need to live up to to make our identity happen?”
And I use being prompt just as an example because it’s one that people can easily visualize. Let’s say that in this meeting, Andrea, you raise your hand and say, “Hey, I think it’s really important that everybody is on time for all of our company functions, meetings and events because being on time shows that you respect the other person. So I think being on time should be one of our standards.” And we all look around the room and, you know, “Does anyone think it’s not important to be on time?” Nope, nobody says anything. “Okay then being on time is one of our standards.”
And now, we have a standard that being prompt is important to us and we’ve all agreed that we’re going to live up to these standards, which means when we hold a company function or we have a Monday morning meeting and you show up 3 minutes late, it is crystal clear, it is in black and white that you just violated one of our standards. You just violated one of the standards necessary for us to live out our identity. So you should actually expect now that someone is going to hold you accountable for that.
And again, once we’ve created this level of accountability where it’s not just vertical but it’s horizontal and everyone knows that if they violate any of the standards that we’ve all agreed to, that someone’s going to hold them accountable now you’ve got the makings of a winning culture.
Andrea: And then that culture then can produce those long term sustainable results that you’re talking about, right?
Alan Stein Jr.: Absolutely, and culture is really how well your organization holds each other accountable to the standards that you created to uphold your identity. That’s where the success flow comes together. You know, people sometimes think culture is a variety of different things. It’s kind of the window dressing. You know, we have casual jeans Friday, and that’s part of our culture. We put a ping pong table in the break room, that’s part of our culture. We want to be young and hip. That’s not culture. Those are some nice accouterments that you can add if that’s what your people want.
Your culture is how well everybody holds each other accountable to the standards that you agreed upon to uphold your identity. And what epitomizes your culture is how the organization behaves when the CEO or I say the head coach is not there. How does the team behave when the manager is not there or when one of the directors or supervisors is not there? If you have a winning culture, it’s business as usual. Everybody’s in their role. They’re fulfilling their role. They’re starring in their role, you know there’s active communication and everybody’s holding each other accountable and everything’s fine.
If you have a dysfunctional culture, that’s when the whole house crumbles if the person in charge is not there, so that’s really what will determine your sustainable long term results is how well you’re able to thrive in this culture where you don’t have to have the head honcho there looking over everybody’s shoulder. Everyone’s going to do what’s right all the time because that’s the way the company is built.
Andrea: Yeah, I love this, I guess you call it the success flow. I really love that. I love how it flows. I love that it starts with identity because I’m absolutely in agreement with you on that. You know, I wish that we had more time to dig even more into that book. There’s so much to look at, but hopefully the listener will go ahead and purchase that book and possibly even have you come speak at their organization. So tell us how can they get a hold of you or how can they find your book?
Alan Stein Jr.: Oh, I appreciate that very much and I would love that as well. If someone’s interested in the book, you can go to raiseyourgamebook.com. And if they’re interested in my speaking or anything else I have going on or social media, I’m at Alan Stein, Jr.on Instagram and in Linkedin and alansteinjr.com is the website.
But, you know, I’m not trying to push a book or even promote my speaking, I just love sharing and connecting with people. So if you heard this interview and something resonated, you know, drop me a line on Instagram or Linkedin, or shoot me a message, it would be great to connect.
Andrea: Well, thank you for your focused and intense Voice of Influence, Alan. It’s great to have you here today.
Barbara Churchill is a sought-after master-certifiedexecutive leadership coach who specializes in working with emerging and seniorlevel leaders and entrepreneurs. She is particularly passionate aboutempowering women to embrace their leadership skills and step into morechallenging roles.
In this episode, you’ll hear why trusting our intuition is at the core her message for the world, how a teacher’s negative words in middle school influenced her career path for decades, how to determine which negative thoughts are untrue, what you can do to manage your critical voice, why you need to give a name and character to your inner critic, how to get out of your head and into your heart, and so much more!
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Transcript
Hey, hey! It’s Andrea and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast.
Today, I have with me Barbara Churchill. She is a sought-after master certified executive leadership coach, specializing in emerging and senior level leaders as well as entrepreneurs. She is particularly passionate about empowering women to embrace their leadership skills and step into more challenging roles. And I just want to tell you before we get started that her energy is so invigorating and Barbara is just an exciting person to be around. She really reaches in and helps people kind of spark to life.
Andrea: So, Barbara, I am just thrilled to have you here today on the Voice of Influence podcast.
Barbara Churchill: Oh, Andrea, you’re so great! Thank you so much for your kind words. I’m excited to be here. What a fun thing you and I are going to be doing.
Andrea: This is awesome! OK, so Barbara, why don’t you share just briefly, what would you say is kind of the core of your message, something that’s kind of driving you and in terms of messaging?
Barbara Churchill: Oh man and I’m such a chatter. I’ll try to be brief. Here’s the gig, you got to trust yourself, period, end of statement. We need to slow down, listen, and turn within, and trust that inner wisdom that we all have. I mean, we keep looking outside of ourselves to find the answers and social media does not help. So we’ve got everything we need right now to be successful. We absolutely know what’s best for us if we would slow down enough t o listen.
Andrea: Hmm, interesting. I really liked that. So where does this message come from for you, like why this particular one?
Barbara Churchill: Well, for most of my life, I struggled with a lot of self doubt, you know, that we all have that inner critical voice that tells us that we’re not smart enough or we’re not talented enough or we’re not good enough, you know. And man, did I listen to that, because no one was telling me that there was anything different.
And I remember, when I was, God, I think it was like eighth grade, I had an eighth grade English teacher and she told me that I was not creative and I was not a good writer. And I figured, “Okay, she’s in authority.” I mean she’s a teacher, she should know, right? And was in such emotional pain after that because I had kind of crafted my entire life, I thought I was going to go be an elementary school teacher. Well, you can’t do that if you’re not creative. I mean, this is what I was telling myself, “Well I can’t do that, so I’ve got to figure something else out, “and I didn’t have it and it stayed with me.
That messaging stayed with me for decades and it completely influenced my career path and my ability to create content and the work that I do. You know, how I looked at myself, and I allowed all of those thoughts to hold me back from going after some of my goals and dreams. And so when I learned about this critical voice that’s in our head, you know, what it was and how I could manage it and quiet it down, and more importantly, how I could connect with that other voice that one of my intuition, you know that inner wisdom piece. I mean, it completely changed my life.
So it’s not that we’re never going to have another negative thought. I think mantras are great. I think positive thinking is great. It’s our brains are hardwired. Science has shown that our brains are hardwired with this negativity. What we need to do is learn how to manage these thoughts and understand that they aren’t true. It’s just our reptilian brain doing its thing. And as long as we can manage those thoughts, we aren’t crippled by them. And then learning how to tap into that inner wisdom whenever you need it is a crucial skill.
That’s what I really trained my leaders to do is, you know, because great leadership has to do with intuition. You know, the pain of a child and all that, you know, transforms your whole career when I’ve learned all of this stuff.
Andrea: So when you say certain thoughts aren’t true, which thoughts exactly are you talking about? I recognize that sometimes when we are like some of the things that we think that are negative, like negative doesn’t always necessarily mean false. So which ones are the false ones?
Barbara Churchill: Well the ones that are all about you and your not measuring up to something, because the inner critic voice is all about keeping you small, keeping you safe, keeping you from coming outside of the box. Well that’s not what life is, right? We’re meant to be exploring and experiencing life as fully as we can. And that inner critic voice keeps us from doing the things that we know we’re meant to do, from getting those goals, from going after that next job, achieving our dreams, or from trying something new.
You can look and notice your thoughts. You can tell when it’s your inner critic if your thoughts are all negative, all about the problem. They’re problem based. They’re talking about you not being enough and you’re not smart enough, don’t try that, who do you think you are; those kinds of thoughts.
Andrea: Problem based are like solution based?
Barbara Churchill: Yes. Yeah, instead of solution focus, instead of being curious, you know. You can tell when it’s the real inner wisdom piece coming out, when you’re thinking of something and saying, “Well, I wonder if we tried it this way,” or “I’m curious what would happen if this?” Or “Hey, I don’t know if I’m going to get this job or not, but I’m going for it.” When it’s based in the solution then that’s the real you, that’s the voice you want to be listening to. When it’s based in a problem that’s your inner critic voice and you’re just going to go into the spin.
Andrea: Hmm, I like that. Do you think that a lot of the leaders that you’ve worked with, do they tend to have these thoughts? Are these thoughts kind of coming from an original place where somebody has said something to them at some point like your teacher did? I mean, is that part of why? I know it’s part of why, but I guess I’m wondering if a lot of these thoughts do originally kind of come from other people?
Barbara Churchill: Well, they do because, you know, you think about it, when you’re a little kid. Think about yourself as a little kid 4, 5, or 6 years old. You are out there just living life, you know, happy looking at things. You’re not sitting here thinking, “I wonder if I’m good enough to play in the sandbox. I wonder if I’m good enough to swing on that swing set. I’m wondering if I’m good enough.” You’re not thinking that, you’re just swinging to go, “Yeah, let’s go,” you know. “Push me so I can go higher,” right? I mean there’s nothing there.
So this was all learned behavior. We look at Barbie dolls and little girls are like, “Oh, I’m comparing myself now. I’m supposed to look like that.” You know, we get this messaging from society. We get it from our own parents and relatives and friends, their limiting beliefs. They come into us and we’re a sponge as children. We just learn everything and we take it as the truth.
And I’ll never forget when I taught my kids about this critical voice, my oldest son started to cry. He was in high school and he said, “Mom, I thought everything I thought was the truth.”
Andrea: Wow!
Barbara Churchill: And it’s so powerful to understand that just because you think it doesn’t make it true to get more curious.
Andrea: That’s interesting.
Barbara Churchill: Yeah, yeah and I see that in my corporate space. Let me tell you, the further up you go, and sometimes it’s called the imposter complex, I’m sure you might have heard of that. Your listeners might have heard of that, you know the “Oh my God, I don’t know what I’m doing in the CEO role. Someday they’re gonna figure it out. They’re gonna figure out that I don’t know what I’m doing.”
And it comes across differently between men and women. Women, they want to be prepared in the meeting. So what they do is they bring all of their notes. You know, they’ve got a stack of books they bring into the meeting and what they don’t realize is that they look like they’re unprepared. The perception is, “Oh my God, what is she got in her hands?” Men come to that, they have their phone, they will wing it and it looks very, very different. So the same thoughts are going through their minds, but how it manifests, you know, to the outside world are very different. But I’ll tell you, this critical voice never goes away, but it’s the learning how to manage it. That’s really the key. It’s really, really the key.
Andrea: OK, alright. Awesome! So now we know that this critical voices there that it’s not necessarily true. What are like maybe three or four things that you suggest that people do to manage that voice?
Barbara Churchill: Well, first and foremost, you have to start noticing and paying attention to what’s going on in your brain. And I know that that sounds like “What, what do you mean notice what’s going on in my brain?” But we have over 60,000 thoughts a day. We’re not paying attention to what’s happening in there and it’s kind of a crazy place and at least mine is.
Andrea: _____.
Barbara Churchill: I mean, you find yourself thinking the oddest things. And so when you start to notice just by the fact that you’re noticing what’s happening in your brain, it starts to separate you from the thought because we believe everything that’s happening in there. And it’s not true. You know, if I said to you, “Oh my gosh, elephants are pink.” “Well, it’s a thought. It’s not true unless I spray paint them,” right? So we start noticing what’s happening, noticing what we’re doing. When I am doing this, what thoughts are getting triggered?
When I think about presenting to the board, what thoughts are getting triggered? What am I starting to think about that? “Oh my God, you have to prepare. You’re not prepared for that. It’s going to take a lot of overtime. You’re really not skilled enough for that.” Are we going down that spin? Start noticing and then you start asking, “All right, let’s pick one of those thoughts and ask, is it a hundred percent true? Not just partially true, is it 100 percent true?” The flip side of that is if it’s not 100 percent true, it is false by the very nature of not being 100 percent true.
So a lot of what we’re thinking we find is our critical voice in our head, and we’re kind of waiting through that and picking the good stuff and realizing how much garbage is really in there. That’s powerful to just notice because now you’re paying attention, now you’re awake.
Andrea: Totally!
Barbara Churchill: And then yeah, discerning which is this thought is, is it problem based? And if it is, okay, that’s my inner critic and I know it’s automatically false or is it solution focused? Oh, that’s who I want to play with. That’s the real me. Those are great thoughts that I want to keep thinking and nurture and then you know. So just by doing those three things, noticing, asking if it’s 100 percent true and then categorizing which is it, problem based or solution focused, gives you so much power.
I mean you can save yourself an enormous amount of stress and pain when you start making decisions based on that positive voice, that knowing voice because we all know more than we think we do our experience. We bring so much into the workspace, so much of our personal lives or experiences or knowledge and our intuition. That’s that voice of wisdom, that inner voice.
I mean we’ve all had those times in our lives where we just knew what to do. We really didn’t have, you know, a design, but we’re like, “Yeah, we had a gut feel,” right? Trust your gut. That’s where it comes from and we have to start trusting that more, listening to that more rather than the other stuff.
Andrea: I’m going to come back to that, but first what would you say to somebody who when they start to hear that critical voice and they become aware that this is, “Oh, this is the critical voice, wait a second,” and then they go down another path that isn’t solution based. It’s actually even more critical because they’re criticizing themselves for being critical. You know what I mean? So what would you say to that person?
Barbara Churchill: I am a big believer in pattern interruption. So I coach my clients when they start to hear in their heads, “Oh my God, I’m doing the spin cycle.” That’s what I call it, the spin cycle. We’re just going down. We’re just going down, down. Alright, we either have to clap. We have to say the word stop out loud. We have to do something that snaps are brain out of that pattern.
Now if you’re in an elevator, you’re not going to just go stop or clap your hands or people would think you’re strange. But that’s what I do. I will do something, “Stop, stop talking. Stop, stop listening. Stop, this is true. Stand up and walk around your desk, shake it off.” You have to interrupt that pattern; otherwise, your brain is just going to go on autopilot. It’s like a hamster in a wheel and then you go back to, “OK, what do I know is true? What do I know is true? I’m criticizing myself for criticizing. Isn’t that hysterical?” Start to be fascinated by your brain and what’s going on in there.
When you get curious, it lightens your load. No one ever felt really heavy or defeated or negative by being curious. Well, that’s curious. You know, it’s a fun word to even say. It’s a fun feeling to be curious and wonder because there’s all possibilities in that. “Well, look at my brain go.”
I just did this with a client yesterday. She was telling me how she was very convicted and how she couldn’t do a particular thing. She couldn’t make this one phone call. She’s an entrepreneur, very successful, but she couldn’t make this one phone cal. And I said, “Wow, are you listening to your brain? Isn’t it fascinating how totally committed to this story you are? That’s fascinating. It’s totally not true because clearly you can pick up a phone, you’re able to do it right and dial the number and speak, but look at your brain go.” And it separates it from us as people. It’s just our brain. It’s that computer in our head that’s just going on autopilot. Somebody programmed that interestingly today, didn’t they? Wow!”
Pull yourself away from it. Stop taking yourself so seriously. I mean, I laugh a lot. I laugh a lot at myself because you know; it’s hysterical what’s happening in my head. I just go, “Wow, look at you gal,” and then you can real yourself in. “Alright, what do I really want to be thinking? What’s really true for me?” And now we’re clicked in to the real you because all of this other stuff is fear and that is fear talking.
I teach my clients a lot of tools and it’s so fun when they get it and so we can use it in our sessions. I teach them to make a character out of their inner critic, really go deep with it and name it. My inner critic happens to be named Sharon. I hope no one’s listening as named Sharon, please don’t take offense. But you know, if we characterize it so that we can visualize it, well we can send them off you know.
This gal I was talking about yesterday, she named hers Bitty and Bitty loves cheesecake. She loved to eat cheesecake. So I said, “You know what, I think Bitty needs a whole cheesecake to herself because you and I have work to do. Bitty has gotten in to this call and we’ve got stuff to do, let’s send her off.” So we know. “OK, visualize there she goes, fork in hand. She’s gonna go eat cheesecake now.” I’m in a deal you know. Let’s game on do the work.
Andrea: Alright, so I get this. But I also, at the same time, know that there are some people that are going into, “What, Bitty, what? Characterize the, you know, whatever.” Can you explain why that works?
Barbara Churchill: It removes you, the person from your thought. It separates that.
Andrea: Yeah.
Barbara Churchill: And we need to separate that because we take our thoughts so literally, we take them as truth. So if I’m thinking about myself that I am not good enough, I don’t know enough, I’m going to feel so awful. I’m going to believe that. It’s going to influence my behavior and my behavior is going to influence the results that I get in my life.
Andrea: Yeah.
Barbara Churchill: And so if I just change how I’m thinking and realize that my thoughts are just thoughts, I can believe them or not. It’s my choice. There’s a lot of power in that and I think that most of us just are on autopilot and we don’t realize that we can really control it. It’s not about just thinking happy thoughts. It’s not all unicorns and rainbows, right? It’s about owning the power that you have to change your thinking because I do things now that I never would have done based on the fact that I understand when my inner critic has entered the room. “Okay, what’s happening? Am I stretching myself? Ah, look at her go. She’s coming in to save me. Guess what? I’ve got this. No worries.”
Andrea: Interesting!
Barbara Churchill: Yeah, by separating you from that messaging that’s the first step. We really need to create that divide so you know you are not your thoughts.
Andrea: I think that’s a really important message. I mean, I know like even when you said don’t take yourself so seriously, I’ve heard that all my life, Barbara. All my life, I was hearing that. I was like, what do you mean? Like I am a serious person, you know, that didn’t help me t just not take myself seriously. But I think to have someone like you there who can say it’s about this. I didn’t want to play the games. I didn’t want to play those kinds of games that you’re talking about playing and I would call those like that’s what I would have called them.
But I think that like you said with the pattern interruption, if you don’t try something new, you’re going to end up down the same road that you are all the time. I love that. And so why not try it. If you know the whole don’t take yourself so seriously, yeah, yeah, you’re tied to your identity. I get it. I was too, as a serious person.
But if you do give yourself like this a chance, you know, I’m talking to the audience right now, the person that’s listening. You know; give yourself a chance to interrupt those thoughts. And even though you are a serious person, you don’t have to if you are, you don’t have to go down this spiral that Barbara is talking about all the time. You can interrupt it. It’s OK if you play a few games because our brains really do need, I mean, I just didn’t realize Barbara how my brain worked. I didn’t get it.
And so to have someone like you there to say and to tell your son, you know, the thoughts you’re thinking aren’t necessarily true and to have that be like, “Oh my gosh,” like that because I know for me, I felt like my thoughts were me. Like just the mind is so tied in my identity.
Barbara Churchill: And there’s such a freedom. I mean, there is science behind this, right? There’s absolute science behind this for all you serious people. And serious people, just because you’re a serious person doesn’t mean that you can’t have fun and doesn’t mean that you can’t change things and you know all of that. Yes, be a serious person. We need serious people. We need serious people who understand that they are not their thoughts. We need everybody to figure that out, right?
Andrea: Right.
Barbara Churchill: But there’s a freedom in that. There’s a freedom in understanding that, “Yeah, I am not tied to this. I am not what I think all the time. I can choose what I want to think and believe because a belief is just a thought we’ve been thinking for a long long time. A lot of times our beliefs are not our own. They were given to us by our parents and society and our friends and sometimes they aren’t useful anymore and we find that we’re behaving in a way and we think, “Well, you know what, that’s not in alignment with who I am anymore. What is that belief? Will do I even believe that anymore?” It’s a great thing to question.
Andrea: And how’s that working for you?
Barbara Churchill: Yeah, I mean if it isn’t working for you, well, let’s get rid of it. We don’t have to, you know, agonize over it. We don’t have to be in pain. We can say, “Yeah, you know what, that doesn’t work for me anymore. What would I like to replace it with? What feels better? What’s more in alignment with who I am?” “Oh, OK.” So we choose that. Sometimes we make things too hard.
Andrea: And I think you said who I am and again, like I said before, I think I thought that I was these thoughts. So who I am or who I could be like the better version of me, I think. You know the version that’s alive, the version that is free and happy. You know, there is that side of people that they may not realize if they are serious, going back to that serious person. But there is that version of you. What could it be like if you were like that too? And I think that that’s important to know, to live into the person that you want to be, not just who you think you are now.
Barbara Churchill: Yeah and redefining who you are. Maybe your definition of who you are is old and is out of date because you took somebody else’s definition or this was your definition from when you were 22.
Andrea: Right.
Barbara Churchill: Well, trust me. I’m not 22 anymore and I have certainly redefined who I am over and over and over again. And it isn’t about always feeling happy either. Well, we’re just going to pick positive thoughts and always feel happy because that’s not realistic. That’s not who we are. There are times in our lives when we’re going to be sad and it’s good to feel that, right? If we love someone so much and we lose them after a long life, like a parent, we’re going to be sad. Well, if we weren’t sad, if we weren’t willing to be sad then we wouldn’t have been willing to love that deeply in the first place.
So there are feelings that were going to have, you know, our thoughts create our feelings. I’m getting way too deep, but our thoughts create our feelings and we get to choose these thoughts. And let’s just make sure that they’re the ones that we really want in there so that they create the kind of feelings that we want to have; positive, difficult, whatever. Let’s make sure we’re understanding where those thoughts are coming from. Are they really serving me? And if not, man, I’ve got the power to change those. That’s an amazing thing.
Andrea: OK, so I love that you talk about going, you know, like kind of using your gut a little bit more. And this is something else that I’m going to tie back into that serious person, because I get them, I guess. And because I think there are probably a few listening or just anybody, have you ever said to people, and I’ve heard this for myself, but have you ever said to people like you’re so in your head right now then you’re just stuck in your head.
And that’s been something that I have, at times I’ve been like, “Well, OK.” I’ve heard that from a number of people. So I’ve asked a number of people and so I’m going to ask you too now, Barbara. What do you mean by that and how do you get from your head to your gut if that’s where you’re headed or your heart? And how do you know that that’s the right place to be at that time?
Barbara Churchill: Ah, these are such good questions. So there are thinkers and there are feelers. And thinkers clearly based on the name of them are in their head most of the time. They’re thinkers, they’re cerebral, and that’s great. There’s nothing wrong with that at all. And there are feelers, and they make decisions based on emotion more often than not rather than data or information or anything like that. And so feelers, and I’m going to be making broad strokes, OK, so bear with me, feelers have a bit of an easier time tapping into that intuition because it’s based in your body. It’s that feeling when they say trust your gut, it actually is a feeling in your lower abdomen area, right? That’s your gut.
And people who are more cerebral and count on data and facts have more difficult time making that connection because they are in their heads more. That’s what that means. You’re thinking, you’re not utilizing the feelings in your body. You’re not in touch with your body. So for those people who are more thinkers, I invite you to start to notice where do you feel things in your body, start the connection between your thoughts and your feelings because one creates the other.
So for example, if you are having a scenario, if you close your eyes, you’ve got a scenario, you’re going to be interviewing for a senior VP job, OK? What is the thought that you have about that? And it might be, “Oh, I’m not sure if I’m really ready for that yet. I’m pretty nervous about it.” OK, if I just speak from that, that means I’m in my head. Now, I want you to connect that, where in your body does nervous show up? When you are thinking this, I want you to feel the nervous. Where does that show up for you? Typically for people, it is in their abdomen area. You know some have it in their chest there might be tightness.
But typically, nervousness is in their abdomen area. And then I asked them, “And what does that feel like? Can you describe that for me?” And it may be a fluttering, it may be a zing of electricity, you know something around that. So when I’m working with serious people, I really work with trying to connect their head to their body so that they can speak from that and they can learn how to feel into these things.
And then we talk about going a little bit deeper and quieting those thoughts because when our brain has over 60,000 thoughts a day, it’s tough to discern, where is the inner wisdom voice because that voice is pretty calm and collected and knowing. The inner critic voice can be loud and shouting and derogatory and all of that. And it’s tough to hear the inner wisdom through all that noise. Does that help?
Andrea: Yeah, yeah. I think one of the questions that tends to really help me too, it’s just what do you want. What do you really want and that seems to also help me to kind of move from problem solving, trying to figure out the answer sort of thing to a desire, which seems to be more about the gut, I think, than the head. Yeah that’s so good.
Barbara Churchill: Yeah and when we don’t worry about the how’s, if we’re trying to solve something and we just say, “OK, let’s not worry about how we get there. What’s the end results? What do we want to happen?” Great question, right? And that’s it. “OK, so then how might we get there?” Now we’re in curiosity mode. Now, we’re in possibility, now we’re in. Well, I wonder if we could do this or we could do that. Now we’re like in a whiteboard, right? We’re just throwing stuff against the wall. It makes it so much easier, takes the pressure off because we’re just experimenting.
Andrea: Yeah and it’s solution-focused, like you said. I love that. That’s great. So, Barbara, if you could leave the audience with some power packed point at the end here. You know, you care about them. I know you do. You’re such a passionate and loving person. What would you want them to hear today to leave them with?
Barbara Churchill: I want you to just understand that you are not your thoughts. Just start getting curious about how your brain works and what’s going on in there, you know. I mean, it’s an interesting place and it’s got a lot of stuff going on, so start noticing it. Notice when you’re doing some critical thinking, what’s happening? What kinds of things are you doing to trigger that? Notice when you’re having some really great thoughts and what things are you doing to trigger those thoughts, right? And that how that feels in your body, just start really getting to know what’s going on in that amazing and fascinating brain of yours and don’t judge it. Just notice, “Wow, that’s amazing. That’s curious,” right? Start to get curious, because then you can decide what thoughts do I want to keep, what thoughts do I want to throw away. That noticing, I’m telling you, it’s extremely powerful.
Andrea: Hmm. Alright, so how can the listener find and connect with you if they’re a little intrigued by all of this conversation, Barbara, and who you are, your voice.
Barbara Churchill: They can find me at barbarachurchill.com. They can find me on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram; all sorts of things in terms of social media. But yeah, barbarachurchill.com and Churchill is spelled CHURCHILL.
Andrea: And was there something you were wanting to share with the audience?
Barbara Churchill: OK, so you can reach me at barbarachurchill.com, and something that I would really love to give away is something that I offer people who connect with me. It’s a 60-minute laser-focused call on what’s happening in your world and how can we work together in that 60 minutes. It’s a powerful hour. Let me tell you, how can we work together to make some shifts? Shift your mindset, shift your results, and shift the actions that you’re taking. I promise, bold, bold decisions, bold actions and bold results, 60 minutes. So barbarabhurchill.com, you can find the information on it there. I would love to connect with them.
Andrea: Awesome! Thank you for your generosity and thank you for being here today, Barbara, I really appreciate it! And really, am grateful for your Voice of Influence in the world.
Barbara Churchill: Oh, thank you so much! It’s my pleasure. I loved it!
Leena Patel is the CEO of Global Impact Systems, founder of Sandbox2boardroom.com, and a leading expert on helping executive teams worldwide drive innovation and develop a culture of collaboration and inclusion. She draws from two decades of experience as a business owner to design and execute innovation initiatives that capitalize on new business opportunities and secure a strategic market position.
In this episode, Leena shares why leaders need to focus on helping their teams become better problem solvers, how her grandfather’s personal relationship with Gandhi had an impact on who she is today, the logic her Gamulation system that helps participants perform better in high-pressure situations, her personal mission to 4x the number of women CEO’s in Fortune 500 companies, and so much more!
Play here (the red triangle below), oniTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Radio(Amazon Alexa) or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Transcript
Hey, hey! It’s Andrea and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast.
Today, I have with me, Leena Patel, who is the CEO of Global Impact Systems, founder of Sandbox2Boardroom.com, and a leading expert on helping executive teams worldwide drive innovation and develop a culture of collaboration and inclusion. Very, very hot and important topics right now.
Leena draws from two decades of experience as a woman-owned business owner to design and execute on innovation initiatives that capitalize on new business opportunities and secure strategic market position.
Now, part of what Leena does that is really fascinating is Gamulation, which I’m excited to hear a little bit about that. Hopefully that’ll come up in our conversation, Leena. But Leena’s voice, this is so fun. She is a powerful person and she’s got this amazing drive, I don’t know, like can really get to the point and can see through clutter. I can tell she can just see through stuff and get right to what needs to be done or said.
Andrea: And so I’m excited to have you on the podcast with us today, Leena.
Leena Patel: I’m excited to be here, Andrea. You know, you must be psychic, because I _____ you know, we haven’t had this conversation and I didn’t even know that you felt that way about me. But one of my gifts that I’ve been told and I’ve known and felt it for decades now is this sort of ability to just get through the clutter, like be able to see exactly what somebody needs to take them to where they need to get to. And it’s just this ability to connect dots.
I actually want share and talk about that today, but crazy psychic ability that you have there. It’s amazing.
Andrea: Well, that’s awesome because, you know, I am kind of known for voice. That’s sort of my thing, like I look for that in people and so I can tell that. I just know that about you. So I’m excited to have this conversation. This will be fun.
So, Leena, what would you say is kind of the core message that really drives you in your business? I mean in your life?
Leena Patel: So, I’ve been on a journey that has evolved over the decades and the place I am right now is…let me kind of just sort of share what’s going on in the world right now. The core message is to help organizations understand that leaders or the teams that they have…we really need to focus on up skilling everyone to become better problem solvers so that we can connect dots, do what I do, which is kind of help people get through the clutter and help them to do that, to be able to connect dots between different ideas, different roles, and different industries.
And the way that we do that is helping them unleash creativity in themselves and in others and teaching them to innovate but in a very, very strategic way. I think that’s the way that businesses are going to win in the future.
And why, I mean why is that driving me? In order to answer that part of the question; I grew up being mentored by my grandfather. I’m not sure if you knew this about me, but his mentor was Gandhi. And the message that I got growing up from my grandfather was…
Andrea: Excuse me, when you say his mentor was Gandhi, can you just briefly explain what you mean by that? Because some of us would consider like authors or activists to be mentors without actually having relationships, so what do you mean by that?
Leena Patel: So he met Gandhi at the age of 16. He actually delivered a speech, a talk at his school, and his life changed. Everything changed for him in that moment and he knew that this is somebody he wanted to follow and he wanted to learn from. So they actually had a live, in person mentor-mentee relationship. He was with him for 16 years. He stayed in his house.
Andrea: Wow!
Leena Patel: He was part of India’s move towards creating independence. There’s a whole sort of back story between his relationships. He was a spiritual activist. He was a political activist and that was his mission and his purpose in life. He was in his 30’s at some point. Basically, the British government kind of forced him to leave India. And so he moved to Kenya from there, which is where he met my grandmother and they got married and that’s kind of how I came into the world.
But those 16 years of his life were a huge part of who he was, what he stood for, how he showed up in the world, and consequently how he raised us; my mother, her brothers, and sisters. And how we were raised because we grew up very close, you know, spending holidays, weekends, summers, and vacations together.
And sort of from the age of four, I had a very close relationship. Two of my uncles committed suicide when I was 4 and 5 years old respectively. The reason for that was they actually felt like they didn’t have a voice. They wanted something in their life that they feel they couldn’t speak up for. And because they didn’t know how to speak up, they didn’t know how to exercise their power and their voice, they took their own lives and that’s a really extreme thing to happen.
But it really kind of anchored into my mind at the age of four without being able to articulate it the way that I can now that I didn’t ever want to do that. I don’t want to ever live my life that way, and I didn’t want other people to live their life in that way.
So that became the beginning of my relationship with my grandfather and him mentoring me because he helped me to understand these incidents and other incidents in my life in the context of, you know, sort of the bigger picture in what’s going on in the world. And so leading change, driving change was a big…it’s just sort of felt like I grew up, it’s part of my DNA, you know. So his lessons for me was to drive change where change is needed, to not be afraid to challenge the status quo, to do it respectfully, do it with kindness and understanding of where people are and meet people where they’re at. But you and I, individually, and collectively _____ and so that’s been a driver for me in my life.
Whatever I’ve done, and just to sort of give you a little bit of a kind of back story of my professional background, I’ve got background in the arts and sports and entertainment. My first career was as a professional dancer. That was over 20 years ago.
Andrea: Which is fascinating though. It’s fascinating.
Leena Patel: But there’s a reason I’m sharing this with you because I moved then from the world of high performance into sports. I started coaching athletes. I worked with some Olympic level athletes. I worked and trained with the artists of Cirque du Soleil for a number of years. I worked with Celine Dion and personally worked with her for many years, over 15 years and her management team and her organization and then move from that world into the world of business.
I started training businesses on how they could bring this elite performance, high performance skill set into their business to drive performance within their team players. And so it’s been this evolution and I share all of this to kind of say that all of these experiences that we have in different areas of our life have led me to this moment of what I’m creating today.
And the realization for me at the time, you know, my whole life would be from sports, to arts, and to business. I’d start learning about the digital marketing and I’ve learned about tax and accounting. And I’d go in and learn about, you know, sustainability in the environment.
As I started evolving in business, I created Gamulation. This is my innovation in instructional design because I realized that people in business weren’t learning the skills they needed to learn. So I came up with a new and more fun and playful way for them to integrate information so that they could up skill themselves quickly.
So the business was going through all this sort of evolution as new skills were being added as I was innovating to adapt to the marketplace. And I was driving myself crazy, thinking, “Who does this? Nobody does this.” Our entire life was taught to zone in and niche and focus on one industry and one specialty, and these are the people that are rewarded.
Here I am learning all these different skills; one, because these opportunities are just coming to me; but two, because I’m genuinely interested in how people do things in different ways. And I went to a mentor and he said “You know, don’t worry, you’ll figure it out. You’ll figure out how everything maps together.”
The turning point for me was realizing that all of this information wasn’t a limitation. It wasn’t a shortfall. It was my secret sauce. And it’s the thing that leaders today need more than ever. They’re solving their problems right now in isolation. Yeah, innovation is a hot topic right now in companies because they’re realizing that they have to adapt to new technology, artificial intelligence, things like that.
And so it’s top of mind for like 85 percent of CEO’s innovation right now but then they’re going ahead and bucketing things. They’re now looking at gender and diversity and figuring out how to put more women in leadership positions and then they’re looking at their sales and marketing teams and figuring out how to help them perform better. And they’re looking at big data and they’re bucketing all these different initiatives in their company and then sort of wondering why they’re not being successful.
So one of the things that I realized is that if I can actually teach them how to connect the dots between these different initiatives, I can actually draw from the 16 plus industries that I’ve now worked in over the last 20 years and help them to see _____ if they can implement what somebody’s doing over here in the tech space, you know, what somebody is doing in healthcare and in manufacturing, for example.
Now they’re innovating. That’s one level. So we teach them actually how to connect the dots in a very systematic way to help them get exponential results.
Andrea: Wow, I love that. It’s interesting because I can understand the frustration with the idea of having to narrow down not being able to use all the curiosity that’s inside of you. And yet, there is a way to use that curiosity and it kind of reminds me of Adam Grant’s book, Originals, and how people who are truly original, innovative and all that, that they really are able to draw from a lot of different sources and background and experience in order to bring all that to the problem that’s in hand.
And it sounds like that’s exactly what you’re doing and that’s what you’re teaching companies to do. I love that! So what are some of the ways that you do that? Could you maybe just share with us about Gamulation, this really cool training, or I’m not exactly sure what it is. I kind of have an idea but I want you to tell us a little bit about it.
Leena Patel: Sure! I’ll give you two examples. I’ll talk about Gamulation since you asked. So we use that as a tool for actually helping leaders and teams understand or learn the skill they need to do. So one of the ways that we want, we want people to actually learn faster. We want them to retain information and we want them to go away and implement it.
Traditional ways of learning have not really served people in doing that. It just sort of giving people a 10-step process, teaching somebody through a presentation whether sort of passively receiving that information. So Gamulation was really a combination of two different ideas, the gaming world which is so popular today and you know, women, men in their 20s, 30s, 40s utilize that as a pastime to activate and engage their brain.
So the gaming world that has really taken off and millennials, particularly, really connect with this. I want to bring that environment of fun and learning through games and through play, but bringing it into a business environment so that it was highly relevant. It was highly structured and it helps people to actually retain information so that they could go in and implement it and actually get results. They could actually get a return on their investment from investing in trainings.
So Gamulation is bringing together in the world of games, the fun and the playfulness that’s _____ and the world of simulation which has been around for a 100 years. And simulations are known and utilized in healthcare and in the military for a long time because they understand that people learn best when you put them into an environment that resembles the environment they’re going to experience. They’re going to be challenged in.
So the military are going to train in a sort of war zone environment so that when they’re on a battlefield they know immediately how they’re going to respond under pressure and they’re trained to do that. And I wanted to train people in business in the same way to put them into environments where their skills were really tested and challenged so that they didn’t just sort of know on a surface level, “Here are the skills to be a great negotiator. Here are the skills to be a great innovator and here are the skills to be a great leader.”
But putting them into environments where their leadership skills would be challenged, where their negotiations skills would be challenged, and where they really have to negotiate. But they have to do it and they’re dealing now with sort of international diplomacy and they’re dealing with contracts, and they’re dealing with time pressure. And putting all this pressure into them to help them see how they’re going to show up when the crap hits the fan, really.
Because it’s easy to be performing at a high level when things are going great, but we’re really going to be challenged and we’re going to make the worst decisions. And I learned this, you know, this is how athletes trained. This is how I trained, and this is how I trained other athletes is if you’re going to win a marathon, it’s great to just be like, “Hey, let’s have you running at a particular pace.” Or you know, “These are the things that you need to be doing to train.”
But on training day, like on the day of the Olympics, on the day when you’re on stage, on a day when you’ve got that really big important meeting going on where the cameras are on you, people are going to be there, there are going to be interruptions, there are going to be audience, all of a sudden your adrenaline is lifted and loosening and you start making crazy mistakes.
So I would train people to operate under high pressure by throwing all these stimulus, distractions, and interruptions at them during the training process so that they learn how to focus even amidst all the craziness and so they wouldn’t be making those crazy mistakes. And because they were training at that level, when they were put into those high pressure negotiation environments or they had to make difficult decisions or teams are falling apart, business deals are falling apart, they didn’t crumble under the pressure. So they made sound business decisions that ended up saving their business, you know, sometimes millions of dollars of revenue depending on the organization.
Andrea: Wow, that’s really interesting! And then you said that you were going to talk about something else too. What else is on your mind?
Leena Patel: So yeah, that’s how I’ve used Gamulation as a tool to train leaders and teams. And it’s simply a tool, a mechanism for helping them get to their goal faster. You’d asked what kind of example of how I’m sort of helping companies do this. One of the things that’s really been huge for our business this year is helping leaders not only sort of innovate in terms of what they need to develop in terms of new product ideas or their processes internally, but as I particularly focused on the entertainment sector, the tech sector and those sort of big, big areas that I focus on.
And there’s a big conversation, I’m not sure if you’re aware of right now, but diversity is the big conversation that’s happening in these spaces where they’re really wanting to focus and bring more women into leadership. There’s a recent initiative by the ex-governor of California where there has to be at least one woman on the board and three by 2021, I think it is. And so that companies and businesses are sort of scrambling to put women in leadership positions to “meet that quota.”
So the gap is that these women are not necessarily trained for leadership positions. They haven’t been given a skill set and so what we kind of have them do is help them to really align. We go into companies and say, “Instead of focusing on your innovation initiative in one bucket and then focus on growing women in leadership and growing your diversity team in another bucket, let’s bring them together. Let’s actually help your women, your potential like women that you’re grooming to step into leadership positions. Let’s really help them to understand your company’s long term goals and utilize and leverage their innate skills and abilities that they have as women, that they have coming from these diverse backgrounds to actually forward your company’s goals.”
So now they’re actually adding to the bottom line revenue of the company. Now, we’re also going and teaching these women not only like use your skills to help the company innovate and drive revenue, but we also are going to teach you actually how do you position it. Because women and men think quite differently as we teach them actually to how they make the business case for their ideas so that they’re speaking the language that men understand, right?
So now, they’re setting themselves up for success because they’re helping the businessmen. They’re setting themselves up and positioning themselves for leadership skills and leadership positions. They’re learning how to ask for the money that just they want and not that they’re owed. I mean, they’re not just saying, “Hey, you know, what, let’s promote more women because it’s the right thing to do.”
So we’re moving beyond kind of tapping into people’s moral consciousness and saying, “Look, this is not only the right thing to do, this is helping us, this is helping you _____.
Andrea: The strategic thing.
Leena Patel: Strategic. It’s really strategic. So women are getting promoted. They’re getting the money that they’re due, the respect that they’re due. They were setting the business up for success. It becomes a win for business, a win for the women and win for the cause, and so that’s an idea.
This is one example of how it really strongly bringing together two areas. You know, bringing together the tech space, bringing together innovation which is needed in every industry right now in order to really be prepared for the future, and then bringing together this initiative to drive women in leadership and uniting it together so that it becomes a win, win, win.
Andrea: Uh it’s fantastic. Yeah, I was noticing that with some women. I spoke at a conference recently with women and we were talking about portfolio building and building business case, just not exactly, but similar to what you’re talking about.
When I was doing some research around that before the talk, I kept hearing from other people that were in executive positions that women don’t come to the table to ask for more money as often as men do or they don’t ask for as much more money in their salaries as men do. That’s just generally speaking of course.
But you know things like this that you’re talking about that I think across industries, women need this kind of training. They need to know how to bring all those things together and think strategically and be able to communicate in that strategic way, yet bring all their empathy and ability to connect to the table. It’s so huge right now. I just think that’s a fantastic thing for you to be doing with companies.
Leena Patel: Yeah. Really, for me, it’s so exciting because I’m speaking literally like a couple of times a month. I’ve been speaking at women’s conferences where I’ve been going into companies and sort of helping them to actually introduce this idea to them and actually how we can implement it within their company.
And I’m talking to these women and it’s amazing while these companies have women’s initiatives and women’s groups and employee resource groups within the company. The very fact that they’re looking at their initiative separately and there’s not this sort of alignment and communication between the different business units and all the way sort of down from executive leadership, all the way down the company is massively hurting them.
I actually looked into this and I found that like the research and the data shows that literally just by making this one shift, they get their goals. I think it was like 38 percent faster, like just because of this alignment and just by bringing two business units together, like sales and marketing. Just by aligning people, their revenue jumps up 20 percent. That’s one shift they need to make.
And so for me, it’s so exciting to go and talk to these women and really listen to what it is that they need. You know, their self confidence has been really burned for a lot of women just being in that working environment. So helping them build that up by teaching them that the natural skills that they have, like building great networks, building relationships, this ability to problem solve, or multitask; when they apply that strategically to the company’s goals and how to do that and put it together in a business case that really make sense for the company, makes sense for them, it shifts them in such a huge way.
So it’s super exciting for me to see that transformation. My personal goal, my personal vision right now is to see more women in leadership right now in the Fortune 500 companies. There are 25 CEO that are women and I want to get that to a 100, like that’s my personal goal and my mission by 2025 and that’s a pretty huge, pretty huge endeavor.
But to tap into those, those Fortune 500 companies and help them to actually not just make that number that women are in leadership, make it like, “Hey, I’m hitting my quota,” but no, this is the right thing to do because now we’re truly leveraging the value that they bring and we’re utilizing it to open up new market spaces and drive revenue to the company.
And by the way, people are feeling great because they’re being heard and acknowledged in the workplace and what a magical thing that you can make money. And you know, you can serve your bottom line and your people are happier for it and you’re doing some good in the world at the same time.
Andrea: Leena, can I just ask you a really blunt question? I’m going to forewarn you. I should’ve forewarned you but I am, what makes you think that you have the ability to get to 100 CEOs by 2025? I want you to be honest because I’m excited to hear your answer.
Leena Patel: So it’s 25 now. There are 25 female CEOs in the Fortune 500 right now, and I want that number to be a 100. That means it’s got to like _____ in the next seven years. So I’m speaking to a number of senior leaders in Fortune 100 companies right now. Actually, there are about four companies, if not five. I’ve got two calls scheduled next week in the Fortune 20, in the top 20.
So I’m going out and we’ll be like making it my mission to talk to and make connections with the influencers because, you know, those companies like when they initiate these changes, it becomes a ripple effect. And the other companies, the medium sized companies and the small businesses start to follow over time. But they’re looking to these big companies, the influencers as kind of leaders and sort of paving the way.
So my decision was, I’m just going to go straight to the top. I want to work with the people that are out there, driving change. They’ve got incredible products and services, they’re offering to the world, and they want to be that _____ in the next 5 to 10 years.
The world is changing so quickly right now that they need to be on top of it. They need to be on top of it in terms of how they’re innovating, how they’re connecting with their customers, the customer service that they’re offering, and the way they’re treating their people. And they need to consider all of this and sort of put this on the table and then be strategic in putting a plan together so that they’re heading, they’re checking all these boxes.
Some of them are doing a great job, but a lot of them, the great companies right now that are doing so well are really struggling.They make great products, but they’re really struggling, for example, right now to support their women. They’re really struggling with understanding how do we work and drive this initiative forward without affecting their bottom line revenue.
And they haven’t cracked the code and part of it is because they’ve been in the tech space for so long. They’ve been in one mindset, which is what we’ve been talking about today and earlier. So kind of going and saying, “Hey look, I’ve got this other perspective. I’ve got this experience of being able to like draw knowledge from other industries and I can help you connect the dots so that now all your initiatives are aligned and you’re moving, your ship is moving in one direction and your people are behind you.”
So while I don’t see it as an easy task and, you know, for one minute I think I’m arrogant not to think I singlehandedly would be able to do this by myself. I think it’s going to take a lot of people jumping on board with this idea and kind of recognizing it.
Our firm, personally, right now is really focused on reaching out to these companies and helping them to understand and we’re getting interest and movement and traction. So I’m really excited to see how this is going to sort of start to cascade over the next 12 months. And, sorry, just what kind of vision is to bring other people onboard and help them to sort of say “This is what I’m doing, like if you want to help and you want to jump on board with this, let’s do this together because this is something the world needs.”
Andrea: Well, it sounds like to me, it sounds like number one, you have confidence because you have lots of positive successful experiences. They’ve built up overtime. You’ve worked with tons of different kinds of people. So number one, you have confidence. And number two, you have purpose. This thing that’s driving you and this is just me kind of my observation of what you’re talking about and why I think that you are going to make this happen, but also because you have this purpose.
You are so driven because you believe in the reason why it’s important and you care about it. It’s something that you want to see happens and you care about voice, you care about, you know, all these things that have kind of happened to you in your life and this huge purpose is like backing you up to.
So it feels to me like you’re unstoppable. It feels like you’re going to make it happen and not because you just think you’re all that, but because you care and you know it’s the right thing. You know it’s going to be good for them and so you’re going after it. And I just wanted to point that out because I love it and I think that it’s going to happen, yeah.
Leena Patel: Thank you. I appreciate that. I know it’s a long journey and it’s taking action every day continuously reaching out, even when people don’t see the value in it or don’t see that it’s top of mind for them today, but continuously pointing out “Here’s where the world’s heading and you’re either going to jump onboard today and start strategically planning for the future or you’re going to be back peddling and catching up in five years time because your competitors have taken the leap.”
And you know, it’s so interesting for me that the people, the companies, specifically companies within the Fortune 50 that I’m talking to right now, the ones that are responding and wanting to initiate this conversation and learn more, are the ones that are actually already doing amazing things in this space and they want to push the needle. And it’s fascinating to me that the people that are already doing great or like the ones like “How can I be better, what can I do differently?”
And the ones that are kind of struggling in this space but they’ve got a multibillion dollar company, they’ve got something that’s really awesome and everyone is using and utilizing their product, they somehow think that because I’ve got this awesome product, they actually don’t need to innovate on their people. They don’t need to change their culture. They don’t need to, you know, kind of focus on taking care of things and they’re missing this whole thing.
And I’m like, “Wow, this is amazing that they’re operating in this way.” And so my kind of goal is to just educate and maybe just to open the window and kind of what could be possible for them if they look at their business from a different perspective. And if they see that a lot of these companies, some of them are goals driven and they understand that and a lot of them aren’t.
So, you know, part of being strategic is helping them to understand that this is actually going to have a positive bottom line effect. But my end goal is to drive them towards understanding that it can be a win win. They can build a great company. They’re building a company and future proofing that company by thinking in this way.
But they’re also, eventually, using their influence and their power to create some good. And creating that good in their workplace and the environment and the culture they’re building, creating some good in the community that they can now kind of impact, creating some good in a world by solving bigger problems in the world. So that’s sort of my, you know, sneaky end goal is to sort of help them to use their power and influence for the better. And I think that, you know, it kind of becomes a win win for everyone.
Andrea: Yeah. What would you like the listener to take home with them today? Of all the things that we were talking about so many important nuggets, but what’s something that you would want to leave with the listener today?
Leena Patel: The number one takeaway, I want people to get as that now is the time to cultivate creativity amidst this chaos. Now is the time to take action, to take risks, to up skill yourself, to up skill your people. Gandhi said we need not wait to see what others do. So taking those risks, even though it feels challenging, you know, to lead the way in your industry and lead the way for the future. Take that action.
Andrea: Hmm OK, so this has been great. This has been fun to hear and inspiring for sure. Leena, how can people connect with you, and is there anything in particular that that you would like to point them towards?
Leena Patel: Sure, our company website is Sandbox2Boardrom.com and that’s Sandbox 2, the number two boardroom.com. And you can definitely connect with me there. I’d say that, you know, wherever you are in this innovation journey, whether you’re just starting to think about innovation or you already got an initiative in mind that you want to develop or that you’re developing, or even if you’re an expert and you want to be stretched and challenged so you can continue to push the boundaries and lead the way in your industry, you want to start by changing the way that you think. You want to start by getting better at solving problems.
One of the ways that you can do that is by asking more powerful questions. And I have a resource for you that will help you to identify the blind spots that your organization could be overlooking. So no matter if you’re at that C-suite level or if you’re a senior leader or you’re an aspiring leader of rising star, just train your brain to be a better problem solver and think differently will kind of move you _____ along that journey.
So this resource, you can download from our website, it’s a free resource code 42 CEO Questions to Maximize Your Innovation Initiative, and it’s going to help you to just think about questions that you may have missed that will help you to move things forward, to think more strategically. And you can access this free resource at Sandbox2Boardroom.com. Again, Sandbox2Boardroom.com/gift and that’s for you as your resource to just start getting moving forward your initiative.
And then I invite those _____ sort of looking to be more, if you’ve got an initiative coming up in the next 60 to 90 days and you really sort of want to move things forward and strategize to connect with me directly, I’m happy to give you some ideas that can really kind of move that forward for you a little bit quicker.
Andrea: Excellent! OK, I love that, the questions. This is going to be fun. So, we’ll make sure to put all that in the show notes as well at voiceofinfluence.net. Thank you so much, Leena, for being here today and for what you are and are going to do in the world.
Leena Patel: Thank you for having me, Andrea! It’s been such a pleasure speaking with you.
Judy Brower is a life and leadership coach. She also just so happens to be one of my mentors. Having learned deep respect for many people who hold opposing belief systems, Judy discovered that when full respect is given, full expression becomes welcome. Her passion is to unleash the potential of effective dialogue into our culture, workplaces, and homes through what she calls, “respectfullexpression.”
In this episode, Judy explains the core of her message, the five statements that will allow you to align your belief systems and truly respect others, why we need to replace judgement with curiosity, the moment she realized she had an agenda that attached her to the church and kept her apart from other outside the church, the difference between tolerance, acceptance, and agreement, and so much more!
Play here (the red triangle below), oniTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Radio(Amazon Alexa) or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Transcript
Hey, hey, it’s Andrea and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast.
Today, I have with me one of my mentors, Judy Brower. I’m so excited to have you here, Judy. Judy is a life and leadership coach who is crazy about Jesus’ life and people, not the least of which are her husband of 41 years, her three children, their spouses and our 10 grandkids. 10, that’s awesome.
Judy, grew up on a farm in Nebraska, raised her kids in southern California and went back to Nebraska for 10 adult years before moving to San Francisco five and half years ago having learned deep respect for many people who uphold opposing belief systems.
Judy discovered that when full respect is given, full expression becomes welcome. Her passion is to unleash potential of effective dialogue into our culture, workplaces, and homes through what she calls respectFULLexpression.
Andrea: Judy, it is great to have you with us on the Voice of Influence podcast!
Judy Brower: Thank you Andrea. I’m so excited to be here and love the way what’s been growing inside of me is so connected to your quest to unleash people’s voice for influence in the world. Thanks for what you do and thanks for including me in it today.
Andrea: Oh yeah, this is great! There’s a lot of really great stuff that we have to talk about because I kind of have a sense of your main message and what you’re trying to accomplish or share with the world. But would you share that with the audience right now, just what’s the kind of the core of what your main message is?
Judy Brower: I guess the core of my main message and the desire behind bringing it to the world is that we would create a tribe of individuals who are gathered around the reality that we all belong by birth to the family of humanity. And that all of us matter equally and when it comes right down to it together we’re creating culture. And for better or worse, everyone’s presence matters.
So this form of us all of humanity lays a foundation for every other form of us that we enjoy. And it creates the potential for all of those different forms of us to be healthy because they’re built on this foundation of all of us being equal human beings who mattered equally right where we are.
Andrea: OK. So why does it matter to you that we talk about and think of ourselves as equal to other people? I mean, that’s kind of one of those things that, you know, it’s in the declaration of independence for the United States. We’re all created equal and there’s a talk of that a lot, but why do you think that matters to you and who you’re trying to speak to? What is the significance of that?
Judy Brower: The significance really can be summed up in the reality that we talk about doing, showing respectful behavior toward one another. We respect and accept one another in theory and believe that everyone has equal rights in theory, but we don’t see one another as equals. And until we see one another as equals, we will never be with one another as equals.
So we’re trying to do something that really isn’t in alignment with what we deep down believe and that never works. I think that’s a big part of the chaos and why hostilities arise between people of diverse opinions and lifestyles because respectful behavior without a heart of respect falls flat. It’s condescending.
Andrea: What’s the difference between respectful behavior and having a heart of respect?
Judy Brower: Well, the way that I see us is not about anything that we do, but it’s a way of seeing and being with people. It sort of summarized in five statements that allow us to actually get our deep down belief system aligned so that our hearts will be full of genuine respect instead of just our behavior. Would it be helpful if I share those five statements with you?
Andrea: Yeah definitely.
Judy Brower: OK, so the first one is I accept you as an equal human being whomatters, period. Apart from anything you do, say, believe, or think; I accept you. We’re both part of the human family. It’s kind of that idea that we get to pick our friends but we’re stuck with our family and first and foremost, we’re a family of humanity.
And then it goes deeper with I respect your God-given ability to think, evaluate, reason, relate, work and create and your God gives you freedom to choose how you’re going to use it. And it allows people to be part of a family but distinct from one another in a way that demands respect.
Feel free to ask questions of how I’m expressing this…
Andrea: Yeah. No, definitely, I’m curious about the second one. I think it’s so important. I feel like all of this is so important so I just want to make sure that I completely understand and that the listener does as well or that we think through this because this idea of saying that we respect somebody but not really respecting them…say the second one again.
Judy Brower: OK. The second one is I respect your God-given ability to dothings that other created things can’t do;animals and the rest ofour amazingworld. We’re set apart as humans and that we can think and evaluate reason, relate, work, create and love. And we do it all by choice because God gave us the dignity of the freedom to choose how we use those abilities.
Andrea: Yeah.
Judy Brower: So I look over at another person and go, “Wow, you have incredible potential as a human being and I don’t get to control how you use it.” That’s respect.
Andrea: OK, cool. Give us number three.
Judy Brower: OK. Number three is you have a uniquely amazing design and sodo I and I choose to admire and enjoy who you are. I’m not going to alwaysunderstand who you are because you’re different than I am. But you have uniquemagnificence to bring into the world and so do I.
You know, when you just stopped to look at the fact that we all have different fingerprints that speaks volumes about how unique we are as individuals and the beauty of what we have to offer each other if we’re willing to embrace and admire rather than compete with the diversity that’s built into our human design.
Andrea: I really like this point, but at the same time I think it could be confusing. How does somebody truly admire somebody that they don’t understand?
Judy Brower: It has to do with being fascinated by them, stepping back and go, that’s fascinating. You relate with life this way and I relate with life so differently because I have a different personality. I’m wired differently than you are, “Hmmm that’s fascinating.” If I want to continue to grow and expand as a person and my weaknesses become strengths then I can do that by actually really embracing to the point of admiring the ways that others are different.
Andrea: Cool! OK, what about number four?
Judy Brower: Number four is I’m curious about your unique journey becauseyou’re on a unique journey and I’m on a unique journey. And because of our journey and all that we’ve experienced in the process that we’re in with life, we see things differently, we formed different opinions, we have different beliefs that we’ve adopted. And because you’re on a unique journey, you have beliefs and opinions and lifestyle choices that don’t make sense to me and I have ones that don’t make sense to you. If I embrace that as a good part, a real part of what it means to be on a human journey then we can walk our journey together and I can be curious about how your opinions formed and I can allow you to see how mine formed. And in doing so, our journeys will speak into each other’s lives.
Andrea: Yeah, being curious about somebody else instead of just judging them immediately.
Judy Brower: And when we listen for understanding, we get it. If we listen to change someone’s mind, we shoot our opportunity to inspire one another in the _____.
Andrea: Yeah.
Judy Brower: The fifth one just dovetails with that and it’s the idea that we’re in this together and we need each other, “I need you and you need me and we need us.”
Andrea: If somebody doesn’t feel that way, you know like, I don’t need somebody that’s different than me. I don’t understand them. I don’t want to be around them. I don’t need them. In what way are you saying that we need each other?
Judy Brower: Well, we’re stuck together so we’re going to co-create culture. It’s to my advantage to bring out the best in you and to allow you to bring out the best in me. Then we create a culture that’s healthy and where people’s minds and hearts are expanded. It also has to do with the idea of synergy and it’s all over in our world, right? The sum is greater than the individual parts.
So in my manifesto, I speak of a symphony in which the trombones can enjoy getting together and practicing the trombone and the beautiful music that comes from a trombone. But how much more full and rich is it when the trombones come together with all of the other instruments and bring their part to the beauty and the fullness and the richness of the whole symphony under the direction of the conductor. But it requires this humble confidence that my part matters but not more than anyone else’s.
Andrea: I think something that you said here just a minute ago, I’m just taking some notes, you kind of mentioned at the beginning as well that we are co-creating culture.
Judy Brower: Uh-hmm
Andrea: And because we are co-creating culture, like you said, it is in our best interest to bring out the best in one another. I think that is really powerful statement. It might even be a great way for you to summarize this because you can’t just take over culture, you know, one group taking over culture from another or that sort of thing. It just doesn’t happen like that.
And I think that’s the kind of, that we have these culture wars and we have all these problems that are coming up with huge dichotomies between beliefs like you’re talking about and this idea that “Look, we’re creating this one culture together.” So we, obviously, aren’t going to be able to turn it into the thing that we all exactly want. But if we bring out in one another then maybe there’s something to that and I think that’s really powerful, Judy.
Judy Brower: It sort of gets at the heart of we’re better together. It’s a phrase that we throw around, but until we really believe it deep down that the person I see outside my window right now doing things that I don’t agree with matters to me and is equal to me then that way of thinking can never be developed and we can never become actually better together.
Andrea: OK say that again, if you’re seeing somebody outside your window that you’re disagreeing with but you’re thinking of them as equal, then what?
Judy Brower: Then it opens the door to me believing that we’re better together in spite of our differences.
Andrea: OK!
Judy Brower: Because we’re a family and it’s in the best interest of the family to draw the best out of each other. And we do that by appreciating the good that’s there and looking past what we don’t like that we see on the surface to actually believe that this person matters, is full of great potential and has all kinds of things to offer me and ways to speak in my journey that will cause me to expand as a human being.
Andrea: I love all this. Tell me though, where does this come from? Where did your passion for the way of us come from? How this _____ individually?
Judy Brower: It’s fascinating because as I described myself in the bio, I am crazy about Jesus. I’ve been a Jesus follower for 40 years and that’s been the most significant part of who I am. But because I never gained an understanding that I am first a human being, that first God made me as a human and set my life in motion as part of the family of humanity to co-create culture along with my fellow human beings.
I attached myself to the church and separated myself from the rest of humanity without even realizing that’s what I was doing and I had an agenda for the rest of humanity. So then I moved to San Francisco and I become overwhelmed by the beauty and the richness and the goodness of my fellow human beings, their potential and the way they’re living it out apart from Jesus.
And I’m like “Wait a minute; I didn’t have categories for this. I didn’t have categories for being able to learn from you and being inspired by you and the beauty of bringing all of who I am to the table and receiving all that another person brings to the table and enjoying the dynamic potential of that relationship.”
Andrea: OK, can you help me to kind of…you said before you had an agenda that attached you to the church and apart from other humanity, what made that agenda or what was the agenda and why was that so polarizing, I guess?
Judy Brower: Oh that’s a great question. Thanks for asking it. I feel like a natural agenda developed in the heart of people who love Jesus out of a pure desire to spread the life-giving relationship that we have with Him. We long for others to know it and to experience what we have. That’s a beautiful thing. That’s because we’re all human beings and we want to share what we have with others that’s good. That’s part of what it means to co-create culture.
But what happens when we segregate together with other church people who believe that is we began to see ourselves as above our fellow human beings and the answer to other people’s needs and problems. And it creates an agenda within us to persuade others that they need to see what we see and believe what we believe so that their life can be better now and they can be prepared for the possibility of what life after this life.
This urgency grows inside of us with this longing and we quickly transition into disrespecting the freewill and the dignity that God built into humanity. And we violate human boundaries by attempting to come into people’s lives and tell them what they need to believe and how they need to change.
So what realized when I moved to San Francisco that really drove this home for me is that, what I believe, my evangelical faith is offensive to people for the simple reason that we’ve lived it out in violation of human dignity. Does that make sense?
Andrea: So we’ve lived it out in the violation of human dignity. I know what you’re saying. So it sounds like what you’re saying is “Because we cared so much about this, we lived it out but we were doing so in a way that made us feel like we were above everybody else.” And then that made everybody else say, “Well then you obviously don’t matter to me then.”
Judy Brower: Yes, and you have a God-given freedom and responsibility to use your thinking, your experience, your ability to reason, and evaluate and entertain different ways of making sense out of life according to your own free will. And when I try to put my experience and my beliefs on you that’s when I’m violating your human dignity.
Andrea: OK, so would you mind giving us a couple of examples? I’m thinking like what’s the difference between the way that you pursued conversations with people that were different than you before versus how you pursue them now? What are you actually saying that’s different? What are you actually experiencing inside that’s different?
Judy Brower: It’s a deep down respect for the value and worth of every human being, as a human being, along with valuing and respecting their unique design and their unique process. And being willing to enter into that process in my own process, allow our processes, if that’s the word, to come together and speak into each other’s process from a place of mutuality.
Here’s an example that maybe will help you understand this. After five and a half years of living in San Francisco and learning how to really value and respect people, I enrolled in a secular leadership program. And in that leadership program, my tribe helped me understand the ways that I was violating human dignity without even realizing it. So it came down to two things. They told me that I fail to lead and make a difference in the world when I become persuasive or apologetic.
So here’s what I came to understand that I have a tendency, and I think we all do when we meet people, to evaluate ourselves against them. And when I put myself slightly above someone, I’ll become slightly arrogant and want to persuade them that my way of seeing or being or living is the right one, it’s better. And when I find myself coming in below them in any way shape or form, I become slightly insecure and then I become apologetic.
So I came to the city a bit arrogant thinking that I had something to offer the city that was better than what they had to offer me. And then I became apologetic and began to wonder if people in the city even wanted me because my beliefs are so offensive.
So I entered into this leadership program either in a given moment, being persuasive or apologetic. And they said “Stop it.” Both of those things are ugly when you speak with conviction and no persuasion, I want to listen. And when you have the confidence to speak your truth without apology, I want to listen. But when you get persuasive or apologetic, I shut down. And I went, “Oh my gosh, I’ve spent my whole life either being persuasive or apologetic.”
And what’s grown inside of me as a result of these changes, the way that I’ve learned to apply to them are these statements that I’ve developed that I’m now learning how to see people through them. And as I do, I’m developing humble confidence, mutual relationships where I want to hear what you have to say because I value you and I want you to hear what I have to say because I value me and I value my message.
And it’s creating this ability to be in mutual relationships with people where FULL respect and FULL expression are both part of the equation and our relationships are effective and productive or sharing and exchanging of ideas is life-giving but never condescending or defensive.
Andrea: Yeah. When you said that, “What I have to offer you is better than what you have to offer me,” I think that there are a lot of people, who, like you were mentioning just being condescending and that’s obviously very condescending. And yet, when you have a strong belief system which is something that we’re all really kind of encouraged to have, maybe not everybody but certainly in religious groups or sometimes just ideologies, it’s like we’re supposed to have this really strong opinions or strong belief systems.
But then it makes it difficult to have these conversations that are not condescending. I think it has happened to me before, certainly, where it’s threatening to my ideology. Because you’re different you’re threatening my ideology is you’re threatening my belief system.
So if I am going to actually respect you and actually have this conversation and really truly listen to you and dialogue with you and not be condescending and all those things then I end up feeling like, “Oh crap, maybe what I believed is not that strong belief that I thought it was. Maybe it calls that into question.”
And I think that’s one of the hardest things, especially for Christians that I’ve seen but certainly other religious groups, I’m sure, and other people with strong ideology is that if we are going to actually have a conversation with somebody who’s different and not be condescending then it sort of makes us hold them out with open hands instead of hiding them tight behind our closed fists. But man, it’s pretty hard to have a conversation if you don’t.
I think that this is really important. So how can we sort of become comfortable with this idea of calling our own beliefs into question, or at least holding them out so that they could possibly be influenced by somebody who’s different than us and why is that so important?
Judy Brower: So it’s really connected or a foundation is developed when you just choose to begin to look at people through the eyes of “We’re in this together. We’re equal human beings and both of our voices matter.” And then we build on that by recognizing the importance of process that every human being is in a process that begins when they’re born and ends when they die, and therefore it’s messy.
Everyone is an expert on their own opinion, their own experiences, and their own belief system. So I can’t go into someone’s life saying “I’m the expert on your life but I am the expert on my life and my belief system.” So if everyone is an expert, and I want to continue to grow as a human being and I know that I have to or die then I invite your expert thoughts and ideas and I also bring mine and it’s messy. But if I value you as an expert then I can be an expert without making you feel defensive.
So I can learn from your expertise while holding on to mine and my beliefs will become more and more pure and more and more evolved and more and more engaging and I will have more and more influence and so will you. And when everyone’s best is unleashed, everyone wins.
Andrea: “When everyone’s best is unleashed, everyone wins.” That’s significant.
Judy Brower: So it’s a choice. It’s a choice to stop protecting our beliefs except in our own heart. I don’t want to change my beliefs but I do want to allow others beliefs to speak into mine. And what I’ve learned is that people who have opposing beliefs has so much to offer mind and that their beliefs inform mine more fully and make mine more rich.
So I haven’t changed anything about what I believed in the last five and a half years, but I’m now free to learn from others and therefore my beliefs are more rich and more life-giving to me and have more potential to offer life to others.
Andrea: Because you understand them better or because, why it’s potential to offer more to others?
Judy Brower: Because people are willing to listen. It turns out that when FULL respect is given then FULL expression is welcome. I do get to share my expertise and I want to share my expertise. It matters so much to me. And 40 years of walking with Jesus has given me so much beautiful understanding that I want to share with the world. I’m discovering that the same thing is true with another’s journey and therefore this mutuality can grow and my voice increases as I allow other people’s voices to increase. And none of us are in competition with each other because we’re all unique and all of our voices matter to everyone.
Andrea: So let me ask you another question. I think people probably who are Christians or people who do have a strong belief system, I think there’s still probably sitting here going, “Okay, but don’t you still have an agenda? Don’t you still want to offer your beliefs? Don’t you still want to offer this wonderful relationship that changed your life with others?” How would you answer that question?
Judy Brower: What God has done to eliminate the agenda from my heart, literally, I find myself so free five and a half years after living here of agenda that I came that agenda brought me to San Francisco. Now that agenda is gone but not the desire. So what I’ve learned from God is that it’s His agenda. He’s the only one whose heart is pure enough to have an agenda and He’s above us, humans, so He can have an agenda for us. That’s great. I’m not going to try to stop God from having an agenda on me, my life, or anyone else’s.
But because I’m an equal human being, if I have an agenda for you, I’m violating God and the dignity that He gave you and offers you every day to choose how you live your life even if it means rejecting Him. So I leave the agenda to God and I don’t pretend to understand how it all works. I play my part as a human being well and I take the love, the respect, the acceptance, the admiration, the fascination, and the mutuality that He has invited me to have with my fellow humans.
And the closest thing I have to an agenda is to offer that, not with the desire to change you, but with the desire to bring all of who I am and receive all of who you are and wonder what God’s doing with it and allow God to use it in the ways that He intends to, to expand, grow, and unify all of us.
Andrea: So it’s this opportunity to dialogue, to have this respectful dialogue that you’re talking about without trying to persuade somebody without trying to be apologetic, but yet still having the conversation. It sounds like you’re still having the conversation but with a totally different perspective and in terms of your heart and what you’re trying to accomplish per se.
So you’re not necessarily trying to accomplish that this person believe what you believe or do what you do, but you’re trying to accomplish the respectful dialogue. You’re trying to accomplish this opportunity to have this connection. So maybe that sparks curiosity, maybe it does get somebody to think more about what they believe or that sort of thing, but you’re saying that it’s not the end goal per se.
Judy Brower: No.
Andrea: Not for you.
Judy Brower: Exactly. Yeah, and it is incredibly freeing to be so engaged with people as my full and authentic self. I know that I’m going to grow because I’m going to ask and be curious and learn from them. And whether or not they do that with me, it’s completely up to them. But I think because we were made to travel together and be in relationship with one another, it sparks a natural desire to reciprocate that mutuality. It feels good.
And I’ve noticed that in a city that values tolerance, that tolerance is really sort of a shallow but good starting place if it leads us to acceptance. Tolerance says you’d be over there and do what you want to do and I’ll just put up with it even though I hate it. And acceptance says, I accept you and your thoughts and your ideas on your journey, your belief system, or your lifestyle. I wonder what you see about life that I’ve missed. I wonder what it feels like to be you.
Andrea: Which sounds different than agreeing, it’s not accepting as different than agreeing.
Judy Brower: It’s conversation for the sake of understanding and mutual inspiration.
Andrea: Do you feel you’re living under less pressure now that you don’t have to have this agenda and that you’re not on the particular kind of mission that you thought you were on?
Judy Brower: Yes, so much freedom, so much joy, and what’s beautiful for me as a Jesus follower is instead of loving people for Jesus, I’m loving people with Jesus. He loves, dignifies, and values people. Everyone is someone who matters to Him and that allows me to walk with people in the same way and love them and respect them with Him.
And my relationship with Jesus is more alive than it’s ever been and more rich and full and my life is as well. My relationships are beyond anything I ever could have imagined. I’ve lost all judgment and all agenda and it’s replaced with respect, acceptance, curiosity, and fascination because we’re equal and equally valuable human being.
Andrea: Awesome!
Judy Brower: What’s fun though is that my voice now has to come out of respectful expression. So I’m getting in conversations with people even other believers, especially unbelievers, and it’s messy. And I need to respect where they are on their journey and not expect them to be where I am on my journey and allow God to have them in a process that His hands on with all of us and none of us are going to be at the end of this journey of what it means to walk with Him and our fellow humans until the end.
So my need to have an agenda to change the minds of my fellow Christians is gone also.
Andrea: Now that’s good. That’s pretty hard when you’ve had a big huge change like this and then to be able to still turn around and apply it to the people that were just like you.
Judy Brower: I’ve always felt free that I was free to judge people who judged others. And I’ve come to realized that if everyone doesn’t matter equally regardless of their opinions or their lifestyles or their attitudes then no one does, not even me. If everyone matters then everyone matters, and everyone matters.
It still takes my breath away to say that, it literally takes my breath away, because of how powerful it actually is to live from that place right there.
Andrea: Judy, if you could have the listener do something or remember something in specifically from this interview, like what one thing do you want to challenge them or challenge them with or leave them with?
Judy Brower: What are the possibilities of living as if everyone you look at matters, everyone you come in contact with matters equally? And what if you just walk out into the world and began to see people that way? How would it change the way that you relate with them? How would it change you? And maybe just experiment a little bit.
Of course, I’d be most delighted if you wanted to experiment with me. If you want to become a part of a tribe that’s seeking to live this way and sharing the stories of the way that it’s impacting us, I would love for you to go to respectfullexpression.us and send me an email that would allow me to connect with you and where you are on this journey, whether you’re a believer in Jesus or not and how can we walk this road together and make this world that we live in a better place for everyone.
If there’s ever been a time that our world needs this, it’s right now in the middle of the political chaos because ultimately it doesn’t matter if you’re a man or a woman, if you’re a person of color or white, if you’re rich or poor, if you’re a part of one religion or another, ultimately that doesn’t matter. First and foremost, we’re equal human beings. All of the issues in our society would actually be resolved by this one choice to see the people around us, around the entire globe as part of a family that we’re committed to as a choice.
Andrea: Alright. Well, thank you so much for taking time to share your passion with us today, Judy. And we’ll definitely include your website in the show notes and people can download your manifesto there, is that right?
Judy Brower: Yes. I would love for you to download it and read it and think on it. And even if you just respond with your thoughts, any ideas, thoughts that you have or stories or desires that would expand my thinking and encourage my heart would be greatly appreciated. I can’t be in this alone. I don’t want to be in the alone. None of us were made to be in this alone. So anyway, in which you would want to join me, partner with me one time over the long haul, I’m open.
Andrea: And when you talk about joining or partnering with you, you’re referring to a conversation, you’re referring to coaching, or referring to just any kind of way that you can be a part of each other’s journey?
Judy Brower: Yes. My main approach to all of this has been to engage people in 6-week discussions virtually so that we can gather from wherever we are in smaller groups. Discuss these ideas and these statements and wander together at what it would look like to implement them, allowing their messy discussions because everybody comes where they are and everybody is met where they are. But they’re profitable and that they allow us to enlarge our ways of living and relating with people.
So my greatest desire would be to have you connect in a 6-week discussion and you can ask for that as you email me as well.
Andrea: OK, awesome! Well, thank you so much, Judy. I hope that more and more people will adopt the idea of respectful expression and be able to dialogue with one another and live together and co-create a culture that is beautiful like a symphony. Thank you so much!
Judy Brower: Me too. I wish that you could actually see the smile on my face and feel, maybe you can feel the smile that’s in my heart as I’m actually sitting here imagining every fascinating human being that might be listening to this podcast that you provide and that might connect more deeply with the voice of influence that we all long to have and the idea of respectFULLexpression. So thank you for giving me the opportunity to connect with you and others.
Tiffany Adams has spent most of her professional life working in a corporate setting dealing with human capital management; both before and after they’re hired. She’s previously worked for companies like IBM and is currently the Director of Client Solutions with the Ken Blanchard Companies.
What I love about Tiffany and is that she does this work with a servant-leadership attitude.
In this episode, Tiffany and I discuss what she does for her company and clients, what servant leadership and situational leadership looks like, why the idea and practice of servant leadership means so much to her, what it’s like working for someone who truly believes every single person matters, how servant leadership can help with selling your services and products, the main rule she uses when selling anything, why you shouldn’t be afraid to ask for feedback from clients on the work you’re doing, and more!
Play here (the red triangle below), oniTunes, Stitcher or TuneIn Radio(Amazon Alexa) or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Transcript
Hey, hey! It’s Andrea, and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast!
Today my guest is Tiffany Adams. I’m so excited to have Tiffany with us today because, first of all, she’s just an absolute joy and you’re going to love her. And the other thing is that she has so much knowledge and experience around sales and human capital but the first part of this all is with the servant leadership kind of attitude. So we’re going to learn more about that from Tiffany.
But let me tell you a little bit about Tiffany to give you some context. When she first started out she was not interested in sales, whatsoever, and yet the very first job she had was as a defense contractor in sales.
Since then she spent the majority of her time in corporate with kind of dealing with human capital management before and after people are hired just helping with the talent. And that’s most notably in IBM and now with the Ken Blanchard Company. She’s going to tell us a little more about that.
Andrea: So Tiffany, good to have you on the Voice of Influence podcast.
Tiffany Adams: Thank you!
Andrea: Another kind of fun tidbit about Tiffany is that she grew up in my hometown. So we’ve actually known each other forever. She and my sister were really great friends growing up.
So Tiffany, it’s just really, truly fun to have you here especially knowing, you know kind of having seen the arc of your career and seen where you are now, it’s just really fun. I’m excited to talk to you about what you’re doing. So can you tell us a little bit what you’re doing with the Ken Blanchard Company?
Tiffany Adams: Yeah, thank you. I was just thinking about this last night, Andrea, on the plane home about our journey from being the really annoying little sister’s friend that were always naturally trying to kind of annoy you and sort of get in what you and your friends were doing to where we are now. It’s pretty fun.
So yes, I am a director of client solutions with the Ken Blanchard Companies, which is a really fancy name for doing two things really well. How do I take care of our clients that we have and make sure we’re adding value and we’re serving them, and how do I work to spread the message of Ken Blanchard and what we do and be able to help our business grow?
And most importantly for anyone, a new client, how do I wrap my arms around what their person goals are and help them achieve those?
Andrea: Those are really touchy feely kind of ways and talking about this, I love that. So tell us a little bit what the company does?
Tiffany Adams: Yeah. So Ken Blanchard Companies started 40 years ago. I mean, you may have heard of Ken as being the one minute manager.
Andrea: The one minute manager?
Tiffany Adams: The One Minute Manager is a book that was published 40 years ago and just re-released last year. It really is what took him from being a professor and he was well known within academia for some of the textbooks he had written. He just said, you know, we’ve got to make it relevant to people.
So he connected with Spencer Johnson who was actually a children’s book author and said how do we take this message of leadership and management and make it really relevant in the simple truth and how do we communicate that in a way where people can grasp it, act on it, and live it. And from there, he just kind of kept doing that and that’s what we do still today. Anyone can be a great leader, anyone can be a great manager and that’s what we’re known for.
Andrea: And I know that there are a couple of programs in specifically around servant leadership or at least concepts around servant leadership and situational leadership. Do you want to tell us a little bit about those to give us an idea?
Tiffany Adams: Yes. So servant leadership is something near and dear to my heart and always has been. It’s really the culmination of who Ken is when you think about that. He had a book published earlier this year called Servant Leadership in Action where he collaborated and invited some amazing people across all walks of life to share what is servant leadership actually looks like in your organization.
What do we do, because it’s kind of this you know when you said touchy feely about this ethereal topic and people talk about it a lot. But how do we really wrap our arms around it and figure out? “OK, what do we do about that? How do we build the culture of servant leadership and then how do we build servant leaders?”
With that book, we’ve been touring right now, putting an event in multiple cities and to talk about what it does look like. At the core of servant leadership in our minds is becoming what we call situational leader, which if you think about at a very high level, you’ve heard the term different strokes for the different folks, right? We can just treat everyone the same. Well, it’s really about different strokes for the same folks, so we lead and we’re responsive based on what people need in their development level for a particular task.
So there’s a lot more when you think about it but when you think about those two things servant leadership and how it connects with what we call situational leadership too that would be the cracks of it. But you know we really talk about what is servant leadership mean for ourselves. We have to start with ourselves first because if we don’t take care of ourselves then we can’t take care of anyone and then in a one-on-one relationship or management team and organizational level.
Andrea: You’re kind of getting behind Ken’s message. You seemed to have adapted it and you believe in it and now you’re out there promoting it, why does it matter to you personally?
Tiffany Adams: Great question. So when I think about this and why it connects with me at such an emotional kind of spiritual level for me, growing up, when I look at my major influencers in life, they were very different people, very different experiences, very different platforms and completely different from each other, honestly. Their personalities and how they approach life and maybe even the choices they made in life, you know the colorful versus non-colorful language. But there’s a common thread that I so lived out in each of them and it was that people matter.
So whether it was my grand dad who was a pastor for 40 years in small towns in Western Nebraska, people mattered. Or whether it was another major influencer in my life that he is travelling the world, speaking to people, building schools, you know, has educated many thousands of kids in Haiti or trained some of internationals top executive leaders all over the globe, people matter. Or whether it’s somebody that I love very dearly that was a huge part of our national security and I will never actually know all of the details of that. Why did he do that, because people matter?
So being able to connect with an organization that that’s their mission, vision and goal was such a natural fit for me.
Andrea: So when you say that people matter, how did they demonstrate that to you, like what did that practically look like?
Tiffany Adams: Different ways through different people. So I would say with my grand dad, I remember watching him in a small town build relationships with people that just blatantly didn’t believe what he believed and were very vocal about it. And while he completely believed in his overarching message obviously, being a pastor, he never let that stop the relationship. Does that make sense?
So for him, it was just more about people knowing that in his eyes, whether you disagreed with him, whether you agreed with him, whether he could get you to church because he’d always going to ask you to get ready you know. You could tell him no a million times and he would still going to love you and respect you and want to be there for you.
When his heart was feeling, you know, getting out of the house at 20 degree below weather to get to you, to get you what you needed. So that was a huge, I guess, just part of my life that I watched play out from the time I was a little girl. Caleb Lucien is the founder of Hosean International Ministries. And when he was first starting this ministry, and we talked about this multiple times, he had offers and opportunities from some of the largest pastors that has some of the biggest budgets and influence here today.
I could tell you some of their names and you know you’d be like “Wow, how would you turn that down?” There are times when were so struggling to make sure we can pay our teachers within Hosean. But he turned it down and continues to turn down some opportunities that would make personally his life a little bit easier because he will not take his own paycheck for his own family, with two kids in college, to be able to make sure his teachers get paid. He could do that but he was just like “Tiff, no I mean God has called me to Haiti. I had to build schools here and bring electricity and how do we build the economy and how do we make sure people can build something of their own legacy here.”
So he did that because people mattered. I mean, that’s the _____ that have made such a big impact to my life. You know, Ken is one of the most amazing people because you would think he could command crowds of thousands and draw that. But he will start telling us stories about flying and spending time with a company and a CEO of an organization with 50 people.
So while he could command so much money and probably make so much money speaking to huge audiences, he’ll take so much time to go sit down with a leader of 50 people, 5 people, 10 people and invest just as much time and energy into them because he knows they’re making an impact on people and it doesn’t matter if it’s a smaller number of people. That matters.
Andrea: So every single one of them, every single person matters.
Tiffany Adams: Yeah, yeah and he doesn’t always need to be onstage kind of preaching that even though he can and he can influence thousands at a time. That’s not the only thing that drives him.
Andrea: And it sounds like he lives it out even in conversation with like one-on-one conversation.
Tiffany Adams: Yeah, he really does and he could speak with anyone.
Andrea: You mentioned before we’re actually recording that he just gives you all his attention. Can you tell us what that looks like when you’re the person that he’s talking to? What does that feel like?
Tiffany Adams: Yeah. So long before I came to work in this role, in this capacity, I’ve had the opportunity to spend time with him and his family and it really does go across his family. But they’re the certain people where we would be surrounded by a crowd. And whether he was talking to me or whether he was talking to someone else, you were the most important thing in the world at that moment. His attention is on you. He is asking questions. He’s listening. He’s not just listening where he’s hearing you; he’s hearing what’s just behind your words. If that make sense you know and then he does something about it and you walk away feeling like “Oh my gosh, I matter. I mattered to him in that moment.”
Even at a conference surrounded by hundreds of people trying to get his autograph, he’ll just take even a few precious seconds and make you know that you’re really important, that he cares. There’s been a very few people that I think have the ability to pull that off. I don’t think I do a great job of that and that is something that, personally, I’ve been working to be more intentional about, whether it’s with my own kids or somebody that is giving me their time on a phone call to just shut everything else down and focus solely in what they’re saying and what they need from me.
Andrea: Yeah, there’s something really valuable about feeling like that you have been given attention that someone’s full attention is on you. It’s rare, like you said. It doesn’t happen that often.
Tiffany Adams: It’s rare and when you follow that up with somebody who is definitely not prefect but still pure of heart and they’re not listening to you for their own gain. They’re not trying to get something out of the _____.
Andrea: Yeah. They don’t have their own agenda.
Tiffany Adams: No. They’re not thinking three steps ahead of you, they’re just 100% there and they’re there for you like there’s something really powerful in that.
Andrea: Oh my goodness, you’re so right, there is. I know that part of your job is and has been in the past that you’ve had a lot of experience at least with sales. And I really want to try these two concepts together because I know that most of us feel like sales people or salesy people are that three steps ahead of you. You feel like you’re going to be had or something like that.
So when you think about sales, when you’re actually in the middle of talking to somebody about promoting a product that they might buy, which is sales, how did these things interact for you, how do you tie in this idea of servant leadership you know given somebody your full attention that people matter more than the sale maybe. I don’t know how does this work for you? What do you think of?
Tiffany Adams: Well, I think I’ve been really blessed, first of all, to have had some incredible experiences and be able to build relationships with clients throughout my career no matter what I was doing. So when I was a defense contractor, it was a fairly simple message. But I started to realize that the people that I was serving, they were trusting me, they were my clients, and they were being able to get purchase orders for what I was selling because I was fulfilling a need that they had.
But then beyond that I got wedding gifts sent to the office from individuals and they were sharing with me information about their kids and about these vacations that they were taking.
Andrea: These were people that you’re selling to?
Tiffany Adams: Yes and I’m like “OK, we’ve transcended. I have something I want to sell you and I need you to buy it from me.” It wasn’t “I’ve got to take care of you because I know more about you. I’ve now become emotionally invested in your life and you know sometimes you’re there for a season and sometimes you’re not. It didn’t matter that I know your wife runs the daycare and at the Olympics and somebody that I ran with in college is competing.” And so “I know that your kids need the special signs in your wife’s daycare, they somebody that they can connect with and care for.” You know things like that. Is it really going to impact your life down the road, maybe or maybe not?
We do have this common _____ humanity. For example, have clients that I’ve work with for years and none of us are the same organization any longer but I consider them my friends. I consider them my mentors. I’m just constantly checking in with them and them with me on life in what are you trying to achieve and where do you want to go because we have this history of helping each other that doesn’t stop because of contract they signed.
So for me, yes, we’re trying to build a business and yes, you Mr. and Mrs. Customer, you’re also trying to build a business so if I can help you achieve your personal goal, your team goals and your organizational goals, I’ve done my job. But if I can’t, you still have those and there’s probably somebody that I know and I really enjoy being a connector because selling is teaching. And if you can teach someone and learn from someone, I think that’s a great foundation of a relationship that builds trust and build respect. And if there’s a way to help each other out, we have that opportunity.
If we don’t, that’s OK because we’re all in this life together. I know this is just so touchy feely but it’s just how I approach sales because I think it’s very relational.
Andrea: Yeah, totally.
Tiffany Adams: And it’s OK. If I can’t help you then let’s not in any way _____ then great.
Andrea: OK, we have to go back to something you’ve said just a minute ago, sales is teaching, explain what you mean by that.
Tiffany Adams: Well, I would always ask my team, “Who’ve you taught this week?” Because it doesn’t matter what you’re trying to sell somebody, for us it maybe sometimes technology or more the behavioral sciences aspect people but there’s just more than the sale. There’s more than a contract. There’s more than a demonstration.
No matter what we’re doing is there something that we know about the job market? Is there something that we know about why people are attracted to one organization versus another? Is there something that somebody else might be doing within their organization that I know about that I can connect them with their own colleague because it’s going to impact their lives?
It’s hard for me to sell somebody something if I can’t both teach them something that’s of value to their lives and their jobs and if I can’t learn it from them. I have a hard time with that because it’s too transactional. There are definitely those sales and I engage in them all the time. We all do and it’s necessary and it’s vital and some people are just really good at that and _____. It’s just not the kind of role I’ve ever had so I don’t have that much experience talking about it.
But if we’re not the one teaching our clients some things, somebody else will be and not just naturally build trust. And if people don’t trust you, they’re not going to buy from you because what we do impacts people and their organization but it also impacts their future career path and what they’re trying to achieve.
Andrea: Yeah and if you don’t believe in your product enough, you don’t believe in your service enough that it’s going to help people, you don’t believe it enough to say “I can actually help you” then why would you be selling it?
Tiffany Adams: Yeah, I personally would have a hard time. Other people don’t and they’re great at it you know and that’s OK. My natural style is exactly the way you just described.
Andrea: Yeah, and I think that that’s the listener too. I mean, listener at home wherever you’re listening, I know that you care about people that’s why you’re listening. So I realized that the idea of selling something; an idea, a product, or a service, you don’t want to be that salesy person but you’re listening to Tiffany and you’re saying to yourself “Maybe, I don’t have to be that person, I could be Tiffany.”
I can incorporate this attitude of people matter and I’m here to serve and lead in this conversation by offering content, by offering teaching or connection or whatever in order to see things go through. And you don’t have to blush when you tell somebody that you’re offering them a product, you’re offering to sell them something. I think that’s what so powerful about this is that you’re not apologetic about actually selling them.
Tiffany Adams: No, I’m not. And especially with what I do now if we can teach someone something that helps them have more effective communication with their team or if they’re managing up with their leader, they’re serving both themselves and their leader in doing that, like “Can we work better together and more efficiently and more effectively to serve each other and serve our clients?” Everybody had these jobs where they’re not fulfilled. They’re not engaged. They feel rejected and it’s a weight.
No matter how much we try to shed that weight before we come home at night, it’s still there and it impacts our relationships outside of work. So if there’s anything that we can do to positively impact that or influence that, I think that’s a beautiful thing because you’re not just a better colleague or a better employee, you can be a better friend or spouse or aunt or uncle, parent or grandparent or a corporate citizen.
I’m just so blessed in the work that I’ve been able to do because it is all about people whether that’s the technology that surrounds it or like what I’m doing now with training, I’m in leadership that really goes beyond the walls of just an organization.
Andrea: Alright, so we’ve talked about this internal positioning of your own heart and mind knowing that “OK, what I have to sell is important and it can help people but then also people matter and so I’m here to do this, you know, serve through selling essentially and teach and connect through selling.”
Would you bring us down to a really tangible level for us and tell us maybe two or three things that you practically do in the process of selling, maybe just a few tips that would help us to kind of wrap our minds around it, maybe some actionable things that we can even try.
Tiffany Adams: Hmm good question. So can you clarify for me or give me a scenario of, are you just building a business? Do you have a book of business that you’re trying to increase?
Andrea: So let’s say, we’re talking to somebody who has something like that to offer but they’re not really sure, you know, what are some practical things that they could do in terms of building those relationships and not being afraid of actually putting themselves out there to sell?
Tiffany Adams: Yeah. I would say at a very foundational level, I have a personal role that if anyone should ask for anything, let’s say I’ve been pushing my message out there and somebody comes back with a question, if it’s all possible, I try to make sure they know I’ve received their message and they get somebody reach out them in two hours.
Andrea: OK!
Tiffany Adams: So that is what I attempt to do. Now, what’s non-negotiable for me is that I’ll be 24-hour responsible. If somebody asks me to do something or get something for them, and what’s really cool, this is actually an internal norm at the Ken Blanchard companies, and I didn’t know that until I actually started. So talk about lining up with my own values. If I can’t get somebody an answer in 24 hours, I’m continually like communicating with them about what I have found out or what my next steps are to try to serve them with that, right?
We can’t figure out the world’s problems or answer and get the answer that we might be looking for always within 24 hours because people have client meetings, or there’s travel there, or they’re on vacation with their family. But I can still communicate with my clients or prospects who are always referred to as my clients in my mind and what I’m doing to help them. I have received feedbacks from multiple clients in the past that I get one deal just based on that alone.
Andrea: Just because you were in consistent contact with them, letting them know your process and where you’re at.
Tiffany Adams: Yeah, I was responsive to them and I was proactive. You know one client that I ended up working with for years and years told me probably like a year and a half after “You know why you got our business, don’t you?” And I was like “Yeah, because we’re the best ones for it.” And they’re like “Well, yeah, I mean not, but it’s because you two responded so quickly. When you ask you a question, you either got us the answer or told us you’re working on it and kept us updated. So we were able to get five, six, seven pieces of data for you that we needed to make a decision before we had heard back from the other company on the first question.”
So that’s getting into the _____ of what we do in selling but I get really passionate about that and I took your assessment.
Andrea: Yeah, the Fascinate Assessment.
Tiffany Adams: Yes, the Fascinate Assessment and it really did line up with my personality. So I’ve used a lot of emotional language today because that’s the value that I have and I think you have to have your heart engaged to be as passionate about what you do as you can. But I’m very much process-oriented and I know there are thousand things that need it done and done well for me to actually achieve the end goal.
So I’ve got ton of things and I can actually dive into “How are we gonna do this.” The other thing too is I’m constantly asking my colleagues and even former colleagues that are still great friends, “Hey, what are you doing that’s working? What have you learned?” What helped the clients that I could incorporate because it can always get better?” And I just learned that from some pretty amazing coaches that I had through high school and college growing up that you can always get better.
Andrea: And don’t be afraid to ask that’s great.
Tiffany Adams: Don’t be afraid to ask. Feedback is the breakfast of champions, so I want to know what I’m doing well so I can keep doing that but also what I can change. I was in Minneapolis yesterday; we have that servant leadership live in _____ of events and afterwards there was a colleague of mine and he said, “Can I give you some feedback?” I’m like “Yes, you can.” He was like “Thank you.”
And we just had this great conversation and I said “Thanks so much for sharing that because I actually was thinking about that point exactly when I walked back into this room and you validated that and you’re totally right and I can change that next week when I get to deliver the same kind of presentation for Denver event.” I get to do that and he made me better and I appreciate that.
Andrea: So don’t be afraid of feedback, feedback that might help you get better. Don’t let your ego get in the way.
Tiffany Adams: Yeah, I’m always afraid of feedback. I hate it.
Andrea: I love that you just said that.
Tiffany Adams: I get nervous.
Andrea: I love that you just said that.
Tiffany Adams: Yeah, I was sitting down with my boss yesterday and she had taken notes about it and there were like six really positive things about what I did, but I was still nervous _____ because she’s just amazing individual, an amazing leader. But it’s just funny because it’s such a natural human response to be nervous when you’re getting feedback like we don’t have to like it. We’ve still just have to ask for it because we know it makes us better.
Andrea: Hmmm yeah. So feedback is the breakfast of champions. It doesn’t mean that it’s the donut of champions. It’s the oatmeal, it’s the…
Tiffany Adams: Right.
Andrea: That is so great. I love that. Tiffany this has been such a delight. I love this example. I love sharing you as an example of what it can look like to really care about people and value people, say that people matter and live that out through the process of your work when you have to be selling and get to sell, get to share these things with other people.
So I really appreciate you bring this to our audience because I think that it’s something that people tend to be a little more apathetic and sensitive maybe, which I think a lot of my audience an tend to be. We have a harder time diving into that because we’re so worried about what other people saying that we’re going to like I said come off as salesy.
Thank you so much for being such a great example for us and for sharing your expertise around this area. I really appreciate it.
Tiffany: Yeah. You’re so welcome. You know if I can leave you with one thing as you’re building your business and I love you do this and I love it when I look at what you share. You really take what you have learned about a particular topic or some insight you just had and you want to share that with others into teaching not selling that help build your voice.
Andrea: Exactly. Yeah, content marketing is what we call it in online world. Yeah, so keep doing that and thank you to the listeners and thank you to you for being here. Would you like to share with us if people are interested in looking into connecting with the Ken Blanchard Company and servant leadership and all that, do you want tell us anything about that?
Tiffany Adams: Yeah absolutely! So you can do a couple of things, just go to www.kenblanchard.com that’s the really easy way to get connected with us and we’ll get you in touch with the right person. I love connecting with people on LinkedIn. I can certainly get you connected to the right person that can answer all of your questions as well or just share our own personal stories.
Andrea: Awesome! Well, thank you so much Tiffany, I appreciate you and your voice of influence.
