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Why Don’t People Trust Experts?

Episode 157

Voice of Influence Podcast Andrea Joy Wenburg

With all of the global crises that have happened this year, people are stressed and we’re finding ourselves in the middle of a great divide when it comes to our perspectives on many important topics and it’s certainly having an impact on how we’re able to be a voice of influence.

In this episode, Rosanne and I discuss the growing lack of respect and trust for expertise and how you can get people to buy into your ideas in spite of that, the parallels between parenting and getting buy-in on your ideas from those around you, the importance of understanding that some people react based on logic while others react based on emotion, the value of taking actions to calm a situation rather than escalate it and the role self-awareness plays in that process, and more!

 

Transcript

Hey there!  Welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast.  I’m Andrea Wenburg and Rosanne is with me again today.  We’re going to have a good conversation here in just a minute.  And we want to set it up a little bit by explaining, in case you haven’t been around much or if you didn’t realize what we’re really about.  Voice of Influence serves leaders and subject matter experts by helping them navigate personal and interpersonal human dynamics in order to effectively engage others and carry out their strategic mission.

 

So, if you are somebody who are in leadership, you have some expertise, and you really want to get that into the hands of the people that need it, we’re here to help you do that because there’s a lot going on that can get in the way of that happening.  And so, we’re going to talk about that a little bit today.

 

Now, just so you know, if you are interested in growing in your own social emotional intelligence, so that you can handle difficult conversations, feedback conversations, or things that need to happen between two people.  You’re wanting to convince somebody of something or you’re wanting to confront them about something, and you want to do this with more ease.  Well, we have a free mini course for you, and we’re so excited about it, and in under 30 minutes, you’re going to learn how to implement our proprietary model so that your conversations have a deep impact on others.

 

Go to voiceofinfluence.net and hit the podcast tab and there you’ll find more information about our free course the Deep Impact method.

 

 

Andrea:  Rosanne, welcome back to the show.

 

Rosanne Moore:  It’s good to be here.

 

Andrea:  And we’ve kind of been trying to talk through some of the things that we want to talk about today.  So, I’m just going to kind of let you set us up.

 

Rosanne Moore:  Well, we have talked a lot recently about how we see what you’ve referred to as the great divide, this divide in our nation with people. with different worldviews and how in this past year, in 2020, it’s become more problematic with all of the crises that are going on globally and nationally.  People are stressed, they’re tired, and it’s caused an even sharper division in perspective.  So, talk to me about that, Andrea, what do you see happening?

 

Andrea:  Well, I think the thing that kind of most concerns me for our audience in particular, has to do with the growing lack of respect for expertise in general.  And not just a lack of respect, but it’s also just general confusion about where should I get my information?  Who can I trust?  How do I know that I can trust somebody and what they’re telling me?

 

Rosanne Moore:  Right.

 

Andrea:  You know, my dad grew up, “You just trust the doctor.”  “The doctor tells you what to do, and you just trust them.”  And now there’s a lot more for good cause and good reason, people are advocating for themselves more in their own healthcare, which is good.  And yet, some of this finding your own voice and advocating for yourself, asking questions has turned into more cynicism and skepticism of what experts really provide.

 

Rosanne Moore:  Yeah, I mean, we’ve talked about how an expert is someone who really has devoted themselves to a subject so that they learned the nuances of it.  And so assuming that, because you have a piece of information, that’s equal in weight to somebody who’s looked at all of the nuances of something, that can be dangerous.  It’s got to be frustrating for our listeners who are experts in their field when they try to bring something and they’re not heard.

 

Andrea:  Right, right.  So, as a listener, maybe you have experienced this yourself where you have expertise to share but it’s not necessarily being taken with the same level of trust and “Okay, sure, I’ll do what you suggest.”  Or maybe you’ve got a change that needs to be made in your working environment, and you know that this is the right thing to do, you know, that this is the best thing to do, but you’re having a hard time getting people on board with it.  And I think that part of what we’re seeing in 2020 is this general like, confusion about like, “Why should I trust you?”  “Why should I do what you suggest to do?”

 

Rosanne Moore:  So, what should a leader do?  I mean, how do they get buy in on essential change?  That’s something that our organization specializes in.  So, share some of that, Andrea, what has led you in your thinking about this topic?

 

Andrea:  Hmm.  Well, you know, I sort of grew up watching my teachers and there are other students in my classes.  And it was just really observing when people actually understanding the teacher and taking in their information and obeying the rules of the classroom and when where they not and why.  Why was this happening?  I was constantly asking this question that was rolling around in my mind and kind of got to the point where I’d start to predict that when a teacher would say something, I’d be like, “They’re not gonna be able to understand that.”  And then I’d try to think of a new way to explain it to somebody, you know, not because I always knew.

 

I would oftentimes have to ask the questions myself and figure out what they’re trying to say or what they’re trying to accomplish.  And then perhaps every once in a while, you know, be a translator for another student in the class.  I needed a translator sometimes too but the point is that I just sort of have been studying this even as a kid.  And so, you know, I’ve continued to pursue that through my education, in my post secondary education.  And then I became a mom and, Roseanne, when you’re a mom, you have to really negotiate.  You have to be really good at getting people, little people to comply with what you have to say.

 

Rosanne Moore:  Right, absolutely into to make sure you’re getting behind their eyes so that you understand where the breakdown is.  So, you’re not trying to fix something that’s not broken and missing what is.

 

Andrea:  Right.  And this story comes to mind about 10 years ago, my daughter, she was about three.  We had continually gotten into this situation where I would tell her to do something or tell her it was time to do something; she would start to be upset about being told what to do.  And then I would get stern like I grew up thinking I should do.  I should be stern and I should take control of the situation, “I’m the mom here.” and give her that mom look, you know.  And that would set her off even more and the situation would just escalate.

 

So, of course, I’m given a child that is not ideal for my way of interacting and moving in the world.  I mean, you know, I had a whole plan for parenting before I started parenting.  Don’t we all before we start?  And I think this is so applicable to all of life.  So, that’s the reason why I’m telling this story.

 

But anyway, so this has been happening quite a bit.  And one night, it was it was about time for bed and I said, “Amelia, why don’t you go brush your teeth?”  And she looked at me and she said, she didn’t want to brush her teeth and I don’t remember exactly how that came out or I had no idea why.  But it just felt like a, “I don’t want to do it because you just told me to do it, so therefore I don’t want to do it.”  And there was this pushback and I thought for a second, I was going to do the mom look and get really stern.  And then I thought about it for a second, I’m like, “There’s something else going on here.”

 

And I had been studying other things.  So, I have a background in psychology and theology and some other things, and I’d been studying this for myself and trying to understand myself and why I was so irritated sometimes.  I would get really angry, irrationally so, and I didn’t always know why.  And then I started to really think about it.  I’m like, “You know what, when I’m really angry…” sort of prickly like a porcupine, feeling attacked or whatever it might be, “I want to just punch people.”  You know, not actually physically but that’s what my presence is.  I want to punch back.

 

But what I realized that I needed was I needed somebody to come calm me down because I didn’t actually want to do that, I actually wanted to cry.  And I didn’t want to admit that I wanted to cry.  But there was something inside of me that was sad and I needed help, like I was reacting in anger.  And that’s a normal thing for people to do to react out of that anger instead of reacting out of sadness.

 

So, when I looked at my daughter and things were going in that direction of escalation, I have one way of thinking about this, she has another.  We’re both feeling disrespected right now.  And I feel like as a parent, I should be able to take control of the situation.  But instead I looked at her and I thought, “What if she is acting like a porcupine, but she really just needs somebody to help her calm down.  Maybe I could be compassionate and help her calm down instead of being angry and forcing her to do what I told her to do and ending up in a big power struggle, and everybody being frustrated.”

 

So, I just looked at my little girl with her fiery eyes and I knelt down on the floor, and I reached out my hands and I just kind of opened up my arms.  I had no idea what would happen.  And as soon as she saw me do that, she came in and kind of fell into my arms and started to cry.

 

Rosanne Moore:  Ohh!

 

Andrea:  Why, because I asked her to brush her teeth?  No.  You know, like there was so much more going on in that moment underneath the surface.  And so, of course, I sort of teared up too, and I’m kind of tearing up right now thinking about it again.

 

Rosanne Moore:  I am too just listening.

 

Andrea:  Because this has played out many, many times since then in our relationship.  And I’ve realized that there’s something else going on inside of my daughter that is causing her to react with that kind of prickliness.  And the same thing happens with me.  She starts to be disrespectful of me, so then I feel disrespected and then I get prickly and only it furthers the process.  It only further escalates the whole thing.  So, I think that moment taught me something so huge, because after I gave her that hug and I just held her for a little bit, it was not hard to have her go brush her teeth.

 

That was not the issue.  It was just the simple like, maybe it was me asking her to change course in the middle of, you know, her playing and she didn’t want to stop.  It could have been that she felt like I didn’t care what she thought and I was already starting to look at her with a face that was the stern mom look and she doesn’t feel loved and that she feels disrespected and so that she was reacting to that.  It could have been a number of things.  But I think that the main thing that I learned from that was that sad is under angry.

 

Rosanne Moore:  Right.

 

Andrea:  Sad is under angry.

 

Rosanne Moore:  And I think what I’m hearing from you too, correct me if I’m wrong, is that if a leader makes the mistake of engaging someone who has an emotional barrier to something and just tries to do it logically, like with a kind of a command thing, they’re not actually going to be heard.  And so, when you’re running into resistance, it’s important to look for what is taking the person you’re trying to talk to out of a logical place and into an emotional place.  And if the leader is getting triggered to be in an emotional place, that’s what it sounds like you were doing with Amelia.

 

Andrea:  Exactly.

 

Rosanne Moore:  So, being aware on both levels, what’s taking us out of a place of actual dialogue, and I know in my background with teaching special needs kids, the two sides of the brain, the emotional side and the intellectual processing side are different.  And if you have the emotional side flaring, you’re not going to get anything taught.  And so that’s what I hear you saying, am I right in that?

 

Andrea:  Right.  So, you know, it kind of goes back to Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.  People need to feel like they’re taken care of.  Their physical needs, their emotional needs are taken care of before they can really start moving in a new direction before they can really start changing something.  And so, if there is a sense of “I’m not safe right now,” or “I’m not respected right now,” then it’s going to be really hard for that person to let down their guard, not fight back, and let down their guard and then be able to actually take in what you have to say at all, let alone make the decision to follow what you’ve said.

 

I mean that is what we talk about in the Deep Impact method.  And I seriously want as many people to watch this video series as possible.  It’s a short course and it’s for free.  And I want as many people to watch this as possible, because what I’m hearing back from people who have watched it is that it actually is kind of mind shift for the way that they’re talking to people.  And my hope is that, you know, when we look at our conversations, and we see the other person on the other side, and they are getting emotional, there is an escalation that’s about to take place, or we know that this is what typically happens.  That we as a voice of influence, that I as a voice of influence will stop and say, “Now wait a second what’s going on here?”  “What do I know that is true about me?”  “What do I know that is possible, like what could they possibly be going through and then how do we move forward from here?”

 

So, the main point of that particular story is both the fact that there’s something else going on underneath the surface, but then also that if we address the sadness first, we’re going to have a much easier time getting to change.  If we’re just reacting out of the anger, where I’m angry, you’re angry, we continue to be angry and we don’t address the actual grief of the moment.  There’s something going on inside of you.  There’s something going on inside of me that I’m sad, we are sad.  If we don’t address that, we’re skipping over something vitally important that could get us to a solution much, much quicker.

 

Rosanne Moore:  And I think to it as you’re talking, it’s not always your daughter’s reaction was to push back vocally but sometimes people shut down when they’re in grief.  And so either way, whether they push back or whether they shut down, having that awareness of what’s going on, that’s getting in the way of actually, like being able to dialogue is so important.  So, when you work with leaders to help them navigate through this undercurrent internal reactions and adoption of changes, obviously, you’re not going to have them go hug them like you did with your daughter.  So, what process do you recommend?

 

Andrea:  Well, first of all, self-awareness.  First of all, we all have to kind of look at ourselves and say, I mean, one of the best reasons I was able to actually be able to take this to a new level with my daughter was because I understood about this about that myself.  So, first of all, what’s going on inside of me right now and why am I so angry?  And if I am angry, what is sad about this situation?

 

Rosanne Moore:  So, you’re in motivation, being aware of what was motivating you was crucial.

 

Andrea:  Yes.  Look underneath the surface to say and to be able to ask about this particular situation that I’m in right now, “What is sad about this to me?”  Because if I can be honest about my own, what’s hard about this, what’s difficult about this?  Then I can share that with the other person and say, “Look, this is really hard for me.  I do not like having to go down this path.  But here we are, you know, it’s the beginning of empathy to be able to really understand yourself and be honest about that.  It helps you to be more empathetic toward the other person.  It helps the other person be more empathetic toward you.

 

Rosanne Moore:  And I think sometimes it can be fear underneath anger.  I see that a lot, you know, that the anger is a safeguard against feeling fear.

 

Andrea:  So, fear and sadness, I think are very similar.  There’s the fear, but then there’s the sadness about the fear.

 

Rosanne Moore:  Right.

 

Andrea:  So, I would I would still get back down to that.  So, what is going to help calm the situation instead of what’s going to feed the fire?  So, what does this person need from me to empathize with me?  .  Fear is sad.  It’s sad that people are afraid.  So anyway, I would go back to what is sad about this situation.  Well, it’s sad because I’m absolutely terrified of, you know, whatever might be going on.  That is sad.  So, I need to know that about me.  I need to start to understand what might be going on with that.

 

So then, after that self-awareness, then there’s a sense of, “Okay, now I need to be curious and empathetic and respectful of why the other person might be resisting.”  So, the respect here may not be the kind of respect that is like, “I respect you because you have earned my respect the way that you’ve treated people and your expertise and all that kind of stuff.”  It might not be that kind of respect.  Instead, it could be the kind of respect that is about the other person actually being a human being.  I respect the fact that you’re a human being, that you have emotional needs, that you have an experience of all of your own.

 

So, if I can start there too, if I understand, “Okay, so I respect that you’re a human being, and that there’s a reason why you’re resisting.”  Then I start to can start to ask those questions inside of myself.  I can start to kind of dig a little and the other person.  So, what might be going on?  Why might they be resisting?  What might they be sad about?

 

Rosanne Moore:  And what if it’s not?  Part of it could be at times, not knowing something, right?  Not having certain skills or resources.  Sometimes the emotional thing has a very practical component to it.  Would that not be true?

 

Andrea:  Yes.  So, when we get to this point, the curiosity, the respect, all that kind of thing, then I think that we can look at it in three kinds of components, what might be causing this person to resist; the head, the hands, or the heart?  So, the head being what do they still need to know or understand so that they can move forward, so that they don’t feel resistant?  For the hands, what skills or resources do they need to pull it off?  And for the heart, what beliefs or feelings are going to need to change?

 

First, I think you have to address the fear or the sadness that we were talking about before, at least being able to understand that about the other person.  And then to ask that question of is there something that you need to be able to move forward?  Or is there something that’s getting in the way that you don’t understand?  Is there something else that you need in terms of resources or is there just like you totally are resistant because you don’t agree that this is the right direction to go?

 

Rosanne Moore:  You know, talking about this, Andrea, reminds me of a situation that I was in with the birth of my second child.  I have had a very traumatic delivery.  And there was some medical malpractice and mistakes had been made with my first child.  And so, with my preparing for the birth of my second child, I was very resistant to the idea of letting somebody else make decisions that I didn’t feel comfortable with.  I had gone into it very trusting the first time, didn’t know a lot, and the second time I was going to be prepared.

 

And I can remember interviewing doctors, pediatricians and they picked up immediately.  It was not hard kind of wearing it, my resistance to their expertise.  I think there were four different ones that I interviewed and the first three responded to that by doubling down on why they were the expert and I was not and I needed to do things, like they needed to call the shots.  Understandable, obviously, I had not been to medical school; I had not done all the things that they had done.  But the last one, when I started asking questions about how he handled things, instead of answering my questions, he asked me a question.  He said, “Did you have a bad experience?”

 

Andrea:  Oh, perfect!

 

Rosanne Moore:  And I told him what had happened and he said, “I’m so sorry that happened to you.  I can understand why you really want to make sure that your baby is taking care of well this time.”  And so then he walked back through all those other questions that I had and he explained his expertise, and that’s who I chose.

 

Andrea:  Of course, yes.

 

Rosanne Moore:  Now, did he make any suggestions that were different than the others?  No, he didn’t.  He held the exact same position, but he was the one I chose because he did engage me on that level.

 

Andrea:  Yes.  It so, so good.  What a great example, Rosanne.  I mean, it goes back to that people don’t care what you know until they know that you care.

 

Rosanne Moore:  Right.

 

Andrea:  And the reason for that is that they don’t feel safe.

 

Rosanne Moore:  Yes.

 

Andrea:  People are resisting you and you’re resisting what you have to share with them, your expertise, your knowledge or experience.  They’re resisting, they’re resisting, they’re resisting.  There’s something in them that is not feeling safe.  And so, it may be because of you, it may not.  But it’s _____ upon you as the person who is wanting to have, you know, the influence as somebody who cares about other people to ask that question, you know, “What might be going on?”  “Is there a bad experience?”  Or, you know, it could have been a different situation.  It might be a different question, but you stay curious and be respectful of that other person, even though they weren’t at medical school with you.  Man, that’s so important.

 

Rosanne Moore:  Yeah.  And all of my birth experiences, quite honestly, that was the best birth experience because both my OB and the pediatrician were very aware of what I had been through the first time and they did everything in their power to make sure that I felt heard and a part of the decisions and respected throughout the process.  Yeah.

 

Andrea:  It’s so good.  So, it’s time for us to wrap up, Rosanne.

 

Rosanne Moore:  Sure.

 

Andrea:  I think that if I were to summarize anything here, or if I just say, please remember this, please remember that sad is under angry.  Please, remember that.  There is a reason why people are angry, and it’s not usually the top response.  It’s not usually the core response.  It doesn’t mean that it’s not important.  Anger is very important.  And it doesn’t mean that we should write off people’s anger, it means that we need to be curious about why they’re angry and what might be going on inside of them that could actually be sad.

 

One more thought on this.  I’ve got a question for you, the listener.  When do you feel most close to people, when you’re arguing with them or when they tear up?  And maybe you start to give them a hug or, you know, maybe you don’t touch them.  But, I mean, we feel closer to people when we can see that they’re actual human beings.  And we’re not just arguing on a on this other level, that is maybe just about things that are on the surface that we’re not really getting down underneath.

 

And so, if we can get down underneath, if we can feel that empathy for the other person’s human experience that is vitally important.  If you have expertise, it’s vitally important that you understand that you can’t just share your expertise.  You’re going to have to be an expert on people too.

 

So, the rest of this month, we’re going to be talking about this particular topic.  Next week we’re going to be airing an interview that I did with Dr. Espen Klausen, the psychologist on The Psychology Behind Personal Change.  Then we’ll take another look at that and we’re going to just dive a little bit deeper here the rest of the month on this particular topic.  We’re kind of excited about taking a little deeper dive.  It’s sort of like a theme we’ve got running right now, Rosanne,

 

Rosanne Moore:  Yes.  So, if you want to become more effective in conversations where you’re encouraging an individual to make change, whether it’s in a formal situation an annual review or responding to feedback on the job, or whether it’s just in a passing conversation.  We started out by talking about the deep divide in our nation, maybe you have family members that you want to be able to engage better or there’s someone close to you that needs to take more responsibility for something, a bad habit they’re stuck in.  We have a free mini course that’s available for you.

 

And Andrea already made reference to this at the top of the show, but go to voiceofinfluence.net/podcasts and you can find information on the Deep Impact method.  Also, if you want to work one on one with Andrea but you’re not sure what that would look like for your specific business situation, we recommend starting with the Clarify your Voice Call.  Again, you can go to voiceofinfluence.net and hit the contact button there and ask to learn more about clarifying your voice.

 

Andrea:  Thank you, Roseanne.  All right, so your voice matters, let’s make it matter more!

Posted on

Handle the Haters: Diving Into My Success Magazine Article

Episode 128

Voice of Influence Podcast Andrea Joy Wenburg

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

How do you handle the haters?  I mean, haters gonna hate, right?  So, we’ve just sort of got to shake it off.  And, while I love that idea of being able to just shake it off, it can be a lot more complicated than that.

I was recently asked by Success Magazine, “How do you handle the haters?” My response is in the March/April 2020 edition of Success Magazine.

In this episode, Rosanne is going to interview me about that article, and we’re going to give a summary of the article and take a real deep dive into the three points that I made. We also use the topic of politics to explore how we could potentially get to a place where we are truly having a respectful dialogue that solves problems.

Take a listen to the episode below!

Mentioned in this episode:

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Transcript

People of influence know that their voice matters, and they work to make it matter more.  I’m Andrea Wenburg, and welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast.

How do you handle the haters?  I mean, haters gonna hate, right? So, we just sort of gotta shake it off.  I love that idea of being able to just shake it off, but it can be a lot more complicated than that.  

I was recently asked by Success Magazine: “How do you handle the haters?”  My response is in their March/April 2020 edition of Success Magazine.

Today, Rosanne is going to interview me about that article, and we’re going to dive a little deeper into the things that I said.  In particular, we’re going to give a summary of the article and take a real deep dive on the three points that I made. I think that you’re going to find them helpful.  At least, I’ve heard that they can be really helpful to folks.

And also, we actually dive into politics a little bit.  Not so much specific politics but how we could potentially get to a place where we are actually having respectful dialogue that solves problems.  And then Rosanne also asked me what words I have for those who might be hiding behind their computer screens and hating on others.

If you’re interested in reading the article in Success Magazine, it is or will eventually be out online.  It is also in the magazine itself, which could be found wherever magazines are sold.

Here is my conversation with Rosanne:

Hi, Voice of Influence listeners!  This is Rosanne Moore, I am the Voice of Influence Communications Specialist, and we’re doing things a little differently today.  I’m going to get a chance to interview Andrea. She had a wonderful opportunity recently to be interviewed with Success Magazine, and we want to talk a little bit about the things that she brought up in that article, which was entitled “Handle the Haters”.

So, Andrea, because Voice of Influence is so focused on positive things, what was it like for you to address that topic?

Andrea:  It was really interesting.  I was kind of excited to get the question because I like being able to kind of toss things up and turn the tables a little bit, like give people a different perspective.  So, the perspective that I wanted to bring to that question was instead of focusing on handling haters, focusing more on how do we handle ourselves. That maybe some of the criticism that we feel when we’re hearing other people and what they’re saying to us is actually inwardly directed; like, we are feeling that ourselves more than they are worried about hating on us.

And I think there are haters, for sure, but to me, that was my perspective and that’s what they asked for.  They asked for, “What’s your story,” and I shared that my perspective on haters is that it was more about my fear of other people and what they might think or what they might reject me for or whatever than it was about actual criticism.

Rosanne Moore:  That’s an interesting perspective because I’ve often noticed that online it’s very difficult to have a discussion because people seem to assume they already know what you’re saying.  Unless it’s instep, lockstep with what they’re saying, they take it as criticism. And so, to hear you say that, to encourage people to look at what’s being triggered in them is an interesting perspective.  Can you say more about that?

Andrea:  Yeah, I mean, I think that that’s very true.  It’s very hard for people to have an actual conversation like a discussion online.  Especially, I think I see it on Facebook and Twitter in particular, where people… it’s sort of like the gloves are off, and we just go at each other.  And a lot of times, it’s sparked from offense; like people feel offended, and so therefore they come back with an even harsher word. It would be interesting to see what would happen if we all just decided not to be offended by each other because we might actually have a conversation.

Rosanne Moore:  That would be nice, right?  I have tried personally to make a practice of – unless there is actual name-calling or, like, things that give clear indication of a negative tone – to try to read any kind of response, no matter what it says, in an objective tone in my head.  Because I think a lot of times you’re right, we come at discussions ready to be offended or assume that the other person is angry instead of that they’re just discussing something.

Andrea:  Right.  I think sometimes that’s really a projection.  We assume that other people are going to respond the way we would.  Sometimes, it has to do with the fact that we’ve experienced this before.  We’ve experienced this kind of criticism before so we’re assuming that’s what they’re doing.  But sometimes, it’s because we are that critical of other people and other perspectives. And so, when we hear somebody else say that, we feel very defensive.  And it’s kind of messy.

Rosanne Moore:  Yeah, that’s good.  I would have go back a little bit to the points that you brought out in the article in Success Magazine.  Your first one was that when you’re speaking publicly, when you’re putting yourself out there to share your message, your voice of influence, that family and friends are not your audience.  And that you shouldn’t target them because if they feel targeted, even though you want to influence them as well, they’re going to feel defensive and shut things down. Can you say more about that?

Andrea:  Okay.  So, the interesting thing about this is that Success Magazine itself their audience is people that are entrepreneurs.  They’re online, they’re trying to speak, they’re trying to write, and that sort of thing.  And so, it’s sort of like talking to people that are doing what I’m doing. And in that context, I think that it’s really important for people who are wanting to do the kinds of things that I’m doing to remember that their friends and family are not their audience.

Because that is true, when people feel targeted… there have been times – and I could point to probably two or three times – where I didn’t mean to target somebody, specifically, but it was close enough to the truth of some situation that actually happened that when I did talk about something or write about something that person felt like they had been targeted. And it almost ruined a relationship.  Thankfully, it didn’t totally, but yeah, it was very scary.

Rosanne Moore:  So, when you say target them, you’re specifically thinking, like, using examples that are too close to home, that kind of thing?

Andrea:  Yeah, either examples or that the message is something that is immediately applicable to somebody that you’re very close to.

Rosanne Moore:  I see.

Andrea:  So, when I was writing, when I was blogging on a regular basis, I was not ahead of the game by any means.  I was writing for that day, and then I would post usually that day. And so, the things that I was thinking about, stirring in my heart, whatever, were things that had been happening in that sort of immediate timeframe.  And then if I would put that out there in that way, right away, it could be perceived by somebody as being about them when I didn’t necessarily mean for it to be or maybe it just looks like it, you know.

And I think there were a lot of times when I first started blogging that I really was concerned about whether or not people that I knew and loved would read what I had to say.  I really wanted them to be my audience. I wanted them to support me, to care about what I had to say, to help me get this blog off the ground, that sort of thing. And until I was able to sort of surrender that, give it up, not try for that anymore, not expect that of my friends… I mean, there came a point where I said to some close friends of mine, I was like, “I would much rather you’d be my friend than my audience.  I need you as my friend. I’d rather you just not read or listen to anything that I say because I want to maintain this friendship.”

And thankfully, a lot of those relationships were able to just sort of evolve, and everybody was able to sort of put that aside and not worry about, you know, being offended by what I talk about or whatever.  You know, like we’re able to still have conversations around it. But that was something that felt very threatening, I think, to me and to my relationships. That was really important in that context.

Rosanne Moore:   So, when you started, your intent was simply to process what was going on for you, but to others, it kind of came across as a passive-aggressive way to correct or to…

Andrea:  Yeah, it could totally appear passive-aggressive.

Rosanne Moore:  Yeah, that’s a good point because that could be very innocently done and cause trouble without realizing it.  And I guess that goes back to the whole kind of thing we teach at Voice of Influence of knowing your audience, and realizing not just what your message is but who your listener is, and how it’s going to impact them as well. 

Andrea:  Absolutely.  I think if I were to take this article and the things I said and apply it to our audience more broadly, I would say that is exactly it; know your audience is the first point.  Is that person that you’re talking or that you’re getting criticism from, are they somebody that you really respect and you want to listen to what they have to say, and that it should impact the way that you think about things?   If that’s the case, then let that be what it is and don’t call them a hater, you know. Or it could be somebody that’s maybe designed to be in your audience. Maybe they’re somebody who is on your team at work, or they are in your audience at a convention or something like this.

If you’ve touched something in them that is kind of wounded and hurt, and then they are being critical of you or hating on you online or in some sort of way even personally…  The more important thing that you and I both know is that we have to stay curious in those situations and really just try to figure out what this touched in them or what was threatened in them when you said something.  Because you do have sort of a responsibility to those people, you do have a responsibility to be curious about to try to understand where they’re coming from no matter what they’re saying because you want to get to the heart of it.

Rosanne Moore:  And you kind of brought that out in the article when you said, “Love people more than you fear them.”  That’s what you were talking about, wasn’t it?

Andrea:  Yeah, definitely, that was part of it.

Rosanne Moore:  Yeah, that you have to continue to be curious rather than defensive if people don’t receive what you’re saying, or they make assumptions about why you’re saying it or what you mean that don’t really fit with what you’re saying.

Andrea:  Right, because they’re offended easily.  And then the third category of people, I think, for knowing your audience would be the people that really might just be haters.  They really are just hiding behind their computers and, you know, feeling really angry at the world. They want their voice to matter, and so they’re going to put it out there even if it does hurt somebody.

There are times when it’s okay to just let those sort of roll off and not stay curious about them.  You can have compassion on people who are hateful because you know that they are hurting. There’s got to be something hurting inside of them.  But that doesn’t mean you have to feel responsible for figuring out what you did wrong, and why they’re offended, and all that kind of stuff.

So, those folks, I would say, it’s okay to let those folks go and just move on.  But are they somebody that’s really in your audience that you feel responsible for?  Stay curious. Are they somebody that you have a lot of respect for and they’re bringing up some sort of criticism that you need to pay attention to?  Pay attention to it. But if it’s somebody that’s really just kind of out on the fringes and hateful, you can’t take responsibility for everybody.

Rosanne Moore:  That’s a good point, right.  You also talked about, “Sometimes you have to sacrifice what you want for what you need, and that ethical influence has a cost.”  What were you referring to there?

Andrea:  I think that the writer of the article tweaked something that I said for the first statement there, “Sacrificing what you want for what you need.”  I am trying to remember what my response actually was to that. But the main thrust of that second point is about understanding that there is a personal cost to putting yourself out there.  If you’re wanting to have any kind of influence whatsoever, that means you’re not hiding under a rock on an island without anybody else around. Then you’re a person, you’re a human being, and there’s some sort of cost that you’re going to incur because of putting yourself out there.

Rosanne Moore:  So, in other words, that while you may sacrifice comfort or safety or whatever… instead of maybe saying what you want for what you need, instead, you’re willing to make sacrifices to do what you believe is most important, what you’re called to do.

Andrea:  Exactly.  That was really more of what I was trying to get at with that point.  And I didn’t have a chance to be able to say, “Oh, that wasn’t quite it,” you know, with the article.

Rosanne Moore:  Right.

Andrea:  And I thought, “Well, it’s not the end of the world, you know.  I still got in the point about it being about coming at a personal cost.”  But it really is about the mission, though. It really is about, “Okay, what am I willing to sacrifice for the mission?”

Rosanne Moore:  And how do you evaluate that?  What kind of things are you willing to sacrifice, and where do you draw a line and say, “No, I’m not willing to do that”?

Andrea:  I think that’s a super important question.  It seems to me that we need to prioritize the things that we’re willing to put on the line for our mission and what we’re not.  So, for example, for me, I am willing to put myself on the line in the sense that other people are definitely going to criticize me.  I’m going to have to get over that in order to continue down this path, in order to continue to have any kind of impact.

Rosanne Moore:  Sure.

Andrea:  So, I’m willing to sacrifice the comfort of feeling like I’m always right.  I’m willing to sacrifice the comfort of feeling like everybody always agrees with me or should agree with me, knowing that that’s not going to happen.  I have to sacrifice that harmony or lack of tension. There’s always going to be some kind of tension. I have to be okay with that feeling. So, there is something there that I sacrifice.

Rosanne Moore:  And what kind of things are you not willing to sacrifice?

Andrea:  Yeah.  And I would say maybe I’d throw in with that last point just that that sometimes I’m willing to sacrifice feeling vulnerable, basically, is essentially the thing, I think, maybe.  Like, I can feel vulnerable or make myself vulnerable to criticism, and that’s what I’m willing to sacrifice. What I’m not willing to sacrifice would be, I’d say, that number one, if it impacts the safety or wellbeing of my family; in particular, my children.  You know, they’re vulnerable. They are vulnerable and I have to protect them.

So, you know, my husband and I have to be in conversation about what we’re willing to say about them or not say about them, or if they were to be put in the line of fire in some way, that would shift how I approach things, for sure.

Rosanne Moore:  Right, right.  That makes sense.

Andrea:  And I’m sure that there are other things, like I wouldn’t want to sacrifice my own voice.  I can sacrifice the idea of, you know, speaking to everything, “Maybe I’m not gonna speak to this thing because this other thing is more important to me.”  So, I’m willing to bite my tongue here so that I can have a bigger voice there. But if I were to say I’m going to not speak the truth of what I actually believe, I’m going to actually lie… you know, being untruthful would be something I’m not willing to do.

Rosanne Moore:  Right.  That makes sense.  Yeah, sometimes you have to keep your powder dry for the battle, where it matters most, but that’s not the same as betraying the core of who you are. 

Andrea:  Great way to put it.

Rosanne Moore:  And it sounds like anybody in your position, anybody who’s going to have or for any of us who want to have a voice of influence, there needs to be a willingness to develop a thick skin and a tender heart at the same time.

Andrea:  That’s a complicated kind of a requirement there.

Rosanne Moore:  Right.  Okay, so, you talked about how do you evaluate what you’re willing to sacrifice and what you’re not willing to sacrifice.  Before we touched on the idea of loving people more than you fear them… when you think about what you’re sacrificing, what you’re not willing to sacrifice, when do you take in feedback from other people?  When is that a sacrifice of control, then when do you draw a line and say, “No, that’s no longer helpful, and I’m not going to do that”?

Andrea:  Hmm.  Can you expand on what you’re saying there?  What kind of example would you be talking about here?

Rosanne Moore:  Well, for instance, if you’ve engaged someone and it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere, you don’t have to just be open to haters.  When do you decide when there’s feedback that’s valuable for you, and when do you decide, “This is a voice I don’t need to keep listening to”?

Andrea:  Hmm.  That’s a really interesting and complicated question, right?

Rosanne Moore:  Well, let me simplify that.  What’s kind of the grid for you about when you take in feedback and when you don’t?

Andrea:  Well, I think that it has something to do with whether or not the other person is really doing this because they have your best in mind.  If they’re just wanting to argue with you and win you over to their side of the argument, that’s just arguing with somebody. If that person seems to really care about you, and for me, you know, my mom would always tell me, “Andrea, people don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care,” and that is a quote that comes from, I don’t know, Roosevelt or somebody, but it’s definitely a historical kind of… it’s been around for a while.

But the essence of that is that if people know that you have their best interests at heart then they’re more likely to take in what you have to say.  They’re more likely to feel like, “Okay, let me think about what you’re just saying right now.”

Rosanne Moore:   So just because they’re criticizing, they’re not haters.

Andrea:   Right, right.  Oh, yeah, totally.  I think that that is really important with that first point of knowing your audience, so who are you listening to then, you know.  Is it somebody that really cares about you and so you’re willing to take their criticism in? But how you determine whether or not that person is somebody you want to take their criticism or not… I mean, that’s hard.  It’s hard to know. I mean, if they know you, if they care about you, if they’ve demonstrated that they’re for you; I think that that’s something that each of us should think about for ourselves, when do we feel most open to criticism?  When do I feel most open to hearing from somebody else, and then turn the tables and say, “Well, then that’s how I need to be treating other people when I have something to say.”

Rosanne Moore:  That’s an interesting point.  I know I don’t have difficulty taking negative feedback if it’s done from a standpoint of exploration rather than an assumption of negative motives.  f I feel like there’s a mischaracterization of…

Andrea:  Of you?

Rosanne Moore:  Of me or of my motives then even if they’re right about that there’s something that I need to change, it just feels yucky.  It’s a lot harder to receive, and I can usually over time parse out, “All right, this is the part that’s true that I need to look at.”  But I still come away, “That’s not a person I wanna hear from in the future,” because they didn’t come at it from a standpoint of assuming that my intentions were good and that I had missed the mark, you know, or I had a blind spot about something, so that’s a good point.

Andrea:  I think if we’re characterizing people as being from a different side and that other side is evil… I mean, this is what’s going on with politics.  A lot of people that are in politics right now or people that are listening and feeling like they’re a part of a political party… or not even just a political party, but you know, following Trump or not following Trump, whatever, it seems like that is the line right now.  We either follow Trump or you don’t follow Trump. And anybody on one side of the line characterizes the people on the other side of the line as being evil and so they totally write off every single thing that they say.

Rosanne Moore:  Right.

Andrea:  That is not going to get us to consensus of any kind.  So, how do I listen for what is really going on in the other person?  Like, bringing it down outside of politics, bring it down to the actual person themselves.  What does this person in front of me, who’s maybe on the other side of the line, if you’re on one side of the line or the other – some of us, you know, are trying to look at it objectively – but how do I listen for what’s really going on inside that person?  What is being threatened in them that’s causing them to believe something that I don’t believe?

Rosanne Moore:  And not be able to hear…

Andrea:  And not be able to hear from anybody else.  Yes, not be able to hear what I have to say.  It’s not even worth saying it when the other person can’t hear it.  So, how do I get to the heart of that person and find out what’s really going on inside of them and speak to the heart of that person instead of talking politics around the top?  Because if you start at the heart, if you get to the core of a person that’s really struggling with something, or they feel threatened in some way that they’re political party or their side of the spectrum is validating for them, you have to be able to show them that you are for them.  Just because you’re against, you know, maybe their political stances, you can still be for the person.

So, if we could just do that, if we could just bring it down to that personal level and to the heart, I think that we’d have a chance of actually having conversations.  But as soon as we get into inflammatory statements and assuming that, “You know, the other person is x, y, and z, and I am not and so therefore, I cannot listen to anything that they have to say.  I’m gonna write off everything that they have to say,” you’ve lost the conversation. You’ve totally lost any kind of influence you could have over that person or their way that they’re thinking about things.

I would just throw in there because I brought up politics – I try not to, but right now, it’s a big deal – and I think that as long as we’re using buzzwords that we’re hearing from politicians, buzzwords like corruption…  Both sides are using that word and it means something different to them. It looks like something different to them. And when you use buzzwords like that – or buzzwords of fake news or whatever – if you’re using those buzzwords, you are putting yourself in a position to be written off by one side or the other and to not actually get into a real conversation.  So, to take it again, like, throw out the buzzwords. Let’s get down to what is actually going on inside people. I think then we’ve got a chance.

Rosanne Moore:  So, really, we can’t even have an objective discussion about issues until both sides are really willing to look at what’s going on in their own heart that makes it hard for them to hear, it sounds like.

Andrea:  Yeah, there’s so much, right?  There’s so much there, and I think that’s why it’s important for us to have, you know, conversations like this and conversations that are about people and what’s going on inside of them.  The more that we can have those conversations, the more likely we can have conversations about policy and about politics that are actually going to do something, but as long as it’s just about that, no way.  We’re not getting anywhere.

Rosanne Moore:  So, do you have any words for those who do find themselves often in high conflict argument, you know, discussions.  I mean, there are people who seem to spend a lot of time on the internet, or whatever, criticizing others. What would you say to someone who is in that place?

Andrea:  I think that what you’re striving for, what you want, is you want your voice to matter.  You want to be heard, and you want to have influence. If you’re doing that, you’re doing it because you’re trying to have some kind of influence, and I respect that.  I get it. I think that’s important, and that your voice really does matter, and it should matter. The trouble lies in thinking about what the outcome is of what you’re saying.  I think we all have to look at what are we really wanting out of this situation. Do I just want to feel better? Then I may as well just spew hate because that’s going to make me feel superior in the moment.

But if you want actual influence, if you want to actually see something change then you need to do the more complicated and hard work of figuring out who your audience is, what your mission is, what you’re willing to sacrifice for that, and then loving people more than you fear them so that you can come to the conversation caring about that other person.  And come to that conversation in love instead of worrying about whether or not you’re right or wrong, and how superior you feel. As long as that is the goal, as long as you’re elevating yourself to feel superior, it’s going to be really hard for you to have the actual influence that I think that you really do want.

Rosanne Moore:  What I’m hearing you say is to have real genuine influence, you have to lay down your lust for power – for power over, I should say.  Not the power that comes from genuine strength, but the kind of power over that shuts down opposition instead of being able to do the hard work of actually influencing and persuading.

Andrea:  Yes, that feeling inside where you just need to have that power to shut people down, I think that also is tied directly to that need to be right.  Because there’s something really threatened in us when we’re not right when we’re found out that we’re wrong about something or that somebody else doesn’t agree with us on something, and we’re threatened at the core when that happens.  And that’s why we exert more power to try to make it go away. We don’t like that feeling. But if we can sacrifice that, if we’re willing to sacrifice our need to be right, then we might have a shot at having a conversation where we get something accomplished.

Rosanne Moore   That’s a great point, Andrea.  Thank you so much. This has been a really rich podcast.  I hope, listeners, that you’ve gotten a lot out of this. I know I have.  It’s always a good reminder to me to be present in the conversations, not simply to discuss ideas but to remember there’s a real person in front of me that I need to take care of and love well in the midst of a hard conversation.

Andrea:  That’s right, especially if you really want to have influence over them if you want to have influence on them and their opinions.  Otherwise, go for it, just hate on people and make yourself feel better. But that’s not going to change the conversation. It’s not going to get you where you really want to go.

Rosanne Moore:  Well, it goes beyond that, right?  Because it’s not simply hating or not hating.  Even if you’re not being hateful – if you’re trying to discuss an idea but you’re not taking care of the heart of the person in front of you – you could be right, you could be logical, you could be respectful, but they still may not hear any of that.

Andrea:  Absolutely.

Rosanne Moore:  Because something may be triggered in them that you need to take care of first, that may be a barrier first that you have to address before they can even receive what you’re saying in the spirit and what you’re trying to give it.

Andrea:  Roseanne, that’s why you’re Communications Specialist because you’re really good at summarizing what I say, much more succinctly and powerfully so.  But I thank you, thank you for giving me a chance to share these things. It was fun. It was fun to have this conversation with you with our listeners.

Rosanne Moore:  It was fun.  And if you enjoyed today and you want to benefit more from the wonderful services that Andrea offers to companies that have worked with us and working with human dynamics and within their company and building a culture and a climate in a business where people communicate well and serve each other well, get in touch with us at voiceofinfluence.net.

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Four Imperatives for Successful Managers with Ron Carucci

Episode 101

Ron Carucci is a co-founder and managing partner at Navalent where he works with CEO’s and executives who are pursuing transformational change for their organizations, leaders, and industries. Ron has a thirty-year track record helping some of the world’s most influential executives tackle challenges of strategy, organization, and leadership. He has been featured in many business publications including The Harvard Business Review and Forbes.

In this episode, Ron shares what first got him interested in topics like influence and leadership, the shocking statistic of how many people aiming for leadership positions fail within the first 18 months, the four traits his study revealed that all people who succeeded in becoming influential leaders in their organizations had in common, what his research showed about the connection between honesty and being an influential leader, how his company helps organizations diagnose and correct the issues within them, and more!

Mentioned in this episode:

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

Transcript

Hey, hey! It’s Andrea. Welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast. Today, I have with me Ron Carucci who is co-founder and managing partner at Navalent, working with CEOs and executives pursuing transformational change for their organizations, leaders, and industries. He has a 30-year track record helping some of the world’s most influential executives tackle challenges of strategy, organization and leadership all over the world. He’s been featured in many business publications, including the Harvard Business Review and Forbes.

Andrea: Ron, welcome to the Voice of Influence podcast!

Ron Carucci: Hey, Andrea, good to meet you. Thanks for having me.

Andrea: All right. So your body of work is just a great fit for our audience, so we have a lot that we could talk about. It will be fun to see where this conversation goes today. To begin with, what kind of got you interested in the areas of influence and power and honesty and leadership in general?

Ron Carucci: Well, it certainly wasn’t looking around and seeing how well those things are going in the other parts of the world. I think we’re all discouraged when we look around and see the degree to which influence and power are being used in ways that caused far more harm than good. But it was personal.

Probably about maybe just under a decade ago, we were working with a client in one of our sort of very beefy, transformational products. As is always the case, a young leader distinguished himself in that project. When it was over and people were ready to be reassigned to bigger jobs and newer roles in the new organization design we had finished, he was given a chance to take on a much bigger opportunity. Of course, nobody was surprised and everybody assumed he would thrive.

In about nine months into that assignment, he called me. When I saw him in my caller ID I distinctly remember thinking, “Oh, he’s calling to check in and say hi, give me a great progress update and all the great things they’ve accomplished since we finished.” But he was calling to tell me he’d been fired and that he was looking for help networking another opportunity.

I was shocked. I just couldn’t imagine how could that possibly have happened. He was on top of every nine-box, eight-box, six-box high potential career property list.

A couple of hours later, the CEO, who had been our client, called also to tell me they had to let him go and he was a little bit perturbed and more than subtly _____ that similar responsibility for his failure was mine for not having better prepared him which, of course, to anybody in this field it’s devastating to hear that somebody is laying the failure of a great, otherwise promising, leader at your feet.

Andrea: Oh yeah.

Ron Carucci: So I said, “Can we come in? Can I come sniff around? I mean, I just want to, on my own dime here, understand how could we all have so badly misjudged his opportunity and talent and potential and find out what could have gone wrong here,” because I was just baffled.

So we went in and that short investigation is what led us to our 10-year longitudinal study with more than 2,700 leaders. And, Andrea, only to discover that he was just one more statistic that we’ve known for decades, that more than half of people in his position, leading from the middle of an organization trying to enter the top, more than half of them, maybe 50 to 60 percent of them, fail in their first 18 months.

And I thought, “How is this acceptable? How is this appropriately okay that we just continue to take otherwise very promising people and send them off a cliff?” So I was like, “We’re going to turn over every single rock we can find to uncover every landmine being put in these people’s way and expose them to find out how do we prevent this carnage.”

Of course, all the recruiters love it because it’s an annuity for them, but we just felt like we can do better. The great part of the research was that we thought, “Well, okay. So if 50 to 60 percent of them are failing, what are the other 40 to 50 percent of them doing that are sticking the landing, that are arriving at higher altitudes and thriving in these more complex, more ambiguous purchase? How are they doing it?”

We were able to, in fact, extrapolate very consistent patterns in that population of people that set them apart and allowed them to be influential and successful for more difficult places.

Andrea: Well, that’s so exciting. What kinds of things did you find that helped them to be more influential and successful?

Ron Carucci: There were four. The interesting thing about these patterns, my research team got a little bit frustrated because I made them do 99 different regression analyses to keep looking at the data because they kept coming back, no matter how we cut the data up and sorted it, these four patterns, in some form or other, were the top of the list. And if any of them were not included, it put the leaders in the failure group.

What that meant was you had to be good at all of them or you were in the failure group. And I didn’t want to have to write that. I wanted to be able to say, “Three or four will be fine and you can learn the fourth,” but that’s not how…

So I tell people think of this as one thing with four parts.

Andrea: There you go.

Ron Carucci: Not four things because, while they can be somewhat isolated to develop them, the reality was that all of them are what’s required to succeed.

The first one was context. These were the leaders that could come in and read the tea leaves around them. They were curious. They asked hard questions. They wondered about the environment around them and they recognized that, for them to be influential, they had to adapt as much to their environment as they had to impose change on it. Too many leaders come into situations to be influential looking to impose an answer that they already had.

It’s interesting, Andrea, we do this to leaders on their way in. During the selection process, we say things to people like, “Hey, look at these great brands you’ve built. That’s what we need.” Or, “Oh, my gosh, you’ve had such success leading sales forces. That’s exactly what we’re looking for here.”

And in those statements, we’re setting those people up to fail because what we’re telling them is, “You have a recipe. You have a formula. And we’d like you to repeat that formula when you come here.” What they think is that they just have to go reach back to past success and slap it on formulaically to the environment they’re on without even adapting it or thinking about the context.

So this mythical mandate creates this contextual blindness in people, and it happens every day. We all see it. Of course the harder they slap, the more receptive _____ becomes and the people begin to back away. We’ve all seen the movie when somebody comes in and of course we all hear the famous last words, “Oh, they weren’t a good fit.”

Andrea: Right. It seems like there is an expectation of new leaders to be solid and not movable. But what you’re saying is that they should be moveable. They should be adaptable. There should be some adaptability in what they do.

Ron Carucci: Not ‘should be’, Andrea. There has to be.

Andrea: Yes.

Ron Carucci: How could you… there’s no one-size-fits-all. No matter how good you’ve been in your past, no matter how much talent you have, there’s no way that anything you can do is Plug and Play. So you have to walk into the environment assuming that you don’t have to go native. You don’t have to completely go native into the landscape and be like everybody else, because then your ability to create change is a little off.

But you have to adapt enough to build credibility with people, that they know you didn’t come to fix them or change them, that you came and that you’re willing to have them fingerprint you as much as you’re willing to fingerprint them.

Andrea: Absolutely. I love that so much. I really, really do. I love that.

Ron Carucci: The second one was breadth. Breadth, these are the people that they grew up in finance, they grew up in marketing, they grew up in some discipline, but they no longer have the luxury of seeing the world through that lens.

So, if you came up through finance, you can’t see the world economically. If you came up through marketing, you can see the world through consumers and customer analytics.

Breadth means you understand that the best parts of an organization happen at the seams. And that organizations naturally fragment, so you have silos, you have cliques, you have groups, you have regions, you have affinity to localization. And your job is now to stitch those seams. Your job is now to build bridges. Your job is now to create connection among people and to create traffic patterns that bring people together to create more cohesion in your organization, not intensify fragmentation.

These are the leaders that could build bridges. These are the leaders that could cross borders in organizations, that could bring people together, that were willing to see that if they were in sales, they knew they drove marketing crazy and wanted to find out why. They knew that if they were in supply chain, they drove R&D crazy and they wanted to find out why. They didn’t just intensify the rivalries. They actually built bridges and created community across unlikely boundaries because they understood that that’s where real value gets created.

The third was decision-making choice. So, the most influential people are not afraid of hard choices. Too many people get into influential positions where they want to please everybody. They say ‘yes’ too often. They make promises they can’t keep. And they dilute the focus of the organization because they commit to way too many things and, in so doing, they institutionalize mediocrity, because everybody is trying to do everything and then, therefore, nothing well.

So these people could say no. They knew that that influence and leadership mean disappointing people at a rate they can absorb. That it’s okay to say ‘no’ for the greater good. And that the greatest gift you can give those you’re trying to influence is focus and a narrowed set of priorities.

And the last one, not surprisingly, was connection, was the relationship they have with people. What was interesting about this group, from an influence point of view, is that they didn’t prioritize their stakeholders, bosses, peers, or direct reports according to what they needed or what they could get from them. They prioritized their relationships according to what they could most contribute. They focused more on the people whose agendas they could drive, on whose development they could advance, on whose success they could contribute to more so than the people they needed to contribute to theirs.

You’ve seen them. We’ve all seen them in organizations. These are the people everybody wants to be around, the bosses everybody wants to work for, they’re the ones who are just nice, good-hearted people. They’re smart. You know that if you’re in their presence you’re going to feel good, you’re going to learn, you’re going to be committed, you’re going to feel safe to be yourself. And they’re the ones that are the most influential.

So context, breadth, choice, connection. Four not easy things but the key thing is, to your listeners, Andrea, is the time to start learning these is yesterday. If you wait until your first significantly influential role to start learning them, that’s probably not going to go too well.

But you can start learning these right at college. You can find seams and boundaries to cross. You can be contextually curious. You can start figuring out what is your decision-making apparatus and how do you prioritize and how do you narrow and say no and find the courage to make hard choices. And you can start finding ways to help other people be successful. So the sooner you start putting those muscles, the more likely it is you will be influential.

Andrea: That’s so good. These are great. OK, you also have done research recently on honesty. How does that connect with this? Why did you make that choice to study honesty?

Ron Carucci: After our 10-year study, the database grew. So at 15 years, we now have 3300 interviews in the database. In those first four patterns we isolated, we were looking for what shapes individual behavior. But I wanted to know what it was that could create systemic performance position.

We didn’t go looking for… we decided, since we’re using some pretty sophisticated Artificial Intelligence, we’ve got IBM Watson in there, which is an amazing technology, we thought, “Let’s let it tell us.” It reads the data, Andrea, we’re talking creepy-well, like it’s creepy what this stuff can read. So we thought, “Well, let’s see what it will tell us about the system of organization.”

It turns out it came back and it was able to predict four – there may have been more but we cut it off at four – conditions in which people will lie, but they line up very closely with the pattern. This was not intentional. This was just serendipity. But they line up with those four patterns of influence.

The first one was strategic clarity. So if your organization lacks that, meaning you have a mission, vision, and value, you have identity statements that don’t match your behavior in the eyes of your customers or your employees, or if I go around the organization and I say, “Hey, what’s your strategy,” and I get 20 different answers, or people’s own sense of purpose is not locatable in your purpose, so there’s a disconnect there, if that strategic clarity is missing, you are three times more likely to have people lie or withhold the truth.

The second one was accountability systems. The way contribution is measured, not compensated but measured, is seen as unfair. In other words, people think that there’s a bias. They think they’re not really truly being heard or seen. They don’t think they’re getting fair feedback. If your accountability systems are seen as unfair, you are four times more likely to have people lie and withhold the truth.

The third was governance. If your decision-making processes of the way resources are allocated is not transparent, it’s opaque, it seems capricious. In other words, there’s no form for the truth to be told and it has to go underground. You are three-and-a-half times more likely to have people lie or withhold the truth.

And lastly, if you have unresolved conflict, if you have cross-border rivalry, if you have conflicts at the seams between departments that remain unresolved, in other words, if you fragmented the truth and now we have dueling truths, you’re six times more likely to have people lie or withhold the truth.

Andrea: Wow!

Ron Carucci: And it’s cumulative, so for the cash, the cruise and the car, if you have all four of those conditions, congratulations, you’re 16 times more likely to find yourself on the headline of a newspaper and a story you’d never wanted to be in. So I was sort of sitting around playing with these content and I put them side by side and I realized, oh, my gosh, if you’re a contextual leader, you could bring strategic clarity. If you have breadth, you can bridge the seams. If you’re a good choice maker, if you can narrow priorities, you can contribute to great governance. And if you build great connections, you can hold people accountable in an honest way.

So the four influence patterns can have a direct implication on creating a more honest organization, not just a more influential one.

Andrea: That’s just incredibly powerful. So how do companies utilize or how can they utilize this research that you’ve done in these connections and these insights that you have you’ve made?

Ron Carucci: Well, the first thing is to be honest.

Andrea: Right.

Ron Carucci: Everybody wants… 5,000 people did not wake up at Wells Fargo one morning and say, “Hey, here’s an idea.” You know, 90 R&D engineers didn’t get up one morning in Germany and say, “I know how to beat out that electric car market. Let’s sell more diesel cars.” These are things that happen over time, right? The fungus in that ethical Petri dish grew over time.

So be honest that the origins of these problems are much, much sooner than you think they are. By the time you were starting to hear noise or symptoms are starting to appear or scandals are emerging, you are years past the origins of those stories.

So diagnose. What do we say about cancer? Early prevention, early cure, right? Get your annual MRI done. Have your organization looked at not just for ethical things but just for its wholeness. We’re not just talking about integrity as a matter of truth telling, but integrity as a matter of consistency, congruence. You are being who you say you are. You are deciding on things according to a strategy you commit to. You are teaching leaders to con to talk about contributions in a fair way.

This is all organizational health issues that will… if you’re wondering why half of your employee population is disengaged or your employee engagement scores are what they are, or you’re having talent defections by your most talented people, this is not random. It’s not because it’s a good employer marker, right? People really do quit bosses, not companies.

So, for goodness sake, don’t ignore the signs that there are some even minor cracks in the foundation of your organization. Go dig deep. Get an MRI to understand where might we be at risk, where might we be susceptible to problems down the road that we might not want to be part of, and do and address it head on.

Andrea: Now, with this one, with this being honest part, this is kind of hard because prevention is much more difficult or it’s much more difficult to convince people to actually do. What kind of organizations tend to actually be honest in the first place? Which ones are choosing to not ignore the signs and things like that?

Ron Carucci: I’m studying one company right now in Phoenix, Arizona. They’re called Nextiva and I’m studying them. I just wrote a piece in Forbes about them and I think I’m going to study them for a book I’m writing on this. The hard answer is the ones that build them from the ground up that way, right?

Now, I don’t want to have to say that either. It’s like saying you have to be good at all four of these things. I don’t want to have to say, “Well, if you’re now 40 years old, you’re too far gone.” I do think if a leadership is committed to wanting a healthy, whole, vibrant organization, you can. And, you know, people can come back from Stage VI cancer, right? You just have to go and do the work. You have to care enough to want to go there.

If your complacency, if your success, if your financial success is tied too much to the status quo, if you’re too fearful of making change or too fearful of looking in a mirror of what it might tell you, it’s like the person who doesn’t go to the dentist. It’s like, “Well, I don’t want to go now.” So suddenly it’s eight years later and their teeth are falling out. Denial is a very powerful force.

I think the organizations that are, it’s hard to say it, Andrea, but the ones who are in pain, the ones who skin their knees, who get some early warning signs that things aren’t going well. Pain is a marvelous source of commitment. As the old adage goes, the sight of the gallows focuses the mind. But it would sure be great not to have to wait until you’re in pain before going. You get an annual physical for a reason.

So, I don’t know why leaders wouldn’t want to be honest in the employee engagement survey. Would you not want to have some ongoing set of metrics that tell you is my organization and those leading it healthy, and doing it in a way that is consistent with who we say we are?

The thing I always tell my leaders is, “Would you tell your mother? If the next morning, would you make a decision that you would be proud to tell your mom and that you wouldn’t mind having it on the cover of the New York Times?” If you can tell me ‘yes’ to both those things, you’re good. But if you would not be proud to tell your mom or you would not want it on the cover of the Wall Street Journal or the New York Times, there’s a reason that you should have paused.

Andrea: Yes, absolutely. That’s really interesting. And definitely with the pain, it’s the same way with individual people. People don’t want to change until they are kind of shaken. It takes a lot for people to change individually too.

Ron Carucci: And most of us are all _____ until our doctors say, “two of the four are occluded,” we don’t think about our cardiac health. I was walking around with a really strong pain in my calf all fall long and I was afraid it was a blood clot because I had blood clot pain in… DVTs, deep vein thrombosis in my family. I went and had an ultrasound on Christmas Eve. I was so panicked. It wasn’t that at all. That’s OK. It’s muscle strain. So I continued to play tennis. I continued to play. I wrapped it. I didn’t really ice it much, but I kept it wrapped.

Until one day on a tennis court, early January, big popping noise, and I’m down on the ground writhing in pain because I slipped muscle. Why? Because I thought, “Oh, it’ll be fine.” I checked and it wasn’t a blood clot. Well, when the lady came back into the ER and said, “Not a blood clot,” and handed me a whole bunch of information on muscle strains, what caused me to not go, “Oh, I guess this really is a problem.” I decided it wasn’t the problem I was most fearful of, so it wasn’t a problem.

Andrea: Right. Yes. It’s not the one that we’re looking for.

Ron Carucci: Right. And then I paid a price for this. Then I was off the tennis court for two-and-half months, where it could have been probably three weeks had I just taken care of the problem when I really first dealt with that, which was like October.

So you’re right, as human beings we’re comfort-seeking, stability-seeking machines. We want stability. We are homeostatic-seeking machines. And we all say we’re all for change but what I really am is all for you changing, especially if you change so I don’t have to.

Andrea: Totally. OK, so be honest. That’s the first one. What’s the second one?

Ron Carucci: So get data, do diagnosis that tells you where you’re vulnerable, where you susceptible, or where you have a disease growing and then act upon it. And don’t look for quick fixes. Don’t run everybody through an integrity workshop for half a day on a video. Don’t do a campaign. Don’t go put up posters that say, “Hey, if you see something, say something,” and think that the “nudges” are going to change behavior.

Don’t do team building. If you’ve got a lot of cross-border conflict, don’t bring everybody together to do trust falls.

The origins of these problems are systemic and you have to put in systemic solutions. If people in sales or marketing aren’t getting along, don’t just bring them together for a workshop on collaboration. Look at the incentives and what their metrics are. Look at governance to see where decision making is happening. Look at how the resources are allocated to see do they understand the value of your brand that both of them hold? Is sales being incented to sell things and make promises that marketing can’t keep? So, look at the systemic things that may be causing the conflict. It’s not just always interpersonal

Andrea: Totally.

Ron Carucci: The interpersonal things you’re seeing are probably more symptoms than they are roots.

Andrea: That’s great. So, either two then? Is that what you’re basically…

Ron Carucci: I think the last thing I would say is install a mechanism that continually gives you ongoing feedback. Just like a diabetic puts a meter in his or her arm to constantly be monitoring blood glucose, find ways that you have regular access to the health of your organization and the vibrancy you want it to have and be fine tuning all the time so you don’t get to the place where you would ditch.

Andrea: So how do you, how does your company actually help other companies to do this?

Ron Carucci: We have a really forensic way of doing a deep MRI. When we go in and we want to get a look under the hood, we do a very, very comprehensive diagnostic look. We extract data from people’s minds and hearts and the archives of your database, unlike what most people can’t do, and when we bring together an entire story that’s comprehensive.

And we put back in the room every single voice that you send onto the room. So we force leaders to listen to… by reading hundreds of pages of comments and data that we code in very sophisticated coding technology so you don’t know who said it but you know what was said.

So you hear everything we heard, you see everything we see, and then we make you spend time in a room for day or two. You have to make sense of that story. We’re not going to come and tell you as consultants, “Here’s the answer.” We’re going to say, “OK, here are the questions you obviously have been avoiding. Now, you as the leadership would have to look each other in the eye, look in the mirror at that hundred pages of story and we’re going to work until you have conclusions, until you have a plan you feel good about.

And at that point then I’ll tell you what I think. I’ll tell you my point of view as an outsider comparing you to the other hundreds of companies I’ve worked with. There might be a 15 percent gap that I may have to sharpen the contrast on but, for the most part, we’ll be aligned. The difference is you’re going to own it because it’s your story.

So the next chapter of that story is yours to write, not mine. So I think then we’ve got a very different psychological process that I’ve now forced you and your team to look at in the mirror, look at a story, say hard things to each other and now take ownership of a story in ways that you can circumvent.

And the minute that consultants come in with the answers, they went in and now it’s analyze and recommend, then I’m going to get up and 20 slides and tell you what you have to go do. There is zero emotional ownership for those answers in the room. I’ve now sidestepped the most important part of creating transformational change, which is embedding into your heart, mind, and soul the need to understand your role in how we got here and how we get to where we’re going to go.

Andrea: I think that’s brilliant. And it has to be very, very effective. Do you have a difficult time getting people… or I suppose if they want to work with you, that’s just the way it is, right?

Ron Carucci: Well, yeah. On occasion, we’ll get a leader who will say something like, “Oh, you don’t need to do any diagnostics. I can tell you what’s wrong.” To which we typically say, “Uh-huh. If you could have done that you wouldn’t have had to call.” So obviously we already know what you’re thinking the problem is as either, at best, partially right or completely wrong.

And I think if you have a severe pain in your chest and you walked into a cardiologist and you pointed to it saying, “There’s this really sharp pain right here.” And your cardiologist quickly said, “Oh, upper-left quadrant ventricle needs a stent.   Let’s go put one in.” Would you just walk into the OR with them and let them put you under and cut you open? Would you not want to say, “Uh, don’t you want to look first?”

Why, for goodness sake, would you do that with your organization if you wouldn’t do it with your own body? Why would you just go cutting up your organization? And we do it all the time, just we snip orchards and rearrange deckchairs. We slap on new processes. We overlaid new training and skills. And we just pile up, we pile on new governance with new task forces and new committees and whatever. It’s like bad wallpaper in a house. You walk into a house and there’s like nine layers of wallpaper smacked on top of each other, and they’re all peeling off and it won’t take another one.

Why would you do that to your organization if you wouldn’t do it to your body?

Andrea: I love that. That’s a great analogy. So, is there something that… just off the record here real quick, I have on here that it looks like you have something to offer people, your website and then transformation. Do you want to tell people about it?

Ron Carucci: Yeah. By all means, come stay in touch. We can be found at Navalent.com. We’ve got a free ebook called Leading Transformation. If you want to know more about our playbook and how we do this, come to navalent.com/transformation and download our free ebook on all the ways we think about change and transformational work.

We’ve got some phenomenal videos. We’ve got great whitepapers. We have a quarterly magazine called the Navalent Quarterly. You can subscribe for free. We’ve got lots of rich content. If all this is of interest to you, come hang out with us. You can all also find me on Twitter @RonCarucci and you can find me on LinkedIn as well, so love to keep chatting.

Andrea: Great! Thank you so much for being with us here today at the Voice of Influence. We’re really honored to have you and inspired. There’s so much here to dive into and for people to really chew on and think about and really act on. Thank you so much for sharing your voice of influence with our listeners,

Ron Carucci: Andrea, the pleasure was mine. Thanks so much for having me.

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How to Break Out of the Spin Cycle of Self-Criticism with Barbara Churchill

Episode 73

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!

Take a listen to the episode below!

Mentioned in this episode:

Barbara Churchill Voice of Influence Podcast Andrea Joy Wenburg

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

Transcript

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

 

Today, I have with me 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!

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Finding Convergence Between Your Calling & Career

Episode 12 with Josh Erickson

For the past 20 years, Josh Erickson has been utilizing his experience, intuition, and insatiable drive for success to help transform businesses and teams into champions. After being proven successful in his own ventures, his innovative methods have expanded in reach, helping institutions like FedEx, Catholic Health Initiatives, and the University of Nebraska take their employee engagement and team collaboration to new heights. His ability to navigate the cyclical patterns of human behavior, coupled with his dynamic and personable presentation style have established him as a pioneer in his field, paving the way for emotional and professional empowerment in collaborative environments, large, small, and everywhere in between.

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Transcript

Hey, this is Andrea and welcome to the Voice of Influence Podcast. I’m really glad that you’re here with me today. And today I have a fun guest. His name is Josh Erickson and Josh and his wife, Nikki – we, Aaron and I knew them back, I don’t know what was it, 10 years ago or so and when we’re living in the same town. Now, we both moved away from that town and we haven’t really kept in touch. I’m really looking forward to hearing from Josh about what he’s doing with his business, Team Concepts. 

Andrea: Josh Erickson, it is really good to have you here today!

Josh: Hey thanks, my pleasure to be here.

Andrea: Let’s start a little bit with maybe where you’re at right now and then we’ll go back and find out how you got to where you are right now. So what is Team Concepts? What is this business that you have?

Josh: Well, Team Concepts is a consulting company. Basically, we work with all size of organizations to improve employee engagement organizational proficiency. We really believe that in order for an organization to be successful, everybody needs to lead. People need to take ownership and they need to figure out how they can lead within that organization. And we have a phrase that says “When everybody leads, everybody wins.”

And so we try to help organizations build the team where everybody is leading. And in order to do that, we need to understand personalities, styles, profiles, and the different leadership components of any group. So we worked with athletic teams. We work with, obviously businesses, schools, with the high schools assemblies; middle schools assemblies, teachers and services. We work at nonprofit organizations and just any organizations that require teamwork which is pretty much everything.

Andrea: So true. So I know that you have been always doing Team Concepts, so why don’t you take us back to kind of…I guess, I’d love to hear about where you started out and how you’ve gotten to this point right now. So what were you doing when we met you guys like I don’t know, was it 10 or 15 years ago?

Josh: Yeah, 2003 or 2004 I suppose. I’ve always done Team Concepts on a part time basis and that is ever since college. I really got into this idea of team building in order to be a more successful coach. I was a wrestling coach, so just figuring out how to get my team to collaborate together and to develop leadership with my team because I know if I could just get them to lead themselves, it really just made my job easier. And so I started practicing different methods and investigating

But the whole time I was coaching wrestling, I taught school. I was a youth pastor. I started a nonprofit organization and I really give my life to public service, different groups, and being involved. But I always did this team building stuff on the side. And then about eight years ago, I really started a sense of change in what I wanted to do, obviously still serving the community but probably from a more influential role. I felt like my overall community influence as a youth pastor or somebody, ministry, or nonprofit was minimal.

And I really want to have that ability to impact the whole community with the things that I felt and the way that I see the world. So I realized, in order to do that, I would have to be a successful member of the business community also. My wife and I started dabbling in some different business ventures trying to figure out how we could really just kind of gain influence in the community. And we knew that it had to be from a financial aspect that we just had to be seen as successful.

So while I was doing Team Concepts and doing these other things and I also started doing investment properties, flipping houses and some commercial properties. Then we got into a restaurant business and started several restaurants and owned and operated. At one time, we were doing 13 restaurants at a time and then when the opportunity presented itself, we started getting out of that.

And four years ago, I had to say just kind of pivotal moment from myself. I just realized “You know, instead of Team Concepts, and teambuilding being my hobby, this is really what I wanna do. And I wanna run it like a business not as a hobby.” So the business experience that I’ve gained from the construction and then the rental property management then the restaurants, I just started applying that to Team Concepts. I thought “You know, I’m gonna put a budget together. I’m gonna put a business plan together. I’m gonna start advertising and will start marketing and really solidify the product offerings that I have for different organizations.

And so I would say that that journey is what’s that kind of led me here. It’s what I’ve always wanted to do and I didn’t know that it’s what I wanted to do until I went through some other things. And it’s been unique because I find myself in a very influential place for a definitely a lot of organizations especially my clients. They allow me a lot of power when they hire me to come in and work with their employees and work with their staff and help lead and guide their organization.

Andrea: I find this really interesting because I think that there are a lot of people who do have that heart. They want to be an influencer and so the gravity towards those… I mean, the two things that you were doing beforehand, teaching schools and being a youth pastor, and being a coach those are really great ways to influence people. But like you were saying you kind of had this. I don’t know, did you just feel it like a deeper call? Did you just keep feeling called to more, how did you know?

Josh: Yeah, I think as I matured and just had more experiences in life, you know, I used to believe that I have the best ideas for kids and how they should look their lives and had the best ability to influence them. And so when I was younger that’s young in my professional career that’s really all I saw myself doing. I supposed as I gained experience and just life grew, I started realizing that I wanted to impact, not just kids, but I wanted to impact the city.

We started a nonprofit organization in 2003, called One City and that was a city-reaching organization to really empower people to take responsibility for the condition of their city. As I started doing that, I just realized that there’s only so much influence you can have as nonprofit which is great. It’s a great influence but yeah, I just needed more. I really felt like even governmentally like I had ideas and things that I wanted to be able to share. And not just share through a letter or not just share through an empty, you know, a blank stare from somebody who didn’t respect me. But I really wanted to gain the ability to speak government policy to political institutions to the business community.

And I didn’t want to counterfeit it. I didn’t want to find the way in. I knew the only way to get there was to really get involved in business and feel the struggles. You know, we got some successes and we’ve had some failures. And we had to make some really hard decisions when it came to the cost-benefit ratio and the return of investment. The experience gained in running my own businesses and having the employees has really helped me feel a big part of society. I can emotionally relate to people at all different levels.

I know what it feels like to be a teacher. I know what it feels like to be a government worker. You know, I was a soldier in Nebraska Army National Guard. I remember that feeling and then I also remember the feeling when people started to perceive us as successful when we bought a bigger house and we drove nicer cars. And when we started to do that to feel the different perception of how society feels about us, it’s just different. And to live the experienced life on both the sides where people perceived you as not successful and then the other side when people perceived you as successful or at a higher social status.

I don’t think you can really empathize and lead effectively. And so through the process, I’m just thankful for the journey that Nikki and I had been onto, to really understand where people were at and how to influence people at all levels of socioeconomic status.

Andrea: You know, just personally, I always thought that it wasn’t good for me to try to gain different kind of status in society or whatever. You know, I almost thought that being in ministry or having that kind of mindset that I shouldn’t try to get people to perceive me in a different way. Does that make sense?

Josh: Uh-hmm.

Andrea: Did you ever feel that way? Or did you just kind of…

Josh: Yeah.

Andrea: I mean, was that a struggle?

Josh: You know, I would say the first part of our marriage in our life; we never officially did it but we kind of talked about poverty that we were not going to be successful for the sake of our ministry because we didn’t want to make anybody believe that we were any better than anybody. So we lay that aside, although, it’s kind of funny because Nikki and I, we’re just very gifted people. And I think that they led me out of that realizing that I have the ability to be way more successful with even very little effort than a lot of people do. And it’s not because anything I did. It’s just that the way that I see the world, people find value in.

And so when I expressed it and when I used the intellect and the lens that I see the world with, it adds value to people. And for me that’s really what influence is, is the ability to add value in a simple way to other people because we can be influential over our children because we add so much value but that’s not really scalable. I mean, I have five kids but I don’t think we can handle another one because they’re so time-consuming.

But when we started talking about influence, it’s really the ability to add value or even to have the perception of adding value to somebody’s life. And when you can add value to somebody’s life, you have influence over them. And to have that the scalable model of influence in order to grow in your ability to influence others, you have to add value with your words. You have to add value with your ideas.

And because you can add value to tens of people or maybe even hundreds of people physically, now you can share, you can invest in them. You can be one-on-one with them or you can help meet their physical needs or even their emotional needs. But in order to really have them influence on society, on cities, on a larger organization or even worldwide influence, you really have to be able to add value with your words, your thoughts and your ideas.

And I think what led me out of or into this next season of life, it’s not even out of anything but is when I started to realize that my ideas and my words were influential no matter what audience I got in front of. I used to believe that they were just influential for kids. Then I just had some opportunity to speak to larger groups of people, adults, and I got the opportunity to speak to some politician and through some different experiences. And I just started realizing that every time that I had the ability to voice my opinion that it’s influential to people at all varying levels.

I just realized that my ideas, my thoughts, my words, add value to people at varying levels. And for me to stay at one place and just say this is my position would really be kind of robbing me of my destiny and maybe robbing God of the glory that he deserves who created me the way He did. He put ideas and thoughts and creativity in me in order to really live out my destiny and live out my purpose in life. I have to expand that and see how much influence do I have and what platform can I build to just share my ideas and my thoughts with the world and how far would they reach.

And now that’s where my goals has changed in life is to see how far this voice that God has given me can reach and see where He wants it to go and how He wants it to look. And in that Team Concepts as a platform I’m using right now, because I just seen more and more difficulty for organizations to really build a solid team to understand the concept of teamwork as we deal with, especially with multigenerational organizations, the lack of communications and understanding between the generations as we lead in a world we’re leading.

A generation of people that in the baby boomers that really believe in positional leadership and authority that you respect authority for the sake of authority and we’re entering into a generation, the emerging workforce generation does not believe in positional authority. They do not have a respect for any title or position. They have respect for people who show them respect.

Then we have this organizations that are really struggling to find the balance of “Okay, how do we attract or retain new people to our organizations with this multigenerational concept, and how do we have the influence over different generations all at the same time?” And it really requires some skill, some understanding but I really believe that I developed the system with Team Concepts that’s easy to remember, easy to use and that can benefit organizations of all type.

Andrea: Wow! Yeah, that’s a huge need. I find myself being a person who resonates with the younger generation maybe, who wants to be respected and have a hard time grappling with or putting myself into this position where I really appreciate positional authority if you will. So I find that a very personal thing. Do you have any suggestions for people about how to communicate with somebody who really just wants to be respected not just told what to do?

Josh: We did them look at the life experience and the quality and just what life is teaching people in each generation. So it take the baby boomers, you know, they were born shortly after the depression. Their parents lived through depression and they were taught that if you don’t work, you starve to death. They were thankful for the opportunity to work and they were also thankful for education because anytime they got out of school, it didn’t make any difference how boring school was or what was being taught, it meant that they didn’t have to work.

So school and education was just so much different because it was either “Oh if I’m not here working on blackboard then I’m gonna be digging potatoes.” So it’s obviously was a much better thing to be educated. So the teacher became the one who is the one who got them out of this work. And the teacher was seen as a hero because their position of authority that they had was automatically respected because it was an improved quality of life but what they’re being asked to do, right?

And so anybody who was in a depression or let’s just say a boss then, let’s say this baby boomer got his first job, well they remember that if we don’t work, we don’t eat. That we’re going to starve if we don’t eat. So that position was being shown to automatically give them respect because it improved their quality of life. They gave over the influence because the title alone of being a boss meant that “My family is not gonna starve or I’m not gonna starve.”

And so positional authority, those people had influence because they were adding value to life. And so the switch is comes over the last two generations is that work no longer adds value to life. So it’s not a direct comparison because nobody remembers or nobody thinks that we’re ever going to starve, that we have to do these things. And so I think about teachers now instead of being respected automatically, they’re giving a classroom full of students that could be playing video games or doing some incredibly fun but instead, they have to be sitting, they’re listening to them.

And so the difference in the educational environment and the culture is just…I mean, you can’t even compare them in how they grow up. So what we have here is people, the older generation and baby boomer generation that they’re in a position of leadership right now. They believe that “I’m adding value to your life.” They believe that intrinsically where young people come into a job thinks “I’m adding value to your life; you’re not adding value to mine. I showed up to work today.” Obviously that adds some value and neither one is wrong.

That’s what people realized is that nobody is wrong. It’s just as our culture has emerged and changed and we transformed into a much more prosperous culture, there’s a negative and positive consequences. Obviously, we don’t want anybody to think about starving because it’s not fun. But fear-based motivation is effective and it does work. It’s not where we want to live, but it does work. But now, we’re trying to motivate the kids and motivate this emerging workforce just from a compensation package.

Well, compensation really doesn’t even work either because you have to find the way to add value to who they are as a person. And I would say that the baby boomer generations never even dreamed that finding convergence. They didn’t care about convergence, they just wanted survival. And if they found more than survival, they were thankful and they work harder to start giving extra and to start allowing their kids to do extra and then their grandkids to do extra, to do more. So it’s the very fact that they paved away for people to do more that has led to the change in culture where people automatically thankful. People are automatically appreciative of a gift or appreciative of an opportunity because they have millions of opportunities.

And so this idea that everybody can come into the environment and just know how to get along is ludicrous, because it takes a lot of thought and it takes a lot of skill to navigate that all the different world views that are coming into the workplace right now, because they’re so opposing. It just really becomes important to understand that “You know what, if you don’t know how to navigate, they said, nobody is wrong.” And they can’t throw us aside because it’s people world view. It’s how they experience life and experience culture.

So as far as like for me automatically, you know, I’m in between and if somebody who automatically wants respect because they’re human being or because they have a title, they’re both right. Everybody deserves respect, but it’s how you give it, how its felt. And so with the emerging generation and I really just try to focus on what I’ve already talked about here today and it is how they add value by being just who they are. How do we help them find convergence as quickly as possible because obviously, the younger we get, the less patient people are too.

You know, I’ve got a millennial employee who wants to find convergence in his 18-months in. He’s like “I’ve done convergence this life’s over.” I was like “You know, it was a 25-year process for me to find convergence.” And my father and my grandfather didn’t care and didn’t even understand what convergence was. They didn’t care because they were just happy not to be starving. And now we have a next generation who’s trying to find convergence and they understand it even if they don’t have that as their title. It’s what they’re looking for that ultimate value satisfaction and stuff. But they want it quickly and so there’s just a lot of balance there.

Andrea: I love hearing your thoughts on this. It’s definitely something that I’ve thought about as well and the idea of having a voice of influence and one of the things I say is “Your voice matters but you can make it matter more.” And it sounds like we’re talking about both of those things. It’s like yes, inherently, you matter inherently you add value. But at the same time there is a perception and putting yourself in a position where people are ready to listen to you is different.

How did you get to this point where you had built yourself this platform where you could speak, where you did have the opportunity to speak to people in all kinds of different scenarios? Was that something that you also set out to do or did you just find yourself in these different positions and the doors just kept opening up, or how did that build for you?

Josh: Yeah. Whenever I try to build my platform, I fail. Whenever I just try to look at the world and see where I can add value, my platform grows. You know, the even flow of economics, there’d been times when my families has been in need and I really thought “Man, I really need to build my platform and need to get out there because I prosper financially when people want to hear what I have to say.” But it just that never seems to really work for me. So how I’ve grown more than anything is just really looking at organizations, looking at people and start really giving away my advice for free and just see how I can add value and then build rapport with those people and that’s where my clients came from and referrals.

And I’ve got several from advertising also but the majority of the clients that I’m working with have just been because I care about their organizations and I really want their organizations to succeed. And I thought, “You know, I got these thoughts and ideas that I believe can add value to you, do you think this is valuable?” And we see if there’s a mutual beneficial situation there. But I would say more than anything, my platform has grown just when I observed the world around me, organized my own thoughts about it and then share those thoughts in a way that I believe that’s right to the people involved and that’s really how it’s grown.

Andrea: Uh-hmm, so it’s that been mostly in person? Have you done much building online or is it mostly been in person?

Josh: Yeah, all in person. Yeah, one-on-one phone calls and personal. Obviously, you know after our little staff this morning trying to get this thing done that I’m not very tech savvy guy, so I don’t… I barely uses technology for any of my platform.

Andrea: Well, it sounds like you don’t have to because you have that natural ability to connect and the desire to share what you’re thinking and what you’re learning. I mean, that’s powerful in it of itself. I asked you before I noticed that you’re strengths finder coach, Gallup’s strengths coach, is that right?

Josh: Yes.

Andrea: So do you want to share your top five for anybody that is listening.

Josh: Yeah, I’m a big fan of Gallup’s StrengthsFinder. Yeah, I was part of the second class they offered when they decided they were going to outsource their coaching and I let other people from outside their organization get certified. Anyway, my Top 5 – my number one is Activator. My number two is WOO, which is Winning Other’s Over. My number three is Maximizer, which means nothings ever good enough for me, and number four is Strategic, and number five is Self Assurance.

Andrea: Hmmm, I mean it’s just sounds like you to me, especially after everything that you just described in your story and everything. Of course, I have a pretty good idea of what all those things are but that activator, that desire to get people going, right?

Josh: Yeah definitely.

Andrea: And the WOO is being able to easily connect with people and draw people in. I mean, all those things together I think are really just powerful combinations. So do you think that you’ve always been all those things? Have you seen that in yourself since you were like a kid?

Josh: Yeah, you know, seven on my top 10 strengths are in the domain or the category of influencing others and this is what my life is has really I think always been about. I tried to be great athlete, but I wasn’t that great. I was good but not great. I was an amazing coach. I was a much better coach than an athlete and I think that’s kind of been my life, my skill sets are, not that outstanding in an out of themselves. But when I have the ability to activate other people and when people around the cause share ideas and get people excited, motivated, and organized around an idea or concept that’s when I really get to add the most value.

I kept talking about adding value because I believe that’s the source of all influence but great things happens when people get to add value by being who they naturally are. And that’s when you start to hit what I would call convergence in your life or the switch part of your life is when you get to be who you are and you’re adding value to a lot of people. That’s where influence really starts to increase exponentially. And through strengths and through self-evaluation processes, I just realized that what I bring, I had energy and ideas to any organization. But I don’t add a lot of work value. I don’t add a lot of hourly value for the stuff that I do. I can do those things but it’s very minimal value that I add.

But when I have the ability to share ideas, when I have the ability to encourage and motivate and get a platform to set an objective and tell people why it’s important to  objective, that’s when I have the ability to really be influential at the highest capacity and I love the idea of convergence where you find the thing that you love to do, that’s your passionate about and that becomes the thing that you’re able to provide for yourself and your family through.

And I think that’s what I’ve been able to do through Team Concepts is I’ve created a platform where I just going to be myself. I get to add value the way that I add most value to an organization and be the most influential. And it’s now the way that I’m providing for my family. First is running a restaurant. I mean, it’s a tough thing to do but it didn’t need my specific skill set to do that and I was moderately successful at that but nowhere near as influential as am in this current role.

Andrea: Yeah and the journey that you been on to get to that point where you could find that convergence, that’s a long journey. It wasn’t just overnight. You didn’t just decide and then it happened. It sounds like you had a vision and you started walking down that path. Did you feel like you had a pretty good idea of each step along the path?

Josh: No, not at all. I really believed that my life have been a little more just like Forest Gump. I say that often that I’m just going to force my way through this. You know, you try to make the best decisions with the information you have at different stages in life and try to pick opportunities when you see them. Whenever I create, I try to create an opportunity for myself, it fails. Whenever I just sit back and look and see what opportunities are available to help others or add value, it works.

I would say that the biggest pivotal moment, the only time I knew that there was a moment was when I just realized we had just kind of suffered a business loss and some hard time and I knew that I had to find to make up the difference for the money we had lost in one venture and I say “You know, the only way that I wanna make this money back and the only I wanna provide my family is Team Concepts.” And I said “That’s what I love to do and that one was a pivotal moment for me where I said “You know, I just got to do this. It’s either gonna work or it’s not, I’m gonna go all out. I’m gonna give everything I have and try to find this convergence.”

You know, I’ve been doing this for 16, 17 years on the side and loved it but you know all of my…I don’t think anybody except for my wife told me that it was a good idea. Everybody said, that’s such a…well the first thing is I’m creating a market especially in the Midwest. There’s people that do some other things on the Coast, but in the Midwest, there’s really none. I don’t really have a direct competitor here. For that different thing I do, some competitors that indirectly compete with some of the services I offer. But as a whole, nobody offers the services we offer.

So you have to create a new market. You have to create the need around that new market and let people know that they have a need and then you also have to tell them that you’re the person to meet that need and that your organization is going to meet that need. So we go through a lot of difficulties in our sales process because very few people are out there looking for “Hey, I need somebody to come in and teach my team how to work together, how to be more efficient and effective.” It’s because it’s indirect result from a bottom line for an organization, not a direct result.

Andrea: Right. And it’s so valuable but like you said it’s indirect, so people don’t necessarily feel that right away especially with small businesses, it can feel like you’re just trying to survive anyway and not necessarily financially. Maybe just trying to survive the day-to-day, and the idea of taking time away from whatever you’re doing with your employees or whatever, that’s a hard sale but so worth it in the end. And I’m sure that you have plenty of testimonials to attest to that.

Josh: Yeah, you know when people are busy living life; it’s tough to work at improving your life. The same way most home owners go through or business owners and/or business managers is that you know, the only time my houses ever done is the week before we list them to sell them. The rest of the time, we’re just too busy living to actually work at our home improvement and do the projects that we wanted to do and make things actually the way that we want them. But when we get to the end or we decide we’re going to sell our home or we’re going to move on then we’re like “Oh we got to make this look like we’ve always want it to look so other people would buy it.”

And I think business owners get in that in their mind, they’re like “Oh this is gonna be great. We’re gonna be like this. We’re gonna be like this.” But yet, day to day living in an existence where their company isn’t, their workplace is not the environment, it’s not the culture, or it’s not all the things that they want. But in the back of their mind, it is and that they’ll get there someday but how do you create that deadline for yourself when it’s not. We’re going to sell that over, we’re going to move.

And unfortunately, a lot of the times for business owners and managers the deadline creates itself and that you have a crisis. You start losing key employees until it affects your bottom line because your culture isn’t what it needs to be then that crisis will call them to action. But I would much rather see organizations work on the top end and that is “What are you dreaming about? What are you trying to look like?” And make them believe that “You know what, you can’t have that, you can’t be like that but it’s really tough to do yourself.” But when you bring somebody else in that knows exactly how to influence people to create that culture, it just works better.

Andrea: Yeah, it actually kinds of reminds me of your story and how you’re kind of dabbling in Team Concepts until there was an actual financial loss and then you went for it. Do you think it would have happen quite like this if whatever business opportunity didn’t fail?

Josh: No. I don’t think so. I think it’s actually what had to happen for me to launch into this business, because it was hard for me to really push or sell this because it’s so personal to me. It’s like selling myself.

Andrea: Yes, I get that.

Josh:  And that part is really tough to do aggressively. It’s easy to do when it’s passive and people are talking great about you and they’re friends and that but to aggressively say “You know what; you need what I have to offer.” It takes a lot of confidence and it takes a lot of drive. But it’s amazing if you go home at night and you realize that if you don’t do this your kids are going to be hungry. It’s pretty easy to find that confidence and it’s very easy to find that drive. So when we found ourselves in a hard spot, I realized that there’s only way out and that was for me to really find convergence and get paid to do the things that I love doing the most and what I’m best at. So we had to create that opportunity.

Andrea: Yeah, I love that. This is all very, very interesting. And I’m so glad that you’re doing what you’re doing Josh. I’m glad that even though you had to experience some loss and frustrations and whatever else came with that a few years ago that you could come to this point where you really living into who you are and sharing that with others in such a powerful way. So thank you so much for that.

Josh: Oh thank you!

Andrea: And so now that we know who you are and everything, if somebody were to want to get in touch with you, are working on mostly of local level then or do you do any travel?

Josh: No, we work nationwide. So if a local in the Central Nebraska area, I have some different program and a more in depth program available, obviously logistics. We have three different training facilities that we use here in Central Nebraska. But when I travel nationwide, we have scaled activity based programming, obviously my speaking and consulting. Team Concepts is pretty…we have a lot of different products offered.

We offer activity based learning Low Ropes training for larger organizations and schools. And so those require vehicle travel with trailers so that scale is different there. But when I travel and speak and consult on managing millennial engagement, managing the engagement cycle of others and building teams that lead themselves, all three of those topics I travel nationwide on because it’s just me who showcase of activities.

Andrea: Yeah that’s cool. Well, how can people get a hold of you, Josh? Go to teamconcepts.com?

Josh: Yeah that’s perfect. And my phone numbers are on there too. I don’t mind people to contact me directly and just see if there’s anything I can do to add value to any organization or anybody’s life. That’s what we’re here for.

Andrea: Awesome! Well, thank you so much for your Voice of Influence and for sharing it with us today.

Josh: Oh thank you. I appreciate the opportunity.

 

 

 

END

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About the Voice of Influence Podcast

00 Episode & Transcript

In this episode you’ll learn about the premise of the Voice of Influence podcast and what you can expect.

  • Do you want to know that you belong somewhere and your voice can make an impact?
  • Maybe you know your voice matters, but you want to make it matter more.
  • Why my creativity, sensitivity and intensity is both a blessing and a struggle.
  • Andrea connects her experience as a vocal student at Belmont University and the University of Nebraska – Kearney with the idea of developing a Voice of Influence.

Mentioned in the podcast:

Please listen via iTunes or Stitcher.

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Transcript

Hey, hey! It’s Andrea Joy Wenburg and you’re listening to the first episode – the About episode of the Voice of Influence podcast. In this episode I’m going to share with you just a little bit about myself and the premise of the podcast and what you can expect.

So I am Andrea Joy Wenburg, author of UNFROZEN: Stop Holding Back and Release the Real You. I grew up in Holdrege, Nebraska. I loved my experience there. I had lots of great friendships, amazing teachers and opportunities to learn and grow. And what I found out there was that I could sing. Now, this podcast isn’t about the singing voice, but it relates so give me just a minute to tie it all together for you.

I found out that I could sing and it was something that I really loved to do. I would get up in front of an audience and sing and I felt like I could really connect with the audience. I felt like they were hearing my message and when I was particularly in the zone – feeling the message in the song, I felt like I was really connecting. And I thought, “you know what? I want to do this for the rest of my life. I want to connect with an audience like that.”

So I ended up going to school at Belmont University in Nashville, TN because I thought I wanted to be a recording artist. I wanted to stand up on stage and connect with an audience.

Well, it didn’t take me too long to realize that I actually don’t have the drive to do what it takes to pursue that dream and that though I wanted to be the next Sandi Patty (a gospel singer at the time), I realized when I got down there that there were a lot of other girls wanting to be the next Sandi Patty, as well. So it became evident that I didn’t have that start quality or the drive to pursue that dream.

I redirected my focus to helping other people find and use their voices. I went back to school in Nebraska to become a music teacher. Now, what was interesting is that I refused to even apply to this school when I was in high school because I thought, “I’m never going to be able to stretch my wings in Nebraska.”

Well, when I got back to UNK, my experience with a vocal instructor there went above and beyond any music experience I had in Nashville, which was surprising to me. When I stepped into Dr. Foradori’s office, she asked me “So, Andrea, do you know about this or that” and I said, “Ya, I get all this!”

But as we got going in lessons she realized I didn’t know as much as I thought I did. And at one point she said to me, “You know, Andrea, once you really understand what it means to connect your breath, you’re going to carry with you a foundation for singing that’s going to carry with you no matter what you sing. Once you understand this one concept and it really clicks inside of you and you get that, it’s going to totally transform the way you sing everything else.”

Eventually I did get that concept and it did totally transform the way that I sang everything else. I did have that support underneath of me with breath and what it took for me to sing like I wanted to sing.

Now, I say all of this because since then I have focused more on what it means to find and develop a voice of influence in the world, because there is something else that I really care about.

I’m somebody who cares a lot about – and I think maybe everybody does – that we want to know that we have a seat at the table. And when I say seat at the table, I’m thinking like when you walk into a cafeteria and there’s a bunch of people sitting and you wonder, “where do I fit?”

And when I say seat at the table when talking about is when you walk into a room and there’s a bunch of people sitting around maybe it’s like a cafeteria and you’re wondering, which table do I fit at? Where do I fit?” This is something that I really struggled with in my life. I wondered “where do I really fit?”

Well, it’s nice to have somebody turn around and say, “Well Andrea, why don’t you sit down at our table. We want you to sit here.” That feels great because then you feel like you belong and are excepted and you connect. With other people. The thing that I really realized, though, was that’s not the only thing I want. I also want to know that when I say something, it matters. That my voice makes a difference. So, if you’re sitting at that table and you’re thinking, “I don’t really feel like these people are listening to what I have to say.” Or you start to speak up and they say, oh that’s stupid.” Or they write you off. Or they say it doesn’t matter, or whatever. They don’t have a respect for what you have to say for your vioce.

That’s a little harder place to be in. Because then it feels like you are being used, not like I belong and I making a difference, “they invited me to sit here, but I’m not actually getting to have an impact on the dialogue.” Which is different than saying, I want to have all of my ideas taken for everybody to believe everything that I say, and that the buck stops here, kind of thing. I’m not saying that.

I’m saying that we want to have our voice matter in the dialogue of life.

So, when I think about that, and I think about the voice of influence and what that means how that relates to what it means to have a voice, I realized that there is something really special about this idea of the connecting of breath on the one side, and how that applies to the way that we connect with other people with our voice of influence. When we have certain things, When we change certain things about the way that we speak that or message or the way that we are communicating, when we change those certain things, or we get those certain things, then our voice, no matter where we go, in our relationships, at home, at work, or in the world. Whatever audience you’re trying to speak to, when you really carry with you that voice of influence, it will matter more with everybody, everywhere you go. And your voice and message has a better shot of actually making a transformational difference in the life of the person you are speaking with.

Because, when we really do have that voice of influence, it’s not just about saying, “this is what you should do, this is what I want.” That sort of thing. It’s not necessarily that, because we can always try to shame people into doing what we want them to do. But that’s not the kind of person I think you are. You are the kind of person who really once to make a difference in the heart of a person. Because you know that when somebody changes on the inside, it’s going to come out in so many different ways on the outside. And that is way more powerful than just changing and outward thing.

So, this podcast is about developing a voice of influence, understanding where it comes from, why we are the way that we are. Who we are. What we really want to say, and how we can say it in a way that is truly a transformational kind of message.

That is the basic premise of this podcast.

I want to mention that last year I published a book called UNFROZEN: Stop Holding Back and Release the real you. And that book is actually my story about me and my voice. So, if you are ever interested in reading or listening to that book – I am currently working on the audio version and it will hopefully be out very soon. So, if you are listening to this in the near future, it’s probably out. You can look it up on Amazon or find it here.

It’s my story about me, and trying to understand what my voice is like. Coming to grips with the fact that I am super creative, but also really sensitive and that being creative, sensitive and having a lot of intensity – that those things altogether became both a great power, and a great struggle. And something that could actually get in the way of me using my voice and connecting with other people.

That is what the book is about, and I would encourage you to check it out if you’re interested. And now I want to tell you what you can expect from this podcast.

We are going to be on a regular rhythm of 1, 45 minute interview and one short after show kind of episode where I will be speaking for maybe five minutes, reflecting on something that came up in the episode before that. The interviews will be interviews with experts, leaders, Thought leaders – people who really have well-developed voice of influence or something they can really speak to that would be helpful or interesting to you.

It’s really important to me that you don’t just listen to the interviews and forget them. So I want to offer these little episodes that you could listen to on the way to work or whatever, and be something you could chew on that would really make your voice matter more.

That’s the basic rhythm, that we will have an interview and then a short segment. And for April we will be doing an interview and a short segment, two times each week. We will be doing a lot of those episodes in here in April 2017 and after that we will settle into a rhythm of an interview on Monday and a short segment on Thursday each week.

That is the basic premise and what you can expect from this podcast. I also want to let you know that I’ve opened up a Voice of Influence Community Facebook group for message-driven leaders. So if you are interested in communicating with other people who want to develop their voice of influence, and discuss different things that come up on the podcast, then that would be a great place for you. I would love to have you.

And the final thing I want to mention to you is that in every beginning and ending of the podcast, we say, “Your voice matters, but you can make it matter more.” And what I mean by that, is that inherently, because you are a human being created by God, your voice – your thoughts and feelings and how you express them, that matters. And no matter what anyone tells you, I believe that you matter, and your voice matters.

However, I do think that there are some people who are able to develop that voice in such a way, that we can make it matter more. Meaning, we can make a bigger difference. So although you really cannot matter anymore or less in one sense, in another sense, in the sense of how much impact you have on the world, and relationships and things like that, you can make your voice matter more. You do that, by developing it. You do that by using it.

It’s just like when I was in Dr. Foradori’s voice studio and she would have me sing, and if it didn’t come out right, she would have me mimic her, or she would give me the tools that I needed, or she would suggest that I try something new and feel something different in my mouth or that sort of thing. And she would also help me find the right music for my voice. Which, I think is like finding the right message for your voice of influence.

There are many different correlations that I will be making or referencing here on the podcast, but my point in the end is that I really hope you will take the time to develop your voice of influence. And rather than just be somebody who sings every once in a while in the car so that nobody else can hear them, if you are listening to this podcast, it is because you don’t just want to sing in the car. It’s because you want your voice to matter beyond the immediate where you are at right now. You wanted to matter in your relationships, in your home, in your work, and in the world.

So, that’s what we’re here for. I am so glad that you are here. And I hope that you will join me in the voice of influence community Facebook group. You can find a link to that here or search for it in Facebook.

Thank you so much for being here in this about me episode. I am truly honored that you have given me a few minutes of your time today and anytime that you come back, man! I am really honored that you would take the time to be with us. So thank you.

Your voice matters. Now let’s make it matter more.

Join the Voice of Influence Community Facebook Group here.